M. Arlidge - Little Boy Blue

‘If we don’t we’ve got at best another twenty-four hours and I don’t think that’s enough. She’s too confident of herself, we need more time to wear her down.’

‘You really want to dive in again, after what happened last time?’ Sanderson replied, as coolly as she could. ‘We have got to be sure.’

‘She was the last person to visit Paine on the night he died.’

‘That we know of.’

‘And she’s never once protested her innocence, despite numerous opportunities to do so.’

‘Nor has she confessed. So what have we actually got?’

Helen watched her two deputies debate the evidence. It was still early and she was exhausted and irritable after her night-time excursions. She hadn’t slept a wink last night, replaying what she’d seen over and over to see if she could have been mistaken. Her defences were up and every tiny noise had seemed so ominous that in the end she’d given up trying altogether and headed into the office. She knew that today would be crucial for the investigation, so when Sanderson and Charlie arrived, she called them both into her office.

She had thought about apologizing to both of them for her recent behaviour, but the events of last night still hung heavy on her mind and with the clock ticking on Samantha’s custody there was no time to waste. So they’d pressed on with the case, just about managing to ignore the tensions bubbling beneath the surface. Helen would have to force the pair of them to work together if necessary, as they were both good officers whose recent misdemeanours were mostly a product of her own fractured focus.

‘What have we got on the credit cards?’ Helen asked suddenly, interrupting the debate.

‘The Zentai suit and hog ties that killed Paine were bought with a different credit card to the one used to buy Elder’s wet sheets,’ Sanderson replied.

‘Have we cross-referenced the stores and websites that the two different cloned cards were used in? To see who might have stolen the details?’

‘Yes, but it’s already a massively long list. The supermarkets, Boots, W. H. Smith, Amazon, PayPal, iTunes…’

‘Can we link either of the cloned cards to Samantha? We know that as Michael Parker she had form for this kind of thing.’

‘Nothing on her home computer, phones or devices. And we didn’t find any cards at her flat.’

‘Does she work anywhere other than the bar?’

‘Not that we know of.’

‘What about the deliveries of the bondage items themselves?’ Helen said, turning to Charlie.

‘As with Elder, the BDSM stuff was delivered by courier to a vacant address. A domestic property awaiting new tenants.’

‘Get on to the estate agents that rent them out. See if there’s any connection between the different properties and a particular agency.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘What about the boot print?’ Helen continued. ‘Meredith said the print she found at Paine’s was a size six. Parker is a size seven, but that doesn’t necessarily rule her out.’

‘There was loads of stuff in the flat geared towards sizing down, corsets, heels -’ Charlie responded.

‘Trying to make herself as petite as possible.’

‘Exactly. But no sign of any boot or shoe that fits.’

Helen nodded, but her frustration was clear.

‘We’ve got the tread pattern,’ Sanderson interjected. ‘It’s quite unusual, so we’ll chase down which outlets sell it.’

‘Good. We’re not letting Samantha believe she’s anything other than our number one suspect and we exhaust every avenue, up to the last minute to link her to these murders. Understood?’

Sanderson and Charlie nodded and left. Helen picked up the phone to dial Meredith Walker, but as she did so DC Reid knocked on the door. Replacing the cradle, Helen beckoned him in. Reid approached clutching a DVD. He handed it to Helen without a word, clearly worried about being the bearer of bad news.

Helen slipped the DVD into her laptop and the screen filled with a CCTV feed.

‘What is this?’

‘CCTV taken from a street near the Eastern Docks. One of the night watchmen down there saw someone matching Parker’s description, so we checked it out.’

Reid reached over and fast-forwarded the footage, before eventually pressing play. Helen leant in, looking closely at the date and timeline.

‘This is the night Max Paine was killed?’

‘Correct.’

The camera gave a decent view of the dockside and Helen now saw a woman walk into view. She paused the image – slicked down hair, a large, light-coloured coat over a skin-tight suit – it was Samantha all right. Helen resumed playing the footage and watched as the woman struck up a conversation with a man idling near a stationary van. Parker appeared to take the man’s hand and put it between her legs. Moments later, the two figures climbed into the back of the van.

‘The van doesn’t move for the next three hours. Then Parker exits. She doesn’t look in a very good state and gets out of there as quickly as she can.’

Helen nodded, but her eye was already straying to the timeline at the bottom of the screen, rewinding the footage to the moment Parker got into the van with her bit of rough. The clock read 22.02.

‘How accurate is the time on this feed?’

‘To the second.’

Helen breathed out, then suddenly stepped forward, kicking her office chair with all her might. It careered across the room, slamming into the wall before toppling over. Without bothering to offer an explanation, Helen walked out of the door and away across the incident room, dozens of pairs of eyes following her as she went.

‘Not up to my usual standard. But pretty damn good in the circumstances, wouldn’t you say?’

Samantha offered her nails to Helen, clearly pleased with the few cosmetics items she’d managed to source.

‘Very nice,’ Helen told her, keeping her temper in check. It had taken the best part of twenty minutes to pull Samantha up from the cells, but the interval had done little to calm Helen. Jim Grieves had put Paine’s time of death as somewhere between 10.30 p.m. and 6.30 a.m. the following morning. Notwithstanding the fact that Paine died slowly, Parker’s presence at the docks at 10 p.m. meant it was more than likely that someone had visited Paine’s flat after her.

‘I want to keep myself looking my best. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?’

Her tone was teasing and playful.

‘Absolutely. But I don’t want to string this out any more than we have to. I expect you’re anxious to get home.’

Samantha shrugged, disappointed with Helen’s response. Was she expecting – hoping – for more aggression from Helen?

‘You’re right. It doesn’t do to leave my babies alone for too long.’

‘Quite.’

Samantha’s dolls were in fact all in evidence bags at Meredith’s lab. Surely Samantha would have guessed that, so was this yet another game? Helen looked down at her file, leafing casually through the pages, saying nothing. She could see in her peripheral vision that Samantha was twitchy and ill at ease, as if this exchange was not going as she’d hoped.

‘I’d like to clarify a few details about your night with Max Paine.’

‘Of course.’

‘We talked a little about “The Phoenix” last time.’

‘Got your juices flowing, did it?’

‘I want a little more detail about what you got up to specifically,’ Helen demanded, ignoring Parker’s jibes.

‘A lady never tells.’

‘Was it straight S &M or something more exotic?’

‘The latter.’

‘Details, please.’

‘Restraint and suffocation. I want total control.’

‘And how do you achieve that?’