by Kate Medina
Lupo. He had come back. Her beautiful soulful wolf was home.
It occurred to her briefly as she reached for the key that it was odd Lupo had returned to this door when she’d let him out of the kitchen. When she always let him out of, and he always returned to, the kitchen. But as her fingers closed around the chill copper, she pushed the niggle of uncertainty from her mind. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. Her hunched, submissive reflection in the wine cellar doors had brought her up short, given her a two-thousand-volt shock. She hadn’t realized how unsparingly her mental state had manifested itself in her physical bearing. Her reflection had been ridiculous, that of a beaten, cowed, bovine creature. She couldn’t continue as she was, letting life cow her, Hugo, control her, bully her. She had to force herself to be stronger. She would never be happy if she didn’t. Lupo must have heard or scented her as she walked past the door. White Fang. My wolf. Wolves could scent game carried on the wind from over three kilometres away – she’d read that somewhere. Or perhaps he had seen her through the swimming pool’s glass atrium, talking to Hugo. It was like a goldfish bowl, the swimming pool. Anyone standing outside on the dark lawn or hiding in the trees could look in and watch them, watch their every move, while remaining entirely invisible themselves. The thought had always disturbed her and she didn’t like to use the swimming pool at night, certainly not alone. But that would change now. She would make that change. Be stronger, braver.
As she twisted the key in the lock, an involuntary shiver ran down her spine, a lingering sense of that odd white shape out in the woods. Lupo. But it had been Lupo, hadn’t it?
There it was again, the scratching, shaking her out of her reverie. And now that she was standing right by the door, she could hear sniffing coming from the crack beneath it. The tension drained from her.
A blast of cold air hit her full in the face, bringing tears to her eyes as she pulled the door open wide. White, filling her clouded vision. Something huge and white.
But not Lupo. Not Lupo.
A face.
She saw that now.
A face.
A mask.
Pale eyes beneath the mask, that pierced straight through her.
Fear, terror, was instantly acid sharp in her mouth. Her head exploded with pain, then only blackness.
4
A couple of weeks ago, Eunice Hargreaves had watched one of those nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel that she did so enjoy and, as she pulled back her bedroom curtain and peered out onto the deserted A234, she felt as if she had been teleported from the confines of her cottage bedroom and deposited high on a snowy peak in the Canadian Rockies.
The wolf was standing quite still, looking up at her, its attention no doubt caught by the movement of her curtains as she’d parted them. It was huge and powerful and pure, pure white, with depthless azure-blue eyes that caught the moonlight and reflected it back at her. Transported to the wilderness of that documentary, her aching joints and the ache in her heart for darling Derek that kept her up at night were momentarily forgotten and she was a young girl again, awed by the beauty and majesty of this animal.
Caught up in her imagination, it took her a long moment to realize why the wolf wasn’t moving, wasn’t running. Her rheumy gaze found the length of rope that tethered its ice-blue collar to the lamp post outside her front gate. Electric light then, not the moon, reflecting in the dog’s eyes, and Eunice was back in Walderton, blue ropes bulging through the diaphanous skin of her hands with the effort of gripping tightly to the window frame to stop her frail body from toppling. Back to the grim reality of her life, the all-encompassing loneliness she had felt since her husband died last year, punctured only by weekly visits to a charity lunch club in Chichester, the odd, fleeting, duty pop-in from a neighbour.
Dropping the curtain, she hobbled to the bedside table. Who should she call? 999? But, no, a huge wolf-dog tied to a lamp post in the middle of the night wasn’t a desperate emergency, though how on earth was one supposed to find the number for the local police station – if there even was one any more with the government cutting every public service to the quick? And there was another number, wasn’t there, a not-quite-emergency police number? 112? Or was that for America? She and Derek had spent their fortieth wedding anniversary in New York and they had been robbed at knifepoint in Central Park. The police had responded ever so quickly, though they’d been quite brash when they arrived, but she really couldn’t remember if Derek had dialled 111 or 112 and if that then meant that the English, not-quite-emergency number was 112 or 111 …
I’ll try both, she decided, pragmatically. Quite simple really.
5
The house was huge, mock-Tudor, or perhaps genuine Tudor, given its size and position, on the brow of a hill at the top of a gently sloping fifty-metre-long gravelled drive that cut off from Blackheath Lane on the outskirts of the village of Walderton. Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons had driven through the village itself on the way here from his home in Chichester, and though it was knocking three in the morning, the gibbous moon’s cool light had illuminated a poster-child English village, chocolate-box quaint with its whitewashed, flower-basket-bedecked pub, crooked, tiled houses with leadlight windows and a neat, triangular village green on which cricket would doubtless be played and Pimm’s drunk in the summer. All very beautiful and yet even Dr Ghoshal’s morgue held more appeal for Marilyn. The mere thought of living in a Marplesque village such as this one, where everyone made it their express business to know everyone else’s, brought him out in hives.
Crunching his ancient Z3 to a stop on the sweep of gravel drive in front of the house, Marilyn cut the engine. Tilting his head back, he let his eyes drift closed for a brief moment and tried to focus his mind on the blank pink insides of his eyelids. He didn’t yet know what he would encounter behind the ornate facade of this grand house, but from DC Darren Cara’s panicked voice on the radio, it wasn’t going to be rose-garden pretty. Snapping his eyes open, he pushed open the driver’s door and climbed out. Though he had managed barely three hours’ sleep, he felt fine, good even, he’d venture to say. His puritanical new approach to life seemed, unfortunately, to be serving him well.
He was far from the first attendee at the crime scene. Piccadilly Circus would doubtless be quieter at three in the morning. Six members of Burrows’ CSI team were clustered around the forensics van, getting suited and booted on the gravel drive. Beyond them, DC Cara was pacing across the expansive, pillared and porticoed porch, his baggy forensic overshoes inflating and deflating in time with each stressed step, as if linked to miniature pairs of bellows. Marilyn was pretty sure it wasn’t only the bleaching effect of the moon’s cold light that had boil-washed the colour from his face.
‘What have we got, Cara?’
‘Murder, Guv.’
Marilyn drily raised an eyebrow. ‘I got that far myself, thank you, Detective Constable.’
Cara didn’t smile, not even a flicker to massage his superior officer’s ego. ‘Double murder. A married couple, early forties. The man is called Hugo Fuller and his wife is Claudine. She was found floating face down in the swimming pool and he was tied to a lounger and stabbed, through the, uh—’ He stopped speaking to clear his throat.
‘Through the …?’
‘Uh, through … through the eye.’ Despite the throat-clearing, his voice was a parched croak. ‘Both eyes actually.’
‘Lovely.’ Marilyn suppressed the ghost of a twenty-five-years-on-the-job, seen-it-all, cynical smile. Cara had transferred from Traffic to Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes just over a year ago, and though they had dealt with a few sexual assaults, a couple of adult murders and a particularly traumatic child murder during that time, Cara hadn’t seen any of the bodies in situ, at the crime scenes. He was now undergoing Major Crimes’ equivalent of a baptism, though to be fair to the kid, this one sounded like baptism by fire.
‘Who found them?’ Marilyn asked.
‘One of Surre
y and Sussex’s dog teams. They were called out to retrieve a husky that was tied to a lamp post in the middle of Walderton. Some old lady was woken by it barking. The dog had a tag on its collar. There was no answer at the door, but the dog team said that they saw a light on around the side of the house. The garden wraps around the house, there’s no fence dividing the front from the back, and the lawn slopes down from this floor on the brow of the hill, to the basement level at the back.’ He raised a gloved hand and flapped it behind him, indicating where a gravel path cut off the sweep of gravel drive and curved around the right side of the house, out of sight. ‘They followed the path, down the hill, to the indoor swimming pool. The lights were on inside and the walls are all glass.’
‘Do we have any information on the couple?’
‘Yes, sir. Hugo Fuller runs … ran a property business. Buying freeholds and living off the ground rent, something like that. It’s very lucrative.’
Marilyn surveyed the enormous Arts and Crafts facade. ‘Clearly.’
‘And his wife supports a few local animal charities.’
‘You’re well informed, Cara.’
‘They’re high profile in the local area. I’ve read about them a few times, Guv.’
‘Read about them? In what?’
‘Sussex Life.’
Marilyn pulled a face. ‘Sussex Life?’
‘It’s good to be plugged in,’ Cara said, with a note of defensiveness. ‘Learn about the area I’m working in, the people. I didn’t grow up around here.’ It was an unnecessary statement. Cara’s accent was pure London, his heritage multi-racial: Barbadian father and white-Irish mother. It didn’t take a genius to work out that he hadn’t grown up in this bastion of lily-white Englishness. ‘You might have seen pictures of the Fullers in the Sussex Society pages,’ he continued. ‘They’re in there all the time at one function or another.’
Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘Do I look like someone who reads the society pages? Any society pages?’
DC Cara looked at his boss. Nicknamed Marilyn, after Marilyn Manson – a moniker his colleagues had bestowed on him the first day he joined the force and that had dogged him ever since – because of his disconcerting, one azure-blue, one brown, mismatched eyes and his penchant for dressing head to toe in black, he did not, in any way, look like someone who read the society pages.
‘No, Guv,’ muttered Cara, suitably admonished.
6
Marilyn followed Cara into the hallway, stepping gingerly onto polished cream marble, ice-rink slippery under his forensic overshoes. The whole ground floor of his Georgian terraced house could have fitted snugly into the Fullers’ hallway. A gargantuan gold-framed mirror occupied the lion’s share of the wall dead ahead, making midgets of Marilyn and Cara even as they walked towards it. They passed the door to a playing-field-sized sitting room to their left, all gold damask sofas and thick white shag-pile rugs; a dark study space to their right, bedecked with heavy oak bookshelves lined with pristine leather-bound hardbacks, none of which looked as if they had ever been touched let alone read; a walnut kitchen next, bifold doors beyond the island opening out onto what Marilyn assumed was the garden, although it was too dark to tell. A wide cream marble staircase, adorned with an intricately sculpted gold banister, curved away to the upper floors and a chandelier that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a banqueting hall in Buckingham Palace hung from the ceiling above, throwing shards of tinkling light around the pale vanilla walls. The decor bellowed from the rooftops: Footballers’ Wives. The Fullers were clearly overburdened with wealth, but not much taste.
On doctor’s orders, Marilyn had been teetotal for the past twenty-nine days – Not that I’m counting every single, painful bloody minute – and as he followed Cara carefully across the hall floor, approaching his own Lilliputian reflection in the Fullers’ mirror, he had to acknowledge that it was doing him good. He looked, if not quite ten years younger, certainly a solid few months – and at his age, forty-nine now, three months away from his fiftieth and dreading the relentless downward slide that he was sure his next birthday would herald, he’d take those. He’d take a week, a day, a few minutes. Seconds. It had got to him, that impending birthday. Hanging over him like the ageist sword of Damocles.
‘As I said before, the garden slopes downstairs, front to back,’ Cara said, as he stopped at the top of a set of cream marble stairs that descended to a basement level. ‘There’s a wine cellar, gym, sauna and swimming pool on the level below this one, but it’s not underground.’
The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was a quarter the size of the main hallway, with a matching cream marble floor and pale vanilla walls, and lit by a mini-me chandelier. Racks of wine bottles were visible through dark double glass doors to their left – the wine cellar, Marilyn supposed, de rigueur in this kind of residence – a gym straight ahead, equipped with more torture equipment than Marilyn had ever felt the need to use in his life, and a frosted-glass doorway to the right, which Cara pushed through, holding it open behind him.
The changing room area they entered was operatingtheatre bright from rows of recessed spots, two more clear glass doors to their left revealing a sauna and steam room. An open archway dead ahead led to the swimming pool, their dual figures reflected, Lilliputian once again, in the wall of black glass beyond the placid blue rectangle of water.
Cara stopped just this side of the archway and held out an arm. ‘Hugo Fuller is to your left, Guv. Claudine Fuller in the pool, also to your left. Neither of them have been touched or moved.’ He pressed himself against the wall, giving Marilyn space to go first; not, Marilyn suspected, out of deference. Cara had clearly had more than his fill at the first viewing, and as Marilyn stepped through the archway, into the foliage-lined Caribbean-warm glass orangery that housed the twenty-five-metre swimming pool, and saw the horror show that was Hugo Fuller, he appreciated exactly why.
Jesus Christ.
The man was reclining on a wooden steamer chair, facing the pool, the wall of glass and the dark garden beyond. Facing. Staring. Sightless. His eye sockets were filled with, what – mush, was the word that instantly popped into Marilyn’s mind, pure mush – his face a mask of coagulating burgundy blood. Blood coated his bare chest, had soaked the lapels of the white towelling robe swathing his corpulent frame and pooled sloppily into his lap. But it wasn’t his eye sockets, horrendous as they were, that hitched the breath in Marilyn’s throat. It was the scratches, gouges more accurately, deep vertical gouges that ran from his hairline down his face, through his eye sockets – had they done that to his eyes? – before furrowing down his cheeks to his chin. He looked as if he had been savaged by a wild beast. Marilyn swallowed, forcing down the rising bile, as subtly as he could.
‘So that’s Mr Fuller,’ he said, in the absence of anything else popping into his brain. ‘What about the wife?’
He turned, grateful for the opportunity to look away, his gaze fixing with relief on Mrs Fuller. Claudine, Cara had said. She was fully dressed still in dark jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt, raw silk, expensive – ruined now, Marilyn thought ridiculously – floating face down in the swimming pool, her blonde hair fanning out in pale, seaweed tendrils around her head, a meaty patch on the back of her head where, despite the water, the blonde tendrils were matted with blood. Dead, without question, unless she was a champion breath-holder. Cause of death? Marilyn didn’t want, or need, to speculate. That wasn’t his job.
He turned at the sound of ponderous footsteps – his lead CSI, Tony Burrows, looking tired, his moon face puffy with recently vanquished sleep.
‘Burrows, good morning. Welcome.’
‘Even sparrows are not farting at this ungodly hour, Marilyn.’
‘Perils of the job, Tony.’
‘Indeed.’ Stifling a yawn with the back of one latex-gloved hand, his gaze moved past Marilyn’s left shoulder to find Claudine Fuller. ‘Poor woman.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘Leave the bodies where they are. I want Dr Flynn to se
e the scene as we found it. This isn’t normal.’
Burrows grimaced. ‘Can any murder really be classed as normal?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘Unfortunately, it’s a long time since anything about human nature surprised me.’
Marilyn shook his head and stepped aside, so that Burrows could view the horror that was Hugo Fuller. ‘No, this, Tony, this is something else altogether.’
7
Jessie felt as if she was swimming upwards through black treacle. She surfaced, her ears tuning to the nagging sound of her mobile’s ring, her eyes flickering open, shut, sticking shut. She forced them open again, her brain lagging way behind, lost in that treacle of dense, muggy, hungover sleep. The room was pitch-black, no telltale leak of light from below the curtains. Twisting sideways, she fumbled her mobile from the bedside table.
‘Marilyn.’
‘You’re needed, Dr Flynn.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.’
‘Oh God, that early.’
‘For a double murder, even I get up in the middle of the night.’
Double murder. ‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get here. As soon as you can. I’ll text you the address.’
Silence on the end of the line; the only sound, Callan snoring softly beside her. Odd that the telephone hadn’t woken him. Usually he was bolt upright at any noise courtesy of the antennae that came with his job as a military policeman. Always on call, even when he was fast asleep. And he had driven them to dinner last night, so he didn’t even have ‘hangover’ as an excuse like she did. She gave him a soft kiss on the shoulder, feeling the warmth of his skin against her lips, sucking in his scent for a brief, calming moment before twisting away, wincing at the chill air that wrapped around her as she climbed quietly out of bed.
