Free Deadlight by Graham Hurley Page B

crawled over everything, front door, hall door, every exterior window and every carpet beneath the window sill inside. Absolutely no sign that anyone had tried to force their way in.
    ‘What about this plaster cast? The footprint?’
    ‘Definitely fresh and definitely worth pursuing. But we found bugger all on the bedroom window above, and nothing on the carpet inside. Whoever was standing in the flower bed never went in through that window.’
    ‘And you’re still telling me the cast doesn’t fit any of Coughlin’s shoes?’
    ‘No, sir. Too big.’
    ‘Shame.’ Faraday frowned. ‘So whoever got in, Coughlin let in. Is that a safe assumption?’ Heads nodded round the table. ‘A friend then, is that what we’re saying?’
    A hand went up. It was DS Brian Imber. A trim, combative fifty-three-year-old, he’d come down from theHavant-based Crime Squad to head up the
Merriott
Intelligence Cell.
    ‘We have to ask ourselves some questions here,’ he said slowly. ‘The man had no friends. This is Billy No-mates. It’s all there in the statements from the prison.’
    Dave Michaels threw down his pencil.
    ‘Yeah … but Brian, he has to have a friend somewhere, doesn’t he? Mates are like …’ He shrugged. ‘He had to have
someone
to talk to.’
    ‘OK.’ Faraday took the point. ‘So who?’
    ‘Haven’t a clue, guv. Yet.’
    Faraday returned to Imber. The Intelligence Cell was responsible for analysing the calls Coughlin might have made.
    ‘What about his phone? Where are you on that?’
    ‘We’ve applied for billings on his land line and mobile. The forms are ready for your signature.’
    ‘What about 1471? Any joy?’
    ‘Withheld number.’
    ‘What time?’
    ‘Two minutes past midnight.’
    Faraday wrote down the time and gazed at it. Coughlin had logged on to the porn site at seventeen minutes past midnight, a quarter of an hour later. Did that mean he’d only just come in? Or was he so pissed, or so preoccupied, that he wasn’t answering the phone beforehand? Had he gone out early, bought the Scotch, stopped for a kebab somewhere, and then gone home for a night in front of the telly? Or had he been out all evening and brought someone back? A stranger, say? Someone he’d picked up? He tabled the suggestion and saw Dave Michaels pull a face. Stranger murders were the toughest of all.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘Could be, boss. You look at the shots from Niton Road, it could easily be some stranger. Coughlin bringshim home, gives him a bit to drink, makes a move, gets it wrong, and the bloke takes exception.’
    ‘
Kills
him?’
    ‘Batters him. Smashes the place up. Then leaves the porn mags as a kind of message. You’re asking me whether that sounds credible? Yes. You’re asking me whether it happened? Impossible to say. For now.’
    Faraday nodded, knowing it was true. The wider they cast the investigative net, the greater the chance that something – some interlocking pattern of events – might slowly start to resolve. In the meantime, all they could do was take it a step at a time, making sure they missed nothing.
    Jerry Proctor went through his first list of forensic submissions: tapings, the empty Scotch bottle and an abandoned glass that were ready to be shipped to the Forensic Science Service in Lambeth. The SOCOs had lifted good prints from a number of surfaces in Coughlin’s front room and they’d all been sent over to the force labs at Netley for possible hits on the NAAFIS database. If any intruder had a criminal record, the system would flag up a name.
    Faraday knew that Proctor’s SOC team would be spending the next couple of days going through the rest of Coughlin’s flat, swabbing door handles and switches, removing items for chemical analysis, applying specialist techniques to floors and carpets in search of tiny traces of protein that might indicate blood. Only when every last square inch of the flat had been searched would the house finally be available for Brian Imber’s