Page 3 of Indefensible
Murphy nodded slowly. “Here’s hoping.”
“Can we start with your full name and address?” Deryn got his phone out to make a recording, and his notebook as backup.
“Brody Johnson Murphy,” Murphy said, and reached into his pocket for a wallet, extracting a card which he placed in the table and pushed towards Deryn. “Special Agent Murphy, FBI, New York office.” As Deryn’s eyebrows rose, Murphy said, “But I’m here as a private citizen. Mason is a friend. He called me last week and asked me to visit. Said he needed my help and he would tell me about it when I arrived.”
Deryn picked up the card. It seemed genuine, but how would he know? “We’ll have to verify this.”
“Of course.”
“Now, your friend. I need his full name, and a description. Is he an American?”
“Mason Abruzzi, thirty, about five ten, a hundred and eighty pounds, blond, blue eyes. Dual nationality, US and UK. He’s lived here for a few years now, but he grew up in the US.”
“What does he do for a living?”
Murphy’s face reddened slightly. “He’s, um, very wealthy. Like a millionaire. I’ve never known him to have a job.”
Which didn’t explain why he was living in one of the poorest places in the UK, in a tiny house with chickens and a cat. Or, indeed, why he had disappeared on the day his friend arrived. His FBI friend. The same day they found two bodies. Glover was going to like this even less.
“Did your friend Mason use drugs?” Deryn asked.
CHAPTER 3
DAY ONE
Ascenes of crimes van arrived at Mason’s house before Deryn got an answer to his question about Mason and drugs. The civilian officer bustled into the back garden, looked irritably at the chickens, and headed for the kitchen in a full set of white overalls, mask, hair covering, gloves and bootees. Murphy asked if she planned on taking fingerprints. She scowled — at least that was how it appeared behind the mask — and said no, she’d only been told to test for blood.
Deryn shrugged at Murphy’s raised eyebrow. He’d come across this particular SOCO before and knew there was nothing to be gained by asking her to do anything other than her assigned task. To be fair, she was efficient.
“It’s blood,” she said, twenty minutes later. “Confirmation will have to wait on the lab,” and she was gone as quickly as she had arrived.
Murphy had spent those twenty minutes complaining about the lack of finger printing. “There should be a proper search…” he kept saying.
Deryn agreed, especially once the blood was confirmed. “But there could be innocent explanations,” he said. “We don’t knowyet that it’s your friend’s blood, and even if it is, we don’t know that he didn’t cut himself and go to hospital for stitches.”
“Without his phone?”
“Maybe he had another one. Or maybe he didn’t expect to be gone so long.”
“I know,” Murphy said, not troubling to hide his sarcasm, “maybe he cut himself so badly that he forgot. We should find out.”
That was something Deryn could do. He rang the two hospitals with emergency departments within driving distance, neither of whom had a Mason Abruzzi as a patient.
“He could have called an ambulance.” Murphy said. “Or a cab.”
Both would have taken him to the same two hospitals, but he rang the ambulance call centre anyway, and the only taxi firm that was likely to come as far as Cwmcoed. Nothing.
“Something has happened to him,” Murphy insisted. “It doesn’t make sense that he would beg me to visit and then just go out for the day.” There was an edge of desperation in Murphy’s voice, or so it sounded to Deryn. Murphy’s face was pale with a bright red spot on each cheekbone.
“You’re exhausted,” Deryn said. “There’s every chance that your friend will be back by the morning. There’s a hotel a bit further down the valley. Better not stay here just in case. Why don’t I show you where it is, then you can phone him again and come back in the morning?”
The red spots on Murphy’s cheeks became redder. “Don’t patronise me.”
Deryn blushed. “I wasn’t. But we both know that I can’t commence a major search for a non-vulnerable adult. We both also know that people do behave out of character. Yes, there is blood and overturned furniture, but it isn’t enough and you know it. And youareexhausted.” Quite why Deryn was soconcerned about a man he had only just met, he didn’t know. But he was. Murphy was easy to talk to, as strangers so often are.
Murphy nodded slowly. “We should make the house secure, and probably do something about these chickens,” he said, sounding weary, as if these tasks were too much. The sun had begun to dip in the sky, casting shadows over the garden.
“We can put the chickens to bed early,” Deryn said, with no real idea what this might involve, but unwilling to leave them outside all night at the mercy of the foxes who must live in the woods. “I can put crime scene tape over the back door.” He could see that Murphy wasn’t entirely happy with either of these proposals but was too tired to object.
