Kill Who You Want

Chapter One

Author's note: the novel begins with the previous part, the prologue

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Six weeks later...
Monday February 12th, 5.33 p.m

Another patrol car blared around the corner the corner outside, came screeching to a halt. The whole living room was pulsed a strobing white, the venetian blinds in the front window slicing perfect knife strokes through the incoming light.

"I know this is hard Adam. All such a lot to take in right now."

Detective Sergeant Annie Wye touched a finger to Butterfield's cheek, rotated his head thirty degrees. Forced him to look at her. His was a shivering, huddled figure there on the settee beneath her, his eyes wide, unblinking, as if what they'd witnessed had frozen them hard. He would be in his early-thirties, she judged, a year or two older than herself. Hair blonde like her own, the eyes a similar shade of bluish grey. WPC Cathy Hargreaves was crouched beside him, her hand circling his lower back. A thick smear of blood gleamed across the shoulder of his coat, the shirt beneath.

"I need you to help me though. Think you can do that Adam?"

He frowned up at her, as if unsure of where he was, how he might have come to be there. Trembling from the shock, the after-reverberations of a hammer blow. They needed to get him cleaned up, Wye thought. Get him out of there. Away.

"You say you've been at work all day. I need you to tell me where that is exactly."

His gaze had slipped back towards the half-opened kitchen door. The angle mercifully acute, only the bloodied sole of a slipper was visible.

"We need to know where you work Adam."

Forcing his gaze back up at her, he finally twitched dry lips into motion. "Epcott and..." A deep, stuttered exhale was required to get it all out. "And Preston."

At this, Wye snapped her fingers purposefully at DC Larkinson behind her. The constable remained motionless however, unstirred, his gaze similarly fixed on the kitchen doorway. There was something about him, a certain long-limbed awkwardness, which made him seem a decade younger than his twenty-five years. A mere kid playing at being a plain-clothed copper. Never more so than that particular moment, his flesh noticably paled, did he seem a fish floundering out of water.

"Larkinson! Epcott and Preston. I need you to get on it please."

The added volume to her voice, its hissed no-nonsense urgency, was enough to snap him back to attention, have him wheel dutifully away, phone fumbled from pocket.

New to Ravensby, she wondered what Epcott and Preston was precisely. Some kind of law firm? Solicitors? Wondered too why the hell Inspector Kubič wasn't picking up his damn phone. It wasn't lost on her that for the moment at least she was the most senior officer in attendance at a murder scene. An unprecedented state of affairs, one which required the calmest of heads, the steadiest of nerves. She'd attended enough training sessions on serious incident response to know just how crucial those first few minutes were, how any oversight or misjudgement could potentially compromise an entire investigation.

"During the afternoon, at work." Her attention had once more turned to the forlorn figure beneath her. "Did you pop out at any point?"

Butterfield appeared not to register the question though. Just looked through her. Beyond her. The frown again, that awful constant tremble.

"I thought it was just a... just a crank. A sick joke." His head tumbled between palms. "Something like that... Christ. If you took it seriously..."