Gagged & Bound by Natasha Cooper

the superintendent’s office since nine o’clock and was on her way back to her overflowing desk when she noticed the atmosphere. At first she couldn’t work out what it was. Then she saw fury in some of the faces she passed, and an unpleasant mixture of excitement and shame in others. She’d only ever seen that particular combination when someone unpopular had been injured.
    ‘Who’s been hurt?’ she asked Fred Walley, her favourite sergeant.
    ‘Stephanie Taft. You know, the one-woman cleaner of the sewers.’ Caro felt as though she’d been dipped in an ice bath. For a moment she couldn’t breathe or move.
    ‘What’s happened to her?’ she said at last, amazed to find that her voice worked in spite of the clenching in her throat.
    ‘Shot on a drugs raid.’ Fred looked curiously at her. ‘Are you OK? You weren’t a friend, were you, Guv?’
    ‘I’ve met her once or twice. Is she dead?’
    ‘Yeah. It was only a .22, but they got her in the neck. She lived longer than if it had been a head shot, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. You can’t put a tourniquet on a neck. Must’ve been bad luck. They were probably aiming at her head, filthy toe-rags, and were too out of it to shoot straight.’
    Unless it was someone who knew what he was doing, Caro thought, and had been aiming at the most vulnerable spot just above the bullet-proof vest. The use of a .22 could mark him out as a professional in itself. For anyone who could shoot straight,
a small bullet was always preferable – much more likely to disintegrate within the victim’s body and so provide no evidence to identify the rifle that had fired it.
    ‘Poor cow,’ said Fred. ‘I didn’t always like what she did, but she didn’t deserve this.’
    ‘Was anyone else hurt?’
    ‘You ought to sit down and have a cuppa.’ His voice told her he was still wondering why she’d taken his news so hard. ‘It’s been a shock.’
    Caro frowned to get his face back in focus. ‘What? No, I’m fine. Was anyone else hurt?’
    ‘Not that I’ve heard. Bad luck, like I said.’
    ‘Who was the target of the raid?’
    ‘God knows.’
    ‘I heard something about the Slabbs causing new trouble on the street. Was it them?’
    ‘Not as far as I know, but I doubt it. They don’t go in for shooting us, Guv. They bag-and-gag their own. Or they did in the old days.’
    ‘True.’ Caro made an effort to smile and said she mustn’t keep him. She waited until he was out of sight before making herself walk back to her office. She wasn’t sure she could keep a straight line and didn’t want to arouse any more suspicion than she already had.
    Was Stephanie’s death an accident? Or an attempt by the Slabbs to stop her talking to anyone else about their man inside the Met?
     
    Three hours later, in an office on the north side of the river Thames, James Grogan, one of the selectors for the liaison job, strolled in to have a word with the chair of the panel.
    ‘I’ve just heard about the death of this woman, Taft. Is there anything for us to be concerned about, Martin?’
    ‘In what way, James?’
    Grogan moved to the window, looking out at the depressing view of a back yard furnished with immense rubbish bins and inhabited only by pigeons and the odd rat that was too lazy to patrol the sewers.
    ‘She’s been trying to sell a story that John Crayley is bent. I wondered whether this might have had something to do with an attempt to stop her.’
    ‘Sell? Are you speaking metaphorically or suggesting that she’s trailed her fantasy in front of the newspapers?’
    ‘The former,’ Grogan said.
    ‘Ah. Good. No, we have nothing to worry about. It has been raised and looked into and we’ve been given the all-clear.’
    ‘But she’s dead.’
    ‘So I hear. Poor woman.’ Martin sounded politely sad, but not remotely worried. ‘I’ve raised that, too, and am reliably informed that it was a deeply unfortunate accident. It is, of course, particularly