a couple of hours. She’ll be back long before Adam gets home. He won’t even need to know.
‘OK,’ she says eventually. ‘I’ve only just got out of the shower, but I’ll get there as soon as I can.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ breathes the assistant. Who is, as Alex reminds herself, unquestionably very bright and very ambitious, but still terrifyingly inexperienced. ‘That is so kind of you.’
‘No problem,’ she says, trying to sound more animated than she feels. ‘Just hold the fort for an hour. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
* * *
Ruth Gallagher can’t remember the last time she was in Alan Challow’s office. Six months ago? Longer? She’s run three or four murder investigations in the last year but it’s usually the DS who deals with the forensics. As for Alan Challow, he tends to come to you, not the other way round, so to be invited to his home turf is an anomaly, to say the least. She’d like to think he has something important to say, but if all these years in Major Crimes have taught her anything, it’s not to get her hopes up.
There’s no answer to her knock, and she pushes open the door to find the office is empty. It looks exactly as she remembers it – the view down over the car park, the meticulously tidy desk, the complete lack of any personalization whatsoever. Ruth is good at detail – at seeing the meaning in the supposedly trivial; she’s learned as much about her temporary team from their desk detritus as she has from their personnel files. The toddler pictures stuck round the edge of Gislingham’s computer screen; Everett’s carefully tended pot plant and Somer’s photo of a woman so like her they must be sisters; the casual scatter of Quinn’s desk; the chocolate wrappers hidden in the bin under Baxter’s. As for Fawley, he has a photograph, too. His wife and son on a beach somewhere, tanned and barefoot, the sunset behind them redding their hair and making the resemblance between them even more striking. Jake Fawley is smiling, a little warily. It must have been taken the summer before he died.
‘Sorry to keep you,’ says Challow, coming in behind her and closing the door. He has his thermal coffee mug in one hand.
‘I thought it would be easier to do this one in person.’ He gestures to the chair and goes round the desk to his own seat.
‘So what have you got?’ says Gallagher, watching as he takes out a tub of sweeteners from his desk drawer and carefully counts out three.
‘Let’s do the dull stuff first. We’ve checked the samples we took from Graeme Scott against the plastic bag used in the Faith Appleford attack and none of the fingerprints are a match. The male DNA on it isn’t his either, and there was no DNA from Faith in his car.’
‘We’d all but ruled him out for Faith anyway. His alibi checked out. What about Sasha?’
‘None of the knives from the house, the cottage or the car were used in the attack, and there was no DNA from her in any of those places either. Sorry.’
‘You did check the front seat of the car, as well as the back?’
Challow gives her an old-fashioned look. ‘I do know what I’m doing, you know.’
‘Sorry – it’s just that we were working on the theory that he might have offered Sasha a lift that night. But from what you just said –’
He’s shaking his head. ‘Highly unlikely. It’s extremely difficult to clean any car that well, and Scott’s showed no sign of being vacuumed any time this millennium, never mind last week.’
Gallagher sighs. ‘OK, so it looks like we can rule him out for Sasha too. But didn’t you say you had some non-dull stuff as well?’
‘Ah,’ says Challow, putting his stirrer down carefully on a napkin. ‘That’s a good deal more interesting. The carrier bag features there too.’
‘OK,’ says Gallagher slowly.
‘We ran the DNA profiles on the bag last week and didn’t get a match in the database. But there was one thing we didn’t do.’
‘And that was?’
‘Comparing those profiles to one another. It wasn’t a cock-up,’ he says quickly, seeing her face, ‘that’s never been standard operating procedure – in fact, if Nina hadn’t taken another look when we were doing the work on Scott –’
‘You’re losing me –’
‘Two of the DNA profiles we found on the bag – turns out they’re related.’
‘Related to what?’
He sits back in his chair. ‘To