intercom. Montell leaned on the button for a few seconds. They waited, but no sound came from the speaker grille.
‘No luck,’ the DC exclaimed. ‘Maybe she’s gone home to her mum for a day or two. Come on, Amy,’ he called out, ‘you’re holding up our investigation.’ He thumped the black door with the side of his right fist. It swung open.
‘Jesus, Griff,’ said Steele, ‘you haven’t broken the bloody lock, have you?’
Montell peered at the door frame. ‘No, boss, I haven’t; it must have been on the latch.’
‘Careless,’ the inspector murmured, ‘or . . . Let’s take a look.’
A short narrow staircase, with rails on either side, rose up to the little flat. Steele led the way, opened the door to the living area, stepped inside and stopped in his tracks. ‘Aw, fuck!’ he moaned.
Amy Noone was lying on her back in the centre of the room, facing the morning sun and bathed in its light as it streamed through a big dormer window. She was naked, and her face was peaceful, as if she was in a dreamless sleep. Her dark hair, which had been in a ponytail when they had visited her the day before, was loose and neatly arranged, allowing them to see that it was streaked with honey-blonde highlights. Her arms were stretched out by her sides, palms down.
‘The bastard,’ Montell hissed. ‘This is just too much.’
Steele saw that behind the glasses his eyes were squeezed tight shut. ‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘Hold it together.’
The DC nodded. ‘I will, boss, don’t worry. But you and Tarvil were talking to this kid only yesterday, and now look at her. Why the hell did he need to kill Amy? She wasn’t an artist.’
‘Neither was Harry.’
‘His body was hidden. Amy’s is laid out just like the other two.’
‘Yes. Now let’s stop making assumptions and get back to being professional about this. Don’t move; stay exactly where you are and look around. What do you see?’
Montell did as he had been ordered: slowly, carefully, he gazed round the room, doing his best to take in every detail. ‘I see a pink towelling dressing-gown, thrown over one of the dining chairs. There’s a T-shirt on top of it, and a pair of pants on the floor beside the gate-leg.’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘I see two mugs on the work surface, next to the sink beside the kettle, and a jar of coffee with the lid off. And a spoon. There are coffee granules spilled on the work surface.’
‘What don’t you see?’
The detective looked around the room for a second time, and then a third. ‘A bed,’ he replied eventually. ‘This is a studio apartment, she was in her night clothes at one point before she took them off, but I don’t see her bed.’
‘No,’ said Steele, ‘because it folds up into the wall, there, between those two cupboard doors. See? The legs are hinged and they tuck away too, but you can see four marks on the carpet where they stand when it’s down. She didn’t undress for this guy, Griff; probably the opposite. She dressed to let him in, and he stripped her again, after she was dead.’
‘How did he get in?’
‘He talked himself in.’
‘Or she knew him.’
‘Maybe,’ Steele conceded, ‘but if she knew him, would she have bothered to put her bed away? Take a good look at her hair; the ends are still wet. Go into the bathroom; touch nothing, but go and look.’
Montell stepped over to the studio’s only other door and opened it, then looked inside. ‘The shower’s been used today,’ he called out. ‘There’s a damp towel on the floor, and a plastic cap.’
‘Yes, now go and take a look at her T-shirt. I would, but I want to keep movement in here to a minimum: it’s a confined space.’
‘Okay.’ Steele waited. ‘There are damp patches on it.’
‘I thought there would be. Are you getting the same picture as me? Amy’s just got up. She’s had a shower, being careful to keep her hair as dry as she can. She’s a stylist: she won’t do her own hair; she and her colleagues will go to work on each other’s after the salon closes. Trust me on this: I’ve been out with a couple of hairdressers in my time, and both of them asked where my shower cap was.
‘She’s almost finished drying herself,’ the DI continued, ‘when the buzzer goes. She answers it, and the killer’s there. She lets him in, but not before she’s put on the T-shirt, her knickers and the dressing-gown, and pushed the bed back into its alcove. He talks to her for a bit. She’s just up and hasn’t had breakfast, so she asks him if he’d like a coffee. He says, “yes, please,” so she goes over to the sink, fills the kettle, and she’s spooning coffee into the two mugs when he shoots her in the back of the head. He strips her, lays her out like this and then leaves.’
‘God,’ Montell whispered, ‘it’s like we were in the room when it happened, watching it.’
‘I wish we had been,’ Steele murmured. ‘Then we could have stopped the fucker.’
‘Why’s she naked? Neither Stacey nor Zrinka were.’
‘He did them in public places. He didn’t have time.’
‘And Padstow had already seen them naked.’
Steele scratched his chin. ‘I was at both post-mortems. Stacey Gavin was a pretty girl, but her body wasn’t especially attractive. She had a thick waist and a big brown mole on her side, below her left breast. Zrinka had a figure like a model, but it was disfigured by a vivid appendectomy scar. On the other hand, Army’s flawless; she’s unmarked, and her skin’s like fine china. Maybe he has a thing about perfection. Or maybe the sod just wanted to see Army naked, to humiliate her for her open dislike of him.’
‘Wouldn’t he have been taking a hell of a risk, calling at that time of the morning? A lot of people must have been going to work. There’s a big chance he’ll have been spotted.’
‘Not as big as you think. The salon doesn’t open till ten, remember, and it’s just round the corner. He could have sat here, waited till it was quiet and then made his move.’
‘Would she have let Padstow in? She didn’t like him.’
‘That’s what she said, but you never know, that may have been loyalty to her friends.’
‘Let’s go back to the why, sir. Why kill Amy? What reason could there have been?’
‘The most obvious one is that she would have been a key witness in any trial. She was the only person who could have stood in the witness box, pointed to Padstow and identified him as the guy who was chucked by both of the female victims, then followed into Zrinka’s affections, and bed, by Harry Paul.’
‘In that case, is there anyone else who could identify him? Zrinka’s mother, for example?’
‘She never met him. They only spoke on the phone. But Russ and Doreen Gavin did. Griff, let’s back out of here, get uniforms to seal the place off, and call in Arthur Dorward and his fine-tooth combers. Once that’s under way, we need to get to South Queensferry, not just to talk to Russ Gavin but to make sure he and his wife are still in one piece. I’m going to send a car there right away, but meantime, without alarming her if I can avoid it, give her a call.’
Forty-eight
‘Maybe it’s Tuesday.’
‘What?’ Tarvil Singh exclaimed, gazing bewildered at Ray Wilding, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk as he gazed at the chart on the wall.
‘I’ve just noticed. Both murders were on Tuesday: the first Tuesday in March and the first Tuesday in May. Maybe that’s the real link between them and we’ve been missing it all along.’
‘In that case we’ve got a bit less than two months to catch this guy before he does it again.’
‘Bags of time.’ Wilding sighed. ‘Where does all that take us?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Singh grunted.
‘The information we got from Mrs Dell and her boy.’
‘Nowhere forward that I can see. Okay, there’s a new connection between all three victims, in that they all had the same agent, but we knew they were linked before we went up there. Okay, if you look at the three of them,
