‘Hot Fuzz.’

  ‘Right. It’s kind of that. I’m getting reminded that coming down from the Met does not make me Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Morse.’

  She nodded. Ozzie swaggered back into the dining room and rested his muzzle on her knee.

  ‘So, look, no more of this feeling sorry for me,’ he said gently. ‘I want to see you begin your life. Not hang around with me because you’re worried I’m not going to cope without you. All right? Deal?’

  ‘I’ll try, Dad.’

  He grabbed her other hand, and raised his eyebrows, waggling them at her. ‘Just try?’

  ‘Okay!’ she laughed. ‘Deal!’

  Chef Mike pinged and the kettle clacked off a moment later.

  Emma grinned. ‘Right! It’s puddin’ time!’

  33

  Rather than spend the whole of Monday morning brooding and scrolling through news sites on his phone, Boyd decided to throw himself into the to-do list entitled ‘Things about the house that need sorting’. He’d been pushing that list away from the moment they’d started unpacking. It was time to man up. It was too bloody easy these days to sit on the sofa, endlessly swiping upward or trawling nostalgically through Facebook.

  Boyd shook his head.

  Facebook. That was something he’d not looked at in a long, long while. It was too bloody painful. The constant trickle of condolences had finally dried up, thank God, but Facebook itself was continuing to be an insensitive arse. The ‘On this day whatever years ago’ photographs took their toll. The pictures of all four of them together – at Alton Towers, Harry Potter World, eating a bucket of deep-fried chicken at a music festival… It was never-ending. There should be a button on Facebook, he thought, that allowed you to say those people are dead, so fuck off with all the memories for a bit please. The opposite of a Like button. A middle finger button, maybe.

  Well, there was stuff here in the real world that he could and really should be cracking on with. The house – lovely, grand and incredibly priced though it was – was shabby, sad-looking and in need of some Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen style make-over.

  The first time he’d viewed it with Emma, he’d been amazed at how much he’d be getting for his money. The contrast from their Clapham two-up two-down to this vast mansion had dazzled him. He hadn’t needed to request a second viewing. He hadn’t even bothered to offer less than the asking price; it had seemed like such a bargain.

  Now, having been here for a couple of weeks, the magical spell was beginning to lift. He could see all the little gotchas that the surveyor had dutifully pointed out and that he’d wilfully ignored: the cracked ceiling roses and missing sections of coving, the rotting window frames, the patches of damp. The pointing on the brickwork that was beginning to fail. The roof tiles that would need replacing…

  His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket. He fished it out, expecting to see Emma’s face on the screen. She’d gone to do the weekly shop and tended to check in with him at least twice to see if there was anything he could think of to add to her list.

  It was an unknown caller. Chances were it was another sales-bot calling to see if his was a legitimate phone number.

  ‘Boyd,’ he answered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Boyd,’ he repeated. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Jo. Jo Bambridge. I was expecting Samantha Okeke to answer.’ ‘Is this not her number?’

  For a moment he had a complete mental blank. Then he suddenly remembered. Okeke must have picked up the wrong cards.

  ‘It’s okay, Ms Bambridge. This is DCI Boyd. Did you want to speak specifically to DC Okeke?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well… she said if anything else occurred to me, if I remembered anything else that might be useful –’

  ‘To call, yes. And have you? Remembered anything?’ He grabbed a pen and his notebook.

  ‘I… I just wanted to say that last night I was going through photos on my old phone. I’ve got thousands –’

  Don’t we all?

  ‘– and my photos go back, well, quite a few years. I can’t bring myself to delete them, you know? So, I was going backwards, to the time before we split up – you know, happier times. God, we looked so happy… smiling, laughing.’ She paused and took a deep breath. Boyd hoped she wasn’t going to start crying again. ‘Anyway, I came across some photos I took in the office the day I walked out. I completely forget they were there on my phone.’

  ‘Photos of the office?’ he asked, willing this to turn into something useful.

  ‘Gerald’s computer screen. His chat screen. The things they’d been saying to each other… sending to each other. I took photos to confront him with, in case he just closed it down or tried to claim I imagined it or… or… misunderstood –’

  Boyd interrupted in disbelief. ‘You’ve got actual readable images of his chat history with this woman?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, god…’ Her voice was wobbling now. ‘It was… just so lewd. Disgusting. She was… throwing herself at him. And… oh… God…’ She began to sob.

  Where was Okeke when you needed her? Boyd was no good at this sort of thing.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘Slow down. Take it easy.’

  ‘I… completely… forgot about them… I suppose I tried to blank it all out…’ Her words were slurring. He wondered if she’d been drinking. ‘He was…’

  ‘He was what, Jo?’

  ‘He was desperate for her.’

  Boyd sighed. That couldn’t be pleasant for the poor woman to read again after all this time. ‘Look, Jo, that must have been horrible to stumble across.’

  He could hear her breath hitching down the line. He doubted he was helping that much.

  Finally she spoke again. ‘I can send you the screenshots, if it helps. But I’d need you to be completely discreet.’

  He was fully aware that he ought to tell her to call DC Okeke and send them to her instead. Officially he was on sick leave. He’d be in a whole heap of shit if he continued to investigate. But since when had that ever stopped him?

  ‘How many photos do you have?’ he asked, trying not to sound too eager.

  ‘I took three screenshots. Very quickly. One’s a bit blurry but the other two are fine.’

  ‘Okay. And you can definitely read what’s on his screen?’

  She mumbled an affirmative. ‘It’s just text. Slightly blurry. There’s no pictures of her.’

  ‘All right.’ He sighed. What am I doing… ‘Text them to me.’

  ‘You promise you’ll be discreet with them?’ Jo asked, worried.

  ‘Yes, I promise.’

  A pause. ‘Thank you, Mr… sorry… PC Boyd.’

  ‘DCI,’ he corrected her. He’d sweated fifteen years to get those letters in front of his bloody name. But she’d already hung up.

  Ozzie was looking up at him, curiously.

  ‘Now,’ he explained to the dog, ‘that was just a phone call about some sleazy sexting. You’re way past that kind of nonsense, aren’t you, old son?’

  Ozzie opened his mouth, letting his pink tongue roll out of the side.

  Boyd smiled. ‘Maybe not, then, you randy sod.’

  His phone buzzed again. He tapped the screen and opened the message.

  Here you are. Please, please be discreet with these.

  As promised, she’d sent three images of a computer screen. He tapped and expanded the first one. It showed a spreadsheet open in the background and on the left a chat box with speech bubbles on the left and right trailing upwards. And, yes, Jo Bambridge had been right: it was legible, and it was lewd.

  But what caught his eye was the deep pink banner at the top of the chat box, showing the usernames of both people in the chat room. He could see that ‘GerryBoy’ was one. Classy. The other was just a blur.

  He opened the second image. The banner was entirely out of shot in this one. He tried the third.

  The name GerryBoy was on the left of the banner in blue. In the middle was a red heart logo, and on the right, in Barbie pink, was the name Zophia Kardevev.

  ‘Zophia Kardevev. That,’ he said, turning to the ever-attentive Ozzie, ‘sounds very much like a Russian name. What do you think, boy?’

  Ozzie tilted his head to one side and blinked in agreement.

  34

  Emma came in the front door, carrying three Tesco bags and one from Homebase.

  ‘You all right, Dad,’ she said as he ran up the hallway. ‘You look like someone in a big hurry.’

  Boyd opened the door to his study, and his jaw dropped. He’d probably only stepped into the room twice since they’d moved in. The last time he’d peered into it, it had been a dumping ground of stacked cardboard boxes, his Ikea computer workstation in pieces on the floor and his slouch chair on castors shoved into a corner, still wrapped in plastic.

  Now, everything was all set up.

  The workstation had been assembled. His ancient PC was out of its box, the cables and monitor all waiting patiently to be plugged in. The cardboard boxes – thank you, Ems! – had mostly gone. There was just one more stack of boxes to be processed, and chances were they contained the Christmas decorations and the plastic tree anyway, all of which could be dumped in the loft until they were needed.

  ‘Whoa!’ he exclaimed, turning round to face Emma.

  ‘I sorted your study out days ago,’ she said. ‘I thought you –’

  ‘This is amazing, Ems! This is amazing! I promise I’ll say thank you properly later – I’m really sorry, I just need to do something for work,’ he said as he entered the room, leaving her standing, bags in hand, in the hallway.

  ‘Police work?’ she called out.

  ‘Yeah. A bit.’

  ‘You want a coffee?’

  ‘Yes please,’ he mumbled, already busy with the nest of cables draped across the table.

  He busied himself plugging everything in, setting things out on the workstation’s modest table surface, and then switched the PC on. He tapped his fingers impatiently as he waited for Windows to slowly stir from its slumber. It gradually dawned on him that there was a new Wi-Fi router he’d have to connect it to, before he could actually get online. Bloody technology. Finally his computer woke up, but before it would connect to the world again it decided it needed a thorough update.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he muttered as Emma entered with his coffee.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Microsoft’s the matter,’ he said, nodding at the blue screen. ‘Stupid fucking thing.’ He stood up and took the mug from her.

  ‘What are you doing on the computer? Research? Investigating? Is it something you’re allowed to tell me?’ she asked hopefully.

  Technically, no, it wasn’t. But then, technically, he should probably have redirected Jo Bambridge to the inquiry team’s phone number in the first instance.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman.’

  Her brows bounced up in surprise. ‘Right… For yourself or for “a friend”?’

  He laughed. ‘No, not for me, you muppet. One of the victims on the yacht was – well, it looks like she was – a Russian woman. We’ve only had a first name to work with up until now.’

  ‘And now you have a surname?’

  ‘I’m hoping so.’

  Emma pulled her iPhone from the back pocket of her dungarees. ‘All right – give it to me.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘It’s okay, Dad,’ she said, ‘I won’t share it with anyone. Promise!’

  He glanced at his computer. The updates bar hadn’t moved. ‘Kardavev,’ he told her, and spelt it out.

  ‘Do you know what she looks like?’

  He shook his head. ‘We haven’t managed to get a single clear shot of her face so far.’

  ‘Well, is she old? Young? Blonde? Dark? White?’

  Boyd re-ran the CCTV images in his head. ‘Dark hair. Long. White. Slim. Young.’ He thought back to what Jo had told him and mentally added Big tits to the list. She’d said Zophia was twenty years younger than her. ‘Early to mid twenties, at a guess,’ he added. ‘Probably quite glamorous.’

  ‘And from Russia,’ prompted Emma.

  ‘Yes, well, based on her name, I think so.’

  ‘Oka-a-a-ay… glamorous, Russian, young… and over here?’ Emma frowned through her glasses as her thumbs got to work. ‘I think I know exactly where to go.’

  ‘I’ve got a gut feeling she’s some kind of a scammer. Or maybe just a girl looking for a rich sugar daddy.’

  ‘Aha!’ Emma said. ‘There’s actually a social media platform dedicated to that.’

  ‘A social media site for sugar babies seeking sugar daddies?’ Why didn’t that surprise him. These days there seemed to be a social media platform for everything.

  While Emma tapped away, Boyd looked back at his computer. The monitor was displaying a cheery image of Douglas fir trees and the snow-dusted Rocky Mountains, on top of which the bloody Windows Update bar had barely advanced.

  ‘There,’ she said. She turned her phone round to show him.

  He took it from her. The deep pink at the top of the screen was what drew his attention first. The same suggestive, fleshy hue from the screenshots. The site was called AskForSasha.com.

  Below the banner were a list of smiling female faces and profiles. All very glamorous selfies that he suspected had been filtered to within an inch of their absurd, almost cartoonish lives.

  The name Zophia Kardevev in the search bar had produced two direct hits, plus a seemingly endless list of near-misses.

  The first Zophia Kardevev was young, attractive and had long brown hair. He looked at her biography. Christ – it was like looking back in time to the seventies – she gave her vital statistics (36, 24, 34) before anything else. Then her age (twenty-four). After that came her sales pitch.

  I am looking for a nice man to take care of me. I like Big Daddies. Not model types but a real-looking man. And not young. I like my husband to be mature, thoughtful, intelligent, generous. So let’s talk about love!

  ‘Jesus. They’re not exactly subtle, are they?’ said Boyd.

  ‘Well, it is what it is,’ Emma replied. ‘They want some rich old saddo to shower them with gifts and in exchange they’ll, you know, be their trophy girls.’ She shrugged. ‘At least it’s honest. This is what I’ve got to offer and this is what I want kind of thing.’

  True.

  ‘It’s a lot less random and expensive than going out to bars or night clubs,’ she added. ‘And honestly, after Covid, the idea of sweating on a crowded dance floor and getting corny chat-up lines sprayed into your face by some drunken arse isn’t that appealing to us girls these days.’

  He looked up at her.

  ‘And before you ask, Dad: no, I’m not on Tinder and I’m not on AskForSasha.com either. Well, not yet anyway,’ she added with a smirk.

  He glared at her, then turned his attention back to the phone. Zophia Number Two was blonde and equally glamorous in a sort of caricature-like way. Her painted brows made her look like Groucho Marx, though.

  I want a man with gsoh and plenty of meat on him. I want a Love Bear who can make me smile and make me feel safe. I will be yours, if you will be mine.

  ‘What’s a g–’

  ‘Good sense of humour,’ Emma said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ll have to learn what those sort of things mean if you’re ever going to get out there again, Dad.’

  He laughed sarcastically. ‘I’m not going to be “getting out there” any time soon, Ems. That ship has sailed for now.’

  ‘You’re forty-six, not eighty-six,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m also not ready to put myself out there like a sad old Toby mug sitting in a charity shop window! Neither do I want to go “shopping” for a partner like they’re a pair of Nike trainers.’

  She smiled. ‘Well, hopefully not on this website at any rate.’

  ‘Or Tinder, or… Match.com… or… the others.’

  She looked over her glasses at him. ‘That’s pretty much exhausted your knowledge of dating sites, hasn’t it?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not something I’ve felt the need to research yet, my little lambkin.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re just going to trust to blind luck, then? Hope that Mrs Perfect will one day bump into you and you’ll have one of those rom-com encounters in the canned veg aisle at Tesco?’

  ‘I’ve already met and married Mrs Perfect. If I ever meet someone again, it’s, at best, going to be a Mrs You’ll Do.’

  She laughed. He returned to scanning the search results . The names of the near-misses were growing more and more approximate. The ages increasing. He wondered if that was coincidental or whether the search results, other than the exact hits, were actually sorted by age, youngest first.

  Jesus. It really did feel like the grubbiest place in the virtual world to be loitering around. The kind of site that demanded a history purge and a thorough hand-wash afterwards.

  He scrolled back to the top of the list. ‘Can you screenshot the first two girls and text them to me?’

  She took her phone back. ‘Sure. I’ll send you their links too.’

  Boyd returned to his computer to see the updates bar had managed to budge a couple of inches. Clearly Microsoft Windows would need the whole morning to get re-acquainted with his computer.

  ‘You should, though,’ Emma said.

  ‘Should what?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘Think about what?’ he asked, deliberately not getting her meaning.

  ‘Putting yourself out there. Maybe using something like Match.com?’

  He sighed. ‘Look, Em, if it happens, it happens. I’m really not in a hurry to find someone.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, what about you? You’re not getting any younger, chicken.’

  ‘Pfft!’ she replied. ‘Luckily things have moved on a bit since, you know, ancient times. It’s not like I need to find a man before I’m thirty or I’ll be doomed to be a spinster for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Well, no –’

  ‘I’m not in a hurry either, Dad. Although…’