Manhattan in Reverse Read Free Page A

hugged her tighter.
    I made an effort to focus on the task in hand. ‘We’d like samples of every specimen the forensic team collects from here, fibres, hair, whatever,’ I told the detective. The basic procedures which had been reiterated time and again during my investigator courses at the family institute. Other strategies were invoked by what I saw. I lowered my voice, turning slightly away from the students so I could speak my mind freely, and spare them any further distress at this time. ‘And it might be a good idea to take blood samples from people in the immediate vicinity as well as any suspects you might determine. They should all be tested for alcohol or narcotics. Whoever did this was way off balance.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ the detective said. ‘My team’s already on its way. They know what they’re doing.’
    ‘That’s fine,’ Francis said. His look rebuked me. ‘If we could also sit in on the interviews, please.’
    ‘Certainly.’
    *
     
    The Oxford City police station was less than a mile from Dunbar College. When Francis and I reached it at one o’clock there were few officers on duty. That changed over the next hour as Gareth Alan Pitchford assembled his investigator team with impressive competence. Officers and constables began to arrive, dressed in mussed uniforms, bleary-eyed, switching on the central heating in unused offices, calling down to stores for equipment. A couple of canteen staff came in and started brewing tea and coffee.
    The building’s Major Crime Operations Centre swung into action as Gareth Alan Pitchford made near-continuous briefings to each new batch of his recruits. Secretaries began clacking away on typewriters; detectives pinned large-scale maps of Oxford on the wall; names were hurriedly chalked up on the blackboard, a confusing trail of lines linking them in various ways; and telephones built to a perpetual chorus of whistles.
    People were brought in and asked to wait in holding rooms. The chief suspects, though no one was impolite enough to say it to their faces. Gareth Alan Pitchford soon had over thirty young men and women worrying away in isolation.
    ‘I’ve divided them into two categories,’ he told the Operations Centre. ‘Dunbar students sharing the same accommodation wing; physically close enough to have killed Raleigh, but for whom there is no known motive, just opportunity. And a batch of his closest friends. We’re still waiting for the last one of them to arrive, but I gather the uniform division has now located him. First off, I want the doctor to collect blood samples from all of them before the interviews start; if this is a drug- or alcohol-induced crime we’ll need to be quick to catch the evidence.’
    Standing discreetly at the back of the room, I watched the rest of the officers acknowledge this. It was as though they were willing that to be the solution. Like me, they didn’t want a world where one normal, unaffected person could do this to another.
    ‘Wrong approach,’ Francis muttered quietly to me.
    ‘In what way?’ I muttered back.
    ‘This slaying was planned; methodically and cleverly. Drugs or alcohol implies spur-of-the-moment madness. An irrational act to which there would have been witnesses. You mark my words: there won’t be a fingerprint on either the knife or the window.’
    ‘You may be right.’
    ‘When Pitchford starts the interviews, I want us to attend those with Justin’s friends. Do I need to tell you why?’
    ‘No.’ It was at a time like this I both appreciated and resented the old man’s testing. It was an oblique compliment that he thought I had the potential to succeed him eventually; but it was irritating in equal proportion that I was treated as the office junior. ‘Whoever did this had to know Justin, which means the friends are the only genuine suspects.’
    ‘Glad to see all those expensive courses we sent you on haven’t been totally wasted,’ Francis said. I heard a reluctant note of approval