Free Then We Die by James Craig Page B

Her hair was pulled back and she wasn’t wearing any make-up. As her fingers danced across the keyboard, he idly noticed that she wasn’t wearing any wedding or engagement ring.
    ‘How’s it going?’ he asked, flopping into his chair.
    ‘Not bad,’ Roche replied, not looking up. ‘Got some interesting stuff back from Phillips.’
    Carlyle leaned back in his chair and yawned. ‘About the skeleton, you mean?’
    ‘No, that will still take a while. But she found a cartridge in the grave. Presumably the bullet that killed our victim.’ She swivelled in her seat to face Carlyle directly, a big grin on her face. ‘And she found the gun too.’
    Carlyle sat up.
    ‘Presumably what happened was that the guy was shot and dumped in the shallow grave. The killer couldn’t keep the weapon about his person so he tossed it in too.’
    ‘Thank you, Sherlock Holmes.’
    Carlyle saw her face darken and he quickly held up a hand. ‘Sorry, my sense of humour.’
    She gave him a sharp look.
    ‘Not always to everyone’s taste,’ he admitted. ‘Anyway, what else do we have?’
    ‘The gun is a . . .’ Roche looked back at the notes on the screen ‘. . . Walther P38.’
    ‘Never heard of it,’ Carlyle said.
    Roche squinted at the screen and read out: ‘ “It’s a nine-millimetre weapon that was developed as the service pistol of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War Two.’ She shrugged. ‘Dunno who the Wehrmacht are.’
    ‘The German army.’
    ‘Okay. So someone used a German pistol to shoot this man and bury him in a park in Central London.’
    ‘If it was during the war,’ Carlyle mused, ‘in a blackout, during the Blitz, that might explain how someone could easily get away with it. Bloody long time ago, though. How the hell are we going to find out who this guy was? It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
    Roche tapped the keyboard on her desk with an index finger. ‘I’ve been taking a look through the Zella-Mehlis database.’
    ‘Have you indeed?’ Carlyle replied, not having the remotest clue what she was talking about.
    ‘Basically, in 2009, the Met digitized all of its still open Missing Person cases.’ She gave the keyboard another tap and a new screen popped up. To Carlyle it looked like just an endless list of words. Roche clicked on a name and a man’s photograph appeared. ‘This is just some guy I picked out at random, but you can do a search by various characteristics, date of birth, date reported missing and so on.’
    ‘Sounds good. Have you found any possibles yet?’
    Roche shook her head. ‘I’ve only just started. What I thought I would do is first search for anyone who went missing near Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the war.’
    ‘Won’t there be a lot of them?’
    ‘I’ll start off by looking for men between eighteen and thirty. Most of those otherwise would have been off fighting at that time.’
    ‘I suppose,’ said Carlyle vaguely. As far as he knew, no one in the Carlyle family had fought during the war, apart from some distant cousin of his grandfather, who had never come back from a prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. Not one to daydream, he pulled himself back into the present. All of this was basically of historical interest only, and he had work to do.
    And he needed another coffee.
    And he still had to phone his mother.
    He pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the door. ‘It’s all sounding very interesting,’ he said over his shoulder, leaving Roche to her databases. ‘Keep me posted.’
    At the front desk, Carlyle waited for Kevin Price to finish talking to a geography teacher from Doncaster who’d been relieved of £150 in a Soho clip joint. Carlyle watched the man slouch out of the station clutching a piece of paper containing his crime-identification number.
    ‘Will he be able to claim on his insurance?’ he asked.
    ‘He probably won’t even dare try,’ Price laughed, ‘in case his wife finds out what he’s been up