‘. . . I’m not around . . .’

  She could still taste the red wine, thick on her tongue, and though it wasn’t quite eight-thirty in the morning and she was still wearing pyjamas, finishing that bottle off felt like the most sensible decision Pippa would make all day.

  Michelle Cutler gritted her teeth and pushed on into the last half-mile of a tough uphill climb in the Italian Alps. The scenery was pretty, but God, it hurt. Her instructor – a nicely-ripped young thing called Eduardo – told her that she was nearly there, that she needed to feel the burn, so she pushed even harder, staring at the screen and thinking of all the ways in which she’d have enjoyed feeling the burn with Eduardo that didn’t involve riding a pricey and over-complicated exercise bike.

  Five minutes later she was still thinking about it as she stepped into the shower. Her mobile chirped just as she was reaching for the tap, but she ignored it, letting the call ring out as she moved beneath the hot water. She knew it would be Jacqui calling and that Jacqui would only be calling to ask, again, about the whereabouts of her beloved son.

  Bloody Jacqui.

  Michelle worked herself into a lather in every sense, thinking about it. It always used to be fat male comedians making jokes about their mother-in-law, but she reckoned that actually far more women than men had those . . . issues. Well, they certainly did if their mothers-in-law were anything like Jacqui.

  Once she was dry and had made herself up, she dressed in comfy sweats then wandered down to the kitchen. She sat at the enormous marble-topped island and, after wondering what to do with herself for a few minutes, she reached for a shiny green apple from the fruit bowl. They were almost never eaten, being purely for decoration and replaced when they went soft, but she fancied one, so sod it.

  The scissors were still sitting there at the other end of the island.

  Seeing them made her smile as she remembered what she’d done with them the night before. She’d been using her phone to track his, so she’d known where he was and what was happening and putting those nice sharp scissors to good use had seemed like a very clever thing to do.

  And Michelle knew she was clever.

  Far cleverer than the likes of Jacqui gave her credit for, anyway.

  She bit hard into the apple, enjoying the crunch, relishing every moment of the tearing with her teeth and the sweetness afterwards. She swallowed, then barked at the smart speaker on the worktop, asked it to play a Bon Jovi track. Her karaoke song of choice. That to rock out to, or the sad one from Titanic if she’d had a few too many and was feeling a bit teary.

  As she danced around the island, she imagined Eduardo dancing opposite her, so she gave him all her best moves. She shimmied and dipped and thrust her hips, showing off a body perfected at the gym and at Pilates classes and on those punishing bike rides through Italian mountain passes or along Californian hillsides. She raised her arms and sang along with the chorus, belting it out until her throat hurt and hearing her voice bounce back at her off the marble and the stainless steel, the polished tiles they’d had shipped over from Venice. She heard the echo rising up to the vaulted ceiling then dying away.

  She stopped and quietly told the speaker to shut up.

  She was singing and dancing in her stupidly expensive kitchen and there was nobody there to see it. Nobody to tell her how great she sounded and how fantastic she looked.

  Michelle sat down and tore into the apple again.

  That was all right though, she decided, it was no big deal. Being alone was not a problem, being alone would be good for her.

  More to the point, it was something she’d have to get used to.

  FIVE

  Miller could never get very excited about hotels. Most of the ones he ever needed to stay in for work were predictably bog-standard and, if he was shelling out for it himself, then as long as the bed was decent enough he was happy. You only ever slept there after all, so Miller could never understand the need for all the fancy stuff. He and Alex had treated themselves to a high-end establishment a couple of times – on her birthday one year and for a competition in Scarborough – but even then he wasn’t exactly bowled over by the chocolates on the pillow (nasty, like dog-chocolate) or the towels folded so they looked like swans (they didn’t) and who the hell needed their toilet paper arranged into a nice pointy V-shape?

  There was only one way to fold a towel, bog-roll origami was idiotic and he could always pop a Malteser on his pillow at home if he felt like it.

  So, no, a hotel was not a place that set him all a-quiver with anticipation.

  Unless there’d been a murder in it, obviously.

  The Sands was a big old monstrosity on the seafront and maybe it had been smart and stylish a hundred years ago. Maybe it had been the place to be. Miller guessed that it was still impressive enough to anyone checking in, but once you stepped out of the lift into one of the tatty, snot-green corridors, it was obvious that the lobby was where all the money had been spent and that the establishment was barely worth its three stars. If a guest staying at the Sands was to discover something that looked like chocolate on their pillow, Miller would have strongly advised against eating it.

  By the time Miller and Xiu got there, room 503 was already a hive of activity. Crime scene tape had been stretched across the doorway and tied to the handles of the adjacent rooms. While they changed into their forensic romper-suits in the corridor, CSIs crept around with their brushes and scrapers or carried boxes of equipment in and out. Glancing into the room as he pulled up his plastic hood, Miller could see that there were already several similarly clad force photographers snapping away inside and that Prisha Acharya, the on-call pathologist was already at work.

  ‘Right, shall we have a look at him?’ Xiu asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t think he’s going anywhere.’

  Xiu led the way.

  Miller exchanged a few grunts of greeting with some of the officers and CSIs already in there. Nobody seemed awfully surprised to see him. Most of them, who he only ever really met at crime scenes, probably didn’t even know he’d been away, and if they did they may not have known why, which was fine by him. Acharya glanced up from the body on the bed and nodded.

  The man they were all there to see was face down in a puddle of blood. There was a tattoo of some kind on his shoulder, which Miller guessed was meant to be an eagle but thought looked more like a demented budgie, and he was wearing white boxer shorts with what looked like penguins on them. Underwearwise it was clearly an unforgivable choice, but Miller supposed that the man sporting them was long past caring. He walked across to the window and took in the breathtaking vista of dirty cement and blackened rooftops, a sliver of what might have been the sea.

  ‘Well, if he paid for a room with a view, he should ask for a refund.’ Miller turned back into the room. ‘Oh, wait . . .’

  ‘OK,’ Acharya said. ‘Ready to turn him.’

  She counted to three and Xiu and Miller stepped closer to the bed as a couple of CSIs heaved the body over.

  ‘Small calibre, looks like.’ Xiu was pointing to the nice, neat bullet hole in the middle of the man’s forehead. ‘Nine millimetre, maybe.’

  Under normal circumstances, Miller would probably have said something unnecessary to Acharya at that point and, because they’d worked together a while, she’d have been expecting him to.

  I don’t want to leap to conclusions or tell you your job, but might that be the cause of death?

  Instead he just stared at the dead man’s face, feeling like he’d been punched.

  ‘You OK?’ Xiu asked.

  He nodded and began to breathe a little more easily as an officer wandered across with something dangling from his gloved fingers. ‘Found this, sir.’ The officer proffered an expensive-looking brown wallet. ‘No money inside, but I think there’s enough in there to identify him.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’ Miller was already on his way out of the room. ‘I know who that is.’

  Back in the corridor, they lowered their hoods.

  ‘His name’s Adrian Cutler,’ Miller said. ‘His father’s Wayne Cutler. They’re not . . . a nice family.’

  Xiu was nodding and Miller could see that she recognised the name. It was probably the first one mentioned to her when she’d joined the team. He knew very well what the second name would have been.

  ‘Drugs and sex work,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m a bit busy right now.’ Miller waited, but there was nothing. ‘But yes, those are indeed the areas of criminality with which Mr Cutler senior is primarily associated.’

  ‘We should talk to Ralph Massey,’ Xiu said.

  And there was that other name. That other punch.

  ‘Laundering money through a network of ballrooms and casinos and Cutler’s main rival, right?’ Xiu nodded back towards the bedroom. ‘I mean this certainly looks professional, so Massey should probably be our first port of—’

  Miller raised a hand to stop her and thankfully it worked. ‘First off, well done for being, hands down, the winner of the Lancashire Police Job-Pissed Swot of the Year Award.’ Xiu blinked slowly. Miller was starting to notice that she did that a lot. ‘And second of all, there are more than two gangs. It’s not West Side Story. There’s plenty of others bumping up our overtime, plus these days we’ve got the county lines drug gangs to think about.’

  ‘Of course. I’m aware.’

  ‘But yeah, obviously we’ll be having a word with Ralph Massey.’ It was hard not to gag, just saying his name. He watched as a uniformed officer came bowling down the corridor towards them, alongside a pudgy individual with a blue suit and a red face.

  ‘This is the hotel manager,’ the officer said. ‘He wants a quick word.’

  As the officer walked away, the manager marched across and shook Miller’s hand with both of his, which was usually a sign that someone cared about something a great deal or else was just a bit of an arse. He talked directly to Miller, as though Xiu wasn’t even there.

  ‘Paul Mullinger,’ Paul Mullinger said. ‘Well, this is horrible . . . goes without saying, and I know you have a job to do, but I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t have to close the hotel completely. I mean, surely that won’t be necessary, will it?’

  Miller extricated his hand and pointed at Xiu. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Xiu. Maybe you didn’t see her.’ Mullinger may have reddened a little but it was hard to tell. He leaned across and gave Xiu’s outstretched hand the same creepy-clutchy treatment as he had Miller’s. ‘Good, now we’re all friends,’ Miller said, ‘and no, I don’t see any reason why the hotel needs to close.’ Well, aside from what I can only presume are reasons of health, safety and food hygiene standards. ‘This floor will need to be shut off for a day or two, though. Have all the rooms up here been cleared?’

  ‘Well, checkout time was over an hour ago.’

  ‘You might want to make sure.’

  ‘Right. Yes, of course.’

  Mullinger scuttled away towards the room at the far end of the corridor, removing a pass key that was attached to a chain on his belt.

  ‘I can stick up for myself, you know,’ Xiu said.

  ‘Never said you couldn’t.’

  ‘Thanks, though.’ She glared at Mullinger as he opened a bedroom door and peered inside. ‘Knob!’ Mullinger closed the door again and gave them a wave.

  ‘So, why’s Adrian Cutler staying in a crappy hotel?’ Miller smiled at Mullinger who was moving towards the next door. ‘No offence.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘Yep, with three young kids. Big house on North Park Drive.’ Miller knew the area well, one of the pricier parts of town; a million miles away (though actually only six) from the area in which he himself had grown up. Not that Miller was from a particularly deprived area, though there were plenty of those, too. He’d grown up in an ordinary part of town midway between ‘rough-as-a-badger’s-arse’ and ‘all-fur-coat-and-no-knickers’, even if his childhood (thanks to a mother who was only sporadically healthy and a father who was only sporadically present) had been anything but ordinary.

  Miller watched Mullinger open another door and check that the room was empty. A thumbs-up.

  ‘Trouble at home, maybe?’ Xiu suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Business meeting that went wrong?’

  ‘In his penguin boxers?’

  Things were now getting a little tricky for the manager. He’d reached the room next door to the one that contained the body and the handle had crime scene tape wrapped around it. He pointed and shrugged, not sure what he was allowed to do. Miller waved and told him to take the tape off.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Miller said. ‘We’ll put it back afterwards.’

  ‘If Cutler wanted to treat himself,’ Xiu said, ‘there’s plenty of nicer places he could have chosen.’

  Miller knew she wasn’t wrong. ‘There’s an alleyway round the corner with a few old mattresses in it. That’s a step up.’

  ‘Secret assignation, you think? Didn’t want to be anywhere he might be recog—’

  Xiu stopped when Mullinger cried out and they turned to see him stagger back from the open door of the adjacent bedroom and press himself against the wall.

  ‘Oh, Jesus . . .’

  Miller and Xiu stepped quickly across, peered into the bedroom and saw what the manager had seen. The body of a man lay at the foot of the bed. Unlike the one in the room next door, this victim was fully clothed, but there was just as much blood and the bullet wound was virtually identical.

  ‘I reckon we should probably call this in,’ Miller said.

  Xiu reached into her bodysuit for her mobile.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing.’ Miller nodded towards the hotel manager. Mullinger was gasping like a beached fish and his previously ruddy complexion was now the colour of old porridge. ‘This is not going to look good on Tripadvisor.’

  SIX

  An hour or so later, Sullivan had arrived and gathered the team for an ad hoc meeting in the small lobby area on the fifth floor outside the lifts. There was a plastic potted plant, a low table and two armchairs, though Miller had no idea why. Did people really need to make themselves comfortable while they were waiting for the lift in a five-storey building? Thumb through a magazine? How long did the bloody thing take?

  Staff had brought up a Thermos of coffee and there was a basket of biscuits; two of each sort in plastic wrappers, same as the guests might find in their rooms. Miller rootled through the selection on offer while Sullivan did his bit.

  ‘So, aside from the fact that we’re all looking at a very long day, based on observations and the intel gathered so far, what do people think?’

  Nobody – not Clough or Fuller or Xiu – seemed hugely keen to speak up.

  Miller stepped forward, brandishing a pack of biscuits in each hand. ‘I think that a ginger snap is far superior to a shortbread finger, so I’m frankly gobsmacked that the finger outnumbers its gingery counterpart by about three to one. I’m not sure there’s much point in complaining about the discrepancy, but still.’ Sullivan didn’t look impressed, but that was never Miller’s intention. ‘Oh, you meant, what do we think about the case? Sorry, but you weren’t very specific. Well . . . I think we’re looking at a hitman who went to the wrong room.’

  Sullivan studied him. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Why not? Everyone makes mistakes. So . . . in he goes, bang bang . . . checks his instructions, calls the client, whatever . . . oh, shit, number 501 not number 503! What am I like? Knock knock, bang bang. Two for the price of one. Job done.’

  ‘You’re not quite back up to speed, Dec,’ Sullivan said. ‘So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyone else?’

  ‘We’ve got two wallets,’ Xiu said. ‘No cash in either, but two solid IDs. Barry Shepherd – they’re checking him out back at base – and Adrian Cutler, who I’m obviously aware of and who the rest of you are clearly very familiar with.’

  Xiu looked across at Miller and so did Sullivan. Something knowing in his expression, which made Miller wish that lift shaft was empty so that he could toss the new DI down it. The rest of them just looked sheepish.

  ‘The empty wallets are weird,’ Fuller said. ‘If this is a professional hit, why bother nicking cash?’

  Sullivan nodded. ‘It’s a good point. We need to look into that. And where’s Shepherd’s phone . . . ?’ He stopped as he saw Acharya and Penny Dawson, the CSI team leader, walking towards them from the crime scene.

  ‘So, what’s the verdict?’

  ‘Well, they’ve both been dead approximately twelve hours,’ Acharya said. ‘They were almost certainly killed at around the same time. Possibly within a few minutes of each other.’

  ‘Right, thank you. PMs in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll do my very best, Detective Inspector.’ Acharya walked away towards the lift and waited. She didn’t bother taking a seat. As she passed, she gave Miller a sly wink, which was very much appreciated.

  Sullivan turned to Dawson.

  ‘Been busy, Penny?’

  Dawson looked at him like he was an idiot, which again was very nice to see. ‘What do you think? A hotel room is pretty much a CSI’s worst nightmare.’

  ‘No shortage of trace, then?’

  ‘Put it this way, if you wanted me to process all the DNA in those two rooms, I could probably turn it round for you in . . . oh, eighteen months?’ She turned and smiled at Miller. ‘Good to see you back, Declan.’

  ‘Good to be back, Penny,’ he said.

  Sullivan sniffed and adjusted his collar. ‘You’ve got something, though.’ He nodded towards the plastic evidence bag in Dawson’s hand.

  She held it up, dangling it like treasure. ‘Physical evidence, which, as of now, is our best bet. Quickest, certainly. Hairs found in Mr Cutler’s bed and they don’t appear to be his.’