by Peter James
As they entered the hallway, both shouting loudly, ‘POLICE! POLICE! THIS IS THE POLICE!’ they were confronted by a large, hostile brown dog, standing waist-height to Robinson and growling at them from what looked like the doorway to the kitchen.
Focused on the stairs, Robinson turned away from the dog, avoiding eye contact with it, but braced with the ram in case it came at him, and noticed his colleague taking out her pepper spray. He hoped the animal would stay where it was, not wanting to hurt it, and sprinted up the stairs, shouting out again, ‘POLICE! POLICE!’ Then, ‘Mrs Darling? Mrs Darling?’
At the top was a short landing, and as Juliet Solomon reached her colleague, the dog was standing at the bottom of the stairs barking at them excitedly, as if having decided this was now some great game everyone was playing. Neither police officer had to look far. Directly in front of them was a white door – or the remains of one. Its centre had been kicked or hacked out, making enough of a hole for a grown person to climb through. On the other side of it they could see a figure standing. A small, thin man in his early fifties, wearing a baggy knitted jumper and grey flannel trousers.
He was just standing, motionless, holding a wood axe, both hands gripping the handle, the way he might hold a barbell. There was blood on the blade and no expression on his face, none at all.
The floor and the walls around him that the two officers could see from the doorway were spattered with blood.
‘Drop your weapon!’ Juliet Solomon shouted, as Matt Robinson made an ‘ambulance urgent’ call on his radio.
There was no response from the man. He just stared blankly ahead, as if in a trance.
Outside a siren was coming closer.
‘Drop the axe!’ Solomon repeated, more loudly, and took a step closer to the door.
‘Are you Mr Darling?’ Matt Robinson shouted. ‘Where’s Mrs Darling?’
Again there was no response.
The dog was barking furiously again now. There was the sound of voices and the clump of boots downstairs. Robinson heard Ops-1’s voice on his radio, informing him that armed response officers were at the scene.
‘I’ll give you one more warning,’ Solomon shouted, increasingly concerned. ‘Put down your weapon!’
Very calmly and quietly, looking down at the blood-soaked floor, Seymour Darling said, ‘She didn’t give me any option, I had to do it. I needed to do it, actually. Sometimes in life you just have to do things. It is what it is.’
68
Monday 25 April
Roy Grace heard gunshots as he stood outside the door. Several single shots in succession, then the rapid fire of an automatic weapon. He knocked on the door. There was no response. He knocked louder.
‘Ja?’
He entered Bruno’s small but cosy attic bedroom. The walls were painted red, with small white shelves artistically arranged around, all done by Cleo. On the walls were posters of a couple of Manchester United footballers, and another of a female rock singer Roy did not recognize. On one of the shelves was a white Star Wars stormtrooper with a clock in its stomach. Next to it sat a teddy bear wearing a Man U scarf. On another shelf was a row of Harry Potter and Anthony Horowitz books in German, and on another a Sonos player. Above it, a gangly stuffed toy monkey hung from its tail.
His son was lying back on his bed, with the bed linen also in the Man U strip. He was dressed in a red and white T-shirt, blue jeans and cream socks, holding a gaming controller in his hand. On the wall-mounted television screen in front of him a shadowy figure was darting through 3D alleyways in what looked like a Middle Eastern city. Bruno was aiming the sights of an AK47 at it, and as the figure jumped briefly into sight, he fired another burst, the bullets kicking up dust from the walls and ground. He glanced briefly at Roy, with a look of annoyance.
‘How are you doing?’ Grace asked.
Concentrating fiercely, waiting for his enemy to make his next move, Bruno said, ‘Erik is winning. He has thirty-two kills, I only have seventeen.’
‘It’s ten o’clock, maybe you should think about going to bed – you have your first day at school tomorrow.’
Ignoring him, Bruno fired another burst and this time bullets ripped through the figure, blood spurting from his back. It jumped in the air and then fell forward. At the bottom of the screen the digits 18 appeared, next to 33.
‘No!’ the boy shouted. ‘No, this is not fair! Erik just got another one!’
‘Bruno,’ Grace said, more insistently. He wasn’t really comfortable with his son playing these violent shooting games, but Bruno had been playing them at the Lipperts’ house, and clearly for some time, and now was not the moment to try to change that. It was something for another day.
Still focused on the screen, Bruno said, ‘It is eleven o’clock in Germany and Erik is not having to go to bed.’
‘You have your first day at school tomorrow.’
‘So?’
‘So maybe you should think about getting some sleep.’
‘Erik has school, too.’
Unsure for a moment how to respond, he asked, ‘So what time do Erik’s parents allow him to go to bed?’
Two more shadowy figures appeared out of a doorway. One turned, pointed a machine pistol and began firing at them, while the other zigzagged along the alley.
Suddenly the screen froze. The words got you! game over! appeared.
Bruno threw the console down onto his lap in anger. ‘Look what happened – you see – you distracted me. Now Erik has won again.’
‘Does he often win?’ Grace asked with a grin.
‘He’s good, he always beats me,’ he said, sulkily.
‘I think we can beat him!’
‘How?’
‘I was a firearms-trained police officer, Bruno. I know about gunfight tactics – would you like me to teach you sometime? There are techniques to shooting someone – and avoiding being shot yourself – in exactly the same situation as the game you are playing.’
He saw the glint of curiosity in his son’s eyes. ‘Can you teach me now?’
‘Not now, but perhaps after your mother’s funeral.’
‘Then I’ll beat Erik?’
‘I guarantee it. I’ll teach you to shoot like a policeman – and even more importantly, how to avoid getting shot.’
Bruno thought for some moments. Then he nodded, brightening a little. ‘OK.’
‘Then you and I will destroy Erik!’
For almost the first time since he had met him, his son grinned. Then he heard Cleo’s voice calling out from downstairs.
‘Roy – phone for you!’
‘Later in the week, OK?’ he said to his son.
‘Ja, OK.’
Wondering who was calling, and strongly suspecting that at this hour of the evening it wasn’t going to be great news, he went downstairs and picked up the phone. ‘Roy Grace,’ he answered.
He was right.
Some years ago, on a police management course, he had read a book called The Peter Principle. It was subtitled, Why Things Always Go Wrong. The central tenet of the book was that in many organizations sooner or later everyone gets promoted to the level of their incompetence. The man at the other end of the phone right now was testament to that.
Andy ‘Panicking’ Anakin, Duty Inspector of Brighton and Hove. It seemed to Roy Grace – and other officers he knew – that Anakin was unable to treat any situation calmly, and he sure wasn’t calm now. The man sounded on the verge of a heart attack.
‘Roy – oh shit, we have a situation.’
‘Tell me?’ Grace said, picking up the wine glass he had left on the living room coffee table, and taking a sip. He wasn’t on call this week, so he was perfectly at liberty to have a drink, but he’d been careful tonight, as he had to work, and had drunk just a half-glass of a delicious white Burgundy that Cleo had bought at a bargain price from their favourite wine merchant in the city, Butler’s Wine Cellar.
‘I understand that you are interested in a character called Seymour
Darling, in connection with your current murder investigation?’
‘Correct, Andy, I am. Why?’
He told him, chapter and verse, his voice becoming increasingly hysterical with every detail.
‘Seymour Darling’s done this?’
‘That’s why I’m calling you – I thought you might want to pick this one up as you already have this charmer on your radar. Sounds like it was a domestic that escalated. He has past form – but not on this scale. What do you think – do you want this?’
Grace’s brain was racing. He was thinking about all the evidence already stacked against Seymour Darling.
‘Sure, Andy, it makes sense for me to take it on. I’ll assign my deputy SIO, DI Guy Batchelor, to pick this one up. I want to keep this all within the same team.’
‘Good, well, that’s what I thought, Roy.’
‘No flies on you, are there, Andy?’
‘Only dead ones, Roy,’ he said wryly.
As soon as he had all the details and ended the call, Roy Grace dialled Guy Batchelor.
69
Monday 25 April
‘Oh Jesus!’
In his twelve years of being a police officer, six of them as a detective in Major Crime, Jon Exton had never experienced a crime scene like this one. Standing alongside Guy Batchelor, both of them gowned up in protective paper-suits, gloves and shoes, he was staring, trance-like, at the severed head of Trish Darling. It was lying in a pool of dark crimson blood, on the cream shagpile carpet, framed by her straggly greying hair and still wearing glasses. He couldn’t get the thought out of his head that she looked like one of those Halloween masks you saw in joke shop windows.
Except this was no joke.
One of her severed hands lay in a smaller pool of blood close by. The other lay on the other side of the room, together with segments of both her feet. Her torso had been split open down her midriff; there were blood spatters on every wall, on the carpet, on the bedspread, on the curtains and on the ceiling.
He turned away, struggling not to throw up.
‘Hold it in, Jon,’ Batchelor said. ‘Not all over our crime scene!’
Close to fainting, Exton clung to the DI as if he were a life raft, in a desperate attempt to stay vertical. ‘Sorry – sorry,’ he slurred.
‘It’s OK, mate, happens to us all at times,’ Batchelor sympathized. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
The sight, along with the coppery smell of the dead woman’s blood, was making Guy Batchelor queasy, too. In the room with them were two Crime Scene Investigators, similarly clad to themselves, and the CSI photographer, busy recording everything on video.
Batchelor looked at his watch. It was just coming up to midnight. He yawned. ‘You’re not married, are you, Jon? Girlfriend, right?’
‘Dawn.’
‘Lovely lady – you brought her to the CID dinner last year – she’s an Aussie?’
‘Yep!’
‘Could you imagine chopping her up into bits like this?’
Exton shook his head.
‘Me neither – Lena. I mean, like – bloody hell, you’ve got to be more than a bit pissed off with your wife to do this.’
‘That’s probably the understatement of the year, Guy.’
Batchelor remembered meeting Darling’s wife on Saturday. A total bitch. But no one deserved this. ‘OK, the mortuary team will be here shortly, so there’s not much else we can do. Some shut-eye?’
‘Sounds like a plan.’ Exton looked down at the severed head again, as if drawn to it by a magnet. The woman’s eyes stared right back at him, sending shivers through him. It was as if she was saying, ‘Do something!’
Involuntarily, and almost imperceptibly, he nodded at her. We will, he mouthed silently.
70
Tuesday 26 April
At 8.30 a.m. the following morning, Guy Batchelor read from his prepared notes to the assembled team in the packed conference room. There were two new whiteboards alongside the four that had been up for some days, displaying crime-scene photographs of Lorna Belling’s death and postmortem, her association chart, and photographs of the suspects – her husband, Corin, Seymour Darling and Kipp Brown. On one of the new ones were grisly photographs of Trish Darling’s dismembered body, and on another a fresh association chart for Seymour Darling, along with his face-on and three-quarter-angle profile photographs taken when he was booked into custody last night.
‘This is the eighth briefing on Operation Bantam,’ the Detective Inspector said. ‘Overnight we’ve had a significant development.’ He told the assembled group about the circumstances in which Seymour Darling was found in the bedroom, holding an axe, surrounded by the dismembered remains of his wife, and was arrested at the scene, without a struggle. ‘An interview coordinator is currently preparing the interview strategy.’
‘I suppose it won’t be a piecemeal interview?’ Norman Potting said.
‘Careful, Norman, you could get poleaxed for a joke that bad,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘Or you could be for the chop!’ DI Dull said, the Direct Entry DI surprising everyone by displaying that he actually had a sense of humour.
Grace smiled. ‘OK, we’ve opened the Christmas crackers and read out all the jokes, shall we now be serious, team?’
Suddenly he heard a rustling, rattling sound that brought back sad memories of Bella Moy eternally rummaging in her box of Maltesers. He glanced round and saw that Velvet Wilde was passing round a large yellow pack of M&M peanut chocolates. Several of the team – some of whom probably hadn’t yet had any breakfast – took them gratefully.
He felt a moment of concern as she offered the pack to Norman Potting. The young DC had no way of knowing just how much pain her kind gesture might be causing him.
Potting waved them away, politely.
Then she rolled a few out onto the work surface in front of her, a red, a brown and two green ones, and popped one into her mouth.
He watched Potting carefully. The old detective looked like he was struggling to keep his composure. Grace wondered whether he should have a word with Velvet after the meeting. Then suddenly, to his surprise, Potting leaned across, grabbed the bag, shook several out into the palm of his hand, and gave the bag back to Velvet with a murmured thanks. He popped a green one in his mouth, looking happier. Grace saw him shoot a sly glance at the DC.
Privately, Grace smiled, shaking his head. Did the old stoat have his beady eye on her? He was happy at the thought that Norman was dealing with his loss of Bella, but if he was thinking of making a play for Velvet, he was going to be in for something of a disappointment.
Batchelor went on, reading from his notes. ‘What we know about Seymour Darling so far is that he has a criminal history of progressive escalation of violence. He has three previous convictions, the first in 1997 for shoplifting, for which he got a fine and community service order. In 2003 he got two years suspended for demanding money with menaces. Then, significantly, in 2005 he got four years for GBH, when he permanently blinded a woman in one eye in an assault in a pub. He’s a regular Mr Nice Guy.’
‘He should have chosen a career in politics!’ Potting said, popping another M&M in his mouth, and shooting another glance at Velvet to see if she responded, but she was looking up at the whiteboards, studying them.
Ignoring the remark, Batchelor continued. ‘DS Exton is currently at the postmortem, which is being carried out by Dr Theobald. I’ll be heading over there after this briefing. But I have a feeling establishing the cause of death is not going to be an issue in this case.’ He glanced down at his notes. ‘OK, media strategy. As we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the murder of Mrs Trish Darling, and therefore don’t need the assistance of the local media, I’m intending to hold a short press conference later this morning, but with the gruesome bits edited out – I don’t want the Argus going sensational on us and scaring everyone in the city. I’m proposing to give the bare facts, that a woman was found dead in her home in Hangleton, last night.
Her husband is in custody, and he is also under investigation by the police in connection with the murder of another woman, Mrs Lorna Belling, last week. Does anyone have any issues with that?’
DI Donald Dull raised his hand. ‘Actually, Guy, I do.’
‘Go ahead.’ Batchelor raised his arms expansively, his polite smile masking his fury at the hubris of this totally inexperienced parvenu.
‘Aren’t you making a potentially dangerous assumption here? I believe Detective Superintendent Grace has a very apt expression for assumptions: Assumptions make an Ass out of U and Me?’
Glowering at him, Batchelor said, ‘And your point is exactly?’
‘My point is, Temporary Detective Inspector,’ Dull said, pointedly accentuating the ‘Temporary’, ‘Seymour Darling may have murdered his wife in a fit of rage. Why does that make him a prime suspect in the murder of Lorna Belling? The circumstances are very different.’
Batchelor said nothing for some moments; he was thinking hard how to respond without pissing the man off. ‘Not prime suspect, Donald, but of course he does remain a suspect.’
Grace looked at the new DI. He was well aware that part of the reasoning behind bringing in Direct Entry officers was precisely what Dull was doing now – bringing fresh thinking. It was easy for policemen with years of experience to become too cynical and just too suspicious to look beyond the basic facts in front of them. Dull had made a good point. Having met Trish Darling himself, he could see what a bitter person she was. They needed to reserve judgement on whether Darling should continue to be linked to Lorna Belling’s murder – if it was murder – until after he had been interviewed further.
‘I’ve got a point as well, Guy, about your press conference,’ Grace said. ‘You need to deal carefully with any potential issue over the fact that Darling was on bail at the time he killed his wife. I suggest we speak after this briefing and involve Media HQ.’