‘Sure, of course. You’d like that?’
He shrugged. ‘If they are any good.’
Grace smiled, happy to have a channel of communication with him, and feeling a burst of optimism. It was going to work out fine, it really was.
He hoped.
35
Friday 22 April
As the postmortem continued, with Dr Frazer Theobald moving at his customary slow — at times glacially slow — pace, Guy Batchelor stepped away several times into the tiny office, to make calls. He was trying to find a relative of Lorna Belling who could make the formal identification of her body, as well as assembling his enquiry team, but it wasn’t proving easy. She had a sister who was in Australia, whom he had managed to contact, but it would be at least two days before she arrived in England. And Lorna’s parents, who were on a cruise, had been contacted, but could not get back here until sometime after the weekend.
He appointed a crime scene manager, an office manager, a POLSA — police search advisor — a HOLMES team, an analyst, and the small group of detectives Roy Grace had requested, all but two of whom were available. The first briefing would be at 6 p.m. this evening.
He had already organized an outside enquiry team, and set their parameters. They were to speak to the landlord and the letting agent, if there was one; to all Lorna Belling’s neighbours in the building; to check any CCTV footage they could find in the immediate surrounding areas to see if they could place the husband around the flat; to try to make contact with her friends; and to contact her dead husband’s work colleagues to see if he’d disclosed anything to them. A search of the Bellings’ home was currently under way, and any computers or phones found there would be taken to Digital Forensics — formerly known as the High Tech Crime Unit — to be interrogated. Batchelor also instructed them to make sure they found the appointments book for Lorna’s hairdressing clients.
Determined to make a good impression in his first SIO role, he logged on to the Murder Manual, ticking through every rigid step of a murder enquiry, dutifully and laboriously writing his decisions down in his pale-blue Policy Book. It was the document with which all SIOs covered their backs — details of every decision you made, and the reasons. If an investigation ever went south and you were called to account, you had it right there, in black and white. And in this modern age of accountability in the police force, where you walked constantly on eggshells, it seemed at times, sadly, that covering your back had become almost more important than solving the crime.
He felt pleased that this one was falling into place. If the lab could follow up the fingerprints on the beer cans with DNA matches from around the tops of the cans and maybe on the cigarette butts — and add to that the husband’s DNA from the semen in Lorna Belling’s vagina — it would be strong evidence. Overwhelming.
Case closed.
Then his phone rang. It was Cassian Pewe. And he was surprised at what the Assistant Chief Constable was telling him. Equally, there was no way he could refuse.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, bemused, as he ended the call. ‘Of course we’ll look after him, sir. It will be a pleasure.’
36
Friday 22 April
As Marcel Kullen drove him and Bruno from the Lipperts’ house, Grace heard the ping of an incoming text and glanced at his phone. It was a message from Guy Batchelor:
Hi Roy, tried calling but it goes to voicemail. Pls call me urgently.
He apologized to Kullen, and to Bruno on the rear seat, who appeared absorbed in something on his phone, and called Batchelor immediately. He answered on the first ring. ‘Boss, sorry to bother you at such a tough time.’
‘It’s no problem — what’s up?’
‘We have a new member of our team foisted on us by Pewe — one of these Direct Entry guys.’
‘What?’
The Home Secretary had introduced a controversial new scheme under which people from civilian life — the community at large — could bypass all the usual training and career ladder process of the police force, and instead of starting as probationers, then becoming constables, then moving on through the ranks, were able to come straight into the police at inspector level and higher.
Grace understood that there were advantages to having people with business experience coming into the force, but the value they could bring, in his view, was in management roles — not operational ones.
‘The ACC has dumped a civilian bean-counter on us, in the role of detective inspector.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Get this. He was previously a sales manager at a pharmaceutical company and you’re going to love his name. Donald Dull.’
‘You’re kidding. Sounds like a real Mickey Mouse detective!’
‘Very good, boss. He pronounces it Dool.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘I’ve got that treat coming up shortly. He’s going to be just the kind of person I’d be happy to know was behind me, protecting my back as I crash through the door of an armed suspect.’
‘OK, I can’t do much right now. Just put him in a role where he’s not any danger to any of the team — or himself. I’ll do what I can when I get back.’
‘What’s the police motto?’ Batchelor said. ‘To serve and protect? I thought we were meant to protect the public, not count their sodding beans!’
37
Friday 22 April
Like everyone in Major Crime, Guy Batchelor was still getting used to his new surroundings. For all the inadequacies of their old HQ in Hollingbury, at least there had been parking in and around the place. Here most of the team had to leave their private cars a good fifteen to twenty minutes’ walk away from the entrance, angering the local residents by taking their parking spaces, to the point where cars were being vandalized. Officers heading home, exhausted after a long shift, were finding they had flat tyres, or worse, keyed paintwork.
One of the perks for Batchelor of his current role was that he was permitted to use an HQ car park.
At a quarter to six in the evening he settled into one of the twenty red chairs arranged around the long, light-coloured table in the narrow conference room on the first floor. The cream walls were bare, apart from a large flat-screen monitor and a round white clock. On one end of the table sat a Polycom telephone conferencing device that looked a bit like a three-legged drone. It had a round, brushed-metal head on a stalk that, voice-activated, would swivel disconcertingly like a robot towards whoever might be speaking.
He’d set up four whiteboards. On one, headed OPERATION BANTAM, were crime-scene photographs of the victim; on the next were postmortem photographs; on the third was an association chart for Lorna Belling, to which was also pinned a police mugshot of her husband, Corin; and on the fourth a street map of the area around her flat, with the building ringed in red.
He suddenly noticed one of his team had stuck on the door the name of the operation, together with an image from the old film Chicken Run. It brought a smile to his face.
In front of him, Guy had placed a mug of coffee, his Policy Book and the notes for the briefing printed out by Roy Grace’s secretary. He ran through them, feeling apprehensive at managing his first ever murder briefing as an SIO, yet confident they were already close to a conclusion. Supremely confident, actually, thanks to the information that had just come in.
Ten minutes later his team was assembled around the table. There were the trusty regulars that Grace favoured, DS Norman Potting, DS Jon Exton, DC Jack Alexander, as well as DC Kevin Hall, the temporary replacement for Tanja Cale who was away on holiday, David Watkinson, the Office Manager, Georgie English, the Crime Scene Manager, Sergeant Lorna Dennison-Wilkins, the POLSA, and Annalise Vineer, the HOLMES indexer. In addition there were two new detective constables, Velvet Wilde, a slim, attractive woman in her late twenties, with close-cropped blonde hair and a distinct Belfast accent, who had recently moved from uniform to CID, and Arnie Crown, a short, wiry American of thirty-six, who had been seconded to Major Crime from the FBI as part of an exchange.