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have tortured and killed him
, Julie was thinking. She kept staring, horribly transfixed, but she was aware that someone was shouting
‘MRS FROBISHER!
’ and she turned just in time to see Susan disappearing out of her line of sight, clattering backwards, into the wall as she fainted, her flailing left hand tearing a roll of pornography off the wall, exposing the bare brick behind it.
    Julie looked down, her own legs weak beneath her, and saw her friend unconscious on the floor, Sergeant Black and the plain-clothes detective both bending over now. Susan’s wedding ring glittered on her hand, a hand that clutched a scrap of paper showing a semi-erect penis dangling inches from a greedy mouth.

TEN
    DETECTIVE SERGEANT HUGH Boscombe tapped the chewed blue biro against his teeth as he flipped through the manila folder on his desk. He let out a low whistle. Twenty-four years on the force, you think you’ve seen it all, and then a doozy like this comes up. The sheer amount of evidence at the scene too – boxes and boxes of it. The uniformed boys were still bringing it in downstairs. Videotapes, DVDs, Polaroids, magazines, sex toys. And a lot of paperwork like the stuff he was looking at now, financial records and so forth. He took the last chunk of pork pie from its waxy paper and munched on it as he kept reading.
    ‘
Macros Holdings, Incorporated Netherlands, agrees to loan Mr B. Frobisher the sum of £14,000 sterling at the rate of 0.05% interest against security of his shares in the same to the value of …
’
    He yawned. What time was it? Nearly midnight. He’d spent the last couple of hours going through this stuff. Some of the videotapes and photos – Jesus H. Over his head most of this financial stuff though. Make interesting reading for the lads over in fraud no doubt. Exciting though – bona fide murder. Crack this and …
    Christ, he shouldn’t have finished that bastard pie. Boscombe patted his gut. The wife was right. Getting out of control. Comfort eating mostly. Hadn’t been a great couple of years, with that bugger Hannah making detective inspector before him in the last round of promotions. And Davy Bryant the round before that. Bloody Wilson. The chief inspector had it in for him. That was the fact of the matter. Had to stop all this snacking – easing his grievances late at night with the fruit slices or the coffee cake, or the toasted sandwich before bed. You just didn’t burn it off like you used to once you got into your forties. Was wreaking havoc with his bloody bowels too. He glanced into the open bottom drawer of his desk – at the mountain of empty cartons of Rennies, Ex-Lax, the dead Gaviscon bottles.
    ‘Aye-aye, Sarge.’
    Boscombe looked up. ‘Wesley.’ His underling, Detective Constable Alan Wesley, fourteen years his junior. Not a bad lad. College boy, like most of them these days. Just over a year out of uniform though, and still as green as they came sometimes.
    ‘Quite a night, I gather,’ Wesley was saying, pouring himself coffee over at the machine. ‘Some goings-on down at Wellington Street from the looks of the stuff getting brought in downstairs.’
    ‘It is that, son. Double-headed joy boys and all sorts.’
    ‘Yeah, I just had a quick look through some of it. More on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy Horatio and all that, eh?’
    ‘You what?’ Boscombe said, not looking up.
    ‘Never mind. Is that the fella’s wife down in interview C?’
    ‘It is that.’ Boscome highlighted something on one of the documents he was reading with a yellow pen and moved it to the top of the stack in the manila folder. He stacked the manila one on top of a red folder: some choice pickings from the physical evidence – just enough to make the point. ‘He’s over in the morgue. Should have a COD soon.’
    ‘Nice-looking lady.’
    Boscombe sighed. The kid was young. In any case of spousal murder where did you start? You started with
the surviving spouse
.