‘Sounds like a major incident to me,’ Elinor said.
‘Yes, but it’s more of a cold case thing. Endless picking through bones and running tests. It’ll keep the forensic anthropologists going for weeks.’
‘But eventually they’ll have to figure out who did it,’ Torin said. ‘Somebody’ll have to be charged, surely? They don’t just get a free pass for being nuns.’
Elinor poked him in the arm. ‘But if there’s no such thing as free will, then they had no choice. So what right do we have to punish them?’
Paula groaned. ‘You two make my head hurt. It’s too early for this.’
Torin grinned. ‘Can I take a packet of biscuits with me? For the boat?’ He had become the default caretaker of Tony’s narrowboat on its permanent mooring in Minster Basin. He went there after school two or three times a week to turn over the engine and check everything was secure. Lately he’d taken to staying for an hour or two, reading where there were no distractions.
‘As long as you don’t stuff yourself with the whole packet before you come home for dinner,’ Elinor said. ‘Exercise your free will and resist.’
‘Resistance is futile, El.’ He shovelled the last of his eggs and toast into his mouth and, still chewing, headed for the hall, grabbing his backpack of school books on the way. ‘Laters, ladies.’
‘He’s very sparky just now,’ Paula said.
‘Moving to sixth-form college has made all the difference. Nobody knows that his mother was murdered three years ago and nobody knows about that stupid nonsense last year. He’s got the break he deserved.’ Elinor gathered dirty plates, mugs and cutlery and loaded the dishwasher.
‘Next lesson, clearing up after himself,’ Paula sighed.
‘I’ll put you both down for that course.’
Paula leaned across the open dishwasher and kissed Elinor’s forehead. ‘I need to run, sorry. See you tonight.’
‘Good luck with Rutherford.’
Paula groaned. ‘Oh, how I miss Carol Jordan.’
Although the ReMIT team occupied the same offices as they had under Carol’s command, there were several key differences. Most important, in Paula’s opinion, was the disappearance of the state-of-the-art bean-to-cup coffee machine. Its replacement by a kettle and a jar of instant felt like a studied insult to the past. Another difference was that Stacey had been turfed out of her cloistered enclosure and shifted to a corner of the main office. She was still more or less walled off by her array of half a dozen monitors, but Paula knew her friend interpreted the move as an indication of mistrust, and that stung.
‘I always delivered,’ Stacey had complained. ‘I don’t need people looking over my shoulder while I’m doing it.’ She had a point. It wasn’t always helpful to know how she got her results. And she always had a beautifully constructed explanation, so everything looked kosher. Paula thought in these days of fake news and data manipulation on an industrial scale, they needed Stacey’s black arts more than ever. What they didn’t need was to make her feel like she was under suspicious scrutiny.
The main office now sported whiteboards and crime scene boards all round the walls. No chance now of staring into the middle distance once a major investigation got under way, Paula thought.
Rutherford had safeguarded his own personal space, moving into Carol Jordan’s old domain, adding a whole new row of filing cabinets. That morning, however, the office was empty, the monitor on the desk grey and dead. Everyone else was at their desk, doing whatever they thought made them look busy. In Carol’s day, when ReMIT didn’t have a live case, they’d sometimes taken a look at unsolved cases, often ones that Tony had reckoned might yield fresh results. It kept them occupied and it felt worthwhile even though the cases didn’t always make much progress. But Rutherford hadn’t yet laid down any guidelines for how they should occupy themselves when there was no major incident on their desks.
Karim was hunched over his desk, checking out the overnight reports, obviously looking for something that might have the potential to fall their way. He’d joined Carol Jordan’s ReMIT full of enthusiasm for the job, amazed at what he saw as his luck. Twenty-six, three years out of university with the law degree his family had pushed him into, he’d admitted to Paula that joining the crack unit had more than made up for the disappointment his parents gave regular voice to. ‘I always wanted to be a cop,’ he’d said. ‘It’s not like it was ever a secret. “You’re too little,” my mum used to say. “You’re too skinny,” my brother still tells me. It’s tough, taking all the crap whenever the aunties and uncles come round. But it’s my life.’
He’d been shy at first, but his keenness had been obvious from the beginning. He was good with women witnesses; big brown eyes and lovely skin, they all wanted to snog him or mother him. Now he’d grown in confidence and Paula reckoned it wouldn’t be long before he got his sergeant’s stripes. He moved his chair to the side so he could see Paula across their back-to-back desks. His voice was soft, pitched so only she would hear. ‘What do you think the point of yesterday was?’
Paula raised her eyebrows. ‘Team building, DC Hussain.’ Heavy on the irony. ‘Which bits of you still hurt?’
‘Mostly my ribs. The guy that brought me down fell on me like a tree. I wasn’t feeling a lot of solidarity with my partner right then.’
‘Not enough weeks on the street. Be interesting to see how Rutherford plays that one in the debrief.’
Before Karim could reply, DCI Rutherford strode in. ‘Morning briefing, everyone,’ he announced cheerily, striding across to take up position in front of one of the whiteboards. Everyone turned to face him. ‘Useful though yesterday was, it’s time for us to get down to some proper police work.’ From his hearty tone, he made police work sound on a par with a box of assorted doughnuts. ‘One of the
