‘I thought we could have a glass of wine,’ Jenny said as Isaac closed the door to the flat. She was wearing a dress; her face was made up. ‘It’s the only time we can talk, with you being so busy.’
There was no suitcase in the hall, no sad face.
‘I can’t change you, not that I want to,’ Jenny said. She came over and kissed him, flung her arms around his neck. ‘I’ve missed you, you know.’
‘The same for me,’ Isaac said.
The meal remained untouched, the wine as well. It was the first time since that night when she had given him the cold shoulder that they made love.
***
No one was looking their best for the 6 a.m. meeting. Isaac arrived twenty minutes late, a smile on his face. Wendy wanted to comment but did not. Isaac had been able to get some rest, she and Larry had not, apart from an hour on a chair in the office. Bridget had brought in fresh clothes for her.
Larry was still wearing his clothes from the day before; he was not looking so good. Constables Taylor and Mortimer were still in the office, both alert and cheerful.
The stamina of youth, Wendy thought. She remembered when she had stayed up all night partying as a teen, and then gone out as a constable on the beat, but now she needed eight hours sleep a night to feel her best, and she had only received a fraction of that over the last few days.
‘Bright and breezy,’ Isaac said as the team came to order. On the table in the conference room, a selection of food from a local bakery, as well as six coffees.
‘Everyone’s hungry, I suppose,’ Bridget said.
Isaac said he was, as did the others, but for him, it wasn’t true. In the short time at home, he had made love to Jenny, slept for two hours, and even had breakfast.
So much for my weight, he thought, as he helped himself to some of the food.
‘We’ll go around the room for your updates,’ Isaac said.
‘We’ve got an 8 a.m. appointment with the taxi company,’ Wendy said. ‘We phoned the manager, woke him up. He wasn’t pleased and sounded drunk. His language wasn’t the best, full of invective.’
‘Not our problem.’
‘He sharpened up once I told him who we were and why we were phoning.’
‘Good job he did.’
‘If he hadn’t, we would have knocked on his door, woken him and the neighbours up.’
‘You had to threaten him?’
‘He was courteous afterwards. Apparently, one of the men in the office is getting married.’
‘Stag night, a few too many drinks, a stripper,’ Larry said.
‘He told you?’ Isaac asked.
‘Not in so many words. I just added the stripper in for effect.’
‘We don’t want to hear about your stag night,’ Wendy said. ‘No doubt you had a stripper.’
‘Two, if you must know. Don’t tell my wife, will you?’
‘I won’t if you don’t go into any more details.’
‘Larry, Wendy, focus,’ Isaac said. ‘We’ve got two young and impressionable constables sitting in with us. We don’t want them to get the wrong idea.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ Katrina Taylor said.
‘Did you get the data we wanted?’
‘According to the manager, their expert was worse than him,’ Larry said. ‘He promised he’d be in the office when we arrive.’
‘Bridget, CCTV cameras in the area?’ Isaac asked.
‘There’s a lot of traffic. I started last night, and although I can see a taxi, almost certainly the one in question, the tracking back to where it came from, where it was going, is not so easy. We agreed that it was best to wait till this morning.’
‘We need the driver and the taxi. Where is it, by the way?’
‘It’s out of service, engine trouble. We’ll ask the CSIs to check it out, but it doesn’t seem that much will be gained,’ Larry said.
‘Nothing,’ Isaac agreed. ‘We’ll meet at midday, either here, or phone in. We need to know everything about this taxi trip. See if you can find out who the mysterious woman is.’
‘Christine Mason?’ Wendy said.
‘No more to say to her at present. Did she stay with her sister?’
‘We believe so. I’ll phone her at the Fitzroy Hotel later today.’
***
Wendy remembered the last time she had visited the principal office of a taxi firm, more years ago than she cared to remember. It had been a smoke-filled environment – everyone smoked back then – the smell of tobacco, a fan attempting to keep the place cool, two dispatchers in radio communication with the taxis, pieces of paper clipped to a board, a line drawn through them as the job was allocated. On the other side of the cramped room, a dozen people operating the phones, taking a customer’s details, and then clipping the job to the board, a runner, a young lad no more than seventeen tasked with the job. It had been bedlam, but it had been alive.
‘Times have changed since then,’ Patrick Gleeson, the owner of the company said. He was a ruddy-faced man, barely up to Wendy’s shoulder, although he wore a smile that stretched from ear to ear – it seemed to be a permanent fixture. He had arrived at the premises not long after Larry and Wendy. No black cab for him, but a Mercedes.
‘Business good?’ Larry asked.
‘The minicabs eat into the pie, and then we had those damn Ubers cutting corners, not paying taxes, and the drivers wouldn’t even know where Buck Palace was, even
