The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell Read Free Book Online Page B

his coat up, took off his tie and jacket and went straight through to the kitchen, where he pulled the cork out of a half-drunk bottle of red wine that stood on the pine table in the middle of the clean tiled floor. He filled a vast glass. It was a ‘62 Cheval Blanc that had tasted a damn sight nicer the previous evening, but was still drinkable. Taste didn’t matter so much: these days he needed at least a few glasses to ease his mind and body’s nightly fight against sleep.
    The wine wasn’t his. None of the bottles were. His father, once he had retired from the force, sought a new passion and found it in wine, specifically Bordeaux. He collected bottles from all the best vintages, laying them down proudly, cataloguing them in a ledger. Occasionally, on special occasions, he would toode off to the cellar, blow the dust off one he thought may drink well, open it up and serve it to his guests, offering alongside it a description of the vintage, the maker, whether it had been a good year and why, and some of the wine’s characteristics. Then he would sip and savour just one glass during the course of a meal, sometimes making it last a whole evening. Among the last phrases he remembered his father saying to him — before he took the cocktail that ended his pain - was, ‘Look after the cellar, son.’
    ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he muttered as he took another large slug, wincing at the acidic bite created by being left open twenty-four hours.
    He wandered out of the kitchen and back into the hall, then turned into the sitting room. Occasionally, when he walked through the door, he detected a lingering hint of the lavender that formed part of the small bowls of potpourri his mother had left dotted around the place. They were one of the first things he threw out when he moved back into the house, on that drab November day a few weeks after his father’s death. And they remained among the last.
    The walls bore ghostly imprints, grey-white traces of now unwanted photographs and pictures. The sideboards were bare apart from a few well-thumbed magazines, the odd book and a couple of empty candleholders. The only photograph on display in the room — in the entire house, as it turned out - was of Foster at his wedding, grinning with an insouciance he no longer recognized beside his best man and best mate, Charlie. They had been inseparable.
    He cast his eyes around the room. Seven years ago he’d moved in. It still looked like he was lodging.
    He thought about the day, the murder, the body; then he thought about Barnes. He’d asked Foster whether he was aware of his own family history. He wasn’t, and he’d said as much. What was the point?
    But Barnes’s question reminded him of his father.
    Of those last few days. That was his significant family history.
    He headed over to the bureau in the far corner of the room, the place where his father used to sit and pore over his paperwork, glasses perched on the end of his nose, a cigarette balanced on the rim of an ashtray, spiralling smoke. He lowered the lid for the first time in years, the past leaping out. There was a cup with his father’s pens, a half-shorn pad of writing paper, a Metropolitan Police paperweight detailing his years of service, 1954—1988, a letter opener in the shape of a sword and a photograph of Foster in short trousers, with his mum on Camber Sands. He stared at it for a few seconds then closed the bureau lid.
    Closed the past.
    He collapsed on to the sofa and turned on the
    television, immediately muting the sound. He was tired, but he knew he was not yet ready to sleep.
    First he needed to switch off mentally, which meant emptying his head of all the thoughts swirling around in it.
    They had nothing. The killer had left no detail, no trace, clue or weapon at the scene. No witnesses had yet come forward. There was no obvious motive.
    They had a reference carved on a chest, a number left on a mobile phone, a missing, severed pair of hands. That was all. They