"What facets of the Tina Davis case were you allotted to examine?" I asked."I looked into some captivating details," Nelson replied, "such as where she purchased her suits.""Where she acquired her suits?" I exclaimed."Yes, and how she paid for them.""Tell us all about it," I demanded."In the cupboard of her flat we found six boxes of fashionable clothing, all for men. There were shirts, jackets, trousers  and shoes, all from big-name stylists. None of the items had ever been worn, or even opened. All the buttons on the shirts were still done up, all the packaging intact. The assortment, though small, was worth in the area of twenty to twenty-five thousand pounds. I had the privilege of tracking the acquisitions, finding out where each item came from and how much it cost, how she paid for it all and when. Mesmerising details, but I couldn’t see how any of this had any bearing on the case.""You can't?" I asked."No.&rdq

23 I kept perusing through the articles; even though I wasn't examining them for anything, in particular, I thought I might as well continue until Sandra got back. I found an interesting piece from a local newspaper from Wales, covering a declaration I'd overlooked the first time I'd read it. But now, my interest piqued, and I paid closer attention. ... despite police stating a baffling fatality, Home Office forensic pathologist Dr Jasmine Jae said the conditions insinuate it was a murder. Dr Jae, who has worked on high-profile murder enquiries in North Wales, said apart from instances when someone has died of injuries such as knife or gunshot wounds, determining a cause of death was more multifaceted in a rotting corpse. She intimated that if Ms Davis were poisoned or strangled, a pathologist would have difficulties ascertaining this on a putrefying body. DCI Burton and I agreed that it was a murder. But was it conceivable that her killer strangled T

I came back a few seconds later with my file in my hands. As I didn't own a computer or a mobile phone, I filed the old-fashioned way, writing everything down on cards designed for my index.I flicked through the sheets until I found the record I wanted. "Ah, here we are," I said. "Ahmed Dastageer, a British Muslim of Pakistani descent. Born in Birmingham. He fled to Pakistan after a fatal knifing of his uncle. Apparently he was quizzed by police in association with that offence but was discharged and permitted to leave the country. He lived in a part of Pakistan where his ancestral relations lived, and married a daughter, or a niece of the creator and mystical leader of the Fist of Allah, an extremist group who have crafted their style by blasting passenger trains in India and Kashmir.""How nice of them," Sandra said."Yes," I said. "Ahmed deceptively revisited England and was allegedly grilled and discharged again this time in association with the tube-and-bu

As the morning dragged on, I paid attention to material about the shadowing, arrest, and tribunal of the Liquid Bombers. It was a long and complex story.Sandra went off to work while I continued with my research.The surveillance of the Liquid Bombers was astonishing. The conspirators shadowed for practically twelve months before their arrest. Police had fitted a covert camera in the Bomb Factory.MI5 had diverted the email that the conspirators had sent, and some of this email presented as proof. Undercover detectives from all over Britain had allegedly brought in to follow the collaborators around. One officer sat across from a conspirator at an Internet cafe and watched him download data used in arranging the attack.Some of the original reports said the police had arrested twenty-five people, and some reports stated that the police released one of them immediately. Later reports put the number of people detained at twenty-four.Several more pe

Friday began warmer and drier than previous days, for which my back was grateful. Before I ate my breakfast, I looked in on the countertop test. The façades were dry, and all except the brownest appeared clean. But I pulled a fingertip across them, and it came up pale white. The deposit was chalky and, to some extent, tacky, and it took a bit of determination to clean it off my fingers. If the purpose of our test were to discover whether a white chalky deposit could have been left behind, perhaps inadvertently, after an almost comprehensive scrubbing with an everyday domestic product, then the answer was clear. I left the countertops untouched so that Sandra could see for herself. After I had eaten my bacon sandwich, I spent time looking from beginning to end through my files in search of articles about the encrypted communications between the conspirators and Ahmed Dastageer. I found a piece in the Daily Mail called POLICE OBSERVED THE CONSPIRACY EVOLVE, THE