‘Thanks, guv. I owe you one.’
‘Yes, you do. In a pint glass.’
‘Be gentle, guv.’
‘Aren’t I always?’ He knew what she meant. His heart used to sink when he had to deliver bad news. He’d sweat, feel embarrassed and anxious at the same time. But not any more. Not after his wife’s death.
‘Just . . .’ Jools hesitated. ‘Be kind, OK? It’s a massive shock. Try not to sound like you’re reciting a script.’
‘Noted.’
Moving stiffly, Cherry Andrews showed Ford into a meeting room off the main reception area. The walls were dotted with grease marks from peeled-off Blu Tack. A pedestal-mounted fan moved the warm, humid air around the room.
‘Please have a seat,’ she said, gesturing at one of the hard, plastic-backed chairs around the table. Her face was pale. ‘What’s happened? Why are you here?’
Her forehead was grooved with concern. Ford looked her straight in the eye. He may not have felt any nerves or dread, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed the moment when you planted a bomb in the centre of a family and detonated it. Whatever Jools said, he knew their pain better than anyone. He just couldn’t bring himself to admit how much. Or why.
‘There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’ll be straight with you. I’m afraid your sister has been killed. Her son, too. We’re treating their deaths as suspicious. I’m sorry for your loss. Truly, I am.’
Then he waited. You had to. You had to wait to see how the family member whose emotions you’d just blown to pieces was going to react. Some went into shock, not moving, not talking, barely breathing. Others hit you, beating their fists against your chest until they collapsed, sobbing. Others got angry, the men especially, railing at you, yelling, swearing. Others denied it. Even after you cuddled them and told them how sorry you were, Sam, but it’s true. Mummy’s dead. She’s not coming back. It was an accident.
‘How?’ she asked, after ten seconds of silence.
‘We’re not sure. But I have to tell you, it looks as though they were murdered.’
‘Looks?’ she said, louder this time, her eyes glistening. ‘What do you mean, “looks”? Were they or weren’t they?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. They were.’
This wasn’t protocol. He was supposed to wait until the results of the post-mortem. But hell, it wasn’t as if Angie Halpern had accidentally killed her son, throttled herself and then bled herself to death.
The tears overflowed Cherry’s lower lids, spilling down her cheeks and splashing on to the tabletop. A sob broke free, a gluey croak that hung in the air between them. She pulled a tissue from a pocket and wiped her nose.
‘Did she . . . I mean, were they . . . ?’ she asked in a voice clotted with sudden grief.
He knew what she meant. What she wanted to know. Relieved that at least he could offer her this small crumb of comfort, he told her what she wanted to hear. ‘It looks as though they died quickly.’ They didn’t. I’m sure of it. ‘We need to wait for the pathologist to conduct her tests’ – not ‘perform an autopsy’; nobody wants to picture knives and saws at a moment like this – ‘and there were no signs of any sexual assault.’
The language was brutal. But so was violent death. He’d never found that relatives responded well to euphemisms. It was as if, in this moment of extreme emotion, only the truth would do. The plainer and more unvarnished, the better.
She looked at him with eyes streaked black as her mascara ran. ‘What do you need from me?’
‘I need to find out as much as I can about Angela. Who she—’
‘Call her Angie. Please. She hated being called Angela. Said it reminded her of Mum.’
‘Sorry. I need to build up a picture of Angie as a person. The people she knew. Who she worked with, socialised with. Who she confided in. Did she have any enemies? People who might have wished her harm?’
Cherry dragged the tissue across her eyes, reducing it to a soggy, frayed scrap. He offered a fresh one from a packet in his jacket pocket.
‘I need to think. Oh, God, what do I do about the funerals? There’s so much I don’t know.’
Like, how do you tell your relatives? How do you stop yourself weeping through her funeral? Beating your fists against your father-in-law’s black-suited chest and sobbing uncontrollably as he pats your heaving back? There’ll a grief counsellor. But you can’t tell her why you’re so fucked up. You’d go to prison. Sam would grow up an orphan. Work’s good, though. Work’s always there for you. You can forget about your grief if you keep working.
‘I’m going to assign a family liaison officer to you,’ he said quietly. ‘She’ll help you get through this, Cherry, I promise. But I need you to know that we won’t be able to release the bodies until all our tests are done and we have all the evidence we can find from’ – from their bodies, from their dead bodies, don’t say it – ‘a careful examination.’
She’d passed from the heightened emotion he’d seen so many times before into a passive state. She looked at him, but her eyes barely focused. She twisted and picked at the second tissue until it was a pile of damp shreds on the table in front of her.
She nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘I have to go. I’m sorry.’
He handed her his card and repeated the mantra about getting in touch with information, however insignificant it might seem.
Back at Bourne Hill, Ford passed his own office and headed for its neighbour, bigger by a factor of two and with much better furniture. Time to inform the big boss: Detective Superintendent Sandra Monroe. He knocked and entered.
DAY TWO, NOON
The woman behind the desk looked up from a phone. She pushed her ash-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘Henry! What news from the frontline?’
‘Double homicide. Bad.’
‘And when you say “bad”. . . ?’
‘Mother and child. Posed together in a lake of her blood. The number 666 daubed on the wall in blood. No robbery. No sexual violence. No witnesses.’
Sandy said nothing at first. Ford waited. He knew what she was doing. Running through the scenarios that could affect the progress of the case, from investigative to legal to public relations. The higher up the ladder you went, the more politics you had to worry about.
‘We’ll issue a basic press release. No conference yet,’ she said. ‘If you can catch him inside a week, we won’t have a media circus on our hands.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Anything you need?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m good.’
‘That’s my boy. Because my budget’s enough to pay your wages and toner for the printers, and that’s about it.’
Ford gathered his team together in a conference room. And now, surrounded by cops rather than dead bodies and blood-gorged flies, on his home turf, he felt the nerves kick in good and proper. His guts squirmed.
He surveyed the officers and police staff sitting round the U-shaped table. His ‘inner circle’ in particular.
To his left sat Jan Derwent, a steady detective sergeant with fifteen years in. Her moans about her big-hipped figure and her habit of bringing in home-baked cakes were, Ford felt, somewhat at odds with each other. Jan was the team’s POLSA – police search adviser. She’d earned the team’s admiration when she’d uncovered a Yorkie bar missing from another officer’s lunchbox in Mick Tanner’s desk.