When she turned off the ignition that evening, Barbara Havers remained inside the Mini, once again listening disconsolately to its sputtering engine. She rested her head on the steering wheel. She was knackered. Odd to think that spending hours upon hours on computers and telephones was more exhausting than hoofing round London to track down witnesses, suspects, reports, and background information, but that was the case. There was something about staring at a computer terminal, reading and highlighting printouts, and running through the same monologue on the phone with one desperate set of parents after another that made her long for baked beans on toast – bring on a tin of Heinz, that ultimate comfort food – followed by a horizontal position on the daybed with the television remote tucked into her hand. Simply put, she hadn’t had an easy time for one moment during the first two endless days of the investigation.
First there was the subject of Winston Nkata. Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata. It was one thing to know why Hillier had promoted her colleague at this particular point in time. It was quite another to realise that, victim of political machination or not, Winston actually did deserve the rank. What made it all worse was having to work with him in spite of this knowledge, realising that he was just as uneasy with the whole situation as she was.
Had Winston been smug, she would have known how to cope. Had he been arrogant, she would have had a bloody good time taking the piss. Had he been ostentatiously humble, she could have dealt with that in a satisfyingly biting fashion. But he was none of that, just a quieter version of regular Winston, a version that affirmed what Lynley had indicated: Winnie was nobody’s fool; he knew perfectly well what Hillier and the DPA were trying to do.
So ultimately, Barbara felt sympathy for her colleague, and that sympathy had inspired her to fetch him a cup of tea when she fetched one for herself, saying, ‘Well done on the promotion, Winnie,’ as she placed it next to him.
Along with the constables assigned by DI Stewart, Barbara had spent two days and two evenings coping with the overwhelming number of missing persons reports that she had pulled from SO5. Ultimately Nkata had joined the project. They had managed to cross off the list a good number of names in that time: kids who had returned to their homes or had contacted their families in some way, making their whereabouts known. A few of them – as expected – had turned up incarcerated. Others had been tracked down in care. But there were hundreds upon hundreds unaccounted for, which took the detectives to the job of comparing descriptions of missing adolescents with descriptions of the unidentified corpses. Part of this could be done by computer. Part of it had to be done by hand.
They had the photographs and the autopsy reports from the first three victims to work from, and both parents and guardians of the missing kids were almost universally cooperative. Eventually, they even had one possible identity established, but the likelihood was remote that the missing boy in question was truly one of the bodies they had.
Thirteen years old, mixed race black and Filipino, shaved head, nose flattened on the end and broken at the bridge…He was called Jared Salvatore, and he’d been gone nearly two months, reported missing by his elder brother who – so it was noted in the paperwork – had made the call to the cops from Pentonville Prison where he himself was banged up for armed robbery. How the older brother had come to know young Jared was missing was not documented in the report.
But that was it. Sorting out identities for each corpse from the vast number of missing kids they had was thus going to be like picking fly poo out of pepper if they couldn’t come up with some kind of connection between the murder victims. And considering how widespread the body sites were, a connection seemed unlikely.
When she’s had enough – or at least as much as she could handle for the day – Barbara had said to Nkata, ‘I’m out of here, Winnie. You staying or what?’
Nkata had pushed back his chair, rubbed his neck, and said, ‘I’ll stay for a while.’
She nodded but didn’t leave at once. It seemed to her that they both needed to say something, although she wasn’t sure what. Nkata was the one who took the plunge.
‘What d’we do with all this, Barb?’ He set his biro on a legal pad. ‘Question is, how do we be? We can’t ‘xactly ignore the situation.’
Barbara sat back down. There was a magnetic paper clip holder on the desk, and she picked this up and played with it. ‘I think we just do what needs doing. I expect the rest will sort itself out.’
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I don’t sit easy with this. I know why I’m here. I want you to unnerstan’ that.’
‘Got it,’ Barbara said. ‘But don’t be rough on yourself. You deserve-‘
‘Hillier wouldn’t know sod all ‘bout what I deserve,’ Nkata cut in. ‘Not to mention DPA. Not before this, not now, and not later.’
Barbara was silent. She couldn’t dispute what they both knew to be the truth. She finally said, ‘You know, Winnie, we’re sort of in the same position.’
‘How d’you mean? Woman cop, black cop?’
‘Not that. It’s more about vision. Hillier doesn’t really see either of us. Fact is, you can apply that to everyone on this team. He doesn’t see any of us, just how we can either help him or hurt him.’
Nkata considered this. ‘I s’pose you’re right.’
‘So none of what he says and does matters because we have the same job at the end of the day. Question is: are we up for that? ‘Cause it means letting go of how much we loathe him and just getting on with what we do best.’
‘I’m on for that,’ Nkata said. ‘But Barb, you still deserve-‘
‘Hey,’ she interrupted, ‘so do you.’
Now, she yawned widely and shoved her shoulder against the recalcitrant door of the Mini. She’d found a parking space along Steeles Road, around the corner from Eton Villas. She plodded back to the yellow house, hunched into a cold wind that had come up in the late afternoon, and she went along the path to her bungalow.
Inside, she flipped on the lights, tossed her shoulder bag on the table and dug the desired tin of Heinz from the cupboard. She dumped its contents unceremoniously into a pan. Under other circumstances, she’d have eaten the beans cold. But tonight, she decided she deserved the full treatment.
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