The wind refused to let up or calm down, and the scabby collie dog looked cold and hungry sitting on the porch when Lottie and Boyd pulled into Lorcan Brady’s driveway. Everywhere was dank and black. Branches on the trees surrounding the house dipped and swirled, cracking against the roof tiles.

‘It’s awful weather for October,’ Lottie remarked.

‘Doesn’t matter what month it is, it’s like bloody winter.’

‘Lighten up, will you. You’re making me depressed.’

‘That poor dog looks like he should be in the dog pound,’ Boyd said.

‘They’d put him down.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You’re a cruel—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Boyd said.

They got out of the car. The dog raised its head but didn’t move.

‘Maybe you could bring him home. Little Louis would love a dog.’

‘Will you stop?’

Lottie opened the front door with the key they’d recovered from the remnants of Lorcan Brady’s burned jeans. A pile of mail shifted as she shoved the door inwards. With gloved hands she picked it up and scanned through it.

‘Junk,’ she said, and dropped the pile on the table in the hall. It was already overflowing with rubbish.

‘Smells a bit rank in here,’ Boyd said, sniffing the air.

‘Damp,’ Lottie said. She walked into the room to her left. A sitting room at one time, it now looked like it had evolved into some kind of a den.

‘Easy to tell his mother isn’t around any more,’ Boyd said.

‘Poor woman. Maybe she’s better off.’ They’d discovered that Lorcan’s mum had died two years previously from cancer. There was no record of a father.

A small table with crooked legs stood in the centre of the room, cluttered with empty beer cans and a candle melted to its wick.

‘Yuck,’ Lottie said, looking through the detritus on the table. Crisp bags, chip bags, two half-eaten burgers. The carpet was littered with crumbs and dirt. The fireplace was piled high with fast-food wrappers, and a pizza box containing a few crusts lay on the floor. Shelves in the corner were stacked with beer cans rather than books. The arms of the chairs had served as ashtrays, with burns tracked along them.

‘No sign of drug paraphernalia,’ Boyd said.

‘As if it would be left out on view,’ Lottie said.

‘Everything else is.’

She examined one of the shelves. ‘Boyd, do you see a fish tank anywhere?’

‘No. Maybe in the kitchen. Why?’

‘Look at all that fish food.’ She counted twenty-seven containers.

‘Let’s have a look in the kitchen.’

The door was open and Lottie was about to step in but stopped. She put out a hand, preventing Boyd from entering.

‘I think we’ve found where Marian Russell was held,’ she said.

Boyd peered over her shoulder. ‘Jesus! It’s like something out of The Walking Dead.’

‘Contact SOCOs. I’m going to have a quick look upstairs.’

‘Don’t you think we should wait?’

‘You can. I need to know what type of lunatics we’re dealing with.’

Boyd pointed into the kitchen. ‘And that doesn’t tell you?’

Lottie hardly heard what he said. She was already at the top of the stairs. The landing floor was constructed of old wood, and above her head, a light bulb was screwed into a makeshift electrical fitting attached to a cross-beam. There was no ceiling. All the studding appeared to have been stripped away. Electrical cables ran along the beams. The light switch was missing screws and hung at an angle from the wall. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Entering the nearest room, Lottie deduced it had been Lorcan’s mother’s. Untouched since the day she died, most likely. Mounds of dust had collected on the gold satin bedspread. A yellow-ochre hue sliced the room in two, escaping from the space between the closed curtains. She shut the door and entered the second room.

The smell hit her. Rancid dirty clothes. She held a gloved hand to her mouth. Used condoms were strewn across the bare wooden floor, lying among dust and discarded beer cans. A jumbled mound of filthy sheets was scrunched up on top of the mattress, and the velour headboard was covered with cigarette burns. A chest of drawers stood under the window, and Lottie braced herself for the trek across the floor, expecting at any minute for vermin to scuttle out from beneath the bed.

About six tins of Lynx deodorant stood haphazardly amongst drink cans and empty cigarette packets. Three deep drawers. She opened the first one. A whiff of puke rose to her nose.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she muttered.

‘What?’

Lottie jumped, jostling the collection on the dresser.

‘Boyd, you bastard. You frightened the shite out of me.’

‘The state of this place. What kind of tramp is Brady?’

‘A filthy one. Everything stinks. How could Emma Russell be involved with him?’

‘Love is blind,’ Boyd said.

‘Love would want to have no sense of smell to come into this room. I really can’t see Emma in this pigsty.’

‘What’s in the drawers?’

‘Give me a chance.’ Lottie gingerly moved the underwear around, her gloved fingers searching beneath them. Finding nothing, she closed the drawer and opened the next one. T-shirts and vests. The bottom drawer too had little to offer. ‘More clothes. Hey, wait a minute.’

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Boyd leaned over her shoulder.

‘If you thought it was a bag of heroin, then yes.’ She held it aloft.

‘That’s worth a fair bit.’

‘How much do you think?’

‘There must be at least ten ounces in there.’

‘Worth killing for?’

‘There has to be more. I’ll look in the bathroom.’

‘You might want a gas mask.’ Lottie opened her handbag, found a plastic evidence bag and deposited the heroin. Giving the drawer a final glance, she closed it.

As she was passing the bed, she flicked up the bundled sheeting. Snagged up in the clump of dirty linen, she caught sight of a snatch of purple material. Carefully she plucked out a girl’s hoodie. She’d seen one similar to it recently, but in a different colour. Where? Who’d been wearing it? Emma Russell! Had the girl really been in here? Having sex with Brady? It didn’t fit with the image she had of her. But she’d been proven wrong before.

‘Found more!’ Boyd shouted from the bathroom.

With a shake of her head, Lottie folded the hoodie and took it with her. Boyd was on his hands and knees, having removed the avocado-green plastic covering from the side of the bath.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘That’s some haul.’ Boyd had extracted three more bags of heroin.

‘But it’s not a lot in the scheme of things, is it?’

‘Lorcan Brady’s fingers were chopped off, Marian Russell had her tongue cut out and was left for dead, and an unidentified male was stabbed and burned. There must be more drugs.’

‘Maybe they went up in smoke in the cottage fire?’

‘I think we’d better find out before someone else is murdered,’ she said.

‘We need to identify the dead man. It might lead us to his killer.’ Boyd got up from his knees. ‘Want to look in the cistern?’

Lottie lifted the lid from the toilet cistern. ‘Water. Nothing else. But…’

‘What?’

Shifting the lid back on the cistern, Lottie glanced around the dingy bathroom with its plastic decor and drab tiles. ‘If Lorcan Brady was big into the drugs game, don’t you think he would be living somewhere better than this?’

‘Possibly.’

‘The hacking-off of his fingers – I think he was stealing from the big guys. Got caught out. Was he a middleman, or the lowest link of the chain? Is something bigger going on?’

The trundle of a heavy van and the screech of brakes from outside caused her to look up. ‘That’ll be McGlynn and his team.’

Boyd said, ‘Wait until he sees the amount of blood in that kitchen.’

Lottie had another look into the bedroom and a familiar icy chill settled between her shoulder blades.

‘Boyd?’

‘What?’

‘We’d better find Emma.’