The Sister(82)

This rape had jumped the queue, and he was only too aware that he still had to trace Martin Shaw. He wondered what had happened in the cells, to warrant the DCI going down there with such apparent urgency.

Finished with his notes, he bookmarked the first page with a pen clipped over it and then shut the pad.

His fingertips drummed on the edge of the desk; he was becoming impatient now. Pulling up his sleeve, he looked at his watch. Is he ever coming back from those cells?

The door behind him was open a crack; the bustling sounds of the busy office came through, it seemed there was a spate of telephone calls, most of them had been answered, but a couple of phones rang on insistently – there weren’t enough people to answer all the calls. Just to be helpful he considered going out and answering a few calls himself; he’d rather be doing something other than wasting time as he waited for the chief’s return. He slipped into a kind of non-thinking abstraction.

Theresa appeared, entering backwards with a cup in both hands, she turned and handed him one before putting the other on the desk.

‘He still not back?’

‘No, but he said he’d only be a couple of minutes.’ He shrugged. Now they were alone together in Kennedy’s office, awkwardness descended on them, blanking them off from one another. It made for a difficult, stilted conversation, knowing he might walk in at any moment.

She broke first. ‘I must get on,’ she said.

‘Yeah sure, I...thanks for the tea.’

‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

At the door, she hesitated.

‘Does the chief seem okay to you?’

‘Grumpy as ever,’ he said and grinned. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, it’s probably nothing. He just seems on edge lately. Or is it just me?’ she said.

The door jerked open; she snatched her hand from the handle and jumped back.

‘Excuse me; I’m not interrupting anything am I?’ Kennedy shot her a look as if she’d betrayed him and burned Tanner with a harsh glare.

She saw it and quickly fumbled an explanation. ‘I had my hand on the handle, sir, when you pushed it, that’s why I jumped away.’ It made her sound guilty.

‘Theresa?’

She stopped dead in the doorway, her body language defensive. She did not turn.

‘You don’t have to call me, sir.’ He smiled, but it looked forced. He went round the desk, spinning the chair to face forwards before sitting down.

‘That was a waste of time. Some nutter claiming to be the Midnight Man, he was as thick as two short planks. I invented a raid and questioned him about it, and he confessed! Right, now where were we?’

Tanner thought about what she had said. The DCI did seem on edge, and what he’d just told him sounded implausible, there was something wrong. He knew better than to ask what it was when Kennedy was in this sort of mood. The last thing he needed was to have his balls chewed off. ‘I came in to tell you about the interview I had with the victim at the hospital last night,’ he said. A small but involuntary cough escaped his lips; he caught it in his cupped right hand and then took a sip of tea. ‘Right, sir, what we have so far. I managed to speak to the victim, Natasha Stone, last night. She’d only just moved to that address; she inherited the property from her grandmother. She used to go and stay there most weekends to keep her company, so there was a lot of her stuff already there. Anyway, she moved in straight away, pretty much as soon as her granny died.’

‘I don’t need her life story. Let’s move it on a bit shall we?’ He sighed.

‘It’s all kind of relevant, sir.’

‘All right, but let’s just speed it up, shall we?’

Before continuing, he cleared his throat and took another sip of tea. ‘She’d gone to bed just before midnight, Saturday. She reckoned she’d only been asleep a few minutes when she was woken; she thinks he whispered something to her, but she couldn’t recall exactly. She said it might have been her name.’ He wasn’t actually reading from his notes; he used them more as an aid to his memory; he turned onto the next page. ‘When she switched on the light, she saw the intruder was wearing a gas mask. She said she was paralysed with fear. Before she had a chance to recover her senses, he pinned her down and pushed something over her nose and mouth.’

Noting the increasing level of drama, Kennedy looked up from jotting notes of his own as Tanner continued.

‘She’s a school laboratory technician and she says she recognised the smell straight away – it was chloroform.’

‘Chloroform? That isn’t used anymore. No one’s used that in this country for years. I thought it was banned.’ Kennedy scribbled more notes. ‘We need to get someone onto to that. Is it still available and do you need a licence?’

‘Already done, sir. We had a stroke of luck, because when we started talking about it, she told me one of her colleagues was caught making it at the school and they suspended him immediately. His name is Adam…’ The surname eluded him; he started snapping his fingers. ‘You know like the park… ‘

Clearly enjoying his subordinate’s rare moment of fallibility, he prompted him unhelpfully. ‘Which park – Hyde park, Valentine’s park, come on, Tanner, get with it!’

Heat flushed under his collar as he ran his finger down the page. ‘There it is… Bletchley, Adam Bletchley.’