“Yes, yes. My son, my son.”
“But you just said undertaker…”
“He’s dead.”
Koralova nodded. That was certainly a form of trouble. “Where is the body?”
“Upstairs, in his room.”
“Okay, my colleague will go and check,” Koralova nodded at Kane, “while you tell me what happened?”
“I came home from work, I work in a supermarket, and I’ve got our tea, him and me, my son and me, and the house is quiet, and I put everything on the table and go find him, cos he must have his headphones in, be playing games, and I get here… and he’s dead.”
“When you say dead, and I’m sorry to ask this, but how did you check?”
“It’s obvious.”
“And what seems to have caused it?”
“Anna,” came a call from Kane. “Come and see this,” calm but clearly worried about something.
“I’ll just be a moment and we’ll check on the…body.” She didn’t want to leave this woman, but Kane was clearly concerned.
Koralova jogged up the steep steps and saw her colleague stood in the hallway. She went to him and peered past and…
There was a body. A man of around twenty, hanging dead. But not very far. There was a rope round his neck, tied to the handle of a door, and he was hanging as if he was slumped, his purple and blue face distended but strangely calm.
The two constables exchanged looks and Koralova grasped her radio.
“Hello, does anyone know where DC Atkins is at the moment?”
“Over in Farhill.”
Koralova looked at the body, hanging much as the suicide she’d attended a few days ago would have looked before being cut down. “Don’t worry about Atkins,” she continued, “I think we have two very connected suicides. We’re going to need the MCU for this.”
“Shall I show you the office?” Wick offered to Susan.
“Yes, that’ll be great thanks.”
“Good,” Wick used an outstretched arm to direct Susan out of the office and down the corridor. “We have all the usual elements of a police station, such as cells and interview rooms, but the MCU work mostly out of their own open plan office. They stopped at a large brown door, on which were two signs. One was clearly smart and official and said MAJOR CRIMES UNIT. The other was the same size but printed off and it said The Bunker.
“What does that mean?” Susan asked.
“I put that there,” Wick explained. “I want this office to feel a safe place for my officers. This is to be a sanctum away from the chaos and crimes of the world.” He pushed the door open to let Susan enter first and she could see some quirks. Yes, the office was filled with tables, chairs and piles of paperwork, but there was an actual sofa along one wall, a fully padded plush one. There wasn’t an assortment of instant coffees but a state of the art and clearly expensive coffee machine. There were walls filled with the signs of ongoing investigations, but there was a whiteboard standing freely with ‘Oxford Police Thesaurus’ hand-written on it and the word ‘Gym Nonce’ added below. There were more green plants than your average kitchen garden. To Susan it felt, on the one hand, like someone had tried to be trendy and introduce soft edges into a normally hard-boiled office. But on the other, it really felt like everyone had bought in.
“Everyone. This is Susan, she’s the journalist who will be tailing you.”
Susan smiled at the room. Grayling and Maruma were in suits this time, and they waved a hello. Sharma and Lindleman were new to Susan and they clearly viewed her sceptically, but they still nodded and said hi.
“I see you’ve met our maniac,” Rob said.
“Oh, don’t start,” Grayling replied.
“What?” Susan wondered aloud.
Rob grinned, “after the song from Flashdance, about a lass who’s release from life is to dance.”
Susan smiled at an unimpressed Grayling, “I can see that.”
“Did you know that song was about a serial killer originally?” By the time he’d finished, all eyes were on Green, who was still eating his cookie.
“Don’t spoil it with facts Green,” Rob replied. “This is a charming nickname. I in no way meant it as a double-edged sword.”
“Lindleman,” Grayling shot back, “go make Susan a coffee.”
“I will be proud to, and that reminds me, it’s Morthern pride weekend soon.”
Susan opened her mouth quizzically, “do you mean civic pride? Gay pride? You go to a Morthern gay pride?”
“It’s new,” Wick replied, “must have started while you were studying.”
“No,” Lindeman replied. “I do not go to pride. One does not go to pride. One struts into pride, one conquers pride, one dresses up with the attention to detail of a physicist and the eye of an artist and lands in a shower of glitter and madness.”
“Sometimes, Susan,” Sharma sighed, “you’ll feel like it was better never to have spoken to him.”
“Can I ask a question?”
Susan was sat in the back of an unmarked police car which Grayling was driving and which had Maruma in the passenger seat. As she said it, she leant forward.
“You can ask anything,” Grayling explained, “we just might not answer it all.”
“Okay, okay, so why aren’t we going to the suicide that’s just been called in?”
“Oh, we will, we will. But the scene of the first suicide is on the way, and if they’re connected, it’s imperative we get to that before it’s been disrupted. We have two PC’s waiting for us at todays, victim name of Kofi Salmons, securing that, but we have to see what state the other is in.”
Maruma took over “best case scenario, the parents have been too upset to touch the room and all they’ve done is close the door. Worst case scenario they’ve dumped their son’s possessions in a skip and steam cleaned the place.”
“Oh, I get you, right. And then?”
“Well this isn’t an MCU case at the moment, we’ve got to recheck everything to see if there’s anything, err, untoward?” Grayling looked at Maruma.
“I think we can say murderous, let’s go to murderous.”
“Ooh,” Susan exclaimed.
“Don’t get excited, if in doubt we think murder and work back, so we don’t miss anything. That said, a DC has already looked at this so could simply be a coincidence. But the DC only found the boy killed himself. He never found the reason why. That might be important.”
Maruma clarified, “although the odds are two people don’t commit suicide in the same very unusual way in close proximity, without the details being in the press, without some story… some sort of connection.”
Soon they were knocking on a door.
“Hello, I’m DC Grayling and I’m just following up on your loss. Could I ask you a couple of quick questions and look upstairs please?”
“Of course,” said the mother, who didn’t seem to have stopped crying. When they’d all gone into the hall, Grayling asked the key question.
“Have you touched your son’s room at all?”
“No, no, no, couldn’t bear to. Just closed the door. Couldn’t bear to.”
Susan noticed that Grayling and Maruma exchanged a look that was best described as an optic high five and soon all three were upstairs and entering the deceased’s bedroom.
The body was gone, of course, and the rope had been removed and was sitting in an evidence bag at headquarters. But everything else was here. And everything was the word. The room was filled with piles of stuff. There wasn’t just an Xbox, but two parallel piles of games rising on it and above it. There weren’t just clothes, but strewn fabric over most of the floor and the bed and chair. The room wasn’t so much lived in as a poltergeist’s storage space.
“So, what are we looking for?” Susan asked.
“Well,” Grayling replied as she ran her eyes carefully over it all. “At the moment we’re just securing the scene. We’ll take a deep dive soon. But we have the victim on CCTV buying a rope. We have him texting i
ncoherently about dying. We then have him dead from that rope. It looks like a suicide. The question is…”
“Ah.” Grayling and Susan looked at Maruma as he carried on speaking. “There is something untoward.”
“Go on…”
“This entire room is a jumble, except,” Maruma gestured to a table. “There is a five-inch by eight-inch rectangle of free desk with a pen laid in the middle, and that pen is clicked open. There should be something here, a notebook or something. And it’s gone.”
“Good spot,” Grayling said.
“Really?” Susan was looking at a patch of nothing.
“There’s no note, there was no note,” Grayling was already onto Maruma’s line of thought. “While it looks very much like this boy did commit suicide, there was no reason why. The text messages, as incoherent as they were, didn’t tell us why. And maybe they don’t say why because someone took the note, notebook, whatever.”
“That feels…” Susan searched for the right words, “like you’re out on a limb.”
“It can start like that.”
There was a knock on a door. The DCI looked up, saw three figures standing behind the glass of the door and went over to open it. Soon Grayling, Maruma and Susan were in the office.
“How are you all?”
“Good, good,” Grayling replied in the manner of someone who’d say good even if her leg had fallen off. “We’ve got something to check.”
“Go on.”
“We have two suicides,” Grayling began. “Young men, classic age for it. First, white male aged nineteen called Jonathan Stewart. Second, black male aged twenty-one, called Kofi Salmons. Our research today hasn’t found any connection between the two. There are no phone records of contact, the relatives and friends have no knowledge of the other. Neither left notes, or any hints as to why they died beyond the first having a series of classic signs of depression in the days before. Second one total shock.”
“And you’re leading this somewhere?” the DCI concluded out loud.
“The details of the suicides weren’t in the press. But both men died the same way. Hanging themselves from door handles. A method that works if you are really determined to die but so unusual, to have two so close together is very, very odd. We want permission to investigate this fully. We have a reason, Maruma…”
“We believe a notebook or note was taken from the room of the first victim. Which means there is something happening in the shadows here.”
“Is this evidential? Intelligence led? Gut reaction?”
“More of the latter.”
Wick nodded and gripped the edges of his desk. Then he looked at Susan. “We can’t investigate everything. We’d like to, we should do, but we can’t. The government cut our funding time and time again, stripping us to the bone. People think the police have a problem dealing with criminals. They’re only half the story. We have a problem with a government that only want their ivory towers protected. So, we have to make choices about where these resources go. To decide what we try to solve. Don’t get me wrong, we’re damn good police. But I have to decide if this warrant’s putting two DC’s of the MCU on it, when a court would say this is two suicides with no connection.”
Susan nodded. “What will you do?”
Wick went from angry to smiling. “When Grayling and Maruma have an inkling, you back that inkling. Look into this. See what’s happened. And you Susan, drink it all in.”
Karen had been sat in a waiting room for fifteen minutes. The walls were white, and the magazines were from the previous year, while the water in the strange storage bottle had probably been there the same. It wasn’t a pleasant place to sit, but she had to, because her Community Mental Health Team had been in this building for as long as Karen had been ill, and no amount of asking them to come to her house had ever worked. Finally, however a mouse of a woman poked her head round, always tilted as if patronising the sick, and asked Karen to step inside the office.
It had been carefully arranged according to criteria Karen didn’t wish to know. All she wanted was guidance on how to adapt now she’d left the ward.
“It’s good to see you again Karen,” the psychologist said. “How are you feeling these days?”
“Everything is odd really,” the patient replied. “I think I’d got, what do they say, institutionalised? I dreamed of being able to pick my clothes and buy my food and cook, and now I’m here I keep wanting people to do it for me.” She was sad, deeply sad, that returning to the wild had not solved any problems.
“How about your issues, how are they doing?”
“I still feel that darkness, that hole in me, but I am managing to keep going.”
“Anymore suicidal ideation?”
“No, nothing like that, mostly just odd.”
“In that case I’d like to suggest a group.”
“Group?”
“Yes. There is a group which meets regularly for survivors of mental illness, particularly suicide and time spent on a ward. I feel you’d benefit immensely from going.”
“Oh, yes, right, other people like me?”
“Exactly.”
“I didn’t realise you did stuff like that. No one mentioned it inside.”
“Well we don’t. This isn’t NHS. New Hope Church runs the Surviving Mental Trauma group and I recommend you go to it.”
“Right. Oh. I never thought about going to church.”
“You don’t have to attend a Sunday service. It’s just for people, as you say, like you.”
“Yes, yes I can do that.”
“Good, I’m pleased you’ve moved on.”
“Sorry, what?”
“Coming out of the health system.”
“But I’m not. Am I?”
“You’ve been treated and released from a ward and you aren’t reporting unusual symptoms, so we will be discharging you from our care.” The Mouse smiled and Karen felt a stabbing pain. It felt odd being home and now the NHS was booting her. She wasn’t ready.
“Really?”
“To be candid Miss Edwards, we simply don’t have the funding to keep seeing people who are better.” But I’m not, Karen wanted to say. Yet, maybe she could be? The Mouse continued “go to the group, New Hope Church are excellent, they’ll be able to support you for a long, long time more closely than we ever have. Enjoy. Would you be able to fill in a patient satisfaction survey on your way out?”
“So, what’s the plan?” Susan asked as Grayling drove them through the streets. The latter answered.
“SOCO are going over the scenes of both suicides and…do you know what SOCO is?”
“Nope.”
“Scene of Crime Officer; taking the fingerprints and doing the science bit. We have to leave them to it first, and while they won’t be long, it gives us enough time to do a bit more digging. By bit more I mean a lot more. So, the question is where…”
The police radio let out a burst of noise and a voice quickly asked “Grayling and Maruma, where are you? Queensgate, right?”
“Affirmative. Driving through it now.”
“We have reports of a stabbing in progress. Uniform are on the way but you’re probably closer.”
“Give us the details and we’ll go.”
Grayling put her foot down on the accelerator. She liked dancing above all else but speeding along in a car was a close second and she didn’t get to do it very often. That was why the car was soon swung around a corner and braked hard to a halt behind a marked car which was in the middle of the street, doors open.
“Stay in the car,” Grayling told Susan, who ignored this entirely and jumped out after them as they ran towards the open door of a semi-detached house.
“Police!” Grayling shouted, “We’re Police, where are you?”
A uniformed officer appeared in the door. His face was set into a snarl and he had blood down the hi-vis portion of his kit. “You better come in.”
They did.
It was now Susan began to take things in. The
re was a screaming, a low-level constant screaming from a middle-aged woman who was gripping her arms. Her knuckles were white. The bloodied officer had gone back to his vigil, which was kneeling next to the young woman on the floor. Five foot two, short brown hair, her now pale face was turned to the ceiling and both her torso and the floor were covered in a rusty smelling dark red mess.
Susan swallowed hard as she realised it was blood. “Is she?”
The PC turned to Grayling and Maruma. “She died a minute ago. Was alive when I got here, but she’s pretty fucked up. Bled everywhere, nothing I could do.”
Sirens in the background, the ambulances arriving, and then paramedics rushing in, sending everyone out as they began their emergency procedure on a lifeless body.
Grayling turned to the constable. “What do you know?”
“I was with her. I was with her and she died.”
“Okay, you did good, she didn’t die alone. Company is comfort. What happened?”
“Her boyfriend, she had an argument with her boyfriend, big screaming match and the mum says she saw him pull a knife and just…go berserk.”
“Name?”
The mother paused enough to spit out “Ade. Adrian Erwin.”
Maruma turned to the door. “Where does he live?”
“Next street. Number eighteen.”
Grayling nodded and burst into a run, with Maruma close behind, Susan followed.
As they moved Grayling spoke into her radio.
“Where’s the firearms unit?”
“City of course, where it always is. ETA for you, an hour.”
“Got it.” The radio was turned off. “F. F,” Grayling cursed.
“What’s happening?” Susan asked.
“To save costs we share the firearms unit with three counties, which means it’s never where we need it. We’re little. So, we’re going ourselves.”
“Is that wise?”
“General rule of policing is if you can get evidence, you get it,” Maruma explained. “I’d bet he’s at home trying to wash the blood off him. We get him now and this is a slam dunk.”
They went hurtling down the street, almost skidding outside number eighteen. “Sol, round the back,” Grayling said. “Susan, stay here.” Grayling marched to the front door and found it open; left in a rush. That meant she was legally allowed to march in. She moved quickly from room to room until she found a kitchen where blood stains covered door handles and worktops, another open door, and Grayling stepped out into a small, mostly paved garden.
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