Faraday 01 The Gigabyte Detective (2 page)

“It’s not in London actually.”

“Where is it then - Los Angeles? Well, at least a different set of taxpayers will be footing the bill.”

She sat opposite him on the chair with the broken spring. She felt a little shame-faced as she confessed, “Actually it’s in Torquay.”

“Torquay?” He regarded her with horror.

“In South Devon.”

“I know where Torquay is, thank you very much.” His face twisted with contempt. “So - what’s happened? Some old dear been shaken to death by her pink rinse and they haven’t got any spare local plods to look into it?”

Charlotte smiled despite herself. “In fact you’re partly correct, Apparently the lady mayoress was murdered a year ago and they still haven’t been able to charge anyone with the offence. She was a middle-aged woman who was one of the stars of the local community. I understand the Torquay bigwigs have been making a fuss. It may surprise you to know that a lot of wealthy people live part of their lives in Torbay, including a number of City bankers, stock-brokers and financiers. Between them they wield quite a lot of clout.”

“So how did all these splendid bigwigs hear about you?”

“You remember I gave a presentation to the Association of Chief Police Officers last month? As I told you they all seemed a bit sceptical at the time.” She shrugged. “However it appears that, when they’re desperate enough, they’re prepared to try any solution that may solve their problems. Yesterday the Deputy Chief Constable of the Devon and Cornwall force rang John Hayden.”

“Who’s John Hayden?”

“The Assistant Commissioner.” She felt an immediate annoyance that Mitch obviously never listened to her comments about her work. “I’ve told you enough times that he’s the only chap who’s ever given me any support. If it hadn’t been for him the whole project would have been abandoned long ago.”

A smirk appeared on her partner’s face. “Got him to blame for it, have I? So - I gather you’re off to Torquay next week. How long will that be for?”

“Probably three months.”

“Three months!” He looked startled. “I thought you said this brilliant programme could do a year’s work in five minutes. Why the hell do you have to be there for three months?”

“It may not be that long.”

He pulled a face. “I don’t see much of you as it is. And now you’re going to bury yourself in the depths of the country for three months.”

Charlotte knew only too well that her partner was a confirmed city dweller. Born and brought up in London, he regarded the country as a place for day trips on sunny Sundays.

“Come off it, Mitch,” she protested. “Perhaps it’ll be over much quicker than that. I just don’t know what’s involved until I get there. But my boss had to let me go for a decent period to stand any chance of my sorting it out for them.”

He snorted, then simply turned away and concentrated on his marking. But she couldn’t let it rest like that. She went over and sat beside him.

“Mitch,” she pleaded, “you know this is important to me. It’s my one chance to make my mark with this new programme. And I won’t be there all the time. We’ll be able to meet up at weekends after the first couple of weeks.” She had the fleeting thought that it might even freshen up their relationship, but she knew better than to suggest this to him.

“When will you ever be able to get away for the weekends?” He turned back to her accusingly. “I know you. There will always be some little detail which has to be cleared up, some interview which you couldn’t possibly arrange in normal working hours. That’s how you organise your life - always centred around your work.”

“Well, you could come down and see me,” she tried to suggest, admitting to herself, even as she said it, that it wouldn’t work.”

He snorted. “Oh, yes! And I’d spend most of my time sitting round, waiting for you to get back from some vital assignment, while I watch the bloody rain belting down and herds of sheep walking about getting wet.”

“It’s flocks.”

“What?”

“Sheep are in flocks. It’s cows that walk about in herds.” She shook her head. “Anyway there won’t be a sheep in sight. Torbay isn’t a hamlet on the North Yorkshire Moors. It actually has things like theatres and cinemas … . .”

“Huh,” he grunted. “I remember seaside theatres from my school holidays - rows of second-rate dancing girls bouncing up and down and loud-mouthed, unfunny comedians. No - thank - you.”

“Don’t be so unreasonable.”

He had a surly look on his face now. “In any case, you’re not interested in the theatre any more. You’re never willing to come with me these days.”

“That’s not fair Mitch. You only seem to come up with the idea at the last minute, and you always choose a night when I’ve got some work that I just have to finish for the next morning.”

Her partner threw down the essay he was marking and stood up. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m hungry. I’m going round the corner to the King Billy for a bite to eat. Are you coming?”

“You don’t need to go out. I’ll get you something.”

“There’s nothing in the fridge.”

She tried to mollify him. “Well, let’s ring for a pizza. You like pizzas.”

“I’m, fed up with this dreary place.” He grabbed his jacket and made for the door. “I want to get out.”

“The King William isn’t exactly smart.”

“Anything’s better than here.” He went out through the door, leaving her biting her lip.

The problem was, she knew that he was partly right. The flat was dreary. Worse than that - it now seemed to be nothing more than the place where they slept and argued. These days they didn’t seem to go out and do things together any more. And she admitted it was partly because of her demanding job. Being the only woman DCI in her division meant she had to work twice as hard as most of the men to avoid being the butt of unwarranted criticism.

She looked round the drab little living room - at the fading, over-dark colours of the curtains and the upholstery, at the plastic finish of the dining table and chairs and felt depressed.

She pushed the long, dark hair back from her face. “I suppose we should have made more of an effort to find a nicer place,” she thought tiredly to herself. “Perhaps we would stand a better chance of making a success of our relationship if we bothered a bit more about the setting.”

The funny thing was that it had seemed to be just the right place when she and Mitch first found it - the ground floor of a small three-storey building in a quiet little cul-de-sac away from screaming kids. The place was cosy and convenient, if a little dark. It was less than ten minutes walk from Kings Cross where they could get buses or the Underground to anywhere in London. Although the furnishings were cheap, the flat otherwise exactly fitted their specification, and for the first few years they had been perfectly happy in the place.

Or had they, if she was really honest with herself? The cracks had started to appear in their relationship some time ago and had been widening ever since as her career had taken off and his had remained steadfastly in the doldrums. Earlier talk about getting married when they had sufficient money saved for her to give up work seemed to have been forgotten. Mitch denied that he resented her success at the Met. However he never ceased to snipe at her about the long hours the job demanded and therefore the time they missed being together.

She promised herself, as she went to warm up some food, that she would sit down with her partner when he came back from the pub and they would try to plan more of a future together - after she came back from Devon, of course.

* * * * * * * *

It took Stafford Paulson nearly ten minutes to find a parking space. Divisional headquarters was so swamped with staff these days that they’d soon have to extend the car park. He thought bitterly that he could use a couple of these extra staff in his little department in Torquay. As a result of the search he was a few minutes late for his meeting with his boss. That wouldn’t make it any more enjoyable.

He was irritated by the sudden call to the late meeting. If possible he liked to finish on time on a Friday so that he could have a leisurely meal with his wife Dorothy before he ran her to her bingo and carried on to his boat in Galmpton Creek to prepare it for a day’s fishing, weather permitting.

He went upstairs and along the corridor in the executive wing. He paused outside the door labelled ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Lasham’ for a few seconds before he knocked.

The gravel voice with the Lancashire accent roared, “Come in.”

Paulson obeyed.

“You’re late, Paulson - as usual.” Mark Lasham ground out another cigarette butt in the aluminium ashtray on the corner of his desk as he glared at his subordinate. He was an unhappy man.

Stafford had been made aware long ago of the fact that Lasham had spent the last eighteen years ruthlessly climbing the ladder of success in the police force. The DCS bragged that he had received no helping hand from anyone. He had no relatives to make the path easy for him. He had no brilliant academic background to rely on. It had been tough all the way. But Lasham was a tough man.

There were many, both among his police colleagues and in the criminal underworld, who had cause to remember him and shudder - his squat, powerful physique; his square head mounted on a short neck, with the small steel-coloured eyes and the close-cropped, dark, bristling hair; his thick, square hands with the stubby fingers, the right index stained yellow by the lighted cigarette which was habitually jammed against it - these provoked a sensation of wariness, if not of fear. There were many in the West Midlands, and before that in Liverpool, who had cause to rue the day they had crossed the path of Mark Lasham.

In order to get the magic title of Chief Superintendent, he had been forced to accept a post in the West Country. It was an area which was known as the graveyard of ambition. But not for Lasham. He fitted as uncomfortably into the soft Devon landscape as a rhinoceros into a cottage garden. He had decided he would stick it out here for the statutory three years, while his colleagues edged warily round him. Then he would be looking for somewhere more suitable to exercise his talents - somewhere where there was some action.

Meanwhile he had to deal with characters like Inspector Stafford Paulson, who stood uncomfortably at attention across his desk.

“Have you seen this?” He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk.

Paulson picked it up. It was a photocopy of a cut-out newspaper article.

Lasham snorted. “It’s an article in yesterday’s Torbay Advertiser penned by some fucking clever-clogs reporter who thinks he’s solved the Cynthia Adams murder.”

Stafford started to read it but Lasham snatched it back. “Don’t bother now. You can take it away and go through it at your leisure over the weekend. The silly bugger’s dreamed up some idea that our Cynthia was fifth the murder - one every summer - a bloody serial holiday killer.” He snorted again

“It’s the first time I’ve heard that idea.”

“It’s a load of crap, of course.” Then Lasham suddenly pointed at Paulson so violently that he recoiled a step. “But why has he done it?” Lasham demanded. “I’ll tell you why. It’s nearly a year, Paulson, since that stuck-up tart was murdered on your patch, and you’ve got nowhere with finding the culprit. Everybody’s getting fed up waiting for an arrest.”

Paulson was struck silent by the injustice of the attack.

“Every time I bump into the Chief Constable,” Lasham continued, “the first question he asks me is, ‘Any luck with the Torbay hotel case?’.” He leaned across the desk and hissed at his junior. “I’m bloody fed up with it.”

Stafford Paulson remained standing and kept quiet. He tasted the stale acid atmosphere of the unventilated office with a feeling close to nausea. He used to enjoy his job. That was before Lasham arrived. The last two years had been nothing but pressure - filling in forms, doing returns, finding ways to massage the clear-up figures - no matter how. He now seemed to spend far too much of his time sitting behind his desk trying to make the results look better than they really were and explaining the frequent failures. Detective work had lost its pleasure for him. There were too many people breathing down his neck, too many self-interested bastards like Lasham around.

“Why don’t you get stuck into it and sort something out before the next one dies?” demanded the Chief Superintendent.

Paulson sighed inwardly. He had forty-one months to go before he could apply for early retirement and get away from this place. Somehow he had to get through those last three and a half years and keep his nose clean. Then he could happily pass the rest of his days in his garden at Stoke Gabriel or messing around on the Dart in his seventeen-foot cabin cruiser.

“It isn’t as though you’re short of bloody evidence,” protested Lasham. “There were fingerprints everywhere, bodily fluids over half the bed. You’ve got a complete DNA profile of the murderer, and still you haven’t found the bugger. How many people have you tested up to now?”

“Just over fifteen hundred.”

“Well - test some more.”

“It’s not as easy as that.” Paulson dared to stand up for himself a little. “We’ve spread the net very wide already and it’s a long job getting them all to come in. There’s been a hell of a lot of resistance.”

His boss sighed. “Don’t I bloody know it. I’ve had complaints from just about every big-wig below the Prince of Wales. They’re all bloody outraged when we suggest that they might have been ferreting around in Cynthia’s knickers. I suppose they’re frightened of trying to explain it to their wives when they get home.” He resumed his pugnacious expression. “But it must be one of them. Obviously the woman had threatened to spill the beans about the affair and they decided to shut her up. The only thing is, somehow you’ve been looking at the wrong people. I just don’t know how you do it.” He shook his head. “How many damn people are there in Torbay for God’s sake?”