Chapter 8
‘Extraordinary,’ I said.
Laura just grunted in reply, but I knew she agreed with me.
We were both in early, working through the vast swathes of witness reports that had been collected by the door team yesterday.
Anything out of the ordinary was usually flagged up for immediate attention, but Laura and I were both of a mind that details could easily be missed and preferred to scan as much as possible ourselves.
So we’d been sitting in relative silence in the small office we share, heads bowed over documents. The only sounds were the whirring ceiling fan, the occasional sniff from one of us, and the constant turning over of pages. The coffees in front of us trailed steam into the air.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You said that already.’
‘Did I? Perhaps I can’t believe my eyes.’
There are a number of ways to proceed with an investigation like this.
One of them is forensics. The post-mortems would be performed first thing; in the meantime, everything else was either being analysed or waiting to be.
In reality, forensic results tend to be of most use when you have a suspect to test them against. Unless someone with a criminal record sticks their fingerprint on a victim’s forehead, forensics leaves you with a shadow but no body to cast it.
A good, clear outline, for sure, but only really useful when you have someone to compare with the shape.
Another way is by looking at the victim’s past. Leaving aside our as yet unidentified second victim, how had Vicki Gibson found herself in her killer’s sights?
She hadn’t been robbed. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted.
Perhaps someone hated her for some reason we’d yet to ascertain.
The clearest candidate for that position – still kicking his heels in a cell downstairs – looked to be in the clear.
The third way – as old-fashioned as it gets – is witness statements. It’s actually very hard to commit a crime in public without being caught somehow. CCTV is rare in the grids, but it’s a highly populated area and Vicki Gibson had been murdered in plain sight of several windows.
All the people who might have been looking out of those windows had been interviewed, and yet, according to the reports in front of us, nobody had seen anything.
Laura picked up her coffee and took a sip.
‘It’s not so unusual,’ she said. ‘It’s the nature of the area. People often turn a blind eye in the grids. We both know that from bitter bloody experience.’
‘Not so much on the outskirts.’ The central areas were full of illegal people, illegal trades, and people who were notoriously reluctant to talk to the police. ‘And that’s almost always drug-related. I don’t see this as that sort of attack, do you?’
Laura shrugged. ‘Not on the surface. But you never know.’
‘She had two decent jobs under her belt.’
‘Exactly. We know she needed the money. So it could be drug or debt related.’
I thought about that. It was a possibility.
Take a loan from the wrong people and it wasn’t unlikely you’d meet with reprisals if you failed to repay.
Anyone who saw the murder would probably decide they had far better things to do than get involved by talking to us about it, like absolutely anything at all.
A boardroom crime.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We can look into that. Who are the street-merchants in that area? I don’t know off the top of my head.’
‘Me neither.’
‘I don’t know if I buy it though.’
Laura sighed. ‘Me neither.’
‘And it wouldn’t explain our second victim, would it?’
‘No. Unless he wandered past, drunk, and the killer followed him to make sure he hadn’t seen anything.’
‘That’s a theory?’
‘Sort of.’
‘It’s weak as a kitten, that one.’
She sighed again. ‘I know.’
I picked up my own coffee, and we sat in silence again for a few moments. Nobody looking out of their windows. Apparently nobody around on the street at the time. I didn’t buy the debt idea, but there had to be some explanation for it.
There was a rap at the door. An officer opened it immediately without waiting to be invited.
‘Do not disturb!’ I shouted.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘We were deep in conversation there. Deep.’
Laura gave me a withering look.
‘Shut up, Hicks,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘Simon Duncan’s downstairs. He wants to know whether either of you is attending the post-mortems?’
Laura looked at me. I held my palm out.
‘Not me,’ I said.
‘All right, I’ll go.’ She stood up. ‘What are your plans in my absence, then? Going to sit there and pout?’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Troll East. Try to identify our homeless victim.’
‘Lovely.’
‘It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’
Laura gave me a half-smile as she headed to the door. Compared to Troll East, the autopsy was the easy option.
She said, ‘Might as well be you, then, eh?’