Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,6

able to go and watch Plymouth Argyle whenever they played at home. He wasn’t lazy, but he was restless. Or, as he put it, at a crossroads.

At 36, Jack should, by now, have been a detective inspector at least, rather than a lowly DC. When Maggie had asked him if they could move to London for her career, he’d said, ‘Sure. Gang wrangling will be a bit like sheep wrangling, I expect. Only with knives.’

Maggie had asked Jack what it was he truly wanted, and all he could come up with was ‘you’, which, although lovely, wasn’t very helpful. Then he’d answered more seriously.

‘I want that look I see in your eyes when you put that stethoscope round your neck. You’re proud of what you do, Mags. You’re excited. I want to feel excited.’

London was, in fact, a huge risk, both emotionally and financially, but Jack’s commitment to Maggie made it the right decision. They knew no one in the South-East and, although Maggie could make a lifelong friend in a supermarket line, Jack was more standoffish. He didn’t care about friends – he had Maggie – but the money was a worry. They went from having both time and cash to spend at the end of the month, to being skint ships that passed in the night. And they had to plan two months in advance for any extra expenditure – such as the car’s MOT. Maggie dealt with all of this, though. She was the organiser, and she was the one who never panicked when the account turned from black to red.

Jack had agreed to make the life-changing move because he’d always known that Maggie was destined for greater things, and he didn’t want his indecisiveness to hold her back. As it happened, Jack’s current boss, DCI Simon Ridley, had heard about his transfer on the grapevine and had done a little digging. Jack’s reputation in Devon was as a solid foot soldier with an exceptional eye for detail and a natural ability to talk to people, read them and work out the best way to get what he needed from them. His interview technique was greatly admired, although it had never been pushed to its limits in Totnes. Ridley had decided to give Jack the opportunity to find his path with the Serious Crime Squad, but very quickly worked out that Jack’s not being stretched in his previous role was less to do with the location and more to do with his lack of ambition. However, he was diligent and got on with his work, so Ridley had kept him on . . . for now.

*

It was Jack’s turn to have the car that morning which, as he sat in a tailback on the A3 near Battersea, he was deeply regretting. His work mobile danced on the passenger seat, pinging and vibrating away as message after message came through from the app version of HOLMES. HOLMES was the bible for police case-related information and was normally installed and issued on tablets for use in court or on cases. But the technology was unreliable, so many officers invested in top-of-the-range mobile phones and installed HOLMES on them instead. It was allowed – just about.

As the pinging and vibrating continued, Jack smiled and shook his head as he imagined DCI Ridley’s messages, all perfectly spelt and punctuated instructions for the day. Ridley was in meetings all morning, which was why being a little bit late was no big deal. Jack would make the time up at the end of the day, seeing as Maggie would be on her next night shift and he’d be going home to a cold bed.

Ridley led a divisional team of twelve Serious Crime officers. The case that Jack was currently working on had started out with one young dad, who happened to be an engineer, realising that the baby monitor in his daughter’s nursery was sending a signal to three devices, rather than the two he expected. The monitor had been hacked and an unknown person or persons were watching his daughter sleep.

Once the police had the geography of the rogue signals pinned down, the legwork had begun. Hundreds of hours tracing, interviewing, ruling in or ruling out every known paedophile and associate in the area. Over several months, they had discovered hundreds of hacked baby monitors, all within the same fifty-mile radius. They visited 756 paedophiles, their friends and their families, and narrowed the field to thirty-two. Then to one, a Donal Sweeney, who shared