be way too risky taking me out. I’m too high profile.’
But now they had.
Tina was surprised to see that there was only a single squad car, as well as a possible unmarked, in the parking spaces outside. There was no scene-of-crime tape sealing off the premises, nor any signs of SOCO. Only a very cold-looking uniformed copper in a fluorescent jacket standing guard outside the front door. With Penny dead less than twenty-four hours, it could only mean that they weren’t treating the death as suspicious, and Tina felt an immediate flash of anger.
She showed the uniform on the door her warrant card and wentup the narrow formica steps to the cramped first-floor room where she’d come only once before to see Penny. They’d met regularly over the past months, but whenever he’d thought he might have a lead worth talking about she’d always insisted they have their discussion in a place where it was less likely they’d be overheard. Penny had thought her paranoid – she knew that – particularly as none of the leads he was turning up were high quality, but Tina had had enough experience of their adversary to know that his ruthlessness and his desire to clear up loose ends could never be underestimated.
A young man in a suit and protective gloves – the only occupant of the room – stood up from the laptop he was examining and turned to greet her as she knocked on the door and stepped inside. He was tall and powerfully built, with short, cropped blond hair and a round, cheery face which had still not quite lost its puppy fat. Tina put him at about twenty-seven, though she reckoned he could probably pass for three or four years younger.
The man gave her a small, sympathetic smile and put out a hand. ‘DI Boyd, thanks for coming. I’m DS Rob Weale. Mr Penny’s wife told me that you’d met up with him a number of times recently.’
‘That’s right,’ Tina answered as they shook.
She slowly looked round the room. It was cluttered, as it had been the last time she’d been here. Files, newspapers and books were piled up on the windowsill, and much of the available floor space was taken up with unopened cardboard boxes. Nothing looked particularly out of place, except Penny’s chair, which had been moved out from behind the desk. Tina felt her jaw tighten as she scanned the contents of his desk: the photo of his two smiling girls; another one of his wife, Natalie; his stained West HamUnited coffee mug sitting forlornly between the laptop and an overflowing Heineken ashtray. He’d been warned twice by the building’s owners not to smoke in the office but, like Tina, he liked to cock his nose at authority. She sighed. She’d liked Nick Penny.
There was no sign of his body now, and only the vague, almost imperceptible smell of decay in the frigid air, mixed with stale smoke, confirmed what had happened here.
‘Would you like to talk somewhere else, ma’am? I can imagine it’s not that easy for you doing it here.’
‘I’m fine,’ she answered, keen to get things moving. She forced herself to say the words: ‘How did he die?’
‘He hanged himself from there,’ answered Weale, motioning towards the steel girder that bisected the room a foot and a half above his head. ‘He stood on his chair. He’d swallowed a load of Bombay Sapphire before he did it. When he didn’t come home last night, and his wife couldn’t get hold of him, she called the police. A local patrol car found him when they came by here just before ten p.m. The bottle was by the chair, and the initial toxicology results show he was more than four times over the drink-drive limit when he died. We haven’t got an exact time of death, but the pathologist thinks it was between five and seven p.m.’
Tina put a hand on the desk as the full enormity of what had happened suddenly hit her. ‘Did he leave a note?’
‘He left three. One to his wife. One to his children. And one to someone he only addresses as T, and which he’s signed
Heidi Hunter, Bad Boy Team