paper boiler suit and a pair of gloves. ‘You’d better wear this,’ she said. ‘Not that you’re going to be disturbing much evidence.’
Healy took the suit.
Inside the flat, a series of stand-alone lights had been erected, their glare washing into the corridor. Apart from the buzz of a generator, the apartment was pretty much silent. The occasional click of a camera. A mumble from one of the forensic team. Brief noises from other flats. Otherwise, nothing.
After zipping up the boiler suit and pulling up the hood, Healy moved into the flat. It was just like the ones the other victims had lived in. Run-down. Squalid. Damp. In the kitchen, which led off from the living room, a big brown watermark had formed on the linoleum. Healy spotted DCI Melanie Craw looking around inside. There was a door off the living room, opening on to a bedroom. Chief Superintendent Ian Bartholomew stood in the doorway, the bed in front of him. He looked back at Healy, a pissed-off expression on his face, then to Craw, who’d arrived from the kitchen.
‘Melanie,’ he said. ‘What the bloody hell am I supposed to tell the media?’
Bartholomew backed out of the bedroom and let Healy take it in. The crime scene. A small bedroom with a tiny walk-in closet, a dresser, and a television on a chair in the corner of the room. The carpet was worn, the wallpaper peeling. On the pillow, placed in a neat pile, was the victim’s hair. He’d shaved it all off, just like all the others, and left it there. The mattress was where the body should have been.
But that was just the problem.
He never left the bodies.
PART ONE
1
12 June
Her office was on the top floor of a red-brick four-storey building just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The other floors belonged to an advertising agency and a big international media company. Two code-locked glass doors protected sharp-suited executives from the outside world, while a security guard the size of a wrestler watched from inside. Everything else in the street was either dead or dying. Two empty stores, one a shoe shop, one an antiques dealer, had long since gone. Adjacent to that was a boarded-up Italian restaurant with a huge NOW CLOSED sign in the window. The last man standing was a video rental store that looked like it was on its way out: two men were arguing in an empty room with only a single DVD rack and some faded film posters for company.
It was a warm June evening. The sun had been out all day, although somewhere out of sight it felt like rain might be lying in wait. I’d brought a jacket, just in case, but for the moment I was in a black button-up shirt, denims and a pair of black leather shoes I’d bought in Italy. They were the genuine article, from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, but I didn’t wear them much; mostly their purpose in life was to cut my feet to shreds. Yet they were a sacrifice worth making for the woman I was meeting.
Liz emerged from one of the elevators in the foyer about fifteen minutes later. People had been filing out of the building steadily since five, but the office she worked in was also the office she ran, so she tended to be the last one out. She spotted me immediately, standing in the doorway of the now-defunct antiques shop, and I was struck by how beautiful she looked: dark eyes flashing as she smiled, long, chocolate hair pulled back from a face full of natural angles. Elizabeth Feeny, solicitor advocate, had thrived in a city packed with dominant males: she’d gone up against bigger fish and won; she’d taken their clients and retained them; she’d brought together a team of formidable lawyers under the umbrella of Feeny & Company and she’d fronted a number of high-profile cases that had secured her growing reputation. It would have been difficult not to be impressed by her, even if I hadn’t been seeing her for eight months and living next door to her for a lot longer. She completely looked the part, moving across the road towards me in a white blouse and black pencil skirt that traced the gentle curves of her body. But her biggest asset was that when she smiled, she made you feel like the only person in the room. That was a useful skill when you were pacing the floor of a court.