Cold Pursuit by Judith Cutler Page A

a week’s worth of still sealed envelopes addressed to Dilly on to the desk of Mike Dalton, her tame forensic scientist. ‘That’s a big help, isn’t it? You might as well have these too, just in case.’
    He eyed the sheaf, but donned gloves and picked up that morning’s delivery, which had been intercepted by the Royal Mail and diverted to Maidstone, as Fran had requested anything addressed to Dilly at work should be. Until an anonymous note arrived at Dilly’s home address, she’d reluctantly acceded to Dilly’s pleas that her ordinary mail should continue as usual.
    Mike popped it into an evidence bag. ‘Quite a lot of people in London. Commuters. Not just Kent. Sussex is in TVInvicta’s catchment area too. And you said this woman went national?Northerners come to London too.’ Mike dropped the fact as if it were a leaden weight.
    ‘And so do Brummies. And that’s our only, very tiny, lead so far.’
    ‘Come on, Fran, what am I supposed to be looking for? It’s a big place!’
    ‘What do they make in the Midlands these days? Not cars any more.’
    ‘Chocolate. They still make chocolate. Yes, someone working for Cadbury’s would be nice and obvious.’
    ‘Wouldn’t it just? Just give it your bog standard going over, Mike – bearing in mind it was the Chief himself who dropped this on to me.’
    ‘I thought you were retiring? Funny, you spend forty years longing to do all the things you didn’t have time to do when you were crawling up the promotion ladder and when you know you’re going to have hours and hours to do just what you want it’s dead scary and you can’t think of anything you really want to do. They’re so short of experienced forensic scientists…’
    ‘I thought the universities were snowed under by applicants!’
    ‘You missed an essential adjective, Fran. Experienced. They want me to carry on working part-time. On the face of it that sounds brilliant. But I don’t know I could do the job if I didn’t put my heart and soul into it.’ He touched the evidence bag. ‘OK, then. If I can’t get anything from this, do you want me to pass it on to Guy the Graphologist, lethim see if he can find any word patterns?’
    ‘That’ll come expensive. Just hunt for chocolate. Yes, and anything else the Black Country makes these days,’ she joked.
    He lifted a minatory finger. ‘For a start, Cadbury’s is in Birmingham, not the Black Country. For seconds, half the Black Country industrial output has disappeared. Have you looked at the figures for our manufacturing base?’
    Fran couldn’t say she had, but knowing Mike they were serious. He had the sort of flesh free face that would have made him the perfect extra in a Dickens TV adaptation and had once famously said he didn’t do joy. But he brought to his job an imagination that some of his colleagues declared was unscientific – his response being that all the great scientists had made leaps of the imagination that ordinary mortals couldn’t even guess at.
    He’d picked up and was reading a random page from Fran’s sheaf. ‘Quite poetic, isn’t he? Biblical even. Are any of the others?’
    Biblical! But, not wanting to give him any pointers that might be quite spurious, she said flatly, ‘Not as far as I know. What she hadn’t opened I left sealed. I thought my loss might be your gain.’
    ‘Well, at last I’ve got you trained,’ he observed with what in anyone else might have been a smile.
     
    Strolling back to her office – these days she consciously tried to resist the fashion of clutching a file and striding, grim-faced, as if late for anappointment with her doom – Fran popped her head into the Incident Room, its walls now papered with notices, photos, diagrams and maps. With the arrival of the new acting Chief Superintendent, Jill had been moved, not altogether tactfully, as Fran had already told Cosmo, to a goldfish bowl at the far end of the room, leaving Henson’s office to Joe Farmer. The newcomer was a