“Thanks, boss.”
“How is Nicola, by the way?”
“She’s all right. We take it one day at a time.”
Helen nodded. She respected and liked Tony for his conscientious, patient care of his wife. It must be hard to live a life that you never wanted, after the life you’d planned for had been so brutally snatched away from you. He was a good man and she hoped they would be okay.
Walking away from the café, she had a spring in her step. The course they were pursuing was fraught with danger, but she sensed that finally they were getting closer to their killer.
50
Picking up an unmarked pool car, Charlie sped out of the back entrance, anxious to get this over with. Jennifer Lees, the Family Liaison officer assigned to accompany her, would take the lead, but it would be Charlie who would have to ask the awkward questions. Normally Helen would interview the victim’s family in the first instance, but she had disappeared on undisclosed business, leaving Charlie to carry the can.
They pulled up outside a run-down terraced house in Swaythling. This was the home Gareth Hill shared with his mother—“shared” in the past tense, as his mutilated body was currently lying on a slab in Jim Grieves’s mortuary. They couldn’t formally identify him as the third victim until his next of kin had done so, but they knew they had the right man. He had minor convictions for shoplifting, drunkenness and even one pathetic attempt at indecent exposure, so they already had his picture on file. Once the formalities were done, that file would be markedDeceasedand sent upstairs to the incident room for evaluation.
An enormous woman of seventy-plus opened the door. Her blotched ankles were swollen, her stomach jutted out generously and her jowls hung deep from her plump face. But hidden amid all that flesh were two incongruous, ratlike eyes that stared fiercely at Charlie now.
“If you’re selling something, you can piss—”
Charlie held up her warrant card.
“It’s about Gareth. May we come in?”
The whole house stank of cats. They seemed to be everywhere, and as if scenting danger they clamored round their owner now, demanding her attention. She stroked the largest one—a ginger tom called Harvey—as Charlie and Jennifer broke the news to her.
“Dirty little boy.”
Jennifer turned to Charlie, this unexpected response rendering her temporarily speechless.
“Did you understand what we said, Mrs. Hill?” Charlie asked.
“Miss Hill. I’ve never been a Mrs.”
Charlie nodded sympathetically.
“Gareth has been murdered and I—”
“So you keep saying. What did he do—try and run off without paying?”
Her tone was hard to read. She sounded angry, but was that distress punching through too? This woman’s armor was hard, toughened by years of disappointments, and she was hard to read.
“We’re still investigating the circumstances, but we suspect this was an unprovoked attack.”
“Hardly unprovoked. If you wallow in the gutter...”
“Where did Gareth say he was going last night?” Charlie interrupted.
“He said he was going to the pictures. He’d just got his benefits so... I thought he must have come in after I was asleep. I thought the lazy oaf was still in bed...”
At last her voice wavered, as the reality of her son’s death struck home. When her defenses finally collapsed, they would collapsebig, so Charlie carried on the conversation a bit longer, then excused herself to head upstairs. She had learned as much as she could, and she wanted to be away from this woman’s sharp grief. Charlie knew she was weak to let another’s distress spike so sharply with her own sense of loss, but she couldn’t help it.
Pushing into Gareth’s bedroom, she tried to gather her thoughts. It was truly a sight to behold. Empty fast-food wrappers littered the floor, lying in company with used tissues, old magazines and discarded clothes. The whole place looked and smelled dirty, as if someone had existed rather than lived here. It was stale. Stale and empty.
Gareth wasn’t an attractive man, and he could hardly have brought girls back here anyway. The mess was bad enough, but would he have had the balls to parade another female in front of his mother, presuming he could have persuaded one to return home with him in the first place? Charlie thought not. His probation reports suggested he had learning difficulties and cripplingly low self-esteem. The evidence of his home life seemed to confirm that. This was a house that trapped people rather than protected them.
Looking around the detritus, Charlie saw that the only item of value in evidence was the computer. Perched in glorious isolation on the cheap desk, it stood proud. Its aluminum casing and familiar logo looked fresh, as if this totemic item had been kept clean and safe while all else had been allowed to go to seed. No doubt this treasured possession was Gareth’s passport to life, and Charlie felt sure that the key to his death lay within it.
51
