The Suburban Strangler: Leon Reed on the Murder Mystery He Was Hired to Erase

What is The Suburban Strangler about?

Six months ago, Police Captain David Sinclair died in his home office, and the city was handed two conclusions in the same breath: that he had done it himself, and that he had been the Suburban Strangler all along. The killings stopped. The file closed. Everyone exhaled and went back to their gardens.

Then a penthouse. A young woman dead on white marble, the Strangler's signature back after six silent months, and — in the middle of a scene Leon Reed was hired to make disappear — a tarnished silver locket holding a photograph of him and his sister Chloe, who vanished a year ago.

Detective Faith Sinclair catches him with it in his hand. She is David Sinclair's daughter, she has never believed a word of the official story, and she is the last person in that building Leon wants to owe anything to. What follows is a murder mystery worked from both sides of the law at once, by two people with no business trusting each other and no one else left to try.

Why did Leon Reed take the locket from the crime scene?

InterviewerYou've cleaned a lot of rooms. What do you actually see when you walk into one?

LeonEverything that shouldn't be there. That's the whole job. A room has a shape it is supposed to have, and I put it back into that shape. \[pause\] The penthouse had one thing in it that wasn't part of the shape, and it was my sister's.

InterviewerSo you put it in your pocket. That was evidence.

LeonIt is a photograph of me and Chloe in a locket she has worn since she was nineteen. It belongs in a drawer in her apartment. Not on the floor of a penthouse I have never been to, in fresh blood, at two in the morning. \[pause\] And I know what happens to a small silver thing once it goes into a bag and the bag goes into that building. It gets logged. It gets filed. It stops existing. They buried the truth about her father in there; I watched them do it on the news. So no. I didn't take evidence. I took the only thing anybody has ever found.

InterviewerDetective Sinclair called it evidence.

LeonDetective Sinclair also told me Chloe was dead. She looked at that photograph for about as long as it takes to blink and told me the girl in it was dead, like she was reading it off a form somebody else had filled in. So somebody needs to explain to me who dropped that locket in wet blood tonight, because people who have been gone a year do not lose jewellery in penthouses six months after the killings are supposed to have stopped.

What does Leon think of Detective Faith Sinclair?

InterviewerShe stitched you up at her kitchen table an hour ago.

LeonShe poured whiskey on it first, and not the good kind. I don't think she owns the good kind. She is a decent hand with a needle. I'd have used different thread and better light.

InterviewerYou're now working a murder mystery with the detective who tried to arrest you. Do you trust her?

LeonShe is the only person in this city who lost something the same night I did and still talks about the case in the present tense. That isn't trust. That's arithmetic.

InterviewerShe's keeping the locket until the case closes.

LeonYes.

InterviewerAnd you agreed to that.

LeonI agreed out loud.

The murder mystery he can't scrub out

He stops walking here, and it takes him a while to start again.

InterviewerChloe has been gone a year. What do you think actually happened to her?

LeonI don't know. \[pause\] I would like to give you something better than that. A year of looking, and the honest answer is still that I don't know. She was working on something. She was careful, so she told me nothing, and then she wasn't anywhere. I used to think not knowing was the worst version of this. It isn't. The worst version is that I had learned to live around it. I had a system for the days — I cleaned, I slept, I did not say her name out loud for weeks at a time — and I called that coping. Then a locket came up out of a floor and there was no system left.

InterviewerTonight you told Sinclair your sister wasn't one of the victims.

LeonChloe is an investigative journalist and she was writing about these murders. She vanished the night Captain Sinclair was murdered. The same night. I am not a detective and even I can hear that. For a year I have been carrying her around as a missing girl, because that is the word people hand you. She wasn't a girl something happened to. She was working. She got close enough to something that it became worth making her stop — and the police captain who died that same evening got buried as the man who did all of it. Those are two facts, and there is one line between them.

InterviewerLighter question, because you look like you need one. You live in that van, don't you.

LeonI do not live in the van.

InterviewerThere's a pillow in the van.

LeonThere is a rolled towel in the van. It is a very organised van. Everything in it is labelled and everything in it is exactly where it should be, and after a shift that is the only room in the world I can stand to be in.

What happens now that Leon and Faith have a deal?

InterviewerYou told her you'd do this your way. What does your way look like?

LeonNext question.

InterviewerThen this one. What are you actually afraid of?

LeonThat she's alive and I'm slow. Everyone keeps trying to hand me the other fear, the tidy one, where I grieve and it finishes and somebody says something kind at a service. I'm not frightened of that. I have had a year to learn the shape of that one. I'm frightened of the version where she has been out there the whole time, close, doing this by herself because she decided I couldn't help — and I spent that year on my knees with a brush, putting other people's floors back to normal.

InterviewerYour phone has gone off four times since we started.

LeonYes.

InterviewerIs it her?

Leon\[doesn't answer\]

InterviewerAll right. Last one, then. Anything you'd say to the people who are about to watch all of this happen to you?

LeonLook for the thing in the room that doesn't belong. Everybody looks at the mess, because the mess is the loudest thing in there, and the mess tells you almost nothing. \[pause\] The locket was the smallest object in that penthouse and the only true thing in it.