Mick was his second DS, by his own admission ‘an old-school copper’. He’d joined the police straight from school. At thirty-eight, Mick had built up an impressive network among the city’s criminals, along with a physique honed by many hours in the gym. During a recent red-faced rant on the topic of compulsory diversity-awareness training, Jools had quipped that Mick’s black goatee and shaved head made him look like ‘a bald Satan’.
His two detective constables were on the way to making a decent team, if they could channel their professional rivalry into policework and not undermining each other. Julie ‘Jools’ Harper had, after boarding school in Salisbury, followed her father and grandfather into the army and spent her last three years as an MP in the Criminal Investigation Branch. With her slight but muscular runner’s build, pixie-cut red hair and flashing emerald-green eyes, she resembled a feisty elf; the kind who would follow the evidence, build a case, interview suspects and make arrests with a single-minded determination born of a lifetime’s adherence to rules.
Completing the quartet was Olly Cable, a fast-track boy with a degree in criminology. At twenty-four, he was five years Jools’s junior. He still had to learn the difference between knowing something and letting everyone else know he knew it. Olly had rowed at university and carried his six-foot frame well, clothing it in designer suits, and wore his dark hair in a fashionable forties look. Ford had noticed him bestowing longing glances on Jools when he thought he was unobserved.
Until recently, Ford would have been sitting among them, a DS like Jan and Mick. Then he’d got the coveted DI’s post after the previous holder left for the Met. Overnight, those comfortable, banter-filled relationships changed. Not least with Mick, who’d made no secret of the fact he’d felt the job was his by right.
‘Mine for the asking, Henry,’ he’d crowed, just before Sandy had made the formal announcement a month earlier. Sandy had already given Ford the good news the previous evening, shaking his hand then enveloping him in a tight hug.
Some who’d been on the receiving end of a ‘Monroe Special’ alleged they were the reason for her nickname: the Python. Frowned upon by HR, no doubt, but a sign she’d accepted you. Others swore blind it was her habit, when a front-line copper, of squeezing the truth out of suspects in muscular coils of evidence, forensic questioning and, when all else failed, a good old-fashioned dose of intimidation.
Was she in tune with the times? Nobody would accuse her of that. Was she a gold medallist in bringing villains to justice? Guilty as charged.
And now, here he was, about to lead his own team into battle in their first major case since he’d taken over. The inner circle, the police staff investigators and CSIs, the uniforms. He looked at each of them in turn, waited for complete silence.
‘Angela Halpern. Known from now on as Angie. And Kai Halpern, her son. Angie was a single mum. A widow. Murdered sometime in the last forty-eight hours.’
‘COD, guv?’ Jan asked, prodding her heavy-framed glasses higher on her nose.
‘While we wait for the PM report, it’s all conjecture, but it looks as though Angie was throttled, and Kai – well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘No obvious signs of violence, so poison? Doc Eustace will tell us.’
‘What about the scene?’ Mick asked.
‘The primary scene was a bloodbath. She bled out. And someone – the killer, we assume – wrote the number 666 on the wall in blood.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Mick said with feeling, running a palm over his shaved skull.
‘Satanic murderer hits Salisbury!’ one of the police staff investigators called out.
Ford waited until the banter evaporated under his stern gaze. He turned to the left side of the table. ‘Jan, I want you to set up a search. The house, obviously – all three flats – then, what, a fifty-metre perimeter?’
She nodded and made a note. ‘Should be about right. Anything you want me to look for in particular?’
‘There was a lot of blood. Gallons of the stuff. If he got away without leaving some sort of trail, I’d be amazed.’
‘Lose your breakfast again, did you, guv?’ Mick muttered, just loud enough for Jan to hear.
‘Leave it, Mick,’ she hissed. ‘You know what today is.’
‘Joke.’
‘Right. So, blood drops, footprints or partials?’ Jan asked.
‘Exactly. Other than that, the usual,’ Ford said, offering her a small smile of gratitude. ‘I’d like to recover whatever he used to wound her, too. The murder weapon might be his bare hands, but he must have used some sort of edged or pointed weapon to bleed her out as well.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, Olly.’
‘Sorry, sir, but you keep saying “he”. Shouldn’t we be a bit more open to the idea of a female killer?’
Ford caught Mick Tanner’s eye-roll. ‘Let’s settle on “they” for now. Now, what about motives-slash-lines of enquiry?’
‘Robbery gone wrong?’ Jan asked.
‘Nothing taken. Next?’
‘Jealous partner?’ This from Mick.
‘Husband’s deceased, but we’ll check for boyfriends. Next?’
‘Stalker,’ a civilian investigator suggested.
‘Possible. Can you look into that, please? Anything else?’
‘Work colleague with a grudge?’ Olly offered.
‘Seems a bit over the top for a professional rivalry, but yes, possible.’
‘What if the woman was only collateral damage?’ Nat, standing at the back of the room, asked.
‘Meaning?’
‘We’re all talking about Angie. Her ex, her stalker, her colleagues. What if the killer was interested in Kai?’
Ford frowned. Please don’t let it be a child killer.
‘That’s an interesting idea, Nat. Let’s look at all the nonces in our patch with convictions for violence as well as their usual scumbaggery.’
‘Sir?’ It was Olly again. ‘Aren’t we all avoiding the obvious?’
Ford sighed. Bloody graduate fast-trackers. ‘Which is?’
‘Stranger murder.’
‘They’re very rare. But then, so are murder scenes like ours. How do you explain the lack of evidence of forced entry or defensive wounds on Angie Halpern’s body? Wouldn’t she try to fight off a stranger?’
Olly frowned. ‘He rings the doorbell and gives her a line. Something to make her trust him. Then he bashes her over the head to subdue her so he can bleed her out.’
‘Olly could have a point, boss,’ Mick said. ‘After all, she’s hardly going to let a stalker in, is she?’
‘I don’t think a woman living on her own would let a stranger into her home just on the strength of a line,’ Jan said, making air-quotes around the final word. ‘Especially not if her little boy was in the flat with her.’
‘Fine,’ Mick said. ‘Say she knows him, then. Maybe not well. But enough to trust him. He’s not a threat, so she lets him in.’
Ford decided it was time to refocus the discussion. ‘What about the blood?’ he asked the room. ‘It’s obviously not just a by-product of an attack. Angie and Kai were posed. No violence to the bodies, beyond the obvious. Does blood mean something to our killer? Let me hear your ideas. Word association. Blood.’