Cold is the Caller

  Prologue

  Wounds. They remain as scars.

  Always there. Reminders.

  “What’s your emergency?”

  “I killed a man.”

  “Where?”

  “In his house.”

  “Sir, where is that?”

  “In his street.”

  “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Fuck off.”

  T slammed the phone down, laughing his damn head off. What a bloody rush.

  Leaning over the waist-height wall beside the river, he let go of the mobile, the plop of it hitting the murky water satisfying, just like it had been when he’d dropped the other thing in five minutes ago. Then he got in his van and sped off along the city streets, giggling, a thread of euphoria streaking through his body. Life was good, wasn’t it, when you decided to bump off all the people who’d pissed you off, hurt you, hurt your sister?

  Yeah, it was good all right.

  Georgia would be home off the night shift in a few hours. She’d find that dead bastard and crap her knickers. What he’d give to see her face when she spotted Jason, lying there like he was.

  He should have stayed there. Waited for her. Killed her, too. After all, she had a part to play in all this. If she’d been a good wife, Jason wouldn’t have had to find someone else to poke his dick into, would he.

  Maybe I’ll get her another day.

  No ‘maybe’ about it. She had it coming to her. Soon.

  He stopped at an all-night Sainsbury’s garage, asking for some Butterkist through the intercom thing they used during the night at these places. He’d need it later. While he waited for the blonde female cashier to go and get the popcorn, his phone seemed to burn in his pocket. It contained the video of him with Jason. Interesting viewing wasn’t the word. He’d watch it at some point when he had a moment.

  “Three ninety-nine,” the cashier said.

  Was she having a laugh?

  “What, for a bag that size?” he asked, something else burning in his other pocket. Cigar cutters.

  No, don’t use them here.

  “That’s garage prices for you, I’m afraid.” She shrugged.

  Her lack of care annoyed him, but not enough to do anything about it.

  Lucky girl.

  He paid, took his purchase out of the box in the wall she’d dropped it into, and got in his van. And spotted CCTV pointing right at his vehicle. Would the police check who was on the streets at this time of night once they found out Jason was dead? Check the whole city?

  He’d fucked up.

  Shit.

  Chapter One

  “Do you realise what a monumental fuck-up this is?” Bethany whispered to her partner, Mike, tapping her booted foot on the incident room floor, her mind racing with thoughts on how to fix this.

  She glanced around at the other two members of her team, Leona and Fran. They were busy working, blonde heads bent, too far away to hear the conversation.

  Good.

  “What the hell am I going to tell the chief?” she said quietly.

  “It’s my fault, so I should be the one to tell him. I couldn’t keep it from you any longer. The sleepless nights…” Mike scrubbed his black-bearded jaw. “I forgot to log it at the scene, all right? It happens. It got lost in the mountain of evidence, plus, I remember being distracted.”

  “But the case goes to bloody trial in the next few months.” Bethany closed her eyes for a moment, calming herself so she didn’t go off on one. “Actually, yes, you tell him, but I’ll come with you. I won’t let you do this alone. We stick together always, got it? First, though, we just need to think of an excuse as to why it wasn’t logged.”

  “Um, because I forgot?”

  “No, that’s not how it happened, is it.” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you get what I’m saying?”

  “We lie?” His eyebrows lifted then.

  I swear he plucks them.

  “Er, yes?”

  “Christ.” He released a ragged breath. “What you’re asking…”

  “What I’m asking will save your arse. You could get a right old bollocking for this if you admit what you’ve done—or didn’t do. And this lie isn’t any different to the one you’ve been carrying around with you, is it?”

  “What do I say then if I don’t tell the truth?” The poor sod appeared fraught with indecision.

  Catch twenty-two was a right arsehole.

  She stared at a pile of papers on his desk. On the top was the piece of evidence Mike hadn’t logged at the scene, sitting there all proud and alarming in its clear bag. The scrap of blood-soaked material inside had gone hard. It should have been with forensics, tested for type, DNA, not there in front of them.

  It could still be done. They had time.

  She rooted in his drawer for a pair of gloves and put them on. Then snatched up the bag and slid it down the side of his desk, between the solid panel leg and the wall.

  “What are you doing?” Mike stared at her, his mouth hanging open.

  “Take it back out.” She held her breath, waiting for him to twig what she was up to.

  “For fuck’s sake. If I’m taking it back out, what was the point in putting it down there in the first place?”

  “Take it back out!” Keep your voice down, woman.

  Leona and Fran seemed oblivious, thank goodness.

  “Damn,” Bethany said. “I’ve just dropped your favourite pen down that slot.” If she’d said it any louder, she’d have been shouting.

  Mike pulled the desk away from the wall a bit so he could reach in and get the bag. He stood there holding it, and, Lord have mercy, dust and a cobweb clung to the surface. Nothing like authenticity.

  His expression asked: Now what?

  Bethany took the gloves off and stuffed them in her pocket. “Oh shit! Can you believe this? How the hell did that get down there?”

  Mike didn’t say a word.

  “Must have slid off your desk at some point,” Bethany went on. “Thank God you found it. This could massively help the Valiant case.”

  At last, realisation dawned. Mike nodded. “We need to get this to the chief.”

  “Too bloody right.” Bethany winked and called out to Leona and Fran, “Look what’s just turned up.”

  They swivelled in their seats.

  “Only a piece of Valiant evidence.” Bethany smiled. “It got wedged down the side of Mike’s desk.”

  Leona scratched her head. “Will we get in trouble?”

  “What, for an accident?” Bethany shook her head. “We all saw how many bags of evidence were on this desk back then.” She tapped the wooden surface. “One was bound to go astray.”

  “But they get logged at the scene,” Fran said, her forehead creasing. “Someone would have noticed it was missing by now.”

  “Well, with the amount of SOCO there, maybe it was forgotten. Maybe there was a slip up.” God forgive me for putting ideas in their heads and blaming it on someone else. But there had been a tremendous amount of officers present. It could have happened this way. “Whoever found this bit of evidence put it in this bag here, and it’s been written on, but shit happens, right? There are no initials as to who bagged it, though.”

  Miracles did happen.

  Leona and Fran nodded.

  “The main thing is, we have it now. Come on, Mike.”

  She led the way out and into the corridor. Mike stood beside her, and she looked up into his eyes once the door had closed. “I sounded plausible, yes?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “No buts.”

  “Does this make us bent coppers?” He stared down at the bag in his hand.

  “Shut up with that sort of talk. It doesn’t make us anything but lairs. The keepers of a secret
. The main thing is, we’re fixing it now.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s not sitting right with you, is it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Will possibly losing your job sit better? This will be the third thing on your sheet if you admit to what really happened. Why did you keep it quiet when you realised what you’d done?”

  Mike shrugged. “Didn’t want to admit I’d ballsed it up. Didn’t want another mistake on my record.”

  “When did you actually find it?” She pointed to the bag.

  “A week after I logged everything. Well, clearly not everything…”

  A week would have been easier to deal with. Months had passed, so the course she’d now set in motion was the only way to smooth things over.

  “Right, follow my lead.” She walked down the corridor towards Chief Kribbs’s office, glancing over her shoulder at Mike, who still stood there, forlorn and troubled. “Move your arse, Mike Wilkins, it’s time to face the music.”

  * * * *

  “Thank heavens the phone saved us from one of his diatribes,” Bethany said as they legged it downstairs to the car park after the meeting with Kribbs.

  “I can’t believe he swallowed the story.” Mike’s footfalls clattered on the steps behind her, relief evident in his voice.

  “Yeah, well, I must have been convincing. Either that, or he has something more important rolling around in his noggin, so that was why he brushed it off. Be quiet now—people listen, add two and two together, and come up with the truth.”

  She shot out into reception. “Got that address for me?”

  Rob Quarry, the front desk sergeant, held up a yellow Post-it note. “A bit of a mess there, by all accounts.”

  “Right. I don’t want to be told before I see it for myself. What are we looking at as a charge?”

  “Murder. His wife found him.”

  Bethany winced, putting herself in the woman’s shoes. Finding Vinny dead would just about kill me. “Poor cow. Okay, we’ll be going then.” She took the note and handed it to Mike.

  In the car, she set off fast, Mike still clipping in his belt.

  “Fuck me, can you go any faster?” He gripped the ‘oh shit’ handle above the door.

  “Prone to exaggeration much?” She laughed. “I drive fast, you know that. Get over it.” To add the raspberry sauce and nuts on top of his crapping-his-pants Mr Whippy, she pressed her foot down harder.

  “Not funny, Beth,” he said.

  She slowed. “Aww, where’s your sense of humour?”

  “I lost it when I messed up.”

  “Well, now it’s fixed, so you can have a bit of a giggle again. I should have noticed something was wrong lately. You haven’t been yourself. I just put it down to—”

  “Don’t even go there.” He cleared his throat.

  Mike’s ex-girlfriend had been unable to cope with police hours and had left their shared home, only a Dear John letter propped on the mantelpiece to explain why she’d fucked off the cowardly way—to Dunnet Head in Scotland, no less. She couldn’t have scarpered any farther. Apparently, she ‘couldn’t bear to see the upset’ on Mike’s face, hence the letter.

  Bitch. I never did like her.

  “Still raw then,” she said. “You know, keeping it all inside isn’t good for you. Talking it about it will help.”

  “I don’t want to.” He sighed.

  “I’m here.” She reached out and squeezed his knee. “I’m here.”

  “Maybe one day I’ll open up.”

  “Make it soon, yes? I hate to see you like this. It’s been six months.” She turned left onto the housing estate renowned for residents with high-end everything. Rumour had it, even the women’s fake toenails cost a fortune.

  “I know how long it’s been,” Mike said. “Cheers for the reminder, though.”

  His comeback stung, and guilt settled inside her at her insensitivity. She’d come off as uncaring, and that was the last thing she wanted to do with Mike. They’d been partners for a long time. Years. “Shit, I didn’t mean to rub it in. I want to help. I’m trying to, in my own clumsy way.”

  “I know. Ignore me.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m just being a mardy arse.”

  “That you are. Anyway, we’re here, look, so, as usual, personal stuff gets left inside the car as of now.”

  A SOCO van cuddled the kerb directly outside twenty-one Bladen Avenue, and the ME’s red car, nudged up behind it, all but kissed its arse. The ME himself, Presley Zouch—named so on account of his mother being a tad too obsessed with Elvis, bless her blue-suede-shoe-loving heart—had once said, tongue in cheek, he’d chosen a red car because of the amount of blood he dealt with on a daily basis.

  A twisted bastard, he was, but Bethany liked his bluntness. She knew where she stood with him.

  She parked behind his Ford Ecosport and turned to Mike. “Ready, matey?”

  “Yep. Let’s get to it.”

  On the pavement, she scoped the area. Uniforms already stood at front doors—she made out Glen Underby and Nicola Eccles, her two favourite bobbies. “Nice to see our beloved front desk sergeant got the ball well and truly rolling. Rob’s a godsend.”

  Mike nodded. “He certainly gets on with things.”

  She turned her attention to the property belonging to Jason and Georgia Holt. Mock Tudor, without the thatched roof. It had maybe five or six bedrooms, going by the amount of lead-paned windows. In the shingled front garden, potted plants and flowers bobbed in the slight breeze, which took the edge off the summer sun that seemed to have a mind to burn everything to a crisp this year. All in all, a pretty swanky place.

  “Someone’s got money,” she said, idly wondering how much the council tax would be for a house that size.

  “Doesn’t everyone have it on this estate?”

  “Hmm.” She walked up the paved path slicing between the cream-coloured shingle and approached the officer at the front door.

  Tory Yates handed over the log. Bethany signed it then passed it to Mike.

  “Were you first on the scene?” she asked.

  “No, Underby and Eccles.” Tory grimaced. “I’m glad, because apparently, it isn’t pleasant in there.”

  “Bugger.” Bethany glanced at the box just inside the door. “Do we need full suits?”

  “I’d say so.” Tory grabbed a set each and held them out.

  Bethany and Mike togged up on the doorstep, hoods in place, and Tory stepped aside to let them pass.

  In the hallway, Bethany checked out their surroundings. Four doors off a large, square hallway. SOCOs were in the spacious kitchen to the right, swabbing blood that streaked the white worktops. Ahead, the door swung open, revealing dark wooden flooring, a cream leather sofa, and beside it, a mahogany occasional table with a blue vase full of flowers on top. The second door on the left had a SOCO kneeling under a desk—an office.

  She turned to look at Tory’s back. “Where’s the wife?”

  Tory spun round. “In there.” She pointed to the closed door. “The dining room. It’s been dusted and checked, given the all clear to use.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Glancing at Mike, Bethany said, “Body or wife first?”

  “Body.” He sniffed. “We’ll get a better sense of what she tells us if we know what she found first.”

  “True.”

  She led the way to the living room, assuming Jason’s body was in there. Poking her head around the door, she sucked in a huge breath at the sight. Jason, in front of the fireplace. Blood everywhere, soaking into the rug, plastering the walls, stippling the mirror…

  “Ah. I just need a second,” she said and took a step back, staring at the floor to centre herself. Evidence markers sat beside blood scuffs in the hallway. Had the killer brought the blood out with them? Or had it been the wife? She stared up at Mike, who stood beside the table with the flowers.

  “You okay, Beth?” he asked, eyes full of concern.

  She steeled herself to go back insi
de. Nodded. “I have to be. I’ve got no choice.”

  Chapter Two

  Bethany stood a metre or so away from the body. The blood on the hardwood had long since dried, and photos had been taken, but she still felt bad for standing on what had once coursed through Jason’s veins, even though a plastic sheet covered the area outside the rug.

  Presley knelt beside Jason’s legs, bending one to check for the status of rigor. Either Jason had been killed recently or rigor had come and gone. Going by the blood having dried, she’d say the latter.

  Jason had been opened up like a tuna can, a circle of skin cut away, so big his whole midsection from below his ribs to his pelvis was exposed, an empty cavity. His innards had been removed, and his spine, covered in flesh and God knew what else, was the only thing left.

  She switched her focus to his chest, and a piece of black material had been stuck to his skin, a white skull printed on it, staring at her as if it had seen exactly what had happened here, the eyes filling the sockets a disturbing shade of red. Skull images didn’t usually have eyes, so what did that mean? And the fact the material had been stuck onto him… Had the killer known Jason would be alone for long enough to give them the opportunity to do this wicked thing? Or had they continued regardless and would have dealt with the wife if she’d come home in the middle of it?

  Mike took a deep breath. “What the ever-loving fuck is this all about?”

  “No idea. Was just wondering the same thing myself.”

  “I mean, his face…”

  “I know.”

  Jason didn’t have one, as such. His skin had been peeled off—cut again, same as his stomach—his muscles exposed, only a few yellow globules of fat clinging on. And his eyes…red contacts, a lock of his dark-brown fringe draping across one socket. Jason’s smile no longer existed. Where his teeth were was anyone’s guess.

  “Do you think the skinning is significant?” she asked no one in particular. “That has to be a skill. Not everyone would know how to do that.”

  “Amazing what you can learn from Google,” Mike said.

  Presley stood, his ginger hair shining in the sunlight coming through the French doors. Blood stained his protective suit, almost perfect circles on the knees. “That’s your area of expertise, finding significance.” He took his pad out of his bag and drew, creating a picture of the body’s position. “From what I can see, everything was done to him after death—the removal of skin, teeth, and innards. This would have taken quite a bit of time, so whoever did this knew he had a long window in which to carry out what they undoubtedly think of as their ‘work’.”