‘What you got?’ Kim asked, entering Mitch’s makeshift lab down the hall from Keats’s office.

The small space didn’t compare to the state-of-the-art laboratory at Ridgepoint House in Birmingham which counted as the West Midlands Police Forensic Headquarters but it was used by a couple of the senior techies when basic, urgent analysis was required.

Kim had only visited Ridgepoint House once and was thankful for the tour guide who directed them around a labyrinth of interlocking rooms set out with lasers, lamps, microscopes and cameras. She had felt like a lab rat herself as she’d wandered through the maze of sterile white walls.

She remembered the fingerprint lab where they were told that the team had lifted prints from more than 25,000 separate exhibits including firearms, mobile phones, documents, broom handles, car doors, windowpanes, handcuffs, sex toys and fruit.

Mitch had been stationed several floors above the fingerprint lab, as part of an elite team of experienced investigators and crime scene coordinators, the faces of the team that liaised with detectives to oversee the forensics on major crimes such as murder, rape, and arson.

And Mitch was as thorough as they came.

She had no idea of the state of his private life but she did know his work ethic often matched her own.

She remembered one of her first cases as a DI. The victim, an elderly woman, had been smothered by a pillow in her bed. Her son had claimed to be out shopping for his imminent holiday, something they could not disprove. Mitch had worked from seven in the morning until eleven that night when he’d called her with a DNA match from droplets of saliva on the pillow that had come from the victim’s son. They had arrested him two minutes before he boarded a plane to Spain and, judging by his luggage, he’d not been planning a return flight any time soon.

Without Mitch’s determination and skill, Mr Longton would now be languishing in Mallorca instead of Winson Green prison.

‘Please tell me it’s my footprint,’ she said, hopefully.

He shook his head. ‘Tomorrow, hopefully, but in the meantime, take a look at these little beauties,’ he said, moving away from the microscope.

‘Sounds like the best offer we’ve had all day,’ Bryant quipped.

She sat down in Mitch’s seat and took a look.

‘That’s a fibre?’ she asked, doubtfully. Mitch had magnified the fibre so she could see that it was constructed like a pie that had been cut and the pieces spaced out as opposed to the clean smooth surface of fibres she’d seen before.

He nodded.

‘Okay,’ she said.

He replaced the slide with another.

She looked again.

‘Same?’ she asked.

‘Identical. First batch were the ones taken from the lips of Phyllis Mansell. Second batch were a bit harder to distinguish from the blood found around the wound of Doctor Cordell, which is what I was trying to do when I received a request earlier today from some crazy police officer.’

She turned to her colleague. ‘Bryant, he means you.’

Mitch chuckled. ‘They match,’ he confirmed.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘So, we have forensic evidence to tie those two murders together?’

He nodded.

Up until now the tenuous link between Cordell and the dead nurse’s mother had been at the very best circumstantial.

‘Tell me more,’ Kim said, resting back in his seat.

‘Textile fibres fall into three categories: Natural, manufactured and synthetic. Your natural ones come from animals, plants, and minerals like wool, silk, hemp and the most common which is cotton. Undyed white cotton is so common it’s of little evidentiary value.

‘Manufactured fibres come from rayon, acetate, triacetate, raw cotton and wood pulp. Synthetic fibres come from polymers which are substances made up of a series of monomers, single molecules strung together to make longer molecules that can be thousands of monomers long. Nylon and polyester are synthetics.’

Kim knew that, contrary to most popular TV programmes, fibres were lost quickly from a crime scene. The stats said that after four hours you’ve lost approximately eighty per cent rising to ninety-five per cent after twenty-four hours. Anything finally lifted with tape or a vacuum was like gold dust.

‘So, I used my scanning electron microscope—’

‘Bloody hell, Mitch, even I’m growing old over here,’ Bryant moaned.

Kim crossed her arms. ‘Aww, let him talk, Bryant. He doesn’t get out much.’

Mitch smiled and continued.

‘So, using dispersive X-ray spectrometer with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry I discovered—’

‘That you could make up your own words and we wouldn’t have a clue?’ Bryant asked, as the door opened.

‘Mitch, it’s almost eight and I’m heading… oh, sorry to interrupt,’ Keats said, straightening up his overcoat.

‘Okay, see you in the—’

Damn it, Kim thought, realising the day had got away from her. She was going to be in some serious trouble tomorrow.

Unless.

‘Keats, can you hang on for one minute?’ she asked. ‘Need to talk to you urgently about something once we’ve finished with Mitch.’

‘Inspector, I’ve been here since—’

‘It’ll take just a minute,’ she assured him. ‘I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t urgent.’

He huffed. ‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait for five minutes and then I’m leaving.’

‘Thanks, Keats,’ she said to his back as he left the lab.

Kim ignored Bryant’s questioning glance as Mitch continued with his explanation of what he’d found.

‘The chemical composition of the fibre and any pigments or treatments added during or after manufacture. These chemical determinations can point to the manufacturer of the fibre or match one fibre to another.’

He stopped speaking.

‘Please tell me this is where we get rewarded for our patience,’ Kim said.

‘Oh yes. I can tell you that the microfibres are manufactured by Hollings in Merseyside and they are cloths, Inspector: blue, square cleaning cloths.’