Page 105 of Better the Devil

Logan was barely listening. He flipped through the pages, scanning the text, searching for anything in there about sexual activity. Shona had said he’d been sexually active just before his death.

Aside from the torn-off strip of the condom wrapper, which could have been lying there in the car for weeks, he didn’t understand how she could know that…

He stopped when he found the paragraph he had been looking for.

‘Oh,’ Logan said. ‘Oh, shite.’

‘Sir?’ Sinead asked.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jack exclaimed. He prodded at the page, his mind whirring with all the possibilities and ramifications of what he’d just read. ‘Shona, she said he’d been shagging. Victor Belov. She said he’d recently been sexually active.’

Tyler’s fingers flew across the keyboard. His lips moved as he skim-read what appeared on his screen.

‘How could she tell that?’ Dave wondered. ‘Did he still have a stiffy?’

‘Oh, bloody hell, boss!’ Tyler cried. ‘I see it.’

‘I don’t understand. Surely you can’t actually tell a man’s been up to that sort of thing, can you?’ Sinead asked. ‘I mean, I suppose there could be… stains, or whatever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s been sexually active.’

‘Could’ve been wanking,’ Dave added, in case anyone hadn’t come to that conclusion themselves.

‘There were… injuries,’ Logan said. ‘Beyond the ones we knew about on the forehead and the throat, I mean.’

‘Injuries?’ Hamza frowned. ‘Defensive ones?’

‘Not exactly,’ Tyler said, reading from his screen.

‘Turns out, sometimes youcantell when a man’s been up to that sort of thing,’ Logan said. He held up the report, fingershooked over the top of it, and pointed to the relevant section of the page. ‘Assuming he’s been the one on the receiving end.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

This changed things.This meant something.

Based on the post-mortem, Victor Belov had recently had sexual intercourse with another man, possibly just hours before his murder. Maybe even less.

But who? And where? And how did that tie in with everything else?

Logan didn’t know the answers to any of that yet, but there was an electricity in the air now. The Incident Room felt like it was coming alive for the first time that day.

This meant something. Thischanged things. He was sure of it.

‘We got into his phone yet?’ Logan asked, pacing back and forth in front of the Big Board.

‘Nothing yet, no,’ Hamza replied.

Logan clapped his hands together. The sound was like a shockwave that raced around the room. ‘Then tell them to get their finger out. I want location data, texts, emails, WhatsApps, fucking…Wordle scores. Anything that’s on there, I want to see it.’

‘I’ll chase up the tech team,’ Hamza said, reaching for the phone.

‘What about the network? They given us call data yet?’

‘Technically, yes, boss,’ Tyler said. He clicked his mouse, then turned his monitor to show a largely blank spreadsheet. ‘Says he made eight calls in the last six months, all to home. I’m thinking he had a second number that we don’t know about.’

‘Virtual SIM, maybe,’ Dave suggested. ‘If we could get into his phone, we’d find it.’

Logan about-turned and started to pace quickly in the opposite direction, stabbing a finger at Hamza’s phone as he passed the DI’s desk.

‘Tell the tech squad that if they don’t have something for me by close of play, I’ll be down there first thing in the morning to shove their heads up their arses. Use those words. Use thoseexactwords.’