Perfect Kill. Helen Fields

a glance at the victim – scrawny, neck covered in what looked like jailhouse tattoos – she left the kitchen and went into the lounge. Hand-rolled cigarette ends overflowed from every conceivable container, and a few had missed judging by the blackened holes in both the furniture and carpet. Takeaway cartons were strewn liberally about. A yellowing sofa that had obviously been chewed by a dog at some stage sat sadly at one end of the room, collapsing in the centre. It looked embarrassed to be there, Ava thought. Rightly so. The whole place stank. An old vest had been used to soak up some sort of spillage on a cardboard box that was doubling as a coffee table, and the curtains were makeshift scraps of material, hung with gaffer tape.

      Ava took the stairs, aware of the carpet sticking to her shoe coverings, glad of the gloves she was wearing that protected her hands from contamination as much as protected the scene from her. Straight ahead was a bathroom she didn’t even dare enter. The stench coming from it was nauseating. The first boxroom bedroom was jam-packed with bits of broken furniture and old suitcases. Beyond that lay the other bedroom, housing an equal number of cigarette butts as the lounge, and a bed with sheets that might never have been changed. No curtains at all upstairs, and no clothes in the open wardrobe. What clothes there were had ended up scattered across the floor in varying piles of slightly worn to absolutely filthy. Next to the bed was a pile of red-inked bills. Ava picked one up and opened it. Apparently Mr Gene Oldman hadn’t been meeting his electricity payments. She looked around. It was a tip. Every surface in the entire house was dusty or sticky. Except one.

      Ava took the stairs back down two at a time.

      ‘Everyone stay still,’ she ordered. ‘Wherever you are. The kitchen floor’s clean.’

      ‘Ma’am?’ Tripp queried, staring at her from the hallway.

      ‘Every other surface in this entire house is a bacteria brothel. There’s a dead man lying in the corner of the kitchen with his brains marking the walls – no effort to clean that up – and yet the kitchen floor is absolutely spotless. Somebody cleaned it, so whatever was on there was more important to the killer than the body itself.’

      ‘I need a complete window blackout and luminal spray asap,’ one of the scene examiners shouted. ‘If the surface was bleached and the victim’s been dead seven hours already, whatever was on the floor will be fading fast.’

      Ava stood back and let them work. Every window was lined with blackout blinds and every door shut until no light could enter, then four officers waited to spray a section of floor each.

      The entire floor began to glow immediately.

      ‘That’s the bleach,’ an officer explained. ‘You were right. It’s been recently cleaned, but it was fast and areas have been missed. There,’ he pointed in the direction of the back door, down in the corner near the skirting board. ‘And there. Photos immediately please.’ A faint blue glow came from two lines of grouting, and a semicircle roughly two inches across could be seen clearly near the back wall, furthest from the door.

      ‘Why does it glow blue?’ Ava asked.

      ‘The chemicals react with the iron in the blood’s haemoglobin. We’re on borrowed time though. It’s fading. That’s why we have the cameras ready to record areas of the floor where we need to pay special attention afterwards.’

      Ava trod carefully in the dark, moving towards the semicircle that was the boldest of all the glowing sections of floor.

      ‘It’s the edge of a footprint,’ she said. ‘Just the back of the heel. Can we get an accurate foot size from this, do you think?’ she asked the lead scene examiner.

      ‘I’d say there’s enough definition there for that, and now we know where the blood is, we might be able to ascertain more with further testing. The fact that we’re seeing this much glow probably means the bleach wasn’t very strong.’

      ‘Any hope of getting DNA?’

      ‘Depends if we can find a sample unaffected by the bleach.’

      ‘All right,’ Ava said. ‘The victim’s name is probably Gene Oldman, the property owner. Could you double-check against other fingerprints and DNA in the property? I didn’t see any photo ID lying around.’

      She made her way outside. In other areas of the city the presence of so many police officers would have triggered the build-up of an automatic crowd. Onlookers would be waiting for a body to be brought out on a stretcher. Speculation as to what nightmarish events had occurred would be circulating. But this was the heart of Wester Hailes. When the police arrived, doors were slammed and curtains were closed. No one stood out on the street. A loathing of authority overrode natural curiosity.

      ‘DI Graham,’ she said. He was in the throes of organising a nervous-looking bunch of uniformed officers. Conducting door-to-doors in that region of the city was about as much fun as a colonoscopy.

      ‘Ma’am,’ he said, face straight, no sign of what had happened the night before. He was professional and discreet, which made Ava feel worse rather than better about what she’d done.

      ‘I’d like to knock on the immediate neighbours’ doors myself to get a feel for what’s happening, but would you do the talking?’ Ava asked. Years of working undercover meant Graham had developed an easy tone which had the hardiest of potential witnesses opening up to him. In spite of her long, curly hair and unthreatening physique, her English accent courtesy of an expensive education insisted on by her parents rendered her something of an affront to some people, particularly in an area as deprived as Wester Hailes.

      They knocked on the first door and waited. Not so much as one curtain twitched, yet there was a clear sense that the property was occupied. Ava motioned to a uniformed officer to check round the back. It took no more than two minutes before a young couple were being escorted around from their back garden.

      ‘They were just headed through their back gate, ma’am,’ the officer explained.

      DI Graham took over. ‘Well, thanks for coming to chat. Won’t keep you long. You’ve probably noticed activity in your neighbour’s house.’ No response. ‘Were either of you in last night?’

      ‘We went to bed early,’ the man said, glancing sideways at the woman.

      ‘Did you? It’s really helpful that you were in your property. We have reason to believe there might have been a gunshot. Did you hear anything?’

      ‘Slept right through. Didn’t hear nothin’,’ the man declared.

      ‘Is your bedroom at the front or the back of the house?’ Graham asked.

      ‘The back,’ the man said. ‘So what?’

      ‘So that would have been above and right next door to the room where we think the gun was fired, likely around three a.m. Are you sure you didn’t wake up at all?’

      They both shook their heads.

      ‘A window was broken, too. I’m guessing there’d have been quite a disturbance. Did you know your neighbour well?’

      ‘Not really,’ the man said.

      ‘So you knew him a bit then,’ Graham said. Ava had to give him credit. He was a thousand times more patient than her. ‘What was he like?’

      ‘He was a creep,’ the woman said. The man gave her a sharp look that Ava didn’t like.

      ‘How so?’ Graham asked.

      She shrugged, suddenly finding the pavement of huge interest. Her partner took over. ‘You know what some blokes are like. Can’t keep their eyes off a woman’s tits when they’re talking to her. That’s why we never chatted to him much. Now we didn’t hear anything and we didn’t see anything, so are we free to go?’

      Graham looked at Ava, who nodded. ‘Give your details to the uniformed officer behind you, then you can go. And if either of you should suddenly remember anything, get in touch, okay? We know not to use your names.’

      ‘Don’t know