the only defence she had was to look unbeaten. She knew what the other detectives thought of her. Token woman. Keep the politicos happy. A drain. Too wrapped up in childcare to do her job properly.
‘Sorry, John, but I got held up finishing the jobs you couldn’t manage.’
‘Not today.’ It was her inspector, Tom Clemens, a grizzly detective, known for his growls. He said it quietly, but everyone around him knew that he meant it. He was getting older, his stomach growing over his waistband, and what hair he had left was now grey and whisker-short. But every young detective wanted to end up like him.
Laura pulled at her shirt collar, throwing a warm breeze down the front of her flak jacket. Hot days in London just hang there, the heat swirled by traffic, disappearing only at night. She always thought that body armour must have been tested in December, because it wasn’t made for days like this one.
She kept looking down as the detectives were briefed, and then they set off in their pairs, intent and thoughtful, leaving her behind.
She looked up when her inspector addressed her.
‘What are they saying on the news?’ he asked.
Laura shook her head. ‘I don’t know. We’ve maybe got a few hours of shock before we get grilled.’ She looked around. ‘So what have we got?’
‘Not much,’ he answered. ‘We’re going door-to-door, trying to find where the shots came from. But it’s a slow job. If the shooter is still out there, he’s going to be waiting a long time for the knock on the door.’
‘He’s gone,’ said Laura simply. ‘Joined the crowds, headed back into town.’
‘I know that, but I’m not going to risk being wrong.’ Tom looked down at the bloodstains, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know what Dumas did to deserve this, but he’s upset someone.’
‘Where do you think the shots came from?’
He nodded away from the Cafe Boheme, towards Charing Cross Road, past the bars and cafes, Ed’s Diner, neon Americana squeezed into a corner plot. ‘The guess is somewhere over there. The people sitting outside looked instinctively one way when they heard the first shot.’ He looked back down at the floor. ‘It gets him in the right side of his chest as he’s standing. When he took the second shot, the one to the head, he had spun around, clenched up, looking into the cafe. His head snapped backwards like he’d taken the blow from the front, from inside the cafe. The people nearest to him ducked and looked that way, and that’s when the scramble around the tables started. But I think that was just instinct, going from what they saw, and no one has reported seeing the gunman in the cafe. If he’d been nearby, somebody would have seen him, without any doubt.’
‘No grassy knoll.’
He nodded. ‘One gun, two shots.’
Laura smiled. She guessed there’d be a conspiracy website online within twenty-four hours, but Laura was aware that a bullet does strange things to a head. The bullet pushes the blood out, so it can force the blood and brains out of the exit wound like a jet spray. And Laura knew that a pressure hose kicked backwards, not forwards.
Tom raised his eyes upwards. ‘We just need to know where they came from.’
Laura looked around, chewing her lip. There were five exit routes for the shooter and apartments above most of the shops and bars. Laura noticed For Sale signs, meaning empty properties. The best place to start.
‘What theories are we working on?’ she asked.
He sighed. ‘Right now, we don’t have one. Likely some crackpot did this, just for the attention. But we’re going to look into Dumas, see if he has any secrets. We’ll look at drugs, women, money, gambling, but I’m not convinced.’
‘Why not? Drugs and gambling follow fame like a best friend. You get drugs and gambling, you get bad people chasing debts.’
Tom shook his head. ‘Too much chance. This involved planning. How did anyone know Dumas would be here? My guess is that it was a gay thing, you know, like targeting anyone down here. Just seems that Dumas was in the wrong place.’
Laura looked at her inspector. She could see his forehead glistening with sweat. It was a simple shooting but she detected a fear, like he knew that whatever happened from now on would be crawled over by every hack in the land, breakfast news for the masses.
‘Maybe the gay thing was about Dumas,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m only guessing, but maybe it was some kind of violent outing. You read the papers. A few thousand men play football for money in this country, and maybe one, possibly two, have come out. There must be more gay footballers out there. Why not Dumas?’
‘Have you seen his fiancée?’ Tom said, knowing nearly everyone had seen virtually all of his fiancée, glamour shots and daily updates keeping the tabloids in business.
‘Of course I’ve seen his fiancée,’ she said. ‘I’m just saying keep an open mind.’
‘If you’re going to kill a football star,’ he said, ‘you do it properly. He’s got the money to get security, so you make it one hit, one shot, guaranteed no cock-ups.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘It will be some nutter. It always is.’
‘I made some calls before I came out,’ said Laura. ‘To Drugs, Vice. No one’s threatened Dumas and he isn’t known to us.’ When there was no answer, she asked, ‘What next? Just try and work out where the shooter was first, to see what’s there?’
‘We’ve got people going round all the businesses, seizing any CCTV footage. Got any better ideas?’
Laura looked at the floor again. She guessed not.
‘We need to catch this bastard,’ he said.
Laura nodded sadly. ‘Yeah, I know, and we will.’
As he turned away, Laura saw the other detectives glaring at her. She knew their problem: her inspector liked her, but she hadn’t put in the hours crawling up his arse.
She smiled at them, wondering when they would ever work out the connection.
She was about to walk away, get some space to think, when she saw a uniform heading towards her. As he got up to her, he said, ‘There’s been a call from an estate agent. Two of their staff were meeting a client here, and they haven’t been heard from since. They’ve missed two viewings.’
‘What was the address?’
The uniform looked around and pointed. ‘In that building there.’
As Laura followed his finger to the flats above the shops, she saw a window open just at the bottom. She turned around and followed the line of sight, saw how it looked straight down to where Dumas had been shot.
‘At least we might have solved that part of it,’ she said, and then shouted to her inspector.
I could see the media camp, kept back by crime-scene tape. They were further than I was from the scene, kept right back on Charing Cross Road, a tangle of cameras, tripods and boom microphones.
