‘Au contraire, Henry!’
The owner of the deep, amused-sounding voice tapped Ford on the shoulder. He turned to greet the forensic team manager, a short, round man wearing wire-framed glasses.
‘Morning, Alec.’
Alec clocked the new CSI, but then leaned closer to Ford. ‘You OK, Henry?’ he murmured, his brows knitted together. ‘What with the date, and everything.’
‘I’m fine. Let’s leave it.’
Alec shrugged. Then his gaze moved to Hannah. ‘Dr Fellowes, you’re here at last! Welcome, welcome.’
‘Thank you, Alec. It’s been quite an interesting start to the day.’
Ford said, ‘Some idiot was making a nuisance of himself in reception as Hannah was arriving. He’s cooling off in one of Ian’s capsule hotel rooms in the basement.’
The joviality vanished, replaced by an expression of real concern. ‘Oh, my dear young woman. I am so sorry. And on your first day with us, too,’ Alec said. ‘Why don’t you come with me? I’ll introduce you to the team and we’ll get you set up with a nice quiet desk in the corner. Thanks, Henry. I’ll take it from here.’
Ford nodded, eager to get back to his own office and see what the day held. He prayed someone might have been up to no good overnight. Anything to save him from the mountains of forms and reports that he had to either read, write or edit.
‘DI Ford? Before you go,’ Hannah said.
‘Yes?’
‘You said I should call you Ford. But Alec just called you Henry.’
‘It’s a nickname. I got it on my first day here.’
‘A nickname. What does it mean?’
‘You know. Henry. As in Henry Ford?’
She looked at him, eyebrows raised.
He tried again. ‘The car? Model T?’
She smiled at last. A wide grin that showed her teeth, though it didn’t reach her eyes. The effect was disconcerting. ‘Ha! Yes. That’s funny.’
‘Right. I have to go. I’m sure we’ll bump into each other again.’
‘I’m sure, too. I hope there won’t be a drunk trying to hit me.’
She smiled, and after a split second he realised it was supposed to be a joke. As he left, he could hear her telling Alec, ‘Call me Hannah.’
DAY TWO, 8.59 A.M.
The 999 call had come in just ten minutes earlier: a Cat A G28 – suspected homicide. Having told the whole of Response and Patrol B shift to ‘blat’ over to the address, Sergeant Natalie Hewitt arrived first at 75 Wyvern Road.
She jumped from her car and spoke into her Airwave radio. ‘Sierra Bravo Three-Five, Control.’
‘Go ahead, Sierra Bravo Three-Five.’
‘Is the ambulance towards?’
‘Be about three minutes.’
She ran up the stairs and approached the young couple standing guard at the door to Flat 3.
‘Mr and Mrs Gregory, you should go back to your own flat now,’ she said, panting. ‘I’ll have more of my colleagues joining me shortly. Please don’t leave the house. We’ll be wanting to take your statements.’
‘But I’ve got aerobics at nine thirty,’ the woman protested.
Natalie sighed. The public were fantastic at calling in crimes, and occasionally made half-decent witnesses. But it never failed to amaze her how they could also be such innocents when it came to the aftermath. This one didn’t even seem concerned that her upstairs neighbour and young son had been murdered. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe the husband had kept her out of the flat. Wise bloke.
‘I’m afraid you may have to cancel it, just this once,’ she said. You look like you could afford to. Maybe go and get a fry-up, too, when we’re done with you. Put some flesh on your bones.
The woman retreated to the staircase. Her husband delayed leaving, just for a few seconds.
‘We’re just shocked,’ he said. ‘The blood came through our ceiling. That’s why I went upstairs to investigate.’
Natalie nodded, eager now to enter the death room and deal with the latest chapter in the Big Book of Bad Things People Do to Each Other.
She swatted at the flies that buzzed towards her. They all came from the room at the end of the dark, narrow hallway. Keeping her eyes on the threadbare red-and-cream runner, alert to anything Forensics might be able to use, she made her way to the kitchen. She supported herself against the opposite wall with her left hand so she could walk, one foot in line with the other, along the right-hand edge of the hall.
The buzzing intensified. And then she caught it: the aroma of death. Sweet-sour top notes overlaying a deeper, darker, rotting-meat stink as body tissues broke down and emitted their gases.
And blood. Or ‘claret’, in the parlance of the job. She reckoned she’d smelled more of it than a wine expert. This was present in quantity. The husband – what was his name? Rob, that was it. He’d said on the phone it was bad. ‘A slaughterhouse’ – his exact words.
‘Let’s find out, then, shall we?’ she murmured as she reached the door and entered the kitchen.
As the scene imprinted itself on her retinas, she didn’t swear, or invoke the deity, or his son. She used to, in the early days of her career. There’d been enough blasphemy and bad language to have had her churchgoing mum rolling her eyes and pleading with her to ‘Watch your language, please, Nat. There’s no need.’
She’d become hardened to it over the previous fifteen years. She hoped she still felt a normal human’s reaction when she encountered murder scenes, or the remains of those who’d reached the end of their tether and done themselves in. But she left the amateur dramatics to the new kids. She was a sergeant, a rank she’d worked bloody hard for, and she felt a certain restraint went with the territory. So, no swearing.
She did, however, shake her head and swallow hard as she took in the scene in front of her. She’d been a keen photographer in her twenties and found it helpful to see crime scenes as if through a lens: her way of putting some distance between her and whatever horrors the job required her to confront.
In wide-shot, an obscene parody of a Madonna and child. A woman – early thirties, to judge by her face, which was waxy-pale – and a little boy cradled in her lap.
They’d been posed at the edge of a wall-to-wall blood pool, dried and darkened to a deep plum red.
She’d clearly bled out. He wasn’t as pale as his mum, but the pink in his smooth little cheeks was gone, replaced by a greenish tinge.
The puddle of blood had spread right across the kitchen floor and under the table, on which half-emptied bags of shopping sagged. The dead woman was slumped with her back against the cooker, legs canted open yet held together at the ankle by her pulled-down jeans.
And the little boy.
Looking for all the world as though he had climbed on to his mother’s lap for a cuddle, eyes closed, hands together at his throat as if in prayer. Fair hair. Long and wavy, down to his shoulders, in a girlish style Natalie had noticed some of her friends choose for their sons.
Even in midwinter, flies would find a corpse within the hour. In the middle of a scorching summer like the one southern England was enjoying now, they’d arrived in minutes, laid their eggs and begun feasting in quantity. Maggots crawled and wriggled all over the pair.