Into the Dark by Stuart Johnstone

Author:Stuart Johnstone [Johnstone, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2021-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Alyson yawned and stretched, checking her watch at the same time. She’d knock off in an hour or so, but she liked this time, this calm period that always felt like the warm-down after a long run. It was a chance to look at things without the distracting buzz of the office – especially without the stress that came off DCI Templeton like steam, which was difficult not to breathe in.

The DCI left twenty minutes ago. Alyson could safely leave at any time now that she was gone. It wasn’t presenteeism that had her here after most, if not all, had left. Although it probably didn’t do her career any harm to hear the DCI saying goodnight most days. She stayed because if she was going to figure this out, it would only happen with a bit of quiet.

The first floor at Leith Police Station had steadily filled. It wasn’t as crazy as things had been at the beginning of the Bradley case, but it was getting there. Her own role had changed, and that was a good thing. Before, she felt like an office junior, and now she was part of the core team. Duncan’s advice had been sound: ‘Stay involved’. There were four new members of the enquiry team, pulled from a pro-active unit who worked out of Fettes, whose only job was to trawl through city CCTV now that they had a more accurate description of the van that may or may not have been involved. DCI Templeton had been happy about that development and Alyson was pleased that Duncan had been sure to let her know Alyson had been responsible for it. The mind-numbing CCTV job might have been hers if she hadn’t stayed so close to Duncan and the DCI. It didn’t hurt either that she was HOLMES trained. Another reason to keep her from the grunt work.

She recalled when she’d undertaken the training. As interesting as it was, she was also certain as to its futility. They’d used the example of Peter Tobin to show how the system works from a Scottish perspective, but how many Peter Tobins was she likely to encounter in her career? Serial killers were not common in the UK and a rare species indeed in Scotland, yet here she was, using the system she’d been sure she never would. The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System was software designed to take, store, evaluate and crucially link massive amounts of data collated during any large inquiry, its necessity highlighted during the evaluation and review of the Peter Sutcliffe conviction in 1981. West Yorkshire Police had missed several opportunities to link the Yorkshire Ripper to his victims due to the antiquated card-index system they had used.

Still, she’d sat in front of the computer day after day inputting data and running analysis and still no link had been thrown up between a ten-year-old boy and a seventy-one-year-old priest. If you’d started a joke with these two victims, there would have been some grim punchline laying into the Church’s deplorable record of child abuse.

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