My partner’s name is Daniel Duffy. Dan Duffy, to his mates. Ash calls him Dandruff. Which is ironic because Daniel’s completely bald. Ash doesn’t use the nickname in Daniel’s presence, obviously – he calls him Dan, although they’re certainly not mates – but Daniel knows. Unsurprisingly, my partner doesn’t find my ex-husband’s nickname for him amusing. He gets his own back, though. He insists on calling Ash by his first name – Quentin. Behind his back as well as to his face. Ash hates it. Daniel is the only person who calls him Quentin. Even Ash’s mother calls him Ash.
‘No, it’s OK. He’s away until the day after tomorrow. I haven’t told him about any of this yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘He wasn’t …’ I trail off. I was about to say Daniel wasn’t as supportive as I’d have liked with everything Iris went through during the last school year, but I stop myself. That’s not fair on Daniel. Iris isn’t his daughter. She’s Ash’s. And Ash was an absolute rock. Neither Iris nor I would have got through any of that without him. Ash was dependable and available; he said and did all the right things. ‘I’ll tell him when he gets back,’ I say. ‘He’ll be home the day after tomorrow.’
‘I can drop in on my way home this evening if you like,’ Ash offers. ‘I’ll bring a takeaway.’
‘That would be nice. Thank you. Ash, Iris doesn’t know yet either.’
Ash is silent for a few seconds. He strokes imaginary stubble on his chin, the way he always does when he’s thinking something through. Then he says, ‘She has to know, Carla. We could tell her together later, if you want.’
‘OK.’ I’ve finished my tea, and I’m fiddling with the stirrer.
‘Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. We’ll be fine.’
I look up, into Ash’s eyes, and something passes between us. I know Ash is thinking along the same lines as me. He’s worried, too. He can’t possibly know for sure that we’ll be OK. A teenage boy has been murdered. The police will be looking for the killer.
And our daughter has motive. She’ll be the main suspect.
Chapter 4
Ian
NOW
It was late when he got home last night and he has had to get up early. Again. It’s only been a couple of days and already he’s very short on sleep. He’ll expect his team to put in the hours, too, until this case is solved. He has recently completed the final course on the Management of Serious Crime Development Programme and he has his sights set on a promotion to detective chief inspector in the not-too-distant future. This is his first case as senior investigating officer. He’s desperate not to bollocks it up.
He manages a smile when Jo steps outside. She hands him a cup of coffee then wraps her dressing gown tightly around herself, shutting out the cool morning air. She doesn’t have to get up for at least another hour. He assumes she has got up for him, although she has just gone back to school this week – he means, to work – after the summer holidays, and she’s stressed about her own job, so perhaps she didn’t sleep well either. She keeps him company while he has a smoke. She’s been on at him to give it up, but she refrains, for once, from giving him the evil eye while he puffs away.
This morning, she doesn’t ask for details about the case and he doesn’t offer any. There are certain aspects of his job he’s not supposed to discuss at home, but he has always told Jo far more than he should. She’s smart, way smarter than he is, and she has helped him to come at an investigation from a different angle more than once. But for this particular investigation, he’s going to have to be very careful what he tells his wife. He has hardly seen her, but he has rung her. He only gave her the bare facts, but it didn’t take her long to pass on that info to her bestie. It could have been embarrassing for him. It could even have got him taken off the case. So, he’s glad she doesn’t probe. If he’s working a case that gets under his skin, like this one, he has to compartmentalize, as Jo knows, which means not allowing work to bleed into his home life. Not that he’s going to get a lot of home life for the foreseeable.
He’s not going to be able to just switch off whenever he comes home to try and grab a few hours’ kip either. The image of Josh’s dead body will haunt him – day and night – until they’ve arrested the murderer. Ian deals with his fair share of domestic violence, drugs-related crimes, burglary, possession of weapons. He has seen quite a few dead bodies over the course of his career. Sure, he was used to seeing dead bodies even before he became a peeler – he grew up in Derry, near the Bogside, during the Troubles. He has become immune to some of what he comes across and hardened to most of the rest of it. You have to if you want to stay sane. But it never gets easier when a child is involved. (Technically, Joshua Knoll was an adult – just – but he was still a kid in Ian’s eyes. His whole life ahead of him.)
When Ian was called out to the unexplained death the day before yesterday, he was told they were dealing with the body of a young male in his late teens / early twenties. He immediately thought of Joshua. Ian hadn’t known Joshua Knoll well, but he’d seen him a few times at Ash’s or at Carla’s, back when Iris was dating him. Joshua had gone missing – the mother, Yvonne, had been making a big song and dance about it (by which Ian means she was hysterical), although the parents didn’t actually report their son missing for three days. The subject had been assessed as low-risk. Joshua had stormed out of the house after a row with his father, Richard Knoll (they argued a lot, according to Yvonne), and it wasn’t out of character for Josh to take off like this – he’d been known to sleep over at friends’ houses before, sometimes for a couple of days, without checking in with his parents.
Richard supposed his son was cooling off somewhere and would eventually come home. Joshua had taken clothes with him and, it transpired, he’d used his credit card to buy food the day after he’d left. (Shame he hadn’t taken his mobile. That would have made their job a lot easier.) He wasn’t on medication. No mental health issues. (Carla would beg to differ on that one, for sure, but Ian’s talking self-harm or suicide attempts, not narcissistic personality disorder, which is what Carla has unofficially diagnosed Joshua with.) The whole thing had only landed on Ian’s desk the day before yesterday, ten days after the kid had been reported missing and nearly two weeks after he was last seen.
When Ian had arrived at the scene – a clearing in Buryknoll Wood – he was briefed by the officer in charge of the incident. He’d got suited and booted up, slapped on his mask and walked into the tent. He took one glance at the victim. He recognized him, despite the fact the kid had clearly been dead for several days and his face had taken on a greenish hue. He’d promptly run back out of the tent to boke up his breakfast. Not his finest hour. His colleagues would be taking the piss for some time yet, so they would. That was another requirement in this job. Besides the thick skin, you needed a good sense of humour, preferably gallows humour, the darker the better.
This morning kicks off with a team meeting. Ian has officers on house-to-house duties, although the nearest houses are a few miles from the part of the woods where Joshua’s body was discovered. He has more officers scouring the woods beyond the immediate crime scene. And he has officers checking out CCTV, although that’s a long shot. Even though the UK is one of the most surveilled countries in the world, North Devon has pretty sketchy coverage and the nearest CCTV is also several miles from Lower Buryknoll Wood.
One of their priorities right now is interviewing friends and relatives of the victim. Now they’ve identified the victim, they need to identify any possible suspects.
‘It’s important to use the evidence to make hypotheses,’ Ian reminds his team. And himself. Not that they have much evidence. ‘It’s tempting to jump to conclusions and then twist the evidence to fit half-baked theories,’ Ian continues. ‘It’s vital to keep an open mind and not develop tunnel vision.’
That said, initial gut feeling, Ian likes Richard for this. As anyone knows, when it comes to murder, the killer is usually known to the victim. And there was something a bit off about Richard from the get-go. Contrary to his wife, he didn’t seem particularly worried about his son’s disappearance. It would seem from the tent, food and sleeping bag they found at the crime scene that Joshua was camping in the woods. Presumably this is where he was cooling off from the row he’d had with his father. The forensic pathologist confirmed that the murder had been committed here – the body hadn’t been discarded in this location after death – so it seemed safe to conclude that Joshua wasn’t lured to the woods to be killed, but rather killed in the place he’d chosen as his hideout. Did Richard find him? Did he know where to look? Ian has gone easy on the fella so far, but he will need to talk to him again later today.
Talking to people who knew Joshua will also help them to build up a profile of the victim. Find out how the kid lived and they will probably find out how he died. Well, they know how he died, more or less – the pathologist will give him the gory details (he’s going to see her straight after this meeting), but it’s clear that Joshua was stabbed.Whyhe died is what he means. Andwhohad motive.
Ian checks everyone knows what to do and ends the meeting. Then he sets off for the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in Wonford. It’s a journey that should take him about five minutes, but instead takes him twenty. As he parks in the car park, he regrets coming. He could have sent Helena, his deputy SIO. Perhaps he should have. Leaning against the wall of the building, he smokes a cigarette before going inside. He hopes he’s not going to make an eejit of himself again in the mortuary. If he barfs in here too, he’ll never live it down. He doesn’t usually feel quite so nauseous when he sees dead bodies, even decomposed ones. It’s because he knows the victim, he supposes. Or, more likely, because Joshua wasn’t much older than his daughter, Millie. He stubs out his cigarette and pops two cubes of chewing gum into his mouth. He spends a few seconds psyching himself up. He’ll be wearing a mask and he’ll breathe in through his mouth. That should do the trick.
He knows Lorraine Davies, the Home Office pathologist. She’ll want to get down to the nitty-gritty as soon as they set foot in the post-mortem room. His stomach roils in trepidation. He and the CSI photographer follow her as she strides down the corridor. He practically has to skip to keep up with her. ‘Any thoughts on time of death?’ he asks.
‘He’s been dead for at least a week,’ she says. ‘The twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth of August is my best estimate. I can’t narrow it down any more than that, I’m afraid.’
‘Shit,’ Ian mutters into his mask. It’s a slightly delayed reaction because he has to do the mental arithmetic. If his calculations are correct, Joshua was reported missing two or three days before he was killed. Someone’s head is going to roll. Thankfully, not his. When he inherited the misper case, Josh was already dead.
