Selina Seth was discovered not far from her final sexual encounter. Her battered and broken body looked like it had been shaken to death, with each limb twisted at an unnatural angle. Her killer had made a decent attempt to conceal the corpse, but a dog walker discovered the grim scene before the businesswoman had even turned cold and immediately raised the alarm.
Although shocked by the gruesome sight, with the victim’s hair matted to her head by blood and mud, there was still something vaguely familiar about her to the man taking his mutt for its morning constitutional. Later he had asked the detective who questioned him, ‘Was she that jewellery lassie?’
Detective Chief Inspector David ‘Bing’ Crosbie surveyed the murder scene and sighed. He knew Selina’s death would soon be common knowledge. He could feel the excitement in the air and hear the murmurings of the PCs manning the police line. Of course, Strathclyde had more than its fair share of murders, but this was different – this was a high-profile killing. It was certainly Crosbie’s first ‘celebrity’ case in the twenty years since he had joined the force.
He swore repeatedly under his breath: ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, you stinking motherfucking turd.’ Crosbie never cursed in front of fellow officers, but his inner monologue seemed to suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome. It would often let rip over everything from police incompetence to politicians’ meddling in police matters, or how it was a cast iron fact that his superior Detective Superintendent Cruickshank had only been promoted because he was a member of the same masonic lodge, golf club and gym as Chief Constable Ramsgate.
Whenever he was being addressed by Cruickshank – for his superior only ever addressed, never consulted anyone beneath his rank – Crosbie’s inner monologue would be doing cartwheels. ‘If there was a Masters degree in brown-nosery, you’d pass with an A – that’s A for dirty, back-stabbing arsehole’ was the general theme for one of his inner barrages during which he maintained a silent, fixed grin.
But he wasn’t smiling today. Selina Seth’s death would be headline news, and with the press meant pressure, and pressure meant mistakes. He thought back to Jill Dando, the popular TV presenter shot dead on the doorstep of her London home in 1999. Amidst a media maelstrom, the police eventually did what they always do, and arrested the local loony – a man known to stalk females. In 2008 their suspect was acquitted after a retrial. Police had got the wrong man.
Crosbie did not intend to do the same. But that would be easier said than done with every newspaper and TV station in the country demanding answers, coming up with their own theories, all of which would be his job to investigate.
But first the victim.
Just as DCI Crosbie was pulling on his forensic suit and gloves to approach the crime scene, a call was made to a reporter on the Daily Herald. The dog walker had been severely warned by Crosbie’s underling Detective Constable Marc Donohoe not to speak of his findings to anyone and had been reminded sternly that he would be found guilty of perverting the course of justice if he went bleating about it. This had not stopped Donohoe himself calling his friendly newspaper contact with the information, earning himself a handsome five hundred pound tip-off fee. Of course, it was illegal to pay a police officer under the Bribery Act, but newspapers had been carrying out the practice since time immemorial. And Connor Presley was only too happy to take the call from his contact. It meant the new Special Investigations desk had its first case.