6

  He stared out at Hastings’ seafront. Such a quaint little seaside town.

  At this time of year, evenings seemed to begin at four. The street lights in every city and town winked on in unison and bathed the night in a sickly chemical orange.

  He leant against the railings of his balcony and gazed down at the pier, almost directly below him. There was a café there and, halfway down its broad and empty length, what appeared to be a bar or a pub. He watched the inviting lights flickering and the silhouettes of late-afternoon patrons moving around inside.

  He smiled. I actually did it. I actually killed someone.

  Those few words set his shoulders and arms trembling uncontrollably again. It wasn’t the cold, even though he was standing out here on the balcony in just a T-shirt. It was… the rush, the exhilaration, an almost equal mix of what-the-fuck-did-I-do fear and elation.

  ‘I did it,’ he whispered to himself.

  It was like losing his virginity. The first blooding of a young fox hunter. The first-ever taste of Armand de Brignac champagne. He remembered being nine years old and whispering with Marcel in the dormitory bed next to his about what it would feel like to kill another human being.

  Marcel hadn’t been interested. Marcel was into rare stamps.

  Well, now… he finally knew. Fucking great was how it felt. Better than sex or champagne. Better than drugs even. He shuddered and let out a soft whoop of adrenaline-fuelled delight.

  It felt like permission… permission to be what he was always to meant to be. The King. And this little seaside town spread out below him like a toy town was going to be his personal fiefdom very soon.

  ‘The killing was an unfortunate necessity, Father…’ he voiced aloud. At some point he was going to have to explain it. Better to get the words straight now…

  7

  Okeke brought two pints of lager over to where Jay sat. He’d picked a table by the rear window that looked out onto the pier’s decking, deserted this time of year and treacherously slick with drizzle.

  ‘Here you go, love,’ she said, setting the drinks down.

  ‘Cheers, baby,’ he said, immediately reaching for his. ‘So why the early finish today?’

  ‘Cashing in on my overtime hours,’ she replied. ‘Since the D-Sup isn’t signing off on any overtime any more, he said I could take a little flexitime.’

  ‘Well, that’s decent of him,’ Jay said, giving her a smile. ‘Cheers.’

  Okeke watched her boyfriend chug down a quarter of his pint in one go. ‘Steady, Jay. It’s only four.’

  ‘Ah… It’s okay, love. I’m not on tonight until ten,’ Jay replied.

  She looked up at him. ‘You’re working tonight?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He wiped the beer foam from his lips.

  ‘I thought you said you’d swapped shifts with Louie?’

  ‘Couldn’t get hold of him to confirm it.’ Jay tapped his phone to wake it up. ‘Nah, still no answer from the bugger. I have to be on the doors tonight, babes. I’m sorry.’

  Okeke frowned. ‘Great. I was hoping we could both get rat-arsed, grab a Chinese on the way home and have drunk sex later.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘I can’t just assume Louie’s covering for me on the door tonight. I’ve got to go in.’

  She flicked his arm.

  ‘Ow!’ he mock-yelped, rubbing it.

  ‘I desperately need to get pissed,’ she muttered. ‘Arsehole.’

  ‘Aren’t you on shift tomorrow?’ he asked, checking his phone again.

  ‘I am… but I fancied a fun night.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’ he asked, putting his phone back down once more.

  ‘I just lost my case.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s a murder case now. Above my pay grade, apparently. Boyd’s got it.’

  Jay perked up at the mention of the name. ‘How is the guv? I haven’t seen him since before Christmas.’

  ‘Fine. The same old six-foot-five ugly block of wood.’

  ‘How’s his girlfriend?’ Jay frowned for a moment. ‘Charlotte?’

  Okeke sucked air between her teeth. ‘Apparently “girlfriend” isn’t the correct term to use, according to him.’

  He laughed. ‘Friend with benefits, then?’

  ‘Also not that. They’re just “good friends”.’ She sipped her beer. ‘She’s taking time away. Because of all that shit that happened. The tower stuff.’

  Jay raised a finger. ‘Ah, right. Yeah. That.’ He nodded. ‘You know… I do worry about him, the guv.’

  Okeke snorted. ‘Um, excuse me… he’s my workmate, not yours. If there’s any worrying about a colleague to be done, that’s my job.’

  ‘What he needs is a bird, Sam,’ Jay said, ignoring her. ‘Yeah… a good solid woman. That’ll sort him out.’

  ‘Bird? And which decade have you just crawled out from?’

  ‘Huh?’

  She shook her head. Although he had a lovely soul, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. For Jay, life’s various dilemmas and their answers boiled down to certain-shaped pegs that could be banged into certain-shaped holes.

  ‘He’s a man who lost his wife and son three years ago,’ she reminded him. ‘That’s not a thing you can wallpaper over with… a new “bird”. Or are you going to tell me he’d be better off getting back on the bike…?’ She paused. ‘Seventies analogy aside.’

  Jay laughed. ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’

  She changed subject. ‘Speaking of Boyd, how’s Emma settling in behind the bar?’

  ‘Fine,’ replied Emma. She bent down and, in the fading light, managed to locate and scoop up Ozzie’s offering off the pebbles with the poop bag. ‘Not gonna lie, Dad – the shifts seem to whizz by. Which is great. I hate clock-watching.’

  Boyd nodded. It was good to hear her say that. ‘There’s nothing worse than a job that drags.’ He let Ozzie run the extendable lead out to its max as he pursued another cowardly wave back off his beach.

  ‘It definitely doesn’t drag,’ she replied.

  ‘You enjoying it, Ems?’

  She looked at him. ‘Mostly… except when you get dirty old creeps trying to hit on you across the bar.’

  ‘What do you say to them?’

  She laughed. ‘Usually stuff they can’t hear. It gets too noisy to talk when the girls come on.’

  ‘Girls?’

  ‘Uh-huh, the dancers.’

  Boyd stopped walking. ‘Hold up… Ems.’ Okeke and Jay had said nothing to him about girls dancing when they mentioned there was a bar job going if Emma wanted it.

  ‘Relax.’ She turned to look at him. ‘They’re doing the dancing, Dad, not me. I’m just serving ridiculously overpriced drinks to a bunch of dirty old men. It’s fine. And the tips are good.’

  ‘Emma… tips?!’ He wondered what Julia would make of her daughter working in a place like CuffLinks.

  ‘Jesus, Dad! Nothing dodgy! “Keep the change” kind of tips, okay?’ She took a step back and grabbed his arm to get him walking again. ‘The idiots that come in there are loaded with cash and they like to splash it around. You know?’

  He was well aware of that particular kind of idiot – rich, ruddy-faced plonkers who’d hit the mid-life-crisis speed bump and were all about buying themselves a young piece of arse.

  He could picture the inside of the club and the types of men that went there. He’d seen enough of them in his time at the Met. They were sad places, really.

  ‘Just be careful, Emma,’ he found himself saying.

  ‘I am,’ she replied. ‘Plus… I’ve got Jay watching over me.’

  Right. Much as he liked the big guy… and Okeke too, he was going to have words with her about not even hinting that CuffLinks was, he strongly suspected, nothing more than a strip club.

  ‘This is me,’ she said, letting go of his arm. They were a hundred yards short of the pier and the White Rock Theatre across the road.

  ‘You want me to wait up?’ he asked. ‘I can give you a lift home…’

  ‘Dad?’ she said, her voice rising at the end. A gentle admonishment. ‘I can call an Uber. It’s not like I can’t afford it.’

  She walked up the shingle towards the promenade, looking back to wave one last time. He watched her cross the road, then turned to gaze out to sea and the horizon, almost indistinguishable now as Friday night descended obscenely early.

  He heard someone whoop from one of the penthouse flats overlooking the pier and smiled. Someone was obviously very happy the weekend was finally here.

  Lucky them.

  8

  ‘I presume the reason it’s you here. DC Okeke, and not DCI Boyd is that… what? He doesn’t do weekend shifts?’

  Okeke laughed, sensing that Dr Palmer was having a now-familiar dig at Boyd’s weak stomach.

  ‘I think we both know why he’s not here,’ she replied. She was tempted to declare out loud that he was a big wuss, but from the look on Palmer’s face that would have been redundant; she was clearly thinking the same thing.

  The guv had actually come in early this morning: an attempt to get ahead of the in-tray full of paperwork he needed to either clear or redirect. She’d popped in to log on, before going straight out again and over to Ellessey Forensics.

  ‘He’s working this morning,’ said Okeke. ‘He was rather impressed that you Ellessey folks work weekends, too.’

  ‘I don’t usually,’ Palmer said with a sigh. ‘But I’ve got some catch-up work to do, so here I am. And then of course there’s this…’ She pulled up a stool beside the examination table. ‘I’m going to sit if you don’t mind. My back’s killing me.’

  Okeke drew up beside the table to study the twisted, broken cadaver laid out upon it. The body had the look of a lazily stuffed Guy Fawkes, arms and legs bulbous and formless; the torso had been compressed around the waist to a narrow fold, causing the skin to burst around the navel. Most of the organs of his lower abdomen hung outside his skin, like toothpaste squeezed out of an old, wrinkled tube.

  There was no recognisable head to speak of. Where the neck ended was an intact portion of jaw and teeth, but the rest of it was a flattened mush of bone, brains, skin and hair.

  ‘Well, now…’ Palmer began, ‘this one’s a bit of a mess. I hear he came out of a garbage compactor?’

  Okeke nodded. ‘He’d been tipped in by accident. We’re keen to know if he was dead before he got mangled.’ She was well aware that there was a young man who really needed to know the answer to that as soon as possible.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Palmer replied. ‘He would have died several hours before, I think.’ She lifted one shoulder up carefully and Okeke heard the crackle of shattered bones grinding. ‘Come and look at this,’ she said.

  Okeke rounded the table to Palmer’s side. The pathologist pointed out five incisions at the top of the back and between the shoulders.

  ‘He was stabbed with a large knife. And these are all deep; this was done with force and at least one of them punctured his heart. These wounds are what I would consider “frenzied” incisions. As in, the whole blade was fully inserted… right up to the handle.’

  Okeke nodded. What she was looking at matched the security camera footage she’d watched yesterday. Frenzied was a good word for it.

  ‘You get stab wounds like this with fights… The adrenaline’s in full flow, punches flying, lots of kinetic energy.’

  ‘But not in the back, surely?’ said Okeke.

  ‘Not in a fight, no. But I’m talking about the energy behind these penetrations. There’s also this…’ Palmer placed the shoulder back down gently and pointed to the neck, just beneath what remained of the man’s jaw. ‘The killer also had a go at cutting his throat. It’s not an effective attempt, to be fair. On its own it wouldn’t have been fatal. It missed the carotid.’ Palmer looked at Okeke. ‘But that would seem like someone wanting to make absolutely sure he was dead.’

  Okeke nodded.

  Dr Palmer settled back on her stool. ‘I would say this was a very deliberate and very determined attempt to end a life.’

  ‘Are there any identifying marks on the body?’ Okeke asked.

  Palmer turned over the left forearm to reveal a tattoo: a grinning skull with a red beret and an eagle’s wings spread out behind it. ‘At a guess, I’d say our Doe is an ex-para.’

  Boyd took the call as he watched Sully and Magnusson do a final pick-through of what was left of their pile of rubbish. The stench inside the vehicle maintenance workshop was almost unbearable. He was relieved to have an excuse to back out of it, into the fresh air.

  It was Okeke on the phone. ‘All right, guv?’ she inquired.

  ‘Better now I’m outside,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve managed to completely stink out the maintenance depot.’ He had a feeling it was going to linger for days, if not weeks, and would well and truly piss off the mechanics who had to work in there. ‘What have you got for me, Okeke?’

  ‘Our guy was dead hours before he was tipped into the truck. Dr Palmer said cause of death was several deep penetrations to the back, which pierced the heart. He was attacked from behind, as we saw on the footage from the security cam. Oh… and there was an attempt to cut his throat for good measure.’

  ‘Christ. That was what he was doing when he reached into the bin, then.’

  ‘Right,’ said Okeke. ‘Not your average fist fight after closing.’

  To say the least. ‘Anything that’s going to help us ID him?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘He’s got a para tattoo.’

  ‘Parrot?’

  ‘Para!’ Okeke repeated. ‘As in… he’s probably ex-paratrooper regiment.’

  ‘Ah, right, got you. And nothing else? No wallet, car keys? Parking ticket? What about his phone?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Great.’ Boyd sighed. ‘All right, then. Better get yourself back here and we can start brainstorming our next steps.’

  He hung up and lingered outside the open doors of the workshop, preferring the cold damp aerosol-like rain to the pungent aroma inside. It was unlikely that anyone at Hastings would have opened a missing persons file just yet. A call from a concerned loved one might have been made, but since the victim was an adult male, there’d have been the usual ‘give him twenty-four hours’ advice from Control, followed by a ‘you’ll see, love… he’ll be back with an apology and a bunch of flowers, later today’.

  All the same, it might be worth checking on LEDS.

  ‘We should mobilize some boots on the ground,’ said Boyd. ‘Get them pounding the pavements. The guy’s mobile phone could have been tossed into any of those front yards along Milward Road.’

  ‘Or the killer could have it,’ said Okeke.

  Boyd leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘He’d have to be a complete moron to hang on to it.’

  Okeke threw a paperclip at his gut.

  ‘What the –?’

  ‘Your belly’s showing,’ she replied.

  He looked down and spotted a shirt button undone. He fumbled hastily to do it up. ‘He may well have tossed it into another bin further down the road.’

  ‘Which could mean it’s sitting in Sully’s garbage pile,’ said Okeke.

  ‘Or in one of the bins that wasn’t emptied,’ mused Boyd. ‘Either way, it would be helpful to get our hands on it to ID the victim.’

  Okeke sat forward. ‘You think we should –’

  ‘Go and rummage in some bins?’ Boyd pulled a face. ‘No, I definitely don’t. We can get the uniforms checking those at the same time as they’re checking the gardens. There won’t be another collection until Thursday. If it’s there, it’s not going anywhere.’

  Okeke clicked through the security camera footage, stepping through it absently, frame by frame. ‘Do you think they knew each other?’

  Boyd sat forward again and played with his copy of the footage on his screen. ‘Possibly.’ The sudden and overwhelming violence of the attack suggested a motive driven by hate. ‘Revenge?’ he idled aloud.

  ‘Crime of passion?’ added Okeke.

  ‘Or booze-fuelled testosterone.’

  ‘What? ’Ere, mate, you spilt my bloody pint?’ Okeke said with her best pub-bloke voice.

  Boyd shrugged. ‘Or… ’Ere, mate, you tried chattin’ up me girl.’ He scrubbed back to the start of the clip and watched the attack again. It seemed too ferocious, too desperate to be the result of some squabble in a club. ‘The attacker’s bloody manic. That kind of rage, it –’

  ‘Oh, Boyd-eey!’ The piercing high-pitched sing-song voice rang out across the floor.

  He turned to see Sully approaching, with Magnusson, head and shoulders taller, following in his wake. Sully was holding a plastic in-tray in both hands as though it was a candle-lit birthday cake. ‘You’re going to be very happeee!’ he sing-songed again.

  Sully set the tray down on Boyd’s desk. It held a large clear plastic evidence bag with a number of items inside. ‘One blood-spattered set of house keys; no address on the fob unfortunately. One Fitbit watch in good working order… and one tie clip with the word “CuffLinks” on it.’

  Okeke got up from her desk and hurried over to look down at the evidence. ‘Shit. That’s Jay’s club.’

  9

  There was something about rubbing stained beeswax into old, thirsty wood that he found strangely satisfying. Sensual even. Maybe it was because it felt a little like he was massaging Sam, gently easing the wax into the grain like oil into the pores of her skin.

  Not that he’d ever tell her that, he cautioned himself. She’d take the piss out of him relentlessly for getting horny over old oak furniture. But… ooh, that gentle circling motion with the cloth that brought up the whorls of wood grain to a rich, dark, shiny lustre was really quite something.

  Jay reached out for his can of Black Label and took a generous slug. Saturday morning was his Man-Cave Time – a pass to do whatever he wanted whether Sam was at work or not. No judging. No guilt trip. It was also workshop time for him and Louie. Sam loved to tease him about his Saturday mornings, saying the ‘boys’ were playing Repair Shop together in the garage.