Page 4 of Crocodile Tears

“You wanted a hot chocolate? Damn it – I thought you’d prefer a coffee,” he said. Her face fell, and he grinned. “One hot chocolate waiting for you in the command post, Mel.”

“Thank you, sir dear.” The forensics tech gave him a cheeky mock salute. “I knew you wouldn’t forget a fellow chocoholic.”

“Anything to report, Mel?” he called as she turned to go.

“I know I work miracles, but I’ve only been here an hour. Give me a bloody chance.” She disappeared with a wave of her hand.

“Who found the body?” he asked, turning back to Reed.

“Housekeeper – Chantal Boucher,” Reed replied, glancing at the data hovering in the air above his holopad. “She’s not an indentured servant. She lives out, but she’s registered on the house’s biokey, so she didn’t need anyone to let her in. She arrived at 10.30a.m. as usual and found him. Didn’t touch or move him, and called the police straight away. Body was still warm when they arrived. They did a full sweep of the house, but there was nobody else here. I checked before you arrived, just to be sure.”

“And where is Ms Boucher?”

“I sent her home. She was in a complete state.”

“I’ll need to interview her.”

“I’ve arranged for her to be brought in to Inquisitus at 9a.m. tomorrow. Hopefully, she’ll have recovered by then.”

“I would have preferred to speak to her today,” Josiah said sharply.

“No, you really wouldn’t – you wouldn’t have got anything sensible from her with all that wailing, and you don’t exactly have the kind of manner that little old ladies respond to, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.”

“Are you saying I frighten people?” Josiah glared at him.

“Just a bit. You’re doing it right now,” Reed returned pointedly. “Ms Boucher is hardly a flight risk, anyway. You should have seen her. She’s at least sixty and a tiny little thing – I really doubt she murdered Elliot Dacre.”

“Okay – but send a duck to bring her here first thing tomorrow morning. I want to talk to her at the crime scene, not at Inquisitus.”

Reed raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly protocol, sir.”

“She’s the housekeeper, so she knows this place inside out. I want to walk through precisely how everything looked when she arrived this morning – it might help shake out some details she’ll forget if we interview her at Inquisitus. I’ll get her ferried back in to see you later, so you can record an official statement.”

He turned his attention to the corpse. The dead man’s face was almost as white as his dressing gown, and his lifeless eyes stared back at him. “Murder weapon?” he queried.

“No sign of it,” Reed replied. “So, I think we can rule out suicide, unless he shot himself in the head and then someone else waltzed off with the gun.”

“Any house cameras?” Josiah glanced around. Most houses had them, embedded in their smartwalls.

“Plenty.”

“Good.”

“But all the data on them has been wiped for the past twenty-four hours,” Reed added. “It was never going to be that easy, was it?” He winked. “I checked the house system – it’s all been erased.”

“By whom? What’s the biosig?”

“By Dacre.”

“What?” Josiah stared at him. “The dead man wiped his own house system?”

“Well, he might not have been alive when he did it,” Reed offered. “It’s easy enough to get a retina scan off him.” He gestured at the corpse, with its wide-open eyes.

“What time were they wiped?”

“That info has been erased, too,” Reed told him. “Most likely by the killer.”

“Hmm. Makes sense.”

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