She had to be sure. She had already ruined Mark’s career and probably more besides and logically the case against him was sound, but… Helen was full of doubts. He had seemed so hurt, so outraged, so defiant – he couldn’t have acted all that, could he? Having initially been stunned by the existence of a mole within the team, latterly Helen had come to hope that this rat would lead them straight to the killer. Instead it had taken them off on a tangent, distracting them from the main prize. Helen was tempted to let it go. To turn right round and go back into the investigation room, but it was too late for that now. She had served the execution papers to the condemned man and there was a process to follow. But with the axe hovering, Helen had to be sure.
And it was whilst reviewing the personnel files that she found something intriguing. Helen had been at the forensics lab on the day that Amy’s testimony was illegally downloaded, Whittaker had been sailing at Poole and Charlie had been accounted for – in Helen’s mind at least. That left Mark and the techies: Peter Johnson, Simon Ashworth and Jeremy Laing. They had all been on strike that day, so it couldn’t have been one of them… but there was something curious about Simon Ashworth. Something Helen had overlooked previously. He had come to Hampshire police from the National Crime Unit in London, where he had been helping to construct the new database, arriving here on the back of a promotion. He had fitted in well, been a good worker, but now he was being transferred back to London. Having only been with them four months. It was a sideways move and a strange one, especially as he had taken a twelve-month lease on a flat in Portsmouth. Something had happened. But not officially. Something unseen and unsettling had sent him scurrying back to London.
Helen was on the scent now and her suspicions were further aroused by the fact that Ashworth was nowhere to be seen. Sick leave – though nobody seemed to know what was wrong with him. No, that wasn’t quite right. People did know what was wrong with him, they just didn’t know if he was sick or not. It had taken Helen quite a while to open Peter Johnson up – to get him to talk about his colleagues – but when she did she soon discovered that Simon Ashworth was not a popular man.
He had broken the strike. Helen felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up when he said it. Ashworth was not a union man, but still he had been expected to follow the lead of his boss and colleagues and honour the one-day walkout. But he hadn’t. He was a loner by nature, socially maladjusted, and often rubbed people up the wrong way. It made him a bad team player and potentially easy for someone like Mickery to pick off? Peter Johnson made his antipathy for Ashworth pretty plain, but denied getting him transferred. He and his colleagues may quite possibly have made him feel unwelcome – usual treatment for a scab – but he would say no more than that, fearing an accusation of harassment, even bullying. The transfer must have been Ashworth’s idea.