Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster emitted a weary sigh as he crouched over the woman’s corpse, arc lights in the garden bathing them both in bright light, anticipating the first light of dawn. During his convalescence, human nature had not taken a turn for the better. He rose to standing, wincing slightly at the bolt of pain searing up his leg from the metal plate holding his right shin together, then shuddered as he felt a cold cough of wind on the back of his neck. He’d not worn a coat, assuming when he was called and told of a woman’s murder at her house she would be found inside, and not outside on a small, slightly overgrown lawn. The throat had been cut. The body was framed by a wide slick of blood. He looked around the garden. The fences at all three sides were high, giving a degree of privacy, though the upstairs windows of the properties on both sides would have had a partial view. Young professional couples lived either side and got home after dark. Neither of them had seen the body. Still, to Foster it seemed the killer had taken a strange risk.
He returned to the house. The sitting room was neat and ordered, no signs of a struggle. Foster rubbed his face with his right hand. It was his first week back, early November. He’d insisted on being on call. The call had come that Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., four hours after the body had been discovered. He climbed into his old suit, realizing only then that he could fit his thumbs into the gap between his gut and the waistband, forcing him to dig out a belt and pull it to the tightest notch. It had been just over six months since he’d been tortured and beaten and saved only seconds from death. The thought of getting back on the job had kept him going during some long dark nights of the soul. During some nights, when the dreams were at their worst, Karl Hogg’s hot breath still in his nostrils, the excruciating pain as both tibia and fibula snapped under the weight of Hogg’s mallet, he’d thought this moment might never arrive.
But here he was; his first case back.
He had anticipated a gang killing, probably some hapless kid stabbed in the street in Shepherd’s Bush or Kensal Rise. Instead he’d got this – a woman lying dead in a garden, in a lavishly furnished Victorian terrace, on a quiet affluent street in Queen’s Park, a middle-class ghetto between Kensal Green and Kilburn.
Detective Inspector Heather Jenkins walked into the sitting room with a scene of crime photographer at her shoulder. ‘Mind if I . . .’ he said, motioning towards the garden nervously.
‘Fill your boots,’ Foster said.
He turned to Heather. Her hair was scraped and tied back off her face and she looked pale and worn. Bad news, he thought.
‘The victim’s name is Katie Drake,’ she said. ‘Thirtyseven years old. An actress. The neighbours two doors down found her. They had a set of keys. They were alerted by a friend of Katie’s after she and her daughter failed to turn up at an ice-skating rink to celebrate the daughter’s fourteenth birthday.’
Foster felt a shudder of apprehension. ‘And where’s the daughter?’