‘I don’t want you dealing with my case,’ Anna said flatly.
‘It’s not your decision,’ Townsend replied.
‘I’m making it my decision. I don’t have faith in your competency, Detective Inspector.’
‘You’ll have to take the issue up with my Chief Inspector.’
‘I don’t think you’re good at your job. You’ve certainly screwed things up with your investigation into the Steiners.’
‘Get out of my way, Ms Vaughan.’
‘Not until you tell me the name of the officer you’re passing my case on to.’
‘I said, get out of my way, Ms Vaughan. I don’t have time for this nonsense, I’m a very busy man.’
‘I’ll tell you again, you’re incompetent. And worse than that, you’re prejudiced. Against me.’
‘I’m becoming increasingly tired of dealing with you, Ms Vaughan.’
‘You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care if you handle my case or not, it doesn’t matter a damn, not compared to what’s happened to Ben and Sharon Steiner. Forget me, go out there and find her, Detective Inspector Townsend, find Sharon Steiner. Do your bloody job. More than that – show some humanity. Get your damned investigation sorted out, get your team into shape, and find Sharon Steiner while there’s still anything left of her to find!’
Townsend stared at her, his face expressionless except for the flexing of his jaw muscles. Then, in a very low voice, he said: ‘Accompany me to my office, Ms Vaughan.’
‘Accompany you to your office!’ Anna snorted. ‘What the hell are you, the head-bloody-master?!’
He pushed past her and stormed along a corridor, reaching the door to his office and flinging it open with a resounding bang.
‘In!’ he ordered.
‘This isn’t a police state yet, you know.’
‘In!’
‘Another time, Detective Inspector. I’m busy too. I have to get home and write an article … about you, and how you’ve behaved here tonight. Who knows, it might just finish your career. It certainly won’t do your promotion prospects any favours.’
‘In!’
‘I’ll make my own way home,’ Anna said, and with that she turned on her heel to walk away.
‘Ms Vaughan,’ Townsend called after her. ‘One last thing before you go.’
Anna stopped, sighed heavily, and waited.
‘Well?’
‘I just wanted to say … well done.’
Nonplussed, Anna turned round and looked back along the corridor at Detective Inspector Townsend. But now she saw that Townsend’s whole demeanour had changed. He was smiling. His eyes were smiling, all the iciness and aggression melted away from them.
‘I mean it, Ms Vaughan,’ he said, and there was warmth in his voice, there was humanity. ‘It’s one thing to stand up to the police at a press conference surrounded by fellow reporters – but it takes real guts to do it alone, without backup, in the depths of a police station at two in the morning. So – well done. And please accept my apologies. I would rather not have had to put you through such rough treatment just now. Rest assured that I would never have subjected you to any of it without good reason. A damn good reason.’
‘Good reason? I … I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
‘The Steiner case. You have no idea what’s really happening with it, Ms Vaughan. No idea at all. And given what’s happened to you tonight, with that so-called present turning up on your doorstep, it looks like you’re far, far more involved with that case than you can imagine.’
‘I … I …’
Townsend held out his hand to her, a genuine gesture.
‘Please, come through to my office and I’ll explain everything,’ he said. ‘It’s important, Ms Vaughan – not just to the Steiner case, but to you, personally. I need to speak to you. Your life might very well depend on it.’
Anna stepped warily into Townsend’s office. She still didn’t trust him. Even less did she understand what the hell was going on with him.
‘Please, take a seat,’ he said.
Gingerly, she sat down. Townsend settled himself behind his desk across from her. It was the same arrangement as in the interview room just moments before, but the atmosphere was now completely different. The sense of hostility was gone. Townsend gently offered Anna another coffee, apologised again for his earlier treatment of her, and then dug out a file from his desk drawer.
‘Look familiar?’ he asked, sliding the file across to her.
Anna opened it and leafed through the pages inside. They were transcripts of emails – the emails sent to her by the ‘whistleblower’ inside CID – and the emails Anna had sent back in return.
‘You’ve been monitoring me all along, I take it,’ Anna said.
‘In a manner of speaking. This whistleblower you’ve been communicating with – it’s me, Ms Vaughan. All that so-called insider information you’ve been receiving came from the laptop sitting here on this very desk between us.’
‘But … But I …’
‘Had a single word of it been true, Ms Vaughan, you would of course have been totally justified to make it public in your newspaper articles. As it happens, it wasn’t true at all. It was lies, Ms Vaughan. I fabricated everything – the cock-up with forensics, the missing CCTV footage, the procedural irregularities.’
‘You duped me.’
‘Yes,’ said Townsend, without a hint of gloating. He was, if anything, apologetic. ‘Yes, Ms Vaughan, I duped you. And you will, of course, be keen to know why. Well, now the deception has been revealed, the time has come to explain what’s really going on with the Steiner investigation.’
He opened up his laptop. An audio-visual screen behind his desk lit up, displaying a police forensics photograph.
‘This is the Steiners’ bedroom as we found it after the abduction,’ Townsend explained. ‘As you can see, the bed sheets are all disturbed, a chair is tipped over, there are signs of a struggle all around the room … and, of course, there’s the blood.’
A second photograph showed a huge black mass of blood on the floor beside the bed and thick, red streaks leading away from it towards the door.
‘It’s Ben Steiner’s blood,’ Townsend went on. ‘Forensics got an ID on it almost straight away – despite what we led you to believe, Ms Vaughan. We’re pretty sure he was attacked in the bed with an axe of some sort, that his body fell here, next to the bed, and that he was then dragged – either dead or unconscious – across the floor.’
A third photo showed the blood streaks leading across the Steiners’ first-floor landing and disappearing into the bathroom.
‘The body, what’s left of it, was found in the bath tub. Do you have a strong stomach, Ms Vaughan?’
‘I … um … well …’
‘I can jump ahead. You don’t need to see it.’
‘No. No, I can take it. Show me.’
She regretted it almost at once. But although she winced, she forced herself not to look away.
‘We think the axe that was used on Ben Steiner in the bedroom is the same on that was used to dismember him in the bath tub,’ Townsend said, staring at the horrific photograph