Shipwright kept his promise and rang her as she reached the M5 exit that would take her back into town.
‘I spoke to Sandwell about Woakes.’
‘And?’
‘His reports describe him as enthusiastic, determined and insatiably ambitious.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. But Sandwell also spoke to his last DI. They did not ask for his reference. If they had it would have been stamped CPT.’
‘CPT?’
Anna waited. Shipwright had great timing.
‘As in “cannot polish a turd”. Woakes, apparently, has issues. Comes across as bright and very enthusiastic. But he’s been off on a couple of long breaks with stress. Gets morose and withdrawn and fails to cope. Anger issues, too.’
‘Are you saying he’s not up to the job?’
‘I’m saying that some HR nob had suggested a change of scenery for Woakes so that another force could try and deal with his failings.’
‘Do they have a label for these failings?’
‘The word paranoid was used. Sandwell shied away from saying “disorder”.’
‘Bloody hell. How come we’ve been lumbered with this?’
‘Ah, well. That’s the thing. He struck lucky with a couple of cases. Blundered in on his own and did the job. That got him a sympathetic hearing with the ACC up there in East Mids. I wouldn’t blame Rainsford as he’s probably had his ear and several other appendages bent to find room.’
‘I knew it. I could smell it.’ Anna gripped the steering wheel. ‘What am I supposed to do now? Sit back and let him play captain bloody chaos?’
‘Keep Rainsford apprised. These things tend to have a way of working themselves out.’
‘Is that what you’d do?’ Anna asked, fishing.
‘Yes, as well as keeping the bugger at arm’s length. Find him something he can get his teeth into like a hit and run in Perth.’
‘Why Scotland?’
‘I meant Western Australia. That’s about as far as you could throw him.’ Shipwright chuckled.
Anna grinned. ‘Don’t think Rainsford would stump up the airfare.’
‘No, I know. All you can do is be careful.’
She thanked Shipwright and rang off. Not what she’d wanted to hear, but confirmatory nevertheless. She toyed with taking Holder and Khosa into her confidence but decided against it. If Woakes was already paranoid, the last thing she wanted to do was give him more ammunition.
It was well past lunchtime by now. Anna found a Costa and took a flat white and a salad to a table at the rear and set up her MacBook.
The visit to Janice Dawson had made her mind up about Hawley. Woakes’ ‘shake the tree’ approach was all wrong as she guessed it would be; Hawley had nothing to drop.
Anna knew Danaher was working on the images, but she believed what Varga had told her. Further discovery was not totally dependent on resources alone. It needed either luck, as had happened in the discovery of Rosie’s photograph, or a trawl of websites that were hidden from plain sight. It would all, in Varga’s words, take time.
But the knot of dread in Anna’s gut told her that time was something they didn’t have when it came to Blair Smeaton. She needed input, a direction, something that might push her towards where to go next in the case. She needed more intel on the image.
And there was one person who knew a lot more about this sort of thing than she did. Than anyone she knew did.
She forked chopped salad into her mouth, logged on to the cafe Wi-Fi and opened a particular folder in her email. Since her run-in with the Woodsman, Anna had received several emails from someone called HuSH.
She’d shown the first couple to Rainsford, who’d enlisted the help of cybercrime to try tracing.
‘Unfortunately,’ the man had said, ‘it’s using a pseudonymous remailer. A software programme that anonymises email addresses. The ‘nym’ server receives the normal email, strips headers and replaces them. The message is then encrypted and sent out through a random three-stage chain to arrive at the server. It is decrypted there and sent to the recipient. This particular one does not allow replies.’
She’d listened, not understanding all the technical terms, but understanding enough to know that she would never want to reply or have these communications traced. She had not shown Rainsford any more of the emails. They were private and she suspected – though he never mentioned his name – from only one possible source.
Hector Shaw.
Each message was brief. Initially they were sympathetic, with Shaw wishing her well after her ordeal, but always spiked with coded messages that he and only he could know anything about from their conversations at Whitmarsh. But it was the one she’d received after her discharge from hospital as she’d recovered at her own flat that she opened now.
Anna, I hope this finds you well and almost ready to return to work. They miss you, I’m sure, and we both know there is much more work to be done. I can find you work, Anna, you know that.
Your parents must be very proud that their odd daughter has found a niche in which to flourish. I say parents, though of course only your mother remains alive. Your father would, I’m sure, be delighted with your progress. His death must have come as a great shock. For him to die alone must have hurt you, Anna, given that you were so close. If only your mother could have found it in her heart to let him enjoy those last few weeks under his own roof, it might not have ended so tragically. But then you know your mother. I suspect she is an unforgiving soul. A good trait to have inherited as a police officer, but less attractive when it leads to ending thirty years of marriage. Was she resentful? Were you the cause of that resentment, Anna?
Does that thought prevent you from sleeping?
I, on the other hand, sleep soundly every night.
So much to discuss, Anna. I look forward to our next meeting,
HuSH
Anna closed her eyes and breathed deeply. How did he know so much?
But she knew the answer to that one, too. Shaw’d had a hand in the broken jaw which eventually shut her drug-dealing ex up. It was obvious, too, from the email that Shaw had gleaned much from Tim Lambert’s outpourings before they were stemmed.
He must have used someone else to send the emails. It had to be through a third party because a category A prisoner like Shaw would have no direct access to the internet or a computer. She could have asked Whitmarsh to investigate, but the truth was that these contained too much information. Why on earth would she want the contents of it to be made public? She’d stored the emails away on her laptop, still wondering how Shaw had managed it without any access to a PC.
But what if he did have computer access?
The thought stuck its head above the parapet. Anna’s common sense told her that it was impossible, yet the concept blossomed, not because of what Shaw had done, but because of what he might do. She’d considered proposing it to Rainsford, suggesting giving Shaw supervised access to allow him to help her in her investigation…
The notion fluttered briefly before scattering like charred paper on the wind.
Rainsford would laugh her out of his oh-so-tidy office. But still the thought wafted in and out of her mind, stimulating the wriggly worm to gnaw away at her skull. With that thought came something of a revelation. Disturbing as it was, Anna had begun to trust Shaw. In so far as believing that he would not waste her time or deliberately lie to her anyway. She shook her head as she imagined attempting to explain that concept to Ted Shipwright, whose description of Shaw at their first meeting was ‘a card-carrying nutter’.
His objections to what she was proposing echoed in her head in Dolby surround sound.