The Rules of Murder Read online

  He nodded slightly.

  ‘Alex?’ Dani said.

  ‘Alex Acaster,’ Caroline said. ‘But then his parents were here too, probably until midnightish I’d say.’

  ‘Perhaps we could move on?’ Dani said. ‘Hopefully, the timeline will become clearer once we’ve spoken to the other guests. Now, I know this is a difficult question, but can you think of any reason why someone would want to hurt Oscar?’

  ‘No,’ Henry said after barely a second’s thought.

  ‘No,’ Caroline echoed a moment later.

  ‘He’s never been in any kind of trouble? Gangs? Drugs?’ Easton asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ Henry said, his heckles once again raised by Easton, even though the question had been perfectly reasonable in Dani’s mind. ‘That’s a ridiculous and baseless thing to suggest.’

  ‘And you can’t think of anyone in particular who’s got a grudge against your son?’ Dani said.

  ‘He’s a popular kid.’

  ‘So that’s a no?’ Easton said.

  ‘Yes, it’s a bloody no.’

  ‘What about you?’ Dani said, and for a few moments the room fell deathly silent as Henry glared defiantly at Dani, then at Easton, then back to Dani.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Is there anyone you’ve had a falling out with?’ Dani said. ‘Either personally or professionally? Anyone who might harbour a grudge against you or your family who could have done this in order to punish you.’

  ‘Detectives, this is getting out of hand,’ Henry said through clenched teeth. ‘If you’re going to interrogate us then perhaps I should be asking my lawyer to attend.’

  ‘We can, of course, halt this and carry on more formally with your lawyer if you wish,’ Dani said.

  She left the invitation dangling. She certainly didn’t want to do that so early in the investigation, when all she was trying to do was understand the lay of the land. This was no interrogation as far as she was concerned, even if their questions were making the couple uncomfortable.

  ‘Honey, come on,’ Caroline said to her husband quietly, ‘we don’t have anything to hide. We should carry on.’

  A sigh, then the slightest of nods from Henry.

  ‘Did you have any security personnel on site yesterday?’ Dani asked.

  ‘No,’ Henry said. ‘We’ve never had security personnel here. This is our home, not a fort.’

  ‘But you had a lot of guests, and some of them are quite prominent people. Lord Hastings. Andrew Lawrence, the local MP here. Weren’t Michael Whyte and his wife here too? I thought he played in Spain now.’

  ‘Yes, he was here. His agent is a very good friend of mine. What’s your point?’

  ‘How did you ensure no one came onto the property who shouldn’t have been here?’

  ‘The front gates are electronically controlled. One of Pamela’s team was responsible for recording who came through. And we had a guest list at the door to mark who came into the house.’

  That was kind of what Dani had been asking about. So there weren’t professional security guards, but there were still measures in place by the house staff to make sure only invited guests were admitted.

  ‘Other than the gates, are there any other means of entry to the grounds?’ she asked.

  ‘Any old idiot can climb over a wall, I guess, but there’s no other proper route, no.’

  ‘But we do have CCTV cameras too,’ Caroline said. ‘They cover right around the outside of the house, and there’s a few in the gardens too.’

  Dani already knew this. In fact she’d already set up one of the DCs to look over the footage from the previous day, and was keen to make that her next stop.

  The room went silent. The natural detective in Dani was telling her to continue to probe. For more than one reason she was a little uncomfortable about the party that had taken place the night before. Between the Redfearnes and the guests who’d been there, why had no one noticed that Oscar had disappeared? And how had a killer managed to not only get on and off the grounds of Drifford House, leaving barely a trace, as far as Dani was aware, but also to kill Oscar Redfearne quite horrifically without any of the more than two hundred other people around being any the wiser?

  The most obvious answer was that the killer was already on the grounds. One of the guests, or one of the staff, though so early in the investigation Dani had no way of knowing why that would be the case.

  She didn’t have to keep pushing these two here and now, though. They were consumed by grief and they deserved Dani’s and Easton’s patience and respect. There was a time and place for pushing and this wasn’t it.

  ‘OK, thank you very much for your time. I think we probably have enough for now.’ Dani got to her feet. Easton followed suit. ‘I really am very sorry for you both. We’re going to be on site for a good deal longer yet, so if you need anything from us at all, please do just ask.’

  Caroline nodded but said nothing. Henry looked away, out of the window.

  Dani and Easton made their way to the door.

  ‘When can I see my son?’ Henry asked.

  Dani paused. She closed her eyes as the gory images of Oscar’s corpse flashed in her mind once more. She pushed them away as best she could as she turned back to Henry.

  ‘There’s currently a team of forensics scrutinising the scene. I’m afraid it’d only hamper their efforts right now to have anyone who’s not working with them to go down there. I’m so sorry, Mr Redfearne, I do hope you understand?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Of course, you’ll be able to come and see Oscar once his body has been removed.’

  ‘In the morgue. You’re saying I’m not able to see my son until he’s in the morgue.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Redfearne.’

  He said nothing more, and neither did anyone else. Feeling about as shitty as she could imagine, Dani turned and opened the door to leave.

  Chapter Five

  ‘You OK?’ Easton asked as he and Dani headed away from the library down a corridor that was plastered with various oil-painted portraits. Past members of the Redfearne family?

  ‘You were pretty close to the line back there,’ she said, sounding more agitated than she’d intended.

  ‘Good cop, bad cop,’ Easton said. ‘I thought you’d be happy that it was me pushing and not you.’

  ‘Time and place, Aaron. The mutilated body of their only son is lying in a pool of blood and guts in their garden.’

  Though she was hardly one to talk. It was far more usual for her to be the bad cop in such a situation. In a way, she was glad Easton had taken on that mantle, in what had been one of the hardest conversations with a victim’s family she could recall.

  ‘Yeah,’ Easton said, ‘and he was killed out there while his parents were busy getting pissed, and no one gave a damn. In fact, they apparently had no inkling at all that anything was untoward until we arrived this morning.’

  ‘You’re saying you think they’re lying to us?’

  ‘I’m saying regardless of the fact their son is dead, I don’t like them. I don’t like their attitude to life, the—’

  ‘You don’t like the fact they’re worth millions and live in this huge mansion and drive expensive cars and throw big bash parties with celebrities. Sounds more like envy to me.’

  Easton was now sour-faced. ‘That’s not it at all. You can be rich and humble. I got the opposite impression from him.’

  Dani wouldn’t necessarily disagree with him on that, but still…

  Easton’s buzzing phone distracted them both from the conversation. They stopped walking as he answered.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Got it. We’re coming now.’ He pulled the phone from his ear and turned to Dani. ‘Constable found something on the CCTV.’

  DC Constable was one of several DCs in the homicide team. He was a close friend of Easton’s, and a good worker, though even having known him for coming up to a year, the humour of his surname still tickled Dani, particu
larly when she saw the questioning looks whenever he was introduced to someone for the first time.

  ‘Then let’s go,’ she said.

  * * *

  They carried on their way, through a room that had been introduced to them as the gallery, and deep into the old servants’ wing of the house, past the kitchen, pantry, a utility room, eventually coming to a cluster of basic square rooms that in years gone by may have been bedrooms for the live-in workers.

  Today the rooms were mostly used for storage, although one of the rooms, a ten by ten foot square with a single, small barred window with frosted glass, was now some sort of security suite with a desk and chair and computer with two widescreen monitors.

  Constable was sitting at the chair by the desk, busily scrolling through colour video footage from the night before. Pamela Longbridge, the stony-faced head of staff, was standing over his shoulder, still sullen. Dani couldn’t tell if it was her natural demeanour or the toll of the day’s events.

  ‘I’ve scoured the footage and I’m pretty sure I’ve found the last glimpse of Oscar Redfearne,’ Constable said.

  Dani moved closer to the screen. Unlike the grainy green CCTV of years gone by, this was full colour and the image clear and vibrant high definition, albeit the people on screen were still small and Dani found herself squinting a little to really focus.

  ‘Just here,’ Constable said, and he paused the image as a man stepped out from an open side door. Dani thought she recognised the spot the camera was picking up: the doors that led out from the corridor by the library where they’d been moments before.

  ‘That’s definitely Oscar,’ Pamela said.

  ‘Six-zero-nine p.m.,’ Dani said.

  So a little later than Oscar’s parents had recalled last seeing him.

  Constable hit play again, and as Oscar took another step from the house, his right hand trailed behind him and the next second he’d pulled a young woman in a black dress outside with him. The two walked off to the left and were soon out of the camera’s view.

  ‘Who is that?’ Dani asked.

  Pamela sighed. ‘Sophie Blackwood. A member of the serving team. She’s only been with us a couple of weeks, mainly helping to cover staff summer holidays. And she was supposed to be working yesterday, not cavorting with her employers’ son.’

  Dani ignored that comment.

  ‘Is there a camera that picks up where they went?’ she asked, to neither Pamela nor Constable in particular.

  ‘Only barely,’ Constable said.

  He typed away and pulled the mouse across the desk here and there and moments later another screen popped up. He spent a few moments getting to the right point in time. This camera was once again angled so that much of what it picked up was an area immediately along the outside wall of the house, but as Constable found the right time and clicked play, sure enough in the top corner, heading in and then out of the screen in the space of a couple of seconds, were four legs.

  ‘We can’t see their faces?’ Dani said.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ Constable said. ‘But the time works. Perhaps if you wanted to be absolutely certain you could map the exact route outside, but there’s no other logical explanation other than this being them.’

  ‘Heading away from the house, towards the woods,’ Dani said, thinking through the orientation of the outside of the mansion.

  ‘I just can’t believe this,’ Pamela said, angry more than anything else. ‘She was supposed to be working. What the hell was she thinking?’

  Dani once again ignored the comment. ‘And there’s nothing at all picking out Oscar coming back to the house after that?’

  ‘I’ve been through once,’ Constable said. ‘I can do it again to be sure.’

  ‘Please. And Sophie?’

  ‘I wasn’t looking out for her in particular the first time, so I’ll do that on the next run, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t pick up anyone else at all coming back past these two cameras. It’s not the main entrance after all.’

  ‘What time was Sophie supposed to be working until?’ Easton asked Pamela.

  ‘The whole night. Until two a.m., to give time after the last guests left to start the clean-up.’

  ‘So?’ Dani asked.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Was she still here working until two a.m. or not?’

  Pamela looked worried now, as though the issue at hand was finally dawning on her.

  ‘I can’t be sure. We had dozens of staff yesterday, and as you can surely imagine it’s a hectic day and night to say the least. Matilda might be able to be more definitive.’

  ‘OK. Well I suggest you go and find her. And we’ll need Sophie’s contact details.’

  Pamela nodded and went to move away.

  ‘What about the cameras inside the house?’ Dani said.

  Pamela paused.

  ‘What cameras?’ Constable said.

  ‘There’s one in the main hallway,’ Dani said. ‘One in the corridor out here, and another just outside the corridor by the gallery? I spotted them as we walked through.’

  Constable looked to Pamela.

  ‘They’re on a different system,’ she said.

  ‘How do we get access?’ Dani asked.

  Pamela looked a little flustered now. ‘Yes they’re for security, but those cameras cover movements of the family and their guests within the sanctity of their own home. I just…’

  ‘And they might provide us with more clues as to what happened to Oscar. And Sophie,’ Dani said.

  Pamela’s face had gone pale. ‘I’d have to check with Henry.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll understand,’ Dani said.

  Pamela said nothing as she stepped out of the room, and Easton’s earlier words about the Redfearnes’ party being the equivalent of the Presidents Club dinner bounced in Dani’s mind. Pamela hadn’t mentioned those cameras to Constable before now, and was clearly hesitant to provide access. Was that because she knew exactly what took place at these parties and was intent on sparing her employers’ blushes? Was it more than blushes she was sparing?

  Dani cringed at the thought.

  Regardless, with or without the Redfearnes’ permission, they’d get hold of those tapes. This was a murder investigation.

  Dani was glad that Henry Redfearne quickly came to that conclusion too. Less than ten minutes later Pamela returned with his blessing and the details and access codes for Constable to pull the recordings up, though it was notable that there were no cameras from the main living rooms downstairs, where most of the guests would have been, and nothing at all covering the upstairs of the house and its multitude of bedrooms.

  ‘Find the one from the corridor by the gallery,’ Dani said. ‘That might show Oscar’s last movements before he left the house.’

  Constable nodded and after a bit of trial and error he found the right one. He opened up the recording and began to scroll through; the image on the screen moved rapidly through the day, people ebbing and flowing at speed.

  ‘Stop there!’ Dani said.

  Constable hit the pause button. Dani’s eyes flicked to the time stamp. Five fifteen. Too early.

  ‘That’s Oscar, isn’t it?’ Dani said. The clothing was certainly the same, but the view was only of the back of him as he headed along the corridor.

  ‘Yes,’ Pamela said.

  ‘But it’s too early,’ Constable said.

  ‘Perhaps he was just heading into the library,’ Pamela said.

  Which made sense. ‘OK, keep going,’ Dani said, ‘but more slowly.’

  Constable nodded, and Oscar had soon moved away and out of sight of the camera. People continued to come and go as the time in the corner of the screen sped towards six p.m., but no sign of Oscar now. In the intervening time Sophie had gone back and forth, presumably from the gallery to the library, to get fresh bottles of champagne, but there was no sign of her interacting with Oscar, or anyone else.

  There was a knock on the door. Dani turned to see the matronly Matilda s
tanding there with a piece of A4 paper in her hand. She looked to Pamela before catching Dani’s eye.

  ‘You wanted Sophie’s details?’ Matilda said. ‘This is what we have. It’s the CV she gave us. It has her home address, email, mobile.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Dani took the paper; Matilda was already turning to head away.

  ‘Do you know where Sophie is?’ Dani asked.

  Matilda paused and turned, looking a little more worried now.

  ‘I’ve not seen her since yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘But when yesterday? Pamela said she was due to be working through the night. Was she?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really can’t say. It was a busy night. You know?’

  Dani didn’t really, though it seemed like everyone else thought that she should. What exactly had gone on last night when it was accepted that a young waitress would just disappear for most of her shift?

  ‘So when did you last see her?’ Dani asked.

  ‘Boss?’ Constable said.

  Matilda seemed glad of the intervention. Dani turned back. Her eyes first looked down to the time on the screen. Just after six p.m. She looked at the image to see the back end of a short, plump man swaying down the corridor.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Dani asked, to no response.

  A moment later, at the top of the screen, two bare legs appeared. Sophie Blackwood came into view, heading away from the library, champagne bottle in hand. The man slowed in his step and seemed to deliberately move into Sophie’s path. He put his hand out onto the wall when Sophie tried to edge past. It was clear by the scowl on her face that she was less than impressed.

  ‘Who is he?’ Dani asked again.

  She turned to Matilda who was playing with her phone. She looked up and shrugged. Dani looked to Pamela who was staring at the screen, lips pursed.

  ‘Pamela?’

  ‘I can’t see his face, but… I think it’s Arnold Davenport.’

  ‘Davenport?’ Easton said. ‘As in Davenport Associates?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  Dani looked to Easton, her baffled face indicating she had no idea what he was talking about.