Page 41 of The Killer’s Mark

Buckby hadn’t been dead long enough for the sickly-sweet pervasive stench of decomposition to start. Unless the environment was especially hot or especially humid, that took at least twenty-four hours. But there were other smells. In death, particularly a bad death, the victim lost control of their bladder and their bowels. It was that Poe had smelled when he’d opened the front door.

Buckby had been zip-tied to a high-backed wooden chair. Ankles, wrists and elbows. He was naked. He’d been tortured. Nothing subtle. Torture didn’t have to be. Pain was the objective. Pain and the fear of worse pain. Buckby’s torturers had kept it simple. Used whatever was to hand. In this case a steel meat-tenderiser, a mallet with a spiked surface. Perfect for softening meat; perfect for inflicting horrific damage to the human body.

Dual use.

They’d started with his ankles. Smashed them to a pulp. Poe imagined he’d have been singing like a canary by then. They’d moved on to his knees, turned them to mush too. Probably checking he wasn’t withholding anything. Or maybe Poe had it the wrong way around. Maybe they’d started with the knees then moved on to his ankles.

That they hadn’t travelled up to his elbows, his wrists, his balls meant they’d got what they came for. This hadn’t been a punishment beating; it was information extraction.

And once they had everything, they’d stuck a serrated knife into his jugular vein. Twisted it until the wound was too big to clot. Let him bleed out. Avoided the major arteries and the resultant arterial spray. Meant they didn’t leave his house looking like they’d been bobbing for apples in a bucket of pig’s blood. Opening the jugular was a controlled killing. Professional. So was stopping the torture when they had the information they’d come for. No one had lost control. No one had caught the blood lust. Poe wondered if it was relevant that Buckby had been killed the same way as Vincent du Buk. Was someone passing on a message? Maybe it was just that the throat was the most convenient part of the body. It was soft. Exposed. Easy to get to. Full of stuff that shouldn’t be cut.

He took all of this in from the kitchen door. He didn’t need to check for a pulse. The wound was incompatible with life. He reckoned Buckby had been dead for a couple of hours. The blood on the linoleum floor had started to dry and crack at the edges. It was dark, much darker than it had been when leaving his body. Poe thought that had something to do with the iron in blood oxidising, but he could have been wrong.

He stopped filming. Was about to call it in. Then he remembered he wasn’t a police officer any more. He had no right to examine the scene. He wouldn’t be able to access the crime reports. If the CSI guys found something, he wouldn’t be told. If the labs identified someone from an errant strand of DNA, he wouldn’t find out.

It was a strange feeling. An outsider looking in. He didn’t know if he liked it or not.

So instead of dialling 999, he shot more video. Took photographs. Made sure he captured the grotesque scene in the kitchen. He then walked through the rest of the house and filmed everything he could think of. He backed it all up to the cloud the way Bradshaw had instructed. He sent her a text asking her to download it. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but even the dumbest detective in the Met would seize his phone as evidence.

He thought about calling Flynn first. Give her a heads-up. He decided not to. Flynn worked in the modern slavery unit. This looked like organised crime. If he was going to call anyone, it would be Susan Hawksworth, the officer in the NCA’s Organised Crime Command. The woman Flynn had introduced him to. She was the one who’d given him Buckby’s name. Said he was a source that vice had used back in the day. He decided not to call Susan either. He thought she’d find out soon enough.

He dialled 999.

Chapter 34

Poe was in handcuffs. He’d shown the first-response officers – a woman who looked like Sky TV’s Beth Rigby and a man who didn’t – his gumshoe PI business card. He might as well have shown them his Blockbuster membership card. He didn’t blame them. Even if he’d still been with the NCA, he was the first person at a suspicious death. That made him suspect number one until something proved he wasn’t. So he didn’t complain. He accepted wearing the handcuffs and he accepted being swabbed. Having his hands put in evidence bags. It was good police work.

And they had taken away his phone.

After he’d been sitting in the back of their car for twenty minutes, the circus arrived. Plain-clothes cops. The first responders from the on-call murder investigation team. MITs were how the Met was structured to investigate murder. They were usually led by a detective chief inspector. He or she had two detective inspectors, four sergeants and around twenty detective constables. Some civilian support staff. It was a tried and tested formula. And with a clear-up rate of over ninety per cent, it seemed to work. More MIT cops arrived. More uniformed cops. CSI vans. Cordons were set up – the outer on the street, the inner at Buckby’s front door. Access was strictly controlled. Poe was glad he’d taken the photographs and the video. He wasn’t getting anywhere near that crime scene again.

After a few minutes, a cop in a machine-washable blue suit walked over to the car and peered in at him. He didn’t look happy. It was a look Poe was used to, although he’d normally had the chance to earn it first.

The cop opened the door and got in the back with Poe.

‘My name’s Detective Inspector Greene,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

Greene had a sallow complexion and red-rimmed eyes. Sour alcohol on his breath.

‘Nothing I haven’t already told the uniformed guys,’ Poe said.

‘Tell me.’

‘The victim’s called Mark Buckby. I met with him yesterday. I was halfway to Cumbria today when he called. I got off the train at Warrington and came back. He’d been dead a couple of hours by the time I arrived.’

‘Why did you go inside?’

‘His door was unlocked.’

‘So?’

‘His door was unlocked and he was expecting me. He’d asked for the meeting. I thought it was suspicious he didn’t answer.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m ex-NCA. Detective sergeant. I find everything suspicious.’

‘You’re ex-NCA?’