system, which now boasts not only the crime scene images but also some of those found among the Mancinis’ possessions. Not so many of Janet, because I suppose she never had a regular person to take photos of her, but plenty of April. April in party dresses, April on a beach. April holding a huge toffee apple and laughing. She had wide blue eyes, like her mam, and when she laughed, everything in her face was laughing too. April Mancini, the toffee apple kid.
I pick out about a dozen pictures in total. Some of Janet. Some of April. Obviously we’ve got printers upstairs, but only regular black-and-white ones. Tomasz’s empire is responsible for all bulk runs, all color printing, all fancy print jobs—and I’m after photo-quality reproduction. Tomasz makes me fill out some forms, which annoys me because I don’t like forms, which means I make a mess of them, which means that Tomasz ends up doing them for me. I polish up one of my nicest smiles and give it to him when he’s ready. He tells me to come back in forty-five minutes.
Back at my desk. Aside from my work on the Penry case, I’ve been tasked with two jobs for today. One is to answer any Lohan-related phone calls from the general public that come in as a result of our media appeals for information. The other is to get stuck into Janet’s Social Services records and see if there’s anything useful there. A grandly named executive summary is what Jackson is after. I take three calls—one nuts, two sane but probably useless—and start on the paperwork. I’m good at this kind of thing. That’s what a Cambridge training does for you: reading mounds of stuff fast and extracting the useful part quickly and clearly. All the same, I’d prefer to be on the inquiry proper, so I work fast, accumulating brownie points.
I’m hard at work when my phone rings. It’s Jackson, using the speakerphone on his desk, to tell me to come over. No reason offered.
I enter his office but hover by the door. Jackson does door-open meetings and door-closed ones. The former sort are usually better, but I’ve had more than my share of the latter. I wait for a signal as to what kind of meeting this is and, from the way he looks at me, guess it’s a door-shut one. I close it.
“Yes, sir?”
“Good work on the autopsy. Fast, accurate. Good stuff.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re doing the same on the Social Services stuff, I expect?”
“That’s the plan.”
I sit down. Jackson is being nice to me, which is a bad sign. I wonder what I’ve done wrong.
“A sudden burst of hyperactivity on the Fiona Griffiths front usually means you want something. So, why don’t you tell me what that is?”
This throws me a bit, because I didn’t know I was so obvious.
“If possible, sir, I’d love to be full-time on Lohan. I think I could contribute.”
“Of course you could. Every officer in the department could contribute.”
“Yes. But at the moment, I think there are only two women on the team. D.C. Rowlands and D.S. Alexander. Obviously they’re both brilliant officers, but I just thought that they might be stretched a bit thin. I mean, I know you can get men to do the some of the interviews, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, if prostitution is involved.”
I’ve hardly explained myself brilliantly, but Jackson knows what I mean. It’s all very well getting men to interview prostitutes, but there’s a certain kind of interviewing they just can’t do. There’s always a shortage of women for those interviews, and uniformed officers are often brought in to try to address the shortfall. Which is fine, except that having a female officer in full uniform—baton, handcuffs, radio, protective jacket, and boots—doesn’t exactly get the girlie juices flowing. Jackson is a grizzled old sod, which means that he remembers the old days, when prostitutes were just bundled off down to the interview rooms to be shouted at by whole bunch of blokey officers who exuded
I pick out about a dozen pictures in total. Some of Janet. Some of April. Obviously we’ve got printers upstairs, but only regular black-and-white ones. Tomasz’s empire is responsible for all bulk runs, all color printing, all fancy print jobs—and I’m after photo-quality reproduction. Tomasz makes me fill out some forms, which annoys me because I don’t like forms, which means I make a mess of them, which means that Tomasz ends up doing them for me. I polish up one of my nicest smiles and give it to him when he’s ready. He tells me to come back in forty-five minutes.
Back at my desk. Aside from my work on the Penry case, I’ve been tasked with two jobs for today. One is to answer any Lohan-related phone calls from the general public that come in as a result of our media appeals for information. The other is to get stuck into Janet’s Social Services records and see if there’s anything useful there. A grandly named executive summary is what Jackson is after. I take three calls—one nuts, two sane but probably useless—and start on the paperwork. I’m good at this kind of thing. That’s what a Cambridge training does for you: reading mounds of stuff fast and extracting the useful part quickly and clearly. All the same, I’d prefer to be on the inquiry proper, so I work fast, accumulating brownie points.
I’m hard at work when my phone rings. It’s Jackson, using the speakerphone on his desk, to tell me to come over. No reason offered.
I enter his office but hover by the door. Jackson does door-open meetings and door-closed ones. The former sort are usually better, but I’ve had more than my share of the latter. I wait for a signal as to what kind of meeting this is and, from the way he looks at me, guess it’s a door-shut one. I close it.
“Yes, sir?”
“Good work on the autopsy. Fast, accurate. Good stuff.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re doing the same on the Social Services stuff, I expect?”
“That’s the plan.”
I sit down. Jackson is being nice to me, which is a bad sign. I wonder what I’ve done wrong.
“A sudden burst of hyperactivity on the Fiona Griffiths front usually means you want something. So, why don’t you tell me what that is?”
This throws me a bit, because I didn’t know I was so obvious.
“If possible, sir, I’d love to be full-time on Lohan. I think I could contribute.”
“Of course you could. Every officer in the department could contribute.”
“Yes. But at the moment, I think there are only two women on the team. D.C. Rowlands and D.S. Alexander. Obviously they’re both brilliant officers, but I just thought that they might be stretched a bit thin. I mean, I know you can get men to do the some of the interviews, but it’s not quite the same, is it? I mean, if prostitution is involved.”
I’ve hardly explained myself brilliantly, but Jackson knows what I mean. It’s all very well getting men to interview prostitutes, but there’s a certain kind of interviewing they just can’t do. There’s always a shortage of women for those interviews, and uniformed officers are often brought in to try to address the shortfall. Which is fine, except that having a female officer in full uniform—baton, handcuffs, radio, protective jacket, and boots—doesn’t exactly get the girlie juices flowing. Jackson is a grizzled old sod, which means that he remembers the old days, when prostitutes were just bundled off down to the interview rooms to be shouted at by whole bunch of blokey officers who exuded
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