‘Why d’you think?’ she said, an edge to her voice. ‘Tactical won’t write itself, you know.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. My mum is dying, I nearly said. The only reason I didn’t say it was because I couldn’t have dealt with her embarrassment, and the things I knew Kate wouldn’t say that I so badly needed to hear. ‘Did I miss much?’
‘You missed Trigger making the tea,’ she said. This was a standing joke. Trigger only ever made the tea when one or other of us was out of the office. In other words, he didn’t.
‘How’s your mum?’ Trigger said, ignoring Kate’s barbed comment.
‘She’s the same,’ I said. ‘Thanks for asking. I’ll go back to the hospital after this; I just thought I’d come in and see Frosty.’
Kate didn’t speak. I thought about logging on to the workstation but I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I went to the DI’s office, but the door was open and he wasn’t there.
I went next door to the main Intel office. Ellen Traynor was the only one in.
‘Do you know where the DI is?’ I asked.
‘Probably in the MIR,’ she said. ‘He’s been in and out of there all day.’
The Major Incident Room? What was going on? I took the lift up to the next floor even though it was only one flight. I was still tired despite the extra sleep, my limbs aching. I was going to knock on the door of the MIR but it was open, a man in a suit propping it with his foot while he shouted across to someone at one of the desks and spoke into the phone he was holding up to his ear.
I squeezed past him, having already caught sight of Frosty, perched on a chair pulled up to a desk just to the left of the door. He looked ridiculously relieved to see me.
‘What’s going on, sir?’
He didn’t even notice the ‘sir’ this time, just beckoned me over. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Annabel. Come and have a look at this.’
I stood behind him and peered over his shoulder at the computer screen. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s the statement made by our mutual friend. The reporter.’
‘A statement? What’s he made a statement for?’
He looked at me in surprise, then obviously realised that he was going to have to go back a few metaphorical pages and help me catch up.
‘Yesterday, in the early evening, Sam Everett had a phone call from a female who claimed there was another body we hadn’t found yet. She provided an address. He wrote it down. He went off to check it out – as journos do, of course, although it would have been nicer if he’d thought to notify us first – and at the address he realised that there was a body in there because he could see part of it through a downstairs window. Then he called us out.’
‘Was it the next-door neighbour who rang him, then?’
‘No – that’s the interesting bit. We traced the call back to an address in Briarstone, right over the other side from Carnhurst where the body was. No reply. Broke in. Woman called Eileen Forbes lives there.’
‘And?’
‘Dead. Less than twenty-four hours.’
‘Murdered?’
He shrugged. ‘Got to wait for the PM, but, on the face of it, it looks bizarrely like all the others. No food in the house, no sign of any activity, just the woman on her own. Post neatly piled up on the dining room table, unopened. We got some phone data back already – she only made that one call to the newspaper. It’s the only outgoing call for weeks. Incoming calls all unanswered. Like she was deliberately not contacting anyone. And at the moment we can’t work out any connection between her and the body we found in Carnhurst.’
‘So the woman who called – she starved to death?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘And the body – the one in Carnhurst?’
‘Same.’
‘So how did this Eileen know the body was there?’
His face lit up. ‘Exactly,’ he said.
I looked around the room, at the people buzzing about setting up desks, on the phone. There were six desks crammed in here already, a small office in the corner, enclosed by a partition with a glass panel at the top.
‘So,’ I said, wondering if I was just tired or if I was being incredibly stupid, ‘all this…?’
‘They’ve set up an incident room. They’re going to treat it – for a while, anyway – as a proper murder enquiry.’