‘If it was anyone else, I would have stayed at home.’
‘You really know how to make someone feel wanted, don’t you,’ said Stanford, shuffling along the bench, making way for Henley.
‘Don’t start.’ Henley stifled a yawn as a wave of jetlag hit her.
‘It’s good to have you back boss,’ said DC Salim Ramouter. He held up his near-empty beer glass in salute.
‘Kiss arse,’ Joanna sniggered.
‘Because it’s your birthday, Jo, I’m not going to respond,’ said Ramouter.
‘Where’s Eastwood and Pellacia?’ Henley asked, scanning thecrowd for her colleagues, as Joanna and Ramouter continued to banter. The unseasonably warm October weather meant the beer garden was filled to capacity with the post-work crowd, students and locals.
‘Getting a round in. I told them you were on your way, so you won’t be left out,’ Ezra, the unit’s forensic computer analyst, replied.
‘If I’d known I’d be coming back to this craziness with Sian Fox-Carnell, I wouldn’t have got on the bloody plane,’ said Henley, catching her boss, Pellacia’s eye as he and DS Roxanne Eastwood made their way towards their small group. She felt the unmistakable pang of longing and looked away.
‘It’s not the best news to come back home to.’ Stanford picked up a beer mat and tapped it repeatedly on the table, signalling his annoyance.
‘What are we talking about?’ asked Eastwood.
‘Fox-Carnell,’ Stanford answered.
Pellacia groaned, placed the tray on the table and handed out the rest of the drinks. ‘Do we have to talk about her?’
‘I would gladly not talk about her for the rest of my days but the fact that me and Henley have been summoned to court is going to make that a bit difficult,’ said Stanford.
‘What for?’ Henley asked as Eastwood handed her a glass of wine.
‘They’ve listed Fox-Carnell’s case first thing Monday morning and the judge has requested our presence. I was going to wait until you’d at least got two glasses of wine down you, but no time like the present.’
‘I tried to get you out of it, but the judge wasn’t having it,’ Pellacia said. He took a sip of his beer, holding Henley’s gaze for a second longer than was necessary.
‘I know Fox-Carnell was before my time at the SCU, but I thought she was bang to rights,’ said Eastwood.
‘She is,’ Pellacia responded vehemently. ‘Rhimes, Stanford, Henley and I worked that investigation to the ground. Left no stone unturned. We had evidence of Fox-Carnell tampering with medication, witness evidence—’
‘None of that matters though. Not when her legal team are saying that there was no direct evidence of Fox-Carnell injecting her patients with lethal doses of medication, and they’re not wrong,’ said Stanford.
‘But that wasn’t our case, was it?’ countered Henley. ‘The evidence showed that she either switched the medication or purposely gave the incorrect dosage directions to the patients’ family members who were looking after them. She was the only person responsible for killing two people and nearly killing two more.’
‘If the CPS hadn’t run scared, we could have charged her with more deaths,’ added Pellacia.
‘But from what Stanford told me, no one is saying that Rhimes and his team did anything wrong,’ said Ramouter as a barman placed two large bowls of nachos on the table.
‘Of course we didn’t do anything wrong. This is just the inevitable fallout of discovering that Dr Fry was one of the people responsible for putting an innocent man in prison for twenty-five years,’ said Henley. She checked her phone as it started ringing and motioned for Stanford to move.
Pellacia frowned ‘That man has blood on his hands. How many more people like Andrew Streeter are sitting inside for crimes they didn’t commit and how many have got away with literal murder?’
Joanna pulled the nachos towards her. ‘Fox-Carnell is chancing her arm, and she won’t be the only one. It won’t matter if you were charged with shoplifting a car tyre or a mass murder, they’re all going to lodge appeals if Dr Ian Fry even breathed near their forensic report.’
‘Everything all right?’ Pellacia asked, joining Henley outside the pub. He pulled out a box of cigarettes from his pocket and sighed when he saw it was empty.
‘Consider that a sign,’ Henley said, putting her phone away.
‘Yeah, I really should give up.’
They stood in silence that was somehow both comfortable and uncomfortable.
