The Essence of Evil

by The Essence of Evil (retail) (epub)

  ‘Odds and sods. Worked in his dad’s business for a while. Some sort of building contractors, from what I can gather. More recently he’d been working as an apprentice plumber for one of his dad’s mates, and doing night classes.’

  ‘Though he had quite the side business going.’

  ‘Either that or he had a serious coke problem.’

  ‘We have to assume his death could be related to the drugs.’

  ‘Seems the obvious answer doesn’t it… but I sense you’re not convinced by that?’

  ‘No. I’m not. Though I don’t really know why.’

  Dani took a left turn, leaving behind terraced rows of mainly Asian-inspired shops and eateries and onto a quieter and wider residential street.

  ‘Take this right,’ Easton said after a few hundred yards.

  Dani did so, then stopped soon after at a red light at a busy crossroads flanked on one side by a petrol station and on the opposite by a grand old pub building that had been remodelled as a trendy bistro. Together with the leafy streets and the imposing period houses it was certainly a homely and relatively wealthy area. The lights turned green and Dani pulled away.

  ‘It should be just down here on the right,’ Easton said, craning his neck.

  Dani turned, then after a hundred yards she pulled the car to the side of the road outside the unassuming detached house on a quiet suburban street. It seemed nice enough, not all that upmarket, but close enough to more affluent areas to make the residents feel like they’d made it in life. Plus the residents could still claim to come from the borough of Solihull, of course.

  Matthew Reeve opened the door to Dani and Easton. In his forties, he was tall and athletic with a wide chest and a face that was dominated by a heavily chiselled jaw. Dani had her ID card at the ready and did the introductions. They’d called in advance to prep the parents about the reason for the visit and Matthew said little, just ushered them inside. His wife, Barbara, was in an armchair in the floral-inspired lounge. She looked sunken and hollow. In Dani’s experience it was the way all mothers looked when they learned of the death of one of their sons or daughters. Even Dani, who’d suffered more than most, couldn’t quite imagine what that pain must feel like.

  ‘Please take a seat,’ Matthew said.

  Dani and Easton sat next to each other on a three-seater sofa. Barbara offered them hot drinks – as a courtesy more than anything, Dani decided, and both she and Easton politely declined. Matthew sat in a chair next to his wife and reached his hand out onto hers. She didn’t react at all. In fact Dani hadn’t even seen the woman blink yet. She could quite easily have passed for a waxwork.

  ‘We attended an address this morning on Rotton Park Road,’ Dani said. ‘We believe that’s where your son, Paul, lived?’

  ‘Yes. He did. Does,’ Matthew said.

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you that the body of a young man was found there. We have reason to believe it was your son.’

  Dani noticed Barbara Reeve flinch, but she held herself together.

  ‘We’ll need you to come and perform a formal identification of the body at a later time, but for now it would be useful if you could provide confirmation based on a photo of the deceased. The picture I’m about to show you… this won’t be easy for you, but I’d like you to tell me if this is your son.’

  Dani nodded to Easton who took out his phone, found the close-up of the dead man’s face, and passed the phone over to the Reeves. Matthew took it in his hand, took one glance and looked to his wife. She was staring at him. He nodded to her, and she flicked her eyes to the screen for just a split second before she whipped them away again. She broke down in tears.

  ‘Mr Reeve, is that your son?’ Dani asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure.’

  ‘It’s Paul,’ he said as a tear escaped his eye and ran down his cheek.

  * * *

  The foursome remained seated in the lounge. For minutes no one had moved. Dani and Easton were giving the Reeves the time they needed to process the death of their son, but Dani wanted to push on. There were questions she needed to ask. If they’d let her.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Barbara asked, looking up at Dani.

  ‘It’s too early for us to say exactly. But we think he was murdered. Stabbed.’

  ‘How? Why? Who would do that to him?’

  ‘Those are some of the questions we were hoping to ask you,’ Dani said.

  With that, Barbara’s expression turned from hollow to scathing in a flash. Dani wondered whether her words had been misconstrued. She braced herself for the outburst that was surely coming. She’d seen it many times in family members who’d just learned of the death of a relative: consumed with pain and anger, they needed to vent, and the police were an easy target. Dani knew better than anyone how venting and raging was a by-product of trauma. She would try to remain as placid as she could. Barbara Reeve had lost a son and she needed support.

  ‘So you don’t know who did this?’ Barbara blasted. ‘What good is that? You should be out there now, catching my son’s killer.’

  And then, as quickly as the anger had come, it was overtaken with sadness and Barbara bowed her head and sobbed.

  ‘So you think this could take a long time then?’ Reeve asked. He betrayed no emotion, though he seemed strained as though he was bottling it up to try and stay strong for his wife. Eventually it would explode out of him, Dani knew. It always did.

  ‘It’s possible,’ was all Dani said to that. ‘You have to understand that we’re at a very early stage of the investigation.’

  ‘But you have no suspect?’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t yet.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Barbara said. She jabbed a finger towards Dani in something of a eureka moment. ‘I know you.’

  Matthew Reeve raised an eyebrow and looked over to his wife. Dani felt Easton staring at her too and she tensed up, waiting for Barbara to carry on.

  ‘I saw you in the paper, quite a while back, but then the other day as well. You’re that detective who was almost killed.’

  She turned to her husband for confirmation. He looked back at Dani, his eyes now beady as he tried to place where he might have seen her before.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Dani said.

  ‘Hell of a thing to come back from that.’

  ‘It was. But I’m back nonetheless.’

  ‘They caught the guy, didn’t they? The one who did that to you?’

  Barbara pointed again. Dani knew she was indicating the scar. By now Dani’s blood was rushing, and the room felt stifling. Given the press conference and the headline in the local paper, she had to expect to be recognised. She just wished it didn’t make her feel so useless and… angry. Why did it make her feel angry, exactly?

  Was a smaller part of what Ben had stolen from her a sense of anonymity? It was true that in the past Dani had been a private person, a detective devoted to catching the bad guys rather than being in the limelight. Now, no matter what she did in her career, Dani would always be known as the woman who was almost killed by her serial killer brother.

  Dani clenched her teeth.

  ‘It was your brother, wasn’t it?’ Barbara said, not yet reading the signs, as everyone else in the room cringed and just willed her to shut the hell up.

  ‘Yes,’ Dani said, her hands, her feet, her legs, now trembling as she struggled to contain her emotion. But she fought through it and when she spoke, she sounded calm and collected, almost detached. ‘My brother. My twin in fact, if you must know. He did this to me.’ She touched the scar. Ran a finger along its length. Remembering. ‘He tried to kill me. He didn’t succeed. And now he’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars. I stopped him, just like I’ve stopped dozens of killers in the past. And I’ll do everything I can to find your son’s killer too.’

  The room fell silent. Reeve nodded as though impressed with Dani’s resolve. Barbara just
held Dani’s stare, her face giving nothing away.

  When the tension grew unbearable, Dani sprang to her feet, fished her phone out of her bag and looked at the screen at the imaginary call coming through. ‘If you could excuse me a minute, I’ve just got to take this.’

  She strode for the door without waiting for a response.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dani took several gulps of fresh air as she stood outside the Reeves’ house, trying to rein in her irritability. She wanted nothing more than to be amenable and sympathetic to the parents of a young man who’d just been found murdered, but despite her best intentions, the mention of Ben and her past had a habit of bringing the worst out in Dani. The last thing she needed was to be butting heads with the parents of the deceased, but she’d felt about ready to explode at Barbara Reeve for bringing up her ordeal.

  She took two more lungfuls of air and held her body rigidly in place, until the trembling stopped. Satisfied, she made her way back into the house.

  As she walked through the hall she stopped to look at the gallery of family photos hanging from the wall and up the side of the staircase. She’d noticed them on the way in, but hadn’t been given the chance then to take them in properly. There were various holiday snaps and professional photos of the Reeves taken over the years. Paul Reeve featured in many of them. He was tall and lean with chiselled facial features – much like his father. His squared chin, protruding brow and dark stubble made him look older than his age. In many ways he was handsome, but there was an unpleasant glint in his eye. Rebecca had said he was creepy; the Agnews had said something similar too. There was simply something… off about him.

  Paul wasn’t an only child. There were even more pictures on the wall of a guy Dani could only guess was Paul’s older brother. He was not as tall, nor as athletic as the now-deceased youngest son, but the firm family favourite, Dani decided. As kids he was the one always in his mother’s arms on the holiday shots, where Paul was often off skulking to the side. The brother was the one with a wide and happy smile, compared to Paul’s frowns and pouts. The star photo of the gallery by far was of Paul’s brother wearing graduation garb from Aston University. No such picture of Paul existed.

  ‘That’s Anthony,’ Barbara said, her unexpected intrusion startling Dani.

  Dani turned to Barbara who was standing in the lounge doorway, her face drained, her eyes welled with tears.

  ‘He’s older than Paul?’ Dani said, quickly recovering.

  ‘He was. Ant’s dead too.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Dani said, her words edged with genuine shock.

  ‘It was a car accident. A lorry driver, asleep at the wheel on the M6, ploughed into his car. Four years ago this December. Ant and his girlfriend both died that night.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Dani said, surprised that Barbara was holding herself together as well as she was.

  ‘The guy’ll be out of prison next year, they reckon,’ Barbara said. ‘Good behaviour. Our Ant had good behaviour all his life… where’d it get him? No one can give him a get out of jail free card.’

  Dani didn’t know what to say. She felt immensely sorry for Barbara and Matthew Reeve, to have lost not one but two adult sons, and in such a short space of time.

  ‘They’re lovely photos,’ Dani said, thinking about how she could steer the conversation somewhere useful. She wanted to find out more about the brothers. More about who Paul Reeve was, and what had got him killed.

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s all I have of my boys now.’

  Barbara turned and padded off towards the kitchen.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want a hot drink, detective?’ she called without turning back.

  ‘Black coffee, please. Strong.’

  ‘But not strong enough,’ Barbara called back. And Dani thought she knew what Barbara meant by that. What she would do for a vodka on ice…

  She huffed at her own immature thought and moved away from the wall of photos and back into the lounge. She took the seat next to Easton again.

  ‘We were just talking about Paul’s football career,’ Easton said.

  ‘Your colleague here,’ Matthew said, ‘he’s got his head screwed on all right. If only Paul had known someone like this back when he was a youngster.’

  Dani looked over at Easton, impressed by the compliment. He flicked his eyebrows in a self-satisfied manner.

  ‘Paul was good, wasn’t he?’ Dani asked, looking back at Matthew.

  He half-smiled and shrugged. ‘He loved his football, but… oh, I don’t know. Of course it would have been great for him to play for the Villa – that’s my team, his too – but you need more than just talent. A lot of it’s luck. Right place, right time. Even without the injury, it would have been tough, but… we’ll never know.’

  Dani sensed plenty of tension in Matthew Reeve, and she had the feeling that it wasn’t all related to the news about the death of his son. There was something else underneath, as though Paul’s failed football career had long been a bone of contention in the family. She thought back to the photos on the wall. Of Paul’s distance in the pictures, and of the elder son’s graduation. How far back did all the strain go?

  ‘So what did Paul want to do with his life, after football was out of the picture?’ Dani asked.

  ‘Well that was the problem, wasn’t it? He had nothing to fall back on. We told him all along he needed a backup. We wanted him to go to uni, like Ant, but Paul was having none of it. In the end he came away from school with nothing.’

  Barbara came back from the kitchen with a tray of steaming mugs and her expression turned from amenable to hostile when she heard what her husband was talking about. She pretty much slammed the tray down. Two of the cups spilled over in the process.

  ‘Don’t you dare talk about my Paul like that.’

  ‘I was just answering their question,’ Reeve said, his hackles rising too.

  Barbara dished out the drinks and Dani took a long, deep inhale of her treacly black coffee, the hot vapour renewing her focus.

  ‘How was Paul in himself when he realised his football dream was over?’ Dani asked. She felt Barbara giving her daggers but she kept her focus on Matthew.

  ‘It changed him,’ he said ‘He wasn’t himself anymore. I mean, he was depressed. Maybe not… you know, not like…’

  Matthew looked away from Dani as though he was treading on territory that was too close to her own position.

  ‘…he wasn’t diagnosed with it or anything. He wasn’t on Valium or Prozac or any of that nonsense—’

  Dani tried her best not to react, though she was sure Matthew was insinuating that she was on all that nonsense. Which she was, but that wasn’t the point.

  ‘—but he was definitely different. Different to the boy we knew.’

  ‘You took him on at your company?’ Easton asked.

  ‘He needed a job. He was still living at home through all this but we wanted…’

  Matthew trailed off again, unable to say what he’d intended. Barbara was kind enough to finish her husband’s sentence.

  ‘What my husband is trying to say is that he wanted our son out of the house. He thought Paul was a useless sponge. He gave him a job just so Paul would have enough money for us to get rid of him for good without us worrying about him living out on the streets somewhere like a bum.’

  Barbara glared at her husband but he just looked straight ahead at Dani. He remained impassive but the slight twitches in his facial muscles suggested he wasn’t far from breaking down. Dani thought he was probably now severely regretting the many run-ins he’d had with his son. Whatever his emotion, he held it in.

  ‘You say Paul had changed,’ Dani said. ‘How did he take Anthony’s death? You said, Mrs Reeve, that Anthony died nearly four years ago. Wasn’t that about the same time Paul stopped playing football too?’

  ‘Paul was as devastated by Ant’s death as we both still are,’ Matthew said. ‘But if you’re trying to suggest he got his leg broken in
three places on the football field, jeopardizing his whole career, just because of Ant… I mean…’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not suggesting anything like that,’ Dani said, holding her hands up. ‘I just want to understand what could have been going on in Paul’s mind. How he changed and why.’

  ‘He was only a kid when he had the accident. Not quite nineteen. It took months and months to get him back on a pitch but a good while more for him to realise he would never make it. Was it the injury or just his head that changed? Who knows. Either way he was lost in life. He had enough reasons to be.’

  By now Matthew Reeve was answering almost in monotone. Barbara, meanwhile, was simmering. She looked furious but was holding her tongue. Dani hadn’t wanted to upset them, but they clearly were very troubled. Could this be because she was close to something that the Reeves wanted to keep tight to their chests?

  Should she push on or call it a day?

  ‘Mr and Mrs Reeve, do you know of any reason why someone would want to hurt Paul?’

  Dani decided to push on. She wanted to know what they were hiding, but she would do it as softly as she could.

  Barbara scoffed. Matthew didn’t react.

  ‘What on earth are you trying to suggest?’ Barbara asked.

  ‘Most people are killed by someone they know,’ Easton said, and Dani was glad he had taken the baton. ‘We don’t yet have any suspects for Paul’s murder but chances are it was someone he knew. We’re just trying to find out about your son, his habits, his friends, so we can find leads to follow. Had he made friends with anyone you disapproved of? People who were mixed up with—’

  ‘Just stop right there!’ Barbara shouted, putting her hand up. ‘This is my son you’re talking about. He was a good boy.’

  ‘Did you know he dealt drugs?’ Easton asked. ‘Cocaine. Ecstasy. Perhaps others.’

  Barbara’s cheeks flushed. Dani could tell Matthew was clenching his teeth.

  ‘Yes. We did know,’ Matthew said. His wife shot him a look but it was too late to stop him talking. ‘It goes back a long way. A couple of months before his injury, Paul was suspended by the club for two weeks. For possession of cocaine.’