Paula exchanged glances with Alvin Ambrose. It felt like being back at primary school. Who was going to make a bid for teacher’s pet? Predictably, Sophie Valente bent her arm at the elbow in a half-raise.
Rutherford smiled. ‘Sophie? Care to share?’
‘The human remains in the convent grounds,’ she said confidently.
Uneasy now, Paula deliberately stared at the floor, not risking meeting anyone else’s dubious eyes. As she’d explained to Torin, this didn’t feel like the sort of case ReMIT had been created for.
Rutherford beamed at his favourite pupil, her failures of the previous day clearly filed under ‘not wanted on voyage’. ‘Exactly. You might be a newcomer to Bradfield like me, Sophie, but it’s good to see you’re paying attention. For those of you who missed it, a property company sent the bulldozers in to a former convent and girls’ home that they acquired after it closed down five years ago. The convent of the Order of the Blessed Pearl at Bradesden. The home was called the St Margaret Clitherow Refuge and School.’ He paused and looked around. ‘Feel free to make notes.’ Karim and Steve fumbled with pens and pads. The others didn’t even fidget. ‘When the diggers started work, they turned up human remains. Bones, to be precise. Not a bonny sight. It’s hard to be sure at this stage how many bodies we’re looking at but it’s likely to be more than thirty. Maybe a lot more. And our job is to find out who those skeletons belonged to and who put them there. And whether we’re looking at suspicious deaths. Which, if you ask me, is a no-brainer, given the scale of the thing.’ He paused for dramatic effect.
‘Do we have any indications of how long they’ve been in the ground?’ Paula asked.
Rutherford’s smile tightened at the corners. ‘Well, I think it’s safe to assume they’ve been there at least five years, given when the nuns departed and the school closed down. But how recent they are? Well, we’ll have to wait for the forensics on that one. Carbon dating, and all that. Alvin, I want you to liaise with the lab on that one. They won’t want to spend their budget on it, but push them. Play the emotional blackmail card if you have to. “All those wee lassies belonged to somebody.”’
‘Do we know they’re all female?’
‘It’s a reasonable assumption, given that it was a convent and a home for girls. Alvin, lean on the labs for that too.’ Alvin looked glum. He’d never been drawn to the scientific end of investigations.
Rutherford’s paternal condescension was clearly going to be an issue, Paula thought. ‘But don’t be jealous of Alvin having all the fun. There’s plenty of work to go round on this one. DC Chen, I want you to go through all the records pertaining to the home. The Catholic Church must have details, even if they’re not on the census or anything official. I want to know who lived there and when and for how long.’
Stacey visibly perked up. Paula knew there was nothing she liked better than mission impossible. ‘I’m on it,’ she said, turning her attention back to her screens, her fingers whispering over the keyboard.
‘DI McIntyre, I want you to liaise with DC Chen on tracking down these nuns and any former residents of the home. We need to interview as many of them as quickly as we can. Karim can give you a hand with that. So get those leads coming, Chen, and get those interviews ticked off, Inspector. Sophie, I want you down at the crime scene to talk to DCI Fielding and see what’s what, and when you’ve got a handle on what it’s like down there, you can set yourself up back here as the clearing house for all the information as it comes through.’
It was, Paula thought, a big job for someone who didn’t have much experience of major incident rooms. Sure, Sophie seemed to have the organisational skills. Hell, you had to be organised to be so well-groomed this early in the day. The kind of make-up that looked effortless but actually took more time than slapping it on with a trowel; glossy chestnut hair in an immaculate French pleat; clothes that matched, barely a crease in sight. And that was how she looked every morning. She wasn’t easily flustered either. It would be interesting to see how she negotiated the complicated no man’s land between Rutherford and Fielding. Not a job Paula envied her.
Rutherford noticed Steve fidgeting. ‘Steve. There must have been men who worked there. A priest. Maybe a handyman. Or a driver. The local education authority must have been involved too. Even if the kids were schooled in the convent, there would have had to be inspections and such. A GP. They must have had a GP practice registration. Check all that out. Alvin can double up with you once he’s rattled the cages down at the labs.’
It wasn’t the most coherent allocation of tasks Paula had ever heard. She wasn’t unhappy with her lot; she knew her skills lay in interviewing witnesses and teasing out key information from suspects. But the rest of it seemed a bit hit and miss. She’d also noticed the way he addressed them. She and Stacey were always rank and surname. Stacey didn’t even get rank always. Everybody else was on first-name terms. The guys, obviously, because policing was all about man-to-man bonding. And Sophie presumably because she was one of the DCI’s chosen few. She wondered if Rutherford even knew he was doing it. She’d try not to let it bug her too much. And in the meantime, she’d show Rutherford she wasn’t there to make up the
