Sins of the Father

by Graham Hurley

Genres: Police Procedurals; Mystery

Synopsis

A rich old man, Rupert Moncrieff, is beaten to death in the silence of his West Country waterside mansion, his head hooded and his throat cut. His extended family are still living beneath his roof, each with their own room, their own story, their own ghosts, and their own motives for murder. And in this world of darkness and dysfunction are the artefacts and memories of colonial atrocities that are returning to haunt them all.

At the heart of the murder investigation is DS Jimmy Suttle who, along with his estranged journalist wife Lizzie, is fighting his own demons after the abduction and death of their young daughter, Grace.

But who killed Rupert Moncrieff? And what secrets is the house holding onto that could unravel this whole investigation?

The enquiry takes Suttle to Africa and beyond as he slowly begins to understand the damage that human beings can inflict upon one another. Not simply on the battlefield. Not simply in the torture camps in the Kenyan bush. But much, much closer to home.

Read by Jonathan Keeble

Release date: November 20, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

 

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

 

‘Full lips. Freckles. Soft brown eyes. Plus a sudden smile like a note of music: unexpected, harsh, atonal. Scary hair too. Another clue.’

This from an email recovered from Claire Dillon’s hard disk after the seizure of her PC. Claire had evidently been in contact with one of the men who’d drifted across her path, and had offered a brief glimpse of the person she thought she was before the darkness enveloped her forever. A copy had gone to Jimmy Suttle, courtesy of an ex-colleague on the Pompey Major Crime Team, and Suttle had shared it with Lizzie, who’d printed it out.

Alive, this woman had perplexed family, friends, occasional lovers and a small army of recce troops from the mental health establishment. She had looks, talent. She plainly knew how to write. She could even put herself inside her smile and recognise how crazy she was, how brittle, how lost among the razor-edged shards of someone she might once have dimly remembered.

Dead, though, she’d left nothing but media headlines and a scalding grief. The headlines – what she’d done – had come and gone in less than a week, but the grief knotted and thickened as Lizzie struggled to get this woman into focus.

Only last week, with Claire’s self-description etched on her brain, Lizzie had insisted on seeing the photos from the post-mortem. Suttle thought it was a lousy idea, but Lizzie was way past listening to anyone else and in the end Jimmy’s mate on the enquiry had taken the case file to the photocopier and obliged with a selection of shots. Two of them were head and shoulders on the gleaming slab and told Lizzie nothing she didn’t already know. In death it was rare to smile, but the rest was exactly the way Claire Dillon had described herself: Full lips. Freckles. Soft brown eyes. Scary hair too. Another clue.

Was this the face of evil? On balance, Lizzie thought not. Which didn’t help at all.

 

As for Jimmy Suttle, that interminable summer – blessed by the best weather he could remember – passed in a blur. He felt totally adrift, an object in deepest space. Much of what had once masqueraded as real life no longer meant anything to him. He ate little, drank less, seldom returned social calls, walled himself away. When colleagues at work began to worry about how thin he’d got, and how gaunt, he blamed it on the pile of stuff he was having to do at home, not just the house but the garden as well. It was a lie, of course. But that didn’t matter either.

Chantry Cottage, for sale since late spring, finally went to a couple moving down from the West Midlands. The estate agent said the guy had been a jobbing builder all his life. He’d have the roof sorted in weeks, ditto the windows, though decent central heating might take a while longer.

The sale went through in early October. Suttle, mercifully busy on a complex murder enquiry in Barnstaple, had neglected to find anywhere else to live, and it wasn’t until a week before exchange of contracts that he started asking around. On the phone to Lizzie, conversations that were happening less and less often, he assured her that he had the matter in hand. He’d made calls to a couple of estate agents in Exmouth. There were loads of properties on the market. Two more lies.

In the end, with the buyers due to exchange the following day, he was saved by one of the younger civvy inputters in the Major Incident Room, a woman called Angie. Her granny had died. She’d been living alone in a flat overlooking the seafront in Exmouth. The place apparently had brilliant views as well as parking. Might D/S Suttle be interested?

The two of them went down to Exmouth that night. The Beacon turned out to be a picturesque terrace of tall Regency houses straddling a rise several hundred yards back from the seafront. Angie had the key. The property lay near the top of the hill. To the rear was a big church, its tower visible for miles around. Out front, with the remains of a sunset still pinking the clouds over the estuary, the view looked more than promising.

There were four bells beside the shabbiness of the front door. Granny had lived on the third floor. Angie and Suttle let themselves into the gloom of the shared hall. The creaking stairs went on for ever. Behind the door on the second floor someone with hearing difficulties was listening to the local weather forecast. Rain and strong winds by dawn. The front clearing through by midday.

Making a mental note, Suttle followed Angie up two more flights of stairs. She had a moment’s difficulty with the key to Flat 3, but then they were inside. The tiny entrance hall was in semi-darkness. There was that lingering smell of cooking oil and over-boiled vegetables Suttle recognised from a trillion witness interviews: solitary lives buoyed only by lap-top meals in front of the telly and the odd sudoku to warm the rest of your brain.

Angie was trying to find the switch for the hall light. Suttle stepped past her, wanting more of the sunset.

The front room was dominated by a huge bay window. Beyond lay the darkening coast, which seemed to go on for ever. Way out in the far distance the arm of the bay was already pricked with lights. Closer was the mouth of the river and the long curl of salt marsh he recognised from expeditions with Lizzie and Grace when they’d still been a family. A cloud of gulls pursued a trawler pushing towards the dock. A line of bigger vessels stirred at their moorings. The water, from here, had a luminescence he’d only ever seen in photograph galleries. It looked like velvet.

‘We can get rid of all this. Don’t panic.’

‘Rid of all what?’ Suttle was still staring at the view.

‘All Granny’s stuff. Christ, it’s a museum.’

Suttle at last looked around. Angie was gesturing at the furniture, a neat half-circle of matching armchairs in threadbare chintz drawn up in front of the electric fire.

‘And Jesus, take a look at these. I’ve no idea why she’d buy stuff like this.’

She was gazing at the pictures on the wall: clumsy, lifeless watercolours in fading blues and yellows. Flowers. Beach scenes. A stick-like child astride what might have been a donkey.

Suttle shrugged. The pictures, like the rest of the folksy bric-a-brac that littered the room, had probably come from half a lifetime of bring-and-buy sales, but he didn’t care. What mattered was the view.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Just look.’

 

Afterwards he took Angie for a thank-you drink at a pub down the road. He hadn’t touched a beer for weeks but the last half-hour had unlocked something deep in his head. After the suffocating chill of Chantry Cottage – the windows that never closed properly, the damp, the constant drip-drip of water – Flat 3 had been a release. The view dominated everything. It was so theatrical, so laden with water and light and the promise of constant change. It shook your feathers. It pulled you out of yourself. From there, on his new perch, he could practically touch the weather. Rain and strong winds by dawn, he thought. The front clearing through by midday.

Angie had settled for a soda and lime. For reasons Suttle recognised only too well, she was reluctant to look him in the eye. She knows, he thought. Just like everyone else knows. You do your best to hunker down, ride out the storm, pretend nothing has happened, but what you never take into account is other people. They want so much to help you. And they always know best.

‘I’m serious about Granny’s stuff,’ she said. ‘A couple of trips to Ikea, you won’t recognise the place.’

Suttle studied her a moment, then shook his head. Mentally, days ago, he’d already consigned everything he owned in Chantry Cottage to some house clearance guy with limitless patience and a biggish white van.

‘Fuck Ikea,’ he said softly. ‘You know what that flat reminds me of? My mum’s. When I was a kid.’

‘Exactly. That’s why you need Ikea.’

‘Wrong. Just now I’m no one. I need nothing.’ He reached for his glass. ‘Cheers.’

 

 

 

 

 

One

 

 

 

 

Sunday, 8 December 2013

 

Suttle was on the beach when he took the call. D/I Carole Houghton, as wedded to quiet Sunday mornings as he was.

‘We have a situation,’ she said at once. ‘You’re going to love this.’

Suttle turned his back on the scouring wind, cupping the phone to his ear. The beach was empty at this time in the morning but his borrowed dog seemed to have spotted company half a mile away.

‘Skip,’ he yelled. ‘Come here.’

The dog ignored him. It belonged to a young Polish couple who occupied the flat above Suttle’s, and he took it out first thing on Sundays to give them a lie-in. A couple of hours at the right state of the tide would take him miles along the gleaming beach, emptying his head of everything but the chill blast of wind off the sea, and interludes like these had become increasingly precious. Now he ran, conscious that the rest of his day suddenly belonged to someone else. His boss, as it happened, had a great deal of time for dogs but absolutely no patience with crap excuses. You kept dogs on leads. Much the way you led your Major Crime team.

D/I Houghton restricted her briefing to the barest details: posh house in Topsham, an incident rung in an hour or so ago, a visit within minutes from a uniformed patrol, and now a long list of calls she was making on behalf of Detective Superintendent Malcolm Nandy.

‘Operation Amber,’ she said briskly. ‘Suspicious death doesn’t do it justice. Enjoy, eh?’

 

Topsham was a pretty village five miles upstream from Exmouth. Centuries of commerce had settled comfortably on the merchants, shipwrights and assorted gentlefolk who’d turned a bustling trading post into a sought-after riverside postcode. The trophy address in the village was The Strand, a street of handsome Dutch-style houses that overlooked the water downstream from the quay. These properties, as Suttle had once gathered from Lizzie, went for deeply serious money, and the pick of them all lay at the very end of the street where the tarmac suddenly gave way to a breathtaking view of the estuary: miles of silver-grey water framed by the gentle green swell of the Haldon Hills.

Suttle nosed his Impreza through the open gate. Crime scenes were always badged by SOC vans and metres of blue and white tape, and this one was no different. Thanks to Skip, Suttle was a late addition to the carnival.

Nandy emerged from the house, deep in conversation with D/I Houghton. The Detective Superintendent was a lean veteran in his late forties with a greying fuzz of close-cropped hair and a legendary reputation for seizing every investigation by the throat. In Nandy’s view, most of the pieces fell into position within a day or two if you gave the evidential bag a good shake. Beyond that, if you weren’t looking at a result, you were probably into something altogether more troublesome.

Just now he was tallying the boxes he wanted Houghton to tick. Scene parameters. Time parameters. Search parameters for the Territorial Aid Group. CCTV. Automatic number-plate recognition. House to house. Each new ask drew a cursory nod from the D/I, and Suttle guessed she’d actioned much of this stuff already. Major crime investigations, like riding a bike or flying a 747, came naturally after a while. Especially if you were as savvy and proactive as Carole Houghton.

Nandy had finished. He tapped his watch, shot Suttle a murderous look, checked an ever-growing list of unanswered calls on his smartphone and headed for his car.

For the first time Suttle noticed the name of the house, engraved on a slab of slate beside the big wooden gates.

‘Magharibi?’ he queried.

‘I gather it’s African, Jimmy. Christ knows what it means.’

D/I Houghton was a big woman with tinted glasses and a mass of artfully permed hair, and like Nandy she had a million things to do elsewhere. The makings of a squad were racing in from various corners of Devon and Cornwall and she needed to be at the Middlemoor headquarters to set up the Major Incident Room. The first team briefing could wait until this evening, but for now she wanted Suttle to get himself up to speed.

‘You’ll find Luke inside. He’s doing a flash intel search.’ She was looking pointedly at the salt stains on the bottoms of Suttle’s jeans, at the sand on his runners. ‘There’s a pile of forensic suits in the SOC van. Help yourself.’

She dug in her pocket for her phone and left without saying goodbye. Suttle watched her climb into the Range Rover she used for towing her horsebox and then turned back to the house.

It looked Edwardian, maybe a decade or two older, a slightly forbidding essay in red tiles and greying stucco with a multitude of lead-light windows and a sturdy front door with iron studs that badly needed painting. It was the kind of house that promised countless rooms inside, a twilight world, deeply private, somewhere you might lose yourself for weeks on end and not see another soul. Suttle listened to himself. Was he making this stuff up? Probably not, he thought. The best jobs happen in the shadows.

He was still wrestling with the forensic one-piece when D/C Luke Golding appeared. He was small – five six, five seven – and as ever the suit engulfed him. He and Suttle had been working together for a couple of years and for a time the relationship had floated on the shared acknowledgement that life, in the round, was a richly bonkers proposition. At first Suttle had gladly signed up to this proposition, enjoying Golding’s astonishing talent for surfing the madness that lay at the heart of so many investigations. But now, after what had happened in the summer, he knew different. Your own life could come close to killing you. In places where it really mattered.

‘Well?’ Suttle nodded at the house. Treading plates were visible through the open door, disappearing into the gloom of the hall beyond.

Golding loosened the hood of the suit and tilted his face to the wind. With his boyishness and sudden grin he could almost pass for a teenager, an assumption that some of the rougher trade had lived to regret.

‘Guy’s in his eighties,’ he said. ‘Or was.’

‘Name?’

‘Moncrieff. Rupert.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Someone set about him. Big time.’

Moncrieff, he said, appeared to have been poorly for a while. A mild stroke had affected his mobility, and he’d spent much of the last year in and out of bed. He shared the house with two of his kids – a woman in her sixties and a younger son. The son, whose name was Neil, had rung the incident in, the call logged at 09.02.

‘How did he die?’

‘Stab and slash wounds. Plus something special for afters.’

Golding watched Suttle slip on his bootees then led the way inside. There was a smell of furniture polish. The gloom of the long panelled hall was splintered by cold shards of winter sunlight on the parquet floor. Doors were open down the hall, and from every room came the ticking of clocks. Suttle paused to listen, wondering what happened when the hour came round and some of them chimed. A chorus of insects, he thought. Feasting on time.

‘Are you interested or what?’ Golding was waiting at the end of the corridor. Another open door.

Suttle joined him. Golding stood aside.

The bedroom seemed to double as a study. One of the walls was lined with bookshelves, and the antique desk in the big bay window commanded a view across the garden to the water beyond. Suttle was still trying to remember the name of the stately white birds pecking at the acres of gleaming mud when Golding drew his attention to the bed in the corner masked by the suited figure of the CSI. He was deep in conversation with the Crime Scene Manager, a guy called Robin whom Suttle had last met at the Barnstaple job.

‘How’s it going?’ This from Golding.

The CSM broke off, offering Suttle a nod of recognition. ‘Fine. We’ll be through here by close of play. Tomorrow we’ll start on the rest of the house.’

‘Matey?’ Golding nodded at the bed.

‘The pathologist’s due any minute. Driving down from Exmoor.’

He stepped aside and for the first time Suttle saw the figure collapsed against the nest of pillows. The wrecked face had been slashed to the bone, the ribbons of flesh hanging from his cheeks and chin still dusted with white stubble. Blood had fountained over the pillows and duvet from deep wounds to his throat. His head sagged to one side, nearly dislocated from his body, and there was a look in the startling blueness of his eyes that spoke of incomprehension as well as terror. Transfer this tableau to an art gallery, thought Suttle, and the queues would stretch around the block.

‘What’s that?’ He’d spotted an object on the pillow. The material looked rough, maybe jute. More blood.

‘It’s a sack. The son who phoned this in found it over the old boy’s head. Two eye holes. Crude as you like.’

‘What was it doing on his head?’

‘No idea.’

‘Weapon?’

‘In the corner.’ The CSM indicated a neat pile of evidence bags stacked on the carpet.

Suttle knelt beside them. The machete had to be a couple of feet long, the tarnished blade swelling out from a wooden handle. There were roughly carved markings on the handle, and blood had already congealed where the steel bedded into the wood. A leather scabbard occupied another evidence bag, neatly tagged with date and time.

Suttle got to his feet again and looked around. One of the walls, bare of bookcases, was hung with primitive tapestries. Skinny native women with gourds on their heads. Palm trees. Mountains. A dark green smudge of forest below the treeline. Elsewhere was a line of native shields, animal skin stretched tight over wooden framework. The best of them was carefully patterned in reds and blacks, another gust of Africa.

‘It’s Masai.’ The CSM again.

‘How do you know?’

‘We took a safari last year. Kenya. The missus wanted to bring one back.’ He pulled a face. ‘No chance.’

Suttle nodded, his gaze returning to the machete. ‘This belongs to the house? Part of the collection?’

‘Yeah.’ Golding this time. ‘Neil, the son, ID’d it. There are two of them. They both belonged to his dad.’

‘So where is he now? This Neil?’

‘Heavitree nick. Waiting for us.’

 

Lizzie Suttle was late for her meeting in Gunwharf. A girl from the publishing house had phoned on Friday. Simon Horobin was attending a reception in Portsmouth’s new Mary Rose Museum at noon and would very much appreciate an hour or so of her time beforehand. Just a coffee and a chat and a chance to take stock. Nothing ominous.

Nothing ominous. Lizzie’s blood had iced at the phrase. Back in Devon, eighteen months ago, she’d played a major role in an armed siege transmitted live on TV. Half the nation had awaited developments at Chantry Cottage, where a bunch of psychotics had taken both her and Jimmy hostage at gunpoint. The men in blue, mercifully, had finally done the business, and in the tumult of the weeks to come Lizzie had signed a six-figure deal with a leading London publisher.

Her husband had been a key member of the squad that had nailed the bad guys. She herself had spent four long hours contemplating a messy death. There were links – richly sensational – to the war in Afghanistan. The book couldn’t fail.

But alas it had. Failed to behave. Failed to make it beyond a first feeble chapter. Failed to become the passport to the kind of life she’d always dreamed about. For months she’d been fending off increasingly alarmed enquiries from both her agent and her editor at the publisher. Its publicity department was whipping up a storm. Pre-sale subs into the likes of Waterstones were deeply promising. TV companies were already queuing up to option the story. So where was the fucking book?

She’d only ever met Simon Horobin once in her life. He headed the editorial side of the company. At the press conference to announce the deal, more than a year ago, he’d pumped her hand, given her a hug and told the world they were looking at the biggest thing to hit publishing in a very long time. After that, silence.

Now he occupied a corner table in the café-bar. She’d chosen the Waterfront Café because even on a Sunday morning it would be reliably full. She could hide her shame in the swirl of other people’s conversation. With luck she could be away within the hour.

Horobin got up and extended a hand. No hug this time.

‘Coffee?’

‘Sure. I’ll have a latte.’

Horobin waved her into a seat. He was a short, slightly dumpy figure. The last time she’d seen him he’d gone for the bookish and slightly tweedy look. Now, despite a visible paunch, he’d submitted himself to a greying razor cut, designer jeans, an uncomfortably tight denim shirt and a sprinkling of estuarial vowels. If it was meant as a makeover, thought Lizzie, it didn’t work.

Waiting for the latte, Horobin tried to attempt small talk, but Lizzie saved him the trouble. No point in avoiding the obvious.

‘The book’s not happening,’ she said.

‘At all?’

‘At all.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. Stuff?’ She was watching a family battling the wind on the boardwalk outside. ‘I just can’t do it.’

Horobin nodded, seeming to understand.

‘I saw you on TV back in August,’ he said at last. ‘That press conference. The one about Gracie. The one the police organised.’

Nobody called her daughter Gracie. She eyed him for a moment.

‘And?’

‘I thought you were amazing. Real composure. That must have taken some doing.’

‘It did.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘Horrible. Horrible beyond belief.’

‘Right …’ Something seemed to have brightened in his face. Lizzie could see it in his eyes.

‘My agent says you’ll be wanting the advance back,’ she said. ‘Have I got that right?’

‘You have.’

‘The full thirty thousand?’

‘I’m afraid so. Unless you think there’s still a chance.’

‘No way.’ She shook her head. ‘What I thought was there has gone. I just can’t find it. I had a plan. I’ve always had a plan. This one seemed foolproof. Jimmy’s mates in the Job. Access to the guys in prison. Military contacts in the Marines. What drove those men to do what they did. It had bestseller written all over it. Then …’ She made the vaguest gesture, both hands, resignation writ large.

‘But you started?’

‘I did. I gave it a month or two, just to get my breath back after all that bloody trauma at the cottage. Then it was Christmas. My husband and I … there were issues for sure but we were getting on top of them.’

‘Issues to do with the book?’

‘Yes, in part. Jimmy was never that keen on lining his mates up for me to have a little chat. I’d somehow assumed that would just happen, but a girl can get these things wrong. You go through a thing like that, have a bunch of nutters with a gun to your head, the cavalry lined up outside, and afterwards you assume the men in blue will be happy to talk. Wrong. Some of the key guys on the case didn’t want to know. They’d toss me little bits and pieces – leavings really, stuff I could have got from the press cuttings – but there was no way they were going to let me close. That was a problem. I was starting to write fiction. I was starting to make it up. Hopeless.’ Her hands again, shaping the big hole where a book should have been.

‘What about the guys they put away?’

‘One of them was dead. Even my reach doesn’t extend that far.’

‘And the other two?’

‘They were on remand at first. Then banged up for life. I went through their solicitors. That was another thing. One of them wanted serious money. The other one had had enough.’

‘Of what?’

‘Everything. Afghanistan. What happened to him afterwards. Me. The lot. The closest I got to him was a phone conversation with a prison visitor who’d had an encounter or two. She said he’d turned his face to the wall. Apparently it happens all the time. She called it zombie land.’

‘Nice title.’ The interest was back in his eyes.

‘Thanks. But I’m not really helping, am I?’

‘Au contraire.’ He leaned forward, frowning now, a man with something important on his mind. ‘Be honest with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will it ever happen? The Devon book?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That makes things simpler.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I pay you back the thirty thousand? We call it quits?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘You mean there’s a way out of this?’

Her own interest had quickened. The last ten minutes had been as embarrassing and shameful as she’d expected. Now he seemed to be offering some kind of deal.

‘What happened back in the summer …’ he said slowly. ‘We were all with you. Everyone I know who followed that story. We felt for you.’

‘We’re not talking Devon, right?’

‘Of course not. I don’t know how much bad luck one person can expect but you seem to have copped everything.’

‘Copped’ sat uncomfortably in the sentence. He must have picked it up from his kids, Lizzie thought. Or some shit TV series.

‘What happened in the summer was in a different league,’ she said quietly. ‘What happened in the summer turns you into someone else.’

‘That’s well put.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Tell me more.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it might save you a lot of money.’

Lizzie held his gaze. He’s talking about the advance, she told herself. ‘So how does that work?’

‘You write a book about it. You explore the way it happened. You look for answers.’

‘There are none.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve looked already. Had one or two conversations.’

She briefly outlined the doors she’d knocked on, the people she’d met, the questions she’d asked, the answers she’d discounted. Faced with what had happened, people either lied for their own peace of mind or simply turned away. Zombie land, she confirmed.

‘But you’re still interested?’

‘Of course I’m still interested. It changed my life. It is my bloody life.’

‘Then I suggest you start all over again. Get inside what happened. Tease out every detail. Go for multi POV.’

‘POV?’

‘Point of view. A tragedy like yours touches dozens of people. They each have their own story.’

Lizzie sat back for a moment and nodded. A psychoanalyst she’d contacted in her darkest moments had said something similar. To properly recover you have to understand, she’d said. Only then can you begin to put yourself back together again.

‘Writing as narrative therapy? Is that what we’re talking about?’

‘Exactly. But something else too. The best books are inspirational. They take us to somewhere very bleak. They force us to confront the unimaginable. And then the journey takes a different turn. We all need to feel better about ourselves. You can make that happen. As long as the story’s right.’

As long as the story’s right. More than a year ago Lizzie had thought four hours looking down the barrel of a gun in Chantry Cottage had the makings of a pretty good story. Now this.

‘We’re talking personal here,’ she said. ‘Deeply, deeply personal. You do realise that?’

‘Of course. That’s why I’m suggesting it. Before, you were in the hands of others. This time the story belongs to you. It’s your property. From where I’m sitting that earns you the right to a lot of conversations. People won’t refuse you. Trust me. I know they won’t. Not if you do it right.’

The silence stretched and stretched. Lizzie had long forgotten about her promised latte. When it finally appeared, she pushed it to one side. How come this man had beaten her to the obvious? How come it took an overweight London publisher to tease just a glimpse of salvation from the purgatory of the last four months?

‘Forty thousand,’ he said. ‘And that’s just the advance.’

‘To do what?’

‘To explore what happened. To make it real. To share it with us. And to hunt for some kind of answer. I’ll need to fix the small print with your agent, but that’s the basic offer. Seventy-five thousand words. World rights. Plus TV, film and audio.’

‘What’s the deadline?’

‘Thirtieth of April.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘It’s not. This book writes itself. The deadline gives us time to meet the obvious pub date.’

‘Which is?’

‘August the 24th.’ The smile was back. ‘That’s the first anniversary, isn’t it?’

 

Neil Moncrieff was already in the biggest of the interview rooms at Heavitree police station when Suttle and Luke Golding arrived. Someone had fetched him a coffee from the machine down the corridor, and he sat in the throw of light from the high window behind him, a tall hunched figure casting a long shadow over the scuffed table.

Suttle did the introductions before dispatching Golding for more coffees.

Moncrieff watched the D/C dig in his pocket for coins and then leave the room. ‘What sort of person would do a thing like that?’ he asked. His voice was light, barely a whisper, and there was a hint of a lisp.

‘Good question, Mr Moncrieff.’ Suttle slipped into the chair opposite. ‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’

Moncrieff nodded. Suttle judged him to be in his late thirties. The scarlet remains of a long-ago attack of acne had cratered the paleness of his face, which was partly curtained by a lank fall of hair, and there was something about the way he held himself that suggested extreme apprehension. Bad things had happened. And there was m