‘Dave?’ Anna insisted.
His head snapped up. ‘OK, what I see from this morning is that we got a result. I was right, yeah? I’ve seen this before working serious crimes, or the human exploitation directorate as the PC brigade insist on calling it. We broke up a gang grooming kids. Nonces are nonces forever. They never stop. And they’re all fucking cowards. We squeezed a couple in the Midlands and they started singing. Led us to all sorts.’
Anna’s brows lowered. ‘Hawley was never a nonce, Dave. He was cleared completely.’
‘Then why does he have a list of victims stuck to the back of two landscapes in his bedroom?’
‘Definitely the more interesting question and I haven’t got an answer for it yet. But it isn’t the point. Dave, come on. Your instincts are good, spot on in fact. Hawley may be valuable to us. But your way is not my way. I need you to understand that.’
‘We’ve got the bastard on the ropes, haven’t we?’
‘Exactly. His defences are up. He knows we’re looking. But what I want to know is how familiar he is with Clevedon. Is he a hiker? Someone who can carry a heavy backpack? The sort of thing you learn from subtle interrogation. Do you think he’s going to volunteer that sort of intel now?’
Woakes sighed. ‘This is the way I function. I need to get stuck in. Ma’am, all I’m trying to do here is be a good copper. OK, I admit I can be a bit… overenthusiastic.’
‘Let’s hope Rainsford sees it that way.’
Woakes let his head drop. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, do you have to—’
Anna snorted. ‘Of course I have to. Rainsford’s expecting us to close the Morton case. How do you think I can explain us messing up his apprehension, let alone walking all over Hawley for no good reason?’
Woakes’ expression hardened. ‘I don’t think you’re being very supportive.’
‘Supportive? Is that how you see it? Jesus, Dave, smell the coffee here. All I see is that you’ve walked in wearing size twenty clown shoes and thrown a grenade into my team. No one gets to do that.’
Woakes shook his head. Small, repetitive movements with his gaze deflected. ‘God, they told me you were a frosty…’ He caught himself just in time.
‘They? Just exactly who are they, sergeant?’
Woakes’ mouth hardened. ‘I didn’t see you pushing Hawley’s buttons. I mean, with all due respect, what did you do? Just sat there, watching him, waiting for inspiration.’
Anna nodded. ‘Yes, exactly that. Watching and waiting. You should try it sometime. Because what I saw as I watched and waited was that he lives alone, uses the preparation of the property for sale as an excuse to hide the fact he hasn’t been bothered to redecorate, though he lives there most of the time judging by the six-pack of light beer and a couple of bottles of good wine in the fridge. There were no spirits in the drinks cabinet. Probably doesn’t trust himself. The mail on the table was addressed to him there. You saw the recipe books and the shopping full of fresh vegetables and some cuts of meat, I take it?’
Woakes stared back at her.
Anna went on. ‘All this means that he’s self-contained, looks after himself, and can’t decide whether to keep his aunt’s bungalow or not because it’s a safe haven away from his professional life. But you, of course, got all that, too, simply by shaking the tree, yes?’
Woakes responded with a dismissive shrug. ‘I spoke to his colleagues in two A and E departments. They think he’s weird. He won’t see kids. Runs a mile from them.’
‘Should it surprise you after what he’s been through? He’s probably terrified.’
‘You saw he had new locks on his garden shed, did you?’
Anna snorted. ’Yes, I did. And he has every right to do that. And we have no right to ask him why.’
‘Christ, I can’t believe your defending this bloke.’
Anna nodded. ‘Believe what you like. But you need to start doing as you’re told and learning to be a team player and showing the rest of us, me especially, some respect. Second and last warning, Dave. I can always have you working on something else if you’d prefer?’
Woakes said nothing.
‘I said is that what you’d prefer?’
‘No, ma’am.’
She could have turned away and left him standing there. But she’d learned from Shipwright that a dressing down should be delivered swiftly and decisively. Once done, best forgotten.
‘Right, now, let’s get this briefing sorted.’
Upstairs, Anna told the squad about their meeting with Hawley, while Woakes sat at the back. But he looked distracted and she surmised he was still smarting like a schoolboy caught smoking in the bathroom. She ignored him and concentrated instead on what she’d learned from Hawley.
‘I know how this sounds,’ she said after writing the names of Hawley’s victim list on the whiteboard, ‘but I’m coming at it from two angles. The first is that we’ve caught Hawley out and he’s involved in some way in these five cases. The second is that he’s trying to make sense of the distressing experience he had as a suspect. That the original investigators had a point when they focused on him, but they didn’t realise at the time what it was exactly. And it’s made him believe that perhaps these victims were connected somehow by their medical histories, or the doctors they saw, or the hospitals they visited. Either way, it’s worth at least looking and ruling out any connections.’
Holder spoke. ‘But if he was involved, why show you all this?’
‘He didn’t have much choice once Dave accidently discovered his cuttings library on the back of a painting.’
Holder turned to look at Woakes. ‘Intuition?’
Woakes didn’t answer.
‘There is that,’ Anna said. ‘Or as Hawley’s solicitor might interpret it, an illegal search.’
‘The obvious thing to do would be to find out if Hawley’s ever worked in the places the victims lived,’ Khosa said.
‘Good idea, Ryia. Let’s throw it into the mix. Justin, drag the files up from Hawley’s list and find out if and where they were treated. Then ring the hospitals and see if Hawley ever worked there. Where are we with the image?’
Holder shrugged. ‘We’ve had it enlarged and gone over it. There is no branding on the bottles. The clothes Rosie wore were what she was abducted in. She had the vest on under her school uniform. No price tag on the blanket or the bucket. There’s nothing there.’
‘There must be something,’ Anna said.
‘I’ve spoken to someone in Hi-Tech, ma’am. They can get to us tomorrow.’
‘No. Not good enough. This is fresh evidence. The only fresh evidence in nine years. We need their input and we need it now.’
Holder nodded. ‘I’ll ring them again, ma’am. See if they can get someone to us today.’
Anna looked at her watch. ‘By close of play today, Justin. OK, Ryia, that gives us three hours to get over to Charterhouse where Rosie’s remains were found. Sort out the location and you’re driving. Let’s say, thirty minutes?’
Khosa nodded.
Anna turned to Trisha. ‘I’ll dig into Hawley’s background.’ In her peripheral vision, she saw Woakes sit up. But Anna ignored him. ‘Trisha, let’s get some fresh search terms into HOLMES. Hospital sex offenders, links to doctors, nurses, etcetera.’
Trisha wrote on her pad. She’d have access to indexers who provided admin support, inputting the various reports their lines of enquiry generated, and extract data from the cross-referencing queries. But Anna knew that Trisha did the interpretation and analysis of what these database searches threw up. She was the receiver. They’d need filtering for relevance and then phone calls to follow up. The end result, if anything of use did appear, would be her well-written summary. It wasn’t simply a question of pressing a button.
‘Any joy with military links?’ Anna asked.
‘Not yet, ma’am.’
Finally, she looked at Woakes and the red flush spreading up from his neck. ‘Dave, you get on to the SIO involved in the original enquiry.’
‘Haven’t you asked Ryia to—’