Rush of Blood (11 page)

Jenny Quinlan started slightly as a healthy stack of paperwork was dropped on to the desk she shared with another TDC, and
as she smoothed her skirt and caught her breath, she looked up to see Detective Sergeant Adam Simmons grinning down at her.

‘Here you go,
Trainee Detective Constable
Quinlan.’

Simmons parked his sizeable backside on the corner of the desk. Jenny slid her chair back a few inches and nudged the Tupperware
container that held her lunch out of harm’s way.

‘Right up your street, this one.’

Jenny turned back to her computer screen. ‘Really?’ Simmons said much the same thing every time he palmed off some tedious
or menial job on her.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

‘Who’s worried?’

‘Piece of piss, this one, I promise.’

‘Meaning it’s something you can’t be arsed with.’

‘Spot on.’

‘Great …’

Jenny glanced up to see that Simmons was grinning again and, not
for the first time, she wondered if the attention she was being paid was because her self-styled mentor had taken something
of a shine to her. It was hardly flattering – the man could not be less sexy if he worked as a Jeremy Clarkson lookalike –
but whether he was taking the piss or simply taking advantage, it made his presence fractionally less annoying.

It wasn’t as though she was beating off admirers with a stick.

‘Come on, Jen, you know that this is all part of the training. Sucking up to your sergeant.’

She knew well enough, having spent five months based in the CID room at Lewisham station. The weekly sessions attending court
and observing post-mortems, the training in interviewing prisoners and handling evidence had gone hand in hand with those
equally important modules that were not to be found in any Met Police prospectus or TDC handbook. The nod and the wink as
favours were done and earned. The pulling of rank and the passing of bucks. The banter and the bullshit.

‘As long as it’s only sucking
up
,’ she said.

She was delighted to see Simmons blush. This was the first time she had given him anything back – anything like
that
at any rate – and it was thrilling to see that it made him so uncomfortable. She remembered one of the female DIs in the
pub one night, leaning across and whispering, ‘Plenty like him around. All gob and no truncheon …’

Simmons eased himself away from the desk and slapped the flat of his hand down on the pile of papers he had delivered. ‘Anyway,
just as long as we’re clear,’ he said. ‘Anything comes of this, any testifying needs doing and I’m the one who gets to go
to Florida.’

‘Eh?’

Jenny reached across and took the top sheet of paper. She recognised the seal of the US government and glancing down she saw
that the covering letter had been sent from the office of the embassy’s assistant legal attaché. She looked at Simmons.

‘Don’t get excited,’ he said. ‘It’s just a couple of interviews, nothing too far away.’

Jenny was starting to get very excited, but did her best to hide it. She flicked through the pages, shaking her head and puffing
out her cheeks as she looked at the names and addresses. ‘I’ll try not to get too carried away with the glamour,’ she said.

‘Just ask the questions and write it up.’

‘Then you put your name on it?’

‘Only if you’ve done a good job,’ Simmons said. ‘If you haven’t, I tell them I trusted you with something but you obviously
weren’t up to it.’

‘I think I can manage to ask a few questions,’ Jenny said.

‘I’m sure you can, love.’

‘
Here’s
a question …’ Simmons had turned away, but now he turned back and leaned down towards her; up for the banter, for the
craic
. It was fine because, for once, she wanted him close. ‘How much aftershave can one man wear before it actually becomes an
arrestable offence?’

The expression on the sergeant’s face – the attempt to look as though he had found it funny, the nodding and that eyes-closed
smile – would be the second-best moment of Jenny Quinlan’s day.

Reading through the documentation over the next hour or so, it was easy enough to follow the paper trail. The request, made
almost a week earlier, had been fielded initially by staff at the US Embassy’s legal department and passed on to New Scotland
Yard. Jenny could only surmise that it had finally filtered down through assorted Territorial Policing units to CID at Lewisham
because of the station’s proximity to one of the three addresses on the original request form from the US.

Sarasota Police Department. The Crimes Against Persons Unit
.

‘Coffee would be great, if you’re making …’

Jenny looked up. Two detective constables, a man and a woman, had just come back into the office; the woman doing the asking
ever so nicely. This was part of it too, the glorified fagging, and Jenny swore to herself that when she became one of them,
she would not do the same to whoever was in her position.

She laid the paperwork to one side. Said, ‘Yeah, not a problem.’

She smiled at the two DCs as she walked across to the coffee machine, only too aware that they had probably sworn the very
same thing to themselves once upon a time.

‘Black with one sugar and white without,’ the man said.

‘Right,’ Jenny said, but she did not need to be told. She could manage to ask a few questions and she could remember coffee
orders.

As she waited for the ancient, grumbling machine to do its work, she thought back to the exchange with Simmons an hour or
so before. The crack about his aftershave. Pleased with herself as she had been, her leg had been trembling as she’d said
it and, even now, just thinking about him slowly rolling his head around before walking back to his desk, she could feel something
tighten in her stomach.

‘Funny, love,’ he had said. ‘That’s funny.’

She looked across, but Simmons was engrossed in something on his screen. Instead, she caught the eye of the male DC, who nodded
and smiled. Now, he
was
sexy, but like most men with any standards or a modicum of self-esteem he had never shown the remotest interest in her and
Jenny turned quickly back to stare at the machine before the blood had a chance to reach her cheeks.

She could hear her friend Steph giving her a good telling-off, asking her why she never believed any man could be interested.
Why she thought so little of herself. Easy enough for Steph, who looked like Courtney Cox pre-surgery and who’d had a boyfriend
since they were in junior school, for God’s sake.

‘You do
tell
them you’re not a lesbian,’ Steph had said once. ‘Don’t you?’

It was true that a lot of people assumed Jenny was gay, believed that any woman who wanted to be a police officer had to be.
She had argued with a man about it once, a friend of a friend of Steph’s she’d quite fancied and she could still remember
how … desperate she had sounded, with a drink or three inside her, trying to explain to him that she honestly
wasn’t
gay. At least that’s how it had seemed afterwards and she had not bothered explaining it to anyone since, deciding any
bloke that ignorant was not worth chasing, however tight his arse was.

‘Very high and mighty,’ Steph had said. ‘But how long since you’ve had a decent shag?’

Jenny delivered the coffees and got no more than muttered thanks. She spent five minutes in the ladies, imagined exchanges
with Steph, Simmons and the tasty DC rattling around inside her head, then walked slowly back to her desk. She still had three
dummy crime reports to finish and a hypothetical anti-drug operation to plan for her workbook.

It wasn’t like she had a lot of time to go looking for a bloke, was it?

She picked up the documentation Simmons had given her and began flicking through it. Three interviews to conduct and write
up. Piece of piss or not, it looked as though she was just about to get even busier.

She read through the request from Sarasota Police Department one more time, looked at the world clock on her computer, then
checked her watch. They were five hours behind in Florida and in less-than-sunny Lewisham it wasn’t even twelve-thirty yet.
She would try to get at least one of the reports finished, put a coat on and eat her sandwiches in the park, then call Detective
Jeffrey Gardner after lunch.

She wasn’t sure what a Florida accent was like anyway, but to her he just sounded like Elvis. His voice was lazy and chocolate
brown and when he answered the phone he called her ma’am. She imagined him in a busy office with the first coffee of the day.

Doughnuts, maybe, and photos of the dead girl laid out on his desk.

Jenny introduced herself as a detective constable. Most TDCs did the same thing every now and again, besides which she told
herself that Andy Simmons would almost certainly not want anyone to know he had palmed the job off on a trainee. The way she
saw it, she was saving everyone unnecessary time and pointless explanations.

She felt bad for a minute or so.

Then she forgot about it.

‘What can I do for you?’ Gardner asked.

Jenny explained that she had read through all the documentation supporting his request for follow-up interviews with the three
British couples. She said that she would try and get the interviews done as quickly as possible. He told her he was grateful
for her help, how much he appreciated the support and co-operation the Met was giving his department on a difficult case.

She called him Detective Gardner. He told her to call him Jeff.

She thought about telling him to call her Jenny but decided it might make her sound less professional. Instead, she said,
‘There were a few more things I wondered if you could send me. Just so I’m fully up to speed with everything.’

‘A few more things?’

‘Well, I know that all the couples were originally interviewed on the day that Amber-Marie went missing.’

‘Just a couple of routine questions from patrolmen at the scene.’

‘Would it be possible to see the transcripts of those?’

‘Yeah, it’s … possible. But this is just basic follow-up stuff I need you to do, you know? I sent a list of questions over,
you got that, right?’

Jenny flicked through the pages on her desk until she found the list Gardner was talking about. She had already picked out
several of the questions with a pink highlighter. ‘Yes, I’ve got them in front of me—’

‘I’m just making sure all my ducks are in a row here, that’s all.’

‘I understand, but I do think it would help to see what was originally said.’

There was a sigh. ‘Sure. I’ll get the relevant pages from the patrolmen’s notebooks faxed over to you.’

‘Thank you, Jeff.’

‘A few things, you said.’

‘Well, I was hoping you might send me some pictures of Amber-Marie.’

‘Pictures?’

Jenny looked around. Simmons was deep in conversation with
someone on the far side of the office who was pretending to find whatever he had to say funny. ‘Well, anything you have really.
Photos of the body obviously, and a copy of the PM report would be useful.’

There were a few seconds filled with background chatter before Gardner said, ‘You’re just supposed to be asking a few questions.’

Jenny lowered her voice. ‘I know this is just routine, and I’m sorry to put you to any extra trouble, but I don’t really believe
in doing anything without being armed with as much information as possible. Least of all when we’re talking about a murder
inquiry. The more of it the better.’ These were the things she trained for, after all; the boxes that needed ticking in her
workbook before she was assessed and signed off. She had to ‘demonstrate competence’ in planning an operation. She had to
show that she could organise and that she could take personal responsibility. ‘It’s your decision, obviously, but I genuinely
believe that as far as getting your ducks in a row goes, all this will help me do that job properly …’

She had to show initiative.

The American told her to hang on, and the change in sound made it clear that he had put his hand over the mouthpiece. There
was a minute or more of muffled conversation with someone – the tone of both voices even, some laughter in there at the end
– until Gardner came back on the line.

‘OK, Detective Constable,’ he said. ‘Let me have your fax number and email address …’

Sue found the boy towards the end of the lunch break. He was behind the chapel, crouched against a wall; his face glistening
and snot-smeared like he’d been crying for a while. He was a Year Eight kid, twelve or thirteen, and she knew it was a couple
of younger lads who had been giving him a hard time. She’d caught them at it before.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you sorted out.’

Avoiding the playground, she walked the boy to an empty classroom, gave him some tissues, tried to calm him down. The urge
to cuddle the poor little bugger was overwhelming, but she knew she had better not. She had seen one colleague’s career go
down the toilet after comforting a fifteen-year-old child in his class. Admittedly, that had been a male teacher and a female
pupil, but still.

Bloody ridiculous …

The Head of Sport glanced in through the classroom window and came in for a few minutes. He leaned against the edge of a desk
and folded his arms. He told the boy he needed to toughen up a little, that if he stood up to the ‘little shits’ who were
tormenting him just the once, they’d get bored and find someone else to pick on. Behind his
glasses, the boy’s eyes began to fill again. The Head of Sport shook his head and said, ‘I’ll leave him to you.’

Sue wondered if the man had been bully or victim at school; it had clearly been one or the other. Once upon a time she thought
that the world could be divided neatly into bullies and victims, but that was before long hours on playground duty where she
had learned to recognise those other types who watched from the shadows or lingered around the fringes. Those who cajoled
the bullies into action, winding them up like a child poking a dog with a stick until it bit. Those who liked to be part of
the audience and to see a little blood and those who simply longed to run and tell; the ones that got their jollies vicariously.
It took all sorts to make a world, her mother had told her that often enough. Even within the two main categories there were
subgroups. Many who bullied did so because they had once been on the receiving end and, as far as the victims went, she had
known more than a few – long past childhood, all of them – who could not get through life any other way.

The ones who needed their victimhood. Who were defined by it, and would always find someone happy to oblige.

The boy sniffed, and asked in a quiet, high voice if Sue was going to say anything to anyone about what had happened. She
looked at him, her sympathy waning just a little. His slack mouth and crooked fringe. She knew he might turn out to be one
of those destined to suffer at the hands of the few who could see him for what he was.

That ‘V’ for Victim inked invisibly on to his forehead.

She thought about the most recent email from Angie.

Not sure if any of you have been keeping up with this on the web
…

Sue almost smiled, thinking about Angie surfing the net deep into the night while Barry snored upstairs. She already had her
marked down as a social network addict, happily tweeting and poking the hundreds of friends she had never met. Sue herself
had never seen the point of all that, though Ed dabbled on some of those sites now and again, did stuff on his BlackBerry.
She let him get on with it. She had looked at his Facebook page once or twice early on, but now she was
happy to remain as ignorant about some of his female ‘friends’ as she was about the overnight sales trips – to the north,
to Amsterdam, Barcelona and Dublin – which were seemingly every bit as necessary as they always had been, despite the orders
starting to dry up.

Here’s a couple of the stories I found online if anyone is interested
…

‘I’m OK now, miss,’ the boy said. ‘I don’t want to be late for my next lesson.’

Sue wondered if Amber-Marie Wilson had a Facebook page and guessed that, if she did, it would now be getting very popular.
She had seen a few of those. Virtual wreaths and smiley faces and messages of condolence left for the deceased as if they
were still around to pick them up.

Miss u always

RIP babes

Thinking of you, never b forgotten x

Stupid. As though grieving itself was simply not enough. As though you had to be
seen
to be grieving.

‘Mrs Dunning? Can I go back to my class now …?’

Sue asked the boy if he was sure he was all right. He nodded and she gently brushed brick dust from the shoulder of his blazer.
She asked him if he wanted her to say anything to his mum. He shook his head and Sue thought, you should tell your mother
everything, young man, because I’ve got a horrible feeling you’re going to need all the friends you can get.

Ed drove into the pub car park, sat there for a few minutes with the radio on, then went inside and ordered a pint. He carried
his beer out into the garden and lit a cigarette. There was a man, same kind of age as he was, sitting at one of the wooden
tables a few feet away. Ed caught his eye and the other bloke nodded and raised his glass an inch or two off the table in
greeting. Ed found himself wondering if this other man was doing the same sort of thing that he was. He thought about going
over to join him, sharing a pint or two and a few jokes about what they were up to on the sly. Killing some time. He was
about to say something when a woman came out of the pub to join the man at the table, who had obviously been waiting for her,
so Ed nodded back then turned away.

He spent the next few minutes concocting an elaborate fantasy in which a second woman came out of the pub – this one twice
as attractive and with nobody waiting for her – and sat down at the table next to his. Her legs made a sexy kind of
shushing
noise when she crossed them. She asked him if he had a spare cigarette, and it went from there.

‘You waiting for anyone?’

‘You, I think …’

‘That works for me.’ She smiled and blew smoke into his face, which he’d always thought was a come-on. ‘You know this place
has rooms, don’t you?’

His dialogue could be a bit cheesy sometimes, he knew that, but he put plenty of work into the physical detail, which was
what mattered to him the most. The glimpse of a white, lacy bra-strap when she leaned forward. A gap between her front teeth.
Pink, painted toenails.

‘So, why don’t we have a few drinks and see what happens?’

A middle-aged couple with a dog wandered across and sat at the nearest table, which pretty much killed things, but Ed was
happy enough. He had plenty to work with later on. Alone, or with Sue, depending on her mood.

Ed glanced across and saw that the man who was drinking with his girlfriend was watching him. He suddenly had the mad idea
that the bloke knew exactly what he’d been thinking, or at the very least knew exactly what he was doing there, sitting on
his own like Billy No-Mates. Maybe he would finish his drink and move on to somewhere else, before he started to look like
too much of a loser.

Pink, painted toenails
…

He reached beneath the table, slipped his hand into his pocket and made a few necessary adjustments.

He had been doing a lot more of this the last six months or so, as business had started to tail off. On a day like today,
when Sue was at
work, he could always go home for a few hours in the middle of the day. It wasn’t possible during the school holidays of course,
though they were only a few days away, and Sue had found out once when one of the neighbours had said something. Besides which,
the truth was that he preferred being out and about.

He got restless sitting on his backside.

He had always covered a decent-sized sales territory. He liked to drive, to get around and see different bits of the country.
It wasn’t a sightseeing thing, nothing like that. He just enjoyed covering ground. The cost of petrol had become something
of an issue lately though, so these days he was as likely to kill a few hours sitting in a country pub somewhere in Hertfordshire
as he was batting up and down the M1 and seeing what he could find to do for fun in Leeds or Sheffield.

Fun was still important to him. The day it wasn’t, he wouldn’t care if he turned up his toes. He just had to work a little
harder to find it these days.

His phone chirruped and when he picked it up there was a text message from Dave Cullen, asking if he fancied a lunchtime drink
some time. They had swapped numbers back in Florida, but this was the first time Ed had received a text. He read it through
a couple of times. He wondered if the same message had been sent to Barry. He’d be seeing them both anyway in under a fortnight
when they all got together for dinner, but he supposed that a drink couldn’t hurt.

Might be fun.

He texted back:
Sounds good, mate. Up to my eyeballs with work, but why don’t we try and organise something next week? Clear the afternoon
and make a session of it!

Then he finished his drink and sent a text to Sue.

Buy some pink nail varnish
.

When Ed walked into the kitchen, Sue was at the cooker, stirring something. The radio was on, a woman talking about a film
or a play she hated, and Ed walked across and turned the volume down. Sue asked about his day and he told her he was knackered,
that he’d been
tearing about like a blue-arsed fly. There weren’t enough hours in the day, he said. He asked about school and she told him
it had been much the same as ever, going into no more detail than he had done; both saying ‘you know’ because the other one
did know, both seemingly keen to leave work behind them and relax.

‘What was that text all about?’ she asked.

‘Did you get the nail varnish?’

‘I got it, but I really don’t think pink’s going to suit you.’

He laughed and moved up close behind her. He leaned into her and she had to steady herself momentarily against the cooker.
He stayed pressed against her for half a minute or so – she with a wooden spoon dripping above a pan – then he blew softly,
just once, on the back of her neck and turned to the fridge in search of wine.

‘I fancy Indian,’ he said.

Sue turned. Said, ‘I’m making spaghetti Bolognese.’

‘I’m really in the mood for a good curry.’ He opened the fridge and took out a bottle. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all the
way home.’

‘What about this?’ Sue asked, waving the spoon over the pan.

‘We can freeze it.’

‘It’s almost ready though.’

‘I fancy Indian.’

Ed poured himself a glass of wine, then opened a drawer and began searching inside. Sue continued to stir her sauce. On the
radio, the woman was saying something about the leading actor in the film or play she had seen, but Sue could not hear it
properly.

When the phone rang, neither of them moved to answer it.

‘Can you get that?’ Sue asked eventually.

‘I’m trying to find that bloody takeaway menu,’ Ed said.

Sue took the pan off the heat and walked across to the phone, picking up a tea towel and wiping her hands as she went. She
answered the phone and gave her name. A few seconds later, she said, ‘Oh …’

Ed stopped searching for the menu.

‘No, I don’t think that will be a problem,’ she said. ‘Are you talking to everyone? To the Finnegans and—’

Ed moved into her eyeline. He raised his hands and mouthed a ‘What?’

‘I suppose so,’ Sue said, after listening for a minute. ‘It’ll have to be after four-thirty though, because I don’t get home
from work until then, so …’ She hummed agreement a couple of times and then said, ‘We’ll see you on Wednesday.’

When she had hung up, she looked at Ed and shrugged and said, ‘Police.’

‘Eh?’

‘They want to talk to us about Florida.’

‘What about Florida?’

‘What happened to the girl.’

‘Just us?’

‘Everyone, I think,’ Sue said. ‘She didn’t really want to say, but that was the impression I got.’ She moved past Ed to the
open drawer and after a few seconds’ searching she produced the menu he had been looking for. She handed it to him and said,
‘Don’t over-order.’ She turned and walked back towards the cooker. ‘You always over-order.’