Hunter Hunted by Jack Gatland (best value ebook reader .TXT) 📗

this, she didn’t respond, already walking to the main entranceway.

‘The bastard entered the office and DCI Monroe emerged to confront him,’ she explained, and Declan noted the more formal way she named Monroe now, as now all business, she forensically went through the events. ‘I think Monroe knew his attacker. He had enough time to run, or to call for help. He could have moved back into his office and barricaded the door, but he didn’t.’

‘The drugs in his system?’

‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’ Doctor Marcos shook her head. ‘I genuinely think he was surprised at this arrival, but not threatened.’

‘He’s Glaswegian,’ Billy suggested. ‘He doesn’t do well with threats.’

‘Anyway, he’s facing, well, whoever it is, and then he’s struck.’ Doctor Marcos showed her forearms. ‘We have several welts on his arms, around here, as if he’s thrown them up to block a strike from some kind of baton, or staff,’ she pointed over to a spare desk, the sheets of paper that were on it scattered to the floor. ‘He’s then grabbed and thrown over that table. At this point they strike his face badly, and he bleeds from the lip and nose.’

Declan was angering more now as he listened. ‘And then?’

‘Then he looks to attack his assailant with a keyboard,’ Doctor Marcos pointed to a broken one on the floor, a marker next to it. ‘It’s blocked but effective. The attacker loses ground. I think Monroe went to run at this point but was tripped, and fell over there.’ She pointed to the floor by the broken glass. ‘We have a small amount of trace blood there. And then I think the noise gains attention. Our attacker knows they don’t have long. They grab Monroe and physically slam his head into the glass window.’

‘And it breaks?’

‘Christ, no,’ Doctor Marcos shook her head, kneeling beside the impacted glass. ‘This is impact resistant. He slammed the poor bugger’s head into the glass three, maybe four times until it shattered.’

She stood up.

‘Guard said he heard glass smashing and ran to see what it was. Thought it was an external window, it was so loud. The attacker would have known that his time was up. His target was, for all intents and purposes, dead. When they found Monroe, he was in a pool of blood. It must have looked horrific. Job done, our attacker leaves. Moments later, the guard arrives, calls an ambulance.’

‘Any idea how the attacker got out?’ Declan was already pacing the scene, trying to work out in his mind the battle that Doctor Marcos had just described. She rubbed at her chin as she considered this.

‘Probably waited downstairs in the examination room until the guard passed and then slipped out,’ she suggested. ‘We’re looking for CCTV that could help us.’

Declan looked to Billy. ‘What’s frozen on the screen?’ he asked.

Silently, Billy opened the laptop. On the screen Declan saw an image of Kendis Taylor, taken on a zoom lens camera, walking down a street on the phone.

‘It says that while in Syria for The Guardian she was radicalised by an extreme terrorist faction,’ he explained. ‘But there’s no proof. Just conjecture. It says they believe she has a UK handler, but doesn’t mention his or her name or where they’re based.’

‘What’s the rest of it say?’ Declan stared at the screen. ‘It looks like there’s more on page two?’

‘That’s the problem,’ Billy closed the laptop back up. ‘The laptop is frozen. It looks like it was sent to Monroe but by who, how, or even when I don’t know.’

‘And you don’t want to restart it because?’

Billy made a face at this. ‘Everyone always goes ‘turn it off and on’ as if that’s a magical answer, but if I turn this off, we might lose this file. I don’t know what server it was on, or where he downloaded it from. I’d rather see if I can back up the hard drive first.’

‘Kendis isn’t a terrorist.’ Declan spoke it as a statement. Billy shrugged.

‘Someone seems to think so, and whether she was or wasn’t, she was being watched.’

‘She wasn’t,’ Declan insisted again, more forcefully this time. Billy quietly nodded and walked over to his desk, pulling out a USB drive and slamming it into the side of the laptop with a little more force than was usually required.

‘You’re not the only one pissed at this,’ Doctor Marcos said. ‘We’re all angry.’

Declan nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just… the thing here with Kendis, it seems off somehow.’

‘Then prove it,’ Doctor Marcos walked off now. ‘Don’t just shout it at people.’

Declan stood alone now, staring around the office. There was nothing he could do here; perhaps he could check into the external CCTV, see if there was anything that he could find.

His phone buzzed. He hadn’t realised that he’d placed it on silent, and he pulled it out. There were three unread messages on it, all from Kendis over the last hour.

We need to talk

Call me when you get this

Dammit this is important you dick

Looking back to Billy, still working on the laptop, the image of Kendis still visible, Declan looked back to the phone. He didn’t want to call Kendis in the middle of this. He needed to convince himself that she wasn’t a part of it, even in some small way. Even though he’d known her all of his life, there had been a good decade where the two of them hadn’t spoken. Hell, he’d only called her after his father died because she’d been working with him.

No. Kendis wasn’t a terrorist, no matter what anyone said.

There was movement from the entranceway, and Declan turned to see Will Harrison, the special advisor to Charles Baker, enter the room. Overweight as ever, Harrison was in his early thirties, his hair cut short at the side, maybe a number two razor setting even, and left long on top in that ‘Peaky Blinder’ style that seemed trendy with people half his age. It was a style that didn’t match his shape