‘Nice street,’ Holly Little said. ‘Lovely park opposite. I think I could live here.’
‘All you need is a rich old uncle to die and leave you a couple of million quid and you’d be sorted.’
‘Or win the Lottery,’ she replied.
‘I wouldn’t bank on that buying you anything much. I almost won it once.’
‘You did?’
‘Well, sort of — five matches. Same day that half of England had the same numbers. I ended up with a few hundred quid. Seven hundred and eighty-five, to be precise.’
‘Bummer.’
‘That wasn’t actually the word I used, but you’re on the right track.’ Then he pointed through the windscreen. ‘There!’
They pulled up outside a handsome, red-brick Victorian house in good condition. There was a short, neat front garden with a tarmac drive up to what was previously an integral garage that had, at some time, been converted to a room. As they got out they could hear yapping.
They hurried through the rain up to the shelter of the entrance porch. John rang the smart, in-period, bell push. They could both hear, clearly, the loud ring from the interior of the house. The yapping became frenzied.
He knelt down, opened the letter box and peered in. The floor was littered with newspapers and mail. He pressed his nose in and sniffed, instantly recoiling.
The one smell all police officers could instantly recognize. And loathed.
The two officers looked at each other. They’d been partnered up for long enough to know each other’s body language. And Holly Little was reading his loud and clear.
They walked down the side of the house, past the bins, and into a very well-kept urban garden that could do with the grass cutting. There were patio doors leading out from a conservatory at the rear. John rapped on the window. The dog came racing through, putting its paws up against the glass, near demented.
‘Think we should call for a dog unit?’ he asked.
‘You wuss!’
They went back round to the front. John hurried over to the car, removed the heavy battering ram and lugged it up to the imposing front door. ‘You happy about this?’ he asked her. ‘We’re not contravening any of the new bloody privacy laws? We don’t need to get a warrant?’
‘Would it make you feel better?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Let’s go round the back and do the patio doors — less expensive to repair.’
They hurried round. He swung the ram at the door, shattering it, then again, punching a big enough hole for them to crawl through. The dog snarled at them and then ran out into the garden. Laying the ram down, John called out, futilely, he reckoned, ‘Mrs Driver? Hello! This is the police! Hello!’
The dog came running back in. Holly Little tried to stroke it, but it shot past and ran up the stairs.
The smell was even stronger now they were inside the house. The distinctive, putrid, cloying smell of decaying human flesh and blood. There was no smell on earth more horrible to either officer.
‘Mrs Driver!’ Holly called out, with little expectation of a response. ‘Hello, this is the police!’
They split and dutifully checked out the ground-floor rooms. There were stains of dog wee on the white carpet, and several dried dog messes. Then they looked in the separate garage. It contained a modern Mini and a silver classic Mercedes 500SL, from the 1980s. No sign of anyone.
Then they ventured upstairs. The dog was frantically yapping and pawing at a closed door. John turned the handle and tried to open it, but it would barely budge. He pushed hard against it, opening it just a few inches, the stench even stronger now. Then he threw all of his considerable weight against it and it opened wide. He burst through, stumbling across the room, closely followed by Holly.
An instant later a pair of stockinged legs, high in the air, one foot wearing a velvet slipper, the other bare, struck him in the face.
30
Tuesday 2 October
Matthew Sorokin sat in his uniform in the tiny office he had been allocated in the single-storey building occupied by the Sheriff’s Department of the Hernando County Police. He sneezed, feeling another cold coming on. The air con was freezing his nuts off, the one thing he did not like about Florida. Outside it was often hot and humid as hell while inside it was an icebox. He seemed to be permanently either sweating or shivering, and sometimes, like now, both.
He was leafing through the album of crime scene photographs of another cold case he had been allocated. Back in 1998, Dara Lamont, a beautiful socialite, lay in the hallway of a mansion on a gated estate in nearby Naples, most of her head blasted away by a shotgun. It had initially looked to the cops like a burglary gone wrong, but that had soon changed.
Her husband, Arron, then thirty-four, had been in the process of filing for divorce, and having uncovered a string of his infidelities, his wife was after him for every penny she could get. His real estate company had taken a nosedive after a large, unwise investment, and from being worth millions, was struggling to survive. On the night Dara had died, Arron had a cast-iron alibi. He was 1,283 miles away in New York, having dinner with his then mistress, now his wife, who had stood by her story, and he had the restaurant receipt as further evidence.
But Sorokin had discovered something significant. AT&T never destroyed their phone records. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1879, established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. It had a monopoly on the US telephone service until 1982. As a matter of policy, they kept all phone records for twenty years and then archived them. But when Homeland Security was established in the aftermath of 9/11, a request was made to all US phone providers to retain call records indefinitely.
Sorokin had managed to obtain the complete call log from Arron Lamont’s mobile phone from 1998. The calls put him in Florida, at the family home, at the exact time of his wife’s murder. The Sheriff’s task now, in order not to be shot down by a defence brief, was to try to establish that the husband had the phone in his possession at that exact time. That was a tough one. A real challenge.
Sorokin was grateful for it. For taking his mind off the nightmare of the past week.
The waking nightmare that had become his new normality. His life.
His phone rang.
‘Deputy Sheriff Sorokin,’ he answered.
‘Very grand. Does Deputy Sheriff Sorokin have time to talk to an old buddy?’
‘Gerry!’ he said.
‘How you doing?’
‘I’d like to say great, Gerry! I’d like to say it’s good to hear from you, but right now, if I saw you, I’d happily plug you.’
‘Hey, whoahhh! Wind back, pal!’
‘Gerry, there isn’t any winding back.’
‘Buddy, what’s the problem?’
‘That dating agency you put me on to?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘It just cost me a packet, OK? Ninety thousand bucks.’
‘Holy shit. That’s why I was calling you, to see how it was going. Say you’re joking?’
‘I’m not joking.’
‘I was calling to warn you. I’ve got another pal I put on to online dating — a guy in England, he got stiffed for an insane amount of money. I met Karen, my wife, online. Thought I’d do you guys a favour. But it seems it’s been hijacked by total shitbags since. Ninety thousand bucks? What do you mean, ninety thousand bucks?’
‘I mean, Gerry, ninety thousand bucks.’
‘How in God’s name did you part with that kind of dough?’
‘Probably the same way your pal in England got suckered. I thought she was for real — her name was Evelyne Desota. A babe. We got on so well, and I felt — you know — I really cared for her and trusted her. She had a whole load of issues, with a nightmare of a husband and family — so I thought. I don’t know what to believe any more — I don’t think I believe any of it. I was just spun a load of total baloney.’