by Kate Medina
‘He was alive for that?’ Cara murmured.
She nodded. ‘It says to me anger, real fury. And hatred too. Intense hatred. His eyes are—’ she broke off, sucking in a breath to fight another stomach heave. Burrows would have a cardiac if she vomited in the middle of his crime scene.
‘Mush?’ Marilyn said.
She nodded. Mush.
‘It’s to do with seeing … watching. The killer made the husband watch his wife die and then took his eyes out. Deliberately took his eyes out. And he was alive,’ she finished, her voice strangled. ‘I’d bet a lot that he was alive throughout.’
‘And the scratches?’
‘Made by the same implement that carved those scratches into the door, I’d say.’ She paused. ‘And I think that they … this might have something to do with dogs.’
Marilyn raised an incredulous eyebrow. ‘Dogs?’
12
Callan knew that he should slow down, but adrenalin and endorphins were coursing through his veins making him feel impossibly alive, healthy, whole again. A rare feeling, intoxicating in its intensity. He crested the hill, virtually scrabbling on his hands and knees the last few metres were so steep, his heart punching against his ribs, lungs screaming for oxygen. Head thrown back, he stood, sucking in the freezing, liquid air, but still his lungs heaved and sucked like a punctured pair of bellows and the pounding in his heart had moved to his head. Pounding, throbbing. He straightened, too quickly, must have done, because he staggered dizzily, his flailing hands finding the trunk of a tree, clasping the solid wood, leaning against it now, his tongue out, panting like a dog. Closing his eyes, he sought out the quiet place in his mind that he’d told that mumsy therapist about, that he went to when he felt an epileptic fit coming on.
Good, that’s good. When you feel an epileptic fit coming on, close your eyes and go up to Foley Hill. It’s a stunning autumn day, like the one you describe, sunny but chilly …
But he was here already, bodily, standing on the top of that hill he’d described, feeling the chill wind curl around him, willing the dizziness, the drum-thump in his head to recede, and he couldn’t go there in his mind also. Hands grappling at the tree trunk, he slid to his knees, the rough bark sandpapering the ends of his grasping fingers. The ground slammed up to meet him and then he was gone, only faintly aware of what his body was doing, writhing, jerking, his limbs flailing, feet pedalling in the damp leaf mulch. Through frosted glass he saw the shifting mosaic of branches and leaves above him, bright patches of chill blue sky, and something else too. Something pale.
A face?
Someone?
Was someone here, watching him? He tried to call out, but his body wasn’t his own, his brain was fog, and his tongue was rubber-useless in his mouth.
Slowly the fit receded and he lay on the damp carpet of orange-brown leaves, shaking and sweating, his skull nursing a brain that had been cleaved in two with an axe.
Twisting onto his front, he vomited once, twice. Pushing himself onto his hands and knees, he hauled himself to standing with his grazed fingers, leaning against the trunk of a tree for support. His vision refocusing, he looked around. He had had the strong sense that someone else had been up here with him, still had a lingering feeling that he wasn’t alone. But he could hear nothing, see no one, just the blank trunks of trees, the motionless carpet of orange-brown leaves masking their roots, not even the scamper of a squirrel or the chirp of a bird to carve up the dead silence.
Fuck. His epilepsy was getting worse, much worse. Usually it was stress and tiredness that kicked off fits, but he had slept well the past few days and his job hadn’t been stressful for some time. And yet here he was, covered in leaf mulch and vomit, his head pounding as if a road drill was going to work on his skull. He needed to tell Jessie, couldn’t keep pretending that everything was all right. He owed her time to prepare herself for the operation because now, standing here, post two fits in the past hour, he knew that he didn’t have a choice but to let them operate.
13
If she glanced sideways, tilted her head just a fraction, she’d see the lifeless form of Hugo Fuller through the glass wall of the swimming pool complex, still strapped supine to that lounger. Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist, was there now, his beanpole frame doubled over Fuller, the look on his face pure query. No disgust there. No horror.
And the look on Fuller’s?
Jamming her eyes shut, Jessie tilted her face skywards and took a few deep breaths, sucking the chill morning air deep into her lungs. Her chest was so tight with tension that she felt as if the air was barely reaching the back of her tongue. She had never seen anything like the sight of that body. Of that face. Of those cavernous black eye sockets.
Her gaze moved from Fuller’s supine form to the base of the door that led from the sunken patio, where she was now standing, inside, to the door through which Claudine Fuller had let in death. It hadn’t been fingernails that had done that to Fuller’s face, his eyes, just as it hadn’t been fingernails that had made these marks on this door.
It hadn’t been fingernails.
Had it been claws?
Strong, sharp claws.
But not a dog’s – surely?
Ducking her gaze to the patio, Jessie shut out the sound of Marilyn next to her, tapping the leather-soled toe of one navy suede Chelsea boot impatiently against the York stone. Though he operated in the same way that she did, needing space to ‘get a sense’, his natural lack of patience made him chafe against that desire in others.
Could it have been a dog? A huge dog – bigger even than a huge male Siberian husky? Raking and – what – whining? Sniffing? For Claudine, the animal lover.
An involuntary shudder ran through her. Someone walking over her grave.
She stood, wrapping her arms tight around her torso.
‘It’s—’ A sudden vibration in her pocket, the third she’d felt in the past few minutes. She couldn’t answer it now. Pulling her mobile half out of her pocket, she glanced down at the screen. Three missed calls from Callan. ‘Sorry, Marilyn, just give me a second.’ She fired off a quick text – at the crimescene xx – and slid the phone back into her pocket. She’d call him back as soon as she could.
‘It’s what? Premeditated?’ Marilyn said. ‘Clearly.’
She shook her head. ‘Creepy, I was going to say. Really fucking creepy.’
Marilyn gave a grim half-smile. ‘That’s not a very professional term, Dr Flynn.’
‘No—’ A pause. ‘I think—’ She broke off again. How to verbalize her thoughts? ‘Look, Marilyn, I know that this is going to sound mad …’
Marilyn smiled. ‘I’d be disappointed in you if it didn’t.’
Jessie bit her lip. ‘Madder, maybe, than even you give me credit for.’
‘Go on.’
‘I think that … I think that our perpetrator pretended to be the dog returning, pretended to be Lupo, and scratched at the door.’
Marilyn raised a cynical eyebrow.
‘For the wife. She loves dogs. So perhaps … probably, actually, probably after Lupo had been gone for some time, she started to get worried. And then she heard the scratching. Scratching and sniffing under the door, perhaps, like dogs do. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought, would have just yanked the door open, and—’ Unwrapping her arms from around her torso, she spread her hands.
Marilyn shook his head. She hadn’t convinced him. From the look on his face, she hadn’t even got close. ‘There’s no way that fingernails made those marks in the door’s paintwork,’ he said.
‘No, you’re right, they didn’t. Couldn’t have done.’
‘And – so?’
‘And – so—’ she broke off with a shrug. ‘You’ve heard of Freddie Krueger. Edward Scissorhands.’
‘Edward Scissorhands was a comedy. Wasn’t it?’
‘I never watched it. I only saw the posters. And Nightmare on Elm Street definitely wasn’t a comedy.’
‘It would probably l
ook like a comedy now, with those forty-year-old special effects.’
Jessie gave a crooked smile.
Marilyn sighed. ‘What the hell are you saying, Jessie? That Freddie Krueger caught the dog, tied it to a lamp post outside some old biddy’s house and then hiked back through half a kilometre of trees to scratch at the Fullers’ back door?’
Jessie lifted her shoulders again. Yes, that’s pretty much the long and the short of what I’m saying.
Marilyn mashed his fingers into his eye sockets. He felt as if someone had plucked his eyes out, ground them in a bowl of salt and jammed them back in his head. But at least he still possessed eyes.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Dropping his hands, he met her gaze. ‘What? I recognize that look. What now? What are you thinking now, Miss Psychic-Psychologist-Psychobabble?’
‘Hugo Fuller’s eyes. The marks on his face.’
‘His eyes were gouged out with a knife.’
‘Were they?’
Marilyn tilted his head questioningly. ‘Weren’t they?’
Jessie shook her head, slowly. ‘No, I think they were clawed out. You could see. The marks on his forehead, the marks on his cheeks. It wasn’t a knife.’
‘So how did he die? Claws couldn’t penetrate his brain.’ But even as Marilyn said it, Jessie could sense his lack of conviction. She didn’t pull him up on it, just looked back down at the door, the marks.
‘They’re similar, aren’t they, Marilyn,’ she said finally. ‘The gouges down Fuller’s face and the marks on this door. So similar as to be probably caused by the same thing. The same tool. The same—’ She broke off with another shrug. It was all she seemed to be able to do this morning – shrug.
The same hand. The same claw.
She didn’t say it – because it didn’t need to be said.
Marilyn remained silent for a long moment. ‘God help us,’ he said finally, with a gargantuan sigh. ‘God help us.’
14
‘As I said, I’m Hugo’s stepmother,’ Valerie Fuller said coldly. ‘Not his actual mother. So, you had that wrong.’ She was leaning against the door frame, arms folded, hugging a chunky-knit argyle cardigan tight across her ample chest. She had already pulled the front door three-quarters closed behind her, to keep the heat inside her neat barn conversion, Detective Sergeant Workman assumed. She hadn’t invited Workman to step inside, showed no indication that she was going to. ‘Thank you for taking the time to come over and tell me about his death in person, though a phone call would have sufficed,’ she added.
DS Workman had drawn or, more accurately, been handed the short straw, Marilyn being still occupied at the Fullers’ crime scene with Jessie Flynn, DC Cara and Burrows’ CSI team. She was beginning to regret her label as the team’s ‘tea and sympathy’ woman. However, it was abundantly clear that Valerie Fuller required no sympathy and that she could, doubtless, very efficiently make her own cup of tea.
‘It’s against regulation to break the news of relatives’ deaths over the telephone. It has to be in person, face to face,’ Workman explained.
The Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes family liaison officer, who Workman had just asked to wait in the car, had expected to stay with Valerie Fuller for a day or two, helping her to work through her grief. Not necessary, she had been told, in no uncertain terms. Mrs Valerie Fuller seemed ambivalent about her stepson’s brutal demise.
Workman nodded. ‘Stepmother,’ she echoed. ‘I will ensure that is changed in our records.’
She flipped the collar of her navy woollen overcoat up around her neck and lifted her shoulders, sinking into the warm wool. The barn conversion was nestled at the end of a narrow valley between two hills, the valley creating a wind tunnel with its apex at the doorstep on which she was standing. Mrs Fuller seemed oblivious to her discomfort – or, if she had noticed, she gave no indication that she cared.
‘How old was Hugo when you married his father?’ Workman asked.
‘Five.’
‘And his mother?’
‘She died when he was two and a half.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’ Her tone was offhand, patently lacking in concern. ‘But he wasn’t a very nice boy,’ she added, suddenly, unexpectedly.
‘You mean, he became a not very nice boy because of his mother’s death?’
Valerie brushed a stand of blonde hair from her forehead. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. Hugo wasn’t ever a nice boy. He was wrong from the start. I knew him before his mother died, you see. I was his father’s secretary, so I knew the family. Not well, but enough. Even when Hugo was little, a toddler, an age when every child should just be adorable, there was something hugely unappealing about him.’
‘In what way?’
A careless shrug. ‘In every way. His personality, his demeanour, the way he interacted with others, animals and people. Everything.’ She gave a dismissive little laugh. ‘You know how some people are just born wrong. Hugo was one of those.’
Workman resisted the urge to object, but she wasn’t here to debate. She was here to break some terrible news – which she had done – and to gain some information, as quickly as possible, given that she had already lost all feeling in her ears. But to her, saying that someone was ‘just born wrong’ denied the presence of any nuance in the nature–nurture debate. Was anyone really just born wrong? And to say that a child hadn’t been affected by his mother’s death revealed, to her mind, an absence of humanity. She felt sorry for the toddler Hugo, the young Hugo who must have mourned his mother’s loss and sensed his stepmother’s hostility.
‘Did you have any of your own children?’ Workman asked.
‘I had two girls with Hugo’s father. Kitty and Florence.’
‘How old are they?’
‘Kitty is thirty-four and Florence thirty-two.’
‘So, six and eight years younger than Hugo.’
‘About that, yes.’
‘Do they keep in touch with Hugo?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Valerie Fuller rolled her eyes, a small but pointed movement. ‘I’ve already told you, surely. Hugo was a little shit. My girls never liked him. Anyway, he went away to boarding school when he was eleven, so they didn’t see much of him when they were growing up. They were never close.’
‘Eleven?’ Workman asked.
‘Yes, and to be quite frank it wasn’t soon enough.’
‘Where did he go?’
‘Fettes College. Hugo’s father went to Fettes College, his father before that and God knows how many Fuller boys before that. I don’t come from boarding-school stock. I was Godfrey’s secretary, so I was distinctly lower-middle-class in relation to him. I had to work hard to be an appropriate Mrs Fuller, to fit into his world. I was what one would term as a trophy wife. I was twenty-five years Godfrey’s junior.’
‘When did Godfrey pass on, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Nearly twelve years ago, now.’
‘Do you still miss him?’
A fleeting thawing of her expression. ‘Yes, I do. We had a good marriage, all in all.’
‘Did he have a good relationship with Hugo?’
Valerie Fuller’s expression iced over once again. ‘Godfrey adored Hugo. He was terribly proud of his son, of who he had become. Hugo was rich, as you know.’ Another dismissive wave of her hand. ‘That nasty little business of his was very lucrative.’
‘Nasty business?’
Valerie nodded. ‘Hugo set up and ran a property business, buying up freeholds and increasing the ground rent many times over, exploiting people living in cheap leasehold accommodation. There’s no law against it, so the poor sods had to pay or lose the roof over their heads.’
Workman nodded. She knew little of Hugo Fuller’s background or business interests, though all those details would be thoroughly fleshed in over the course of what would, hopefully, be a quick investigation. It would benefit no one to have a murderer of the like of who had
killed Hugo and Claudine Fuller so viciously on the loose.
‘Do you think his murder could have had something to do with his business?’ she asked.
‘I have no idea who would have murdered Hugo and Claudine, though I can’t imagine that anyone Hugo dealt with on a professional basis – I’m using that word in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion, by the way – would have viewed him with fondness.’
‘And his business was successful?’
‘From a monetary perspective, absolutely. Though, of course, Hugo should have been successful. He was brought up with every advantage, plenty of money, the best education, and his father doted on him. Godfrey gave him money to help him set up the business.’
‘It was a good investment, by the sound of it.’
Valerie bristled. ‘There were a number of failures before that. Hugo wasn’t clever, but he was cunning and entirely lacking in morals. The business he ended up in was the business that suited him perfectly.’
‘What about Claudine Fuller?’
‘What about her?’ Valerie asked, in a tone that suggested Workman’s question had been genuinely odd.
‘Did you have much of a relationship with her? Did you like her?’
Valerie lifted her shoulders. ‘I met her for the first time at Hugo’s engagement party and then again at their wedding. They married two or three years before Godfrey died.’
‘And?’
‘And she seemed far too sweet a girl to have got tied up with Hugo, though it shouldn’t have surprised me that he chose someone he could dominate.’
‘And you haven’t seen much of her since?’
Valerie shook her head. ‘We saw them for dinner once, shortly before Godfrey died, and I saw them both at Godfrey’s funeral. That’s it. I was happy to sever contact with Hugo once Godfrey passed on. I have … had no love for Hugo and I doubt that he had much for me.’
Workman nodded. ‘Do your daughters still live locally?’ she asked.
‘No. Kitty lives in North Devon. She’s married to a local GP and has two young boys. Florence is in London, working in publishing. She’s living the single life.’
