‘You’re saying that her death was deliberately prolonged?’
He didn’t look her in the eye but cast his head down, seemingly quite literally chewing on the answer, finally nodding reluctantly but firmly.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Have you found anything else?’
‘We have. A piece of clothing snagged on a loose nail. It isn’t covered in dust or dirt like the rest of the place so we believe it to be recent. It doesn’t come from either of the gentlemen who discovered the body. We’ll tape-lift from it and hopefully get skin cells for matching.’
‘Can I see it, please?’
Two Soups held up an evidence bag. Inside was a scrap of black cotton, perhaps an inch square in size.
‘You’d think he’d have noticed leaving that behind.’
‘I can only imagine that he had his hands full, Detective Inspector. Quite literally.’
‘I guess so. This is ripped from a T-shirt, maybe?’ Tam Harkness habitually wore black T-shirts.
Baxter demurred, ‘It’s possible.’
Narey hesitated. The one question that she really wanted to ask had been stuck in her throat.
‘How long, Mr Baxter? How long has she been dead?’
That question could as easily have been rephrased as, ‘Was she alive when I was searching for her? Or had she been murdered before I even heard her name?’
Baxter reverted to type and refused to answer either spoken or inferred questions.
‘I wouldn’t care to speculate, Detective Inspector. We have science for that. You will have results as soon as it is humanly possible to get them to you.’
He left her to it, his parting gift a look that suggested he’d be grateful for her getting out of the way before too long. She was in no hurry to oblige him.
Why here? Why did he bring you here, Eloise? Somewhere you would inevitably be found. And why place you next to the beer barrel rather than hiding you behind it? And why take you at all?
She was still lost in her own thoughts when DS Rico Giannandrea made his way through the cellar minefield to stand at her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Rachel. I know this wasn’t how you wanted it to end.’
She answered without taking her eyes of Eloise. ‘Ah, but I did want it to end, Rico. That’s my sin. I’d got to that stage that I wanted to find her. Dead or alive. Be careful what you wish for, that’s what they say.’
‘Yes, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. I know how you meant it and so do you. You couldn’t have done more to find her, and you couldn’t have done anything to stop this from happening.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Okay, you stay here and oversee this, Rico. I’ve got a visit to make.’
‘Eloise’s mother?’
‘Yes. I should maybe wait until they confirm it but it’s her, I know it is. And I don’t want her finding out from anyone other than me.’
‘You don’t want me to go with you?’
‘No. I need to do this myself. But I’ll be paying another visit later today and I’ll need you with me for that one. Just to make sure I don’t do anything I shouldn’t.’
‘Tam Harkness.’
‘Yes.’
CHAPTER 10
When the caller named Matthew Marr signed off there had been stunned silence in the room. For an instant. It broke, almost immediately, into a cacophony of recrim- ination, anger and confusion.
‘Shit, Salgado what the hell have you done?’
The detective turned open-mouthed to face O’Neill’s accusing stare. ‘Well at least I did something. Everyone else just wanted to sit and look at it.’
‘Yes, you did something. You blew it.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘It sure as shit looks that way.’ O’Neill was furious. ‘Geisler, is there any way of knowing who the hell that was and where he is? How do we get back in touch with him?’
‘Of knowing who he is or where? No. To get back in touch we can just do what we did. But we can’t make him play. He’d have to want to talk to us and it don’t seem like he does right now.’
‘Dammit.’
The caller’s opening line was still on the screen, scream- ing at them.
Where the hell have you been, Ethan? It should be done by now. He should be dead.
‘He should be dead,’ Salgado repeated. ‘What the hell is this?’
‘We need that guy back on the line,’ O’Neill insisted. ‘We do whatever we need to get him to talk to us. Fuck. Geisler, we’re going to need everything you can find on this damn computer. Everything. If someone – what the hell have we got here – if someone is dying then we need it fast.’
‘I’m on it. Our first problem is doing two things at once that will get in the way of each other. We need that line open for you to communicate with your guy, but I also need the elbow room to get into the guts of this machine. Can I make a suggestion?’
‘Go on.’ Salgado was grudging.
‘We spend five, ten minutes now trying to talk him out into the light. Chances are that will fail, but we should try. After that I suggest we send him a message every hour on the hour. Establish a routine, let him know when we’ll be here if and when he wants to talk. In between, I do my thing and squeeze this bird like it’s a lemon.’
O’Neill and Salgado looked at each other over the tech’s head, both shrugging.
‘Okay, Kurt, it’s good,’ O’Neill told him. ‘Apart from the weird mixed metaphor about the bird and the lemon, that’s as good a plan as we’ve got for now. We need to work out a wording to use with him. Treat him like a jumper standing on a ledge. Lure him back inside.’
‘So that we can kill him,’ Salgado added.
‘Yeah, just don’t tell him that. So, what do we say?’
‘We’ve already missed something that we should have said,’ Geisler told them. ‘There was clearly some kind of codeword that this guy expected, and we didn’t deliver. He knew immediately that it wasn’t Garland on the other end of the chat. There’s no point in trying to pretend otherwise. I say we tell him we just want to talk and reassure him it’s safe to do so.’
‘We tell him that we’re cops?’
‘Not until we have to. I’d go for honest up to the point of stupid.’
‘You could be describing Salgado.’ O’Neill grinned. ‘Okay, let’s do it. Message this creep then we go to the hourly plan.’
We should talk. You’ve nothing to lose by having the conversation.
It wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer, but it did the job. Short, to the point, open-ended, non-threatening. They alter- nated it with variations of, Are you there? I just want to talk.
As they’d discussed, Geisler and Salgado tried it for ten minutes, but they could see that the messages hadn’t been read, never mind responded to. They signed off with, I’m here if you change your mind. Will be here on the hour, every hour.
*
The room seemed colder and brighter in the cool of the evening when Geisler called Salgado back. The tech’s last message – Let’s talk, Matthew – was front and centre on the computer screen. Timed at 7 p.m. precisely. Below it, a single word and time notified that it had been viewed almost immediately. Read 19.01.