The Reckoning (8 page)

‘There was nothing different about him.’ She gestured to the door. ‘He was always concerned about his security, but he was more bothered about the business than about himself.’

‘So as far as you’re aware, he had no warning.’

‘Nothing.’ She gave a long, quavering sigh. ‘I thought things were getting back to normal. But things will never be normal now. I’ve already had a couple of phone calls from reporters asking about Ivan, about his past. Everyone will know. We’ll have to move again. And I don’t know what I’m going to tell the boys.’

This time, she didn’t cry. I had a slight suspicion that life would be easier without her husband around. Maybe Claudia was coming to that conclusion too. She stood up and brushed off the seat of her jeans. It wasn’t too fanciful to see it as wiping away all traces of the office building. I hoped she could walk away and not look back. She deserved to leave her husband’s mistakes behind her. And if she could think about him without bitterness – well, so much the better for her. It was beyond me, but I’d worked on child pornography cases; I’d seen it for myself. I didn’t need to imagine the kind of images Ivan Tremlett had downloaded. Nor did I need to imagine what kind of person would be titillated by them. It was a crime for a reason. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing how thoroughly he had been punished.

Damn. That was worryingly close to how the killer seemed to feel. It had been too long a day, I thought, as I said goodbye to Claudia Tremlett and watched Derwent lock up after us. It was time to go home.

The inspector, naturally, had other ideas. ‘Get a move on, Kerrigan. The traffic is going to be shite all the way back into town. We need to get going.’

I fell into step behind him. My feet were aching, my neck hurt and I could barely think straight, but I didn’t dare opt out. ‘Where are we headed?’

‘Back to the nick. I want to brief Superintendent Godley before the close of business. You might as well come too. Someone has to read through the files on Palmer and Tremlett and it’s not going to be me.’

The files would be dense, the material contained in them would be upsetting, and it wasn’t really fair of Derwent to palm the lot off on me. But that wasn’t why I went down the stairs slowly, painfully, as if my shoes were soled with lead. Bad though spending the day with Derwent had been and grim the things I’d seen and heard, I would happily have done another twelve hours of it rather than spend any time at all in the office. There was unfinished business there – business I didn’t want to finish. Business I didn’t even want to think about.

But then, maybe I would be lucky. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it today. It was getting late. Most people would have gone home already. I made the most of a tiny burst of energy generated by wishful thinking and hurried across the road after Derwent. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe everything was going to be all right.

I really should have known better.

As it turned out, we needn’t have rushed back. The superintendent was in a meeting that dragged on into the evening, a meeting that involved several senior officers and DI Bryce at Godley’s side. The other officers were so senior that I had never seen them in person before, just in pictures on the Met website. Something big was going on and, whatever it was, Godley wasn’t pleased about it. On the rare occasions when the door to his office was open, I had a grandstand view of him from my desk. His expression was that of a man under intense strain, with lines entrenched across his forehead and around his mouth. I had never seen him look like that, even at the height of the hunt for an active serial killer. The media had turned on him like dogs running wild and still I hadn’t ever seen him look upset. Tired, yes. But not hunted, as he was now.

On the bright side, the delay meant I had plenty of time to get very familiar indeed with the details of the murdered men’s files. The transcripts of the interviews with the two girls in Palmer’s case showed that their evidence was contradictory and confused, as Derwent and Vera Gordon had said. It was hard, though, to fault the CPS for proceeding. Children were not usually good witnesses, especially about something as traumatic as sexual abuse. They were likely to blur the outlines of the truth, to agree too readily with suggestions from those interviewing them, to forget key details from one interview to the next. So you could spin it both ways. Either they were lying deliberately, or they were too upset to remember accurately. If they were lying, there was something depressingly plausible about the details of their accounts; the conclusion was inescapable that they had done the things they described, even if it wasn’t with Barry Palmer. That lent them credibility even though their stories were weak in places. They didn’t have to be accurate for them to be telling the truth, and the jury had believed them. I tried to shake off the creeping gloom that was starting to affect me. It wasn’t up to me to retry the case following the death of the defendant, I reminded myself. Guilty or not, he had been singled out as a child molester and that had probably sealed his fate. But whether or not he was obviously, rampantly guilty, wasn’t the issue here. What I thought of him mattered not at all. He had been murdered, and it was up to us to find out who did it.

A whiff of bullshit permeated the statements from Ivan Tremlett; without surprise, I found myself on the side of law and order. Tremlett had constructed an elaborate conspiracy to explain the images in his files, but the investigating officer had been meticulous, compiling spreadsheets to prove that the images had been downloaded at times that Ivan Tremlett had been working. The timestamps showed that he had sometimes gone looking for images between writing emails, as if he had needed a break, or felt he deserved a treat. He had over a thousand images squirrelled away in various corners, password-protected and disguised as innocent, personal files. That hadn’t happened by accident. And I found it hard to believe it had been the work of his junior colleague, a young woman who gave a warm statement in support of him
after
he had accused her of tampering with his files. If she was trying to manipulate his employers to turn against him, as Claudia had suggested, she was playing a very long game indeed.

Halfway through the Tremlett file, Derwent walked past me and whistled to attract my attention as he threw an envelope onto my desk. ‘Hanshaw’s autopsy reports. Thought you might want to look at them.’ He walked backwards for a couple of paces, the better to see my face when he added, ‘I haven’t looked at them, so just give me the main points when you get the chance.’

Autopsy reports were probably my least favourite form of reading; I skimmed through them trying not to think about what I was supposed to be taking in. The sheer scale of the violence floored me. The injuries Dr Hanshaw had listed for the two men ran into three figures – some of them very minor, some of them catastrophic. Torn muscles, broken bones, bruises and cuts, stab wounds, amputations and rough excisions – the words brought back the images I had tried to suppress from Barry Palmer’s house, and conjured up images I never wanted to see from Ivan Tremlett’s office. I put the files to one side and stared across the office at Godley’s door, wishing dully that he would wrap up his meeting so that I could go home.

‘So this is what you’re up to. Watching the remake of
Twelve Angry Men
. Shame they had to slash the budget.
Five Angry Men
doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.’

In spite of everything, my first reaction at hearing Rob’s voice was pleasure. ‘Hey, watch it. You’re behind the times. In the modern-day Metropolitan Police Service, it would be
Five Angry Individuals
. You can’t exclude the possibility that a woman
could
have a role.’

‘I’m not sure we’d get away with calling them angry, either.
Five Individuals with Different but Equally Valid Opinions
.’

‘That sounds about right.’ I leaned back in my chair to look up at him. He was unusually tidy in a dark suit. ‘What are you doing here so late?’

‘Cleaning up a mess.’

‘What kind of mess?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you another time.’

Too many people around, I presumed. Someone had cocked up and it had fallen to Rob to sort it out. DC Rob Langton was that sort of police officer, diplomatic when he needed to be, clever without needing to shout about it, tough enough when that was called for. The mess – whatever it was – wouldn’t harm his career. He had the useful knack of walking away from disastrous situations with his reputation not only intact, but enhanced. I wished I had some of his skill and more of his luck.

‘What’s this?’ He was looking at the stack of files on my desk.

‘My latest dream job.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Have you had any dealings with Derwent?’

‘No. What’s he like?’

‘I’ll tell you another time,’ I said, echoing him deliberately.

‘I’ll look forward to it.’ He started to walk towards his own desk but stopped and turned back, leaning down so no one could overhear. ‘Since we have so much to say to one another, do you want to get something to eat later?’

‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

‘I’m suggesting we have dinner, Maeve. I haven’t seen much of you for a couple of months but I presume you still eat.’

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’ I started reorganising the things on my desk so I didn’t have to look at him. ‘It’s just that it’s late and I don’t know when I’m going to be free.’
And, as you’ve reminded me, I’ve been avoiding you for two months for a reason
.

‘I’ll wait.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I know.’

Impasse. ‘Look, I can’t go out anyway. Dec is coming over with the last of my stuff.’

‘The poor bugger. He spends his life shifting boxes of your belongings from house to house. How long did you stay in the last place? Six weeks?’

‘Nine. And if you’re trying to imply I have commitment issues, think again,’ I said, unruffled. ‘I only moved because the plumbing went disastrously wrong. I liked that flat until raw sewage started bubbling up through the bath drain.’

‘That would tend to change your mind about a place. Still, seems hard on your brother to have to do this every couple of months.’

‘Declan doesn’t mind. Well, strictly speaking he does, but Mum makes him do it anyway.’

‘How is your mum?’

‘How long have you got?’

‘All evening.’ It was neatly done, I acknowledged. Rob pressed home his advantage. ‘We don’t have to go out. We can eat at yours.’

‘I’m not cooking.’

‘No, you are not.’ He shuddered. ‘Never again.’

‘I never said I was good at it.’ I had only once cooked a meal for Rob. Vegetable lasagne. The sauce was watery, the vegetables unrecognisable slime. The pasta had the consistency of roofing felt. The cheese had blackened in the oven and set like tarmac. We had abandoned the attempt at eating it halfway through – in favour of doing something that I
was
good at, I recalled, at roughly the same time that Rob remembered too. A slow smile lit up his face and I couldn’t help laughing at him, because however much I wished we had kept things between us simple and professional, there had been times when the complications were so worthwhile.

‘Anyway, so we’re clear on who’s doing what, you’re supplying the venue. I’ll sort out the food.’

‘I’m not altogether sure that the venue has adequate facilities, by which I mean I don’t know if I’ve got plates. Or cutlery, if it comes to that.’

‘Then we can have sandwiches.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t wait to hear what excuse you come up with next.’

‘For the record, I still don’t think it’s a good idea.’

‘Just because you can’t trust yourself to be alone with me.’

‘I am quite capable of resisting your charms.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Nine o’clock. Dec should have been and gone by then.’ I blushed when I heard how that sounded. ‘Not because I want us to be alone. Just because I don’t want him to tell Mum about you.’

‘Understood.’

‘You are not going to be able to believe how much I can resist you, by the way. You’re invited for food. That means you eat and leave.’

‘I expected nothing more.’

‘Right. Well. I’ll see you at nine.’

‘On the dot.’ He walked away and I looked around the office with a carefully contrived neutral expression on my face, checking that no one had noticed the little scene. The only person who was looking in our direction was Liv Bowen, the newest detective on the team and the only other female. She blew her fringe out of her eyes and gave me a meaningless smile, which I returned.

Somehow, I hadn’t got around to having a conversation with DC Bowen yet. She was quite beautiful, with flawless skin and a delicate oval face. She wore her hair long, but kept it knotted at the nape of her neck. She had a dancer’s body, graceful but strong, and looked like anything but a police officer. If I struggled to be taken seriously, it had to be ten times worse for her. She had come to the team from an intelligence job in Special Branch, and there was plenty of speculation about whether she’d be able to cope with the work on a serious crimes squad that specialised in murder. There were also, I happened to know, more than a few rumours about her private life. I could guess the team had said much the same about me when I joined, but I didn’t know the details and I would never make the mistake of asking. My height would have made it hard for me to fade into the background even if I’d wanted to, but I tried not to draw too much attention to myself. I wore shapeless suits to work and rarely bothered with more than the bare minimum of make-up. Liv Bowen didn’t seem to wear any make-up at all, but then she didn’t need it. And she didn’t need my support if she was going to make her way in Godley’s team, I told myself.

As I was thinking that, she stood up and went over to where Rob was sitting, showing him a piece of paper. As she leaned over him she said something that made him laugh. I swallowed. They were working together on whatever case Rob was dealing with; they had to talk, whether I liked it or not. And I did not like it, I admitted to myself. I did not like it at all.