‘I can wash my dirty laundry in public, Prime Minister.’ Lord Edward Hunter held the prime minister’s eye as he spoke. ‘And I can assure you there will be no bombshells. Although I rather suspect you know all of this already.’
The hush in the Downing Street study was oppressive. The prime minister finally spoke. ‘You’ve been briefed on why you are here, Edward. If I ask you to be Lord Chancellor, will you accept?’
‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ Lord Hunter could not stop the grin that had spread across his face.
‘Good, then we’ll make the press announcement tomorrow. You’ll be a great Lord Chancellor, an honour to us all.’
‘I am your servant, sir,’ he nodded at the prime minister. His response was rather formal but he felt elated–even if he had known that he would be offered this position long before he stepped over the threshold.
The serotonin continued to pump round his body long into the night. He was unable to sleep. Throwing his legs over the side of the bed he felt his toes dig into the deep carpet; he inched them along the floor until he found his slippers. His wife, Mary, always a light sleeper, tossed and turned beside him. He wandered down to the kitchen and made himself a warm, milky cocoa. He rested his fine bone-china mug on the arm of his Chesterfield chair in the library, blew on the drink and then sipped cautiously. In the small hours of the night, he could be honest with himself. It wasn’t only the excitement of his appointment that prevented sleep. When Lord Hunter had told the prime minister that there were no skeletons in his past he was telling the truth.
But there was a secret.
Few people knew about it, and those who did would not speak. Nonetheless, it bothered him that he’d had to hide it from the man who was fulfilling his ultimate ambition.
Lord Hunter took another sip. The cocoa was having the desired effect and he felt sleepy and relaxed. There was no way he could change the past; the secret had remained hidden for twenty years and the chances that it would surface now were remote. The more sleepy he got, the more he convinced himself of this.
The cocoa grew cold as the new Lord Chancellor fell asleep in the chair.
DI Duncan Bancho rested his head on his cluttered desk and lightly banged his forehead off it until an unpleasant ache made him stop. The pain took longer to come than it had the last time–or the time before that. He knew that he was pathetic; his life was shit, no money, no promotion and no sex. It was the latter that was really bothering him just now. Peggy had been his last serious fling, and that had been disastrous. Actually, disastrous didn’t even come close. The lies and betrayal had cut him deeper than he cared to admit. Well-meaning friends tried to set him up on blind dates, but he wasn’t a man who enjoyed sex with strangers. He missed the dull, domestic routine: sitting in on a Saturday night with a carry-out pizza and a cheap bottle of plonk watching crap telly with someone he liked would be his idea of heaven.
Bancho acknowledged that his current attitude was affecting the team; even the assistant chief constable had pulled him in for a pep talk. Given that the actual words were, ‘Pull your fucking socks up you miserable bastard, you’re getting on everybody’s nerves,’ he wasn’t too sure how helpful it was, but he had to recognize that things were bad. He needed to socialize more, extend the hand of friendship to his colleagues, and all that bollocks. The detective pushed back his chair and wandered out to the operations room to grab a coffee. He put a smile on his face, which he hoped didn’t look as forced as it felt–otherwise it would frighten those of a weak disposition.
The chatter in the operations room didn’t stop when he walked in the door–that was always a good sign. He wasn’t an official weirdo yet. His colleagues were hard at work and looked just as tired as he felt; a few of them even raised their heads and nodded in his direction. Bancho straightened his tie and ran a hand through his hair. PC Tricia Sheehy didn’t look too shabby in this light and, even in his miserable state, he had started to notice that she was the one thing that was keeping him going at work. Sometimes the thought of her even cut a few seconds off his banging-head-on-desk routine. She poured him a cup of tar-black coffee out of the percolator.
‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ she asked as she tucked a stray blonde hair behind her ear. She was medium height, medium to look at, but with a spark in her brown eyes that penetrated his deadened senses–a bit.
‘Bancho! The ACC wants you to call,’ shouted a secretary.
Bancho didn’t acknowledge her. He sipped his coffee and continued to look at Tricia Sheehy.
‘I said, where have you been hiding? You deaf?’ Tricia asked again.
‘He says it’s important,’ the secretary bawled even louder this time. ‘And I thought he sounded like he actually meant it.’
‘I heard you’ve already been in to see the boss this week…you know he doesn’t like to be kept waiting. You best go–sir,’ said Tricia. She briefly placed her hand on his arm to emphasize that he needed to move, and a quick tingle spread through his body.
Bancho refilled his cup and took it back to his office, which seemed to have got dirtier and lonelier in the five minutes he’d been in the ops room. He put his feet up on the desk, opened the bottom drawer, took out a chocolate digestive biscuit and dialled the ACC.
‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, no preamble necessary between the two men, who knew that formalities only wasted time in the real world.
‘Another one’s turned up.’
Bancho stared into space. Christ.
‘His name is Alan Pearson, thirty-six, he was a mortgage broker,’ said the ACC.
‘Suicide then? Money problems?’
‘Well, that would be bloody convenient, wouldn’t it, Bancho? But why the hell do you think I’d be calling you about that? Not a snowball’s chance in hell. This is yours now; you and your bloody fancy training sessions in America need to come to the fore, my man. Get this solved, sorted, ended, whatever you want to call it–fast.’
Bancho got over his quick bout of wishful thinking and asked, ‘MO? Is it the same as the others?’ If so, this was the third in the series of killings.
‘Yes. No sign of a struggle, a syringe filled with pure heroin in the right internal jugular, massive overdose, leading to a coronary…then the heart was removed post mortem. We’ve managed to keep the removal of the heart out of the papers, but it’s only a matter of time. You’re going to have to take over on this one, Duncan, it’s definitely a series.’ The ACC said it in a way that left no room for objection. Bancho swore under his breath, regretting the day he’d ever let Lothian and Borders Police send him to Quantico for a residential course on serial killers. He’d hated it, hated the bloody Americans, all looking as if they’d stepped out of a film with their chiselled jaws and perfect hair, and hated all the serial-killer profiling stuff which he couldn’t see translating to Edinburgh. America was different, too different he thought, the geography, the people–none of it was the same over here; even while on the course, he’d constantly questioned whether there was any point to him being there.
‘Right sir,’ he said, sighing deeply. ‘I’ll
