‘Constables Radcliff and Jones, they’re upstairs, third floor,’ the cop called back.

They rode the lift in silence. Stevie concentrated on her breathing and prepared herself for the worst. Angus had his eyes closed and was jingling the loose change in his pocket.

The lift doors opened to castles of glassware and mountains of white crockery. They skirted piles of fluffy towels and stacks of coloured sheets and headed towards a collection of display beds made up with fashionable linens.

There was no death scent, no buzzing flies to warn them of the body’s proximity, only the sweet smell of scented candles and the crackling of a police radio.

They introduced themselves to Constables Radcliff and Jones and took tentative steps towards a bed decorated with a brocade canopy and a silver woman. She lay on her back with her legs bent. She could have been an obscene advertising ploy, one more gimmick to entice the gullible buyer. Buy this bed and you too could look like this. Stevie felt the bile begin to rise. She turned her head to be almost blinded by the spotlight erected by the police photographer, further adding to the staged artificiality of the scene.

The woman’s face was an expressionless mask; she might have been a mannequin from Ladies Wear. Easeful Death was printed down the length of her right thigh in black marker pen.

‘Not again.’ Angus’s voice was soft. His attitude to the dead was always reverential, unlike some members of the squad who popped into her mind.

Wayne Pickering appeared, making the final adjustments to an oversized paisley bow tie. ‘Silver Finger,’ he said in his usual deadpan.

Speak of the devil.

‘It was Bronze Finger last time. Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?’

And his disciple.

Barry Snow turned to Stevie. With the light shining from the spotlight behind him, she could barely see his face, but his large ears stuck out like wing nuts. ‘That was an inaccuracy you know,’ he said. ‘People don’t die just from being painted.’ He leaned towards the body and pointed to the neck area. ‘I’m guessing this one was also strangled.’

‘Let’s leave that to the pathologist to determine, okay?’ Stevie ran her eyes up and down the body, absorbing every detail. The woman’s left hand seemed to be locked into a fist around a small strip of something brown. Peering closer, she tried to identify the protruding object. It looked like a piece of fabric—a piece of the killer’s clothing perhaps? Hard to believe that she had reached out to the killer while she was dying and grabbed this without his knowledge.

Stevie straightened and looked at Wayne Pickering who was finishing his own visual examination of the body. She pointed to the woman’s fist.

‘Yes, wonder what the hell that is? I guess we’ll have to wait for the pathologist to prise it out.’ Wayne pivoted on his heel and scanned the shop floor. ‘And where’s our illustrious leader?’

‘On his way.’ Angus said. He was next in seniority after Monty. ‘I’m going to talk to the woman who found the body. Stevie, come with me. Wayne and Barry, you guys comb the whole shop for ways the killer could have broken in. SOCO will be here soon, work with them. Also, get one of the uniforms to stop anyone else using the lifts. That’s the only way he could have got the body up here, they’ll have to be carefully examined.’

‘Unlike Linda Royce, this one wouldn’t have needed props to keep her posed,’ Stevie said to Angus as they walked towards the shop and floor manager who’d discovered the body.

‘True,’ Angus said. ‘And I’d like to know how he got the body up here without triggering any of the alarms. I favour the lift, though I guess he could have used the stairs. But the body would have been heavy and awkward to carry up three flights. We’ll get SOCO to check them anyway.’

A middle-aged man and an older woman, the shop and floor managers respectively, stood tense and anxious next to shelves of bathroom ornaments.

‘When can we open up for business, detective?’ the shop manager asked. The man looked like he’d dressed in a hurry. The shirt under his suit jacket was buttoned wrong and his face was furred with brindle stubble. His mouth, still gaping with shock, looked like that of the blue porcelain fish staring at Stevie from the shelf behind.

‘I’m afraid you’ll probably be closed for the rest of the week, Sir.’

The man sighed heavily and looked at his floor manager. Her face was pale under a thick layer of foundation, her voice a tremolo of barely contained hysteria. ‘I just don’t understand how anyone could have got up here without triggering the motion detectors. I set the alarms myself last night.’

‘You don’t have security guards?’ Angus asked, looking from one to the other of them.

The man said, ‘Only roving patrols to check up on things if the alarm is triggered, that’s all most department stores have these days. Burglaries are rare in our type of store, most of the criminals seem to content themselves with shoplifting.’

A constable approached the group. ‘Excuse me, Sir.’ His eyes darted to the managers, unsure if he should be speaking in front of them. Angus gave him a nod and he said, ‘We know how the alarm was deactivated. The external phone line that goes to the control room of the security company was cut. The alarm would have rung, but wouldn’t have gone through their monitoring system.’

‘You still rely on that old system?’ Stevie asked incredulously.

The shop manager became flustered, defensive. ‘We haven’t been in this building long. We inherited the security system from the previous owners. We were going to update next year.’

‘Surely someone must have heard the racket?’ Stevie questioned the constable.

‘We’re asking around, Ma’am. But you know what it’s like in the city on weeknights. Quiet as the grave.’

She would have preferred a different choice of simile, but had to agree with him. The manager turned his head to follow the progress of a group of overall-clad forensic officers. Stevie caught Angus’s eye, telling him with a look that this was not the place for any further interviews.

He said to the managers, ‘I’m going to ask one of our officers to accompany you to Central. I’d like the next round of questions to be conducted in an interview room. We need to get details from you about the closing up routine of the shop, the alarms etc.’

‘Taking us down to the station? Is that necessary?’ The woman’s age-spotted hand reached to the chain at her neck. ‘We’re not under arrest are we?’

Stevie swallowed down her impatience. ‘No, you’re not under arrest, but we need to talk to you away from these distractions.’

When they had gone, Stevie said to Angus, ‘I keep flashing back to Linda Royce’s body at the bank. James De Vakey said we needed to check the security guards again. I was going to have them polygraphed today. I was hoping there might’ve been security guards here too—they would have provided us with a handy commonality, but it seems there were none near the place.’

‘Okay, you go back to the bank guards, though the chances of their involvement are looking slimmer. I’ll interview the two managers back at Central.’ Angus smoothed down his hair as he looked around the shop floor, which was now bustling with police activity. ‘Two hot cases needing a separate team on each, and where the hell is Monty? He’s the only one with the authority to enlist the help of more suburban dees. We can’t cope with all this alone.’

‘De Vakey might be able to help us with a thing or two, I’ll give him a call.’ Stevie reached into her bag for her phone. But before she had time to dial the lift pinged, announcing an arrival.

Angus swore. ‘I told them to secure the lifts.’

The doors opened revealing Monty looking very much the worse for wear in the clothes he’d been wearing the day before. His butter-coloured shirt had turned rancid and his pants were concertinaed with crease marks. His skin was pale against his auburn hair, making the stubble on his face shine. Stevie’s heart sank with the departing lift, recognising that self-loathing, morning-after look. She lowered her voice. ‘Jeez, you look like shit,’ she murmured.