Little Darlings. Melanie Golding

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 strong enough.

      The babies, though. The babies muddied the waters, and she knew it. So much so, that she wasn’t certain she could read the signals properly. She couldn’t tell if she felt so strongly about this case because a criminal needed to be apprehended, or because there were babies in potential danger.

      ‘Jo, get your stuff.’ It was Thrupp.

      ‘What’s up, sir?’

      ‘There’s an incident down at Kelham Island. Uniform have been dealing with it but they need our input. You can drive.’

      ‘What’s going on?’ It was unusual for a DI to be summoned to an incident. It only happened when there was something high level, like a hostage situation, or something to do with organised crime, where strategic leads were required on the ground.

      ‘Some kiddie on the roof of one of the disused factories. Reported initially as a suicide attempt. Apparently it’s escalated.’

      ‘Escalated how?’ said Harper.

      ‘It’s not enough to kill yourself, is it? Not when you can take out a building and a whole load of members of the public, too. Couple of police officers, maybe, for extra points. He says he’s got a bomb, and he wants a bloody helicopter.’

      ‘What’s the helicopter for, sir?’

      ‘I don’t know, do I? Sounds to me like he wants to blow one up. Jesus. I don’t have time for this.’

      Harper pocketed her notebook and swung her bag over a shoulder before jumping up and heading for the door.

      ‘Wait,’ said Thrupp.

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘Change those ridiculous bloody shoes. Now.’

      ‘Sorry, guv.’

      ‘Did you go out in those this morning?’

      ‘Um,’ said Harper, slipping the rubbery five-toes trainers off and her sensible shoes on. ‘No?’

      Thrupp shook his head almost all the way to the lift. She started to jog to keep up with him, his enormously long legs giving him an advantage when it came to striding.

      As Harper and Thrupp buzzed across town, down into the valley to quell disaster and keep the peace, the computer in Harper’s office blinked and went to sleep. The email from Records containing Lauren’s 999 call shuffled unnoticed into the ‘read’ section of her inbox, pressed down by the weight of the unread, soon to be consigned to the oblivion of Page Two.

Chapter 9

      The man lay half on the pavement, limbs twisted, head smashed. Blood pooled darkly, forming tendrils that crawled towards a drain. Harper started walking towards the body but was stopped by a uniformed officer.

      ‘Sorry, СКАЧАТЬ