police officers in the room. A community support officer is sitting at one of the spare desks and Gemma Tang, the pretty Chinese press officer, is leaning over the large table by the window, crossing out large sections of a press release. She’s model-beautiful, with a backside that Ben Nielsen has frequently imagined bouncing coins off. McAvoy is giving himself eyestrain trying not to look.
In ones and twos, the officers have drifted away from the major incident room. Trish Pharaoh and Ben Nielsen are atthe morgue, witnessing the post-mortem exam. The two most junior detectives are collecting witness statements from those members of the congregation too shaken up to speak coherently yesterday. Sophie Kirkland took a phone call just before lunch from a pub landlady whose security cameras had captured a fleeting image of a man in black roughly five minutes after the attack took place. She’s taken two uniformed officers with her to search the local area for clues.
Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he’s decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.
McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by thespeed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him open to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.
The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialised. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.
If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the centre of the board in red marker pen.
Medium build. Medium height. Dark clothes. Balaclava. Wet, blue eyes
. It’s not much to go on, and they all know it. And although there is nothing more McAvoy could have done, he feels achingly guilty that he did not glimpse more of his attacker.
A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colours denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that thesuspect travelled east through the city and past the
In ones and twos, the officers have drifted away from the major incident room. Trish Pharaoh and Ben Nielsen are atthe morgue, witnessing the post-mortem exam. The two most junior detectives are collecting witness statements from those members of the congregation too shaken up to speak coherently yesterday. Sophie Kirkland took a phone call just before lunch from a pub landlady whose security cameras had captured a fleeting image of a man in black roughly five minutes after the attack took place. She’s taken two uniformed officers with her to search the local area for clues.
Colin Ray and Shaz Archer have gone to speak to an informant. A telephone call to his bedsit home has already produced one lead. One of the punters at the Kingston Hotel has been letting his mouth run away with him. According to the snout, the bloke has always had strong opinions about foreigners and incomers, but recently lost his wife to the attentions of an Iranian pizza chef, and has been talking more and more about making somebody pay. It would be dismissed as idle gossip, were it not for the fact that a quick check on the Police National Computer showed that he’d been nicked twice for possessing illegal weaponry, and once for wounding. Even though Colin Ray is supposed to be managing the office, he’s decided that he’s best placed to follow this particular line of inquiry, and made himself scarce. Inspector Archer, never far behind, has tagged along, leaving only McAvoy and Helen Tremberg to answer the phones.
McAvoy looks back through his notes. He’s written pages of names, numbers, details and theories on his lined pad. The script is unintelligible to anybody but him. He’s the only officer who knows Teeline shorthand. He learned it in his spare time while in training, after being impressed by thespeed at which a journalist had taken down the quotes of the senior officer he’d been shadowing that day. It has proven a useful six months of his time, even if it has left him open to the occasional moment of open-mouthed scorn from colleagues who wonder if he’s having a mental breakdown and filling his notebook with hieroglyphics.
The phone calls so far have been pretty weak. Despite the television appeal this morning, they’re suffering from Sunday syndrome. People are enjoying days out with their families or relaxing down the pub, and the idea of ringing a police station with information about a murder feels much more like a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday kind of activity, so the flurry of calls that the team had expected has not materialised. It’s barely proving worth the overtime.
If nothing else, at least the incident room is taking shape; this is largely thanks to McAvoy and the relative inactivity the day has delivered. He’s brought a whiteboard in from another office and begun sketching a brief outline of the previous day’s sequence of events. His own description of the suspect has been written in the centre of the board in red marker pen.
Medium build. Medium height. Dark clothes. Balaclava. Wet, blue eyes
. It’s not much to go on, and they all know it. And although there is nothing more McAvoy could have done, he feels achingly guilty that he did not glimpse more of his attacker.
A map of the city has been stapled to another wall. On it, drawing pins of different colours denote the definite and possible sightings of the suspect as he made his escape from Trinity Square. It is a composite of witness statements, CCTV footage, and guesswork. With it, they can surmise that thesuspect travelled east through the city and past the
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