Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch Page B

awkward long shape that hinted of two rooms that had been knocked together. It was pleasingly not-pink, but instead wallpapered with subtle lemon yellow and light blue stripes. The furniture was expensive but modern and had taken some punishment around the legs and corners. Again not much in the way of books, just the rest of the Harry Potter set and what looked like textbooks on the fold-down desk. Much less in the way of furry mascots, but stray bits of Lego had worked their way into gaps between the chest of drawers and the skirting board. An obvious gap where the High-Tech Crime unit had had it away with her laptop. A poster of Hunger Games over the bed – Jennifer Lawrence taking aim down the length of an arrow.
    I pulled out one of the Harry Potters. It was practically mint, probably unread. I put it back and decided that there wasn’t anything useful here.
    ‘I understand why you have to do these things,’ said Victoria Lacey from behind me – I turned to find her in the doorway. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to.’
    ‘So do I, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Did Nicole have a Kindle or any other kind of eReader?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I’m sorry?’
    ‘Why do you want to know?’ she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
    ‘They can get emails and other social media,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that. We need to ensure we haven’t overlooked any avenues of communication that might have existed between Nicole and other people.’
    ‘When you say “other people” you mean paedophiles, don’t you?’
    Her lips clamped shut on the end of the sentence. I could see she was trying to say the unthinkable in the hope it wouldn’t be true – it’s a sort of magic thinking, but unfortunately not the kind that works.
    ‘Not just paedophiles,’ I said. ‘Undesirable contacts, estranged parents, dealers, gang members, that sort of thing.’ Christ, I thought. Talk about scant comfort.
    ‘That’s your speciality in London, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Gang violence, that sort of thing.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I check for things that other officers overlook.’
    ‘Because there aren’t any gangs out here,’ she said. ‘I mean, apart from the Travellers and I suppose some of the Poles, but then they don’t live around here as such.’ She stopped and stared at me for a moment. ‘This is a good place to bring up kids, you know. Not like London. I mean, anything can happen in London.’
    I asked her if she’d grown up in London herself, but she said she came from Guildford.
    ‘But I lived in London for a couple of years. Before I met Derek,’ she said. ‘He’s from here. I’m from off . That matters up here. But I suppose in London everyone’s from off .’
    Except those of us who are from Kentish Town, I thought.
    ‘Derek whisked me up here almost as soon as he heard I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘He already had the house by then, bought it off the church when the village lost its vicar. I’m glad he did, because there’s room for kids out here.’ She looked around the room. ‘Do you think they have missed something?’
    I glanced around the room – there were still traces of fingerprint powder around the window frames, the door, and anywhere else an intruder might have touched. I estimated that more forensic time had been spent in that one room than in the last fifty local burglary investigations.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they have.’
    She started to cry then. I’m not even sure she was aware it was happening until she felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. I took a step towards her, but she whirled quickly around and fled.
    I went downstairs and let myself out.
    The next morning my phone pinged while I was in the shower. It was an email from Kimberly Cidre at the High Tech unit. There was an attached image which even my dinky phone display could expand enough for me to see a familiar pattern of microscopic pits and lesions. I forwarded them on to Dr Walid but I