Chrissie fiddled with her pen. ‘I can’t make that call on their behalf. It’d have to be done after hours, when the equipment isn’t being used for cases that are logged and listed.’
‘But it could be done?’
‘You just don’t know when to back off, do you, Paula?’
‘Not when it comes to serial murder. This man has killed eight people that we know of. We don’t know why he’s doing it, but the chances are his eighth victim isn’t going to be his last. Unless he’s Chinese and he’s got some warped idea about lucky numbers. God, listen to me, I sound like Tony on a mad day. Chrissie, he’s going to keep doing this until we stop him.’ She meant what she said, and it shone through. What was the point of them if they couldn’t go the extra mile when it truly was a matter of life and death?
Chrissie looked away, refusing to meet the judgement in Paula’s eyes. ‘I’m on your side,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know whether I can deliver what you’re asking.’
Thanks to the club website, they’d narrowed down the likely shirts that would have been current at the time of Lyle Tate’s murder and placed them in separate evidence bags. Paula dumped the bags on the table and pushed them towards Chrissie.
‘Try. That’s all we’re asking. You’d be examining these shirts anyway on the off chance of trace evidence. Just push it the extra mile. Please.’
Chrissie gave a tired smile of concession. ‘No promises. I’ll talk to the person who raised it in the conference I was at. See if I can figure out how to proceed. Don’t put any probative weight on this yet, Paula. Don’t be saying, “We’ve got you bang to rights, your shirt’s going to put you away.”’ She caught Paula’s look of surprise and chuckled. ‘Yes, I know what you lot are like.’
‘We’ll be as silent as the graves where those young men were buried,’ Alvin said. ‘Do what you can for us.’
‘Don’t raise your hopes too high. It might come to nothing. Don’t stop looking for other ways to make your case.’
‘As if,’ Paula said.
They both longed to go home, to make a brief escape into the normality of family life where the confrontations were never as grim or as dangerous as the ones they faced at work, the place where they could close the door on the horrors for a short time. Paula and Alvin both had their own justifications for what they did. For Paula, it was a kind of bargain – ‘If I face down the darkness and the pain and the rage out there, in return, my family will be safe.’ For Alvin, it was a simple equation – ‘Every villain I take off the streets is one less potential threat to my family.’ Both understood the strength they derived from their home lives. Even when the battle lines were drawn – and every family had its battles – they knew this was what mattered.
But tonight, they needed to draw on another kind of family. Every case had its own momentum. And there came a tipping point in every case where it might be won or lost. That was when the team had to come together and share. When Carol had been running ReMIT, there had been no question of her not being part of that brainstorming. This time round, nobody even suggested Rutherford should be included. It saddened Paula that there seemed to be a divide between the DCI and the rest of them. It wasn’t good for morale and that wasn’t good for creativity.
They met in a corner of the Skenfrith Street police canteen, Alvin and Steve equipped with loaded burgers to accompany their mugs of tea. Paula brought them up to speed on their visit to the lab and Chrissie O’Farrelly’s promise to look at the possibility of invisible blood. ‘The science just gets weirder and weirder,’ Karim observed.
‘Talking about weird – that house of Mark Conway’s is well weird,’ Steve said through a half-chewed mouthful. He swallowed. ‘It’s completely impersonal. Even the pictures he’s got framed in his office are like a parody of what you see on the telly – Conway shaking hands with famous people, Conway with some footballer’s arm draped over his shoulders, Conway posed with the rest of the directors of Bradfield Vic. But you look beyond that and there’s nothing. No family photographs, no personal letters, no stash of greetings cards from anybody special.’
‘He’s right,’ Alvin said. ‘Bedroom’s like a stage set. Nothing that gives anything away beyond the superficial. Well-groomed rich man who loves football. I don’t have any sense of who he is or what he’s like.’
‘I’ve told you what he’s like,’ Sophie sighed. ‘He’s a decent guy who’s built up a successful business from nothing. He encourages his workforce, he doesn’t exploit his position in a sleazy way. I still can’t get my head round the idea of you all thinking he’s some kind of monster.’
‘We don’t talk about monsters here,’ Paula said. ‘Just people who do monstrous things. When we had the benefit of Tony Hill working with us, we learned to stop demonising people who perpetrate atrocities. It makes them bigger and stronger in our imagination. And it makes them invisible because we’re all subconsciously looking for somebody monstrous. I’ve come across quite a few serial offenders now, and not one of them was larger than life.’
Sophie glared at her but said nothing. Paula wished they’d got off on a better footing, but she wasn’t going to ignore the evidence slowly building up against Mark
