Free The TV Detective by Simon Hall Page B

you?’
    â€˜I try not to miss anything. So?’
    â€˜I was just wondering …’
    Dan told Adam about his research in the news library, the impressive number of passionate enemies Edward Bray had accrued over the years.
    â€˜So, I was wondering,’ he continued, ‘whether shooting him in the heart was symbolic in any way. Whether it might indicate an attack motivated by sheer hate.’
    â€˜A bit crime fiction, isn’t it? More the stuff of books than real detective work.’
    â€˜But possible.’
    Adam nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, possible, I’ll allow you that. Particularly when I add the bizarre piece of evidence the labs have given us.’
    â€˜Which is?’
    Adam took a couple of paces towards the felt boardsand tapped the picture of Edward Bray.
    â€˜As part of the attack, the lost although apparently unlamented Mr Bray was kicked in the face. But get this …’
    He paused like a veteran actor, ready to deliver the denouement of a play, wanting to be certain he had the audience’s complete attention.
    And he did.
    â€˜Yes, get this,’ Adam continued finally. ‘Edward Bray was kicked in the face– but only after he’d been shot dead.’
    Adam allowed a long pause for the image to settle on the MIR. When the detective was sure the drama of his point had been made and it was time to leave the stage, he gestured to Dan and headed for the door. But there was one thing the apprentice investigator had to know first, however overawing might be these first moments of his initiation into a criminal inquiry.
    â€˜Mr Breen, may I just ask a question?’
    The sharpness of the look suggested not.
    Dan swallowed. ‘It is a very quick one,’ he persisted. ‘I promise.’
    â€˜Go on then.’
    â€˜What’s that about, then?’
    Dan pointed to the wall of the MIR, by the door. Hung there, in a plain black frame and set behind a sheet of glass, was a piece of paper, A4 sized.
    On it was printed simply;
    992 619U
    Adam hesitated. ‘Ah, that,’ he said, quietly. ‘That’s the final question of one of the biggest cases we’ve ever investigated – and one we still haven’t been able to solve, even all these years on. Do you remember the story of Mitchell Bonham?’

Chapter Six
    I T TOOK AN EFFORT to concentrate on the road. Dan’s head was full of that hour in the MIR, the revelations he’d already heard, and what they would do next.
    The first interview with a witness.
    Or, as Adam Breen had put it, ‘Initially a witness, anyway.’
    â€˜Meaning?’ Dan asked, as they walked down the stairs from the MIR.
    â€˜It’s remarkable how quickly a witness can become a suspect in this business.’
    All it needed was a musical sting to emphasise the drama of the detective’s words. Dan was beginning to suspect his new colleague was something of a frustrated actor. He certainly enjoyed a little theatre.
    Which thought Dan deposited safely in his mental bank. It might just be useful, when it came to the need for a story.
    Teasing his mind too was the case of Mitchell Bonham. It went back fifteen years, to well before Dan’s time at Wessex Tonight , but the story had such notoriety he knew it anyway. Some of the older hacks still talked about it, using the whispered tones that, in generations long past, might have been reserved for huddles around the camp fire and the scariest of stories.
    Bonham was a nobody and a nothing, a thin, balding, middle-aged clerk in a solicitors, a man who finally found meaning in his life by taking life. He killed once, then again and again, murdering for no better reason than curiosity, to find out what it felt like. To end the lives of his fellows, and yet still be able to walk amongst the milling throng, the mass of people passing by unaware of the invisible mark he carried so proudly.
    He killed five people, mostly younger and