12
The RTA and the fire played second fiddle to World Cup football on the radio, the sporting achievements of eleven men dominating the news headlines. Daniels had watched the game alone at home, unmoved by the hysteria that was going on in the rest of the country. Not that she didn’t like sport. She did. But she could’ve done without the hype beforehand. Her team had talked about nothing else for weeks. The tournament hadn’t lived up to its billing – not by any stretch of the imagination.
A murder enquiry was well underway by the time Daniels reached the incident room, launched by her new boss, Superintendent Ron Naylor. She could feel the tension in the office the minute she walked in. She was expecting that. The nature of the crime, the death of a young child, affected everyone. But like the components of a well-oiled machine, each member of her team had a part to play and it was business as usual.
She watched them from the doorway, brooding on her visit to Bridget McCabe’s home on her way in. She’d gone to offer comfort to the girl’s father, not knowing if she’d be welcome at such a difficult time. He was a widower, a single dad of three girls, who’d lost his wife to a malignant brain tumour a year ago.
Poor sod!
In a moment of confusion, Daniels’ jaw had dropped when Bridget opened the door. Except it wasn’t her at all. It was her identical twin, Becci.
McCabe had come to the door, pulling the surviving twin inside. ‘Fuck’s sake! What is wrong with you people?’
The DCI had shown her badge to reassure him she wasn’t press. Inside the house, she’d managed to convey, she hoped, a sense that Bridget had no idea of how poorly she was, that she was conscious, joking even – that she wasn’t alone. Mick McCabe appreciated that. There was nothing more to be said.
Such traumatic situations made Daniels question her decision to join the force. But then the opposite was also true. Those same events compelled her to remain in the job for as long as possible. Nevertheless, at the McCabes’ front door she’d had a sudden urge to run and keep running, not to get involved, let the traffic and welfare departments do their jobs. It was their remit to support bereaved police officers, not hers. But she liked to think that her timely intervention had made a difference in some small way.
Gormley looked up, probably wondering why it had taken her so long to dash home, shower and change. She thought of offering an explanation but then decided not to get into it. They both needed their minds on the job. They had an arson case to solve and, as brutal as it might sound to the wider public, Bridget McCabe was history. Reflection was a luxury Kate couldn’t afford. It was time to move on.
Her DS looked weary. He’d not gone home, hadn’t wanted to disturb his wife – at least, that’s the reason he gave. Instead, he’d opted for a shower in the men’s locker room. Like the rest of the team, he kept a change of clothes there for such an eventuality. Daniels’ attention shifted to a nearby desk.
The squad rookie, Detective Constable Lisa Carmichael, was a bright and bubbly twenty-five-year-old with more nous than her age would suggest. A whizz-kid on the computer, she was an officer of exceptional talent, ripe for promotion and tipped for the top. A young woman keen to put a recent setback behind her, having been slipped a Mickey Finn by some freak in a nightclub on the team’s last, her first, undercover operation.
Right now, she was entering data into the HOLMES system. As she typed, information was updated automatically on a state-of-the-art murder wall, a digital, touch-screen facility in the relatively new murder suite. The identities of victims Nominal One and Nominal Two – Mark and Jamie Reid – were highlighted, along with their ages, dates of birth, relationship to each other. Daniels had instructed Carmichael to upload only images of Mark and Jamie Reid alive. She didn’t want civilian typists seeing the harrowing crime-scene photographs displayed. More importantly, she wanted her officers to relate to the victims as people, which was difficult to pull off if badly burned corpses were constantly in their faces. It was a skill, knowing how to get the most from her team.
Carmichael was scratching to find information to input at present. A video of the crime scene would be shown at the briefing later. But there was a lack of witness statements coming in from the house-to-house team. Unbelievable in a street where most of the residents had been up when the fire began. Daniels’ guts were telling her that the person she was looking for would be among them, or else not so very far away from Ralph Street. Only time would tell if she was right in that assumption.
Carmichael logged off. She’d just removed her warrant card from its slot when her landline rang. She took the call, gesturing to Daniels not to move away. She obviously needed a word. After a moment or two, she thanked the caller and put down the phone. ‘That was Tim Stanton,’ she said. ‘He needs to get an early start in view of the unprecedented number of bodies lying in his morgue. You heard about the RTA?’
‘Yeah, I heard.’ Daniels explained that she and Hank had been delayed by it on the way to the fire. ‘Tell Stanton I’m nipping back to the crime scene with Hank and then I’ll be with him.’
Carmichael’s face dropped. ‘But you said the next one was mine.’
‘Don’t whine, Lisa. I know what I said. Trust me, this isn’t the right one for you. You don’t want to go there. Postmortems are gruesome, more so when the cadaver no longer resembles a human—’
Carmichael looked at Gormley, a plea for support.
‘What?’ Daniels said. ‘You got something to say, Hank? Spit it out!’
‘You did promise her. No point putting off the evil day.’
The DCI listened carefully as he made a case for Carmichael. It reminded Daniels of when she was starting out. Keen to experience a murder enquiry down to the last detail, she’d pleaded and cajoled, using every trick in the book in order to tick all the boxes and impress her senior officers. Countless times, her former boss and mentor, Superintendent Bright, had warned her she needed to walk before she could run. But did it make a difference? Did it hell! As far as Daniels was concerned, she knew best. From the begging expression on Carmichael’s face, her DC thought she did too.
Daniels had to hand it to her: the girl had guts. Problem was, she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. But, knowing how protective of their protégé Gormley was, the DCI knew he’d given the matter serious thought and not jumped to a decision they’d all live to regret. If he reckoned Carmichael was ready, that was good enough for her.
‘OK,’ Daniels relented. If the truth were known, she was too tired to argue. ‘I’ll drop Hank off and pick you up in half an hour. Get yourself some mints.’
‘Mints?’ Carmichael queried.
‘That’s what I said.’ Daniels walked away.