Whatever it was, it could have slithered under one of the cupboards that lined the walls to her left. She was trying to puzzle out how to check without contaminating the crime scene or getting herself shot when she heard heavy boots clumping down the stairs.
Then, in her ear, intimate again despite its agitation, Foster’s voice.
‘Stand down. Everybody stand down.’
Finch and two officers Gilchrist didn’t recognize filled the passage. Finch was white-faced, his eyes panicked. The three men crowded into the kitchen. Finch looked at the body at Gilchrist’s feet.
‘Shit, Gilchrist – you do that?’
His voice trembled. One of the men with him pushed forward. Gestured to her.
‘You’re needed upstairs. We’ll take care of this.’
Gilchrist bridled at his tone.
‘And you are?’
The man was about six inches taller than her and broad enough to fill up most of the kitchen doorway. He smiled, revealing two missing front teeth. It made him look like a big kid.
‘Just a messenger. You’re needed upstairs.’
He stepped to one side, extending his hand in an invitation for her to go past. Finch was still gawping at the body on the floor. The second man was smirking at Gilchrist.
She pushed past them and headed for the first floor. There was a bedroom at the top of the stairs. Harry Potter was standing against the wall looking blankly along the landing.
Gilchrist edged past him. A second door was open to her right. A bathroom. The toilet faced the door. A man was sitting on it, hunched forward, his head over his bony knees, his trousers and a widening pool of blood eddying around his ankles.
Most of the policemen were crowded in the doorway of the front bedroom, looking in, guns dangling. She could hear a television blaring somewhere in the room.
She was tall enough to see over the shoulders of the two who were blocking her way. She saw the double bed, saw the man sitting up in it. He was bare-chested, tilted to one side. There was a spray of blood and other material on the wall behind him and a red jagged hole in the centre of his forehead. Someone hadn’t been aiming at body mass.
The naked woman sitting dead beside him had no face left to speak of.
Gilchrist seemed to have a heightened sense of smell. The man and woman had been having sex, she could tell. But there was also the smell of cordite, sweat, blood and shit.
She could hear the heavy breathing of the policemen all around her. Ragged, snorting. Animal.
‘I was told I was needed upstairs,’ she said to the first policeman to notice her presence. He looked at her coldly. Slowly, they all turned to her. She shivered.
‘Chief Superintendent Foster?’ she said.
The first man she’d addressed tilted his head as if to get a better look at her. He frowned.
‘Outside.’
She went back down the stairs. She glanced down the corridor to the kitchen as if she could picture tomorrow’s headline there, printed in large letters on the fridge. Neatly alliterative: Massacre in Milldean.
Finch and the other two policemen had gone. The body of the skinny man was still there. The pool of blood had spread wider across the floor, thick and syrupy, though other footprints had now joined her own. Finch and the others she assumed.
She walked to the door of the kitchen and, crouching, peered under the cupboards. She was thinking about what had fallen from the man’s hand. But she could see nothing.
TWO
I was at an official dinner in the banqueting room of the Royal Pavilion when the roof fell in on my career. My beeper vibrated in my belt just as Bernard Rafferty was beginning to grate.
Rafferty was the director of the Pavilion, a pompous little man who also wrote political biographies. I saw him all the time in Brighton – for though it might be a city, it is still a small town – but I also regularly encountered him in national radio and TV studios. We were both used as pundits, although his favourite topic of conversation was himself. Tonight he was launching a fund-raising initiative to turn a rundown part of the city near the station into a cultural quarter.
I was sitting at one of a number of round tables in the ornately decorated room. They were ordered around the long central table set for a Victorian banquet. A huge dragon chandelier hung over it from the canopied ceiling decorated with fantastic animals. Around the perimeter of the room were Spode blue lampstands and rosewood sideboards and the walls were hung with large canvases of Chinese domestic scenes. The room was an incredible confection. As was this gathering.
The top table was filled with local politicians and wealthy businessmen. Both the city’s MPs were there with the Leader of the Council, Rupert Colley, sandwiched between them. All three looked to be texting on their phones. Winston Hart, the head of the Southern Police Authority, was gazing up at the ceiling.
I was hoping the Prince Regent had more fun when he stayed here than I’d ever had at these dinners. A young woman from the council’s tourism department had been mildly flirting. She’d pressed her business card into my hand and insisted I call her if I ever wanted a private tour of the Pavilion. I’d enjoyed the attention but had not taken it seriously. I loved my wife, Molly, who was at home in the grip of another migraine.
Events like this were enough to induce migraine in anyone. Molly, however, was particularly unsuited to her role as company wife. She suffered from depression. It had come on after the birth of our second child, Tom, and had never really gone away.
Medication lifted her moods but, in common with many depressives, when her mood was lifted she chose not to take the medication, thus prompting a new bout of despair.
I whispered an excuse to the tourism officer and left the banqueting room unobtrusively, looking at the number on the beeper only when I was in the corridor.
My deputy, Philip Macklin. I frowned. I’m an obsessive by nature. I’ve always found it difficult to delegate. Once I made Chief Constable – the youngest in the country – I recognized that was neither practicable nor good management practice. I resolved that my management style would be as liberal as my policing policies – well, all but one of my policing policies.
Delegation was key, I knew, and because I was reluctant I overcompensated. I delegated too much. The difficulty I had with delegation was compounded in my deputy’s case by the fact that I wasn’t sure he was up to the job.
I speed-dialled him.
‘Philip, it’s Bob.’
‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we have a major situation.’ Macklin sounded panicked. No change there, then. ‘A dynamic entry by the tactical firearms unit. Home arrest. The information was sound… Seemed sound.’
‘Terrorists?’
‘No, sir.’
‘You were the gold commander?’
My force operated the standard gold/silver/bronze system of command and control for firearms operations and incidents. Gold commanders, who were at least chief inspectors or superintendents, could take responsibility for authorizing firearms issue for specific operations. They took strategic command with the help of a tactical adviser.
One of the things I intended to address was that we had far too many officers qualified to be gold commanders. There were around seventy, which meant that none of them got an opportunity to gain much experience of this most sensitive of duties.
For dynamic entry, the gold commander needed to be one of my four assistant chief constables. Macklin, as my deputy, was the most senior, though not the best.
‘I’m gold commander, yes, sir.’
