Destruction of Evidence (30 page)

‘Do you only stock Welsh books?’ he asked a young woman with spiked silver and purple hair who was stocking the shelves from a trolley.

‘English section is through the arch. Are you looking for something in particular?’

Peter thought back to his own childhood and tried to recall the first books he’d taken notice of.

‘Are you?’ she slid half a dozen Welsh Quick Read books on to a shelf.

‘A picture book for a young child.’

‘English or Welsh?’

‘As I don’t speak Welsh I suppose it’d better be English.’

‘You’re never too old to start. They run evening classes in the tertiary college.’

‘Definitely English.’ Peter said flatly.

She abandoned the trolley and walked through the arch showing him half a dozen shelves of children’s books.

‘Can you recommend any?’

‘Alphabet, Numbers? Is the child going to learn to read phonetically…’

‘I was thinking of a fun bedtime story.’

‘Age?’

‘Under a year.’

She proceeded to pull them off the shelves. ‘Nursery rhymes, classic children’s fairy tales, Winnie the Pooh…’

Peter made his choice purely on the illustrations, familiar titles and the thought of the amusing voices he could adopt when reading them to his son – or daughter. He smiled at the thought. A son would be wonderful, a daughter even better because she’d look like Daisy.

He picked up Jack and the Beanstalk, The Billy Goats Gruff, The Three Little Pigs and – the Snow Queen. ‘I’ll take these four.’

‘The Snow Queen is beautifully illustrated but frightening. Hardly suitable for a young child.’ The girl sounded like a Sunday school teacher.

‘It’s what I want.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The assistant obviously didn’t subscribe to the view that the customer was always right. ‘The till is this way.’

To his disappointment she slipped the books he’d chosen into a paper carrier bag.

‘You don’t wrap the books?’ he asked.

‘We have a gift wrapping service…’

‘When I was a kid and my father used to buy us books they always came wrapped in brown paper.’

‘And no doubt one of the assistants used to carry his purchases behind him when he left the shop.’

Peter took out his wallet. ‘How much?’

‘Sixty-eight pounds ninety-nine pence, sir.’

‘What!’

‘Children’s books of this quality are expensive, sir.’

He handed over his credit card.

* * *

‘Even if he reformatted the disks and hard drive more than once some of the information will remain, sir,’ Sarah explained down a line that was fading in and out as Chris Brookes her “other half” drove towards Wales. ‘It will just be scrambled. Are you sure you can’t wait? We’ll be there in two hours.’

‘I need to check something urgently.’

‘First you have to find out if he’s just deleted his files or used one of the software programmes that clean up the drives and disks. Pressing delete or dragging it to a wastepaper basket will scatter the data, not obliterate it. The file stays. Information about that data, along with the data itself, will be left on hard drive in temporary files and registry entries. If we’re in luck you may find the original file still intact. Start by checking the time stamp information. It will show if and when any files were deleted and what the properties of those files were.’

Trevor listened intently to the instructions Sarah Merchant fed him down the line. He poured a glass of water and took a bite out of the roll. The bread crunched but it was edible and all he wanted was to stave off hunger pangs. He followed her directions.

‘Now we’re reinstating the parameters, sir…’

The fragment of photograph slowly, gradually grew in size.

He stared at it then blinked. The room appeared to be moving around him. He could no longer focus. He heard Sarah’s voice but it seemed to be coming from a great distance.

‘Sir…’

‘Sarah…’

‘Sir…’

It was no use, he simply couldn’t keep his eyes open. He fell, knocking over the glass of water. The last thing that registered was that he wasn’t alone.

‘Peter?’

White-gloved hands took his computer and emptied his briefcase… then there was only darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Peter was in the baker’s watching an assistant wrap a loaf of bread in a sheet of white paper that looked so thin it could almost be tissue when his mobile rang.

‘Peter?’

‘Sarah, so looking forward to seeing you,’ he greeted her expansively.

‘I’ve just been talking to Trevor.’

‘He cracked the computer yet?’

‘He started mumbling,’ she broke in impatiently. ‘He sounded ill. He didn’t end the call for some time but all I could hear was breathing and footsteps.’

‘It’s probably the line. We’re in the depths of deepest darkest Wales.’ He gave the assistant, who was listening in, a bright artificial smile.

‘I think something’s wrong.’

‘This is a sleepy Welsh town.’

‘Please, go and check he’s all right,’ she pleaded.

‘For you, darling, anything. And while I’m at it I’ll shake out the red carpet for your arrival.’

‘We’re undercover.’

‘Then I’ll paint it black.’ Peter handed over a ten-pound note, pocketed his change and took his bag of baguettes, sausage rolls and doughnuts. He left the shop, and sheltered in the doorway; turning up his collar against a sudden squall of rain.

He looked up and down the road. To his left was a marble-fronted interior designer’s that reeked of quality – and expense. The sort of place he usually walked past at speed. On one side of the window a tiffany lamp stood next to a bowl of silk orchids on a revolving Edwardian bookcase. The other was filled with a display of linen upholstery fabrics. The rolls cascaded artistically from a mahogany dining table. But Peter didn’t see the cloth, only the thick brown paper on the floor that the cloth was resting on.

The bell clanged as he opened the door, just as it had done in every other shop he’d entered in town making him feel as though he’d walked through a time warp.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

An elegantly dressed woman with silver hair left a desk behind the counter and joined him.

He looked around. One of the rolls of fabric caught his attention. A pattern of fantastic animals, all smiling and all in improbable colours. Red giraffes gambolled with purple hippopotami. Green monkeys swung in lilac and orange trees above white-foamed water filled with pink-spotted blue whales and cream-and-black-striped crocodiles.

The woman saw what had caught his attention and rolled out the cloth. ‘That is one of our most popular patterns, sir.’

‘It’s certainly colourful.’

‘It will complement any nursery decor. It’s a pattern adored by parents and children of both sexes and not tied into any commercial film, cartoon or,’ she lowered her voice as though she were about to swear, ‘television series.’

Peter thought it would look brilliant in the room Daisy had prepared for their baby. She’d already had the decorators in to paint the walls “sunshine yellow” and spent hours poring over nursery catalogues before deciding on plain whitewood furniture. He could imagine a duvet cover, curtains and even a small sofa and chair in the fabric. The room was certainly large enough to accommodate them.

‘How much would I need for curtains and throws to cover a bed and chair, and to make cot and bed linen?’

‘We have matching cot and bed sized duvet covers, sir, and the amount of fabric would depend on the size of the windows.’

He gave her approximate measurements and she talked him into buying twenty metres, plus three sets of cot and three sets of bed linen and then added, ‘you do realise that once it’s cut you may not be able to match it, sir. The dye batches can vary enormously.’

‘Make it thirty metres,’ he said rashly.

‘It is forty pounds ninety-nine pence a metre and there’s the linen…’

Peter blanched. This was one expense he’d never be able to claim back from the force. He could almost hear Bill Mulcahy shouting. “Forty metres. All you were after was a bit of bloody brown paper. Half a bloody metre would have done, Collins… ”

For the second time in an hour he extracted his credit card from his wallet and handed it over.

The woman produced a long thin rod from beneath the counter. Working slowly and methodically, she unrolled the cloth and began measuring it. When she’d finished, she cut it carefully, folded it and the linen together, tore a large sheet of brown paper from a roll on the wall and covered the counter with it. Placing the linen in the centre of the sheet she wrapped and tied it into a neat parcel with string.

‘You’re an expert packer,’ Peter complimented.

‘A necessary skill for anyone who works with soft furnishings.’

He slipped his credit card into the machine and tapped out his number. ‘Bet you don’t get many orders that size in a town this small,’ he said casually as they waited for the bank to accept it.

‘You’d be surprised. Only two weeks ago we had an order for one hundred and twenty metres of fabric.’

‘Someone professional?’

‘You could say that. Tim Pryce is redecorating ten of the rooms in the Angel.’

Peter opened the door to the cottage and walked in. Dropping the parcel on the stairs, he called out, ‘Honey, I’m home.’

When there was no answer he went into the living room. Trevor was lying on the floor, an empty glass and plastic bottle that had held water next to him. Peter knelt besides him, checked he was breathing and placed him in the recovery position. Only then did he notice that the patio doors were open. Trevor’s briefcase was lying open and empty on the table. Next to it was the lead to his laptop. There was no sign of his computer or the disks he’d taken from Dai Smith’s house.

Patrick ended the call to the emergency services and laid a reassuring hand on Peter’s shoulder. ‘The paramedics will be here in ten minutes and I bet you a bottle of oak-aged malt it’s Gamma Hydroxybutyrate.’

‘Gamma what?’ Peter asked testily.

‘GHB to you, one of the classic date-rape drugs,’ Patrick declared. ‘Banned since 2002 in the UK. Easy to manufacture, beloved by users of the gym because it soothes muscle pain and gives the recipient a feeling of euphoria, or so I’m told. Almost odourless and tasteless although it’s slightly salty; the perfect drug to slip into the drinks of unsuspecting women and men by would be rapists. It takes effect within ten to twenty minutes.’

‘And Trevor?’

‘If it is GHB he could be out for two to four hours depending on the dose he was given.’ Patrick picked up first the glass then the bottle from the floor with his pen so as not to smudge any prints. He shook them in turn and a drop of liquid fell on to his finger from the bottle. He sniffed then tasted it. ‘No salt. This has been rinsed out. As there’s no way of knowing how much Trevor ingested he’ll have to stay in hospital so he can be monitored until he comes round.’

‘He’ll hate you for it.’

‘I’ll risk his wrath as all I have as an aid to diagnosis is his current condition. He could slip deeper into a coma or even die if he’s been fed too much. Or given something entirely new in the drug line. The chemists are coming up with variations all the time.’

Peter leaned over Trevor and adjusted the cushion he’d placed under his head.

Patrick pulled two evidence bags from the pocket of his white lab coat and wrapped the glass and bottle. ‘He’s not going to be a happy when he wakes and finds his computer gone.’ Patrick looked at the lead and empty briefcase. ‘You must be getting close to solving this mess?’

‘What makes you think that?’ Peter asked.

‘The state of Trevor. He’s obviously rattled someone’s cage enough for them to drug him in order to steal his laptop.’

Tim Pryce walked through the patio doors and looked down at Trevor. ‘How is he?’

‘We’ll know more when he gets to a practising doctor and away from a pathologist. Hopefully he’ll live,’ Patrick slipped his mobile back into his pocket.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Tim apologised. ‘I’ve spoken to everyone in the Angel. The staff, the customers, the residents and people in the bar. No one has seen anyone hanging around the back of the cottages. Carol March and Reggie Moore are supervising the search of the property but I doubt they’ll find anything. Whoever took Trevor’s computer and disks is probably long gone. I’ve never had anything else like this happen to any of the Angel’s guests before…’

‘Just four people murdered two doors away,’ Peter said scathingly. ‘Looks like this street’s going downhill.’ He left Trevor’s side at a knock at the door. ‘That’ll be the ambulance.’

‘If it is, it’s quick,’ Patrick commented.

‘They haven’t far to come.’ Tim closed the patio doors.

‘Stay with Trevor, Patrick.’ Peter answered the door. Ken was outside, Mars standing obediently at his heels.

‘I’ve only just heard. Is Inspector Joseph all right?’ Ken asked.