Little Darlings. Melanie Golding
illuminated behind the desk by the glow from the computer screen.
She watched for a while. Nothing happened except the clock slowly marking the minutes.
Harper forwarded the video to 04.15. There. Something ran across the floor, taking the same route that Harper herself had taken earlier in the day, towards the bay where Mrs Tranter and Mrs Gooch were installed, bay three. She backed up the video and ran it again. A flash of something, rodent-like, blink and you’d miss it. The midwife kept her eyes on the screen and didn’t flinch. There seemed to be a streak of them, whatever they were – more than one, anyway, flowing past the nurse’s station. They’d have been right in her eye line. On the screen, Mallison made no reaction whatsoever.
Harper examined the section frame by frame, stopping it where three blurred smudges swam across the floor. The way they flickered, caught between two frames, they looked like big black fish. Shadows of fish. Maybe they were shadows, something flying across the light above rather than on the floor – that might also explain why Mallison didn’t react. They might have been moths, or big flies or something. Harper watched it again, in real time. She shook her head, watched it once more. It could easily have been a blip; a digital anomaly, nothing at all. So why did she feel the hair rise on the back of her neck?
Mallison had said she was in the staff loo just before Lauren’s crisis, which is why she didn’t notice anything unusual happening in the bay – Mrs Tranter would have made quite a bit of noise when she panicked and pulled the babies with her into the bathroom. Sure enough, on the tape, the midwife left her post to go to the loo at 04.21, and was still absent from the frame at 04.29, when Lauren’s 999 call was made. Harper stared hard at the screen and wished she could hear what was happening, but there was no audio. The midwife did not return to her post for another six minutes, when she sat down and started typing again. One minute after that, at 04.37, Dave appeared in his security guard’s uniform, using the desk to brake as if he’d been running – so he did in fact make it there in about five minutes, if you allowed him a minute or two to be on the phone with dispatch. Dave almost head-butted Mallison as the momentum carried his top half forward, and then the two of them rushed towards bay three, disappearing out of the camera’s view, to get Lauren out of the bathroom where she’d locked herself before dialling for help. Harper was frustrated that the camera didn’t cover the bay. If it had, she could have seen exactly what happened in there between 04.15 and 04.29. That poor woman had seemed deeply traumatised by whatever it was.
But why was she so curious about what couldn’t be seen by the camera? After all, according to the nurse, Lauren’s real trauma had happened in the two days before: the birth, the haemorrhage, the lack of sleep. If Harper could have seen what was happening in the bay it would have been a film of a woman losing her mind. No one needed to see that.
But those shadows. She shivered. Something about this case didn’t feel right.
She took an investigative materials envelope and filled in the details on the front, before burning a copy of the CCTV footage and slipping the disk inside. She had to know what the shadows were, and Forensics would be able to tell her. Hesitating over the funding authorisation box, Harper looked over her shoulder to check no one was coming before she signed an expertly practised facsimile of DI Thrupp’s signature, adding his officer number.
Turning back to her screen she opened the email from Records with the mp3 recording of the 999 call Lauren had made from inside the bathroom. Harper hadn’t been able to get much out of Mrs Tranter at the hospital, and it wasn’t just because the woman had been medicated up to her eyeballs. Mrs Tranter was holding back, certainly. Maybe there was something Harper could learn from hearing exactly what Lauren had said to the emergency operator. Maybe the mp3 would stop the internal detector from twitching.
She didn’t like to call it a hunch. Hunch sounded clichéd, like something out of a bad detective novel. What she had was a keenly developed sense of intuition, one that wasn’t always based on hard evidence, but that she’d learned to trust over the years. Her bosses didn’t trust it, however: Harper’s intuition, while it sometimes resulted in arrests, never seemed to have a warrant, or a decent evidential paper trail. DI Thrupp was particularly sore about a recent case in which some evidence had been gathered in a less than orthodox fashion.
Harper had been driving home from the office when something suspicious caught her eye. The disused warehouse could be seen from the road and she drove past it every day, but on this occasion the car parked in the usually empty lot stood out: the distinctive yellow Mercedes belonged to a suspect in a fraud case she was working. Harper had parked out of sight and approached covertly – alone and without back-up. When she got close enough, she overheard a conversation within the warehouse, which she had recorded, despite not having the correct permission to do so. Then, without shouting the standard police warning, Harper had kicked down the door, discovering two men who had just been discussing how much to pay for the huge container of counterfeit cigarettes they were standing in front of. Harper was acutely aware that the growing tobacco black market had links to organised crime and helped to fund terrorism. The people involved in it – the men she had caught – didn’t care that the product was often contaminated with asbestos, rat droppings and mould, or that the smokes were frequently made in overseas factories that used forced child labour. It was easy money; often easier than smuggling drugs, as even if the lorries were stopped, the dogs at the ports weren’t looking for tobacco.
One of the men, the fraud suspect, they’d been tracking for almost a year. The other one was a local businessman, very well connected, with no police record despite several extremely close calls and an intelligence file back at the station nearly an inch thick. The arrest was a huge bonus for the force, more so when they examined the truck and found that several of the cartons right at the centre of the stack didn’t contain cigarettes but raw cocaine – more than ten kilos of the stuff. But. There was no previous evidence trail, no warrant. The conversation, however damning, had been recorded without the go-ahead from any senior officer.
With both men cuffed in the back of her car, Harper had rung Thrupp.
‘I need verbal authorisation for a surveillance operation,’ she’d said.
‘You’ll need to speak to Hetherington. I don’t have the rank for that.’
‘I think you might, in extreme circumstances, if a superintendent isn’t available, if authorisation is needed urgently, sir.’
‘How urgent is it?’
‘How can I put this. It’s kind of . . . retrospective.’
The bollocking she’d got was immense. At first, he’d outright refused to help her, was prepared to let both the case and Harper’s career suffer the consequences. But eventually she’d talked him round. Hetherington would certainly have given the go-ahead, she’d said, only there hadn’t been time to contact him. There were literally one or two seconds between discovering the crime and her decision to act. The authorisation issue was only a case of delayed admin, if he could just see it that way. If she’d left it any longer, the shipment would have been shipped, they’d have lost the ringleader for another six months, and maybe never have caught the other guy at all.
So, through gritted teeth, Thrupp had logged a written authorisation for the surveillance, citing that Hetherington had been temporarily uncontactable. He had tweaked the timecode in the report to make it look legit so it could be used as evidence in the court case, where both of the suspects received custodials. Harper was sure that the DI would be pleased after that. But no. He could barely look her in the eye. During the process for submitting evidence, the super had questioned the report, but had signed it off because it was Thrupp, his old pal and golf buddy. It was embarrassing, though, for both men, and Thrupp was still angry about having to ask a favour in a way that made him look unprofessional. She reckoned he planned to stay angry until the end of time. Once everyone had stopped congratulating Harper, she’d been punished, restricted to desk duties for eleven weeks, and only escaped a disciplinary by a whisker.
She wasn’t sorry, though. Even after all of that, she knew she’d been right to do what she did, and what’s more she knew she’d do it again, or something similar, if her intuition was