Although . . .
How did they get onto the car? How the hell did they track it to the garage?
How much closer will they get?
What if they decide to search the car? They’ll find forensic evidence. They’ll come back to the garage and make the connection to me.
‘Shit,’ he said quietly, his fist tightly clenched. He could hear Gavin on the other side of the garage, putting a wheel back on.
He paced up and down for a few seconds, ignoring the pain that still wracked his body.
Wait, he told himself. Calm down. You heard her on the phone. She doesn’t think it’s that car. They’re probably looking at hundreds of cars, from CCTV or something. If they really thought it was that one, they’d have come here in person. A routine inquiry, that’s all it was.
He took several long, deep breaths. He knew he couldn’t let this get to him. His nerves were shot already.
He had to keep his wits about him for what he needed to do later.
44
Hannah had her defences up even before she went into DCI Ray Devereux’s office. She suspected he wasn’t about to offer a pat on the back. More likely a kick in the arse.
He’ll ask me to run through our progress on the case, she thought, and he’ll question my judgement, and then he’ll summarise by telling me how I need to pull my socks up. That’s usually how these things go. He’ll do it nicely, though. Probably wearing a smile as he points out my deficiencies.
She quickly found out that her suspicions were unfounded.
Things were much, much worse.
‘Come in, Hannah,’ Devereux said, indicating the chair on the other side of his desk.
No smile. Uh-oh.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen the local rag today, have you?’ he asked.
She glanced at the folded-up newspaper in front of him. ‘No. Why?’
‘Take a look.’ He slid it across to her.
Hannah read the headline:
TRAIN-DEATH DETECTIVE IN SCRAP WITH VICTIM’S SON.
Fucking hell, Hannah thought. She continued to read:
A high-ranking police detective who was investigated for her part in a fatal chase was involved in fist fight yesterday with the dead woman’s grieving son.
Detective Inspector Hannah Washington of Stockford Police had been the focus of an inquiry in September regarding her actions during an investigation into the whereabouts of a known criminal, Mr Tommy Glover. What began as routine questioning of Ms Suzy Carling, who was Glover’s partner at the time, quickly degenerated into a foot chase that led to Ms Carling running onto a railway line in front of a high-speed train.
Ms Carling was killed instantly in the collision, but although she had never been arrested, charged or named as a suspect in any crime, the inquiry later cleared Inspector Washington of any wrongdoing in taking up the pursuit. Mr Shane Carling, son of the deceased, denounced the decision at the time, declaring it a ‘travesty of justice’.
In a bizarre twist last night, Inspector Washington chose to dine at the King George pub in Stockford, where Mr Carling, a regular at the pub, was already drinking at the bar.
Witnesses report how an intense ‘scrap’ broke out between Mr Carling and Inspector Washington in the upstairs toilets, with the detective aided in the struggle by her husband Ben. The fight resulted in Mr Carling sustaining injuries that made him look ‘like he’d gone ten rounds with Tyson Fury’.
Hannah pushed the paper back towards Devereux. She’d had enough poison.
‘Bullshit,’ she said.
‘What is?’ Devereux asked.
‘All of it. It’s so biased, for one thing. I’m the “Train-Death Detective” and he’s the “grieving son”? Give me a break. And then they make it sound like I’d gone to that pub because I knew he’d be there—’
‘Did you know he drank there?’
‘Of course not. Do you think I’d be stupid enough to go there if I had? I went there because Marcel Lang recommended it. Carling can’t be that much of a regular, because Marcel has eaten there several times and he’s never bumped into him.’ She jabbed at the paper. ‘And then there’s all this shit about a “scrap”. It wasn’t a fucking scrap. It was an assault. By Carling. If Ben hadn’t turned up, I’d have been the first person in history to have been murdered with a fucking bog brush. Who are these so-called witnesses anyway?’
‘All right, Hannah. Calm down. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this.’
‘Fine. Watch the interviews with Carling. He puts his hands up to all of it. If anyone’s a “victim” here, it’s me. Twice, in fact!’
‘Yes, about that . . . There’s nothing in your reports about the first assault.’
‘That’s because it wasn’t worth reporting. I didn’t see who it was, and neither did anyone else.’
‘But it was serious enough for you to require hospitalisation?’
‘That’s an exaggeration of the truth. I dropped in to A&E because Marcel Lang insisted on it. It wasn’t that bad.’
‘I’ve already spoken to Marcel about it. Apparently you lost consciousness.’
