by Carl Goodman
20/20
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
An Andalusian Dog
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Eight Minutes Dead
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Exit Strategy
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
A letter from Carl
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
20/20
Carl Goodman
For Cheryl and Ross
Prologue
It’s not what you think.
The words reverberated inside her head, twisting and coiling like an echo in a cavern or the last lilting notes of some almost forgotten melody. She could see only blurred shapes, saturated colours and pinpricks of white sparkling in obsidian blackness. The world seemed distant to her, as if she were approaching it from space. Not approaching, Irina thought as she tried to make sense of what she was feeling. It was as if she were leaving the world, never to return.
It’s not what you think.
Something had broken, something inside her mind. Her thoughts were fractured and disjointed as though she had suffered some injury, which she could not yet comprehend. It had all been fine, she remembered that much. She remembered thinking it was just an ordinary day, a lazy day. Misha had taken the car to go shopping and would not be back for an hour or more yet. Grigori had left early for London, and she was on her own.
No need to rush. She would get out of bed, put some coffee on, take a shower, get dressed eventually and catch up on Facebook. Maybe she would sort out what to do for lunch, give the girls from the club a call, meet up at a coffee shop, talk about fashion, or tennis, or who was screwing who.
There’s a delivery for you.
A delivery? Irina remembered the answerphone’s persistent buzzing, a call from the guard on the front gate of the estate. She had padded downstairs, not bothering to dress, and had stood naked in the warmth of the kitchen while she took the call. A delivery?
It needs a signature.
She did not remember ordering anything. Maybe it was for Grigori, but he had not said anything. It didn’t matter. An inconvenience; it seemed everything got delivered these days. A sly smile. Maybe it would be a good-looking driver. Maybe she should answer the door naked too. A quick fuck even as she signed for the package, something to tell the girls about over lunch. She remembered imagining herself pinned up against the front porch, legs wrapped around some muscular young body, her backside grinding against freshly varnished woodwork. She remembered laughing at herself too. It was just a stupid fantasy. She was not that brazen, not like some of the other girls at the tennis club. And anyway, even in her wildest dreams she would never really betray Grigori.
I’ll let him in.
Irina had gone back upstairs and put on a dressing gown, full length and quite heavy. It was decent, nothing revealing. There would be nothing to raise the ardour of her imagined hunk of a deliveryman. He would probably turn out to be some fat old bald guy, she had thought as she waited for the answerphone to buzz its angry buzz again. When it did she had pressed the button to open the tall wooden gates of the house.
Things became hazy after that.
I can’t move.
Everything was bright. Everything was a blur. Her thoughts crawled. They staggered around inside her head and her mind seemed unable to keep track of them. She felt weak. She couldn’t lift her arms. She could not even feel her legs. What the hell was happening to her?
It’s not what you think.
Somebody had said that. Who? She remembered opening the door. The driver had stopped the van at the front of the house, inside the high brick wall on the pale gravel drive that looped around the front lawn. A white van, a uniform of some sort. He had a brown parcel in his hand. A book, Irina had thought. Perhaps Grigori had ordered a book. The driver was tall and lean, but she could not see his face. He wore a baseball cap. He looked down as though he were studying something. He had one of those gadgets in his hand, the ones they got you to sign on even though you could never make the scrawl look like a signature. He would pass it to her in a moment, no need for words. Then Irina remembered. He had leaned forward and shoved it into her chest.
Pain. Like she had never felt before. She had thought she was having a heart attack. She remembered him standing over her, reaching down, pulling the collar of her dressing gown, and pulling the gown apart.
It’s not what you think.
He had said that to her as she lay on the floor trying not to die. Then nothing, until now.
Where was she?
She was still in her house. Even with her blurred vision she could see familiar shapes beyond the window. The green of English oak trees, the blue of a clear September sky. Such weakness, in her limbs and in her head. Where was she?
In the dining room. She could tell that from the window. Upright. On a chair, turned away from the table. Facing outwards. She could not move her hands. She could not even feel her feet. She managed to look down. She tried to scream, but she did not have the strength.
He had stripped her. She was naked, tied to the chair at her wrists and ankles. She could not move her head. There was something in her neck. It caused a dull pain and however hard she tried she couldn’t force her head to move. Panic hit her, a sudden adrenalin rush. Fear, fear of what he would do to her, what he would do when he was finished with her. She strained against the ties, but she could not move her hands.
A shadow, shifting in the room.
He was still there. Of course he was. She tried to brace herself. What would come first? Would he push himself between her legs or force himself into her mouth? What would he do to her?
It’s not what you think.
She had heard him say that, she was sure she had. The shadow moved closer. He was standing over her now, a darkness that obscured her view. She had the distant feeling of his hand on her head, a gentle pressure against her cheek, firm, but not rough. A sensation on her face, damp, the trickling of fluids. Then, unexpectedly, light.
Light, from above, from an angle she had not seen before. It did not make sense. The growing light, the weakness in her limbs and in her head, the pressure on her face, the moist sensation, none of it made sense. Then it did. Then she realised what he was doing and she tried to scream again.
A shimmer of silver, glistening as it played over a tapering edge of surgical steel. The curving blade of a scalpel, reflecting a flawless September sky as he brought it carefully, almost tenderly, towards her.
An Andalusian Dog
Chapter One
Strange weather.
Both hot and cold, Eva Harris thought as she slammed the door of the unmarked police car and made her way towards a line of blue-and-white tape that waved and spasmed in a stiff morning
breeze. The news channels were calling it an Indian summer, but the name did not do justice to the bizarre contradiction of chill northerly wind blended with sultry sunlight that streamed from an actinic September sky.
As she walked towards the line of tape cool gusts swept brittle leaves into twisting zephyrs that rose up around her like clawing ghosts. Both hot and cold, Eva thought. It felt like a metaphor for something, although at that point she could not work out what. She drew her coat around her and turned her collar against the breeze, even though low sunlight was already starting to warm her back. Eva walked briskly towards the uniformed officer who stood, waiting and watching her as she approached.
She knew she looked conspicuous. A moderately tall woman with closely cropped blonde hair and a physique that might have belonged to a dancer, Eva studied the world with suspicion. She stared out at it through pale-green eyes set under dark, arcing brows that bisected a slender, oval face with high, almost Slavic cheekbones. Her skin was fair and unblemished. Her hair had been razor-cut into layered spikes barely a centimetre long, but that only served to accentuate the elegance of her skull. Eva was capable of looking in a mirror and knew her appearance to be striking, but she had convinced herself her taut body and sinewy build came as a consequence of exercise and necessity, not affectation. Her hands were long and slender but her knuckles, especially the front two, were hard and calloused as a consequence of pounding punchbags for hours at a time. The expression she wore invariably conveyed the distrust with which she viewed life. Cautious, calculating, and experienced beyond her years. Christ, Eva thought as she walked up to the tape. I’m just not supposed to be here.
The uniformed constable looked down on her with an earnest expression though and lifted the tape for her when she stopped in front of it. Eva stood five foot nine in her bare feet, but the wiry cop must have been six foot six in his. Not a hint of the thought that must have been going through his head revealed itself on his face. She felt mildly impressed. Nothing about him said: she’s a bit young to be a DI.
She ducked under the tape and stood beside him. ‘Who’s managing the crime scene?’
‘Sergeant Moresby,’ the constable told her. ‘He’s around the side of the house at the moment. You can’t miss him.’
It was the second time she had heard the name that morning. Eva did not know what he meant by not being able to miss him, but she nodded and started walking towards the side of the house. A minor victory, she thought, one she chalked up inside her head. At least she had not asked him: who’s in charge? The constable’s reply to that could only have been: you are.
I’m in charge. Secretly, the thought terrified her. The freshly promoted Detective Inspector’s first day at a new station and here she was at a crime scene, and a physical crime scene at that. Not even cybercrime. Eva had expected her first placement as a DI to be in the city, tackling digital forensics and unravelling complex fraud cases. That was what she had trained for, where she excelled. A bit young to be a DI. Well at twenty-seven maybe that was true, in anything other than cyber anyway, but cybercrime was precisely where DI Eva Harris would have shone. She had seen herself leading a team of bright and even younger analysts, all sitting behind desks and screens, all at arm’s length from the real world. A computer science graduate with a passion for complexity and with a complex background of her own, Eva was more than ready for technical investigations and unravelling the convolutions of darknets and dark webs. That had been her intention, the trajectory of her fledgling career, but someone else had other plans for Eva Harris. Somebody wanted her here, in this specific place, for complex reasons of their own. She knew exactly why. She hated it, but she understood their remorseless logic and knew there was no point in trying to fight it. Like it or not she was here, now, and she had a job to do. Sink or swim, Eva thought as she straightened her back and forced herself to bury the sense of dejection deep inside. It still pressed down on her, though. She had not even made it to the station yet.
She heard the call at six that morning while standing in the shower as steaming water stung her into wakefulness. The control room officer at Kingston had been apologetic. DCI Sutton was not going to make it in until later in the day they had said, so would DI Harris mind collecting her car before she came to the station?
That itself had not seemed like a hardship, although Eva had wanted to get the introduction to her new team over and done with. The sense of being dumped in a situation beyond her control had weighed down on her again. It did not surprise her that Sutton intended to be there when she arrived though, if only to handle introductions and set expectations. Eva had agreed and taken a taxi to the garage on Portsmouth Road from which the county police force leased vehicles for detective officers. The car seemed fine, dark blue and quite new. She was about to drive it away when her phone rang once more. The CRO again, but this time the call was urgent. Could DI Harris go straight to an incident, please? Sergeant Moresby is already on site. Maybe it will be routine, she had thought as she spoke the postcode the CRO gave her into the sat-nav, but the brief conversation that followed quickly put paid to that idea.
Eva stopped on the front lawn for a moment and tried to absorb as much as she could. The house was vast, quite new and must have been worth a fortune, standing as it did in an exclusive estate in suburban Surrey some twenty miles from the centre of London. A quick search on her phone told her St Jude’s Hill encompassed a thousand acres but contained only four hundred homes, each hidden from the other by mature trees and manicured hedgerows and all linked by narrow, winding lanes. The CRO had not given her many details except that the incident was being classed as homicide. It was Sergeant Moresby who had made that pronouncement too.
When she walked around the side of the house she understood what the constable meant. Sergeant Will Moresby, probably fifteen years her senior, stood beside the house like a silverback gorilla guarding his territory. Not quite as tall as the constable but close to twice his weight, with thick black hair and heavy eyebrows that would have joined in the middle but for judicious use of a razor. He must weigh at least twenty stone, Eva thought as she stared. Not much of his mass looked like fat.
Moresby spotted her instantly, though, and prowled over. ‘Good morning,’ he growled as he barrelled up, ‘sorry to drag you out on your first day. I’d welcome you to Surrey but I don’t think the place is showing itself in its best light this morning.’
He actually did look like a gorilla, Eva thought as she tried to find something to say. Muscle stretched his uniform. Huge hands dangled at the end of his arms and he stooped ever so slightly when he walked. She could imagine him bellowing his rage at some unfortunate object of his attention, probably just before he dislocated their limbs. And yet, she noticed as she summoned up the courage to match his gaze, his eyes were deep brown and somehow not unkind. For some reason, apart from sheer mass, he made an immediate impression on her. Not a vindictive man, she imagined. What you see is probably what you get.
‘I didn’t get many details from the control room,’ Eva told him after a moment. ‘Is the body inside?’
‘It is,’ Moresby said. ‘We can go in right now if you like, but forensics mentioned they’d like a little while longer to make sure they’ve got everything covered.’ He hesitated. ‘If it’s helpful I could give you a bit of background on the place while they’re sorting things out?’
A decisive moment; she understood that straight away. What was she to be, the arrogant domineering bitch of a DI who led from the front and expected everyone to dance to her tune, or an intuitive officer who listened and actually paid attention to what other people thought? When she considered it in those terms it hardly felt like a question at all.
‘Okay, Sergeant,’ Eva told him. ‘Why don’t you give me the tour?’
Moresby led her to a point at the back of the property and up a mound of grass that sloped gently towards a section of garden wall made from old brick, mostly hidden by rhododendrons and laurel bushes. Through a narro
w gap in lush vegetation she could see almost as far as the lane beyond. The view troubled her; she did not know why. Something about the dark, heavy bushes perhaps, or the overhanging trees whose fractal branches formed a cage against the sky. It felt as though some preternatural sense of gloom pervaded the narrow lanes. A place where lies were told, Eva thought as she stared, where secrets were kept and buried. All around her deciduous leaves shook and rustled in the breeze. When she tried to ignore the sense of foreboding that settled over her, something in the darkest recess of her mind told her: don’t.
‘I think they first started building here in the 1920s,’ Moresby said as he pulled a limb of a bush back to broaden the view a little. Through the gap she could just make out the roofs of a couple of nearby properties. It took a moment, but then she understood why he was showing her the limited vista. The level of privacy it conveyed surprised her, and here in the heart of the affluent Home Counties that had to come at a considerable price.
‘It’s one of the most expensive estates in the country,’ Moresby continued. ‘You don’t often see properties coming onto the market here for less than ten million quid. It used to be the favourite hang-out for ageing rock stars and hedge-fund managers, but over the years most of the houses have been snapped up by wealthy overseas buyers.’ He crumpled his oversized features into a frown. ‘That can be a problem, sometimes.’
‘How so?’
‘It makes them targets. When you’ve got a concentration of rich foreigners living in close proximity, gangs sometimes can’t resist the temptation. Not just gangs. There’s been political intrigue here too.’ He let the limb of bush drop back. ‘They reckon about a third of the houses are owned by Russians now.’
‘Do they cause trouble?’
‘The residents?’ A shrug. ‘Rarely a peep; oh, the occasional party that gets out of hand but nothing to write home about. We’ve had a few nasty break-ins, though. A couple of years ago one gang took a family hostage and tortured the wife by pouring boiling water down her back until the husband gave up the code for the jewellery safe. It’s hard to stop incidents like that. There’s security on the gates but this is no Fort Knox. Part of the appeal of the estate is that it’s pretty safe, high-profile incidents notwithstanding. It’s a rich county. You’ve got Esher on one side, Weybridge on the other and Cobham just down the road. No one bats an eyelid at Aston Martins and Maseratis rocking up in Waitrose car park.’
