‘I’ll come down with you.’
Kathy found herself alone in the lift with Jay, who went on, ‘I’m going with some friends to a gig next Saturday, and I just wondered if you’d like to come along.’
‘Oh.’ Kathy was surprised. Suddenly she was being showered with invitations. Well, why not? ‘Okay… fine.’
‘You will? Great!’ Jay seemed unexpectedly pleased. The lift doors opened at the ground floor. ‘Fantastic. I’ll let you have the details tomorrow. See you.’ Jay grinned and waved goodbye as she surrendered her pass and hurried out into the street.
Kathy found Bren at his desk, head bowed over paper, thinning dome gleaming under the fluorescent lights. ‘Hi, Kathy. How’s it going? Look at this stuff. It’s all been piling up while we were working on Verge. Now there’s no escape. I’d much rather be out stomping around the countryside in wellies looking for stiffs. You’re lucky to be tied up in that committee. Cushy number, yeah?’
‘Swap.’
‘Like that, is it?’
‘Yes.’ She hesitated, not wanting to add to his burdens, then said, ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem, Bren. I wondered if I could talk it over with you.’
‘Sure.’ He waved a hand at a chair. ‘Take a pew. I’m glad of the excuse. Want a coffee?’
Kathy said, ‘I’ll get it,’ and went over to the pot brewing on top of a filing cabinet nearby while Bren sorted his papers into piles. ‘It’s to do with that business I asked you about yesterday.’
‘The stuff-up with the lab? Yes, fire away.’
‘Well…’ She sat down, handing his mug over, ‘I followed it up. I went to see the clerk they said was responsible.’
‘Did you?’ He grinned. ‘Blimey, you have got time on your hands. So what was the problem?’
Kathy accepted the rebuke with a shrug. ‘Something about it bothered me. Anyway, when I spoke to her it turned out she didn’t know a thing about it. She’d got a new job because she wanted full-time work, and the lab never questioned her. Instead, someone went to her house and got her to sign something she didn’t even have a chance to read. They never mentioned the Verge case. She was set up.’
Bren frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound like the lab.’
‘No, it doesn’t, does it? And the thing is, the person who went to see her was one of ours, the LO who was implicated in the initial mistake, Paul Oakley.’
‘Blimey, that smells.’ He thought about this, then said, ‘But if the lab accepted it… I mean it’s their business, isn’t it? And Oakley’s left the force now, hasn’t he? Was the woman upset when you spoke to her? Did she want to complain?’
‘No, not at all. She just wants a quiet life.’
‘Well then, I don’t see the problem, Kathy. These things happen.’
‘I think there’s more to it than that. This morning I went to the offices of the Verge Practice, to talk to Sandy Clarke’s secretary.’
Bren looked puzzled. ‘You have been busy.’
‘Going through their records, I found that Sandy Clarke had a visit from Paul Oakley on the morning of the twenty-third of May.’
Bren’s perplexity deepened. ‘Yeah…?’
‘This was nine days after Miki’s body was found, and two days after Oakley took over from Leon as LO on the case. It was also two days after the lab results on the pillow with Clarke’s DNA were first recorded.’
‘Okay. So Oakley wanted to familiarise himself with the scene.’
‘No, he didn’t go up to the apartment. He stayed in Clarke’s office the whole time. The secretary remembers that they were so engrossed that Clarke kept the Mayor waiting for his next appointment.’
There was silence for a moment, then Bren said softly, ‘What are you thinking, Kathy?’
‘I don’t know…’ Now it came to the point, she found she couldn’t bring it out into the open.
‘Come on. You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?’
‘Well…it’s just, the mistake, the cover-up. Like you said, both unlike the lab. And both involving the same officer who pays a private visit to the suspect at the critical time when the crucial information gets lost…’ Again she hesitated, hoping Bren would finish the train of thought for her, save her from actually putting it into words.
‘Go on,’ he said impassively.
‘I thought about that case last year, the SOCO who tried to lose evidence for money.’
Bren said nothing at first, then under his breath, ‘Hell.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you should talk to Brock.’
‘I can’t.’ And this time she knew she couldn’t put it into words, not all of it. ‘Oakley is a good friend of Leon, and Leon himself might have got involved without realising it, and Leon and I have just split up, so it’d look as if I was stirring this up out of spite.’
‘So you want me to take it on.’
She nodded.
‘Well…we can’t just leave it, can we?’
‘I appreciate it, Bren. I mean it. This has been really bothering me.’
‘Don’t worry. You can forget about it now.’
‘Thanks. It’s been weighing me down.’
And that was true, she realised, as she walked away. She literally did feel as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
There was a stack of mail and papers waiting on her desk, too. She flicked through them, then froze at the sight of an envelope addressed to her in immaculate handwriting she knew very well. Leon’s. A rush of possibilities came to her- he had made a terrible mistake, he couldn’t live without her, he wanted to meet again. She almost got on the phone to tell Bren to forget what she’d said about Oakley, but instead she picked up the envelope, seeing it tremble in her hand. Inside was a standard form with the report of forensic tests carried out on her car. There was no accompanying letter, not even a signature.
She sat down with a deep breath and scanned the report, hardly taking it in. No fingerprints, no distinguishing MO. Some fabric traces had been found on the jagged edge of glass remaining in the window frame. Further action requested? Kathy ticked the ‘NO’ box and slipped the form into the file tray. She tore the envelope with its neat handwriting into a dozen small pieces and threw them into the bin.
23
Paul Oakley sounded delighted to get the call from Bren, requesting a meeting. ‘I’ll come to you, Bren,’ he said. ‘Any time it suits. Today? Not a problem. I’ll be there.’
He was under the impression, so Bren soon realised, that the purpose of their meeting was to discuss ways in which his fledgling company, Independent Forensic Services, could assist the Met, and specifically the Serious Crime Branch.
‘Leon put in a plug, did he, Bren? Well, what are mates for, eh? To be honest, there’s a fortune to be made out there in what I call the badlands, you know, discreet testing of celebrities’ fag ends for dodgy journos who want to know what diseases they’ve got, that sort of stuff. But that’s not what we’re interested in. With my background in the force, true forensic work is our forte.’
Bren let him talk without interruption, trying to assess the man. He’d had little contact with him before, and tried to keep an open mind, but Oakley’s endless optimism and overenthusiastic sales pitch began to grate.
‘… Rigorous support for rigorous police work has always been my passion, Bren, and I think we can honestly compete with the old hands and come up with a service of absolute dependability, integrity and, most important, attractive cost. You and I both know what a burden it is to your inquiries to know that each and every DNA test is costing your budget three hundred and twenty pounds.
Suppose we could improve on that by, say, twenty per cent. That means twenty per cent more tests, maybe
