Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller

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.