Mason knew it was over when Amelia got out of bed and started dressing in silence. Rain lashed the bedroom windows. Thunder rolled and cracked in the night beyond the half-drawn blinds. The storm had been a long time coming and was a blissful relief from the heatwave that had been choking the city of York for weeks. But all Mason could focus on was the stiffness in Amelia’s movements as she buttoned her blouse.
She never stayed the night. By mutual agreement this—whatever this was—was just about what time they could snatch around their cases. But she usually stayed for a while after the sex…to talk. She liked to talk. Mason had come to like it, too.
But now she stared fixedly ahead as she dressed, and the silence was heavy between them.
“Everything okay?”
She sighed. “I think it’s time.”
He knew what was coming but, somehow, Mason just felt…blank. “Time for what?”
Amelia sat on the edge of the bed to pull her heels on. “Come on, Mason. We both know this has run its course.”
Mason searched for the right reaction. “I thought we were having fun.”
“We were. We did. But there’s something missing, isn’t there?”
He didn’t meet her eye.
“Mason, if you can’t be honest with me, at least be honest with yourself.”
“Honest about what?”
“You need…more. I don’t know what, but you’re not getting it from me.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is,” she said with a frank look. “I’m okay with that. But I’m not okay with sex that isn’t blowing both our minds. Life’s too short.”
He blinked. “You’ve never complained.”
“It’s not a complaint,” she said and retrieved her earrings from the dressing table, “or a comment on your performance.” The smile she gave herself in the mirror eased his wounded pride. “But I know you’re not getting everything you want.”
“I like you, Amelia. I thought you liked me.”
“I do. And this has been good. But it’s time to end it.”
“Is this because of that email from HR? About relationships at work?”
“This isn’t a relationship,” she said, patting his leg. “We both agreed on that from the start. And, yes, technically, I am your boss—”
“Boss’s boss,” he said with the lopsided smile that usually brought an answering smile from her.
But her lips remained a flat line. “Do yourself a favor, Mason. Open yourself up. You don’t limit yourself at work. Don’t do it in your personal life.”
“I wasn’t aware I was.”
She looked at him hard. “It’s time for something new…for both of us. That’s it.” She kissed him softly and straightened. “You understand, right?”
Mason opened his mouth to answer before he knew what the answer would be. His phone started buzzing on the bedside table. Amelia’s rang half a heartbeat later.
“It’s the station,” Amelia said as she frowned at her phone screen.
“Me, too,” Mason said. “That can’t be good.”
* * * *
Mason crawled along the country roads, hardly able to see ten feet in front of the rain-pelted windscreen.
He cursed under his breath the whole, fraught journey then out loud as he climbed out into a lay-by crowded with police cars and SOCO vans. A uniformed constable appeared with an umbrella, which promptly turned inside out, dousing them both with spray.
“Don’t bother,” Mason said, raising his voice over the wind. “Where is he?”
“This way, DI Walker.”
Mason bent his head to follow the constable’s bright yellow rain poncho through an open gate. They battled uphill through the wind with his shoes sinking into four inches of mud.
Finally they came under the relative shelter of some close-growing trees. Mason stepped, blinking, into the brightly lit interior of a forensic tent.
“Lovely night for a murder.” A petite woman with close-cropped orange hair appeared at his side in a white forensic bodysuit. She was bearing a cup of take-out coffee and a grim expression.
“You’re telling me,” Mason muttered, sipping the coffee and examining the organized chaos around him. “So, Vickers, who found him?”
“A uniform did, out here doing a routine sweep. The victim’s partner rang the station a few hours ago. He’s been gone less than twenty-four hours, but the partner was pretty insistent.”
“Has next of kin been informed?”
“Not yet. He fits the description of the missing person all right, but there’s no ID.”
“And just how much evidence have we lost?” Mason said as the wind renewed its efforts to tear the tent from the ground.
Vickers winced. “They won’t know for sure until they get him back to the lab,” she said, heading to the plastic curtain that protected the crime scene. “But doc says there’s unlikely to be any fingerprints or DNA.”
Mason swallowed a curse. “And how long does she reckon he’s been out here?”
“She’s not sure about that, either.”
Mason frowned as a scene tech took his barely touched coffee and handed him his own suit and gloves. “I’ve never known Kumar to not have an estimated Time of Death.”
“Yeah, well, this is kinda beyond her expertise. Didn’t they tell you on the phone?”
Mason’s heart sank. “Tell me what?”
“The victim’s a haemophile.”
His stomach dipped. “Who?”
“We think…Darragh Kelly.”
Mason stared at his DC for a long moment then took a breath, pulled on his mask and stepped through the curtain.
Mason had seen many bodies over the course of his career. He remembered his first murder victim like it was yesterday. He’d been a drug dealer, beaten to death by a rival while they’d both been high. They’d caught the perpetrator within twenty-four hours. He’d walked into an A&E with two broken hands and blood on his clothes that wasn’t his. It was an open and shut case, and neither of the men had been good people. But seeing the victim’s body in the dumpster, thrown away like trash, had been a shard of ice driven into the pit of Mason’s stomach.
He’d had that same feeling to a greater or lesser extent with every body he’d examined since.
But this was different. The feeling was deeper. Colder. More like fear.
The haemophile lay in a shallow, muddy hole between the roots of a tree. One leg was bent under him. His arms were splayed. The techs had removed as much soil as possible, but the dirt clung to his fine suit and the luminous blue of his disarranged tie. His shirt had probably been a very crisp white. Now it was filthy and clung to the pale skin like cling film. The eyes were open and hooded. Even from where he stood, Mason could see they were green, like ivy or bottle glass—and eerily bright, even in death. He made himself step closer.
The victim’s hair was red—not the bright red-orange of Vickers’ natural ginger, but blood-red. Not dyed, but not human, either.
Mason examined the single, neat hole in the center of the forehead with an uncomfortable feeling.
“I tell you what, Walker,” Dr. Kumar said, standing from her kneeling position next to the body. Her face was obscured by a mask, but her eyes behind her goggles were dark with mixed feelings. “Haemophile forensics are baffling. I’m not sure I can face the amount of stuff I’m going to have to un-learn to be able to deal with this.”
“I hear you, doc. Just give me what you do have.”
The doctor gazed down at the body with an expression that was part-regretful, part-bemused. “I’m guessing gunshot to the head as cause of death. It looks like it was pretty close range. But their bones don’t break the same way ours do, so I can’t be sure.”
“Any bullet?”
“There’s an exit wound,” Kumar said, nodding to the head. “But the techs haven’t found anything.”
“So probably killed elsewhere.”
Kumar shrugged again, unwilling to commit.
“Anything else?”
“Time of death…I don’t know. I’ll have to do some reading on decomp and body temp statistics in haemophiles—if there’s even any reading to be found. Oh…and I think both arms are broken,” she said, pointing. “The humerus on both left and right appear misaligned. I’ll know more once I’ve done X-rays.”
“That must have taken a hell of a lot of strength,” Vickers murmured. “Their bones are like iron, aren’t they?”
Kumar nodded. “That much I do know. But that’s about it. No ID on the body, either, so we can’t even be sure—”
“It’s Darragh Kelly, all right,” Mason said. “I met him once.”
“Shit,” Vickers muttered. “As if we didn’t have enough mess with the whole Lucien-escape thing. Oh,” she winced. “Sorry, boss.”
Mason shook his head. “No, you’re right. That is very much my personal mess. But let’s just deal with one earth-shatteringly unorthodox crime at a time.”
“Seconded,” Kumar said, shaking her head.
“He was dumped,” Mason murmured, pacing around the scene. “In a shallow grave. Hasty. Undignified. Not meant to be found?”
“There’s no regret here,” Vickers mused. “But no passion, either. The execution-style killing, the impersonal dump site… It’s almost…”
“Routine,” Mason finished for her.
“Right,” Vickers nodded. “Even though there’s absolutely nothing else routine about it.”
“Also right,” Mason said. “Okay,” he said, finally looking away. “I want a full work-up—forensics and autopsy, everything you have on the scene and the body. Whatever there is, I want it.”
“You’ll have it,” Kumar said levelly. “If it’s here, you’ll have it.”
Mason nodded. “Vickers, you’re with me.”
She nodded and followed him back through the curtain. “Next of kin?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Vickers sighed as they stripped out of the white suits. “This part never gets any easier. Aw crap,” she added as she checked her phone.
“What?”
She held out the phone. “This has already hit the internet.”
Mason swore. “How?”
“The partner, Tom Addams? He posted online trying to find Kelly. The news sites have taken a wild guess and run with it. The story’s everywhere. And this time the bastards are actually right.”
“This does not help us…or Addams,” Mason muttered as he stepped into the howling rain.
“I doubt he’s thinking straight, boss,” Vickers muttered. “Poor guy’s been in limbo all day.”
Mason suppressed a surge of guilt. “Well, let’s go put him out of his misery.”
“And into a worse one,” Vickers murmured with a solemn expression.
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