Anya Lipska - Death Can’t Take a Joke

‘ Nada. ’ Ben shook his head. ‘You’d think somewhere between the corner shop and Hollow Ponds somebody would have seen them.’ He frowned at the floor. ‘Officially, the case is still open, but after this long? You and I know it’s dead as a doornail.’

Forensics had been unable to recover any DNA evidence, but one name kept coming up – Anthony Stride, a serial child sex offender who lived three streets away from the Ryans. When Hannah picked Stride out of a book of mugshots, a search warrant was granted and the police found evidence on his computer that he’d boasted about the attack under a pseudonym on a chat room used by abusers.

Kershaw remembered Ben’s jubilation when he’d told her the news. But when the case came to court – disaster. The defence barrister put the DC who’d searched Stride’s flat through the wringer, finally getting him to admit that he’d pulled up the search history on Stride’s PC and clicked through to the chat room. The computer should have been bagged and sent straight to the Computer Crime Unit where specially trained officers would have preserved and cloned the data before investigating it further. The cock-up allowed Stride’s barrister to plant the idea in the minds of jurors that the cops might have interfered with the crucial evidence. Next, cross-questioning Hannah via video link, he’d suggested that since Mr Stride and she were both regulars at the corner shop, she might have seen him there on a previous visit, thus sowing another seed of doubt. In his summing up, he had made much of the idea that, in the light of Hannah’s learning difficulties, it would be ‘all too understandable’ for her to confuse Stride with her real attacker. The jury deliberations took seven hours, but they’d eventually returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict. When the judge revealed that Stride had already served time for offences against young girls, there had been gasps on the jury benches and two female jurors had openly wept.

Kershaw had never seen Ben so rocked. Although he hadn’t been the Ryans’ official FLO – family liaison officer – he’d spent a lot of time with them and grown particularly close to Hannah’s Dad Jamie, a second-generation Irishman who ran the family haulage firm. Ben’s distress at what he saw as his failure to nail Stride so alarmed her that she had even tried – unsuccessfully – to persuade him to put in for counselling. Recently, he’d seemed to be getting back to the old Ben, so finding out that he was still seeing Jamie Ryan socially made her uneasy: getting personally involved in a case was never a good idea. She decided to broach the subject with him when they were properly alone.

For now, she just touched his arm lightly, by way of apology for her bad temper. ‘Of course you can stay. I’m on early turn tomorrow, so let yourself in. I’ll see you in the morning.’

Ten minutes later, she was in mid-chat with fellow DC Sophie, who sat at the desk opposite hers, when Streaky swaggered over.

‘Sorry to break up a good gossip, girls,’ he said.

Sophie bridled. ‘Actually, Sarge, I was just briefing Natalie on our most recent cases.’

‘Swapping knitting patterns more like,’ Streaky chuckled, pushing Kershaw’s paperwork aside to clear space on the desk for his substantial backside.

As Sophie’s face flamed red, Kershaw felt a mix of sympathy and amusement. She’d endured her fair share of Streaky’s sexist banter in the past, before coming to realise that it was all just part of his act. He’d actually admitted to her once, at the end of a particularly long night in the Drunken Monkey, that women made far better detectives than men; even if he’d gone on to spoil things by adding that their superior observational and deductive skills were down to them ‘ always being on the lookout for a husband’.

‘Sophie was briefing me on the local drug gangs, Sarge,’ said Kershaw, shooting a supportive look her way. ‘In case Jim Fulford’s murder does turn out to have been a junkie mugging.’

‘Not that you’re going to have any time to spare for the Fulford case, DC Kershaw,’ said Streaky, pointing a rolled- up printout at her. ‘Docklands nick has just told me that you’ve taken it upon yourself to identify some mystery roof diver?’

‘Ah, yes, I meant to talk to you about that, Sarge.’

‘You do know we investigate murders here, don’t you? Which if memory serves, tend to be defined as deliberate slayings at the hands of a third party ?’

‘Yes, Sarge, it’s just that I was first on the scene, and since I did all the initial investigations, I thought it made sense for me to finish the job.’ When she said it out loud like that, it struck her how head-girlish it sounded. And she had to admit that, now she had a murder case to get her teeth into, the mystery jumper could prove to be a major in- convenience.

Streaky unrolled the printout with a magisterial frown. ‘Let me see … no identification of any kind on the body … no tattoos, birthmarks or unusual dentistry … no missing persons report fitting the description … number of people working in Canary Wharf tower 7,653 …’ After shooting her a meaningful look, he turned to the second page. ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon! If I implied that there were no clues to the identity of the deceased, I was wrong.’

By now, it was Sophie who was sneaking Kershaw the sympathetic looks.

‘PC Percy Plod found a zloty in the gutter!’ Streaky scooted the document onto Kershaw’s desk. ‘With a red-hot lead like that I should think you’ll have the case solved by the end of your shift. It’s a shame you’ll have your hands full, because I was going to give you some more action points in the Fulford case.’ Getting to his feet, he tucked an errant shirt tail back into his trousers, and strode off.

Janusz was kneading bread dough on his kitchen worktop when his mobile sounded.

‘ Czesc, Oskar,’ he grunted, holding the phone to his ear with his thumb and index finger so as not to douse it in flour.

‘Ask me what I found out about your friend with the Land Rover Discovery.’

‘I haven’t got time to play twenty questions,’ said Janusz. ‘I’m up to my elbows in sourdough.’

Oskar made kissing noises down the phone. ‘You know, Janek , you’d make someone a lovely wife. I bet you’re wearing a really cute apron, too.’ Then, adopting a concerned voice: ‘You do know that I’ll always be there for you, don’t you?’