THE WATCHER
Kate Medina

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Copyright © Kate Medina 2020

Jacket design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020. Jacket photographs © Ebru Sidar/Arcangel Images (branch), Silas Manhood (figure)

Kate Medina asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008214050

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008214074

Version: 2020-08-19

Dedication

For Bettina and Sean

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Kate Medina

About the Publisher

1

One Year Ago

The jetty was made of weather-beaten wooden slats, yawning gaps between each, and with every step he took Robbie could focus on nothing but the grey-black water heaving twenty metres beneath him. He shuddered and his stomach clenched tight. His mind sought out the last time his father had brought him here, so many years ago that the memory was as distant as the horizon. A family open day at the lifeboat station – he must have been only five or six. It had been midsummer, he remembered, bright sunshine and a faint breeze frothing the tops of the swelling waves. The rusty steel handrails of the jetty had been festooned with blue and red balloons, leading the small children along its rickety fifty-metre-length to the lifeboat shed at its end, drawing their eyes away from the drop to the sea.

But Robbie hadn’t been distracted by the balloons.

The very second that he had stepped onto the jetty his attention had been snatched by the chasm below. A jumbled mosaic of brown, yellow and white beach pebbles below him at first, then slippery, seaweed-smothered stones, then that heaving, swirling sea. He had been fixated by that sea – so far beneath – the only thing to stop him falling into its swallowing depths, the bleached wooden stats that flexed and groaned with each timid step he took.

He hadn’t even known then, about the boy. Or about the boy’s dog.

Even so, he had felt the nastiness of this place. Sensed it.

And now he did know about the boy and about the boy’s dog. He knew everything.

One, two, three, four. Don’t stand on the cracks in the pavement. Don’t stand on the cracks between the planks. The yawning, wide gaps that will suck you down and swallow you whole.

‘Robbie.’

His gaze snapped up. Though his father tried to hide his feelings, had learnt to hide them well, Robbie had learnt to read them better and the look of distress in his father’s eyes as he’d looked back and caught him stepping awkwardly, sideways, crab-like, from plank to plank, was toddler-book easy to interpret.

You’re fourteen not four. His father didn’t say it. Couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk upsetting him.

‘Are you OK, Robbie?’ That empathetic, singsong voice that Robbie had grown to hate.

He nodded, didn’t speak. He spoke rarely, only when he had absolutely no choice, when shrugs, eye rolls and hand movements failed to communicate what needed to be said.

His father smiled, an awkward smile that didn’t attempt to touch his eyes. He turned and continued his determinedly hearty walk along the jetty toward the lifeboat shed, his yellow cagoule billowing as it filled with autumn wind, making him look like a giant, animated canary. Robbie followed, head down, his gaze focused on the planks, on the grey-blue deadliness far below.

The lifeboat was huge and red, its bow extending from the open doors of the lifeboat shed, towering above them.

‘I always wanted to join,’ Allan said, running his hand along the boat’s hull. ‘To do something great like that.’

Why didn’t you? Robbie thought. Because of me?

He didn’t say that either. Instead, he turned and looked to the horizon where the undulating grey line of sea meeting sky was punctured by the dark grey hulk of a ship. A container ship? A cruise ship? A navy vessel? How far out was it? Kilometres out to sea – too far to identify.

Was the boy out there too? Had he travelled that far by now?

Had his skin and bones?

2

Claudine Fuller twisted the key in the lock, reaching up to flip open the top bolt, ducking down to unlatch the bottom.

‘Out you go, Lupo.’

The dog looked up at her, its azure-blue eyes catching the kitchen ceiling lights, making them look almost translucent, depthless. She could dive into those eyes, lose herself in them. She often felt as if Lupo could see right into her soul, as if he understood. And now she felt as if she could see right into his. She was sure, sometimes, that he was a wolf, a heroic, storybook wolf. White Fang. She had wanted to call him White Fang, from the adventure story by Jack London that she had adored when she was a teenager, but Hugo had thought that it was a ridiculous name. Hugo didn’t read, despite the scores of leather-bound hardbacks creaking the shelves of his study. To her knowledge the only thing that touched those books was the end of Junita’s feather duster. Claudine wasn’t permitted in Hugo’s study. It had never been an explicit command, but the implicit edict was clear. When he was at work or socializing without her, the room was locked; when he was at home, he was perennially in there, ‘working’, though she suspected that much of Hugo’s so-called work involved arranging extracurricular activities he didn’t want her to know about.

The feel of Lupo’s cold, wet nose tucking into her palm brought her back to the present.

‘Sorry, boy,’ she murmured, pushing open the kitchen door and stepping onto the York stone patio to watch him streak across the dark lawn and launch himself into the woods.

A flash of white – gone.

Another flash, a second later – gone.

He could disappear for half an hour, roaming through the woods that encircled their house and garden, part of their fifty-acre property, but so thick that the sunlight struggled to penetrate the trees’ dense canopy even during the day. Timid by nature, Claudine rarely ventured beyond the edge of the fastidiously clipped lawn, beyond what she knew. An exotic bird in a gilded cage. She had always been that way. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl, her father had used to call her when he was alive. She envied those independent women who had the guts to study hard, go to university, build their own impressive careers, chase their dreams. But she just wasn’t constructed that way. Her dream had always only ever been to marry someone like her father, a strong man who would look after her. Control me. She pushed the thought from her mind. And so, she had married Hugo, charmed by his self-confidence, his relentless self-belief. Now, fifteen years married, she saw it for what it was: an unswerving conviction that most others were quite simply beneath him. He had married her because she was beautiful and docile and because she had needed him. Hugo loved to be needed.

Claudine shivered. A stiff breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, creaking branches and stirring leaves into a furious stew. Though she would never dare to admit it to Hugo, she had always hated this extravagant house, hated the isolation, the loneliness. Hugo didn’t like her to work. He said that it reflected badly on him, made it seem as if he couldn’t support his wife. Hugo and his mates adored to tease each other about money, wealth. At a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, when someone had asked him which mortgage provider he recommended, he’d announced – ‘I’m not that end of the market, mate’ – and had then laughed uproariously at the man’s expense and his own genius wit. The poor man had only been trying to tap his knowledge of the property market, but Hugo had taken it as an opportunity to stamp on his ego. Just for fun, of course. No hard feelings. Even though twenty of West Sussex’s finest had been clustered around the dinner table, their ears flapping like Dumbo’s.

I hate this house. But most of all, I hate those woods.

Hugo loved them of course, loved the kudos of inviting his bloated property industry friends over to shoot pheasant in the autumn. Claudine would find birds in the garden gasping for air, their chests peppered with shot, or twisting in pathetic circles on the lawn, their wings mangled. But it was the look in their eyes that always cut her deepest, the look of futile hopelessness. Whoever thought animals weren’t sentient beings were idiots. She used to try to rescue them, drive them to the wild bird sanctuary in Sidlesham, but it was ten kilometres of narrow country lanes and, by the time she’d got there, most of the poor things had died of shock. The shooting season was well underway now, but she hid indoors, the radio turned to blaring; let the poor birds spend their last sorry moments alone.

Another flash of white.

Lupo.

She stared hard into the soupy darkness.

Lupo?

But the white shape wasn’t moving, wasn’t a streak. Why was he standing still? What was he looking at? Usually he just tore.

As she squinted hard into the black gaps between the trees, she realized that it couldn’t be Lupo. It was the wrong shape, too big, too tall. Unless. Unless, he was standing on his hind legs, looking up into the trees, stalking a squirrel perhaps. He didn’t usually, he was a sled dog not a hunter …

‘Lupo,’ she called. Still the shape remained motionless. ‘Lupo.’

Could he hear her? The wind was strong, blowing away from her, carrying her scent and surely her voice. But the trees were swirling, their branches creaking, and she’d never had a strong voice.

‘Lupo?’

The harder she stared, the more the dark trunks and black gaps between blended and the white shape shifted until it was gone, and she was no longer sure what she had seen.

Shivering again, nothing to do with the chill wind this time, Claudine stepped back inside the kitchen and pulled the door quickly shut, ducking to flip the bottom lock into place, standing on tiptoes to slide the top lock home.

What on earth had that been? That odd, immovable white shape in the woods? A ghost?

No, of course, not. Even she didn’t believe in ghosts. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. She needed to toughen up, be braver, take control of her imagination, her thoughts, rather than letting them control her.

But where was Lupo? He should be back by now.

3

‘Karma? I’m surveying fucking karma and from where I’m sitting it looks great.’

Claudine heard Hugo’s voice booming around the glass atrium that housed their swimming pool as she moved through the changing area. He perennially sounded as if he was addressing a crowd through a loudhailer.

‘Don’t call me again.’

She stepped quietly onto the honed granite tiles that surrounded the swimming pool in jet black. The water, tiled beneath its surface in pale blue-grey granite punctured by scores of tiny, sunken lights, sparkled like the Caribbean Sea on a brilliant midsummer’s day; the temperature in the pool house, too, equator hot. Hugo, reclining on one of the oak steamer chairs, his chest and stomach gaping from a loosely tied white towelling robe, lowered his mobile from his ear.

‘Who were you talking to, darling?’ Claudine queried in a low voice.

‘No one you need to worry about, baby.’ His eyes roved from her toes back up to her face. ‘You know that I don’t like you dressing in jeans.’

‘I’m only hanging around the house, Hugo. I’m not seeing anyone today—’

‘Me, Claudine. You’re seeing me.’

She gave a pensive, scolded schoolchild nod. ‘Lupo hasn’t come back. I let him out about forty-five minutes ago. He disappeared into the woods and he hasn’t come back.’

Hugo made no move to stand. ‘There’ll be a few dead pheasants out there that the gun dogs failed to find.’ He smirked. ‘I’d imagine he’s chowing down on fresh kill.’

Claudine dipped her gaze. Hugo knew how much she loved animals, hated killing.

‘I can’t even hear him barking,’ she said, despising the plaintive tone that crept into her voice whenever she spoke with him, hating the way that Hugo made her feel. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. ‘I can usually hear him barking when he runs through the woods, the odd bark, at least.’

Hugo lifted his shoulders disinterestedly.

‘Would you go out and look for him, please, Hugo?’

Hugo spread his hands, indicating his supine form. Claudine’s eyes glanced over the paunchy spread of his gut, feeling bile rise at the thought of how it slapped against her thighs at night, when he climbed on top of her and spread her legs.

‘No, Claudine, I won’t,’ she heard him say. ‘I’m not about to start crawling around in the woods looking for that sodding dog in my dressing gown. And stop treating him like a surrogate child. He’s a hulking great wolf, not a bloody baby.’

Claudine winced, not only at Hugo’s tone. Not a bloody baby. They hadn’t been able to conceive. She hadn’t known until they were married that Hugo was sterile; evidently, he hadn’t thought it relevant. She had suggested a sperm donor, but of course he wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t entertain the thought of bringing up another man’s child.

‘I thought I saw something outside,’ she murmured, her mind’s eye finding the image of that strange, pale figure. ‘In the woods.’

The ring of Hugo’s mobile bookended her sentence. ‘I need to get this, Claudine. Leave me, will you. It’s a business call.’

Claudine gave a tiny nod. What business associate would be calling Hugo at a quarter-to-ten at night? She was pretty sure some of Hugo’s business calls were as legitimate as much of the time he spent ‘working late’.

Pulling the door to the swimming pool complex closed behind her, Claudine crossed the basement hallway, catching sight of her hunched, folded reflection in the darkened glass doors of the wine cellar, inwardly cringing at the outward manifestation of her timidity. She stopped suddenly.

A noise?

Not the boom of Hugo’s voice, but something else, lighter, irregular. She tilted her head to listen.

Nothing for a moment, then there it was again, that same light, uneven noise.

The external door from the basement hallway opened out onto a sunken patio area that led, via a short flight of curved York stone steps, to the lawn. They rarely used the door or the sunken patio beyond it, shaded and dank as it was even in summer, preferring instead to access the garden from the kitchen or sitting room doors upstairs.

But there the noise was again, louder now, impossible to ignore, coming from beyond that seldom used door. And with a huge sense of relief, Claudine realized that it was the sound of scratching. Nails – claws – on wood. Unmistakable now that she had stepped over, was pressing her ear to the solid wood.

Lupo. He had come back. Her beautiful soulful wolf was home.

It occurred to her briefly as she reached for the key that it was odd Lupo had returned to this door when she’d let him out of the kitchen. When she always let him out of, and he always returned to, the kitchen. But as her fingers closed around the chill copper, she pushed the niggle of uncertainty from her mind. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. Her hunched, submissive reflection in the wine cellar doors had brought her up short, given her a two-thousand-volt shock. She hadn’t realized how unsparingly her mental state had manifested itself in her physical bearing. Her reflection had been ridiculous, that of a beaten, cowed, bovine creature. She couldn’t continue as she was, letting life cow her, Hugo, control her, bully her. She had to force herself to be stronger. She would never be happy if she didn’t. Lupo must have heard or scented her as she walked past the door. White Fang. My wolf. Wolves could scent game carried on the wind from over three kilometres away – she’d read that somewhere. Or perhaps he had seen her through the swimming pool’s glass atrium, talking to Hugo. It was like a goldfish bowl, the swimming pool. Anyone standing outside on the dark lawn or hiding in the trees could look in and watch them, watch their every move, while remaining entirely invisible themselves. The thought had always disturbed her and she didn’t like to use the swimming pool at night, certainly not alone. But that would change now. She would make that change. Be stronger, braver.

As she twisted the key in the lock, an involuntary shiver ran down her spine, a lingering sense of that odd white shape out in the woods. Lupo. But it had been Lupo, hadn’t it?

There it was again, the scratching, shaking her out of her reverie. And now that she was standing right by the door, she could hear sniffing coming from the crack beneath it. The tension drained from her.

A blast of cold air hit her full in the face, bringing tears to her eyes as she pulled the door open wide. White, filling her clouded vision. Something huge and white.

But not Lupo. Not Lupo.

A face.

She saw that now.

A face.

A mask.

Pale eyes beneath the mask, that pierced straight through her.

Fear, terror, was instantly acid sharp in her mouth. Her head exploded with pain, then only blackness.

4

A couple of weeks ago, Eunice Hargreaves had watched one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel that she did so enjoy and, as she pulled back her bedroom curtain and peered out onto the deserted A234, she felt as if she had been teleported from the confines of her cottage bedroom and deposited high on a snowy peak in the Canadian Rockies.

The wolf was standing quite still, looking up at her, its attention no doubt caught by the movement of her curtains as she’d parted them. It was huge and powerful and pure, pure white, with depthless azure-blue eyes that caught the moonlight and reflected it back at her. Transported to the wilderness of that documentary, her aching joints and the ache in her heart for darling Derek that kept her up at night were momentarily forgotten and she was a young girl again, awed by the beauty and majesty of this animal.

Caught up in her imagination, it took her a long moment to realize why the wolf wasn’t moving, wasn’t running. Her rheumy gaze found the length of rope that tethered its ice-blue collar to the lamp post outside her front gate. Electric light then, not the moon, reflecting in the dog’s eyes, and Eunice was back in Walderton, blue ropes bulging through the diaphanous skin of her hands with the effort of gripping tightly to the window frame to stop her frail body from toppling. Back to the grim reality of her life, the all-encompassing loneliness she had felt since her husband died last year, punctured only by weekly visits to a charity lunch club in Chichester, the odd, fleeting, duty pop-in from a neighbour.

Dropping the curtain, she hobbled to the bedside table. Who should she call? 999? But, no, a huge wolf-dog tied to a lamp post in the middle of the night wasn’t a desperate emergency, though how on earth was one supposed to find the number for the local police station – if there even was one any more with the government cutting every public service to the quick? And there was another number, wasn’t there, a not-quite-emergency police number? 112? Or was that for America? She and Derek had spent their fortieth wedding anniversary in New York and they had been robbed at knifepoint in Central Park. The police had responded ever so quickly, though they’d been quite brash when they arrived, but she really couldn’t remember if Derek had dialled 111 or 112 and if that then meant that the English, not-quite-emergency number was 112 or 111 …

I’ll try both, she decided, pragmatically. Quite simple really.

5

The house was huge, mock-Tudor, or perhaps genuine Tudor, given its size and position, on the brow of a hill at the top of a gently sloping fifty-metre-long gravelled drive that cut off from Blackheath Lane on the outskirts of the village of Walderton. Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons had driven through the village itself on the way here from his home in Chichester, and though it was knocking three in the morning, the gibbous moon’s cool light had illuminated a poster-child English village, chocolate-box quaint with its whitewashed, flower-basket-bedecked pub, crooked, tiled houses with leadlight windows and a neat, triangular village green on which cricket would doubtless be played and Pimm’s drunk in the summer. All very beautiful and yet even Dr Ghoshal’s morgue held more appeal for Marilyn. The mere thought of living in a Marplesque village such as this one, where everyone made it their express business to know everyone else’s, brought him out in hives.

Crunching his ancient Z3 to a stop on the sweep of gravel drive in front of the house, Marilyn cut the engine. Tilting his head back, he let his eyes drift closed for a brief moment and tried to focus his mind on the blank pink insides of his eyelids. He didn’t yet know what he would encounter behind the ornate facade of this grand house, but from DC Darren Cara’s panicked voice on the radio, it wasn’t going to be rose-garden pretty. Snapping his eyes open, he pushed open the driver’s door and climbed out. Though he had managed barely three hours’ sleep, he felt fine, good even, he’d venture to say. His puritanical new approach to life seemed, unfortunately, to be serving him well.

He was far from the first attendee at the crime scene. Piccadilly Circus would doubtless be quieter at three in the morning. Six members of Burrows’ CSI team were clustered around the forensics van, getting suited and booted on the gravel drive. Beyond them, DC Cara was pacing across the expansive, pillared and porticoed porch, his baggy forensic overshoes inflating and deflating in time with each stressed step, as if linked to miniature pairs of bellows. Marilyn was pretty sure it wasn’t only the bleaching effect of the moon’s cold light that had boil-washed the colour from his face.

‘What have we got, Cara?’

‘Murder, Guv.’

Marilyn drily raised an eyebrow. ‘I got that far myself, thank you, Detective Constable.’

Cara didn’t smile, not even a flicker to massage his superior officer’s ego. ‘Double murder. A married couple, early forties. The man is called Hugo Fuller and his wife is Claudine. She was found floating face down in the swimming pool and he was tied to a lounger and stabbed, through the, uh—’ He stopped speaking to clear his throat.

‘Through the …?’

‘Uh, through … through the eye.’ Despite the throat-clearing, his voice was a parched croak. ‘Both eyes actually.’

‘Lovely.’ Marilyn suppressed the ghost of a twenty-five-years-on-the-job, seen-it-all, cynical smile. Cara had transferred from Traffic to Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes just over a year ago, and though they had dealt with a few sexual assaults, a couple of adult murders and a particularly traumatic child murder during that time, Cara hadn’t seen any of the bodies in situ, at the crime scenes. He was now undergoing Major Crimes’ equivalent of a baptism, though to be fair to the kid, this one sounded like baptism by fire.

‘Who found them?’ Marilyn asked.

‘One of Surrey and Sussex’s dog teams. They were called out to retrieve a husky that was tied to a lamp post in the middle of Walderton. Some old lady was woken by it barking. The dog had a tag on its collar. There was no answer at the door, but the dog team said that they saw a light on around the side of the house. The garden wraps around the house, there’s no fence dividing the front from the back, and the lawn slopes down from this floor on the brow of the hill, to the basement level at the back.’ He raised a gloved hand and flapped it behind him, indicating where a gravel path cut off the sweep of gravel drive and curved around the right side of the house, out of sight. ‘They followed the path, down the hill, to the indoor swimming pool. The lights were on inside and the walls are all glass.’

‘Do we have any information on the couple?’

‘Yes, sir. Hugo Fuller runs … ran a property business. Buying freeholds and living off the ground rent, something like that. It’s very lucrative.’

Marilyn surveyed the enormous Arts and Crafts facade. ‘Clearly.’

‘And his wife supports a few local animal charities.’

‘You’re well informed, Cara.’

‘They’re high profile in the local area. I’ve read about them a few times, Guv.’

‘Read about them? In what?’

‘Sussex Life.’

Marilyn pulled a face. ‘Sussex Life?’

‘It’s good to be plugged in,’ Cara said, with a note of defensiveness. ‘Learn about the area I’m working in, the people. I didn’t grow up around here.’ It was an unnecessary statement. Cara’s accent was pure London, his heritage multi-racial: Barbadian father and white-Irish mother. It didn’t take a genius to work out that he hadn’t grown up in this bastion of lily-white Englishness. ‘You might have seen pictures of the Fullers in the Sussex Society pages,’ he continued. ‘They’re in there all the time at one function or another.’

Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘Do I look like someone who reads the society pages? Any society pages?’

DC Cara looked at his boss. Nicknamed Marilyn, after Marilyn Manson – a moniker his colleagues had bestowed on him the first day he joined the force and that had dogged him ever since – because of his disconcerting, one azure-blue, one brown, mismatched eyes and his penchant for dressing head to toe in black, he did not, in any way, look like someone who read the society pages.

‘No, Guv,’ muttered Cara, suitably admonished.

6

Marilyn followed Cara into the hallway, stepping gingerly onto polished cream marble, ice-rink slippery under his forensic overshoes. The whole ground floor of his Georgian terraced house could have fitted snugly into the Fullers’ hallway. A gargantuan gold-framed mirror occupied the lion’s share of the wall dead ahead, making midgets of Marilyn and Cara even as they walked towards it. They passed the door to a playing-field-sized sitting room to their left, all gold damask sofas and thick white shag-pile rugs; a dark study space to their right, bedecked with heavy oak bookshelves lined with pristine leather-bound hardbacks, none of which looked as if they had ever been touched let alone read; a walnut kitchen next, bifold doors beyond the island opening out onto what Marilyn assumed was the garden, although it was too dark to tell. A wide cream marble staircase, adorned with an intricately sculpted gold banister, curved away to the upper floors and a chandelier that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a banqueting hall in Buckingham Palace hung from the ceiling above, throwing shards of tinkling light around the pale vanilla walls. The decor bellowed from the rooftops: Footballers’ Wives. The Fullers were clearly overburdened with wealth, but not much taste.

On doctor’s orders, Marilyn had been teetotal for the past twenty-nine days – Not that I’m counting every single, painful bloody minute – and as he followed Cara carefully across the hall floor, approaching his own Lilliputian reflection in the Fullers’ mirror, he had to acknowledge that it was doing him good. He looked, if not quite ten years younger, certainly a solid few months – and at his age, forty-nine now, three months away from his fiftieth and dreading the relentless downward slide that he was sure his next birthday would herald, he’d take those. He’d take a week, a day, a few minutes. Seconds. It had got to him, that impending birthday. Hanging over him like the ageist sword of Damocles.

‘As I said before, the garden slopes downstairs, front to back,’ Cara said, as he stopped at the top of a set of cream marble stairs that descended to a basement level. ‘There’s a wine cellar, gym, sauna and swimming pool on the level below this one, but it’s not underground.’

The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was a quarter the size of the main hallway, with a matching cream marble floor and pale vanilla walls, and lit by a mini-me chandelier. Racks of wine bottles were visible through dark double glass doors to their left – the wine cellar, Marilyn supposed, de rigueur in this kind of residence – a gym straight ahead, equipped with more torture equipment than Marilyn had ever felt the need to use in his life, and a frosted-glass doorway to the right, which Cara pushed through, holding it open behind him.

The changing room area they entered was operatingtheatre bright from rows of recessed spots, two more clear glass doors to their left revealing a sauna and steam room. An open archway dead ahead led to the swimming pool, their dual figures reflected, Lilliputian once again, in the wall of black glass beyond the placid blue rectangle of water.

Cara stopped just this side of the archway and held out an arm. ‘Hugo Fuller is to your left, Guv. Claudine Fuller in the pool, also to your left. Neither of them have been touched or moved.’ He pressed himself against the wall, giving Marilyn space to go first; not, Marilyn suspected, out of deference. Cara had clearly had more than his fill at the first viewing, and as Marilyn stepped through the archway, into the foliage-lined Caribbean-warm glass orangery that housed the twenty-five-metre swimming pool, and saw the horror show that was Hugo Fuller, he appreciated exactly why.

Jesus Christ.

The man was reclining on a wooden steamer chair, facing the pool, the wall of glass and the dark garden beyond. Facing. Staring. Sightless. His eye sockets were filled with, what – mush, was the word that instantly popped into Marilyn’s mind, pure mush – his face a mask of coagulating burgundy blood. Blood coated his bare chest, had soaked the lapels of the white towelling robe swathing his corpulent frame and pooled sloppily into his lap. But it wasn’t his eye sockets, horrendous as they were, that hitched the breath in Marilyn’s throat. It was the scratches, gouges more accurately, deep vertical gouges that ran from his hairline down his face, through his eye sockets – had they done that to his eyes? – before furrowing down his cheeks to his chin. He looked as if he had been savaged by a wild beast. Marilyn swallowed, forcing down the rising bile, as subtly as he could.

‘So that’s Mr Fuller,’ he said, in the absence of anything else popping into his brain. ‘What about the wife?’

He turned, grateful for the opportunity to look away, his gaze fixing with relief on Mrs Fuller. Claudine, Cara had said. She was fully dressed still in dark jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt, raw silk, expensive – ruined now, Marilyn thought ridiculously – floating face down in the swimming pool, her blonde hair fanning out in pale, seaweed tendrils around her head, a meaty patch on the back of her head where, despite the water, the blonde tendrils were matted with blood. Dead, without question, unless she was a champion breath-holder. Cause of death? Marilyn didn’t want, or need, to speculate. That wasn’t his job.

He turned at the sound of ponderous footsteps – his lead CSI, Tony Burrows, looking tired, his moon face puffy with recently vanquished sleep.

‘Burrows, good morning. Welcome.’

‘Even sparrows are not farting at this ungodly hour, Marilyn.’

‘Perils of the job, Tony.’

‘Indeed.’ Stifling a yawn with the back of one latex-gloved hand, his gaze moved past Marilyn’s left shoulder to find Claudine Fuller. ‘Poor woman.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Leave the bodies where they are. I want Dr Flynn to see the scene as we found it. This isn’t normal.’

Burrows grimaced. ‘Can any murder really be classed as normal?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Unfortunately, it’s a long time since anything about human nature surprised me.’

Marilyn shook his head and stepped aside, so that Burrows could view the horror that was Hugo Fuller. ‘No, this, Tony, this is something else altogether.’

7

Jessie felt as if she was swimming upwards through black treacle. She surfaced, her ears tuning to the nagging sound of her mobile’s ring, her eyes flickering open, shut, sticking shut. She forced them open again, her brain lagging way behind, lost in that treacle of dense, muggy, hungover sleep. The room was pitch-black, no telltale leak of light from below the curtains. Twisting sideways, she fumbled her mobile from the bedside table.

‘Marilyn.’

‘You’re needed, Dr Flynn.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.’

‘Oh God, that early.’

‘For a double murder, even I get up in the middle of the night.’

Double murder. ‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. As soon as you can. I’ll text you the address.’

Silence on the end of the line; the only sound, Callan snoring softly beside her. Odd that the telephone hadn’t woken him. Usually he was bolt upright at any noise courtesy of the antennae that came with his job as a military policeman. Always on call, even when he was fast asleep. And he had driven them to dinner last night, so he didn’t even have ‘hangover’ as an excuse like she did. She gave him a soft kiss on the shoulder, feeling the warmth of his skin against her lips, sucking in his scent for a brief, calming moment before twisting away, wincing at the chill air that wrapped around her as she climbed quietly out of bed.

It was at times like this that she questioned her own sanity at ever having got involved with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes and Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons. Though, to be fair, it hadn’t been a well-deliberated choice, far more the employment equivalent of boiling a frog. A couple of the cases she had worked on while a clinical psychologist with the Defence Psychology Service had overlapped with civilian cases that Marilyn had been working on, and she had ended up helping him, proving herself far more adept at understanding criminals’ psychology than she had ever expected to be.

The second of those cases, last November, had been the one which had abruptly ended her army career. She glanced down at the scar that ran across her left palm from the knife attack, still raised and ugly, but faded to a deep brown, no longer the furious purple that had goaded her for so many months. And though her fingers would never be dexterous, her repaired extensor tendons were functioning now, more or less, and her hand no longer felt like the grotesque hand of a mannequin. Her dismissal from the army had pretty much coincided with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes’ last criminal psychologist, Dr Butter, retiring, and the rest, as they say, was history. It filled a gap for both her and Marilyn and, like the scar on her hand, her hankering for her old job was fading, the only connection she now had with the military the man currently asleep in her bed.

The ping of a text arriving shook her back to the present. Double murder. Shit, she needed to switch her brain on and get moving.

In the dark, she fumbled some clothes from the cupboard and took them into the bathroom where she splashed warm water on her face, cleaned her teeth, and shucked on jeans and a navy V-neck jumper, the latter fraying at the sleeves where she’d chewed it in a misguided attempt to stop chewing her nails. Never mind, she didn’t imagine that Marilyn’s invitation required a designer ensemble.

Downstairs, she pulled on her trainers and reached to the key rack for her Mini keys, finding an empty space. Callan’s car was in the garage for its annual service, and he’d borrowed her Mini yesterday. He had learnt to line his shoes on the shoe rack, almost as precisely as she lined up her own, even though she knew that if it was his own house, he’d kick them off in a muddy heap on the doormat. The shoes he managed, to assuage her OCD; the keys were a bridge too far. Shoving her hand in his coat pocket, her fingers closed around a folded envelope which she pulled out so that she could reach back in for the keys tucked beneath it.

The thick white hallmarked envelope sprang open in her hand revealing the crest of the Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit, Frimley Park Hospital. Callan had told her that his only contact with his neurologist was now six-monthly check-ups and he’d last been a couple of months ago. His brain, the bullet, all fine – he’d told her – so why the letter? Her gaze flicked to the stairs: no sound, the landing in darkness. She could read the letter, shove it back and he’d be none the wiser.

Her fingers itched as she felt the rough edge of the torn envelope. He hadn’t been honest with her, so she had a right to read it, didn’t she? But then an image rose in her mind, watching her mother standing in the dark hallway of her family home, glancing furtively over her shoulder to check that she was alone – as she had just done – then searching her father’s coat pockets, the two outside, the one inside, finding nothing, sagging, physically sagging with thwarted frustration, ducking down and rifling through his briefcase, more frustration, more repressed, suppressed fury. Watching again, months later, as her mother frantically, blatantly, right in front of her, searched his pockets and briefcase again, knowing in her heart that her husband was having an affair, being stonewalled, told she was delusional, unhinged.

Her mother had been right of course. Jessie’s father had been sneaking around behind her back for more than two years by the time she had found irrevocable proof, stoking his affair with Diane while his wife cared for their desperately sick eight-year-old son. Living with suspicion had destroyed the remaining soft parts of her that hadn’t already been destroyed by her son’s illness. And seeing her mother, Jessie had promised herself that she would never live that way herself. But here she was, standing in a darkened hallway, Callan asleep upstairs, being suspicious, furtive. She couldn’t read his letter in secret, had to ask him about it. Her own intense obsession with privacy wouldn’t let her invade Callan’s, because she would be furious with him if he invaded hers. Stuffing the envelope back in a vague semblance of the way she had found it, she grabbed the keys, snatched her navy puffa from the coat rack and pulled open the door.

As soon as you can, Marilyn had said. What the hell was she going to face when she got there?

8

‘Can I go in alone?’

‘Alone?’

Jessie clocked the undercurrent of hurt in Marilyn’s tone and suppressed a smile. ‘You can accompany me, if you don’t speak. If one of your senses is occupied, by noise—’ A pause, the ghost of another smile. ‘Chatter, the other senses don’t work properly. And I need to focus so that I can—’

‘Get a sense?’ Marilyn cut in.

She met his gaze and grinned. ‘No flies on you, DI Simmons.’

Marilyn rolled his eyes. He was becoming acclimatized to her foibles, her need to immerse herself in the scene alone, or, at a minimum, in silence, to get a sense. In truth, he operated pretty much the same way himself, alone, in silence, trusting his intuition, usually just DS Sarah Workman, his quiet, dependable, supportive crutch, omnipresent. The last case he and Jessie had worked on together, only six short weeks ago – six weeks that felt a lifetime of disturbed sleep and self-recrimination long – she had operated the same way, frustrating him at times by how self-contained she was. The child murder – double child murder – had battered his emotions like no other case he had worked on in his twenty-five years with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, had dumped his confidence, his self-belief, in the garbage can. He had screwed up unforgivably, blamed himself, rightly in his opinion, for the death of that second child; a little girl he was sure could have been saved if he hadn’t missed the hole, that gaping black sinkhole, in his logic. Her death, that sinkhole, was the reason for his new-found teetotalism. He had felt compelled to offer his resignation, which had been turned down, his exemplary record deemed to have more than made up for that one mistake, however unforgivable a mistake he considered it to have been. But he had been grateful, as he was a walking cliché: the detective inspector with no life outside his job; he would have been rudderless without it.

‘Ready?’ Jessie asked.

She had hurriedly climbed into the forensic overalls and overshoes that one of Tony Burrows’ CSI team had handed her. Now she pulled her waist-length black hair into a messy bun, securing it with the band she habitually wore around her wrist for just such occasions and tucked the bun and stray strands into the overall’s elasticated hood.

Marilyn nodded. ‘I’m steeling myself for round two.’ He glanced behind him at Cara, who still looked paler than the Fullers’ shiny Dulux Pure Brilliant White painted front door. ‘DC Cara?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Marilyn ignored the waver in Cara’s voice, was happy to give the kid a break. He didn’t have a strong stomach himself at the best of times and was surprised, given the horror show awaiting them downstairs, that his own voice wasn’t wavering.

‘Listen and learn, Cara,’ he said, laying a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘Listen and learn from the maestro.’

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Could you be any more patronizing?’ she cast quietly over her shoulder as she turned and crossed the pillared porch, Marilyn a step behind her, Cara following a few paces behind him.

‘Patronization is the glue in any successful hierarchy,’ he muttered back, with a wink. ‘When he’s an aged DI himself, I expect him to adopt the same condescending attitude, keep the minions from getting above their station.’

‘To me, I meant, DI Simmons, not to him.’

‘You can handle it, Dr Flynn,’ he muttered, as he followed her over the threshold, into the Sussex house of horrors. ‘Oh, and just for the record, I don’t chatter.’

9

The house was a monument to opulence, an Aladdin’s cave of gilded gold everywhere – staircase, mirror frames, bowls and statuettes – that caught the light cast from the elephantine chandelier’s myriad dangling crystals and threw it around in diamond spangles. Should have brought my sunglasses.

‘Walk down the length of the hall and take the stairs, dead ahead, to the level below,’ Marilyn called out.

Jessie moved gingerly down the hallway as instructed – the combination of overshoes and polished marble life-and-death slippery – past a determinedly masculine study lined with leather-bound volumes (for show, she found herself thinking), a lavishly decorated sitting room, gold photographs adorning a marble mantelpiece (most featuring a stunning white dog with ice-blue eyes, no children visible), then finally a massive kitchen doubtless designed and constructed by some high-end designer she’d never heard of and had no interest in ever hearing of.

A draught at the bottom of the stairs she’d descended from the hallway to the level below pulled her attention to a door that gaped open, revealing a sunken patio area that segued, via a flight of wide curved stone steps, to the manicured lawn above. Woods hemmed the lawn on all sides, thick and dark, unpenetrated by the deep orange rays of the dawn light. The corpulent form of Tony Burrows, Marilyn’s lead CSI, clad in a white forensic onesie overall identical to the one she was wearing, just a good few sizes larger, squatted on the patio.

‘We believe that he approached the house through the woods,’ Marilyn said, as they stepped outside.

‘He?’

‘Burrows found a couple of muddy footprints on the patio. Men’s. They’re not Mr Fuller’s.’

‘What size are they?’

‘I’ll have that in a moment,’ Burrows called out. ‘But they’re definitely men’s, unless it was a “she” in clown shoes.’

‘Isn’t that possible?’ Jessie asked.

‘Yes, it’s possible,’ Burrows conceded.

‘The state of the victims, particularly Mr Fuller, concurs with it being a “he”,’ Marilyn cut in. ‘From a strength perspective.’

Unless it’s a female body-builder wearing clown shoes. Jessie didn’t say it. Marilyn would take her through his first-cut reasoning now, as they surveyed the crime scene, and she would discuss it with him, challenge him. But she had worked with him enough times to know that he would never reach a conclusion without microscopically examining every angle and the nth degree multiple times first. There would be plenty of time to air her more outlandish ideas.

‘And he entered the house via this door?’ Jessie asked Burrows.

‘Yes. There are a couple of other faint footprints on the marble.’ He indicated two yellow numbered cones. ‘And there’s blood on the floor over there and a patch on the skirting.’

‘There’s no damage to the door,’ Jessie said. ‘It wasn’t forced.’

‘No,’ Marilyn confirmed. ‘It was unlocked and opened from the inside.’

‘That suggests that either they knew the man, were expecting him, or—’ she broke off. ‘Though why then approach through the woods?’

‘So as not to be seen,’ Cara ventured. ‘Even if they were expecting him, if he wanted to kill them, he wouldn’t want to be seen by anyone else as he came to the house.’

‘There almost certainly wouldn’t have been anyone to see him anyway,’ Jessie said. ‘It was night-time, dark. The drive opens onto a narrow country lane that doesn’t appear to go anywhere much. The nearest neighbours are, where?’

‘Those on the outskirts of the village of Walderton, over a kilometre away by road, about five hundred metres as the crow flies.’ Cara pointed. ‘That way, straight through the woods. The dog was found tied to a lamp post in the middle of the village at a quarter-past-one this morning.’

‘Who found him?’

‘An old lady. She said that she was woken by the sound of a dog barking persistently and got out of bed to investigate.’

Jessie nodded, gazing out across the flat expanse of lawn, frosty with dew, which reflected the dawn light, making the grass look as if it was scattered with orange diamonds, to the dense, dark wall of trees. No diamonds there, no light, no sparkle. Though she loved solitude, had chosen to live in a cottage down a quiet country lane precisely to avoid unwanted human contact, she also loved the fact that her cottage was small, cosy, just a lounge and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. If she was feeling nervous, if a case she’d worked on had lodged itself in her brain, she could search from top to bottom in sixty seconds, prove to herself that a serial killer hadn’t crammed himself into her laundry basket ready to rise and strike like a snake charmer’s adder when she was brushing her teeth. Despite her initial intention of living in splendid isolation, she also now loved Ahmose’s fatherly presence next door, loved his presence and loved him, her adopted parent, more even than her natural parents or certainly more than her father. The magnitude of this house, of its grandiose seclusion, made her shiver. She couldn’t imagine swimming in that pool, a goldfish in a bowl watched by – who? Anyone who had a mind to hike through those dense trees. It was the stuff of nightmares. Had Claudine Fuller felt secure here? Though the autumn sun was now rising above the treeline, those dense woods remained unpenetrated by its glow.

‘The dog was removed for a reason,’ she said.

‘Unless it ran away and someone found it and tied it to the lamp post,’ Cara ventured.

‘Had it been seen in the village before?’

Cara shook his head. ‘The dog teams said that the woman who called it in had never seen it before and it’s a small village and she’s nosy – their words not mine.’

‘We’ll question everyone in the village,’ Marilyn said. ‘Obviously. About the dog and about any suspicious people, movements, et cetera, they might have noticed in the past week or two.’

Jessie nodded. ‘And that’s the closest village?’

‘Yes,’ Cara said. ‘It’s the only one within two kilometres of the house.’

Jessie shuddered. Splendid isolation. ‘Then I think we can assume the dog doesn’t typically run away.’

‘I wouldn’t bloody run away if I lived here,’ Marilyn muttered.

‘The woman … Mrs Fuller, was patron of a number of animal charities,’ Cara said in a resolutely professional tone. ‘I think she would have provided the dog, Lupo, he’s called with a good home. Cared for him, loved him.’

Marilyn winked at Jessie, then spoke in a similarly professional tone. ‘So, can we assume that our perpetrator removed the dog so that it couldn’t guard? Couldn’t warn the owners of an intruder?’

‘Perhaps,’ Jessie said. ‘But, if someone, a stranger, can just take the dog and tie it to a lamp post, I’d say that it wasn’t a great guard dog in the first place. What breed is it?’

‘A Siberian husky,’ Cara said. ‘They’re not great guard dogs evidently, as it’s not in their nature to be aggressive to people.’

Jessie nodded. Stepping over to the door through which the Fullers’ killer had entered, she squatted down.

‘Don’t touch.’ Burrows’ voice boomed in the eerie silence. ‘Following instructions from Lord-God-on-High to leave everything inside the house as it was until you arrived, I am still to process the door, both inside and out.’

Jessie placed her hands on her thighs, as much to balance herself in the crouch as to stop herself from involuntarily reaching out and fouling up Burrows’ crime scene. Though she was wearing gloves, she knew that he still viewed her as an amateur when it came to moving responsibly around crime scenes, and he was right to do so.

‘There are faint vertical marks on the paintwork near the bottom of the door,’ she addressed the comment to Marilyn – Lord-God-on-High – who was hovering over her.

‘From the dog?’ he asked.

Without answering, she reached out, fingers bent into claws.

‘DON’T TOUCH.’ From behind her. Burrows.

‘I’m not touching, I’m miming.’ Her gaze grazed from the bottom to the top of the white-gloss-painted door, tracking from left to right as it rose, searching every square centimetre. She looked across and met Marilyn’s questioning look. ‘There’s no glass in the door and no spyhole. And there are no other scratches on the door, not even minor ones, no wear and tear. It’s—’ She paused. ‘It’s as you would expect for a door that belongs to this house – pristine.’ She looked back to the base of the door. ‘Apart from the bottom.’

The scratches in the paintwork were too far apart, surely, for a dog’s compact claws. So – what then?

‘What’s your theory, Jessie?’ Marilyn asked, lowering himself gingerly into a crouch next to her, with audible clicks from both knees and a heartfelt ‘ouf’.

She didn’t answer. Was thinking, visualizing.

Not claws. So – fingernails?

The image made her deeply uneasy. The image of someone – a man – someone with big feet, squatting by the door raking his fingernails down the paintwork. But that image, disturbing as it was, didn’t quite fit either. Could fingernails really cleave these marks in paint? They were too weak, weren’t they, to tear paint from wood? They’d just glance off, leave dull streaks on the paint’s surface, or bend and break.

A tight, claustrophobic feeling in her chest – So what on earth did make these marks …?

She looked across, met Marilyn’s searching, disconcerting mismatched gaze. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have a theory. Not yet, anyway.’

10

Callan opened his eyes and lay still, staring up at the ceiling. He had been half-aware that Jessie had left, but it had been pitch-black then and he must have crashed straight back to sleep. Now, the dull grey light of morning was seeping through the curtains and his body clock was telling him that it was time to get up for work, even though it was a Sunday. If Jessie had been here, he would have slept in, found something more interesting to do than sleeping, but there was no point in staying in bed alone.

Tossing back the duvet, he stood, too quickly. His head spun and he fumbled his hand onto the bedside table to steady himself, knocking the bedside light to the floor in the process. Fuck. Feeling dizzy and disorientated, he sat back down on the edge of the bed and dropped his head to his hands, closed his eyes and stared hard into the insides of his eyelids, seeking to find the quiet place that he went to when he was trying to stave off an epileptic fit. His neurologist had referred him to a counsellor.

Lots of people find it helpful.

He’d resisted; it wasn’t his thing.

Just try it. Go once and then decide whether you want to continue.

So, he had. Once.

Where are you most happy? she had asked him.

Making love with my girlfriend. He didn’t say it, reckoned that the birdlike woman, with the pearl-pink lipstick and neat greying-blonde bob would not have appreciated the aside. She had reminded him of his mum – someone’s mum at least.

Running, up on the Downs, he’d said instead.

Imagine it. Close your eyes and take yourself there.

He closed his eyes and felt as if he was coiled in barbed wire and that it was tightening around him with every word the woman said.

Which part of the run do you like best?

I have a favourite route I take.

Describe it to me.

I run to a place called Foley Hill. There’s a track that cuts through the trees.

What are the trees like?

Thick. A mix. It’s autumn now so the leaves are turning.

Describe the colours to me.

Look out the window, he retorted, in his mind. Yellow, orange, red, brown, he said.

Lovely. It sounds lovely. And the path. What’s that like?

It’s steep. Near the top I almost have to scrabble up using my hands. It’s slippery now as the ground is carpeted with leaves.

Go on.

Despite his cynicism, the barbed wire was uncoiling, the tension draining, and he could see Foley Hill in his mind’s eye. More than that – he could feel it, smell the leaf mulch, feel the chill of the autumn air cooling the sweat on his skin.

Nearer to the top of the hill, the trees thin out and the summit is bare, he volunteered. On a clear day, I can see all the way to the south coast.

Is there a bench? Can you sit?

No, I stand. He always stood, panting, his heart beating like a jackhammer, gulping in the cold air.

Good, that’s good. When you feel an epileptic fit coming on, close your eyes and go up to Foley Hill. Imagine that it’s a stunning autumn day, like the one you describe, sunny but chilly …

He still wasn’t sure that he believed in all that shit, but he had been so desperate then, a week ago, when his neurologist had told him the news, that he’d have tried anything. He had just wished, at the time, she’d stop talking so that he could fully concentrate on taking himself to Foley Hill, but now that she wasn’t here, that quiet woman who was somebody’s mum, he couldn’t go there at all. Dropping his hands, he opened his eyes. Usually it was stress or tiredness that kicked off his fits. Now, he felt neither, and still he could sense an attack coming on. He slumped back flat on the bed and jammed his eyes shut again, willing his muscles to relax and his mind to transport him to Foley Hill. Maybe he was just lacking in imagination, because all he could feel was the claustrophobic stuffiness of the central heating, and all he could see was the inside of his neurologist’s office. The MRI scan of his brain, sitting on the desk between them like a ticking bomb.

Your epilepsy is getting worse because the bullet is shifting. It’s causing more trauma, more swelling.

Why? Why is it shifting?

A shrug. It hadn’t been the reaction he’d expected. Something more professional would have been good.

Because you don’t sit still.

I can’t spend my life sitting still.

Another shrug. There you go.

And in response to Callan’s crossed arms, crossed legs – defensive body language Jessie would say, and she’d be right.

When we agreed not to remove the bullet originally, two years ago, we took a calculated risk. If you were a couch potato that risk would probably have paid off. It had a decent chance of paying off anyway.

And now?

His neurologist had spun the MRI scan of his brain around on the desktop. His brain looked like a cauliflower cleaved in two, the bullet a dark grey conical shape above the white glob of his left eye.

Whenever brain swelling occurs, it increases the intracranial pressure inside the skull. This pressure can prevent blood from flowing to your brain, which deprives it of the oxygen it needs to function. This swelling can also block other fluids from leaving your brain, making the swelling even worse. Damage or death of brain cells may result. The bullet is causing localized swelling and my advice is that it should be removed.

You said, two years ago, that the operation was too risky.

Then, yes.

And now?

It’s no less risky.

Callan lay on the bed, staring up at Jessie’s bright white ceiling, waiting for the fit to come. Stress, tiredness. Stress. It’s no less risky. His brain was fogging as if the room was filling with smoke, his muscles contracting, limbs twitching, starting to flail. He could feel them – a part of him, but not – beyond his conscious control. He caught his shin on the edge of the bedside table, something crashed to the ground, the lamp, for the second time in two minutes – Jessie would kill him – and that was the last thing he remembered.

Gradually the fit subsided. He lay still, panting and sweating, feeling chilled right through to the marrow of his bones. His heart was beating the way it did when he sprinted to the top of Foley Hill, clawing his way up the last steep fifty metres with his hands. But he wasn’t at Foley Hill. He was lying on the bedroom floor in a pool of vomit, shivering uncontrollably, feeling like a drug addict coming down off a hit. Curling up into a ball, he cradled his head in his hands. Fuck. His fits were getting worse, more frequent, more violent. It was only a matter of time before one happened at work, or when he was driving, or in front of Jessie. He was lying to everyone, his boss, his colleagues, his mother. Jessie. Himself. He needed to make a decision.

Ten minutes later, downstairs in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, he felt in his coat pocket for his house keys, found them tucked underneath the letter from his neurologist sent as a follow-up after last week’s appointment, summarizing their discussion, laying out his options. As he held the envelope in his fingers, he thought back to yesterday afternoon, borrowing Jessie’s Mini, leaving the keys mangled with his house keys, in his pocket. Her Mini keys were gone, his house keys remained.

Flicking open the envelope’s flap, he withdrew the letter. He didn’t need to read it, had read it enough times in the past twenty-four hours to have memorized every word. Had Jessie read it? They had lived together for nearly a year now and he reckoned that she wouldn’t have done, that she had too much integrity, respected privacy, hers and his, too highly. He hoped that he was right. When he had decided which of Dr Bose’s rock-and-a-hard-place, operate-or-leave options to take, he wanted to tell her himself. Ripping the letter in two, he shoved it in the kitchen bin, underneath the food cartons from the take-away curry they’d had after the pub last night.

Back in the sitting room, he pulled his running shoes off the shoe rack by the front door.

Because you don’t sit still.

He looked at the sofa. No – it wasn’t him. He’d have to take his chance with not sitting still.

Slamming the door behind him, he walked to the end of the path and started running as soon as his feet hit the tarmac. He’d go up to Foley Hill again – go there for real, instead of trying to force his imagination to take him there. He just hoped to God that Jessie hadn’t read that damn letter.

11

‘We think that the woman, the wife, Claudine Fuller, was hit over the head with something heavy, then dragged into the swimming pool area. Dragged by a foot or a leg.’ Marilyn indicated the thin snail’s trail of dried blood, visible only as a dull line against the glistening black marble floor. ‘We haven’t fished her out of the swimming pool yet, as I wanted you to see her in situ, but you can see that she has blunt instrument trauma to the right temple and another to the back of the head, probably as she turned to run. The man, Hugo Fuller, was incapacitated with a stun gun, then bound to the chair with rope.’

Jessie and Cara followed Marilyn into a white-tiled changing area, brightly illuminated by scores of tiny, recessed ceiling spots. Through a curved doorway, Jessie saw a thick vertical slice of azure swimming pool, the dark legs of someone – Mrs Fuller, Claudine, doubtless – floating face down on its surface, the lawn and gardens beyond the swimming pool glistening under the cold, bright autumnal sun, the grass diamonds gone now, the woods though, still unpenetrated by light.

‘I asked Burrows to leave the crime scene untouched until you’d seen it. It was clear that Claudine Fuller was dead when we arrived. It was clear to the dog teams, an hour before we arrived, that the poor woman was dead.’

Jessie nodded. ‘Thanks for that, but I think you’re putting a little too much faith in my abilities, Marilyn.’

‘You saved my career, Dr Flynn,’ he muttered, so that only she heard.

She shrugged off the compliment. Although she would never admit it to Marilyn, she already felt out of her depth with this nasty double murder. His expectation was weighing on her; and Cara’s expectation as a young, keen newbie – Listen and learn, DC Cara – was equally weighty. She had solved the last case that she and Marilyn had worked on together, the high-profile murder of two ten-year-old girls, but she believed she’d been lucky, caught a break and saved him. Luck, not genius.

‘Her hands and feet are tied,’ Cara said, unnecessarily, as they stepped through the arched doorway onto the black-tiled surround of the swimming pool, honed thankfully rather than polished. She didn’t fancy skidding on her Tesco’s plastic bag overshoes and ending up in the pool with Mrs F.

Jessie nodded. ‘She wouldn’t have been able to swim,’ she murmured, equally unnecessarily.

They regarded Claudine’s floating form in solemn silence for a few moments, Jessie’s eyes finding the bloody mess at the back of her head.

‘Seen enough?’ Marilyn asked.

She nodded.

Knocking a fist against the glass wall of the swimming pool, he motioned to Burrows who was standing on the patio talking to two of his CSI team. ‘All yours,’ he mouthed, pointing to Mrs Fuller.

He moved further along the edge of the swimming pool, Jessie and DC Cara tracking dutifully behind.

‘Now to the horror show that is Mr Hugo Fuller.’ Stepping sideways, Marilyn extended his arm, as if he was a magician revealing the result of a particularly tricky act. Jessie almost expected him to burst forth with a ‘Ta da’. Her eyes lingered on his extended fingers, saving herself momentarily; they flicked to the supine form of Hugo Fuller.

Jesus Christ. She gagged, couldn’t help herself. Swallowing back the rush of hot acid bile that coursed up her throat and filled her mouth, she took a couple of heaving breaths. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘My thoughts exactly. Hugo Fuller was stun gunned to subdue him and then tied to the chair.’ His voice was determinedly matter-of-fact as he extended his arm again to indicate two small elliptical burn marks on Fuller’s corpulent chest.

‘Does a stun gun render the victim unconscious or paralysed after operation?’ Jessie asked, her tongue working around the acid coating her mouth.

‘It depends on the voltage, but basically a stun gun causes complete disruption of the muscular and electrical system of the body for the time that it’s activated, causing total and painful paralysis. Once the cycle is complete the effect of the stun gun ends.’

‘But there must be significant after-effects. It must knock the breath from you, mentally, if not actually physically paralyse you for a decent length of time after it is deactivated, particularly if you’re not expecting it.’ She indicated Fuller’s mobile, which was lying in a pool of blood on the floor beneath the lounge chair. ‘If you’re chillaxing by the pool in your towelling robe, chatting on your mobile.’

‘Yes, you’re right. It is safe to assume that the after-effect of the stun gun would have disabled Hugo Fuller long enough for the perpetrator to tie him to the lounge chair so that he could then murder him.’ He looked to Cara. ‘As soon as we’re finished here, find out which company Fuller’s mobile is registered with and find out who he was speaking with this evening.’

‘Yes, Guv.’

‘What was the actual cause of death?’ Jessie asked.

‘We’ll need Dr Ghoshal to confirm, but both Burrows and I believe that a penetrative injury through the eye was the most likely cause of death.’

‘And the scratches down his face?’

Marilyn shrugged. ‘To cause pain? Torture him?’

Jessie gave a non-committal nod. The whole scene – not just the brutal, gut-wrenching horror of it – was bothering her. It didn’t feel right.

‘The brain is able to perform critical functions despite serious local damage, whether caused by a penetrating trauma or another trauma,’ she continued. ‘Such as a stroke, or an operation by a neurosurgeon. I remember a case I studied, where a man was doing a bit of DIY at home in the evening, while having a few drinks, and lost control of the nail gun—’

Cara grimaced and went a shade paler, if that were even possible.

‘A six-inch nail went straight through his left eye and penetrated his frontal lobe.’ Jessie gave Cara what she hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘He was fine.’

She looked over and met Marilyn’s gaze, knew what they were both thinking. And Callan. A Taliban bullet lodged in his temporal lobe and still operating as normal. But for how long?

‘Yuh … uh …’ She fought to regain her train of thought, an image of that envelope from Callan’s neurologist rising in her mind. ‘To kill via the brain requires causing a significant enough injury to cause widespread swelling or major intracranial bleeding, which depending on the exact kind of bleeding can cause compression of the brain, spasm of the arteries, or both, leading to tissue death and ultimately brain death. A single knife, nail or stick of wood in the eye that penetrates the brain, provided that it doesn’t hit a major artery, and isn’t waved around, would probably not kill a healthy person outright. Though obviously, given the range of outcomes, it’s not the most sensible idea—’

She sensed Marilyn looking hard at her. ‘If I’m not mistaken, you’re chattering, Dr Flynn.’

Lifting her shoulders, she flashed him an apologetic smile. Why was she so nervous? The scene, obviously, the grotesque, abattoir horror of it. But Callan, more, she realized. Contemplating Hugo Fuller’s injuries had taken her right back to Callan, to this morning, to that letter.

‘Sorry, you’re right, I’ll stop.’ A pause. ‘Rambling, that is.’

‘And – so,’ Marilyn asked.

‘Cause of death?’

He nodded.

‘The eyes – both, I’d say. But then there must be some significance to that. It’s a grim way to kill someone, even for the killer.’ She flapped a hand in Hugo Fuller’s direction. ‘It would have been so much easier just to stab him through the heart, particularly as his chest was exposed.’ She looked from Fuller – reclining in that lounge chair, his eye sockets caves of blood, blood and aqueous fluid streaked down his face and chest, those wild animal gouges to his face – to his wife, Mrs Fuller, Claudine. Dead, yes, but in a more humane way, if murder could ever be termed humane. ‘I know that you’re a betting man, Marilyn.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m giving clean living a go.’

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Is that a blink-and-you’d-miss-it kind of a go?’ She caught his gaze and realized, from his look, that he was entirely serious. ‘Oh, I’ll put a lid on the facetious comments then.’

‘You do that, Dr Flynn. And the bet?’

‘That she was alive and sentient when she was put into the pool. He might have knocked her unconscious, stunned her or whatever, at the back door to incapacitate her while he dealt with the husband, but I’d bet that he then waited until she came around before he dropped her in the pool.’

‘Because it’s unnecessary?’ Marilyn murmured.

‘Yes.’

‘What?’ Cara cut in. ‘What’s unnecessary?’

Jessie broke eye contact with Marilyn and swung her gaze to meet Cara’s questioning look. ‘Tying Hugo Fuller up. If he wanted to kill them both by the most expedient method, he would have done the wife in the hallway, once she’d let him in, and then come in here and stun gunned and killed the husband. Or just killed the husband. Hit him over the head with something, or stabbed him in the heart. Unless … unless the perpetrator wanted him to watch his wife dying.’

She looked back to Hugo Fuller, chillaxing, trying to suppress the heave in her stomach at the sight of him, the sharp taste of bile bubbling up her throat. He looked like a medieval torture victim. Her gaze moved from Fuller to Cara who, despite his natural skin colour, looked paler than she did midwinter. Apparition pale. Ghoul pale. She knew exactly how he felt.

‘I’m struggling with it too,’ she said in a voice pitched low enough that Marilyn wouldn’t hear. ‘Though I presume that it gets easier with experience.’ She flashed him a quick smile. Presume … hope … pray. The Fullers, the azure water sparkling with its dozens of submerged lights, the tropical heat of the pool house, was making her feel as if she was a castaway on a midsummer’s ocean, two of her ship-mates dead, rotting beside her.

‘I think you may find that whatever was used to take out Fuller’s eyes didn’t reach his brain,’ she continued, refocusing back on Marilyn. ‘Deliberately, didn’t reach his brain, or not at first anyway.’

‘He was alive for that?’ Cara murmured.

She nodded. ‘It says to me anger, real fury. And hatred too. Intense hatred. His eyes are—’ she broke off, sucking in a breath to fight another stomach heave. Burrows would have a cardiac if she vomited in the middle of his crime scene.

‘Mush?’ Marilyn said.

She nodded. Mush.

‘It’s to do with seeing … watching. The killer made the husband watch his wife die and then took his eyes out. Deliberately took his eyes out. And he was alive,’ she finished, her voice strangled. ‘I’d bet a lot that he was alive throughout.’

‘And the scratches?’

‘Made by the same implement that carved those scratches into the door, I’d say.’ She paused. ‘And I think that they … this might have something to do with dogs.’

Marilyn raised an incredulous eyebrow. ‘Dogs?’

12

Callan knew that he should slow down, but adrenalin and endorphins were coursing through his veins making him feel impossibly alive, healthy, whole again. A rare feeling, intoxicating in its intensity. He crested the hill, virtually scrabbling on his hands and knees the last few metres were so steep, his heart punching against his ribs, lungs screaming for oxygen. Head thrown back, he stood, sucking in the freezing, liquid air, but still his lungs heaved and sucked like a punctured pair of bellows and the pounding in his heart had moved to his head. Pounding, throbbing. He straightened, too quickly, must have done, because he staggered dizzily, his flailing hands finding the trunk of a tree, clasping the solid wood, leaning against it now, his tongue out, panting like a dog. Closing his eyes, he sought out the quiet place in his mind that he’d told that mumsy therapist about, that he went to when he felt an epileptic fit coming on.

Good, that’s good. When you feel an epileptic fit coming on, close your eyes and go up to Foley Hill. It’s a stunning autumn day, like the one you describe, sunny but chilly …

But he was here already, bodily, standing on the top of that hill he’d described, feeling the chill wind curl around him, willing the dizziness, the drum-thump in his head to recede, and he couldn’t go there in his mind also. Hands grappling at the tree trunk, he slid to his knees, the rough bark sandpapering the ends of his grasping fingers. The ground slammed up to meet him and then he was gone, only faintly aware of what his body was doing, writhing, jerking, his limbs flailing, feet pedalling in the damp leaf mulch. Through frosted glass he saw the shifting mosaic of branches and leaves above him, bright patches of chill blue sky, and something else too. Something pale.

A face?

Someone?

Was someone here, watching him? He tried to call out, but his body wasn’t his own, his brain was fog, and his tongue was rubber-useless in his mouth.

Slowly the fit receded and he lay on the damp carpet of orange-brown leaves, shaking and sweating, his skull nursing a brain that had been cleaved in two with an axe.

Twisting onto his front, he vomited once, twice. Pushing himself onto his hands and knees, he hauled himself to standing with his grazed fingers, leaning against the trunk of a tree for support. His vision refocusing, he looked around. He had had the strong sense that someone else had been up here with him, still had a lingering feeling that he wasn’t alone. But he could hear nothing, see no one, just the blank trunks of trees, the motionless carpet of orange-brown leaves masking their roots, not even the scamper of a squirrel or the chirp of a bird to carve up the dead silence.

Fuck. His epilepsy was getting worse, much worse. Usually it was stress and tiredness that kicked off fits, but he had slept well the past few days and his job hadn’t been stressful for some time. And yet here he was, covered in leaf mulch and vomit, his head pounding as if a road drill was going to work on his skull. He needed to tell Jessie, couldn’t keep pretending that everything was all right. He owed her time to prepare herself for the operation because now, standing here, post two fits in the past hour, he knew that he didn’t have a choice but to let them operate.

13

If she glanced sideways, tilted her head just a fraction, she’d see the lifeless form of Hugo Fuller through the glass wall of the swimming pool complex, still strapped supine to that lounger. Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist, was there now, his beanpole frame doubled over Fuller, the look on his face pure query. No disgust there. No horror.

And the look on Fuller’s?

Jamming her eyes shut, Jessie tilted her face skywards and took a few deep breaths, sucking the chill morning air deep into her lungs. Her chest was so tight with tension that she felt as if the air was barely reaching the back of her tongue. She had never seen anything like the sight of that body. Of that face. Of those cavernous black eye sockets.

Her gaze moved from Fuller’s supine form to the base of the door that led from the sunken patio, where she was now standing, inside, to the door through which Claudine Fuller had let in death. It hadn’t been fingernails that had done that to Fuller’s face, his eyes, just as it hadn’t been fingernails that had made these marks on this door.

It hadn’t been fingernails.

Had it been claws?

Strong, sharp claws.

But not a dog’s – surely?

Ducking her gaze to the patio, Jessie shut out the sound of Marilyn next to her, tapping the leather-soled toe of one navy suede Chelsea boot impatiently against the York stone. Though he operated in the same way that she did, needing space to ‘get a sense’, his natural lack of patience made him chafe against that desire in others.

Could it have been a dog? A huge dog – bigger even than a huge male Siberian husky? Raking and – what – whining? Sniffing? For Claudine, the animal lover.

An involuntary shudder ran through her. Someone walking over her grave.

She stood, wrapping her arms tight around her torso.

‘It’s—’ A sudden vibration in her pocket, the third she’d felt in the past few minutes. She couldn’t answer it now. Pulling her mobile half out of her pocket, she glanced down at the screen. Three missed calls from Callan. ‘Sorry, Marilyn, just give me a second.’ She fired off a quick text – at the crimescene xx – and slid the phone back into her pocket. She’d call him back as soon as she could.

‘It’s what? Premeditated?’ Marilyn said. ‘Clearly.’

She shook her head. ‘Creepy, I was going to say. Really fucking creepy.’

Marilyn gave a grim half-smile. ‘That’s not a very professional term, Dr Flynn.’

‘No—’ A pause. ‘I think—’ She broke off again. How to verbalize her thoughts? ‘Look, Marilyn, I know that this is going to sound mad …’

Marilyn smiled. ‘I’d be disappointed in you if it didn’t.’

Jessie bit her lip. ‘Madder, maybe, than even you give me credit for.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think that … I think that our perpetrator pretended to be the dog returning, pretended to be Lupo, and scratched at the door.’

Marilyn raised a cynical eyebrow.

‘For the wife. She loves dogs. So perhaps … probably, actually, probably after Lupo had been gone for some time, she started to get worried. And then she heard the scratching. Scratching and sniffing under the door, perhaps, like dogs do. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought, would have just yanked the door open, and—’ Unwrapping her arms from around her torso, she spread her hands.

Marilyn shook his head. She hadn’t convinced him. From the look on his face, she hadn’t even got close. ‘There’s no way that fingernails made those marks in the door’s paintwork,’ he said.

‘No, you’re right, they didn’t. Couldn’t have done.’

‘And – so?’

‘And – so—’ she broke off with a shrug. ‘You’ve heard of Freddie Krueger. Edward Scissorhands.’

‘Edward Scissorhands was a comedy. Wasn’t it?’

‘I never watched it. I only saw the posters. And Nightmare on Elm Street definitely wasn’t a comedy.’

‘It would probably look like a comedy now, with those forty-year-old special effects.’

Jessie gave a crooked smile.

Marilyn sighed. ‘What the hell are you saying, Jessie? That Freddie Krueger caught the dog, tied it to a lamp post outside some old biddy’s house and then hiked back through half a kilometre of trees to scratch at the Fullers’ back door?’

Jessie lifted her shoulders again. Yes, that’s pretty much the long and the short of what I’m saying.

Marilyn mashed his fingers into his eye sockets. He felt as if someone had plucked his eyes out, ground them in a bowl of salt and jammed them back in his head. But at least he still possessed eyes.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Dropping his hands, he met her gaze. ‘What? I recognize that look. What now? What are you thinking now, Miss Psychic-Psychologist-Psychobabble?’

‘Hugo Fuller’s eyes. The marks on his face.’

‘His eyes were gouged out with a knife.’

‘Were they?’

Marilyn tilted his head questioningly. ‘Weren’t they?’

Jessie shook her head, slowly. ‘No, I think they were clawed out. You could see. The marks on his forehead, the marks on his cheeks. It wasn’t a knife.’

‘So how did he die? Claws couldn’t penetrate his brain.’ But even as Marilyn said it, Jessie could sense his lack of conviction. She didn’t pull him up on it, just looked back down at the door, the marks.

‘They’re similar, aren’t they, Marilyn,’ she said finally. ‘The gouges down Fuller’s face and the marks on this door. So similar as to be probably caused by the same thing. The same tool. The same—’ She broke off with another shrug. It was all she seemed to be able to do this morning – shrug.

The same hand. The same claw.

She didn’t say it – because it didn’t need to be said.

Marilyn remained silent for a long moment. ‘God help us,’ he said finally, with a gargantuan sigh. ‘God help us.’

14

‘As I said, I’m Hugo’s stepmother,’ Valerie Fuller said coldly. ‘Not his actual mother. So, you had that wrong.’ She was leaning against the door frame, arms folded, hugging a chunky-knit argyle cardigan tight across her ample chest. She had already pulled the front door three-quarters closed behind her, to keep the heat inside her neat barn conversion, Detective Sergeant Workman assumed. She hadn’t invited Workman to step inside, showed no indication that she was going to. ‘Thank you for taking the time to come over and tell me about his death in person, though a phone call would have sufficed,’ she added.

DS Workman had drawn or, more accurately, been handed the short straw, Marilyn being still occupied at the Fullers’ crime scene with Jessie Flynn, DC Cara and Burrows’ CSI team. She was beginning to regret her label as the team’s ‘tea and sympathy’ woman. However, it was abundantly clear that Valerie Fuller required no sympathy and that she could, doubtless, very efficiently make her own cup of tea.

‘It’s against regulation to break the news of relatives’ deaths over the telephone. It has to be in person, face to face,’ Workman explained.

The Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes family liaison officer, who Workman had just asked to wait in the car, had expected to stay with Valerie Fuller for a day or two, helping her to work through her grief. Not necessary, she had been told, in no uncertain terms. Mrs Valerie Fuller seemed ambivalent about her stepson’s brutal demise.

Workman nodded. ‘Stepmother,’ she echoed. ‘I will ensure that is changed in our records.’

She flipped the collar of her navy woollen overcoat up around her neck and lifted her shoulders, sinking into the warm wool. The barn conversion was nestled at the end of a narrow valley between two hills, the valley creating a wind tunnel with its apex at the doorstep on which she was standing. Mrs Fuller seemed oblivious to her discomfort – or, if she had noticed, she gave no indication that she cared.

‘How old was Hugo when you married his father?’ Workman asked.

‘Five.’

‘And his mother?’

‘She died when he was two and a half.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘Yes, I suppose.’ Her tone was offhand, patently lacking in concern. ‘But he wasn’t a very nice boy,’ she added, suddenly, unexpectedly.

‘You mean, he became a not very nice boy because of his mother’s death?’

Valerie brushed a stand of blonde hair from her forehead. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. Hugo wasn’t ever a nice boy. He was wrong from the start. I knew him before his mother died, you see. I was his father’s secretary, so I knew the family. Not well, but enough. Even when Hugo was little, a toddler, an age when every child should just be adorable, there was something hugely unappealing about him.’

‘In what way?’

A careless shrug. ‘In every way. His personality, his demeanour, the way he interacted with others, animals and people. Everything.’ She gave a dismissive little laugh. ‘You know how some people are just born wrong. Hugo was one of those.’

Workman resisted the urge to object, but she wasn’t here to debate. She was here to break some terrible news – which she had done – and to gain some information, as quickly as possible, given that she had already lost all feeling in her ears. But to her, saying that someone was ‘just born wrong’ denied the presence of any nuance in the nature–nurture debate. Was anyone really just born wrong? And to say that a child hadn’t been affected by his mother’s death revealed, to her mind, an absence of humanity. She felt sorry for the toddler Hugo, the young Hugo who must have mourned his mother’s loss and sensed his stepmother’s hostility.

‘Did you have any of your own children?’ Workman asked.

‘I had two girls with Hugo’s father. Kitty and Florence.’

‘How old are they?’

‘Kitty is thirty-four and Florence thirty-two.’

‘So, six and eight years younger than Hugo.’

‘About that, yes.’

‘Do they keep in touch with Hugo?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

Valerie Fuller rolled her eyes, a small but pointed movement. ‘I’ve already told you, surely. Hugo was a little shit. My girls never liked him. Anyway, he went away to boarding school when he was eleven, so they didn’t see much of him when they were growing up. They were never close.’

‘Eleven?’ Workman asked.

‘Yes, and to be quite frank it wasn’t soon enough.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Fettes College. Hugo’s father went to Fettes College, his father before that and God knows how many Fuller boys before that. I don’t come from boarding-school stock. I was Godfrey’s secretary, so I was distinctly lower-middle-class in relation to him. I had to work hard to be an appropriate Mrs Fuller, to fit into his world. I was what one would term as a trophy wife. I was twenty-five years Godfrey’s junior.’

‘When did Godfrey pass on, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Nearly twelve years ago, now.’

‘Do you still miss him?’

A fleeting thawing of her expression. ‘Yes, I do. We had a good marriage, all in all.’

‘Did he have a good relationship with Hugo?’

Valerie Fuller’s expression iced over once again. ‘Godfrey adored Hugo. He was terribly proud of his son, of who he had become. Hugo was rich, as you know.’ Another dismissive wave of her hand. ‘That nasty little business of his was very lucrative.’

‘Nasty business?’

Valerie nodded. ‘Hugo set up and ran a property business, buying up freeholds and increasing the ground rent many times over, exploiting people living in cheap leasehold accommodation. There’s no law against it, so the poor sods had to pay or lose the roof over their heads.’

Workman nodded. She knew little of Hugo Fuller’s background or business interests, though all those details would be thoroughly fleshed in over the course of what would, hopefully, be a quick investigation. It would benefit no one to have a murderer of the like of who had killed Hugo and Claudine Fuller so viciously on the loose.

‘Do you think his murder could have had something to do with his business?’ she asked.

‘I have no idea who would have murdered Hugo and Claudine, though I can’t imagine that anyone Hugo dealt with on a professional basis – I’m using that word in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, by the way – would have viewed him with fondness.’

‘And his business was successful?’

‘From a monetary perspective, absolutely. Though, of course, Hugo should have been successful. He was brought up with every advantage, plenty of money, the best education, and his father doted on him. Godfrey gave him money to help him set up the business.’

‘It was a good investment, by the sound of it.’

Valerie bristled. ‘There were a number of failures before that. Hugo wasn’t clever, but he was cunning and entirely lacking in morals. The business he ended up in was the business that suited him perfectly.’

‘What about Claudine Fuller?’

‘What about her?’ Valerie asked, in a tone that suggested Workman’s question had been genuinely odd.

‘Did you have much of a relationship with her? Did you like her?’

Valerie lifted her shoulders. ‘I met her for the first time at Hugo’s engagement party and then again at their wedding. They married two or three years before Godfrey died.’

‘And?’

‘And she seemed far too sweet a girl to have got tied up with Hugo, though it shouldn’t have surprised me that he chose someone he could dominate.’

‘And you haven’t seen much of her since?’

Valerie shook her head. ‘We saw them for dinner once, shortly before Godfrey died, and I saw them both at Godfrey’s funeral. That’s it. I was happy to sever contact with Hugo once Godfrey passed on. I have … had no love for Hugo and I doubt that he had much for me.’

Workman nodded. ‘Do your daughters still live locally?’ she asked.

‘No. Kitty lives in North Devon. She’s married to a local GP and has two young boys. Florence is in London, working in publishing. She’s living the single life.’

Workman nodded. ‘This may sound like an unnecessary question, but I do need to ask what you were doing last night between the hours of ten p.m. and one a.m. this morning.’

Valerie smirked. ‘You’re not really sizing me up as Hugo’s murderer, are you?’

Workman met her smirk with an apologetic lift of her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, but I do need an answer.’

‘I was having dinner and playing bridge with some friends in Bosham. I arrived at seven-thirty p.m., give or take a few minutes, and left at around midnight. I’ll give you their number.’ She ducked inside for a minute and returned proffering a sheet of cream notepaper with the names Dan and Margaret White written on it and a local phone number scribbled beneath. ‘And I didn’t nip over to my stepson’s house to butcher him and his wife on the way home.’

Workman returned her cynical half-smile with a hollow one of her own.

‘No, I’m pretty sure that you didn’t.’ She held up the piece of paper. ‘Thank you for this and, once again, please do accept my condolences for the death of your stepson and his wife.’

15

Darkness had fallen by the time Jessie dragged her exhausted body and brain from the Fullers’ crime scene and drove home, the twin cones of her Mini’s headlights picking out silent country lane after silent country lane, no one seeming to be out and about on this chilly autumn Sunday evening. She was slightly ashamed to admit that she had glanced quickly through her rear passenger window to check that the back seat and footwells were empty, before opening her driver’s door, climbing in and locking it immediately behind her. Ridiculous, she knew. As if anyone who could do her damage would be small enough to squeeze into a space that struggled to house a supermarket bag full of shopping. But still, she’d felt tense and jittery walking down the Fullers’ gravel drive on her own, back to her car, those horrific murders and the disturbing nature of the crime scene having already wormed their way deep into her psyche.

She parked outside her cottage as the clock nudged nine p.m. The lights were off downstairs, but a pale rectangular light shone through the lounge window – Callan must be sitting on the sofa, working on his computer. But when she opened the front door, she saw his computer lock screen, the badge of the military police floating on a snowscape, and an immobile Callan-sized shape, flat out on the sofa. Grabbing her knitted argyle throw from the chair, she draped it gently over him. His face, in the semi-darkness, was pale as the gritty wheat throw, and though he didn’t stir, his eyes were flickering from side to side underneath his lids. Dead asleep, but his mind agitated nonetheless.

What are you thinking about, Callan? The contents of that letter?

She had forgotten to return his phone calls and now, sensing it was better not to wake him, she couldn’t ask. Her gaze found his coat, hanging on the rack. Would the envelope still be in its pocket? Though she felt a strong pull to tiptoe over and check, she knew that she wouldn’t. She was obsessive about privacy. When she had lived with her father and his new wife Diane, in their narrow terrace in Fulham, she had understood that every day when she went to school Diane would be in her room, looking through her stuff, invading her privacy, just because she could. Diane always left something out of kilter, so that Jessie would know. And then at Hartmoor Mental Hospital, eyes had watched her through the sliver of reinforced glass in the door that trapped her, against her will, in that tiny prison room. Nothing private; nothing sacred, not body or mind.

She trailed her fingertips across Callan’s forehead, her heart swelling with love. His skin felt cold, but clammy with fevered sweat. Pulling the throw further up, she tucked it in around his shoulders. Still, he didn’t stir. Ducking down, she pressed her lips to his forehead, then headed upstairs to bed.

16

She was jerked into consciousness, suddenly and sharply, by a noise that she’d used to cringe and block her ears against when she was at school. Fingernails scraping down a chalkboard. Frowning, she rolled over, hooking an arm and leg over Callan, tucking her face into the warm, concave space between his neck and shoulder. He stirred, but didn’t wake. When had he come upstairs and got into bed? She didn’t know; hadn’t woken.

The noise came again, louder this time, and even though she moulded herself to Callan’s solid, safe bulk and yanked the duvet over her head, she could still hear it.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

Razor-sharp nails clawing down board, or wood, making her teeth grit and goosebumps rise on her skin. Rolling away from Callan, she slid out from under the duvet. Her bedroom was cold – not the normal night-time cold of radiators gone to sleep, but ice-box cold, depths-of-midwinter cold, the type of cold that burrowed through to the very core of your bones. She pulled her dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door and shrugged it on, wrapping the tie tight around her waist, hauling the collar up around her neck. It was jet black outside, she saw from the bedroom window, the moon a bold splash of white gold high in the sky, casting no light on the fields below.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

The noise was coming from downstairs. A ridiculous image of Miss Coffs, her GCSE maths teacher, rose in her mind, skinny and impossibly posh in her tweed suit, with her coiffed Margaret Thatcher hair, standing in her tiny sitting room, dragging one carnation-pink-polished nail down a line of quadratic equations. The thought made Jessie cringe and smile in equal measure.

It was cold on the landing as well, as if every window in the cottage had been left open, letting the outside flood in. And now that she was walking down the stairs, she could hear another sound too, that of lapping water. Had she left the kitchen tap on?

As she stepped from the bottom stair into the sitting room, she sank ankle-deep into ice-cold water. She yelped, hopping from foot to foot until the cold had numbed her skin and she felt it no more.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

No Miss Coffs in her lounge, but still the sound of her carnation-pink nails. She sloshed across the lounge. At the kitchen window loomed a huge, pale shape, its hand raised as if to snatch her attention. Not a hand though, she realized with sudden horror, but a paw, a massive, pale wolf’s paw, razor-sharp claws bared.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

She swallowed.

My mind is playing tricks. A dream – it has to be.

She could barely breathe. She wanted to scream, to run back upstairs to Callan, to hide under the duvet and press herself against his safe, warm bulk, but she couldn’t move, not a muscle.

Wake up. Control your body.

Instead, she watched helplessly as her hand stretched out and grasped the key in the lock, her fingers working to their own tune, turning, swinging open the door, letting in … letting it in.

The chill night air sliced through her skin. A freezing breeze ruffled her hair and flapped the hem of her dressing gown around her knees. The silence was absolute and she could smell something primeval, musty. She wondered if there was a place one reached where it was impossible to feel more afraid, and if there was, she was there, breathless with terror, trapped and helpless inside her own body.

One step at a time, her foreign legs bore her outside, eyes casting around for that huge, pale creature she had seen through the window.

Where had it gone?

Behind me? She spun. No, nothing, just the kitchen door gaping open, an empty expanse of pale ceramic tiles shiny with damp, water leaking over the threshold and pooling around her bare feet.

A noise. A whimper.

She twisted back to the dark garden. And saw him. Not the pale monster, but Lupo, sitting in the centre of the lawn. Deep gashes ran down his face and his eyes were gone, but there was something in those depthless black sockets that pleaded with her, begged her to let him in, save him.

‘Jessie, what the hell are you doing?’

She leapt and spun again.

Callan was standing on the doorstep. He looked hard, and solid and safe, and all she wanted to do was to hurl herself against him, but her body still wouldn’t cooperate, so she remained where she was in the middle of the freezing lawn, shaking and shivering.

‘Jessie!’

‘Lupo,’ she called.

‘What?’

‘I thought I saw Lupo in the garden. The Fullers’ dog. Lupo.’

‘You were sleepwalking.’

She shook her head. Had she been? ‘No, I was awake. I felt awake.’

‘Come in now. It’s freezing.’

She met his gaze dully and nodded. She felt as if she was floating underwater, everything muffled by dense liquid, her movements slow and ponderous. Should she tell him about the … the what? The animal? The wolf? That huge pale figure at the kitchen door? No – she knew that she wouldn’t. He’d think that she was crazy. Perhaps she was crazy.

‘What time is it?’ she murmured, instead.

‘Just past midnight.’

‘Not late. I thought it was three or four, that I’d been asleep for hours.’

He shook his head, held out his hand. ‘Come inside, gorgeous. Come back to bed.’

Jessie nodded. She let herself be led meekly inside, stood while Callan locked the kitchen door behind her, felt his strong arm slip around her shoulders and guide her upstairs. But still that image of a broken, bloodied Lupo filled her mind.

17

‘Hugo Fuller had decidedly questionable morals, by the sound of it, but that doesn’t mean that he and his good lady wife deserved to die.’ Marilyn cleared his throat, a grating sandpaper rasp in the silent room. ‘Far from it. Very far from it. Now, any questions for me before we hear from our resident clinical psychologist, Dr Jessie Flynn?’ His gaze tracked along the rows of assembled faces, before alighting, settling, on Jessie’s. He raised his arm, gesturing to the gaping space beside him at the front of the room. ‘The floor is all yours, Dr Flynn.’

Resident clinical psychologist, Dr Jessie Flynn.

She couldn’t remember the last time Marilyn had referred to her formally, except in jest. Pushing herself reluctantly to her feet, grabbing her notebook, just something to hold to calm the shake in her hands, though it contained no notes related to the case, she rose and skirted around the chairs to join Marilyn at the front of the incident room. Twenty cynically expectant faces stared back at her, a sea of crossed arms and legs echoing the facial expressions, none of it confidence-boosting. Jessie’s gaze flicked quickly to the huge whiteboards paving the walls, where the fledgling investigation played out in crime-scene photographs; schematics of the Fullers’ house and the woods hemming it; maps of the local area already marked with likely approach routes to the house and escape routes from it – multiple approach and escape routes, needles-in-haystacks multiple, courtesy of the house’s grandiose isolation; as well as flipchart sheets, each filled top to bottom with ‘to-do lists’. Just the beginning. The first few broad-brush strokes that would be painstakingly fleshed out, coloured in with many hundreds of hours of mainly terminally tedious grunt work.

Unless.

Unless they caught a break.

Her job, to catch them that break. She wasn’t sure that she was up to it.

‘OK, uh, thanks for coming in,’ she said. Her voice wavered and she was angry at herself for it.

‘They didn’t have choice,’ Marilyn cut in. ‘It’s called work and they get paid to be here.’

Jessie joined the ripple of laughter with a muted smile. Marilyn had sensed her unease, she realized, and the joke had been his way of lightening the atmosphere after the deadening video walkthrough of the Fullers’ house. The sight of the couple’s ravaged bodies – Hugo Fuller’s in particular – had been almost as horror movie on the screen as it had been in real life, and Marilyn was perhaps trying to demonstrate that they were all on her side, or the same side at least. But his casual aside served only to knock her off her stride. She had been all set to begin, keyed up, focused.

She flicked open her notebook and glanced unseeing down at the randomly opened page, buying herself time. Why on earth did she feel so nervous? Because she’d done nothing but one-on-ones with individual patients for years? Her job, getting into the mind of one person, not selling her ideas to twenty. Or because, although she had helped Marilyn on two previous investigations, this was the first time that she had been wheeled out as an expert from the get-go? Surveying the faces in front of her, most of whom had been on the force for years, she felt like a one-eyed man called in to guide the fully sighted through Daedalus’ labyrinth.

‘OK, so, uh, it’s personal,’ she began. ‘I believe that it’s personal, that the killer has some personal connection to the Fullers, most likely to Hugo Fuller.’

A man’s voice, calling out from the back of the room. She didn’t see whose. ‘Why most likely to Hugo Fuller?’

‘Because I think that he was the intended target. The autopsy will confirm or refute, but I think that his wife was killed first, tied up and drowned in the swimming pool, while he was made to watch. So, while she clearly suffered, he suffered more.’

Another man’s voice. ‘What if he didn’t like his wife?’

A burst of harsh laughter, too loud, graveyard humour to paper over the canyon-sized cracks of tension and unease in the room.

‘It’s irrelevant,’ she said when it had died down, her smile fading too, readopting the mask of professionalism to paper over her equally canyon-sized confidence cracks. ‘Even if Fuller didn’t like his wife, by killing her first, the murderer was deliberately drawing out the torture for him. For any human being, however cold or lacking in morals, seeing another human being killed, someone you have lived with and potentially loved at some point, would be incredibly traumatic. And also, he would have known what was coming, known that he was next.’

‘Isn’t it possible that the killer tied Fuller up to keep him subdued while he did the wife and that it was nothing to do with watching or drawing out torture?’ the same man challenged – a middle-aged, dark-haired, jowly man who Jessie didn’t recognize. ‘There was most likely only one killer, wasn’t there, DI Simmons, and Fuller was a big man.’

Jessie looked across at Marilyn, waiting for him to answer.

‘The forensic evidence we have, limited to footprints so far, suggests that there was only one killer,’ Marilyn said. ‘A man. Other forensic evidence collected at the scene has been sent to the labs and is being expedited, so that may yet prove us wrong, but, yes, we are ninety-nine per cent sure that this crime was perpetrated by one man.’

‘Right,’ the man at the back continued. ‘There was one killer and two victims and so he probably couldn’t have handled both at once. And, as I already said, Fuller was a big man.’

‘If he had just wanted to kill both of them by the most expedient method, he would have killed Claudine Fuller in the downstairs hallway, when she opened the door to him,’ Jessie said, adding for clarification: ‘To the dog … to what she thought was the dog. Then he would have come into the swimming pool and killed Fuller. Fuller was lying on a lounger facing away from the patio where the intruder entered. The only light onto the patio was the dim reflected light from the swimming pool’s conservatory. There is a solid door and a changing room between the hallway and the swimming pool area and the swimming pool has noise – the sound of the air-conditioning system, the pool filter, the bubble of the Jacuzzi. It’s unlikely that Hugo would have heard his wife being killed, so he still would have been surprised. I believe that the set-up was deliberate and that the murderer wanted Hugo Fuller to watch.’

‘So you’re saying that Hugo Fuller knew the killer?’ DC Cara asked.

‘Not necessarily. Fuller may have known his killer personally or he may never have actually met him. But yes, I would say, without doubt, that something Fuller did, either to this man, or to someone he loved, was a driver for the murders.’

‘Why?’ asked Sergeant Arthur Lawford, the exhibits officer, frowning. He was a veteran of forty years, had started in Major Crimes when Marilyn was in short trousers (though Jessie had trouble imagining Marilyn in anything apart from his battered black leather biker jacket and faded black jeans, or one of his identikit, drainpipe-legged, black suits), and Lawford was happy to languish at sergeant level, had no desire to be a star player. She met Lawford’s insipid blue gaze.

‘The murders, particularly that of Fuller, were exceptionally violent, but not in a way that demonstrates impulsive aggression or lack of control. To my mind, the crime scene demonstrated a very planned and calculated level of aggression, of nastiness for want of a better word, that to me says personal. The killer wanted Hugo Fuller to suffer, not just physically but also, and more importantly perhaps, psychologically. For the whole time the perpetrator was tying up and killing Claudine Fuller, Hugo would have known … known what was coming and he almost certainly would have known why, worked out why. Or been told why, if he couldn’t work it out himself.’

Jessie’s mind filled with an image, the swimming pool, the heat, a big man tied to a wooden lounger, struggling hard, knowing that it was futile, that he couldn’t free himself, then offering the killer inducements, anything he wanted, anything, just to stop. And when he realized that the killer couldn’t be bought, crying, howling, begging.

‘Tears,’ she murmured.

‘What?’ Marilyn asked.

‘Tears,’ she repeated, lifting a hand to indicate the photographs tacked to the board behind her, but not turning to look herself. She’d had her fill of Hugo Fuller’s injuries this morning, in addition to another painful shot in the arm when she’d let her eyes graze around the walls while she’d been finding her confidence at the beginning of this meeting. She didn’t need a third dose. ‘I’ll bet that there are tears mixed with the blood on Fuller’s face. He would have struggled and fought, to start with, maybe been angry, abusive. Then he would have tried to bribe the killer, boasted about his wealth, offered the killer anything, anything, to stop. But then, as the horror show playing out in front of him progressed, he would have realized that he was fucked, and he would have cried. Cried and begged …’

She tailed off, her gaze tracking around the faces, taking in the changing expressions as they digested the information she had just shared. Though most of them had worked for Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes for a number of years, she doubted many had worked on a case this determinedly gruesome. They had seen the crime-scene video, but most had probably already compartmentalized it, pushed the gory details to the backs of their minds. She could see, from the looks on people’s faces, that her words had forced an uncomfortable clarity.

‘Business?’ a voice croaked from the back of the room. ‘Could the personal be related to his business?’

Jessie nodded. ‘Yes, it could be related to his business, because his business was effectively personal. It affected people’s lives, the roof over their and their families’ heads.’ She glanced at Marilyn to see if he had anything to add.

‘His business was basically screwing poor people,’ Marilyn added. ‘He bought up freeholds on cheap properties, mainly blocks of flats and terraced houses in poor areas, and then raised the ground rent by a few thousand per cent. So, where people were previously paying negligible sums for their ground rent, they were suddenly forced to pay hundreds or thousands of pounds a year. If they couldn’t pay, their property was repossessed and they and their families were kicked out.’

‘Shouldn’t that be illegal?’ Cara asked.

Marilyn lifted his coat-hanger shoulders. ‘If everything that was morally repugnant was made illegal we’d all be working 24/7 rather than just 18/7, so count your lucky stars that it isn’t.’

‘It may not be to do with his work,’ Jessie cut in. ‘There may be another reason entirely.’

‘Like what?’

She resisted the urge to shrug. God knows. ‘Look into his background. If he screws people professionally … metaphorically professionally,’ she added hurriedly. ‘He could be screwing people all over the place. Metaphorically …’ Think of a different word. But she couldn’t. She felt as if her brain was floating around, untethered, in that swimming pool with Claudine, at the back door with her as she opened it to …

Scratching.

Sniffing.

Edward Scissorhands?

Freddie Krueger?

‘Metaphorically and, uh …’ She spread her hands and smiled. ‘Literally.’

‘It was a messy crime scene. Can we assume that the killer is disorganized?’

‘No, absolutely not. I’d say exactly the opposite. It was messy because it was vicious, but actually, the murders were well thought out, well planned and well executed. There was one killer, two victims, so he had to plan well to ensure that he overpowered both Hugo and his wife, so that he could then enact the theatre he’d planned – the “show” – for Hugo Fuller.’

‘What about the dog?’ Marilyn asked.

Jessie glanced over to the picture of Lupo, looking pure wolf, pure White Fang, on the board. She had loved White Fang when she’d been a teenager, had wanted to be there, in the Yukon territory, in charge of a dog team. The ultimate in escapism. She had loved any book that had allowed her to escape from the broken edifice of her teenage life, had devoured hundreds in the year she’d been incarcerated in Hartmoor Psychiatric Hospital. She wondered quickly whether Claudine Fuller had wanted to escape as a teenager too, whether she had wanted to escape as an adult, as a wife. ‘He took the dog and tied it to a lamp post in the village deliberately.’

‘The dog wasn’t found until one-thirty a.m.,’ Marilyn said. ‘But the pathologist, Dr Ghoshal, estimates that Hugo and his wife were killed between ten p.m. and midnight. Again, he will confirm after the autopsies which are scheduled for tomorrow.’

‘The dog is very noticeable and the village is small.’

‘Miss Marple, eat your heart out,’ Marilyn muttered, almost under his breath.

‘So, it is logical to assume that the murderer took the dog and tied him up somewhere else,’ Jessie continued. ‘Somewhere he wouldn’t be found, perhaps in the woods surrounding the Fullers’ property, and then he moved him to the village after the murders. Otherwise, I think he would have been seen earlier. Again, that shows planning, thought. He brought along a lead to tie Lupo up. It’s not the actions of a disorganized killer.’

‘And it’s not the actions of a random nutter,’ Marilyn finished. ‘Even though many of you may have been thinking Langley Green, while viewing that video walkthrough of the crime scene.’

At the mention of Langley Green – the inpatient mental health clinic in Crawley – a couple of the civilian workers sucked in audible breaths. Marilyn didn’t want that, didn’t want them boxing up the killer as a deranged psychopath in reaction to the nature of the crime. He didn’t want people picturing him as a creature with red eyes, horns and a forked tail, someone you’d be able to identify just by catching his eye in a crowded room, immediately recognize the insanity lodged in the brain behind the gaze. He wanted them sensible, focused and, most importantly, open-minded. ‘I will reiterate. Neither Dr Flynn or I believe that these murders were the work of a random nutter, so erase that thought from your minds.’

A sudden, high-pitched screech from the street outside, a child in pain or terror. Jessie flinched. Another screech. No, not a child. Foxes, either fighting or mating. It was the kind of sound that could scrape fingernails down your soul, particularly after what she’d seen in that house yesterday and after her dream. Outside the grimy windows, a dull autumn day was pushing away the last vestiges of darkness, but she could still see the ghost of her own animated reflection, the faint reflected backs of the heads belonging to the faces in front of her making her look as if she was viewing a phantom theatre performance through opaque glass.

DS Workman raised her hand, polite as always. ‘Has this person killed before?’

This time Jessie did shrug. ‘I don’t know, is the honest answer. But I would say that he has definitely fantasized about the killing of Hugo and Claudine Fuller. Visualized it. It’s incredibly—’ she broke off, struggling to put into words what she was thinking. ‘It’s a very “stage-set” killing, very theatrical. And, as I said before, I believe that it’s to do with watching.’

She sensed Marilyn’s head swivel, his eyes focus on her. ‘Can you elaborate on the watching?’

She nodded. ‘He made Hugo Fuller watch his wife being killed and then he took Fuller’s eyes out. Deliberately took his eyes out, before he killed him. So, I would say that whatever personal reason drives the killer, watching is key.’

Silence in the room. The absolute, stilled silence of a stunned audience, a collective holding in of breath. Not even the ambient noise usually associated with a room full of people: the scuff of feet on worn carpet, the crossing and uncrossing of restless legs, the rustle of clothing.

‘Is he likely to kill again?’ DC Cara’s voice, breaking the deadening silence, pulling her mind back into the room.

Though Jessie had dreaded this meeting, she had most dreaded this question, the one question that she felt entirely unqualified to answer. Even less qualified than the others that had come before. She shook her head, a shake that morphed into a half-nod, to stillness.

‘I believe that he will only kill again if he has another personal axe to grind. Probably the same axe to grind that he had with Hugo Fuller, whatever that axe is.’

‘Motivation,’ Marilyn muttered. ‘The classic – motivation. It always comes down to motivation. We need to find out what the killer’s motivation is. And quickly.’ The arc of his raised arm indicated the mosaic of photographs tacked to the whiteboards. ‘Because I, for one, don’t want to attend another crime scene that looks like this.’ He laid a light hand on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, Dr Flynn, for that very thorough briefing.’

With a fleeting smile and an overwhelming sense of relief, Jessie returned to her seat at the back of the room.

‘And now DS Workman will give us a summary of what she learnt from Hugo Fuller’s mother yesterday evening,’ Marilyn said.

‘Stepmother,’ Workman corrected, rising to her feet. ‘And it’s not much, I’m afraid.’

18

Jessie heard the efficient clack-clack of Detective Sergeant Sarah Workman’s sensible, low-heeled navy courts on lino tiles, closing the gap between them. She was tempted to break into a full-on Usain-Bolt-hundred-metre sprint, put as much distance as she could between herself and whatever task Workman intended to rope her into, but instead, she arranged her expression into a semblance of professionalism, turned and waited for Workman to catch her up.

‘Can I have a quick word, Jessie?’

‘Sure.’

‘Thank you.’ Workman dusted an invisible piece of dirt from the sleeve of her navy suit jacket with fidgety fingers. She seemed uncharacteristically nervous, jittery. Jessie had only ever experienced the professional face of DS Workman, the woman who was Marilyn’s unfailingly supportive crutch, his walking, talking Rolodex, his diary, his details woman, his inexhaustible memory. The steadfast Workman who remained centred even when the walls surrounding them were plastered with images of eviscerated corpses, of the worst examples of what human nature could inflict on others.

‘Here or somewhere private?’ Jessie asked, sensing that whatever Workman wanted to talk about didn’t relate to the case.

‘Good morning, ladies.’

Is it? ‘Morning,’ Jessie replied, shifting back against the wall to let Arthur Lawford and another man from the incident room meeting, who she hadn’t been introduced to, walk past.

‘Private. Do you mind?’ Workman replied, when the men had disappeared through the swing doors at the far end of the corridor.

‘No, of course not.’

‘I wanted to ask you a favour,’ Workman said, as the door to the ladies’ toilet shut behind them.

Jessie, backed up against the row of sinks, nodded. ‘Ask away.’

‘It’s a big favour and it has nothing to do with work. I know that I shouldn’t ask, given how much you’ve got on with the case, but I can’t think of anyone else to turn to.’

With the thought of taking more on, Jessie felt a sudden, sharp burst from the electric suit – stress, tension manifesting itself in her old nemesis that she had fought so hard to control. She had no room, in the mess that was the Fullers’ murders, to perform favours, any favours.

‘Anything,’ she said, ignoring the suit. ‘Really, anything.’

Workman smoothed a fidgety hand over her low-maintenance bob. ‘There’s a boy I know. Well, more a young man, really, I suppose. He’s fifteen. I met him at Age UK charity. We both volunteer at a lunch club there on Sundays, serving food to the old folk, washing up, that kind of thing. It’s for people who live alone, to give them company and a decent meal once a week. There’s a minibus that drives around ferrying them back and forth.’

Jessie nodded encouragingly, though she felt anything but.

‘He has a …’ Workman touched her fingertips to her mouth ‘… a severe cleft palate. It was repaired when he was a baby, but he was left with significant facial deformity and a bad lisp. He has been bullied virtually since birth.’ A flickering, nervous smile. ‘Relentlessly bullied.’

Relentlessly bullied.

Jessie tightened her grasp on the steadying edge of the sink behind her back as the electric suit hissed, not for him, but for herself, for her past.

‘He needs help.’

‘What about the NHS?’

‘He’s had everything that the NHS will provide. Mental health among teens is at crisis point and the NHS can’t cope. There aren’t the resources.’

Jessie nodded. She knew about the limits of the NHS mental health provision all too well herself from her own days working as an NHS psychologist before she had left and joined the Defence Psychology Service.

‘The bullying continued the whole time that Robbie was being treated by the NHS psychologist. Allan, his father, said that it was as if the help that Robbie was getting was being undone as soon as he’d received it.’ Workman raised a flat hand, above her head, as if measuring the height of an invisible child. ‘That he could never get any traction, never get to a state where he felt positive enough about himself to stand up to the bullies. He hadn’t had any counselling for eighteen months and he’s gone downhill fast since it finished – become hugely more anxious, terrified about going to school, agoraphobic, and his self-esteem is destroyed. And he’s depressed, clinically depressed. Allan feels that Robbie is slipping away from him, slipping somewhere he may never be able to come back from.’

Jessie nodded, her mind’s eye finding the images of those celluloid corpses papering the walls of the incident room.

Slipping somewhere he may never come back from.

They both knew what Workman was talking about; it didn’t need to be said.

Jamie.

Suicide.

The electric suit hissed and snapped, worse than it had been in weeks, thoughts of her little brother Jamie always a bright red cape to her electric suit’s bull.

‘Robbie asked you for help?’ she managed.

‘Oh, God no, he’s far too proud for that. His father did. He’s a single parent, mother walked out years ago from what I can gather, and he has struggled to bring Robbie up. They can’t afford to move from the area, though the boy has moved schools twice. But with kids linking up on social media, bullied children just can’t get away. It follows them. Robbie’s a fabulous boy – Allan has done a great job – but he can’t do anything about the bullying. He’s a fixer by nature, I think, and he can’t fix this, though he has tried, really tried, for years. He couldn’t stop the bullying and he can’t mend what it has done to his son.’

‘How long have you known them?’ Jessie asked.

‘I met Allan first. He was arrested for assault, four or five years ago now. He pushed some shitty kid at Robbie’s school, a cocky, sporty kid called Niall Scuffil, and Niall’s mum called the police. Niall had broken Robbie’s arm a couple of months before, jumped on him when he was walking home from school. A few other kids were watching, egging him on. Boys and girls.’ Her voice caught on the word ‘girls’ and she pursed her lips, as if she had a bitter taste in her mouth.

If Workman was expecting girls to be above bullying, she would be – clearly had been – sorely disappointed. Jessie knew that well enough from her own teenage experiences that girls could be vile and, from what she heard, many girls now were worse. Tougher, over-sexualized, grown up too soon with all the internal psychological tensions that created.

‘I was the arresting officer. I went around to speak to Niall’s mother, gave her a piece of my mind. She withdrew the charges, but with very poor grace.’

‘And nothing happened to Niall?’

‘It was Robbie’s word against eight others. Though Allan said that Robbie was so ground down by then, he didn’t even complain. He just took it.’

‘Dragging himself through the days probably takes all his energy,’ Jessie said. ‘Just surviving.’ She knew that well enough herself from her own teenage experiences and hers hadn’t been nearly as bad as Robbie’s, from the little Workman had told her.

She grasped the edge of the sink behind her, relishing the feel of the cold porcelain against her skin. She felt nauseous – sick and intensely hot. The tiredness, she reasoned, her sleepwalking episode of last night disrupting what little shut-eye she’d had. Nothing to do with the electric suit scorching her skin, brand-hot with the memories.

‘I can see him later today. After the Fullers’ autopsy.’ The words rushed out of her before her logical mind could intercept them.

‘Are you sure?’ Workman tilted her head, gaze searching Jessie’s face.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ she said, forcing a smile that she hoped didn’t look as fake as it felt. If she didn’t do it today, tomorrow might easily become ‘tomorrow never comes’ and, from what Workman told her, never wasn’t an option for Robbie Parker.

19

‘Remind me again why you want me to attend the Fullers’ autopsy,’ Jessie asked Marilyn, as they walked side by side down the basement corridor that led to Dr Ghoshal’s autopsy suite.

Jessie didn’t know if it was the product of the disturbed sleep or her imagination, overactive in anticipation of what was to come, but the neon-white strip-lit corridor felt freezing cold, as if they were advancing along a horizontal ice shaft. She rubbed at the goosebumps on her forearms.

‘I asked you to attend because this is the first case you will have worked on from beginning to end with Major Crimes and I want you to experience every aspect of a murder investigation,’ Marilyn said, glancing across at her. He raised an eyebrow. ‘And because you might make a useful contribution.’

‘What, like filling Dr Ghoshal’s spotless stainless-steel sink with half-digested bacon sandwich, perhaps?’

Marilyn smiled. ‘You’re making me feel hungry.’

‘Oh God, yuk.’

‘My fridge was empty, so I only managed a couple of well-past-their-sell-by-date Weetabix.’ He clapped a hand on her shoulder. ‘You will thank me for this afterwards.’

‘How did you arrive at that dubious conclusion?’

‘Because I know that you’re the kind of woman who likes a challenge.’

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t you dare try to dress this one up as doing me good.’

‘You’ll see.’ Marilyn opened the door they had reached and they entered a small room with metal lockers on one side, a fitted bench on the other. A changing room? Or an unprepossessing antechamber into hell, Jessie caught herself thinking.

‘Ready?’

‘You can’t possibly expect an affirmative to that question.’

Suppressing a smile, Marilyn rapped his knuckles twice on the door opposite the one through which they had entered and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Taking a steadying breath, Jessie followed, stepping into a low-ceilinged white-tiled room, beige vinyl covering the floor and running a quarter metre up the walls, ubiquitous in hospitals and clearly morgues. There were interrogation-chamber-bright lights, a row of metal doors that looked like the entrances to industrial-sized fridges (and probably were) set into the far wall, and three people dressed in green scrubs and clinical face masks occupying the space. Jessie had watched as many crime box-sets as most people, flicking channels late at night and ending up on Silent Witness for want of anything better to watch (though to be fair it did make for great late-night viewing) and the autopsy suite she had stepped into was nothing like the high-tech room that the cast operated in, with its plate-glass viewing gallery and space-age decor.

Dr Ghoshal’s coolly appraising brown eyes met hers over his clinical face mask. ‘Welcome, Dr Flynn. Is this your first autopsy?’

Jessie nodded. ‘Can’t you tell from the colour of my skin, which perfectly matches the colour of your tiles?’ And the colour of the corpses on your dissecting table – she didn’t say it. She had met Dr Ghoshal only a few times, though had gathered pretty much instantaneously that cracking feeble jokes about the contents of his autopsy suite would be strictly verboten.

‘I will make the experience as pleasant as I possibly can then, Dr Flynn.’

‘Thank you.’

Marilyn had admitted, on the walk down the corridor, that the last of Dr Ghoshal’s autopsies he had attended, that of ten-year-old Jodie Trigg, he had excused himself and exited only a few short minutes after he’d entered. He said that he just couldn’t stomach watching that little girl being hacked to pieces, however clinically and dispassionately. He couldn’t recall his excuse, though he knew that Dr Ghoshal would have seen right through it as if through sparkling clean window glass. The weakness of his stomach and of his resolve hadn’t been only because of Jodie’s diminutive age, but also because he blamed himself wholly for her presence on the dissecting table in the first place. If they’d been quicker, made fewer mistakes in the investigation, she would have lived.

‘It’s the first time I’ve ever walked out of an autopsy in my twenty-five-year career in the force,’ he had said, with a slightly embarrassed shrug.

Glancing over at Marilyn now, Jessie saw that his expression was stone, his gaze focused unwaveringly on Hugo Fuller. He looked as if he would very comfortably be able to see this one through. She wished that she could claim the same. She still hadn’t looked directly at either body, had just glimpsed them through the comforting opaqueness of her peripheral vision.

‘Let’s start with Mr Fuller, shall we,’ Dr Ghoshal said.

From the corner of her eye, Jessie saw Marilyn step forward to take up a sentry position by Hugo Fuller’s feet. She forced herself to look at Fuller directly for the first time, at his face, at the pale, naked slackness of his body. Her gaze skipped beyond him, to Claudine. Despite the severity of Fuller’s injuries, the ravaged pits of his eyes, the gouges carving his face, he was easier to look at than his wife. Her corpse was so alabaster pale that Jessie could almost have convinced her brain that Claudine was carved of marble, not made of flesh and bone. But the expression on her face, in death, held a depth of sadness that was heartbreaking. What had Claudine been thinking about when she died? Had she been thinking about the loss of her own life? For some reason, perhaps just a fanciful one, Jessie thought not. Her mind found the photographs lining the mantelpiece – the only photographs – in that depressing mausoleum of a house, of Lupo, Claudine’s baby left behind, no one to care for him or to love him. Had that been her final thought? Jessie was sure that if she had been Claudine, it would have been hers.

Her gaze moved back to Hugo Fuller and she stepped forward as Dr Ghoshal had instructed, taking up a position by Marilyn’s side. Perhaps it was because she knew him to be a shit, suspected him to be responsible for both his own and his wife’s murders, that she didn’t feel as upset as she had expected to.

‘Shall I begin?’ Dr Ghoshal asked.

‘Yes,’ Jessie answered, with only a tiny waver in her voice.

The noise of Dr Ghoshal’s scalpel slicing through Hugo Fuller’s skin was, to Jessie, lions tearing a zebra’s flesh from its bones. The sound of him methodically carving off the top of Hugo Fuller’s skull with the circular reciprocating saw, the sear of a diamond blade through steel, even the low, monotonous hum he was making – ‘his concentration hum’, Marilyn had warned her – like a hive of furious bees. Her stomach felt as if it was filled with bubbling acid that threatened to surge up her throat. She cast her gaze around the white-tiled autopsy suite, until it alighted on a stainless-steel sink behind and to her right. Five strides, a couple of seconds.

‘How did he die?’ Marilyn’s voice pulled her back.

‘Devastating trauma to the brain,’ Dr Ghoshal said.

‘Through one eye?’

‘A single stab wound to the brain can be survivable, DI Simmons,’ he replied, in his perennially prosaic tone.

The man with the nail gun, Jessie thought. And, far more importantly, Callan. She still didn’t know the contents of that letter from his neurologist, still regretted letting her obsession with privacy trump her curiosity.

‘Two stab wounds, however,’ Ghoshal continued. ‘More challenging. And once the instrument was in Mr Fuller’s brain, it was moved around – waggled, for want of a better word. Your man was determined to kill.’

‘What instrument was used?’

‘A knife or skewer perhaps, narrow, thin-bladed, not serrated, driven through each eye socket, into the brain.’

‘Eye socket?’ Marilyn asked. ‘You mean eyeball? Through his eyeballs?’

Dr Ghoshal’s eyes rose fractionally ceiling-wards, enough for both Marilyn and Jessie to clock the movement. ‘Eye sockets, DI Simmons,’ he repeated. ‘The contusions to Mr Fuller’s face, the mutilation to his eyeballs, occurred ante-mortem. I wouldn’t imagine that there was much of his eyeballs left when he was finally put out of his misery with the thin-bladed instrument driven into his brain.’

Marilyn nodded. Jessie took a breath. The bubbling acid was rising up her throat. She gulped, trying unsuccessfully to swallow it down. It would be too humiliating to vomit now. She focused her gaze on the stainless-steel fridge doors across the room, on the three of them in reflection: Dr Ghoshal, a runner bean in his green scrubs, Marilyn, a thin black crow in his suit, she as apparition pale as Fuller’s corpse, even when reflected in steel.

‘Both the mutilation to his eyes and the contusions down his face were caused by the same instrument, I would say,’ Dr Ghoshal continued. ‘And I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to hear that they would have caused very considerable pain.’

‘Torture?’ Marilyn asked.

Dr Ghoshal lifted his narrow shoulders. ‘It would most certainly have been torture for Mr Fuller, though whether torture was the primary motivation is not for me to ascertain.’ His coolly appraising gaze moved from Marilyn to Jessie. ‘What is your theory on the contusions to Mr Fuller’s face and the ante-mortem trauma to his eyeballs, Dr Flynn?’

Jessie forced herself to hold Ghoshal’s gaze, tough given its searching intensity. Was he testing her? Probably.

‘I think that they had two purposes. Firstly, to torture him, cause extreme suffering before his death. But I also believe that they had meaning both for the murderer and for the victim.’

Dr Ghoshal raised an eyebrow. ‘Meaning?’

She nodded, with far more certainty than she felt. ‘My theory …’ she broke off, glancing over at Marilyn, checking in. His face was poker – she was on her own facing Ghoshal. ‘My theory is that the murders are personal and that they are to do with watching.’

‘Watching? Watching what?’ Ghoshal asked.

‘I don’t know. But I do believe Fuller would have known exactly why he was being tortured and why the killer was employing the methods he employed.’

‘Were the contusions done with the thin bladed instrument that was used to kill him?’ Marilyn asked.

Dr Ghoshal shook his head. ‘It’s clear from the pattern of the contusions, which are spaced identically apart from each other, top to bottom, and from their consistent depth, that they were done at the same time, not individually.’

‘With what?’

‘Some type of large, sharp, fork-like instrument, I would suggest,’ Ghoshal said, after a moment. ‘Or—’ he broke off, raising a gloved hand, fingers bent into a claw. He rotated his hand, spreading fingers, moving them closer together. It was the first time since they had entered the room that Jessie had seen him look anything other than entirely unhesitating.

‘Fingernails?’ Marilyn ventured.

Ghoshal shook his head. ‘Human fingernails would be too weak to cause trauma this extensive.’

‘An animal?’ Jessie asked. ‘A dog?’

Dr Ghoshal didn’t answer for a moment. ‘It would have to be a huge dog to inflict contusions this far apart. Also, I don’t believe that a typical dog’s claws would be sharp enough or have enough force to create this depth of trauma.’ He picked up a metal ruler from the tin tray, held it to Fuller’s face. ‘The distance between each contusion is two point eight centimetres. That’s a very big dog. A very big, very strong, very vicious dog.’

‘But a dog could have done it?’ Jessie pressed. ‘A big dog, as you say? A wolf-dog?’

‘Perhaps,’ Ghoshal said finally, his coolly cynical gaze rising to meet Jessie’s. ‘It’s possible. Not probable, not probable at all, but I suppose that it is possible.’

20

Jane Jones, Hugo Fuller’s secretary, lived in north Chichester, on an estate of modern red-brick terraced houses, all bordered by privet-hedge-trimmed front drives and neat, handkerchief-sized back gardens. Workman had telephoned the offices of Winner Fuller earlier and been told that Hugo Fuller hadn’t turned up for work today, though that wasn’t unusual evidently, as he often had meetings out of the office.

She had also been told that Jane Jones, Fuller’s secretary, was working from home today as she was waiting in for a furniture delivery. The man on the phone had sounded young and ‘cat’s away, mice will play’ delighted that neither the boss nor his wing-lady were in evidence today; he clearly hadn’t connected news reports of a couple brutally murdered in their Sussex country house with Hugo Fuller. Marilyn had, so far, managed to hold back the names of the victims from the journalists who had already picked up on the murders, though he doubted that luck would last until the evening news.

‘Jane Jones drives the same car as you,’ Marilyn said to Workman, indicating the navy-blue 2016-registration Ford Fiesta parked on the tarmac drive. ‘Same make, same colour, same age!’

‘And if Dr Flynn was here she would doubtless draw some conclusions about our shared psychology from that coincidence,’ Workman said with a smile.

Marilyn raised an eyebrow. ‘And she’d be right to. You know that we policemen—’

‘Persons,’ Workman interrupted.

Both eyebrows raised, accompanied by a roll of his eyes. ‘Policepersons don’t believe in coincidences.’

A white, oval ceramic plaque painted with a sprig of bluebells proclaimed that this was number fourteen. Raising his hand, Marilyn knocked on the lilac-painted front door. It was answered with brisk efficiency, within seconds, by a woman of a similar age to Workman, mid-forties, dressed in a pair of slim-legged navy trousers and a white crew-neck jumper. Her medium-brown hair was short, cut into as an efficient style as the manner of her door opening – much like Workman’s own hair and door opening. There was, indeed, something very ‘kindred spirit’ about Hugo Fuller’s secretary; the man had had commendable taste, in secretaries at least, Workman surmised, avoiding the amused glance Marilyn shot her as he held up his warrant card.

‘Detective Inspector Simmons, Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes. And this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Sarah Workman.’

Jane Jones eyeballed them both dispassionately from the doorway. ‘How can I help you, Detective Inspector Simmons?’

‘Could we come in for a moment, please?’

‘If you must.’ She stood back and ushered them into a small, neat sitting room at the front of the house, containing a simple beige leather three-piece suite and a smoked-glass coffee table, the window overlooking the Ford Fiesta and shared patch of grass beyond. Marilyn spoke when they were all seated.

‘I’m sorry to tell you that your boss, Hugo Fuller, was murdered last night.’

If either of them had expected her to expire with shock, they were disappointed. Jane Jones took the news as if Marilyn had informed her that her supermarket delivery was missing a couple of essential items.

‘You don’t look surprised,’ Marilyn said. ‘Or particularly upset.’

Jones lifted her shoulders. ‘Mr Fuller was my boss, not my husband, my brother or son. And I’m sure that it won’t have escaped your notice, even this early in any investigation you might be conducting, that he wasn’t the nicest man.’

‘So, you think he had it coming?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I mean, really, does anyone have it coming?’

Marilyn didn’t answer, though if he had his response would have been in the affirmative. Though he put equal effort into every murder he dealt with, give or take, he couldn’t say that he was equally surprised when some people became victims. Certain individuals lived in a world where their getting their comeuppance was only a matter of time.

‘Was he murdered at home?’

‘Yes.’

She suppressed a shudder. ‘I never liked that house.’

‘You’ve been there?’

‘A couple of times to collect things for work. We didn’t socialize, if that’s what you mean.’

‘What didn’t you like about it?’

‘The isolation mainly. And though it was grand, they didn’t have great taste; or I suppose I should say, he didn’t have great taste. It was all his taste of course.’

‘Of course?’

Jones arched an eyebrow. ‘Hugo quite unequivocally wore the trousers.’

‘In what way?’

‘In every way, Detective Inspector Simmons. Work, home, marriage, taste, you name it. I don’t think that Claudine got a look in, poor love. How is she, by the way? Is she holding up OK?’

‘I’m afraid that Claudine Fuller was also murdered.’

Jones’ hand flew to her mouth. For the first time since they had entered her home, she looked shocked and genuinely sorry. ‘Oh, God, no. You didn’t say.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Marilyn said. ‘I should have mentioned that at the beginning. It was a double murder. They were found dead in the early hours of this morning, in the swimming pool complex attached to their house.’

‘I’m so sorry. Poor poor Claudine. I hope it wasn’t too dreadful for—’ She broke off. ‘What a stupid thing to say. Of course it must have been dreadful.’ She met Marilyn’s gaze. ‘Do you have any idea who killed them?’

He shook his head. ‘We’re at a very early stage in the investigation, Mrs—’

‘Miss.’

‘Miss Jones, and we don’t have any leads at the moment. We were hoping that you could help us with that.’

She nodded. ‘Of course. Whatever you need.’

‘Thank you.’ Marilyn leant forward, steepling his fingers. ‘Can you tell us about Hugo Fuller’s business?’

‘His business was buying up ground rents to leasehold properties. The revenue came from the tenants’ ground rent payments.’

‘We’ve done a little research, Miss Jones. He didn’t have a great reputation for being a fair and generous landlord.’

Jane Jones’ mouth tightened. ‘It’s business, Detective Inspector Simmons.’

‘But there’s business and there’s business, isn’t there Miss Jones?’

‘That’s very cryptic.’

‘Hugo Fuller’s business was buying up freeholds and ramping up the ground rent by hundreds or thousands of per cent, wasn’t it? And if families couldn’t pay, they were kicked out of their properties, made homeless.’

‘No one is truly homeless in this country, Detective Inspector. The council has a legal responsibility to house everyone.’

‘Didn’t you have any moral objection to what you were doing – working for a business like that, a man like that?’ Workman cut in.

Jones shrugged. ‘He paid my salary on time and he was a decent boss.’

Workman raised an eyebrow. ‘Decent?’

‘He was never nasty to me, if that’s what you’re asking. And he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.’ She smiled, a cynical, slightly bitter smile. ‘He was a “does what it says on the tin” kind of man.’

‘What about the people he was screwing?’ Marilyn asked. ‘I can’t imagine that they shared your view regarding Hugo Fuller’s decency.’

A raised eyebrow, accompanying another cynical smile. ‘Do you mean metaphorically or physically screwing, Detective Inspector?’

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