Ten Guilty Men (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 3) by Sean Campbell, Daniel Campbell Page A

glanced up. ‘How’d you know that?’
    Purcell held up his smartphone. ‘Google.’ He grinned.
    ‘Well then,’ Morton said. ‘If Detective McGoogle is correct then they’d have had no reason to approach the ticket office at all. It had been closed for hours.’
    ‘They could have been drunk. It certainly looks like she’s leaning on him on the tape,’ Ayala said.
    ‘They could have been pretending to be drunk. The CCTV camera is right above the ticket office plain as day.’
    ‘You think it was an attempt to set up their alibis?’
    ‘It seems awfully convenient that they flagged down a taxi right in front of a camera.’
    ‘Boss, you’re being paranoid. There are cameras all over the place.’
    ‘If there are cameras everywhere, then find me one which shows what happened to our papier-mâché peer, because if Paddy and Gabby are innocent then our prime suspect is a nobody who has disappeared into the wind without a trace.’
    Mayberry stood and raised his hand.
    ‘Yes, Detective Sergeant?’
    ‘Did our v-victim re-join the, the, the, dancy-music?’
    ‘The party?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Morton paused. None of their witnesses had actually seen Ellis return to the party.
    ‘You think she was already dead before the end of the night, and that she was dumped in the pool later?’
    ‘Y-yes sir.’
    ‘That means any of the guests could have done it,’ Ayala said.
    ‘That seems unlikely. We had no sign of a struggle upstairs. Presumably someone checked on the birthday girl during the night. She had friends there, and she’d just argued with Kal. Do we really think he killed her, came down to play poker and then left without anyone noticing him doing clean-up in the room? I’m not buying it. One of our five is the killer. Unless someone here can prove otherwise?’
    Purcell cleared his throat. Everyone turned expectantly, expecting another insight from Detective McGoogle. ‘The thermostat–’
    ‘Not the thermostat again. I’d rather you told me you had made it into her laptop.’
    ‘Yes, the thermostat. And no, I haven’t made it into the laptop. It’s a smart thermostat. To save energy, it turns off radiators when people have left the house. There isn’t much point heating empty rooms. This is a crude system. The more expensive ones control homes on a room-by-room or zone-by-zone basis. This one just turns the heating off when everyone leaves.’
    ‘So we calculate the drop in temperature between the time the party ended and when we got there?’ Ayala asked.
    ‘Don’t be daft, Detective. It would have hit ambient temperature fairly quickly, and we’d be basically guessing. We also know someone entered Edgecombe Lodge before we did.’
    ‘Who?’ Ayala demanded.
    ‘Whoever called you lot in. Someone found the body and unlocked the house.’
    Presumably the same person that called in the anonymous tip. ‘So how does this thermostat help us, Stuart?’ Morton asked.
    ‘Simple. It logs when the system turns itself on or off. On the hour, every hour, it checks with a set of heat sensors to see if anything in the house is within two degrees either side of thirty-seven Celsius.’
    Ayala looked on blankly.
    ‘People,’ Purcell explained flatly. ‘People have a body temp of around thirty-seven. If the sensors don’t detect heat signatures belonging to people, the system assumes the house is empty and turns off all the radiators.’
    ‘You said sensors plural. Does that mean we can track where in the house people were on each hour by where the heat signatures were?’ Morton asked.
    ‘Sadly, no. That data isn’t recorded. It’s a binary set-up. Either people are there or they’re not. It isn’t a surveillance system.’
    ‘It should be!’ Ayala said. ‘It would double up nicely. So when did the system turn off the heating?’
    ‘Two o’clock in the morning.’
    ‘Which means the house was empty by two,’ Morton said. ‘The station isn’t far from Edgecombe Lodge, so it’s consistent