When the Evil Waits by M Lee (top fiction books of all time txt) 📕

heard anything from Paul Turnbull?’

He shook his head. ‘Not a lot.’

She decided to be more direct. ‘What have you heard?’

Makepeace smiled. ‘Not a lot. It’s on a need-to-know basis and Turnbull has specified that you two, and me, don’t need to know.’

‘Thanks for the heads-up before.’

‘We have to stick together against the idiots. We’re being frozen out, Emily. I’d start packing your boxes if I were you.’

He smiled once again at both of them and sauntered back to his desk.

‘Can you find out, Chrissy?’ said Emily under her breath.

‘I’ll try – a few of them owe me favours. What are you going to do?’

‘Spend the rest of my evening sitting next to somebody who sweats and is desperate to get into my knickers.’

‘Sounds interesting.’

‘I wish.’

Twenty minutes later she went up to the techies’ floor while Makepeace was away from his desk – Nerd Central, as it was called by the less enlightened members of the force, but in modern policing, it had become a vital resource. It was here that data on mobile phones was extracted, computer codes cracked, and most importantly for her, CCTV images analysed.

Phil Reynolds was the techie head of CCTV, sitting in his own private edit suite built from taxpayers’ money. She knew he fancied her and wasn’t above using that fact to ensure her work received priority. Now she had to face spending a whole evening together without even a glass of wine for solace.

‘Have we got anything, Phil?’ She sat down, feeling him tense up beside her.

‘Hiya, Emily, the data from Daniel Carsley’s phone hasn’t come in yet. The lads are stuffed working on a county lines drug case, trying to break encrypted messages. Rather them than me.’

‘When can we get the times off the mobile towers?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Not very useful, Phil.’

The techie blushed. ‘I have more bad news. The hard drive you gave me from the shop is totally fried. I don’t know what they’ve done with it but it looks like it’s spent the last six months at the bottom of the Mersey.’

‘Nothing you can do?’

‘We could sell it for scrap and make a couple of bob, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t be too keen.’

She smiled briefly. ‘Right. How about the footage from the ATM and from the trams?’

‘Both look good. Which do you want first?’

‘Let’s do the trams, starting with the first one on the morning of the 23rd that stopped at Sale Water Park.’

‘Righto – gone with the wind, coming right up.’

‘Gone with the Wind?’

‘A tram? Moving? Gone with the wind?’

She laughed dutifully. Techie jokes were always the worst. ‘Let’s start with the platform footage.’

‘What are you looking for?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

Chapter 47

‘Hiya, Dad.’

Eve was bright and bouncy on his screen. Exactly the opposite of how he felt.

He stopped off in Greggs to grab a couple of Cornish pasties for dinner, eating them sitting alone at the kitchen table of the service apartment with a cup of tea. Next to him was his laptop. He had finished the report for Claire Trent earlier and was checking it for typos.

Of course, Polly was there by his side.

‘Don’t take it so hard, Ridpath. It’s just a job like any other. You win some, you lose some.’

He stared straight at the face of his dead wife. ‘I seem to be losing a lot, recently.’

She laughed out loud. ‘Oh dear, we are enjoying a pity party today.’ She pretended to cry, rubbing her eyes like a baby. It was the same way she used to tease him when he came home from work with a grumpy face. ‘Boo hoo, poor Ridpath, he’s been taken off the case. What is he going to do? Roll over and give up?’

‘I don’t ever roll over and I ever don’t give up.’

‘So why are you doing it this time?’

He looked away and when he looked back, she had vanished.

He threw the half-eaten pasty in the bin and called up his daughter. He always missed her voice, missed her brightness.

‘Sorry about ringing so late last night, I was on a case.’

‘Which one?’

‘You know I’m not supposed to talk about it.’

‘I know, but I won’t tell anyone. Anyway, there’s only Paw Paw and Ah Kung here and they spend their lives watching Hong Kong television.’

‘Sorry, still can’t tell you and anyway, I’m off it now.’

‘That does sound good.’

‘It doesn’t feel good either. I’m sorry, thinking about myself all the time. Living with Grandpa and Grandma, it’s not great for you, is it?’

‘It’s not so bad. They mean well, but they’re from a different generation. Their idea of fun is to watch the news in Cantonese.’

‘You know they love you, don’t you?’

‘I know.’ A long pause. ‘When are we going to get back together, Dad?’

‘Soon, when I’m more settled, more in control.’

‘But when will that be? Give me a date, a time?’

‘I don’t know, Eve.’

‘You said it would be when the case finished. Well, it’s finished now, you said you were off it. So can I come home?’

‘Not yet, but soon, I promise.’

She pursed her mouth but finally nodded. ‘Promise me something else.’

‘Anything, Eve.’

‘We’re going to put flowers on Mum’s grave on Sunday. Promise me you’ll come too.’

‘I’ll try…’

‘Trying isn’t doing, Dad.’

‘When did you become the little philosopher?’

‘Since Mum died, one of us has to. And don’t change the subject…’

Ridpath closed his eyes for a second. Polly’s face appeared in his mind as he remembered her when they first met on St Patrick’s Day, with her bright green hair, like an Irish leprechaun dancing to a wild reel. Except she wasn’t Irish but Chinese and the music was by Maroon 5 and Destiny’s Child.

‘Dad?’

He heard Eve’s voice as if it were coming from the end of a long tunnel. ‘I’ll try,’ he finally whispered.

Chapter 48

It was close to ten p.m. when she finally discovered something.

The footage from the platforms had been worse than useless. Sale Water Park wasn’t a busy stop. Hardly anybody got on or off before nine a.m. There