THE EMAIL ARRIVES AT EXACTLY midday.
Brian Slade—cane thin, perma-dressed for running, standing at his adjustable desk in the corner of the newsroom—does not see it at first. He is in the zone, up against deadline, writing the main body of an article about Darren Platt, the Premier League striker who may or may not have had sex with an underage girl in a hotel room with two of his friends. The verdict is due today, tomorrow at the latest, and will be front page of The Daily the moment it drops.
Slade takes a sip of water from his bottle and shifts from foot to foot, shaking each leg out in turn, flicking away his nervous energy. It doesn’t matter to him which way the verdict goes. If Platt is found guilty, Slade has a string of ex-girlfriends and assorted conquests lined up who’ll pose in not very many clothes for a few grand apiece and give chapter and verse on the footballer’s many kinks and shortcomings in the bedroom and as a person. If Platt is found not guilty, which past history and the fact he gets paid two hundred grand a week so can afford the best defense money can buy suggests he will, then Slade will use the threat of all these exes telling their sordid little tales to leverage an exclusive interview with Platt himself. Either way he gets an exclusive and The Daily gets its front page. Sex, sport, money, and glamour, that’s what shifts newspapers and drives click traffic, always has and always will. He just needs the verdict so he can slap an ending on his story.
He stretches some stiffness out of his lower back, takes another sip of water, and is about to dive back into his story when a calendar alert pings up on his screen.
Police Press conference—1 P.M.
If sex and scandal are Slade’s bread and butter, then “the-police-are-shit” stories are more like his hobby, and the release of the annual crime stats is usually good value. Slade has already seen how bad they are courtesy of a copper on his payroll and doesn’t want to pass up the opportunity of watching Commissioner Rees squirm as he tries to put a positive spin on the pile of dog turds he has to deliver. If Slade can finish this article and park it in the next five minutes he’ll have plenty of time to run over to New Scotland Yard and get in position for all the fun and games. He clicks on the calendar alert to close it, then spots the email, the subject line snagging his attention:
DS GEORGE SLADE—RIP
Slade experiences the usual rush of emotions whenever he encounters his father’s name: hatred, disgust, fear—still fear after all these years. He looks around the office to see if he can spot anyone smirking or pretending not to look his way, but everyone is staring at their screens. Whoever sent the email is either not in the room or doing a good job of keeping their head down.
He checks the sender—justice72@yahoo.com. Could be anyone, a standard newsroom wind-up, find a person’s weak spot then poke it relentlessly, and everyone knows everyone’s secrets in this place, it’s a matter of survival as much as anything, come for me and I’ll come for you, mutually assured destruction, survival of the shittest.
Slade clicks open the message expecting to see a picture of someone’s arse, or a still from a gay porn video with his face photoshopped onto some bloke getting pounded by another dude or something equally witty. Instead a series of large image files start downloading.
The first photo shows a white room with blood, lots of blood, and what appears to be a dead woman lying in the center of it. The next shows the woman in life, beautiful and blond but with a knife driven through her smile, the blood on the blade staining her perfect teeth. She is cuddling up to a blandly handsome man who looks like he might be a celebrity, though Slade doesn’t recognize him so he can’t be. Together they look like a couple in an advert selling something aspirational like investments or high-end cruises. A caption beneath the photo reads “Kate and Mike Miller.”
Slade googles them, clicks on the image tab, and scrolls through the results looking for a match but finds none.
Interesting.
Who doesn’t come up in a Google search these days?
Slade switches back to the email and stares at the picture of the smiling couple with the knife driven through it. “Hello, Kate and Mike Miller,” he murmurs. “Who are you, I wonder?”
The next image downloads, an exterior of a house, a big, modern-looking thing with a wall of glass rising behind mature trees and what looks like gravestones in the foreground. It’s a strong image and the slowness of the downloads shows that these are large files, print quality, though the crime scene photos all have a time and date stamp on the bottom right corner that will need cropping out. Slade can see this house image sitting nicely beneath a headline, but what’s the story? The subject line mentioned his father, but he can’t see what connects him to these images other than it’s a crime scene and his dad was once a detective in the Met, before they kicked him out. He checks the date stamps on the crime scene photos. Today’s date. Not one of his old cases then. So what is it?
Another photo opens, a closer shot of the dead woman’s body, her blood vivid against the white rug she’s lying on; and there’s something else, something Slade had missed in the wider shot. He leans forward and squints at the image, trying to make out the objects arranged so carefully around the dead woman. As if in response another image opens showing a close-up of one of them, a book, and Slade instantly knows what the story is and exactly how to spin it.
Laughton Rees.
He hasn’t thought about her in years, not since he was reporting on the McVey case almost twenty years ago.
He snatches up his phone, finds a number in his recently called menu, and dials it.
Laughton Rees, one of the lead characters in his first proper scoop, the gift that kept on giving as her life spiraled into tragedy. But then she’d pulled herself together and ceased to be of interest. And now she was back, her name swimming out of a room full of blood in a millionaire’s mansion.
Money. Murder. People in high places. He could write it in less than five minutes, he just needs to check it’s true, or true enough to hang a story on at least.
The phone starts ringing and he scrolls back through the photos looking for the picture of the house. There can’t be many houses like this built right next to an old cemetery, not in London at least. It might be in another city, of course, but he doesn’t think so.
“What do you want?” a low voice murmurs. “I’ve already given you the crime stats.”
“I’m not calling about that, I’m calling about a murder. Victim is a woman. Blond. Nicely put together. Somewhere in her thirties, maybe forties but well preserved, or she was until someone stuck a knife in her multiple times. The house she was killed in is one of those wanky, architect-designed steel-and-glass boxes, looks like a dentist’s or the offices of a tech company. It’s right next to an old cemetery, big trees, headstones with moss on them. Maybe Highgate, maybe Stoke Newington.” He hears a sigh, then the muffled sound of a keyboard being tapped. “How recent?”
Slade glances back at the time stamp on the corner of the photographs. “This morning.”
More typing. “OK, I got it. Victim is Katherine Miller, with a K. Age late thirties. Found dead in her Highgate house by her cleaner.”
Slade opens his notebook and starts scribbling. “Does the cleaner have a name?”
“Er . . . Celia Barnes.”
“Any suspects? Anyone in custody?”
“None yet, though we’re looking for the husband, one Michael James Miller, late forties, current whereabouts unknown. What’s your interest?”
“Not sure yet. Is there anything else?”
“Not much. The scene’s still being processed, so the case file won’t get fully updated until they get back and upload it. The cleaner’s been interviewed and there’s an audio file of that.”
“I’ll have that. Anything else?”
“Not really. There’s a brief initial report from a DS on the Murder Squad that describes the scene as being very clean.”
Slade looks back at the photo of the woman lying in the center of a room decorated with her blood. “What do you mean clean?”
“I mean forensically clean—no fingerprints, no DNA, like it’s been wiped down by someone who knew what they were doing.”
“Really?” Slade scrolls back to the book and smiles when he rereads the title, the story taking solid shape in his mind now. “Is there anything in the file about some objects that were left by the body?”
“Nothing. Sounds like your information is more up-to-date than mine. Who you getting all this from?”
Who indeed?
“What time was it called in?”
“Err . . . seven fifty-seven A.M.”
Slade scrolls back through the email, checking the time stamps on all the crime scene photographs, and smiles.
“You’re not my only friend in high places,” he says. “Keep me posted about any new developments and I’ll call back later for an update.”
He cuts him off and opens a new document, all thoughts of Darren Platt and his court case now forgotten. There’s only one story that’s going to be on the front page of the evening paper, and it’s not going to be about shagging footballers.