Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Copyright © Jane Casey 2019

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Stephen Mulcahey/Trevillion Images (figure), Shutterstock.com (forest and yellow tape)

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: 9780008149031

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008149055

Version: 2019-11-27

Praise for Cruel Acts

‘Cruel Acts is magnificent. I’ve loved all Jane Casey’s books but this is definitely her best one. I could not stop reading it! Utter brilliance’

Marian Keyes

‘You’ll be checking the locks and looking over your shoulder after reading this one: Cruel Acts is clever, classy crime fiction with a conscience. I couldn’t put it down’

Erin Kelly, bestselling author of He Said/She Said

‘Jane Casey’s brilliant storytelling pulled me straight into Maeve Kerrigan’s world, leaving me breathless and wanting more. Brava!’

Fiona Barton, bestselling author of The Widow

‘Jane Casey is writing one of THE very best police series around … Terrific’

Sarah Hilary, bestselling author of the DI Marnie Rome series

‘The smartest, most empathetic writer of police procedural novels today. I absolutely, whole-heartedly adored this book’

Liz Nugent, bestselling author of Skin Deep

‘One of the most authentic police procedural writers around’

Jo Spain, bestselling author of The Confession

‘Cruel Acts is a compulsive read. The story is captivating’

Patricia Gibney, author of the Detective Lottie Parker series

‘An utterly engaging, powerful novel that had me hooked from page one’

Helen Fields, author of Perfect Remains

‘Kept me turning the pages long into the night’

Rachel Abbott, author of the Tom Douglas thriller series

‘Humane, emotional and deeply intelligent’

Sinéad Crowley, author of the DS Claire Boyle series

‘Mesmerising’

Sunday Times

‘The plot makes for a breathtaking page-turner’

Sun

‘One of the most thoroughly human and convincing police officers in the fictional ranks’

Guardian

‘Jane Casey is a terrific writer and her Maeve Kerrigan books are irresistible’

Irish Times

‘This brutal thriller doesn’t pull its punches, and it hooks till the last gasp’

Heat

‘You’ll be totally hooked’

Woman & Home

‘A masterful tale of twisted psychology, trauma and betrayal’

Woman’s Weekly

‘A series that’s establishing itself as one of the finest in all of crime fiction’

Irish Independent

Dedication

For Sinéad and Liz, my wise women

Epigraph

The investigator should pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry, whether these point towards or away from the suspect.

Code of Practice for Investigators

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Cruel Acts

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

Chapter 41

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Jane Casey

About the Publisher

1

The house was dark. PC Sandra West stared up at it and sighed. The neighbours had called the police – she checked her watch – getting on for an hour earlier, to complain about the noise. What noise, the operator asked.

Screaming.

An argument?

More than likely. It’s not fair, the neighbour had said. Not at two in the morning. But what would you expect from people like that?

People like what?

A check on the address had told Sandra exactly what kind of people they were: argumentative drunks. She’d never been there before but other officers had, often, trying to persuade one or other of them to leave the house, to leave each other alone, for everyone’s sake. It was depressing how often she encountered couples who had no business being together but who insisted, through screaming rows and bruises and broken teeth, that they loved each other. Sandra was forty-six, single and likely to remain so, given her job (which was a passion-killer, never mind what they said about uniforms) and her looks (nothing special, her father had told her once). Generally, she didn’t mind. It was peaceful being on her own. She could do what she wanted, when she wanted.

Sandra had a look in the boot of the police car and found a stab vest. Slowly, fumbling, she hauled it around her and did it up. It was stiff and awkward, made to fit someone much taller than Sandra. Still, it was in the car for a reason. She walked up the path to the front door. Everything was quiet. Hushed.

Maybe one of them had taken the hint and left before the busies arrived. Sandra shone her torch over the window at the unhelpful curtains, then bent and looked through the letterbox. A dark hallway stretched back to the kitchen door. It was quiet and still.

A screaming argument that ended with everyone tucked up in bed an hour later? Not in Sandra’s experience. She planted her feet wide apart, knowing that she had enough bulk in her stab vest and overcoat to intimidate anyone who might need it. Then she rapped on the door with the end of her torch.

‘Police. Can you open the door, please?’

Silence.

She knocked again, louder, and checked her watch. God, nights were hard work. It was the boredom that wore you down, that and the creeping exhaustion that was difficult to ignore when you weren’t busy. She wasn’t usually single-crewed but some of her rota were off sick. She never got sick. It was something she took for granted – the colds and viruses and stomach bugs all passed her by. It made her wonder if everyone else was really sick or if they were faking, and whether she was stupid not to do the same. She tried to suppress a yawn with an effort that made her jaw creak. It was tempting to call it in as an LOB. Sandra smiled to herself. It wasn’t what they taught you at Hendon, but every police officer knew what it stood for: Load of Bollocks. Then she could get back into the car and go in search of refs. She hadn’t eaten for hours, her stomach hollow from it. Knowing her luck, she’d be about to bite into what passed for dinner and her radio would come to life.

The trouble was, there was a kid in the house. You couldn’t just walk away without finding out if the kid was safe. Not when there was a history of domestic violence and social services being involved. Chaotic was the word for it: not enough food in the house, patchy attendance at school, the boy needing clean clothes and haircuts and a good bath. How could you have a kid and not take responsibility for him? OK, Sandra’s parents had been short on hugs and they hadn’t had a lot of money to spend on her and her brothers, but they’d been reliable and she’d never once gone hungry. Nothing to complain about, even if she had complained at the time.

She bent down again and peered through the letterbox, moving the torch slowly across the narrow field of view this time. It cast stark shadows in the kitchen and across the stairs. But there was something … she squinted and changed the angle of the torch, trying to see. There, on the bottom step: light on metal. And again, two steps up. And again, three steps above that.

Knives. Kitchen knives.

They were stuck into the wood of the stairs, point first. All the way up, into the darkness at the top.

Sandra wasn’t an imaginative person but she had an overwhelming sense of fear all of a sudden, and she wasn’t sure if it was her own or someone else’s.

‘Hello? Can you hear me? Open the door, please, love. I need to check you’re all right.’

Silence.

Oh shit, Sandra thought, but not for her own sake, despite being scared at the thought of what might confront her inside the house. Oh shit something very bad has happened here. Oh shit we probably can’t make this one right. Oh shit we should have come out a lot sooner.

Oh shit.

She got on her radio and asked for back-up.

‘With you in two minutes,’ the dispatcher said, and Sandra thought about two minutes and how long that might be if you were scared, if you were dying. She’d asked for paramedics too, hoping they’d be needed.

The second police car came with two large constables, one of whom put the door in for her. His colleague went past him at speed, checking the rooms on the ground floor.

‘Clear.’

Sandra was halfway up the stairs, listening to her heart and every creak from the bare boards. The torch was slick in her hand.

‘Hello? Anyone here?’

The thunder of police boots on the steps behind her drowned out any sounds she might have heard. Bathroom: filthy in the jumping light from her torch, but no one hiding. A bedroom, piled high with rubbish and dirty clothes. No bed, but there was a pile of blankets on the floor, like a nest. A second bedroom was at the front of the house. It was marginally tidier than the other one, mainly because there was almost no furniture in it apart from a mattress on the floor. Shoes were lined up neatly in one corner and a collection of toiletries stood in another.

The woman was lying across the mattress, half hanging off the edge, a filthy blanket draped across her. Her head was thrown back. Dead, Sandra thought hopelessly, and made herself smile at the small boy who crouched beside the body.

‘Hello, you. We’re the police. Are you all right?’

He was small and dark, his hair hanging over his eyes. He blinked in the light, his eyes darting from her to the officer behind her. He wasn’t crying, and that was somehow worse than if he’d been sobbing. Sandra was bad at guessing children’s ages but she thought he could be eight or nine.

‘What’s your name?’

Instead of answering he huddled closer to the woman. He had pulled one bruised arm so it went around him. It reminded Sandra of an orphaned monkey clinging to a cuddly toy.

‘Can I come a bit closer? I need to check if this lady is all right.’

No reaction. He was staring past her at the officer behind her. She waved a hand behind her back. Give me some room.

‘Is this your mummy?’ she whispered.

A nod.

‘Is your daddy here?’

He mouthed a word. No. That was good news, Sandra thought.

‘Was he here earlier?’

Another nod.

Sandra inched forward. ‘Did you put that blanket over your mummy?’

‘Keep her warm.’ His voice was hoarse.

‘Good lad. Good idea. And you put something under her head.’

‘Coat.’

‘Brilliant. Can I just check to see if she’s all right?’ Sandra stretched out a gloved hand and touched the woman’s ankle. Her skin was blue in the light of the torch, and even through the latex her skin felt cold.

‘He hurt her.’

‘Who did, darling? Your dad?’

The boy blinked at her. After a long moment, he shook his head slowly, definitely. It would be someone else’s job to find out who had done it, Sandra thought, and was glad it wasn’t her responsibility. The closer she got to the woman on the mattress, the more she could see the damage he’d done to her. And the boy had watched the whole thing, she thought.

‘All right. We’ll help her, shall we?’

His huge, serious eyes were fixed on Sandra’s. She wasn’t usually sentimental, but a sob swelled up from deep in her chest and burst out of her mouth before she could stop it. She held out her arms. ‘Come here, little one.’

He shrank into himself, turning away from her towards his mother. Too much, too soon. She bit her lip. The sound of low voices came from the hall: the paramedics at long last.

‘I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here. We’ve got an ambulance for your mummy. We need to let the ambulance men look after her.’

‘I want to stay. I want to help.’

‘But you can’t.’

The boy gave a long, hostile hiss, a sound that made Sandra catch her breath. The paramedics crashed into the room, carrying their equipment, and shoved her out of the way. She leaned against the wall as they bent over the figure on the mattress. It was as if Sandra had come down with a sudden, terrible illness: her stomach churned and there was a foul taste in her mouth. A cramp caught at her guts but she couldn’t go, not in the filthy bathroom, not in what was going to be a crime scene. She clenched her teeth and prayed, and eventually the pain slackened. A greasy film of sweat coated her limbs. She lifted a hand to her head and let it fall again. What was wrong with her?

The boy had scrambled back when the paramedics crashed into the room. He crouched in the corner of the room among the shoes, those round solemn eyes taking everything in. Sandra watched him watching the men work on his mother’s body, and she shivered without knowing why.

2

It was a day like any other; it was a day like they all were inside. Time pulled that trick of dragging and passing too quickly and all that happened was that he was a day further into forever.

He sat on his own, in silence, because he’d been allocated a cell to himself. It was for his protection and because no one wanted to share with him. He wasn’t the only murderer on the wing – far from it – but he was notorious, all the same.

That wasn’t why no one wanted to share with him. His health wasn’t good, a cough rattling in his chest all night long. That was more of a problem than the killing, he thought. But he’d taken his share of abuse for the murders, all the same. No one liked his kind.

He shifted his weight in the cheap wooden-framed armchair, feeling it creak under him. He had never been a fat man but prison had pared away at his flesh, carving out the shadow of his bones on his face.

The room was fitted out like a cheap hostel – a rickety wardrobe, a small single bed, a desk against the wall. There were limp, yellow curtains at the window. At a glance you might not notice the bars across the same window, or the stainless steel sink, or the toilet that was behind a low partition. That was one good thing about being on his own. He’d shared cells before, when he was younger. You never got used to the smell of another man’s shit. Of all the smells in the prison – and there were many – that was the worst.

He picked up the envelope that he’d left lying on his desk. It was open. A screw would have read it before he ever saw it. That was standard. Small writing, black ink. He wasn’t used to seeing it: his name in that writing. He turned it over a couple of times. Nothing important in it or he’d never have seen it. But no one writes a letter without saying something, even if they don’t mean to say anything at all.

He ripped the envelope getting the letter out of it. The paper was flimsy, the words on the other side bleeding through. He wasn’t a great reader at the best of times. His eyes tracked down the centre of the page, the scrawl transforming itself into phrases here and there. Don’t forget we’re all trying … I know you can … easy for me to say … coming to see you … your appeal … lose heart … forget what happened … start again … have hope … your son.

‘Fuck you.’ It was a whisper, inaudible above the banging and shouting and echoing madness of a prison in the daytime. With a wince, he got to his feet and crossed to the toilet. He stood over it, tearing the letter in half and half again, ripping the paper until it was a handful of confetti. He dropped it into the bowl. He’d imagined the ink would run but it didn’t. The paper sat on the surface of the water, the black writing burning itself onto his retinas. He pissed on it in a stop-start trickling stream, annoyed by that as much as the way the paper stuck damply to the sides of the toilet. He flushed, and waited, and grimaced at the scattered, dancing fragments that remained in the water.

He had a whole life sentence stretching ahead of him but that wasn’t what made him bitter.

If by some miracle he got out, he would never be free.

3

The lift doors closed and I shut my eyes, then forced them open again. It took about half a minute to go from the ground floor to our office: thirty seconds wasn’t quite long enough for a cat nap, even for me. The weight of the box I was carrying pulled at the muscles in my shoulders and arms but that was fine; it distracted me from the wholly unpleasant sensation of mud-soaked boots and trouser legs. I didn’t need to glance in the lift’s mirror to see how bedraggled I was after a long night and a cold morning at a crime scene in a bleak, muddy yard. I only had to look to my left, where Detective Constable Georgia Shaw was hunched inside a coat that was as saturated as mine. Her usually immaculate fair hair hung around her face in tails. Like me, she was holding a heavy cardboard box filled with evidence bags and notes.

‘We drop this stuff off. We do our paperwork.’ I paused to cough: the chill of the night had sunk into my chest. ‘We finish up and we go home.’

Georgia nodded, not looking at me.

‘Nothing else. Home, hot baths, clean clothes, get some sleep.’

Another nod.

‘If anyone manages to track down Mick Forbes and he gets arrested we’ll have to come back to interview him.’ Mick Forbes, a scaffolder in his fifties, the chief and only suspect in the murder of his best friend, Sammy Clarke, who had been battered to death in the muddy yard where we’d spent the night.

Georgia sniffed.

‘So get some rest while you can.’

‘OK.’ Her voice was a whisper.

The lift doors opened and I strode out, trying to look as if it was normal for my feet to squelch as I walked through the double-doors into the office. Head high, Maeve.

A quick scan of the room was reassuring: a handful of colleagues, mostly concentrating on their work or on the phone. A few raised eyebrows greeted me. An actual laugh came from Liv Bowen, my best friend on the murder investigation team, who bit her lip and dragged her face into a serious expression when I glowered at her. But for a brief moment, I allowed myself to feel relieved. I’d got away with it this time. I’d rush through the paperwork and then escape, unseen by—

DCI Una Burt opened the door of her office. ‘Maeve? In here. Now.’

I stopped, caught in the no man’s land between her door and my desk. Common sense dictated I should put the box down rather than carrying it into her office, but that meant leaving my evidence unattended. ‘Ma’am, I’ll be with you in a minute—’

‘Right now.’ The edge in her voice was serrated with irritation and something more unsettling. The box could come with me, I decided, and trudged through the desks to Burt’s office.

My first impression was that it was full of people. My second was that I would rather have been just about anywhere else at that moment, for a number of reasons. The pathologist Dr Early sat in a chair by the desk, tapping her fingers on a cardboard folder that was on her knee. She was young and thin and intense, rarely smiling – which I suppose wasn’t all that surprising, given her job. Today she looked grimmer than usual. Standing beside her, to my complete surprise, was a man who was tall, silver-haired and catch-your-breath handsome. My actual boss, although he was currently supposed to be on leave: Superintendent Charles Godley.

‘Sir.’

‘Maeve.’ He smiled at me with genuine warmth as I put the box down at my feet. ‘You look as if you had an interesting night.’

‘Not the first time she’s heard that. But I’ll give you this, Kerrigan, you don’t usually look as if you spent the night in a sewer.’ The inevitable drawl came from the windowsill where a dark-suited man lounged, his arms folded, his legs stretched out in front of him so they took up most of the room. Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, the very person I had been hoping to avoid. I could feel his eyes on me but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting. Instead I smiled back at Godley.

‘It wasn’t the most pleasant crime scene, but I’ll live. It’s good to see you, sir.’

‘You too.’

‘Are you coming back to us?’ I had sounded over-enthusiastic, I thought, and felt the heat rising to my face. Una Burt wouldn’t like it if I was too keen to see Godley return. She had only been a caretaker, though, standing in for him while he was away on leave.

‘Not quite. Not yet.’ The smile faded from his face. ‘I’m here for another reason. I’ve got a job for you.’

‘For me?’

‘For you and Josh.’ Una bustled around to sit behind her desk, pausing until Derwent moved his feet out of her way. She sat down, pulling her chair in and leaning her elbows on the desk – the desk she had inherited from Godley. He was much too polite to react, although I knew he would have recognised it as her marking her territory. Currently, he was a visitor in her office and she wanted him to know it.

‘What sort of job?’ I asked, wary.

‘Leo Stone,’ Godley said. ‘Our latest miscarriage of justice.’

I frowned, trying to place the name. ‘I don’t think I know—’

‘Yeah, you do.’ Derwent’s voice was soft. ‘The White Knight.’

That sounded more familiar to me. Before I’d run the reference to earth, though, Godley snapped, ‘I don’t like that name. I don’t like glamorising murder. We’re not tabloid journalists so there’s no need to use their language.’

Derwent shrugged, not noticeably abashed. Before he could say something unforgivable and career-threatening, I spoke up.

‘You said a miscarriage of justice.’ I didn’t know why I was distracting Godley from Derwent. If the situation were reversed he would sit back and enjoy my discomfort. ‘What’s happened?’

‘He was convicted last year, in October. He’s been in prison for thirteen months now. One of the jurors in his trial has spent that time writing a book about the experience, and self-published it without running it past a lawyer. In it, he happens to mention how he and another juror looked up Stone on the internet, against the judge’s specific instructions, during the trial.’ Anger made Godley’s voice clipped, the words snapped off at the end. ‘They discovered Stone’s previous convictions for violence and told all the other jurors about it.’

‘I think my favourite line is, “We left the court to discuss the evidence we’d heard, but it was just a pretence. We had already decided he was guilty, because of what we’d found out for ourselves.”’ Burt leaned back in her chair. ‘Exactly what you don’t want a jury to say. But instead of making his fortune selling his book, he’s earned himself a two-month sentence for contempt of court.’

‘So Stone’s appealing.’ It wasn’t a question: there wasn’t a defence lawyer in the world who would let an opportunity like that slip through their fingers.

‘He is. At the end of this week. And the appeal will be granted,’ Godley said.

‘Right.’ Lack of sleep was making my head feel woolly. ‘Well, there’ll be a retrial. The problem was with the jury, not the evidence.’

‘There should be a retrial. But that’s the issue I have.’ Godley looked at me, his eyes even bluer than I’d remembered. ‘What do you know about the case?’

‘A little. Not much more than I read in the papers.’ I tried to remember the details I’d gleaned. ‘They called him the White Knight because he seemed to be rescuing his victims. He kidnapped them and killed them, either immediately or later. By the time we found the bodies they were too decomposed to tell us much about what he’d done.’

He nodded. ‘We only found two bodies but we’re fairly sure there’s at least one more victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more out there. He was a nasty piece of work. He was abusive in his relationships, he had convictions for fraud, burglary and theft, and he had a lengthy history of violence towards strangers, as the jury found out.’

‘When is he supposed to have started killing?’ I asked.

‘He got out of prison three years ago after serving five years for burglary. The first murder was a month later – a woman named Sara Grey. It was opportunist. Impulsive. I don’t believe he planned it particularly well but it worked so he tried it again.’ Godley folded his arms. ‘Don’t be misled by the nickname. He was a murderer, plain and simple, but they had to try and make him into something more exciting. They twisted the facts because they wanted to sell newspapers, not because it was true. He saw his opportunity to kidnap women and he took advantage of that. Three women disappeared in similar circumstances, but he was only charged with killing Sara Grey and Willa Howard. And he was convicted.’

‘OK.’ I was trying to read Godley’s expression. ‘But why does that involve us? It was Paul Whitlock’s team who investigated the killings, wasn’t it?’

‘It was, and he did a good job. But Glen Hanshaw was the pathologist who did the post-mortems.’

‘Oh.’ I didn’t need to say any more. I understood the problem now. Glen Hanshaw had been a good friend of Godley’s. He had clung on to his job despite the ravages of cancer, right up to the end. I was starting to see why Godley was so upset.

‘There have been two acquittals in murder trials since he died, largely because he wasn’t there to defend his findings.’

‘And because his findings were shaky,’ Dr Early said. She glanced up at Godley, her face set. ‘He was a fine pathologist but he started making mistakes in the months before he died and he wouldn’t accept that his judgement was impaired.’

‘The pain medication affected him,’ Godley said. ‘He wanted to work – it was the only thing that mattered to him. But he needed to be dosed up to be able to do the job.’

‘He should have known better than to persevere. It was self-indulgent.’ It was professionalism that made Dr Early sound so severe. I knew she had done her utmost to help and support Dr Hanshaw, and that she had mourned him as a mentor, if not a friend. Glen Hanshaw had been a short-tempered misogynist and I’d never really understood Godley’s fondness for him.

Now the superintendent sighed. ‘Whether he should have been working or not, he’s become a target for defence lawyers. If he was involved in a case, you can expect the evidence he gathered to be challenged. And in the case of Leo Stone, the defence team are going to be looking for anything they can throw at the new jury to distract them from Stone’s guilt.’

‘The trouble with retrials,’ Derwent said, ‘is that they’ve heard all the best lines already. If you go back with exactly the same case and run it the same way, the defence know what to expect.’

‘Which is where you come in,’ Godley said. ‘I want to put a stop to the attacks on Glen’s reputation and his work. Dr Early has agreed to review his cases going back to before his diagnosis, and specifically his work on Leo Stone’s prosecution. In the meantime, I don’t want any cases to collapse purely because of his involvement. His reputation matters, and not just because he’s not here to defend himself. If all his decision-making is called into question we are going to see a torrent of appeals, especially from prisoners with whole-life tariffs.’

‘The worst of the worst,’ Una Burt said. ‘And they have nothing better to do than look for grounds to appeal. They’re in for life; they don’t have anything to lose.’

Godley turned to me. ‘Maeve, I want you and Josh to look at the case against Stone. Start from scratch: witnesses, families, the works. I’ll arrange a meeting with Paul Whitlock.’

‘He’s going to be pleased,’ Derwent observed. ‘Nothing like having another team come and take over your case.’

‘He’ll be professional about it,’ Godley said sharply. ‘He’ll understand why I don’t want to take any chances. Whitlock’s priority, and mine, is making sure that the right man is in prison for the murders of Sara Grey and Willa Howard. If that man is Leo Stone, I want him off the streets and behind bars.’

‘So don’t wind them up, Josh.’ Una Burt leaned all the way back in her chair, acting casual although her eyes were bright.

Derwent looked hurt. ‘Why single me out?’

‘Because I trust Maeve to behave herself.’ And I don’t trust you. She didn’t need to say it out loud. I suppressed a wince. Burt didn’t like Derwent, but I was the one who’d suffer for it.

‘Josh, I want you working on this case because I know you’ll do a good job. But Una is right. This is a high-profile investigation and you will be under scrutiny. It’s worth bearing that in mind from the start.’ There it was: the smooth diplomacy I’d missed so much from Godley. Derwent subsided, placated, and yet, from the satisfied expression on her face, Una Burt seemed to feel as if she’d won too. I had missed Godley more than I realised.

‘Can Georgia finish up on your case from last night?’ Burt asked me.

‘She should be able to handle it. We don’t have anyone in custody yet.’

‘I’ll get someone to take over as OIC.’ Burt squinted through the window that gave her a view of the office. ‘Chris Pettifer doesn’t look too busy.’

I didn’t want her to get someone else to take over – it was my case after all – but I knew that it was pointless to protest when DCI Burt had made up her mind. I made my face blank and nodded when Burt told me to brief Pettifer on the case before I went home.

‘You can take the files on the Stone case. Get your head around it before tomorrow.’

Or I could sleep, I thought, since I hadn’t for twenty-four hours. I could have a long bath and a decent meal and sleep.

‘Fine,’ I said.

Derwent stood up and stretched. ‘That’s useful. You do the reading, Kerrigan, and you can give me the highlights tomorrow.’

‘Why can’t you read up on it yourself?’ The question slipped out before I thought about whether it was appropriate for me, a detective sergeant, to ask a detective inspector why he wasn’t doing his job.

‘I’m busy,’ Derwent said coldly.

‘Right,’ I said under my breath, and bent down to pick up the box at my feet. Godley opened the door for me. Because I was tired and not really paying attention I started to move towards it at the precise moment when Derwent was walking past, and collided with him. I stepped back, horrified. He looked down at his shirtfront where a long black streak of mud had suddenly appeared on the immaculate white cotton.

‘Kerrigan.’

‘It was an accident,’ I said quickly.

He gave me the kind of look that he usually reserved for child-killers at the very least, and for a beat I held my breath. Then he lifted the box out of my hands as if it weighed nothing and walked away.

‘I can manage,’ I said to his retreating back, futilely.

‘Thank you, Maeve,’ Una Burt said from behind her desk, and I remembered where I was, and left her to her discussions with Godley and the pathologist.

4

Derwent was always a fast mover. By the time I made it out of Una Burt’s office, he was already on the other side of the room, well out of reach. He set the box down beside Pettifer’s desk with a remark that made the big DS throw his head back and laugh. I started towards them – it was still my case to hand over, I thought with a shiver of irritation – and checked myself as Georgia stepped into my path. She had found a hairbrush and cleaned herself up a bit. She’d managed to find the time to reapply her mascara, I noted.

‘What was that about?’ She nodded towards the office behind me. ‘Is that Superintendent Godley?’

‘Yeah.’ Of course Georgia would have spotted him. She had an extraordinary instinct for career advancement.

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘He had a job for me.’

‘Can I help?’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘You don’t even know what it is.’

‘So?’ Georgia’s blue eyes were unblinking. I could see it from her point of view: a chance to impress the boss before he came back to the team. Get a head start. Make progress.

‘I’m not in charge of this one.’

‘Who is? DI Derwent?’ She swung round, looking for him.

‘You’re going to be working with Pettifer on the Clarke case,’ I said firmly. ‘Once that’s out of the way, we might be able to use you. But at the moment—’

She pulled a face, obviously annoyed. ‘Pettifer can finish the Clarke case on his own.’

‘He could, but he isn’t going to.’ I stared her down for a long moment, daring her to take it further, and in the end she broke first.

‘So what’s the case?’

‘Reinvestigating—’ I broke off to cough. ‘Reinvestigating the Leo Stone case.’

‘The White Knight? Wow. I would love to work on that.’

‘Noted.’ There was nothing to encourage her in my tone of voice.

‘Why did Superintendent Godley want you to work on it?’ Her eyes were narrow.

Derwent leaned in between us. ‘Because he has a soft spot for Kerrigan.’ Georgia laughed.

‘Because he thinks I’ll do a good job,’ I said stiffly.

‘Of course you will.’ Derwent patted my arm.

Instead of arguing the point I walked away from both of them to talk to Pettifer myself. Georgia could try to convince Derwent to let her work on it too. If he wanted her, he’d include her in spite of my objections. If he didn’t want her help, nothing I could say would persuade him. Either way, I didn’t need to hang around.

He caught up with me in the kitchen where I was waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘What’s up with you?’

‘Nothing.’ I coughed again. Shit, I didn’t want to be ill. ‘I’m tired. I’m cold. I want to go home.’

‘My home.’

‘I’m renting it. That means it’s my home. Temporarily, anyway.’ I still wasn’t used to living in a space that I associated so completely with Derwent. For instance, I’d discovered there was no bleach strong enough to take away the mental image of him lounging in the bath.

‘As long as you’re looking after it.’

‘Yeah, I don’t want to piss off the landlord.’

‘Oh, you’ve done that already. Look at me.’

I did, reluctantly. He was holding the sides of his jacket open so I could see the muddy mark that ran across his chest. Not just the shirt: the tie too. ‘I said I was sorry.’

‘No, you said it was an accident.’

‘Well, it was.’ I took a deep breath. ‘But I’m sorry.’

‘Finally. You’re forgetting your manners.’

‘Speaking of which, I could manage the box by myself. You didn’t even ask before you took it.’

His eyebrows went up. ‘Don’t try to pretend that’s why you’re in a mood.’

‘I’m not in a mood.’ I turned and leaned against the kitchen counter, gripping it for courage. ‘I am very annoyed that you decided to stir up trouble by hinting that Godley wanted me to work on this case for any other reason than that he thinks I’m a good detective. You of all people know how unfair it is to suggest he puts professional opportunities my way for personal reasons.’

Derwent gave me his stoniest look. ‘That’s not what I did.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Saying he had a soft spot for me?’

‘It’s banter.’

‘It needs to stop. It’s not a joke. Someone like Georgia who doesn’t know any better will take it seriously, and I’ve had enough of it. You know it’s not true and you know there are a lot of people who’d like to believe that it is.’

‘You can’t live your life worrying about what other people think.’

‘Spoken like someone who doesn’t ever have to worry about it.’

‘You don’t have to. That’s my point. You’re choosing to care.’ He shrugged. ‘These people aren’t worth getting upset about. If they want to think the worst of you, they will, whether I say anything or not.’

‘Maybe, but you don’t have to throw fuel on the fire.’ Frustration was a knot in my stomach. It was impossible to explain how I felt to Derwent, and he didn’t have the imagination to put himself in my shoes. The gulf between his life and mine was unbridgeable. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to have to prove yourself over and over again,’ I said at last.

He rolled his eyes. ‘I have a fair idea.’

‘Because I’ve told you before. And yet, here we are, having the same conversation all over again.’ I turned away from him and squashed the teabag against the side of the mug, viciously. When I flicked the teabag at the bin I had the very small satisfaction that it went in first try.

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Derwent said at last. He almost sounded sincere. He would never admit he had been wrong, though, and nor would he apologise.

‘Thanks for being so understanding.’ I poured the milk into my tea and watched little white specks bob to the surface. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, who puts gone-off milk back in the fridge?’

‘Poor Kerrigan. It’s not your day,’ Derwent said, and left, whistling as he went.

I leaned against the wall, defeated. I was tired and cold and fed up. All I’d wanted was a hot bath, a good meal and an early night. Instead I had nothing to look forward to but a long evening on my own, reading about someone else’s investigation and some very dead women. Not my day, not my week, not my year.

5

I had read the files and looked at the photographs until my eyes burned; I had watched the CCTV that the first investigation had painstakingly located and analysed. I knew the circumstances of Sara Grey’s disappearance inside out. Still, as Derwent drove down the Westway, I felt my pulse getting faster. Sara Grey. Victim one, chronologically.

‘Bloemfontein Road is coming up on the left. Not this one, the one after.’

Derwent slowed to make the turn.

‘This was where the tyre gave up.’

‘Puncture?’

I nodded. ‘They never worked out where she picked up the nail. There was nothing forensically interesting about it. Probably bad luck rather than Leo Stone’s planning. We have CCTV of her here, turning into Bloemfontein Road.’

‘Tell me about her.’

‘Sara Grey was twenty-nine at the time of her disappearance. She was engaged to Tom Mitchell, who was the same age as her. She was a primary school teacher; he had his own property development company.’

‘Did they ever check to see if he had employed Leo Stone?’

‘I didn’t see anything about it in the files.’ I scrawled a note to myself to look into it. ‘He was in Latvia on a stag weekend when it happened. Otherwise he’d have been suspect number one.’

‘Being out of the country doesn’t let him off the hook as far as I’m concerned. It’s a bit too convenient.’

‘Poor guy. If he’d been in the UK you’d be even more convinced he was involved.’

‘It’s always the husband. Or the fiancé. Or the boyfriend. Or the ex.’

‘Not this time. The original investigation focused on Tom, though, before her disappearance was linked to the others. They were looking for money worries or secret affairs or any kind of motive. They didn’t find anything.’

Derwent grunted, not convinced.

I leafed through my notes. ‘There was nothing to say Sara was being stalked – no concerns for her safety, no threats. On the day she disappeared no one was following her – at least as far as the investigators could determine.’

Derwent had slowed down to a crawl, creeping down Bloemfontein Road. ‘So what happened then?’

‘She parked just where that Volvo is. It was eleven at night but it was a Saturday, a summer night. There was a lot of traffic on the main road and there were people around. It was a warm evening – there’d been thunderstorms earlier but it was clearing up. When she got out of her car, she was seven hundred and eighty yards away from her home at 37 Haddaway Road.’

Today the light was flat, the clouds brooding over our heads. It was hard to imagine the street wrapped in the dark heat of a humid summer night.

Derwent pulled in a few cars ahead of the Volvo and parked. ‘Then what?’

‘Then she sent a text message to her fiancé telling him what had happened.’ I flipped to the relevant page and read it out. ‘Flat tyre!!! I don’t know what to do.’

‘The poor bloke was in Latvia. How was he supposed to come to the rescue?’

‘She probably just wanted to tell someone what had happened.’

‘No, she wanted to make him feel guilty for being off on a stag weekend instead of here.’

I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘That’s a very jaundiced view, even for you.’

‘She was high maintenance. I have limited patience for that.’

Melissa, Derwent’s girlfriend, was not the sort of person who would be low maintenance. If it had been anyone else I might have said as much, but Derwent had made it clear time and time again that while my personal life was endlessly entertaining, his was not available for discussion. Beside me, Derwent drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, as if he knew what I was thinking. ‘Then what happened?’

‘He replied: “Oh shit. Where r u? How bad is it? Driveable?” Obviously it wasn’t. She checked their AA membership and discovered it had lapsed so she decided to walk home. She sent him a message to that effect at 23.15.’ I showed Derwent the relevant page.

I can’t drive it. Left the car on Bloem Rd and I’m walking home. You can sort it out when you get back tomorrow. <3 <3

Derwent grimaced. ‘Something for him to look forward to.’

‘He replied, “Typical! Call me when you get in.”’ I flipped the page. ‘According to this, “No further calls were made or received from Miss Grey’s phone and no further messages were sent by her. Mr Mitchell did not hear from his fiancée again after the message sent at 23.14. Cell site analysis revealed the phone remained switched on for a further twenty minutes, at which point it was powered down. Mr Mitchell informed police that it was highly unusual for Miss Grey to turn her phone off.”’

Derwent peered out of the car. ‘It looks like a safe enough area.’

‘It is. And they’d lived here for a year. She knew exactly where she was and she knew the quickest way home was going to be on foot.’

‘She should have been safe here.’ After a moment, he focused on me again. ‘So what route did she take?’

‘We don’t know.’ I pulled out a map I’d printed off. ‘This is Haddaway Road where she was heading. The direct route is along this road here, Haigh Road, leading into Radcliffe Road.’

‘Any reason to think she didn’t go that way?’

‘A bit of her mobile phone handset was found on Radcliffe Road in a hedge.’

‘OK. Sounds promising.’

I flattened the map out and pointed to a star I’d drawn. ‘It was here. Quite a long way from the path. I wonder if it was thrown out of a moving vehicle.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘This sighting of a couple arguing.’ I leafed through the file and pulled out the witness statement. ‘The witness was a Mrs Hamilton. She lives on Cordray Road, here.’ I showed him where it was on the map. ‘She was driving home and happened to glance along a side street in this area – she couldn’t be specific about which street it was but it was somewhere off Simpson Road.’

Simpson Road was about a quarter of a mile south of Haigh Road. ‘That’s way off the route she should have been taking,’ Derwent said.

‘Exactly. It was around the right time though. The investigators spent a lot of time trying to get Mrs Hamilton to remember anything else but she wasn’t a great witness, reading between the lines. She got more and more confused and in the end she said she couldn’t be sure of anything she’d told them. She withdrew her statement.’

Derwent groaned. ‘Good work, lads.’

‘It was a dark night, she was driving, she glanced down a side street and sort of saw two people who might have been arguing. It wasn’t going to make or break the case even if she remembered every detail.’

‘What did she say about the man?’

‘Nothing. He was standing behind a white van. She didn’t see more than the back of his head.’

‘Leo Stone’s pretty distinctive. He’s tall, for one thing. She’d have noticed that, surely.’

‘She said not. All she could say was that he was taller than the woman.’

‘How tall was Sara Grey?’

‘Five two.’

‘Right, so my nan would be taller than her.’

‘Yeah. It wasn’t altogether helpful testimony. Wrong place, right time, few details.’ I tapped my pen on the map. ‘The van, though.’

‘I like the van.’

‘We all like the van. It’s one of the only points of comparison we’ve got, apart from where the body ended up and how it was left, and that’s Dr Hanshaw’s territory.’ I didn’t need to say the rest because Derwent knew as well as I did that if that was called into question, we could lose Sara Grey altogether. The pathologist’s evidence was a big part of what had put Leo Stone behind bars. Without it, he could walk for good.

Derwent opened his door. ‘Let’s follow her route. Work out the timings. What time did Mrs Hamilton see the arguing couple?’

‘Half past eleven.’

‘So how long did she have to get there?’

‘Fifteen minutes or so.’

He looked me up and down. ‘Your legs are about twice as long as Sara Grey’s. You’ll have to take baby steps.’

Even with Derwent slowing me down (‘Oi, giraffe, put the brakes on’) it was possible to walk as far as Simpson Road in fifteen minutes. The area was middle-class, quiet, the houses well kept. It had been two and a half years since Sara Grey disappeared and there was no point in looking for evidence but I imagined her walking home, moving fast, her head down, and I wondered how she could have ended up so far off course. For once, Derwent was thinking the same as me.

‘Why would you go this way?’ He pulled the map out of my hand and studied it, frowning. ‘If we assume Mrs H was right about what she saw.’

‘These are busier roads than the direct route. Maybe she wanted to stay where there were more people around. Alternatively, something was making her uneasy. If someone was following her, she might have taken a different route home, trying to shake them off.’

‘Wouldn’t she have wanted to go straight home? Get indoors where she was safe?’

‘Not if she was concerned about them knowing where she lived. She’d never feel safe again if she led them to her door, even if she made it inside without coming to grief.’

Derwent shook his head and walked away.

‘What?’

‘Just …’ He swung back to face me. ‘What a way to live, that’s all. Working out what risks to take. Who to trust. Walking fifteen minutes out of your way to give yourself a better chance of making it home in one piece.’

‘That’s life, isn’t it? What’s the alternative? Staying at home?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re not serious.’ I folded my arms. ‘If anyone should stay at home, it’s men. They’re the ones who cause most of the trouble.’

‘Like that’s going to happen.’

‘Well, women shouldn’t have to hide away either.’

‘It’s for your own good.’

‘You have to live,’ I said quietly. ‘You look over your shoulder. You check who else is in your train carriage. It’s second nature – like looking both ways when you cross the road.’

‘I don’t always look both ways.’

‘I know.’ I had hauled him back onto the pavement out of harm’s way more than once. ‘I can’t decide if it’s male privilege in action or reckless stupidity.’

‘Bit of both.’

I started walking back towards the car. ‘Let’s assume for a minute that Leo is our killer. What was he doing here? He doesn’t seem to have any connection with the area. He didn’t grow up here. He never lived here. So why go hunting here?’

‘Good point.’ Derwent looked around. ‘This is the sort of area you’d only visit if you had a reason to. What are we close to? Westfield?’

We weren’t too far from the giant shopping centre that was one of the main attractions of west London. ‘I don’t know if Stone is a big shopper. Hammersmith Hospital is the other side of the Westway. And so is HMP Wormwood Scrubs.’

‘Did he ever do time there?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll check. And I’ll check if he visited anyone there.’

‘You think he didn’t act alone?’

‘It’s one possibility,’ I said. ‘At the moment, I don’t feel as if I know anything about him.’

‘Maybe he followed her off the Westway. If he saw the flat tyre he’d have known she was in trouble. Offer to help – Bob’s your uncle.’

‘They checked the CCTV and didn’t see it. The only person who saw a van was Mrs Hamilton.’

‘And she didn’t get the VRN.’

‘What do you think?’

Derwent sighed. ‘All this time in the job and I’ve never had a single witness with a photographic memory.’

‘Me neither.’

‘They must exist.’

‘They’re too busy passing exams and winning pub quizzes to be witnesses.’ I thought for a second. ‘He had the van. Where was he working when this murder took place?’

‘You should find out.’

‘I should, and I will.’

Derwent stopped beside the car and stretched. ‘So this is the last place anyone saw her alive. When did they find her body?’

‘A long time later. She disappeared on the twelfth of July 2014, and her body was found in December. And the only reason it was discovered was because Willa Howard’s body was dumped in the same nature reserve. A visitor to the reserve found Willa, and then DCI Whitlock’s team searched the rest of the area. They were the ones who located Sara’s remains. That’s when it became clear that Leo Stone was responsible for Sara’s death as well as Willa’s.’

His forehead crinkled as he considered it. ‘Even though there’s basically nothing in the way of physical evidence or eyewitness testimony.’

‘Leo has always sworn blind he had nothing to do with Sara Grey’s disappearance.’

‘He would.’

‘He convinced her parents he was innocent.’

Derwent shook his head. ‘Then they’re as gullible as their daughter was.’

6

‘So, three months on from Sara Grey’s disappearance, he’s on the hunt again. And he finds Willa Howard slap bang in the middle of Bloomsbury.’

‘Before that, there was Rachel Healy.’

Derwent frowned. ‘He was never charged with her murder.’

‘Because they never found the body.’

‘Is that the only reason?’

‘Not entirely,’ I said. ‘When they searched Stone’s house they found blood under the floorboards, but it was degraded. They couldn’t get a full DNA profile, but what they found didn’t match Willa Howard or Sara Grey. They checked it against the DNA of missing women from the greater London area over a five-year period and the most similar one was Rachel Healy. She disappeared three weeks before Willa Howard and hasn’t been seen since.’

‘And the blood was the only thing that connected her with Stone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Let’s stick with Willa and Sara for now, since he was charged with their murders.’

‘What about Rachel?’ I had read about her last of all, the previous night when I was yawning and desperate for sleep; it hadn’t taken long and it had woken me right up. Of all of Stone’s possible victims, she had received the least attention. No body, no evidence, no leads. A dead end.

‘If we have time, we can talk about her. But there are probably good reasons why they left her out of the original case. Three weeks before Willa Howard doesn’t leave much of an interval. Sara Grey was three months before that.’

‘It’s not scientific. They don’t mark murder opportunities on their calendars,’ I snapped.

‘That’s not what the profilers say.’

‘And you have so much time for what profilers say.’

He grinned at me. ‘It’s science. They’re basically infallible.’

I rolled my eyes, knowing full well that he thought the opposite of what he was saying. ‘Look, what are the chances the blood doesn’t belong to her? She fits the profile of the other victims, and the way she disappeared—’

‘Noted,’ Derwent said, in a way that meant I don’t care. ‘Back to Willa.’

‘Willa is the reason they found Stone in the first place. Say what you want about the original investigation but DCI Whitlock did a good job with Willa. She went missing on the thirty-first of October – Halloween. The last time anyone saw her was in the Haldane, a pub about five minutes’ walk from here.’

We were parked in Corona Mews, a narrow cobblestoned lane with three-storey mews houses on either side. Some of the buildings were businesses, the shutters pulled back on the ground-floor spaces that the private homes used as garages. It was an expensive little enclave, despite its faintly bohemian air, and it was quiet. This was the secret hinterland of Bloomsbury, part of a warren of close-set streets that were invisible from the busy thoroughfares that bordered the area, funnelling traffic north to King’s Cross and south to Holborn.

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘Willa’s disappearance was out of character – she didn’t turn up at a family event the following day, her phone was off, she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. The local CID started looking for her straight away. She hadn’t used her Oyster card on any of the local buses or the underground and they didn’t pick her up on CCTV. She was very striking – she was tall, with long fair hair that she wore loose, and she had been distressed when she left the Haldane because of the argument she’d had with her boyfriend. It was Halloween. There were lots of people wandering around, but no one remembered seeing her.’

Derwent was listening intently. ‘He must have picked her up near the pub.’

‘That was the theory. They canvassed the area, looking for anything unusual, and they found Miss Middleton.’

‘Who is Miss Middleton?’

‘She is the resident of number 32, Corona Mews, and she does not like visitors.’

On cue the front door of number 32 opened and a narrow face appeared. ‘You can’t park there.’

Derwent slid down his window. ‘Police.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’ She made little shooing motions. ‘Go on. Hop it. This isn’t a car park.’

‘Miss Middleton?’ I leaned across so she could see me. ‘We wanted to talk to you about Willa Howard.’

‘What, again?’ She was a foxy little woman with wiry dyed-red hair and sharp brown eyes. I guessed she was eighty but she was spry with it. ‘I thought I was done with all of that.’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

Derwent got out of the car and she stared up at him, hostility warming into something more like appreciation. ‘Well.’

‘May we come in? I promise to wipe my feet.’

‘You’d better.’ She gave a short cackle. ‘Got to put me face on, since I’ve got visitors. Make your own way up.’

For a pensioner, she had a fine turn of speed, and by the time I shut my door she had disappeared.

‘I know I’m going to regret this,’ Derwent said.

‘Once we’re finished here we can go to the pub.’

‘But we’re on duty.’

‘I’ll buy you a lemonade.’ I peered up the stairs. ‘Can’t keep a lady waiting, sir. You’d better go first.’

Viv Middleton was waiting for us in her sitting room, enthroned on a reclining armchair that faced an enormous flat-screen television. She had applied dark lipstick with more speed than accuracy. The place was spotlessly clean and sparsely furnished – a sideboard, a small cupboard, a single upright chair to one side of the recliner with a library book on it. It looked as if it had been decorated last in the early 1980s. Two big windows overlooked the street and from the recliner, Viv would have had a perfect view.

‘You can take the chair if you want,’ she said to Derwent. I got, ‘You’ll have to stand.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Derwent said, adopting his usual pose with his feet planted far apart. ‘I’ve been in the car all day. I need to stretch my legs.’

‘Ooh, well don’t let me stop you.’ She cackled happily. For once, Derwent looked embarrassed. He folded his arms and stared at the floor.

‘Miss Middleton, you were a key witness. What can you tell us about the van you saw?’ I asked.

‘It was parked outside my house for two weeks, on and off. He’d come early in the morning and go late at night. Too quick for me, even though I was watching for him. I left notes on it, you know. Telling him he couldn’t leave the van there. And I made a note of the registration number. Complained to the council a few times but they’re useless.’

‘So you never saw the driver,’ I checked.

‘Not Stone. No. I saw him in court. Horrible-looking man. Give me the shivers. You could see he was a killer.’

‘Did you see anyone else near the van? Or driving it?’

She shook her head. ‘I only ever saw him driving away. I’d hear the door go and look down but he parked the wrong way for me to see who was driving. He’d get here early in the morning and I don’t do mornings.’

‘What was he doing here? Was there any building work going on in the street?’ I asked.

‘There’s always someone doing building work. Listen to that.’ She held up a hand and I heard the distant whine of an electric drill.

‘And none of your neighbours saw him?’

She snorted. ‘They don’t notice anything. Half of them are rented out – what’s it called – holiday stays type of thing. The other half are too far up themselves to notice a van unless it’s blocking their Ferrari or Jaguar.’ She dragged out the syllables of the car names, rolling her eyes for comic effect.

‘Not like you,’ Derwent said. ‘How come you live here?’

‘I spent sixty years working for a lovely man, an American. I was his housekeeper. He was rich as you like but he didn’t get on with his family because he was gay, you see, and they couldn’t accept that. He left me this place for the rest of my life. His family want to get me out but there’s nothing they can do. I’ll be carried out of here.’ She grinned, showing off false teeth as white and regular as piano keys. ‘All I need is someone to look after me now. What is it they call them?’

‘A carer?’ Derwent suggested.

‘No, that’s not it.’ The grin widened. ‘A toy boy, that’s the one.’

Miss Middleton gave us special permission to leave our car parked in front of her house while we walked down the narrow cobbled streets to the Haldane pub.

‘How did they link the van to Leo Stone?’ Derwent asked.

‘The registered owner was traced to a Travellers’ site in Hertfordshire. He said he’d sold it to a man he knew as Lee. Lee had promised to register it as his, but he hadn’t completed the paperwork. He didn’t know where Lee lived but he had a mobile phone number for him.’

‘Lee being Leo?’

‘Lee being Leo. They found him in Dagenham, in a house that belonged to his aunt – she died a few years ago and left it to him.’

He’d been watching television and drinking cheap lager at eleven in the morning, almost four weeks after the disappearance of Willa Howard.

‘When they searched the house they found a room with a new hasp and padlock. He said there was no key and they never found the key in the house or garden, but when they cut the padlock off they found this.’ I handed Derwent a spiral-bound album of photographs and he flicked through it: the front of the small, post-war house – three windows and a door, like something drawn by a child. The hall, a narrow and dim space with old-fashioned wallpaper. A dirty kitchen. An untidy sitting room, the surfaces covered in dented cans and takeaway containers. A pile of clothes in the corner of the room. A blanket thrown over the end of the sofa. The door behind the sofa. The padlock. The room behind it: a cheap bedframe with broken slats fanning out underneath it. A new mattress on the bed, still covered in protective plastic. No furniture, except for a large steel storage cupboard in the corner of the room. Derwent paused.

‘And this is significant, I take it.’

‘Turned out to be. It was second-hand, bought through a local buying-and-selling group and collected from outside the seller’s home while they were at work. The buyer paid cash. It was designed to contain hazardous materials. It even had an integral sump in case of any spillages.’

‘Useful.’

‘Very.’

It was empty, the inside spotless except for a wisp of plastic.

‘They didn’t work out exactly where the plastic came from but it’s the type decorators use for protective sheeting when they’re painting a room. There’s no record of Leo buying anything like that but he was in and out of building sites. He could have nicked it.’

The next picture was a close-up of the plastic. Derwent pointed at a smudge. ‘Is that blood?’

‘A tiny amount of it, and it belonged to Willa Howard.’

‘Well, there you go.’ Derwent snapped the book shut and gave it back to me. ‘That’s him done and dusted.’

‘When they were searching the house they took up the floorboards in that room and found Rachel Healy’s blood.’

‘Or someone else’s.’

‘It could have been someone else’s. But how likely is that?’

Derwent raised an eyebrow. ‘That he killed someone else or that Rachel’s blood was a partial match?’

‘The blood matching.’

‘Partially.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not a blood expert.’

‘He wasn’t charged with her murder. There has to be a good reason for that.’ Derwent checked his watch. ‘Pub?’

‘Pub.’

We walked in silence down the cobbled streets. I was thinking about Willa Howard running to her doom, blinded by tears and anger, and about Rachel Healy and why I couldn’t forget about her. Derwent, from his expression, could have been thinking about anything at all.

‘This is the pub.’ I pointed. It was a square, squat building on a corner site, a survivor from the 1930s with the original bar and a certain hipster cachet as a result.

‘Looks nice.’

‘It looks like the sort of place that has no CCTV, which is in fact the case.’

‘Typical.’

‘Indeed.’ I stopped. ‘Let’s go back to Willa’s disappearance. You have to imagine it’s Halloween.’

‘Yeah. Busy night.’

‘And it’s unusually warm – twenty-four degrees. The streets on either side of the pub were full of drinkers standing around making noise.’

‘Potential witnesses, though.’

‘They saw nothing. I’ve got to hand it to Whitlock here. His team tracked down a lot of the customers from the pub and looked at their photographs and video footage from their phones. It was a big night, lots of people wearing costumes, lots of moving and still images.’

‘Which showed what?’

‘Willa Howard sitting at the bar beside her on-and-off boyfriend, Jeremy Indolf. They were having a drink together to discuss their relationship.’ I looked up from my notes. ‘He was seeing someone else and Willa wasn’t happy about it.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘He made her cry. She gave as good as she got though. The bar staff all remembered her because she was so feisty. She was calling him every name under the sun. None of the bar staff wanted to go near that end of the bar, but they had to because Jeremy kept ordering drinks. Eventually she picked up his drink and poured it into his lap, then stormed out. And disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘The boyfriend has to have been a suspect.’

‘He was, but they ruled him out pretty quickly. He cooperated fully with the investigation. According to him and the staff, he stayed here for another hour, drinking and trying to chat up other women.’

Derwent snorted. ‘He couldn’t manage two. What was he going to do with a third?’

‘Jeremy is nothing if not ambitious. Anyway, he didn’t do anything to Willa and he didn’t call anyone or send any messages asking someone else to harm her. What he did do was drink. By the time he left, he was barely able to walk. We have CCTV of him heading towards Russell Square underground and weaving across the pavement. An hour after she left the pub, Willa was long gone, but no one saw where she went and she didn’t appear on any CCTV footage that the original investigation recovered. There was nothing to say where she had gone.’

‘They were bloody lucky to get the VRN for the van.’

‘And to find “Lee”. And to discover a trace of Willa’s DNA in a cupboard in his house. Don’t get me wrong, they put in a lot of legwork to find the van, but if that bit of plastic hadn’t been recovered from the cupboard, we’d be no further on.’

‘Every investigation needs some luck.’ Derwent looked hopefully at the bar. ‘You said you’d buy me a drink.’

‘If we can talk about Rachel Healy.’

‘There’s always a catch with you, isn’t there?’

‘I like to get my money’s worth,’ I allowed.

‘Come on, then.’ He didn’t sound as if he minded too much; maybe Rachel had been playing on his mind too. He held the door open for me and I walked in, feeling the shiver of recognition: the bar, the green-painted walls, the worn and faded floorboards – I had seen it all in the files.

Willa had seen it all the day her life spun out of her control, when the biggest problem she had was an unfaithful boyfriend. If she’d met her boyfriend somewhere else, or if he hadn’t been cheating on her, or if she’d argued with him earlier in the evening … but she hadn’t.

Wrong place, wrong time.

7

It was the middle of the day so the bar was quiet except for some mellow swing music and the barman’s girlfriend talking him through her plans for a weekend away. We sat in a corner, knee to knee, leaning across the table like lovers so no one could overhear our conversation.

‘Rachel Healy.’ I held up her photograph. It was a formal portrait taken when she started working at an estate agents, Gallagher Kemp. She looked groomed, her fair hair glossy and smooth, her make-up professionally discreet. Her smile was warm, though, and the gap between her front teeth enhanced her beauty instead of detracting from it.

‘Pretty girl,’ Derwent observed.

‘Woman,’ I said automatically. ‘And yes. She was stunning.’

‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

I placed the photograph on the table with exaggerated care because I really wanted to smack him with it. He drank some lemonade and only the tell-tale deepening of the creases at his eyes gave away that he was smiling against the rim of the glass.

‘She disappeared nineteen days before Willa Howard. She worked late that night.’ I took a map out of the file and put it between us. I had drawn a star on the Chelsea office of Gallagher Kemp estate agents. ‘It was a Monday in October and they weren’t too busy but she’d been away on holiday and she needed to catch up. Gallagher Kemp do commercial property at a very high level, according to their website. If you have a company of five hundred people to rehouse in the City, they’re a good place to start.’

‘When you say she was working late—’

‘She was in the office, not showing any premises to prospective renters, so that’s not how she met her killer. Her boss was also working late – his name is James Gallagher. He said they left together. He gave her a lift and she asked him to drop her off in King’s Cross, although she lived in Tufnell Park. He left her near the station and drove home – he lives in Islington – and she went on her way, and no one ever saw her again. She never made it back to her flat. Ordinarily she got the Northern Line but she didn’t use her Oyster card or bank card and as with Willa there was no sign of her on CCTV.’

‘Who reported her missing?’

‘Her flatmates. They got the brush-off from their local police station – you know the drill.’

‘She’s a grown woman and not vulnerable and there’s no reason to be concerned for her safety yet.’

‘That’s the one. No one took it seriously until the following day when she didn’t turn up for work and didn’t call in either. Someone rang her flatmates and they said she hadn’t come home. James Gallagher kicked up a bit of a fuss at the local police station, which helped set the wheels in motion.’

‘Decent of him,’ Derwent observed.

‘He was the last person to see her. I’d imagine he was quite keen to find her, because otherwise he could have been a suspect.’

‘That or he felt guilty about leaving her somewhere that turned out to be dangerous.’ Derwent frowned. ‘But we don’t know that Leo Stone was the specific trouble she encountered.’

‘There’s the blood under the floorboards.’

‘Which is not an exact match.’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘It could have been hers but equally it could not have been.’

‘That’s the trouble with DNA. On the one hand, it’s pointing us at Rachel Healy. On the other hand, that blood could belong to someone else. It’s not enough to get a conviction as it is. We’d have been better off in the old days when it was blood type only. Juries want a hundred per cent certainty these days. Close isn’t good enough.’ Derwent flipped a beer mat off the edge of the table and caught it as it spun around in the air. ‘Then there’s the point that her body was never recovered from the nature reserve where the other two victims ended up.’ Flip. Spin.

‘Nope. I think every inch of it was searched, too. Whitlock didn’t want to miss something obvious.’

‘So what do you think about the blood?’

‘I think we should assume it was Rachel’s.’

‘Why?’

‘Because assuming it isn’t won’t get us any further and we haven’t identified any other women he might have attacked. Our best chance is to be positive about connecting Rachel Healy to Leo Stone and work to that end.’

‘This is a man who kills without spilling blood, though. The only blood we found from the other victims was a speck on some plastic. He’s incredibly disciplined about it. You’ve seen the pictures – the room was spotless. So you have to believe he took Rachel to his house and for some unknown reason killed her in a messy and uncontrolled way, and that he was sufficiently excited by that to go back and take another woman off the street nineteen days later.’

‘Maybe it went wrong.’

‘Maybe it was nothing to do with him,’ Derwent countered, and my throat tightened with irritation.

‘Well, the blood had to come from someone. Even if it wasn’t Rachel Healy, and I think it was, someone died violently in that room and bled through the floorboards. How does that fit in with your incredibly disciplined killer?’ My voice was a shade too loud and Derwent grinned.

‘Shh. You’ll scare the barman.’

‘He’s not listening.’ I leaned sideways to check, all the same. His girlfriend was still talking, although she had moved on to the tattoo she was planning to get and where it should go.

I took a grip on my temper and returned to Derwent. ‘If it wasn’t her blood, where did Rachel Healy go?’

‘Someone else killed her. A boyfriend. An ex. A stalker. I don’t know.’ Derwent tapped the beer mat against the edge of the table. ‘It’s more of a stretch to believe it was Stone than that someone else wanted her dead. Two women a week die at the hands of partners or ex-partners. Did we look at her boyfriends?’

‘I don’t know. I assume so – at least before Whitlock got involved. There was a whole month where nothing much happened on the investigation, remember.’

‘That won’t have helped.’

‘No. No one helped Rachel, alive or dead.’

Derwent leaned back, watching me with that close attention I slightly feared. ‘Don’t get hung up on her.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You need to keep some perspective on it. She’s been missing for years. Your chances of finding her at all are slim, let alone making a case that Leo Stone killed her. If she’s dead, it doesn’t matter to her.’

‘She has a family. Friends.’

‘And you can’t bring her back for them.’

I looked away instead of at his face. I didn’t want to admit that he was right, but I knew he was. The CD changed to piano music, cool notes drifting through the dusty air like snowflakes. The barman dropped the cloth he had been using to polish glasses and leaned across the counter, drawing his girlfriend’s face towards him so he could kiss her. She held on to his wrists and closed her eyes and I found I was holding my breath …

‘You’re quiet.’

I came back down to earth with a bump. It was just as well Derwent had his back to the bar because he would probably have heckled, or at the very least criticised the barman’s technique. ‘It’s this case. It looks solid from a distance but it all falls apart when you poke it.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re having doubts about Stone.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence to think his van was here and Willa’s blood was in his house by chance. But Miss Middleton never saw Leo Stone at the van. No one did. They didn’t trace a building company that was using him around here. According to him he’d been off work for a month because of back pain and Miss Middleton got the VRN wrong when she wrote it down.’

‘Back pain my arse. His van was here. He was hunting in this area. It’s perfect. No CCTV. No nosy neighbours. Plenty of footfall from the pubs, people coming home late. Easy access to main routes out of the city centre.’

‘That’s a good point. We’re not far from Euston and King’s Cross. The Euston Road is the A501 and if you stay on it and keep heading west, it turns into the Westway.’

‘See? It all fits. He was using that as his main route through the city and dropping off it anywhere that seemed quiet and residential. This is exactly the sort of place where no one is going to notice you hanging around. You heard what Miss Middleton said about the area. It’s a backwater between busy areas. It’s not unusual to have strangers passing through, or hanging around for a few days at a time. No one is going to look twice at a man in a white van unless they’re an elderly lady with nothing better to do.’ Derwent drained the last of the liquid in his glass and burped. ‘Come on. Back to the car. It’s time to go and talk to Dr Early about body dumps and decomp.’

‘I can hardly wait.’

8

Derwent breezed into Dr Early’s office. ‘Knock knock, Doc. What have we got?’

She looked up from her paperwork. The desk was, as usual, piled high with folders. Some of them had slid sideways, spilling their contents: forms, lab results, photographs … I had trained myself to look anywhere but at the pathologist’s desk. It was all right if you were prepared for what you might have to look at, but a glance could be scarring. Once seen, some horrors couldn’t be unseen. ‘Too much work and not enough hours in the day.’

‘Same,’ I said. ‘Is this a bad time?’

‘Not if you’re here to talk about Leo Stone.’ She stood up and with unerring confidence hooked a file out from the middle of the cascade of papers on her desk. There was a system to the chaos. ‘I’ve set things up in the meeting room next door.’

We followed her obediently, in my case wondering what she meant by things and suspecting I wasn’t going to like whatever it was. I was much too experienced now to be worried about fainting or vomiting at a grisly post-mortem, but I couldn’t claim to take every detail in my stride.

‘Here we are.’ The room was dim, the blinds closed. Dr Early tutted impatiently as she adjusted them, turning the slats so we could see the images on two large noticeboards that filled one end of the room. As light flooded in, the shadowy pictures leapt into focus. ‘I’ve done one side for Sara Grey and the other for Willa Howard. You wanted a quick catch-up, I take it?’

‘Ideally.’ Derwent’s attention was on the noticeboards. He strolled down to look closer, his hands in his pockets, but the way he stood – his absolute focus – told me he was concentrating on what was in front of him, and that he was by no means as casual about it as he pretended to be.

‘I’ve pulled this together from the files and the evidence that was presented at trial. I’m going to explain all of this to you as I would explain it to a jury, so if I use too much jargon, feel free to stop me and ask any questions you might have. Also, some of this isn’t my speciality. If you really want the details on this, you need a forensic entomologist.’

‘You’ll do for now,’ Derwent said, and Dr Early ran the end of her pen along a series of photographs that filled the top left corner of Sara Grey’s noticeboard.

‘This is the body where it was discovered in the nature reserve. It was actually the second one that was located, I believe, but she died first so I’m going to start with her.’

The photographs were taken from every possible angle and all showed the same thing: the skeletonised remains of a human being who had been left to disintegrate on open ground. The grass was trampled in front of the body but it had grown up to a height of four or five feet around her, and through her. There was something almost beautiful about the grass, the tiny wildflowers, the leaves and the bones, especially in the close-up images where it was possible to forget that these were the mortal remains of pretty, shy Sara Grey, whose face smiled back at me from the centre of her board.

‘I went and had a look at the dump sites to see if there was anything I needed to know about the locations – if they were especially wet, for instance, that would affect what we found.’ She pointed to a large sheet of paper that stretched between the two boards. It was covered with inscrutable marks and shapes. ‘This is my best artwork, so be kind.’

‘It’s lovely,’ Derwent said kindly. ‘What is it?’

‘A map of the site.’ She sounded a touch defensive. ‘I know it’s hard to follow but it makes sense to me. Sara was dumped here. She wasn’t dressed or wrapped in anything and no attempt was made to cover her or Willa.’ Dr Early indicated a roughly oblong squiggle on the map. ‘This is a rectangular building around a hundred metres away from where the body was left. It’s a bird-watching hide, which is significant because pedestrians aren’t allowed in this area of grassland’ – her pen traced a triangle in front of the hide – ‘in case it disturbs ground-nesting birds. The path runs on the other side of the building, here. It’s this line of dots.’

‘How accessible is the area?’ I asked.

‘The car park isn’t far away at all – a couple of hundred metres the other side of those trees.’ The trees were a row of asterisks that ran behind the grassland where the body had lain. ‘This nature reserve doesn’t have a permanent guard in residence. There’s nothing to steal, for one thing. There are gates and fences, but it’s not what you’d call secure. They also issue permits for night visitors from time to time, so no one would think it was strange to see a car or a van in the car park outside the usual opening hours.’

‘Do they keep a register of visitors?’ I asked, and Dr Early looked surprised.

‘I didn’t ask.’

‘Never mind, you’re doing well,’ Derwent said with a glower in my direction. She wasn’t a police officer, after all; I couldn’t expect her to think like one. ‘Keep going.’

‘The site he picked was far enough from the hide that no one there would notice any smells or unusual insect activity in this area – from a hundred metres away, you might see a larger number of flies than you’d expect or even a larger number of scavenging birds and butterflies and moths than would be typical for this area, but you wouldn’t connect any of those things with a corpse unless you were looking for one which, of course, we always are so for us it would be obvious but for your average layperson none of that would ring a bell.’ She ground to a halt, a little out of breath.

‘Right,’ Derwent said. ‘Of course.’

‘And the other thing about picking a reserve where there’s birdwatching is that they don’t allow …’ She looked from me to Derwent expectantly. I got it first.

‘Dogs.’

‘Exactly. It was a brilliant place to choose. No dogs allowed, so no dogs sniffing out the bodies until long after nature had done a huge amount of work in removing the soft tissue, the muscle, the skin. All we really have to go on are the bones at that stage, and bones are extremely useful but they don’t tell you the full story. For instance, if she had soft-tissue injuries, we’re not going to know what they were. The soft tissue goes with the first wave of insect activity – the blowflies and the greenbottles and the flesh flies. Female blowflies can sniff out a dead body within minutes. They don’t have strong mouthparts so they can’t tunnel into the body. They lay their eggs anywhere that’s easily accessible – injuries, eyes, mouths, nostrils—’

‘I get the picture,’ Derwent said quickly.

‘Right, right. It’s all so clever, that’s all. Nature tidying up after itself. The insects help decomposition along, and they do it in a way that’s completely predictable, which is particularly helpful for us.’ She clicked her pen. ‘But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was talking about injuries and how we can’t prove what killed Sara Grey.’

‘What? Not at all?’ Derwent sounded disconcerted.

‘We can’t prove it. We can suggest certain things, and rule other things out. Like, for instance, there’s the fact that Dr Hanshaw didn’t find any broken bones when he examined her. We didn’t recover all the bones, but that’s not unusual in a case where a body has been left in the open. Being buried tends to hold things together a lot more.’

My eyes flicked to the images of Sara Grey’s skull pillowed in the grass. ‘Aren’t those skull fractures?’

Dr Early’s eyes gleamed. ‘I was hoping one of you would notice. Yes, look at this image of the head. You can see quite clearly that there has been significant damage to her skull.’

The head was tipped back, the neck at an awkward angle, the chin pointing to the sky. Leathery remnants of muscle and skin coated the bone in places but I could see missing teeth and a couple of wavy cracks that ran from the eye socket up towards the crown of the head.

‘Here’s a better image of the top of her head – see the way the fractures waver across the bone?’

We nodded.

‘That’s a sign that she was already dead when the injuries happened. A post-mortem fracture has these crumbly edges – it’s like snapping a biscuit in two. You won’t get a clean line. If you’re alive, the break will be straight because the bone has more give in it. Think of snapping a piece of chocolate. You get a straight edge.’

‘I’d rather not think about food in this context,’ Derwent said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Really?’ Dr Early looked surprised. ‘I always think the biscuit and chocolate analogy works for juries. Everyone can visualise it.’

‘It’s very helpful,’ I said and she beamed.

‘The other thing is the colour of the break. See how it’s lighter than the rest of the bone? Definitely post-mortem. What I can’t tell you is how she acquired the injuries. It could have been accidental. Dead bodies are really hard to manipulate – dead weight is a bugger to move around, no matter how strong you are or how small the victim is. So he could have dropped her a few times or whacked her into a doorway without meaning to hurt her.’

‘When he was finished with her he didn’t care any more,’ I said, and something in my voice made Derwent turn to look at me with a raised eyebrow. Dr Early didn’t seem to notice.

‘Probably not. She became a problem. Something to be dumped, not cherished.’

‘Cherished is an odd word to use. He killed her,’ Derwent said.

‘Mm, but how he killed her is the point. No nicks or marks on the bones, so almost certainly not stabbing – she had no defence wounds on the bones we recovered from her hands and arms either. Her hyoid bone is intact, which strongly suggests she wasn’t strangled. I think she was asphyxiated. It doesn’t take long to starve the brain of oxygen and achieve loss of consciousness so she would have had minimal opportunity to fight back and harm herself. I think he smothered her not long after he kidnapped her.’

The muscle was flickering in Derwent’s jaw. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

‘That’s not a question I can answer,’ Dr Early said seriously. ‘But I think it’s worth looking at Willa Howard in more detail.’

I had been strenuously avoiding looking at Willa Howard in any detail at all. There was something more unsettling about the images of her, probably because she was more recognisably herself than her sister in death. The flesh had melted away from her body but there was still skin on her bones, and much of her hair had survived, spread out around her in straw-like profusion. She was lying on her front with her head turned to one side, her hands by her sides, palm up.

‘Willa was over here.’ Dr Early pointed to another squiggle on the map, further away from the hide. ‘When you visit the site you’ll see why she was found first – the body was in the lee of a fallen tree. A visitor to the site decided the tree would make a great vantage point for a picture, even though it was off the path. He stumbled over her.’

‘Jesus,’ Derwent muttered.

‘It must have been quite a shock,’ Dr Early agreed. ‘Luckily for him she was quite advanced in decomposition. The worst part – from the point of view of smell and maggots and so forth – is between four and twenty days after death. The gases build up inside the body. Once the abdominal wall is breached the body deflates and starts to dry out and most of the insect activity is from beetles, mites – that kind of thing. She was well into this stage when she was found in the first week of December, which was some five weeks after she disappeared.’

‘So you think she was killed straight away as well.’

‘It seems possible. But unlike Sara, she did have some injuries we can see. This is an X-ray of her skull – see the missing tooth at the front, here? That was broken off around the time of her death. The root is still there.’

‘Sara was missing teeth too,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, but we recovered them. They became dislodged from the jaw after the gum deteriorated, once there was nothing holding them in place. Willa’s was snapped off and we didn’t find the tooth.’

‘It doesn’t rule out asphyxiation, does it?’

‘Not at all. We don’t know what method he employed but he may have needed to use more force on Willa. She was a little taller and heavier than Sara.’

‘And she was angry. She’d been drinking and arguing with her boyfriend.’ I could imagine her, her body humming with adrenalin and fear, lashing out at Leo Stone because how dare he attack her …

‘There was the blood on the plastic in the cupboard,’ Derwent said. ‘That had to come from somewhere.’

‘Probably this injury, or a nosebleed. Something like that. Unfortunately we did lose a certain amount of detail to decomposition before she was found.’ Dr Early peered at the X-ray as if it would reveal something new to her. ‘There are three things, really, that I wanted to draw to your attention. One: Dr Hanshaw also concluded that the women were asphyxiated and there’s nothing to contradict his assertion. As I said, without being able to see the physical manifestations of asphyxia – the pinpoint haemorrhages and so forth – it’s a case of excluding other modes of death. We are left with asphyxia as the most likely method of murder, as it’s relatively non-violent.’

‘Unless he poisoned them,’ Derwent said.

‘I know you’re joking but we did test for poisons. We tested their bone marrow and their hair, and it’s the hair that’s the second thing I want to talk about.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look at the condition of Willa Howard’s hair compared to how it was in life.’

‘Being dead isn’t great for your looks, as I understand it,’ Derwent said.

‘No, but it doesn’t change the consistency of your hair so quickly,’ Dr Early countered.

Willa’s hair had been long, smooth and thick. Every witness in the bar had commented on it. I frowned at the dry, frizzed-out thatch that covered her scalp. It was orange-tinged and it had snapped off in several places, leaving the ends uneven. ‘It looks as if it was bleached.’

‘That’s exactly what happened. She was soaked in bleach. I’d guess her entire body was immersed in bleach at least once if not more.’

‘To eradicate evidence?’

‘Maybe. Or to try to slow decomposition. The third thing about these bodies is the most interesting, at least to me. The women seem to have died relatively quickly after they were kidnapped, but they weren’t dumped in the nature reserve for a significant period of time after their deaths.’

‘How significant are we talking?’ Derwent asked.

‘Weeks. Maybe more in the case of Sara Grey. And I know that because of the insect activity I mentioned earlier. Dr Hanshaw got a forensic entomologist to sample insect life from the bodies and from the area around the bodies. It’s a reliable way of calculating how long the corpses had been there and what condition they were in when they arrived. What she found was a very small number of the insect first responders – the blowflies, the greenbottles, the flesh flies and so forth. There were plenty of beetles and mites who target fly larvae though – every decaying corpse is also an insect crime scene, I always say – so they had been present at one time, but the larvae hadn’t matured through their three stages to burrow into the ground and become pupae – or if they had, it was somewhere else and they were left behind when the bodies were moved.’

‘What does that mean?’ Derwent asked.

‘It means he kept the bodies until they weren’t usable any more,’ I said.

‘That’s my interpretation.’ Dr Early looked from me to Derwent, eyes bright. ‘The trouble with necrophilia is that it’s so messy.’

I shuddered. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Toughen up, Kerrigan,’ Derwent snapped. ‘You do need to think about it, because we need to work out where he kept the bodies between the cupboard in his house and when he dumped them here. Not in Dagenham – there wasn’t a trace of post-mortem body fluids from either Willa Howard or Sara Grey, and from what you’re saying, Doc, there would have been a lot.’

‘Absolutely. The body’s own enzymes begin to liquefy the internal organs even without the help of insects. You can slow the process by keeping a body cold, but unless you find some way of mummifying them, you’re going to find they deteriorate.’

‘And there’s no evidence he tried to do that,’ I checked.

‘None at all. Unfortunately there isn’t much evidence of what he did, either. By keeping them until they had completed putrefaction he reduced the chances of anyone literally sniffing them out at the dump sites and he destroyed a lot of the forensic evidence we might have recovered otherwise.’

‘It was all so well planned, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘We only found Willa Howard by chance, and that led us to Sara Grey. Leo Stone doesn’t strike me as a particularly deep thinker but he managed to kidnap women, keep them for as long as he liked, move them without being spotted and then dispose of them effectively.’

‘He’s spent years in prison. He probably spent the whole time planning what he was going to do when he got out.’ Derwent’s mouth twitched. ‘He had all the luck until he got arrested. You’ve got to think it’s our turn to be lucky now.’

9

Of course, luck wasn’t with us the next day either. The judges’ decision was a foregone conclusion, and everyone knew it, but the tension in the air was as thick as the mist that pressed against the small high windows. The lights were on, the old pearly shades casting a soft glow that fell on the walls of law books, the high wooden bench where three judges sat, sombre in their full wigs and gowns, and on their clerk who was busy with paperwork, his pen racing across the page. It fell on the attentive barristers at their desks in front of the packed benches of the public gallery. It fell on the tiny dock with its over-arching iron bars that separated the prisoner from the rest of us who sat in the courtroom. We were free and he was not.

Not yet.

I sat in the last row of the public benches. Despite its importance, the Court of Appeal was held in a small room, and it was packed. The court reporters were choosy about which cases they covered but this one was a guaranteed front-page splash. A murderer was always news. A murderer of women was even better, especially if the women were beautiful, especially if they had everything to live for, especially if they met a horrible end at the hands of a perverted stranger. But best of all was a gruesome series of murders combined with a miscarriage of justice. That was a story that had everything.

I looked at the man in the dock. Leo Stone, the man who had been haunting my thoughts, a nightmare made flesh. His eyes were closed, his face pale and impassive, his hair dark and greased back from a low forehead. He was tall but gaunt; his skin fell in loose folds from his prominent cheekbones and sagged from his jawline. Often, prisoners didn’t come to the Court of Appeal. It was quicker and cheaper to make them attend by video link, but on this occasion, I could understand why he had wanted to be present. I knew better than to think murderers always looked like what they were but something about Stone’s physical presence chilled me. The words and images from the files I’d read battered the inside of my skull along with a single word: evil.

‘If he’s stuck for cash he can always write the Leo Stone diet book,’ Derwent muttered, leaning over so his elbow pressed against my side painfully. ‘There isn’t a spare ounce on him.’

‘Not the time or the place,’ I hissed. ‘And give me some room.’

Derwent shrugged and folded his arms across his chest, making himself even broader. His knees moved an inch or two further apart, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I shifted to my right, trying to put some space between his thigh and mine, and collided with my neighbour on the other side.

‘Sorry.’

Godley nodded, preoccupied. Unlike me, he was concentrating on the judge’s speech and sat statue-still. Beyond him sat DCI Paul Whitlock, who was in his late fifties. I’d met him before the hearing started, in the echoing, cathedral-like main hall of the Royal Courts of Justice. He had given me a quick, bruising handshake, without a smile. He had retired after Leo Stone’s conviction, before the crowning achievement of his career had turned into a messy disaster, and he lived on the Kent coast now. I assumed he spent most of his life out of doors because his skin was like old leather. Under his tan, he looked drawn and tired. What we were watching was the dismantling of a case he had built, painfully and in the full glare of public scrutiny. I could imagine how he was feeling.

The words fell from the bench like wood shavings, dry and dusty, delivered in a refined Anglo-Indian accent.

‘It is one of the abiding principles of the British legal system that a jury trial must be fair. A jury must be impartial. They must base their opinions on the words of counsel, on the evidence they hear and on the judge’s guidance. It is abundantly clear that in this case the jury did not do their duty. Rather, they chose to ignore all instructions and plunged into a world of speculation and ill-informed comment, aided by the media’s distorting lens. The duty of a jury is a sacred one. A defendant is entitled to expect that a jury will conduct themselves fairly. Otherwise justice cannot be done. And it has not been done in this case. The appeal is granted. I order that the prisoner, Leo Stone, be returned to prison and a further application be made to the Crown Court for bail pending a retrial.’

A murmur ran through the courtroom. In the dock, Leo Stone opened his eyes for the first time, staring about him as if he had just woken up. His eyes were dark, the pupils invisible. One of the officers with him took his arm, but gently.

‘Come on.’

Stone didn’t move. His eyes scanned the public gallery, row by row, until they stopped. For a moment I thought he was looking straight at me. Then the man in front of me raised a hand to shoulder height: a salute that received an answering nod from the prisoner. Only then did Stone turn, dropping his head and rounding his shoulders as he trudged down the steps to the cells below the courtrooms, where he would wait for a transfer to prison. Freedom was within his grasp but it wasn’t his quite yet.

The judges rose and filed out through a door behind them, and as the door closed the barristers abandoned their respectful demeanour instantly. The juniors gathered up their papers and legal reference books, moving with the speed born of long experience in the Crown Court, where the next case followed on the heels of the first. The opposing silks leaned towards one another as they tucked pens into pockets and settled their gowns on their shoulders more firmly, laughing as if they had been working together rather than competing for the judges’ favour. The journalists had slid out of the benches at the earliest opportunity, scattering down the long, tiled corridor to find a quiet nook where they could call their newsrooms.

On my right, Godley sighed. ‘Well. That’s that.’

‘Nothing else they could do.’ Whitlock stood up. ‘Frustrating, though. In some ways it feels worse than if we’d lost the first trial. I took a lot of satisfaction out of locking Stone up. It made me feel the world was a safer place for him being behind bars.’

‘We’ll put him back there for you. Fucking juries.’ Derwent eased his hips forward, slouching. It wasn’t actually possible to lounge on the high-backed wooden benches but he gave it his best shot.

Harry Hollingwood QC paused at the end of our bench. ‘Quick chat before I go back to chambers?’

‘Of course.’ Godley got up, energised. I made to follow him and Paul Whitlock, but hung back to let someone pass through the heavy doors before me. He hesitated for a beat, looking at me and I returned the scrutiny: dark hair, dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, a slight frame. The man who had been in front of me in the hearing, who had waved at Leo Stone.

‘Come on.’ The man behind him nudged him. He was a head taller and correspondingly broad, his shoulders straining against the fine fabric of his three-piece pinstripe suit. It was exquisitely fitted, I noted, just as I noted that he was strikingly handsome and roughly my age. He had a full beard, which ordinarily did nothing for me, but he made it look good. He stared at me briefly, assessing me in much the same way that I was eyeing him, but whether he was impressed or not I couldn’t tell.

The first man mumbled something and pushed the door open. I followed them out and stopped, watching them walk away down the corridor, one looking dazed and hurrying to keep up with the other’s long stride.

‘Not what you’d expect.’ Paul Whitlock nodded in their direction. ‘Considering.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Chap with dark hair is Kelly Lambert.’

I shook my head, not recognising the name.

‘Leo Stone’s son.’

‘His son?’

‘Long lost. Stone never married his mother – it was a casual relationship. They were both young when Kelly was born – early twenties, they would have been. Stone’s forty-eight now, though he looks older than me. Kelly’s mum died when he was young and he was taken into care. He had no contact with his dad for a long time, but Stone was in and out of prison so it was probably for the best. He wouldn’t have been a good influence, put it that way.’

‘How come they got back in touch?’

Whitlock shrugged. ‘Lambert found him when he was in prison in 2013. Started visiting him. When Stone came out, Lambert helped him get his life back on track. Lambert’s a carpenter. He got his dad some labouring work on building sites. Nothing skilled, but enough that he had a bit of cash. He wanted to keep him out of trouble, he said.’

‘That worked well.’

Whitlock gave a short laugh. ‘You said it.’

‘Did you look at him as a suspect?’ Derwent asked.

‘He had solid alibis for all the disappearances.’ Whitlock shook his head. ‘Kelly’s an argument for the care system. Whoever looked after him, they did a decent job. He seems to be the kind of chap who sees the good in everyone. Either that or he doesn’t want to believe that half his DNA is from a murdering shit. He’s been campaigning to get his dad released. Absolutely refuses to believe his dad could have done anything like that to those women, even though Stone had a history of violence towards his mum before they split up. Stone was a suspect in her death but they never made it stick.’

‘It’s a big jump from domestic abuse and burglary to murdering strangers,’ I said, as neutrally as I could. Whitlock bristled all the same.

‘It’s a good case. It’s solid. Stone got lucky on a technicality. There’ll be another trial and this time he’ll go away forever.’

And I’ll be proved right. He didn’t need to say it. I didn’t blame him for minding, in fact.

‘Who was the other guy with Kelly Lambert?’ Derwent asked, saving me the trouble.

‘That’s Stone’s solicitor, Seth Taylor.’ Whitlock grimaced. ‘Clever guy. Arrogant, though. He’s made his reputation off how he handled Stone’s case. They didn’t give us an inch, all the way through.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought he had much material to work with,’ Derwent said. ‘It was pretty cut and dried, as I understood it.’

‘It didn’t seem that way once the defence got to grips with the evidence.’ Whitlock shook his head. ‘Tell you what, if I ever get in trouble with the law, I’m calling Taylor. He’s all charm on the outside but if you challenge him, you’d better come prepared for a fight.’

‘DI Derwent is always prepared for a fight.’ I said it for the pleasure of making Derwent scowl.

‘I’m looking forward to seeing his face when Stone gets convicted again.’

I looked around, checking for eavesdroppers, and noticed a young woman in dark tights and a bulky coat. She was sitting in one of the alcoves outside the court, apparently concentrating on her phone.

‘We should take this somewhere else,’ I said quietly. Derwent, naturally, ignored me.

‘Jesus, I feel sorry for Lambert but he’s out of his tiny mind if he thinks his dad is innocent. I’ve never seen a more obvious psycho. He needs locking up again, as soon as we can possibly manage it. If we can get him put inside for anything at all, we should.’

‘We can’t harass him,’ I said.

‘I’m prepared to risk upsetting him if it means no one else dies,’ Derwent snapped.

‘Harry’s waiting,’ Godley said, with maximum disapproval, and on this occasion even Derwent took the hint.

10

The café in the Royal Courts of Justice was at the back of the ground floor, in an old courtroom that had been refitted with cheap tables and chairs. It was crowded with that peculiar mix of people that frequented the RCJ: the tax cases, the personal injury suits, the police officers and criminals and their families and the lawyers, all pretending to ignore one another. Hollingwood had found a table on the other side of the room. His junior, Kit Harries, waved at me energetically from the queue.

‘Coffee? Your usual?’ The barrister’s voice carried easily over the noise in the café. I gave him the thumbs up rather than trying to answer.

‘Do you know him?’ Derwent was beside me all of a sudden.

‘Kit? Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I’ve worked with him a few times.’

‘He looks better with his wig on.’

The barrister had a lot of very fine straw-coloured hair and a round face, and his wig had made him sweat so his hair was plastered to his head. As usual, Derwent wasn’t kind but he was right.

‘He’s a lovely person and he’s married, so be nice.’

‘I’m always nice.’

‘Not in a way that’s noticeable to the casual observer.’

Derwent moved away from me, grinning to himself. As if to prove me wrong, he went across to the queue to help Kit with the drinks. I followed Godley and Whitlock to the table, not without some misgivings. Derwent would take the opportunity to talk to Kit about me, unsupervised, and I liked Kit but he wasn’t the most discreet person I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t think of anything I needed to hide, specifically, but then again I couldn’t think of anything I’d like Derwent to find out about me. He knew too much already.

Without his wig and gown, Harry Hollingwood looked different too. His grey hair was swept back from a high square forehead and brushed against his collar at the back. He was compact, fit, fiftyish and he looked good-humoured, despite the loss in court. His small brown eyes were shrewd and full of life.

‘Sit down, sit down. I thought we should have a little post-mortem before we all went home.’

‘It was the result we expected,’ Whitlock said, which was his way of reassuring the lawyer that he didn’t blame him.

‘Couldn’t have gone any other way. The point is that we’ve got to prepare ourselves for a retrial.’

‘How soon can we expect the retrial?’

‘Soon,’ Hollingwood said. ‘He’ll be in the Crown Court tomorrow to be formally released from prison. How long do you want him out?’

‘Not long.’

‘Well, then. We’ll seek an early trial date. In the circumstances, we should get it. But that obviously means you have less time to conduct your reinvestigation. A month or two.’

‘We’ll manage,’ Godley said, with a confidence that I didn’t feel. ‘Have you met Maeve Kerrigan? She’s one of my best detectives.’

Hollingwood nodded to me. ‘Kit speaks very highly of you.’

‘I’ve always enjoyed working with him.’ I hoped I sounded like a tough and experienced detective sergeant, even if I was flustered to the point of blushing by what Godley had said.

‘I should say that the previous investigation was excellent.’ Hollingwood turned to Whitlock. ‘We were very happy with the evidence as it was gathered and presented to us. I am simply conscious of the fact that time has passed and the defence has had an opportunity to revisit the case they ran. We want to be prepared for them to take issue with anything that was awkward for them in the previous hearing. We’ll be disclosing anything new that you find out, of course, but with any luck it will be unanswerable.’

There was a brief hiatus while Derwent and Kit returned with the coffee. Kit had the expression of a man who had gone through a car wash in a convertible with the roof down. Derwent was at his most bland. He smiled at me as he sat down: never a good sign.

‘What was the defence?’ I asked quickly. ‘I read the files the other day and it seemed there wasn’t much room for doubt.’

‘There’s always room for doubt in a defence case,’ Hollingwood said. ‘They don’t have to prove he didn’t do it. They only need to confuse the jury. The idea is to reinterpret the evidence so the Crown’s account of what happened seems open to debate.’

‘He had a really good brief,’ Kit contributed. ‘One of those guys who does a closing argument that makes the jury fall in love with him a little bit. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry.’

‘I don’t see where the doubt comes in,’ I said. ‘Stone was sitting in the house when they went there to ask him about the van. There was forensic evidence of Willa Howard having been in the room behind him.’

‘No,’ Kit said, grinning. ‘That was the mistake we’d made, according to his brief. There was forensic evidence in the cupboard in the room behind him. The defence alleged he’d found it dumped on a street corner and thought it would be useful. The defence said that someone else had used it to imprison Willa Howard before or after her death, and that Stone had unwittingly brought it into his home.’

‘And locked it in a room? And hid the key so we never found it?’

‘They said that Stone was worried about being burgled. He was obsessed with security.’

‘Yeah, funny how serial killers like their privacy.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Surely there’s no way the jury would have fallen for it.’

‘You don’t need to convince all twelve of them. You can get a mistrial if you confuse three of them beyond the point where they know black from white.’ Hollingwood leaned back in his chair, amused rather than upset by it. ‘The prosecution has to play it dead straight – no showboating, no dramatics, just concentrate on the facts. The defence can do what they like.’

‘And as for being convincing, they won over more people than you’d think. Journalists, campaigners … and Sara Grey’s family.’ Whitlock’s voice dropped at the end of the sentence, and I realised with a mild sense of shock that he was angry. ‘I need to warn you about that. You’re going to have to handle them with care. They turned against the police during the initial investigation into Sara’s disappearance. My understanding is that the local CID didn’t impress them and stepped on a few toes. The fiancé was out of the country when it happened, but the detectives had their concerns about him. That bothered the family, who felt they were wasting time instead of locating her. Then they took offence at some of the questions that we had to ask. Sara’s body was well away from where we found Willa Howard. It was the cadaver dog that found her, not us. And there were differences in how the bodies were positioned. We didn’t want to assume they were both left there by the same killer. Dr Hanshaw was confident that both women had died in the same way, but by the time we found them, they had been left to nature for some time. The remains were skeletonised. He wasn’t able to specify a definite cause of death for either of them. Now, of course, the question is whether he missed something.’

Beside me, Godley was absolutely still. He wouldn’t give away how much he minded Glen Hanshaw’s reputation being questioned, but his very silence was loaded with emotion, I thought.

‘The Greys believe that we’ve never found Sara’s killer – that she wasn’t killed by the same person who killed Willa Howard, and that person was definitely not Leo Stone. They’ve bought into a conspiracy theory that we’re deliberately trying to mislead them. They don’t trust us, but they trust Stone and his son. Kelly Lambert made friends with them – can you believe that?’

‘Is that why they don’t want to believe Stone was Sara’s killer?’ I asked.

‘That and the lack of forensic evidence. They don’t think she would have stopped to talk to him that night. She was quiet – a bit shy. Timid. She wouldn’t have argued with a guy like Stone. She’d have crossed the street to avoid him.’

‘If he let her do that.’

‘Then there’s the fact that there was no trace of her in Stone’s house or his van.’ Whitlock sighed. ‘I wish we’d connected the two cases earlier, but we didn’t. I wish I’d been able to investigate Sara Grey’s disappearance. It bothered me that they hadn’t taken it seriously enough. They could have put more resources into it. Then again, we knew Willa Howard was missing almost as soon as she disappeared – within twelve hours. It was a densely populated area with a lot of footfall, even at that time of night. Halloween jogged people’s memories too.’

‘You did a remarkable job to track down the van.’ Godley leaned forward, holding Whitlock’s gaze with that intensity that made you feel you could walk through fire for him, that you wouldn’t mind dying for him … ‘Without the van, we would probably never have made a connection between the missing women and Stone, even if we’d found the bodies. The van broke the case.’

Whitlock ducked his head. ‘We did all right. I had a good team. I may be wrong but I don’t think there’s much new ground to explore when it comes to Willa Howard’s death.’

Except how she died, and where, and when. I thought of Dr Early revisiting the files, the photographs. ‘How do the Howards feel about this?’

‘They think Stone is guilty. It’s easier for them than the Greys, I think, because they didn’t believe a word of the story about him finding the cupboard in the street. There’s the van in the right area and the blood – that’s enough for them. They fell out quite badly with the Greys over it, which was a shame. Nice people.’

‘Are they the kind of nice people who would mind if we apply to exhume their daughter’s body?’ Derwent, blunt as ever.

Whitlock winced. ‘Depends on how you approach it.’

‘With great sensitivity,’ Godley said, and I wondered if he’d forgotten how Derwent preferred to work. I had a question to ask myself.

‘Tell me about Rachel Healy.’

‘A dead end.’ Whitlock’s face had hardened, stubbornness making it into a thing of angles. There was something in Whitlock’s voice that sounded final, as if the subject was irrelevant and therefore the discussion was at an end.

‘She went missing not long before Willa Howard.’

‘We concluded the disappearance was too close to Willa for it to be connected. He took one in July and one in October, not two. That’s the sort of thing a killer does when they’re losing control – when they’re running out of time. Stone had no idea we were going to knock on his door, and he didn’t take a fourth woman after Willa Howard, though we didn’t catch up with him for a few weeks.’

‘Maybe something went wrong,’ I said. ‘Maybe it wasn’t a satisfying murder as far as he was concerned.’

‘We did look for her. We never found the body. The conclusion we reached was that she was never in Stone’s house or his van. The blood from under the floorboards wasn’t conclusive. It sent us on a wild goose chase. We were under pressure to clear up as many disappearances and murders as possible and Rachel Healy got lumped in with the other two.’

‘There was a reason the CPS didn’t charge him with her kidnap and murder,’ Hollingwood said. He was watching me, his face open and friendly. I knew when I was being placated and it prickled along my nerves. ‘I didn’t want Rachel Healy on the indictment. The evidence that he was involved in her disappearance was circumstantial at best. The forensics were the weakest part of our case. I was of the opinion that including her and introducing the idea that a third woman had died in that room – whether it was Rachel Healy or not – could only damage us. It would have provided an opportunity to the defence to muddy the waters. We had no body. We were asking the jury to take too many leaps of faith – that she was dead, that Stone had been involved, that her body had been left somewhere other than the area where the other two women were found, for a reason we didn’t know. Too many questions there, don’t you think?’

‘Questions that deserve an answer,’ I said.

‘We did our best.’ Whitlock, bristling.

Derwent got there before I could. ‘No one’s saying you didn’t. There’s a reason she’s on this case.’

She being me. I opened my mouth to change the subject before he said anything else, but he steamed on.

‘Kerrigan can charm the birds from the trees and find things you never knew were missing. If there’s a way to trace Rachel Healy and tie her murder into this case, Kerrigan will find it. Once she’s decided she’s going to do something, she doesn’t give up.’ Derwent paused for a beat. ‘It makes her bloody irritating to work with, obviously, but she’s right about this one.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and he grinned at me. A ripple of amusement ran around the table, a welcome break in the tension. I waited until they’d stopped laughing.

‘Anything on Rachel Healy will be new to the defence. If Stone killed her, he thinks he got away with it. At the moment we don’t even know where she was before she disappeared. It’s not going to be easy to make enquiries after so many years, but it’s surprising what people can remember when you ask.’

‘All this time and not a sign of her body. I really wanted to find her.’ Whitlock grimaced. ‘I dream about her sometimes. Gets under your skin, you know.’

I did know, all too well.

‘We’ll look after her,’ Derwent said to Whitlock. ‘We won’t let you down.’

The retired policeman nodded and attempted to smile. It flickered across his face uncertainly, like a lightbulb about to blow.

11

‘The rural dream. You can keep it,’ Derwent said. ‘Why would anyone want to live here?’

‘Grammar schools. Commutable distance from London. Local amenities. Decent lifestyle.’

‘Yeah, but apart from that.’

‘I don’t think we’re seeing it at its best.’

We were driving out of London towards Aylesbury, a medium-sized market town where Sara Grey had grown up. Her parents still lived there, outside the town. It was a cold day, the sky the colour of steel, and the fields were boggy from heavy rain the night before. Crows hunched in the branches of trees and along fences like witches’ familiars, their rasping call echoing across the countryside.

I went back to the opinion column I was reading out from my phone.

‘“In the era of social media, when everyone has access to the internet all the time, is it even possible to have a fair trial by jury? A case such as that of Leo Stone is the ideal test: a horrific series of headline-grabbing crimes, a suspect who seems to fit the image of a ruthless killer, grieving families and photogenic victims, and an unregulated internet full of rumours. If it’s a crime to be unattractive, then the prisons should be overflowing. Leo Stone was on trial for murder but he was judged on his past and his appearance. That’s not justice – it’s prejudice.”’

I paused expectantly, and was not disappointed.

‘What fucking horseshit.’ Derwent glowered at a driver who was failing to give way to him.

‘There’s more.’

‘Of course there is.’

‘“What must Leo Stone’s lawyers have thought when they read juror Stan Maxwell’s self-published account of the trial? They must have been pleased that they had grounds for an appeal, but I think they must have been horrified too. How easily a man can lose his freedom and his reputation. By his own account, Maxwell and his fellow jurors read the rumours that spread, unchecked, across the internet. They searched for the secrets of Leo Stone’s life: the missing pieces of the puzzle that they weren’t supposed to know. They cheated the system. They cheated Leo Stone. They cheated justice. This is how easy it is to lock up an innocent man: a few unflattering pictures, a few stories that float without attribution or evidence to tether them to the facts of the case, a few arrogant and prejudiced jurors with smartphones.”’

Derwent grunted. ‘Well, he’s not wrong there. Nice of him to mention the dead women too.’

I checked. ‘He didn’t.’

‘I know,’ he said patiently. ‘That was my point.’

‘Wait for the next bit.’

‘Go on.’

‘“But even if they had confined themselves to looking at the evidence, there’s no reason to believe the jury would have been able to make a fair decision. Two murder appeals have been successful already this year because of the revelation that the Home Office pathologist Dr Glen Hanshaw failed to uphold the highest standards of his profession in the months before his death, through ill health and arrogance. Hanshaw is dead and gone. His legacy is a black mark on the legal system that nothing can erase.”’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘Don’t crash the car.’ I put a hand on the dashboard to brace myself as Derwent swerved impatiently around a cyclist.

‘That makes it sound as if poor old Hanshaw was deliberately trying to trick people. He was doing his best.’

‘Which wasn’t good enough.’

Derwent shifted in his seat, irritated. ‘He could have done with more oversight but he wasn’t that sort of person. There was no one around to tell him he wasn’t coping. At least, no one he trusted. No one he’d listen to.’

‘If that ever happens to you, I promise I’ll tell you to quit.’

‘If I’m dying and I still want to go to work every day, you have my permission to shoot me.’ He glanced sideways at me. ‘This is why you need to start looking for a new bloke.’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘You’ll end up like Glen Hanshaw if you don’t. You have nothing in your life but work.’

‘Excuse me—’

Derwent held up a hand. ‘Save the outrage. Tell me, when was the last time you went out? Not on a date. Just out.’

I opened my mouth to tell him it was none of his business and shut it again.

‘Ages, is it? Months? Last year some time?’

‘I don’t remember.’

He whistled. ‘Worse than I thought.’

‘I’ve been busy. I’ve been working a lot.’

‘Pulling double shifts. You must be raking in the overtime.’

There it was: a door offering me a way out. I could explain myself by telling Derwent I was just saving up for a deposit so I could buy my own flat and stop paying him rent.

The trouble was, it was a lie.

Worse than that, it was a lie he would spot in a heartbeat.

‘I might be a bit lonely.’

Another glance, this time unexpectedly gentle. I had to look away at the passing streetscape before I could go on. ‘It’s so much easier when you’re in a relationship. You wake up on a day off and you go and do something. No planning. No fuss.’ I swallowed. ‘Everyone I know seems to be getting married, or they’re just married, or they’ve just had a baby. None of my friends are ever at a loose end. They have their own lives – it’s not their fault that I don’t.’

‘What about Liv?’

‘She’s having IVF.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Don’t say anything. She and her girlfriend want to have a baby. They’ve picked a donor but it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘I was about to volunteer,’ Derwent said, and I laughed before I could stop myself. There was a chance – a small one – that he was actually serious.

‘Listen, Kerrigan, you’ve been under a cloud since that two-timing shitweasel dumped you and went off to play happy families with his new bird. You’ve got to get your head straight.’

‘That two-timing shitweasel’, otherwise known as the love of my life, Rob Langton. Derwent wasn’t his biggest fan. ‘Thanks for the advice.’

‘You’re not getting any younger, you know. If you want to have kids, you need to meet someone in the next year.’

‘I’m not that old.’ Outrage made my voice squeaky.

‘Your clock is ticking, whether you can hear it or not. Think about it. You meet someone. Then you’ve got to spend a year or so getting to know them. Then you’ll want to get married because your parents would shit a brick if you had a child out of wedlock. That’ll take another year to organise. And then you’ll be cleaned out financially. You won’t want to take maternity leave until you’ve built up a bit of cash. Call it another year. Then you can’t assume you’ll get pregnant straight away. All the time your fertility is declining. Sad, really.’

‘You seem to have given this a lot of thought.’ My voice was so cold it could have flash-frozen a side of beef. Derwent wasn’t noticeably affected.

‘It’s just common sense, isn’t it, but you don’t seem to have any.’

‘I know you’ve embraced domesticity—’

‘This has nothing to do with me.’

‘You’re so right. So why are we talking about it?’ I waggled my phone at him. ‘Do you want to hear the end of this or not?’

‘Give it to me. I can take it.’

‘“After his successful appeal yesterday, Leo Stone deserves an apology from all of us. The Metropolitan Police, too, must bear responsibility for this miscarriage of justice. The CPS is insisting there must be a retrial, wasting more time and money. An innocent man must suffer because they can’t bear to admit they made a mistake. Sara Grey’s family have campaigned for Leo Stone’s release from prison. They, like me, believe Leo Stone is innocent of these murders. He is a victim of this crime, like the two women he was alleged to have killed. If the Home Secretary has any sense she will discourage the CPS from pursuing him any further so the Met can reopen the case and, this time, bring the real killer to justice.”’

‘Who wrote this?’

‘A journalist named Christopher Fallon.’ I showed Derwent the byline photograph, knowing it would irritate him further.

‘State of him. Pencil-necked twerp, telling me I can’t do my job. Listen, Christopher, if I want your opinion I’ll come round to your house and beat it out of you.’

‘He’d be shaking in his shoes if he could hear you.’

Derwent glowered at me instead. ‘You don’t think that sort of piece affects public opinion?’

‘A tiny number of people will read it.’

‘The victims’ families will read it.’

‘True. But they don’t love us anyway.’

Derwent didn’t reply, because it was true. That was one very good reason why we had decided to do places before people.

I concentrated on the directions DCI Whitlock had given us, aware that if Derwent took a wrong turning it would be my fault. The roads got narrower as we came closer to the Greys’ home, and Derwent slowed down. The slackening speed of the car seemed to mirror my reluctance to get there.

‘They’re angry. Very angry. They won’t trust you and they definitely won’t help you,’ Whitlock had warned us. I liked to make my own mistakes, instead of inheriting the results of other people’s poor judgement.

‘That’s it up there.’ I pointed to the right, where a white, thatched building stood in a gravelled yard. It was a barn conversion, half-timbered and sagging under its heavy roof. It appeared ancient but well looked after.

‘Big, isn’t it?’

‘They’re well off. She’s a retired GP and he was a management consultant.’ I hesitated, waiting for him to turn the car through the gate. ‘Remember what the boss said. We need to be on our best behaviour.’

‘I know you’re not implying I would do anything else.’

‘I wouldn’t dare.’

Derwent parked beside a battered Volvo and a newish BMW. ‘Let’s see those convent manners, Kerrigan. I’m counting on you to charm them.’

Charm was not going to be enough, I thought, on edge as Derwent rang the doorbell.

The car had been loud on the gravel, so they had known we were outside. Even so, it took a long time for anyone to come to the door. When it opened, an elderly man stood in front of us. He was leaning on a stick.

‘Mr Grey?’

A nod.

I introduced myself and Derwent. ‘Thank you for agreeing to speak with us.’

‘We had no choice.’ He stepped back and disappeared into the house, leaving us to shut the door and follow him into a huge double-height room with a brick fireplace at one end and a kitchen at the other. A slim, pale woman sat on one sofa, her face tight with tension. Mrs Grey, I guessed, and corrected myself: Dr Grey. She stood up as we approached, but her eyes followed her husband, not us. He had a dragging walk, one foot sliding along the ground as he moved.

A second man stood by the fireplace, his hands in the pockets of immaculately pressed chinos. He had the ruddy complexion of a man who spends a lot of time on golf courses, and his hair was slicked back from his forehead. I knew before he spoke that he was going to have the sort of plummy voice that made my hackles rise.

‘Hi. Tom Mitchell.’ He leaned across and shook hands with Derwent, sketching a wave in my direction. ‘I was Sara’s fiancé at the time of her disappearance.’

‘Please tell us’ – Mr Grey sat down with a grunt of effort – ‘what exactly this charade is supposed to achieve? You’re investigating Sara’s murder all over again so you can prove that Leo Stone did it.’

‘We’re examining every aspect of the previous investigation to make sure we haven’t overlooked any details,’ Derwent said.

‘And if you have?’

‘Then we’ll advise the CPS accordingly.’

‘What a waste of everyone’s time,’ Mr Grey spat. ‘An exercise in reinforcing a set of errors that should never have been made. A cover-up for your friends, so no one realises they framed an innocent man.’

‘There was a considerable amount of evidence that suggested Mr Stone was your daughter’s killer,’ I said tentatively.

‘That’s what you wanted everyone to believe.’

‘The fact is that no one knows who took my daughter.’ Dr Grey’s voice was low and precise. ‘No one ever traced the person who killed her. I’m absolutely sure of that. We’re asked to believe that Leo killed her purely because her body was left in the same area as Willa Howard. Well, I’m sorry. It isn’t convincing to me and I don’t think it would have convinced the jury if they hadn’t broken the law to find out more about Leo.’

Leo. ‘Are you in contact with Mr Stone?’

‘Not directly. We get messages from him.’

‘Written messages?’

‘No. His son Kelly is in touch with us. He passes on communications from Leo.’

‘What sort of communications?’ Derwent asked and Dr Grey glanced at him before she answered.

‘He’s very grateful to us for our campaigning on his behalf. I always say it’s in our interests as well. We want Sara’s real killer to be located and punished. He shows tremendous empathy to us in our difficulties. Kelly, too. He’s quite remarkable.’ Dr Grey took out a handkerchief and pressed it under her eyes. ‘They want us to get justice for Sara’s sake, not just because Leo is incarcerated. I can’t believe that after all this, you’re pursuing him again.’

‘What would you prefer us to do?’ Derwent asked.

‘Find the real killer, of course.’ She flung out a hand in irritation. ‘Your stupid colleagues wasted weeks bothering Tom and his friends, even though he wasn’t in the country when poor Sara disappeared. He couldn’t have been involved and we said so. But they didn’t listen. They were utterly determined to make him into a killer. They wanted to turn us against him but we didn’t listen, did we, Tom?’

‘No. And I was very grateful.’ Tom looked from me to Derwent and back again. ‘I’m not going to tell you how to do your job but I can save you a lot of time if you’re drawing up a list of suspects. I wasn’t involved.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Derwent’s voice carried the slightest overtone of I’ll-be-the-judge-of-that.

‘The fact is,’ Dr Grey said again, ‘your colleagues struck lucky when they found Sara’s body. They saw an opportunity to make Leo take responsibility for Sara’s death as well as the other girl’s. Far easier than looking for a second killer.’

‘But the two bodies were left in much the same way,’ I began.

‘A dead body is a dead body, especially if it’s left outside. There was nothing left of her. She was eaten, Detective. Animals took her flesh. Her face. Her hands. She was utterly decomposed. Have you read the pathologist’s report?’

‘I’ve spoken with the pathologist who is working on this case now.’ In the face of Dr Grey’s anger I felt like a badly prepared student. I should have read Dr Hanshaw’s report as well as talking to Dr Early.

‘They didn’t even find all her bones. The small ones disappear. They were missing twenty-three bones – vertebrae, toes, fingers. Bones that I made.’ She stopped, choking with emotion, the mother in her elbowing aside the rational scientist who believed in facts above all. ‘I blame them for not finding Sara’s killer. I don’t think the original investigation was adequate in any way. I do not believe that Leo was involved in the slightest, with either murder. I will not help you to lock him up again.’

‘That’s not our aim.’ I really hoped Derwent wouldn’t contradict me. ‘Our intention is to review the evidence and make sure the correct person is prosecuted for murder. If the evidence leads us towards Mr Stone, we’ll know that the original investigation was sound. If it leads us away from him, please believe me, we’ll follow the facts. We don’t want an innocent man to be behind bars. We want justice for your daughter too, and we’ll work as hard as we can to get it.’

‘I gather from DCI Whitlock that Sara’s possessions are here,’ Derwent slid into the quiet aftermath of a speech that I was both proud and embarrassed to have made. ‘Is it possible for us to look at them?’

‘I suppose so,’ Dr Grey said heavily.

‘I’ll show you.’ Tom Mitchell started towards the stairs that led up to an upper floor. He moved quickly, full of nervous energy. I caught a flash of gold from his left hand as I followed him: a wedding ring. ‘It’s all boxed up, I’m afraid. But the police went through everything. They couldn’t find anything in Sara’s life that would have made someone want to harm her.’

He led us into a room that should have been a bedroom but it had no furniture in it. Boxes piled on top of boxes filled the space instead. The room smelled musty and he pushed open the window.

‘She’d moved out, you see. There was nothing here. All her things were in our flat. I kept everything for a long time. I didn’t want to clear Sara out of my life, I suppose. But in the end I had to. She wasn’t coming back. Barbara – that’s Dr Grey – didn’t want to unpack it so it ended up here.’ He stood in the middle of the room and looked around, his posture somehow conveying bafflement and longstanding grief. ‘Not much, is there? Not for a whole life.’

I felt unexpectedly sorry for him, and angry with myself for my reverse snobbishness. Bad things could happen to wealthy, privileged men who wore Ralph Lauren cashmere jumpers and inherited signet rings, the crest softened and blurred by time. Life wasn’t easy for anyone who mourned, whether they were rich or poor.

‘What do you think happened to her?’ I asked, taking advantage of the fact that the door was closed.

‘She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ He rubbed his head with his left hand and winced. ‘I keep forgetting I’ve got a ring on this hand and end up battering myself.’

‘Recent addition?’ Derwent asked.

‘I got married a couple of months ago.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I felt weird about it. The Greys said they understood, but—’ he broke off. ‘Oh, you know. It shouldn’t have been this way. It should have been Sara.’

‘Is that how you felt?’

‘A bit.’ He looked miserable. ‘A lot. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.’

‘What does your missus make of that?’ Derwent asked, and I was glad he had, because I was wondering the same thing.

‘She understands of course.’ He held himself stiffly, guarded now. ‘She was one of Sara’s best friends. It helps that she knew her so well. We talk about Sara a lot. She misses her too.’

‘I’m sure she does,’ I said.

‘Vanessa was supposed to be our bridesmaid.’ Tom sighed. ‘I’m lucky to have her.’

We got back into the car after a long and thoroughly unhelpful search through Sara Grey’s possessions – the clothes, the photographs, the school reports and letters, and books she had loved. The Greys had sent us on our way without warmth, just as angry as they had been when we arrived, despite my best efforts.

Derwent drove out through the gate with a sigh of relief.

‘They really don’t want Leo to be guilty, do they?’

‘Nope.’

‘They must see something in him that I don’t.’

‘The son has obviously worked hard on them. Plus the original investigation burned through any goodwill there might have been towards us by focusing on Tom.’ I shook my head. ‘Maybe it’s just that they don’t feel any better for having Leo locked up. It hasn’t brought their daughter back. If he’s the wrong man, they can keep looking for justice.’

Derwent nodded. ‘So how long would you give Tom Mitchell’s new marriage?’

‘Months.’

‘Weeks, I’d say.’

‘Days.’

‘It’s over already.’

‘It never started,’ I said soberly. ‘He’s not over Sara yet. Maybe he’ll never get over her.’

‘Poor bloke,’ Derwent said, as if he meant it.

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