Still Waters

Thirty-two

The entire squad was assembled, two dozen individuals variously standing, sitting, leaning, staring at bitten-down fingernails, recently buffed shoes, casting their eyes back over the canal maps tacked to the walls, before and after photographs of Jane Peterson, Miranda Conway, Irene Wilson, and two still-unidentified women; twenty-four officers, men and women, but mostly men, mostly white, aged between mid-twenties and late thirties, motivated, bright, carefully chosen, keen to do well, succeed, get the bastard who did these sorted and sorted fast.

Helen Siddons, smart and businesslike in a gabardine safari dress, was coming to the end of that morning’s briefing. The team initially working the Worksop murder had passed on details of two potential suspects, one a brewery salesman whose regular run took him through most of the sites where bodies had been found. Details were on their way round.

“That aside, what I want us concentrating on is this period between the first two murders and the last three. If we are looking for the one man, what was he doing during this time? My gut feeling tells me he was locked away, maybe for something dissimilar, but equally it could be for some kind of sexually orientated crime. So, let’s use the technology, chase down what we can.”

She stepped back a moment, taking one deep breath and then another, amidst general coughing and clearing of throats.

“All right, all right, there’s one more thing. The postmortem suggests that Jane Peterson had for some time been the victim of persistent physical abuse. Not the most serious, in terms of what many of us are used to dealing with, but a broken rib, bruising to the body, the kind of injuries that are often sustained within abusive relationships where the person perpetrating them has sufficient control over his or her temper not to strike out at the face or some part of the body where injuries would more easily be noticed.”

Heads were turned in whispered comment and she waited for silence to return.

“I can’t be sure how relevant this is to our primary investigation; but it can’t be ignored. Which is why Detective Inspector Resnick, who most of you already know, is with us today.”

Off to one side of the room, Resnick-clean shirt, second-best suit, clean tie-regarded the floor with interest.

“The inspector had met both Alex and Jane Peterson socially and had begun making inquiries into Jane’s disappearance. So he has good prior knowledge here and it would be foolish to ignore it. And with the blessing of our respective lords and masters, he’s going to be with us on this, concentrating on that particular aspect of the investigation. DS Kellogg and DC Khan will work with him, leaving the rest of us to concentrate on the wider picture.

“Right, questions?”

High-ceilinged, tall-windowed medical wards had once run more or less the length of both floors in the top half of the building. These had now been partitioned off to accommodate the squad’s requirements: an open-plan office and large meeting room, Helen Siddons’ own office leading off it, were on the upper floor; the computer room, communications room, and numerous smaller spaces, largely for the purpose of conducting interviews, were on the lower. Resnick and his small team had been allocated one of these, just large enough to hold three chairs, two desks arranged in an L, one computer screen, two telephones, a small cupboard containing empty files and a notional amount of stationery, and a metal waste-paper basket, color gray. The walls were a suspicious-looking shade of lime green; the suspicion being that it was a mistake. The window, open now by several inches at both top and bottom, afforded a generous view over the Roman Catholic cathedral and the restored Albert Hall and Institute down toward the various buildings of the city’s second university and the bland ugliness of the flats that rose up without majesty above the Victoria Centre.

Helen Siddons had telephoned both Anil Khan and Lynn Kellogg earlier that morning to pass on the news; it had not been phrased as a request. Resnick himself had managed a brief word with Lynn, her response matter-of-fact, cool, everything would be fine.

“Okay,” Resnick said, “two things we have to do. Confirm, if possible, Jane Peterson’s injuries were caused by her husband. Find out what might have happened between them to drive him over the edge. So statements from friends, colleagues, relatives, will all need to be double-checked. We need to go through the records at Accident and Emergency, talk to her GP.”

“And Prentiss,” Lynn said, “the osteopath. If he was treating her, you’d’ve thought he must have seen something.”

“He didn’t say anything?” Khan asked.

“Nothing specific. Accused Peterson of bullying her, right enough, obviously didn’t like him, didn’t like him at all, but nothing more than that.”

“Talk to him again,” Resnick said. “Make it priority. And remember, there are seven days during which we’ve no idea where Jane Peterson was. And at some point in that time she met her killer. Could be accident, chance. Or it could be somebody she knew, had planned to see.”

“It could be Peterson himself,” Lynn said.

“Exactly. So the other thing we have to do is go back through that list of people at the day school. Busy building, middle of Saturday afternoon, somebody must have seen her leaving. She could even have been picked up outside. And let’s double-check Peterson’s movements that afternoon while we’re about it.”

“This whole disappearance business,” Khan said, “he could have been faking it all along. Keeps her out of the way somewhere, secure, while he creates a fuss …”

“Right,” Lynn said, warming to the idea, “plays the distraught husband just long enough, then kills her and dumps the body in the canal, so that we think she’s been done by the same bloke as all the others.”

“Which,” Resnick said, “is exactly what we are doing. Most of us, anyway.”

“Well,” Lynn said, “if he did do it-Peterson-we’re going to get him.”

“Right,” Resnick said. “And if he did do it, what interests me is why.”