Chapter 3
Chapter Three
McCaffrey stood at attention in front of my desk in my poky office, where my new fridge hummed as it cooled numerous essential cans of Dr Pepper. Her natural red hair was tied back in a ponytail rather than in her usual bun, and she looked the wrong side of tired.
‘McCaffrey, what have you got for me?’ I asked.
‘I canvassed the area thoroughly around Lord Marlow’s residence but unfortunately no one saw anyone enter or exit the property.
Of the nearest neighbours, a satyr took a sleeping draught and the other – a Common realmer – sleeps with earplugs in.
Neither heard a thing. A number of the residents on the street were out of their properties at the time of the initial canvass, so I’ll return later this evening. ’
I checked the time; we were close to 2pm already.
‘Have you had some refs?’ I asked with concern. We couldn’t have our staff operating on empty, especially with the long hours we frequently pulled. Fuelling the body was a must, though I was fuelled primarily by Dr Pepper.
‘No ma’am,’ McCaffrey confirmed, looking like a pixie could push her over.
‘All right, grab some food and take an hour. After that, I want you to see Ji-ho and get him to dig into Marlow. I want to know everything about the victim, down to whether he was a boxers or briefs man.’
‘You got it. Any news about our new digs?’
‘The DSU has closed the deal, and any day now we should get the green light to move into Number 1 Bridge Street.’
McCaffrey grinned, the smile reaching her blue eyes. ‘Still can’t believe we scored such a cool property.’
‘We’ll see how cool it is once we get in,’ I said cynically. ‘Old buildings always have their foibles.’ Not to mention uneven flooring. A lot of the old houses in Chester looked like someone half-drunk had done the flooring. Perhaps they had.
‘That’s half the fun. They have charm!’ McCaffrey said. ‘I bet it’s going to be fancier than my new home. Steeped in history versus a new-build.’
‘Right, you’re moving soon, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, tomorrow. I’ve got a day’s holiday to do the move.’
‘Hope it all goes okay for you. With it being a new-build, hopefully it’ll be plain sailing.’ I’d only had one house move, from my mum’s out to my rented flat. I still remembered the literal hell of carting boxes repeatedly up the stairs, though Rupe, Julian and Grant had helped.
‘Thanks, boss. Here’s hoping,’ she said cheerfully. McCaffrey looked around. ‘Where’s your bird? I like the little fella. He’s got sass.’
‘He went back home. Needed some rest.’ And didn’t that just stick in my craw? Something was off with my avian friend, but he refused to tell me anything about it, no matter how much I pressed.
In my downtime, I’d done some research on caladrii, hoping to get some insight, but so far I’d found little to nothing, mostly because there was hardly any information out there on the magical birds.
McCaffrey studied me, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a packet of jelly babies. ‘Want one?’
I really did, so I took a red one and enjoyed the sugar hit. ‘Thanks.’
‘Sure thing, boss. I’ll let you know what Ji-ho finds.’ She stood and exited my office, leaving the door open to reflect the brass’s open-door policy.
Shortly afterwards Laura came in with a report in hand. She flashed me a wide grin. ‘Channing’s first report. Our baby’s all grown up.’
‘Not quite,’ I muttered as I took it. I scanned the document and had to admit I was impressed. He’d dotted every i and crossed every t.
I signed it off and held it out to our admin assistant. ‘Thanks Laura. File it and copy it to the ME’s office and to Thackeray too please. He’ll want to know about this.’
‘He’s off today,’ she noted.
‘All the same.’ Thackeray lived and breathed the job, to his wife’s frustration.
I knew he checked his email even when he was off.
The man didn’t know what a work-life balance was.
Not that I could throw stones. I took cold files home for fun.
It had started with my dad’s files, but when I got nowhere fast, I started taking others home, trying to box them off.
I knew what it was like to need closure and have none.
I chewed on my lip as I once again thought of Jingo’s so-called ‘evidence’ he’d brought ’round to my apartment.
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been a copy of a crime scene photo I’d seen many times before, with one sole addition: a necklace clutched in Dad’s hand.
A necklace that hadn’t made its way into evidence, and a necklace that had been very carefully airbrushed or magicked out of the original photograph.
Or very carefully added in by Jingo.
I didn’t trust the man as far as I could throw him. He could have fabricated this whole thing to make me feel like I owed him. I’d put nothing past him.
I’d done extensive research on the pendant hanging from the chain.
It was a black circular talisman with three golden lines.
The bottommost was the longest, the middle line shorter, and the top not much more than a hyphen.
Together, they gave the impression of a half-drawn triangle.
And damned if I could find a single thing about it on the whole Connection database.
Was it a real clue, or was it an attempt by Jingo to draw my eyes elsewhere?
I wanted to distrust it, to dismiss it, yet I couldn’t. Deliberately misplaced evidence felt all too right for the Connection, the oft-times corrupt organisation I worked for. Knowing that corruption still lurked was the reason I hadn’t shown a soul the image.
Because if it was real … there was a reason someone had removed it from the photograph, and I was going to get to the bottom of it. And if Jingo was leading me on a goose chase, then I was going to make it my life’s mission to make his life a living hell until I could justifiably end it.
My email pinged – it was a message from Kate. She had some preliminary findings for me, so I left my office and collared Channing.
‘With me,’ I said brusquely. ‘We’re going to see the ME.’
I waited until he’d climbed into the car to say, ‘Good work on the report. Clean, relevant, to the point.’
‘I’ll save the poetry for Frost,’ he joked lightly.
‘Don’t mix business and pleasure,’ I warned him. ‘They don’t make good bedfellows.’
He grimaced. ‘I know you’re right, but she’s very lovely.’
‘She is. She can be your very lovely friend.’
He sighed but didn’t speak until we pulled up outside the ME’s office. ‘Did the ME give any hints about what she found in her email?’
‘No, just that she’d done some preliminary work.’
I pushed open the mortuary door and met Sharon’s steely gaze. ‘She’s expecting us,’ I said firmly.
The green-skinned dryad pushed back her glasses and glared at me.
‘One moment.’ She picked up her phone and dialled, waiting, presumably, until Kate picked up the line.
‘I have Inspector Wise and Detective Channing for you.’ She paused.
‘Of course, thank you.’ Sharon put the phone back in its cradle.
She stood, showing off a light cream suit that seemed more wedding than funeral. ‘Follow me.’
I swallowed my objections. If Sharon wanted to show me the way, she could damn well do so. Maybe she needed to get her step count in.
She eyed us both carefully. ‘Where’s the bird?’
‘At the circus,’ I lied flatly, because it was none of her damned business where Loki was.
She pressed her lips so tightly together that they almost disappeared. I resisted the urge to tell her it was a vast improvement.
She held open the door for us, and we slid into Kate’s domain. It was too corpsey to call an office, yet it had too much tech to merely call it a morgue. Kate was at a standing desk, typing away, but she turned and gave us a brilliant smile as we walked in.
‘Stacy, Detective Channing, come on in. That’ll be all, thank you, Sharon.’
Sharon sniffed and left, court shoes clicking on the tiles as she stomped away. She had a passive-aggressive walk. I’d rather tell people how I felt than use disdainful sniffs and prim heels to communicate my feelings.
Channing cleared his throat. ‘Call me Elliott,’ he offered.
Kate smiled. ‘Thank you, Elliott, and of course, you must call me Kate.’
‘This isn’t a social gathering,’ I said flatly. ‘Can we get to the corpse?’
‘She’s grumpy because an ogre killed him,’ Channing murmured in a conspiratorial aside to the ME.
‘Yes,’ Kate agreed, ‘that does put some extra pressure on her. We’ll have to see what we can do to help.’
‘I’m right here!’
Kate winked. ‘So you are. Come on then. Let’s get you back into your happy place. Let’s talk death.’
Kate had Lord Marlow laid out on a metal gurney.
He had a small modesty sheet over his groin, but the rest of him was laid bare.
She’d done some restoration work. After weighing all the organs, she’d put his entrails back where they belonged and performed some neat sutures to tidy up the body.
It still looked like an unholy mess, but markedly less so.
His tidied-up body made me think of the map of scars I carried.
My scars didn’t look so different from his – except I’d been lucky enough to survive them.
Various lines of thick puckered skin decorated my whole body, less neat, less artfully stitched, and far more inconvenient to explain on first dates.
‘Fast work,’ I commented.
‘Some pressure on me for this one too,’ she explained. ‘Politically, with Lord Marlow being a Symposium member, we’re going to want to achieve some results, fast. And even without that pressure, the wife is coming to identify the body shortly, and I wanted him as presentable as possible.’
‘You’ve done a great job,’ Channing offered. ‘If you draw the sheet up, you’d hardly know he’d died screaming.’
‘Yes,’ Kate said faintly. ‘Thanks for that, Elliott.’
‘What have you got for us?’ I asked, impatiently interrupting the niceties.