Helen’s tone was flinty and unyielding. She wouldn’t normally be so aggressive to her superior but she felt too passionately on this point to back down.
‘There are lots of good DCs out there, choose one of them. I’ll have a full team and Charlie can go to Portsmouth, Bournemouth, wherever. A change of scene might do her good.’
‘I know it’s hard for you and I do understand, but Charlie’s got just as much right to be here as you. Work with her – she’s a good policewoman.’
Helen swallowed down her kneejerk response – getting abducted by Marianne hadn’t been Charlie’s finest hour – and considered her next move. Detective Superintendent Ceri Harwood had replaced the disgraced Whittaker and was already making her presence felt. She was a different sort of station chief to Whittaker – where he had been irascible, aggressive but often good-humoured, she was smooth, a born communicator and largely humourless. Tall, elegant and handsome, she was known to be a safe pair of hands and had excelled wherever she’d been stationed. She seemed to be popular, but Helen found it hard to get any purchase on her, not just because they had so little in common – Harwood was married with kids – but because they had no history. Whittaker had been at Southampton a long time and had always regarded Helen as his protégée, helping her to rise through the ranks. There was no such indulgence from Harwood. She generally didn’t stay anywhere too long and was not the kind to have favourites anyway. Her forte was keeping things nice and steady. Helen knew this was why she’d been drafted in here. A disgraced Detective Superintendent, a DI who’d shot and killed the prime suspect, a DS who’d killed himself to save his colleague from starvation – it was a sorry mess and predictably the press had gone to town on it. Emilia Garanita at the Southampton Evening News had fed off it for weeks, as had the national press. It was never likely in these circumstances that Helen was going to be promoted into Whittaker’s vacant shoes. She had been allowed to keep her job, which the police commissioner had apparently felt was more than generous. Helen knew all this and she understood it, but it still made her blood boil. These people knew what she’d had to do. They knew she’d killed her own sister to stop the killings and yet they still treated her like a naughty schoolgirl.
‘Let me talk to her at least,’ Helen resumed. ‘If I feel we can work together, then maybe we can fi-’
