TANNAHILL STEPS OUT OF THE living room and hands the camera to the officer in charge of exhibits to upload the contents to the central crime report, commonly referred to as the Murder Book. In the time it has taken him to process the crime scene the hallway has also been processed and cleared, and a large room opposite that looks like a study has been turned into a makeshift field office. Detective Constable Baker is over by the front door, talking on his phone and pacing. He sees Tannahill, waves a greeting, and ambles over, phone still clamped to his ear.
Tannahill has worked with Baker for almost a year now and can’t quite figure him out. Given his experience he could easily have risen higher in the ranks but seems perfectly happy sticking at his current level and pay-grade. He also has a wife, two daughters, and an enviable family life in a career legendary for its ability to wreck them. Maybe his lack of ambition and the happiness that came with it was the key to his success.
Baker hangs up as he reaches him. “How’s it looking?” he says, nodding at the living room.
“Messy. What about you?”
“Well, we’ve established the man of the house isn’t hiding upstairs and kicked the first officer on scene up the arse for not checking the property properly. We bagged a couple of toothbrushes and hairbrushes to harvest DNA samples of the owners and started a house-to-house to see what we can find out, but so far nobody seems to know very much about the Millers.”
“Anything on the CCTV?”
Baker shakes his head. “It was switched off. I’ve arranged for the hard drive to be cloned in case there’s anything useful on it, but I doubt there’ll be anything from last night. It all seems pretty calm and well planned. No sign of a break-in, no alarm was tripped, nothing was broken, so whoever got in either had keys and codes or they were known to the victim and she let him in. We’ve contacted the company who installed the security system to get a list of who had access, but my guess is that, apart from the cleaner, it was just the owners, and seeing as one of them’s dead and the other one’s missing it isn’t hard to figure out what happened.”
“You think he killed her?”
Baker shrugs. “Nine times out of ten it’s the husband.”
Tannahill glances back into the living room, where the chief exhibits officer and an assistant are now standing over the still form of Kate Miller, her arms outstretched and sightless eyes staring upward now the mask has been taken away and carefully placed in an evidence bag by the assistant. “I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does it ever?”
“No, but if you wanted to murder your wife, or a domestic spiraled out of control and you ended up killing her, what’s the most obvious thing to do to try and cover it up?”
“Make it look like a burglary gone wrong.”
“Exactly. You smash a window, turn some furniture over, then you call the police and tell them you came in, found your missus in a pool of blood, and do your best to act like you’re now losing your mind with shock and grief. What you don’t do is switch off all the alarms, stage an elaborate scene by placing a bunch of strange objects around the body, then vanish.”
“Yeah, those objects are pretty weird. You ever see anything like that before?”
Tannahill shakes his head. “Only in books. I’m hoping forensics might be able to pull something useful off them.”
Baker sucks air through his teeth. “Yeah, well, don’t hold your breath on that score. Apart from the bloodbath in there, the rest of the house is squeaky clean—no prints, no blood traces on any of the access routes, nothing on the front or back door handles, nothing on or around any of the baths, sinks, or showers in the house, of which there are many.” He nods at the living room. “I reckon they must have cleaned themselves up in there, changed their clothes, shoes, everything, then taken everything away in a plastic bag or something. Like I said, calm and well planned. Whoever our killer is, they’d obviously done their homework.”
“Unfortunately, they did.” Tannahill nods at the junior exhibits officer emerging from the room holding an evidence bag in each hand. “Hold that book up a second, would you?”
The paper-suited officer holds up the bag containing the book and Baker reads the title and the name of the author through the plastic.
“Laughton Rees. Oh, shit!”
The exhibits officer peers at the book too and frowns, his eyes the only thing visible between his mask and the hood of the paper suit. “Who’s Laughton Rees?”
“Trouble,” Baker replies. “A massive potential headache.”
“Laughton Rees is Commissioner Rees’s daughter,” Tannahill explains. “And in less than two hours her dad is going to be standing in a room full of journalists telling them knife crime in the capital is at an all-time high, so if the press catch wind that another knife-related murder happened this morning, and that the crime scene appears to have been forensically cleaned using a book his daughter wrote as a kind of guide, then it’s not going to look very good for him, is it?”
“Ooooh,” the exhibits officer says, nodding slowly. “Yeah, that is bad, isn’t it?”