‘It’d be even more amazing if you stuck to the job and found a murder witness,’ said Meera, taking the lid off her cardboard cup. ‘Starbucks tea is horrible. Why hasn’t the City got a decent chain of teashops? My gran still makes proper Delhi spiced tea.’ She took a sip and grimaced. The flow of workers into offices was steady now.
‘This is a chance to prove ourselves,’ said Colin, balling up his fast-food bag and looking for somewhere to put it. ‘Find the little girl and we’ll come off bin duty and surveillance for good. Move up the ladder.’
Meera was doubtful. ‘That’s not going to happen. There is no ladder. We’re at the bottom of the pile right now, and I can’t see the unit hiring anyone else beneath us. They don’t even have a teabag allowance. So, how do you want to do this?’
Colin looked up at the steel and glass buildings sandwiched between Georgian and Victorian brick houses. ‘Looks like the offices go a long way back. We’ll have to cover them all. We won’t get much joy asking which employees bring kids in because it was a Saturday, so there would have been different receptionists working. It would be better to find out who was in each of the buildings at the weekend, then see if they brought children. And I think we need to keep it a bit vague. If we tell someone that their kid might have been a witness to two deaths, they’re liable to prevent us from talking to them. City types can be dead arsey.’
‘We’re officers of the law, Colin, they can’t “prevent” us from doing anything.’
‘Maybe not, but we need a detailed account from a girl who looks like she’s about eight years old.’
‘OK – you take those two sides, I’ll take these. And I’ll find her first.’
Colin grinned. ‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Because if I was a parent who had to go into work on a Saturday and my kid wanted to play outside, I’d make sure I could see her from my office window, and those trees are in the way of the rooms on the south and east sides.’
‘OK, you have a head start – do you want a little bet?’
‘Not if it ends with me having to go on a date with you if I lose.’
‘You read my mind. It’s not like you haven’t been out to dinner with me before.’
‘Funnily enough, I don’t count sitting on bins all night doing surveillance while you eat chicken jalfrezi out of a box. First one to finish calls the other.’
Meera headed into the nearest building on her side of the square.
Back at the unit on Caledonian Road, Dan Banbury went to see John May. ‘We’ve got a match on the girl,’ he said. ‘It’s definitely the same kid in both screen grabs, the shot from Salisbury Court and the Coram’s Fields footage. It’s just a piece of software that matches physical features and body shapes, so I don’t have an ID for you, but we’re working on it. I put a rush on the test fibres from the Waters apartment and we have a match on those, but it doesn’t make sense to me.’
‘You’re talking about the hairs?’
‘They’re from Sabira Kasavian.’
‘So they were lovers.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Banbury hedged. ‘They just place her in his bed.’
‘What, you think she came by to read the Sunday papers with him or something? If she isn’t a murderess she at least cheated on her husband, which means she lied to us.’
‘I don’t know that she did.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something’s not kosher. I tried to picture what happened. Waters invites her back to his flat, or Sabira calls on him. Women are more prone to shedding signifying evidence than men. Make-up and long hairs with traceable dyes, a wider variety of clothing materials; my missus leaves a trail of tissues and trash wherever she goes, and if she opens a handbag – well, it’s like Vesuvius. It might have cost her a grand at a fancy store but basically it’s a dustbin with a strap. God help her if she ever tries to have an affair, I’d be on her like—’
‘Dan, get to the point.’
‘Sorry, John. Kasavian often works late, but hasn’t been out of the country in more than two months, which means she wouldn’t have stayed over. Even so, I’d expect something else in Waters’s flat – a visit to the bathroom, something from the lounge sofa or the kitchen, but there’s nothing. And it’s not just her, there’s nothing from anyone else other than Waters in the whole place.’
‘So you’re saying someone planted the hairs.’
‘More than that, I’m saying they cleaned the flat up so we’d only find the hairs. There’s nothing else there to contaminate the evidence. It’s like someone wants to guarantee that she gets the blame.’