At this stage of the game, the net was cast wide, but not overly deep.

  ‘We’re just getting started,’ Tanner said. ‘There’s going to be a lot more to get stuck into when we get full forensic results back, and we’ll be up to our eyeballs by the time the techies have finished with the victim’s phone and computer. Hopefully, we will. So, everyone needs to get their nut down, and anyone who doesn’t wants to stop and ask themselves if it’s really worth pissing me off. No stupid mistakes, nothing half-arsed and no cutting corners, fair enough? That said, we need to do this on the hurry-up . . . ’

  She let that sink in.

  She made eye contact with a few of them to make sure it had sunk in.

  Obviously, Tanner told them, their job, the job of any homicide unit, was to catch every perpetrator as quickly as possible and, more often than not, speed was the most effective weapon they had. The first twenty-four hours, hot irons, all that. Still, there were newbies on the team, so although she did so rather less dramatically – less forcefully, at any rate – than Tom Thorne might have done, she wound things up by telling them exactly why, with a case such as this, time was not on their side.

  Ten minutes later, Thorne and Tanner closed the door of the DCI’s office behind them. Russell Brigstocke, the nominal SIO on the case, had been watching the briefing from the back of the room and nodded at Tanner as she and Thorne sat down, to let her know she’d done a good job.

  ‘Sir.’ Tanner did not need to be told.

  ‘So, where the hell are we, then?’ Behind his desk, Brigstocke began leafing through the case file; a ‘murder book’ that was, as yet, a rather slim volume, but one which they all knew would fatten rapidly. What had once been a luxuriant quiff was a little shambolic these days and the chain attached to his specs gave him the look of a somewhat dotty headmaster, albeit one who could still dish out a good kicking if he needed to. Tanner was relatively new to the team, but Thorne and Brigstocke had worked together for a long time. In Thorne’s admittedly chequered experience, most officers of DCI rank and above were more politician than plod, but Brigstocke was a welcome exception. They’d fallen out, of course, spectacularly on more than one occasion, but Thorne was confident that, when it mattered, he and his boss had one another’s back.

  Fairly confident, anyway.

  ‘Looks like they had an arrangement and Sumner went somewhere to meet her,’ Thorne said. ‘Dinner.’

  ‘Spaghetti,’ Brigstocke said, looking at the notes. ‘Worth talking to Italian places nearby?’

  ‘It might have been local, I suppose, but my money’s on somewhere a bit further out. Wouldn’t want to risk being seen.’

  ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ Brigstocke nodded, like it made sense.

  ‘One way of putting it.’

  ‘We picked his car up going past Gospel Oak station just after seven-thirty,’ Tanner said. ‘Then again ten minutes after that, heading north towards Highgate. We’ve got him coming back past the station at nine forty-five. There’s obviously a passenger in the car, but it’s not a clear image.’

  ‘Sod’s law,’ Brigstocke said.

  ‘He opens his garage with the remote and drives straight inside,’ Thorne said. ‘Because he doesn’t want his nosy neighbour, or anyone else who knows that his wife’s away, clocking that he’s brought a woman home with him. The pair of them go out through the back of the garage and into the house through the kitchen door.’

  ‘Then she drugs him,’ Brigstocke said.

  ‘Well, obviously we’re waiting for forensics to confirm it, but I reckon she slips something into the plonk. Maybe they sit snogging on the sofa for half an hour or whatever, until she’s pretty sure the drug’s kicked in, then she takes him upstairs and does what she’s really there for.’

  ‘What we can’t find,’ Tanner said, ‘is any sign of a woman leaving that area on foot in the time frame we’ve got. Nothing on any of the cameras that picked Sumner’s car up.’

  Thorne turned to look at her. ‘I don’t think she did leave on foot. I think she left the house through the back gate, slipped along that alleyway and walked to whichever street she’d left her own car in.’

  ‘Covered in blood?’

  ‘It’s dark and she’s wearing a coat.’ He waited. ‘Why not?’ Tanner still seemed unconvinced, so he looked at Brigstocke.

  ‘All right, I’ll go with it.’

  ‘She knows where he lives, susses out the area, where the cameras are, all of it. She drives over there beforehand, parks up on a road nearby, then heads off to get ready to meet Sumner later on.’

  ‘You saying she’d planned it well in advance?’

  ‘Come on, do any of us think this was a spur-of-the-moment thing?’

  The short silence that followed, the shifting in the seats, made it obvious that none of them did. ‘So, how did he meet her?’ Brigstocke asked.

  ‘We’re still waiting on the nerds,’ Thorne said.

  ‘If you’re talking about the Digital Forensics Unit, those nerds are probably responsible for seventy-five, eighty per cent of all our decent results.’

  Thorne nodded, impressed. ‘Still nerds, though.’

  Tanner smiled and so, eventually, did Brigstocke.

  ‘They’ve promised a preliminary report by the end of the day.’

  ‘We’ll know then,’ Thorne said. ‘It’ll all be on the phone or the laptop, or both.’

  This was the information they were really waiting for, counting on. The forensic scientists dealing with physical evidence had worked quickly and already provided enough to secure a conviction, but it was largely academic until such time as an arrest was made. There had been no shortage of DNA and print evidence found at the crime scene, though nothing that had yet been matched with anything on the database. They had also identified a partial footwear print lifted from the bathroom floor as belonging to a size six Dr Marten, which was certainly not a shoe owned by Andrea Sumner.

  Thorne was already picturing those shoes, tapping nervously against the floor of an interview room.

  Until such time . . .

  ‘So, one of those dating apps, you think?’ Brigstocke looked at them. ‘An online escort agency?’

  ‘Got to be favourite,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner nodded her agreement. ‘He wanted sex, basically. All tarted up with dinner and a bottle of Merlot, but that’s the long and short of it. So I doubt very much this woman is someone our victim met at the bus stop, or in the queue at the post office.’

  Brigstocke hummed and nodded. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘What about the killer taking the ears?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thorne let out a long breath.

  ‘Might need to put your Dr Perera on standby, Tom. If and when we make an arrest.’

  ‘She’s not my Dr Perera.’

  ‘No?’

  Thorne could see that Tanner was trying to suppress a grin. ‘You know what I mean. Not when it’s a job.’

  The DCI set the file down on his desk and rolled his chair away. Thorne turned to stare out of the office window for a few seconds, across the lush green sports field and the pulsing M1 towards the grim sprawl of the industrial park beyond. Then he let his head drop back and spoke to the dirty-white ceiling tiles. The words themselves were rather more . . . dramatic than those Tanner had used when talking to the team twenty minutes earlier, but he said them as casually as if he were asking for another sugar in his tea.

  ‘If we don’t catch her, she’s going to do it again.’

  SIX

  The headless corpse of a mouse had been waiting for Tanner in her kitchen when she got home and for once it had been a fairly easy case to crack. She was not best disposed towards the cat for a while, but by the time Mrs Slocombe sprang on to her lap an hour or so later, all had been forgiven, even though the guilty party was a notorious recidivist. Tanner allowed the cat to settle as she finished what was left in her glass. The red wine and the warmth of the cat were a pleasantly soporific combination, and soon she was struggling to stay awake, while the rhythmic purring and the snare-roll of rain on the roof drowned out the chinless moron on TV who was begging Alan Sugar not to fire him.

  I’d fire him, Tanner thought, as she let her eyes close. In a heartbeat, the useless pillock.

  Drifting, she thought about the kick-arse speech she’d made to the team earlier in the day, her best Henry V routine. Better than Lord sodding Sugar, anyway. The need for commitment and for urgency which Tom Thorne had stated rather more bluntly in Brigstocke’s office afterwards. She remembered the veiled threats of disciplinary action she’d bandied around; the ton of bricks she would bring down on any idiot who didn’t pull their weight or do things the right way.

  Anyone who did not follow the correct procedure.

  As was so often the case, it was Susan’s voice she heard, saying, Who the hell do you think you’re kidding? and Tanner sat up fast when she felt claws in her chest. The cat jumped away and the rain had stopped and all she could think about was the warm spatter on her face and the weight of a poker in her hand.

  She stood up, cold suddenly, and followed the cat into the kitchen. She stood for half a minute, wondering what she’d gone in there for, then decided that a herbal tea would help her sleep. Camomile, maybe, or one of those fruity ones Tom Thorne enjoyed taking the piss out of. Leaning against the worktop, she remembered their conversation outside the Sumner house, when they had talked about the level of violence, about whether a woman could really be responsible. As the kettle began to grumble behind her, Tanner remembered the blood soaked into those clouds on the duvet and a victim who had been unable to defend himself, and thought:

  Am I any better than . . . ?

  Don’t be daft. Nic . . . don’t be so stupid.

  Susan’s voice again. Not in any sort of spooky way and not because Tanner was losing it, but just because she constantly found herself imagining what her dead partner would say in any given situation. Hammering at a brick wall of no comment in an interview room, or if the car wouldn’t start, or when they’d run out of those biscuits they’d both loved in the supermarket.

  The kettle turned itself off.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Tanner said.

  Susan was bang on, same as she usually was. Tanner was in no way similar to the woman they were now trying to catch, not even close. What was done was done – one moment of madness when rage had got the better of her – and the best way to make up for it was by working to put things right for anyone facing the same hell she’d once been in. For the likes of Andrea Sumner.

  Justice now was the best thing Tanner could offer, or at any rate it would have to do. Justice was . . . atonement. Wasn’t it?

  Atonement? Listen to you.

  Tanner smiled. Susan would never have said anything as poncey as that.

  She turned round to make the tea, shushing the cat who had begun to pester her again, nosing around her shins and yowling insistently. As if a bowl of Felix Double Delicious and a mouse’s head had not been quite enough.

  Thorne and Melita lay reading in bed, each having eaten far too much of Melita’s seafood curry to even consider anything more physically demanding. Melita was reading a novel about old people solving a murder, while Thorne flicked through the latest edition of Country Music, which the permanently miserable newsagent round the corner from his flat ordered in for him.

  Seriously? You like all that twangy stuff?

  I do, yeah.

  Blokes in big hats?

  He was excited to see that there was a new album by Sturgill Simpson out soon and decided that he’d get it. That he’d go to a shop and buy it. He knew he could download it on to his phone, stream it or whatever, but he couldn’t be arsed to learn how all that carry-on worked. He still bought CDs, listened to them in the car or played them on what he refused to think of as anything but his ‘stereo system’. He still played his records now and again, and would buy a lot more if vinyl hadn’t become so bloody expensive. A few months earlier he’d wanted to replace his copy of Johnny Cash At San Quentin, which was scratched to buggery. They’d been asking forty-odd quid for it, so Thorne had learned to live with the scratches.

  ‘How was Phil today?’

  Thorne turned. ‘He was fine.’

  She looked at him, a question in her expression he couldn’t work out and didn’t want to think about for too long.

  ‘Yeah, you know, his usual self. Gobby, and not quite as funny as he thinks he is. He sends his best.’

  Melita smiled and turned a page. ‘Send mine to him.’

  Thorne was keen to change the subject. ‘How was your . . . what did you say it was . . . kistophile, today?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s klismaphile, and I didn’t see him today. He’s a private patient.’

  ‘Right.’ Thorne went back to his magazine, trying to come up with something. ‘Public enema number one.’

  Melita grunted, like she wanted to get back to her book.

  ‘Oh yeah . . . Brigstocke talked about bringing you in on the case.’

  She lowered the paperback and turned to him. ‘Right. Well, I’ll have to check my diary, see if I’m available.’ She reached over and punched him on the arm. ‘I’m kidding.’

  ‘If and when the time comes, you know.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to do you out of a payday, but I’m hoping it won’t come to that.’

  ‘No, fingers crossed it doesn’t. Seriously though, it’s good that he brought it up.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You hadn’t said anything . . . ?’

  ‘No, I swear.’

  ‘OK, then.’ Melita leaned across to put her book on the bedside table and switched her light out. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone thinking it was nepotism. Or that I was working in return for sexual favours from a certain detective inspector.’

  Thorne rubbed his stomach. ‘Not tonight, you weren’t.’

  ‘Well, let’s see how we feel in the morning,’ Melita said.

  Thorne turned his own light off and lay in the dark for a few minutes, the ghost of the bulb dancing behind his eyelids. He’d meant what he’d said; he hoped this case would never reach the stage where Melita’s services were called for. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t believe he could catch the killer. He wasn’t short on confidence, misplaced or not. It was more about the kind of case that called for his girlfriend’s expertise and how he was likely to feel about it afterwards, whatever the result. The marks a case like that would inevitably leave. Had left.

  ‘Night,’ Melita said.

  In the end, of course, he knew there wasn’t a fat lot he could do about that, that all he could do was his job, so he tried to tell himself there was very little point in worrying about it.

  Thorne rolled on to his side and tugged at the duvet.

  He’d learned to live with the scratches.

  SEVEN

  In the bedroom of a small flat on the other side of the river, Rebecca Driver was wide awake at her computer and making up stories.

  She had been doing it ever since she could remember, trying to write things that were funny at first, that might make the other kids at school laugh, if she was lucky and got called up to the front of the class. They did laugh, too, most of the time, and it was the best feeling in the world. Then, a bit later on, when things had turned to shit at home, she didn’t much feel like being funny any more.

  It was just monsters after that, and nobody liked those stories very much.

  Age: 26.

  Location: Essex, but happy to travel.

  She stared at the screen and racked her brains. She had already come up with a name for this new character and now she was trying to describe her, to think of the things she liked. The films and music she always went back to, favourite food, all the usual. This was the part she enjoyed the most, the bit she put most effort into. Not that any of it was much effort. The story was what really sold it though, she reckoned; the details that would catch the eye, the message it gave. The pictures could come from anywhere, of course, and they were always the thing she left until last, anyway. It was never any problem explaining that discrepancy away.

  Smoker: No. Horrible habit.

  Traits in a partner that would be unacceptable:

  She typed Erectile dysfunction, giggled then deleted it.

  She still enjoyed making up stories, did it in her head all the time, but it could never come close to the pleasure she got from reading them. She’d spent a lot of time alone in her room after things had turned ugly, with the door locked and always, always a book to lose herself in. Headphones pumping out metal, so she could tune out the noise downstairs. She could still feel it, though; vibrating in the walls when things were starting to get smashed downstairs and her mother was screaming at him about something that didn’t actually matter, because deep down she knew.

  Losing herself wasn’t just a treat back then, it was a necessity.

  It was the scary stuff she’d needed, right from the off, not that any of it actually scared her. Nothing scared her. Those kinds of books were the best escape route, that was all, so she devoured them. Thrillers with gore-spattered corpses on the cover, dark fantasy, horror of course . . . until eventually she had discovered true crime.

  She smiled and started to type again.

  That was when all this had really started, obviously.

  Looking for: Fun. Passion. Use your imagination!

  She swallowed a mouthful of the coffee which had gone cold and glanced at the clock on the screen. She’d give it another couple of hours, try to release as many characters into the world as she could come up with before she got too tired. Work in the morning, on top of all this.