Bolt grunted. ‘Somehow I doubt it.’

Six

FOR THE LAST fifteen months, a brutal serial killer dubbed The Disciple had kept the south of England in the grip of fear, and the media in the grip of excitement. Before the previous night’s attack, he’d committed six murders in three previous incidents. His modus operandi was always the same. He picked isolated detached properties occupied by professional couples, all of which so far had been to the west of London. He would break in at night, disable the male partner with a non-fatal stab wound to the leg, before overpowering and binding the female partner. He’d then torture and sexually assault the woman, and on one occasion the man as well, before finally killing them both with a knife, using their blood to daub Satanic signs on the walls of the room in which he carried out the attacks. On each occasion the left-hand little finger of the female victim had been cut off, and was subsequently missing from the crime scene, suggesting The Disciple was taking them as trophies.

Bolt had been brought in to lead the inquiry four months earlier, after the previous senior investigating officer – a good solid cop called Mason, whom Bolt had met a couple of times before – had had a massive heart attack and dropped dead. That should have told Bolt everything he needed to know about this case. It was a nightmare for any SIO. Not only was the pressure for a result enormous, and seemingly continuously building, but leads on the ground were desperately scarce. The Disciple might have been a sick, deranged individual, but he was also clever enough not to leave any DNA behind at the scene of his crimes. So far, the only possible clue they had to his identity was a witness description of a man in dark clothing and a woollen cap seen by a male dog walker hanging round near the house of the final two victims the day before they were killed. The description of the man himself was fairly basic – tall, well-built, somewhere in his thirties – but the witness had noticed a dark green tattoo on his left forearm, where his sleeve had been rolled up. It wasn’t much to reassure an increasingly concerned public that they were making progress on the case, especially considering the number of detectives working on it, but Bolt had learned in more than twenty-five years as a police officer that sometimes you simply had to be patient and wait for the break, although in recent weeks he too had grown intensely frustrated with the lack of leads.

Now, though, it looked like they might have one, in the form of a survivor. Bolt wasn’t going to get his hopes up too much, but when he’d taken the case he’d always known that, as long as he kept killing, The Disciple was going to make a mistake eventually. Maybe, just maybe, this was it.

It was 7.10 a.m. and night had given way to an overcast morning when they arrived. The murder scene was a large detached house in the middle of a stretch of beech wood – the kind of place that estate agents would claim had character – surrounded by a high brick wall, which was possible but not easy to scale, set on a quiet, heavily wooded back road not far from the A33. The road in front of the house was lined on both sides with police vehicles, and a group of uniformed PCs were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches.

‘It’s a perfect location for The Disciple,’ said Mo, as they parked up behind a police van and got out of the car. ‘He could have watched the house to his heart’s content and no one would have spotted him.’

‘I don’t understand what makes people live out in places like this,’ said Bolt. ‘It’s so damn lonely. I need people around me. I need to hear, I don’t know . . . Noise.’

‘You’re a city boy. So am I. But I reckon my wife would love it out here.’ Mo stood staring at the house, leaning back so his belly stuck out. He’d always been a short, stout little guy, the very antithesis of Bolt, who was tall and broad-shouldered, but he’d put on a fair bit of weight of late, and with his thick head of almost-silver hair, he was now beginning to resemble a middle-aged Hobbit. ‘How much do you reckon this place costs?’ he asked vaguely.

‘God knows. A million. Two million. A lot more than you or I could ever afford.’ Bolt reckoned that Mikaela would have liked a place like this too. She’d always wanted to move out of the city and start a new life and family in the countryside. For a moment, he wondered how they would have coped: them living out here and him still a city cop, commuting into town. Pretty well, he imagined.

She’d liked fresh air. Bolt could take it or leave it.

They climbed under the police tape, showed their IDs to the group of cops eating their breakfast, then made their way over to the van containing the coveralls that they needed to put on before they could enter the crime scene. Bolt felt mildly nauseous at the prospect of going inside. He hated the sight of any dead body, and always had done, ever since he’d seen his first one back in the early days in the job. He’d seen plenty since and, every time, it reminded him far too much of his own mortality – the knowledge that one day he would end up a lifeless husk like all of them.

Death depressed Bolt. The needless, violent deaths of those whose time should have still been far away depressed him even more, and there were few killings more violent and needless than those committed by The Disciple. At the home of the last two victims, he’d been almost overcome with emotion as he’d walked through the house, seen the photos on the wall of the young couple – both barely thirty – and then gone into the bedroom and seen the terrible things that had been done to their naked bodies. Almost overcome, but not quite. Ultimately, he was still professional enough to hold himself together in front of his colleagues, but more and more these days he wondered if he was becoming too affected by his job; whether it was time to pull back from the tough, high-profile cases and finish the last four years of his thirty with a whimper rather than a bang.

‘DCS Bolt?’

Bolt turned to see a short, prematurely bald guy with a kindly, boyish face and chubby cheeks, dressed in coveralls. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m DCI Matt Black. Thames Valley CID. I’m in charge of securing the scene.’ He spoke matter-of-factly in a slight West Country burr that reminded Bolt of the guy who’d played Inspector Wexford in the old TV series. He also looked too young to be a DCI, but maybe that was just Bolt showing his age.

‘Pleased to meet you, Matt.’ He put out a hand and shook, before introducing Mo to him. ‘We’d appreciate it if you could show us around the scene.’

‘Of course. Come this way.’

They followed Black as he led them through the police vehicles and along a path lined with fluorescent markers towards the house. An imposing set of wooden security gates with a curving line of wrought-iron spikes along the top announced the entrance. The gates were open, revealing a gravel driveway and turning circle in front of the house, and a separate two-car garage to the left. A red Porsche Turbo – the kind beloved of middle-aged men wanting to impress the girls – was parked in front of it, and Bolt assumed that it belonged to the male victim. As they passed through the gates, he asked if they’d been open when the first officers had arrived at the scene.

Black shook his head. ‘No. They were closed and locked. We think the suspect came over the wall round the back, and picked the lock on the back door. It’s only got a single five-bar lock, along with two bolts that weren’t pulled across, so if someone knew what they were doing, it wouldn’t be that hard to get in.’

‘You’d think they’d have a state-of-the-art security system living round here,’ said Mo.

‘They do. And CCTV cameras covering the back and the front of the property. But the alarm wasn’t on, and it looks like the CCTV camera round the back was tampered with.’