5
Irvine put an elbow on her desk and propped her chin up on her hand. She could feel her lower lip pouting and tried to pull it back in. Armstrong was sitting beside her and tried his best to look sympathetic.
Jim Murphy was used to pouting detectives.
‘You know how it is,’ he said to Irvine. ‘This blood stuff takes time. I’ve been up to the top floor twice already today but those lab guys can’t be rushed. It’ll be done when it’s done.’
Irvine leaned back in her chair and rubbed at her eyes, suddenly feeling tired.
‘What about CCTV? They delivered the recordings yet?’
‘Oh, sure. I got an e-mail with all that stuff in digital format. Save me logging on to try to find it.’
‘Anything on it?’
He looked at his watch. Stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked back at Irvine.
‘Came over less than an hour ago. So …’
‘You haven’t looked at it yet?’
‘No.’
‘But you know how to, right? I mean, you can read the angles, know where the cameras are pointed, judge distances.’
‘Yeah, I can do that.’
‘Any chance you can make a start on it today?’
He looked at his watch again. Now rubbing at imaginary stubble on his clean-shaven face. He pushed his glasses up on to the bridge of his nose.
‘Well …’
‘It’s a murder inquiry, Jim. Please.’
‘Fine. But it’ll just be a start. There’s a lot of stuff on there and it’s …’ He checked his watch. Again. ‘After three now.’
‘I appreciate it, Jim. I do.’
Irvine gave him her best smile: figured if she couldn’t appeal to his sense of civic duty she’d try another route. Feminine wiles. Not subtle. Murphy didn’t go for it.
So much for the killer smile.
‘Let me know tomorrow morning how you’re getting on?’ Irvine said.
Murphy nodded, turned and walked away without saying anything else.
‘That was … helpful,’ Armstrong said.
Irvine watched Murphy pull open the door to the stairwell at the far end of the open plan area.
‘Actually, he is very good,’ she said.
Irvine looked at Armstrong, caught him staring at the injured side of her face. Realised that the pain was starting up again. She put her hand against her face and felt the swelling.
‘I don’t think we’re going to accomplish much more today, do you?’ Armstrong asked.
She knew where he was going with this.
‘Before you say anything, I’m fine.’
‘I’m not planning on contradicting you on that.’
‘But you are about to suggest that maybe I should go home early. After all I’ve been through.’
She made quotation signs with her fingers as she said the last sentence. Remembered someone else who did that – Cahill. It was a sign that his particular brand of rough charm was starting to work on her.
‘Something like that. We can pick up with him tomorrow,’ he said, nodding his head to the side in the direction Murphy had gone.
‘What about the rental agency for the accountants?’
She swivelled in her seat and lifted the card from her desk. ‘We could go and talk to them.’
Armstrong took the card from her. ‘I’ll do that. I’m pretty sure I won’t get attacked in their swanky office.’
Irvine narrowed her eyes at him, drummed her fingers on the desk.
‘It would give me a chance to pick up Connor early from the childminder’s, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Connor’s your son.’
She nodded, though he hadn’t asked it as a question.
‘So go. Do it. Take a couple of hours off and swallow some painkillers.’
At home, Irvine made Connor his favourite dinner of spaghetti with cheese sauce and gave him a bath after watching a Scooby Doo DVD. He loved Scooby Doo. Maybe as much as she did.
She let him splash around in the bath with his toys before taking him to his room and reading him a few pages of Winnie-the-Pooh. He listened rapt as she told him about Pooh’s and Piglet’s not-so-brilliant plan to kidnap Roo. She found herself vaguely disturbed – thinking that it was a little too much like a child abduction plot. Then Kanga gave Piglet a cold bath for his troubles. Order restored to the Hundred Acre Wood.
Crime and punishment.
If only it was that easy in reality.
After Connor was settled in bed, Irvine checked her mobile, hoping that Logan had called. He had not.
‘Probably still in the air,’ she told herself.
She ran a bath and looked in the mirror at the ever-expanding mass of black and purple bruising that seemed to be spreading across her face.
Undressing in the bathroom and leaving her clothes in a heap on the floor, she slipped into the hot water and dipped her head, soaking her hair and pushing it back. After that she doused a facecloth with cold water from the tap, put it over her face and lay back, trying hard not to remember the fear she felt back in Suzie Murray’s building as the man who might have killed Joanna Lewski came at her.