Читать книгу The Chapter of St Cloud - Marcus Attwater - Страница 15

DC Dasgupta waved a file at him. 'Pathologist's report, sir.'

'Just in time, give it here.'

He was on his way to see his boss, but he quickly leafed through the file to see if there was anything exceptional. He needed to see the DCI in full possession of the facts. But there was little in it of interest. The cause of death was blindingly obvious, and that the victim had been in excellent health was now sadly irrelevant.

'Morning, ma'am,' he said, entering his superior's office.

'Good morning, Collins.' She continued typing for a moment. DCI Flynn was a small, exceptionally neat woman with expensively cut grey hair. Her first name was Bridget, and she was known among her colleagues as 'old Biddy', but never to her face. She wasn't old at all, he put her at forty-five or thereabouts, and Collins always thought they might have been friendly if they hadn't had a slightly prickly work relationship. Bridget Flynn liked order, and she thought her DI's methods unnecessarily chaotic. He could never convince her that, in his head, he had it all sorted. Investigations took a certain shape where the DCI got increasingly impatient at his complete lack of progress, right until the moment when he suddenly collared a suspect. She never believed that he, too, could only explain how he got there afterwards.

'Right, that's done,' she said, 'The Chief Super is on to me again about statistics. You'd think statistics were the be-all and end-all of Her Majesty's police force, to hear him talk.'

'I'm afraid the violent crime stats have gone up by one,' he said.

'As long as the solved murder cases also go up by one,' she said. 'Will they?'

'I hope so.'

'So what have we got?'

He rapidly filled her in on the Whiteside case. 'I've got a strange feeling about this,' he concluded, very glad that Sergeant Walter wasn't there to hear him say it. 'It doesn't fit any picture I've seen before.'

Not that DCI Flynn was inclined to give him much quarter.

'Collins, a long tradition of fictional detectives notwithstanding, we're not paying you to have feelings. This is a criminal investigation. Investigate.'

Yes, Ma'am.

'Ma'am? If I wanted to look at a file from years ago, the mid-eighties, where would I look?'

'Why would you want to do that?'

'Just something that caught my attention.' He had learned by now that she didn't always push it if he refused to answer. She gave him a slightly exasperated look. 'You look it up in the computer, like you would a recent file, note down the number and ask the desk sergeant for the keys to the cellar.'

Walter and Dasgupta were questioning the people on Jim's list, to see if any of them were connected to the victim. Sergeant Pardoe was interviewing neighbours. Holmes was in the Hollow Crown, talking to Whiteside's colleagues. Collins spent the entire afternoon going through the events of last Sunday with the boy's parents, hoping to find a clue, a chink in the story, something that did not fit. They returned to the station one by one, filed their statements, filled in reports.

'The landlord nearly socked me one, when I suggested Sean might have been on the bend,' Sally said.

'He gets violent, does he?' Dasgupta asked.

'I said 'nearly'. Anyway, he didn't pull a gun on me.'

'And was he on the bend?'

'I don't think so. He seems to have been a pretty straight bloke.'

'Apart from the drugs.'

'Yeah, but if we locked up every student who got some pills for himself and his friends, we might as well merge the prisons and the universities. Right, that's it for today, I think.' She pushed back her chair and stretched. 'I'm going to catch some sun while it's here. Anyone coming for a drink?'

'Can't,' Pardoe said glumly, 'We're having my sister-in-law over for dinner.' It was clear he would have preferred a pint in a pub.

Sally and Chandra were already on their feet. 'Sir?' she said, 'Are you coming? I think we'd better not make it the Hollow Crown, though.'

'Just a moment, Sally. You grew up here, didn't you? Does the name Danvers mean anything to you?' Collins asked her.

'I've read Rebecca, sir.'

'We had a teacher at the comp called Danvers,' Chandra recalled, 'Took me years to figure out why everyone called her 'Mrs' even though she wasn't married.'

'Why do you ask?' Sally wanted to know.

'Oh, just something that came up today. It was a long shot anyway. Enjoy your drinks.'

'You're not joining us?'

It was tempting, but Owen had looked up the number of the Skinner file, and had asked the desk sergeant for the keys to the cellar. 'Some other time,' he said regretfully, 'Got some things to do first.'

The look DC Holmes gave him had a lot in common with that of Bridget Flynn earlier in the day.

What's got into me? he asked himself as he carried the buff-coloured folder up to his desk. Sally was right, he should be out in the sunshine. But he had promised Mr Walsingham he'd have a look at the file, and here it was. He had promised only because there was nothing else he could do - even if there was something in it, it struck him as too outré and nebulous a matter ever to bring to court. No use wasting his time on, so why? Maybe because his detective's mind had noticed just enough oddities to command his attention. It seemed to him absurdly convenient, for example, that they had Barry Skinner's file in the archives here. Alice Wright was killed in nearby Oxford. Danvers was a local name. And the site of the medieval priory of St Bernard, which Mr Walsingham assured him had belonged to the chapter in a way he couldn't quite follow, lay just west of town. It seemed to be a local matter. On the other hand - how many hands did he need for this case? - he had very little experience of murdering monks, so perhaps it was best to keep an open mind. He started reading the file from the top and soon forgot all about sunshine in a familiar routine.