Collins felt as though all the wind had been taken out of her sails. She wanted to kick herself as she listened to all the prime assignments connected to the case being handed out to those around her. She felt particularly cut to the quick when Woods was told to gather background information on Chadwick in order to expand the victim’s profile. Soon it seemed she was the only one on the team with nothing to do.

‘What would you like me to work on, sir?’ she said meekly as the other officers began to drift away.

‘News of the find has been broken on the afternoon TV bulletins,’ said Anderson. ‘That means we’ve had a couple of confessors come in already. I want you to take their statements and eliminate them from the inquiry.’

Every major crime always attracted a group of ‘confessors’ who came forward, admitted involvement and desperately wanted to be punished. Although they were regulars, they still had to be interviewed and their statements logged so they could be eliminated from the inquiry. This was always a relatively simple matter, as they knew almost no details of the crime other than whatever they had managed to glean from the TV and newspapers. They were a necessary evil in every incident room, but dealing with them was normally a task for some of the most junior officers on the team, not a DI.

‘With respect, sir, I think I’d be more usefully employed elsewhere on this job –’

Anderson cut her off sharply. ‘If you want my respect, Collins, then I suggest you start out by doing what I say and not questioning my authority.’

Collins bit her lip and took a deep breath. She had to calm down fast before she said something she wouldn’t be able to take back. Or worse still threw a punch. The last thing she wanted was to be hauled back in front of the DPS. She pushed her anger way down into the pit of her stomach and spoke as calmly as she could.

‘Yes, sir.’

4

DCI Anderson had asked the entire team to gather in the incident room at 9 a.m. the following morning for a briefing. Collins had arrived almost an hour earlier to write up her notes on the interviews she had conducted the previous evening with the confessors.

She had barely been at her desk ten minutes when Anderson arrived. He acknowledged her presence with a small nod and a half-grunt before making his way directly to his office in the corner of the room and shutting the door firmly behind him.

Over the next half hour other members of the team began to arrive and the skeleton crew who had been manning the incident room overnight left to head home.

As Collins peered at her computer screen, a shadow fell over her desk.

‘Cheer up, it might never happen!’

Collins looked up to see the smiling face of Tony Woods looking down on her.

‘Too late. It’s already happened,’ she replied.

Woods perched on the edge of her desk and leaned towards her, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘I don’t know what he’s playing at. I honestly don’t. I tried having a word with him yesterday, saying he was wasting a valuable resource by keeping you on the edge of the main investigation, but he just wouldn’t hear it.’

Collins smiled weakly. ‘Thanks, Tony, but I think I’m on my own for this one. If I get a good break on the case, he’ll probably start trusting me, but until he starts trusting me, I won’t be in a position to get a break on the case. Catch-22.’

Woods was nodding slowly. ‘You could always try sleeping with him.’

Collins didn’t miss a beat. ‘Well, it certainly helped when I applied for my last promotion.’ She looked up at Woods and allowed her face to break into a full smile. ‘I’m kidding,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Woods. ‘So was I. What about talking to Higgins?’

‘No, that would really piss Anderson off. I know I’m being kept out of the loop because of the trouble with the DPS.’

‘But you haven’t done anything wrong,’ said Woods.

‘I know, but when people start throwing mud around, some of it is bound to stick. Just being called in by the DPS is enough to convince most people you must be bent, regardless of whether there’s any actual evidence.’

She swept her hand back through her hair. ‘How did you get on with the backgrounder?’

Woods shrugged. ‘Nothing that runs the flag up the flagpole. Married, couple of kids, one sister and two brothers. Both his parents are alive but divorced. Worked as a commercial property developer at some bigwig firm in the City. Not so much nine to five, more eight to eight, which is why he got the big bucks. The Merc was a company car.

‘No evidence of financial worries, nothing to suggest problems with drink or drugs. Small circle of friends. Enjoyed his job. No enemies. Pretty unremarkable by all accounts. I’m going to see the widow later this morning.’

‘Are we treating her as a suspect?’ asked Collins.

‘The DCI told me to keep an open mind, but we both agree it’s pretty unlikely. I managed to track down a few of his work colleagues and one of his siblings. It wasn’t the happiest marriage by all accounts, and there seems to be pretty strong evidence of at least one affair going back over the years. The wife’s in line for a pretty good insurance payout, but to be honest it’s a fair bit below what she would have got if she had divorced him. It’s not really motive. We’d be looking at her a lot more closely if it was just Chadwick who had turned up dead.’

Collins nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Once you get more than one body involved, it stops being a simple murder. When you have three with the same MO, there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason behind it.’

‘So what’s your theory, then?’

‘Haven’t really got one yet. It all rests on who the other two victims are. Everyone who gets killed gets chosen one way or another, even if it’s just completely random. If we find out what criteria the killer is using to choose victims, that might lead us right to him.’

DS Porter and DI Hill bustled into the incident room and Collins eyed them warily. Anderson had brought them on to the team after having worked with them on his last two assignments. As a consequence they usually got to work at the sharpest end of a case, and Collins wasn’t the only one who resented them for it.

‘I can’t believe you’re still stuck on confessor duty,’ said Woods.

A few moments later the door to Anderson’s office opened and he stepped out, taking a moment to mentally check that everyone from the team was present, before making his way to the notice board on the far wall.

He pinned up a sheet of paper with RAYMOND CHADWICK printed on it in large block capitals.

‘This is victim one. I’ve just been on the phone to forensics and they’ve matched the remains found at the scene with DNA recovered from his home.’ He looked around the room until his eyes found those of DS Woods. ‘Tony, when you see the widow, try to get hold of a picture of him so we can put one up here.’

Woods nodded.

Anderson stepped to one side and pinned up a second sheet of paper, this time with the name EDWARD MILLER printed on it.

‘This is victim number two. We’ve had a bit of a lucky break. Mr Miller got himself convicted of GBH three years ago, so his DNA was on the database. Now I can see all your little brains buzzing away and getting ready to ask the obvious question – could this be linked to his death? The short answer is, of course, and it’s a line of inquiry some of you will be pursuing vigorously during the course of the next few days.’

Collins sighed quietly. She would have cheerfully bet money that she would not be one of those chosen to pursue that particular line of inquiry.

‘What’s interesting about Miller is that he has been missing for the best part of two years.’ Anderson paused to let this sink in with the members of the team. ‘Yesterday we were working on the theory that the deaths might have taken place a few weeks apart, but this massively expands that timescale. This killer clearly has access to cold-storage facilities, and, according to the experts, under the right conditions a body can be preserved pretty much indefinitely. It’s going to make the search for victim number three that much harder because we’ll have to go back as far as we can. And it goes without saying that we drew a blank on the DNA database so far as the third victim was concerned.’