Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(21)
‘Helpful,’ I said, and managed to get the hot tap off before the bath overflowed.
There was a pause.
‘If I tell you something can you keep it a secret?’
‘Sure.’
‘Nah, nah, nah, you said that too quickly,’ she said. ‘I mean really secret. You don’t tell nobody, not your boss, not your mum, not Toby, not nobody.’
‘Yeah, OK.’
‘Swear on your mum’s life.’
‘Not my mum’s life.’
‘Yes, on your mum’s life.’
‘I swear on Mum’s life I won’t tell nobody,’ I said.
‘I don’t think Walbrook comes from my mum at all,’ said Beverley. ‘I think she’s way older than that.’
‘Older than Father Thames?’
‘Nobody’s that old.’
9
Two Plus Two
Unlike most of the Folly’s cases, Operation Jennifer was a full-on major investigation with a full-on inside inquiry room stuffed with analysts and data entry specialists and lorded over by a case manager. The case manager keeps track of what goes into HOLMES and what comes out. It is their job to keep an investigation on the rails even when the senior officers have all been sidetracked by an unfortunate fatal shooting.
Stephanopoulos used to do this job for Seawoll and our case manager, Sergeant Franklin Wainscrow, had been picked on her say-so. So it’s not surprising that when we came in on Friday morning fresh lines of inquiry were waiting on our desks in the visitors’ lounge.
David Carey had been busy at the bell foundry, and while we were failing to save Richard Williams he’d been conducting a properly thorough interview with Dr Conyard. One of the questions he’d asked was – had Richard Williams supplied any special instructions or materials for the construction of the bell? Turns out that Richard had provided several sacks of aggregate for use in making the mould. One of the analysts had spotted this, linked it to the brick thefts and pushed it back to Wainscrow, who generated an action for Carey, which he fobbed off on to me over breakfast by pretending to need my advice. The cheeky sod.
‘You’d be amazed to know what they use to make the moulds,’ said Carey. ‘Not just the clay and the loam, which I get by the way, but manure?’
‘What kind of manure?’ asked Guleed, who was having an omelette with toasted crumpets.
‘What?’
‘What kind of manure – horse, cow . . . human?’
‘I didn’t think to ask,’ said Carey. ‘I’m not sure it’s relevant to this particular line of inquiry.’ He poked at his kippers a bit and sighed. ‘Anyway – one of the analysts wanted to know whether it was possible the aggregate had come from the bricks stolen from those archaeological sites.’
I paused with a forkful of kedgeree halfway to my mouth and kicked myself for not thinking of that myself.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That would be interesting.’
‘Lucky for you,’ said Carey, ‘there was enough of the mould left to get samples.’
‘And?’
Carey frowned down at his plate, shook his head and reached for his tea.
‘We’ll know when we get the results. Two weeks to a month, depending.’
‘Depending on what?’ I asked.
‘Just depending,’ he said, and pushed his plate away.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Guleed.
Carey shook his head.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘No offence, Peter, but when this case is done I’m going back to my nice horrible murders.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to think that a six-week floater was horrible, but the shit you deal with . . . Fuck.’
Toby, who had an instinct for abandoned breakfasts, materialised beside Carey’s chair and gave him the big eye special. Carey did a quick scan to make sure Molly wasn’t watching and put his plate on the floor under the table.
‘She hates it when you put the plates on the floor,’ I said.
‘Gets them clean though, don’t it?’ said Carey, retrieving his suddenly gleaming plate. He looked at me. ‘I reckoned that since you were already in with the archaeologists you’d want to take that over that line of inquiry.’
See what I mean? The sly sod.
I had another round of IPCC interviews where I got the distinct impression that they wanted rid of this case as fast as possible. Contrary to what you might think the IPCC, being understaffed and poorly resourced, try to avoid being assigned cases. Which is probably why the Police Federation tries to dump as many on them as they can – the better to educate them about the nature of most complaints. Still, even with my Federation rep glaring at them, the interviews took up most of the day.
After which I headed back to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to spell Nightingale, who was practically camping in their foundry room and no doubt swapping manly stories about hitting pieces of metal together.
While he went back to the Folly I sat guard in the corner of the furnace room, partly because of its good lines of sight but mostly because it was the only place I could get a decent Wi-Fi signal.
Given that all three named authors had died suspicious deaths, I had another look at the PDF of the script fragment I’d found in Richard Williams’s home office.