Chapter Three

Hetheridge parked behind the two-story house, easing his Lexus between a panda car, blue lights endlessly flashing, and a black BMW that surely belonged to the victim, or his family. He had already received a few details from the dispatcher, but did not intend on biasing Kate by revealing them. According to Superintendent Jackson, Kate was a typical flighty female – too distracted by trivialities to home in on the big picture, more interested in personalities than hard facts, and consumed with the desire to solve a big case entirely through her own efforts. Per Jackson’s six-page recommendation that Kate be given the sack, her worst failing was wild egotism – trusting too much in her own inexperience while ignoring the hard work and invaluable contributions of steadier, more seasoned detectives. Kate, by contrast, had spent less time crafting her written explanation of the public row with the superintendent. The mandatory report had arrived on Hetheridge’s desk with only five minutes to spare before his deadline, scrawled by hand on a piece of copier paper. It consisted of one word: Plonker.

“Your neck of the woods?” Kate looked around the exterior of the detached brick house, with its enormous treed lot and pea-gravel car park, wide enough to swallow the average council flat. “Nice.”

“New money,” Hetheridge replied, deliberately sounding snobbish. Ordinarily, he would have responded with a shrug, steering any conversation with his juniors away from the personal – especially as it applied to him – to keep their minds on the case. But something about Kate made him want to startle her every chance he got.

“Yes, quite vulgar, really,” Kate agreed in a passable imitation of his tone. “This is no murder – poor bugger topped himself from shame.”

“Press are crowding the barrier,” Hetheridge said, pressing his hand into the small of Kate’s back and pushing her forward as photographers shot in their general direction. “Inside. They usually know better than to print photos that include detectives, but it will only take one to compromise the investigation.”

He expected her to argue, or perhaps bristle at his touch. He hadn’t meant the soft push to be offensive, only imperative, but who knew how the modern career woman might interpret such an action? Hetheridge had never worked with a female DS before, but he had worked with a junior officer whose photo, snapped in front of a corpse and published in the Sun, had precipitated the kidnapping and ransom of that officer’s wife and child. Hetheridge had no intention of allowing such a tragedy to happen again.

Kate didn’t bristle. Obediently, she led them into the house – specifically, into a mud room, where two uniformed constables awaited them. The room, painted stark white and lit by unshielded bulbs, was home to several metal wheelie-bins, a row of Wellingtons, and pile of dirty trainers. An assortment of macks and trenches were hung at staggered intervals along the rear wall.

“Good evening, Chief,” a constable, blonde and pale-faced, greeted Hetheridge. The man looked as if he’d been sick. The sharp stink of vomit hung in the air.

“Good evening, Constable,” Hetheridge replied. “This is my partner, DS Kate Wakefield. Where is the victim?”

“Upstairs. Library. Forensic called to say they’re held up, but will arrive before dawn. In the meantime …” The constable handed both detectives filmy blue booties and blue latex-free gloves. Hetheridge covered his shoes, then slipped on the gloves, noting that they were a shade too tight for his hands, and clearly too loose for Kate. Such was the peculiar genius of Met-issued gear: guaranteed to never fit any officer, regardless of height, weight, or build.

“The wife, Mrs. Comfrey, blames an intruder. She thinks this was a home invasion. The daughter thinks it might have been a houseguest. The family held a dinner party, but it broke up before the first course was served. Erupted into one big row, according to the daughter, though Mrs. Comfrey says otherwise. Mr. Comfrey went upstairs to the library. Mrs. Comfrey saw the guests off and went up to her room. Around ten-thirty she went back to the library to check on her husband, and discovered the body. According to her, the French doors on the balcony were open, as if someone broke in that way.”

“Or left that way,” Kate suggested.

“No sign of forced entry from outside,” the constable replied. “The area below the balcony has been roped off, and photos will be taken as soon as it’s light.”

“Who besides Mrs. Comfrey was in the house when the victim was killed?” Hetheridge asked. Something about family name seemed familiar to him, especially in conjunction with Belgravia, but he couldn’t yet place it.

“No one. The daughter, Jules Comfrey, left when the party broke up to go after one of the guests. She said her father had been highly offensive, and she was trying to repair the damage.”

“Live-in help?”

“The Comfreys don’t have any. When the dinner party was called off, the cook and her helpers packed up the food, cleaned the kitchen, and left. We’ve already taken down names and addresses, and will round them up tomorrow for questioning.”

“Is there a groundskeeper, or gardener?” Hetheridge asked.

“Yes. Lives in Cricklewood; takes the train in. He had already left for the day before the guests started arriving.

Hetheridge glanced at Kate. She was taking notes, not on a pad, but on a Blackberry-style smart phone, using a stylus with astonishing rapidity.

“Who is being detained in the house now?” Hetheridge asked the constable.

“Mrs. Comfrey and Jules Comfrey. The daughter returned to the house when Mrs. Comfrey called her, after finding the body. Apparently that was her second call, right after 999. They’re together now in the parlor. Oh, and Mrs. Comfrey asked to be allowed to ring for her physician. Both ladies are very upset, so I allowed it.”

Kate’s stylus stopped clicking. She shot a glance at Hetheridge.

“Has the doctor arrived?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Send him away without granting him entry. Furthermore, the Comfreys will make and receive no other phone calls to anyone until I say so. Are we clear?”

“Clear, sir,” the constable croaked, embarrassed. He jerked his head at the second constable, who hurried away to make certain the Comfreys’ physician was denied access to the crime scene.

“Excellent. Now lead us to the victim.”

Taking a deep breath, the pale young constable turned and guided Hetheridge and Kate out of the mud room, through an old-fashioned scullery and a gleaming white-tiled kitchen, outfitted with every conceivable modern appliance. From there, they entered an oak-paneled corridor dominated by a steep, narrow staircase – the upstairs route intended, in another era, only for servants. At the foot of the stairs, the odor of vomit was sharper, and beneath it lurked two fainter smells Hetheridge knew intimately – the coppery scent of blood, and the sweet, sickening tang of burnt human flesh.

As the constable started up the stairs, Hetheridge paused, gesturing for Kate to precede him. Still engrossed in note-taking, those hazel eyes widened as they had in the elevator, when he first insisted on letting her precede him. Then she scooted in front of Hetheridge, ascending the stairs with a quick, light tread. Smiling to himself, Hetheridge followed behind somewhat more slowly, ignoring the twinge of protest from his left knee. Arthritis, he had long ago learned, could only be managed with two things: denial, and an absolute refusal to stop moving.

At the top of the landing, the constable veered right, stopping before an open door. “In here, sir.”

Kate, only a meter away from the young man, raised her eyebrows. Hetheridge glanced from the blonde constable to Kate, then pointedly back at her, as if inquiring, do you see what I see? The constable, rather slow on the uptake, caught on to Hetheridge’s rebuke at last, clearing his throat.

“Sir and ma’am,” he corrected. His two-way radio blared, and the constable, looking relieved, turned aside to listen to his fellow officer’s question.

Kate was smiling at Hetheridge, eyebrows still raised.

“I don’t like to see my junior team members treated with disrespect,” Hetheridge said, “male or female.”

“Not sure it had anything to do with me being female, at least not this time,” Kate replied in the cheeky tone that came so naturally to her. “Not when you swept in with that voice and that ice-blue glare, Lord Hetheridge himself, scaring the hell out of everyone, and in a tuxedo, no less. Of course, poor little DS Sod-All faded right into the woodwork.” Fitting the smart phone’s stylus into its slot, Kate tucked the device into her coat pocket. “I’ll take thorough notes on everything, I promise. But first I want to see the scene, you know, really see it, without trying to distill it into words at the same time.”

Hetheridge nodded, hiding his approval. He wanted to see how Kate functioned without influencing her actions. Expression neutral, he gestured once again for her to enter first, then followed her into the library.

Both the library’s lamps were still burning. One, an amber-shaded banker’s lamp, cast a wedge of light across a roll-top desk swamped with papers. The other lamp, a tall, golden Art Deco torchiere, illuminated the center of the room. On either side of the torchiere, two leather wingback chairs were placed, facing a brass-screened fireplace. The fire, wood rather than electric, had guttered down to sullen red embers. Crumpled before those embers was a man’s body, on its knees before the long marble hearth.

The victim, Comfrey, looked as if he’d died while flailing out of the chair. The victim’s hands, loose at his sides, were bloodied and scored with black streaks. Similar marks marred his throat, and black marks scored his shoulders, where his shirt had offered only slight protection. Comfrey was propped against the chair, his head thrown back. Ordinarily a corpse in such a position would fall forward, pulled down by the head’s dead weight. In this case, the weapon that had dealt those injuries to Comfrey’s hands, chest, and neck, a brass poker from the hearth’s collection of fire irons, had been driven into his right eye. The poker had been shoved into the skull with enough force to leave it sticking out of the eye socket. And the poker had sufficient heft to keep Comfrey’s head thrown back, maintaining his body in the kneeling position, hands loose at his sides like a supplicant.

Hetheridge, absorbing the details of the corpse, nearly missed the soft sound beside him. Glancing over, he took in Kate’s ashen face and tight mouth, and knew she had never been exposed to such a crime scene before. Beads of sweat had broken out across her upper lip, and her hands were clenched awkwardly in front of her.

“I need assurance this wasn’t a home invasion,” Hetheridge snapped, in a tone that suggested Kate had been seriously delinquent. Immediately, her hands unclenched, and her gaze shot to him, startled.

“Examine the balcony. Check behind those curtains and see if the windows have been disturbed. Then go downstairs and inspect the ground beneath the balcony. Determine what tools or physical skills would have been necessary for an intruder to enter from that balcony.”

Nodding, Kate moved toward the balcony. It was several paces away, and Hetheridge hoped the fresh air wafting in through the still-open French doors would be enough to steady her. Violent death was hard enough to view, to catalog, to study. But it was the smell of it, the blood and the shit and the piss, that brought such a death home to Hetheridge – that gripped him viscerally, making him imagine he might actually die the same death, if he contemplated it long enough.

Hetheridge wandered slowly around the room. He kept to a tight path, taking no extra steps and – despite the blue gloves – touching nothing. Until CID finished with the scene, he was hesitant to do anything that might compromise their efforts. Instead, Hetheridge visually inspected the roll-top desk, which was stacked with unopened mail, some handwritten papers, and what appeared to be business reports. He examined the small round table positioned between Comfrey’s wingback and the torchiere lamp. A book had been put there, closed, the reader’s place held by a tasseled book mark. A drink sat beside the book: two fingers of amber liquid in a crystal glass. Both book and glass were spotted with red pinpricks of blood and flecked with what was probably flesh.

Hetheridge turned back to the dead man. Had he been introduced to Comfrey, during one of those endless social obligations, sometime in the last ten or twenty years? The name still nagged at him. Hetheridge, who prided himself on his excellent powers of recollection, hated admitting he had forgotten something, even to himself.

Comfrey’s face had taken the brunt of the assault. If Hetheridge had ever been introduced to the man, he had no chance of recognizing him now. The man’s nose was flattened, hit so often white bone showed through the mess of flesh. His front teeth were broken off. And the smell of burnt skin and hair emphasized the obvious – the killer’s poker had come directly from the fire.

Hetheridge had studied the requisite psychology of the homicidal individual from books and scholarly papers, as well as from life experience, but in this case, advanced powers of psychiatric deduction seemed unnecessary. This killer was no intruder-stranger. This killer knew Comfrey, and vented his rage – his or her rage, Hetheridge corrected himself dutifully – on Comfrey’s face, as killers so often did when the motivation was intensely personal.

Hetheridge glanced at his Rolex. He believed he’d been examining the scene for five to ten minutes, and was startled to learn he’d spent nearly a half-hour in the library. The blonde constable, whom Hetheridge had nearly forgotten, was still waiting just outside the door, looking strained and eager for dismissal.

“Constable,” Hetheridge called. “Were you sick in this room?”

“No, sir,” the man replied, taking a reluctant step into the library. “I made it outside. It was Mrs. Comfrey, sir. She found the body, was sick, and called 999.”

“Of course,” Hetheridge said. He took a last look around the library, then smiled at the constable, amused to see that the man did not relax at all. He recalled Kate’s characterization of him in his evening dress, sweeping into a murder scene to terrify hardworking young officers. Surely, she exaggerated.

“Take me to Mrs. Comfrey and her daughter, please.”

This time, the constable led Hetheridge down the grand staircase, scarlet-carpeted, oak-banistered, and lit by a glittering crystal chandelier. From there, they entered the parlor, a gracious and airy room with modern furniture, mostly white, and bowls of yellow chrysanthemums. Kate stood near the cold fireplace, composed again, tapping on her smart phone. Two women sat on the long white sofa. A slim, angular brunette in her late teens or early twenties, presumably Jules Comfrey, turned toward Hetheridge as he entered. Her face was pale, but he saw no tell-tale splotches of redness to indicate she’d been crying. Another woman, also brunette but older and softer-faced, glanced at Hetheridge and froze, her hand going to her throat.

“Tony,” she cried, rising from the sofa. “Oh, Tony, thank God it’s you. Malcolm’s dead. What am I going to do?”