Playing James Read online

  A week’s worth of tension snaps inside me. You can almost hear it. “Stupid? STUPID?” I screech. Unfortunately screeching is a fair description. “The diary is not STUPID. Just because some of us don’t have your high-handed, God-like approach to life doesn’t mean all other careers are STUPID.”

  “Who’s high-handed?” he shouts back.

  “YOU’RE high-handed.” I look around for Callum. My eyes alight on him sitting innocently at his desk watching us. “Isn’t he high-handed, Callum?” I shout over.

  Callum grins and nods. A few other people in the department are looking over with interest and they bob their heads around in a the-girl’s-got-a-point sort of way.

  “See?” I shoot back at James Sabine. “Callum says you’re high-handed.”

  “Actually,” interjects Callum as he wanders over, “I didn’t exactlysay James was high-handed. I was merely agreeing because sometimes he can be a little . . .”

  “Keep out of this, Callum,” thunders James Sabine.

  “You have had it in for me from the start,” I continue, unabashed. “You’ll use any excuse just to get me off your back. You have been nothing but uncooperative, difficult and obstructive. What you don’t realize though, Mr. Hot-Shot Detective, is that while you are swanning around playing superhero, other people’s lives . . .” I pause for a second; is this a little melodramatic? Sod it. “. . . other people’s lives and careers are being stamped underfoot, all because you can’t put up with me following you around for a few weeks. Well, shame on you,” I say, complete with some rather fancy finger-wagging. I sound as though I’m from a bad movie made prior to 1940.

  I stop and slowly curl up my finger. Some scattered applause comes from our newly acquired pavement audience, which quickly disperses as James Sabine turns his glare on them.

  “What you don’t realize, Miss Colshannon,” he says quietly, turning his gaze back to me, “is quite how annoying you are to have around. It’s like being followed by a particularly persistent little mosquito who refuses to be swatted. We are so understaffed here that each of us carries the workload of three officers, and in addition to this I now have to deal with the extra work that you seem so adept at creating. Why don’t you press people do something positive instead of slowing down the progress of all my cases?” He pauses. “I am going to have to report this leak to the Chief Inspector.” He turns on his heel and strides off, intent on his mission.

  I wince and stare ahead for a few minutes. So, Holly, how would you say that went? How exactly were you safeguarding your future there? The mosquito jibe has particularly struck home. I muse to myself for a while, wondering who was really in the right and who was in the wrong. It seems that maybe we both have a point. Obviously mine is bigger than his though. I sigh to myself and miserably pick up the phone to break the news to Joe that the diary might be a little shorter than we first envisaged. I dial his direct line extension.

  “Hello?”

  “Joe, it’s Holly.”

  “Have you looked at it?”

  “Yep. Detective Sergeant Sabine has just gone to report it to the Chief Inspector.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. They may chuck me out.” This is understating the obvious a tad.

  “Over my dead corpse,” he growls. I don’t think it is the moment to pedantically point out that (a) it might well be that way if Detective Sergeant Sabine has anything to do with it and (b) “over my dead corpse” isn’t strictly speaking the correct expression. “Do you know how the Journal could have got hold of this?”

  “No, but I’ll try and find out, if it will help. I’ll speak to you later.” I replace the receiver, deep in thought.

  Robin is my first port of call. She seems very distracted about something initially until I tell her in full what has happened and then her concentration seems to snap into focus. She is as appalled as I am, and very concerned about the future of the diary. She points out that the PR write-up has only been released today and naturally doesn’t contain the two important pieces of information about the hair and the mysterious substance. I tell her about James Sabine and our small disagreement. And she does exactly what I had hoped she would. Robin gets on the phone to the Chief to safeguard the future of her project. I smile to myself and leave the room. I may be a little harder to get rid of than he thinks.

  I go back to my desk and stare at the article. James Sabine returns to his desk. I look up. “Well? Do I have to pack my bags?”

  “Not yet. But don’t get your hopes up,” he snaps. The Sabine family motto is obviously not “forgive and forget.” “The Chief just wants me to get to the bottom of it, for now.”

  “Him and me both,” I murmur.

  “What have you found out?”

  “Nothing.” I stare down at the article on my desk.

  “Wonderful,” he mutters sarcastically.

  “I am trying,” I snap.

  “Extremely,” he snaps back.

  I ignore him and stare and stare at the text in front of me until something so obvious pops up that I cannot believe I didn’t see it before.

  “Detective Sergeant Sabine, how do you file the reports?” I say suddenly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Do you have a file on each crime?”

  “We write up the report on the computer and then file hard copies and additional documents in a paper file.”

  “Where’s the paper file?”

  “All working paper files are locked in my desk.”

  “How about the computer?”

  “I don’t think I could get it in the drawer,” he says dryly.

  “I mean, can anyone access the file on the computer?”

  “Of course. Another officer may need the information on a case. You’re not suggesting that someone here . . .”

  “Can I see the computer file?”

  He looks at me hesitantly and then shrugs. “I suppose so.” He turns to the computer and after a few minutes pulls up the file. I walk around to his desk and look over his shoulder. He scrolls down.

  “There!” I say, pointing at the screen.

  “What?”

  “There! You’ve spelled Sebastian Forquar-White’s name with a ‘k’.”

  “So?”

  “The article did too. I checked the spelling of the name with Anton yesterday and it is spelled with a ‘q’.”

  James Sabine doesn’t say anything but sits looking at the screen. “That doesn’t mean anything. Someone else could easily make the same mistake,” he says after a minute.

  “Perhaps. But could someone from the outside have hacked into this computer? Is the mainframe connected by modem to anything?”

  “No. You have to actually be inside this department to get into the files.”

  “Can we see who last accessed the file?”

  “I can’t but the IT department probably could. I’ll see what they can do.” He gets up and leaves the room.

  I wander back around to my desk and sit down heavily. My momentary elation is replaced by frustration. I look around the department, wondering, aside from the obvious suspect, if anyone in this office is taking handouts from the Journal.

  My first foray into detecting seems to end here. Depressingly enough, there is nothing more I can do about it. I draft an e-mail to Joe saying that I’ll be in later to discuss the situation. James Sabine returns after a while.

  “Have you spoken to IT?”

  “They’re going to look into it.”

  He goes back to vetting his mound of papers. There must be something interesting there because he almost immediately picks up the phone, has a brief conversation while jotting down some notes, and then gets up. I look at him expectantly.

  “Are we off?” I say hopefully.

  “Well, I am.”

  What does that mean? Is he going to the loo or something? I hover uncertainly until he looks back over his shoulder and says, “Come on then, if you’re coming.”

  I chase after him. There is a chor
us of “Bye Dick!” and “Catch you later, Dick!” I fervently hope he didn’t hear them.

  Detective Sergeant Sabine accelerates our usual car up the ramp and out of the underground car park.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Uniform has been questioning some of the staff down at the hospital. For the drug theft. They didn’t like the look of one of the nurses. I’m going to check him out.”

  “Him?”

  James Sabine glances over at me. “He’s a male nurse.”

  “Oh.”

  An awkward silence descends on us. Our past relationship is positively festooned with love hearts compared to the aftermath of our argument. I bite my lip and look out of the window. I suppose I really ought to apologize for the sake of the diary, but I can’t quite bring myself to yet.

  Finally, I grudgingly say through gritted teeth, “Look, I’m sorry if I appeared a little overwrought this morning. It hasn’t exactly been an easy week.” Well, it was almost an apology.

  He replies, equally grudgingly, “That’s OK. I’m sorry for calling you a mosquito. I mean, it’s true, but I still shouldn’t have said so.” That was even less of an apology than mine. We both look as un-sorry as two people could ever appear and travel in silence to our destination.

  My mind is on the impending questioning of a suspect as I catch up with James Sabine as he walks toward the suspect’s house.

  “Do you want me to say anything?” I ask.

  “No. Say nothing.”

  “You don’t want me to help at all?” I suggest, anxious to be involved.

  “Help?”

  “Well, you might want me to be the bad cop or something?”

  He stops and faces me. “Bad cop?” he says wearily.

  “Or good cop? I don’t mind. Or—”

  “Miss Colshannon. I appreciate your offer of help, but can I point out the fatal flaw here?” I arrange my face into a questioning look. “You are not a police officer. You see? Good cop,” he continues slowly, pointing to himself as though explaining it all to a five-year-old and then, pointing to me, “No cop.” He repeats the action again. “Bad cop, no cop. Do you get it? You’re watching too much TV.”

  I resign myself to a non-speaking part and follow him as we climb a wrought iron staircase and ring the bell of flat three. No answer. We ring again. James Sabine turns to me.

  “Remember, don’t say anything.” I shake my head vehemently as though the thought wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. The door opens a crack. Detective Sabine holds up his ID and says, “Are you Kenneth Tanner?”

  The shadowy figure nods his assertion to this question.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Sabine. I would like to ask you a few questions regarding a theft at the hospital where I believe you work?” The door opens slightly more at this point to reveal a man in his mid-twenties. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a sweat-shirt and is looking decidedly the worse for wear.

  “Yeah? What do you want to know?”

  “May we come in?”

  The man makes to open the door wider to allow us access, but instead slams it in our faces as we try to move inside. James Sabine, who obviously has more developed reactions than I, rams his shoulder against the door, but it’s too late, the lock has already slipped into place. He takes a step backward and kicks the door, just above the handle, with his right leg. It swings wide open and crashes against the back wall.

  “Stay here,” he says to me as he runs inside.

  Needless to say, I don’t stay anywhere and peer in after him. I watch as he darts across the hallway and bobs his head around the door directly opposite. He then flings himself across the room and I catch up just in time to see him wrestling Kenneth Tanner away from an open window with a wrought iron fire escape outside it. Within about thirty seconds, James Sabine has got both the suspect’s hands behind his back and is kneeling on them while feeling for his handcuffs. He produces them with a flourish like a magician and clicks them into place. I hear him reading Kenneth his rights.

  “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defense . . .”

  Blimey. It’s not even lunchtime.

  “Holly! Congratulations!” says Callum. “Your first arrest!”

  “Yeah! Well done!” shouts another officer from his desk, and several others smile over at me.

  I smile modestly back.

  “Was it a difficult arrest?” asks Callum jokingly.

  “Terribly.”

  James Sabine is standing behind me. Callum gestures toward him with his head. “Was Dick here much help?”

  “Useless. Sat in the car.” Callum and I grin at each other. Detective Sergeant Sabine raises his eyes to heaven and walks off, leaving us to it. I move toward my desk and come back to earth with a bump when I realize that the story of my first arrest is probably being leaked as we speak.

  James Sabine makes a start on the baffling amount of paperwork that results from making an arrest (if it had been me, I think I would probably have let the suspect go) while I work on today’s diary installment on my laptop. Now and again I look up and stare pensively ahead of me. Callum wanders over and throws a wad of paper onto James’ desk.

  “I was just down with forensics. Roger asked me to give you this.”

  “What is it?” I inquire.

  “The report from the Forquar-White burglary.” Detective Sergeant Sabine is already leafing through it.

  “Have they got the DNA results from the hair?” I ask excitedly.

  Detective Sergeant Sabine barely looks up but Callum replies, “It’ll be weeks before that comes back from the labs, Holly. It won’t be of high priority—”

  I interrupt him. “Why?”

  “Well, murder cases, rapes, that sort of thing, take higher priority than a burglary.”

  “They can’t identify that peculiar substance,” James Sabine murmurs to himself, his eyes still firmly glued to the report.

  “Yeah,” says Callum. “Roger mentioned it to me. He says he has no idea what it is.”

  “Are they going to try and find out?” I ask, aghast.

  James Sabine’s head snaps up. “They just haven’t got the resources at the moment, Miss Colshannon. Lack of funding. There’s something else you can write about.”

  The rest of the afternoon is taken up with interviewing Kenneth Tanner, which I’m not allowed to sit on. I fervently hope we won’t be scooped again but realize with a sinking heart, as I watch James Sabine tapping the details into the computer, that it is unlikely it will stop here. At the end of the afternoon I pack up my stuff, say my goodbyes for the day and go over to the paper. Joe is waiting for me.

  “Well?” he demands.

  “Well what?”

  “Did you find anything out about the Journal?”

  “We found out that someone might have been reading Detective Sergeant Sabine’s computer files, which basically means it could be practically anyone in the building with the possible exception of the canteen ladies. And maybe not even then. The IT department are trying to trace the culprit but not with a great deal of enthusiasm. How about you, did you find anything?”

  “I called a few contacts, a couple of ex-employees of the Journal, to see if they could discover anything but all they said was that it was an inside source.”

  I sit down in the chair in front of Joe’s desk. The man himself paces in front of me.

  “Spike Troman is their crime correspondent, isn’t he?” I ask. From what I’ve seen so far, Spike is a small weasel of a man whose name, unfortunately for him, does not belie his nature. There is nothing sharp about him.

  “There’s no way Spike could be doing this by himself. He would definitely need spoon-feeding.”

  “How long do you think he’s had a contact at the station?” I ask.

  “Well, they can’t have just found him or her solely to ruin the diary. I mean, the diary was arranged so quickly that there simply wasn’t time.”

  “But it was so blatant. Rev
ealing the forensics stuff, I mean. They must know there’s going to be an inquiry.”

  “Deliberate sabotage. The diary would have made them worried. I was hoping it would be such a success that people would permanently switch from the Journal to us. They probably thought it was worth taking a risk to try and show us up.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Can you keep the details off the computer so they can’t be leaked?”

  “Detective Sergeant Sabine would never agree to that.”

  “Well, not very much then. Maybe with the IT department looking into it the informant might get freaked. Don’t trust anyone there, Holly.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Don’t send your copy by e-mail; you’ll have to come over to the paper every night and download it yourself. And Holly, can you try and do something different from the Journal?”

  “Like what?”

  “We haven’t printed anything the Journal hasn’t already known about so far. They’re making us look like idiots. We’re supposed to be the ones on the inside and yet they’re still getting all the stories. You’re going to have to try and get some interesting stuff out of this detective, things that the Journal couldn’t possibly get hold of. Does he eat doughnuts? Are there any inside feuds in the office? Spice it up a bit! Give our readers something that the Journalcan’t. Details.”

  “Details,” I repeat. I nod and walk distractedly out of his office and down toward Tristan. My hands close into tight little fists with fury at the Journal and the mole. They are ruining my one big chance. Who on earth is doing this? The only thing to gain would be money and even then the risks outweigh it. Unless . . . Unless an officer who doesn’t like reporters very much is trying to get his newest sidekick thrown out? But would he really sabotage his own cases to do so?

  eleven

  Lizzie arrives for our Monday evening together in a state of very high excitement. Before I can even start on my week-end’s events, she says, “I had the best day ever on Saturday. Guess what I did?”

  “What?”

  “I tried on wedding dresses!”

  My God! Things have moved on quickly. I sit down suddenly in shock as she bustles through to the kitchen asking, “What have we got for munchies?”