Hold My Hand: The addictive new crime thriller that you won’t be able to put down in 2018. M.J. Ford
on when the pool was put in?’ she asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Carter. She saw him start the game up again with his mouse.
DCI Bridges was back in his office, on the phone, and a stack of papers lay in front of him. Jo wondered if her results were in the pile. It had been a fortnight since she’d undergone the half-day assessment for a Detective Inspector position, and she knew she’d done pretty well in the role play and interview board sections. It would likely come down to the written test result, and that was harder to judge. Bridges maybe knew already, and was just waiting for the right moment to tell her.
Jo checked her emails. Some phone records had come through in relation to a drug-trafficking investigation they were doing in Snow Hill, as well as a few CCTV files on a burglary carried out on a machine-hire warehouse out west. She saw someone called Heidi Tan from Thames Valley had already started forwarding her the entire contents of the Dylan Jones file in batches of scans, and added her to the distribution list on the case. Efficient.
Jo opened up the first few in no particular order. Most of it was clearly written on a typewriter, but there were some handwritten pages also. Witness statements, photos of Dylan, of Matthews, interviews. There was a recording of the original 999 call. She placed on her headphones.
‘What’s the nature of your emergency?’
‘A boy’s gone missing. From the circus. I think he was kidnapped.’
Hearing her brother’s voice, raw and inflected with the accent of their youth, was shocking.
‘You’re calling from Home Farm, Yarnton, is that correct?’
‘Er, yeah, I think so?’
‘And can I take your name?’
‘Paul Masters … I ran here. Can you send someone?’
‘A car has already been dispatched. The boy who’s disappeared – can you tell me where he was last seen?’
‘I don’t know. At the circus. My sister—’
‘Detective?’
Jo looked up. Bridges was standing over her.
‘Can I have a word?’
‘Doesn’t sound good,’ said Jo.
Bridges wasn’t giving anything away.
‘In my office in five?’
Not good at all.
‘Sure.’
She took a deep breath. Rob Bridges was a good bloke, and she trusted him to be straight with her whatever. He was an odd one in the force, having had a career in finance before making the switch to law enforcement. Somehow he’d risen fast, and now, mid-forties, had moved across from the economic unit into CID. It was he who’d suggested she go for the promotion in the first place, and she knew that if it came down to it, he personally would vouch for her. Though if she’d failed the test, no amount of senior support would push her past the post.
She turned back to the files, opening up the arrest details for Clement Matthews. The mugshot showed a pudgy man with curly dark hair. Clean-shaven. He looked bored, sleepy, with an edge of defiance in the way he stared down the lens. Jo resisted searching for her eight-year-old self’s statement in the interview files. There was a picture of a Liverpool football shirt, said to be the equivalent of the one Dylan was wearing, a 1987 season with the Crown Paints logo in yellow. Jo felt a wave of sadness at the thought of the rag holding together the remains, caked in soil and other debris that would probably never be washed out. The shirt was what she remembered most about Dylan, the thing that had caught her envious eye that day at the fair.
Jo was about to close the picture when a thought arose.
Why leave just the shirt? Why not the other clothes? Underwear, socks, trousers? If you were covering your tracks, why not get rid of everything? She fired a quick email to the Salisbury lab, copying Ben, to see if they’d found anything else. It might simply be that the other clothes had become separated with the decomposition.
She left the computer and crossed the banks of desks towards Bridges’ office. He’d left the door open and she knocked, then went inside.
‘You may as well close it,’ he said.
Jo did so, a sinking feeling in her stomach. Definitely bad news. She braced herself.
‘Is everything all right between you and DI Coombs?’ said Bridges.
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘Humour me,’ said Bridges. ‘I let the relationship slide, because it hasn’t affected your work, and to be honest, I don’t want to stick my nose in. But if your personal life affects operations here, that becomes a problem.’
‘Has he said something?’ asked Jo, aware that she was being evasive.
‘No,’ said Bridges. ‘And I haven’t asked him yet. But I’m beginning to think I should.’
‘We’re not together any more,’ said Jo, as flatly as she could manage, and she felt suddenly angry not just towards Ben, but towards Bridges too. Why should I be saying all this? Ben’s the lying sack of shit who got us into this mess. He’s the one who flushed our entire fucking future down the drain.
Bridges steepled his fingers. ‘I thought as much. Okay, Jo, I’m taking you off the Dylan Jones case from this moment.’
‘But, boss …’
‘Surely you can see why. We’re going to get a lot of attention on this. I can’t let the investigation be compromised.’
‘It won’t be. Look, talk to Ben. He’ll tell you—’
‘The decision is made, sergeant. Follow up on the Thompson gang surveillance. Pass anything on Dylan Jones to Ben.’
‘This is—’
‘A done deal. Thanks Jo.’
Jo returned to her desk, fuming. She should have been grateful. The chances of identifying a suspect would be small, and in every likelihood whoever buried Dylan was dead anyway. It was the injustice that burned. The sense of powerlessness. She’d done nothing wrong.
And, in the back of her mind, there was disappointment. She wasn’t sure about there being a poetry to her involvement, but she couldn’t argue there was a kind of circularity. Ben and Bridges had taken away any chance she had to see the case through. To make amends.
The emails were still coming in from Thames Valley. She hovered the mouse over the delete button, ready to consign the case files to her Trash. So much for making amends.
Then her phone rang. An Oxford number.
She answered.
‘What did you tell them?’ said a man’s angry voice.
‘I’m sorry, who is this?’
‘She was here, just now. You must have told them!’
In the background, Jo heard another voice. ‘Calm down, Gordon. Please.’
Mrs Jones.
‘I’ll be making a formal complaint,’ said Mr Jones. ‘You come round here, pretending to be on our side. Dropping your little bomb and leaving us to pick up the pieces. This might just be a game to you …’
‘Please, Mr Jones,’ said Jo. ‘Tell me what’s happened. Has someone visited you?’
‘A journalist. A fucking hack!’ he said.
‘Gordon!’ came his wife’s distant exclamation.
‘Mr Jones, we didn’t contact any journalists,’ said Jo. ‘Please, believe me. We’re not sure how they’ve gotten hold of the news about