Danuta Reah - Night Angels

He ignored her, and stared into space, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘That’s shit,’ he said again. There was a slight frown on his face now. ‘What time was the mail?’

‘I don’t know. Last night, I think.’

‘Why would she stay over in Manchester? It doesn’t make sense.’

Roz was surprised. She hadn’t really thought about it. She’d been annoyed that Gemma hadn’t phoned in the first place, and then hadn’t had the courtesy to follow the message up with a phone call this morning, but had assumed that she was tied up with the rigmarole of garages, repairs and all the rest of the hassle that came with a broken-down car. ‘How do you mean?’ she said.

‘Why didn’t she get a train back? She knew the meeting was important.’

Roz thought about it. It still didn’t seem a matter to spend much time on. It was a bit odd, but Gemma would explain when she got back. ‘Maybe she couldn’t get to the station,’ she said.

‘That’s what I mean. If she couldn’t get to a station, she must have been on her way back when the car broke down. She wouldn’t have been able to find a hotel either. She’s got AA. They’d have got her home if the car was too bad to fix at once. If she was still in Manchester, why go to all the expense of a hotel? Get a train, come in for the meeting, go back later and pick the car up. Simple.’

When she thought about it like that, it was odd. ‘I think…’ she said, when the door flew open and Joanna was there. She looked at them, and Roz could see the picture it formed in Joanna’s mind, she and Luke leaning against the desks, drinking coffee, chatting. She felt guilty, and she felt irritated with herself for feeling like that. She suppressed the instinct to put her cup down and start explaining. ‘Problem?’ she asked. Joanna was frowning.

Joanna’s face cleared as she looked at Roz. ‘No,’ she said. Then she turned her gaze on Luke. ‘The Barnsley analysis. I said I needed the report today.’ And you’re wasting time drinking coffee and gossiping .

Luke held her gaze for a minute, then as the silence began to get awkward and Roz could feel the tension in herself, a desire to start talking to break it, he said, ‘It’s on your desk. I put it there last night.’ He smiled. ‘After you’d gone,’ he said.

Joanna’s pause was barely perceptible. ‘Don’t just dump things on my desk, Luke. Put them in my in-tray.’ She cast a critical eye over the coffee pot, the cups, the clutter on the desks. Roz glanced quickly at Luke, and was surprised to see a gleam of laughter in his eyes.

Joanna had obviously decided to quit while she was ahead, and turned her attention to Roz. ‘I’m going to see Cauldwell now,’ she said. Suddenly she looked pleased. ‘I should be free in about half an hour. We need to talk about the new staffing. I’d like to get started on that this weekend.’

Roz checked her watch. ‘I’m lecturing in five minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ll come along to your room after. Three?’ That would give her time to get something to eat.

Joanna gave this some thought. ‘Two-thirty,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through.’

So much for lunch. Luke had turned back to the computer. Ignoring his grin, Roz said, ‘OK,’ and followed Joanna out of the room. She realized, as she pulled out her file of lecture notes, that they hadn’t resolved anything about Gemma.

Roz’s undergraduate lectures were always popular. She offered them as a small part of the linguistics module that the English Literature undergraduates had to follow in their first and second years. Anything with the word forensic in aroused the curiosity of the students, and Roz tried to fill the lecture with interesting examples of the way the theory they had been struggling with could be applied. Though a lot of their work was to do with the individual features of the human voice that made each one distinctive, possibly unique, she focused on the less technical areas of the work of the Law and Language Group, work dealing with threatening letters, contested statements and confessions. High-profile cases, the ones that had a bit of glamour.

She told them about a recent case where the recorded keystrokes on a word processor showed that an apparent suicide note was most unlikely to have been written by the dead woman – an experienced user of word processors. ‘Whoever wrote that note didn’t know how to use the machine – they used the “enter” key the way you’d use carriage return on a typewriter. And there’s other information recorded on a computer that people don’t know about: dates and times that can tell you if a document is what it claims to be. On the other hand, you can’t say which actual machine a document was written on, whereas each typewriter had its own idiosyncrasies.’

She showed them a signed witness statement where extra lines had been interposed to make the witness incriminate himself, and the ways in which analysis had identified the different authorship. The students were quiet, attentive.

But as she talked, her mind was not really on the familiar lecture. She made her usual jokes, put examples up on the screen, answered questions, all on autopilot as she thought about Gemma and about what Luke had said. He was right. Of course Gemma would have come back, unless it was so late there were no trains. And that was ridiculous, because those meetings never went on after about four. Maybe she’d stayed for something to eat, maybe planned a wander round, gone sightseeing down Canal Street…But it didn’t seem very likely. Not Gemma. That reminded her of the call she had to make to DI Jordan over in Hull.

She thought about the voice on the tape, the woman whose spoken English was rudimentary, single words, a few phrases, unclear with tape hiss and the background noise of a hospital, footsteps, metal clashing on metal, voices in an incoherent babble. And the woman’s voice, quiet and uninflected, which made the things she said more shocking, more disturbing. ‘ He [or was it they?] hit , she kept saying, and, ‘ He beat up …’ and a phrase which Gemma, who knew Russian had translated as, I don’t know how to say it , and home , and he kill me , and go , and other words, men all days and I say no, he [they?] make and hurt . And here the unnaturally calm voice had wobbled as though the woman was swallowing tears. She remembered the impersonal terms in Gemma’s report that turned the words into patterns of sound, the sentences into structures divorced from meaning. She remembered Gemma’s face as they listened to the tape together, puzzled and alert, and she wondered again what it was that had been worrying her.

The call had come through at eleven-thirty. By midday, the scene was secure and the investigating team was moving into place. A young woman, dead in the bathroom of one of the cheap hotels on the road out of the centre, to the east of the city. The first – and easiest – assumption was that the woman had been a prostitute who had fallen foul of her client. The Blenheim was a known haunt of the local prostitutes. She had been severely beaten – her face was smashed beyond recognition – and there was evidence of other injuries on her body. By one, John Gage, the pathologist had finished his work at the scene. ‘You can move her now, unless there’s anything you need to do before she goes,’ he said, wincing slightly as he stood up from where he had been kneeling by the bath.

Detective Chief Inspector Roy Farnham stood in the doorway, his hands carefully in his pockets. The photographer had finished, and the Scene of Crime team had moved through the small bathroom, bagging evidence for removal. ‘What have you got?’