DS Paula Powell made her escape from the screaming mayhem that was her seven-year-old nephew’s birthday party and walked home relishing the cooling air of the early evening and enjoying the blessed quiet. It was impossible to tell her sister that she really didn’t yearn for children of her own, that involvement in the noisy, sticky lives of her nephew and niece was not the only brightness in her otherwise bleak and barren life, that pursuing her career as a detective sergeant in the Marlbury police force was not a poor second best to the joys of marriage and motherhood but what she loved. It was impossible to say it without rubbishing her sister’s life, without denigrating the children of whom she was, actually, very fond. She took out her phone to check for messages and found three from DC Sarah Shepherd, each more frantic than the one before, their arrivals unheard in all the screaming. A bubble of elation rose in her chest. She called Sarah back.
‘Sarah?’
‘Paula. Thank God. I really need you here. Ian’s on holiday, David’s not back for another week and I’m first on the scene at what looks like a homicide and a suicide. Dr McAndrew’s here but otherwise all I’ve got is one uniform keeping the rubberneckers at bay.’
‘I’m five minutes from my car. I’ll be with you in twenty.’
‘You’ve got the address, haven’t you? It was in my message.’
‘Yes. Eastgate estate. What a surprise!’
‘I think you’ll be surprised by this,’ Sarah said, and Paula heard her voice wobble.
‘Keep Dr McAndrew there with you till I come,’ she said and started to run, simultaneously cursing herself for the spindly-heeled sandals she had put on in honour of the party and congratulating herself for emptying into a flowerbed the two glasses of lethal punch that her brother-in-law had pressed on her in the course of the afternoon. She hoped the buddleia growing nearby would be able to cope with it.
At home, she changed her shoes, checked that she had all her protective gear, listened again to Sarah’s message and drove the familiar route to the Eastgate estate, generator of – probably – fifty per cent of Marlbury’s crime. Most commonly it was uniformed officers who found themselves there, recovering stolen goods, pursuing vandals and joy-riders, called out to domestic violence or drunken stabbings. Recently, though, Eastgate crime had gone up a notch. Situated as it was between London and Dover, Marlbury had become a convenient link in a chain that trafficked both people and drugs, and Eastgate was playing its part. The police knew that the owners of some impressive houses with high hedges in salubrious parts of the town were playing their part too, but they were more difficult to trawl for, so it was the Eastgate minnows they picked up time and again, expendable food for the big fish. It was the Met’s decision to prioritise breaking this chain that had led to DCI David Scott’s being seconded as liaison to them for three months, leaving her, Paula supposed and hoped, as senior investigating officer on this case.
The planners who designed Eastgate in the 1950s had gone for maximum density; high rise was not an option within sight of the abbey’s celebrated tower, so the houses were rammed together, shoulder to shoulder, their narrow front gardens now crammed with vehicles and wheelie bins, since neither drives nor side gates had been thought necessary. In the great 1980’s council house sell-off, no-one wanted to buy a house here, so there had been no gentrification and precious little in the way of redecoration. Eastgate was, these days, the place where the council put problem families; here they could make problems for each other and everyone else could breathe more easily.
There was no difficulty finding the house: the hubbub of voices led her there and changed its nature as she drew up, got out her gear, locked the car and started to elbow her way through the crowd, her shouts of, ‘Excuse me. Police!’ producing cheers and whistles. She wished she had taken a moment to change out of her flimsy little sundress when she changed her shoes. In spite of her consciousness of being watched as she walked up the short front path, she had time to notice that someone looked after the front garden and the bins were tucked away behind a wicker screen.
In the narrow hallway she came face to face with Lynne McAndrew.
‘DS Powell. Good,’ the pathologist said. ‘I’m just about done here. Your colleague is struggling a bit.’ She pushed open a door behind her so that Paula could see, through the kitchen window beyond, Sarah Shepherd pacing the tiny garden, a clump of tissues pressed to her mouth. At the same time Paula was aware of a smell wafting from the kitchen, sweet and fetid at the same time. She looked at Lynne McAndrew.
‘Yes,’ McAndrew said. ‘I think it was the dog that finished her off.’
‘The dog?’
‘You might as well look at it now, though it’s hardly your priority, of course.’
She led the way into the kitchen and Paula’s eyes were drawn immediately to a bright pool of red in the sink. She approached cautiously and for a moment could make no sense of what she saw, convinced somehow that since this was a kitchen, what she was looking at was something culinary. A dog lay in a puddle of blood, its head thrown back, and under its chin was a deep, dark, red hole with the neck vertebrae glinting white within it. Feeling the saliva rush into her mouth, she fought down nausea. ‘Nasty,’ she said as briskly as she could manage. ‘Let’s go back into the hall.’
In the hall, she said, ’So its throat was cut. What else am I expecting to see? Sarah – DC Shepherd – said a homicide and a suicide?’
‘One upstairs and one down. I’ve finished and the SOCO team aren’t here yet so they’re all yours.’
Paula hesitated. ‘I’d quite like a view from you first. Any pointers?’
Lynne McAndrew gave her a long look. ‘How much of this sort of thing have you seen?’ she asked.
Paula bridled, immediately defensive. ‘That depends on what this sort of thing is.’
‘Violent death.’
‘I’ve seen … well, there’s much less of it than you’d think from watching TV, isn’t there? You have to be a traffic cop to see it on a daily basis.’
‘Right. So you want me to prepare you. It’s not pretty, I warn you, but I’ve seen a lot worse. There’s a child. A girl. Aged six or seven. In her bedroom, on her bed, smothered with a pillow. No blood but not a pretty sight. You can see the struggle still. And there’s cyanosis – the face is blue.’
‘Right. And?’
‘And there’s a woman – young, late twenties probably – with two slit wrists. Lots of blood.’
‘OK. So one scenario is a woman at the end of her rope who kills her daughter – and her dog – and then cuts her wrists. Or we’re looking for a partner or ex-partner and this is a revenge thing. But he’s tried to make the woman’s death look like suicide and that would be surprising, wouldn’t it? Those kind of men – they want people to know it’s them. Their pride’s been hurt and they want to get it back by showing what big men they are. They usually kill themselves afterwards or go on the run. Does it convince you as a suicide?’
’It does and it doesn’t. The wrist slitting was quite professional – no sawing away across the tendons but a deep incision into the artery. And the incision on the left wrist is deeper than the one on the right, which makes sense if she was right-handed. On the other hand, wrist cutters often don’t do much to the second wrist at all. People will instinctively start with the knife in their stronger hand and then when they come to do the second wrist they’re not only using their weaker hand but they’ve got blood gushing out of it. There’s some bruising, too, that needs thinking about.’
She paused and looked around for her case. ‘I’ll take a better look at her when I’ve got her in the lab. If she killed the dog, I’d expect to find canine blood mixed in with her blood. And she’d had a lot to drink – reeked of gin. I’ll be interested to see the toxicology.’
She stood with her hand on the catch of the front door. ‘I should have preliminary results by the end of the day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘But if you’re going to be the SIO on this then it’s about time for you to go and look for yourself, Detective Sergeant, isn’t it?’ She closed the front door behind her.