An Eye For An Eye

5

5

“Nathan.”

“Sir?” Nathan quickly hid his surprise at seeing his superior in the office on a Sunday.

With a sharp jerk of his head, Detective Chief Inspector Collins indicated that Nathan was to follow him, he then turned and strode away through the CID department.

Nathan glanced curiously at his partner as he got to his feet. Burke had no more idea of why the DCI was in the office than he did, however, and merely shrugged. Since his partner couldn’t enlighten him, he left his office and hurried after his superior, catching up to him when he reached the DCI’s office.

“We don’t often see you here on a Sunday,” Nathan said once he was seated. “Is everything alright?” He assumed not since Collins was still dressed in his golfing clothes, which meant he had come to the station straight from the course; the expression on Collins’ face suggested he hadn’t even had the time to finish his round with the chief superintendent.

“No, everything is not alright, everything is very far from alright,” Collins said in an abrupt voice.

“What’s up?” Nathan suspected he knew the answer, but he didn’t want to mention it until Collins did in case he was wrong.

“Why don’t you tell me; tell me about the Bhaskars.”

Nathan ran a hand through his sandy hair while fighting the urge to grimace; he had hoped Collins wouldn’t hear about the Bhaskar situation, at least not until he had something to report other than the nothing he currently had. “We don’t know much,” he admitted reluctantly, “but at the moment it looks like it’s a robbery gone wrong.” It wasn’t what he believed, but he had no evidence to support his feeling that the situation was something more.

“A robbery gone wrong, is that all?” Collins was dubious. “The Herald thinks differently. Roger Kelly called me at the golf course to ask if I was concerned about racial tensions; he hinted that the paper will be running a story about the murders being racially motivated.”

“Kelly wants the murders to be racially motivated,” Nathan said cynically, well aware of how the new editor for the Branton Herald thought. “If the murders have a racial motivation, and tensions in the town increase - which they will if he has his way - then the paper will sell more copies, he’d love that. If that were the case, though, Louisa would have been in touch, she’s their lead reporter, she’d be the one writing the story, and I haven’t heard from her.

“I’ll speak to her, see if I can find out what’s going on, but if Kelly’s calling you, not Louisa, the chances are the story’s at least seventy-five percent rubbish, and he’s stretching whatever he’s got, if not making it up entirely, which is something Louisa would never do. If it comes to it, we’ll know how true the story is when we see what name is on the by-line; if it’s Louisa’s then there’s a good chance the story is true, she’s not likely to write a story about racial tensions if she can’t back it up, and if it’s got Kelly’s name on it, then we can be reasonably sure it’s rubbish.”

“That won’t help us any, though,” Collins remarked. “Once the story hits the stands the tensions will exist, whether they did before or not.” He was silent for a few moments as he contemplated the problems he was facing. “The best way for us to head this off is to get something solid to counter it with, so tell me what you know.”

“As I said, we don’t know much at present. We have a DVD containing CCTV footage from Bhaskar’s convenience store, which is now in the hands of the computer experts; I’m hoping they’ll will be able to enhance the footage and discover something we can use.” As far as Nathan was concerned, the tech experts performed miracles with their computers; his abilities when it came to them were limited to typing up his reports.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Collins wanted to know, disappointed.

“No.” Nathan shook his head. “Christian called in a short while ago, he’s with the officers conducting the door-to-door enquiries; it seems that a dark blue car, possibly a Honda, not known to the local residents, was seen leaving the area around the time of the robbery. The driver had dark hair and stubble. Unfortunately, that’s all we know about him at the moment, and none of the residents were able to provide the license number of the vehicle.” It would have been too great a stroke of fortune, he thought, to get such a useful piece of information so early in the investigation.

Collins was silent for a moment and then he said, “What are you doing to find the car?”

Nathan was tempted to comment that without a license number, the odds of them finding the car were somewhere between slim and non-existent; added to which he hadn’t had an opportunity to set anything in motion because he had been summoned by the man across from him. He held his tongue, however, and instead said, “I’ve got DC Hill going through footage from CCTV and traffic cameras in the area.” He decided not to say that Hill was actually waiting for the footage to arrive, so she could begin checking it.

“I want to be kept up to date with this case.” Collins ignored the look of annoyance that flashed across his subordinate’s face. “If this was a racial crime, I want to know about it, so we can head off tensions in the community. And if it wasn’t, I want to be able to get that out to the press as soon as possible.”