The Silent Room by Mari Hannah

Author:Mari Hannah [Hannah, Mari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781447291060
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

40

Ryan lucked out chasing up his enhancement job on the video shot at the scene. Roz’s memory stick was faulty. Accessing its data was proving more difficult than he’d hoped. He swore under his breath. ‘Please tell me by faulty you don’t mean irretrievable.’

‘No,’ his contact said. ‘We’ll get there.’

‘When?’

Ryan rolled his eyes at Grace as she looked up from her computer, hands hovering over the keyboard. He could see from the monitor that she was searching the HOLMES database, trying to match their unofficial investigation with the official one. In his ear, Ryan’s contact was apologizing, offering no assurances whatsoever. The guy was being noncommittal rather than evasive.

‘C’mon,’ Ryan pushed. ‘You must have some idea.’

‘It’s difficult to say. I can’t give you a timescale.’

Ryan sighed: a further delay was not what he needed. Six days in and he was nowhere. Urging his contact to do his best, he hung up, swearing as he threw his mobile on the table.

‘Problem?’ Grace asked.

‘You could say that.’

‘It’s not going too well this end either.’ She pointed at her monitor. ‘I can’t be certain that what is in here corresponds with the original statements and house-to-house forms.’ She pushed a few keys, her eyes on the screen. ‘The only way to be absolutely sure is to look at one and read the other.’

Ryan groaned.

Grace sat back, her face set in a scowl. ‘Indexers are fallible, Ryan. They may be skilled at inputting data but they’re human. We can’t afford to take it as read. There’s a shedload of difference between “he didn’t hit him” and “he didn’t hit him very hard”. All it takes is for someone to be interrupted, miss a couple of words, and you end up with something else entirely.’

‘Reminds me of the Derek Bentley case.’

‘Yeah, although that was an argument about the meaning of the spoken word rather than a simple typo.’ She paused. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to know about that?’

Ryan didn’t answer. He could see from her expression that she’d realized how daft the question was. From a very young age, he’d held a deep – some would say, unhealthy – fascination with the murder of British police officers. It was an old case that had received massive media attention. The interpretation of ‘Let him have it’ as in, Let him have it with both barrels or, as Bentley’s defence argued, Hand over the gun, were fought over for decades. Bentley received a posthumous pardon in 1998.

‘Aren’t statements scanned in nowadays?’ Ryan asked, changing the subject.

‘Not according to my source at MIT. It’s manual input only, I’m afraid.’

Ryan made a derogatory comment about the police force moving at a snail’s pace. ‘On the plus side,’ he said, ‘there are very few witnesses to the abduction. It’s a tight scene, the offence carried out in broad daylight. Minimal house-to-house, given its location—’

‘What we need is access to O’Neil’s data,’ Grace interrupted.

Ryan pulled a face. ‘You want to ask her for that? Because I don’t.’

‘There is another way.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Grace was grinning.

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