The Assassin's Dog

by David George Clarke

As well as cleaning, greasing and oiling the pulleys and rails he needed as part of his plan, Rosselli needed a little more information before he could implement his final strategy. And for this he was planning a spot of house-breaking.

  He checked the weather forecast and was pleased to find the UK living up to its reputation for overcast and wet days. The entire week ahead was going to be dull, with particularly heavy rain the following day, Tuesday, weather that meant that anyone driving past the Brookes’ cottage would be concentrating hard on the road if they happened to pass him as he walked the half mile from his parked car.

  Over breakfast in his room at the hotel on Tuesday morning, Rosselli was alerted by a ping from his phone as the app monitoring Brooke’s car announced the vehicle was moving. He watched the pulsing blue circle on the screen show the car leave the cottage and head towards Nottingham where Brooke parked as normal at the car park next to the SCF offices. The only risk for Rosselli now was whether Brooke’s wife was going to return from her overseas trip. He called up her social media account and discovered she was finishing up that very afternoon and returning the following day, flights permitting. There was no time to lose.

  After parking his car in what had become his usual spot along a lane and out of sight from the Rappington road, Rosselli settled Goccia in her basket.

  “I’m sorry, tesoro, I don’t want to risk you leaving muddy paw prints in Detective Brooke’s cottage, and if it happens that I need to leave in a hurry, I don’t want to be worrying about you.”

  He rubbed the wrinkles of skin on her neck, tossed her a few of her favourite nibbles and closed the door, leaving the rear passenger windows open a fraction to give her some fresh air.

  Rosselli knew from his previous visits to the cottage that there were no CCTV cameras silently watching the outside, and nor was there a box high on one wall announcing the presence of a security system. But a hidden internal alarm was another matter. The last thing he wanted was to alert Brooke by triggering something that would talk to the detective’s phone, or worse, silently alert a security company.

  Fortunately, the windows at the rear of the house were completely hidden from the road, giving Rosselli the opportunity to scrutinise them carefully for the telltale signs of alarm fittings. There were none and to his complete surprise, as he made his way along the windows he found a small upper window in the downstairs bathroom was open. He couldn’t believe his luck: this man was a police officer and he had left his house open! Either the detective’s mind was a total mess or he was obsessed with ventilating the cottage after McVie’s body had lain there for more than twenty-four hours.

  Rosselli chose not to break in through the downstairs bathroom. He was wet and the chances of leaving traces of mud before he could get his boots off were high. But the open window gave him the confidence that even if there were an alarm system, it wasn’t set.

  The locks on the kitchen door gave every appearance of being sophisticated, but it was an illusion. Rosselli defeated them in seconds and slipped into the kitchen, laying a plastic bag on the doormat onto which he placed his boots while he made a rapid assessment of the room. An alarm control panel would by necessity be within easy reach of the outside door. None was visible and there was nothing in any of the nearby cupboards. In addition, a scan of the door itself showed no signs of any alarm contacts. The potential danger passed; Rosselli was in with more than enough time to achieve his goals.

  He slipped off his jacket and hung it near the door, not something he would normally do when breaking into a building, but the jacket was wet and he wanted to avoid the possibility of leaving any water stains.

  The focus of Rosselli’s break-in was Brooke’s computer. Rosselli needed various phone numbers and those on the detective’s phone would almost certainly be duplicated on his home computer.

  With no sign of a computer in the kitchen, he continued his search in the other downstairs rooms. One large space was clearly Mo Brooke’s workshop. Messy and dusty from her work as a sculptor, it held no attraction for Rosselli. Even with its double-door entry system and powerful extraction fans, designed to prevent dust getting into the rest of the cottage, it would be more or less impossible to enter it without picking up traces of dust and leaving any number of prints and impressions. He was relieved to see no sign of a computer and he quickly closed the door. On the opposite side of the corridor from the studio was a small dining room that would seat no more than six people, and from the state of the table top, the room appeared to double as an office. Centrally placed among the scattered papers and files was an Apple laptop computer, its screen open but black. Bingo!

  Before touching the computer, Rosselli approached it from the side and gently squeezed a tiny ball of plastic putty onto the camera lens from a small tube he kept in the pouch containing his array of lock picks. He knew there was a lot of exaggerated hype about how cameras in apparently sleeping computers could spy on surroundings, but given it wasn’t entirely science fiction, he didn’t want to take any chances.

  And before hitting any keys, he needed to turn off the Internet connection, again in case Brooke had an app alerting him to any unauthorised activity on his computer. Since the modem wasn’t in the dining room, Rosselli returned to the kitchen, but it wasn’t there either. Finally, he moved onto the sitting room beyond the dining room where he saw a smart TV. Behind that, among a tangle of cables, announcing its presence with a set of pulsing lights, was the modem. He removed the power cable and returned to the dining room.

  A tap on the spacebar of the laptop’s keyboard brought up a screen with a photograph of Brooke and his wife standing by what Rosselli assumed was one of Mo’s creations. It was a distorted but recognisable bronze of a barn owl in flight. Impressive, he thought. Perhaps when this little adventure is over, I’ll peruse Mrs B’s catalogue.

  Distracted by the barn owl, it was a few moments before Rosselli registered the significance of the sharp image: the computer wasn’t asking for a password. He shook his head once more at the folly of the detective.

  Moving his latex-gloved fingers over the trackpad, Rosselli brought up the contacts list. It was extensive and he quickly noted down the numbers against Jennifer Cotton’s name, Derek Thyme’s, Neil Bottomley’s, and, for good measure, Mo Brooke’s. But Gus Brooke’s own number wasn’t listed. However it wasn’t difficult to find. He clicked on FaceTime, accessed Preferences and there it was listed under ‘You can be reached for FaceTime at:’ along with three email addresses that might also be useful.

  Rosselli smiled. “Thank you, young detective, I think I have everything I need to turn your life into a living nightmare. But before I leave, I would like to see how well you cleaned up the scene of your superintendent’s death. Have you been as thorough as you thought?”

  He waited until the computer returned to sleep mode, stepped to one side and carefully removed the plastic putty, after which he rubbed over the lens with a lint-free cloth to remove any residue of oil remaining from the putty.

  As he returned to the hall from reconnecting the modem in the sitting room, he remembered the activity of the previous Friday evening when Gus Brooke was frantically removing what he hoped would be all traces of Trisha McVie’s presence in the cottage. Much time had been spent in the downstairs bathroom. He looked at the doors and opened one between the dining room and the sitting room: a guest bedroom and leading from it, an en-suite bathroom.

  He raised his eyebrows in appreciation as he surveyed the bedroom. It was as pristine as a five-star hotel room following a makeover from housekeeping. Everything was perfectly in place with no indication that anyone had been in it. Was the bathroom the same? He pushed open the door, looked in and smiled. If he hadn’t witnessed the attention paid to the room when it was being cleaned, he could have been fooled into thinking that it hadn’t been used for some time. Everything was perfect; too perfect. Bath towels, robes and hand towels were all neatly folded and stacked on shelves by the handbasin; the shower, bath, toilet an
d bidet spotless; the mirror above the washbasin gleaming. Pulling on the mirror revealed a cupboard behind it equipped with neat rows of creams, lotions, razors, toothbrushes in their wrappers, a slightly used tube of toothpaste and a hairbrush. He picked up the brush to examine it closely, noting several either grey or blonde hairs trapped in its bristles. He frowned. The desktop image on Brooke’s computer showed a dark-haired Mo Brooke, but … He pulled out his phone and called up the photos of Trisha McVie’s body.

  “Ash blonde,” he said, “and from the look of the roots, a recent treatment. Oh dear, Detective Brooke, your wife won’t be pleased to find those.”

  He carefully placed the brush back where he’d found it and picked up the next item on the shelf, a bottle of Chanel No.19 perfume still in its packet, although the cellophane had been removed. Touching just the edges of the flap, Rosselli opened the box and slid out the bottle, taking care not to touch the spray release cap. He reasoned that since she had used the hairbrush and possibly a drier that was also in the cupboard, the superintendent might well have used the perfume. Given Brooke’s failing with the hairbrush, there was a good chance that McVie’s fingerprints and therefore her DNA were on the cap and the spray release itself. He returned the bottle to its packet and placed it back on the shelf.

  Rosselli’s next stop was the master bedroom and bathroom. In contrast to the downstairs guest bedroom and bathroom, and the two others he’d glanced at upstairs, the master bedroom showed obvious signs of use. Untidy male use, thought Rosselli as he took in the unmade bed, the pile of unwashed laundry on the floor and a damp towel strewn across a chair.

  The bathroom was the same, although on close examination of the tiled surfaces, Rosselli noted their pristine cleanliness. There wasn’t a smear or deposit of dust anywhere, not even in the most inaccessible corners. But Rosselli was no amateur; he knew exactly where to look. Unlike, it seemed, Detective Constable Brooke.

  He stood back and tried to imagine how a fall could have happened in this room, one severe enough to have ended Trisha McVie’s life, and the more he thought about it, given the injuries, the more he was convinced it had been an accident. She must have damaged her nose first, maybe on the bath rim if she fell. If she were the worse for wear after a boozy night, such a fall could easily happen. Perhaps she felt dizzy after damaging her nose and fell backwards from the raised platform housing the toilet and bidet, striking her head on the shower tray. There must have been a lot of blood, given the severity of the injuries. Since there was no hand shower in the bath, Brooke’s better option would have been to wash the body down in the shower where there was a detachable hose as part of the shower fitting in the shower cubicle.

  So he probably scrubbed her clean here, thought Rosselli, as he knelt down by the shower. He peered at the drain cover. It showed no sign of having been recently removed; there were still the slightest of telltale residues around the chrome fitting. If Brooke hadn’t removed the drain cover, there would very likely be an accumulated mat of hair clinging to the pipe beneath it that could include some of the superintendent’s hair. Ash blonde. Once the forensic teams examined this bathroom, and Rosselli intended to make sure they did, they wouldn’t miss something as obvious as the drain. It was a prime source of evidence.

  Satisfied with the outcome of his visit to the cottage, Rosselli locked up and made his way back to the car where Goccia was ready and waiting, having heard his footfall long before any human would have done.

  His preparative work complete, all he had to do now was sit back and wait while the police continued with their fruitless searching, their lack of results merely increasing their frustration and worry, while with every passing day, the confidence of Detective Brooke that his plan had worked would increase.

  And then, when it was least expected, Rosselli would begin his end game.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Two days after Rosselli had completed his arrangements at the derelict factory, Gus Brooke was sitting at his desk in the SCF main squad room trawling through one of the hundreds of traffic camera videos from the night of Trisha McVie’s disappearance.

  He wasn’t alone. The entire SCF team of detectives and civilian support had spent the past four days examining every frame from every camera in a ten-mile radius of Rappington for Trisha McVie’s car. Since the search area included stretches of the M1 motorway, the whole of the city of Nottingham, the town of Loughborough and part of the city of Derby together with other towns with significant populations, the number of cameras was huge.

  Jennifer had concluded that their lack of success meant either their search radius was too small, which seemed ridiculous given how large it had become, or more realistically, Trisha had only travelled a short distance from where her car was last witnessed having its wheel changed by the roadside to wherever she had been separated from her car and belongings, somewhere that wasn’t covered by any traffic cameras. Which meant a location in or near Rappington.

  House-to-house had proved useless and a trawl through criminal records against the names of people registered as living in any of the houses had only produced fruitless leads that were soon dismissed.

  They were missing something, Jennifer could feel it, something crucial, something that should be blindingly obvious but instead was frustratingly elusive.

  The Met had come to the party again after their initial trawl through all Trisha’s computer files, emails, texts and other phone messages had come to nothing the day after she went missing, her life exposed. They were nothing if not efficient; Jennifer was impressed. Trisha’s old squad, the squad she was still officially part of, had gone out on the streets to question everyone they could find with whom she’d had dealings during her time in London. Every suspect, every criminal who had done time and been released, every slime bag she’d questioned and given a hard time to, every informer she’d cultivated. They had looked at her private life, which had raised a few eyebrows, interviewed Jennifer and others for what they knew about present and past relationships, anyone dumped and bearing a grudge. But there was nothing. While the life of Trisha McVie had been colourful and peppered with several dubious lovers, there was no one who would have resorted to the lengths that would have been necessary to stage the events of the Tuesday evening when she disappeared.

  Equally, her professional life was full of nothing but merit and praise from her fellow officers, even those who had been on the sharp end of her tongue on numerous occasions. She was respected, admired and regarded as exemplary.

  Jennifer’s despondency increased with every negative result added to the whiteboard in the incident room. No one disappeared off the radar like this except in horrible circumstances, circumstances that she didn’t want to think about. Macabre scenarios of Trisha at the mercy of some madman haunted her every waking moment, while her nights were restless and tormented. Yet no matter how bad these were, they were preferable to the alternative of Trisha’s body lying discarded somewhere, perhaps so well hidden it would never be found.

  The lack of progress was wearing down everyone in the SCF, the gloom of their efforts pressing on them an ever-burgeoning cloud of despair. Conversations were brief; there was no banter, just endless frustration. Every time anyone’s phone rang or pinged with a message, ears pricked up around the room and eyes focussed on the recipient for an indication of something, a crumb, anything.

  Gus Brooke’s phone had pinged two hours previously and he had immediately noticed the hush that descended around him, and the need for clarification when he muttered, “shit,” under his breath.

  “What?” said Derek. “What is it?”

  Gus looked up. “Er, nothing. It’s nothing. It’s from Mo. She was supposed to be coming back yesterday from the course she’s been giving but it was extended until tomorrow and now it’s been extended again. She’s thoroughly pissed off but there’s nothing she can do about it. She’s in place and so it makes far more economic sense for her to stay where she is than fly someone else out to replace
her. I think the company she’s contracted to works on a shoestring.”

  Gus had lost the interest of most of those around him with the first ‘nothing’ but Derek had continued to stare at him so he’d felt obliged to explain. It helped; it was the closest he’d had to a conversation for a while, even if it was a monologue.

  “Bugger, huh?” commented Derek. “More dinners for one?”

  “Yeah,” grunted Gus.

  And now his phone had pinged again, a different sound from an email, this was a message and this time it gained less attention. Which was just as well given the explosive nature of the contents.

  Gus picked up his phone. The message was an image with no text. At first it meant nothing, an image taken at night in poor light that made it difficult to interpret. But as he stared at it, frowning, he slowly understood what he was looking at and the blood drained from his face.

  When his phone pinged a second time, he nearly dropped it in shock. He scrolled to the text, his hand shaking.

  Have I got your attention, Gus?

  He reached for the bottle of water that was sitting on one side of his desk: his mouth had gone so dry he could hardly swallow. He scrolled back to the image. It was a shot taken in the boot of his car. The tailgate must have been raised and whoever took the shot had leaned into the car. There was no doubt about it, someone must have been watching when he put Trisha McVie’s body in the back of his car.

  He quickly turned off the screen and looked nervously around, but only Derek Thyme seemed to be looking at him. Gus looked up, a weak smile on his face as he tried to speak.

  “Just Mo again,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “She’s confirming what she said earlier. Don’t know why she needed to repeat it all; except to make it worse. Apparently it could be even longer than a few days.”

  “Tough being in demand,” said Derek, his voice flat. He was trying not to show the uncomfortable feeling he had that Gus Brooke was lying. He’d watched the detective’s face as he read the messages, and from his reaction he would say the content was far more significant than Mo announcing a further delay in her return, something more like the end of the world.