Carol stared at his back, fizzing with anger. The implied criticism in his words was out of order. No other officer under John Brandon’s command had done more to demonstrate commitment to the job, or to the abstract principles of justice that drove her. No other officer had a better track record when it came to dealing with the kind of destructive high-profile cases that fucked up lives and made Bradfield’s citizens look over their shoulders in fear. And he knew that. Somebody somewhere must have given him one hell of a kicking to make him act as if he didn’t.
DC Sam Evans was supposed to be canvassing residents of the converted warehouse where Robbie Bishop had lived. The boss had had this idea that Robbie might have said something to a fellow resident in the sauna or the steam room after his night out at Amatis, something that might lead them to the poisoner. Sam thought the idea was crap. If there was one thing that people like Robbie Bishop learned, it was to keep your mouth shut in front of anybody who might be tempted to grass you up to
So instead of pointless door-knocking, he was holed up in his own living room, laptop on his knees, Robbie Bishop’s emails on his screen. Stacey had said there was nothing there, but he didn’t think she’d had time to go through them one by one. Not when she’d been doing all the techie stuff with his hard drive as well. She might have skimmed the emails, but he’d bet this month’s salary that she hadn’t scrutinized them in detail.
After an hour, he couldn’t find it in his heart to find fault with Stacey for her presumed dereliction. It was bad enough that Robbie cleaved to the text message style of prose, making it less than straightforward to read. Even worse was the banality of his messages. If there was a duller correspondent than Robbie Bishop, Sam hoped earnestly he’d never have to wade through his mail. He supposed the ones about music might contain something worth reading if you had a consuming passion for the minutiae of obscure trip-hop tracks. Maybe Robbie’s fascination for bpm made Bindie’s heart race. All it did for Sam was provoke a strong desire for sleep.
The love stuff was almost as boring as the music. And since Bindie was his principal correspondent, love and music was most of what there was. But Sam wasn’t about to give up. He understood that the most interesting information was often the stuff that was most deeply buried. And so he persevered.
The clue came halfway through the third hour of excruciating assertions of love and analyses of music. He almost missed it, so casually was it buried among the other stuff. Robbie had written, ‘Maybe u shd report this fuckwit. U say he means u no harm, bt wot abt me? Peple like him do al kinds of shit with guns & stuff. Let’s talk about it l8r.’
It didn’t make much sense on its own. Sam went back to the email filing cabinet and called up the saved incoming mail folder. When he clicked to open it, the message read, ‘You have 9743 messages in this folder. It may take some time to sort these messages. Do you want to go ahead?’ He clicked <yes> and while he waited, checked the date on Robbie’s outgoing message.
It took only a few seconds to find the message from Bindie that had prompted Robbie’s reply. ‘I’m starting to get a bit weirded out by this geezer who keeps turning up at gigs,’ Sam read.
‘He’s been sending me letters for a while now-beautiful fancy handwriting, looks like it’s written with a fountain pen–all telling me how we’re meant to be together and how the BBC are conspiring to keep us apart. None of it very sensible, but whatever, he seemed harmless enough. Anyway, he’s finally figured out that I do live club gigs too and he’s started showing up there. Thankfully most of them won’t let him in becoz he fails the dress code, but then he just hangs around outside. He’s taken to parading up and down with a placard saying there’s a plot to keep him from me. So one of the doormen took it on himself the other week to show him that spread we did for the Sunday Mirror for Valentine’s Day. And apparently he was very put out. Ever since, he’s been telling all the door crews that you’ve hypnotized me and made me your sex slave. And that he’s going to put it to rights. I don’t imagine for a moment that he will do anything except crawl back in his burrow eventually, but it is a BIT freaky.’
Sam drew his breath in slowly. He’d been sure there was something to be found on Robbie’s computer. Something that would finally give them a solid lead. And here it was. Twenty-four carat freak. Just the sort who would come up with some complicated plot involving a rare poison and a slow, horrible death.
He smiled at the screen. A couple of phone calls to nail it down, then he’d show Carol Jordan how wrong she was to sideline Sam Evans.
Tony refined the search parameters again and set his metacrawler to work once more. Google was fine for broad-brush searches, but when it came to fine-tooth comb work, it was hard to beat the search engine an FBI profiler colleague had given him with a nod and a wink. ‘It takes a little longer, but you can see the hair in their ears and nostrils,’ he’d said. Tony suspected a lot of what it did was in breach of European data protection laws, but he didn’t think the cops would be coming after him any time soon.
The big advantage he had over his American counterparts was that the sample he was looking at was much smaller than theirs. If an FBI profiler wanted to look at suspicious deaths of white males between the ages of twenty and thirty over the previous two years, he’d have something like 11,000 cases to consider. But in the UK, the total number of murders committed over two years scarcely reached 1600. When suspicious deaths were added, the numbers rose a little, but not by much. The difficulty Tony faced was actually to identify the target group he was interested in. With relatively few murders committed, there was less impetus to break them down into neat categories of age, gender and race. He’d wasted much of the day acquiring information that had turned out to be completely irrelevant. The process was slowed even further because his concentration span had been temporarily shrunk by drugs and anaesthesia. Tony was embarrassed at the number of times he’d started into consciousness, laptop in hibernation and drool running down his chin.
He had, however, narrowed his search to nine cases by the time Carol arrived in the early evening. He’d wanted to do better, to have something to show her, to prove he was still in the game. But clearly he wasn’t, not yet. So he decided to say nothing about his trawl.
She looked frayed round the edges, he thought, watching her slip out of her coat and pull the chair up to the bedside. Eyes heavy-lidded, recent lines showing the strain at the corners. Mouth a despondent line. He knew her well enough to read the process as she pulled herself together and smiled for him. ‘So, how did it go today?’ she asked. ‘Looks pretty different from here.’ She nodded at the shape under the covers.
‘It’s been quite a day. I got my drains out, which was frankly the most painful experience of my life to date. After that, getting the splint off was a piece of piss.’ He gave a wry little smile. ‘Actually, I’m exaggerating. The splint coming off was no picnic either. But it’s all relative. And now I have a leg brace that holds the joint in place.’ He gestured at the lump under the covers. ‘Apparently the wound is healing well. They took me down for an X-ray, and the bone is also looking in pretty good shape. So tomorrow the sadists from physiotherapy are let loose on me to see if I can get out of bed.’
‘That’s great,’ Carol said. ‘Who knew you’d be back on your feet so soon?’