‘We wondered if you might be able to tell us if Richard had said anything about expecting visitors over the weekend.’ Tanner was making it sound nice and casual. ‘On Saturday evening, specifically.’

  She shook her head. It was the answer Thorne and Tanner had been expecting, of course, but it didn’t make the line of questioning they were about to take any easier.

  ‘I told you. I spoke to him on Saturday and he said he was going to get an early night.’

  ‘Of course,’ Thorne said.

  ‘That’s what he told me.’

  ‘Yes, and he might have meant to.’ It was about as much sugar as he could coat the pill with. ‘But I’m sorry to say it looks like that isn’t the way things turned out.’

  Andrea Sumner sniffed, then reached across to snatch a tissue from the box, aware that she would soon have need of it.

  ‘There was evidence to suggest that Richard had a visitor on Saturday night.’ It sounded stupid when Thorne said it. Obviously the dead man had been visited, he would not be dead otherwise, but that was not what he meant and he could see that Andrea knew it.

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘A half-empty wine bottle and two dirty glasses,’ Tanner said.

  ‘They were found in your sitting room,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I didn’t see them.’

  Thorne nodded and sat back. Answering a question which neither he nor Tanner had actually asked was enough to confirm his suspicions. Andrea Sumner was clearly lying to them, but he knew it made no material difference to the investigation and that the denial was clearly important to her. She still had so much to process and deal with. While the pain was, as yet, still too raw to allow even grief to get a decent foothold, she could not bear to consider for a moment that the man for whom she would eventually grieve was not quite the man she had believed him to be.

  She would have to deal with the unpalatable truth eventually, of course, and it was not the first time Thorne had seen the nearest and dearest of murder victims struggle and flail when a loved one’s darker secrets were revealed. Right now, Andrea Sumner’s suspicions about her dead husband’s fidelity seemed shocking enough, but Thorne had encountered worse. He recalled one memorable case when the innocent victim of a pub brawl – a mild-mannered and happily married father of two – had turned out to have not one, or two, but three entirely unknown families scattered across the country. A trio of other wives and just shy of a dozen other children, undreamed of by his widow.

  His widows.

  ‘I went straight upstairs, you see?’ Andrea was already putting the tissue to good use and leaning down for more.

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I didn’t think anything was wrong. The house seemed normal.’

  ‘Sadly, we know that it wasn’t. Which is why we have to ask these questions.’ Tanner leaned forward and waited until Andrea was looking at her. ‘Have you any idea who Richard’s visitor might have been? Maybe he mentioned someone to you before you went to Liverpool?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andrea said. ‘I really don’t know. I mean, one of his mates might have popped round to watch football or rugby or whatever. Someone from work or something. But that doesn’t explain what happened, does it?’

  ‘No,’ Tanner said. ‘It doesn’t.’

  It had been no more than a shot in the dark, of course. The kind of ‘visitor’ they already suspected the killer was, the kind Richard Sumner had been expecting, was not the kind he would have been likely to mention to his wife.

  Have fun in Liverpool, love. Oh, by the way, I thought I might phone out for an escort one of the nights. That a problem?

  Five minutes in that house had been enough to tell Thorne they were not dealing with a marriage of that sort. He wasn’t sure there were marriages of that sort, but even if there were, he didn’t suppose they lasted very long.

  See you on Sunday . . . you enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about me, my long-term girlfriend/boyfriend/sex slave is popping over on Saturday night to keep me company. I’ve been meaning to tell you . . .

  ‘When can I go back to the house?’ Andrea asked.

  ‘Not just yet, I’m afraid,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Only, if I’m going to be staying with my sister for a while, I’ll need a few things.’

  ‘If you give a list to one of the Family Liaison Officers they can pick everything up for you.’

  Andrea nodded, resigned, and said, ‘Fine,’ though it was obviously anything but.

  ‘Actually, there’s one or two things we need from the house and we were wondering if you could maybe help us with that.’ Thorne smiled, like it was no big deal. ‘Richard’s phone and computer? I mean, we’re presuming he had a phone and computer because, well, everyone does, but we couldn’t find them.’

  ‘I’ve got them.’ She began to pick at the damp clump of tissue clutched in her fist, plucking off pieces and letting them drop. ‘They were on the kitchen table, so I put them in my bag while I was waiting for the police to arrive. It was just a reflex, really. I wanted to look after them, for him.’

  ‘Right.’ Thorne could see that, walking back into her house the morning before, Andrea Sumner had known straight away. Not what was waiting for her upstairs, but what had been going on before that. She had known the minute she’d seen that wine bottle and those glasses. Her actions afterwards hadn’t helped the investigation, but they had delayed it by a few hours at most and she hadn’t done anything illegal. Taking the phone and computer had been an attempt to preserve a little dignity, no more than that, knowing full well what might be on them; the kind of information that Thorne and Tanner were clearly after.

  ‘We’ll need you to hand them over to us,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Why, though?’ It was a mumbled plea, but a plea nonetheless. ‘I mean, I know you do that, I’ve seen it on the news and on the crime shows, but those are the kinds of things you take from suspects, aren’t they?’

  ‘Usually,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Richard was a victim.’

  ‘It’s daft, isn’t it? I mean, people keep their whole lives on their phones these days.’ Thorne looked to Tanner who grunted her agreement. ‘On laptops and whatever. I know I do and I’m sure you’re the same.’ Andrea shook her head, but Thorne pressed on. ‘Being able to access the information on there will tell us a lot more about Richard and, hopefully, help us shed some light on why this terrible thing happened to him.’

  ‘If you want to know about Richard, you just have to ask me.’

  ‘Well thank you,’ Tanner said, ‘and we will, but—’

  ‘I knew him better than anyone. I knew everything about him.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner leaned forward and spoke slowly. ‘We’ll also need a DNA sample, if you wouldn’t mind.’ They could have easily helped themselves to a hairbrush or whatever – there would be something suitable in the evidence bags – but a simple swab while the woman was in the building would be rather more straightforward. They certainly didn’t need a sample of her dead husband’s DNA. ‘It’s purely for elimination purposes, obviously.’ Tanner waited. ‘I hope that’s OK, Andrea. It would really help us.’

  It was hard to be sure if Andrea had taken in a word Tanner had said. She was still looking at Thorne, eyes as wide as she could force them, the pieces of damp tissue scattered in her lap and at her feet.

  ‘I knew him.’

  Twenty minutes later, Thorne and Tanner stood outside the entrance to the station and watched one of the FLOs lead Andrea Sumner back towards the car they had delivered her in. The heavy frost that had settled overnight didn’t look like it was going anywhere. An hour and a half before, Thorne had stood outside his flat, hunched-up and swearing, spraying de-icer on the car windows, and it already looked as though that might be the most enjoyable thing he’d do all day.

  Andrea Sumner glanced back at them as the car door was opened for her and she bent to climb inside. Tanner raised a hand to wave, looked at Thorne. ‘After Susan was killed, it felt like I was the one who was dead,’ she said. ‘Dead in all the ways that count, anyway. Walking around like a zombie and waking up every morning as if I’d forgotten what I was there for. Back then, I thought that was probably the worst anyone could ever feel.’ She nodded towards the car that was now pulling out on to the main road. ‘So how does someone get past that?’

  Thorne wasn’t altogether sure it was even possible, but he guessed that catching whoever was responsible for Richard Sumner’s murder might be a start.

  Of course, that was only a possibility, too.

  ‘No idea,’ he said.

  Shivering, they turned gratefully to head back inside and Tanner looked at her phone. ‘You’d better get a shift on.’

  Thorne checked his watch, his breath pluming in the cold as he swore underneath it. He moved quickly ahead towards the Gents before hurrying to collect his jacket and bag from the office, keen not to miss the start of the post-mortem.

  He needed cheering up.

  FOUR

  One post-mortem was more than enough for most people and Thorne had been present at a good many more than that. Hundreds, probably. Though he had become . . . accustomed to the unique sights and smells and the terrible whine of the bone-saw, he still put the Vicks and the earplugs to good use every time, and, unlike the heavily tattooed man sitting opposite him, he was certainly unable to face a full English breakfast immediately afterwards.

  Full English Option Three, to be precise, with two eggs, double sausage and extra bubble and squeak.

  The man was an animal.

  Phil Hendricks was not quite as delicate with a knife and fork as he was with dissecting scissors and rib-shears, so just watching his friend tucking in was making Thorne feel gippier than he had while watching him work on Richard Sumner’s body twenty minutes earlier. He groaned to make his feelings clear.

  The pathologist lifted a fork dripping with baked beans and jabbed it towards the single piece of toast on Thorne’s plate.

  ‘Pussy,’ he said.

  ‘Pig,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks shook his head, disgusted, and the rows of rings, crosses and dangling skulls in each ear moved in unison. ‘Could be worse, I suppose. If you’d ordered muesli, I might not have been responsible for my actions.’ He turned and raised a thumb to the balding colossus behind the counter, who grinned and gave a thumbs-up in return. The café was a five-minute walk from Hornsey mortuary and Hendricks was a regular customer. He raised his voice so that the owner would hear. ‘Mind you, if they served fucking muesli, I wouldn’t come here.’

  The PM itself had been relatively straightforward. ‘No giant moths shoved down the victim’s throat,’ Hendricks had said early on. ‘That’s always a plus, right?’ As usual, his deadpan Mancunian commentary levelled out the horror with banality, though predictably he’d been unable to resist a gag or two when he’d first seen the body. ‘Bloody hell, talk about ear today, gone tomorrow.’ Seeing the look on Thorne’s face, he’d shrugged and said, ‘Chill out, mate, it’s not like he can hear us, is it?’

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ Thorne had said. ‘He’s dead, so he wouldn’t hear us anyway.’

  ‘Bloody hell, everyone’s a critic.’

  Richard Sumner had died sometime between nine and midnight on Saturday evening, Hendricks had said. The cause of death had been a single stab wound to the neck. ‘Slit his throat, with a very thin blade . . . a scalpel, Stanley knife, something like that. He’d have bled out pretty quickly. Same weapon was used to remove the ears and, trust me, I’d love to tell you they got lopped off post-mortem, but the amount of blood on the pillow would suggest otherwise.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He was probably too busy worrying about all that claret gouting out of his neck to care a great deal.’

  Thorne realised that, by the end, Richard Sumner would not have been able to hear himself screaming. He wasn’t sure if that was a blessing or not. ‘What about drugs?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon so. Rohypnol, ketamine . . . some kind of benzo. I’ll know when I get the toxicology results back, but I think it’s a fair bet. Especially if you think the killer might be female.’ He’d looked down at the body laid open on the slab. ‘He was a fairly big lad.’

  Something in the wine, Thorne guessed. They’d be getting those results back soon enough.

  ‘Oh, and there’s a decent amount of half-digested spaghetti in the stomach,’ Hendricks had said. ‘Unless he had a seriously nasty case of worms. So, looks like him and his killer plumped for Italian. Talking of which, you up for a late breakfast . . . ?’

  Now, the café owner sloped across to remove the dirty plates and cutlery, came back almost immediately with fresh mugs of tea.

  ‘Anyway, how’s Melita?’

  ‘She’s good.’ Thorne nodded and smiled. He was hoping he could get over to see her later on.

  ‘Right, or as good as anyone can be with low standards and serious eyesight problems. I’m amazed those glasses she wears aren’t a damn sight thicker.’

  Thorne clutched at his sides theatrically.

  ‘Mind you, at least she can wear glasses.’ Hendricks nodded out towards the mortuary. ‘Unlike that poor sod back there.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense either,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s dead, so why would he be wearing glasses?’

  ‘You do know how jokes work, right? I mean Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen don’t tend to walk into bars together.’

  Having dealt swiftly with Thorne’s love-life, Hendricks talked for a few minutes about his own partner, Liam. ‘My Irishman.’ He seemed as settled in that department as he had been in a long time and, barring the unlikely prospect of Arsenal winning silverware any time soon, Thorne could not imagine him any happier. A good deal of the tattooing and many of the piercings were there as notches on Hendricks’s bedpost, but he hadn’t paid a visit to the tattoo parlour in a good while. Thorne could only hope it stayed that way. It wasn’t like there was too much unmarked flesh left.

  He winced, remembering one such area of his friend’s skin that had been forcibly removed some years before. Excised, before being popped into an envelope and hand-delivered to Thorne himself.

  He tried not to think too often about the man responsible for it.

  ‘So, Nicola working with you on this one, is she?’

  Thorne looked across the table. Hendricks’s face showed nothing.

  It was a simple enough question, but still there was a second or two’s hesitation before Thorne was able to answer; a second or two when their eyes met and the acknowledgement was made.

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  ‘Good job,’ Hendricks said, the momentary awkwardness dismissed.

  Though Nicola Tanner, who could be somewhat squeamish, baulked occasionally at one or two of Phil Hendricks’s . . . excesses, the three of them had always been close. But now they were bound together by their actions two years previously. By what had been done to a man named Graham French, bludgeoned to death after he had been caught and restrained. By the story one of the three had concocted to protect another, and by the professional jiggery-pokery of the third, done to keep his friends from losing their jobs, or worse. The secret they shared was rarely mentioned or even referred to, but it hung around, heaviest when the three of them were together; stinking of blood and wet hair in moments such as this.

  ‘Because I reckon you’ll need all the help you can get.’ Hendricks slurped his tea and swallowed. ‘Judging by the state of our auditorily challenged friend in the morgue. She—’

  Thorne’s phone buzzed on the table and he glanced down at the screen. ‘Talk of the devil . . . ’ He read the text message.

  DNA results back from hair at Sumner house. XX

  ‘Give me a sec.’ Thorne called Tanner’s number. ‘You’re not usually that affectionate,’ he said, when she answered. ‘Two kisses?’

  ‘They’re not kisses, you arse. They’re chromosomes.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Two X chromosomes, which means our killer is definitely a woman.’

  Thorne glanced across the table to see Hendricks, who had clearly overheard, snigger before sticking his tongue behind his bottom lip and rolling his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, obviously.’ Thorne pressed the phone to his ear and turned away. ‘I knew that’s what you meant.’

  FIVE

  Back at Becke House, once she and Thorne had conferred about the PM, Tanner led the first major team briefing. As she spoke, leaning against a desk and gesturing when necessary at the whiteboard behind her, the twenty or so men and women gathered in the incident room studied relevant pages in the case folders that had been put together and handed out by DS Samir Karim. More than a few shook their heads at the crime scene photographs, or sucked in a breath. Karim would also be working as the team’s Exhibits Officer, while others would be responsible for overseeing outside enquiries, co-ordinating interviews and managing intelligence. Tanner herself had selected two members of civilian support staff – only marginally less anal-retentive than she was – and tasked them with indexing every statement, message received and suspect profile on to the HOLMES computer system.

  There was plenty to do.

  Tanner and several others had spent the morning studying footage from local CCTV and automatic number-plate recognition cameras. It was a laborious process and there was still a long way to go. House to house enquiries had been completed in the road where the Sumners lived, but they had already taken the decision to widen the operation to neighbouring streets. A standard search had been conducted for any record there might be of Richard Anthony Sumner in national police systems. They were carefully examining the couple’s financial records, looking at clubs or associations of which they were members, and had begun tracking down and talking to as many of the victim’s friends and work colleagues as possible.