BY THE TIME Constable Riley has driven me through Ashburton, I’ve been fully briefed by DS Talbot. She tells me how they traced Theo’s movements from the taxi driver’s dropping him off in the town center early in the morning two days ago, having picked him up on the public cams fairly quickly. After stashing the larger of his two cases—now in the possession of the manhunt team—behind a set of bins in an alleyway, he wandered up and down the high street as if looking for something. At seven a.m. an old-fashioned corner shop opened, once the province of paper newsprint and magazines. Now it’s a hub for package deliveries ordered via the Internet and a local-information board for those incapable of accessing the Internet. When I comment that I thought everyone was online now, whether chipped or using portable devices, Talbot tells me that it was written into the town bylaws to provide public copies of critical announcements in the shop after the local rag shut down and the unchipped protested, some violently.
In a snippet of film retrieved from the shop’s cam, Theo, with his hand luggage trundling behind him, looks at all the small ads clustered around the local gov-corp branch’s announcements displayed on a screen that takes up most of the wall. The ads are nothing but text boxes in a variety of mostly ill-chosen fonts. Something clearly catches his eye as he stops in front of one. His lips move, as if he is repeating what he is reading to commit it to memory. Then he leaves a disappointed shop owner, who probably hoped Theo would be tempted by one of the many snacks and drinks available at the bank of food-printing machines that fill the rest of the shop. I’m briefly distracted by the fact there is even a shopkeeper there. So many of the shops in London haven’t had human staff for years.
The manhunt team tracked him leaving the town after consulting a local map pulled from his hand luggage that he forgot or simply abandoned in the alley. After an analysis of the ads displayed in the area he was looking at in the shop, it was simply a matter of following up.
My car pulls up outside the cottage in which Theo’s body has been found, one of several advertised on that board as short-term lets for people who still want to visit the area in the off-season.
“Shall I wait here for you, sir?” Riley asks. I’m tempted to bring him in with me, show him how things are done, but I need all of my attention on the case.
“Yes, please,” I say, and leave him and his disappointment inside the car.
The wind whistles and tugs at the door when I get out. Aside from the road there’s nothing but the moor in all directions, bleak and miserable. I have a sudden desire to be back in London, walking through dense streets held snug by skyscrapers and filled with people. Not even Tia can find something interesting to tag as I scan the gorse bushes and stubby grass.
DS Talbot is waiting outside the cottage, wearing a thick, padded jacket over her suit. The profile flashing up next to her as I approach her tells me she’s thirty-two, has risen through the ranks with a number of commendations and is a member of a local amateur dramatics society. I don’t select the option to find out more about her previous stage appearances.
She has a narrow face with rather sharp features and dark brown eyes. Her hair is mostly tied back, apart from a few mousy brown strands teased loose by the bitterly cold breeze. She weighs me up with tired eyes and folded arms. “Any questions before we go in, sir?”
“You seemed to cover everything about him getting here on the way over. Anything else I should know?”
“Not about the manhunt, sir—it was straightforward once we got the shop’s footage. It involved some legwork, as there are a few places on his route that aren’t covered by cams, but we got there without having to ask for satellite data, thank God.” When I frown at the comment, she adds, “Can’t stand the paperwork when we have to pull data from another agency. MoJ backing or not, someone has to make sure it’s all done properly.”
I have a sudden appreciation for how advanced Tia is. “So, he walked a few miles to get here, found that the cottage was still empty and broke in?”
“Yes, sir. Round the back. No other buildings overlook it, and it’s remote enough that few people travel the road onto the moor here. He picked the perfect spot, really. He must have been serious.”
“Serious about what?”
“Committing suicide.”
“He went to a lot of trouble doing something he could have done at the hotel,” I say as she leads me round the back to show me the evidence of the break-in. “Taking a taxi, finding somewhere on a notice board, walking—what?—five and a half miles in freezing weather?”
She shrugs. “Perhaps he didn’t intend to do it when he left the hotel but then had a change of heart. It’s a lonely place up here. Left alone with his demons . . . I suppose they won.”
The back door is open, the wood splintered around the lock. An officer posted outside of it with a nose reddened by the cold hands us both paper-suit packets and shoe covers. We both shrug off our coats reluctantly and prepare ourselves for entry.
As I put on my suit, Tia pings for a house AI but there isn’t one, just a basic local node to access the Internet and manage the household devices. As standard procedure, Tia starts downloading all the data from the node over the past three days.
“Any house cams?”
“One, by the front door. Nothing useful on it. It’s probably why he went round the back.”
“Have you found the local node’s hard drive?”
She nods.
“Take it in as evidence.”
“Sir?”
“It could have been tampered with. The cams in the hotel were.”
She reddens. “I’ve been focused on the manhunt—sorry. I should have—”
I wave a hand and mutter that it’s perfectly understandable, disliking the way my status makes people so afraid of slipping up. “Have the recorders been in?”
“Yes, sir. The SOCO team is in there now.”
We step inside, avoiding the protective plastic that has been laid over footprints already tagged by the chief SOCO. She leads me through a small kitchen replete with an old-fashioned butler sink and state-of-the-art food printer. One of the forensic team dusting it for prints glances at me and then goes back to his task.
I pause to focus on the printer, making the duster shift uncomfortably, thinking I’m taking too much interest in what he’s doing. Instead I’m signaling to Tia that I want the printer data, and in seconds I see a confirmation that the file is available for me to read at will.
“Sir?”
Talbot is waiting by a door at the other end of the kitchen. I move over toward her and she takes me into a dark hallway with a dingy carpet covered by the same plastic, though there are no footprints or anything else tagged here yet. The wallpaper is a tired beige with thin cream stripes. A staircase climbs at my left, so narrow that a rope hung from loops forms the handrail instead of wood. It’s cold and smells damp.
“This is a holiday cottage?”
“At the low end of the market, sir. Not really a surprise it’s empty at this time of year; I doubt many people come back twice. There’s rustic charm and then there’s . . . this.”
“Where is the body?”
“Through here, sir.”
She goes to a door at the far end of the hallway that is ajar and pushes it farther open. I can hear a bustle of activity within, including Dr. Palmeston’s voice as she asks someone to find her a cup of tea before she has to kill someone for it.
She’s the first to look up when I follow Talbot in and she grins. “Sharpen up, you lot. The big cheese from London is here now.” She winks at me. “And he’ll need a cuppa too—it’s bloody freezing in here.”
Two SOCOs look at each other until one of them, a young man, tuts and leaves the room.
“Come over and see for yourself,” Linda says. “Afternoon, Talbot. How are the rehearsals going?”
“Good, good,” Talbot says, staying back.
There’s not a lot of room in the small lounge. It’s cluttered with a large sofa and two armchairs, as well as a modified log burner and two display cabinets filled with china and miscellaneous crap. As I move round the sofa to join Linda, Theo’s body comes into view, curled on his side, wrapped in a duvet with a cushion under his head. He looks asleep. A whisky bottle is lying on its side on the floor next to the sofa. A dark brown stain on a grubby beige rug begins at its neck.
“About two days,” Linda says, predicting my first question. “Sometime in the first night he was here; certainly no more than three meals were printed. I reckon he got the whisky from duty free, as I haven’t seen that single malt for sale around here.”
“The people in the Circle are teetotal,” I say, crouching to look at him more closely.
“Oh. Maybe it was a present for someone. I won’t be able to confirm it until I get him to the lab, but it looks like he used it to swallow a whole packet of paracetamol and another of ibuprofen.” She holds up an evidence bag with empty blister packs inside. “These were next to the bottle. And this.”
She hands over a second bag to me, containing a note.
I killed him and I can’t live with myself. I’m sorry.
The scrawl is written in pale blue ink on a page ripped from a notebook. “Where’s the pen?”
“Haven’t found it yet. Looks like a fountain pen to me. We haven’t gone through the bag yet; we’ve only been here half an hour.”
She moves aside to point at the armchair behind her and Theo’s hand luggage resting on it, still zipped up. On the other side of the room DS Talbot kneels down. “There’s something under the sofa, sir. It could be a pen.”
“Can you fish it out?” I ask the remaining SOCO, who is already opening an evidence bag, ready for the task. In less than a minute I’m looking at a fountain pen through the plastic, and Tia confirms it is the same make as the one missing from the Diamond Suite. I frown at it. Why take a pen from the hotel room of your victim? Did Theo plan his own suicide so far ahead? “Can you open the case next, please?” I say to the same officer, and he nods.
“Of course I’ll go over him properly once he’s at my lab, and once I’ve finished the autopsy on the victim we discussed earlier, but it looks pretty straightforward to me. Nothing to suggest anything other than suicide, anyway. Are you happy for me to move the duvet and do a quick check-over?”
I nod and move out of her way, giving the evidence bag and the pen it contains to Talbot. The SOCO unzips the case slowly and carefully, as if expecting a snake to burst out of it, and then lifts the top flap.
“Shit,” Talbot whispers at the sight of the bloodied towels crammed into the case, the same fluffy cotton as the ones from my hotel bathroom.
“Bag them now,” I say to the SOCO once he moves again, having remained still enough for his retinal cam to record the contents. “I want to see what else is in there.”
He pulls the top towel out and drops it into one of the larger evidence bags. The second towel is pulled out and dropped in too, revealing a hand ax still covered in spots of blood and a section of severed curtain cord with a knot still tied in it.
Linda has been watching too, distracted from Theo after hearing Talbot’s surprise. “There’s your weapon,” she says confidently. “That blade is the right length anyway. And the cord he was hanged with too. Jackpot. I’d like to take both back to the lab with me, please.”
“The ax matches the one missing from the hotel,” I say after Tia’s confirmation. “Talbot, what did your team find in the suitcase he left behind the bins?”
“Clothes, a few souvenirs from Bath and a couple of paper books about the city—the kind they sell in the tourist shops there, sir.”
“You’re certain?”
“I opened it myself, sir,” she says, still staring at the ax.
“Bag both of them,” I tell the SOCO, and he lifts the ax out from the very end of the handle in the hope of not smudging any prints. Once the cord is bagged too I say, “Look inside the wash bag.”
The SOCO does so. “Toothbrush and paste, shaving gear and a bottle of something.” He pulls it out. “Tylenol.”
“That’s a painkiller in the US,” Linda says, but I already know. “The ibuprofen and paracetamol are Noropean brands,” she says, holding up the blister packs in the evidence bag.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Why buy paracetamol when he already had Tylenol in his bag? They’re the same thing. He might not have known that, I suppose.”
“He didn’t buy them after he left the hotel,” Talbot says. “Perhaps he bought them in Bath, when he got the books. I’ll look that up.”
I nod and turn back to the SOCO. “Anything else in there?”
“A small plastic bag,” he says, lifting it out carefully. “Contains a used disposable razor blade, used tissues, several pieces of cotton wool with blood on them, couple of cotton balls—”
“That’s from the hotel bathroom bin,” I say. “Bag it. Anything else?”
He drops it into another evidence bag. “A few pieces of unused cotton wool and some tissues. Nothing else, sir.” I watch him run his hand around the loose pocket in the inside of the lid and shake his head.
“Were you expecting a gun?” Linda asks.
“I wouldn’t have been surprised, but no, I was hoping for something else.”
“He didn’t buy the painkillers,” Talbot says, bringing her attention back into the room. “He visited Bath with Selina Klein, but she didn’t buy any there either.”
“Could they have been found in the cottage?” the SOCO asks, and Talbot shakes her head.
“It’s illegal to store any drugs, legal or not, on premises rented out to the public. Not even a tube of antihistamine cream or antiseptic.”
“He must have taken the ax from the hotel room. Perhaps he stole the pills from the victim,” Linda offers without convincing me, and, by the look of her face, even herself. “We’ll lift whatever prints we can from them. The boxes haven’t turned up yet. There may be something of use there.”
Talbot nods. “We might be able to trace the transaction through the bar code, but it’ll take some time. Thousands of boxes of those pills must be sold every day.”
I agree with her; there are lots of people who still don’t trust their printers when it comes to drugs, so the mass-manufactured tablets are still widely available. “Anything on his person?” I ask, looking over at Theo’s body, the blanket now moved to the end of the sofa, revealing a plain green jumper and jeans with mud spatters around the hem.
Linda checks him over and shakes her head. “Only an old-fashioned wristwatch. Nothing in his pockets.”
“Coat?” I ask the SOCO, and he goes off to find it as his colleague returns with two steaming mugs of tea.
“You are a brilliant officer with a fine career ahead of you,” Linda says to him as he hands a cup to her. He smirks as he hands the other to me.
“If only it were as easy to impress Alex Jacobs,” he says, and Linda frowns at him.
“Do not take your superior officer’s name in vain,” she says, all mock sternness, and then slurps loudly from the mug.
“I found his coat,” says the other officer from the door. “His passport was in one of the pockets, nothing else. I’ve bagged it and the coat.”
I sip the tea, discover it’s a chemical copy from the printer rather than the real thing and set the cup down. I look at Theo, the ax in its evidence bag and the whisky bottle on its side. Everything lying in front of me says “suicide.” Too loudly, perhaps.
“Are you happy for me to take the body from the scene?” Linda asks. “Would be good to get the poor bugger somewhere useful.”
“Yeah,” I say, and she leaves the room, slurping the tea as she goes.
“You’re not happy with it, are you, sir?” DS Talbot says. “The painkillers are bugging you.”
I nod, but they’re not the only thing that isn’t ringing true here. “I need to know where they came from. I have other leads to chase. Can I leave it with you?”
She straightens, as if deriving some pride from the fact I need her. Perhaps she thought that finding Theo Buckingham meant the end of her involvement in the case. “Of course, sir. Would you like direct updates or should I just put them in the case file?”
“The file is fine, unless it’s something critical. Make sure forensics goes over the local node’s hard drive too, as well as sending the data to the MoJ. Oh, have the cottage owners been notified?”
“Yes, sir. They live down in Cornwall. Not best pleased, but they know there’s nothing they can do. There’s an estate agent in the town who manages the property and I got full sign-off from them regarding removal of any property relevant to the case.”
“Excellent,” I say. “I’ll leave you in charge of the scene. I’m going to have a look around the rest of the cottage before I go.”
“The SOCO did a quick check, sir, and he doesn’t think Buckingham went up there. No dirt from his shoes are on the stairs, anyway.”
I glance back at Theo, noting his shoes are still on his feet. It looks odd, with him curled up as if taking a nap. I try to imagine him hacking Alejandro’s body to pieces with that ax and simply can’t. I left the Circle before he joined so I have no idea what he was like, even how he spoke, but what could move a man to that violence after being so close to someone for so long?
I know the answer to that. Jealousy. Desperation. Hatred. So close to love, so easily reached from a place of devotion. What could have tipped him over the edge into those dark waters?
Linda comes back in with a body bag and an assistant. I leave them to it and climb the stairs.
The air is stale and smells of mold. There are only two bedrooms and a bathroom, all of which haven’t been redecorated in the past twenty years. There’s certainly no sign he came up here but I look through the drawers and wardrobes anyway, under the beds and in the bins. Nothing.
I go back down the stairs and wait as the body bag is carried out. Linda says good-bye, and I return to the living room to find DS Talbot standing where she was before, this time absorbed in an invisible task with her APA.
“There’s something I want you to check before I go,” I say, and she blinks at me. “Did he dispose of anything in the town as he left?”
She shakes her head slowly. “No, sir, I’d remember that. And once we found him here I got one of my constables to retrace the route he would have taken, just to look out for anything unusual. Of course, that was a couple of days ago. Do I need to sweep for something in particular?”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t know what it is yet. Thanks for your help. Keep up the good work.”
She smiles, softening the sharpness of her features.
I leave the cottage, feeling more dissatisfied than I should, having found the prime suspect and the primary weapon. I have to report it to Milsom, but I know what she’ll say and I don’t want this case to close yet. Something was missing back there and I can’t shake the feeling it’s critical. Why would a man ask where a uniport charger is unless he had something to charge? And that being the case, what would a man who comes from a place where technology is shunned want to charge in the first place?