‘Let me know when your train arrives at Paddington and I’ll meet you,’ he says.
She breathes in the warm summer air, feeling so much better already.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, grateful for his understanding, ‘for going all funny on you.’
‘It’s OK. You can go funny on me any time. Sure you don’t want me to drive down tonight?’
‘It’s fine. Bex is here. I love you.’
‘I love you too. And, hey, bring your passport.’
‘My passport? Why?’
‘No promises, but maybe we can finally go to Brittany together.’
She’s about to reply when Mark comes out.
‘Better get in there quick,’ he says. ‘Your nice man Rob is buying another round.’
Her head starts to spin. For a moment, she thinks he means that Rob is actually in the pub, but then she remembers. After a beach clean, he usually puts enough money behind the bar for one round, but because of the distressing scene tonight, he’s been even more generous than usual.
‘That’s good of you,’ she says to Rob, who is still on the phone. ‘Buying everyone more drinks.’
‘The least I can do,’ he says. ‘The whole thing’s awful.’
‘I better go,’ she says. ‘Brittany sounds wonderful.’
She hasn’t been to France for years, not since she took Jake to Paris for his thirtieth birthday. And Rob is always talking about Brittany, how she must go there.
‘Saw you on Facebook this afternoon, by the way,’ Rob says. ‘Thought you’d—’
‘I wasn’t on Facebook,’ she interrupts. He must have made a mistake.
‘You were definitely online.’
‘When?’ she asks, feeling the tension of earlier returning.
‘About an hour ago?’
‘It wasn’t me.’
She goes in phases with social media. Right now, she’s in an Instagram phase. Facebook is too bound up with her old life. She hasn’t been on it for months.
‘Maybe change your passwords again,’ he says. ‘You did change them, didn’t you?’
Rob had despaired when she told him her passwords were simple, easy-to-remember names and urged her to include lots of symbols and numbers. How was she supposed to remember that?
‘Of course,’ she lies. ‘You think I might have been hacked?’
‘Maybe,’ he says.
The one other person who knows her password is Jake.
48
Silas
There are only a handful of people in the Parade Room at Gablecross police station when Silas walks in. A couple of uniforms, one or two plainclothes colleagues in the far corner where CID sits. He still hasn’t got used to the new open-plan hot-desking way of working.
After dropping Strover off at her flat in town, he headed straight here, aware that he now has a homicide case on his hands. He is also aware that he should be at home on a Sunday night, but life has lost its balance in recent months. If he’s not working, he’s looking for Conor, pacing the less salubrious streets of Swindon, checking in with the UK Missing Persons Bureau, trying in vain to find some common ground with Conor’s mother, Mel.
He’s already spoken to Kate but couldn’t tell her much. The death of the barman who tried to spike her drink and run her over is most likely linked to drug gang rivalry, but Silas has no idea who killed him. At least there is no longer any imminent threat to Kate.
He plugs in his laptop and waits for it to fire up. His boss won’t be happy that he went down to Cornwall in his own time to investigate a suspect. Even less happy that the suspect is now a murder victim. Silas will liaise closely with Devon and Cornwall, but out-of-area cases are always messy, the sharing of resources never straightforward. Even the much-trumpeted Tri-Force Alliance between Somerset and Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire has crashed and burnt.
He’s about to check his emails when his phone rings.
‘DI Hart,’ he says, sitting back.
The call is from a detective in Nottingham. Silas has spoken to him once before, a few months back, when the detective was setting up a pilot super-recogniser scheme similar to the Swindon unit. He’d wanted some advice on recruitment and protocols.
‘How’s it all going?’ Hart asks, expecting a routine inquiry. A number of other regional forces have established super-recogniser units, disillusioned with the failure rate of facial-recognition software, and most have sought Silas’s advice.
‘I wish you’d asked me that three days ago,’ the officer says. ‘Our super-recogniser results have been incredible, on a par with DNA and fingerprints.’
‘So what’s happened?’ Silas asks.
He expects the detective to say that his unit’s been closed down, run out of town by some new facial-recognition software contract, but the answer stuns him.
‘Our main recogniser, an extraordinary bloke, has just gone AWOL, dropped off the grid completely.’
‘Civilian?’ Silas asks, reaching for a pen and paper.
‘Community support officer. Been with us for years, always been a good spotter.’
‘Family?’
‘They’re distraught. Wife says it’s totally out of character. He’s a man of routine. We’re all worried sick.’
Silas stands up, walks over to the window and looks out onto the deserted car park. Not many people in tonight. They’re all off on holiday, enjoying the summer, as he should be.
‘Has he been involved in any serious-crime cases recently?’ he asks.
‘Nothing major. Indecent exposure, a few assaults, shoplifting. Why?’
Silas thinks back to Kate’s track record. Should he have limited her work to identifying petty criminals? There was a lot of pressure at the time to focus on modern-slavery and organised-crime gangs. ‘It’s just that we’ve had an issue with one of our old super recognisers,’ he says.
‘What sort of issue?’
It’s well known amongst regional police forces that Swindon’s super-recogniser unit was unceremoniously wound up. Just like the Met’s unit was closed, even though the force still uses super recognisers. But no one knows about Kate and the attempts on her life.
‘Our best recogniser, a civilian, was injured in a car accident,’ Silas says. ‘The unit was shut down shortly afterwards, as you know. It now seems that it might not have been an accident. She might have been deliberately targeted – by one of the gangs she helped to convict.’
‘Is that recent?’ the officer asks, surprised.
‘We’ve only found out today. Nothing confirmed, but it looks that way. Did your PCSO do much publicity? Media interviews?’
‘We’ve kept him out of the limelight – our secret weapon.’
Silas wishes he’d done the same with Kate, not exposed her to so much media attention. It was a way of taunting his boss as much as anything. Petty.
‘We’ll double-check the list of recent convictions,’ the detective says. ‘Ones that he can claim responsibility for. I can’t see anyone taking it out on him though.’
That’s what Silas thought about Kate. And look what happened to her. ‘Let me know if he turns up,’ he says. ‘How good is he?’