Private London (Private 4)

She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!

Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.

A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.

Chapter 76

BACK IN THE office I had assembled the troops.

The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.

We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.

Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything the Met had on the case over to me. Maybe there was something in all the data that had been missed.

Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.

I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.

Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.

On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.

He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.

I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.

Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.

I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.

Chapter 77

ADRIAN TUTTLE IGNORED me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.

The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.

He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.

He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’

I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’

Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’

‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.

‘I don’t know.’

Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even more blurred.

‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.

‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.