‘Age?’

  Jay pursed his lips. ‘Young, young-looking. Under thirty maybe? He was well dressed. But then they all are. But he was expensively dressed, if you get my meaning. Like designer stuff.’

  ‘Did he say anything threatening to Louie?’ asked Okeke.

  ‘He didn’t say anything.’

  ‘And then he went into CuffLinks?’

  Jay nodded.

  ‘What time was this?’ asked Boyd.

  Jay shook his head again. ‘I can’t remember. But the lobby cam will tell you.’

  Boyd made a note of that. ‘Right.’

  Jay looked at Okeke. ‘Is this shit for real? Louie’s really dead?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m so sorry, baby.’

  11

  CuffLinks manager Luigi DeSantis was either an incredibly helpful bloke, or, Boyd suspected, just keen to get them in, out and away from his club as quickly as possible.

  He bundled Boyd, Okeke and Jay through the bar area, where Boyd spotted Emma restocking bottles, and into a back office with security camera monitors lined up above a desk along one wall.

  ‘What’s this about?’ asked DeSantis. ‘We don’t have fights or dealers here. This is an exclusive members-only –’

  ‘Louie’s dead,’ said Jay flatly. ‘Some bastard jumped him from behind and stabbed him to death while he walked home.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ DeSantis sat down hard on the nearest chair. ‘Dead? Actually dead?!’

  Boyd nodded. ‘We believe the assailant was in the club earlier in the evening.’

  DeSantis eyes bulged. ‘Really? This is not that kind of a place. We don’t have fights… or…’

  ‘We have reason to believe something – an interaction – occurred between Louie and one of your members,’ Okeke explained.

  ‘What… sort of interaction?’ DeSantis asked.

  ‘Jay says you’ve got a security cam in the lobby?’ Boyd said, ignoring DeSantis’s question.

  DeSantis nodded. ‘But this is a private club, Mr Boyd. Privacy for my clients is, well, it’s very important…’

  ‘We’re not here to embarrass anyone,’ Boyd assured him. ‘We’ve got a pretty decent description from Jay. We just want to see if we can grab a half-decent image of the bloke coming in.’

  DeSantis looked up at the row of monitors. ‘So you want to view the CCTV?’ He spread his hands at the desk. Be my guests.’ He stood up. ‘Can I get any of you a coffee or something?’ Then he shook his head. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee,’ said Okeke. ‘Black please. Jay’ll take a white. Guv?’

  ‘Same,’ Boyd said. ‘I’ll let you two get started.’ He turned to DeSantis. ‘Do you mind if I go and say hello to Emma?’

  ‘Emma on the bar?’ DeSantis had a pair Groucho Marx-like brows that bounced up. ‘You know her?’

  ‘She’s my daughter,’ Boyd said, smiling. ‘Emma Boyd?’

  ‘Ahhh.’ DeSantis nodded. ‘She’s a good girl. Very hard worker. She’ll do well here.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Boyd said. ‘Just mind you keep an eye on her for me. All right?’

  DeSantis backed out of the office to make the coffees, and Boyd ambled over towards the bar. The club was every tacky cliché he’d been expecting: leather and chrome, poles on mirrored podiums, couches around drinks tables tucked into discreet nooks, and several roped-off premium VIP areas with curtains that could be drawn for extra privacy.

  Emma spotted him approaching and her mouth dropped open. ‘Dad? What the hell are you doing here?’

  Boyd pulled up a stool and sat down. ‘So it is a bloody strip club. I knew it!’

  Emma carried on restocking a shelf with bottles of tonic water. ‘It’s a VIP club.’

  Boyd turned to nod at the dance poles. ‘With strippers?’

  ‘Pole dancers,’ she countered. ‘There’s a difference.’

  ‘Same thing, really, isn’t it? Jiggling flesh to be ogled.’

  ‘All right, Wokey McWokeface’

  He laughed dryly. ‘Just… given all the left-leaning, feminist, bra-burning spiel I’ve had from you in the past… I’m surprised that you’re okay working in a place like this.’

  ‘The pay’s way better than the hotel,’ she replied. ‘And I’m constantly busy. It goes fast.’

  ‘And what do you think your mum would have to say about this?’ he asked.

  ‘The exploitation of young women?’

  Boyd nodded.

  Emma stopped shelving the bottles and stood up straight. ‘I think she’d agree with me that it’s the women who are exploiting the stupid older men with their big fat wallets.’

  Boyd smiled and shook his head, but this was something they could debate another time. ‘Do you know Louie Collins?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Jay’s mate? Yeah. They both work on the door. He’s a really nice guy. Why?’

  There was no easy way to say it. ‘I’m afraid he’s dead, Ems,’ he said, reaching over the counter to squeeze her arm. ‘Someone stabbed him to death after his shift on Thursday.’

  ‘What?!’ Her jaw dangled. ‘You’re shitting me!’

  ‘No. It’s… it’s very real. A murder case. My murder case.’

  ‘Jesus, Dad,’ she whispered, still reeling.

  ‘Jay’s reviewing the CCTV,’ Boyd said. ‘He thinks he can ID a potential suspect entering the club.’

  ‘The guy came in here?!’ Emma exclaimed.

  Boyd nodded. He told her what Jay had said, about the incident outside. ‘It could be something or nothing, Ems. We just want to ID him if we can.’

  ‘Christ. Well, if he came in… maybe I served him. What does he look like?’

  He gave her Jay’s description of the guy.

  Emma’s jaw clenched. ‘Oh, shit, yes! I remember him! He tried chatting me up!’

  ‘You spoke to him?’ Boyd clarified.

  ‘Over the bar, yeah. He… lingered for a while. Kept asking me questions.’

  ‘Like what?’ Boyd asked.

  She shrugged. ‘The usual. Do you like working here? What time do you get off?’ She paused for a moment. ‘God. If that was the same actual bloke…?’

  Boyd nodded. ‘Right. It’s a horrible feeling, eh?’ He could see her forearms were goose-bumping.

  She puffed out air. ‘If it was that guy, he was creepy, Dad. Slimy.’

  ‘Slimy? How do you mean?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘I mean… like, totally up himself. Entitled. You know? Like that Game of Thrones guy,’ she explained.

  Boyd shook his head. ‘What?’ Then: ‘Do you mean the blond brat who got poisoned?’

  ‘No, the other brat with long blonde hair, pimping out his little sister,’ Emma said.

  Ah yes, he remembered. ‘The one who ended up with a crown of gold melted onto his sizzling head.’

  Emma nodded.

  ‘So he was young then?’ Boyd said. ‘Or looked young?’

  ‘Oh, definitely young. I got the impression he wasn’t that much older than me.’

  ‘Guv?’

  Boyd turned to see Okeke’s head poking out of the back office. ‘We’ve got something.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be there in a sec.’ He turned back to Emma. ‘If it is that guy, we’ll need to interview you too, Ems. You okay with that?’

  ‘No fricking problem,’ she said. ‘I’ll happily be interviewed if it helps catch the bastard.’

  Boyd patted her hand and went to join the others. ‘So what do you have for me?’

  Jay was sitting at the desk, pointing at one of the screens. ‘That’s the man. I’m pretty sure.’

  Boyd sat down beside him and leant forward to inspect the grainy image. It was from a high angle and aimed into the club’s entrance. He could see Jay on one side of the doorway and Collins on the other.

  The suspect’s head was just within shot. He was lean with light wavy hair. He was wearing a pale suit jacket and a white collared shirt. ‘Can you jump that back a few frames so we can get a full body shot?’ asked Boyd.

  Jay tapped on the keyboard and the footage stepped back through a number of frames, one at a time, until the man in question was in full view and about to walk past Collins.

  ‘There,’ said Boyd. ‘Let’s grab that frame.’

  ‘Sam?’ Jay looked up. ‘How do I…?’

  She leant over and hit a couple of keys to save the screenshot. Okeke pulled out a USB stick and plugged it in just as Luigi DeSantis came back into the room with a tray of coffees.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘We think we’ve got our man on the lobby cam,’ replied Okeke.

  Boyd stared at the frozen image. Emma’s Game of Thrones comment seemed to fit with what he was looking at.

  ‘Emma said she remembers speaking to this guy at the bar,’ said Boyd. ‘He was chatting her up.’

  ‘There’s a camera behind the bar too,’ said Jay. ‘It’s a much clearer one, I think.’

  ‘Right, well then, I suppose we’d better start sifting through that,’ Boyd replied.

  DeSantis set the tray down. ‘Could you copy the camera’s information and go through it back at the station?’ He looked at his watch. The manager gave them an apologetic smile. ‘We open in a couple of hours. I mean, it’s Saturday evening… nearly. And – you know how it is – our members would feel awkward with –’

  ‘The Old Bill hanging around,’ Boyd finished.

  He nodded. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ Boyd picked up his coffee and took a courtesy sip.

  On their way out, Boyd stopped beside the bar. ‘Ems?’ he called.

  Her head popped up. ‘You off?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering how to pose the question he wanted to ask. She could be so stubborn.

  ‘You want to give me a lift home after work, don’t you?’ she guessed.

  Boyd sighed, then nodded. ‘I just think with what’s happened –’

  ‘Yes please. I’ll take it, Dad.’ She smiled gratefully. ‘Thank you.’

  12

  Sundays, Boyd mused, were for reading the papers in bed and late roast lunches. Well, they used to be anyway, back in his old life. There was certainly no bloody way he’d have donated a Sunday morning to work back then. Not even for a murder case.

  Of course, take away the family unit, and Sunday mornings had become a void to fill. Emma tended to sleep until two or three and, once Ozzie had had his hour of pounding the beach, there was little left to do but remember how things used to be.

  Which was why he’d decided to come into work this morning. That and he wanted to go through the remaining CCTV footage himself. He sat through several hours of Emma’s shift. She was right; the job most definitely did keep her busy. He was impressed with her diligence and efficiency and kept reminding himself that the object of the exercise was not to indulge in proud daddy moments but to look out for the sleazy, young, blond-haired suspect trying to chat her up.

  Three hours in, the video timestamp was showing 11.05 p.m. in the corner… and Okeke loomed over his monitor mouthing something at him. He paused the music he’d been listening to, as well as the CCTV video, and pulled his earphones out.

  ‘I just said “morning”,’ she repeated. ‘Nothing more interesting than that.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Boyd frowned. ‘What are you doing here? I didn’t see you on the rota for today.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she replied. ‘And neither are you if I recall correctly.’

  Apart from the pair of them, there was only one other detective on the main floor this morning: one of Flack’s boys shuffled out to cover a gap on the Sunday shift.

  ‘I wanted to get a head start on the bar camera,’ replied Boyd. They’d briefly played around with the fuzzy image from the lobby camera before calling it quits yesterday afternoon. He was hoping that the sharper higher-resolution camera behind the bar would give them something more useful for LEDS’s face-recognition software to work on.

  ‘Me too,’ she said, wheeling her chair around his desk so that she could study his monitor as well. ‘Jay’s really been hit hard by this.’

  Boyd knew Jay well enough to know that his muscular, somewhat threatening stature and Neanderthal-like brow belied a rather sensitive and gentle soul. They’d spent a fair bit of time together, what with the pre-Christmas meal, Friday night team sessions down at the pub, the notorious summer barbecue and of course… Jay’s timely assistance at the campsite nearly a year ago. He had a lot of time for the big guy.

  ‘Jay and Louie went back a long, long way,’ said Okeke.

  ‘Did you know him well?’ Boyd asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Since I moved in with Jay, we’ve had him around for dinner a dozen or so times. I got to know him a bit. But yeah… I mean, they went to school together.’

  ‘So as far as you know there’s nothing about Collins that might suggest a motive for his stabbing? An old vendetta? Something from his time in the paras?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing comes to mind. His interests were pretty bland. He supported the local rugby club, liked a pint; he and Jay were both into tarting up stuff in Jay’s workshop. Jay and Louie… Both of them are into the whole Repair Shop thing, sanding and buffing things on Saturdays, sometimes Sunday mornings in his lock-up.’ She let out a sad humourless huff. ‘Were… I should say.’ She shook her head. ‘They kept talking about going into business together.’

  ‘Christ. Poor Jay. Let’s make sure we catch this scumbag,’ Boyd said, starting the video again.

  ‘Nothing so far, then?’ asked Okeke.

  He shook his head. ‘Most of the people coming up to the bar are women.’

  ‘That’s how it works. They’re the girls who work there. They bat their eyelids and give it the old “buy me a drink, big boy?” routine, then go and place the order. Usually for something ridiculously expensive. They get commission on the drinks that they order. Yeah… CuffLinks really is a mug-magnet.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose it’s just human nature. As long you men remain slaves to your own little winkies, you’ll always be suckers for places like this.’

  ‘Errm, not all of us,’ Boyd said.

  She elbowed his arm. ‘Have you never…?’ she asked.

  ‘Never,’ he replied adamantly. ‘Sad fucking places.’ Boyd shook his head and turned his eyes back to the screen, just in time to see a man – no, the man – he’d seen on the lobby cam.

  ‘Shit. There!’ Okeke barked. Boyd paused the video and scribbled the timestamp into his notebook. 02.29 a.m. Then he resumed play.

  It was definitely the same man that Jay had ID’d from the lobby cam: wavy light-coloured, hair, pale skinned, fine-featured. He was wearing what Boyd liked to think of as ‘Toff casual’ – a pale suit jacket with a dark hanky poking out of the top breast pocket, a white collared shirt, undone to two buttons down.

  ‘He looks very young,’ said Okeke.

  ‘But dresses old,’ muttered Boyd. ‘Like something out of, I dunno… Casablanca.’

  ‘Retro,’ she said. ‘Vintage. It’s a fashion thing, guv… but I wouldn’t expect you to know that.’ She smirked.

  The blond-haired man was talking to Emma, presumably ordering a drink as she had stepped out of shot. Boyd could see him leaning forward on the bar to study his daughter as she worked, oblivious to the creep’s eyes walking up and down her. He stopped the video and took a screen grab; the sleazy bastard was giving the clearest view of his face that they were probably going to get.

  ‘Let’s see what this throws out,’ he said, opening LEDS’s facial-recognition tools and selecting the image file. He clicked on the scan button and immediately the software got to work, identifying reference nodes on the face and placing pixel markers.

  ‘Fancy a brew?’ he said.

  They returned from the top-floor canteen twenty minutes later to find the process had run its course and identified a dozen ID probables in descending order of likelihood. At the top of the list was someone named Roland Sebastian Octavian Hammond.

  ‘Jesus, that’s a mouthful.’ Boyd looked at the mugshot and nodded. ‘That’s our boy.’

  Okeke sat down on Boyd’s chair.

  ‘Oh, right, help yourself,’ he muttered as she did exactly that. She positioned the mouse and clicked on the details.

  ‘He’s got a previous for drink-driving, but that’s about it…’ she said. ‘Oh, and also a few points for speeding. Naughty boy.’ She scrolled down. ‘He had a caution as a minor for possession of cannabis. But otherwise that’s it for previous.’

  ‘Date of birth…’ Boyd pointed at the DOB listing. ‘What does that make him now?’

  She did the maths. ‘Twenty-seven.’

  Boyd tapped his cheek absently. ‘Problem is, there’s nothing there that screams our suspect…’

  Okeke shook her head. ‘He looks like a Hooray Henry.’

  Boyd laughed. That wasn’t an expression he’d heard in a while. ‘You remember Harry Enfield?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Comedian. He did some characters like Tim Nice-But-Dim and… that “Loadsamoney” song.’ He did the Cockney voice and mimed flapping a wedge of notes around.

  Okeke looked at him blankly.

  ‘Well, yeah, anyway,’ he continued, ‘that’s… oh, never mind.’

  Okeke shook her head and turned back to the screen. ‘There’s no record of violence. Just a bit of dope, one instance of driving under the influence.’ She tutted. ‘You can’t be that kind of hair-trigger violent and get to twenty-seven without something else popping up on your rap sheet.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe he just snapped?’

  ‘But he didn’t just snap though, did he?’ Boyd pulled one of the printed images out from the Milward Road security camera. ‘He’s wearing dark clothes. Which means… if this is our guy, he went home, changed clothes, came back out and waited until Collins finished his shift. Then he followed him across town and finally stabbed him to death a few hundred meters from his home. That’s looking very premeditated to me, not a heat-of-the-moment thing.’

  ‘Do you think he knew Louie? Or had some history with him?’ Okeke asked.