The Reckoning (19 page)

Godley had moved on. ‘Have a chat with local CID as well. See if there’s any information coming back to them from their informers about this. Have you made contact with them?’

‘I met one of their DCs yesterday.’ It felt like a lifetime ago.

‘They should be inclined to help. They’ll be glad this one isn’t on them.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Do bear in mind that if we do find someone on the force who has been helping the killer, we’re going to have to tread carefully. I want to know straightaway if anything comes of that line of enquiry.’

‘Understood.’

I took what he said to mean he didn’t want to be bothered if we didn’t get anywhere, and left him to his thoughts. Whatever they were, they seemed to be stopping him from sleeping at night, if the bags under his eyes were anything to go by. None of my business, I assured myself as I crossed the office, heading reluctantly for Belcott’s desk. He was on the phone. I was just the right height to appreciate the brutal haircut he had had recently, so his hair was too short to obscure the weirdly squared-off shape of his skull. I stared down at his scalp gleaming through the dark bristles, the queasy white of a cave-dwelling thing that’s never seen the sun, and felt my stomach turn over.

He glanced up and I rearranged my face into a smile, almost certainly not quite quickly enough. Raising one finger to tell me to wait, he returned to his conversation without seeming to be in a hurry to wind it up. As his side mostly consisted of grunts, I wasn’t entirely clear on whether it was work or personal. But then, as far as I was aware, Belcott didn’t actually have a personal life. I found a spare desk and sat on the edge of it, feet swinging. I could be patient if I needed to be.

Long after my patience had worn out, long after I had given up sitting and started pacing, he finally hung up and swivelled around to face me.

‘Still here?’

‘Obviously. What have you found out?’

Instead of replying, he stood up, pulling the waistband of his trousers up and puffing out his chest. ‘I think this one needs to go straight to the boss.’

My interest sharpened. ‘Did you get a result? Really?’

‘Might have done.’ He leaned over so he could see into Godley’s office. ‘Might have a single name, as it happens. He doesn’t look busy. Are you coming?’

I followed him, nonplussed. I hadn’t really been expecting to find a trail of electronic breadcrumbs that would lead to whoever had been helping the murderer – or maybe the murderer himself. It was a good idea, but nine times out of ten a good idea comes to nothing. It was something of a shock to discover that yes, there was one registered user of the PNC database who had consulted the records of all three victims in the days
before
they were murdered, and only one.

It took Belcott a very long time to explain to the superintendent, and, by extension, me, how very clever he had been in narrowing down the list that IT had supplied. I saw Godley’s eyelids flicker, as if he had finally lost his grip on his patience, and his voice was sharp when he interrupted.

‘Right, Peter. Can we get to the end of this sooner rather than later? I’d like to know who was responsible for this today, if possible.’

‘Of course.’ Belcott sounded surprised and not a little wounded. I didn’t dare look in his direction. ‘The only person to have consulted those records in the past two weeks is a civilian clerical assistant in Brixton, one Caroline Banner. She’s been working there for eleven years, so it’s probably worth checking back to see if she’s been up to no good all along. Nothing in her file to suggest it, I have to admit. She’s a model employee, and her background checks have all been fine – no close relations with criminal records, no associations with known villains.’ He shrugged. ‘No accounting for who’ll turn bad if they get offered enough to do it. Everyone has their price, I suppose.’

‘It needn’t be money,’ I pointed out. ‘Not everyone is motivated by cold hard cash.’

‘What else would it be?’

‘Intimidation, perhaps. Or, considering the victims, she might have been persuaded that what she was doing was just and proper.’

‘Hard to argue with that. Sounds as if the killer is doing the world a favour, if you ask me.’

‘Thank you, Peter.’ Godley was probably the only person alive who could quell Belcott completely in just three words. His repressive tone was probably also designed to discourage me from tackling Belcott myself, but I wouldn’t have bothered to argue with him anyway. I was more interested in finding out what he knew.

‘Did you get a list of every other search she’s conducted in the last couple of weeks?’

‘Amazingly enough, I did think of that.’ He waved a sheaf of pages at me, not giving me time to read anything that was on them. ‘But it’s part of her job, legitimately, to access the PNC database about convicted criminals living in the local area. It’s going to take me a while to separate out the ones who fit into the victim profile you’ve been seeing. By which I mean nonces.’

Godley frowned. ‘You’d better list the sex offenders of all kinds – not just paedophiles. We don’t know what the parameters are for our killer. Just because we have three victims with convictions of that nature, we can’t expect him to stick to cats of one colour.’

‘It’s still going to take me a while.’

‘As soon as you’ve got the list, circulate it to DI Derwent, to Colin and Maeve, and to me. That’s your priority.’

‘What’s mine?’ I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure if Godley would allow it. ‘Caroline Banner needs to be interviewed, but should I wait for DI Derwent to get back?’

‘Is he still at the morgue?’

‘So it seems.’

Godley tapped the end of his pen on his desk, thinking. ‘Right. You’re absolutely correct: we do need to talk to this woman, right now. I want to know what she’s been saying and to whom. But I don’t want to spook her either, so I’m not letting the boys from the DPS arrest her for misconduct in public office – yet. Nor do I want to have personnel breathing down my neck, telling me I can’t ask her any questions because of pending disciplinary proceedings. Maeve, go and find her. Interview her, but gently. Don’t tell her she’s not in trouble, because she certainly will be, but play it down. Go for the sympathy angle – tell her about Ivan Tremlett’s kids. We don’t know why she’s helping the killer, but we do know that these victims don’t cause many people to shed tears. So make them real for her. We need her to want to help us. If she feels guilty, so much the better.’

I nodded.

‘Peter, thanks for helping on this one.’ There was a definite note of dismissal in the superintendent’s voice and I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed it.

‘Don’t you want me to speak to the Banner woman too?’

The answer to that was evidently no. Godley leaned back, looking indefinably authoritative all of a sudden. ‘There’ll be more useful things for you to do here. Like working on that list.’

‘I’m happy to talk to her on my own,’ I said, and subsided at a glare from the superintendent.

‘There’s no question of that. You’ll need someone with you because this is going to be a criminal case eventually, and you need to be protected from the defence. They’ll go for you if they find out you spoke to her informally before she was arrested. What are you going to say if she suggests you said anything inappropriate?’

‘But I wouldn’t.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t. That doesn’t mean she won’t claim you did.’ He looked past me, scanning the office and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘Why don’t you take Rob with you? He’s sensible on these occasions.’

Why not take Rob with me? Because it would be hellishly awkward, actually, Superintendent Godley
.

‘I think he’s busy. He’s out tying up the loose ends on the Tancredi case.’

‘At a guess, the ends are loose no more. He’s sitting at his desk.’

Of course he was. And I had run out of reasons why he shouldn’t be the one to come with me. I trailed a tetchy Belcott out of the office, almost wishing that he had been told to accompany me. Almost. No matter how great the potential for embarrassment if I worked with Rob, it was still likely to be better than the short, sweaty alternative represented by Peter Belcott.

Rob being Rob, of course, he made things easy for me. He was back to his usual self-possession, that amused reserve that had deserted him so comprehensively the previous evening and had still been subdued during our conversation at the Old Bailey. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the bruising across the back of his hand, I might have doubted that he had lost his temper at all. He listened courteously to my floundering explanation of where I was going and why I needed him to come too, or rather, why Godley had said he should come along when I definitely hadn’t asked for him, although I was glad he was free to join me. When I had finally wound down to silence, he picked up his keys and stood up.

‘As long as I get to drive, we can go where you like.’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Do we know she’s definitely at work today?’

‘Godley rang them. They’ve got her sitting in an interview room waiting for us.’

‘Does she know why?’

‘Doubt it. Although you never know, she might have a guilty conscience. If you’d been passing confidential information to someone who shouldn’t have it, you might suspect that’s why you’re being interviewed, I suppose.’

‘You might at that.’

Walking out to the car with him felt more or less like the old days, although much like someone with dormant toothache I couldn’t help poking at the source of the pain to see if it was really gone, and discovered with one look at him that no, it was not. I was exceedingly aware of him sitting in the car beside me – aware too of taking care to avoid physical contact with him, of taking care to choose the right words as we talked. But from him there was no sign of awkwardness and I did my best to match his composure.

On the way to Brixton I told him about my morning’s work, describing the priest’s house and his body – more specifically, what remained of it after the shotgun blast that had ended his life.

‘That does sound a bit odd in the context of the other murders. What did Derwent say when you suggested multiple killers?’

I let my silence answer for me and he laughed. ‘Like that, is it?’

‘I hadn’t thought it out before he left. I only put it all together before I went in to talk to the boss.’

‘A likely story.’ He glanced at me. ‘Seriously, Maeve, watch it. Twisting Derwent’s tail is not the way to deal with him.’

‘You don’t even know him.’

‘I know you. You’re dangerous to yourself and others when you start playing games.’ He sounded nothing but matter-of-fact – distant, if anything – and when I looked he was concentrating on the road.

‘I’m not playing games. I just took the opportunity to talk to the boss while Derwent was otherwise engaged. And it wasn’t as if Godley was delighted to hear the idea anyway.’

‘That’s nothing compared to how thrilled Derwent will be to hear about it second-hand. I’m not saying you were wrong to talk to Godley about it while you had the chance, but you’re going to have to watch your step. Think about how you’re going to approach it now, not when he’s in your face demanding an explanation.’

‘Thanks for the career advice.’

‘Diplomacy is not your strong point,’ Rob said frankly. ‘I’m trying to save you from yourself.’

‘And I’m grateful.’ Not least for the fact that we had just arrived at the car park of the police station where Caroline Banner worked, bringing a neat conclusion to a conversation that was making me edgy.

With the minimum of fuss, Rob managed to insert the car into a space that I would never have attempted.

‘Show-off.’

‘It’s starting to rain and I wanted to get close to the door.’

I shook my head. ‘You wanted to prove you’re a better driver than me.’

‘I don’t need to prove that. You’ve done it for me.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘How many times have you dinged your car this year?’

‘How many points have you got on your licence?’ I countered.

‘Six. I like fast driving.’ He grinned. ‘Your turn.’

‘Three dents, a broken taillight and a scrape along the side. I hate parking.’ I looked at the windscreen; he hadn’t been lying about the rain. ‘We should make a run for it.’

‘Lead the way.’

In spite of my head start, he got to the door before me and held it open. I went through without demurring, wondering why it bothered me when Derwent went out of his way to be solicitous towards me and why it didn’t seem to matter when it was Rob. Perhaps it was because I knew Rob viewed me as an equal in all things except maybe driving and certainly cooking, and I had a pretty good idea that Derwent despised me. He would have been livid if he’d known where I was and what I was doing, and the thought put an extra bounce in my step as I headed for the reception desk to introduce myself and find out where Caroline Banner was waiting. Given the severity of the allegations I had assumed she would have been put in an interview room, but the thin, harassed DI who came to greet us explained that she was sitting in his office. I must have looked surprised because as he set off to show us the way, at a pace that had me struggling to keep up, he said, ‘It wasn’t my idea. It was your boss who requested it. Said he wanted to keep things friendly for now.’

‘That’s the brief,’ I acknowledged.

‘I don’t like it myself. If it was up to me, I’d have her out of here.’ He swung around to look at me. His hairline was receding almost visibly and his expanse of forehead was corrugated with wrinkles. ‘I was supposed to meet you yesterday. Geraint Lawlor. I had to send Henry Cowell instead.’

‘He was very helpful. Knows his stuff, too.’

The inspector grunted. ‘That’s him. Rising star, or thinks he is.’ He spoke brusquely but I thought he was genuinely proud of his junior officer.

‘While I’m here, I wanted to check whether you’d heard anything about the murders from local informants.’

‘Whatever we find out, we’ll pass it along to you immediately. So far, nothing. And we have been looking. Just because we managed to pass the buck to you, that doesn’t mean we’re happy about having this sort of thing on our patch.’