by Alex Scarrow
Boyd twisted in his seat to look back as they went over the crossroads and carried on north. ‘I’m not sure. A tiny bit maybe.’
He turned back round and settled back in the passenger’s seat. It was nice to have Okeke for company. She was the one person at work he was beginning to feel comfortable enough to not have to make small talk with.
Plus, it meant she could drive and he could relax.
‘How’re you doing, guv?’ she asked.
Strike that about no small talk.
‘I’m fine, thanks, Okeke, and how are you?’ he said in an overly bright voice.
She glanced across at him. ‘Have you spoken with HR about some PTSD counselling yet?’
Boyd rolled his eyes. ‘Nope. And I’m not planning to, either.’ In error he’d told her about his recurring dream of Kristy Clarke dropping from the rafters above him and snapping taut with that sound – haaar-ck – and she’d suggested he talk to someone about it. It seemed she wasn’t giving up.
‘That is an idiotic attitude, guv, if you don’t mind me saying. You really should take it seriously. Mental trauma is as real an injury as –’
‘I’m not injured and I’m not traumatised, for crying out loud!’ he cut in. ‘I’ve just had a couple of bad dreams. But noted,’ he said, sighing, ‘and added to my to-do list.’
‘Good,’ Okeke said. ‘It really is best to deal with these things.’
He rolled his eyes again. ‘Right. Great. Thanks, Oprah.’
9
Boyd looked at the sign beside the buzzer. The building appeared to be home to two businesses as well as Sutton’s writerly bolthole: a firm of accountants and a ‘holistic therapist’. He presumed another way of wording that was an ‘everything doctor’, the kind of expensive consultant you’d go to see if nothing was actually wrong.
He pressed the buzzer for the top floor, Sutton’s place.
‘It looks pokey,’ said Okeke, peering up at the narrow façade.
Boyd nodded. Number 176 Chancery Lane in Holborn was so narrow it looked like it had been built between two older buildings simply to fill an unsightly gap. The bricks were stained dark with the soot and grime of London past, and the ledges had been pebble-dashed with pigeon crap.
He rang the bell again.
Chancery Lane opened onto Fleet Street at the far end, busy with suicidal Deliveroo cyclists, inept wobbling Boris-bikers and ponderous bendy buses. This off-shoot was a quiet haven by comparison. Okeke miraculously had managed to find a parking space right in front of the building.
Tired of waiting, Boyd knocked heavily on the door. To the left of it was a small window filled with the charmless vertical slats of an office blind. He saw them part slightly, then a moment later the front door clacked and opened.
An old woman in a smart white blouse and a dark cardigan peered out. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘We’re after Sir Arthur Sutton,’ Boyd said. ‘On the top floor.’
‘And you are?’
‘Police. CID. Do you know if Mr Sutton has been using his flat recently?’
The woman shook her head. ‘I have no idea about the comings and goings of other tenants here,’ she replied.
Beyond her, in the narrow hallway, Boyd could see a small side table on which post had been dumped. ‘Do you mind if we come into the hallway?’
She frowned suspiciously. ‘Don’t you need some kind of warrant to come barging in?’
‘Well, we’re not exactly barging, are we?’ he replied. ‘Just asking. Politely.’
The woman huffed. ‘Can I have your names then?’ she asked.
‘DCI Boyd and DC Okeke,’ Boyd said patiently.
‘And your first names?’
‘Bill and Samantha,’ he replied, this time not so patiently.
‘Which is which?’
He raised a brow. ‘Well, I’m hardly going to be a Samantha, am I?’
The woman narrowed her eyes at them both. ‘How do I know you’re not reporters?’
Boyd and Okeke produced their warrant cards.
With that, she seemed happy with the information she’d collected and she stepped back to one side to let them in. Boyd led the way and Okeke closed the door gently behind them.
‘So do you work down on this floor?’ asked Okeke. ‘At the accountant’s?’
‘Yes,’ the woman replied. ‘At Watson and Dorridge.’
Boyd went over to the side table to pick through the pile of unopened post.
‘That’s mostly addressed to Mr Sutton,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve been tripping over his post every morning for some time.’
‘So he’s not been here for a while?’ Okeke asked.
‘He’s not bothered picking up his junk mail if he has been.’
‘We should try knocking, since we’re inside,’ said Boyd.
‘Don’t you need a warrant or something to do that?’ asked the woman.
‘We’re concerned for his well-being,’ Okeke explained. ‘This isn’t a police raid.’
‘Oh.’ Now the woman just looked disappointed. ‘Well… yes, if you want to. But make sure you shut this front door properly when you leave.’
‘We will,’ said Okeke. ‘Thank you.’
They made their way up two flights of old and worn mahogany stairs to the second-floor landing. At the end, a solitary stained-glass window cast a crimson and lemon glow across the tired, scuffed linoleum floor. The lead lining projected web-like lines of shadow across the hall and up the walls.
‘Okay, so not at all creepy,’ said Okeke.
‘Okay then, let’s knock,’ said Boyd. He stepped past her and rapped his knuckles on the door. ‘Mr Sutt–’
The apartment door swung gently inwards with a creak.
10
’Do you smell gas?’ asked Boyd.
‘What?’ Okeke sniffed.
‘Do you smell gas?’ He looked meaningfully from the door, which was ajar, to the trespassing threshold of the door jamb, and back again.
‘Oh,’ she said, the penny dropping. ‘Maybe. Yes.’
‘Good. Reasonable grounds to enter.’ He held a finger up. ‘Stay back,’ he said quietly.
Okeke raised her eyebrows at him, then she took a step forward, over the threshold of the apartment and onto the tired door mat just inside. ‘POLICE!’ she shouted into the small hallway of the flat.
‘Anyone in here?’ Boyd added, as he stepped in beside her.
Their voices bounced off the wood panelling and tiled floor of the hallway, reverberating into what appeared to be a large room at the end. He could see sunlight streaming diagonally across the room’s floor from above. Skylight windows, he guessed. The cast-down beams of light cut through clouds of lazily swirling dust motes.
They advanced cautiously until they stood in the opening to the room. Sutton was clearly a fan of the creepy, crusty antique look; the floor was set with black and white tiles, the walls lined with either more wood panelling or shelves of faded book spines. Above them, he could see the bones of the building, oak beams running across to support the slate roof. He suspected that if he shone a torch up into the rafters he’d see the eyes of a few dozen spiders shining back.
‘Mr Sutton! Are you in here?’ Okeke called out.
There was no reply.
Boyd ventured into the large open room. ‘This is the police? Anyone in?’
There was still no answer.
He pulled out a pair of forensics gloves and snapped them on. ‘Right, given the door was unlocked, either Sutton forgot to lock it or…’
‘Someone else has got a key.’
‘Or picked it.’ He made a mental note to check the door frame beside the lock for signs of scraped paint or wood indentation that would indicate a little jimmying to coax the lock’s tongue aside.
Beneath a dormer window that looked out onto Chancery Lane and the buildings opposite was a mahogany writing desk and ink blotter. Both in keeping with Sutton’s apparent obsession for all things dark, polished a
nd antiquarian. Boyd expected to see an old Singer typewriter, but when it came to his work Sutton, it seemed, embraced more modern methods. Beside a photograph of a much younger version of himself in a rowing crew was his Wi-Fi router, on and merrily blinking away.
There was no sign of a laptop, though.
‘No family pics,’ said Okeke, pointing. ‘Just lots of himself.’
‘I noticed. He’s obviously not that close with his kids.’ Boyd wandered across the floor towards a galley door with a stained-glass design. He pushed it inwards to find a modest kitchen, the kind that a single man with little interest in cooking would have: a small fridge, a hob and oven and a dishwasher. There were three pans in descending size, hanging from hooks that Boyd suspected were a design statement more than anything else.
He opened the fridge. It was on and contained a few essentials: milk, butter, pate, a pot of stoned olives and feta cheese. Nothing smelled offensive. He uncapped the milk and sniffed. It was on the cusp. He’d have braved it for a builder’s tea if there’d been nothing else to use – but that was it.
‘So he was here relatively recently,’ Boyd called out.
‘Guv?’
‘Yeah?’
‘There’s something you should see.’
Boyd stepped out of the kitchen back into the main room. ‘Where are you?’
‘Bedroom.’
He saw another open doorway punctuating the relentless wooden panelling. He went over and poked his head inside to see an elaborately carved four-poster.
Of course… he’s got a four-bloody-poster.
Okeke was in front of a painting on the wall beside it, something Turner-esque in a thick and swirly gilt frame.
She grabbed one corner of the frame and casually flipped her wrist. The frame swung out on hinges to reveal a wall safe.
Boyd joined Okeke and peered inside.
‘It’s open,’ she said, ‘and empty. Someone’s been looking for something.’
Just then Boyd’s work phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his jacket. It was Sully.
11
‘I think we may have located Sutton,’ said Sully. He took a few steps away from the small crowd of fire crew who’d been pulling the debris mound carefully apart, piece by piece, and who were now gathered around the body laid out on a board.
‘Just a moment, Boyd,’ said Sully. He turned back to the four firemen who were peering a little too closely at their discovery and put his hand over the phone. ‘Gents! Gentlemen! If you wouldn’t mind…’
Sully hated shouting. Shouting reminded him of mothers in playgrounds, or monobrow apes squaring off at each other outside pubs. It was vulgar. But these idiots were looming over his cadaver and probably spattering drops of sweat and goodness knows what else on it.
‘Can you please get the fuck away from the body!’ he snapped loudly. Then: ‘If you don’t mind... gents.’
‘Sorry, Boyd,’ Sully continued. ‘Just shooing away the rubberneckers.’ The firemen returned to their task of pulling away carbonised wood beams and floor boards, leaving Sully alone to squat beside the corpse.
‘What have you got for me, Sully?’ Boyd asked.
‘We have a male body attached to a rectangular section of slate,’ Sully explained. The body looked as though it had been merged with the slate.
‘Attached? What… like nailed?’
‘No, he’s stuck to it… Do you remember that Superglue advert from the eighties? The one where that poor chap in a cheap white boiler suit was glued to a plank of wood and then dangled over a shark pool?’
He heard Okeke let out a snort of laughter.
‘But, of course it’s not that.’ He peered a little closer and with one gloved hand pressed at the resin-like seam between the blackened body and the flat board. It dented easily, like butter left out of a fridge.
‘Yes, it’s body fat. The body’s stuck to it – welded. Like a fried egg or a sausage if you left them in a frying pan for too long.’
‘Jesus, Sully…’ Boyd exclaimed. ‘Why does it always have to be a food metaphor?’
‘It’s a simile, actually,’ Sully corrected him. He leaned in to examine an extended arm and hand. The top side of the corpse was blackened and cracked, almost completely carbonised, but the underside, protected by the seal of fat, looked less well done. He probed the fat with his gloved hand and managed to coax the wrist and hand free of its adhesive. ‘The top is completely blackened but underneath… Hang on, I’m just looking…’
He crouched down further and looked beneath the arm, not wanting to lift it too high in case he caused further damage. Remarkably, the skin was intact, reddened from the heat, and marbled with livor mortis stains, but essentially still raw meat.
‘I think I can see a ligature mark around the wrist.’
‘A ligature mark?’ Boyd repeated. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Uh-huh. Looks like our man was tied out on a slate surface.’ He stood up and took a few steps back to look at the blackened slate board itself. ‘Which, I’m almost certain, was a snooker table.’
Sully smiled as he listened to Boyd suck in a deep breath on the other end of the line. It was vaguely satisfying to hear the DCI’s normally gruff and steady tone tempered by an all-too-human inflection.
‘Want me to send you a picture?’ Sully asked mischievously.
‘Christ, I can wait for that,’ Boyd said, and hung up.
‘Oh, and thanks very much for the prompt update, Kevin,’ Sully muttered to himself as he tucked the phone inside his forensic suit and turned back to the body in front of him.
12
‘Well, it looks like we have a definite murder,’ Boyd said to Okeke.
‘Sutton?’
‘It’s male. Sully can’t possibly know if it’s Sutton yet. But, given what’s been going on here, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.’ He glanced at his watch. It was getting on.
He made a call to the nearest station and an hour later a locksmith was on site with a toolbox to secure Sutton’s flat. He handed Boyd a set of keys and a job slip to sign. Okeke stuck some crime-scene tape across the doorway and they were done.
‘I’ve left a message with –’ Boyd checked his notebook – ‘DI Ashtiani to log the crime and to contact me if they’re planning on looking in on it before Monday,’ he told her.
‘Are we knocking on downstairs before we go, guv?’ Okeke asked.
‘I think we can let the Met do the legwork on Monday,’ Boyd said. ‘We may as well make the most of their manpower. They’re a senior force, but we’ve got the murder. Unfortunately it stays ours. Anyway, I expect the local CID will be glad that someone else has taken the load.’
‘In that case, while they’re at it, can we get them checking the cameras down this road?’ said Okeke. ‘We might get lucky.’
‘Good shout,’ Boyd said, tucking one of the keys into his pocket and putting the rest in an envelope addressed to DI Ashtiani.
They finally exited the building, pausing for Boyd to take a snapshot of the business names on the brass plate beside the door. He preferred to give them both a call himself rather than rely on the third-hand messages from a Met officer going through the motions.
They were both quiet as Okeke drove them out of central London; she was busy with the typical stop-start traffic and Boyd sat beside her, gazing out of the window and gathering old memories like a milkman collecting empties. The route took them south across Blackfriars Bridge, and as he looked out at the South Bank, bathed in sunshine and crowded with tourists, he wondered how many times he and Julia had walked along there on a Sunday afternoon, Emma and Noah in tow.
The car picked up just enough speed south of Brixton to get out of third gear and they kept up a steady pace down to Croydon and the M25.
‘Whoever broke into Sutton’s place was either after Sutton or something Sutton had,’ Boyd said, finally breaking the silence.
‘You don’t say, guv,’ said Okeke.
‘All right,’ Boyd said w
ith good humour. ‘But it never hurts to state what you think is the obvious, does it?’
‘That’s true, guv,’ she replied. ‘And, if I may say so, you’re bloody good at it.’
‘Up yours,’ Boyd said, laughing. ‘Seriously, though. Maybe they found Sutton there?’
‘What? Kidnapped him?’ said Okeke. ‘Then what? They dragged him down to Hastings to his own house?’
‘Yeah, okay. It’s pretty unlikely,’ Boyd said. ‘More likely they were looking for something. There were no signs of a struggle, and the flat was pretty tidy – so whoever it was knew it was empty and knew exactly where to look. Obviously, the timing’s too coincidental for this not to be linked. So, until something says otherwise, we’re looking at a sequence of events that ties in his London flat and his Hastings house. And whatever happened it ended with the fire two nights ago.’
‘So that’s your weekend, is it? Puzzling this out?’ Okeke asked.
Boyd sighed. ‘I was planning to tame my wilderness of a back garden this weekend. I’m thinking I might have to take a chainsaw to the whole bloody lot.’
The ‘garden’ – sixty feet of brambles and nettles – had been neglected and allowed to run wild by the previous owners. For a couple of decades, by the look of it. Now that summer had come to Sussex, Boyd had decided it was time to get out there with a zero-tolerance weeding policy and level everything. Emma and Daniel had promised to help him this weekend, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen now that Ozzie needed looking after.
‘Not gonna lie – it is a bit of a jungle out there,’ said Okeke, then she added, ‘You should have a gardening party.’
‘Well, maybe I will one day when I finally have a garden to have one in,’ Boyd replied.
‘No… not a garden party. A garden-ing party. Get some friends to come over and help you flatten the place, then you could have a bonfire, barbecue and beers after.’
‘When you say friends…?’ Boyd said, shooting her a sideways glance.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Me and Jay would come. Minter might too. And Warren, if his mum lets him out at weekends.’