aced pair of students.
They carried them to a nearby table and handed them round to a group of equally flushed young men. They were all wearing the university rugby colours and were chasing pints with slammers. One of them dropped his glass into his pint of lager and shouted: ‘Depth charge!’
Contempt was too mild a word for what the barman thought of them. He was a postgraduate student who had worked two jobs while getting his first degree and was still left with a mountain of debt. This lot of braying jackasses wouldn’t know a day’s work, or debt, if it bit them on their privileged arses. He looked across at a pretty dark-haired woman who was standing further along the bar. Sometimes he hated his job. Sometimes he liked it.
Chloe Wilson didn’t even notice the barman looking at her. She was feeling hot.
And not in a sexy manner, but in a sweaty, giddy kind of way. The three of them had come out all heels, squeals and ready to partay! At least, that had been the plan. Her two friends, Laura Skelton and Hannah Durrant, had been knocking back the vodka and Red Bulls since six o’clock like they were going out of fashion. And why not? They were all twenty-something-year-old students in the heart of the fine city of London on a Friday evening in spring – what the hell else were they supposed to be doing? But Chloe had held back on the booze. She had to. Someone had to keep a clear head. London could be a dangerous place, after all. Even on campus.
Chancellors University London, also known as CUL or Chancellors, was spread throughout the capital – as were most London-based colleges. But CUL dated way back to the sixteenth century. It had been founded by Henry VIII’s Chancellor – Cardinal Wolsey. It had a central block or two of ancient residential buildings and lecture halls in a warren of inner connecting squares and passages. In the sixteenth century it had been a theological school set to rival Magdalen College at Oxford University.
Nowadays it had a more secular curriculum. After the Reformation the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin had been one of the first to go under the sledgehammer. All trappings of Catholic worship stripped out. Now it was simply the Chapel Bar. It was at the northern end of Chancery Square beneath the main rectory and was a stone-flagged cellar that on this evening was packed wall to wall with animated young adults.
Like the three beautiful young women near the busy bar – making hay while the May sun shone bright.
Ryan stepped over to ask if they needed any more drinks. The dark-haired woman he had been watching earlier shook her head. But her friends drained their glasses and held them out for a refill. Not so much as a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’.
Some of them were coming to the end of their time at college, Ryan knew. Some of them were coming towards the end of their first year. All of them with a bright future ahead. Their confidence was evident in their loud voices, their designer wear and perfect teeth. The privilege that they had inherited would be passed on through generations to come, as it always had been.
Some of them, though, had no future.
They just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter 14
ADRIAN TUTTLE, A tall, gangly, floppy-haired man in his late twenties, pushed the passenger door of my car shut with a bit more force than he probably intended.
It slammed closed. The sound of it echoed all along the street.
‘All right, Adrian,’ I said. ‘Take it easy. You sign on for Private, you’re on call twenty-four seven. Love life always takes second billing. It’s in your contract.’
‘What love life?’
I looked at my watch. Adrian had had to cancel a date when the call from the Met had come in, but I had no intention of missing mine.
Adrian was Private’s forensic photographer. He had his own company car waiting for him but had failed his driving test six times. His luck with the ladies was equally as spectacular. Wendy Lee, his line boss, a five-foot bundle of Chinese energy and an ex-Forensic Science Service pathologist, had called in from Holborn. Her car had broken down so I’d agreed to drive Adrian to the crime scene and meet there. I didn’t fancy his chances taking a taxi through London traffic on a Friday night. Official business meant I could put the detachable blue light on the roof of my BMW 4x4, blast the siren and cut through the commuters like a hot knife through butter.
I could have got one of my operatives to take him, but I like to go out with my agents in the field regularly. Let them know we are a team at Private. Besides, if I’d wanted to be a desk-jockey manager shuffling paper I would have joined a bank. But that night I’d told Wendy I’d swap her taxi for my car and leave them to it. Forensic examinations were definitely not on my agenda for the evening.
Ahead of us the familiar blue lights of parked police cars flashed, and yellow tape blocked the public from the crime scene that lay beyond it.
‘She could have been the one,’ continued Adrian morosely as he unzipped a large carry-case.
‘You’ll get another chance,’ I said, slapping him on the back as he stepped into his scene-of-crime overalls. ‘There’s someone for everybody, you know. Even you.’
Most people assumed that the white-suited forensic photographers and videographers seen on the TV news photographing and recording crime scenes were members of the police force. And sometimes they were – but sometimes they weren’t. The Metropolitan Police, and the other forces throughout the country, also used independent companies. Like us.
The forensic division of Private London had a contract with the Metropolitan Police, purely in the photographic area. Forensic pathologists themselves were still under the direction of the Forensic Science Service, which was an agency of the Home Office working with the police.
Adrian’s boss Wendy Lee had been a popular and highly respected pathologist at the FSS before I recruited her to head up Private’s forensic unit. Some cases required independent forensic analysis before they came to court – and the resources that Private offered Dr Lee tempted her away almost as much as the far higher salary I dangled under her nose. We gave her access to the kind of superior technology that the Met could only dream about.
The detective in charge at the scene, DI Ken Harman, nodded to me as Adrian and I walked up. We’d worked together before.
‘Dan.’
‘Ken.’
We shook hands briefly. And he held up the tape for us to cross under.