Chapter Two

Ben

It took a while for the sound of my phone to penetrate through the layers of sleep. Once it had, I blindly groped around on the nightstand where it should have been. Not there. "Fuck!" Where had I left it? Where was the ringing coming from?

I clambered across the bed in the direction of the sound, the naked man in the bed making the action more difficult than it needed to be. He let out an "oof" as my hand landed somewhere soft. Ignoring him, I made it across the room in less than a second, retrieving my phone from the pocket of my jacket and bringing it to my ear just before voicemail kicked in.

"DCI Weaver," I managed, my voice still roughened by sleep.

"Weaver." There was chastisement in the way Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson Baros said my name. Nothing new there. My superior was a hard taskmaster. He always had been. "We just had a homicide called in."

"I'm not meant to be on tonight," I pointed out. Perhaps my tone was a little too waspish, but was it too much to expect the DCS to do his job and know who was supposed to be where? I didn't think so. "I might be senior officer, but CID has others."

"You'll want to see this one?"

"Will I? Why?"

"Just get there. Fowler picked up his phone the first time I called, so he's probably there already. He'll brief you at the scene." He reeled off an address and despite only being half awake, I committed it to memory. What did I need to do before I left? Clothes. Yeah, that would definitely be better than turning up at a crime scene naked. No time for a shower, though.

I switched the light on and struggled into underwear before yanking open my wardrobe and pulling out a freshly laundered suit. I'd get away with jeans and a T-shirt at this time in the morning, but it paid to look the part if you wanted to be taken seriously. Especially when, despite being late thirties, I often got mistaken for a decade younger. Good genetics were to blame for that. Sometimes it was a blessing and sometimes a curse, but there was no changing it. What time was it? It was still dark, with no signs of dawn on the horizon, so… Three? Four? Definitely no later than five.

"What's going on?" a voice asked.

I spun around to where the guy I'd climbed over in my rush to locate my phone was now sitting up in bed, staring at me. The nights where I picked someone up were infrequent enough for me to curse it being this one. Although, admittedly he was the second this week. I'd felt like I had something to prove after how badly the previous one had ended. And I'd proved it, everything happening the way it was supposed to during a one-night stand, with no intervention from someone who should know to keep their goddamn nose out of my business. "I have to go to work," I said as I pulled on my jacket and made sure I had my badge. Presumably, he'd heard the phone call, so my leaving shouldn't come as any great surprise to him.

"You never said you were a copper." I risked a glance at him to gauge his expression. Reactions to my job usually went one of two ways. Fetish or distaste, without there ever seeming to be a middle ground. His expression turned distinctly lascivious. "I would have asked you to wear your uniform if I'd known."

Fetish, it was then. "I don't wear one. I'm CID. I left that behind a long time ago."

"Right." The smile didn't shift. "Bet you could get your hands on one, though, couldn't you?"

I didn't have time for this. "Listen, get dressed. I need to go, which means you need to go."

He lifted his chin in a challenge. "Tell me what my name is and I will." His name? Fuck. I didn't have a clue. "I can tell you the first letter if that helps?" he offered.

"Sure." I bent over and pulled socks on.

"N."

"Nigel?" I hoped I hadn't slept with a Nigel. Which was probably really unfair to all the Nigels out there.

"Nope. Try again."

"Nile? Nicholas? Noel? Nash?"

"Noel."

"Right." Socks now on, I located my shoes and put the left one on. "Well, Noel, like I said, I have to go."

"I remember your name."

Great! Ten out of ten. Gold star for you. I didn't say any of that. "I'm flattered."

"No, you're not."

He was right. I wasn't. Locating Noel's clothes, I flung them his way, relieved when he took the hint and got out of bed and started pulling them on. By the time I had both shoes on and tied, he was dressed, his casual wear much quicker to get on.

"So… a murder," he said as I led the way to the door.

"A murder," I agreed. "Occupational hazard, unfortunately." He laughed as I locked the door to leave us standing out on the dark street, not a soul to be seen no matter which direction you looked in. No great surprise for—I finally got round to checking the time on my phone—4:17 in the morning.

Noel propped his shoulder against the door and eyed me with a slight smirk. "I had fun, Ben."

"Yeah, fun," I said absently, my mind already on what awaited me at the end of my journey and why the DCS was so dead set on me being the one to investigate it. That meant it was something out of the ordinary. Not that murder could ever be described as ordinary, no matter how long I'd worked for Specialist Crime and Operations Directorate's Homicide Command South, but there were definitely cases that stood out from the rest.

"Any chance of a lift?" Noel asked.

"A what?"

"A lift." His eyes twinkled with amusement. "A ride somewhere other than on a street I don't know. You were the one who dragged me back to your lair."

An interesting interpretation of what had actually happened, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? "Afraid not," I said. "The DCS will spit feathers if I don't get there in record time." Despite my words, a ball of guilt grew in my gut. It was pretty poor form to turf your one-night stand out in the middle of the night. "Can you call a cab?"

"Sure," Noel said, "not a problem." There was an edge in his voice that said it was a problem, that he was far from impressed. I couldn't say I blamed him. Had it been the other way round, I doubted I would have been half as understanding as he was being.

"Great," I said as I disengaged the central locking on my car. "Well… safe journey home."

He was still leaning against my front door, watching me as I drove off. As long as he wasn't there when I got home, I didn't mind.

The address was a fifth floor flat in Hackney. Despite the rush to get there, I bypassed the lift and took the stairs, the memory of a crime scene where I'd gotten stuck in a lift for close to an hour still fresh in my mind. Nothing screamed second-rate detective more than not being able to get to where you needed to be. And that case had only gone downhill from there, with a minute pool of suspects who had all had alibis. There'd been no conviction, the case destined to languish in an ever-growing pile of unsolved murders. One that would no doubt get pulled out every few years in the hope of a breakthrough like all the other cold cases.

It was easy to tell which flat it was as I reached the fifth floor, the door standing open and the threshold a hive of activity. The next-door flat also stood open, an elderly woman standing in the doorway dressed in a fleecy pink dressing gown with her gray hair in curlers. Clutched in her arms was a large Siamese cat, my detective skills not stretching far enough to tell whether the woman was deriving comfort from the cat or simply stopping it from escaping in the fracas. She was deep in conversation with a young constable who looked to be fresh out of Hendon Police College.

Leaning against the opposite wall was Detective Inspector Louis—Lou—Fowler, my partner levering himself away from the wall and coming my way as he saw me emerge from the stairwell. "Took your time getting here." His expression changed as he got close and he leaned in for a sniff. "I see."

As there was nothing I could do about the smell of sex clinging to me, I shoved him away. "What have we got?"

A slight smirk revealed his temptation to say more about me coming here straight from a one-night stand, but then the shutters came down and he switched into professional mode. "Caucasian male. University student. Nineteen years old." He jerked his head toward the woman in the doorway. "Neighbor is Iris Cartwright, age seventy-three. She said she heard him coming home about ten p.m. and that he wasn't alone. Said she heard voices and two pairs of footsteps."

"Male? Female?" I enquired.

"Neighbor said he was as gay as the day is long. Her words," he said when I arched an eyebrow. "She also went on for a while about how it doesn't bother her. I think she wants to be seen as progressive." Lou checked his notepad. "Said there were other noises some time later ."

"Other noises?"

"Sex noises coming through the wall. Loud ones. Then noises of a struggle. A shout. And then silence. And then she heard someone leave. One pair of footsteps this time. She was concerned enough to investigate. Said the door was ajar, but that she didn't want to go in. That something didn't feel right, so she called the police instead."

"So… he picked someone up, brought him back here, things got out of hand, and he ended up being murdered."

Lou grimaced. "If it was that simple, I don't think either of us would be here."

"It's not?"

He jerked his head toward the open doorway. "Probably best you see for yourself. I hope you didn't grab an early breakfast on the way."

That didn't bode well. We moved toward the door and I accepted a pair of shoe covers from the man stationed there, leaning on Lou so I didn't overbalance as I pulled them on. And then we were in, the smell hitting me immediately—the familiar coppery tang of blood.

Lou led me down the corridor, nothing else appearing to be out of the ordinary in the rooms we passed. Lou paused at the threshold of the bedroom. He swept an arm across. "After you?"

"So kind," I said as I stepped into the hive of activity, the blinding white light of a forensic photographer's camera catching me off guard and momentarily blinding me. In here, the smell was stronger. The wall of the bedroom snagged my attention first. What had once been your typical magnolia-painted wall now bore a series of strange symbols, some small, some big, none of them anything I recognized and could interpret. They'd been ‘painted' in red. "Is that blood?" I asked.

"We assume so," Lou said. "Preliminary tests are being carried out. They'll let us know when they get the results."

I turned to the photographer, his work encompassing a painstaking succession of shots which catalogued each mark individually. I flashed my badge at him. "Make sure you take them from every angle, and I want copies of all of them." Once he'd offered a nod, I turned my attention to the bed, and the body sprawled across it.

The victim lay on his front, his body contorted in a position a long way from natural. Blood soaked the pale blue sheets, radiating out from where the body lay. "How was he killed?" I aimed my question at the forensic pathologist bent over the body. Patrick Holmes and I had worked enough crime scenes together that I didn't waste time on a greeting.

Patrick lifted his gaze to mine. He was older than me by about fifteen years, the lines on his face giving the impression that it was more than that. "Two possibilities."

"Which are?"

"Suffocation, given his position. Not strangulation, because there are no marks on his neck."

"And the second?"

"Blood loss. A slow exsanguination."

"From where?"

Patrick's gloved hand plucked one of the victim's wrists from the bed and turned it so I could see.

"Jesus!" I said, Lou's comment about eating breakfast making sense. Bile rose in my throat as I processed someone having amputated every single finger below the second knuckle.

"The other hand is the same," Lou said quietly from his position by my shoulder.

"And the fingers?" I asked.

It was one of the uniformed officers who answered. "No sign of them yet, but we're still looking."

"What kind of murderer has a compulsion to remove all his victim's fingers?"

Lou jerked his head toward the wall that bore the symbols. "The same kind that sticks around to do that. "

I took a slow breath in and then let it out again. "So we're thinking ritualistic, right?"

The silence that followed my question was enough of an answer as I focused back on the body. Poor guy had presumably picked someone up and gotten a lot more than he'd bargained for. It made me look at Noel and him being slightly miffed that I'd refused to drop him off somewhere in a whole new light. At least he hadn't removed all my fingers.