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  “All right, Melissa. Thank you for your time. You’ve been very helpful.”

  They stepped out into the corridor, and Mackinnon pressed the button to call the lift.

  Melissa hovered in the doorway to her flat. “Look, I didn’t trust him. I still don’t. If you really think Ashley was murdered, you should look at Noah first.”

  “Ashley’s parents seemed to think he was a nice guy,” Mackinnon said as a bell chimed to signal the arrival of the lift.

  As the door slid open, Melissa scowled. “That’s because he’s a good actor. Laying on the charm for Ashley’s parents. But it’s all fake. It’s all an act.”

  Outside Marlyn Lodge, Mackinnon turned to Charlotte. “What did you make of that?”

  “I think she was very upset. What she said about Noah was interesting, though. The killer is often someone known to the victim, and Noah fits that profile, all right.”

  Mackinnon nodded. “It’s strange that Ashley’s parents were both taken in by him, especially as they’ve known him for so long. Dads are notoriously protective, aren’t they?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “Usually, but if he was a good enough actor, he could have taken them in.”

  “He’s the most likely suspect so far,” Mackinnon said. “If Ashley’s parents can’t find her laptop, I’m going to pay Noah a visit.”

  “Do you think he’s taken it?”

  “Possibly. If it has anything incriminating on it, that would be one reason Noah wouldn’t want us to find it.”

  “Shall I talk to DI Tyler about a warrant?”

  Mackinnon nodded and checked the time. “Yes, if you could do that when you get back to the station, that would be great. I need to go and see a man about some bugs.”

  Charlotte gave him a wry smile. “Rather you than me.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  After enduring another hot journey on the Underground, Mackinnon collected a pool car from Wood Street Station and drove to East London. Dead on time, he pulled into the Lidl car park on Burdett Road and searched the spaces for a pest control van.

  There were plenty of cars and one white unmarked van, but nothing to suggest it belonged to a pest control company.

  Mackinnon parked up and settled back to wait. He had Gary’s mobile number and could call him if he didn’t arrive within the next few minutes.

  He took the opportunity to check his phone for emails. There’d been a couple of updates, but nothing concrete.

  With the engine turned off, the heat in the car soon became unbearable, so Mackinnon got out, locked the car, and looked around the car park again, wondering if he’d missed Gary’s van the first time.

  He noticed there was a man sitting in the front seat of the unmarked white van and pulled out his mobile to ring Gary.

  The man in the van picked up his mobile at the same time, and Mackinnon realised the pest control company must use an unmarked van on purpose.

  Gary answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Gary? This is DS Jack Mackinnon.”

  “All right. You’re here, are you?” The man in the van peered out of the windscreen, and Mackinnon waved to him. He hung up and got down from the cab. Smiling cheerfully, he held out his hand for Mackinnon to shake.

  “I’m told you need to find out about bedbugs,” Gary said in a loud, booming voice.

  “That’s right. I was expecting your van to be a little easier to recognise with the company name on it or something similar,” Mackinnon said, nodding at the plain white panels on the van.

  Gary winked. “Well, we need to be discreet in this line of business.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, looking shifty as he opened the back doors of the van. To an outsider it must have looked like some kind of illicit deal was going down. The thought made Mackinnon smile.

  “Well, here’s the kit,” Gary said, putting his thumbs in his belt loops and standing back as Mackinnon looked inside. There were multiple containers with spray pumps, the kind Mackinnon had used against garden pests like greenfly in the past. “So, you use that equipment to spray pesticides in the affected properties?”

  “That’s right.” Gary clambered in the back of the van and grabbed a medium-sized white container with a red lid. “This is the stuff we use to kill the little blighters. It’s water-soluble up to a point. Three scoops of this stuff in ten litres of water.”

  “It kills them on contact?”

  Gary chuckled at Mackinnon’s ignorance. “If only. No, they take a while to die out, especially if it’s an established colony. We generally do two treatments. On the first one, we spray all the carpets, and walls, and of course the bed, and then we usually go back two weeks later to repeat the treatment. You see, if there are eggs around, they won’t necessarily be susceptible to the poison. When the eggs hatch, the problem starts all over again, so the double treatment really helps wipe them out.”

  “I don’t know how much your colleague told you,” Mackinnon said, “but the reason I’m interested in these bugs is that we have a murder victim with a series of bedbug bites on both forearms.”

  Gary raised his eyebrows. “She did mention it. I thought it was a bit weird, to be honest. I mean, bedbugs are tiny little things, and they often like to bite you where you have contact with the mattress. That’s not to say forearms don’t get bitten, but for all the bites to be isolated to the forearms is unusual, particularly if it’s more than one bug doing the biting.”

  “How would we know if there was more than one bug?”

  “Well, the bedbugs don’t necessarily feed every day. In fact, some people think they only need to feed every three or four days, so the fact your victim, as you said, had a lot of these bumps on her arms suggests more than one bug. Each one tends to bite three times. Not always, but that’s typical.”

  “Yes.” Mackinnon grimaced. “Our pathologist mentioned that. He said some people think of it as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  Gary chuckled. “Yes, I have heard it referred to that way.” He looked at the container in his hand and then put it back in the van. “Apparently, the things were almost eradicated back in the thirties, so I’m told, but now we’re having a resurgence. We don’t yet have it as bad as New York, but give it time. Things are escalating.”

  “So how many cases would there be in the central London area in a month, would you say?”

  Gary exhaled a long breath. “I wouldn’t have the first idea, I’m afraid. We only treat a small portion of them.”

  “But surely cases of bedbug infestations are reportable, aren’t they?”

  Gary shrugged. “Well, I can tell you the places I’ve treated in the last month. Our company reports to the council, but not all private places do, and in some cases, people decide to try and treat the infestations themselves. It can be dangerous because of the chemicals, although the really strong stuff’s been banned since the eighties. If I’m honest, that’s probably got something to do with the resurgence.

  “There’s two schools of thought. One is that we no longer use the super concentrated pesticides, which are more effective but possibly dangerous to public health, and the other one is there’s a lot more international travel these days, so more opportunity for the little critters to spread.”

  Mackinnon let Gary’s words sink in. It seemed his hope of locating where Ashley had been held for the ten days she was missing by locating bedbug sites was not going to work.

  “Of course, it’s not only bedbugs we treat,” Gary said, taking Mackinnon’s silence as an opportunity to talk. “Most of our calls are about bees and wasps at this time of year. It’s been a bumper year for wasp nests. We get a lot of problems with mice and rats, too, and cluster flies can be a real problem. We get them regularly. But bedbugs are one of the worst. Because you have to spray the whole place, whereas with mice and rats, you lay a few traps, put in the poison, and you’re done. With cluster flies, you get to set off a pesticide bomb in the loft.”

  “A bomb?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” Gary said. “One of these,” he said, disappearing into the van and then reappearing holding a small black container. Mackinnon read the outside label: SMOKE BOMB.

  “They’re pretty effective,” Gary said. “And it doesn’t take long to set one or two of those up in someone’s loft space. Spraying a whole flat or a whole block of flats for bedbugs on the other hand is very time consuming and expensive. That’s why some people opt to do it themselves.”

  Mackinnon wondered why on earth bedbug treatment wasn’t covered by the council. Surely if one flat was infested, they’d eventually spread through the whole building.

  “But the council covers the cost?” Mackinnon asked.

  “Some councils do. Others heavily subsidise like ours. But even that’s too much for some people. Plus there’s the embarrassment factor. People think it’s because their house is dirty, or other people will think their house is dirty. The last case I had was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. It was a poor old bloke in his eighties. He had vision problems, so he hadn’t been able to see them, but the carpet was practically crawling with the things when I got there. I’ve never seen anything like it. Usually they stay well hidden, particularly in daylight, but there were so many of them the place was overrun. We think he got the infestation from his grandson who’d been travelling around the world and had left his rucksack in the spare bedroom. I’ve done the first treatment. I’m going back next week for the second. He thought it was just a rash at first. Didn’t help that his GP misdiagnosed the bites as a reaction to steroid medication.” Gary rolled his eyes.

  He checked his watch. “I’m off to do a treatment now. You’re welcome to come along and take a closer look. It’s an empty apartment block, so no worries about privacy on that front.”

  Mackinnon hesitated. The idea of voluntarily going into a flat known to be infested with bedbugs made his skin crawl. On the other hand, there was still a chance that this information could help them find where Ashley had been held captive. Though, it was looking less and less likely the more he found out about the insects.

  Mackinnon nodded. “All right, then. I’ll take a quick look. Thanks.”

  Gary nodded to the cab of the van. “Get in, we’ll go now. We’ll take a quick look around the place and I’ll show you where they typically hide and then give you a ride back here before I start the actual treatment.”

  “Great,” Mackinnon said, trying to sound enthusiastic as he climbed up into the cab.

  The flats were an old sixties-style block that had been recently renovated. When Gary opened up the ground floor flat, Mackinnon was surprised at how nice and fresh everything looked. He knew Gary had said bedbugs had nothing to do with cleanliness, but this light, bright apartment with freshly painted walls and a soft, pristine, cream carpet was the last place he’d have expected to see the bugs.

  Gary smirked. “I can tell you’re surprised. But honestly, you get them everywhere. I have to admit, the worst cases do tend to be the most neglected buildings, but that’s generally down to the cost. People put off getting in contact because they think the treatment isn’t going to be something they can afford, and it’s not clear that the council will cover it unless they are council tenants. This way.”

  Gary led the way into the bedroom. There was a large bed in the centre of the room. The bed covers had been stripped. Gary knelt beside the bed and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

  He beckoned Mackinnon closer. Pointing at the edge of the mattress he said, “Can you see those dots?”

  Mackinnon squinted at the little black dots. At first, he thought they looked like mould. “Yes,” he said.

  Gary pulled back the seam of the mattress, displaying more little black dots. “It’s what we call insect dirt. In this case, bedbug poo. It’s one of the easiest ways to tell if a bed has been infected. It doesn’t mean there’s an active infestation, because they could have been eradicated, but it’s a good sign to look for if you check into a hotel.”

  Mackinnon hadn’t even thought of ever looking for signs of bedbugs when he checked into a hotel.

  The surprise must have shown on his face because Gary said, “Believe it or not, it’s one of the most common ways to get an infestation.”

  Gary slowly made his way along the edge of the mattress before giving a sharp yelp of victory and pinching something tight between his fingers. “Here we go, an adult!”

  Gary held it up for Mackinnon to inspect, and though Mackinnon wanted to take a step back, he made himself look at the bug gripped between Gary’s fingers. It was reddish-brown, and the most notable thing was how flat it was. It was barely as thick as a sheet of paper.

  “No wonder it can creep through small gaps. It’s so thin.”

  Gary nodded. “It’s thin now because it hasn’t fed for a while. After feeding they get much fatter.”

  Gary squashed the bug between his fingers unceremoniously and then got back to work, shifting the mattress back and revealing the slats of the wooden bed beneath.

  “Lots more here,” he said, but by the time Mackinnon looked, the insects had scurried back into the gaps and crevices around the frame. “The adults are hard enough to spot, but the junior bugs are a nightmare. They are a kind of cream, translucent colour, so if your bedding is white, they’re almost impossible to spot.”

  Mackinnon scratched the back of his neck and shivered despite the warmth in the room.

  Gary looked up and grinned at him. “Seen enough, have you?”

  “I think I have, yes.”

  “I’ll give you a lift back to the car park.”

  As they got back into the van, Gary said, “You might want to wash all your clothes at sixty degrees tonight, just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  “They get everywhere. Just in case you got some on your clothes. A little baby one or something. The heat will kill them. Wash at sixty. The best option is tumble drying, but I don’t think your suit trousers will stand up to that.”

  Mackinnon looked down at his dark grey trousers. He felt like burning them.

  “Don’t look so horrified,” Gary said. “It’s only a precaution. It’s extremely unlikely you got any on your clothes.”

  “Right.” For some reason, that didn’t really make Mackinnon feel better. “Your colleague said she’s going to send me a list of places your company has treated recently, but I wondered if you remember treating a flat in the City of London within the last six months.”

  As they pulled into the Lidl car park, Gary screwed up his face and shook his head. “No, sorry, mate. Not me. East London’s my area. Though, some of the other lads do work the City of London, so you might get some luck.”

  “Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.” Mackinnon opened the van door.

  “Not a problem,” Gary said. “I just hope you catch whoever it is you’re looking for.”

  “So do I,” Mackinnon said, walking back to his car as Gary did a three-point turn and drove off.

  Gary had been informative, but Mackinnon wasn’t sure the information was going to get them any closer to Ashley’s killer. He could only hope that one of the addresses the company had treated recently was Noah Thorne’s. That would be a very interesting connection indeed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Back in the car, Mackinnon checked his emails on his phone, keeping the engine running and the air conditioning on full blast.

  A1 Pest Control had sent him the email. He clicked on it and scanned the list. It was a long list, and it would take a while to get through, but there was one address he really wanted to check out first, and that was Noah Thorne’s. It was rush hour, and if he headed back to the station, he’d be caught up in traffic. There was a coffee shop just across the road, and he decided to head there to look over the list of addresses while getting a little caffeine boost.

  The coffee shop was small, a traditional East End cafe. It had a large air conditioning unit at the rear, which meant it was a more pleasant temperature than outsi
de. There were two empty tables, and Mackinnon took the one closest to the door and waited at the table to get served. He opened the word document on his phone.

  A middle-aged woman with a sunny smile approached him and asked for his order. “What can I get you, love?”

  “A black coffee, please.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  “Do you have any sandwiches left?”

  “No, but I can make up a fresh one. Ham or cheese?”

  “Ham, please.”

  “Brown or white?”

  Thinking of his rather unhealthy dinner last night, Mackinnon opted for brown bread. He was starving and didn’t know what time he’d be able to get anything to eat later tonight. If he found a link between Noah Thorne and the bedbug bites, it was possible that they could have Noah Thorne in custody by this evening, which meant food would definitely take a back seat.

  He selected 'Edit’ and then 'Find’ on the word document and typed in Noah Thorne’s street address.

  He muttered a curse when it came back with no hits. Of course, that would have been too easy. It didn’t rule out Noah. He could have held Ashley somewhere else rather than his apartment. If what he had said was true and Ashley’s parents had been to his place while their daughter was missing, it was unlikely he’d have kept Ashley in the flat.

  Mackinnon thanked the woman who brought him a mug of black coffee. He took a sip of the scorching liquid and looked back down at the word document. The next logical step would be to check the roads around where Ashley’s body was found and then follow the bus route they believed the man who’d dumped Ashley’s body had taken.

  Mackinnon scrolled through the digital copy of the briefing notes, which included photographs. There was a freeze-frame image of the suspect taken from the Chinese take-away’s CCTV. Could the man in the hoodie be Noah Thorne?