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the roots of her investigations. She asked Woodley to come along too.
We took an unmarked pool car. I drove and Fraser studied the stereo, glasses halfway down her
nose. Woodley sat in the back, but took the middle seat and leaned forward each time Fraser said
anything.
Fraser asked, ‘Did you see the email from Press Office this morning?’
‘I did. Pretty brutal.’
‘Indeed. I’m meeting DS Martyn about it at eleven and he’s not going to be a happy bunny.’
DS Martyn was the officer ultimately overseeing this case, and Fraser’s senior officer. He was
never a happy bunny. I waited for her to say more, but she turned on the radio.
‘What do you like to listen to, Jim?’ she asked.
‘Five Live usually, boss,’ I said. ‘Or Radio Bristol.’
‘Those are very pedestrian choices,’ she said. ‘How about a little culture? Have you ever heard of
culture, DC Woodley?’
‘I played the recorder at school,’ he said.
I glanced in my rear-view mirror; he had a deadpan expression, hard to know if he was taking the
piss. Fraser looked amused. She put on a classical music station, turned up the volume.
‘I would have had you down for a Radio Four listener, boss,’ I said.
‘No, no. There’s far too much danger of hearing one of our pals from Scotland Yard crucifying
himself and the entire force on Radio Four. I like to avoid that if I possibly can.’
She leaned her head back on the headrest and when I glanced at her as we stopped at traffic lights,
she had her eyes closed.
We turned up at the address at 09.00. Our man lived in a basement flat, in a shabby street in
Cotham. From the looks of it, the street was mostly student flats, which had been carved out of a
terrace of tall flat-fronted Victorian buildings. The Bath stone facades had probably been attractive
once, but were now dirty and cracked in places. Not a single building looked well looked after.
Wheelie bins littered the pavements or were crammed into the tiny areas that fronted the street. Most
of them were disgorging overstuffed black bin liners. In front of our man’s property, a bin for food
waste had tipped over and deposited its rank contents on the threshold.
‘Not a proud household then,’ said Fraser, stepping carefully around the muck in a pair of little
heels.
We had to repeatedly press the buzzer to get an answer. Our man eventually buzzed us in through
the communal door and we waited in the hallway for him to appear. Fraser flicked through the post
that had been dumped on a communal table. Food delivery flyers littered the floor, and these, together
with Fraser’s shoes and lipstick, were the only sources of colour in the drab space. The light was on
a timer and clicked off just as he inched open the door to the basement.
‘Edward Fount?’ asked Fraser.
He nodded. Fraser introduced us. We produced our badges and he squinted at each one in turn. He
was a slight man, with very pale skin and hair so black that it must have come out of a bottle. It fell in
greasy tendrils around his face and made him look feminine.
He lived alone apparently. There were only three rooms: his bedroom, a corridor that was
pretending to be a kitchen, and a room that must have been a bathroom if the smell coming from it was
anything to go by.
‘They don’t like him,’ Fraser had told Woodley and me before we left. ‘The organisers of the
fantasy meetings – the ones we’ve spoken to – are wary of this boy. He’s a new member, and they
don’t know him well. And, on top of that, nobody saw him leave the woods on Sunday. Some of them