Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller

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.