‘I think he sprayed her with perfume – in the cuts.’

Carmella stared as he pointed.

‘He cut her, then sprayed perfume into the open wounds.’ He kept his voice even. ‘He tortured her.’

Patrick noticed a patch of blood on the pillow beneath her head and stepped around the bed. The hair at the back of her scalp was matted with blood, where she had apparently been struck with a heavy object, or banged against a wall.

He caught Carmella’s eye. Her own shock was morphing now into something else. Determination. He nodded and they left the room, just as the scene of crime officers – the SOCOs – arrived. Patrick and Carmella headed back down the corridor, Gareth following. They would leave the SOCOs to do their job.

Thirty minutes later Patrick and Carmella sat in a conference room on the ground floor, the cleaner who had found the body sitting across from them. The room was dry and hot and smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac. Patrick was sweating, his white shirt sticking to him, but the cleaner, whose name was Mosope Adeyemi, was cool, leaning back in her chair like she was about to interview them for a job. She was an attractive woman, with large, bright eyes and long limbs that Patrick fleetingly imagined wrapped around him.

‘Where are you from?’ Carmella asked. Patrick had asked her to conduct this interview while he made notes.

‘I live in Teddington.’

Carmella smiled. ‘I meant originally.’

‘Abuja, Nigeria. I was a teacher over there, you know. Now I clean rooms, make beds.’

‘For how long?’

Mosope twisted her lips. ‘Hmmm, a year. Just over.’ She leaned forwards conspiratorially. ‘The people who come to this hotel, they are disgusting. Animals. And they never leave tips.’

‘Can you walk us through what happened this morning?’ Carmella said.

The woman sighed. ‘I’d already cleaned half the rooms on that floor, apart from the ones where the guests were still in their rooms, like lazy pigs.’

‘This was, what, just after ten?’

‘Ten fifteen. I checked the time after I found the girl, because I knew you’d ask.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you. Why did you go into room 365 if it was unoccupied?’

‘Because I smelled the perfume.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘Terrible. Cheap. It was coming under the door, the smell. I was curious, so I went in, saw the girl on the bed and came straight out again. That’s it.’

‘Did you see anything strange in the room? Anything different?’

She tipped her head. ‘You mean apart from the dead white girl on the bed?’

Patrick liked this woman, wanted to engage with her. But he stayed silent, letting Carmella continue. ‘I mean . . . You clean these rooms every day. You know how they look. Apart from the body, did you notice anything unusual, anything that struck you?’

Mosope thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Apart from the smell, no.’

‘You didn’t move or remove anything?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Did you see anyone in the vicinity of the room this morning?’

‘Just guests coming in and out of some of the other rooms.’ She paused. ‘There were no clothes on the floor of room 365. You noticed that? I guess he took them with him.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Like a souvenir.’

Chapter 3

Day 1 – Patrick

At the beginning of a murder case, Patrick’s first job was to consider the obvious. A woman beaten to death at home – look at the husband or boyfriend. A youth knifed in the street – check out gang affiliations. So here was a young girl murdered in a hotel room. Less straightforward, but the obvious first action was to check the list of guests and staff. Find out who was in the hotel at the time of the murder.

DS Gareth Batey was waiting in reception, chatting to one of the security guards, a black man with a belly like a department store Santa. As Patrick and Carmella entered the lobby, Gareth came over and said, ‘I’ve asked about CCTV. They have it down here, in the lobby, but nowhere else in the hotel. I’ve told them we’ll need the tapes.’

‘OK.’

‘That’s the security guard who was on duty till midnight last night. Derek Childs. After that, a colleague’ – he consulted his notes – ‘Stavros Demetriou took over. Mr Childs says he didn’t see anything suspicious last night. No-one lurking around, nothing. I don’t have a picture of the deceased, but as soon as we get one I’ll check if he or Mr Demetriou saw her.’

Patrick nodded for him to continue.

‘What else? I’ve spoken to the station. They’re checking reports of missing persons, seeing if we can get an ID on the girl.’

‘Good.’

Heidi Shillingham, the manager, was waiting behind the reception desk. He walked over to her, trying not to think about Carmella’s observation from earlier. Heidi had just put the phone down and was wringing her hands, her face creased with anxiety.

A smile flickered on her lips as he approached.

‘Detective.’

‘Mrs Shillingham . . .’

‘Miss. No-one’s managed to catch me yet.’

Well, don’t expect me to chase you, thought Patrick. ‘I need that list of guests. Also, a full list of staff – everybody who works here, whether they were on shift yesterday or not.’

‘Yes, no problem.’ She hesitated.

‘What is it?’

‘Oh . . . I’ve just been on the phone to head office. We – they were wondering how long it would be before the body is removed and we can have the room back?’ She squirmed. ‘The hotel is fully booked tonight.’

Patrick sympathised. Heidi was no doubt getting shit from someone higher up. But it irritated him too, like the hotel wanted to check somebody into the dead girl’s grave.

‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a day or two before we can let anyone access the room.’

‘Oh dear. What about the floor? We can’t afford to have the whole floor cordoned off . . .’

He shrugged. ‘Get me that list and hopefully we can get this resolved today. Then you can go back to business as usual.’

He walked past Derek, the security guard, and pushed out through the front doors into the bright but chilly morning. He took his e-cigarette out of his pocket and took a deep drag. The light flashed, indicating that it was out of charge, and he cursed it, wishing he could have a real cigarette. There was a newsagent over the road and the temptation to go and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights was dangerously strong. Go on, a devilish voice whispered. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

You could be murdered by a maniac tomorrow.

He resisted, checking his phone to distract himself. There was a text from Gill: I need to talk to you x. He sighed and put the phone back in his pocket. He would reply later, when he got a moment. He knew exactly what she would want to talk about. Them. Bonnie. Their situation. And at the heart of it were the red-hot questions: did he forgive her? Did they have a future? Or had any possible future died the night Gill had tried to kill their daughter?

The thing was, he would happily talk about it – if he knew the answers. If he knew what he wanted, if his heart and mind didn’t vacillate so much. And to make things worse, he knew he was under pressure, that there was a time limit. Gill, quite understandably, wanted to know where she stood. He was going to have to make a decision very soon. Make a decision and stick with it.

And every time he thought about that, he sought a new distraction, because he didn’t want to make that decision.

As soon as he got back inside, Gareth hurried over, phone in hand. Carmella was upstairs, talking to the SOCOs. It crossed Patrick’s mind that Gareth saw Carmella as a rival, that he wanted to win brownie points with his superior officer. He wanted to be the one to make the breakthroughs, deliver the news. Patrick looked Gareth up and down as he approached, thinking how different they were. At school, Gareth would have been one of the popular kids, the football team captain, head boy material, the kind of guy that Patrick avoided, hanging out with his Goth mates, going out with girls who only chose him because they knew their parents would disapprove. There was something of the Peter Perfects about Gareth Batey and Patrick didn’t know if he wanted to protect him or encourage him to stop being such a . . . swot and get himself an attitude.