‘Please, follow me.’
The manager took us to a side room and closed the door. It was a security office, and sitting at the desk were a uniformed guard and a small middle-aged woman. I assumed she was the maid who’d walked in on the smiling man’s room and had a complaint made against her.
‘You said there were no cameras on the floors …’ said Sutty, looking at the TV screen.
‘Correct, but we do have two cameras on the ground floor, one of which is positioned above the front desk. When Mrs Nowak recognized the man from your picture, I thought I should ask her to look through the front-desk footage from the day he checked in …’ The security guard cued up the footage and played it.
It felt incredible to see Ross Browne, the smiling man, move.
He had an awkward, limping gait which reduced his height considerably, and he kept his head angled down, away from the camera, like he already knew it was there. He was wearing the smart brown suit we’d found him in, and he was carrying the case which had been left with the concierge. From the way he held it, the case looked much heavier than when Sutty and I handled it the previous day. I wondered what was in there. He spoke briefly to the young woman at the desk, checked in, signed and then walked out of view.
‘Well, thanks,’ said Sutty, thoughtfully. ‘If we could get a copy of that tape—’
‘That wasn’t what I wanted to show you,’ said the manager. ‘Saul …’ The security guard cued up another video file. ‘The second camera covers the rest of the floor. You can only see the back of people when they go for the lifts so it wasn’t worth looking at until we knew exactly what time the man entered.’
Our man, Ross Browne, walked towards the elevators with the same awkward gait, staying close to the wall. When a door began opening in front of him his posture changed. He stepped back and melted smoothly out of view into an alcove, and the edge of something became visible in his left fist.
The improvised knife we’d found inside his case.
It had been in his palm the entire time. The people who’d walked through the door passed him. He re-palmed the blade and resumed his shuffle towards the elevator. Sutty and I looked at each other. It was like watching two different people inhabit one body.
There was already activity around room 413 when we reached it. A uniformed officer was stationed at the door and Sutty and I climbed into plastic anti-contamination suits before entering.
There was something he wanted me to see.
I didn’t know what to expect but was surprised by the room’s mundanity. It was neat, seemingly untouched, and the bed was made. Two Scene of Crime Officers acknowledged us with nods. Both they and Sutty watched me as I craned my neck to take in the room. I stayed standing on the spot, not wanting to move until I’d been given permission, but from there, nothing seemed unusual or out of place.
‘He was definitely in here?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Sutty. ‘Even put a credit card down at the front desk.’ I’d been too preoccupied watching his movements on the check-in video to notice. It was surprising. A card was so traceable that I assumed he would have talked his way around it. We had a former lover, video evidence and now a bank account. Perhaps he was human, after all. Sutty must have seen the disappointment in my face.
‘Show him,’ he said. The SOCO officers both stood at the foot of the bed and lifted that end away from the floor. Beneath it was an enormous bloodstain, soaked deep into the carpet.
‘No corpse,’ said Sutty. ‘But pints and pints of the stuff …’
I took a step closer. ‘Human?’
‘We’ll know soon enough, but unless he was into animal sacrifice, someone died badly in this room.’
‘Who?’ I said, almost to myself. ‘How would he even get a body out of here?’
‘Can’t help ya with the first one, but if you’d like to follow me into the bathroom …’
At first glance the bathroom seemed untouched, aside from a strong smell of paraffin or petrol coming from the bath itself. We’d expected that because of the dustbin fires. When I looked inside the tub it told a different story. Sutty watched me closely. The bath was gleaming clean but scarred along the bottom. Coarse, overlapping nicks and scrapes alongside several deep, straight incisions.
Something big had been cut up inside it, using very sharp objects.
Sutty walked to the toilet and lifted up the lid. I followed him and looked down.
The water was red.
3
We returned to the station to file reports, liaise with forensics for the Midland and arrange identification of the body for the following day. More importantly, to begin the search for the real Ross Browne. Who he was and the life he’d left behind. We’d found records of a man by his name living in Brighton. The years he’d been in town, and his proximity to the coast, matched what Amy Burroughs had told us.
Local authorities had visited Browne’s flat to no response.
The fact of his military past threw up interesting possibilities about the death, while muddying the water of our investigation. We’d requested his military records from the Ministry of Defence and the paperwork was currently inching its way through layers of bureaucracy. I imagined a brown file being passed, endlessly, from desk to desk.
I checked in with Constable Black, who’d been approaching streetwalkers, known sex workers and pimps. If Cherry had been inside the Palace, she had to have been with a client. Black had been spreading the word about the murder but, so far, no one had even admitted to knowing our victim.
I could hear her flicking through her notebook as she spoke to me. ‘Closest thing I’ve had is the nickname of a regular for Cherry’s kind of service.’
‘Run the nickname by me?’
‘Mr Hands …’
I thought for a moment, wondering if it might apply to anyone I’d met in the case so far. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ I said. ‘But that’s a good start. Keep trying.’
When my phone rang a few minutes later, I hoped it was Black, calling back with a breakthrough.
‘Waits,’ I said, answering. I could hear someone at the other end but they didn’t say anything. I waited for a second and snapped. ‘Listen, I’m fucking sick of this—’
‘Aidan, it’s me, Ricky. We met the other day? Sorry if I’m getting you at a bad time, man …’
‘Ricky.’ Sian’s boyfriend. Her fiancé. I closed my eyes. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘Yeah. Well, I got your number from Sian’s phone …’
‘Does she know you’re calling me?’
‘No, and I’d appreciate it if we could keep this between the two of us. We need a word.’
‘Today’s not great.’
‘It’s important, man. It’s really important.’
‘OK,’ I said, slightly taken aback. ‘I was hoping to talk to you, too. It’d have to be later, though.’
‘I can’t do now anyway. Let’s grab a drink tonight.’ He sounded more like he wanted to clear the air than start a fight. I thought it was an unusual move, to get an ex’s number from your partner’s phone, but Sian obviously meant a lot to him and if pushed I was willing to explain the scene he’d walked in on. We agreed to meet at the Rising Sun later that day, when Sian would be working in The Temple.
‘I’ll see you then.’
‘Sick,’ he said. I hung up and looked at Sutty.
‘So, Amy Burroughs,’ he said. ‘What did you think?’
‘She was jumpy, right from the word go. Nervous about her husband coming home and at pains to point out that Browne wasn’t her little boy’s father. But I guess a cop approaching you on the street at five in the morning could do that …’
‘Hm,’ said Sutty. ‘Did she say anything else about the balls and chain?’