The Domino Killer Read Free Page B

walked alongside. ‘Footprints heading away, where the attacker had stepped in the blood. And it was dripping from something. If it’s the victim’s blood, that suggests a weapon. If it was on his hands, he’d have wiped it on his clothes.’
    ‘Unless the victim got some strikes in first,’ Sam said. ‘There might be some of the attacker’s DNA on those spots.’
    ‘This is going to get expensive if we don’t get lucky,’ Brabham said. ‘Analysing each swab to see who the blood belongs to will take some approving.’
    Sam knew how budgets were stretched, and getting authority for forensic submissions got harder with every case. Murder trumps everything, but money spent on one case means less for another. Policing wasn’t just about feet on the beat.
    ‘Any missing persons reports yet?’ Sam said.
    ‘Someone’s checking,’ Brabham said. ‘But if he’s married, his wife might have put it down to another dirty stop-out.’
    ‘If there’s no call from a worried wife, don’t you think it helps to rule her out?’ Charlotte said. ‘If she was behind it, wouldn’t she be play-acting the frightened wife, sitting at home and calling it in?’
    ‘Not if he’s given himself an alibi,’ Brabham said. ‘Working away, that kind of thing. His fingerprints might help, or DNA, but he might not be the sort to get into trouble. When we find out, though, I want you to go through his life, every detail, however small.’
    Sam was pleased with that. His area of expertise had always been financial fraud, picking through the fine detail, looking for patterns. In cases like this, with husbands playing around, changes in behaviour gave up the secret.
    ‘I’ll start with those,’ Sam said, pointing towards the flowers. ‘I’ll go round the florists, see who sold some of those flowers yesterday. What are they?’
    ‘Calla lilies,’ Charlotte said, and then, ‘Why can’t men ever identify flowers?’
    Sam smiled as he pulled down the zip on his white suit and pulled out his phone. He took a photograph of the paper that the flowers were wrapped in. ‘I’ll think about that as I ring round.’
    Brabham nodded his approval as he turned to go.
    Identifying the body was the most important thing, although finding the answer just meant that someone somewhere was about to receive bad news, and be left for ever wondering what her husband was doing in a park, holding a bunch of flowers.

Four
    Joe sat in his car outside his mother’s house. The police station was fresh in his memory. The smells from the custody suite – sweat and bleach – were still on his clothes, but that wasn’t what lingered. It was something much worse.
    It was the sneer Mark Proctor wore throughout his police interview, always looking at Joe, not at the officer, as if he knew what Joe was thinking. Surely he couldn’t know – he wouldn’t have asked for Honeywells if he knew. No, it was something else, as though he harboured a secret, as though he was the only clever one in the room.
    But it all came back to something else, and that was Joe’s memory of Proctor from years before.
    He stepped out of the car and walked slowly up the path to his mother’s front door. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find when he got there but he felt the need to go back to where it had started.
    His mother still lived in the home he’d grown up in, a once happy family home, a semi-detached behind a low garden wall where he’d lived with his parents, his older brother Sam, and his younger sister Eleanor. Or Ellie, as she’d preferred it.
    As he walked up to the door, the familiar sights calmed him, flooding his mind with images. Playing in the road with Sam; chalking arrows onto the pavement so he could follow. Falling out with neighbours over lost footballs and those slow walks to school. All of that innocence was lost when Ellie died. From then, the house seemed to be in shadow, always an unhappy place; even Ruby couldn’t brighten it.
    So Joe had run