Little Boy Blue

71

‘I have a name for you.’

Helen was now standing in front of the team. A new case file in hand, she was determined not to waste any time.

‘His landlord has identified the victim as Maxwell Carter, more commonly known by his professional name of Max Paine. He was a dominator who worked from his flat, so obviously one of our first lines of enquiry is whether he was meeting a client last night. There were no papers or diaries at the scene, so DC Reid, could you liaise with uniform on the house-to-house enquiries – see if we have any witnesses to activity at the flats last night. We’ll also need to interrogate his digital footprint – did he run websites, was he on Twitter, Tinder? There were no devices in his flat, but we did find chargers for an iPhone 5 and a tablet, so check if he backed up at all and if so where to. Fast-track any warrants – we need to know who he was communicating with in the last few days of his life. McAndrew, can you take the lead on this?’

‘On it,’ McAndrew replied, rising and hurrying off.

‘Max Paine is a local boy,’ Helen continued, ‘with one marriage behind him and a son, Thomas, aged six. He divorced three years ago – his wife Dinah now lives in Portswood with their little boy. I will talk to them once we’re done here. For now, let’s focus on the facts. As with the Jake Elder murder, the killer has been very cautious, very precise. We won’t have Jim Grieves’s findings for a few hours, but so far Meredith has found no DNA evidence of our perpetrator within the flat.’

The way Helen said the word ‘within’ made a few of the team look up. Clearly she was building up to something.

‘However, she has just confirmed to me that her team have found a partial footprint in the corridor leading away from the flat. The lino on the floor had been cleaned recently and we’ve got the faint outline of a size 6 boot. It was raining last night, the ground outside the flats was soft and dirty, so -’

‘Does that suggest his visitor was a woman?’ DC Edwards asked.

‘Or a man with small feet. We’ve got an impression of the tread – which is ridged and in waved grip lines – DC Lucas, can you keep on forensics until we have a match?’

‘Will do.’

Helen handed out the rest of the duties to the team – witness statements, Munch follow-ups, financial investigation, family histories – before calling time on the meeting. It felt good to be leading again, but even now something nagged away at her. She had asked for the whole team to attend the briefing – to push forward together on the new leads – but one officer was notably absent. Which left her wondering:

Where the hell was Charlie?