‘There’s no sound,’ Jake says, but he still turns the cracked screen away from the middle of the café. All he’d said on his text was that he had been sent a video and it had something to do with his ex’s car accident. An RTA wouldn’t normally be the concern of Swindon CID, but Jake’s ex, Kate, is not a normal person. For a year before her road traffic accident, she worked for Silas as a super recogniser, identifying more criminals than the courts could cope with.
‘It’s the Bluebell, in Rockbourne.’
Silas looks up at Jake at the mention of the Bluebell. The pub was recently flagged in an ongoing county lines heroin network. He peers more closely at the screen, wondering how Jake has managed to get hold of the pub’s CCTV feed. And what the hell Kate was doing there.
‘Look carefully,’ Jake says, as the barman fixes the drink. ‘See what he did, just before the ice went in?’
Silas tears another bite off his bacon sandwich.
‘Watch it again now – it’s clearer from this angle.’ Jake adjusts the screen.
Silas leans forward, mopping ketchup from his mouth with a paper napkin.
‘There.’
Silas sees it. Something appears to go into the drink before the ice. But the footage is not conclusive.
‘She was exhausted,’ he says. ‘We’ve been through this.’ He scrutinised the RTA report carefully, made his own inquiries, tried not to dwell on how tired she was that night, how hard he’d been working her. How hard he’d worked everyone in the super-recogniser unit. ‘And she’d had a drink – she was right on the limit.’
‘Shame they weren’t looking for something else,’ Jake says. ‘A sedative of some kind. Her drink must have been spiked. Must have been. It would explain her falling asleep at the wheel.’
Silas isn’t convinced. Not yet. He’s more interested in where the memory stick came from. ‘Who sent you this?’ he asks.
‘No idea.’ Jake turns the package over. ‘Just arrived this morning.’
‘And your mucky prints are all over it.’ Silas takes the package by one corner, as if he’s holding a fish by its tail. Whoever sent it to Jake knew to address it c/o the village post office.
‘I didn’t know what it was,’ Jake says.
‘We’ll take a look at it – if you’re happy to hand it in.’
‘Sure. I’ve made a copy.’
Silas watches Jake take the stick out of his computer and drop it into the envelope that he’s holding out for him. ‘Do you hear from Kate much?’ he asks.
‘Nothing.’ Jake looks down at his mug of tea. ‘I don’t even know where she’s living.’
Silas took a personal interest in Kate’s recovery, visited her most days at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, on his way to or from Gablecross police station. He also tried to stay in touch when she was discharged, but she wanted to cut all ties with him, her job, the force. With Jake too, it seems. The last he heard, she was living in seaside splendour somewhere on the south coast of Cornwall with a wealthy entrepreneur who does something clever in tech.
‘Everyone at the station misses her,’ he says. He knows it’s of little consolation.
‘Me too.’
‘She was an extraordinary woman. Gifted.’
They both fall quiet. Silas is saying all the wrong things today. Kate is the only reason why he’s prepared to forgive Jake for his poor book sales. It was Jake who introduced Kate to him in the first place. Brought her remarkable talent to the force’s attention.
‘I’ll check out the video,’ he says, watching enviously as the waitress puts Jake’s bacon sandwich in front of him. He still marvels at his own short-lived vegan phase last year. ‘Let you know what we find.’
‘If it wasn’t an accident, if someone was trying to harm Kate…’ Jake pauses, eyes welling at the thought. ‘… was it because of the work she did for you? It was in the news again yesterday.’
Silas hesitates. He’s asked himself the same question many times, particularly this last week while he was sitting in court watching a modern slavery gang being sent down for a total of thirty-three years. The original arrests were made by his team, almost entirely as a result of Kate’s exceptional work for the police. It was one reason why he went to such lengths at the time to reassure himself about the circumstances of her accident.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ he says, but the discovery that Kate visited the Bluebell on the night of her accident worries him. At the time, Silas and his unit were investigating possible links between modern-slavery and county-lines gangs in Swindon. The Bluebell was under suspicion, but there was no hard evidence of a connection.
He looks up at Jake, who’s wolfing down his bacon sandwich. The thought of someone targeting Kate, a decent, ordinary human being who happened to have an almost superhuman gift, sends a shiver through him.
13
Kate
The flat white at Kate’s favourite café in the village doesn’t taste the same as usual. It’s not the coffee, or the artistic way it’s been prepared, and she can hardly complain about the al fresco venue, looking out across the beach and harbour. It’s the thought of Rob ordering one. She knows it’s just a bloody cup of coffee, as Bex says, but he’s never had a flat white in all the time they’ve been together. Why start now?
She pulls out her phone and listens to his voicemail message:
‘Just ringing to check you’re OK. I’m at Paddington, about to head over to the office. Wish I was still with you in Cornwall. I’m so glad it went well with Dr Varma. Don’t worry, your pictures will be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery soon – I just know it. Be careful and, you know, sorry I had to bail. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’
It sounds like Rob, always telling her to be careful, ever optimistic about her art. She smiles to herself, glancing along the line of other customers. There’s only one outside table, a long, wooden bar from where you can look down onto the busy beach below. She needs to stop worrying. She’s got so much to be grateful for. At the far end of the table, a pair of binoculars has been provided by the café for admiring the view – or the tanned bodies on the beach. ‘Perv-oculars’, as Rob calls them. Everyone’s perched on chrome bar stools and Stretch is at her feet, his lead tangled around one of the legs. She realises how hungry she is. Bex is always moaning that she eats like a horse and never seems to put on weight. Must be her metabolism. Glancing at the man next to her, she abandons Stretch and her half-drunk coffee and goes to buy some flapjack from the café.
When she comes back, Stretch is whining and the man has gone. She slips Stretch a piece of flapjack, finishes her coffee and leaves, chatting with some people at the café counter on her way out.
‘I won’t be long,’ she says to her friend Mark, who runs the gallery around the corner. He’s got a dog too and she leaves Stretch and her phone with him whenever she goes for a swim. She’s wearing her costume underneath her jeans and heads down to the beach, where she strips off and plunges into the crowded waves. She likes to swim out to the floating platform, about fifty yards offshore. At Rob’s suggestion, she’s been swimming most days. Another healer, like art.