‘What?’ Eva asked, confused.
‘Annual leave,’ he said. ‘Flying at midday.’ He gave her a broad grin. ‘Heard about Daniels?’
She shook her head as they continued to walk down the corridor. Daniels, the sleazy colleague whose PNC login Eva had stolen. ‘What about him?’
‘Some lag broke out of Barfield. Turns out Daniels made an unauthorized PNC search on this bloke a few days ago. Commissioner’s spitting feathers. Looks like a suspension and he’s got one of Jacobson’s murder investigation teams knocking on his door. Still, couldn’t happen to a nicer fella, eh?’
He stopped and looked at Eva as though for the first time, noticing her crumpled casual clothes and that she looked rough. ‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Why the MIT?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘You said the murder investigation team were banging on Daniels’s door. Why? I thought it was just an escaped convict.’
Frank shrugged. ‘Looks like he killed another inmate before he got out. Sounds like a right fucking psycho. Him and Daniels deserve each other. Tell you what – I’ll get us some coffee. Black?’
Eva gave him a weak smile. ‘Great.’
Frank wandered off and she hurried into her room. She felt sick. Joe had said nothing about another inmate. Nothing about…
She drew a deep breath and remembered what he’d supposedly done to Caitlin. The scalpel he’d held in front of her face. The threats he’d made. Had he been lying to her after all? She closed her eyes and saw him, and the look of confused anger on his face when he’d told her all that stuff last night. Bin Laden… assassination attempts… Did she really believe him, or was she just
‘No,’ she muttered to herself.
She reminded herself of the figure approaching her house just moments before they’d escaped it. It was a chilling memory, and it told her that something weird was going on, even if she didn’t know what.
Eva turned and headed back to the door just as Frank entered carrying two polystyrene cups. They collided, and coffee sloshed over Frank’s suit. ‘Oh my God… sorry…
The offices of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Command Unit were on the first floor. Ordinarily they had just a skeleton staff during the night, but it was immediately clear to Eva, as she walked along the corridors, that at least one MIT was active. She counted about fifteen people in the first incident room she passed, all of them looking busy.
Eva stepped inside the room. It was ten metres square and its tinted-glass windows looked down on the Yard’s main entrance. There was the constant noise of muted telephone rings, the tapping of keyboards, the chuntering of a photocopy machine. The room smelled of warm printers and coffee. Eva was a familiar enough face here, but nobody even acknowledged her arrival.
A woman approached from the far side of the room. She was wearing a two-piece suit and her grey hair was very short. For a moment, as the woman looked her shabby clothes up and down, Eva thought she was going to challenge her, but she swerved to Eva’s left and pinned a photograph to a corkboard on the wall adjacent to the door. Eva looked at it and felt her skin prickle. It was an old photo, but it was clearly Joe.
She scanned the room. Frank had mentioned DCI Jacobson, head of one of the MITs. She knew him well – chubby, with brown hair, and always a bit crumpled. Jacobson was one of the few people in this place who didn’t have time for the constant inter-departmental sniping. A good man. She couldn’t make him out in the room. She swallowed hard, then followed the grey-haired woman back to her desk on the far side of the office.
‘Yes?’ The woman sounded impatient and didn’t look up from her screen to talk to Eva. It was clear she felt her personal space was being invaded.
‘Jacobson sent me,’ Eva said, as briskly as she could. ‘I need to cross-check visitors to Barfield over the last week.’
‘First I’ve heard of it.’
Eva gave a half-smile and decided it was better not to volunteer anything. The woman sighed, but rummaged through a pile of papers on her desk until she found a plastic sleeve with a single data stick in it. Without looking at her, she handed it to Eva.
‘Good. Thanks. I’ll, er…’ Eva jerked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backwards, and smiled. It wasn’t returned.
She walked as casually as possible back to the door, holding her breath, positive that she was going to be called back at any moment. But she wasn’t. Out in the corridor again, she did her best not to run, looking for an empty room with a spare terminal. She found one three doors along, and within seconds she was sitting in front of the screen, plugging in the data stick.
The information was divided into folders, one for each day over the past two weeks. She opened a file marked ‘08_05_11’, to be presented with a list of twenty thumbnail images. Her own photograph was third in the list. For a moment she considered deleting it, but she knew that would be stupid, and she hurried on.
The image she was looking for was two places from the bottom. She double-clicked on it, and a larger window appeared with the grainy but familiar face of a man of Middle Eastern appearance staring out at her. Dark skin. Hooked nose. And underneath the picture, a scan of his hand print, the time he checked in and the time he checked out.
His name: Sarmed Ashe.
Her heart was thumping. She closed the window on the screen and removed the data stick, then went to the door. She was about to step into the corridor when she saw the portly frame of DCI Jacobson walk past.
She cursed under her breath and moved to the side of the door, pressing her back against the wall. How long had it taken her to get here from the incident room? Fifteen seconds? She hadn’t exactly been paying attention. She counted to twenty before taking another deep breath, opening the door and leaving the room.
There was no one in sight.
She walked briskly, but not so fast as to attract attention. As she passed the incident room her eyes darted through the interior window. Jacobson was talking to the woman with the short grey hair. Impossible to tell what she was saying. But easy to guess. Ten metres to the lift. She picked up her pace, feeling like she had half the Met following her. On reaching the lift she pressed the down button and waited.
Movement further down the corridor. The door to the incident room opened. Three seconds later the lift hissed open. Eva glanced to her right. Jacobson had emerged into the corridor and was staring in her direction. Was she paranoid, or did he look suspicious? She saw him mouthing the word ‘Eva?’ just as she stepped into the lift and slammed the button for the basement.
Safely inside, she found herself almost hyperventilating and felt trickles of sweat all over her body. This wasn’t just a sacking offence, it was a prosecution offence. And all to help a man accused of murder?
The basement was the lair of the forensic teams. Like nearly everywhere else in the building, it was pretty much empty at this hour. She passed a pale-faced young man in his early twenties who barely seemed to notice her, but apart from that she met no one until she stepped into the badly lit room of the fingerprint department.
Two young men were on duty. Neither looked like he saw much daylight and only one looked up when Eva entered. Eva forced her face into an expression of confidence and marched up to him. ‘DI Buckley,’ she said. ‘Can you run me a search?’
‘ID?’ the young man asked.
Eva casually handed over her ID, which the young man barely glanced at – and so he didn’t see that her hand was trembling.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Eva handed him the data stick. ‘Biometric details of prison visitors. There’s a Sarmed Ashe on there. I want to cross-check him with the system.’ The young man shrugged, as if to indicate that this was trivial for someone of his technical ability, and plugged the device into his terminal. Eva helped him navigate to the correct file. As the young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, she felt her heart hammering in her chest and her eyes kept flickering
