Free Prime Suspect 3: Silent Victims by Lynda La Plante

tossed the report onto Halliday’s desk. “It’s just official, the fire—it wasn’t accidental.”
    “Well, in that case it’s nothing to do with us, is it!” A smile broke over Halliday’s pallid features. Maybe now he could shake this blasted hangover. He sat back, relieved. “Thank God!”
    “Make sure she understands that this is the Vice Squad,” Chiswick told him stolidly, spelling it out. “Any other crimes are forwarded to the correct departments.”
    “We might have a bit of a problem. The boy was earmarked in Operation Contract, could be a tie-in, but I’ll have a word . . .”
    “You’d better,” Commander Chiswick said, his face stern. “I don’t want her—us—to have anything to do with this murder, so reallocate the investigation.” He wagged his finger. “And tell her, Jack, she has no option.”
    Chiswick went out, leaving Halliday delicately massaging his temples with his fingertips.
    They arrived at the morgue a few minutes before two-thirty, and were about to enter the laboratory when Tennison received a call on her mobile. She waved Otley on and listened to Norma relaying her messages.
    “Right. Okay. Did he leave a number?” Tennison couldn’t get to her notebook fast enough, so she wrote the number on her hand. “Anything else?” She listened impatiently. “Again? Just tell her I am unavailable, or put her onto the press officer.”
    She zapped the aerial back and strode into the white-tiled laboratory. Otley was standing with Craig, a scientist with the Forensic team, before a large, oblong lab bench with a white plastic worktop. Pieces of burnt remnants from the boy’s leather jacket, trousers, boots, and underwear were pegged out and separately tagged. There were some loose change, covered in sticky human soot, and sections of what had been a leather wallet, calcified in the heat so that it crumbled to the touch.
    “Just official, the fire wasn’t accidental,” Tennison informed Otley. “What’s all this?” she asked, sticking her nose in and watching Craig poking with a glass rod at a hard wad of blackened paper that was crumbling to grayish ash.
    “Money. Or the remains of it. We’ve still got some under the microscope, but it’s quite a lot.”
    “Like about how much?”
    Craig was squinting at it through horn-rimmed glasses, wrinkling his hairy nostrils. “At least five hundred, could be more.” Using the glass rod as a pointer, he took them through the display. “The clothes, all good expensive items. Quality footwear. We’ve got a label from his leather coat, it was Armani. . . .”
    He moved on, and Tennison said in a quiet aside to Otley, “Martin Fletcher didn’t say anything about money, did he? You think this is what Jackson was after?”
    Otley shrugged. Money hadn’t even been mentioned.”
    Farther along the bench, Craig was pointing to some crinkled bits of glossy paper. “These are sections of phtographs, all beyond salvaging, but they were stuffed inside his jacket. And these scraps of paper, all charred, I’m afraid. Possibly letters . . . hard to tell.”
    “This is it?” Tennison said, surveying the worktop.
    “Yes, this is all that’s left of him,” Craig said.
    On their way out, Tennison said quietly to Otley, “Get Vera brought in again.”
    Inspector Larry Hall and WPC Kathy Trent were cruising Euston Station in reverse, so to speak. They weren’t looking to be picked up, they were planning to do the picking up—when they found him. To a casual observer they would have appeared just like any other young couple waiting to meet someone. Hall wore his dark navy car coat over his double-breasted blazer, and Kathy had on a loose, deep purple trenchcoat and black suede ankle boots.
    Already they’d walked the full length of the concourse at least a dozen times. As each train arrived and the passengers surged up the ramp from the platform, they stood midstream, scanning the wave upon wave of faces rolling toward