Page 9 of No Safe Place
Chapter 5
Wednesday | Morning
Field
One of the benefits of being the Senior Investigating Officer was the power to follow whatever thread you deemed most important, without having to answer to ten people first.
Next on her list, and a persistent gripe at the back of her mind: the sheet of paper she’d recovered from David’s torn clothes. Field strode over to the car that the evidence was being placed into, nodded at the squeaky-voiced youngster in charge of the exhibits.
She rifled through the paper bags, finding the one she wanted at the back.
The sheet of typed A4, badly bloodstained, but legible through the plastic. She scanned the first page.
The Disordered Approach to Diagnosis:a pilot study of the impact of misdiagnoses on young people withcomplex presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and subsequent group-therapy treatment
It was the title page of a paper or an article. It didn’t have an author’s name, but she assumed it was something David was working on, possibly brought home from work with him in a pocket.
Not necessarily the smoking gun she’d hoped for. The attacker’s bank statement or something, dropped as he legged it.
Field leaned closer to the sheet, flattening out the plastic window of the evidence bag. Most of the bottom half of the page was smeared with blood.
There was always a chance that the attacker dropped it deliberately. Pointedly.
Field’s phone buzzed in her back pocket.
She answered the call reluctantly, and only because she had no excuse not to.
The superintendent didn’t wait for her greeting. ‘Quite a morning you’re having over there, DCI Field?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, then stopped speaking.
Field put the sheet of paper back in the boot, and walked to a patch of road where there were fewer people to eavesdrop.
‘I can have this case reassigned. Say the word.’ The superintendent was using his best kindly-and-calming voice, and Field could picture his smug smile on the other end of the line.
Prick.
She kicked at a crumbling garden wall and didn’t answer.
‘You’ve got a lot on, and that case coming up at the Bailey,andyou’ve got the most junior team. We can get someone else—’
Meaning someone male.
‘—to take over from you, if you’d prefer. DCI Raynott, maybe?’
Field did not prefer. DCI Raynott was an arse. They were basically the same age, but unlike her, Raynott had never had children – and unlike him, Field had never had Botox.
Field had been the DCI for Major Investigation Team 4 for six years, and a DI for another seven before that – but somehow MIT4 still ended up with the shit cases. Reassigned from anything meaty and given the months-old dregs. It didn’t help that they were a DI and a DS short compared to the other South London teams, and there was no budget to fill out the ranks.
Field had also ended up in the awkward in-between career position of giving keen newly transferred DSs their first run-around. Just as the young fuckers knew what they were doing, they’d get promoted to a growing task force or a different MIT with a juicier caseload.
‘Like I said,’ the super simpered down the phone, ‘it’s a big case, could be national news.’
Because how could a perimenopausal DCI with twenty-five years’ experience be expected to handle a case of this magnitude?
‘It’s fine, guv,’ she said, finally. He hated being called guv. ‘I was first on scene, and anyway, I’m about to go and inform the wife. It should be me.’
Field shouldn’t use informing a woman her husband was in a coma to points-score against her boss, but needs must.
