The Blissfully Dead (3 page)

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 lobby, Gareth came over and said, ‘I’ve asked about CCTV. They have it down here, in the lobby, but nowhere else in the hotel. I’ve told them we’ll need the tapes.’

‘OK.’

‘That’s the security guard who was on duty till midnight last night. Derek Childs. After that, a colleague’ – he consulted his notes – ‘Stavros Demetriou took over. Mr Childs says he didn’t see anything suspicious last night. No-one lurking around, nothing. I don’t have a picture of the deceased, but as soon as we get one I’ll check if he or Mr Demetriou saw her.’

Patrick nodded for him to continue.

‘What else? I’ve spoken to the station. They’re checking reports of missing persons, seeing if we can get an ID on the girl.’

‘Good.’

Heidi Shillingham, the manager, was waiting behind the
reception desk. He walked over to her, trying not to think about
Carmella’s
observation from earlier. Heidi had just put the phone down and was wringing her hands, her face creased with anxiety.

A smile flickered on her lips as he approached.

‘Detective.’

‘Mrs Shillingham . . .’

‘Miss. No-one’s managed to catch me yet.’

Well, don’t expect me to chase you
, thought Patrick. ‘I need that list of guests. Also, a full list of staff – everybody who works here, whether they were on shift yesterday or not.’

‘Yes, no problem.’ She hesitated.

‘What is it?’

‘Oh . . . I’ve just been on the phone to head office. We – they were wondering how long it would be before the body is removed and we can have the room back?’ She squirmed. ‘The hotel is fully booked tonight.’

Patrick sympathised. Heidi was no doubt getting shit from someone higher up. But it irritated him too, like the hotel wanted to check somebody into the dead girl’s grave.

‘I’m afraid it’s going to be a day or two before we can let anyone access the room.’

‘Oh dear. What about the floor? We can’t afford to have the
whole floor cordoned off . . .’

He shrugged. ‘Get me that list and hopefully we can get this resolved today. Then you can go back to business as usual.’

He walked past Derek, the security guard, and pushed out through the front doors into the bright but chilly morning. He took his e-cigarette out of his pocket and took a deep drag. The light flashed, indicating that it was out of charge, and he cursed it, wishing he could have a real cigarette. There was a newsagent over the road and the temptation to go and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights was dangerously strong.
Go on
, a devilish voice whispered.
You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.

You could be murdered by a maniac tomorrow
.

He resisted, checking his phone to distract himself. There was a text from Gill:
I need to talk to you x
. He sighed and put the phone back in his pocket. He would reply later, when he got a moment. He knew exactly what she would want to talk about. Them.
Bonnie. Th
eir situation. And at the heart of it were the red-hot questions: did he forgive her? Did they have a future? Or had any possible future died the night Gill had tried to kill their daughter?

The thing was, he would happily talk about it – if he knew the answers. If he knew what he wanted, if his heart and mind didn’t vacillate so much. And to make things worse, he knew he was under pressure, that there was a time limit. Gill, quite understandably, wanted to know where she stood. He was going to have to make a decision very soon. Make a decision and stick with it.

And every time he thought about that, he sought a new distraction, because he didn’t want to make that decision.

As soon as he got back inside, Gareth hurried over, phone in hand. Carmella was upstairs, talking to the SOCOs. It crossed
Patrick’s
mind that Gareth saw Carmella as a rival, that he wanted to win brownie points with his superior officer.
He
wanted to be the one to make the breakthroughs, deliver the news. Patrick looked Gareth up and down as he approached, thinking how different they were. At school, Gareth would have been one of the
popular
kids, the football team captain, head boy material, the kind of guy that Patrick avoided, hanging out with his Goth mates, going out with girls who only chose him because they knew their parents would disapprove. There was something of the Peter Perfects about Gareth Batey and Patrick didn’t know if he wanted to protect him or encourage him to stop being such a . . . swot and get himself an attitude.

‘Boss. I think we’ve got an ID,’ he said in his crisp Scottish accent. ‘A teenager whose mum reported her missing this morning.’

He held up his iPhone. On the screen was a picture of a frowning girl. A selfie, as they called it. He thought the frown was meant to be a pout but had gone wrong.

‘Once I got the name I looked her up. I couldn’t find her on
Facebook
, but she’s on Twitter and Tumblr. Calls herself
MissTargetHeart
.’

She had a soft face, dotted with freckles, and light brown hair. The photo looked like it had been taken in her bedroom, sitting on her bed with a teddy bear propped on the pillow behind her. She had drawn a crude target on her cheek in eyeliner, three
concentric
circles, with an arrow through. It was definitely her – the girl upstairs in room 365.

‘Her name’s Rose Sharp and she lives about ten minutes
fro
m here.’

Patrick looked at him.

Gareth’s cheeks coloured faintly. ‘Lived, I mean. Lived.’

Rose Sharp’s mum, Mrs Sally Sharp, lived in a terraced house in a backstreet of Teddington, the kind of place that a decade ago would have been considered moderately desirable but was now worth the kind of money that would make anyone north of the M25 gasp and shake their head. Close to a good school, low crime, a couple of organic delis nearby. A whole generation of
Londoners
had become property millionaires simply by buying at the right time. Patrick knew he could sell his house and move to Thailand and live like a prince. Sometimes, when confronted with this kind of task, he was tempted to pack up and go.

Patrick rang the bell, Carmella standing beside him. Gareth had wanted to come, but Patrick had instructed him to go back to the station and start checking the list that the hotel had finally produced. They were looking for known offenders, anyone with a record of violence or sexual offences. Even though they didn’t know yet if Rose had been raped, the fact that she was underage and had been found naked meant there was almost certainly a sexual
element
to the crime.

‘Call me the second you find anyone who looks like a good hit. Don’t go off on your own, OK? It won’t impress me,’ Patrick had told Gareth.

Sally Sharp opened the door almost instantly, and it was clear that she had been hoping to see her daughter standing there.

Sally looked over Patrick’s shoulder, peered around Carmella. Realisation entered her eyes then, and her face crumpled. But there was still hope – for a few more moments.

‘Mrs Sharp?’ Patrick said. ‘Rose Sharp’s mother?’

She nodded, inspecting Patrick’s badge as he introduced
himself
and Carmella. Her hands were trembling visibly as she held on to the front door.

‘Can we come in, please?’

She led them into the living room. It was an ordinary room: medium-sized TV, saggy sofa, a bookcase filled with DVDs and framed photographs. There they were – the pictures of Rose as she grew up, from a bald-headed baby with dribble on her chin to a teenager in a school blazer. There was a framed photo on the wall of Sally, Rose and a man Patrick assumed was Rose’s dad. Sally was blonde with green eyes, and in the family portrait she sparkled with life and happiness. Now, standing before them, she looked squashed, as if a giant boot had stamped on her.

‘Are you here on your own?’ Carmella asked.

Sally’s eyes followed the two detectives’ towards the portrait.

‘Yes.’ She sounded like she had no saliva in her mouth.

‘Is your husband at work?’

‘I expect he’s at work, yes. But he’s not my husband anymore. He left us a year ago, so it’s just me and Rose now.’ She had a string of beads round her neck that she fiddled with. ‘Have you foun
d her?’

Patrick braced himself. ‘I think you should sit down, M
rs Sharp.’

And before he’d even managed to tell her that they’d found the body of someone who matched the description of their daughter, that they would need her to identify the body, that her life would never be as happy or bright or hopeful again, she started wailing.

Patrick went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, while
Carmella
attempted to comfort Mrs Sharp. He called the
station
to check that the body had been removed from the hotel and
taken to the mortuary so they could organise the identification. Sally had instantly said that she needed to call her sister, and that she would need to tell Rose’s dad, Martin, which had prompted a fresh wail.

While Patrick was waiting for the kettle to boil, he slipped into the hall and looked up the stairs. Looking over his shoulder to check Sally Sharp wasn’t watching, he went up onto the landing. The first door he opened was the bathroom; the second was the master
bedroom
. That left Rose’s bedroom.

He pushed the door open gently and stepped inside. His eyes widened.

Four male faces stared at him from every surface: three white, one Asian. Every inch of wall was covered with posters and pages carefully torn from magazines or printed off the Internet. The screensaver on the computer showed the four boys with their arms around each other’s shoulders. A T-shirt bearing their logo lay on the unmade bed and a life-size cardboard cut-out of Shawn, the most popular member, stood at the foot of the bed.

Patrick was in his mid-thirties. He liked indie and rock music. He didn’t watch much TV apart from CBeebies with Bonnie. He didn’t read a tabloid paper or any glossy magazines. But even he knew who this lot were. Rose was an OnTarget fanatic. Now, he thought, the media were going to have one hell of an angle.

Chapter 4
Day 2 – Patrick

T
he MIT9 incident room at Sutton station smelled of machine coffee and bacon sandwiches, making Patrick’s stomach growl and clench simultaneously as he took his place at the front of the room beneath the blown-up photo of Rose Sharp. In the picture, she was smiling, revealing a gap between her front teeth, though there was a far-off look in her eyes. He
wondered
if she’d been happy and, if not, how far she had been from finding joy in her life. Growing up had been the best thing that ever
happened
to him, Patrick thought. Getting away.
Reinventing
himself
.

He mentally glossed over the fact that he was back living with his parents now.

Half a dozen officers, including Carmella and Gareth, perched on tables or stood, and Patrick found himself appraising them as his eyes passed over them. DC Preet Gupta was leaning against the wall at the back – competent and affable, she was a straight-down-the-line, trustworthy young woman Patrick was always pleased to see on his team. DC Martin Hale, a tall man with thinning hair who reminded Patrick of Kevin Spacey, was older and seemingly happy to stay at his rank forever. He had teenage daughters, and Patrick noticed how Hale’s jaw clenched as he surveyed the
picture
of Rose. He was sitting at the front of the room, so close to Rose’s photo that he could count the few freckles on her nose – and indeed probably was. That summed him up – keen, with an admirable attention to detail.

The next member of the team, Wendy Franklin, another detective constable, was a newcomer, having transferred in from
Wolverhampton
in the West Midlands, and an unknown quantity. Patrick’s initial impression was that – as his mum would say – she looked like a stiff breeze would blow her away. She was skinny and appeared to be about Rose Sharp’s age, though he knew she was actually twenty-five. She was one of the desk-perchers, fidgeting and shuffling about with nervous energy, twiddling a biro between her fingers, looking like she was dying to get stuck in.

There was one notable and very welcome absence: DI Adrian Winkler, a man to whom Patrick had barely spoken since they came to blows, literally, on the Child Catcher case. He knew that Winkler was working on another murder at the moment, had seen him parading around the station self-importantly, flicking back his shoulder-length hair and puffing out his chest like a mating pigeon. Hearing that he wouldn’t have to work with Winkler on this one was the one good thing that had happened in the last forty-eight hours.

‘OK,’ Patrick began, all eyes focusing on him. ‘Welcome to the first briefing for Operation Urchin.’ This was the name the computer had generated. ‘Here’s what we know so far. Rose Sharp,
fifteen
years old, resident of Teddington. Rose’s parents are divorced and she lives with her mother. The father isn’t a suspect, before you wonder. He was away on business in Germany and is on his way back now.’

He went on to describe the scene where they’d found Rose,
consulting
his notepad, writing down several points on the
whiteboard
as he spoke.

‘The main points to consider about the crime scene are: One – the room was supposedly vacant, no key cards had been given out, so how did Rose and her murderer get in? Two – how did they get into the hotel room without being seen? We are checking lists of guests and staff, but so far there have been no hits. There was no CCTV in the hotel corridor, so we can’t tell if she went into the room willingly or not. Three – did she know her killer? If not, what persuaded her to go to a hotel room with him? Four – Rose’s clothes were missing from the scene. Where are they, and why did the killer take them? Rose’s mum has been through her daughter’s clothes and given us a description of what she thinks Rose was wearing. This information is on your printouts.’

Sally Sharp hadn’t seen Rose leave the house, but by checking her daughter’s wardrobe and the washing baskets she believed Rose had been wearing her new Top Shop jeans and a long-sleeved pink and white cotton top. ‘She always wears earrings too,’ Sally had said, her voice catching. ‘And a necklace that her dad gave her. It’s a locket. She keeps a photo of
him
inside it.’ She pointed to a poster on the wall. ‘Shawn.’

Then Sally Sharp had paused.

‘She was wearing her new underwear too.’ Avoiding Patrick’s
eye, she went on. ‘She came home yesterday with a bag from
Primark
and I had a peek inside when she was in the loo.’ Sally had described the knickers: pink with the word ‘LUCKY’ printed across the front. ‘They’re not in her room.’

Patrick handed out jobs to the gathered officers. Wendy was instructed to help Gareth continue interviewing the guests and hotel staff. Martin was given the responsibility of checking Rose’s commu
nications: social media, email and phone. Had she left any clues there?

‘Her phone was missing too,’ he pointed out. ‘She had a contract with O2, paid for by her mum. Martin, I need you to chase up getting the records. Preet, I want you to start talking to Ros
e’s frien
ds. Had she said she was going to meet someone? Any boyfriends her mum didn’t know about?’

‘What secrets did she have?’ Wendy asked in her Black Country accent, as if she were thinking aloud. Seeing the look Patrick gave her, she said, ‘All teenage girls have secrets. If my mum and dad had known half the things me and my mates got up to . . .’

‘Yes, very true. But, according to her mum, Rose was a bit of an introvert. Spent most of her life in her bedroom.’

Wendy nodded. ‘Probably an online predator, then. Some guy pretending to be a fifteen-year-old arranges to meet her at a hotel; she freaks out when she sees he’s fat, bald and fifty; he knocks her over the head.’ She shrugged. ‘Simple.’

Patrick suppressed a laugh, seeing the daggers Carmella was shooting towards Wendy.

‘Yes, well, let’s not jump to any conclusions, eh?’

Wendy shrugged again. ‘All right. But I bet’cha that’s what it
was.’

As Patrick was about to start talking again, the door opened and Detective Chief Inspector Suzanne Laughland, Patrick’s boss, slipped through.

‘Pretend I’m not here,’ she mouthed.

What with Wendy’s interruption and now Suzanne’s appearance, Patrick had lost the thread of what he wanted to say. He turned back to the whiteboard. He could feel Suzanne’s eyes on his back and all of a sudden felt hot, sweat breaking out beneath his white shirt.

He turned back around, trying not to be distracted by the sight of Suzanne tucking a strand of long blonde hair behind her ear.

‘The other thing to note about Rose Sharp is that she was a massive fan of OnTarget.’

‘Ooh, I love them,’ said Wendy.

‘Manufactured shit,’ muttered Martin.

‘All right,’ Patrick said. ‘This isn’t the time for a
Culture Show
debate about the merits of boy bands. I don’t think you’re the target audience, anyway, Martin.’

‘The
On
Target audience!’ Wendy almost shouted, laughing at her own joke and looking around in the hope that the others would join in.

Give me strength
, thought Patrick.

‘The point is,’ he said, embarrassed at this display in front of Suzanne, ‘Rose was a fan. According to her mum, she was obsessed. She spent all her money on them, most of her time chatting about them online . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Talked about little else,
apparently
. OnTarget were her life. This fact is going to give the media an angle, make them more interested than they might have been otherwise. We need to be aware of that.’

‘They’re playing tonight,’ Wendy piped up.

‘OnTarget?’

‘Yeah. At Twickenham Stadium. I was thinking about going but couldn’t find anyone to come with me.’

‘What a surprise,’ Carmella said, eliciting laughter from everyone else. Wendy, though, looked hurt and Patrick felt sorry for her. It was unusual for Carmella to be bitchy, so he wondered what about Wendy had antagonised her.

‘Maybe I should go,’ Patrick said, enjoying the shocked expressions on the faces of his colleagues.

‘I thought you were more of a Cure fan?’ Carmella said.

Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick could see that Suzanne’s lip was twitching.

‘I am. But if Rose was a prominent member of the OnTarget community, this could be a good chance to meet some of them.’ He pointed at Carmella.

‘Oh no, please . . .’

‘And you can come too.’