She was wearing a dressing gown over a nightdress. On the work surface by the sink was a kettle and two mugs. Steam wisped out of the spout of the kettle, only recently boiled. Henry glanced into the mugs. Instant coffee in each, ready to be made into a brew. Next to these items was a toaster with two pieces of toast popped up, ready to be buttered.
Stella Speakman had been preparing breakfast for two and had been shot to death in her own kitchen. It didn’t take a detective to put that one together.
Henry’s instinct was to squat down and have a closer look, but he could see everything he needed from where he was.
The hairs did rise on the back of his neck as he asked himself the next questions: Where was Joe Speakman? And had he done this?
Had there been some horrendous domestic dispute here, one of those ‘murder all the family, then commit suicide’ scenarios? Or had a burglar called?
Henry backed slowly out of the kitchen into the hallway, wondering where Flynn had gone. He pivoted on his heels, eyes pausing on the dead dog, then at the other doors off the hallway, each one closed. He listened hard — not easy because of the pounding in his ears.
A squeak, a scratching noise from upstairs. Or not?
It was tempting to go up, but he had to check the remainder of the downstairs rooms first, horribly aware that someone could be hiding, still armed with a shotgun.
He did the rooms quickly. They were empty. No bodies. No gunman.
Then he was at the foot of the stairs, behind him the dog. It had stopped twitching.
He went up slowly, feeling a second gush of adrenaline. The steps were carpeted and did not creak, so he could move silently.
At the top he turned to the door to his right, knowing it led into the main bedroom. He recalled collecting his coat from the bed when he was leaving the party. He pushed open the door gently. The entrance to the en-suite was on his left, then beyond the room opened out into a very large bedroom with a sitting area and French windows leading out to a balcony. The view from the balcony, he recalled, was stunning, sweeping down the fields to the river.
He went past the closed en-suite door into the bedroom area. The huge bed was rumpled and unmade and there was no sign of anyone.
He breathed a sigh, then back-tracked to the en-suite door, which he pushed open with his fingernail. It swung easily to reveal an expensive-looking fully tiled room, half of which was a walk-in shower.
In which was the naked body of an adult male, crumpled up.
Henry edged across to look into the shower cubicle properly.
Like his wife, Joe Speakman had been blasted to death by a shotgun. Blood, brains and water mingled down the pure white-tiled walls.
Henry was putting all this together.
Speakman showering. The wife preparing breakfast. A run-of-the-mill domestic scene. Not a murder-suicide, because Speakman had not blown his own head off.
Someone else had.
Henry heard something behind him.
He spun.
And the hooded man filled out the bathroom door, a sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun pointed directly at Henry’s chest.
Flynn saw the dead dog at the same time as Henry. Up to that point he hadn’t really been too concerned about proceedings. Visiting the scene of a six-month-old murder that he knew zilch about, then going on spec to see a retired SIO, even though he was vaguely curious to see what his old boss was up to, held no great interest for him.
His mind had been on plenty of other things. Primarily the fact that he’d been almost killed the night before — and was still hacking up smoke-tinged phlegm — and how he could start tracking down the two bastards who’d left him to die in a blazing inferno. Something he was planning on doing with or without Henry’s help.
Then he had to think about Diane and Colin and how he would tell her properly about the fate of the canal boat. He had tried when he phoned her earlier, but it wasn’t a successful attempt at passing a message. She had not been ‘with it’ at all.
And also the shop. It had to be opened for business, which was the main reason for him being in the UK in the first place… and also his need for accommodation. Now he had nowhere to bed down. The thought of crashing out nightly at the Tawny Owl was very appealing, even though it was hardly in the most convenient of locations. Maybe he’d get one more night out of it, but anything beyond that would be very unfair to Alison — and Henry, he supposed. At some point he would have to pay and that was money he didn’t have. He was not a wealthy man at all.
But when he saw the dog, his rusty but still functioning cop instincts surged to the fore.
He had been a good detective. Maybe not in Henry’s league, he was reluctantly forced to admit, but one rung above competent and hard and ruthless with it.
He made his way around the perimeter of the house on the gravel path, carefully looking into each room and seeing nothing.
Then he found himself at the kitchen window, where he saw Henry looking at something on the floor. From his position, he could not quite see what, but the expression on Henry’s face was grave and thoughtful as he backed out of the kitchen without even spotting Flynn at the window.
‘Ten out of ten for observation skills,’ Flynn muttered, about to move away from the window — until he saw the door to the utility room open slowly at the far end of the kitchen.
A man emerged.
Henry had once been winged by a shotgun blast, dozens of pellets hitting his shoulder like pebbledashing. After the numbness and disbelief, the pain had been incredible, right off the scale. But he’d survived.
He knew he would not survive this one.
Whatever was loaded in the shotgun would hit him in the sternum and drive a massive hole through the centre of his body and shatter his spine on the way out, after shredding his heart and lungs on the way.
As he faced the man in the door and his mouth dropped open, and the thought about taking a shotgun blast in his chest went through his mind, he was already throwing himself sideways.
Then there was a roar and a blur combined as Steve Flynn powered into the man, roaring like an attacking lion and using all his brute strength to take him down. But in so doing the shotgun jerked up and a barrel was discharged, splattering shot at an upwards angle into the top corner of the en-suite shower room.
Henry saw the men disappear and roll through to the bedroom.
The man held grimly on to the shotgun as he and Flynn tumbled untidily across the carpet, Flynn completely aware that the weapon between himself and the gunman was still loaded with one barrel.
They hit the floor and rolled, grappling desperately for control of the weapon, the man trying to tilt it away from him just enough so he could take Flynn’s head off; Flynn, totally knowing this was what he intended, and fighting the opposite way. The man had one big advantage, though: his right forefinger was hooked into the trigger guard.
Then they struck the corner of the bed hard and they came apart.
Flynn knew it was over.
The man still held the gun. He contorted, trying to aim the weapon, but Flynn saw that his finger had come out of the trigger guard. He reacted. In that nanosecond before the finger once against instinctively found its place on the double trigger, Flynn’s right hand shot palm-out and smashed the barrel upwards just as the finger jerked on the trigger.
The sound of the blast was incredible.
Flynn’s face was only inches away from the discharge. He heard the hammer connect and hit the cartridge. He felt the kickback of the explosion within the chamber, but at that exact moment he was forcing the gun hard against the man’s chest, so it was pointing upwards under his chin.
Flynn cowered away as the man’s face disintegrated, completely removed by the force of the blast that went straight up into his lower jaw and lifted his mouth, nose, eyes and forehead away from the rest of his head.