by Alex Scarrow
‘He has a housekeeper,’ Wells said, ‘which is probably the woman we rescued.’
Boyd glanced at the smouldering pile of debris within the stone husk of Eagle House. ‘So there’s a chance Sutton’s body is still in there?’
‘If he was at home last night, then that’s where it’ll be. I can’t get a sniffer dog in there until it cools down. We’ll be able to pick through that debris tomorrow hopefully.’
‘In the meantime, we could try and track Sutton down, guv,’ said Okeke. ‘See if he’s away on a trip or something?’
Boyd nodded. ‘Get on to any next of kin. Family, friends. Find out if they know where he was supposed to be last night.’ He turned back to the FIO. ‘So… you’re saying you’re going to need another day with this before we can tape it up as a crime scene?’
Wells nodded. ‘There’ll be vehicles in and out for another twenty-four hours.’
‘Fire scenes,’ Sully huffed. ‘I hate them. They’re already horribly compromised by the time I get my hands on them.’ He rummaged in the bag he’d slung over his shoulder, pulling out a pair of blue nitrile gloves. ‘Mark? Mind if I go walk the perimeter?’
‘Be my guest,’ Wells said.
Poole also dug into her own bag and took out a notebook. ‘Mark, can I grab you for a moment and get a list of everyone on your team who was working on this last night?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he replied. ‘Come with me; we’ve got a roster in my van.’
As Poole and Wells headed across the wet and grimy gravel driveway, Boyd spotted Sully, already sniffing around the thick foliage of the house’s small garden like a dog looking for the right spot to go. The trees in this garden were all mature ones, the nearest of them to the building had scorched branches, but none looked as though they’d been burned enough to die. They formed a thick and impenetrable wall of privacy around the property and its little secret garden. The small lawn – and it was small, about the size of a badminton court – was covered with fire hoses and damp equipment, stretched out across it to dry off in the daylight.
The trees kept most of the garden and the bottom half of the building in permanent shade. ‘The house that time forgot,’ muttered Boyd.
Okeke didn’t answer. He turned to see that she’d walked a little way away from him; she was on the phone to someone. From her hectoring tone, it sounded to Boyd as though she was talking to Warren.
He decided to get a closer look at the smouldering building. He could see why the place had been something of a Hastings landmark. As he craned his neck to look up the stone walls, at the castle-like crenellations along the top of them, and the faux watchtower with a three-sixty view of Hastings, he got a distinctly Gothic vibe from the place.
Though knowing little of Arthur Sutton, Boyd thought the building seemed to reflect his eccentric, Edwardian-Englishman public image. He could imagine the interiors had been stuffed with overly expensive, tasteless furnishings, colonial-era statues and the like, and above some grand mantelpiece the mounted head of some poor bloody mammal on an endangered species list.
Boyd approached the empty frame of a large ground-floor bay window and peered through the shattered teeth of blackened glass at the mound of debris inside. He glanced upwards and saw that a few stoic joists of wood had withstood the avalanche of the slate roof coming down. They held up what remained of the first floor and, further up, the jagged bones of what remained of the second. Beyond that, it was pretty much twists of smoke and July blue sky beyond.
What a bloody shame.
He could understand why Leslie Poole’s shoulders had sagged at the news Eagle House had gone up in flames. It was another part of Hastings’ Grand Past, permanently erased. It looked to Boyd that the building was well beyond restoring. Undoubtedly this prime real estate would be snapped up by some hungry developer and turned into a block of studio flats.
6
Boyd had seen enough for now. He rounded up Okeke, who was so engrossed in what she was doing on her phone that he had to lead her down the sloping driveway by the arm. He left Sully probing the treeline and Poole discussing with Mark Wells when precisely she could take possession of the keys to the crime site.
They walked back to the station, Okeke busy thumbing her screen while Boyd steered her around both people and lamp posts. By the time they returned to the CID floor she had found what she was looking for and was immediately on another call.
‘So when was the last time?.... Okay, so that would be normal for Sir Arthur?...’
Boyd threw his jacket on the back of the chair. He’d actually worked up a sweat on the walk down. After half a year of solid grey skies and pissing rain, it seemed that summer had finally arrived. At the weekends, Hastings was usually busy with a steady trickle of out-of-towners buying bags of doughnuts and plastic tat from the gift shops come rain or sleet, but now the warm weather was here, and the schools had broken up, the town was mobbed all week long.
Boyd glanced at his desk and noticed his forgotten sausage roll, still sitting in its paper bag and cold as a corpse.
Sod it. Stone cold would do. But he needed a coffee to go with it. He signalled to Okeke, who was still busy talking. She mouthed back a yes please. He raised his eyebrows; he hadn’t actually been offering – just letting her know where he was going. She grinned back at him.
Boyd returned from the canteen ten minutes later with a black for her and a frothy cappuccino for himself. She was finally off her phone.
‘Thanks, guv.’
He sat down at his desk, took a sip of his coffee and began to hungrily devour his long-overdue sausage roll. He checked the clock. It was ten to twelve. No wonder his stomach was grumbling noisily.
Okeke wandered over to his desk. ‘I can’t get hold of Sutton. His phone keeps clicking over to answerphone.’
‘That doesn’t bode well.’
‘Well, not necessarily. I spoke to his publishing editor. Apparently he has a habit of going off to write his books in remote windswept rental cottages, phone off, internet off, that kind of thing.’
Boyd vaguely recalled an exchange on Have I Got News between Sutton and Hislop about writing regimes and Sutton grandly announcing that he wrote when the muse hit him and took himself off to some dark and moody corner of the country to do so. Hislop had eye-rolled at the pomposity of the man.
‘What about his family?’ Boyd asked.
‘He has two grown-up children. Neither see him. Or even like him, it seems. An ex-wife who really doesn’t like him, and that’s it for immediate family. I’m going to carry on, guv. See if I can get through to any of them.’
Boyd nodded. ‘Fine. I’ll bone up on his background details. If this was arson, then perhaps Sutton’s pissed off one to many people in his life. If he was home last night,’ he continued, ‘then I guess he’ll be buried in that debris somewhere, poor bastard.’
He turned to his computer and pulled up the LEDS interface in one window and opened Explorer in another, took another greasy bite of his cold sausage roll and began to dig.
A couple of hours later and Boyd had a much clearer picture of Sir Arthur. The man was something of a maverick. A chancer. A Dodger-like character who’d climbed from working-class obscurity and found himself hobnobbing with the good and the great.
Boyd had cut and pasted snippets from Wikipedia, the BBC and various papers into a Word document and now reviewed the messy montage of extracts on the page.
Sutton had started out as a grammar-school boy from Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. He’d managed to get good enough grades to go to Imperial College, London, to study economics and then, partway through that, he’d parlayed his degree course into one at Oxford.
At Oxford in the early 1980s, it seemed he’d struggled at first with his humble background and give-away accent, but he eventually adjusted to his new environs, in a vaguely Walter Mitty way. There were tall stories about his family’s wealth and origins, which his university friends all seemed to have taken with a pinch of salt. But
Sutton had managed, through sheer bullishness and charm, to inveigle himself into the elitist social circles of the Eton School Old Boys.
After Oxford, he’d worked for a while as a Fleet Street journalist, finally editing a tabloid for six months before stepping across into the world of Thatcher-era politics.
He’d worked in the office of the Business Secretary in some nebulous advisory role for a few years, then in 1997 he was ‘parachuted in’ to become an MP for Mid Staffordshire and served in a junior position in the cabinet for a few months.
Boyd speed-read the parliamentary career part of Sutton’s life; politics wasn’t really the man’s thing. Sutton spoke far too bluntly – like Norman Tebbit with his famous ‘Get on your bikes and find a job’ quote. And ‘Hardship is there to filter out the wasters and weaklings’ had been one of the soundbites that had hastened the end of his political career. Sutton had given up on politics after the second Labour win in 2001. He’d leveraged his name and connections to get a generous book deal writing political thrillers, which he’d been doing ever since, churning them out once every two or three years.
Those were the broad brushstrokes of Sir Arthur Sutton. As for his personal life – in 1989 he married Kate Munton-Jones, the daughter of some businessman doing exceedingly well out of the international arms business. It might have been a marriage that had evolved from a genuine love, but marrying into money and influence would have been, Boyd thought, almost certainly the icing on the cake for Sutton. Arthur and Kate Sutton had two children: one son – Henry; one daughter – Hermione.
Sutton had found himself on the receiving end of a little tabloid attention in 2002 when he’d had an affair with a much younger woman who worked in publishing. The Suttons separated the same year and finally divorced in 2012.
Since then, Arthur Sutton had been a confirmed bachelor. None of that second-wife nonsense for him. He’d written in a Telegraph op-ed four years ago: ‘… having sawn off an arm and a leg (financially) to get rid of the ball and chain, it would be the very definition of madness to chain a brand-new ball to my remaining leg.’
Of course he’d drawn some fire for the ‘ball and chain’ comment. Boyd tried not to smile at the five hundred and something comments beneath the online article. Opinions were firmly polarised and in some cases the comments were hilarious.
As for his kids, Arthur Sutton and his offspring were not particularly close, to say the least. His son, Henry, ran a business that had something to do with corporate events; his daughter, Hermione, owned a cake shop in Brighton.
Okeke managed to get hold of his ex-wife’s contact details, and a little more rummaging around on the internet yielded the contact details of Sutton’s literary agent.
‘How’re you getting on with his kids?’ Boyd asked, but Okeke had headphones stuck on her head and was busy watching something on her monitor. Boyd tore a sheet of paper from an A4 pad, screwed it up into a ball and tossed it across the seven or eight feet between their desks to get her attention. His aim was unintentionally accurate and the paper ball bopped off the side of her head.
Okeke pulled her headphones off and turned to glare at Warren. ‘Oh, grow up!’ she snapped.
‘Huh?’ Warren looked up from his screen and pulled his headphones out. Music hissed from them as he held them away from his ears. ‘What’s up?’
‘I said…’
‘Sorry,’ Boyd said. ‘That was me!’
Okeke turned to glare at him, though a little less ferociously than she had at Warren. ‘Well then, you grow up… guv.’
He waved an apology at Warren. ‘My bad. As you were.’ He turned back to Okeke. ‘I was just trying to get your attention. What’s got you so sucked in anyway?’
‘YouTube,’ she said. ‘It’s Arthur Sutton on Have I Got News For You.’
‘Oh? What’s he like?’ He vaguely recalled Arthur Sutton resembling virtually every other politician exposed to the cut and thrust of the show’s regular characters: awkward and embarrassingly unfunny.
‘I’ll send you the link,’ she said. A moment later, the chat window of LEDS pinged open with Okeke’s name, a thumbnail of her ID photo and a link.
Boyd clicked on it and LEDS’ proprietary internet browser offered him the standard warning box about viewing illegal or inappropriate content. He clicked ‘OK’ and then hunted for his own pair of headphones before he started playing the video clip.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out. It was Emma. He felt his stomach drop.
‘Hey, Ems. How’s Ozzie?’
‘He’ll live.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
She sighed. ‘A sock.’
‘What?’
‘He ate a sock. It was stuck in his gut. They operated on him and took it out, and he’ll be ready to pick up from about three this afternoon.’
Boyd looked at his watch; it was nearly lunchtime. ‘Can you pick him up? I won’t be able to get away early today.’
‘We’ll need the two of us,’ she replied. ‘One to drive, one to sit with him. I’ll drive down to the police station for five and then you can drive us both to the vet’s. Sound good?’
‘Sounds good,’ he confirmed. ‘Stupid bloody dog,’ he muttered, surprised at the relief that flooded through him.
7
‘How. Bloody. Much?!’
‘Seven hundred and ninety-three pounds, ninety-nine pence.’
‘You’ve got to be fu–’
‘Dad!’ Emma snapped. She was raising one of her dark eyebrows – and shooting him a look just like her mother would have done.
‘All that for a bloody sock!’ Boyd exclaimed.
‘You’re lucky it wasn’t a toxic substance,’ said the receptionist. ‘He’d have been in observation for another forty-eight hours. Look… do you want me to double check it’s been tallied up correctly?’
‘No, no. It’s fine,’ he managed, as Emma continued to glare in his direction.
‘Sorry,’ the receptionist said sheepishly. ‘I forgot to add the course of antibiotics onto the bill.’
On the way back, Boyd found himself gripping the steering wheel so tightly he was getting what felt like shin splints in his wrists. ‘Eight hundred and fifty quid, because that moron in the back ate one of my bloody socks!’
‘It’s quite common, Dad. Lots of spaniels do it. It’s not just Ozzie.’
‘What? Eat random things that nearly kill them?’
‘You can’t blame Ozzie,’ said Emma calmly. ‘You should try being a little less messy and sorting out your floor-drobe.’
‘So, what? It’s my bloody fault?’
‘And mine, Dad. We’ve both got to be a bit tidier in our rooms, that’s all.’
It would have taken some of the sting out of things if the slimy, mucous-soaked sock they had pulled out of Ozzie’s gut had been one of hers, or even Danny’s, now that he slept over some nights. But no… it had to be one of Boyd’s big, black, for-work Primark socks.
‘Bollocks!’ he grumbled to himself. ‘Fucking unbelievable amount of bloody money.’
‘Maybe we should have medical insurance for him?’ said Emma. ‘Like I suggested?’
He shook his head. ‘Either way you get gouged for money, Ems. It’s ridiculous. The whole thing’s a money-making racket!’
Boyd looked in the rear-view mirror to see Ozzie on the back seat, looking sorry for himself with the ‘cone of shame’ surrounding his head. His eyes blinked blearily, as he sat upright, bobbing and swaying like a Friday-night pisshead waiting for a night bus. For a fleeting moment, Boyd felt something like affection towards the stupid animal that had cost him the best part of a grand.
‘Oz, you big muppet,’ he huffed. ‘I’m glad you’re all right, boy.’
8
DAY 2
Boyd placed his cup on the draining board and dried his hands.
He was about to leave the kitchenette when he realised Okeke was hovering outside, waiting for him. ‘What’s up?’ he as
ked.
‘I finally managed to speak to Arthur Sutton’s daughter, Hermione,’ Okeke said.
‘Ah… and?’
‘She said she can’t meet us until next Tuesday as she’s on holiday in Turkey.’
‘Is she aware of what’s happened?’ Boyd asked.
‘She’s aware that her dad’s house burned down, yeah.’
‘Does she have any idea where her father might be at the moment?’
Okeke shook her head. ‘She said she hasn’t spoken to him in a few weeks.’
‘A few weeks? I thought they were estranged?’ Boyd said.
She shrugged. ‘Don’t believe everything you read. That’s what she said. That she’d spoken to him a few weeks ago. She said her dad has a flat in London; he sometimes goes up there to write. She said it’s not unlikely that he’s holed up there, phone off, internet off and busy knocking out his latest masterpiece.’
‘What about the son? Did you manage to get through to him?’ Boyd asked, picking his phone up and heading out onto the office floor.
‘No. Not yet. I’ve got his number, but he’s not answering his phone,’ Okeke said, following Boyd back to his desk.
‘Well, keep trying,’ he said. ‘Look, after lunch I think I’ll drive up to London to try this writing getaway of his. I could do with an extra pair of eyes.’
Her eyes widened as she realised he was offering a trip outside the station. ‘God, yeah. I’d love to come along. Thanks, guv. Is there any more news from the fire investigation officer?’
‘Wells said they’re going to begin picking through the debris this afternoon. So perhaps either we’ll find him later on or they will.’
Okeke turned the pool car right and headed onto Bohemia Road and up towards London Road. She caught a glimpse of the twin pillars, the eagles marking the entrance to Eagle House as she drove past.
‘Can you see any smoke still?’ she asked.