Perfect Kill

by Helen Fields

  Ava walked around the bed, picked up Graham’s jeans, reached in the pocket for his mobile and tossed it onto the bed next to him.

  ‘Try his mobile again. He was probably sleeping. It’s only …’ She checked the bedside clock. ‘God, I overslept, how is it eight thirty? I’ll be with you in half an hour. Ask DI Graham to meet me there and keep the scene secure. It’s not the easiest of patches on a good day.’ She ended the call. ‘Your phone was off. Tripp’s about to call you. We need to go in separate cars.’

  ‘Can you drop me back to mine on the way?’ Graham asked, standing up and giving Ava the benefit of all six foot four of him stark naked. She looked away, wondering what would be a good alternative career for when she got fired from the Major Investigation Team.

  Graham’s mobile rang. Ava’s followed suit. She walked into the bathroom to avoid anyone overhearing their voices on their respective calls.

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ve got no plans so I’ll be there,’ Graham was saying as she pushed the door half shut.

  ‘This is Turner.’

  ‘Ava, it’s Luc.’

  She opened her mouth to talk, catching sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, socks in one hand, mobile in the other, hair wild, mascara smudged beneath her eyes, skinnier than she’d been for years. It wasn’t a flattering look. She didn’t recommend a diet based solely on stress and insomnia.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Callanach asked.

  ‘Yes … yes I can. Sorry, you caught me at a busy moment.’ A sheen of sweat suddenly glimmered on her forehead.

  ‘Shall I call back later? This can wait an hour or so. Where are you?’

  Ava coughed, and forced some authority into her voice. ‘At home but I’m just on my way to an incident. Go ahead. Tripp’s covering it so I’ve got two minutes.’

  ‘You’re at home? I thought I heard Pax Graham’s voice before …’ Callanach sounded distant, foreign. But then he was – both things – Ava thought.

  ‘He stopped to pick me up en route to the scene,’ Ava thought on her feet, feeling sick, hating the ridiculous sense that she’d been caught cheating, ridiculous given that she was single even if things with Luc hadn’t been properly resolved. ‘It’s a shooting so all hands on deck. MIT went out for drinks last night and I left my car at the station. Is there an update on the trafficking case from your end?’ she asked, moving the conversation onto safer ground, wishing for the tenth time in as many minutes that she’d stuck to beer and not chased it with shots, and that she’d equally stuck to dull celibacy instead of trying to distract herself from the memory of the near miss with Luc by filling her bed with a convenient warm body. She’d broken her self-imposed rules pretty impressively. Drinking with her team was supposed to be limited to one quick glass, then head for the exit.

  ‘No, this relates to a Police Scotland missing persons case, Edinburgh area. Young man by the name of Malcolm Reilly. His DNA was put on the Interpol database two months ago. A body was found and we’ve only just had official confirmation that the DNA is a match. It’s a definite homicide. I’m sending an encrypted email with the details.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll have DS Lively take a look at it.’

  ‘It’ll have to be you, Ava. It’s a bad one. Interpol has been asked to assist local French officers. It appears to be an organ harvesting case. The victim’s been pretty much emptied out anatomically speaking.’

  Ava sat down on the edge of the bath and ran a hand over her eyes.

  ‘You need me to go and interview the family,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’m afraid so. I’ll send you all the details. We’ll need Malcolm’s medical records, and we’re chasing known suspects from our end. When we have any potential names we’ll cross-check to see if anyone was in the UK at the time the victim was abducted.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll send uniformed officers in advance to break the news and offer support, then I’ll get on it later this morning. Give me an hour to check out the shooting then I’ll head directly into the station and take a look.’

  ‘Sorry to land this on you. Sounds like you’re busy enough already,’ Callanach said.

  ‘Until a few minutes ago we were almost having a quiet period.’ She paused. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. Well, I’ll call if I have any questions once I’m up to speed.’

  ‘Jean-Paul would like a conference call, tomorrow morning preferably. Is nine a.m. okay with you?’

  The bathroom door opened. ‘Hey, Ava, we’d better … shit, sorry.’ Pax Graham exited quietly. Ava cursed inside her head.

  ‘DI Graham’s calling you Ava now?’

  ‘You’ve been calling me Ava since we met, Luc.’

  ‘When we met, you and I were the same rank.’

  Ava tried to formulate a response, and failed. ‘We should probably talk some time, about things.’

  Things, Ava thought. As if the dead bodies, trafficked women, and the ocean between them weren’t enough. Talking about things meant acknowledging the fact that for two years they’d pretended to be just friends when there had always been something more than that beneath the surface. Then at the moment it had been about to become something tangible, everything had gone horribly wrong.

  She hadn’t sent Callanach away exactly, but the request for a Scottish liaison officer to work with Interpol had been good timing. Ava asked herself, for perhaps the millionth time, if in different circumstances she’d still have chosen Callanach to go. She knew better than anyone how hard it was for him to go back to France after everything he’d been through. For a while she’d persuaded herself that forcing him to return was in his best interests. That everyone had to face their demons at some point. Of course, Callanach facing his had meant that she’d been able to delay facing hers. Successful relationships had eluded her all her adult life. There had been a brief engagement a while ago, to another police officer who had turned out to be less than charming. There were the odd random flings over the years but nothing that had lasted beyond the magic make-or-break six-month mark. Then there was Callanach, and in spite of waiting for the right moment and making sure it was real, somehow it had all ended in pain, regret and devastation for them both. Not all of it was his fault, either. Ava had taken a long hard look into the face of potential hurt/failure/let down, and chosen to sever whatever affection lay between them. Irrevocably. The man she’d woken up with this morning was simply her way of decorating her very own poisoned chalice with an extra cherry. Well done her.

  ‘Ava?’ Callanach prompted.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, I was checking my diary. Sounds like we’re both going to be too busy to do any talking in the near future. Let’s leave it until we’re in the same country.’

  ‘Of course,’ his voice was abrupt. ‘I should let you go. Don’t worry about the conference call. We’ll exchange details by email. Tell Pax I said hi.’

  He was gone. Ava closed her eyes while her hands stopped shaking.

  She had to get a grip. Malcolm Reilly’s family needed her. Whichever poor soul was lying in a pool of his own blood and brains over at Dumbryden Gardens needed her. Her personal screw-ups were just going to have to take second place. Like always.

  Chapter Five

  Ava stared through the hole in the glass pane at the crumpled body on the floor. The bullet entry wound was clear, as was the fact that the victim had been standing right next to a wall that had caught every fragment of bone, blood and grey matter expelled under bullet force from the exit wound.

  ‘Did the bullet go through the glass?’ Ava called inside to the technician who was busy collecting fragments from various kitchen surfaces.

  ‘Unlikely. We suspect something much larger and more blunt given the size of the hole in the pane.’

  Ava opened the back door of the terraced house cautiously, careful to sidestep any glass on the floor. Only there wasn’t any.

  ‘Have you already swept up the glass for forensic testing?’ she checked.
/>   ‘No, nothing’s been moved from the scene yet. We need everything in place to track the likely journey through the property.’

  ‘Do we have an estimate for time of death?’ Ava asked, checking her watch.

  ‘Six to seven hours ago.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ava murmured as she made her way further inside, mindful that it had to be scene examiners first and police officers second, to avoid contamination. Stealing a glance at the victim – scrawny, neck covered in what looked like jailhouse tattoos – she left the kitchen and went into the lounge. Hand-rolled cigarette ends overflowed from every conceivable container, and a few had missed judging by the blackened holes in both the furniture and carpet. Takeaway cartons were strewn liberally about. A yellowing sofa that had obviously been chewed by a dog at some stage sat sadly at one end of the room, collapsing in the centre. It looked embarrassed to be there, Ava thought. Rightly so. The whole place stank. An old vest had been used to soak up some sort of spillage on a cardboard box that was doubling as a coffee table, and the curtains were makeshift scraps of material, hung with gaffer tape.

  Ava took the stairs, aware of the carpet sticking to her shoe coverings, glad of the gloves she was wearing that protected her hands from contamination as much as protected the scene from her. Straight ahead was a bathroom she didn’t even dare enter. The stench coming from it was nauseating. The first boxroom bedroom was jam-packed with bits of broken furniture and old suitcases. Beyond that lay the other bedroom, housing an equal number of cigarette butts as the lounge, and a bed with sheets that might never have been changed. No curtains at all upstairs, and no clothes in the open wardrobe. What clothes there were had ended up scattered across the floor in varying piles of slightly worn to absolutely filthy. Next to the bed was a pile of red-inked bills. Ava picked one up and opened it. Apparently Mr Gene Oldman hadn’t been meeting his electricity payments. She looked around. It was a tip. Every surface in the entire house was dusty or sticky. Except one.

  Ava took the stairs back down two at a time.

  ‘Everyone stay still,’ she ordered. ‘Wherever you are. The kitchen floor’s clean.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ Tripp queried, staring at her from the hallway.

  ‘Every other surface in this entire house is a bacteria brothel. There’s a dead man lying in the corner of the kitchen with his brains marking the walls – no effort to clean that up – and yet the kitchen floor is absolutely spotless. Somebody cleaned it, so whatever was on there was more important to the killer than the body itself.’

  ‘I need a complete window blackout and luminal spray asap,’ one of the scene examiners shouted. ‘If the surface was bleached and the victim’s been dead seven hours already, whatever was on the floor will be fading fast.’

  Ava stood back and let them work. Every window was lined with blackout blinds and every door shut until no light could enter, then four officers waited to spray a section of floor each.

  The entire floor began to glow immediately.

  ‘That’s the bleach,’ an officer explained. ‘You were right. It’s been recently cleaned, but it was fast and areas have been missed. There,’ he pointed in the direction of the back door, down in the corner near the skirting board. ‘And there. Photos immediately please.’ A faint blue glow came from two lines of grouting, and a semicircle roughly two inches across could be seen clearly near the back wall, furthest from the door.

  ‘Why does it glow blue?’ Ava asked.

  ‘The chemicals react with the iron in the blood’s haemoglobin. We’re on borrowed time though. It’s fading. That’s why we have the cameras ready to record areas of the floor where we need to pay special attention afterwards.’

  Ava trod carefully in the dark, moving towards the semicircle that was the boldest of all the glowing sections of floor.

  ‘It’s the edge of a footprint,’ she said. ‘Just the back of the heel. Can we get an accurate foot size from this, do you think?’ she asked the lead scene examiner.

  ‘I’d say there’s enough definition there for that, and now we know where the blood is, we might be able to ascertain more with further testing. The fact that we’re seeing this much glow probably means the bleach wasn’t very strong.’

  ‘Any hope of getting DNA?’

  ‘Depends if we can find a sample unaffected by the bleach.’

  ‘All right,’ Ava said. ‘The victim’s name is probably Gene Oldman, the property owner. Could you double-check against other fingerprints and DNA in the property? I didn’t see any photo ID lying around.’

  She made her way outside. In other areas of the city the presence of so many police officers would have triggered the build-up of an automatic crowd. Onlookers would be waiting for a body to be brought out on a stretcher. Speculation as to what nightmarish events had occurred would be circulating. But this was the heart of Wester Hailes. When the police arrived, doors were slammed and curtains were closed. No one stood out on the street. A loathing of authority overrode natural curiosity.

  ‘DI Graham,’ she said. He was in the throes of organising a nervous-looking bunch of uniformed officers. Conducting door-to-doors in that region of the city was about as much fun as a colonoscopy.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, face straight, no sign of what had happened the night before. He was professional and discreet, which made Ava feel worse rather than better about what she’d done.

  ‘I’d like to knock on the immediate neighbours’ doors myself to get a feel for what’s happening, but would you do the talking?’ Ava asked. Years of working undercover meant Graham had developed an easy tone which had the hardiest of potential witnesses opening up to him. In spite of her long, curly hair and unthreatening physique, her English accent courtesy of an expensive education insisted on by her parents rendered her something of an affront to some people, particularly in an area as deprived as Wester Hailes.

  They knocked on the first door and waited. Not so much as one curtain twitched, yet there was a clear sense that the property was occupied. Ava motioned to a uniformed officer to check round the back. It took no more than two minutes before a young couple were being escorted around from their back garden.

  ‘They were just headed through their back gate, ma’am,’ the officer explained.

  DI Graham took over. ‘Well, thanks for coming to chat. Won’t keep you long. You’ve probably noticed activity in your neighbour’s house.’ No response. ‘Were either of you in last night?’

  ‘We went to bed early,’ the man said, glancing sideways at the woman.

  ‘Did you? It’s really helpful that you were in your property. We have reason to believe there might have been a gunshot. Did you hear anything?’

  ‘Slept right through. Didn’t hear nothin’,’ the man declared.

  ‘Is your bedroom at the front or the back of the house?’ Graham asked.

  ‘The back,’ the man said. ‘So what?’

  ‘So that would have been above and right next door to the room where we think the gun was fired, likely around three a.m. Are you sure you didn’t wake up at all?’

  They both shook their heads.

  ‘A window was broken, too. I’m guessing there’d have been quite a disturbance. Did you know your neighbour well?’

  ‘Not really,’ the man said.

  ‘So you knew him a bit then,’ Graham said. Ava had to give him credit. He was a thousand times more patient than her. ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was a creep,’ the woman said. The man gave her a sharp look that Ava didn’t like.

  ‘How so?’ Graham asked.

  She shrugged, suddenly finding the pavement of huge interest. Her partner took over. ‘You know what some blokes are like. Can’t keep their eyes off a woman’s tits when they’re talking to her. That’s why we never chatted to him much. Now we didn’t hear anything and we didn’t see anything, so are we free to go?’

  Graham looked at Ava, who nodded. ‘Give your details to the uniformed officer behind you, then you can go. And if either of
you should suddenly remember anything, get in touch, okay? We know not to use your names.’

  ‘Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ the man said, putting an arm around the woman and pulling her away.

  It wasn’t a surprise. There were areas of the city where it was understood you just didn’t speak to the polis. Not if you didn’t want your windows smashed first and your face shortly thereafter. Life was tough. Just buying food and staying out of prison was hard enough for some people. You got a reputation as a rat and you’d be looking for somewhere new to live before you even smelled the petrol being poured through your letter box.

  ‘Let’s try the other side,’ Ava said.

  The door opened before they’d knocked and a stout elderly lady stood, hands on hips, ready to do business.

  ‘Are you here about my disability scooter?’ she shouted.

  ‘I’m DI Graham and we were wondering if you know your neighbour, Gene Oldman?’

  ‘I reported it missing two months ago. Left it outside my front door. Do you know how many polis came to see me about that?’

  ‘I can certainly check up on what’s happening with that case when I get back to the station. Could I take your name?’

  ‘If you haven’t got my scooter, you can get off my doorstep. I’ve got nothing else to say to you.’ A bunch of kids who’d assembled behind Ava’s back began giggling. She left Graham to deal with the woman who clearly had a prepared script that she was going to stick to no matter what, and turned to the kids.

  ‘Live round here, do you?’ she asked the group. There were four of them. Three boys and one girl who was trying to make herself look tougher than the company she was keeping – shoulders back, chin stuck out. Necessary, Ava guessed, so she didn’t get ditched. Gender equality wasn’t a priority on Edinburgh’s backstreets.