Prime Suspect 3: Silent Victims Read Online Free PDF Page B

the window. On the other side of the desk piled high with three-inch thick files, Otley waited, sardonic grin absent for the moment. He’d had to deal with this slit-arsed bitch before, and knew what to expect.
    The room was still in an almighty mess, though WPC Hastings had managed to find her a desk lamp that worked and two more straight-backed chairs with the varnish worn through to bare wood. For the moment, Tennison had more important preoccupations.
    “Right, Sergeant, I am not prepared to take any crap from you, or stand by and let you stir it up. So let’s clear the air.” Tennison jerked her head, eyes hard as flint. “Sit down.”
    “Judging by the state of the rest of your office I don’t think I should risk it!” Otley pulled a chair forward and sat down, an uncertain half smile hovering on his face. “Joke!”
    “If you don’t want to work with me, I can get you transferred.”
    Otley studied his thumbnail. “I was out of line at Southampton Row, but, that said”—he shrugged—“I know you did a good job.”
    “Thank you,” Tennison said, her sarcasm like a saw’s edge.
    Her last case with the Murder Squad had been a racial and political minefield. Teenage half-caste girl dug up in the back garden of a West Indian area seething with antagonism against the police. Despite this, Tennison had stuck to the job like a terrier with a bone. Tracked down and collared a young white bloke with a sickening, sadistic streak who liked taking photographs while buggering his schoolgirl victims.
    Otley was looking anywhere but at Tennison as she moved a stack of files from her chair and sat down. She stared at him a long moment, letting him sweat a little, and then flipped open the green cover of a file. She tapped the report.
    “I have a lot of catching up to do, so, come on . . . are you going to help me or not?”
    “I got an I.D. on the boy in the fire at Reynolds’s place,” Otley volunteered. He took a folded sheet from the pocket of his crumpled suit. “He was a runaway, fifteen years old. Colin, known as Connie, Jenkins. All the state-run homes have their kids’ teeth checked on a regular basis and filed on record—”
    “What’s this boy got to do with Operation Contract?” Tennison asked bluntly.
    There were connections here she couldn’t make. Otley and Hall seemed to be running some cowboy operation of their own. Plus there was an undercurrent in the department; she’d sensed it right away. Not unease exactly, more a kind of apathy. Lack of motivation. She had to get to the bottom line of all this before the whole bloody mess swamped her.
    She strode along with Otley to the Squad Room and up to the board.
    “It was supposed to be a slow start to a massive big cleanup.” He swept out his hand. “All the areas targeted were those specifically used by rent boys.” A glance at her under his brows. “It’s Halliday’s obsession.”
    “Yes . . . And?”
    “That’s what it is—cleanup operation.”
    “So what’s the big deal? Why has it been taking so long?”
    “Because it’s a bloody cock-up—if you’ll excuse the pun!” Otley said with some heat. “The Guv’nor before you got dumped. Somebody had to take the blame.”
    Tennison saw a chink of light. The entire room, while ostensibly working, was taking in every word. Kathy and Norma were sitting at their VDUs, staring at the green screens. Otley was about to go on, checked himself, and looked toward Inspector Hall. Hall came up and the two men swapped some kind of coded message.
    Hall turned to Tennison, keeping his voice low.
    “Ma’am, a few of us think the same way. There was a leak, word got out. No gamblers, no boys on the streets.” His tone turned bitter. “We spent weeks getting ready for a big swoop, all hush-hush . . . came out empty-handed. Surveillance trucks, uniformed and plainclothes officers—it was a fiasco. It had to be a leak but Chiswick and Halliday keep on pushing it.”
    Tennison