TANNAHILL PUSHES OPEN THE DOOR to his tiny studio flat and drops his keys on the countertop that juts into the room defining which bit is kitchen and which is living space. The sofa bed is still pulled out and unmade from the last time he slept in it, which feels like about a week ago but is actually only a day.
He fills the kettle, sets it boiling, then opens his laptop and logs on, glancing up at the room as he waits for the latest case updates to download. You could fit his entire flat in the Millers’ living room twice. He had been living here for over two years now. It had been found in a hurry between court appearances and long days, a temporary solution picked for location and, in London terms, relative cheapness. It was supposed to have been a stepping-stone to something better, something more suitable for a man of his age and professional stature that he planned to find when work eased off a bit. But work never eased off, and so the stepping-stone had turned into a tiny, bare island where apparently he now lived.
He picks a dirty mug out of the sink, sniffs it, rinses it out, then looks in a cupboard for something to put in it. He finds a strip of instant miso soup portions, tears one off and squeezes brown paste into the mug.
The updates to the case file finish downloading and he scrolls through them.
Still no conclusive forensics from the lab on any of the objects.
Still no new information on either Mike or Kate Miller.
Still no new leads, not even with all the press attention, though they’ve had plenty of calls, most of them time-wasters: people claiming to have seen Mike Miller; people claiming be Mike Miller; people claiming to be the killer; people claiming it’s all part of some broader conspiracy involving Russia, or Israel, or Satanists. High-profile cases like this always bring out the crazies. Kick over a large enough rock and there they always are.
The kettle boils and he pours water into the mug, takes a teaspoon from a drawer, and stirs as he checks his phone.
Missed calls from the office and his mother. He should call the office back but feels filled to the brim with work already and wants to process everything from his trip to the Miller house with Laughton Rees first.
Laughton.
He’d meant to ask about her name, but the right moment had never really presented itself. When is the right moment to ask personal questions while poking around a murder scene? Didn’t write about that in her book, now, did she?
He half collapses, half sits on the edge of the unmade bed, drags his laptop off the counter, and clicks on a shortcut to the Automatic Number Plate Recognition portal.
When he was a baby uniform on the force, you had to pick up the phone and talk to an actual human who would run a plate for you while chatting about the weather or football while you waited. Now everything that can be automated has been or is being automated, which means he spends half his life hunched in front of a screen, filling in forms and sifting through the responses.
A new window opens on the laptop and he copies the case file number from the Murder Book along with the registration plates of Kate and Mike Miller’s cars into the relevant search fields. He then clicks on a calendar, selects a time period dating back a month to keep the results manageable, and submits it.
A wheel starts spinning on the screen telling him something is happening. Someone in IT once told him these things are called “throbbers,” but he suspects they might have been winding him up. If he had the energy he would google it, but he takes a sip of his miso soup instead, the hot, salty liquid tasting way better than it should.
His phone buzzes. His mother again. He doesn’t really have the energy to talk to her either, but then he also doesn’t have the energy to keep ignoring her, so he lets out a long sigh, then answers it, putting it on speaker.
“Hi, Mam.”
“You still at work?” His mother is never one to waste time with “hellos.”
“No.”
“Good. Did you eat yet?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
Tannahill glances at the miso soup. “Japanese.”
He hears a deep sigh on the other end of the line. “There’s no goodness in those instant soup things, Tanny, you might as well eat the bloody packet. What time did you get home?”
“Just now, I was at a crime scene with a consultant.”
“And this fella’s more important than calling your own mam, is he?”
“She.”
“Oh?” He hears the immediate interest in her voice and wishes he’d never said anything. “Is she single?”
“We were at a crime scene, we weren’t on a date!”
“What, people don’t meet at work anymore? Is she attractive?”
“Mam!”
“You didn’t answer, so I’ll take that as a yes.”
Two new windows pop up on the laptop screen, showing the ANPR results for both license plates. “I have to go,” he says. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Promise. Love you.”
He hangs up before she can ask any more questions and sips his soup as he scrolls through the results for Mike Miller’s car.
The ANPR results take the form of a list of dates, times, and locations running down the left-hand side and a map filling the rest of the window with red markers corresponding to each camera that recorded a hit. They are densely clustered around the Miller house, and he goes through these first, clicking each camera in turn and unchecking them from the list to leave just the results from slightly farther afield.
There’s one that jumps out immediately, a red marker just south of the river, about six miles from the Miller house. This camera captured Mike Miller’s license plate four times in the last month, the last time a day before his missed flight to Goa.
Tannahill hovers the cursor arrow over the last entry and a new window pops up showing the image captured by the camera. Mike Miller’s car fills the center of the frame. A silhouetted figure is just visible behind the wheel at the top of frame—someone who looks an awful lot like Mike Miller. Someone else is sitting next to him. Someone smaller, dark-haired, female—someone who is not Kate Miller.
He clicks through the other three hits: same car, same driver, and in the last image, same passenger.
Tannahill zooms in to it, but the image quality is too low and pix-elates into nothing without revealing more detail.
“Who are you then, lady?” Tannahill murmurs.
He returns the image to normal size and studies it. Mike Miller’s car is turned off the main road slightly and he is looking at the woman, like they’re mid-conversation and he doesn’t need to pay attention to the way ahead, like he’s waiting for a gate to open or something.
Behind the car on the opposite side of the street he can see a pub with tables spread out along the front of the building. Next to that is a café and what looks like a fancy card or gift shop. It all looks expensive.
He checks the location information of the ANPR camera—72–76 Borough High Street. Sounds about right. Nice area, lots of bars, good food, perfect for the modern man about town cheating on his wife. Southwark was also south of the river, which in London terms meant it might as well have been in a different country from Highgate. No one would have spotted Mike canoodling down there. Different crowd. Lots of tourists.
Tannahill opens Google Street View and types in the camera’s address. The picture zooms down to street level, revealing more shops and a large set of double iron gates with MAIDSTONE BUILDING MEWS written across them in metal letters and a leafy courtyard beyond. It looks like an old factory or a warehouse that’s been turned into an apartment building. Cool city lofts. Good security, which is obviously very important to our Mr. Miller for reasons still unknown. It also looks like a great place to lie low if you’d just killed your wife and the whole world was looking for you.
He pecks out an email to Chamberlain asking him to run a background check on the building, pull the current list of residents, and see if Mike Miller is listed as living, owning, or renting there, then looks back at the photo of the car. The two people inside are looking at each other, easy and casual with each other, as they head into the luxury loft development.
Cherchez la femme, Laughton had said. And here she was.
He finishes his soup, almost chewing the sediment that has settled at the bottom, and searches back through the case file until he finds the passenger manifest of the flight Mike Miller missed. He’d had a business class ticket for 63B, on the upper deck of a 747. Tannahill has only ever flown economy so imagines business is the same only with more leg room, but after a few minutes searching online he finds a seat layout map for a 747 and sees that the business-class seats are staggered and face each other with a divider between them. He checks the names of the passengers either side of the empty seat. Both are women—Andrea d’Almond and Shonagh O’Brien.
He looks back at the outline of the dark-haired woman sitting in the car next to Mike Miller. His money is on Andrea. She looks like an Andrea. “Andrea d’Almond” also sounds way more like femme fatale material than “Shonagh.” He makes a note in the file to do background checks on both of them in the morning, then leans back on the bed, kicks off his shoes, and closes his eyes.
He can feel sleep tugging at him, pulling him down like gravity, but he fights it. Instead he opens his eyes, then another case file—Kai Mustafa, fifteen years old, stabbed for apparently no reason other than he was alone and weak, killed by oncoming traffic after he jumped, fell, or was pushed off a bridge. He was the twenty-second knife homicide in the capital that year, but his murder had not made it onto the front pages of any newspapers. And because Kate Miller’s death had, it meant the already scant resources allocated to delivering justice for him and the other twenty-one cases had now been diverted to her. And though it would be the easiest thing in the world to sign off Kai Mustafa’s case as unsolved and file it away, he can’t, because everyone deserves justice, not just the people with money and status. So he stares at the photo of the unsmiling boy, fixing it in his mind along with the knowledge that this boy died alone and afraid, living on the streets, abandoned by society, and starts working through the evidence, looking for the patterns beneath the surface, looking for the connections that might unlock the case, looking for justice for Kai.