The Watcher

I’ll try both, she decided, pragmatically. Quite simple really.

5

The house was huge, mock-Tudor, or perhaps genuine Tudor, given its size and position, on the brow of a hill at the top of a gently sloping fifty-metre-long gravelled drive that cut off from Blackheath Lane on the outskirts of the village of Walderton. Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons had driven through the village itself on the way here from his home in Chichester, and though it was knocking three in the morning, the gibbous moon’s cool light had illuminated a poster-child English village, chocolate-box quaint with its whitewashed, flower-basket-bedecked pub, crooked, tiled houses with leadlight windows and a neat, triangular village green on which cricket would doubtless be played and Pimm’s drunk in the summer. All very beautiful and yet even Dr Ghoshal’s morgue held more appeal for Marilyn. The mere thought of living in a Marplesque village such as this one, where everyone made it their express business to know everyone else’s, brought him out in hives.

Crunching his ancient Z3 to a stop on the sweep of gravel drive in front of the house, Marilyn cut the engine. Tilting his head back, he let his eyes drift closed for a brief moment and tried to focus his mind on the blank pink insides of his eyelids. He didn’t yet know what he would encounter behind the ornate facade of this grand house, but from DC Darren Cara’s panicked voice on the radio, it wasn’t going to be rose-garden pretty. Snapping his eyes open, he pushed open the driver’s door and climbed out. Though he had managed barely three hours’ sleep, he felt fine, good even, he’d venture to say. His puritanical new approach to life seemed, unfortunately, to be serving him well.

He was far from the first attendee at the crime scene. Piccadilly Circus would doubtless be quieter at three in the morning. Six members of Burrows’ CSI team were clustered around the forensics van, getting suited and booted on the gravel drive. Beyond them, DC Cara was pacing across the expansive, pillared and porticoed porch, his baggy forensic overshoes inflating and deflating in time with each stressed step, as if linked to miniature pairs of bellows. Marilyn was pretty sure it wasn’t only the bleaching effect of the moon’s cold light that had boil-washed the colour from his face.

‘What have we got, Cara?’

‘Murder, Guv.’

Marilyn drily raised an eyebrow. ‘I got that far myself, thank you, Detective Constable.’

Cara didn’t smile, not even a flicker to massage his superior officer’s ego. ‘Double murder. A married couple, early forties. The man is called Hugo Fuller and his wife is Claudine. She was found floating face down in the swimming pool and he was tied to a lounger and stabbed, through the, uh—’ He stopped speaking to clear his throat.

‘Through the …?’

‘Uh, through … through the eye.’ Despite the throat-clearing, his voice was a parched croak. ‘Both eyes actually.’

‘Lovely.’ Marilyn suppressed the ghost of a twenty-five-years-on-the-job, seen-it-all, cynical smile. Cara had transferred from Traffic to Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes just over a year ago, and though they had dealt with a few sexual assaults, a couple of adult murders and a particularly traumatic child murder during that time, Cara hadn’t seen any of the bodies in situ, at the crime scenes. He was now undergoing Major Crimes’ equivalent of a baptism, though to be fair to the kid, this one sounded like baptism by fire.

‘Who found them?’ Marilyn asked.

‘One of Surrey and Sussex’s dog teams. They were called out to retrieve a husky that was tied to a lamp post in the middle of Walderton. Some old lady was woken by it barking. The dog had a tag on its collar. There was no answer at the door, but the dog team said that they saw a light on around the side of the house. The garden wraps around the house, there’s no fence dividing the front from the back, and the lawn slopes down from this floor on the brow of the hill, to the basement level at the back.’ He raised a gloved hand and flapped it behind him, indicating where a gravel path cut off the sweep of gravel drive and curved around the right side of the house, out of sight. ‘They followed the path, down the hill, to the indoor swimming pool. The lights were on inside and the walls are all glass.’

‘Do we have any information on the couple?’

‘Yes, sir. Hugo Fuller runs … ran a property business. Buying freeholds and living off the ground rent, something like that. It’s very lucrative.’

Marilyn surveyed the enormous Arts and Crafts facade. ‘Clearly.’

‘And his wife supports a few local animal charities.’

‘You’re well informed, Cara.’

‘They’re high profile in the local area. I’ve read about them a few times, Guv.’

‘Read about them? In what?’

‘Sussex Life.’

Marilyn pulled a face. ‘Sussex Life?’

‘It’s good to be plugged in,’ Cara said, with a note of defensiveness. ‘Learn about the area I’m working in, the people. I didn’t grow up around here.’ It was an unnecessary statement. Cara’s accent was pure London, his heritage multi-racial: Barbadian father and white-Irish mother. It didn’t take a genius to work out that he hadn’t grown up in this bastion of lily-white Englishness. ‘You might have seen pictures of the Fullers in the Sussex Society pages,’ he continued. ‘They’re in there all the time at one function or another.’

Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘Do I look like someone who reads the society pages? Any society pages?’

DC Cara looked at his boss. Nicknamed Marilyn, after Marilyn Manson – a moniker his colleagues had bestowed on him the first day he joined the force and that had dogged him ever since – because of his disconcerting, one azure-blue, one brown, mismatched eyes and his penchant for dressing head to toe in black, he did not, in any way, look like someone who read the society pages.

‘No, Guv,’ muttered Cara, suitably admonished.

6

Marilyn followed Cara into the hallway, stepping gingerly onto polished cream marble, ice-rink slippery under his forensic overshoes. The whole ground floor of his Georgian terraced house could have fitted snugly into the Fullers’ hallway. A gargantuan gold-framed mirror occupied the lion’s share of the wall dead ahead, making midgets of Marilyn and Cara even as they walked towards it. They passed the door to a playing-field-sized sitting room to their left, all gold damask sofas and thick white shag-pile rugs; a dark study space to their right, bedecked with heavy oak bookshelves lined with pristine leather-bound hardbacks, none of which looked as if they had ever been touched let alone read; a walnut kitchen next, bifold doors beyond the island opening out onto what Marilyn assumed was the garden, although it was too dark to tell. A wide cream marble staircase, adorned with an intricately sculpted gold banister, curved away to the upper floors and a chandelier that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a banqueting hall in Buckingham Palace hung from the ceiling above, throwing shards of tinkling light around the pale vanilla walls. The decor bellowed from the rooftops: Footballers’ Wives. The Fullers were clearly overburdened with wealth, but not much taste.

On doctor’s orders, Marilyn had been teetotal for the past twenty-nine days – Not that I’m counting every single, painful bloody minute – and as he followed Cara carefully across the hall floor, approaching his own Lilliputian reflection in the Fullers’ mirror, he had to acknowledge that it was doing him good. He looked, if not quite ten years younger, certainly a solid few months – and at his age, forty-nine now, three months away from his fiftieth and dreading the relentless downward slide that he was sure his next birthday would herald, he’d take those. He’d take a week, a day, a few minutes. Seconds. It had got to him, that impending birthday. Hanging over him like the ageist sword of Damocles.

‘As I said before, the garden slopes downstairs, front to back,’ Cara said, as he stopped at the top of a set of cream marble stairs that descended to a basement level. ‘There’s a wine cellar, gym, sauna and swimming pool on the level below this one, but it’s not underground.’

The hallway at the bottom of the stairs was a quarter the size of the main hallway, with a matching cream marble floor and pale vanilla walls, and lit by a mini-me chandelier. Racks of wine bottles were visible through dark double glass doors to their left – the wine cellar, Marilyn supposed, de rigueur in this kind of residence – a gym straight ahead, equipped with more torture equipment than Marilyn had ever felt the need to use in his life, and a frosted-glass doorway to the right, which Cara pushed through, holding it open behind him.

The changing room area they entered was operatingtheatre bright from rows of recessed spots, two more clear glass doors to their left revealing a sauna and steam room. An open archway dead ahead led to the swimming pool, their dual figures reflected, Lilliputian once again, in the wall of black glass beyond the placid blue rectangle of water.

Cara stopped just this side of the archway and held out an arm. ‘Hugo Fuller is to your left, Guv. Claudine Fuller in the pool, also to your left. Neither of them have been touched or moved.’ He pressed himself against the wall, giving Marilyn space to go first; not, Marilyn suspected, out of deference. Cara had clearly had more than his fill at the first viewing, and as Marilyn stepped through the archway, into the foliage-lined Caribbean-warm glass orangery that housed the twenty-five-metre swimming pool, and saw the horror show that was Hugo Fuller, he appreciated exactly why.

Jesus Christ.

The man was reclining on a wooden steamer chair, facing the pool, the wall of glass and the dark garden beyond. Facing. Staring. Sightless. His eye sockets were filled with, what – mush, was the word that instantly popped into Marilyn’s mind, pure mush – his face a mask of coagulating burgundy blood. Blood coated his bare chest, had soaked the lapels of the white towelling robe swathing his corpulent frame and pooled sloppily into his lap. But it wasn’t his eye sockets, horrendous as they were, that hitched the breath in Marilyn’s throat. It was the scratches, gouges more accurately, deep vertical gouges that ran from his hairline down his face, through his eye sockets – had they done that to his eyes? – before furrowing down his cheeks to his chin. He looked as if he had been savaged by a wild beast. Marilyn swallowed, forcing down the rising bile, as subtly as he could.

‘So that’s Mr Fuller,’ he said, in the absence of anything else popping into his brain. ‘What about the wife?’

He turned, grateful for the opportunity to look away, his gaze fixing with relief on Mrs Fuller. Claudine, Cara had said. She was fully dressed still in dark jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt, raw silk, expensive – ruined now, Marilyn thought ridiculously – floating face down in the swimming pool, her blonde hair fanning out in pale, seaweed tendrils around her head, a meaty patch on the back of her head where, despite the water, the blonde tendrils were matted with blood. Dead, without question, unless she was a champion breath-holder. Cause of death? Marilyn didn’t want, or need, to speculate. That wasn’t his job.

He turned at the sound of ponderous footsteps – his lead CSI, Tony Burrows, looking tired, his moon face puffy with recently vanquished sleep.

‘Burrows, good morning. Welcome.’

‘Even sparrows are not farting at this ungodly hour, Marilyn.’

‘Perils of the job, Tony.’

‘Indeed.’ Stifling a yawn with the back of one latex-gloved hand, his gaze moved past Marilyn’s left shoulder to find Claudine Fuller. ‘Poor woman.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Leave the bodies where they are. I want Dr Flynn to see the scene as we found it. This isn’t normal.’

Burrows grimaced. ‘Can any murder really be classed as normal?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Unfortunately, it’s a long time since anything about human nature surprised me.’

Marilyn shook his head and stepped aside, so that Burrows could view the horror that was Hugo Fuller. ‘No, this, Tony, this is something else altogether.’

7

Jessie felt as if she was swimming upwards through black treacle. She surfaced, her ears tuning to the nagging sound of her mobile’s ring, her eyes flickering open, shut, sticking shut. She forced them open again, her brain lagging way behind, lost in that treacle of dense, muggy, hungover sleep. The room was pitch-black, no telltale leak of light from below the curtains. Twisting sideways, she fumbled her mobile from the bedside table.

‘Marilyn.’

‘You’re needed, Dr Flynn.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.’

‘Oh God, that early.’

‘For a double murder, even I get up in the middle of the night.’

Double murder. ‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. As soon as you can. I’ll text you the address.’

Silence on the end of the line; the only sound, Callan snoring softly beside her. Odd that the telephone hadn’t woken him. Usually he was bolt upright at any noise courtesy of the antennae that came with his job as a military policeman. Always on call, even when he was fast asleep. And he had driven them to dinner last night, so he didn’t even have ‘hangover’ as an excuse like she did. She gave him a soft kiss on the shoulder, feeling the warmth of his skin against her lips, sucking in his scent for a brief, calming moment before twisting away, wincing at the chill air that wrapped around her as she climbed quietly out of bed.

It was at times like this that she questioned her own sanity at ever having got involved with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes and Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons. Though, to be fair, it hadn’t been a well-deliberated choice, far more the employment equivalent of boiling a frog. A couple of the cases she had worked on while a clinical psychologist with the Defence Psychology Service had overlapped with civilian cases that Marilyn had been working on, and she had ended up helping him, proving herself far more adept at understanding criminals’ psychology than she had ever expected to be.

The second of those cases, last November, had been the one which had abruptly ended her army career. She glanced down at the scar that ran across her left palm from the knife attack, still raised and ugly, but faded to a deep brown, no longer the furious purple that had goaded her for so many months. And though her fingers would never be dexterous, her repaired extensor tendons were functioning now, more or less, and her hand no longer felt like the grotesque hand of a mannequin. Her dismissal from the army had pretty much coincided with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes’ last criminal psychologist, Dr Butter, retiring, and the rest, as they say, was history. It filled a gap for both her and Marilyn and, like the scar on her hand, her hankering for her old job was fading, the only connection she now had with the military the man currently asleep in her bed.

The ping of a text arriving shook her back to the present. Double murder. Shit, she needed to switch her brain on and get moving.

In the dark, she fumbled some clothes from the cupboard and took them into the bathroom where she splashed warm water on her face, cleaned her teeth, and shucked on jeans and a navy V-neck jumper, the latter fraying at the sleeves where she’d chewed it in a misguided attempt to stop chewing her nails. Never mind, she didn’t imagine that Marilyn’s invitation required a designer ensemble.

Downstairs, she pulled on her trainers and reached to the key rack for her Mini keys, finding an empty space. Callan’s car was in the garage for its annual service, and he’d borrowed her Mini yesterday. He had learnt to line his shoes on the shoe rack, almost as precisely as she lined up her own, even though she knew that if it was his own house, he’d kick them off in a muddy heap on the doormat. The shoes he managed, to assuage her OCD; the keys were a bridge too far. Shoving her hand in his coat pocket, her fingers closed around a folded envelope which she pulled out so that she could reach back in for the keys tucked beneath it.

The thick white hallmarked envelope sprang open in her hand revealing the crest of the Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit, Frimley Park Hospital. Callan had told her that his only contact with his neurologist was now six-monthly check-ups and he’d last been a couple of months ago. His brain, the bullet, all fine – he’d told her – so why the letter? Her gaze flicked to the stairs: no sound, the landing in darkness. She could read the letter, shove it back and he’d be none the wiser.

Her fingers itched as she felt the rough edge of the torn envelope. He hadn’t been honest with her, so she had a right to read it, didn’t she? But then an image rose in her mind, watching her mother standing in the dark hallway of her family home, glancing furtively over her shoulder to check that she was alone – as she had just done – then searching her father’s coat pockets, the two outside, the one inside, finding nothing, sagging, physically sagging with thwarted frustration, ducking down and rifling through his briefcase, more frustration, more repressed, suppressed fury. Watching again, months later, as her mother frantically, blatantly, right in front of her, searched his pockets and briefcase again, knowing in her heart that her husband was having an affair, being stonewalled, told she was delusional, unhinged.

Her mother had been right of course. Jessie’s father had been sneaking around behind her back for more than two years by the time she had found irrevocable proof, stoking his affair with Diane while his wife cared for their desperately sick eight-year-old son. Living with suspicion had destroyed the remaining soft parts of her that hadn’t already been destroyed by her son’s illness. And seeing her mother, Jessie had promised herself that she would never live that way herself. But here she was, standing in a darkened hallway, Callan asleep upstairs, being suspicious, furtive. She couldn’t read his letter in secret, had to ask him about it. Her own intense obsession with privacy wouldn’t let her invade Callan’s, because she would be furious with him if he invaded hers. Stuffing the envelope back in a vague semblance of the way she had found it, she grabbed the keys, snatched her navy puffa from the coat rack and pulled open the door.

As soon as you can, Marilyn had said. What the hell was she going to face when she got there?

8

‘Can I go in alone?’

‘Alone?’

Jessie clocked the undercurrent of hurt in Marilyn’s tone and suppressed a smile. ‘You can accompany me, if you don’t speak. If one of your senses is occupied, by noise—’ A pause, the ghost of another smile. ‘Chatter, the other senses don’t work properly. And I need to focus so that I can—’

‘Get a sense?’ Marilyn cut in.

She met his gaze and grinned. ‘No flies on you, DI Simmons.’

Marilyn rolled his eyes. He was becoming acclimatized to her foibles, her need to immerse herself in the scene alone, or, at a minimum, in silence, to get a sense. In truth, he operated pretty much the same way himself, alone, in silence, trusting his intuition, usually just DS Sarah Workman, his quiet, dependable, supportive crutch, omnipresent. The last case he and Jessie had worked on together, only six short weeks ago – six weeks that felt a lifetime of disturbed sleep and self-recrimination long – she had operated the same way, frustrating him at times by how self-contained she was. The child murder – double child murder – had battered his emotions like no other case he had worked on in his twenty-five years with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, had dumped his confidence, his self-belief, in the garbage can. He had screwed up unforgivably, blamed himself, rightly in his opinion, for the death of that second child; a little girl he was sure could have been saved if he hadn’t missed the hole, that gaping black sinkhole, in his logic. Her death, that sinkhole, was the reason for his new-found teetotalism. He had felt compelled to offer his resignation, which had been turned down, his exemplary record deemed to have more than made up for that one mistake, however unforgivable a mistake he considered it to have been. But he had been grateful, as he was a walking cliché: the detective inspector with no life outside his job; he would have been rudderless without it.

‘Ready?’ Jessie asked.

She had hurriedly climbed into the forensic overalls and overshoes that one of Tony Burrows’ CSI team had handed her. Now she pulled her waist-length black hair into a messy bun, securing it with the band she habitually wore around her wrist for just such occasions and tucked the bun and stray strands into the overall’s elasticated hood.

Marilyn nodded. ‘I’m steeling myself for round two.’ He glanced behind him at Cara, who still looked paler than the Fullers’ shiny Dulux Pure Brilliant White painted front door. ‘DC Cara?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Marilyn ignored the waver in Cara’s voice, was happy to give the kid a break. He didn’t have a strong stomach himself at the best of times and was surprised, given the horror show awaiting them downstairs, that his own voice wasn’t wavering.

‘Listen and learn, Cara,’ he said, laying a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘Listen and learn from the maestro.’

Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Could you be any more patronizing?’ she cast quietly over her shoulder as she turned and crossed the pillared porch, Marilyn a step behind her, Cara following a few paces behind him.

‘Patronization is the glue in any successful hierarchy,’ he muttered back, with a wink. ‘When he’s an aged DI himself, I expect him to adopt the same condescending attitude, keep the minions from getting above their station.’

‘To me, I meant, DI Simmons, not to him.’

‘You can handle it, Dr Flynn,’ he muttered, as he followed her over the threshold, into the Sussex house of horrors. ‘Oh, and just for the record, I don’t chatter.’

9

The house was a monument to opulence, an Aladdin’s cave of gilded gold everywhere – staircase, mirror frames, bowls and statuettes – that caught the light cast from the elephantine chandelier’s myriad dangling crystals and threw it around in diamond spangles. Should have brought my sunglasses.

‘Walk down the length of the hall and take the stairs, dead ahead, to the level below,’ Marilyn called out.

Jessie moved gingerly down the hallway as instructed – the combination of overshoes and polished marble life-and-death slippery – past a determinedly masculine study lined with leather-bound volumes (for show, she found herself thinking), a lavishly decorated sitting room, gold photographs adorning a marble mantelpiece (most featuring a stunning white dog with ice-blue eyes, no children visible), then finally a massive kitchen doubtless designed and constructed by some high-end designer she’d never heard of and had no interest in ever hearing of.

A draught at the bottom of the stairs she’d descended from the hallway to the level below pulled her attention to a door that gaped open, revealing a sunken patio area that segued, via a flight of wide curved stone steps, to the manicured lawn above. Woods hemmed the lawn on all sides, thick and dark, unpenetrated by the deep orange rays of the dawn light. The corpulent form of Tony Burrows, Marilyn’s lead CSI, clad in a white forensic onesie overall identical to the one she was wearing, just a good few sizes larger, squatted on the patio.

‘We believe that he approached the house through the woods,’ Marilyn said, as they stepped outside.

‘He?’

‘Burrows found a couple of muddy footprints on the patio. Men’s. They’re not Mr Fuller’s.’

‘What size are they?’