Free Relentless by Simon Kernick

to take advantage, but he
also wanted answers and it was still only twenty to six. If she
worked fast, she could still get a good night out.
'If you can see what you can do, that'd be great.'
'Do you think there's a link between our case and this, then?'
'If there is, I want to make sure we find it,' he said, and hung
up.
By now, they were back at the front of the house. More
police vehicles had arrived, including a dog unit which would
be used to ascertain what route the killers had used in making
their escape - something Bolt hadn't asked about. The tracks on
the path had all been going up so it seemed likely that they'd
fled into the woodland after finishing off Calley. The front
door of the dead lawyer's house was guarded by a uniformed copper, and SOCO officers moved in and out of it, carrying their
paraphernalia.
They showed their warrant cards to the uniform and stepped
inside.
The interior of Jack Calley's place was less spacious than
    it looked from the outside but still impressively done in a
minimalist style that was all the rage these days but made it
appear virtually unlived in. The floors were varnished wood; the
walls cream; the occasional rugs alternated between black and
white; the hall and dining-room furniture expensive combinations
of mahogany and cast iron. The whole thing seemed to
Bolt to belong to a man with a phobia about dirt. A plasma TV
that was bigger and flashier than the one in the team's HQ hung
on the living-room wall like a futuristic ornament, facing a
pair of linen sofas that had been symmetrically positioned in
a perfect yet rather pointless V-shape.
Bolt and Mo spent the next half an hour inspecting the house
while trying not to get in the way of the dozen or so SOCO
officers who swarmed over it looking for tiny clues - traces of
DNA, strands of clothing, anything, in fact, that would help
to identify the two killers. A search of a house like this would
take anything up to three days, and if there were leads here,
they would be found. The technology available to the police
was getting more advanced every year and it was getting to the
point where only the most intelligent of criminals could operate
successfully. This was, of course, a good thing. It was nice to
see the bad guys getting caught, and with such incriminating
evidence implicating them that any denial was rendered pointless,
but something of the job of detective had been lost too. The
crime was no longer such a puzzle, the detective no longer such an important part of the process. Often, their job was done
for them, by the CCTV operators and the guys from SOCO. . Sometimes, Bolt had to admit, it wasn't so much fun as it used to
be.
In the master bedroom, where Calley's kingsize futon took up
mucti of the floorspace,,they found what they were looking for.
    A pair of neckties had been knotted through the wooden frame
on each side of the bed's head. These had obviously been used
to restrain him, and the several small black marks on the
brilliant white sheets in the middle of the bed confirmed their
suspicions that it was here that a naked flame had been applied
to Jack Calley's groin. Two SOCO guys were on their hands and
knees examining the floor around the bed, and it was clear there
wasn't much else the NCS men could do.
'So, what do you think happened, boss?' asked Mo as they
stood well back looking down at the futon, the SOCO guys
studiously ignoring their presence.
'My guess is that when Calley let his killers in, they dragged
him up here. Used his own ties to secure him and then went to
work with the lighter, or whatever they were using to extract
their information.'
'But somehow he manages to escape, get down the stairs
and out the back door, even though there are two of them and
they've tied him to the bed?' Mo sounded sceptical.
'You think he had some help?'
He shrugged. 'They were torturing him here and he ended up
dying two hundred yards away. So something's not right.'
Bolt looked down at the futon again. He imagined