Stalkers

Chapter 24

Gemma read carefully through the print-out that Palliser had just pulled off CrimInt.

‘And this is the last thing he asked Paula Clark to do for him?’ she said.

‘Certainly is,’ Palliser replied.

‘Eric Ezekial? Not the sort of name you’d forget easily.’

Palliser’s office was knee-deep in littered paperwork, most of it having been dragged from the various bags that Heck had brought up from Deptford Green. The larger office beyond the open door, where the Serial Crimes Unit’s detectives had their desks, now lay deserted and dark. Gemma and Palliser, both with collars open and sleeves rolled back, were working by the low light of a single desk lamp.

Palliser yawned. A few moments ago he’d had the sudden inspiration to contact Heck’s former secretary and see if he’d confided anything in her before ‘going on leave’. It had paid dividends, though the woman had torn a strip off him in the process.

‘She wasn’t best pleased when I rang her up at this hour,’ he said.

‘She’ll be even less pleased when I ring her up again, in about two hours, to see if there’s anything she can add,’ Gemma replied. Anyone overhearing this casual comment might have assumed she was joking, but Palliser knew ‘the Lioness’ better than that. ‘This number she faxed it to is definitely up in Manchester?’

He nodded.

Once again, Gemma stabbed Heck’s number into her mobile. Once again, there was no response. Sighing, she put the phone away. She laid the print-out on her desk, alongside a similar print-out for Ron O’Hoorigan and a case file photograph of Genene Wraxford; in trying to pinpoint Lauren Wraxford, the girl Heck was in company with, it hadn’t taken them long to spot that one of the missing women shared the same surname. But she wasn’t their main focus at present. ‘This guy Ezekial is obviously the key,’ Gemma said. ‘Lives in Kingston, I see.’

‘Shall we pay him a call?’

‘No.’ She tapped her teeth with a pen. ‘Find out everything you can about him, Des. But don’t approach him. Same goes for the Wraxford family.’

‘May I ask why?’

She paused, before saying: ‘Heck must have a reason for wanting to stay off the radar. Much as it’s infuriating me, I feel I’ve no option but to respect that a little longer.’

By the furrows on his brow, this wasn’t what Palliser had wanted to hear.

‘You disagree?’ she asked.

‘His reason may not be a good one.’

‘You mean it’s because he’s a murderer?’

‘Of course not. More likely he’s continuing the mission AWOL because he doesn’t want any crap to blow back on you.’ Palliser stood up to go out, but loitered in the doorway. ‘That’s hardly encouraging, is it?’

‘More likely it’s because he doesn’t want me to interfere,’ Gemma argued.

‘Probably it’s both … either way, I’m worried he’s out of his depth.’

‘I’m concerned about that too. I still want to find him. But in the meantime …’ and she picked up the Ezekial print-out, ‘we’re sitting on this lead. At least until Paula Clark feels the urge to blab to someone else, at which point we’ll have to come clean.’

‘Laycock will go fucking ballistic.’

She slipped the print-out into her briefcase. ‘Leave me to worry about that.’

‘This is a total fuck-up, ma’am.’ Such comments were a measure of Palliser’s stress. An old-fashioned type, he rarely used foul language in front of female colleagues, especially not his feisty boss. ‘We should have supported Heck in the first place. I don’t mean covertly. I mean openly. If we were going to do this, we should have stood up to Laycock and demanded the case be kept open.’

‘There were no grounds for that.’ Gemma dragged her coat on. ‘So don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’

‘What’s bloody ridiculous is that Heck may be in danger, and we’re just sitting here.’

‘He’s lucky we’re sitting here, Des!’ she snapped. ‘I sent him out there with a remit to run down a single lead! And to keep me fully and regularly informed. I also told him to keep things low key. For whatever reason, he has disobeyed those direct and explicit orders. I’ll never trust him again.’

‘You won’t trust him?’ Palliser said, as she pushed past. ‘That’s a good one. Have you stopped to think that if he actually trusted us, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place?’

She whirled around and glared at him. But there was no argument. Palliser was being entirely truthful. If not, he wouldn’t have stood there and boldly returned her gaze.

‘I’ll leave you to turn the lights out,’ she finally said. There was an unusual fluster to her cheek. ‘Remember what I said about Ezekial?’