The Complete Nightingale Mysteries Box Set Page 3

  “What were these mystery fibres?”

  “They were identified as cotton, but the type was unknown. According to the techies, they may have come off some kind of cloth, and there was a suggestion that it might have been used to wrap the children in. But that’s as far as they could go.”

  “Were the fibres found at all the crime scenes?”

  “No, just at the last four.”

  “And there was nothing else at any of the scenes?”

  “No.” Mallory shook his head. “No sightings, no prints, no other fibres, no bodily fluids. Nothing. Or at least, nothing we could make anything of.”

  “What about CCTV footage?”

  “Again, nothing. Two of the blocks of flats had cameras installed to cover the main entrances because of past vandalism, but the Toybreaker must have got in and out some other way. And he wasn’t picked up on any local CCTV cameras, either.”

  “Frustrating.”

  “True, although we did think we had a possible avenue of inquiry at one time.”

  “And what was that?” Hannah leaned forward across the table.

  “The victims. They were all kids from one-parent families, but they lived at different locations. So who would have access to that kind of information?”

  “Social workers, doctor’s surgeries, health visitors.”

  “That’s right. But like I said, there were no common factors among the victims. None of them had the same doctor, none of them were on the social services ‘at risk’ register, and none of them had been visited by the same health worker. So all the preliminary checks, the easy stuff, revealed nothing. Right, Gary?”

  Falcon nodded. “So we started to build up a database then. All the social workers and health visitors employed in the city are on it. And we checked all of them. Personal backgrounds, professional details, alibis for the times of the crimes. Everything. But nothing showed up. Then we tried to identify the source of the chloroform, but that got nowhere either. The healthcare line of inquiry’s still open, but it’s been put on hold.”

  “You said you’d looked at the case from every possible angle, but surely there’s one that hasn’t been explored yet?”

  Mallory grinned, and turned to Falcon. “What can she possibly mean?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I understand how the minds of shrinks work. Too complex for me to unravel.” Falcon kept his face perfectly straight. “But I think the lady might just be referring to this hotshot psychological offender profiling thing.”

  Hannah laughed. “All right, you two. I’ll make an allowance for the fact that you’re both obviously stressed out. But yes, I meant bringing in a profiler. But I take it you two don’t agree with the idea?”

  “Open mind,” Mallory said. “Although underneath, I suppose I want police to do police work. Highly trained officers, like Gary here, but still members of the service.”

  “But maybe, just maybe, I can be of some help here.”

  “Lady,” Mallory mimicked Falcon’s voice. “Right now, if I thought it would lead to the arrest of the Toybreaker, I’d accept help from the fairies.”

  “Thank you.” Sarcasm or not, Hannah recognised it as an acceptance of her position in the investigation. True, it was a grudging acceptance, but she guessed it was the best she was going to get. At least for the moment.

  “So let’s get back to the funhouse.” Mallory began to stand up, but Hannah raised her hand.

  “Just one more thing before we go, David. To clear the air. I understand the pressures when an investigation of this kind hits a brick wall. When the media are screaming for a result. But you two are experienced officers and, like you said, handling pressure is part of the job. So is it just lack of movement in the investigation, or is there something here you haven’t told me about?”

  “Shrewd.” Mallory nodded to himself. Then he looked at Falcon.

  The chief inspector shrugged. “Very shrewd. And maybe she should know.”

  “Right.” Mallory sat down again. “I’m what you might call an old-fashioned copper. I used to run CID in the division round here. This was one of the toughest inner-city areas in the UK. Drugs, prostitution, protection rackets, armed robberies, gang warfare, violence on the streets. The lot. Tough villains, tough cops. The one called for the other. We knew them, they knew us. It’s not in vogue now, of course. Not the acceptable face of the modern force.”

  “But they still promoted you,” Hannah said.

  “Oh yes. They made me deputy commander of the Crime Management Team. Because I’m a bloody good copper. But I still bucked against some of the new jargon-driven management strategies. Or rather, against the idiots on Executive Row who proposed them.”

  “Not a good career move, that.” Falcon shook his head.

  “True. Especially when I went too far and stuck my head over the parapet.”

  “Hold it there,” Falcon interrupted. “Before you go any further, I would like to point out to the lady that it was to protect one of your officers. Since I’m sure modesty would prevent you making that point yourself.”

  “All right, so I felt a sense of loyalty to him.” He turned back to Hannah. “It was a high level drugs investigation and we had a young DS working undercover in the ring that was running a large-scale supply racket. He’d taken a long time to work his way in and he was just starting to provide very high grade intelligence. Then I had information from a reliable informant that our man had been sussed and I wanted to pull him out. But I was overruled by the ACC running Crime Management. He wanted to keep the sergeant there for another twenty-four hours until we could set up an operation to move in on the ring. He was the boss, and we did what he said. Then a few hours later I received a message to go to a warehouse in the old dock area. Our man was there. He was strung up from a roof beam. Naked, with most of the flesh on his body burned away with what the pathologist thought was a blowtorch. A slow and very painful death.”

  “And you blamed the ACC for it?”

  “I blamed him because it was his fault. There was an inquiry, but he told them that I had failed to inform him of the full extent of the risk to the DC. It was his word against mine, and in the end neither of us was disciplined. But he was responsible for the sergeant’s death. And one night I got him on his own and decked him.”

  “You got disciplined for that, surely?” Hannah asked.

  Mallory shook his head. “He didn’t report it. If he had, I’d have been kicked off the force. But he knew that if he did make a complaint the whole can of worms would be opened up again and he didn’t want to risk that. But as sure as God made little apples, there’s someone up on Executive Row who hates my guts and wants to see my career in ashes.”

  “I see,” Hannah said. “Like Gary said, not a good career move. But surely the ACC won’t try to shunt the Toybreaker operation off the rails?”

  Mallory smiled grimly. “Oh no, he’s too much the consummate politician to do that. In fact, he’s gone out of his way to make certain he’s put together a good investigation. Me and young Gary here, we’re the dream team.”

  “Dream team?”

  “That’s right. The old-fashioned in-your-face copper, and the modern IT specialist. For the record, Gary here is an expert on the use of computer techniques for criminal linkage identification. Although I have to confess, I don’t really know what it all means.”

  Hannah looked at Falcon, expecting a sarcastic defend-your-territory reply. But there was obviously no rancour between the two officers, and Falcon just grinned.

  “Anyway,” Mallory went on. “The ACC’s made sure people see that he’s put the best team together. But in reality, he’s just waiting for me to foul-up. And if that doesn’t happen he’ll settle for ‘lack of sufficient progress’ in the investigation. Any excuse to get me removed and have my reputation blackened. And in case you think I’m being paranoid, he’s told me so himself.”

  “He admitted it?”

  “Privately, yes. Because he knew the kind of extra p
ressure it would put me under. As if the case didn’t generate enough pressure of its own anyway.”

  Well, well, Hannah thought, realising that she was being sucked into some kind of internal feud within the Garton force.

  “So whatever happens, the bottom line is that you’re not exactly flavour of the month with one of the top brass.”

  “Him and me both.” Falcon grinned ironically.

  “You too.” Hannah felt the situation was beginning to take on a surreal quality.

  “Yep, me too. Except that my problem doesn’t stop on Executive Row. It runs right down to the cleaners in the canteen.”

  “But from what I heard you were . . .” Her voice trailed off as she sought the right words.

  “The golden boy,” Falcon finished the sentence for her. “A university law graduate on the fast track for promotion. And to put the icing on the cake, a black man. The perfect recipe for a truly distinguished career in this modern politically correct police service. Except for one thing.”

  “And what’s that?” She was getting tired of playing games.

  “My name.” He looked at her expectantly. “Falcon.”

  Falcon, of course. It clicked then. “Your father.”

  “That’s right, lady. My daddy. You’ve heard of him, no doubt.”

  She’d heard of him. Conrad Falcon. The most prominent lawyer in the city, at least among the criminal fraternity. ‘Villain’s Friend’ and ‘Scourge of the Police’ were among the names applied to him at various times by the media. And in addition to his law work, he was a nationally famous black activist and had served on the recent government commission on Racial Equality in the Workplace.

  “You know he was personally responsible for the racial discrimination smear campaign that resulted in the resignation of the last chief constable.”

  “Yes, it was common knowledge at the time.”

  “Right, and for the smear campaign to succeed he needed a source hidden deep within the force.”

  “I can see that and . . .” she stopped.

  “You got it. There was a widespread belief that I had been the mole supplying my daddy with sensitive information.”

  She understood then. The rest of the force would never forgive Falcon for that.

  Never.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hannah needed to clear her head after sitting for hours in front of Falcon’s computer screen in the enclosed atmosphere of the Operations Centre, and she decided to walk to her apartment. As she made her way through the streets towards the river she thought about the evening ahead. She was having dinner with Father David, and she made a mental note to write up her notes first so she could brief him on the Toybreaker case.

  She smiled as she thought of Father David. In many ways he was her mentor, the teacher who had guided her and carefully refined her approach to criminal psychiatry. Father David was a Catholic priest with a small ministry in Stamford. He was also a highly qualified psychiatrist with a degree in medicine. The Church made use of his expertise in several ways, and he sometimes acted for his bishop as an exorcist. But he had made his reputation in the field of mental health. For years, with the full blessing of the Church, he’d run a small clinic for disturbed patients, attached to a hospital run by nuns. And Hannah had spent two years working with him at the clinic, after winning one of the greatly sought-after appointments there as a postgraduate research assistant. Only one appointment was made at a time, and Hannah had faced intense international competition to gain the place.

  The two years at the clinic had been the hardest of her life. So much to learn, so much to understand, so much time needed for casework with the patients. Sometimes she didn’t even know what day of the week it was. But she never regretted a single moment of the two years as Father David opened her mind in a way she’d never thought possible. In psychiatry his thinking was extremely modern, even edge-of-the-science in many respects. And he had pioneered several rehabilitation programmes that had gained him international prizes, and an acclaim that made him popular as a consultant and speaker. Despite all these worldly trappings of fame, he was above all else a priest with a life guided by faith, and that set him apart from some of his colleagues who believed he traded in the battle between good and evil.

  The light was fading fast as Hannah walked through the tall glass doors at the entrance to the block of apartments. Inside, she called out a greeting to the uniformed security guard behind his desk in the foyer and took the lift to the top floor. The apartment was her pride and joy. It was in one of the dock warehouses that had recently been converted into housing units, and it had cost an arm and a leg. But whenever the thought troubled her, she justified the price on the grounds that it was a good investment.

  The architects had kept to the original plan of the warehouse and the main living area was a long narrow room with cast-iron pillars supporting the low arched roof. One wall was covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, but almost the whole of the opposite wall was a large plate glass window with a stunning view of the sweep of the river into the estuary and out to sea. It was a view Hannah loved, and often she would just sit and look out across the water as she wound down at the end of a working day. But now she was in a hurry to write up her notes and she drew the curtain across the window before taking a quick shower. When she’d dried herself she pulled on a towelling dressing gown and went into the kitchen to make tea. As soon as it was brewed she poured herself a cup and took it into the study, picking up her handbag on the way.

  The study was small with a round window that overlooked a different stretch of the river, an aspect onto the open marshes on the far side of the water. The room was simply furnished, containing only a small curved-top desk, set under the window, with a swivel seat in front of it. A computer stood on the desk, with a small row of PC manuals on one side and a stack of discs and memory sticks on the other. Hannah put the cup of tea down on a brightly patterned tile, booted up the PC and plugged a fresh memory stick into a USB port.

  She opened a file and named it Toybreaker. Then she took the recorder from her handbag and for the next hour she listened to the tape and transcribed her notes onto the file. When she’d read through them carefully she made a one page bullet-point summary of the data and printed it out.

  In the bedroom she started to dress for the evening. Although she regarded Father David much more as a colleague and friend than a man of the Church, it was still difficult to know what to wear for a dinner date with a priest. In the end she selected a black suit, simple but elegant, and to break the severity she pinned on a red scarf. Then she looked at herself in the full-length mirror set into one of the doors in the wardrobe.

  She was of medium height, slim but with a good figure she took care of by working out in the gym in the basement of the apartment block at least a couple of times each week. She moved her eyes up to the face framed in the shoulder-length dark hair. High cheekbones, a finely chiselled nose that was tilted at the tip, and a mouth that was really too large.

  For a moment she grinned at the reflection. “Well,” she muttered to herself, “You’re not Kate Moss, but I suppose you’ll do.”

  * * *

  Father David was waiting in the bar at the restaurant, sitting at a table with a drink in front of him. He waved when he saw her and embraced her warmly when she came to the table.

  He was ‘out of uniform,’ as he liked to put it, wearing a dark blue suit and black polo-neck sweater. But even without his ecclesiastical robes, he was an imposing figure. Tall and broad shouldered, with the features of his face strong under a mane of thick white hair. A powerful man who could have appeared intimidating. Except for his eyes. Kind understanding eyes that were full of compassion.

  “Hannah,” he held her at arm’s length. “You’re looking a little tired. Too much work and not enough play, I suspect.”

  She grimaced. “I have got rather a lot on at the moment, I must admit. What with the patients at the clinic, the course I’m runni
ng at the university, and the articles I’m trying to write, I never seem to have enough time. And now there’s a new case I’d like to talk to you about. Something that only came up today.”

  “Whoa, slow down, young lady.” He gestured with his hand and a waiter came over from behind the bar.

  “A gin and tonic, I think.” Father David looked at Hannah, who nodded with a smile. “And I’ll have another of the same, please.”

  When the drinks came Father David lifted his glass. “Cheers, and here’s to a lovely evening.”

  “Cheers.” Hannah started to say something, but Father David raised his hand.

  “When we agreed to meet this evening it was as old friends. To catch up on our lives. Not to talk shop. Now you tell me you want to discuss a new case. Well, I’m flattered you want my opinion and, of course, I’ll be happy to help any way I can. But not now. After we’ve eaten we’ll discuss professional matters. Until then, I insist we enjoy some of what I believe nowadays they call prime time.”

  Hannah grinned. “Actually, the expression’s ‘quality time,’ but I agree, we’ll leave work until later.”

  During the meal they brought each other up-to-date on what had been happening in their lives, and as usual Father David had her in fits of laughter with his wicked descriptions of a number of their colleagues. But then he became serious.

  “You said when you first arrived that your workload was becoming oppressive. I understand that, and goodness knows I’m the last person to lecture anyone about becoming a workaholic. But with you it’s different. You’re an attractive young woman. So why don’t I hear talk of men in your life? Is it because of Craig? Are you still trying to get over him?”

  “I’ll never get over him.” She almost snapped the words at him.

  He smiled gently, and took her hand. “Oh, but I think you will. However hard it is.”

  Craig. She still called his name in the darkness of the night when she couldn’t sleep. When the memories came flooding back. Maybe Father David was right, she would get over him. But not just yet.