50/50 Killer (5 page)

'You've been helping yourself,' Eileen told him.

He shook his head: that doesn't matter.

'I just want you to know that I
have
tried hard. I don't want you to think I've let you down.'

Eileen frowned. 'James, what's wrong?'

'You've got to remember, whatever I end up doing, it's all for Karli.'

That set alarm bells ringing. Karli, Reardon's baby daughter, had been the product of a brief reconciliation with his ex-wife, Amanda. As Eileen understood it, that relationship had been volatile from the start, but their two children had created a knot that stopped it unravelling smoothly. Even now, Reardon maintained that Amanda was an unsuitable mother, but the court had sided with her, ultimately granting a restraining order against James and refusing him access to his children.

It wasn't Eileen's place to be judgmental about this. Her job demanded that she remain impartial, allowing him to come to his own conclusions about his behaviour. James was undoubtedly a danger to his ex-wife, but it had also been clear from the beginning that he cared deeply for his children. In seeking a counsellor in the first place, his motivation had been to acquire a level of understanding and control that might allow him to return as a presence in their lives.

His success at session level varied immensely. Sometimes he seemed consumed by hate and rage. On other occasions he was introspective and seemed to be doing well. Overall, Eileen thought, he'd been making progress. And now this.

'James, what have you done?'

'Whatever you hear about me, I'm doing it for her.'

He looked at her, pleading, and then down the drive again.

Making a decision, Eileen unhooked the security chain.

'Why don't you come in for a minute?' she said. 'We can talk about this.'

He was already backing down the step, shaking his head. 'No, I shouldn't have come.'

She stepped outside. 'But you're here now. Why don't you come inside? '

'I'm sorry.'

'James--'

But he turned and ran. She stepped down onto the drive and called after him again, but he ignored her, reaching the street and disappearing. Eileen looked down at her feet. Slippers. She couldn't have caught up with him in running shoes.

Whatever you hear about me, I'm doing it for her
.

The cold rain started tapping on her blouse. She shivered, rubbing her arms, but stayed outside for a moment, staring down the empty drive.

James
, she thought,
what have you done?

3 DECEMBER

21 HOURS UNTIL DAWN

10.20 A.M.

Mark

Disobeying a number of somewhat minor traffic laws, I made the crime scene in good time. The street turned out to be a cul-de-sac, ending fifty metres from the main road in a bulb of tarmac. In between, two rows of drab grey semis faced each other across a short, narrow road. Realistically, there wasn't room for proper pavements or grass verges, but the council had squeezed them in anyway. The rest of the street was filled with police.

Vans and cars were lined up down one side of the road. A small group of officers in black rainslicks were waiting by one - on the balls of their feet; their hands in their pockets - while a few others were talking casually to the neighbours, who were understandably braving the weather, standing out in their gardens and wondering what the hell was going on. One of the subtle jobs those officers would be doing was keeping them all separate: preserving the integrity of witness statements in much the same way as the yellow tape across the road preserved the integrity of the scene itself. I was pleased to see it. If they'd not been doing so, I'd have had to tell them to.

I drove up to the yellow cordon, which wavered as the rain tapped on it, and a policeman jogged up to meet me. I wound down the window and showed him my badge; he took it off me and stared at it for a few seconds. There was a small, unobtrusive camera clipped to his raincoat, which I knew was recording an image of me.

'Detective Nelson,' I prompted him. 'I'm with Mercer's team.'

The policeman passed my badge back. 'He's inside.'

I parked up, set my face in a professional grimace and made my way up to the house. Two crime-scene techs were working in the garden, and an officer was guarding the front door. More cameras. I showed my badge again.

'Sir.'

The officer on the door fitted me with a camera of my own. It would take intermittent pictures and record audio, both of which were transmitted on a coded frequency to equipment in one of the vans outside. This enormous scramble of information - hours of footage from one crime scene alone - would be filed, and then filtered into meaningful fragments of data.

The officer led me into the hall.

'Most of your team's upstairs. But Detective Duncan is through in the kitchen: you need to see him first of all.'

'Thanks.'

I moved through. The living room was on the right-hand side of the hallway. I glanced in and saw more techs on their knees, working carefully along the skirting boards. A camera flashed, and I looked away again and carried on. A little past the living room, stairs led up, again to the right, and then the hallway finished at an open door straight ahead. The room beyond was decorated in fleshy tones - red carpet, cream walls, dark crimson curtains hanging either side of bleary patio doors. More people were working quietly in here. The bulb in the ceiling was unshaded and too bright, giving everyone a harsh, half-shadowed face. More camera flashes: sharp and vivid. Fresh crime scenes are always like this: the weirdest party you've never been to.

I found Simon Duncan in the kitchen, which was separated from the back room by a pair of wooden saloon doors. The fittings in there were pale, clean and expensive, lit by a row of stripbulbs in the ceiling. Simon emerged from the kitchen, slapping off a pair of white gloves, and gave me his smile first, his strong hand second.

'Nelson, yes?' His voice was relaxed and quick: bursts of conversation that challenged you to keep up and get the joke. 'If I remember rightly, that is. Mark Nelson?'

He was taller than I remembered, with a climber's rangy build and tan, and was bald apart from curls of greying hair above his ears, mirrored by similar whorls on the back of his hands. At the interview, he'd twiddled a pen the whole time, asking only one question and that so quickly I almost missed it. He'd interjected on two other occasions with fast comments, each of them signposted by an arched eyebrow and a wry smile. He was reasonably well known in the academy himself: an intellectual troublemaker.

'That's right,' I said. 'Nice to see you again.'

'Got here eventually, eh?'

'The traffic.'

He wasn't bothered; he squeezed past me and we moved back into the hallway.

'The victim's in the bathroom, but there's been activity all over the house. Looks like our subject held him for quite a long time before killing him.'

'Definitely a homicide, then?' I said.

Simon raised that eyebrow of his. 'Pete didn't tell you?'

'We only spoke for a minute.'

'Well, they'll fill you in. Let's just say you're in for an interesting first day at work. Follow me and we'll have a look at the body.'

'Right.'

Before I could ask anything else, he was disappearing up the narrow stairs to the first floor, and I had to move quickly to keep up. I had a feeling I'd be doing a lot of that today.

We stopped on the dark landing. The carpet up here was red, the same as downstairs, and the curtains on the single small window were closed. As I breathed in, I caught the smell of it in the air: hideous and strong. The air was greasy with it, and I felt myself grimacing. Simon nodded towards the bathroom door.

'In here. Are you ready?'

This was a test of sorts, I supposed. But I'd seen bodies before, and I forced myself to put the grimace away.

'Sure.'

We moved into the bathroom - as much as we could, anyway - and that terrible smell increased. Petrol, smoke, meat.

Jesus.

The room itself was small - economical and well decorated. There was a shower cubicle to the left of the door, and the entire room was only twice the width of that, maybe three times as long. There was the toilet and, opposite that, a sink and a mirrored cabinet on the wall. Finally, at the far end beneath the window, there was the bath, running the width of the room. On the window sill above, there were enough gels and foams to fill a men's magazine special supplement, while a silver, executive-style waterproof radio was stuck to the tiles above the taps.

Two other people were in the bathroom and both of them looked up as we entered. One turned back to his work straight away, and Simon introduced me to the one who didn't.

'Mark, this is Chris Dale. He works for the Medical Examiner's Office and he's taken charge of our corpse. Chris, Mark Nelson.'

Dale was younger than I'd have expected for an ME, but then he probably thought the same about me.

'Good to meet you.'

'Likewise.'

Simon nodded towards the end of the room. 'And obviously our victim is the one in the bath.'

I looked between the two men. The bathwater was stained red. You couldn't make out much below the surface, beyond that the man lying there was naked and had rope tied round him. The lower half of his body was obscured, although the backs of his hands broke the surface, forming still, pale islands. Some of the fingers appeared to be missing, and at least one of those still there had been bent right back. At the far end of the bath, his head was visible. It was craning back, staring eyelessly up at the ceiling. The face was burned beyond recognition. The blackened skin had split and peeled away, and where the hair had survived at all it was matted and scorched. His head looked smaller than it should have done, like a pot left in a fire, reduced by the heat.

Keep calm.

'The water's cold,' Dale noted for my benefit. 'Judging by his skin, the hands, it looks as though he was tied up in here for most of the night.'

'Okay.' My voice didn't sound right.

'Given the body's ambient temperature in relation to the water, I'd estimate a time of death between three and four hours ago. Somewhere around seven o'clock this morning, give or take.'

I didn't reply this time, just blew out, wanting to go back into the hallway and close the door on this. But even as I was staring at the victim and feeling that odd crime-scene emotion - a mixture of revulsion, fear, pity and fascination - my training was taking over, turning the death into a puzzle and beginning to work out the blanks.

The victim had been tied up in the bath all night, but he was only killed this morning. That raised questions, and when we found the answers we'd be closer to solving the puzzle. Already I was thinking of robbery, possibly some kind of extortion: something on that level.

'What was done to him?'

Dale looked over at the dead man.

'Preliminary, this. He has the clear injuries to his hands there, and that's repeated over most of his body: he has a substantial number of shallow cuts, a few deeper ones. As to his face and head, I'd guess he was doused with lighter fluid and set on fire.'

'Okay.'

'He has obvious internal injuries to the mouth and throat, indicating that he ingested the lighter fluid as well. Despite all the obvious external injuries, I imagine the official cause of death will turn out to be asphyxia.'

A moment of silence panned out. I stared at the victim's ruined face, unable to imagine what it must have been like to die in such a manner. Instead, I experienced a shiver of something that was part horror, part grief. A sensation of profound sorrow, both that someone had to go through this and that someone could actually carry the act out.

'Are you all right?' Simon said.

'I'm fine. Just thinking.'

'Good. Come on through - the rest of the team are in the spare room. John's been waiting to hand out assignments.'

I followed Simon out of the bathroom, grateful to be back on the landing, and we walked into the spare room at the far end. It smelled of vomit, and I quickly noted the source. There was a stain soaked into the carpet - spatters of blood on the wall, too. Crime-scene techs were attending to both; the man on his knees by the vomit looked as though he'd prefer to be downstairs checking the skirting boards with everyone else.

The rest of my team were in the opposite corner, circled round a computer table. The monitor was open on an email package, and Mercer and Pete Dwyer were standing on either side of the team's final member, Greg Martin, who was sitting down, facing the bright screen. Greg was younger than the others, not much older than me, I thought, and was the team's IT expert. His jet-black hair and sideburns were cropped to the same neat length, and the glasses he wore looked fashionable and expensive. In fact, he was one of the trendiest geeks you were likely to encounter, and I imagined his collection of bathroom potions would probably rival the one belonging to our victim. But at the interview - borderline arrogance aside - he'd seemed relatively friendly.

'Mark is here,' Simon announced.

Mercer held up a finger without looking in our direction.

'One minute.'

Greg clicked something and the screen changed. The hard drive below was whirring away to itself, like a happy cat that didn't know its owner was dead. Additional fluorescent cables ran up from the hard drive, connecting it to the police laptop that Greg was working on.

I looked around the room, and saw a photographer standing a little away from us, angled back, concentrating on the wall behind the door. As the camera flashed, I took a step closer and looked at his subject.

Immediately, my skin began to crawl.

Somebody had drawn in black marker pen on the wall. It was an utterly alien design - an enormous spider web, perhaps, or some kind of dreamcatcher - and it disturbed me for reasons I couldn't put into words. Whatever it meant, I only needed to look at it for a moment to know the person behind it was unlikely to be the dead man in the bathtub.