Page 29 of Better the Devil

‘Dirty, dirty bastards,’ he muttered.

‘I mean, hopefully it’s not a dog,’ Tyler said, steering things away from the ginger incident. ‘But given the Johnny wrapper being found where it was, I’d say someone’s definitely been shagging someone back there.’

‘Could’ve been the victim and his wife,’ Sinead suggested.

Tyler smiled kindly and patted her on the leg. ‘Oh, Sinead. Aye, maybe it was that, right enough,’ he said, smiling like he was talking to a sweet, innocent child.

‘What? It could’ve been!’ she protested, lifting his hand away.

‘They’ve got a massive house. Plenty of room for that sort of thing, I’d have thought,’ Logan said.

‘Maybe they’re just into it, though,’ Dave reasoned. ‘Car shagging, or whatever. Dogging. That old boy says he’s caught a few folk at it. Seemed pretty fixated on the idea, actually. He was pretty much foaming at the mouth at one point, just thinking about it.’

Logan wasn’t buying it. He’d seen Eleanor Belov. He’d seen her house, and her hair, and the way she carried herself. Gettingdown and dirty on top of a manky dog blanket in a lay-by somewhere didn’t seem like her style.

‘Although, actually… They’ve got kids, haven’t they?’ Dave said. ‘That would suggest they might not be using contraception.’

‘Oh, you’d be surprised!’ was all Sinead had to say on that particular matter.

‘Rest of the car was pretty clean,’ Tyler said, moving swiftly on. ‘You wouldn’t know he had kids. No baby seat, no crumbs, sweet wrappers, anything like that. Carpets had been hoovered recently, so the Johnny wrapper couldn’t have been there long.’

‘So, he’d been at it recently?’ Dave said. ‘Maybe that old boy with the Toblerone was onto something, right enough.’

Logan studied the Big Board. There were far more questions on it than answers. Where had Victor been going? Why was the blanket there? Did it belong to the killer?

The condom wrapper, the glass, the footprints, the dog hair. They were all data points right now, but not pointing anywhere particularly helpful.

And what about the business associate Victor’s brothers had been waiting for? He hadn’t turned up. Logan knew that for a fact, because he’d sat just along the road from the entrance to the driveway until a couple of Uniforms in an unmarked car had responded to his call and come to relieve him.

Nobody had turned up at the house. Two BMWs had left at just after three a.m. The gates had closed behind them, and had remained that way ever since.

Questions. Almost nothing but questions.

But getting answers, it turned out, was going to have to wait.

Nobody had heard Detective Superintendent Mitchell enter the room. She’d somehow slipped into a room full of police officers without any of them noticing until she cleared her throat to deliberately draw their attention.

‘Apologies for interrupting,’ she said.

She was not a large woman, and unlike her predecessor, she rarely felt the need to raise her voice. Also unlike her predecessor, she had never loudly referred to a more junior officer as ‘a calamitous clusterfuck of assorted flavours of hot excrement.’

So, she had that working in her favour.

Despite rarely shouting, though, and despite the lack of obscenity in her vocabulary, something about the way she carried herself left you in little doubt that she was the person in charge. Even Logan felt it, which, considering his general disdain for anyone in authority who wasn’t himself, spoke volumes.

‘Ma’am,’ he said, with an implied, ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ left trailing in the air behind it.

‘Two reasons,’ Mitchell said. Even though Jack’s question had gone unspoken, she had heard it loud and clear. ‘First, I wanted to let DC Neish and DC Bell know that interview dates have been locked down.’

Sinead tensed.

Tyler drew in a breath.

‘Tomorrow,’ the detective superintendent continued. ‘I know timing’s not great with everything, but it’s the only time the full interview panel can get together. You’ll both get emails today with times. Good luck to both of you.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Sinead said.

‘Aye, eh, cheers, ma’am,’ Tyler said, and he looked slightly annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to say it first.