Lifting the Lid(82)

He’d been perfectly upbeat when they’d first set off for Bristol, almost to the point of being uncharacteristically chirpy. But that was when they’d had some solid information to go on – the news that their quarry had finally been spotted, the vehicle he was in and even where he was heading. Since then, however, they’d had no reports about his current whereabouts. Not a dickybird. Logan was convinced this was because MI5 had put a block on anyone getting updates but themselves.

‘Seems like they don’t trust us,’ he’d said after yet another failed attempt to prise the information out of one of his many inside contacts.

Swann had pointed out that this was hardly surprising since they had totally ignored the spooks’ order to drop the Trevor Hawkins enquiry altogether. This was when Logan had lost it completely and yelled at her that she was a brainless slapper and he’d see to it personally that she’d be back on the beat the minute this whole sorry business was over and done with. She had responded by telling him he was a sexist, arrogant narcissist with delusions of grandeur and the detective skills of a myopic jellyfish. After trading a series of increasingly inventive insults, they had lapsed into a sulky silence which lasted all the way from Junction 16 of the M6 motorway to just beyond Junction 7 of the M5.

During this period, Swann had occupied herself with recalling each of the occasions when DS Logan had said or done something that had made her want to commit various acts of GBH, most of which were directed at a specific part of his anatomy. But there were just far too many to remember them all.

From time to time, she had also found herself mulling over the facts of the current investigation – such as they were – and what the hell they were going to do when they finally got to Bristol. It was at one such moment that an idea had occurred to her, and she had reached round and grabbed Trevor Hawkins’s case file from the back seat of the car.

She had flipped it open on her lap, aware that Logan was watching her out of the corner of his eye whilst studiously pretending to be taking no interest whatsoever in what she was doing. She’d flicked through the scant few pages to a photocopy of the notes she’d made during their interview with Trevor’s mother, and her eyes had flashed across the barely legible scribblings until she’d found the particular passage she’d been looking for.

‘That’s it,’ she’d said, jabbing a finger at the relevant section on the page.

Logan hadn’t given the slightest indication that he’d even heard her speak, but the twitching muscles on the side of his face had betrayed him.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she’d said, ‘can’t you stop sulking just for a minute?’

‘I am not sulking. I am simply concentrating on driving.’

‘Fine. So you won’t want me to distract you by telling you my idea then.’

‘Huh.’ Logan had managed to pack all the teenage angst of a pubescent schoolboy into that one syllable.

Swann had slammed the folder shut and stared out of the side window while she’d waited for the inevitable.

‘Well?’ Logan had said after a silence of no more than thirty seconds.

‘Well what?’

‘This brilliant idea of yours. You gonna tell me or not?’

‘I thought you didn’t want me to distract you from your driving.’ She could play the sulky card as well as him any day of the week.

‘Oh for f— Look, just tell me, okay?’

‘Trevor Hawkins has a sister,’ Swann had said with more than a hint of triumph in her voice.

‘Remarkable.’

‘And guess where she lives.’

‘How the hell should I know? The Mull of Kintyre?’

She had milked the pause for as long as she’d dared. ‘Bristol.’

Logan had countered the pause with one of his own. ‘Interesting.’

Interesting? Interesting? Was that the best she was going to get?

‘And do we have an address?’

Apparently it was.

‘Not yet,’ she’d said. ‘But it won’t exactly be hard to find out.’

Logan had smiled for the first time in quite some while, but since they’d reached the outskirts of Bristol, the tension had returned with a vengeance. The order from MI5 couldn’t have been clearer, so even if Hawkins was at his sister’s place, what were they going to do about it?

One thing was certain as far as Swann was concerned. Telling Logan to drop a case was almost guaranteed to make him want to pursue it all the harder, and she was being dragged along in the wake of his pigheadedness. It definitely wasn’t going to do much for her chances of promotion. – Hell, disobeying a direct order from MI5 was probably even a sacking offence.