The offices of Scotland Yard’s Homicide Command Unit were on the first floor. Ordinarily they had just a skeleton staff during the night, but it was immediately clear to Eva, as she walked along the corridors, that at least one MIT was active. She counted about fifteen people in the first incident room she passed, all of them looking busy.
Eva stepped inside the room. It was ten metres square and its tinted-glass windows looked down on the Yard’s main entrance. There was the constant noise of muted telephone rings, the tapping of keyboards, the chuntering of a photocopy machine. The room smelled of warm printers and coffee. Eva was a familiar enough face here, but nobody even acknowledged her arrival.
A woman approached from the far side of the room. She was wearing a two-piece suit and her grey hair was very short. For a moment, as the woman looked her shabby clothes up and down, Eva thought she was going to challenge her, but she swerved to Eva’s left and pinned a photograph to a corkboard on the wall adjacent to the door. Eva looked at it and felt her skin prickle. It was an old photo, but it was clearly Joe.
She scanned the room. Frank had mentioned DCI Jacobson, head of one of the MITs. She knew him well – chubby, with brown hair, and always a bit crumpled. Jacobson was one of the few people in this place who didn’t have time for the constant inter-departmental sniping. A good man. She couldn’t make him out in the room. She swallowed hard, then followed the grey-haired woman back to her desk on the far side of the office.
‘Yes?’ The woman sounded impatient and didn’t look up from her screen to talk to Eva. It was clear she felt her personal space was being invaded.
‘Jacobson sent me,’ Eva said, as briskly as she could. ‘I need to cross-check visitors to Barfield over the last week.’
‘First I’ve heard of it.’
Eva gave a half-smile and decided it was better not to volunteer anything. The woman sighed, but rummaged through a pile of papers on her desk until she found a plastic sleeve with a single data stick in it. Without looking at her, she handed it to Eva.
‘Good. Thanks. I’ll, er…’ Eva jerked a thumb over her shoulder, stepping backwards, and smiled. It wasn’t returned.
She walked as casually as possible back to the door, holding her breath, positive that she was going to be called back at any moment. But she wasn’t. Out in the corridor again, she did her best not to run, looking for an empty room with a spare terminal. She found one three doors along, and within seconds she was sitting in front of the screen, plugging in the data stick.
The information was divided into folders, one for each day over the past two weeks. She opened a file marked ‘08_05_11’, to be presented with a list of twenty thumbnail images. Her own photograph was third in the list. For a moment she considered deleting it, but she knew that would be stupid, and she hurried on.
The image she was looking for was two places from the bottom. She double-clicked on it, and a larger window appeared with the grainy but familiar face of a man of Middle Eastern appearance staring out at her. Dark skin. Hooked nose. And underneath the picture, a scan of his hand print, the time he checked in and the time he checked out.
His name: Sarmed Ashe.
Her heart was thumping. She closed the window on the screen and removed the data stick, then went to the door. She was about to step into the corridor when she saw the portly frame of DCI Jacobson walk past.
She cursed under her breath and moved to the side of the door, pressing her back against the wall. How long had it taken her to get here from the incident room? Fifteen seconds? She hadn’t exactly been paying attention. She counted to twenty before taking another deep breath, opening the door and leaving the room.
There was no one in sight.
She walked briskly, but not so fast as to attract attention. As she passed the incident room her eyes darted through the interior window. Jacobson was talking to the woman with the short grey hair. Impossible to tell what she was saying. But easy to guess. Ten metres to the lift. She picked up her pace, feeling like she had half the Met following her. On reaching the lift she pressed the down button and waited.
Movement further down the corridor. The door to the incident room opened. Three seconds later the lift hissed open. Eva glanced to her right. Jacobson had emerged into the corridor and was staring in her direction. Was she paranoid, or did he look suspicious? She saw him mouthing the word ‘Eva?’ just as she stepped into the lift and slammed the button for the basement.
Safely inside, she found herself almost hyperventilating and felt trickles of sweat all over her body. This wasn’t just a sacking offence, it was a prosecution offence. And all to help a man accused of murder?
The basement was the lair of the forensic teams. Like nearly everywhere else in the building, it was pretty much empty at this hour. She passed a pale-faced young man in his early twenties who barely seemed to notice her, but apart from that she met no one until she stepped into the badly lit room of the fingerprint department.
Two young men were on duty. Neither looked like he saw much daylight and only one looked up when Eva entered. Eva forced her face into an expression of confidence and marched up to him. ‘DI Buckley,’ she said. ‘Can you run me a search?’
‘ID?’ the young man asked.
Eva casually handed over her ID, which the young man barely glanced at – and so he didn’t see that her hand was trembling.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
Eva handed him the data stick. ‘Biometric details of prison visitors. There’s a Sarmed Ashe on there. I want to cross-check him with the system.’ The young man shrugged, as if to indicate that this was trivial for someone of his technical ability, and plugged the device into his terminal. Eva helped him navigate to the correct file. As the young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, she felt her heart hammering in her chest and her eyes kept flickering to the door. She expected Jacobson to step inside any second.
‘Gotcha,’ the young man said finally.
‘What do you have?’
‘Well…’ said the fingerprint technician, relaxing a little, clearly enjoying his moment in the sun. ‘You’re lucky we’ve got him, to be honest. It’s only because he had a break-in back in 2008. SOCOs dusted him off just to eliminate his prints from the crime scene. Clean as a whistle otherwise. But what did he say his name was?’
‘Sarmed Ashe,’ Eva breathed.
‘Tch tch tch…’ tutted the technician, nodding. ‘Giving false ID to a prison officer. Naughty boy. ’Fraid that’s not his real name.’
‘What is?’
‘He’s actually called Hussein Al-Samara. Let’s have a look. Iraqi born. Granted political asylum 9 November 2001 – that’s, like, nearly two months to the day after 9/11, right?’
‘Right,’ Eva breathed.
‘Naturalized 15 December 2006… I suppose you want his address?’
Eva tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Print it out for me, would you?’
Ten minutes later, and clutching a single piece of paper, she was once more nodding at the security guy at ground-floor reception, before striding out of the Yard and wondering to herself whether she would ever set foot in that place again.
0700 hours.
Joe was wearing black jeans, a tight grey polo neck, a black woollen hat and a thick, checked lumberjack shirt. It had taken him two hours to find a charity shop where someone had left a black plastic bag of donated clothes in the doorway. These were the best-fitting, and warmest, items he could find. But anything was better than the dirty prison uniform that he had rolled into a bundle and chucked into a big metal catering dustbin at the back of an Indian restaurant on Tooting High Street. With one of the £50 notes he’d taken from Eva’s place, he’d bought himself hot, sweet tea and two platefuls of shepherd’s pie from an all-night café. It tasted disgusting – even the food in Barfield had been better than this – but he needed fuel and he wolfed it down. Just to get hot food inside him felt fantastic.