Sullivan stepped across to take a closer look.

  ‘There’s bulbs attached, which means I can get a solid DNA profile. We can assume the sheets were changed before the victim checked in, right?’

  Miller thought that, as assumptions went, it was on the bold side, but he was willing to go with it for the time being. ‘So, Adrian had a visitor.’ He gave the word just enough stress to make it clear he wasn’t talking about the visitor who’d put a bullet in Cutler’s head, though he was well aware they might have been one and the same person.

  Tony Clough made his first contribution. ‘Prossie, you reckon?’

  ‘You mean “sex worker”, Tony?’ Xiu said.

  Clough was speechless and, if Miller had had anything in his mouth, he might well have spat it out like he was in an old sitcom.

  ‘Thank you, Sara.’ Sullivan nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s exactly what DC Clough means.’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ Clough said.

  ‘Right then. I’ll get back and brief the DCI, get the death knocks organised. The rest of you, stay here. We already know there’s no CCTV on any of the floors, but there are cameras in the lobby, so we can have a good look at all the comings and goings last night. Tony, can you get on to that?’

  ‘Boss,’ Clough said.

  ‘Everybody else, we need to talk to the staff. Find out if any of them had dealings with either of our victims.’

  Miller thought it was about time to chip in again. ‘On the subject of staff, it might be worth finding out if any of them didn’t show up for work this morning.’

  Clough actually snorted. ‘What, you think one of the staff might have killed them?’ He looked towards Sullivan and shook his head.

  ‘All these doors have spyholes, right?’ Miller pointed and waited while everyone looked and saw that he was correct. ‘Whoever it was, Cutler and Shepherd were happy to let them in. Just saying.’

  Sullivan was clearly getting impatient. ‘OK, whatever. Let’s just get this all done on the hurry-up and we’ll meet for a debrief back at base at five o’clock.’

  While Sullivan stayed where he was and Penny Dawson walked back towards the crime scene, Miller moved to the lift along with Clough and Fuller. He pressed the button for the ground floor, looking forward to getting stuck in.

  He was not oblivious to the fact that Xiu had hung back.

  Sara Xiu watched the lift doors close. She glanced at Sullivan who smiled, then wandered across and dropped, sighing, into one of the two armchairs near the lift. Xiu followed the DI and perched a little gingerly on the edge of the chair next to his.

  ‘So, how’s it going?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘Fine.’ Xiu nodded.

  ‘Good to hear.’

  ‘It’s an interesting case—’

  ‘With DS Miller.’

  ‘Oh . . . it’s a bit early to tell, if I’m honest.’

  Sullivan grunted, hitched up his trousers and crossed his legs. ‘Well, you know where my office is, if there’s anything you need to tell me.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘My door’s always open, Sara.’

  ‘He’s certainly . . . different,’ Xiu said. ‘DS Miller.’

  ‘One way of putting it.’

  Xiu saw the muscles working in Sullivan’s jaw. She was eager to join the rest of the team downstairs, but something was nagging at her. ‘I just wanted to ask, sir. DS Miller seemed a bit . . . weird about Adrian Cutler. I mean, is there anything I should be aware of?’

  Sullivan appeared to relax a little as he leaned forward and nodded, knowingly. Like there was something that would be painful to impart, but which, as a helpful colleague, he would force himself to share with her all the same. ‘DS Miller’s wife was a DI on Serious and Organised. The Cutlers were one of the organisations she was investigating when she was murdered. The Cutlers and the Masseys.’

  Xiu was stunned. Why hadn’t anyone seen fit to tell her?

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know she’d been . . .’

  Sullivan nodded again, solemn. ‘Afraid so. Shot in the head. Just like Adrian Cutler.’

  SEVEN

  While Xiu and Fuller interviewed various members of staff and Clough scrolled through CCTV footage from the lobby, Miller walked to the manager’s office, where the chambermaid who had discovered Adrian Cutler’s body was waiting for him.

  Together with a uniformed officer, Mullinger had been inside comforting her and he stepped out for a word when Miller knocked on his door.

  ‘She’s being very brave,’ he said. He nodded, as if to remind Miller that having only recently stumbled upon a corpse himself, he knew exactly what the poor girl had been through. When he leaned in to say ‘but she’s very upset’, his breath made it clear that he’d had a stiff drink or three to deal with his trauma.

  She was sitting in a chair in front of the manager’s desk, her hands folded in her lap, rubbing one against the other as she stared at the wall. Once the uniformed officer had left, Miller walked around the desk and sat in Mullinger’s chair. He waited until she finally raised her eyes to him.

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Miller, Sofia. Is it all right if I call you Sofia?’

  She nodded.

  Sofia Hadzic was twenty-six years old and looked even younger. She was slight, her dirty-blonde hair tied back with a scrunchy, and she had clearly been crying a good deal.

  Miller took out his phone. He pressed the record button and set it down on the desk. ‘Do you mind if I use this? I’m getting on and my memory’s going a bit.’ There was a smile then, or something close to one, but he couldn’t be sure because it wasn’t there long enough. She sat up and he could see that she was trying to pull herself together. ‘Can you just talk me through what happened this morning? Take your time . . .’

  She took a deep breath, then leaned towards Miller’s phone on the desk. Her voice was soft, barely above a whisper. There was a pronounced accent, Eastern European, Miller guessed. Croatia perhaps, or Serbia, but he certainly wasn’t going to presume. Cultural sensitivities, again.

  He knew she wasn’t from Glasgow.

  ‘It was normal, you know?’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘I collect my trolley and I go up to the fifth floor. I go to the room at the far end because that is the best place to start. This was the third room I clean. I knock on the door to make sure the room is empty. Then I open it—’

  She flinched at the sudden knock on Mullinger’s door and both she and Miller turned to see Xiu poke her head round.

  ‘I just need a quick word.’

  Miller apologised to Sofia, turned off the recorder on his phone and stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘I checked the log at reception,’ Xiu said. ‘Both victims were booked in for one night. They actually checked in within five minutes of each other.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Miller said.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘God knows.’ Miller shrugged. ‘It’s just something you say, isn’t it?’

  ‘The receptionist who was on duty last night has gone home, but I’ve left a message and asked them to call me back.’

  ‘Good work.’

  Xiu looked momentarily pleased, then hesitated. ‘Just something you say, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Miller turned away, stepped back into Mullinger’s office and sat down again. He restarted the recording app on his phone and leaned slowly towards Sofia. She still looked shell-shocked.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘You’d just opened the door . . .’

  ‘Yes, and then I go in, and . . .’ She stopped, her mouth hanging open, remembering. She shook her head and lowered it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Miller said. ‘I know this is difficult.’

  She looked up again and now he could see that she was clutching a balled-up tissue in her fist. She pressed it to her eyes.

  ‘I see him straight away. On the bed. He just has underwear on . . . with those birds on them. What are they called?’

  ‘Penguins.’ Miller still hadn’t recovered himself.

  ‘Yes, penguins. He’s just lying there and I can see all the blood, you know? All the blood where he’s been shot in the head. Such a lot of blood . . .’

  She paused, frozen and staring. She quickly composed herself and carried on, but the tears were falling now and her voice had become tired and almost robotic.

  ‘I think I will be sick.’ She pressed her hands to her stomach and closed her eyes. ‘I scream. I just keep screaming until somebody comes.’

  Miller gave her a few seconds, waited until her eyes were open again. ‘Had you seen the man on the bed before?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Is there anything else you can remember, Sofia? Anything at all?’

  ‘It’s stupid, I know, but while I was standing there screaming, I remember thinking that it would be very hard, you know? Very hard to wash all that blood out of the sheets.’

  Miller thanked the young woman for her help and told her that they would do everything they could to help her, that there were people she could talk to if she wasn’t coping. He gave her a card with his number on. He called the uniformed officer back in, then stepped out to find Mullinger lurking.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Three quick questions,’ Miller said. ‘First off, as far as the ratio of gingerbread to shortbread goes, why so skewed in favour of shortbread?’ He waved away the manager’s confusion. ‘OK, I’ll leave that one with you. Second, are there any members of staff who should have been at work this morning and weren’t?’

  Mullinger thought about it. ‘Well, this time of year there’s always a quick turnover, but . . . no, I don’t think so. I’ll double check.’

  ‘If you could. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, on a scale of one to ten, how disgusting is your bar food?’ Mullinger opened his mouth to answer, but Miller quickly cut him off. ‘Be honest, now. I’m a highly experienced police officer and I’ll know if you’re lying.’

  He sat with Xiu at a table in the corner, tucking into a BLT that wasn’t altogether inedible and watching Xiu pick at a salad and sip water that was a lot more sparkling than the conversation.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked, eventually. Miller had already sussed that his new partner wasn’t the gobbiest of souls, but she seemed unusually subdued.

  ‘All good,’ she said.

  ‘Only I can barely get a word in edgeways.’ He smiled and she didn’t. ‘Is it edgeways or edgewise? I’m never sure.’

  She’d clearly never thought about it. ‘I was just thinking about the case,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, right. Very good. Cracked it yet?’

  She shook her head, then forked a tomato rather more viciously than was strictly necessary and they descended into silence again. Miller finished his sandwich. He looked round and could only marvel at the interior décor of the Sands bar, the faux leather banquettes and the hideous artwork that took up every available inch of wall space. While it wasn’t quite in the same league as dogs playing snooker, it was in the same ballpark of atrocity. He made a mental note to have serious words with Paul Mullinger and suggest he get rid of it all in favour of something less offensive. A chimp sitting on a toilet, perhaps, or an inspirational print saying LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE (Miller was all in favour of adding PUKE).

  ‘I didn’t think your suggestion was stupid, by the way,’ Xiu said suddenly.

  Miller waited, because there were several to choose from.

  ‘The whole “wrong room” scenario.’

  ‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t what you would call thinking in a straight line, but that’s not a bad thing.’

  ‘I won’t hand in my resignation just yet.’

  She looked at him, fierce suddenly, which was properly disconcerting if not a little scary. ‘Of course not. No, you should definitely not do that.’

  ‘I just said I wouldn’t, didn’t I?’

  ‘Why would you even think about doing that?’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’

  She sighed and shook her head. She pushed her unfinished salad away from her and necked what was left of her water. She looked at her watch.

  ‘Yeah, we should probably crack on,’ Miller said.

  EIGHT

  Back at the station, while the extended team was gathering in the meeting room, laying out information packs and ensuring that pencils were sharpened, Miller took the opportunity to put in a quick call to his dead wife’s phone. He only did it a few times a day because he wasn’t barking mad, but it always made him feel better to hear her voice when the call – inevitably – went to her answerphone. Alex, telling him she wasn’t there right now, like he needed reminding. Asking him to leave a message, which he obviously didn’t do, but . . .

  It was just nice to hear her voice.

  He didn’t want to forget it.

  He dialled and, listening to it ring out, he imagined Fred and Ginger’s ears pricking up, same as he always did, as the tinny theme to Strictly Come Dancing chimed around his living room.

  For years he’d taken the mickey out of that bloody ringtone, but Alex had loved it. She’d said it made her happy and reminded her of good times even when she knew that her phone ringing usually meant bad news, for her or for someone else. She’d played it just to annoy him sometimes, waving her phone at him and singing along, and he’d pretended that it did, even though secretly he’d loved it too.

  Now, that music just killed him.

  ‘This is Alex and I can’t talk right now, because I’m out somewhere fighting crime, or doing serious damage to a bottle of red. Either way, beep, message, you know . . .’

  There were more people around the table in the conference room than Miller remembered seeing in a long time. Then again, he couldn’t remember anyone discovering two bodies in adjacent hotel rooms, so it was probably fair enough. Xiu, Clough, Fuller and half a dozen other members of the team were all seated, leafing through their packs. Several ancillary staff were standing, including Carys Morgan from the Digital Forensics Unit and someone who might have been called Brian from the Press Liaison Office.

  Sullivan stood up at the head of the table and talked the team through a hastily assembled PowerPoint presentation on the screen behind him. As always, Miller found himself idly fantasising that the wrong file had been loaded and that they would be treated to a selection of Sullivan’s holiday snaps or, better yet, his and Mrs Sullivan’s private collection of saucy bedroom videos.

  ‘Oh, Tim, you’re the best.’

  ‘Yeah . . . who’s your Daddy?’

  It would not be pleasant, but it would certainly ease the tension.

  ‘So . . .’ Sullivan pointed to the screen, as the first pictures of the victims appeared. ‘Adrian Cutler, thirty-one. I don’t think I need to tell anyone about him. Youngest son of Wayne Cutler. It’s safe to assume Adrian was the prime target, so it goes without saying that his old man is going to be looking very closely at the activities of the Massey family and that could all get very nasty. Obviously we’ve given Serious and Organised a heads-up.’ He glanced at Miller. The unit your dead wife used to work for.

  ‘I don’t quite understand the safe bit,’ Miller said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why is it a safe assumption that Cutler was the target?’

  Sullivan stared as though it was a very daft question. ‘Er . . . because he’s the son of a gangland boss?’

  ‘True, but not necessarily relevant.’

  ‘Because it looks very much like he was executed?’

  ‘Yes, that’s certainly what it looks like,’ Miller said. ‘Then again a fried egg can look very much like a tinned peach, which, trust me, isn’t a mistake you want to make more than once. More to the point, even if Adrian Cutler was executed, so was the other bloke. Never mind safe, I’m not even sure it should be an assumption.’

  Sullivan nodded slowly. ‘In his own . . . unique fashion, DS Miller has provided us with a timely reminder that we shouldn’t take anything for granted. But, until such time as he produces any evidence that the target in this case was actually the forty-four-year-old IT consultant in the next room, we’ll move forward on the . . . hypothesis that Adrian Cutler was the killer’s intended victim.’

  ‘I don’t think an assumption and a hypothesis are the same things,’ Miller said.

  Sullivan ignored him. ‘We must not forget however that we are investigating two murders here and whatever our killer’s primary motivation proves to have been, we can’t ignore the second victim. Barry Shepherd. A very different kettle of fish. An IT consultant, as I said, married with no kids. So, how the hell does he end up going the same way as Adrian Cutler and, crucially, what were both of them doing at the Sands Hotel in the first place? Tony . . . ?’

  Clough began sorting through his notes. ‘Right, so we’ve found our . . . sex worker.’ He nodded at Xiu, who did not react, then began handing out photographs captured on the CCTV cameras at the hotel. ‘That’s definitely what she was.’

  ‘The concierge recognised her,’ Fuller said. ‘Told me she’s been there several times. No ID as yet, though.’

  ‘Well, we need to put that right,’ Sullivan said. ‘Let’s find out who she is and bring her in as quickly as possible. Anything else from the CCTV?’

  ‘I’ve gone over all the comings and goings in the key timeframe, and in terms of anyone using the lift to access the upper floors, we’ve got one individual who currently remains unaccounted for and who nobody can identify as a guest.’ Clough handed out copies of a second photograph, which were quickly passed around the table and studied.