JANE CASEY
Let the Dead Speak

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Jane Casey 2017

Cover design Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Chiara Fersini/Arcangel Images (front);

Richard Nixon/Arcangel Images (back)

Jane Casey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008149017

Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008149000

Version: 2017-07-05

Dedication

For Ariella Feiner, with love and thanks.

Epigraph

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Romans 7:19

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Jane Casey

About the Publisher

1

It had been raining for fifty-six hours when Chloe Emery came home. The forecast had said to expect a heatwave; it wasn’t supposed to be raining.

And Chloe wasn’t supposed to be home.

She came out of the station and stopped, shifting her big black bag from one shoulder to the other. The rain poured off the awning, splashing onto the pavement in front of her. It coursed into the gutters where filthy water was already swirling, dark and gritty, freighted with rubbish and twigs and dead leaves. Chloe’s T-shirt clung to her back and her stomach. She twitched the material away from her skin, self-conscious about the swell of her breasts. She hadn’t ever really thought about them until her stepmother had mentioned them.

‘Big girl like you, you need a better bra. Better support. You can’t blame men for looking, you know.’ A thin, spiteful smile. ‘You might as well enjoy it, though. They’ll be down to your knees in no time and no one will care then.’

It had taken Chloe a long time to understand what she meant, which had annoyed Belinda. She still didn’t know why Belinda was angry with her about her body, or people looking at her. A wave of unease passed over Chloe, remembering – the familiar nausea of not knowing things that other people took for granted. It wasn’t her fault; she did try.

There was no point in waiting for the rain to stop. Chloe bent her head and trudged away from the station. Her clothes and hair were saturated within a couple of minutes, her jeans cold and heavy, dragging against her skin. Every raindrop felt like a finger tapping on her head, her shoulders, her back. Her shoulder was burning where the bag strap rubbed it. There were no other pedestrians, except for a mother pushing a buggy on the opposite pavement, striding fast, the hood on her sensible anorak pulled down low over her face. Who would be out for a walk on a wet Sunday afternoon if they didn’t have to be? Not Chloe, not feeling the way she did, sick and tired and still a bit sore. But there was no one to meet her at the station. No one knew she was there.

A car engine hummed on the street behind her and she didn’t think anything of it, even when it got louder and closer. It wasn’t until the car pulled in ahead of her with a jerk of the brakes that she noticed it in any detail. The driver was leaning forward to peer into the rear-view mirror, adjusting it so she could see his eyes staring into hers. The fear came first, a thud that shook her chest as if someone had kicked her. Then recognition: it wasn’t a stranger watching her walk towards him. It was a neighbour. More than a neighbour: it was Mr Norris, who lived across the road from her, who always smiled and asked her how she was, who had very bright eyes and white teeth and was Bethany’s father. Bethany was younger than Chloe but she knew so much more about everything.

Chloe went over to the car, peering in through the window he’d lowered on the passenger side.

‘Where are you off to? Going home? Jump in, I’ll give you a lift.’

Mr Norris never waited for an answer. She’d noticed that before. She didn’t know if it was because she was so slow or if he was like that with everyone.

‘I don’t need a lift.’

‘Course you do. You’ve got that heavy bag.’ He was smiling at her, his eyes fixed on hers. She stared at the bridge of his nose, unaware that it made her look slightly cross-eyed. ‘How come your mum didn’t pick you up?’

‘I can manage.’ It wasn’t a proper answer, and Chloe’s palms were wet from the fear he’d ask again, but there were good things about being thick and not having to answer questions properly was one of them.

‘Now you don’t have to manage. Stick your bag in the back and jump in.’

There was no point in arguing, Chloe knew. She trailed to the other end of the car and put her hand on the latch for the boot. It clicked and she tried to lift it. Nothing happened. She returned to the window.

‘It’s locked.’

‘Not the boot. Put it on the back seat, I meant.’ He bit off the ends of the words, obviously annoyed. And he hadn’t said the boot, Chloe thought, mortified. He’d said the back and she’d assumed he meant the boot. She’d got it wrong, as usual.

She fumbled one of the doors open and dumped her bag on the seat, then opened the passenger door and hesitated.

‘Get in. What are you waiting for?’ He was checking his mirrors, scanning the pavements. Getting ready to drive off, Chloe thought, remembering that and not much more from the three humiliating lessons that were the sum total of her driving experience.

She got into the car, scrambling to close the door and get her seatbelt on before he got annoyed again. He helped her with the seatbelt, smoothing it out carefully across her lap before he slid the metal tongue into the lock. The belt flattened the thin, sodden material of her T-shirt against her body and she thought he was staring at her chest for a second, but he wasn’t, probably. That was just her stepmother and what she’d said. He was a dad, after all. He was old.

‘So where’ve you been? Away somewhere nice?’

‘Dad’s.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Mr Norris went quiet for a minute, concentrating on the road. It didn’t occur to Chloe that he was choosing his words carefully. ‘See much of him?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve never actually met him.’

Chloe stared out of the window, not thinking about her father and the last time she’d seen him, not thinking about how angry he would be now, now that he’d realised she was gone. Not thinking about that took up all of her mental energy. He might have phoned her mother, she thought with a sudden lurch of fear. She hadn’t thought of that.

Mr Norris was talking, words filling the air in the car, telling Chloe about his weekend, about Bethany and what she was doing during the school holidays, about nothing that mattered to her. She stopped listening, drifting a little as the windscreen wipers sang across the glass, until something touched her knee – Mr Norris’s hand was on her leg. She stared at it in mute panic until he moved it away.

‘We’re here.’

The car had stopped outside her house, she realised, the engine still running.

‘You can get out here. I won’t make you run across the road in this weather.’

‘OK. Thanks.’ She reached down to push the seatbelt’s release button but he got there first. ‘Thanks,’ she said again.

‘No problem.’ He was frowning at her. ‘Chloe, love, are you all right? You look a bit—’

‘I’m fine.’ She pulled on the door handle and it didn’t open and her heart rate went spiralling up like a bird spinning through clear air but he reached across her and gave it a swift shove and it came open. His arm brushed against her chest as he drew it back, but that was just an accident, the contact brief.

‘Needs a firm hand.’

‘Oh,’ Chloe whispered. Her ears were hot, her pulse thudding so hard that she could barely hear him, but he was still talking. She got out of the car without waiting for him to stop, slamming the door on him. She turned to scurry up the path, glancing up at the house to see Misty in the window of the front bedroom, her paws braced on the glass, miaowing with all her might. The horn blared behind Chloe twice, very loud. It made her jump but she didn’t look back, her whole being focused on her need to go inside without saying anything else, or crying, one two three four five six seven at the front door eight nine ten eleven keys out twelve thirteen the right key in the lock and the door was opening and she almost fell through it into the narrow, long hallway but she got it shut behind her in the same moment and that was it, she was alone except for Misty, and she could collapse or scream or crawl into a corner and shake or chew her nails until they bled again or any of the things she’d been holding back for days now.

Misty hadn’t come down the stairs yet, she registered, and as if in response a thunder of scratching – sharp-clawed paws on wood – echoed through the still, silent house. The cat was shut in, then. Mum had shut her in. Chloe put her keys on the hall table. She should let the cat out.

Unless the cat wasn’t supposed to be out.

Chloe started towards the stairs.

Unless.

She stopped.

There was a mark on the wall. A big one. A smear, with four lines running through it like tracks. Chloe’s eyes tracked from the smear to the ground, to the droplets that ran down the wall and trickled over the skirting board and puddled on the ground. It was dark, whatever it was. Dirty.

Mud.

Paint.

Something that would make her mother furious.

Maybe that was why the cat was shut in, Chloe thought. Maybe that was it. Misty had made a mess. She started up the stairs, one hand resting lightly on the banisters, and it felt wrong, it was rough, as if something had dried on it, some more of the same dirt. Chloe looked down at it, at the stairs, and then at the hall below, and her legs were still carrying her up but her brain was working, trying to make sense of what she saw and what she felt and what she smelled and the carpet, the carpet was ruined in the hall upstairs, it was dirty and soaked and smeared and the pictures were all crooked.

Behind the closed door Misty set to work, digging her claws under the wood, splintering it as she scraped.

Let her out.

What had happened? The bathroom door was open but it was too dark in there, darker than it should have been. The whole house was dark. There was no reason to look, Chloe told herself.

She didn’t want to look.

… scratch scratch scratch …

Let her out.

Because if not, she’d damage the door.

Damage.

Let her out.

What …

Let her out, or there’d be trouble.

Chloe reached the door, and hesitated. She put out her hand to the handle, touching it with her fingertips. Behind the door the cat howled, outraged. She scratched again and the vibrations hummed across Chloe’s skin.

Let her out.

She turned the handle and pushed the door, and a grey paw slid through the gap, dragging at it to get it open, and Misty’s face, distorted as she pushed it through, her ears flat, her eyes pulled back like an oriental dragon’s as she forced her way to freedom. And then the door was open enough for her to rush through it to the hallway, and for the air inside the room to rush out along with her, dense with the smell of cat shit or something worse.

Before Chloe could investigate, the doorbell shrilled. It was loud, peremptory, and there was no question of ignoring it or hiding: she had to answer it. She hurried back down, narrowly avoiding the dark shape that was Misty crouching at the top of the stairs. There was a big smear up the door, she saw now, as she reached out to open it, a big brownish smudge that ended near the latch.

The bell rang again. Through the rippled glass she could see a shape, a man, his outline blurred and distorted. With a shudder, Chloe opened the door.

‘You forgot your bag, love.’ Mr Norris, with rain spangling his jacket, his tan very brown, his teeth very white. He held the bag out to her but she didn’t take it. She didn’t have time before his eyes tracked over her shoulder and took in the scene behind her and the genial smile faded. ‘Jesus. Jesus Christ. Christ almighty. What the—’

Chloe turned to see what he was looking at, and she could see a lot more when the door was open. A lot more. At the top of the stairs, Misty was still squatting, her eyes glazed and wild, her mouth open. Even as Chloe watched, she bent her head and gently, tentatively, began to lick the floor.

Behind Chloe, Mr Norris retched.

‘I don’t understand,’ Chloe said, and the panic spiralled again but she kept it down, held it back. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened. Please, what’s happened?’

Mr Norris was bent over, the back of his hand to his mouth. He shook his head and it could have been I don’t know or it could have been not now or it could have been something else.

‘Mr Norris?’

He had his eyes closed.

‘Mr Norris,’ Chloe said, very calmly, because the alternative was screaming. ‘Where’s Mum?’

2

I sat in the car, not moving. The rain danced across the empty street in front of me. It was unusual for it to be so quiet at a crime scene. Murder always attracted crowds, but the rain was better at dispersing them than any uniformed officer. The journalists were hanging back too, sitting in their cars like me, waiting for something to happen. Walking across the road would count as something happening, so I stayed where I was. The less attention I attracted, the happier I was.

The light wasn’t good, the dark clouds overhead making it feel like a winter day. I checked. Not quite six o’clock. More than three hours to sunset. Two and a half hours since the 999 call had brought response officers to the address. Two hours and ten minutes since the response officers’ inspector had turned up to get her own impression of what they’d found. Two hours since the inspector had called for a murder investigation team. Ninety minutes since my phone had rung with an address and a sketchy description of what was waiting for me there.

What I saw was a quiet residential street in Putney, not far from the river. Valerian Road was lined with identical red-brick Victorian townhouses with elaborate white plasterwork and black railings, their tiled paths glossy from the rain. The residents’ cars were parked on both sides of the street, most of them newish, most of them expensive.

The exception: a stretch about ten houses long where blue-and-white tape made a cordon. Inside it, police vehicles clustered, and an ambulance, the back doors open, the paramedics packing up as they prepared to move off. And halfway along the cordoned-off bit of street, a hastily erected tent hiding the doorway of the house that was my crime scene.

A stocky figure emerged from the tent, yanked down a mask and pushed back the hood of her paper overalls. Una Burt. Detective Chief Inspector Una Burt, acting up as our superintendent. The guv’nor. Ma’am. My boss. Her hair was flattened against her head: rain or sweat, I guessed. My skin was clammy already, the shirt sticking to my back, and I hadn’t done anything more energetic than drive across London on a wet Sunday afternoon. It was warm still, despite the rain.

Beside me, Georgia Shaw shifted in her seat. ‘What are we waiting for?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So let’s get going.’ She had her hand on the door handle already.

‘We are murder detectives. By the time we turn up at a crime scene, by definition, nothing can be done to save anyone. So what’s the rush?’

She cleared her throat, because when you’re a detective constable you don’t say bullshit to a detective sergeant. Not unless you know them very well indeed. Even if the detective sergeant is so newly promoted she keeps forgetting about it herself.

‘We’re not going to find the murderer by sitting in the car, though, are we?’

‘I once caught a murderer while I was sitting in a car,’ I said idly, more interested in the crime scene in front of me than in talking to the newest member of the murder team.

‘Who was that?’ Georgia narrowed her eyes, trying to remember. She had read up on me, she told me on her first day, and made the mistake of saying it in front of most of the team. If we’d been alone, I might have been able to be nice about it. As it was, I had turned on my heel and walked away, too mortified to say anything. I didn’t need to. I knew my colleagues would say plenty once I was out of earshot.

Some of what they said would even be true.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said now. Be nice. ‘Ancient history. The thing to remember is that it’s not a waste of time to take your time.’

Georgia smiled, but in an irritable stop-telling-me-what-I-already-know way. She was strikingly self-possessed for someone who’d been a member of the team for two weeks. Maybe it was just that I expected everyone else to be as diffident as I had been. Self-confidence had never really been my strong point but it was irrational to dislike Georgia simply because she was assertive.

It was a lot more rational to dislike her because she was absolutely useless. A graduate, she was on a fast-track scheme and had been moved to my team straight after her probation. She was young, she was pretty, she was articulate and confident and ambitious and not all that interested in hard work, it seemed to me. She was a filled quota, a ticked box, and I didn’t think she deserved to be on a murder investigation team.

Then again, that was exactly how the other members of the team had felt about me when I joined.

So I disliked her, but I sincerely tried not to.

Kev Cox emerged from the house, his face shiny red. He scraped back his hood and said something to Una Burt that made her smile.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Kev Cox. Crime scene manager. The best in the business.’

Georgia nodded, making a note. I’d already noticed that her closest attention was reserved for senior police officers – the sort of people who might be able to advance her career.

And a glance in my rear-view mirror told me that one of her prime targets had arrived, though the best thing she could do for her career was probably to stay far away from him. He inserted his car into a space I thought was slightly too small, edging it back and forth with limited patience and a scowl on his face. Not happy to be back from his holidays, I deduced. He had sunglasses on, despite the rain, and he was on his own, which meant he had no one to distract him.

And I suddenly had a reason to go inside. The last thing I wanted was a touching reunion with Detective Inspector Josh Derwent in front of Georgia. There was no way to know what he would say, or what he might do. He would have to behave himself at the crime scene.

At least, I hoped he would.

‘Let’s get going.’ I grabbed my bag and slid out of the car in the same movement. It took Georgia a minute to catch up with me as I strode across the road and nodded to Una Burt.

‘Ma’am.’

‘Maeve.’ Limited enthusiasm, but that was nothing new. I had been disappointing Una Burt for years now. Georgia got an actual smile. ‘Get changed before you even think about going into the house. We need to preserve every inch of the forensics.’

As opposed to obliterating the evidence as I usually do.

‘Of course,’ I said politely.

‘This is a strange one. Come on.’ She led the way into the tiny tent where there were folded paper suits like the one she wore. It was second nature to me now to put them on, to snap on shoe covers, to tuck my hair under the close-fitting hood and work my hands into thin blue gloves and settle the mask over my face. There was a rhythm to it, a routine. Georgia wasn’t quite as practised and I remembered finding it awkward when I was new. I slowed down, making it easier for her without showing her I’d noticed she was fumbling with her suit.

‘What’s strange about this one, guv?’

‘You’ll see.’

I looked down instead of rolling my eyes as I wanted to. Just tell me . . . But Una believed in the value of first impressions.

My first impression of 27 Valerian Road was that it was the kind of house I’d always wanted to own. It was a classic Victorian terraced house inside as well as out, long and dark and narrow, with coloured encaustic tiles on the hall floor and stained glass in the front door. I could have done without the blood streaks that skated down the hall, swirled on the walls, splotched the stairs and – I tilted my head back to look – dotted the ceiling. It was enough to take a hundred grand off the value of the property, but that still wouldn’t bring it into my price range.

‘Cast-off.’ The words came from behind me, and I’d have known Derwent’s voice anywhere, even if I hadn’t been expecting him, but I still jumped. Georgia gave a stagey gasp.

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ I said. And hello to you too, DI Derwent. ‘Was it a knife, Kev?’

‘Possibly. We’re still looking for the weapon,’ he called from his position at the back.

I could picture it: a knife swinging through the air, wet with blood after the first contact with the victim, shedding droplets as it carved through space and skin. And those droplets would tell us a multitude about the person who’d held the weapon: how they’d stood, where they’d stood, which hand they’d used, how tall they were – everything, in short, but their name.

So I understood why Una Burt was particularly determined to preserve the finer details of this crime scene, and if possible I walked a little more carefully as I moved through the hall, stepping from one mat to another to avoid touching the floor. It wasn’t a large space and there were five of us standing in it, rustling gently in our paper suits.

‘Has this been photographed?’ I asked.

‘Every inch,’ Kev said. ‘And I’ve got someone filming it too. But the blood-spatter expert won’t be here for an hour or so and I want her to map it before anything changes.’

I nodded, glancing into the room on the right: a grey-toned living room, to my eye untouched, although there was a SOCO rotating slowly in the middle of the room holding a video camera. Film was much better than still photographs for getting the atmosphere of a crime scene, for putting things in context. Juries liked watching films. I moved back, not wanting to appear on camera. ‘Where’s the body?’

‘She always asks the right questions, doesn’t she?’ Kev nudged Una Burt happily. She didn’t look noticeably thrilled behind her mask.

‘Have a look upstairs.’

Derwent was closer to the bottom of the stairs and he went first. Georgia went next, followed by me. She put her hand out to take hold of the rail and I caught her wrist. ‘Don’t touch anything unless you have to.’

‘Sorry.’

The lights were on in the hall and at the top of the stairs, and it was too bright for comfort. Blood flared off every surface, dried and dark but still vibrating with violence. I didn’t know anything about the victim and I didn’t know what had happened here, but fear hung in the air like smoke. Don’t think about it now. The facts came first. The emotions could come later.

‘What happened here?’ Derwent had stopped at the top of the stairs, moving to one side to let the rest of us join him. A huge wavering bloodstain had soaked into the sisal carpet that covered the floor.

‘We think this was possibly where the first major injury was inflicted. There’s a lot of blood downstairs but in small quantities up to this point,’ Una Burt said. ‘Maybe defensive wounds. Maybe transferred from up here on the attacker’s clothes and hands.’

‘Or the victim’s,’ Kev said, and got a glare from Una Burt. Interesting.

The blood had settled into the weave, spreading out so it was hard to tell how much there was. Not enough to be an arterial injury. Survivable, potentially, I thought. ‘This isn’t a great surface for us, is it?’

‘Nope.’ Kev gestured at smudges on the woven surface. ‘Those are footprints and kneeprints. No detail, no definition. Give me a nice tiled floor any day.’

‘You’ve got the hall downstairs,’ Derwent said.

‘Except that we had people in and out with wet feet before I got here. The coppers had the sense to step carefully but the others …’ Kev raised his eyes to heaven. ‘You’d almost think it was deliberate. If it hadn’t been for the rain we’d have a lot more to go on.’

‘Who was that?’ I asked.

‘One of the two residents – a female aged eighteen – and one of the neighbours,’ Una Burt said. ‘He gave her a lift back from the station. They came in and found this. You’ll need to talk to both of them.’

I nodded and followed the trail to the small bathroom on the right, staying in the doorway because there was nowhere to stand that wasn’t covered in brownish red residue. The shower curtain hung down, ripped off most of its rings, streaked and splattered like the walls, like the ceiling, like the cracked mirror where we were reflected like a gathering of particularly awkward aliens. There were partial handprints on the sink, which was chipped, and the toilet. The seat had come away from the hinges on one side, so I could see the blood ran down inside the bowl, where it had settled thickly under the water.

It had been a white room, once.

‘Christ,’ Derwent said. ‘How many victims did you say there were?’

Una Burt ignored him. ‘This is the main location for the attack. It’s human nature to want to hide and there’s a lock on the bathroom door but this was the worst possible place to run to. It’s a small space with one exit and not much you could use to defend yourself. The attacker was able to stand in the doorway and cause maximum damage at his or her leisure.’

‘His, surely,’ Georgia said. Her eyes were round and very blue above the white mask, but her voice didn’t tremble.

‘Sexist,’ Derwent observed under his breath and she turned to look at him.

‘You can’t assume it was a man,’ I said. ‘You can’t assume anything.’

‘Indeed not. Come on.’ DCI Burt led us back towards the front of the house. ‘Down the hall beyond the bathroom there’s a further bedroom but it’s not disturbed and the blood trail doesn’t lead down there. It belongs to the daughter. This seems to have been used as a guest room.’

It was a large room with a bay window and a cast-iron fireplace on the wall opposite the door. The bed was rumpled. There was a chest of drawers in an alcove, but the bottles and brushes on top of it had been knocked askew. I couldn’t see any blood, but something else was all too evident.

‘What the fuck is that smell?’ Derwent stepped backwards.

‘Watch where you put your feet. The cat was shut in here,’ Kev explained.

‘For how long?’

‘That’s the interesting thing,’ Una said. ‘The daughter left here on Wednesday. It’s Sunday now. It would appear the cat defecated on three separate occasions and it obviously urinated as well, quite copiously.’

‘You’d think it would have run out of piss after a while.’ Derwent was crouching down, peering under the bed at the carpet.

‘Yes, but look at this.’ Una pointed to the corner of the room where there was a half-full bowl of water. I went over for a better view and saw short, fine hairs suspended in the liquid. I nudged the bowl with a gloved knuckle to check the carpet underneath, and the single circular mark told me that it was a one-off arrangement.

‘Someone locked the cat in here deliberately, but they didn’t want it to suffer. They didn’t bother with a litter tray but they left enough water that it could survive until the cavalry came. It could manage for three days without food but it couldn’t have lived without water.’

‘The girl was away from Wednesday,’ Derwent said. ‘Did anyone know she was coming back today?’

‘I don’t know. Maeve, you can ask her about that. I want you to interview her.’

I nodded as Derwent flashed me a look that said Don’t think I won’t try to come along just because you’re a detective sergeant now. I ignored him. He was still getting used to the idea of me being a little more senior, with more responsibilities and, crucially, more independence from him.

To be honest, so was I.

‘Who else lives here?’ I asked Una.

‘The girl’s mother, Kate Emery, aged forty-two. Her bedroom is upstairs.’

I leaned back to check: no blood on the stairs. ‘Was it disturbed?’

‘Not as far as we can tell. Not during or immediately after the attack, anyway. No blood.’

‘Is she the victim?’ Derwent asked.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Don’t you have a photograph of her?’ Georgia hesitated. ‘Or – or is the body too badly damaged to be identifiable?’

Una Burt exchanged a look with Kev that seemed to amuse them both. ‘Come downstairs and tell me what you make of it.’

It was strange how quickly you got used to the blood, all things considered. We picked our way down the stairs and already it was more like a puzzle than an outrage. That was how it would stay for the moment, and it was useful to have that detachment even if I knew it wouldn’t last. I followed Una Burt down the hall, Derwent treading on my heels he was so keen to see what lay ahead. On the left, under the stairs, there was a small shower room. She threw open the door and stood back.

‘Voila. What do you make of that?’

‘Is this where the attacker cleaned up?’ I scanned the walls, seeing faint brownish streaks on the tiles. ‘I smell bleach.’

‘And drain cleaner. Highly corrosive, designed to dissolve hair and dirt that blocks pipes. I found the bottle in the kitchen, in a cupboard. Homeowner’s property.’ Kev’s eyes crinkled as his mask flexed: he was actually smiling. ‘We know they were in here. We know they tidied up after themselves. What we don’t know is whether we’ll get anything useful from it.’

‘Great,’ I said, meaning the opposite. ‘What else?’

‘The blood trail goes into the kitchen and through the kitchen.’ Kev guided us into a smart white kitchen, pristine apart from the dried blood that dragged across the wooden floor and marked the corner of the cabinets. It was smeared across the doorframe and the handle of the back door. ‘And then it disappears. I’m not going to open the door because it opens outwards. It’s still raining cats and dogs and I don’t have a tent set up there yet. I don’t want to lose any of the marks on the inside of the door, but I can tell you what I found – or didn’t find. There’s a patio out there and I can’t currently locate a trace of blood, or a usable footprint, or anything that might tell us where our victim ended up. The rain has obliterated everything.’

‘So no body,’ I said.

‘No body,’ Una Burt confirmed. ‘At this stage we can’t even be certain who we’re looking for. We won’t be sure of that until the DNA results come back. What we do know so far is that Kate Emery hasn’t been seen since Wednesday night. We could run this as a missing person inquiry but I don’t want to waste time. She’s left her phone, her handbag, her wallet, her keys and a whole lot of blood behind. There’s no way someone loses that much blood and walks away. We’ll hope for a sighting of her alive and well, but what we’re really looking for is a corpse.’

3

The girl’s name was Chloe Emery. I checked it twice on my way across the road to the neighbour’s house where she was waiting, 32 Valerian Road. The ambulance I’d seen earlier had been for Chloe, Una Burt explained as we stripped off our protective gear in the tent outside the front door.

‘Went to pieces. Unsurprising, really. But she didn’t want treatment and she wouldn’t let them take her to hospital. They couldn’t force her. The girl needs a gentle conversation about her weekend plans – in particular who knew about them. She was with her dad in Oxfordshire, as I understand it. The parents are divorced. Dad’s remarried. Mum wasn’t.’

‘Seeing anyone?’ Derwent asked.

‘That’s something we need to find out. Obviously, I also want to know if anyone had a reason to harm her mother or her. Or if her mother had a reason to harm anyone, I suppose. Can’t rule that out.’

Derwent had patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’ll let you take the lead on that conversation, Kerrigan.’

‘You will, because you won’t be there. I want you to stay here,’ Una Burt said crisply. ‘You need to look after the crime scene for me.’

‘But I want to go and talk to the daughter.’

‘Kerrigan can take care of that on her own.’ To me, she said, ‘Take Georgia Shaw with you.’

Derwent frowned. ‘Who the fuck is Georgia Shaw?’

‘New DC,’ I said.

‘The blonde?’

I nodded.

‘What’s she like?’

‘You’ll have to decide that for yourself,’ Georgia said, coming to stand beside me. I hadn’t noticed her but of course she was within earshot. She smoothed her hair, which was already immaculate. I was all too aware that no amount of finger-combing was going to sort my own hair out. Heat and rain were a deadly combination.

‘Georgia Shaw, Josh Derwent,’ Una Burt said. ‘He’s my detective inspector.’

My detective inspector. I hid a smile. It was a nice way of reminding Derwent who was the boss, in case he’d forgotten about it during his two weeks off.

Georgia put out her hand and I thought for a brief moment he was going to ignore it but he shook it, without enthusiasm.

‘We haven’t met. You’ve been on holidays since I joined the team.’

‘And now I’m not.’ He turned back to Una Burt. ‘Please let me go and talk to the girl.’

‘Don’t wheedle,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it and it won’t work.’ Her face softened very slightly. ‘NPAS is going to be overhead shortly and they need someone on the ground to help coordinate the search for the body.’ NPAS was the police helicopter; she was pulling out all the stops on this investigation. ‘There’ll be a dog unit and a search team. It’s not just babysitting Kev Cox.’

‘Great.’ He stretched, frustrated. ‘A search through a million gardens in the rain, looking for a missing body. What a welcome back.’

‘Don’t say I don’t find interesting murders for you to investigate.’ Una Burt nodded to me. ‘Get on with it.’

Which left me trying not to mind that Georgia was walking right behind me, leaning to read the notes I’d scrawled on my clipboard.

‘Are you going to ask her why she walked all over the footprints in the hall?’

‘I don’t expect to.’

‘Why not?’

I stopped and faced her. ‘Because I want to get to know her first. I want to get her to trust us. If I need to ask some hard questions, I will, but that’s not why we’re here. She’s the one person who can tell us what happened in that house before she left it last Wednesday, but she’ll only do that if she wants to help us.’

‘What if she did it?’

‘Did what? We don’t even know what happened.’ I turned away. ‘If she doesn’t want to help us find out where her mother is, that tells us something too. But I don’t want to give her a reason not to talk to us. That’s why DCI Burt found something else for DI Derwent to do.’

‘He seems fairly aggressive.’

‘Mm,’ I said, and Georgia could make of it what she liked. Derwent would either piss Chloe Emery off until a day after the end of time or win her heart forever. Extreme reactions were his speciality, and too high-risk for this particular situation.

‘Whose house is this?’ Georgia had dropped her voice to a whisper now that we were right outside the address, which was already a lot more subtle than Derwent would have been.

‘The neighbour who gave her a lift from the station and called 999.’ I checked my notes again. ‘Oliver Norris.’

‘Shouldn’t she have been kept away from him? Until we’ve spoken to them, I mean? In case they’re getting their stories straight.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Don’t you trust anyone? Ring the bell.’

She did as I asked. ‘But—’

‘They were kept separate. There’s an FLO with the girl. Burt said the officer was a dragon and she wouldn’t let Norris near Chloe.’ I grinned. ‘Burt doesn’t trust anyone either.’

The green-painted door swung open to reveal a slim woman with light brown hair and a worried expression, which was fair enough when there were two police detectives standing on her doorstep. She was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse buttoned up to the neck and an ankle-length skirt. I glanced down at her feet to see flat, round-toed shoes in soft blue leather, and buff-coloured tights. I was wearing my lightest trouser suit over a sleeveless top and I was melting. I would have collapsed from heat exhaustion after five minutes in that outfit.

‘Mrs Norris?’

‘Yes, I’m Eleanor Norris.’

‘We’re here to interview Chloe, Mrs Norris.’

‘She’s upstairs in my daughter’s bedroom.’ She looked back as if she was expecting to see the girl standing behind her. The house was a mirror image of the one I’d just visited and I studied it with interest, trying to imagine what the Emery house had been like before most of the contents of a human being had been emptied out all over it. It was hard to see through the clutter of family life – the coats slung over the end of the bannisters, the keys and post on the table by the door. The house I’d left behind me was immaculately tidy, apart from the blood. Here the wallpaper was dated and rubbed, the carpets old-fashioned, the house badly in need of a makeover.

‘Have you spoken with Chloe?’ I asked.

‘No. I mean, I asked if she wanted anything to eat or drink.’ Eleanor Norris squeezed her thin hands together as if they were cold. ‘My husband told me about the house. About what they saw.’

‘Very unpleasant,’ I said blandly.

‘Do you think you’re going to be finished across the road soon?’ Eleanor’s voice dropped so it was whispery low. ‘Only, I think it would be good for Chloe to know when she can go home.’

‘Not soon,’ I said.

‘Even if she wanted to,’ Georgia added. ‘I wouldn’t want to, would you?’

‘She can stay here for a few days, but …’ Eleanor shrugged helplessly. But I can’t accommodate a neighbour in my house indefinitely. Her cheeks were flushed.

‘We’ll know a lot more in the morning,’ I said soothingly. It was true, but probably not relevant to Chloe’s plans. Eleanor Norris didn’t need to know that though. ‘Has Chloe spoken to her father?’

‘No. She won’t call him.’

He’d been informed, I knew. Una Burt had asked Thames Valley Police to speak to him, to get the measure of the man at the same time as breaking the bad news. I hoped for his sake he’d reacted with the requisite shock and horror, and for our sake that he hadn’t, that he had no alibi, that he had been nursing a grievance, that there was a murder weapon conveniently located in his car along with a few telling bloodstains … Ex-husbands made good suspects in murder investigations.

‘Do they get on? Chloe was visiting him, wasn’t she?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ Eleanor looked past us to where the police helicopter was hovering. It was shining its searchlight into the garden behind number 27, the beam piercing the unnatural gloom. ‘What are they looking for?’

‘It’s just part of the investigation,’ I said quickly, before Georgia could say anything about the body, or rather the lack of one. ‘When was the last time you saw Kate Emery, Mrs Norris?’

‘Oh – I don’t know.’ She bit her lip. ‘Wednesday night, I think. We were putting out the bins at the same time.’

I made a note. ‘Did you speak?’

‘No. I waved at her. I had no idea – I mean, I couldn’t know.’

‘Of course. Do you know her well?’

‘Not really.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘My daughter is friendly with Chloe.’ It came out in a rush, as if she didn’t want to say anything about it but knew we’d find out anyway.

‘What’s your daughter’s name?’

‘Bethany.’

‘How old is she?’

‘She’s fifteen. Just turned fifteen, actually.’

‘Younger than Chloe,’ I observed.

‘Yes, but Bethany’s very mature and Chloe—’ she broke off and gave me an embarrassed smile. ‘You’d probably like to speak to her.’

‘Yes, please.’

‘It’s the door straight ahead of you at the top of the stairs.’

I was aware of her watching us as we went up. I didn’t look back at her, even though I was wondering about a couple of things, like her choice of clothes and whether that was why she had sweated through our conversation, and why she had been so concerned about her daughter’s relationship with Chloe. And yet people did behave weirdly around the police, especially on the periphery of a murder investigation, and parents did worry about protecting their children even if they had nothing to hide, and the shock of being close to a violent crime could send your body’s thermostat out of whack. Trust no one … It was a reasonable enough approach, all things considered.

I knocked on the door at the end of the hall and a suspicious face appeared. ‘Yes?’

I showed her my badge. ‘Can we speak to Chloe?’

She was short and middle-aged with close-cropped hair and kind eyes, and I wouldn’t have dared to try and persuade her to do anything against her orders. She peered at me, and then at Georgia behind me, before she nodded.

‘Come in.’

‘Has she said anything?’ I asked in a whisper as I passed the officer, and got a shake of her head in response.

Chloe Emery was curled up on a chair, staring at the rain that was sluicing down the window. She didn’t look round when we walked in. I took a moment to scan the room, more out of habit than anything else, noting amateurishly painted white walls, a crammed bookcase, a single bed, a bedside table with nothing on it but a lamp. Then I shifted my attention to Chloe. She was tall, with slender limbs and long dark hair.

‘Chloe?’

She turned to look at me. Her face was beautiful but somehow blank, with heavy dark eyebrows over blue eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m Maeve Kerrigan. I’m a detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’

She shook her head but she drew her legs up to her chest. She looked nothing short of terrified.

I sat down on the bed opposite her. Start with an easy question. ‘How old are you, Chloe?’

‘Eighteen.’

She seemed younger to me, like a child. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed an appropriate adult to be with her.

‘I know you’ve had a difficult day, Chloe, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I need to ask you some questions. Is that OK?’

She nodded, but warily.

‘Can you state your address for me?’

‘Twenty-seven Valerian Road, Putney, SW15.’

‘And that’s where you live most of the time, is that right?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was toneless and her eyes wandered around the room as she spoke. I felt she was working hard to stop herself from fidgeting.

‘Who else lives there?’

‘My mum.’

‘And what’s her name?’

She thought for a second. ‘Kate.’

‘Kate Emery.’

‘Yes, Kate Emery.’

‘Do you have the same last name, Chloe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that the same name as your father?’

‘Yes.’

‘But your parents are divorced.’

‘Yes.’ Her answers were getting softer. I felt I was wandering onto dangerous ground without knowing why.

‘You were away for the weekend, is that right?’

Another nod.

‘Where were you?’

‘With my dad.’

‘Were the two of you alone?’

‘No.’

I waited but she didn’t say anything else. ‘Who else was there, Chloe?’

‘My stepmother.’ There was a pause and I was about to ask another question when she added, ‘And Nathan. And N— his brother.’

‘Who’s Nathan?’

‘My stepbrother.’

‘And his brother,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

She stared at the corner of the room, pressing her lips together. No answer. It wasn’t a question that was designed to trip her up – quite the opposite. These were the easy, factual questions, the ones that gave people confidence, that settled them into an interview. But I was hitting a wall I hadn’t even known I’d find.

‘Do you have any other brothers and sisters?’

‘No.’

‘So you live with your mum. Does anyone else live in the house?’

‘No.’

‘Can you tell me when you left home for your weekend with your dad?’

‘Wednesday. In the afternoon.’

‘Did you see your mother before you left?’

A nod. ‘She was at home.’

‘Did she say anything unusual? Anything that concerned you?’

Another helpless shake of the girl’s head. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘Did she seem worried or preoccupied?’

‘N-no.’ She wasn’t sure, though.

‘What did she say, Chloe?’

‘She was talking about work. She was busy with work and she – she wanted me to go. She was afraid I’d be late. She had lots of work to do, she said.’

‘What work does she do?’

‘She has her own business.’

‘Do you know what kind of business?’

‘It’s something to do with babies.’ Chloe shrugged helplessly. ‘She doesn’t really talk to me about it. She doesn’t think I’ll understand. She’s probably right.’

‘What time did you come back, Chloe?’

‘I got off the train at three twenty-one.’ It was an oddly precise answer, as if she’d made a special note of it.

‘Were you expecting anyone to meet you off the train?’

‘No. You see, no one knew I was coming back.’

‘Oh?’

‘I left my dad’s house early.’

‘When were you supposed to come back?’

‘On Tuesday.’ She gave a little gasp of a laugh. ‘I thought Mum would be surprised.’

Surprised. Not missing.

‘Was your mum planning to be away while you were away, Chloe, do you know?’

‘No. She wouldn’t have left Misty.’

‘Misty?’

‘The cat.’ Chloe looked stricken. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘Downstairs.’ The FLO gave her a smile. ‘She’s down in the kitchen. I saw her when I went down to get you your cuppa, love.’

Chloe glanced down at the full mug on the floor beside her. It had a thick film on top of it. ‘I didn’t drink it.’

‘That’s all right. We can get you another,’ the FLO said.

The girl looked nauseated. ‘No. No, thank you.’

‘So no one was expecting you to come home,’ I said, dragging the interview back on track. ‘Was there some reason you left early?’

She was bright red, instantly, and she locked her eyes on the floor in front of her. Her lips were pressed together, as if she didn’t want to run the risk of letting as much as a word out. One for the dad to answer, I decided.

‘OK. We’re nearly done. You got a lift from the station, is that right?’

‘Mr Norris saw me. He drove me back here.’

‘Did he come into the house with you?’

A big, definite headshake. ‘I was on my own.’

I looked up from my notes. ‘But he rang 999.’

‘I forgot my bag. I left it in his car. I’m always doing that kind of thing. I should have remembered because I had tried to put it in the boot and he shouted at me – well, he didn’t shout but he told me not to open the boot. It was in the back seat – my bag, I mean. And I forgot.’ She shivered. ‘I just wanted to go home.’

‘So you went inside on your own. Did you notice anything strange?’ Like the dried blood on most of the surfaces …

‘Not at first. I mean, I did, but I didn’t know what it was. I don’t really know what happened. I don’t understand why Misty was shut in and the house was all dirty and Mum wasn’t there.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘I don’t understand anything except that I came home and it was all wrong. It was all wrong and bad, and I don’t know anything except that I want it all to be right again.’ She jumped up, suddenly agitated, and the FLO rushed past me to guide her back to her chair.

‘It’s all right, lovey. You sit down.’

‘We’ll come back and talk to you tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Try to get some rest, Chloe.’

‘I don’t want to rest. I want to go home. I need to go home. I need some stuff from home, and I need to go there, right now.’

‘That won’t be possible, not at the moment,’ I said. ‘But we can get things for you if you give us a list.’

She was shaking her head, tears starting into her eyes. ‘I know where it is. I need to get it. I need it.’

‘What is it?’

Chloe caught her lower lip between her teeth, stopping herself from answering. She shut her eyes for a long moment, then relaxed. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

I exchanged a look with Georgia, who gave a tiny shrug.

‘I can’t help if I don’t know what I’m looking for. What does it look like?’

‘My medication. And …’

‘And?’ I prompted.

‘An envelope. With my name on it.’ She had gone back to looking out at the garden. The agitation had disappeared. She seemed detached.

Withdrawn.

I’d lost her.

‘If I see it, I’ll make sure you get it,’ I tried, and got no response at all. With a nod to the FLO I left her alone.

‘That didn’t go very well,’ Georgia observed, having shut the door behind us.

I whipped around. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, she’s upset.’

‘That’s normal when someone you love is missing.’

‘And she didn’t tell us much.’

‘I thought she told us a lot. Much more than she knew.’

‘Like what?’

‘Think about it,’ I said, and started down the stairs wondering if it was promotion that made people unpleasant, and if I’d be as nasty as Derwent by the time I was a detective inspector myself.

Assuming I made it that far.

4

The hall was empty when I came downstairs. I followed the sound of voices to the kitchen at the back of the house. It was narrower than the one on the other side of the road, and full of people. Eleanor Norris was standing by the sink twisting a tea towel in her hands. A teenage girl sat at the table leaning against a man with short dark hair and a golden tan, who was deep in conversation with a second, white-haired man. A third man sat on a chair he’d pushed away from the table, balancing on the two back legs. He glanced up as we came in.

‘Look out, it’s the filth.’

‘Morgan,’ the tanned man snapped. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Just a joke.’ He let the chair slam back onto the floor and stood up. ‘Morgan Norris. I’m Oliver’s brother.’

‘For my sins. I’m Oliver.’ The dark-haired man stood too, glaring at his brother. I’d have known they were related without being told. They had the same quick way of moving, the same tilt of the head, the same light eyes. Oliver was darker and handsome in a square-jawed, rugby-player way. Morgan was leaner, more like a runner. He was looking at me with frank curiosity which I ignored. I got a lot of that, one way or another. I didn’t look like a murder detective, I’d been told. Too pretty, they said. Not tough enough. Too tall.

Such nonsense.

‘I need to speak to you, Mr Norris. I need to ask you some questions about what you saw this afternoon. Is there somewhere we can talk?’

‘Of course.’ He started to detach himself from the teenage girl who clung on to his arm more tightly.

‘No.’

‘Bethany, I have to go.’

‘Let go of him, Bethany.’ The white-haired man stretched out his hand but didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to. She let go of her father instantly and dropped her hands into her lap.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,’ I said to him.

‘Gareth Selhurst.’

He said it as if I should recognise him, his voice resonant, his barrel chest inflating with pride. An actor? I didn’t know and couldn’t ask. I’d never seen him before.

‘Are you a neighbour? Or family?’

‘I live nearby.’ He gave a vague flourish, not indicating any particular direction. ‘And we are all family here, my dear. All part of God’s family.’

‘Amen.’ Eleanor Norris had whispered it.

‘Gareth is the lead elder of our church,’ Oliver Norris said. ‘He’s here to support us.’

Not an actor: a preacher.

‘I wanted to offer my help,’ Selhurst said. ‘In case there was anything I could do. Sometimes prayer is a great comfort.’

‘Do you know Kate Emery and Chloe Emery?’

‘Yes. Not well.’ He smiled blandly. ‘They don’t worship with us, but the door is always open.’

Not worth interviewing, I thought, and immediately wondered if that was what I was supposed to think.

‘I’ll try not to take too long, Mr Norris.’

‘I want to come with you. I want to hear what happened,’ Bethany said. She sounded like a spoiled brat and looked like a child. Fifteen, her mother had said, but I’d have guessed she was thirteen at most. She was tiny and thin, with heavy, squared-off glasses that hid most of her small face. Like her mother she wore a long-sleeved top. No make-up. No nail varnish.

‘You can’t come, Bethany. The police need to speak to me on my own. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about what happened.’

‘If I don’t know, I’ll imagine worse things. I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll be terrified.’

‘Bethany.’ Gareth Selhurst shook his head at her. ‘It’s not your place to tell your father what to do.’

‘No, I know, but—’

‘Stay here and pray with us. Talk to God.’ Selhurst stretched out his hands, cupping the air. He closed his eyes, his expression blissful. Morgan Norris was shaking his head, his arms folded. Not a member of the flock, I guessed.

The girl put her hand down onto the chair beside her and I realised the cat was there, a cloud of grey fur knotted into a tight ball. She stroked the cat, watching her father’s face, seeing the little shudder of revulsion he couldn’t quite hide.

‘Why don’t you like me touching Misty, Daddy?’ She sounded more like a child than ever. ‘What’s wrong, Daddy? She’s very friendly. She’s purring.’

Under the tan, Norris had gone very pale. To me, he said, ‘Let’s go into the sitting room. We won’t be disturbed there.’

The sitting room was dark when we went in, and Norris fussed about putting on lamps, clearing armchairs of folded shirts so Georgia and I could sit down.

‘Sorry. My wife was doing the ironing in here earlier but she got distracted when I came back with Chloe. Left the place in a bit of a mess.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. There’s no need to tidy up.’ And stop blaming your wife for the mess she made while she was ironing your shirts. I could feel myself bristling with dislike, spiky as a sea urchin. I hoped it didn’t show.

He abandoned the shirts on the ironing board and threw himself into a chair, one hand to his mouth. ‘Sorry.’

‘Are you all right, Mr Norris?’

He nodded but his eyes were closed and I could see a tremor in his fingers. ‘It’s been a bit of a shock.’

‘Do you know the Emerys well?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He blinked rapidly. ‘I mean, how well do you know your neighbours? When we moved in Bethany made friends with Chloe, which was fine, of course. We didn’t mind them spending time together.’ He said it as if other people would have minded, which intrigued me.

‘Why would you mind?’

‘Oh, because of Chloe being the way she is. She’s – I forget the politically correct term. Simple. Mentally not all there. Beautiful girl but a few sandwiches short of a picnic.’ He looked from me to Georgia. ‘I’m not saying it to be offensive. You’ve spoken to her. The lights are on but there’s no one home.’

‘So Chloe and Bethany are friends. What about you and Mrs Emery? Would you describe her as a friend?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ He straightened up, settling his shoulders against the back of the chair, his nausea forgotten. ‘We were friendly. Neighbourly.’

‘What sort of a person is she?’

‘Pleasant. Energetic. She ran her own business, you know. She was involved in local issues. She knew everyone. Friends with everyone, that kind of thing.’

Past tense all the way, I noted. ‘Did you go to her house?’

‘I’ve been in her house,’ he said carefully. ‘I helped her with things like a tap that wouldn’t stop dripping and a light fitting that needed replacing. When she needed a man’s help, Eleanor volunteered me.’

‘Do you like that kind of thing, Mr Norris? Would you say you’re a bit of a handyman?’ I was looking around at the room where we sat, where two light bulbs had burned out of the fitting in the ceiling and a large chip was missing from the plaster on the corner of the chimney breast.

‘No. Not really.’ A smile. ‘But when the wife tells me to go and help out a neighbour, I go. Couldn’t let her down.’

‘So you help lots of the neighbours.’

‘If they need help,’ he said evenly. ‘Kate was on her own.’

‘Was?’

‘Is. Was. I don’t know. Did they find a body?’

‘A body,’ I repeated.

‘I assume they’re looking for a body. I didn’t see one in the house.’ He shifted in the chair. ‘I didn’t go looking for it.’

‘You walked around quite a lot, I gather. The crime scene technicians found a few of your footprints in the hall.’

‘I was in a bit of a panic. I didn’t think. I saw all the blood …’ He was back to looking green. ‘I don’t like blood. I’m not used to seeing things like that. I went in to see if I could help but I couldn’t see Kate. Then I thought it was probably better to take Chloe out of the house and call you lot. And that’s all I know.’

‘Why were you there?’

‘Chloe forgot her bag. Left it in my car. I didn’t want her to worry about it so I carried it across the road for her. As soon as she opened the door I saw that something was wrong.’

‘What did you see that made you think that?’

‘You’ve been in the house,’ he said with a flash of anger. ‘What do you think I saw? Blood. A lot of it.’

‘How did you know what it was?’

He shrugged. ‘What else could it have been? Ketchup? It looked like an abattoir in there. And my stomach went, I can tell you. I was heaving. I couldn’t even speak. It was like an instinct. I just knew.’

‘So what did you do?’

He looked up at the ceiling, remembering. ‘I went in. I made myself go in, even though I didn’t want to. I didn’t realise the blood was dry at first. I thought maybe Kate was injured and needed help.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Into the hall and then on a bit further, to check. I looked into the sitting room. I looked through to the kitchen and saw blood there but no body.’ He pulled at his lower lip, affecting to be shamefaced. ‘I put my hand on the counter in the kitchen, I’m pretty sure. I might have touched a few other places too.’

‘Did you go upstairs?’

‘Yeah. I think so. It’s all a bit of a blur. I mean, I’ve been upstairs in the house before, so if you find fingerprints of mine that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Don’t worry, Mr Norris.’ I smiled at him, bland as cream. ‘We have excellent technicians. They’ll be able to tell if a fingerprint was made before, during or after the attack. So it’ll be easy enough to tell if you’re in the clear.’

He swallowed once, convulsively.

Not so confident now, are you?

‘What were you looking for, Mr Norris?’

‘A body. A killer.’ He laughed. ‘Glad I didn’t find either, really. That’s your job.’

‘Whose body did you expect to find?’

‘Kate’s. Who else?’ He looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Chloe was there. She was fine.’

So he didn’t think of Kate as a possible aggressor. I didn’t know enough about her to make that judgement.

‘Go back a bit for me,’ I said. ‘When was the last time you saw Kate Emery?’

‘I don’t know. During the week some time.’ He frowned. ‘I saw her on Friday evening, I think.’

‘Friday evening. Are you sure?’

‘No. That’s why I said I think it was Friday.’ He wasn’t bothering to try to charm me any more, which was a relief.

‘What was she doing?’

‘She was in her sitting room looking out of the window.’

‘You’re sure it was her.’

‘Yeah. I was walking past on the other side of the road and I waved.’

‘And you think this was Friday evening.’

‘I’m fairly sure. I know I was looking forward to getting home from work and having a cold beer to start the weekend, if my thieving brother had left any in the fridge.’

‘Your brother Morgan?’

He nodded. ‘I only have one, thankfully.’

‘Does he live here?’ I asked.

‘He’s been staying with us for a while. Between jobs, apparently.’ Norris snorted. ‘No sign of him doing anything about getting one. He gave up a perfectly good job in an insurance company to go travelling for three years and got the shock of his life when he came home and no one wanted to employ him. Thank goodness he had us to fall back on.’

‘You don’t sound very happy about it,’ Georgia commented.

‘It’s been months,’ Norris said simply. ‘Too long.’

‘And you can’t kick him out? I would.’

Norris flashed the teeth at her, instantly encouraged, trying to make friends again. ‘It wouldn’t be right. God has his reasons for sending him to live with us. Gareth says we have to pray for his soul, even if I’m sure it’s a lost cause.’

‘Gareth seems to be a big influence on you,’ I commented.

‘He’s the leader of our church.’

‘What church is that?’

‘The Church of the Modern Apostles. It’s an evangelical, charismatic church. Living Christianity. It’s a growing movement, you know. Gareth planted the church here in Putney five years ago and the congregation is increasing all the time.’

‘Including you and your family.’

‘I’m actually an elder of the church. For the last two years, it’s been my job.’

‘You mean Gareth is your boss?’

He shook his head, smiling. ‘God is. But he directs me in his purposes through Gareth a lot of the time. You know, you should come along to see us worship. Share in God’s grace with us.’

I smiled politely and referred to my notes. ‘So you think it was Friday when you saw Kate. What was she doing?’

‘Just standing in the window. Looking out.’

‘Waiting for someone?’

‘It’s a safe bet,’ Norris said evenly.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Chloe spends one week in six with her dad. When she was there or otherwise engaged, Kate sometimes had … visitors.’

‘What sort of visitors?’

‘Men.’

I nodded as if I was unsurprised, as if I’d known about it already. And in fact I wasn’t all that surprised. She was a single mother, after all, and forty-two according to Una Burt. She was entitled to a private life, whatever the neighbours thought. ‘When you say men, did they visit her in groups or one at a time?’

‘One at a time, as far as I could tell.’ He gave a forced, awkward laugh. ‘I don’t think she was into anything as kinky as group sex, but you never know. It’s outside my experience.’

No wonder you couldn’t wait to go round and fix her dripping tap.

‘Did you notice the same men visiting her more than once? The same cars?’

‘I didn’t notice.’ He pulled a face. ‘I didn’t like it. Dating is one thing but that sort of activity in front of everyone, in her own home – it felt sordid.’

‘Did you ever talk to her about it?’

‘I tried. I invited her to come to our church. I thought she might find what she was looking for there.’ He gave me a twitchy smile. ‘It didn’t go too well.’

I flipped over a page on my clipboard with a snap. ‘Were you here all weekend, Mr Norris?’

‘Yeah. I did a lot of gardening.’ He held up his hands, which were scratched. ‘Some of the bushes fought back. Morgan helped me, he can tell you about it.’

‘What did you do with the clippings?’

He frowned. ‘Took them to the dump. That’s what I was doing when I came back and saw Chloe at the station.’

‘I’m going to need your car keys and permission to search your car.’

‘I don’t see why. I mean, I don’t think that’s appropriate.’

I looked at him, eyebrows raised, and waited.

‘You can look. I’m not trying to hide anything.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t know why you’d want to, that’s all.’

‘Just routine,’ I said. ‘Did you notice anything unusual over the weekend? Any strange visitors to the street, any unexpected noises …’ I trailed off. He was shaking his head.

‘I mean, I’ve been racking my brains ever since I went over to Kate’s house. Did I hear a scream? I really don’t think so. Did I see anyone strange? Again, no. Did I have any concerns about anything? Not in the least.’

If he was going to interview himself, that was going to save me doing a lot of talking. I made a meaningless scrawl on the page in front of me. ‘Is there anything you think I should know about Kate Emery or Chloe or anyone else?’

He blew out a lungful of air. ‘Well. There is one thing. I feel a bit bad even mentioning it but I think I should. For everyone’s sake. I know I’m not the only one to be thinking about it and if you don’t hear about him from me, it’ll be someone else who tells you sooner or later.’

I nodded, making my very understanding listening face. Get on with it and stop justifying whatever it is you’re about to say, you horrible man.

‘There’s a lad. A young lad. He must be … oh, twenty. Twenty-one. Something like that. He lives down the road. Number six. His name’s William Turner.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘He was in trouble with the police a few years ago. Four years ago, it must have been, because it was shortly after we moved in. He was arrested for attempted murder.’

‘Arrested? Was he charged?’

‘No. I don’t know why.’

‘Who was the victim?’

‘A friend of his.’ Norris laughed. ‘Some friend. He stabbed him.’

‘What happened?’ Georgia asked, her eyes wide.

‘It was a fight after school one day.’ Norris shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Everyone knew he’d done it but they couldn’t prove it.’

‘Didn’t the victim give evidence?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘He wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t say a word. His family moved not long after. I don’t blame them. We talked about it, but we couldn’t afford to move twice in such a short space of time.’ He shuddered. ‘Not what you want to hear about, is it? Not when you’ve got an eleven-year-old and you’re worried she’ll be hang- ing around on street corners in a few years. But Bethany’s not like that, thank God. We’ve been pretty strict with her. She knows the rules and she knows not to break them.’

‘So, to be clear,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I should focus on William Turner because he was once involved in a stabbing.’

‘Not just that. The kid is weird, let me tell you. He hangs around all the time. No job, obviously. It’s no surprise. I wouldn’t employ him. He has no education and no work ethic.’ Norris leaned forward, dropping his voice, absolutely earnest. ‘I’ve read about psychopaths and, if you ask me, he’s a textbook case. It’s one per cent of the population, you know. One in a hundred. That’s a lot. There’s more than a hundred people living in this street and I’m confident I’ve worked out who ours is.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

‘He watches the girls.’ Norris shook his head, disapproving. ‘I’ve seen him. He sits on his garden wall and he watches them walking up and down the road. Talks to them, sometimes. Calls out, you know. Gets them into conversation. I’ve warned Bethany to stay well away from him. Chloe too. She doesn’t have the common sense to keep her distance. Not when he’s a good-looking lad, which there’s no denying he is. He knows it, too.’

‘You seem to spend a lot of time thinking about Chloe,’ I observed. ‘You know her routine – you know when she’s away and when she’s here. You gave her a lift from the station. You carried her bag over to the house.’

His face went red. ‘I don’t know what you’re implying, if you’re implying anything. I worry about Chloe. I worry about all the girls round here. And the police don’t do anything about Turner.’ He remembered who he was talking to. ‘At least, they don’t seem to.’

‘Looking and talking isn’t against the law. We can’t stop Mr Turner from socialising. Especially if – according to you – he wasn’t convicted of anything.’

‘Yes.’ Norris narrowed his eyes. ‘You don’t think I’m right to be worried either. But you haven’t met him. You haven’t spoken to him. You haven’t looked into his eyes. I have. And I know what I saw there.’

‘What was that, Mr Norris?’

‘He has no soul.’ Norris leaned back in his chair, as if he’d struck a killer blow that ended the argument then and there. In a way, of course, he had. I certainly didn’t want to prolong it.

‘Thanks for your help, Mr Norris. If you think of anything else we might need to know, do get in touch. We’ll probably need to speak to you again, to confirm the details of your statement. And we’ll need to get your fingerprints and DNA, if you don’t mind, for elimination purposes.’

‘Right. Yes. Anything to help.’ He was back to looking uneasy. ‘Though I’m sure there’s nothing that can’t be easily explained if you do find some DNA of mine floating around.’

What exactly did you get up to when you went to fix the tap, Mr Norris?

I followed Georgia out to the hall and collected a set of keys for the Volvo that sat outside the house. As I was leaving, a thought struck me. ‘Mr Norris.’

‘Yes.’ He was already closing the door, relief all over his face. He hadn’t been anything like as relaxed as he’d pretended to be.

‘What’s your problem with the cat?’

‘Oh – I don’t like cats. I have a phobia of them, actually. The fur. The way they look at you. And if you’d seen what it was doing at the house—’ He covered his mouth again and retched. Sweat stood out on his forehead. When he could speak again, he mumbled, ‘Disgusting animal. A charity is coming to take it away. I’m not having it in my home. Why?’

‘Just wondering,’ I said, and followed Georgia down the path to the road.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said once we were out of earshot. ‘Why were you wondering?’

‘Two reasons. Someone managed to lock the cat in that room, and they made sure it could survive being left alone for a few days. He wouldn’t have wanted to go near it and he certainly wouldn’t have cared if it had died from lack of water. Anyway, can you see him being able to stab someone to death? Even talking about the scene made him want to vomit.’

‘You don’t think he was faking.’

‘I don’t. But I could be wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong about the cat.’ As I spoke I glanced back at the house and saw a curtain twitch in an upstairs room: Chloe, I thought. And a second, smaller figure beside her, drawing her away. The light caught her glasses as she moved: Bethany Norris. They were gone before I could draw Georgia’s attention to them.

‘What do we do now? Go and see William Turner?’ She was full of energy, straining at the lead like a dog with the scent of blood in her nostrils.

‘The convenient local psychopath. I think it can wait – I’ll get Liv to do some checks on his history before we call on him. I’d like to know more about what happened to Kate Emery and more about him before I speak to him.’

‘So what? Go home?’

‘Nope. Now we go and see another troublemaker.’ I grinned. ‘But this one is all ours.’

5

‘Welcome back.’ Derwent stood in the doorway of number 27, liberated from his paper suit, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He was still wearing shoe covers, and his standard mocking expression.

‘Shouldn’t I be saying welcome back to you?’ I said.

‘That would have been nice. I don’t think I even got a hello, did I?’

‘Hello.’ I looked past him. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Kev’s blood lady is here. She says she’ll be a couple of hours at least – she’s got to draw a map of all the blood spatter. Easier to map the places that aren’t covered in blood.’

‘If Kev thinks she’s good—’

‘She must be good,’ Derwent finished. ‘But I’ve got the go-ahead to search the other areas of the house, as long as we don’t get in her way, and as long as we’re careful.’

‘I always am.’ I took a pair of shoe covers and handed another set to Georgia. ‘Put them on.’

She did as she was told, but I was aware of her looking from me to Derwent and back again while she did it. I wondered what she’d been told about us. I wasn’t sure what the current rumours were. I knew the truth, which was that there had never been anything romantic between me and Detective Inspector Josh Derwent. And with that in mind …

‘How’s Melissa?’

‘Fine,’ Derwent said shortly.

‘How’s Thomas? Does he like the new house?’

His face softened. ‘Yeah. Loves it.’

‘You spent your holiday moving house?’ Georgia said.

‘Some of it. Some of it in Portugal.’

‘Whereabouts?’

Instead of answering, Derwent cleared his throat. I could tell that he didn’t want to talk about his personal life any more. He was infinitely protective of the ready-made family that he’d acquired eight months earlier: his girlfriend Melissa Pell and her son Thomas, who was just four. Thomas was Derwent’s greatest fan and the feeling was absolutely mutual. And I knew Derwent didn’t even want to think about them in a house that stank of death, let alone say their names.

‘I take it the helicopter didn’t find a body for us.’ I used my back-to-business tone of voice and caught the edge of a look from Georgia. Joyless was the kindest word she would use to describe me, I guessed. Then again, I wasn’t sure how much fun she had expected in a murder investigation team.

‘It didn’t find anything,’ Derwent said. ‘We had a dog here for a bit, but even his handler said he was fucking useless. He found some fox shit, if you’re interested in seeing that.’

‘I can live without it.’

‘What did you find out?’

‘Not a huge amount. There’s a perfect local suspect, though.’

He grunted. ‘There always is.’

‘He doesn’t seem to fit the bill anyway.’

‘Go on.’ Derwent was listening closely as I told him about Oliver Norris and his suspicions about William Turner.

‘I was more interested in what he said about Kate Emery.’

‘Oh?’

‘She had male visitors when her daughter was away. Mr Norris noticed.’

‘What sort of male visitors?’

‘Mr Norris thought they were misbehaving,’ I said primly.

‘Professional or amateur misbehaviour?’

‘That I don’t know. Yet.’

‘If you want to join me in the lady’s bedroom, we can have a look,’ Derwent said with something approaching a leer.

‘Can’t wait,’ I said briskly, knowing that Georgia was still trying – and doubtless failing – to get a read on our relationship. ‘I should ask Oliver Norris if he saw anything suspicious when he came over to fix Kate’s dripping tap.’

‘Did you think Norris was watching Kate? Or Chloe?’ Georgia asked. ‘I thought you were implying that with some of your questions.’

‘I don’t know. Some people are nosy neighbours. Everyone likes to gossip. And Chloe is good friends with his daughter, after all.’ I shrugged. ‘It could be weird that he knows so much about the family’s comings and goings, or it could be second nature to him to know what’s going on in his neighbourhood. I don’t know him well enough yet to say either way.’

‘But you don’t like him,’ Derwent said.

‘I didn’t say that.’

He grinned at me and I knew I’d given it away, somehow, to him at any rate. But then, he knew me better than most.

‘So you haven’t managed to find us a body,’ I said. It was always better to attack than defend, with Derwent.

‘I tried.’

‘We don’t even know who we’re looking for.’

‘Kate Emery.’ He handed me a photograph that he’d liberated from somewhere in the house: a close-up of a smiling woman with shortish fair hair. She was squinting into the sun, her eyes screwed up, her smile strained. It wasn’t a picture I would have chosen to frame but she looked outdoorsy and cheerful. I knew better than to assume she was either, based on a single photograph. ‘I still can’t tell you if she’s a suspect or a victim,’ Derwent added. ‘Kev says they’ll hurry on the DNA.’

‘As it stands,’ Georgia said thoughtfully, ‘we don’t even know if it’s a murder, do we?’

Derwent turned to look at her. ‘Yeah. We definitely shouldn’t leap to any conclusions. It could have been an accident. Chopping vegetables or something, nicked herself, dripped a bit of blood on the floor while she was looking for a plaster, as you do …’

‘No, well, not that.’ Georgia’s cheeks were red.

‘Maybe she tried to kill herself and just kept missing her wrists. After the tenth or eleventh time she got bored and went to find a tall building to jump off. Is that more likely?’

‘It’s possible,’ I said mildly. ‘Not the way you’ve described it, but it happens. When I was a response officer I turned up at a scene that looked like an attempted murder. The guy had awful injuries, but they were actually self-inflicted.’

‘Spoilsport,’ Derwent said. ‘So we’ll leave suicide as a possibility because – what did you say you were called?’

‘Georgia. Georgia Shaw.’

‘Because DC Shaw thinks it’s feasible that someone did this to themselves. And then wandered off to dig their own grave, I suppose.’

I was lukewarm on Georgia Shaw but even so, I winced. I’d been on the receiving end of Derwent’s sarcasm enough times to know that it stung. I’d also worked with Derwent for long enough to know that he had formed an opinion of Georgia already, and there was precious little she could do about it for now.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Here’s what I think we should do. Georgia, I want you to get a SOCO to go over Norris’s car, especially the boot. Make sure he wasn’t moving a body around, not shifting garden rubbish. If you find anything suspicious, tell me, obviously. Don’t give him the keys back yet, even if there isn’t anything.’

‘You want to make him sweat,’ Derwent said.

‘I don’t mind if he’s a bit on edge, put it that way.’ I turned back to Georgia. ‘Then house-to-house. Find out if anyone else saw Kate Emery after Wednesday when Chloe left for her dad’s house, or if Norris was the only one. Ask if they saw anything strange too. Find out if anyone else noticed men coming and going from this house – but don’t suggest it, will you? Rumours become facts too easily, and everyone wants to help so they’ll say they saw God Almighty visiting the house if they think that’s what we want to hear.’

‘I know.’ She was still red, this time with anger, and it was directed at me. She knew very well that I was getting rid of her. She didn’t know it was for her own good.

I checked the time. ‘Half past eight. Don’t spend too long on it. We’ve been here for long enough that anyone who has urgent information for us would have spoken to us already. The immediate neighbours have already been interviewed, so go a bit further down the street. But don’t go as far as William Turner’s house, and if you do see him, be careful what you tell him.’

‘I thought you didn’t see him as a credible suspect,’ Georgia said.

‘At the moment, everyone’s a suspect. Off you go.’ I waited while she stripped off the shoe covers again, very slowly, and gathered her things. Derwent was watching too, his hands in his pockets, whistling silently to himself. It was his habit when he was thinking, and a thinking Derwent was never good news.

As Georgia left I blew my hair out of my face. ‘Hot in here, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the warm glow you get from giving orders, DS Kerrigan. How do you like it?’

‘Oh, shut up.’

He grinned. ‘It suits you, I have to say. I always saw you as more the submissive type, but maybe I was wrong.’

I looked around, peering up the stairs. The lights were off and it was shadowy up there, the horrors half-hidden in the dusk. The house was quiet. Waiting. ‘Where do you want to start? Down here and work up?’

He dropped the mockery straight away. ‘Fine by me.’

My skin was slick with sweat and my hair was sticking to my neck. The crime-scene tents at the front and now the back of the house meant that no air was circulating through it, and the temperature seemed to have gone up as the shadows lengthened. I took off my jacket.

‘Did you iron that?’

I looked down at my top. ‘Yes. Well, I didn’t. I paid someone else to do it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because I find ironing boring and I have better things to do with my time. She cleans too.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Not really.’

‘It is to me,’ Derwent said simply. ‘You usually look as if you’ve just rolled out of bed. Why the change of image?’

‘I do not look scruffy usually. Anyway, what’s wrong with wanting to look professional?’ I was tying my hair up, scraping it back.

‘All of a sudden. Because now you’re a detective sergeant.’ He stressed the last word, grinning at me.

‘You can’t get over it, can you?’

‘I can believe you passed the sergeant’s exam. I can’t believe you managed to swing it so you got to stay on the team.’

I didn’t say anything. He knew as well as I did that the detective sergeant’s place had come up because Chief Superintendent Charles Godley had insisted on it, that he had personally intervened to make sure I stayed exactly where I was. He might be working elsewhere but he was still fully engaged with his team, much to Una Burt’s disappointment. So he had insisted that we needed another detective sergeant on the team. And since we were a man down after one of our colleagues had died the previous year, he’d got his way. Dead men’s shoes. Opportunities carved out of tragedy. I’d found it difficult to celebrate, all in all. It was a death we’d all taken hard, but I’d taken it harder than most.

Then again, it was my fault.

As if Derwent knew what I was thinking, he dropped an arm around my shoulders. ‘It’s good to be back. Did you miss me?’

‘Every day. It was so quiet and peaceful without you.’

‘That’s no fun.’

‘None at all,’ I agreed, and I actually meant it.

We split up on the ground floor. Derwent took the kitchen while I concentrated on the living room. They weren’t readers but there was a big TV and a cupboard full of DVDs – film classics, cartoons, nothing edgy or unexpected. I met Derwent in the hall and we moved up to the next floor, to Chloe’s bedroom where again I found no books, a small amount of make-up, a lot of clothes and a pile of junky jewellery in a drawer. Some of it was unworn, still labelled; one heavy necklace had a security tag on it. I stirred the collection with my finger. Shoplifted? Or was it my suspicious mind? I opened a drawer and found a stack of medicine: Ritalin and six months’ supply of the pill. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Chloe was sexually active but it did. Then again, maybe her mother had thought it was better to be safe than sorry. Preventing pregnancy was a lot better than dealing with an unwanted one. I gathered up all of the medicine to give to her.

Swearing, Derwent dealt with the guest room at the front of the house, without finding anything of interest. The cat-shit smell seemed to have got stronger instead of fading away, and I left him to it without the slightest twinge of conscience. There was a tiny box room at the front too, just big enough for a single bed. It was piled high with sealed boxes, all labelled Novo Gaudio Imports, shipped from China. I sliced one open with a key and found packages of pills. The contents matched the customs declaration on the side of the box though and I assumed it was all legal and above-board, even if I didn’t know what the pills were.

Kate Emery’s bedroom was right at the top of the house along with another bathroom and a study, and we went up there together. The blood trail ran out on the first floor, as we’d thought. Here it was the SOCOs who’d left their mark with traces of fingerprint dust that made the surfaces look grimy. Like the rest of the house it was extremely neat and very feminine – pale pink bedclothes, pink curtains, pink towels in the bathroom. The pillows were piled high on the bed, three on each side and one particularly ornate one in the middle.

‘Melissa would love this,’ Derwent said.

‘Does she like the new house?’

Derwent slid open a drawer in the bedside table and started to work through the contents, setting everything he found on the bed. ‘She keeps putting cushions everywhere. What is it about women and cushions?’

I picked up a picture that was on top of the bedside table: a much younger Chloe and Kate hugging one another, smiling, windswept on a beach. Happy memories. ‘It wasn’t a very girly place, your flat.’

‘No, it was not.’ He glanced at me. ‘The house is better.’

‘Nothing quite compares to the suburbs.’

‘You should know. Sutton’s not far from your mum and dad.’

‘I wondered if you remembered they lived nearby. I have to say, I was surprised you chose to move there.’ I’d left it behind without a flicker of regret.

‘We needed to find a good school for the boy. And he needed a garden. Somewhere he can run around.’ His face brightened. ‘I want to get him a playhouse. They do one that looks like a command post.’

I hid a smile. Once a soldier, always a soldier. ‘Sounds nice.’

‘Yeah. Well. It’s good.’ I knew he’d be snappy for a couple of minutes, having given away more than he intended. The way Derwent behaved, you would think the worst thing in the world was to be liked.

Derwent, domesticated. It was strange, but it suited him. I’d never have thought that out of the two of us he would end up settling down first. But then I would never have thought my handsome, loving boyfriend, Rob, would sleep with someone else and leave me without so much as a goodbye, let alone an apology. It was more than a year since he’d disappeared and I still missed him more than I was willing to admit. I’d loved him enough to want to be with him for the rest of my life, and I’d lost him, and I couldn’t help hoping against hope that I might get him back somehow.

I watched Derwent as he returned to the search, running his hand all the way around the back of the drawer and coming up with something that he inspected.

‘What have you got there?’

‘Two condoms. They must have been a pretty recent purchase, looking at the use-by stamp. But no sex toys. No handcuffs. No whips.’

‘So, much less kinky than Oliver Norris was imagining it would be. What’s that?’ I picked up a leather holder and opened it to find a Kindle. ‘Damn. I was hoping for a diary.’

‘Make-up, moisturiser, eye cream …’ Derwent shrugged. ‘Usual female shit.’

I’d moved on to the chest of drawers, which was neatly arranged and completely full. ‘I can’t tell if there’s anything missing, but I’d be surprised. She had good taste in underwear.’

‘Let’s see.’

‘How did I know that would get your attention?’ I held up a bra: Italian, lacy, insubstantial as cobwebs. ‘That’s not for wearing. That’s for taking off.’

‘Naughty Kate.’

‘Single Kate. She must have been young when she had Chloe.’ I stopped to do the sums. ‘Twenty-four. Maybe she felt she had some catching up to do after her divorce.’

The drawers lower down had T-shirts and jumpers arranged by colour, rolled rather than stacked, organised as precisely as if she’d known they’d be scrutinised by strangers. I checked there was nothing caught in the folds or underneath the clothes or even under the drawer liners. Then I took out each drawer and checked underneath it, and along the sides and back.

‘Think she was hiding something?’

‘You never know.’

I carried on searching, checking between layers of clothes, looking in every box, every container, patting down the clothes on hangers to check there was nothing in the pockets. There was no way to know what I was looking for until I found it. I had searched chaotic and dirty houses, derelict buildings, squats and sheds: this was at least clean. But it was also frustratingly normal.

Right at the back of the wardrobe, though, there was something that gave me pause: a plastic bag folded over. I opened it and sat back on my heels. ‘God.’

Derwent was tipping the contents of the bin into an evidence bag. He glanced up, distracted, and half of it fell onto the floor. ‘For shit’s sake.’

‘Come and look at this,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Clothes.’ I was holding the bag at arm’s length, the back of one gloved hand to my mouth.

He came over and peered into the bag, then recoiled. ‘Fuck. That stinks.’

It was a strong and brackish smell, like unwashed exercise kit or dirty bed sheets.

I squeezed the bag, shuffling the clothes around inside it without touching them. ‘Looks to be a top, skirt, bra, knickers. A whole outfit.’

‘A whole outfit that she couldn’t be bothered to wash?’

‘Or she had some reason for keeping it like that.’ I offered him the bag. ‘I don’t want to take them out in case we lose trace evidence, but look at her underwear.’

He leaned over. ‘Ripped.’

‘Badly.’ I closed the bag again carefully. ‘Why would you leave a bag of unwashed, torn clothes in your otherwise im- maculate wardrobe?’

Derwent looked down at me, his face grave, but he didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t have to. ‘Bag it up.’

I edged the bag into a brown paper sack. It might be connected with what had happened in the house and it might not, but I wanted to know whose DNA was on the clothes and how it had got there.

Derwent retrieved the scraps of cotton wool and other rubbish that had tumbled away from him. I pointed out a stray button and a needle that was silvery invisible in the pile of the carpet. The more we took now, the less chance there was that we’d miss something important, but clogging up the lab with irrelevant material was not going to make us popular.

Derwent headed to the study while I dealt with the en-suite bathroom. It was clinically clean. The SOCOs had been here too but the dusting of fingerprint powder had caught only smudges and the wide swinging arc of a cloth used to polish glass. The air smelled of bleach and something else, more acrid. I bent over the sink and inhaled gingerly: definitely stronger. Drain cleaner, used for legitimate drain-cleaning purposes rather than destroying evidence. The bathroom cabinet was so well organised that I could see at a glance there was nothing of interest in it. One container held spare razor blades with plain black casings, not the pastel colours of women’s toiletries. Which meant nothing, I decided. There was no other sign of a man having lived in the house. Kate herself could just as easily have used the blades. Similarly, the stack of unused toothbrushes still in their packets didn’t mean she had frequent visitors, despite what Oliver Norris had suggested. She was the sort of person who stockpiled essentials like toothbrushes. There was a basket under the sink filled with rolls of toilet paper, and I’d found at least two of everything in the bathroom cabinet. Everything spoke of planning, care, preparation, organisation. It didn’t suggest chaos, terror, impending disaster. It didn’t make me think she had fled in a hurry after killing someone downstairs.

It didn’t make me think she had left at all. At least, not by choice.

‘What have you got?’ I stood in the doorway of the study, mainly because it was very much a one-person space. The computer was gone from the desktop, leaving a labelled void behind, and some of the files and folders were missing from the shelves, the spaces tagged to show that it was the police who’d removed them. Otherwise it was the same as the rest of the house – organised and orderly.

‘Nothing.’ Derwent didn’t bother to look up from the filing cabinet he was flicking through. ‘But Liv’s got the good stuff already.’

‘Is there anything about her daughter?’

‘A fuck of a lot of correspondence with the local educational authority.’ He was skim-reading it. ‘This goes back a long way. She had a fight to get Chloe educated around here. She wanted her to stay in mainstream education and the local council didn’t want to have to pay for the extra learning support.’

‘What’s does it say about Chloe?’ I was curious about her. She had been distant but lucid when I spoke to her. And shock could do that to you.

‘Speech delay. Developmental delay. Attention deficit disorder. Anxiety. Oppositional defiant disorder.’ Derwent snorted. ‘That just means you don’t like doing what you’re told.’

‘What else does it say?’

‘Depends who you ask. According to the Council, she was fine. According to her mother and the educational psychologists she consulted, Chloe needed a full-time classroom assistant to help her, extra tuition, extra time for tests …’ Derwent sighed. ‘Makes you realise how lucky you are if your kid is normal.’

‘I don’t think we’re supposed to say normal any more. There’s no such thing.’

‘Bullshit.’ He pushed past me and disappeared into the bathroom.

I listened to him rooting through the cupboards even though I’d already searched there. ‘Did you find a passport?’

‘In a drawer.’

‘Cash?’

‘Nothing significant.’

‘Jewellery?’

‘No. But she’s not wearing much in the pictures I’ve seen of her.’ Derwent reappeared. ‘Anyway, do you see this as a burglary?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Come and look at this.’ He led me back into the bedroom and opened the French windows. A waist-high railing ran across the space. It was dark now, the lights on in the houses all around. The rain had stopped for the time being but the air was sweet with it and night scents rose up from the gardens that stretched as far as I could see. The trees were plumy with leaves and from where I stood the gardens blended into one enormous space framed with houses, the walls and fences invisible.

‘We need to ask the neighbours if they saw anything.’ I had a perfect view across to the houses behind, to the domestic dramas playing out in brightly lit windows. Life going on, as it tended to.

‘Especially at the back. We think she went out the back door,’ Derwent said. ‘The dog took us to the back fence, through a gate and along an alley that runs between the gardens. We went left. We got one … two … three gardens along – that house.’ He pointed. ‘Twenty-two Constantine Avenue, if you were wondering. We took the dog into the garden and it got excited about the fox shit. And then … nothing.’

‘Who lives in that house?’ It stood out because the lights were off.

‘It’s unoccupied. The neighbours said the owner is in a nursing home. I had a look at the doors and windows, but it looked secure.’

‘Access to the front of the house?’

‘There’s a gate. You could climb it.’

‘Even me? It must be easy. But could you get a body over it?’

‘Very possibly. And if you didn’t want to, you could pick the lock in about ten seconds.’

‘Did the dog seem to think someone had done that?’

Derwent shrugged. ‘The dog had lost interest by then.’

‘But our killer could have parked in front of the unoccupied house and taken the body away in his car.’

‘He could indeed.’

‘It seems like a lot of trouble, though. If you want to move the body, why not take it out the front door?’

‘With all the neighbours watching?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘What you don’t know about that house is that there’s a front garden.’

‘Is there?’

‘With a high hedge.’

‘Now you’re making more sense.’

‘So it’s worth dragging a dead weight all the way over there if you know the area.’

‘If you do,’ I said. ‘You’d have to know it was unoccupied, though, and about the gate. You’d have to be local.’

‘Mm.’ Derwent stared out at the houses across the way where the silent scenes played out, as unreal as television. ‘I might not know where to find Kate Emery’s body but I do have some idea where to start looking for her killer.’

6

Monday mornings are the same the world over, no matter the job or the city. It was a pale and bleary-eyed group of detectives who gathered in the meeting room for an early briefing about the Putney crime scene. I’d seen Una Burt outside the room, pacing up and down, eager to get started. I wished I could feel as keen. I tried not to yawn, my jaws quivering as I fought it back. Georgia Shaw was sitting near the front of the room in a grey trouser suit, silver Tiffany heart earrings, her fair hair sleekly groomed.

I would not allow myself to glower at her. I was better than that.

‘Hi.’ Liv Bowen slid into the seat beside me, immaculate in black, her hair folded into a complicated knot at the back of her head. She was a detective constable and a good one, and she was my friend. I felt myself relax.

‘Hi, yourself.’

‘You look knackered. What time did you leave the scene?’

‘Getting on for one.’ And then I’d gone back to my empty flat. I hadn’t gone to bed straight away. I’d stopped for long enough to eat a bowl of cereal while I watched the news headlines. That already represented something like a victory. One: I had bought cereal. Two: I owned milk that hadn’t gone off. Three: I’d remembered to eat them. I sensed that Liv would be underwhelmed, so I didn’t bother to tell her about it. She lived in domestic harmony with her girlfriend in a pretty little house near Guildford and she had long since despaired of my sketchy home life. I also didn’t tell her how I’d wandered through my flat looking at all the tidy rooms where nothing had moved since the cleaner left two days before. The tracks of the vacuum cleaner were still visible in the carpet. You spent a few hours judging someone else for how they lived and it gave you perspective on your own life, whether you wanted it or not.

The investigation had been on the news, but the details remained under wraps. The media only knew it was a murder investigation. The report was heavy on footage of police officers searching the area in the rain, lifting drain covers, poking bushes with sticks. I had been on screen for a split second. The camera had lingered on Georgia’s fair hair.

I could get to like working with Georgia if she took some of the unwanted attention off me.

‘How did you get on?’ I asked Liv.

‘Bits and pieces. Background stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing you could call an obvious motive to kill Kate Emery.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘I thought so.’

Derwent took the seat in front of me with a sigh. He barely nodded hello, which didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a morning person.

He wasn’t an afternoon or evening person either.

‘Right.’ Una Burt marched in and put her folder down on the desk. ‘We’re here to talk about Kate Emery. She’s a forty-two-year-old mother of one, who lived at Valerian Road in Putney with her daughter, Chloe Emery. Chloe is eighteen. She was staying with her father and his family for the last few days. She left London on Wednesday and returned yesterday afternoon. Five days.’ She looked around the room meaningfully. ‘When Chloe left, everything was normal. When she returned, the house was covered in blood and her mother was gone. We need to know what happened to Kate Emery in those five days, and we need to know where she is now. Who wants to start?’

‘I can fill in some of her background,’ Liv volunteered.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Kate Emery has lived at that address for twelve years. She moved there after her divorce from Brian Emery, Chloe’s father. She had custody of Chloe, who went to the local state schools.’

‘Mainstream education?’ Burt checked.

‘Yes, although with support. Chloe has some educational disabilities,’ Liv explained to the rest of the room. ‘Kate was a stay-at-home mother for the majority of the last twelve years. She started her own business four years ago. It’s called Novo Gaudio Imports. She was importing traditional herbal supplements for childless couples to boost their fertility.’

‘Did she have a medical background?’ Burt asked.

‘She was a nurse before her marriage. She’d let her registration lapse so she was no longer allowed to practise. The imports were classified as dietary supplements rather than medical ones so she was able to supply them legally.’

‘And did they work?’ Burt asked.

‘Lots of grateful customers left feedback on her website. I don’t know how many of them were real,’ Liv said. ‘Many of them seemed very similar in tone, but then there probably isn’t that much to say about getting pregnant. At least, there are probably lots of things to say about it, but not on a website selling fertility drugs.’

I made a note of it all the same. Unsatisfied customer? I was still at the stage of being grateful every month for the definitive proof that I wasn’t pregnant, but I could understand something of the terrible hunger for a child. I’d seen it in others and I feared it. There wasn’t much I could do about it when I was single and likely to remain so.

‘How was the business doing?’ The question came from Colin Vale. I could see he was straining to get at the papers, to scrutinise the accounts. I might have felt guilty that he always got landed with every boring, repetitive task involving hours of paperwork or scouring CCTV, but it made him happy.

‘I can’t say for sure because I don’t have this year’s accounts and the computer guys haven’t analysed her PC yet,’ Liv said. ‘I have the impression it wasn’t doing as well as she’d hoped. She had a lot of stock in her house. Her initial sales were good but they had tapered off over time – the profits for last year are a long way down on the previous year. I looked up the company name and found a pretty damning thread on an infertility message board – Don’t use these, they’re rubbish, waste of money, that kind of thing. There were multiple users complaining about the lack of results and quite a lot of responses were from people saying they wouldn’t try them as a result. Kate actually posted a message asking for the customers to apply to her for a refund, but she said she would only pay up if the thread was deleted. That did not go down well at all, as you can imagine. Then there were a few messages in defence of the Novo Gaudio products. Again, they read very much like the positive comments from the website and the users were pretty sceptical about them. The accounts have all been suspended for “abuse of the website’s terms and conditions”.’ Liv looked up and smiled. ‘That means they were fakes. Sock puppets, they call them. Kate got caught out lying about her products.’

‘So she was struggling to make ends meet,’ Burt said.

‘Well, no. Not really. Her current account was in credit. She had a small savings account – I think she invested a lot in the business but there was a tiny bit of cash left over.’ Liv leafed through the documents in front of her. ‘She was getting something like three grand every month from a personal bank account. I haven’t traced it back yet but that could be Chloe’s dad.’

‘Chloe’s eighteen,’ I said. ‘Would he still have been paying to support her?’

‘Worth asking.’ Burt nodded to me. ‘Get the address from me after the briefing. You can talk to him.’

I nodded. ‘I was going to ask if I could. Chloe came home early from her visit and I’d like to know why. She wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Or couldn’t,’ Georgia said. ‘She seemed quite intimidated.’

Intimidated? I knew exactly what Georgia was implying and so did the rest of the room. She didn’t look in my direction, and it took a practised back-stabber to slide the knife in without checking for a reaction.

‘I think it’s far more likely she was in shock,’ Una Burt said, coming to my rescue, much to my surprise. ‘Maeve is only ever intimidating when she means to be.’

‘How was Kate paying the mortgage?’ Pete Belcott asked. I didn’t like Belcott but I recognised that he was a good police officer when he could be bothered and on this occasion he’d asked precisely the right question.

‘She wasn’t paying a mortgage,’ Liv said. ‘I haven’t found any payments to a bank or mortgage company. Which is why I’d say she wasn’t in desperate need of cash. She could easily have borrowed against the value of the house, even to shore up her business.’

‘Did she have any other payments into her current account?’ I asked.

‘Nothing significant. Refunds for things she bought and returned. A transfer from the savings account, for a few hundred pounds.’ Liv shrugged. ‘What were you looking for?’

‘Another source of income. One of the neighbours mentioned that she had a lot of gentlemen callers when her daughter was away. I was wondering if it was professional or strictly amateur.’

‘If she was on the game she might have been cash only. A lot of them are. They’re not the kind of people who file detailed tax returns.’ Belcott looked around the room. ‘I mean, that’s what I hear.’

Chris Pettifer snorted at that, but it was a pale imitation of his usual mockery. He’d aged ten years in the last few months. He hadn’t been the same since we’d lost a team member. Maybe he blamed himself.

I knew he blamed me.

‘We didn’t find much cash when we searched the house,’ Derwent said. ‘No safe. Nothing in the teapot, even.’

Burt’s attention swung around to Derwent, and it was like seeing an artillery piece wheeling into position. ‘Yes, tell us about what you found out.’

Derwent cleared his throat. ‘Um. We searched the property—’

Burt interrupted. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me and Kerrigan.’

‘What about the dog?’

‘Oh, yeah. That was before. It didn’t find much, to be honest with you.’

I resisted the urge to kick the back of his chair. Get it together. You’re making both of us look bad.

As if he’d heard me, he sat up straighter. ‘If you have a map of the area, I can show everyone the route the dog picked out.’

Of course Una Burt had a map of the area – a satellite photograph of it, in fact, and it was on her laptop so it could be projected on the wall behind her. Derwent got out of his chair and sloped up to the front of the room, the picture of a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework properly. As he’d done the previous evening, he described where the dog had alerted and why it was possibly significant.

‘What do we know about the owner of this property?’ Una Burt tapped the house three gardens over.

‘He’s a pensioner. His name is Harold Lowe and he’s been in a nursing home for a few months according to the neighbour. I don’t know of any connection between him and Kate Emery.’

‘Is the house obviously unoccupied?’

‘Yes,’ Derwent said slowly, thinking about it. ‘But the house is in pretty good condition and the garden is fairly neat. The neighbour I spoke to still cuts the grass for him and trims the hedges. He has a key to the gate but it’s not a very secure lock.’

‘Any CCTV nearby?’

‘Not that I saw. It’s a nice residential road. No one that I spoke to saw anything out of the ordinary but I’d like to go back there and try again when we get a better idea of when all of this took place. It’s hard to pin people down when you’re asking about a five-day period.’

‘We can narrow that down a bit,’ I said from the back of the room. ‘The last sighting of Kate Emery that I’ve heard about was Oliver Norris, the neighbour who was with Chloe when she discovered the crime scene. He told me he saw her on Friday evening. The only other sighting I heard about was Norris’s wife, and she saw Kate on Wednesday night.’

There was a ripple of interest around the room. Norris was just a little too involved to be believed without question.

‘Did anyone else see her on Friday?’ Burt asked.

‘Not as far as I know.’ I waited but there was nothing from the front of the room. ‘Georgia, did you find any neighbours who remembered seeing Kate?’

‘Oh – no. No, I didn’t. They couldn’t remember. No one noticed anything strange.’ It sounded weak and she knew it. ‘I didn’t really get to talk to that many people. DS Kerrigan sent me home.’

‘It was getting late.’ I was doing you a favour, you stupid bint. ‘We’ll go out again today and see if we can get any corroboration of Norris’s story.’

‘All right. I don’t want to assume anything at this stage.’ Burt frowned. ‘I’m not sure how Friday fits in with what we know about the cat. But then, I don’t know how much the cat … er …’

‘Shits?’ Derwent suggested, sitting down again.

‘Quite.’

‘The other thing we found that might help us narrow down when she disappeared,’ I said hastily, ‘was a receipt in the kitchen bin. Someone went shopping on Thursday and bought a lot of food.’

‘A week’s worth for a normal person,’ Derwent said with a glint in his eye. I ignored him.

‘It was all put away but not eaten. There were no wrappers in the bin – nothing to say she’d used anything she bought.’

‘That’ll be a time-stamped receipt,’ Colin Vale said happily. ‘I can check the CCTV from the supermarket. Make sure it really was her who went shopping. See if she was alone. That kind of thing.’

‘Good idea. We’re getting a list of transactions from her bank, aren’t we? Try and find her on the CCTV in every shop that would have it. I want to see her and I want to see if anyone was with her, or following her,’ Burt said. ‘I want to know if she looked tense or if she was the same as ever. I want to know if there was anything strange about the last twenty-four hours before she disappeared.’

‘Did you find anything else in the house?’ Colin Vale asked. ‘A passport? Bank cards?’

‘We found her passport and her wallet,’ I said. It had been in the kitchen, on top of the microwave, complete with her bank cards and gym membership and supermarket loyalty cards. ‘No mobile phone, though we’ve asked her service provider to let us know if it’s in use. No keys.’

‘You’d want the keys,’ Derwent observed, ‘so you could shut the front door without making a big noise and drawing attention to yourself. If you’d killed her, I mean.’

‘The more I hear the more I think we’re right to treat it as murder,’ Una Burt said gravely. ‘What else did you find that might be of interest?’

‘A bag of dirty clothes,’ I said.

‘I know Kerrigan’s not exactly domesticated, but I didn’t think she’d get excited about laundry.’ It was a whisper, but a loud one, and it came from Pete Belcott.

‘It wasn’t laundry.’ It was Belcott’s habit to be rude to me but I absolutely refused to let him ruffle my feathers, especially when I was senior to him now. I described where I’d found the clothes and the condition they had been in. Una Burt’s eyebrows were raised.

‘Sexual assault?’

‘Potentially. I think we have to be careful about it, though. She might have kept them as a souvenir of a particularly – er – passionate encounter.’ I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as everyone in the room turned to look at me, with the exception of Derwent. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t. But you never know.’

‘Indeed.’ Burt made a note. ‘But it’s of interest.’

‘Even if she was raped,’ Chris Pettifer said, ‘it doesn’t get us all that much closer to a killer, does it? If she killed him, that would be something else.’

Burt checked her watch. ‘I’m waiting to hear back from the forensic team about the blood. Keep working on the basis that Kate is the victim for the time being. We need motives and suspects and we’re already a few days behind the killer. I can’t waste any more time.’

‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘There’s no obvious reason for anyone to want to kill her. Everything we’ve found out so far points to her being a person who minded her own business, who worked hard, who was determined but slightly unscrupulous and maybe a little unwise, but it doesn’t add up to a motive.’

‘There’s the ex-husband,’ Derwent said.

‘Yes, but why kill her now? They divorced over a decade ago. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘She was a bit lively in her personal life,’ Georgia Shaw said.

‘According to one neighbour,’ I pointed out. ‘But she was attractive. Maybe she was playing two men off against one another and it went wrong. Maybe she made the wrong person jealous.’

Una Burt nodded. ‘I’ll mention it when I do the press conference later. If I appeal for her boyfriends and associates to come forward in confidence, we might get a better picture of what was happening in her life. What do we know about local suspects? Anyone of interest?’

‘I checked with the local coppers,’ Belcott said. ‘It’s a quiet area. They couldn’t think of a similar incident locally in the past five years.’

‘Oliver Norris told me we should look at a guy called William Turner.’ I said it quietly, knowing Belcott would take it as a criticism of his work, and maybe it was. Fairness made me add, ‘I don’t think he can be relevant, but Norris said he lives nearby and knows Chloe. He was arrested for attempted murder a few years ago but never charged.’

‘Why not?’ Burt asked.

‘Insufficient evidence, I think. I’ll look it up and speak to the SIO before I go back to Putney.’

‘You should certainly speak to him. Get some idea of what he’s like. I don’t want to ignore anything at this stage.’

Speak to SIO I wrote in my notebook, so Burt could feel reassured that I was listening to her.

‘So where does this leave us?’ Burt looked around the room.

‘I’d like to know more about Oliver Norris,’ I said. ‘He’s a bit too helpful and he keeps coming up with important information at the precise moment we need it.’

‘And you said he was paranoid about explaining why his fingerprints might be all over Kate Emery’s bedroom,’ Derwent said. ‘Nothing suspicious about that, is there?’

‘He’s ultra-religious, though.’

‘So? Repressed.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Chris Pettifer said.

‘But possibly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like him.’

‘Whoever did this was at ease in the property,’ Derwent said. ‘They knew where to find drain cleaner. They knew where they could shower off the blood. They knew where to take a body so they could dispose of it without being seen, and they were strong enough to handle a body. This wasn’t a stranger who blundered in off the street. This was someone with a plan and they executed it pretty perfectly.’

I nodded. ‘As far as I can see, only one thing went wrong for them. If Chloe hadn’t come back early, no one would even know yet that Kate Emery was gone.’

7

I was on my own when I arrived at William Turner’s address, and glad to be. Georgia had gone to collect CCTV footage from the local shops and show Kate Emery’s picture around, trying to reconstruct Kate’s movements before the attack. She had gone with bad grace.

‘It feels like admin.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

‘It’s not going to help us find who killed her.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘But I want to see William Turner.’

‘Do you? Because I don’t.’ I picked up my phone. ‘It’s going to be more of a waste of time than looking for CCTV, I promise you.’

‘He sounds interesting. Oliver Norris thinks he’s the devil incarnate.’

‘I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything Norris said to us.’ I started dialling the number I’d found for the SIO in the Turner case.

‘Then we should talk to him again.’

‘About what? The weather?’ I leaned back. ‘The next time we talk to Norris, we need to know exactly what happened to Kate Emery so we can find out how his version differs from the truth. At the moment, all I can say to him is that I don’t believe him. I’ve got nothing to throw at him. When the forensics come back, we’ll see if there’s anything to make him feel uneasy, but as things stand we have to let him go about his business. And you should do the same.’

She had gone, but she hadn’t liked it. I had other things to worry about, like William Turner. I thought about him on the drive to Putney, and the incident that had earned him his reputation. The SIO had remembered the case well. It wasn’t the kind you forgot.

I found a parking space on the other side of the street from Turner’s house and walked across. I would have liked a second to collect my thoughts but there was a young man standing in the doorway, smoking a tiny, pungent roll-up. He watched me stop at his front gate, and his expression was wary under a veneer of insolence. He was mixed race and had the kind of good looks that suited a sullen expression: high cheekbones, a full mouth, a face saved from being too feminine by a square jaw and strong, dark eyebrows. What was it Oliver Norris had said? Good looking and he knows it? He had close-cropped hair that showed off the shape of his head, and skin like honey. He wasn’t big – slight was the word that came to mind – but he was wiry and I thought he was probably stronger than he seemed. He wore a grey V-necked T-shirt with jeans that were skin-tight and ripped at the knee. His feet were bare.

‘William Turner?’

He took a long drag before he replied in a slow, husky drawl that I thought he’d probably practised. ‘That depends. Who’s asking?’

I held up my warrant card and he stepped down from the doorway to inspect it, moving with feline grace.

‘Maeve Kerrigan,’ he read.

‘Detective Sergeant Maeve Kerrigan,’ I said. ‘I’m part of the team investigating what happened up the road.’

‘Yeah, what did happen? I saw all the excitement. Everyone coming and going. Very intriguing. Nothing much ever happens here.’ He flicked the butt of his cigarette away then folded his arms across his chest, pushing his biceps with his fists to make himself look bigger.

‘Do you know the residents of number twenty-seven?’

‘A little. I know what they look like.’ He had stepped back a bit and found some high ground on a loose brick that was by the gate so he could stare into my eyes. His irises were light brown, almost gold, like a lion. Like a predator. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Humans were still animals when all was said and done.

‘But to speak to?’

‘No. You know what London is like. No one knows their neighbours.’

‘Depends on the area.’

‘And the neighbours.’ He laughed softly. ‘No one wants to know us so we don’t know them. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because someone told you to come and talk to me. Because I’m the local scum so if something’s happened in the street it must have been me.’

‘It’s my job to talk to potential witnesses. You live in this street and I’m told you spend a lot of time out here watching people come and go.’

‘You’re told that.’ A slow smile spread across his face. One of his front teeth was crooked, overlapping the other by a couple of millimetres, and it was strangely charming. ‘Let me guess. Who could have told you? So many suspects. This is like doing your job, isn’t it? I can see why you like it. It could have been Narinder across the way, but I think she likes to see me out here. She’s always watching.’ He lifted a hand and waved. I turned in time to see a curtain fall back into place in the house opposite. ‘It could have been the bitch next door but she was away for the weekend. Anyway, she’s too snobby to talk about me. She likes to pretend we don’t exist. So who hates the fact that I dare to show my face in public?’ Turner stroked his chin, pretending to ponder it. He had a few days’ worth of stubble but it was sparse and fine. ‘Who doesn’t like me talking to his daughter?’

‘Mr Turner—’

‘Got it, haven’t I?’ He leaned out so he could look down the street, towards Oliver Norris’s house. ‘I’ve tried to explain it to him. It’s not me making the running. Bethany’s the one who talks to me. It’s not as if I’m all that keen on hanging around with a fifteen-year-old. That’s the kind of thing that could get me in trouble.’ He took a tin out of his back pocket and set it on top of the gatepost. The sweet raw smell of tobacco floated out of it when he popped it open and picked out a cigarette paper. His hands were shaking very slightly as he made the roll-up. It was thin, with no filter, and the back of my throat ached at the thought of smoking it.

‘Mr Turner, I do need to talk to you. I wonder if we could go inside.’

‘We could go inside.’ He ran his tongue slowly along the edge of the paper to glue it together. ‘But you’ll have to put up with my mother if you do that. There’s a reason why I spend a lot of time out here and if you go in there you’ll find out what it is.’

‘I can cope.’

‘I’m not sure I can.’ He lit the cigarette and drew on it, coughing as he exhaled. ‘What a terrible rollie. It’s an embarrassment. I usually do much better than that.’

‘It’s bad for you, you know.’

‘No shit, Sherlock.’ He picked a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. ‘I like to live dangerously.’

‘I spoke to DCI Gordon,’ I said softly.

Turner went very still. ‘That was quick.’

‘I’m investigating a serious incident.’

‘You didn’t say what it was.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Is it murder?’ He pulled at his lower lip again, nervously this time.

‘Why would you think that?’

‘Because. Because of the fuss. Because of the guys in white suits going in and out. I didn’t see a body bag.’ He over-balanced and almost fell off the brick.

‘There wasn’t one.’

‘So what happened?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘You don’t know?’ His eyebrows went up, sky-high. ‘Doesn’t usually stop the cops from talking to the press, does it?’

‘In your experience.’

‘In my very unpleasant experience.’ It was warm in the sunshine but I could see goosebumps on Turner’s arms and he shivered. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to talk about this out here. Come in.’

At his invitation, when he was good and ready. I recognised it for a power play and tried not to feel irritated. Derwent would have found some reason for saying no but I followed Turner to the door, where he stopped.

‘Just so you know, my mum is upstairs and I’d like her to stay there.’

‘I might need to speak to her.’

‘No. No, you don’t.’ He swallowed. ‘She won’t be able to help you, anyway. She’s not – she doesn’t notice things. She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t look out the window. She doesn’t even know anything’s happened.’

‘I still might need to speak to her.’

He bit his lip, then went into the house. It was cooler inside, the air still. A fly buzzed somewhere, the sound swinging from loud to soft and back again. There was an all-pervading smell of vinegar and lemon and the place was absolutely spotless.

‘You need to take your shoes off,’ he threw over his shoulder and padded into the sitting room. I did as I was told and followed him, blinking against the sunlight that streamed into the room. It was neatly furnished with a leather sofa and armchair, and a couple of small tables. What was mainly remarkable, though, was what I couldn’t see when I looked around. No ornaments. No books. No cushions. No rugs on the wooden floor.

Turner coughed again, his chest heaving. The hollow at the base of his throat deepened as he fought for air. ‘Sorry. Need my—’

He dug in his back pocket and pulled out an inhaler, handling it with the practised skill born of long usage. He turned away from me before he used it and I took the hint: this was private. I was intruding on a personal battle. I sat down, acutely aware of the wheezing, terrified in case it stopped. I knew, in theory, how to resuscitate someone, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do it.

‘Sorry,’ he managed.

‘It’s all right. Take your time.’

‘It happens now and then.’ Five words and three breaths to say them. I winced and took my radio out of my bag, holding it on my knee in case I needed to call for help in a hurry, for him rather than me. Suddenly the room made sense to me: hard surfaces. Wipe-clean leather upholstery. No dust. Vinegar and lemon because someone used homemade cleaning products instead of mass-produced chemicals. Nothing left to chance.

He stood with his back to me, his shoulders hunched, his head hanging down. The wheezing lessened, the breaths coming more regularly. Between his shoulder blades, the fabric of his T-shirt had darkened where he’d sweated through it.

‘Sorry about this,’ he said for the third time.

‘You don’t need to apologise.’ He was watching me out of the corner of his eye, I realised. There was something sly about it that put me on my guard; it was as if he was assessing the impact of the attack on me. ‘What triggered that? Do you know?’

‘I’m not very good at taking my medicine. I forget.’

Maybe you should try a bit harder, since it could actually kill you.

‘Was that a particularly bad one?’

‘Normal.’ He leaned against the chimney breast and ran a hand over his head. ‘Happens all the time. Anything can trigger it. Perfume. Chemicals. Dust. Change in temperature. I’ve got shit lungs.’

‘All the more reason not to smoke.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘But you keep smoking.’

‘I’d give up if I wanted to live.’ His eyes were fixed on mine, hungry for a reaction. I shrugged.

‘Most people do.’

‘I thought you’d know by now I’m not like most people.’

I laughed. ‘What are you, twenty? Twenty-one?’

‘Twenty.’ His voice was flat.

‘I’ve never met a twenty-year-old who didn’t think they were exceptional. You saying that tells me you’re just like everybody else.’

‘Hey,’ he said, affronted.

‘Hey yourself.’ I leaned forward. ‘Look, I appreciate the effort you’re putting into this but you’re not going to impress me or shock me or whatever it is you’re trying to do. Drop the attitude and I’ll make this as quick as I can.’

He dug his hands into his pockets and shrugged. ‘OK.’

‘I’m here because your name came up when we made enquiries with the neighbours. I am not accusing you of anything.’

Turner’s mouth tightened but he stayed silent.

‘I know you know Chloe Emery. How would you describe your relationship?’

‘I only know her to speak to.’

‘Have you ever visited her house?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember,’ I repeated.

‘No, then.’ The amber eyes flicked away from me, darting around the room for inspiration. ‘When we were younger, maybe.’

I sat back in my chair. ‘For someone who managed to avoid being charged with attempted murder, you’re a terrible liar.’

The smile spread over his face. ‘I wasn’t charged with attempted murder because I didn’t do it.’

‘Remember, I’ve spoken to DCI Gordon.’

Turner sat down slowly on the arm of the sofa. ‘What did he tell you?’

‘Everything he found out about you and Ben Christie. Which wasn’t much. Why wouldn’t Ben give evidence against you, William?’

‘Because I didn’t do it.’

‘The incident happened in an alley behind some shops. You were there and Ben Christie was there and Ben ended up with a stab wound in his stomach. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to guess what happened.’

‘You could guess, but you’d be wrong.’ Turner’s breathing was still a little fast but his eyes were bright; he was enjoying this.

‘What about the text messages on his phone?’

‘What about them?’

I opened my notebook to read out the exact words. ‘“u know wot u did” “Time 2 make it right” “u can’t back out now” – what was that about?’

‘I don’t remember. Nothing much. Teenage shit. Maybe he spilled my drink or borrowed a quid and didn’t pay it back.’ He yawned. ‘You know you’re talking about something that happened four years ago. I can’t be expected to recall all the details.’

‘He was your friend and he almost died. Of course you remember it,’ I snapped.

Turner lifted his hands and looked at them, turning them over to examine the palms. ‘I was covered in his blood. Did you know that?’

‘I’m not surprised. He was very badly injured.’

‘It was so hot, his blood. It got everywhere. Under my nails. On my shoes. I dream about it sometimes.’ He looked up at me again. ‘I saved his life. I called the ambulance.’

‘You stabbed him.’

‘Not me. I found him. I helped him.’

‘You met him in the alley near your school and you stabbed him.’

‘Did DCI Gordon tell you about the forensics?’ Turner asked, his eyes intent. ‘Did he tell you about the knife?’

‘Yes. He did.’

‘Whose knife was it?’

It was a kitchen knife, an ordinary one with a serrated blade, the kind you might use for cutting up vegetables. Mrs Christie had identified it as one from her house, and cried as she did so.

‘It belonged to the Christies, but—’

‘And whose fingerprints were on it?’ Turner asked.

‘Ben Christie’s.’

‘Not mine.’

‘No. But there are ways of staging that.’

‘I didn’t have to. I never touched it. Did they find my DNA on it?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve read up on DNA. They can do amazing things these days, can’t they? A skin cell or two, that’s all they need to identify someone beyond doubt. And every contact leaves a trace.’

Edmond Locard’s maxim. It was the basic principle of all forensic investigation – that criminals left traces of themselves at crime scenes and crime scenes left traces on the criminals themselves. I wasn’t used to having a suspect quote it at me.

‘So they say. But—’

‘There was no trace of me on the knife. I never touched it. I never held it. I didn’t stab him.’

‘You said yourself you were covered in his blood.’

‘That was after he stabbed himself,’ Turner said dismissively. ‘That proves nothing.’

‘Why would he stab himself?’

‘You need to ask him that.’

DCI Gordon had done precisely that, over and over again. Christie had refused to say. All he had mumbled, over and over again, was that it wasn’t anything to do with William Turner, and no one had been able to prove him wrong.

‘You mean you don’t know? You were there.’ Along with two other teenagers who swore they’d seen Turner helping Christie, calling an ambulance on his phone, cradling his friend and comforting him.

‘I was too late to stop him. I tried. I saved his life. A suicide is a terrible thing.’

‘Says the man who doesn’t care if he lives or dies.’

‘Which reminds me.’ He took out his tin of tobacco again, opening it on his knee this time. ‘Almost time for another coffin nail.’

‘Will-i-am. I wish you wouldn’t call them that.’ The voice came from behind me and I jumped; I hadn’t heard anyone approach. A thin, withered woman stood in the doorway holding a cloth with gloved hands.

‘Mrs Turner?’ I stood up. ‘I’m DS Maeve Kerrigan. I’m here to ask some questions about what happened up the road.’

‘I don’t know anything.’ Her eyes were fixed on her son who was concentrating on his cigarette. ‘Don’t do that in here, William. You’ll drop bits of it everywhere.’

‘Then you can sweep them up.’ He winked at me. ‘Got to give her a reason to live, don’t I?’

Mrs Turner sighed. ‘You’re terrible.’

‘You love it.’

She squeezed the cloth in her hands, still watching him. It was as if I didn’t exist. I could see what William had meant when he said she didn’t notice anything that happened outside their home. DCI Gordon had been forthright about her. ‘She can’t imagine her boy doing anything wrong. She thought I was a bully and a liar. Little Willy never did anything to hurt anyone.’ A snort. In his opinion, Mr Turner had been fully justified in doing a runner before William was born. ‘She had money because her parents were very well off – they bought the house, for instance – but money isn’t everything, is it?’

I had agreed that no, it was not and Gordon had laughed. ‘It helps though.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Well, Turner didn’t stick around to see his son. Maybe the boy would have turned out better if he’d been around. He had too much attention, that was the problem. He thought he was the centre of the universe because, for his mum, he is.’

‘Do you know Kate Emery, Mrs Turner?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘The lady who lives at number twenty-seven. She has a daughter, Chloe, who’s almost the same age as William.’

‘Oh. I know her a bit. Not properly.’ She was folding the cloth over and over, mindlessly. ‘She used to be a nurse.’

‘Once upon a time.’

‘She helped me with William once, when he was younger. He had a bad attack and I ran out into the street in a panic. She helped me before the ambulance came. She was nice then. But I don’t know her.’ She blinked. Her eyelids and the end of her nose were pink and looked raw, as if she’d been crying. She had none of her son’s looks, and I couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive. Mr Turner had to have been a stunner.

‘You still haven’t said what happened,’ William Turner said. ‘Is Chloe OK?’

‘Physically.’

‘So that leaves her mum.’ A muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘Let me guess. She was stabbed.’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘Because you’re asking me about something that happened four years ago, that was thoroughly investigated at the time, as if it’s suddenly important.’

‘Well, it might be.’ I stood up. ‘I can’t tell you what happened at number twenty-seven yet. At the moment we’re still investigating. But I can tell you that we’ll need a sample of your DNA and your fingerprints.’ And while they were at it, I was going to apply for a warrant to search his house.

‘Am I a suspect?’

‘You said yourself you couldn’t remember if you’d been in the house. We need to rule you out.’ Or in. ‘That’s why we need your prints and your DNA.’

Turner nodded. ‘Then come back and get them. I have nothing to hide.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said, and left.

8

I stepped out of the house with a profound feeling of relief that evaporated instantly. Derwent was leaning against the bonnet of my car, his legs crossed at the ankle, his hands in his pockets.

‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.

‘Waiting for you.’

‘For any particular reason? Or because you missed me?’

‘Funny.’ His mood was like a black cloud hanging in the air around him. ‘I recognised the car. Who were you talking to?’

I came closer so I could speak more quietly. ‘William Turner. And his mother.’

‘And did he ping your freak-o-meter?’

‘I’m not sure. He was trying hard to impress me, so there was a lot of showing off.’

‘I bet he was,’ Derwent said softly. ‘How old is he?’

‘Twenty.’

‘And he still lives at home.’

‘He has bad asthma. I doubt it would be safe for him to live alone. Plus, I imagine he’s on benefits. He doesn’t work.’

‘What a prize.’

‘You wouldn’t have liked him.’ But then you don’t like anyone. I tried again. ‘Why are you waiting for me?’

‘Harold Lowe has given us permission to look around his house.’ Derwent held up a set of keys and shook them at me. His expression, if anything, had darkened.

‘I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.’

‘He said that he knew Kate Emery well. She used to bring him cakes, cook him meals, that kind of thing.’ Derwent’s mouth tightened. ‘Guess how she used to come round?’

My spirits sank. ‘Through the back garden?’

‘Got it in one. And get this: she used to use it as a shortcut to get to the shops. She had a key to the side gate and everything.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘So what the dog told us doesn’t mean much, does it? Back to square one. No body, no suspects and no ideas.’

‘Still no sign of the body.’

‘They’re looking. They’ve been out on the river, checking the places the bodies usually wash up. But if she went in the water, she’ll be long gone. All that rain.’

I shuddered, thinking of the cold grey waters of the Thames. Countless bodies had disappeared into it, never to resurface. ‘Risky, throwing a body into the water, though. There’s always someone watching in a city like this.’

‘You’d think so.’ Derwent yawned. ‘She’s probably in an outhouse somewhere, or a ditch.’

‘Or some leafy bit of countryside where she won’t be found for a year or two.’

‘By a dog walker who will never get over the shock of Rex digging up an actual human bone to chew.’ Derwent grinned. ‘That’s one reason why I’m never getting a dog. It’s not as if I need more corpses in my life.’

‘This one would be nice to find.’ I was looking at Kate Emery’s house where there was a uniformed officer standing guard. Flapping tape still cordoned off the house. ‘Where would you dump a body if you killed someone here?’

‘I wouldn’t. I’d leave it where it is. Move a body and you contaminate your car or van. You transfer trace evidence to the body and the car, and yourself. Your risk of being discovered goes up massively. Unless you’ve got an amazing place to hide it, the body will be found eventually. There’s no good reason to take the body away.’

‘Unless you know you left evidence of yourself on the body and you’re not sure you can clean it up.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘If Kate was raped before she died. Or after.’ I said it calmly, professionally, not allowing myself to imagine her pain, her fear, the moment when she realised she was going to die.

Derwent nodded. ‘There is that. She put up a hell of a fight, by the looks of things.’

‘But it wasn’t enough.’

‘Not this time.’ He turned away abruptly and I wondered if he was thinking about Melissa, who had been attacked over and over again by her handsome husband. Some cases were too close to home, for both of us.

We could have taken the shortcut to Harold Lowe’s house – through the bloody hallway at number 27, across the garden, through the gate and down the alley – but Derwent wanted to take the long way round, by road, in my car, which would take a couple of minutes. It seemed like unnecessary hassle to me but I went along with it. The only way to survive working with Derwent was to pick your battles.

‘Is it the house?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Kate Emery’s house. Does it bother you? The blood?’

‘Nah.’ He leaned back in the passenger seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes. ‘Drive slower.’

‘Seriously? You usually complain about how slowly I drive.’

‘I’m tired.’

‘Well, it’s not naptime.’

His answer was a snore. I hit the brakes a bit harder than I needed to at the next junction and he startled awake, his hands flying up.

‘What?’

‘Why are you sleeping?’

‘Because I’m knackered.’ He did look tired, I thought, with shadows under his eyes that weren’t usually there. ‘Thomas hasn’t been sleeping well.’

‘He has to get used to the new house.’

‘It’s not that. He’s been having nightmares. Night terrors, actually.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘It’s like sleepwalking except he’s in bed. Screaming.’ He shivered. ‘It’s fucking creepy. He can be sitting there with his eyes open, shouting at the top of his voice about monsters and people chasing him, and there’s nothing you can do to comfort him. He doesn’t even know you’re there.’

‘What does Melissa think?’

‘She wants to take him to see a sleep specialist.’ He sighed. ‘I think she’s overreacting but I can’t say that, can I? He’s not my kid. Google says it’s normal at Thomas’s age.’

I pulled up outside Lowe’s house, on the road. The high beech hedge screened the front of the house completely from anyone walking past. ‘What did you say he screams about? Monsters?’

‘Monsters, baddies, someone watching him, you name it. I put the light on to show him there’s no one there but he’s not conscious really, so he doesn’t register it. You have to wait for him to calm down by himself and go back to sleep and it takes hours.’ He yawned so widely I heard his jaw crack. ‘It’s happening two or three times a night. And in the morning he doesn’t remember any of it.’

‘Maybe moving house will sort it out.’

‘Maybe. The flat was too small for the three of us. That didn’t help. But Melissa thinks it might make it worse. He’s had a lot of disruption in the past year.’

‘Yeah, but with a happy ending. He got away from his dad, didn’t he?’ Mark Pell had beaten and intimidated his wife until she took Thomas and ran away to London, to what should have been a safe place. It wasn’t her fault that it had turned out to be the opposite.

Derwent nodded soberly. ‘That could be part of the trouble, though. He must miss his dad. Melissa never let him see any of the violence. He didn’t know about her injuries. As far as he’s concerned, his mummy and daddy loved each other very much and then Mummy took him away. Daddy disappeared out of his life from one day to the next.’

‘But you’re there.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘Isn’t it? He adores you, you know that.’

Derwent put a hand up to his eyes, rubbing at them with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’m not crying. My eyes are watering because I’m tired.’

‘Yeah, of course. I think we drove past someone chopping onions, actually. That’s probably it.’

‘Don’t take the piss,’ he mumbled.

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘I want to look after him. That’s all. And I don’t know how to make it better for him.’

‘It’s a phase.’

Derwent squinted at me. ‘What do you know about it?’

‘That’s what my brother says about every annoying thing his kids do. Everything’s a phase. In a month’s time he’ll be sleeping beautifully and you’ll have something else to worry about.’

He thought about it. ‘Thanks, mate.’

‘Any time.’ I got out of the car and looked up and down Constantine Avenue. The houses were detached, set back from the road and there were no pedestrians. It was quiet, and private. ‘This is going to be rubbish for witnesses.’

‘Come on.’ Derwent led the way through the gate and paused to scan the gravel in front of the house. ‘What do you think? Tyre marks?’

‘None to speak of.’ I crouched down, trying to see. ‘Nope. There isn’t enough gravel for that.’

‘Typical.’ He looked up at the house. It was a 1930s house with ugly aluminium-framed windows that had probably been put in four decades after the house was built. It had a general air of being unoccupied. The curtains were drawn in every window and weeds had sprouted through cracks in the steps. Some rubbish had blown in from the street and tangled in the undergrowth. ‘You’d know it was empty, wouldn’t you?’

‘Empty or that it belonged to someone elderly.’ I followed him through the front door, working my hands into my gloves as a precaution but also because I really didn’t want to touch anything. I stepped over the slithery pile of post and junk mail on the doormat, wrinkling my nose. ‘It stinks in here.’

‘Not as much as the nursing home did.’ Derwent looked back at me. ‘When I get old, I’m going to Switzerland to end it all. No way do I want to drag out my days staring at the walls surrounded by a load of drooling vegetables.’

‘It can’t have been that bad.’

‘Whatever you’re imagining, it was worse.’ He strode into the kitchen, snapping with energy now that we were working again, the hunter’s instinct overriding fatigue. I tried and failed to visualise him as an old man. Impossible to think of him being calm, sitting quietly, staring at the walls. He’d burn the place down first.

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