The Fountain in the Forest Read online

  At 10 o’clock sharp, Rex walked into the tenth-floor conference room, where Lollo and various others were drinking coffee from pump-action beverage dispensers that Building Services had placed on a table at one end of the room. Rex was glad he had already had a decent cup. The projector was plugged in, but at that moment all that was showing on the screen was a bouncing-ball graphic bearing the phrase ‘No Signal’. All of the venetian blinds lining the windows along the conference room’s long external wall were down, slats closed, but someone had opened a window at the refreshments end of the room so one of the blinds rattled erratically as it was repeatedly but irregularly lifted and then dropped by the breeze. Closing all the window blinds when one or more senior policemen were in the room was a long-standing legacy of Operation Erin, imaginative Met code for the investigation into the IRA’s London bombing campaign of the early 1990s. The measure, which had been designed to neutralise a sniper threat that was never realised, had been unofficially dropped in the spring of 1998, following the Good Friday Agreement, but then reinstated in 2000, after the rocket attack on the MI6 building in Vauxhall by so-called ‘dissident republican’ group the Real IRA.

  Half a dozen archive boxes were stacked on top of a low wooden cupboard to the left of the door. From where he sat, Rex couldn’t read everything on the box labels, but he could see the important bit: TENNYSON I, TENNYSON II, and so on. He had seen these boxes before, at meetings with the QC who had headed up the defence team. They were the case files from the trial.

  He recognised some of those present: the original defence team, couple of Fuck Me, three or four suits from St James’s Park – Head of External Relations and Chair of the Audit Committee among them – plus a couple of ranks over Lollo’s head: the Borough Commander and the Deputy Assistant Commissioner. Others he was not so sure, but it was safe to say that, with a line-up like this – just the ones he recognised – if the Commissioner himself wasn’t here, Rex knew he would be waiting to be briefed immediately the meeting ended.

  At a certain moment, everyone sat down and the low murmur of conversation stopped.

  ‘Morning, everyone,’ said Lollo. ‘Welcome to Holborn. If you don’t know me, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Jethro Lawrence, and in a moment or two I’m going to hand over to Tabitha, but I just have a couple of bits of housekeeping, and then I’ll explain what the various papers are in front of each of you …’

  Rex zoned out while Lollo explained where the bogs were. He had managed to get back to the paint frame after leaving Gertrude Bisika, albeit too briefly. The doorway had been left open, but was cordoned off by a mesh of hazard tapes of the blue-and-white POLICE DO NOT CROSS and the yellow-and-black varieties. Lifting them, Rex had bent and entered the space. The frame had been raised, and looked clean. The body had been removed and there was no sign of anything untoward other than an irregular area in front of the frame, where blood had spattered before the body had been dropped. The extent of this spatter was now marked with small fluorescent tags, beyond which a perimeter had been outlined in orange aerosol marking chalk. Right now, scrapings of that spatter would be in solution in the lab at St James’s Park, awaiting the attention of some white coat who would pipette out the sediment – or whatever it was they did – and extract any DNA.

  The rope that had been used as a ligature and to tie the victim to the frame had been removed. The whole thing could have been set up in readiness for Hobbs to walk in this morning and stretch another scrim; start a new painting.

  When Rex had closed the doors, there it was: Trudi B – well, it could be Trudi B, or perhaps that was a 13 – followed by a tick.

  He had taken a couple of photos with his phone, closer up, so he could see the texture of the chalk against the matt black-painted surface.

  So it wasn’t a tick, it was a ‘V’.

  ‘Trudi B Ventox’, it had said, or ‘Trudi 13 Ventox’ – or was that ‘Ventose’? It had been hard to tell. This was a chalk scrawl, not neat block capitals. Beneath that was what looked like algebra, or a tally of some kind: ‘C x C III’.

  C x C?

  C times C equals one, two, three?

  Standing in front of it, and reminded of the Tennyson case, he wondered if Ventox or Ventose was like Ventolin; just another brand of asthma medication.

  Before leaving, he had snatched another few photos on his phone and then carefully opened both doors again, to leave them as he had found them, before ducking back under the tape.

  As he walked briskly back through Holborn for the 10 o’clock, Rex had reflected that, for one thing, Webbo would need to get the photographer down there pronto. For another, whether this was relevant or not – and odds were it wouldn’t be – he had wondered how the fuck no one had noticed it on the day.

  ‘I think most of you know each other,’ Lollo now said, ‘but why don’t we start by going around the room, then I’ll hand over to Tabitha.’

  Sitting to Lollo’s left, the Chief nodded and smiled. ‘Thank you, Jethro. Yes, let’s get the intros out of the way. I’m Tabitha Churchill, as you all know. I’ve been Detective Chief Superintendent here for four years now, and before that I met many of you when I was Superintendent at Ealing.’ She turned to the man on her left.

  As DS, Rex was glad that he didn’t get to come to that many meetings at this level. It sometimes felt as if you all simply had to agree to hold your noses and collectively immerse yourself in the murky pond of jargon and circumlocution. Once you were down there, you might occasionally catch a distorted flash of normal life, the real world, refracted through its surface, but not very often. The agenda was a case in point, consisting as it did of a list of acronyms. Reading between the lines, Rex could see that the meeting would go something like this: what has been leaked, who has leaked it, and what are we going to do about it? But he also knew that nothing was ever so simple in policing, and that each team would necessarily have their own take on – and their own stake in – what any of that might actually mean.

  One of the suits – Rex had already forgotten the name – was from the Cyber Crime Unit, or CCU, sometimes known as ‘CU Jimmy’, itself a subdivision of the Fraud and Online Crime division that shared a name – in their case, an anagrammatic near-acronym – with the block of flats where Rex lived: FALCON.

  Part of CU Jimmy’s remit related to computer and network intrusions, whatever the motives and objectives for those intrusions might be, and that included network intrusions into police systems. He gave a short briefing on the overall network security position and compliance with the government’s National Cyber Security Programme, or NCSP, then showed various graphs of incoming malware attacks suffered by police networks in the UK over a ten-year period, before outlining an audit they had initiated in response to the current breach, which had—

  ‘Should we save that for “Next Steps”?’ asked Churchill. ‘Can I ask, though, do we know if this Tennyson leak was the result of a network intrusion?’

  They didn’t.

  ‘And I believe you were going to share preliminary findings,’ she said. ‘Can we do that now, please?’

  CU Jimmy scrolled through several PowerPoint slides, until he reached one that showed a document that Rex immediately recognised as a typed copy of the statement that had been made by one of the Dodos – the Dedicated Detention Officers – who had been acquitted of Trevor Tennyson’s murder.

  ‘This will be familiar to most of you,’ he said. ‘The majority of assets in the leak in question, fifty documents altogether, are digital copies of assets that are already in the public domain. Like this one. Pending a more detailed analysis, it would seem that there’s nothing here that we, or the public, don’t already know, but that doesn’t mean that this is just a bluff.’

  Rex knew the statements well. This went far beyond his own remit as SD lead, but during both the Tennyson inquest and the trial there had been much discussion of the Dodos’ written accounts of the death. The prosecution had focused on two key issues. Firstly that the De
tention Officers had been allowed to converse following the incident, and secondly that all four sets of notes and written statements used near-identical phrasing and vocabulary in describing what had happened, from the moment Tennyson was had up until the incident itself, and this in a way that went far beyond any statistical expectation. The prosecution’s argument, much publicised in trial coverage during their summing-up, had been that this demonstrated ‘blatant collusion’ by the officers, which, together with their demonstrable lack of remorse, should have given serious doubts about the credibility or otherwise of their versions – or version – of events.

  ‘All debate about the contents aside,’ CU Jimmy said, turning to the slide, ‘those of you who are familiar with these forms may observe that there is something unusual about …’

  And here, as CU Jimmy began to explain the technical background – in terms of coding and servers – and the ramifications of the leak, Rex slumped in his chair: this gobbledegook was going straight over his head.

  Luckily Rex was not the only one.

  Lollo caught his eye. ‘Did you switch it off and on again?’ the Detective Chief Inspector asked with a wink, speaking for all of them. ‘No, but seriously, what does that mean in layman’s terms?’ He corrected himself: ‘Layperson’s terms.’

  The technical explanation of autosaves and caches and metadata that followed had Lollo scratching his head. ‘In other words, you can’t say precisely which drive these versions of the documents came from, is that it?’

  It was.

  ‘Well, bloody say so, then!’

  That was the cue for a coffee break, and opening a few more windows to get some fresh air in. After that, there was talk of openness and transparency, presentations about past employment tribunal cases involving PIDA – the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 – and an update on current claims against the force by staff and the small percentage of these that involved whistle-blowers. All of this was about looking for someone with a grievance.

  Later the lawyers gave their opinion, and this is where it got more interesting for DS Rex King. A QC from another chambers had been brought in overnight to give a fresh pair of eyes and to report in addition to the summary of the defence team.

  ‘Yes, a big sigh of relief all round,’ he said, ‘but I agree with what my FALCON colleague said earlier. Just because there doesn’t seem to be anything new here, doesn’t mean that whoever is behind this is bluffing. We’ll discuss this later, but I think we should plan a spectrum response, anticipating that more of this material will enter the public domain, and that it may be more prejudicial to yourselves next time. Yes, of course we need to shine a torch on current employees with a grudge. Possible whistle-blowers and recent tribunal cases is as good a place to start as any. But my feeling is that this may be bigger than that. What we may be seeing the beginnings of here, and what we should prepare for, could be nothing less than an attempt to force the CPS to reopen the case, on the grounds, for example, that the acquittal was unsound.’

  A murmur of alarm went around the room, and the Chief raised her hand. ‘Steady on, everyone. Francis, do you want to explain that?’

  The QC continued. ‘Certainly, Chief Superintendent. In our view, and I should stress this is only a view, the gravamen of— I’m sorry, the burden of the charge was murder, and that should be irrespective of where the death happened, and’ – here he slowed down for emphasis – ‘irrespective of whether Tennyson had taken any steps to avoid the risk of death from other causes or not.

  ‘That’s the important bit. Do you follow me?’

  It looked as if they didn’t.

  ‘Okay,’ he continued. ‘Let’s say – I mean, God forbid – but let’s say Patient X forgot to take his heart medicine on the morning that he is killed by a suicide bomber on the tube. That’s simple murder. Do you see? It’s not somehow Patient X’s fault that he died because he’d forgotten to take his tablets that day.’ The QC paused to allow a murmur of understanding to pass around the table, then: ‘There seems to be no suggestion that this leak comes from the family or the immediate campaign group—’

  ‘Well, we’d know about it if it did,’ said Lollo, and everyone laughed. Rex felt a few eyes land on him, but he ignored them and laughed too. Press coverage of a few high-profile ‘spy-cops’ cases from the 1990s did not mean that the Met wasn’t still infiltrating protest groups of various kinds, but if you’d been in the Special Demonstration Squad or the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, you didn’t exactly put it at the top of your CV.

  ‘Very well, then,’ said the QC. ‘But my point is that, on reflection, and with a bit of distance, we wonder whether the acquittal didn’t rest a little too heavily upon Tennyson himself rather than upon the accused, specifically upon any prophylactic measure that Tennyson may or may not have taken vis-à-vis his asthma; that is, whether or not he happened to have a Ventolin inhaler on his person.

  ‘Putting ourselves in their shoes, if we were putting together an appeal, we think that this might be a place to start. It is certainly a pressure point.’ Warming to his subject, Francis allowed a little hyperbole to creep in, suggesting that they shouldn’t let today’s lack of content lead to complacency about further leaks, and that not to prepare for such an eventuality would be ‘the acme of corporate hara-kiri’.

  King took little comfort from the emerging consensus view – which seemed to be ‘We’ve got away with it this time’ – and even less from Francis Bland’s doom-mongering suggestion that this was somehow the harbinger of a likely retrial, but for now he didn’t want to stand out from the crowd and ruin everybody’s buzz by saying so.

  Tabitha Churchill turned to the Met’s Head of External Relations. ‘Evelyn,’ she said. ‘Two things. One, what are the early indications from the press? I assume no one’s making much of a splash, is that right? And two, are there any bigger announcements on standby, please? What about that ACPO work on police pensions? Is that ready? Let’s soft-launch that. Throw them a bone. I want us to make bloody certain this gets knocked off the six-and-tens, and Newsnight.’

  4: ÉPINARD (SPINACH)

  Like any cop, Rex King knew that most murder investigations were more or less straightforward, with either ‘domestic’ or ‘confrontation’ homicides accounting for the majority of all cases. Where homicide occurred between spouses, there would usually be a history of domestic violence; the offender would almost always be male and the victim female. Whether the offence had been committed in a vicarage or a tower block, however carefully it had been planned, whatever attempts had been made to clean up afterwards, it was generally relatively simple to assemble an information profile – as it was known in the trade – that would be sufficient to identify the suspect, make an arrest and prepare a prosecution. Even unplanned confrontations usually had an audience, and the spontaneous nature of these homicides, not to say their frequently drunken nature, would often mean the offender had little control over the amount of evidence left at the scene: eyewitness accounts, CCTV footage, bodily fluids, items of clothing, you name it. Not so much a song as a symphony of incriminating material.

  Even where this wasn’t the case, and often against their own best interests, an offender could easily negate the scantest information profile by whatever conspicuous actions they might take in the hours and days following the incident. Leaving home suddenly or confiding in others, or their behaviour at press conferences and public appeals. The oversolicitous witness was another, though more contemporary, giveaway. Someone constantly pushing themselves forward to help the police, or especially the media. Once upon a time, that kind of behaviour might have seemed harmless, merely the exercising of some civic duty, but now it stood out like a platypus in a porn film. The notorious British double child-killer Ian Huntley’s name had become a byword for such fantasist limelight-chasing. ‘Doing a Huntley’ was what they called it, and there could scarcely be a greater slur on anyone’s name than that. Rex was frequently amazed at the way offenders couldn’t
seem to stop drawing suspicion upon themselves, but he was glad they did, because he also knew that such compulsive behaviour was often the detective’s closest ally.

  Rex was getting the feeling that, as Deputy SIO on the case, DS Eddie Webster was not going to have such an easy job. This investigation was different. Save for the obvious forensics on the scene, there was nothing much to go on – not yet, anyway. House-to-house enquiries had not turned up anything, nor had the first wave of interviews of theatre staff and contractors. There was nothing on camera either. The theatre’s own CCTV archives had inevitably yielded a number of celebrity sightings, as well as glimpses of dressing-room sprawl and several nipples – cue much prurient laughter among the uniforms – not to mention one playwright tantrum, but little else, and the stagedoor camera had been on the blink for months, they said. Outside was not much better. The local authority and Transport for London cameras had just shown the area’s undifferentiated twenty-four-hour tourist throng; wave after wave of shuffling crowds on Aldwych and Russell Street, Drury Lane and Catherine Street. Coach parties and country mice, newly-weds and in-laws, old folks all out for their Mamma Mias and Matildas, their Billy Elliots or Bend Its.

  The trawl would go on, of course. The attempt to identify any evidence-based line of enquiry. Tracing the main suspect would be a start, whether Terry Hobbs had done this or not. If only to put him out of the picture. The problem was that no one had seen Terry for dust, that much was clear. And no one, it seemed, had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary in the days or weeks running up to the discovery of the body in the paint frame.

  From where Rex King and Eddie Webster stood, it did not look good. Rex joked that he was already starting to feel that they could take this one apart with the avidity of safari park baboons on a banana-flavoured BMW and still not find anything. The investigation team that Webster was managing, and to which Rex was now attached, could be hard at work on this one for months. At the best of times, police work could feel never-ending. In that respect, he sometimes thought, it felt akin to painting the Forth Bridge, but instead of some immense iron cantilever, some engineering marvel to admire, all there was was an endless parade of grim and seedy crimes, their perpetrators and victims, that seemed to stretch from here to oblivion. Faced with that, when all you had was the manual and your training, you sometimes felt about as powerless as Popeye without his spinach. It was like turning up at some slow-motion genocide, armed only with a first aid kit.