‘It’s that she’s better at the head-to-head than any of us.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m going to get a pie from the canteen, do you want anything?’
‘Chips,’ Stacey said.
Alvin gave her a puzzled look. ‘You never eat chips.’
‘I want to feel bad about myself because all my digital wizardry got knocked out of the park by a nun. Which is about as medieval as it gets.’
He patted her shoulder and headed out of the room. But before he could satisfy their cravings for junk food, his phone rang. ‘Get back now,’ Stacey said. ‘The warrant’s through.’
There was nothing subtle about ReMIT’s arrival at Mark Conway’s house. But it soon became obvious there was nobody there to be alarmed about the arrival of a cavalcade of police and scene-of-crimes vehicles. Alvin directed the BMP officers to check out the garage and the other outbuildings and to secure the house once they’d taken the battering ram to the back door. ‘Makes it less obvious if Conway comes back in the middle of our fun and games,’ Alvin said. From the well-equipped utility room, he called Sophie in the incident room to report Conway’s absence.
‘Can you get someone to check whether he’s in his office?’ Alvin asked.
‘Have we not got a team at his office?’
‘We didn’t get the warrant for his office. Just his home. The magistrate didn’t think there was sufficient cause for us to raid his company HQ. At least, not yet.’
‘Why did nobody tell me that?’
Alvin decided to treat that as a rhetorical question. ‘So, we’re going to crack on with searching the house. The forensics crew are on site.’
‘We’re going to end up with egg on our faces,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m as keen as anyone to catch this killer but I simply can’t believe Mark Conway is a serial killer. Full stop. And young boys? That makes no sense. I got no gay vibe off him, ever.’
Alvin shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t perving over teenage boys. If we’ve learned anything from the whole #MeToo thing, it’s that powerful men are very good at using their power to hide the bad stuff they do.’ He wanted her to stop defending Conway so he could get on with his job but she was the ranking officer so he had to put up and shut up. He stared unseeingly at a shelf of laundry products and let it wash over him.
‘Yeah, but a lot of the time their behaviour was an open secret among the poor sods who had to keep their mouths shut to save their jobs and their own reputations. I never heard anything like that about Mark. Sure, he was supportive of young men coming up in the business. He often talked about how he’d had to overcome so many obstacles when he was starting out. But he held out a hand to young women too, there was nothing inappropriate in any of it.’ There was a defensive note in her voice, as if she was waiting to be shot down in flames unreasonably.
‘Well, maybe you’re right and we’re all going to look like bunch of fuckwits. But I wouldn’t like to try to pull the wool over Paula’s eyes.’
Sophie harrumphed. ‘Nobody’s infallible, Alvin.’
‘I need to get on, guv,’ he said, closing down the call. He knew who his money would be on if this were a race. ‘Right. Steve, you take the home office. Karim, living room. I’ll do the master bedroom.’
Gloved and suited up, he moved upstairs, checking each room on the first floor as he went. The master bedroom was unmistakable. Not only was it the largest, with a luxurious en suite bathroom and a separate bedroom, it was the only one that showed any sign of being inhabited. The laundry basket contained underwear, socks, a T-shirt and a dress shirt, the pillows were randomly depressed and the duvet on the superking bed was rumpled. Clearly Conway didn’t have live-in staff, or even a daily housekeeper, even though he could have readily afforded it. Alvin wondered whether that was because he was anxious about prying eyes.
A massive TV filled most of the wall opposite the bed. Alvin picked up the remote and flicked it on. The default was a sports channel showing a repeat of Liverpool’s remarkable European Championship semi-final victory over Barcelona. Not a glory likely to crown Bradfield Vics’ season any time soon, Alvin reckoned. Next to the remote on the bedside table, a thin hardback called Black Boots and Football Pinks. Alvin picked it up and thumbed through it. Some sort of nostalgic tribute to the beautiful game.
There was little else of interest in the room. No drugs stash in the bedside table drawers, unless you counted a box of vitamin C and zinc supplements. No porn tucked under the mattress. No sex toys in the ottoman at the foot of the bed, unless a fake fur winter-weight throw was what turned you on. Even the decorations on the walls – three framed, signed Bradfield Vics shirts – gave nothing away about who Mark Conway was beneath his carefully confected public image.
The bathroom offered no surprises. An array of expensive toiletries lined the glass shelves. A box of condoms, a blister pack of ibuprofen, a half-squeezed tube of haemorrhoid cream, a jar of CBD muscle rub, a tub of cotton wool buds and an electric razor were the entire contents of the mirrored bathroom cabinet. In the shower, a large sponge sat in a chrome caddy alongside shampoo and shower gel. Conway didn’t even have gold taps, which Alvin had thought was compulsory for any self-respecting self-made man who was also a football fanatic.
The dressing room revealed that his suits were all made-to-measure by the same Bradfield tailor. Alvin, a relatively recent immigrant to the city, didn’t recognise the name of a craftsman who had made his reputation in the 1990s providing sharply styled suits for a slew of famous actors
