Die Twice (2006) Omnibus : The Business of Dying; The Murder Exchange by Simon Kernick

Author:Simon Kernick [Kernick, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Fiction, Hard-Boiled
ISBN: 9781466873193
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Published: 2014-06-09T23:00:00+00:00

Friday, sixteen days ago

Gallan

The murder of Shaun Matthews, thirty-one, of the Priory Green Estate in Islington was an odd one from the start. Matthews had enemies, there was no doubt about that. Three months before his death he’d been threatened by two men he’d thrown out of the Arcadia nightclub in Holloway where he worked as chief doorman. One of the two, later identified as twenty-eight-year-old Carl Voen, had claimed that he was going to come back and blow Matthews’s head off. This might not have been taken seriously had it not been for the fact that Voen had a previous conviction for possession of a firearm and two further convictions for grievous bodily harm. He was, by most accounts, a man with a short fuse. He was also, unfortunately, a man with a watertight alibi for the time of death. For at least twelve hours either side of the point at which Matthews had shuffled off his mortal coil, he’d been in custody undergoing questioning about an armed robbery, with the questioning being carried out by two of the detectives who were now investigating the murder.

Shaun Matthews was also a drug dealer. According to anecdotal evidence collated by investigating officers, he supplied Ecstasy, cocaine and, on at least one occasion, heroin to Arcadia clubgoers (apparently in collusion with the club’s management), as well as to individuals visiting his flat. According to more than one source, he had also earned himself something of a reputation for selling below-par products, particularly when operating off the premises. There was a story doing the rounds that one unlucky punter had challenged Matthews about an especially poor batch of cannabis he’d sold him only to have Matthews dangle him by the ankle from the third-floor balcony of his flat while simultaneously slashing his buttocks with a Stanley knife. The punter had needed more than forty stitches on his behind and he, too, had left the hospital muttering words of dark revenge against the man who’d made it so difficult for him to sit down in comfort for months to come.

Nothing about any of this was odd, of course. There are plenty of criminals out there who fail to recognize or abide by even the most rudimentary facets of capitalism, and insist on riding roughshod over their customers and making enemies as casually as old ladies make cups of tea. Sometimes, inevitably, they end up dead, and usually the people doing the killing are those they’ve wronged, but in Matthews’s case there appeared to be more to matters than initially met the eye.

For a start, it had taken two days to conclude that he’d been murdered. Matthews was what a tabloid report might describe as a ‘strapping’ young man: six feet two, sixteen stone of mainly muscle, very fit (at least superficially) as a result of his daily visits to the gym, and no history of medical problems. Therefore when he was found dead in his bed one morning by police officers who’d been called

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