Page 27 of Dropping Like Flies

The address was flat twelve, the door identical to all the others in the corridor. As soon as I knocked, a diminutive woman with dark hair with streaks of gray, and round glasses that made her eyes look bigger than they were, answered the door and stared curiously at us from the inside. “DCI Ben Weaver,” I said, holding up my badge for her to see. “And this is Griffin Caldwell. He’s a special police liaison. Can we come in? We need to ask Douglas Elrod a few questions. It shouldn’t take longer than an hour.”

“Dougie,” the woman said. “No one calls him Douglas. Not even me.”

I took it from her comment and her age that she was his mother. “Dougie,” I agreed. “Is he here? Can we speak to him?” I didn’t wait for her to agree, carrying out the tried and tested police move of stepping forward and leaving her little choice but to step back and grant access. “If he’s not here, we can wait.”

She blinked. “He is here, but he’s very upset. He’s not really up to speaking to anyone.”

“If we don’t speak to him today,” I said. “We’ll need to come back tomorrow. It might be better for Dougie if he just gets it over and done with.”

“He didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she blurted out. “Dougie loved Rupert. He’d never hurt a single hair on his head. Never mind…” She swallowed, the words seeming to dry up in her throat.

“If we could just speak to him,” I insisted.

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, a man appeared at her shoulder. Although, boy was probably a better description given how young he looked and his willowy frame—made even more so by the oversize gray jumper he wore. Dougie was the archetypal twink. His blue eyes were red-rimmed, like he’d spent most of the day crying. “It’s okay, Mum,” he said, his voice soft. “I don’t mind talking to them.” He offered a tremulous smile before leading us into a small but cozy living room, the sofa barely visible beneath all the cushions that covered it. I picked three of them up and moved them aside, Griffin doing the same before we sat.

Dougie glanced at his mum as he took the armchair at right angles to the sofa and pulled the overlong sleeves down to cover most of his hands. “Maybe you could make us some tea.”

She nodded, looking relieved at the excuse to be elsewhere and then disappeared back the way she’d come, the kitchen presumably lying in that direction. There was a goldfish bowl in the middle of the coffee table, one lone goldfish swimming around in it.

“That’s Neptune,” Dougie said.

“Sorry?”

“The fish. He seemed shy when we got him, so we wanted to give him a name that made him feel more powerful. Neptune is the god of the sea.” He gave an embarrassed little laugh. “It sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

“Not at all.” I sat forward on the sofa, offering the introductions again for Dougie’s benefit, seeing as he’d missed the earlier ones. There were no handshakes, none of us feeling the need to initiate one.

Dougie picked at a piece of loose skin on his nail. “I guess you want to ask me about Rupert.”

“We do,” I agreed, Griffin staying silent and letting me do my job. “We’re speaking to all of Rupert’s friends and family. It’s standard practice after a…” I hesitated. Dougie already looked like it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.

“You can say it,” he said. “I won’t keel over just because you use the word murder.”

It might have been convincing if a single tear hadn’t streaked its way down his cheek. I sat up straighter, already feeling like a bastard for the questions I was going to have to ask him. “How long ago were you and Rupert together?”

“We met three years ago,” Dougie said. At Griffin’s slight raise of an eyebrow, he confirmed what we’d both been thinking. “I was seventeen. He was twenty-two.”

Not that big an age gap, all things considered, if you took Dougie being under eighteen out of the equation. “How did you meet?”

“In a bar.”

For the next few minutes, we ran through the circumstances of their past relationship, Griffin chipping in with a few questions when he thought they were necessary. Yes, Dougie had used fake ID. Yes, he’d lied about his age at first, but had come clean before anything had happened between them. Yes, they had been serious, only growing apart when Rupert changed jobs and let his new colleagues’ opinions influence him. No, Rupert hadn’t admitted that was the reason, but it had been obvious. Yes, Dougie hadn’t taken it that well. Rupert had been his first love. He hadn’t been ready for things to end so suddenly between them.

It was at that point that Dougie’s mum came in with the tea, her hands trembling slightly as she placed mugs in front of us, along with a jug of milk and an old-fashioned sugar bowl with a spoon in it so we could add our own if need be.

“Can we have some biscuits, Mum?” Dougie asked, the intention to keep her out of the room obvious to everyone except her apparently, as she readily agreed and disappeared back to the kitchen. While I ignored the mug of tea, Griffin set about adding milk and sugar.

“You made some threats to Rupert,” I said while his mum wasn’t in the room, figuring that it would be easier for him to talk about without a matriarchal presence. After all, what person wanted to talk about their flaws in front of the person who had given birth to them? I knew I wouldn’t. “After you’d split up. Bad enough that he reported you to the police.”

Dougie let out a sigh, his eyes now dry. “It wasn’t like that.”

“So tell me what it was like.”

He pulled his sleeves even further down so that only the tips of his fingers peeked out. “I couldn’t accept that things were over between us. I thought if I showed him how much I loved him, he’d see sense, that he wanted a grand gesture.” He peeked up at me from beneath his lashes, the coquettish look an attractive one. “Have you ever been in love?”

I was suddenly uncomfortably aware of Griffin’s proximity, his hand having stilled in the process of stirring his tea. How was I supposed to answer that when he was sitting right fucking next to me? “Unfortunately, yes.”

Griffin gave a barely audible snort before resuming his stirring, the action far too prolonged for the single spoonful of sugar he’d added to the mug.

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