Death Trap (2 page)

Nikki once again started to ask, ‘why?’ but the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs stopped her.

‘Quick.’ This time Nicola heard the desperation and tears in the cleaner’s voice.

Nicola threw her iPad inside. Scrambled onto the middle shelf with the duvets. Ania slammed the doors shut. Instantly Nikki was engulfed in dark and heat. The footsteps outside got closer, like they were now on the landing. Crouched low she slowly eased her head up and looked through the slats.

All she could see was Ania’s back.

‘What do you want?’ she heard the cleaner shout.

Who was Ania talking to? Nikki couldn’t see anyone else.

No one answered. Abruptly Ania staggered back, her voice high, begging, ‘Please . . . No—’

Pop.

That’s all Nikki heard. Blood spurted out of Ania’s back, slashing high up against the slats in the airing cupboard door. Horrified Nikki felt blood slash against her lips and chin. Frozen with terror she watched Ania’s body slump to the floor. And that’s when she saw who was there.

A man.

Something strange covered his face and he wore black clothing. And he was standing over Ania with a gun in his hand.

Nicola wrapped a palm over her mouth to push back her sobs, but she couldn’t stop the tears running from her eyes. The air in her chest was coming in strange, funny waves that made it hard for her to breathe. She’d never prayed in her life, but she wanted to pray now. Then she heard more footsteps. Her heartbeat madly kicked when she saw the gunman joined by another man dressed exactly like him. They stood staring down at Ania’s body.

The one without the gun turned to the other and spoke. What he said Nikki couldn’t hear because of the thing covering his face. The gunman answered him. She strained to hear what he was saying . . . then wished she hadn’t when she heard his words.

‘Let’s make sure no one else is here.’

Oh my God.

Nikki knew she should move deeper into the cupboard but the terror held her still.

Move.

Move.

MOVE.

Finally Nikki started easing back, scared to death they would hear her. Her chest heaved, but she tried to keep her breathing down; keep it low. She stopped when she felt the end of the cupboard against her back. Panic gripped her again when one of the men started moving.

Oh God, he’s coming towards the cupboard.

His black clothing blocked out the light sending Nikki into the darkest bowels of hell.

Please God. Please God.

He was getting closer. Closer. Closer.

Pleeeeease. Pleeeeease.

She kept the plea pounding in her mind to a God she didn’t even believe in.

The man stopped, hovering just outside. Then he turned away to the side and started walking.

Just stay still until they go away.

Stay still.

Still.

Crouched like a caged animal, with a dead woman’s blood drying on her skin, Nikki waited. The man who’d shot Ania joined the other one. They turned and started walking back along the landing. Nikki let out a soft and shaky breath of relief.

Ping.

Nikki looked desperately at her iPad.

The footsteps stopped. Started coming back.

No. No. No. NO.

The footsteps got closer.

They are going to kill me.

Going to kill me.

Kill me.

KILL ME.

two

9:33 a.m.

As soon as Detective Inspector Rio Wray, of the Metropolitan Police Service, turned her car onto the street in Surrey she didn’t need the address to ID where the killings had taken place. The place of murder was already taped off, local police stationed outside.

Number 3 The Lanes.

Sounded like something out of a Catherine Cookson novel, but the house was anything but. No back-to-back homes here in one of England’s most des res locations, at least according to those ‘where the super rich hang out’ guides that were done every year that Rio was never asked to take part in.

The house was two-storeys, large and sprawling; bottom-half plain brick, top coated white. It put Rio in mind of a private school for girls (not that she knew anything about fee-paying education, having been to a rough and tumble inner London comp). It was set in its own grounds – low grass, mammoth trees, showcasing and sheltering it at the same time. Some would call it impressive, but to Rio all that green plain hurt her eyes, and the seclusion afforded by the garden made it the perfect place for murder.

Rio got out of the car, an ebony BMW, which she’d christened her Black Magic Woman. She finger-combed her twist-out Afro – or ’fro as she liked to call it – then approached the two officers on duty either side of the front door.

‘Ma’am,’ one immediately uttered when she reached them.

His tone was low, with a sideline in barely held back insolence that she didn’t care for, but Rio left it alone. This situation was charged enough. The local police were in a tizzy about the presence of an outsider and her team running this investigation. One of the first acts of the newly appointed – and to some, controversial – Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner had been to shake up the investigation into the vicious spate of house robberies happening to wealthy householders living around London’s greenbelt. She’d done the unthinkable – outsourced the case to the Met. A ‘fresh-eyed, strategic approach’ to solving the case was how she put it. B.S. management speak for ‘you can’t get the fucking job done.’

Rio could understand the heated resentment of the local police. Having another force come in to help clean up your house was not a good look. But then blood in your house was an even worse one.

Rio pushed the politics back and the policing up front. Over the last three months a group of criminals – infamously dubbed ‘The Greenbelt Gang’ by the media – had carried out audacious early morning and increasingly more vicious raids on affluent homes in the area in the last six weeks. In the last attack, fifteen days ago, a woman had been murdered and that’s when Rio and her people had been assigned to the case.

Rio slipped on protective, forensic clothing and entered the house, registering the large, white tiles on the hallway floor, pastel green walls, occasionally broken by large paintings, and a wider-than-average staircase that curved seductively to a world upstairs.

A plain-clothes officer appeared from a room off the spacious hallway: DI Thomas Morrell. A top-heavy guy who’d learned how to carry his increasing weight around. He was bristling, just like the other times Rio had met him, his disapproval at her being assigned the investigation he’d once been the senior on out in the open. Rio didn’t take it personally; she’d probably feel the same way if the situation were reversed.

‘So, are we dealing with another Greenbelt?’ she asked him getting down to business straight away. ‘The privacy of the house fits their MO.’

The flesh on his cheeks wobbled as his mouth moved. ‘That’s not the only thing that fits. Paint-sprayed security cameras, French window at the back shattered by a single shot. No bullet casing to be found and the place a total tip as they searched for anything to line their pockets.’ He pointed to the room he’d come out of. ‘They made sure that no one was left standing this time.’

‘Who discovered the bodies?’

‘A local man who does the gardening. He turned up about an hour ago, couldn’t get an answer, went around the back and saw a body in the kitchen.’

‘We’ll need to check out the gardener . . .’

DI Morrell twisted his lips in a way that Rio knew whatever he was about to spit out next was going to be nasty. ‘If you were from around these parts you’d know that old Amos couldn’t hurt a fly.’

Finally
it
was out in the open.
It
being he had a problem with her being black. She didn’t have to be a genius to know that by ‘around these parts’ he not only meant Surrey but anywhere else in England. Colleagues questioning her abilities because of the colour of her skin was old news. She didn’t have the time of day for some fat fuck of a detective who spoke in double meanings and didn’t have the guts to say it plain and simple to her face.

‘What’s the body count?’ she continued.

‘Three. Male in the front room, woman in the kitchen and another female on the landing upstairs.’

Rio stepped into the main room, let her gaze roam around: a whirlwind of chaos. Typical Greenbelt Gang MO. So many things were dumped on the floor that it was hard for her to tell the shape of the room. Overturned cushions from the L-shaped creamy-beige leather suite, chunks of glass near an art deco style mirror, paper, twin discarded drawers of a dainty cabinet lying on its side. The lights on two small lamps, positioned on corner tables on either side of the French window, gave off an amber glow of softness and calm in a scene of total destruction. And the most brutal devastation of all was the body lying in the debris of the smashed glass table in the centre.

The victim was sprawled out like he’d just tipped over, one leg bent at an angle and the other straightened out. Dried blood circled the left side of his head. Not a perfect circle though, some of the blood had spread and leaked down the grooves between the wire-brushed teak floorboards. Rio crouched down beside him. With thirteen years on the job behind her, now aged thirty-five, she should’ve been a friend to death. But the air caught in the muscles of her throat as it always did. Rio just couldn’t get why humans messed each other up. But then it wasn’t for her to think about the why, but the who. Get the perpetrator off the streets and banged up behind walls so thick that the world soon forgot what their life-taking face looked like.

‘Forensics are on their way,’ Morrell said behind her. ‘Looks like the poor bastard was shot with some type of pistol.’

Rio kept her brown gaze on the body as she pulled out a tiny torch from her pocket, displaying the faint, diagonal scar on her wrist. She shone it on the vic’s head. The bloody grey-black strands of hair concealed the exit or entrance wound. She noticed a hole in his left hand: a defensive wound resulting from his hand stretched out in vain to stop the bullet coming at him. Rio guided the light against the clothing – black polo shirt with a white collar that was dipped in the stain of blood, dark blue tracksuit bottoms, and navy socks. The absence of footwear meant that the vic had probably been relaxing at home, having just risen for a day he had no idea was going to be his last. The clothing wasn’t rolled or wrinkled which meant he’d fallen where he’d been attacked not dragged from anywhere else.

‘Who lives here?’ Rio asked, spinning on the flat of her feet to face the other detective.

‘Married couple in their fifties. Maurice and Linda Bell. And from the descriptions given by the neighbours this is probably Mr Bell. His wife is in the kitchen.’

Morrell made it sound like Linda Bell was in the kitchen preparing a happy, cosy family breakfast. Rio stood up, torch still in her hand, and was guided by the other officer to the kitchen. It was a picture that she’d seen a hundred times. The ordinary domestic moment shattered by the interruption of a crime. The breakfast table had been carefully laid; this was no meal on the move while getting ready for work. There were fresh flowers in a vase, a coffee pot, toast in a rack, cereals in boxes, various spreads, all carefully laid out on a freshly ironed cloth. What stopped it looking like a breakfast buffet in a hotel was the blood – and the body.

‘Gee-sus,’ Rio let out, confronted by the violent streaks and spurts of blood on the floor and the white kitchen units near the sink.

And in a corner, slumped on the grainy flagstone floor, was the body of a woman. Her throat had been cut leaving a frozen, mini waterfall of dark red on the front of her sunshine yellow T-shirt. The only way to get a spray of blood from a wound like that was if the knife or sharp object had been plunged into the side of her neck and then sliced around the front; slice carotid artery; slice jugular vein; final slice through the trachea. Rio couldn’t stop the image that flashed through her mind – standing in another kitchen, stunned as she watched the blood drain from the slit throat of someone she’d been tasked to take care of. The faint scars on her wrist throbbed as Rio shook off the unwanted memory. Rio didn’t approach the body; best to leave that one to forensics.

She turned to Morrell. ‘This gang are developing a taste for blood. You said there was another body upstairs. Did they live with someone else because the breakfast table is set for three?’

He shook his head. ‘The Bells have a son and daughter and there’s evidence that someone else was occupying one of the other bedrooms upstairs. Maybe it was the son or daughter, but there’s no evidence of either of them being here now. They had a cleaner, but it’s unlikely they’d be sitting down with the help at the brekkie table. Old Amos, the gardener, said she came in twice a week: Mondays and Fridays. Her name was Ania. The neighbours haven’t a clue what her surname was. We think the body upstairs is the cleaner.’

Rio was glad to get out of the kitchen back into the hallway. She pulled in a few deep breaths and then wished she hadn’t as the warmth in the air intensified the tang of death at the back of her mouth. Just as they started to walk up the stairs a voice behind called out, ‘DI Wray?’