Death Row - Mark Pearson [21]
As they walked into the station Diane Campbell was handing some files over to Dave ‘Slimline’ Mathews, who was behind the desk.
‘Someone’s not a happy bunny,’ Delaney said.
The chief inspector flashed him a quick smile. ‘Then my job is half done.’
‘How’s the cameraman?’
‘Stable. They’ve got him at the Royal South Hampstead. He’ll live – just have a sore shoulder for a while. Missed all the vital organs. High-velocity bullet. The shock was the most danger to him.’
Delaney, on reflex, rubbed his own shoulder again. ‘I know how that works. So, Melanie Jones. She give up the source?’
Diane shook her head. ‘She stonewalled for a bit, giving it the big confidentiality-of-her-sources crap. But finally she caved in and admitted she hadn’t spoken to anyone at all. It was her editor who called with the information of where we’d be.’
‘He give us anything more?
Diane shook her head again. ‘He claims he got an anonymous e-mail. I’ve sent Jimmy Skinner over there to check it out.’
‘Right.’
‘Not holding out a lot of hope, though. The internet’s easier to hide in than a tick in a flock of unshorn sheep.’
Delaney put his hand in his pocket. ‘The sniper left something behind.’
‘A calling card?’ Diane asked wryly.
‘Maybe,’ Delaney replied as he pulled out the evidence bag and handed it across. ‘Maybe forensics can get something from it.’
Diane looked at the shell casing through the clear plastic. ‘What is it – pistol, rifle?’
‘It’s a … rifle-shell casing. Bolt action: as you load another cartridge it ejects the one before.’
‘Army?’
‘It’s standard military issue yes.’
‘Current?’
‘Yep. There’s thousands like that littered all over Afghanistan.’
‘Melanie Jones. She do anything on the Afghan war?’
‘What war? That’s a fucked-up police operation, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, spare me the political analysis, Jack. Did she do anything on the war? Wind up some comrade of a fallen soldier? Make some comment a disgruntled and disaffected soldier would take the wrong way?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A tenth of all prisoners in this country are ex-military, you know.’
Delaney shrugged. ‘I know, but I get my news from Chris Evans or Roy Smiley at the burger van. I certainly wouldn’t pay good money to watch that bubbleheaded slapper.’
Sally smiled apologetically at Diane Campbell. ‘Do you want me to look into it, boss?’
‘Yeah, you do that.’
‘You seriously think she was the target?’
‘I don’t know, Jack. Who would want to shoot the cameraman?’
‘Someone with an axe to grind with the channel?’
‘No, I don’t buy it. He’s an anonymous nobody. Melanie Jones is the name, she’s the face.’
Delaney shook his head, unconvinced. ‘It doesn’t ring true. If someone wanted to take her out they could have done that any time, anywhere. Why now? Why there? Why Peter Garnier?’
Diane looked at him steadily. ‘Maybe you can find that out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s been a development.’
‘A development?’
‘He wants to speak to you.’
‘Peter Garnier?’
Diane nodded. ‘In the flesh.’
Delaney looked at her blankly for a beat. ‘You are fucking kidding me?’
‘Do I look like I’m smiling to you?’
‘What the hell does he want to talk to me about?’
Diane shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t say. Said he’d talk to you.’
‘And that charade in the woods today? What was that about?’
‘Don’t know. But the morning he leads us a merry dance in Mad Bess Woods is the same day someone takes a shot at him and he decides he needs to speak to you. Maybe he wants to unburden his soul.’
‘How the hell does he even know who I am? What does he want from me?’
‘What am I suddenly, the oracle of fucking Delphi? Go and speak to him, Jack. Find out.’
*
It was Jennifer Hickling’s fifteenth birthday that morning, but if she was at all pleased or excited about it then it didn’t show in the brown eyes that looked back at her from the mirror. She was dressed in a quasi-goth style, with dyed black hair and black make-up around her eyes but not her lips. Her lips were ruby, thick with lipstick. She looked about twenty-two and felt half a century older. She put down a plastic hairbrush matted