Paul went back to the box that held the photos. There were dozens of internal and external shots of the building in the wake of the fire, and a few from before obtained with more difficulty for purposes of comparison. One of the “before” shots of the landing outside Moulson’s flat explained what he was seeing. But it didn’t answer the wider question of why he was seeing it.
The envelope that held the injury photos was sitting right in front of him again. And now he was thinking about oddities, anomalies, things that sat in the wrong place or at the wrong time. This time he gave himself full permission: took his old fetish off the leash. He spread the pictures out in front of him and stared at them hard for several minutes, interrogating them rather than just drinking them in. A feeling for wounds isn’t like a feeling for snow. There was no mystic communion going on here. But Paul was something of an expert in the things you could do to flesh and the results you could expect to get.
This time he saw it.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
He went back to the CCTV footage and watched it in sequence from about 10.50 p.m. through to just after eleven, with lots of stops and starts and rewinds. He was so absorbed that he didn’t see the intern, Susannah Sackville-West, until she reached past him and turned off the monitor.
“Hey!” Paul protested.
“Sorry,” Susannah said indifferently. “But you weren’t listening. Pritchard wants to see you.”
“I’m working!”
“No, you’re not, Paul. That’s why he wants to see you. He says you should be doing trial docs on Bowker and he hasn’t seen hide or hair of you.” She was smirking just a little. He was the one on contract; she was the one working for free in order – gradually, painfully, evitably – to pick up enough experience to someday slide sideways into a salaried position. She had nothing against Levine besides finding him a little creepy, but if he fell down badly enough, she might be able (with no hard feelings) to walk over his prostrate body into his job.
Paul was almost certain that wasn’t going to happen. All the same, in dread of a severe and embarrassing shit-canning, he went to find his boss and tell him by way of mitigation that he’d broken open the Inferno Killer case.
Pritchard wasn’t in his office. He was in one of the boardrooms, walking around and around the table where stacks of paperwork relating to a completely different case (the Crown versus Liam Bowker) were being assembled into a three-dimensional labyrinth of truth and lies. Or four-dimensional really, since Pritchard’s path through them as he walked back and forth was a sequential one, adding the element of time as he decided on the best running order for the defence. He looked like a monk in a cloister, endlessly circling the same space and finding different things to meditate on every time he went around.
“You’re working Moulson,” he said without looking up at Paul as he entered.
“I am, sir,” Paul admitted.
“Bowker first. Then Attalie-Ziscou. Then Moulson. Is your calendar broken, Paul?”
“No, sir, but I… I think I may have found something.”
Best foot forward – offer the outcome as though the outcome justified the process. Because in this case it just might.
“Found something?” Pritchard’s tone was absent, his gaze wandering over the various piles of papers ranged before him. The facts in the case of Crown versus Bowker, insofar as there were such things as facts. “Such as what exactly?”
“Such as a suspect,” Paul said.
Which did the trick. The Crown and Bowker were left to talk among themselves for a while.
There was a big, glaring anomaly in the evidence, Paul told his boss with nervy, hectic eloquence. A wrecking ball for the prosecution case. Jess Moulson’s chances had just gone from snowball in hell to pig in clover. No, in shit. She was still in shit. But with a genuine shot at being hauled out of it.
He talked Pritchard through the CCTV footage – pausing when he got to the big clue that everyone had missed, even though it was so obvious it might as well have had BIG FUCK-OFF CLUE painted on it in neon yellow.
Then he spread out the injury photos and pointed to the odd one out.
“That was nicely done, Paul,” Pritchard allowed when Paul finally wound down. “You’ve given me something to work with. A great deal of something, in fact. Possibly even enough. But still, Bowker first. This will keep.”
He waved Paul back to his desk with a gesture that might have been considered dismissive. But Paul’s heart was singing. Pritchard’s faint praise spoke volumes. More importantly, Jess had put her trust in him and he hadn’t let her down.
When the fire that had destroyed her face had at last decided to speak, it had spoken to him.
59
The Devil was a little wary around Dr Salazar for a while after the Ecstasy incident. He was aware that he’d been coming off the spool that night, and he didn’t feel quite so good about it as he had at the time. He didn’t want to apologise to Sally, obviously. He just wanted the whole thing to pass off without comment.
By way of a peace offering, when he warned Sally about Treacher, he put a little tact into it. He made it seem like he was concerned for Sally’s safety rather than just not wanting him to get out of his depth and fuck up. But the underlying message was still clear. “Anyone asks you anything about Grace or drugs or Curie, you play really stupid and you get out of there fast. Don’t even bother to lie. Just move to higher ground and stay there.”
Dr Salazar pointed out that since technically it was him who was bringing the drugs into Curie, at least for the last leg of the way, he wasn’t likely to be tempted to answer any of those questions. But in any case, nobody had asked him. “Who’d be asking anyway? There’s nobody in Fellside who—”
“Shit!” Devlin exclaimed. “I already told you. These aren’t inmates. They’re the people who used to supply over in Curie before we did. They’re hanging around the Pot of Gold trying to get a sniff of Grace’s operation.”
Sally drank at home. Red wines from the cheaper end of the Waitrose spectrum, one bottle lasting two nights. It was no surprise that all of this had passed him by.
“And they’re just walking up to people…?”
“Sally, you’ll know them if you fucking see them,” Devlin said. “They’ll offer to buy you a drink. Then they’ll get talking about something that’s a million miles away from drugs and prisons, and they’ll work you around to it so cute and slow you’ll think it was your idea. I’m telling you not to get into that conversation. Nod to show me you understand.”
Salazar nodded.
His mind was elsewhere, as Devlin had noticed. He wasn’t thinking about drug muling at all: he was thinking about murder. He’d begun to lay his plans for killing Devlin as soon as he came down from his involuntary Ecstasy high. By the end of the first day, he’d identified the simplest method, done a risk analysis, costed it and given it up as impossible. And he’d done the same thing every day since: he just couldn’t get his mind off it.
The obvious way to do the deed was with poison. Devlin’s pethidine addiction provided a perfect delivery system, and the doctor had access to plenty of things that were lethal in the right dosages. It would be almost too easy.
Looking at the risks, there really weren’t any that he couldn’t get around. The only people who knew that he was supplying Devlin’s habit were him and Devlin. And Devlin wasn’t going to offer that information up, even as he was dying, unless he guessed what was happening to him. The important thing was to choose a poison that took effect very quickly, to shrink the window for deathbed soliloquies.