The Blissfully Dead Read Free Page A

around the welts, and also around her vagina. The smell of perfume coming off her was intense.
    ‘I think he sprayed her with perfume – in the cuts.’
    Carmella stared as he pointed.
    ‘He cut her, then sprayed perfume into the open wounds.’ He kept his voice even. ‘He tortured her.’
    Patrick noticed a patch of blood on the pillow beneath her head and stepped around the bed. The hair at the back of her scalp was matted with blood, where she had apparently been struck with a heavy object, or banged against a wall.
    He caught Carmella’s eye. Her own shock was morphing now into something else. Determination. He nodded and they left the room, just as the scene of crime officers – the SOCOs – arrived. Patrick and Carmella headed back down the corridor, Gareth following . They would leave the SOCOs to do their job.

    Thirty minutes later Patrick and Carmella sat in a conference room on the ground floor, the cleaner who had found the body sitting across from them. The room was dry and hot and smelled of Shake ’N’ Vac. Patrick was sweating, his white shirt sticking to him, but the cleaner, whose name was Mosope Adeyemi, was cool, leaning back in her chair like she was about to interview them for a job. She was an attractive woman, with large, bright eyes and long limbs that Patrick fleetingly imagined wrapped around him.
    ‘Where are you from?’ Carmella asked. Patrick had asked her to conduct this interview while he made notes.
    ‘I live in Teddington.’
    Carmella smiled. ‘I meant originally.’
    ‘Abuja, Nigeria. I was a teacher over there, you know. Now I clean rooms, make beds.’
    ‘For how long?’
    Mosope twisted her lips. ‘Hmmm, a year. Just over.’ She leaned forwards conspiratorially. ‘The people who come to this hotel, they are disgusting. Animals. And they never leave tips.’
    ‘Can you walk us through what happened this morning?’ Carmella said.
    The woman sighed. ‘I’d already cleaned half the rooms on that floor, apart from the ones where the guests were still in their rooms, like lazy pigs.’
    ‘This was, what, just after ten?’
    ‘Ten fifteen. I checked the time after I found the girl, because I knew you’d ask.’
    ‘That’s very thoughtful of you. Why did you go into room 365 if it was unoccupied?’
    ‘Because I smelled the perfume.’ She screwed up her nose. ‘ Terrible . Cheap. It was coming under the door, the smell. I was curious, so I went in, saw the girl on the bed and came straight out again. That’s it.’
    ‘Did you see anything strange in the room? Anything different?’
    She tipped her head. ‘You mean apart from the dead white girl on the bed?’
    Patrick liked this woman, wanted to engage with her. But he stayed silent, letting Carmella continue. ‘I mean . . . You clean these rooms every day. You know how they look. Apart from the body, did you notice anything unusual, anything that struck you?’
    Mosope thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Apart from the smell, no.’
    ‘You didn’t move or remove anything?’
    ‘No, of course not.’
    ‘Did you see anyone in the vicinity of the room this morning?’
    ‘Just guests coming in and out of some of the other rooms.’ She paused. ‘There were no clothes on the floor of room 365. You noticed that? I guess he took them with him.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Like a souvenir.’

Chapter 3
Day 1 – Patrick
    A t the beginning of a murder case, Patrick’s first job was to consider the obvious. A woman beaten to death at home – look at the husband or boyfriend. A youth knifed in the street – check out gang affiliations. So here was a young girl murdered in a hotel room. Less straightforward, but the obvious first action was to check the list of guests and staff. Find out who was in the hotel at the time of the murder.
    DS Gareth Batey was waiting in reception, chatting to one of the security guards, a black man with a belly like a department store Santa. As Patrick and Carmella entered the