“Bugger the chain of evidence,” Kincaid said aloud as he drove from the Hackney flat to Holborn Police Station. But the Polaroid felt like a weight in his pocket. As soon as he’d got in the car, he’d transferred the photo to an evidence bag, but he hadn’t logged it in, so it would be useless as proof of anything.
But he couldn’t get the image out of his mind. They’d guessed that Stanton had worked undercover. They’d guessed that Denis had worked undercover. But they’d had no reason to think that the two had been connected. And what the hell had Angus Craig to do with them? From his appearance in the photo, it was highly unlikely he’d been working an undercover assignment. And he was older than either of the other men, so had probably been senior in ranking.
“Bloody hell,” he said as the thought struck him, then braked hard to avoid bumping the car in front of him.
Angus Craig had been their handler. Everything he’d ever learned about Craig told him that Craig would have reveled in the control that came with the job. Control, manipulation, opportunity.
It also meant that Denis Childs had had a long, and by necessity, fairly intimate relationship with Craig. And that Denis Childs and Michael Stanton had known each other, and probably well.
He was still mulling over the implications when he got to his office. Checking messages and reports, he saw there was no further progress in the investigation into the death of Michael Stanton, other than the discovery of the flat and its contents.
Its contents . . . Angus and Edie Craig had been shot with a semiautomatic pistol, but the gun had been left at the scene. Ryan Marsh had been shot with a semiautomatic pistol, which had also been left at the scene. So there was no connection between the gun in Stanton’s flat and either of the weapons used in the murders—assuming he was right and they were murders. No connection except for Stanton himself. He’d known Angus Craig. He’d been seen near the Craigs’ on the night of their deaths.
And, he had known Ryan Marsh.
Had Stanton killed the Craigs?
Had Stanton killed Ryan, using a different gun but the same method?
And if either of those things were true, how would he ever prove it?
He saw again the baton they’d found in Stanton’s things, and he thought of the description of the wound to Denis Childs’s head. There were no crime scene photos of Denis’s injury to use for a comparison, but he’d be willing to bet that the depression in Denis’s skull would match the thin, flexible end of a deployed baton.
But he couldn’t suggest a comparison to his team, or to the team investigating Childs’s assault, without revealing why he had made the connection. And that took him back to the purloined photo.
He needed to talk to Doug. And King’s Cross was nagging at him. Why, if Michael Stanton lived in Hackney, had his body been found in the Regent’s Canal, a few hundred yards from King’s Cross station and St. Pancras station? St. Pancras, where the white phosphorous grenade had gone off in the great train shed. And the spot on the canal was just a short distance from the Caledonian Road, where Ryan had lived with Matthew Quinn’s protest group. Coincidence? Probably. But he didn’t like it.
Glancing at his watch, he texted Doug. “Meet me in an hour. The Driver.”
Doug replied, “Why the hell there?”
“Will explain,” Kincaid sent back, although he wasn’t at all sure he could.
Leaving his office, he murmured an excuse to Sidana.
He strolled out of the building, trying not to hurry, trying not to feel the Polaroid burning a hole in his pocket, and a few minutes later exited the tube at St. Pancras/King’s Cross. The sky was now completely overcast, and a chill little breeze had come up from the north, welcome after the morning’s heat.
He walked into the wind, due north up York Way, thinking he’d circle round to the Driver via the canal towpath, and have a look at the spot where Stanton had been fished out of the water. Passing the sparkling new complex that housed the Guardian, he remembered when one wouldn’t have chosen to walk along the canal in the daytime, much less at night, but with all the development in the King’s Cross area the canal had become a desirable attraction. And desirable real estate.
Pausing, he looked down at the towpath from the York Way bridge. The canal looked serene, the left side lined with cheerful moored narrow boats, the right, with the sheer walls of offices and flats. He knew, however, that farther east, nearer to the Caledonian Road, there were sections where the moorings were vacant, where foliage blocked the towpath from sight on the left, and where the buildings on the right had small windows like blind eyes. It was in one such section that Michael Stanton’s body had floated to the surface.
He found himself thinking of Ryan again. Ryan, who must have known this area intimately, having lived for months in the flat on the Caledonian Road. Had he photographed it, Kincaid wondered, the way he’d photographed Hambleden? Many of the shots in and around the village had been very good, almost professionally composed.
What, he wondered, had happened to Ryan’s camera? It had not been among the things stashed on the island. Had it been with him the night he died, perhaps in the open backpack in the sitting room of the Hackney flat?
The wind picked up with a gust that blew dust in his eyes and rattled rubbish along in the gutters. He turned and, instead of taking the stairs down to the towpath, walked back the way he’d come.
When he reached King’s Cross again, he rounded the corner and walked up the Caledonian Road. He wondered if Matthew Quinn was still there, and if Matthew might recognize the photo of Stanton. Matthew, he realized, would not know Ryan was dead. Ryan Marsh had disappeared, as far as the group was concerned, on the day of the St. Pancras explosion.
The flat, he saw, had not yet succumbed to the inexorable march of gentrification. The Georgian building looked grubbier and more run down than ever, and when he rang the bell, there was no answer. He’d almost turned away when he recognized the friendly face of the proprietor of the halal chicken shop next door.
“Medhi,” he said, going in. “Medhi Atias.”
Atias, a middle-aged, dark-eyed man with a small paunch, looked up with a surprised smile. “Mr. Kincaid. How nice to see you.”
Kincaid had become acquainted with Atias during the investigation of Matthew Quinn’s little protest group. He’d liked him, and Ryan, he remembered, had liked him, too. “How are you, Mr. Atias?” Kincaid shook his hand across the counter. “How’s business?” The shop, unlike the rest of the building, was clean and bright. Atias had told him that the development of the area had been a good thing for him, because tenants of the new office complexes needed decent, reasonably priced food.