Twenty
Only the Major Crimes Unit team, Detective Superintendent Fletcher, and Glen Ashton remained in the room. Hammersley and Attwood had stuck around for a further ninety minutes, discussing every facet of their own investigation and offering comments on the efforts of Cambridge and Thorpe Wood to date. By the time that stage of the meeting broke up and the two Met detectives took their leave, they were all in full agreement that everything that could have been done had been done.
‘What was that all about?’ Bliss said, looking around at familiar faces once more.
‘We got lucky, I’d say,’ Fletcher replied. ‘Though the dubious look on your face tells me you’re about to suggest otherwise, Jimmy.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m sceptical at the very least. I realise they’re short-staffed and burdened by case overload, but that’s not the Met I know. What’s more, Hammersley couldn’t have been more reluctant if he’d tried. He virtually said as much – that the decision had been taken out of his hands by somebody further up the chain. The question is: why?’
‘Are you implying they know something we don’t know, something they haven’t mentioned?’
‘I can’t put my finger on it. But the Met don’t pass off investigations that readily. And to do so by packaging up all their own case files and having two senior officers traipse up here to hand them over is unheard of in my experience.’
‘Perhaps they live in more enlightened times since their move, Sergeant.’
Bliss gave a gentle snort of derision. ‘I’m sure that’s how they love to describe themselves, ma’am. Great PR. But I’m not having any of it. They were too quick and too willing. Eager, almost. But not the two men actually leading the investigation; neither of them were happy about it.’
‘Would you like me to call my opposite number and ask him directly?’
‘Do you think it would do any good? Is he likely to tell you if there’s an elephant in the room we can’t yet see?’
Fletcher took his point. ‘If you’re right, why would they drop it in our laps?’
‘It’s what you do with a mess,’ Bishop offered. ‘Maybe they’ve seen their own people finding no joy working on three separate cases that are all connected. Perhaps they sent their own people to dig a bit deeper into what we have, to find out if we’ve managed to take it any further than they could. When I made the point about adding their nothing to our nothing and getting nothing, maybe that was the moment DSI Hammersley decided to hand over the poisoned chalice.’
Fletcher closed her eyes and sucked in a deep lungful of air. She let it loose slowly and said, ‘You’re saying we’ve been had. The Met saw this case as a lemon and were happy to give it up.’
‘Their senior leadership, yes,’ Bliss insisted. ‘I could tell by the look in Hammersley’s eyes that he wanted his team to finish what they’d started. But I’m guessing he swallowed his pride because he was instructed to do so if we had nothing new to offer.’
‘Which, if you think about it, tells us a great deal,’ Chandler said. ‘We’ve had this case for five minutes compared to them. With all their resources and reputation, they have little viable evidence, no suspects, no witnesses, not a great deal of forensics. Clearly, the Met don’t see any way of bringing this case to a satisfactory conclusion without at least one more victim ending up naked in a field somewhere.’
‘Penny’s right,’ Bishop said, picking up on the thread. ‘We’ve been chasing a false trail. They can see that, but they’ve also seen that we have nothing more to go on than they ever did. The Met think this case is a loser that will become nothing more than a gruelling media ordeal for whoever has it.’
‘Which begs the question: why did it not go that way for them?’
All faces turned to Glen Ashton, who had been sitting at the table in silence the whole time. Bliss had assumed the ERSOU man was sulking, or at least reluctant to speak up, but he recognised the significance of what was being suggested.
‘Glen’s not wrong,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know about these other murders. We weren’t aware there was a serial out there. There’s only one possible reason for that: the Met never admitted to it.’
Warburton was intrigued, and shuffled in her chair. ‘How could that possibly happen?’
‘Their three murders were spread out between three separate boroughs across London. That gave them the opportunity to put a lid on it. There’s no way the press wouldn’t eventually have figured out something was going on, so the Met struck some kind of deal with them.’
‘What kind of arrangement are we talking about?’
Shrugging, Bliss said, ‘I’m not sure, boss. Perhaps they offered the media an inducement provided they agreed not to broadcast their speculations. We’ve seen it happen in the early stages of other murder investigations in major cities. They convince the media that revealing the story will cost more lives. The press have been stung that way before, so they don’t want to become the new story, having caused further loss of life.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Fletcher said, rapping a hand on the table and bringing the meeting back to order. ‘Whatever their intentions, the Met have left us to run with this. What I’d like to know are your ideas for taking the investigation in the right direction.’
Once again it was Bishop who stepped up; Bliss was proud of his colleague and friend. ‘Ma’am, we are confident that both the jogger who discovered Majidah Rassooli’s body and the dog walker who saw him doing so are not involved. We could do our own interviews, but I’m happy with the statements provided by Cambridge.’
‘And the post mortem results?’
‘Provided us with nothing we didn’t already have, other than confirming how she died and when. I was reading the PM report when our Met officers arrived. As we already knew, there’s evidence of
