The Deaths of December

by Susi Holliday

Genres: Holiday books

Synopsis

When the advent calendar is delivered to the police station, no one takes any notice... until they open it to find a murder behind every door. The hunt is on for a serial killer in a thrilling festive crime novel.

It looks like a regular advent calendar.

Until DC Becky Greene starts opening doors...and discovers a crime scene behind almost every one.

The police hope it's a prank. Because if it isn't, a murderer has just surfaced - someone who's been killing for twenty years.

But why now? And why has he sent it to this police station?

As the country relaxes into festive cheer, Greene and DS Eddie Carmine must race against time to catch the killer. Because there are four doors left, and four murders will fill them...

It's shaping up to be a deadly little Christmas.

(P)2017 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: November 16, 2017

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

There’s an art to taking the perfect photograph.

It’s too easy now – all those camera phones, those built-in filters. People snapping pics of their artfully arranged lunch, taking selfies in changing rooms – all twisted and pouty, angled down so you can’t see the chins, overexposed so you can’t see the wrinkles.

That’s not art.

Art is real. Art is the lines around an old woman’s eyes that tell a story without words. Art is sitting on a freezing cold bench in the darkness, waiting patiently for the sun to rise. Grabbing that photo when the clouds are sitting softly, in perfect formation.

Art takes effort.

I still use a 35mm camera. I know they say that DSLRs and the like are just as good, but they aren’t. Digital is all very well, for convenience and sharing and all that kind of thing, but what you gain in the convenience, you lose in the essence.

You need to feel.

No matter what the situation, what’s going on with your own life, where you’ve got to be. You need to give your subject your full attention. Nurture them as much as you can. Even if all you’re doing is waiting for them to stop something, or start something new. Waiting for them to relax. To forget the camera is there.

Sometimes you don’t even know you’ve got the perfect image until it’s developed. When you pull that sheet of paper through the fluid, carefully letting the liquid coat the film. You have to be patient, waiting for the picture to appear. Hanging it up to dry. Waiting.

Always waiting.

It was difficult, at first. But I wasn’t going to give up on it. It’s like a calling.

I have a job to do.

This one took a lot longer than I expected. I had to wait almost ten minutes, keeping the camera poised and ready, but aware of my surroundings, of the danger. Feeling my heart thumping in my chest, trying not to breathe. Hoping that it would happen soon, and when it did, the fear drifted away, just long enough to allow me to adjust the lens one final time. Zooming in, getting the close-up.

Click and wind.

Then back out, for the entire, perfect scene.

Click and wind.

The centrepiece of this one is red. A dark floral stain against the shocking white of the carpet. The image in the viewfinder is framed by the pale furniture, the delicately painted walls. Just off centre, a figure lies. Half curled, where he has attempted the foetal position. Seeking comfort at the end. Next to him, creeping towards me as if trying to escape its useless host: blood. So much blood.

I feel an ache of sadness, but I push it away. I can’t let it crush me. I can’t let it stop me from doing my job. There is a special kind of silence, at the end.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, as I close the door behind me and step outside into the icy white dark. Cold air against my hot cheeks. Calming.

It took me a long time to perfect my art.

But you know what they say.

Practice makes perfect.

Becky’s washing her hands in the sink, glad that it’s one of those three-in-one things with no mirror above it so she can avoid seeing the bags under her eyes. She shakes her hands, waits for the dryer to come on, gets a sudden waft of something deeply unpleasant. She side-eyes the woman standing next to her, muttering away to herself, and can’t work out if it’s the mangy coat that smells like a dead animal or the woman inside it. She holds her breath. She’s smelled three-day-old corpses less pungent than this.

She batters through the swing door out of the toilets, escapes into the sanctuary of the restaurant. Blinks at the too-bright lights, inhales the fried egg smell. ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ is playing on the sound system. The place is packed, as it always is just before ten thirty, when sausage and egg muffins get replaced by burgers and fries. It’s a treat, this, she keeps telling herself. Not the surroundings, maybe, but the breakfast. Definitely. After the week she’s had.

She’s got her tray, head down – looking for a table – has to be at the side, with a seat at the back, facing into the room. Standard copper thing, that. Make sure you can see what’s going on. Too busy, though, to notice that she’s about to walk slap bang into someone.

A hand stops her.

‘Morning.’

She looks up, blinks. Feels her heart slide into her stomach. She’d wanted to enjoy this food on her own. Have a bit of time before work, where it’d be full on as always, even though she was due a day off now, after the mad few days she’s had.

‘Eddie. You slumming it too?’

‘Food of the Gods, this,’ he says. He nods at a table where a bunch of schoolkids have departed, leaving an explosion of wrappers and cups and half-eaten hash browns. Last day of term. They don’t care if they’re late. Before she can say anything, a quiet woman in uniform and a sad little Santa hat appears and sweeps it all carefully away, leaving that damp cloth smell hovering just above the Formica. She can hardly say no. She slides along the plastic seat, and he follows her in. He unwraps his breakfast and starts eating, staring straight ahead. Savouring it. She does the same. Muffin. Hash brown. She uncaps the orange juice and drinks it in one.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Tough week? Saw you were on DS Fyfe’s team. The assault on campus. Nasty.’

She wipes her mouth on a napkin. ‘Awful. But, you know. We got him. Jack was like a dog with a bone on that one.’

He nods. ‘Good. Good. Can’t say I’ve been so lucky. Still working on the Hollis murder. We’ve got nothing. No one saw anything. Victim had no enemies, no dodgy ex, no psycho neighbour. Nothing. Someone just swooped in, smashed her over the back of the head with a stone vase, and left her there. If it wasn’t for the parcel delivery coming that afternoon, noticing that the door wasn’t properly shut, we don’t even know how long the poor woman might have been left lying on the carpet.’

‘Just before Christmas, too,’ Becky says. ‘Horrible.’

Eddie’s face crinkles into a frown. ‘To be honest, anything that can distract me from the hell that’s Christmas is a good thing. I can’t be doing with it all. Never have done. Well, when the kids were small, I suppose. But now? Everyone spends too much money, eats too much, drinks too much, then moans about their credit card bills in January while they try to survive on a diet of avocado and squeezed lemon juice.’

She can’t help but laugh. ‘Are you finished, Mr Scrooge?’

‘Oh come on. Don’t tell me you like it, do you? All the crowds, the non-stop jingly music. Drunks wearing antlers throwing up in your garden?’

‘I love Christmas, actually. We make quite a big thing of it at home. We don’t spend too much money, but we make sure the whole family’s there for lunch – turkey, sprouts, sherry – the lot. A small gift each, roaring fire. Christmas CD …’

‘You’re winding me up?’

‘Nope. Nine more sleeps, I can’t wait—’ She’s about to say more, when she sees the woman in the fur coat tottering across to a freshly departed table, mine-sweeping the remains. Jamming half a breakfast muffin into her mouth, wrapping up the other bits and shoving them into her pocket. She sighs.

‘Lady Margaret,’ Eddie says. ‘Still going strong, it seems.’

‘They’ll throw her out in a minute.’

‘She’ll be gone before they get the chance. She’s been doing this for years. You must’ve seen her before?’

Eddie slides out of the seat, walks up behind the woman, who’s walking casually out of the restaurant as if she belongs there, just like everyone else.

‘Morning, Ma’am,’ he says.

‘Oh, hello, Edward,’ she says. Becky sees her row of blackened teeth and starts to breathe through her mouth again.

‘Not making a nuisance of yourself, are you?’ he says.

‘Me?’ She laughs. ‘You know me, Edward.’

Eddie holds open the door for her and she disappears out into the frosty morning, pulling her coat around herself and bustling off up the street with a purpose, as if she has somewhere to go, somewhere to be, that isn’t a bus shelter. Or, if she’s lucky, a few hours in the community centre with the rest of her cronies.

‘Come on,’ Eddie says.

She matches his pace as they walk through the town centre, past the stallholders still setting up their wares – the hotdog stands, the towering tree with its twinkling silver lights. Someone has hung some sort of garland around the long-legged spaceship that is almost hidden on a side street until you nearly walk into it. The HG Wells legacy, more noticeable from the name of one of the popular chain pubs than the giant steel alien. War of the Worlds? That’s just this town on a Saturday night.

She’s momentarily transfixed by a group of solemn Chinese carol singers, and their sandwich board that reads: John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

If only it was that simple … Besides – is eternal life really such a good thing?

When they arrive at the station building, Eddie disappears, leaving her with a quick nod of his head. As she pauses next to the front desk, taking off her gloves and stuffing them into her pockets, a uniformed constable appears from a door to the side.

‘Ah, perfect timing, Detective Constable Greene,’ he says. ‘You can take the mail up to CID.’ He thrusts a pile into her arms. Brown envelopes. A few white ones that could be Christmas cards – or abuse – they quite often received abuse. And a large square envelope, addressed ‘To A Detective who knows what to do’.

Carly slides the last pile of boxes off the trolley, flips up the base-plate and pushes the handle back inside. The little fold-up thing was the best online purchase for under twenty quid she’d ever made. Getting the stuff from front door to car and then car to the venue was virtually impossible before, without someone to help. No one ever offers to help now. Well, that’s not true. No one from her family offers to help – the other people at the fairs are generally as useful as they can be, as long as they’ve got their own stuff sorted first.

The problem with these things, like all craft fairs, markets, expos and whatever else they’re calling themselves these days, is that if you don’t get a decent pitch, you might as well forget it. She was naïve in the early days, turning up half an hour before the event was due to open, expecting to still get a reasonable spot. She’d had the worst of the worst, many a time – the table next to the gents toilets, the one next to the draughty back door, the one in the back of the back, with the sellers who were there to pass the time, rather than actually sell anything. Half the time they were asleep, or they’d ask if she could just watch their stall for a minute while they popped off for a cuppa, leaving her with her own stall and theirs, catching the occasional pitying glance from someone who’d walked the length and breadth of each aisle, buying nothing, and who couldn’t be bothered to squeeze past the stall selling pet toys that had spread its way across the already narrow aisle, blocking access to the back row entirely.

She wondered why she bothered.

But then she realised that getting there an hour and a half before doors open was the key. And having the trolley so she could bring most of the stuff from the car at once was the way to do it. People were wily at these things – leave something on your table and go back for the rest, and you’d return to find someone had spread their stuff all over it, dumping your wares on the floor, nothing but a shrug as if to say, ‘Well it wasn’t set up. How was I to know you were coming back?’

All that stuff you think about market stallholders and camaraderie? Fantasy. It’s a cut-throat business, and it’s made even worse when you get the folks turning up with stuff that’s not even handmade – well, not by them anyway. Loads of cheap tat bought in bulk off the Internet, dressed up on the stall with some wafts of incense to make it look authentic. They’re undercutting the real craftsmen and women of these markets. Like Carly, who’s turned her boxroom into a pottery studio and makes everything from bowls and jugs to the most intricately painted ceramic and glass jewellery. People still buy it, of course, and she does enjoy the markets. She just wishes there weren’t so few of them throughout the year. Once a month, she can usually find somewhere to go, but it might be two or three hours’ drive. From late November until Christmas, though, she’s spoilt for choice.

The market at St Mary’s Community Centre is an annual attraction in the town. It’s the biggest church hall in the county. People travel from all around, even the fringes of London, to come to it. More than a hundred stalls, every day, for two weeks. It might even be the biggest Christmas Fair in the South East – the organisers certainly like to tout it as that.

She’s pleased to be here early today, one of the first in. She’s even thought to bring a flask of tea with her, and a slice of yesterday’s banana cake, to save her having to nip out for breakfast. It’s the fifth day of this year’s fair, and every day has been getting gradually busier. There is no quiet time left. People take time off work to go Christmas shopping, and with the church community centre right in the centre of the town, there’s no shortage of footfall.

She peels tape off the top of a box and starts to carefully lift the items out. This one is full of brightly painted bowls. Always some of her top sellers. She glances up at the clock. 8.45. Still a while before it opens. She’s surprised that the woman with the crochet handbags and purses hasn’t turned up yet – she’s been next to her since the first day, and although they hadn’t spent too much time chatting, she’d felt an easy companionship with the other woman. Hilda, her name was. Unusual, Carly thought, having only heard of the name before linked to that old washerwoman from Coronation Street. The actress had died not that long ago. Carly couldn’t remember her real name. Maybe Hilda’s not so unusual in Sweden though. Or was it Norway she was from? Somewhere like that. She pushes the box under her table and opens the next. Vases, only two left. She’s placing one at the far end of the table when she becomes aware of someone standing nearby. She’s been engrossed in her unpacking, her arranging. Hasn’t noticed the young man who wheeled in a set of large, shallow boxes.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘OK if I take this one?’

She wants to protest, doesn’t know why. Hilda is clearly not coming today. Did she mention it yesterday? Maybe she was only doing the weekend.

‘Sure,’ she finds herself saying. She glances at his trolley, the boxes. ‘Maybe not the best space if you’re displaying artwork. Wouldn’t you be better along one of the sides? Maybe one of the ones in front of the black curtain.’ She points, and he follows her gaze, and they both see that all the stalls against the curtain are already taken.

He smiles and shrugs his shoulders. ‘It’s fine. I’ve plenty of stands.’ He unclips the first of his boxes and starts to slide out his work.

Carly rips tape off another of her own boxes. Tries not to look interested, but it’s hard not to, faced with this man. He’s a bit younger than her, she thinks. He’s shrugged off his fur-lined leather coat to reveal strong arms, a wide chest in a plain black T-shirt. He props a painting of a beach at sunset on a small easel he’s placed on the table and stands back. The air shifts, and she can smell him. Something musky, smoky. A whisper of cold air from the crisp morning outside.

‘What do you think?’ he says. ‘It’s Dorset, you know. West Bay? Last summer. I sat for hours on the sand, waiting for the light to be just how I wanted.’

‘Very nice.’ She’s not talking about the painting. ‘But wouldn’t it have been easier just to take a photograph?’ Carly says, with what she hopes is a playful smile.

‘I don’t take photographs any more. Not for pleasure, anyway.’

A flash of something in his eyes, but it disappears as quickly as it erupts. Intriguing. Just how she likes them. She turns away and lets him finish putting his paintings out on display. Hopes he didn’t catch sight of the heat in her cheeks.

She opens the final set of boxes. Displays her jewellery at the front of the table. Tries not to catch the newcomer’s eye.

She doesn’t need this kind of trouble. Not again.

‘To A Detective who knows what to do’.

Becky’s not entirely sure what to make of that. It’s either a piece of junk, or some sort of promo crap. Someone having a laugh – at their expense? She slides it back to the bottom of the pile of mail and jogs up the two flights of stairs to the grey-carpeted, beige-walled home of Woodham CID. She hadn’t really known what to expect of a real police station before she joined. Was it the drab, shaky-partitioned world of The Bill, or something a bit more flash – glass and whiteboards and breakout areas, like she’d seen in some of the US cop dramas? It is neither of those things. It is just an office building, with messy open-plan spaces, small private offices for the higher ranks. The ground floor that she just left is a desk, some plastic chairs, a heavy door that leads to the cells. First floor is more offices, interview rooms and the canteen. None of it is anything special, and from the outside it is one of those brutalist seventies concrete blocks that could be anything from a car park to a hospital.

She pauses outside the door to the open-plan office that she shares with the rest of the lower CID ranks, rifles through the pile of mail. It’s not her job to hand out the mail, but now that she has it, she might as well see what’s there. A couple of things for her boss, DI Nick Keegan. A few things marked ‘CID’ – usually opened by one of the civvies who sit partitioned off at the far end of the room, running searches on HOLMES and the PNC. Then that last thing. The big envelope. Not really for anyone, but also for everyone. She’s a detective. She has to make a decision. She drops the rest of the mail in the in-tray that sits on a filing cabinet just inside the door. Keeps hold of the envelope and walks over to her desk.

‘Morning, Greene. Half-day is it?’

She smiles at her colleague. A straight-backed skinny man in a too-tight red jumper. ‘Brought you something,’ she says, sliding a hand into the back pocket of her jeans, then pulling it out slowly, around the side of her body. She flips him the finger and sits down.

‘Witty,’ he says. ‘Boss was looking for you earlier.’

‘Cheers, Joe.’ She pulls out her chair and sits. Takes a letter opener shaped like a dagger from the mug on her desk that contains various pens, a couple of nail files and a pencil with a bobbing octopus that Joe brought her back from a trip to the seaside once. She gets on well with DC Joe Dickson. Probably because they are roughly the same age, did their initial training at the same time (although he’s been a detective for a few years longer than she has), and mainly because he always has her back when people say things about her that they shouldn’t. It might be all political correctness in the media these days – doesn’t mean it’s like that on the shop floor. You’re too pretty to be a police officer is one of the usual ones. When she’d started out in uniform, it was fine – because no one looks good in those army-style trousers and the thick body armour they all have to wear now; hair scraped into a bun. Big black boots. But since she’s become a detective, it’s like people are seeing her in a different way. Her long hair is dark and shiny, with a natural wave that most women are desperate to emulate. She has huge brown eyes, and a wide mouth and perfect white teeth. It’s all natural, as is her trim figure – shapely in all the ways you’d want it to be. But now that she’s out of uniform it’s causing problems. She’s the least showy person she knows, she’s never been someone to flaunt their looks – and yet people seem to take exception, as if it’s her fault and nothing to do with her genes. She has to work extra hard to be taken seriously, and it rankles. Which is why colleagues like Joe are great to have on-side. Her boss, Nick, has been good too – always pushing her further – testing her, maybe. It hasn’t been long since she cast her uniform aside, but she is relishing the challenge. She knows it’s exactly what she wants.

She runs the dagger – a present from her parents when she graduated from police college – along the back flap of the envelope and opens it up. She peers inside. A thick sheet of cardboard. Pulls it out and a smattering of glitter is scraped off against the edge of the envelope, flutters to her desk like snowflakes.

‘Wow. Haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid.’ She lays it on her desk, pokes around inside the envelope looking for a note, but there’s nothing else in there.

‘What is it?’ Joe wheels himself around on his chair. ‘Is that an advent calendar?’

‘Yeah. A proper one. No chocolates inside these. I don’t think I’ve had one since I was about five. Once I found out there were ones with chocolates, I wasn’t really interested in the little drawings of bells and snowflakes behind the doors.’

‘My mum never bought us advent calendars,’ Joe says. ‘She was so anti-Christmas.’

‘Oh you poor thing.’ Becky sticks out her lower lip at him and he flicks her nose.

‘Go on then, open it,’ he says.

‘Hang on. I don’t even know who it’s for. Maybe I should ask the others.’ She glances around the room, but people are either plugged into headphones or having conversations at their desks. No one is paying attention to her and Joe.

‘No one cares, Becks. They’re trying to sort out their paperwork piles so they can relax over Christmas. No one wants a new case now!’ He grabs the envelope and looks at the front. ‘To A Detective who knows what to do. That’s a rubbish teaser. What does it even mean? Just open it. What’s the date today?’

‘Sixteenth. So we’ve got fifteen to open, plus today. Should I start at one and do them in order, or should I open today’s first—’

He rolls his eyes and grabs the calendar off her. More glitter puffs into the air.

‘Oi!’ She takes it back. Puts a fingernail under the edge of door one and prises it open.

‘What is it? Snowman? Bauble? The suspense is killing me here …’

She frowns, lifts the calendar closer to her face. ‘Weird. I think it’s a nativity scene. It looks like a tiny photograph of a room, someone lying in the middle. Some stuff around, I don’t know what that’s meant to be …’

‘Let’s see.’ He takes it out of her hands, squints at it. Holds it up to the light. ‘Oh—’

‘Oh what? What is it?’

‘It’s not a nativity scene, Becks. Look.’

She leans across, looks at it at the same angle as he is – the light behind, shining through the thin backing. It’s a scene all right. But it’s not a nativity.

It’s a crime scene.

DS Eddie Carmine sits down in a chair opposite his boss and sighs. ‘Seriously, Nick. This job is starting to do my head in. You’d think with a case like this, local, broad daylight, that someone would’ve seen something. Heard something. Anything. Jesus. What happened to nosey neighbours? Good old curtain-twitchers?’

‘No one pays any attention to people in the real world any more. You know that. It’s all social media and WhatsApp and Snapchat, isn’t it?’ Nick grins, clearly pleased with himself for his deep understanding of the psychology of today.

Eddie wants to lean over the d. . .