Detective Chief Inspector Jack Harper
Tuesday 05:15
The sound of my phone buzzing wakes me from the kind of dream I don’t wish to be woken from. One in which I am not a fortysomething-year-old man, living in a house with a mortgage I can’t afford, a toddler I can’t keep up with, and a woman who is not my wife but nags me anyway. A better man would have got his shit together by now, instead of sleepwalking through a loaned-out life.
I squint at my phone in the darkness and see that it is Tuesday. It is also stupidly early, so I’m relieved the text doesn’t appear to have woken anyone else. Sleep deprivation tends to have terrible consequences in this house, though not for me – I’ve always been a bit of a night owl. I shouldn’t feel excitement about what I read on the screen, but I do. The truth is, since I left London, my job has been as dull as a nun’s underwear drawer.
I’m head of the Major Crime Team here, which sounds exciting, but I’m based in deepest, darkest Surrey now, which isn’t. Blackdown is a quintessential English village less than two hours from the capital, and petty crime and the occasional burglary tends to be as ‘major’ as it gets. The village is hidden from the outside world by a sentinel of trees. The ancient forest seems to have trapped Blackdown – and its inhabitants – in the past, as well as permanent shadow. But its chocolate-box beauty could never be denied. The old lanes and narrow streets are filled with an abundance of thatched cottages, white picket fences and an above-average number of elderly residents, who all appreciate a below-average crime rate. It’s the kind of place people come to die, and somewhere I never thought I’d find myself living.
I stare at the message on my phone, practically drooling over the words as I drink them down:
Just the idea of a body being found here feels like it must be a mistake, but I already know it isn’t. Ten minutes later, I’m sufficiently dressed, caffeinated, and in the car.
My latest second-hand 4x4 looks like it could do with a wash, and I realise – a little too late – that I do too. I sniff my armpits and consider going back inside the house, but I don’t want to waste time or wake anyone. I hate the way they both look at me sometimes. They have the same eyes, filled with tears and disappointment a tad too often.
I’m slightly overenthusiastic perhaps to get to the crime scene before everyone else, but I can’t help it. Nothing this bad has happened here for years, and it makes me feel good, optimistic and energised. The thing about working for the police for as long as I have, is that you start to think like a criminal without being seen as one.
I turn on the engine, praying it will start, ignoring the glimpse of my own reflection in the rear-view mirror. My hair – which is now more grey than black – is sticking out in all directions. There are dark circles beneath my eyes, and I look older than I remember being. I try to console my ego; it’s the middle of the bloody night after all. Besides, I don’t care what I look like, and other people’s opinions matter even less to me than my own. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
I drive with one hand on the steering wheel, while the other feels the stubble on my chin. Maybe I should have at least shaved. I glance down at my crumpled shirt. I’m sure we must own an ironing board, but I’ve no idea where it is or when I last used it. For the first time in a long time, I wonder what other people see when they see me. I used to be quite the catch. I used to be a lot of things.
It’s still dark when I pull into the National Trust car park, and I can see that – despite coming straight here – everyone else appears to have beaten me to it. There are two police cars and two vans, as well as unmarked vehicles. Forensics are already on the scene, as is Detective Sergeant Priya Patel. Her career choice hasn’t managed to grind her down yet; she’s still shiny and new. Too young to let the job make her feel old, too inexperienced to know what it will do to her eventually. What it does to us all. Her daily enthusiasm is exhausting, as is her perpetually cheerful disposition. My head hurts just from looking at her, so I tend to avoid doing so as often as it is possible when you work with someone every day.
Priya’s ponytail swings from side to side as she hurries towards my car. Her tortoiseshell glasses slip down her nose, and her big brown eyes are a bit too full of excitement. She doesn’t look as if she’s been dragged from her bed in the middle of the night. Her slim-fit suit can’t possibly be keeping her petite body warm, and her freshly polished brogues slide a little on the mud. I find it strangely satisfying to see them get dirty.
I sometimes wonder whether my colleague sleeps fully dressed, just in case she needs to leave the house in a hurry. She put in a special request to transfer here to work under me a couple of months ago, though God knows why. If there was ever a time in my life when I was as keen as Priya Patel, I can’t remember it.
As soon as I step outside the car, it starts to rain. An instant heavy downpour, saturating my clothes in seconds, and assaulting me from above. I look up and study the sky, which thinks it is night even though it is now morning. The moon and stars would still be visible, had they not been covered with a blanket of dark clouds. Torrential rain is not ideal for preserving outdoor evidence.
Priya interrupts my thoughts and I slam the car door without meaning to. She rushes over, trying to hold her umbrella over my head, and I shoo her away.
‘DCI Harper, I—’
‘I’ve told you before, please call me Jack. We’re not in the army,’ I say.
Her face experiences a freeze-frame. She looks like a chastised puppy, and I feel like the miserable old git I know I’ve become.
‘The Target Patrol Team called it in,’ she says.
‘Is anyone from the TPT still here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, I want to see them before they leave.’
‘Of course. The body is this way. Early indications show that—’
‘I want to see it for myself,’ I interrupt.
‘Yes, boss.’
It’s as though my first name is simply a word she can’t pronounce.
We pass a steady stream of staff I vaguely recognise – people whose names I’ve forgotten either because I didn’t learn them in the first place, or I haven’t seen them for so long. It doesn’t matter. My small but perfectly formed Major Crime Team is based near here, but covers the whole county. We work with different people every day. Besides, this job isn’t about making friends, it’s about not making enemies. Priya has a lot to learn about that. The hushed quiet we walk in might be uncomfortable for her, but not for me. Silence is my favourite symphony; I can’t think clearly when life gets too loud.
She shines a torch on the ground a little way ahead of our footsteps – irritatingly efficient as always – as we crunch over a dark carpet of fallen leaves and broken twigs. Autumn has been and gone, a guest appearance this year before shying away to make room for an overconfident winter. The top button is missing from my coat, so it no longer does up all the way. I overcompensate for the gap with a Harry Potter-style scarf displaying my initials – a gift from an ex. I’ve never quite managed to part with it, a bit like the woman who gave it to me. It probably makes me look like a fool, but I don’t care. There are some things we only hold on to because of who gave them to us: names, beliefs, scarves. Besides, I like the way it feels around my neck: a cosy personalised noose.
My breath forms clouds of condensation, and I shove my hands deeper into my coat pockets trying to keep dry and warm. I’m pleased to see that someone thought to put up a tent around the body, and I step inside the white PVC door. My fingers find the shape of a child’s dummy in my pocket at the exact moment my eyes see the corpse. I grip on to the pacifier so hard that the plastic cuts into my palm. It causes a small burst of pain, the kind I sometimes need to feel. It isn’t as though I haven’t seen a dead person before, but this is different.
The woman is partially covered by leaves, and quite a distance from the main path. She would have been easy to miss in this dark corner of the woods, were it not for the bright lights the team have already set up around her.
‘Who found the body?’ I ask.
‘Anonymous tip-off,’ says Priya. ‘Someone called the station from a payphone down the lane.’
I am grateful for an answer that is as short as the person who gave it. Priya is prone to being a talker, and I am prone to impatience.
I take a step closer, and lean down towards the dead woman’s face. She’s in her mid-thirties, slim, pretty – if you like that kind of thing, which I suppose I do – and her general appearance suggests three things to me: money, vanity, and self-control. She has the kind of body that has been taken care of with years of gym visits, diets and costly creams. Her long, expertly bleached blonde hair looks as though she might have just brushed it before lying down in the mud. Strands of gold in the grime. No sign of a struggle. Her bright blue eyes are still wide open, as though shocked by the last thing that they saw, and from the colour and condition of her skin, she has not been here long.
The corpse is fully clothed. Everything this woman was wearing looks expensive: a woollen coat, a silky-looking blouse, and a black leather skirt. Her shoes appear to be the only thing missing – not ideal for a walk in the woods. It’s impossible not to notice her small, pretty feet, but it’s the blouse I find myself staring at. Like the lace bra underneath, I can see that it used to be white. Both are now stained red, and it’s clear from the frenzied pattern of flesh and torn fabric that the victim was stabbed multiple times in the chest.
I have a curious urge to touch her, but don’t.
That’s when I notice dead woman’s fingernails. They’ve been roughly cut to the quick, and that isn’t all. I loathe being seen wearing glasses, but my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, so I find the non-prescription pair I keep for emergencies and take a closer look.
Red varnish has been used to spell letters on the nails of her right hand:
T W O
I look at the left hand and it’s the same, but the letters spell a different word:
F A C E D
This wasn’t a crime of passion; this murder was planned.
I tune back into here and now, and realise that Priya hasn’t noticed yet, she’s been too busy reading me her notes and telling me her thoughts. I generally find she tends to talk unless specifically asked to stop. Her words trip over themselves, rushing out of her mouth and into my ears. I try to look interested, translating her hurried sentences as she says them.
‘… I’ve initiated all standard golden hour procedures. There’s no CCTV in this part of town, but we’re gathering footage from the high street. I’m guessing she didn’t walk here barefoot in the middle of winter, but without any ID or vehicle registration – the car park was completely empty – I can’t issue an ANPR…’
People rarely say what they mean under stress, and all I hear is her desperation to prove to me that she can handle this.
‘Have you seen a dead body before?’ I ask, interrupting.
She stands a little straighter and sticks out her chin like a disgruntled child.
‘Yes. In the morgue.’
‘Not the same,’ I mutter beneath my breath.
There are so many things I could teach her, things she doesn’t know she needs to learn.
‘I’ve been thinking about the message the killer wanted to send,’ Priya says, staring back down at her notepad, where I can see the beginnings of one of her many lists.
‘They wanted people to know that the victim was two-faced,’ I reply, and she looks confused. ‘Her fingernails. I think someone cut them and wrote a message.’
Priya frowns then bends down to get a closer look. She stares up at me in wonder, as though I’m Hercule Poirot. I guess reading is my superpower.
I avoid her gaze and return my attention to the face of the woman lying in the dirt. Then I instruct one of the forensics team to take pictures of her from every angle. She looks like the kind of person who enjoyed having her photo taken, wearing her vanity like a badge. The flash blinds me, and I’m reminded of another time and place; London a few years ago, reporters and cameras on a street corner, clamouring to get a shot of something they shouldn’t want to see. I bury the memory – I can’t stand the press – then I notice something else.
The dead woman’s mouth is ever so slightly open.
‘Shine your torch on her face.’
Priya does as I ask, and I get down on my knees again to take a closer look at the body. Lips that were once pink have turned blue, but I can see something red hiding in the dark space between them. I reach to touch it, without thinking, as though under a spell.
‘Sir?’
Priya interrupts my mistake before I make it. She is uncomfortably close to me, so much so that I can smell her perfume, along with her breath: a light whiff of recently drunk tea. I turn and see an old frown form on her young face. I would have thought this whole experience – finding a body in the woods for the first time – might have fazed her, unnerved her a little, but maybe I was wrong. I try to remember how old Priya is – I find it so hard to tell with women. If I had to guess I’d say late twenties or early thirties. Still hungry with ambition, confident of her own potential, unscarred by the disappointments that life has yet to hit her with.
‘Shouldn’t we wait for the pathologist to examine the body before we touch anything?’ she asks, already knowing the answer.
Priya sticks to the rules the way good liars stick to their stories. She says ‘pathologist’ like a kid who just learned a new word in school, one who wants people to hear them use it in a sentence.
‘Absolutely,’ I reply, and take a step back.
Unlike my colleague, I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies before, but this is not like any case I have previously worked on. I zone out again while Priya starts to speculate about the identity of the woman. It feels like this is the start of something big, and I wonder if I’m up to the task. No two murders are the same, but it’s been years since I handled a case even remotely like this, and a lot has changed since then. The job has changed, I’ve changed, and it isn’t just that.
This is different.
I’ve never worked on the murder of someone I know before.
And I knew this woman well.
I was with her last night.