Pete was dragging his hands through his close-cropped blond hair, over and over, like he wanted to rip it straight out of his head, and his baby-blue eyes were reddened with tears.
‘She’s a very private person, she lives here,’ said Pete. ‘Up there. That’s her flat. I went up as soon as I came in, called out to her, asked if she was OK. She didn’t answer. So I knocked at her door, still nothing. I tried the handle and it was open. I went in. And I found her. Then I phoned you.’
Tears were slipping down Pete’s face. The female cop touched his arm, guided him to a chair. The male cop looked up at the staircase. Then, with a heavy sigh, he went over there, and began to climb the stairs.
An hour later, CID arrived in the unsexy buttoned-up form of DS Sandra Duggan, whose honey-coloured hair was scraped back to display knife-sharp cheekbones and eyes that viewed the whole world with hostility. With her was DCI Hunter: tall, dark-haired, grave-faced – literally grave-faced; everyone down the nick said he ought to be a fucking undertaker with a boat like that – with a down-turned trap of a mouth and inky-brown eyes that scanned everything around him like a computer.
CID spoke to Pete and then went upstairs with Pete trailing behind them.
‘Fuck,’ said Sandra as they opened the door to the flat and entered the little sitting room straight off it.
Hunter and Duggan stood there and assessed the situation. The dead woman was sprawled out on the thick shag-pile carpet, which was a soft dusky pink. Her head was on a white sheepskin rug by the unlit gas fire, and some of the rug had turned to red where blood had spilled out of the bullet wounds to her neck and forehead.
‘Not pretty,’ agreed DCI Hunter with his usual formal manner. Neither he nor his companion moved further into the room; they wanted to preserve the crime scene.
‘Oh God,’ moaned Pete, looking past Hunter’s shoulder and then just as quickly looking away.
The woman’s eyes were open and already glazing over with the film of death; they stared up at and through the ceiling, blank as a china doll’s. She was wearing a strawberry-pink boucle skirt suit that looked expensive, maybe Chanel; an inch of a paler pink silk lining was visible where it had rucked up over her knees.
Nothing special about the woman at all; a bubble-permed blonde of around forty or fifty, pale almond-shaped blue eyes, a round and maybe even pretty face if it hadn’t been for the blood and the brain matter. She looked good for her age, that’s what Hunter thought; and very, very dead. He sighed for all the loss and grief and anguish in the world, for the evils that were done every day to women, and men, and children.
