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TWELVE

‘Police. What’s your emergency?’

‘I’m in Hendon Park, near the tennis courts . . . and there’s this man. He started talking to me and I thought he was OK at first, but then it all got a bit weird.’

‘Can you tell me your name, love?’

‘He was saying things, being dirty, like I was a prostitute or something.’

‘It’s all right, love, just try to stay calm and tell me—’

‘I tried to leave and he wouldn’t let me. He tried to grab me, so I had to run. I’m hiding now because I don’t know where he’s gone. Fuck . . . fuck, I think he’s still in the park.’

‘So, you’re by the tennis courts?’

‘Yeah, and there’s a café. I’m hiding in the trees, yeah?’

‘That’s the Queens Road entrance, is that right?’

‘You need to send someone, now. You need to get some police here. I’m scared . . . ’

‘Someone’s already on their way, OK? You can stay on the line until an officer gets to you, if you want to—’

‘No, I need to move.’

‘It might be best if you stay where you are, so the officer can find you—’

‘Shit, I can hear someone. It can’t be the police already, can it . . . ’

‘Are you still there, love . . . ?’

Brigstocke hit the button to stop the playback. He leaned away from the computer and turned, eager to hear from those members of the team who were sitting in a semicircle around one of the desks in the incident room. He looked to Thorne first. ‘Tom?’

Having left the park a couple of hours earlier, Thorne had gone home to shower and grab something to eat.

He’d arrived at the office just after seven, and while dozens of uniforms began a fingertip search of the area where the body was found and went door to door on the surrounding streets, he and the other detectives had been called into the incident room to listen to the 999 call.

‘She certainly sounds scared to me,’ Thorne said. ‘Breathless too, like she’d been running.’ He looked to Tanner, Desai and Chall. Nobody seemed to disagree with him. ‘If it was a set-up, she made a good job of it.’

‘We don’t know that yet,’ Brigstocke said.

‘What was she even doing in the park at three in the morning?’ Chall asked. ‘It’s a bit late to be walking a dog or whatever.’

Desai shook her head. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Anyone hear an accent?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘Not a strong one,’ Thorne said. ‘London, though, I reckon.’

‘Agreed,’ Tanner said.

Brigstocke stood up. ‘Right, well, let’s hope we can get a bit more from Callaghan’s bodycam.’

The rest of the team got to their feet and followed the DCI to a different desk, to a computer with a bigger screen.

The camera had been removed from Adam Callaghan’s stab vest and a civilian technician had already slotted it into a dock on top of the desk.

The contents were downloaded quickly, and the technician began scrolling through footage from the first few hours of the dead policeman’s shift.

He stopped once Callaghan was stepping out of his car at the entrance to Hendon Park.

As they were moving chairs into position and sitting down ready to watch, Thorne leaned across to Brigstocke. ‘Where’s Dave?’

‘He was called out in the HAT car.’ Brigstocke waved at the technician to let him know they were ready. ‘Likely suicide in Finchley.’

‘Likely?’

‘More than likely. Some poor sod chucked himself off Dollis Brook viaduct.’

The job of any on-call detective working with the Homicide Assessment Team would simply be to decide if a death was suspicious.

In almost all cases it was a straightforward call, especially where suicide was the most obvious cause.

Thorne knew that Holland would do his job, but also knew he would have resented the demand on his time, especially now.

Whether or not it turned out to be connected to the poisoning of Tully and the others, he would have wanted to be working the Callaghan murder.

‘Here we go,’ Brigstocke said.

The members of the team leaned forward as the footage began to play.

The final minutes of Police Constable Adam Callaghan’s life, as he would have seen it . . .

It’s predictably jumpy, with Callaghan on the move and in a hurry. The date, time code and officer ID are displayed in the top right-hand corner of the screen, the Metropolitan Police logo in the bottom left.

He walks quickly into the park past the shuttered-up café.

The light from the camera illuminates the path, perhaps fifteen feet of it ahead of him as he walks.

He keys the radio attached to his shoulder to let control know that he’s at the location and looking for the caller. Control acknowledges the message.

There is a rhythmic clatter as his stab vest judders against his chest.

He looks right and left every few steps and the camera shows the tennis courts on one side, a thick cluster of trees to the other.

He stops and shouts, ‘Police.’ He waits, but there is only the sound of his own breathing, so he moves on again.

Half a minute later he emerges on to a large open space. There is a semicircle of trees across from him, black against the slate sky, and he moves towards it, shouting again as he picks up speed.

A voice shouts back, high-pitched and desperate.

‘I’m here . . . ’

He begins to jog towards the woodland, his breathing heavier, the stab vest bouncing noisily against him as he moves. The picture freezes momentarily and shifts: dark grass, the trees up ahead; a glimpse of his boot as he runs and lights from one or two of the houses beyond the trees.

He mutters, ‘Fuck,’ as he slips, straightens up and starts to run again.

Half a minute later he is into the trees. He slows and begins to move more cautiously, stepping across large branches and around thick patches of mud. He stops to shout, ‘Where are you?’ and there is movement away to his right. He turns and the camera catches a flash of silver among the branches.

He walks slowly across to where a figure is crouched behind a large tree, arms wrapped around knees, head bowed. He says, ‘Are you injured?’

The head, covered in a thick woollen cap, shakes.

‘You reported a man,’ he says. ‘Is he still nearby?’ He spins slowly around to scan the immediate area and when he is facing the figure again, we see that it’s a young woman who is now getting slowly to her feet. She’s wearing jeans and a silver Puffa jacket. She’s breathing heavily.

‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘You’re safe now. Are you sure you don’t need any medical attention?’

She shakes her head again and steps away from the tree.

He keys his radio. Says, ‘I’ve located the caller and she appears to be unhurt . . . ’

The young woman smiles. ‘Unhurt? That’s actually quite funny.’

‘Sorry, why is it—’

‘You seriously don’t recognise me, Adam?’ She takes another step towards him and removes her cap. ‘How about now?’

There are a few seconds of silence before PC Adam Callaghan’s hand is raised quickly towards his camera and the footage abruptly ends.

‘Shit,’ Brigstocke said.

Thorne had nothing more incisive to add.

While other members of the team exchanged bemused looks, Brigstocke instructed the tech to take the footage back until the screen was filled with a nice clear shot of the woman after she’d removed her cap.

Then he stood and leaned back against the desk.

‘Well, not ultimately as helpful as it might have been, but we do at least have a decent picture of our prime suspect. We need to get this out there as widely as possible. We need to hit all the papers and every local TV news outlet and make sure it’s distributed at every station roll call for the rest of the day.

’ He turned to look back at the image of the woman in the Puffa jacket. ‘Let’s find out who she is.’

The team began to disperse, but both Thorne and Brigstocke stayed where they were. Thorne looked across and Brigstocke’s expression told him that the DCI was thinking much the same as he was.

Yes, they needed to identify the woman, but it would be the answer to an altogether different question which might ultimately prove to be more valuable.

Why the hell had Adam Callaghan turned off his bodycam?