Private London (Private 4)

Three female students from the university had been viciously assaulted. One of them kidnapped. One of them slashed with a knife. One of them beaten with a baseball bat and even now fighting for her life in hospital.

Could be a murder case before the night was out.

DI Webb took a sip of her coffee and scowled. The crystal-ball gazers at the Meteorological Office were promising a sunny day for Saturday and she was supposed to have the weekend off. She’d hoped to get in the garden and sort things out.

Fat chance of that now. This case would put paid to all that. Chancellors University was all about old money. And that meant pressure from above. It always did.

So the garden would go untamed for a while longer. Which would have suited her ex-husband, Webb thought bitterly. Her mood worsening as she took another sip of coffee and wondered why she was even thinking about the bastard.

But she knew exactly why. Goddamn him! Tomorrow was their wedding anniversary. Ten years ago instead of punching him on the nose like he so richly deserved, she had simply slapped him and said yes.

She crumpled the styrofoam coffee cup in her hand and watched as the ambulance drove away. Its sirens shrieking into the night air and the noise bouncing of the cloistered walls of the warren of buildings that made up that part o

f the university.

The lead scene-of-crime officer ducked under the police-line tape and approached. He was followed by DS Andy Crane, Kirsty’s partner.

‘You got anything good for me?’

The SOC officer smiled. He was a handsome man, tall, lean, in his late twenties. ‘Detective Inspector Webb,’ he said, grinning wider. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

‘You’re funny, Richard. Funny like chlamydia.’

‘They say God loves a trier.’

‘They say God loves everyone. Me, I hate most people, so stop flapping your lips like a fishwife and tell me what we’ve got.’

DS Crane shrugged. ‘The paramedic sedated the first one – the knife victim – so we didn’t get much from her. A black van. Hooded men. She wasn’t sure how many. More than three.’

‘They say anything?’

‘No. The one they beat up with a baseball bat tried to stop it, apparently. Some kind of karate nut or some such.’

DI Webb gestured to the taped-off area of the road. ‘Any sign of what we might call clues?’

‘There are some faint tyre marks, and some blood droplets which we are pretty sure are going to turn out to have come from the injured girl’s arm.’

‘Who phoned it in?’

The detective sergeant pointed across to the pavement where a woman in her thirties was drinking a mug of tea, a female uniformed officer speaking to her. ‘Jane Harrington, lectures here at the university.’

‘What did she see?’

‘Nothing. She was on her way home after a late tutorial. The van had gone before she got here. Found one student unconscious and the other hysterical and screaming, with blood pouring down her arm.’

‘Cut badly?’

‘Her wrist was sliced, is all, as the other girl tried to fight them off. Not too deeply. Nothing arterial.’

DI Webb made some notes in a small black book that she pulled out of her coat. ‘Names?’

‘Chloe Wilson is the girl hit with the baseball bat, the woman knifed is Laura Skelton and the woman they took is Hannah Durrant.’

‘All students here?’

The detective sergeant nodded again. ‘Coming to the end of their first year. Chloe Wilson reading law and psychiatry, the other two just psychiatry.’

DI Webb nodded to her assistant. ‘Okay, stay with it, sergeant. I’ll check back later.’