“Including my boots.”
“Yes. They were there, near the door. Under a hazmat suit he must have somehow pinched from the emergency crew.”
Chapter Eighteen
Melissa kicked off the next morning’s work by dividing the stack of papers she was holding into three and sharing them out between Jones, herself, and me.
“Do you know how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle defined genius?” she said, as she straightened the piles.
Jones shook his head.
“I have no idea,” I said, although I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with paperwork.
“He thought it was an infinite capacity for taking pains,” Melissa said. “And boys, I know this isn’t going to be fun. These interview summaries aren’t light reading. The Met aren’t famed for the tightness of their prose style, and from the ones I’ve seen the fire brigade aren’t very original with their answers. I’m sorry about that. But if it helps to look at it this way, what I need from you today is a big dose of genius.”
“No problem,” Jones said. “Painstaking is my middle name. One thing I’m not sure about, though - what do you expect us to find that’s been missed before?”
“Anything that doesn’t ring true,” Melissa said. “Any contradictions. Discrepancies. Anything we know can’t be true. We’re running out of options, and if our fresh eyes could just spot something - one single clue - to help us find who caused the original damage to that door, it would be huge.”
The whole exercise smacked of desperation to me, whether it was aimed at finding a gem hidden in the reports, or preventing us from pursuing more fruitful avenues elsewhere. At best it seemed like a fool’s errand, but I told myself that wasn’t my problem. I concentrated on what my control had been at such pains to spell out. My job was to look for signs of guilt. But to focus on the people inside the room. Not outside, in the fire brigade or the police. Specially bearing in mind Melissa’s unexplained absence, yesterday.
Jones scooped up his allocation of papers and took them to the far corner of the long rectangle of desks that filled the meeting room Melissa had requisitioned for us. He sat down and started working his way straight through from top to bottom, keeping up a steady pace. He certainly looked conscientious, but I noticed he couldn’t keep his gaze from wandering to the window in between pages.
Melissa took a seat at the centre of one of the rectangle’s long sides and spread her copies out in front of her, face down, like a child shuffling cards. She picked them up to read, one at a time, apparently at random. Then she started to form a series of piles, some separate, some overlapping. I was curious to understand her method - unless she was just trying to create the appearance of a system - but before I could reach a conclusion her phone rang. She talked for just over two minutes, standing up half way through and nodding as she listened. Then she hung up and turned to look at us, her head tipped to one side and a half curious, half suspicious expression on her face.
“OK, hands up,” she said. “Which one of you was it?”
“Which one of us, what?” I said.
“Which one of you prayed for a miracle?” she said. “Because it looks like we might have come across one. From a most unlikely source.”
“Excellent,” I said. “You can’t beat a spot of divine intervention in a case like this. Who was it? And what did they tell you?”
“It was Stan Leckie. Head of Hospital Security. He just took a call from one of his old snouts. One from way back, when he used to work here. The guy has something that could help us, apparently.”
“Can we trust him?”
“Leckie? I think so. We’ve re-done all the background checks. And he’s doing the right thing, passing this on to us. As for the snout, your guess is as good as mine. But for what it’s worth, Leckie’s sure the guy is who he claims to be. He says his material was always A1 in the past. And the group he was embedded in have the capability to handle something like this. Or did, when Leckie was running this guy.”
“Why did he contact Leckie?”
“Leckie recruited him. When Leckie moved on, the guy dropped out of sight. Some snouts are like that. They don’t like being passed to a new handler.”
“And he’s just resurfaced now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he found out something too important to ignore. I hope.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Who knows? It might come to nothing. But it’s better than a poke in the eye. Leckie’s putting together a meet, right now. You guys pound through a few more of those forms. I need to dig up some old files. I have a feeling our morning’s about to get a whole lot brighter.”
It turned out Melissa hadn’t contented herself with running background checks. She’d also snagged us a car. By the time we stepped outside thirty minutes later a black Range Rover was already sitting at the kerb, waiting for us, with its engine running. The driver was standing next to it, ready to shake hands. Bright blue eyes scanned us from beneath bushy eyebrows, and between his neatly combed fair hair and pinstriped blue suit, he looked every inch a banker or stockbroker. I wondered if he picked the outfit to match the car, or if he dressed like that out of choice. I also wondered if he’d be open to the idea of stopping at the nearest Starbucks.
“Pleased to meet you all,” he said, climbing back in behind the wheel. Melissa took the passenger seat, and Jones and I slid into the back. “My name’s Pearson. Nigel. Thanks for getting me out of the office, today.”
“We’ll get you out whenever you want, if you help us get a result today,” Melissa said.
Pearson smiled, and was silent for a moment as he squeezed the Range Rover between two black cabs. From the general direction he was taking, I guessed we were heading for the start of the M1. I felt a surge of nostalgia for the area, involuntarily thinking back to all the times my father took me to the RAF Museum in Hendon when I was a kid. But this was quickly replaced by other memories, less wholesome, of my various visits to the police training college just down the road.
“Do you know much about this place we’re heading for?” Melissa said.
“A little,” he said. “You?”
“Not much, beyond the address.”
“Well, if it was a private party, I wouldn’t be fighting you for tickets. In terms of location, it’s awful. But then, it’s in Luton. What more can you say?”
I’d been to Luton many times as a kid and a teenager, and under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be high on my list of places to revisit, either.
“Whereabouts in Luton?” I said.
“A horrible, decrepit part, about four miles north of the city,” he said. “An industrial suburb called Frankston. Ever heard of it?”
“I’ve heard of it. I’ve never been there, though.”
“You’ve not missed much. The specific place we’re going to started life as a workhouse. It would have been grim enough in the 1840s. And it’s worse, these days.”
“Most of those places have been turned into apartments, by now.”
“Right. And if this one hasn’t, what does that tell you?”