Silent Footsteps by Jo Bannister

Author:Jo Bannister [Jo Bannister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2018-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Superintendent Maybourne, who had not become Norbold’s senior police officer by having her name pulled out of a hat, saw immediately the advantages of Detective Chief Inspector Gorman’s request. With Gabriel Ash in hospital, nothing would induce Hazel to return to Cambridgeshire; and if she was going to be in Norbold, the safest place for her was at a computer in the upper reaches of Meadowvale Police Station. She agreed to a temporary attachment to CID while Gorman was still warming up his argument.

More surprisingly, Hazel herself raised no objection. Indeed, she seemed to see the proposal as a good career move, and Saturday morning found her out of uniform and closeted with Gillian Mitchell’s computer files.

DS Presley was right: IT was her thing. She’d taught the subject at high school level before joining the police, and she knew what Tom Presley did not: that computers aren’t clever, they just do very simple things very quickly, and the secret to making them work for you lies in how you formulate your instructions. Hazel would only open the files one after another and read their contents page by page, which is what Presley would have done, if she couldn’t find what she was looking for in a fraction of the time by searching the entire drive for a list of key words.

After two hours of this, she had preliminary findings to share.

‘This is not a comprehensive list of everything Gillian Mitchell wrote on her computer,’ she explained, pausing until Gorman nodded his understanding. ‘I haven’t finished. I’ll go down deeper, unpeeling the memory like an onion, and there’ll be other connections I haven’t stumbled on yet. But what I’ve got so far is worth you having a look at right now.’

‘Yes?’ hazarded Gorman. ‘Good …’

Hazel smiled tolerantly. He was not really a twenty-first-century policeman. He was more at home with notebooks than iPads, with breaking down doors than dismantling security protocols, and with villains he could wrestle with rather than those he had to out-think. That didn’t stop him being an effective investigator, it just meant that when it came to data manipulation he needed the explanations to be kept simple. So she didn’t try to impress him with her skill but went straight to the headline.

‘Gillian Mitchell knew Leo Harte.’

Dave Gorman’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline. Admittedly, they hadn’t far to go, and once there they blended in perfectly. But Hazel would treasure his astonishment for the rest of her life. ‘Did she, by God!’

‘She had a file full of facts, figures and dates, charting his career from teenage hustler to serious white-collar criminal. Hard to know how much of this would stand up in court, but if even a quarter of it was verifiable he was going to spend the next fifteen years behind bars.’

‘She was writing an article about him?’ Gorman whistled, deeply impressed. ‘That took guts.’

‘I think she was writing a book. There’s an outline there, a couple of chapters roughed out – and then it all stops.

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