He thought of the tense conversation he had just held and reminded himself to dispose of the cheap ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phone, which was burning a hole in his pocket. There could be no slip-ups, not now. There was too much at stake, the least of which was his job title. In certain circles, punishment was swift, brutal and didn’t make allowances for rank.
Within two minutes of entering the police station, Ryan was informed that Colin Hart had been allowed to return home. His solicitor, a well-heeled young woman from a premier legal firm in the city, had made several loud declarations about the shoddy treatment of her client and had stalked out of the building with Colin meekly in tow. Armed with new information following their visit to HMP Frankland, Ryan and Phillips walked in the direction of Faulkner’s office to seek further ammunition to bring Colin Hart back in, this time under arrest. They found his staff, heads bent diligently over microscopes, but no Faulkner.
“Damn. Is he out on a call? If so, why are the rest of his team still here?” Ryan isolated one, shifty-looking young lad sitting across the room who was studiously avoiding looking across at either of them.
“You!”
His eyes snapped up.
“Where’s Faulkner?”
“I-I-I … He’s out, sir.”
“I-I-I want to know where,” Ryan parodied, a bit unkindly.
“I don’t know, sir.”
He looked as if he was telling the truth, and the rest of the crowd looked equally devoid of useful information.
Or, so he thought.
“Sir?”
A homely-looking woman edged forwards.
“I was hoping to speak to Tom about this,” she confessed, feeling guilty and disloyal. “But he hasn’t been back in the office for a few hours and I … well, really think we’ve hit on something important.”
“Go on.”
“It’s to do with Amy Llewellyn’s bracelet, sir. We cross-checked the DNA swab Colin Hart gave us earlier and we’ve found that it matches one of the unidentified LCN DNA samples found on the bracelet. It’s a tiny sample, a few skin cells only, but …”
“Exactly. But.” To avoid kicking any living or inanimate objects, he stared unseeingly at a nondescript landscape print of the Northumbrian coastline, which hung inside a plain wooden frame on the back wall of the room.
He should have been told the moment the results had come in. They’d let Colin Hart walk free because they didn’t have enough to hold him but, ironically, the forensic evidence had been sitting in a petri dish upstairs. When he looked back from the picture on the wall, the CSI woman was practically quaking in her rubber-soled shoes. He flashed her a smile, in sympathy.
“That was excellent work. You did the right thing, letting me know.”
Her skin turned a slow shade of red. She might have been a mother of three, two of them sons, but that didn’t mean she had lost her appreciation for a man who looked like the Chief Inspector. She was only human, after all.
“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll keep working on the rest.”
Ryan turned back to Phillips.
“Should be enough for an arrest and a search warrant. Get on it, will you?”
“I’ll have a chat with the magistrate,” Phillips executed a funny little dance, in anticipation.
“What the hell was that?”
“You’ve never seen Singin’ in the Rain?” Phillips asked, in a shocked tone.
“Sure, I’ve seen it,” Ryan replied. “Only I don’t remember Gene Kelly doing anything like that.”
“Well, you’ve either got it, or you ain’t.”
Ryan couldn’t help but grin.
Geraldine Hart could hardly breathe, a state of affairs arising from a combination of stale atmosphere and the simple fact that her heart struggled to pump the oxygen around her body. Her chest heaved and shuddered as her lungs tried to open and draw the air into her morbidly obese body.
All the while, she watched daytime television from the relative comfort of her orthopaedic mattress. Beside her rested an empty tray, which formerly held all manner of edible goodies, but now only the wrappers remained. She was very aware that her incontinence pad needed changing; in fact, it had for quite some time now and the smell was beginning to bother even her unfussed nose. Colin had been absent for ages. The ornate clock on the mantel, sandwiched between two porcelain figurines, told her that he had been gone for nearly four hours, and it was now approaching eight o’clock.
Past dinnertime, she thought pitiably.
Just then, her well-trained ear picked out the sound of the front door opening and then shutting quietly downstairs.
She stabbed at the volume button on the television remote to turn down the sound and opened her mouth to yell.