Dark Mirror bak-10 Read online

  Brock studied him for a moment. ‘I’m almost inclined to believe you, Nigel. But there’s something there, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling us.’

  •

  ‘But there’s not a trace of his DNA at Rosslyn Court,’ Brock objected. ‘And no sign of arsenic at his home.’

  Kathy nodded. It was true; they’d tested his clothing, the keyboard of his computer, his fingernails, and every inch of his bedroom and garden shed and found no indication that Ogilvie had ever been in contact with arsenic, let alone acquired enough to poison someone. ‘But we did establish a connection to Dr Ringland, who has buckets of the stuff.’

  ‘Mm.’ Brock didn’t sound convinced. ‘We’d better organise an audit of that laboratory.’ He checked his watch. ‘Another meeting. I’ll leave you to it.’

  Auditing a university laboratory wasn’t something Kathy had been faced with before and she wondered how to set about it. She decided to phone Sundeep Mehta for advice, and he immediately offered to help. They discussed how it should be done, and afterwards, while Sundeep organised an inspection team with Forensic Services, Kathy worked her way through the university administration until she got to speak to the senior academic responsible for the laboratory. The man was guarded and clearly worried when Kathy explained the reason for her call.

  ‘You’re not suggesting that we were the source of the poison, are you?’

  ‘We know that Marion Summers visited the laboratory, and so far that is her only connection to a source of arsenic that we’ve been able to discover. So I’m sure the university will be as anxious as we are to eliminate this possibility as soon as we can.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. But she could hardly have just walked in and helped herself.’ The academic left the conclusion unspoken.

  ‘We have no reason to suspect Dr Ringland or his team of any lapse, but it would clearly be best if they didn’t carry out the audit themselves.’

  They discussed the issues at some length, and Kathy began to realise the time and effort that would be involved. There wasn’t only the physical security of the laboratory and its materials to consider, but also the paperwork trail of purchase orders, stock records and disposal arrangements. They agreed to meet the following day to draw up detailed plans for inspection and forensic analysis, supervised by a joint committee. In the meantime, the academic agreed to close down the laboratory and seal its premises and records.

  •

  Brock was playing devil’s advocate, Kathy thought to herself that evening, as she sat with a glass of wine and the remains of an Indian takeaway on the sofa in her flat. He hadn’t been entirely convinced by Sundeep’s claim that the scene in Marion’s kitchen was staged, and was becoming impatient with the lack of progress. He wasn’t the only one: the case had dropped below the press radar now, and Forensic Services were clearly reluctant to spend more time on it. It had reached that messy stage, she thought, of inconclusive leads and dubious theories. A young woman, secretive and possibly hysterical, disturbed by a recent miscarriage, stages an attention-seeking cry for help, miscalculates and kills herself. End of story, move on.

  Except that somehow Marion had got her hands not only on a few grams of arsenic, but also on three-quarters of a million pounds, and they had no idea from where. And then there were the predators-Keith Rafferty, Nigel Ogilvie, perhaps Anthony da Silva, and the unknown father-standing in the background.

  She turned again to the photographs on her laptop of Marion’s study, those taken by the SOCOs on Friday and on her phone that afternoon. She’d been mistaken about the pinboard, it seemed-there was only one small change, the removal of that unidentified photograph of a woman brooding over Rossetti in the middle. Everything else was the same. And da Silva’s biography of Rossetti was gone too, as she’d thought. The obvious culprit had to be da Silva himself. Perhaps there had been a compromising inscription in the book, and he’d had a key and come back to check on things once she’d told him that they knew about the house. But why wait till then? And what was the significance of the missing photograph? It was equally possible that Tina or Emily had helped themselves to these trophies from Marion’s room. Were they aware of the significance to Marion of the unnamed woman?

  She’d had large prints made of some of the crime scene photographs, and with these she formed a collage on her wall reproducing the display on Marion’s pinboard. Was this something she should follow up? Until the woman’s picture disappeared she would have said it was, literally, academic. It occurred to her that she could construct her own version of this, with the images of the people involved in Marion’s death. She sorted through her papers and began to stick their photographs-Keith Rafferty’s stark police file photo, a brooding image of Anthony da Silva from the back of his Rossetti book, a snap of Nigel Ogilvie from his own phone camera, looking owlishly startled, and, at the centre, the black and white photograph of Marion herself. Was there some sort of parallel here?

  She gathered up her file and noticed her bag in the far corner of the room, still only half unpacked from the weekend. It seemed a long time ago now. She thought again of Guy Hamilton, in Dubai or Qatar or wherever it was, and at precisely that moment, as if by induction, her phone rang and with a jolt she heard his voice.

  ‘Kathy, hi. It’s Guy. Guy Hamilton, from Prague? Is this a bad time?’

  ‘No… no, not at all, Guy. How are you? Are you in the Gulf?’

  ‘No, they delayed the trip for a few days. I’m just waiting, twiddling my thumbs. I wondered if you felt like going out for a drink or something.’

  ‘Sure. When?’

  ‘Well, now, if you’re free.’

  ‘Okay… yes! That would be good.’

  ‘Great. You live in Finchley, right? I’ll come and pick you up. What’s the address?’

  She told him and hung up, feeling her cheeks burning. Then she jumped to her feet and started to get ready.

  When he pressed the buzzer she took the lift down to the ground-floor lobby, and saw him waiting on the other side of the glass doors, stroking the ginger cat that was curling round his ankles. He was wearing the soft suede jacket she remembered from Prague. He looked up as she opened the door, and they grinned at each other and exchanged a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘I think she likes me,’ he said, and it took Kathy a second to realise he meant the cat.

  ‘She belongs to Jock, the manager. Basically she vets everyone who calls.’

  He led her to a little Porsche parked near the gate, and when he said he didn’t know the area she directed him to a wine bar she thought would be all right, not too far away. As he drove they tentatively re-established contact, feeling different now on home ground. He was quiet, grateful that she had been free at such short notice when he’d been at a loose end, waiting to go away.

  He corrected himself when they settled themselves in the bar. He hadn’t meant that he’d called her because he was at a loose end. The fact was that he’d intended to do that anyway, but assumed he wouldn’t be able to until after this trip.

  ‘Same here,’ Kathy said, feeling unexpected pleasure at the confession. ‘I was going to call you.’

  ‘Oh, great! Well… cheers.’

  They talked about the weekend, casting it in a retrospective glow that reflected on their evening now, warming them with shared intimacy as Kathy remembered the characters they’d met at Rusty’s show and Guy recalled the one with the dark glasses, falling over the dustbins outside.

  ‘I’ve been so flat out since I got back,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  ‘Busy time, eh?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘The same case? The girl who was poisoned?’

  ‘That’s right. I should have moved on, but I can’t seem to shake it off.’

  ‘But it was suicide, didn’t Nicole say?’

  Kathy hadn’t realised that Nicole had been talking about it. ‘That’s what it looked like, but…’

  ‘You’re not so sure?’r />
  Kathy shrugged.

  ‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘Reason tells you that you’ve got the answer, but it doesn’t feel right, eh? I get that all the time.’

  ‘But surely, as a structural engineer, you have the maths to tell you if you’re right or not.’

  ‘I wish. No, you have the maths to tell you if it’ll work, but is it the best answer? Is there another way of looking at it you haven’t thought of?’

  ‘That’s exactly right. And I think Marion was struggling with the same problem.’ She told him about Marion’s pinboard, its network of relationships, and how she felt she needed to do a similar thing.

  ‘But you’ll have computer programs for that sort of thing, in the police, don’t you? I’ve seen it on TV, the murder wall, glowing in gothic darkness.’

  She laughed. ‘Yes, we have one of those, but I need something at home, that I can think about over a glass of red.’

  ‘We have programs we can put on our laptops, for analysing complex relationships of things-people, cash, construction events. I use that sort of thing all the time.’

  ‘Maybe I need someone like you to give me a few lessons,’ she said.

  ‘I think you do.’ He grinned.

  They talked some more about his job with a big international firm of engineers, based near the BT tower. He also began to open up about himself, his family in Esher, mentioning a three-year relationship that had recently ended.

  ‘How about you?’

  Kathy hesitated. ‘It tends to be difficult, with the job. The last two men in my life’-no three, she thought, God -‘were police officers, and that made it easier in a way…’

  ‘But also like living over the shop?’ he offered. ‘Yeah, I had a girlfriend in the office once and it was a bit claustrophobic. Bloody difficult actually, when things went pear-shaped.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, remembering.

  ‘Maybe you need to branch out a bit. Sample some other profession.’

  He was right, she thought. Time for a change. The others hadn’t done her much good.

  After midnight she began to stifle yawns, and he drove her home. ‘Listen,’ he said as they got out of the car and walked to the glass door, ‘I could show you some of the software we use for creating networks. We could download it onto your laptop and you could work out your own pattern, like Marion’s. If you’re busy I could just drop a disk into your letterbox…’ He stopped and stared at the bank of letterboxes that was built in next to the door. She followed his gaze and saw what looked like a cat’s tail protruding from one of the slots.

  ‘That’s my box,’ she said.

  ‘It looks…’ They went closer. ‘Isn’t that your manager’s cat? How did she manage to get in there?’ There was no way the cat could have squeezed through the opening.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ Kathy said. ‘Jock’s always fooling around.’

  But she felt uneasy as she opened the door and they went into the hallway, from which the residents had access to the backs of their boxes. She pulled her keys from her bag, but already she’d seen the trickle of dark liquid oozing from the lip of hers. She slipped the key in the lock, swung the small door open, and then jumped back as a cascade of bloody offal spilled out onto the floor.

  ‘Aww!’ Guy gagged at her side as the sickly smell hit them. ‘What the?’

  The bloody mess was all over the floor and the back of the other boxes-and her shoes, Kathy noticed.

  ‘Is it Halloween or something?’ Guy said. ‘Is it kids? Tell me that’s not the cat.’

  As if in answer, something slowly slid forward out of the box and tumbled to the floor. It was the rear end of a cat, its hips and two legs, dragging behind it the ginger tail.

  They stared at it in horrified silence for a moment, then Kathy pulled out her phone and rang a number. ‘Jock? It’s Kathy Kolla from 1203. I’m in the front lobby. I think you should come.’

  It took several minutes for Jock, muttering and swaying, to appear from his small flat at the back of the block. He swore when he saw the mess, then turned pale as he made out the tail. ‘Is it Trudy?’ he wailed. ‘Is it my baby?’

  They worked together to gather up the remains and mop away the blood. Jock went off to call the police, muttering that it would do no good.

  ‘Oh, Guy, your jacket.’ Kathy looked at the stain on his sleeve. ‘We should sponge it off. You’d better come up to the flat.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, as the lift rose to the twelfth floor, ‘that was nasty.’ His face clouded. ‘It couldn’t have been meant specifically for you, could it, Kathy? I mean, one of your old customers, or something? Someone who knows where you live?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No chance of that.’ But Kathy was mentally checking through the people she might have annoyed enough recently to do something like this-the Roach clan, the Fab Five…

  While she sponged his jacket he roamed around the room, becoming interested in the pictures on the wall. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m sure I could find something to help you with this.’

  She tried to sound interested, but she couldn’t get the business downstairs out of her head. It was Keith Rafferty’s style, she decided, picturing the ugly leer on his face. Did he try something like this on Marion? After a while she sensed that Guy wanted to stay, but she wasn’t ready for that. Eventually he thanked her and shrugged on his jacket, and she showed him out to the lift. They kissed goodbye, promising to meet again when he came back from his assignment, and she returned to her flat, feeling exhausted. She opened the door to her small bedroom and switched on the light, and saw Trudy’s little head staring up at her from her pillow. sixteen

  B rock stood at the window on the sixth floor of the headquarters building and stared impatiently out across the roofs to his own office, two hundred yards away. The door opened behind him and his boss, Commander Sharpe, strode in.

  ‘Sorry to keep you, Brock. Lot to catch up on. So where were we?’

  ‘Personnel.’ Brock resumed his seat. ‘I think we’ve just about finished.’

  ‘One other matter.’ Sharpe drew a document from his file and handed it over. The letterhead was Metropolitan Police Service: Directorate of Professional Standards, and the subject title, ‘Complaint against Detective Inspector Katherine Kolla, Homicide and Serious Crime Command’. The complainant was Keith Rafferty, represented by Julian Fenwick.

  Brock skimmed the document, then handed it back.

  ‘That’s your copy, Brock. You’re familiar with the circumstances?’

  ‘Oh yes. The man’s a thug, both him and his friend Crouch. They were in the army together. Apart from the matters on his police record, it’s highly likely that they raped a woman in Belfast. DI Kolla had grounds for suspecting Rafferty’s involvement in the death of his stepdaughter, Marion Summers.’

  ‘Yes, but Fenwick makes a strong case that she mishandled the investigation. You see there, where he charges her with provocation, intimidation, entrapment and fabricating evidence.’

  Brock was tired of this. He’d spent the past three weeks covering Sharpe’s back. ‘Look, Dominic’-Sharpe looked startled, as if unaware that Brock even knew his first name-‘Kolla is a first-rate officer and we’ve been working under extremely difficult circumstances while you were away, with an acute shortage of manpower. She used her initiative under intense pressure. This…’ he waved the document, ‘is crap.’

  ‘Nevertheless, David…’ Sharpe gritted his teeth, ‘Fenwick has a habit of making such cases stick, as we know to our cost. He says he will seek an injunction if we don’t immediately prevent Kolla from making further contact with Rafferty or Crouch, pending a full investigation of their complaint. I believe we should comply.’

  ‘That would be tantamount to an admission of fault.’

  ‘I don’t agree. I think it would be a prudent precaution, and I want you to see to it.’

  Brock sighed. ‘Very well.’

  ‘There’s no question of her being suspend
ed from duty at this stage,’ Sharpe went on. ‘Just a transfer to other inquiries.’

  •

  ‘A cat’s head in your bed?’ Bren raised his eyebrows. ‘Who’s this, the kitty Godfather?’

  ‘It’s Keith Rafferty, that’s who it is.’ Kathy glanced at Pip, who was listening with a look of disgust on her face. ‘His style, wouldn’t you say, Pip?’

  ‘Yeah, absolutely. What a creep. But how did he get into your flat?’

  ‘Yes, how did he manage that?’ Bren looked concerned.

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know. I’ve changed all the locks, and tried again to get our manager to install CCTV, but he says he’s too heartbroken to deal with things like that at the moment. You should be careful, Pip. He might have a go at you too.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s Rafferty?’ Bren said.

  Kathy shrugged. ‘Maybe it was just the tooth fairy having a bad day.’ She sighed and ran a hand over her face. ‘Look, I’ve been through it in my mind and I just don’t see who else would want to have a shot at me like this.’

  ‘Maybe I should pay him a visit,’ Bren offered.

  ‘No thanks, Bren,’ Kathy said. ‘That’s probably exactly what he wants. Anyway, I’d better go. I’ve got a university laboratory to audit.’

  All the same, as she walked away the image of the tiny bloody head on her pillow came back to her, and she suppressed a shudder.

  •

  The laboratory staff were gathered in the front lobby of the building, whispering together in small clusters, watching the officers in protective clothing going in. Through the glass panels of the doors Kathy caught a glimpse of Sundeep Mehta with a clipboard, issuing instructions.

  ‘So just how long is this going to take?’ Colin Ringland’s voice had become indignant. ‘It’s extremely disruptive, and potentially dangerous and costly. We have experiments set up, work in progress.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Dr Mehta, Dr Ringland?’

  ‘The Indian chap? He just breezed in and kicked everybody out. I tried to explain that we’d already sealed off the critical area, but he wouldn’t listen.’