The Trouble With Time Read Free Page B

death
     
    “His effects should have gone straight to Records,” Quinn said, seeing Jace pick over the bags. “I doubt he had family. The taxpayer will be funding his funeral.” He removed the dataphone, put everything else back into a larger bag and moved it to the top of a cabinet.
    While he was doing this the door opened and Scott and Farouk walked in together. Quinn joined his team at the table, switched on the vidcam and opened the meeting.
    “As you all know – with the possible exception of Scott – McGuire’s TiTrav is the first we’ve had wind of in the UK for nearly six months. I don’t need to tell you the potential consequences of having one of these things on the loose. Our absolute priority is to find it, and we need to do that within the next few days. Everyone in IEMA has their eye on us. If we fail, the Americans will send a team, and there is no way I am going to have that happen while I am running this department. So, let’s have your ideas.”
    Kayla said, “McGuire may have had no family – and I’ll be checking that – but he must have had associates besides Ryker. He got his drugs from someone, for one thing –”
    She was cut short by a knock on the door. Quinn looked up in irritation as the door opened and a young woman entered. “Mr Quinn, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Sir Douglas would like you to come to his office immediately.”
    Sir Douglas Calhoun was IEMA UK’s chief executive. Quinn got to his feet and looked round the table. “We’ll finish this later, by which time I’d like you to have come up with some leads.” He ripped McGuire’s dataphone out of its plastic bag and handed it to Jace. “You can start by checking out every contact on here.” He followed the young woman out of the room.
    The others stayed in the office for a few minutes, discussing possibilities, then got up to go.
    “If only McGuire hadn’t got himself shot. A man like that, he’d have told us anything we wanted to know if we only surrounded him and frowned a bit,” Farouk said tactlessly. “Would have saved us a lot of work.”
    Scott stirred but said nothing.
    Jace said, “At least it’s not one of the early TiTravs. If someone’s got it we’ll know the minute they turn it on. Which makes it pretty useless, really.”
    There was another knock on the door and a man’s head appeared. He looked around. “Mr Quinn not here?” He pointed to the bag of evidence. “Do you know if he’s finished with those yet so I can take them down to Records?”
    “Yes, take them,” said Jace.
     
    The rest of the day they spent attempting to trace McGuire’s contacts. It turned out he did have one living relative, a daughter. She was seventeen, and her name was Saffron McGuire. It seemed a surname was all he had given her; her parents had not been together for long, and never married. Her mother had brought her up alone. Jace sent Kayla to see Saffron, with the idea she might find a female cop more sympathetic. She’d just lost her father, after all, even if they’d had little contact.
    Kayla returned an hour or so later. Jace looked up from his online search, which was not going well. The only promising lead from McGuire’s dataphone turned out to have been in prison for the past six months. “How did you get on?”
    Kayla dumped her handbag on Jace’s desk and pulled up a chair. “I didn’t see her. She locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.”
    “Did she say anything through the door?”
    “Yes. ‘Fuck off’.”
    “Ah. What about her mother?”
    “She was quite friendly. She’s got a boyfriend who lives in the flat. They’ve been together for five years.”
    “Did she say anything useful?”
    “No. She was happy to chat, she made me a cup of tea, but she hasn’t seen McGuire for years. Said she should never have got involved with him, he was always a waster, but she was just a teenager and didn’t know any better. He was good-looking, apparently, when he was