Silent Kill: A Gripping New 2020 Detective Novella From a Sunday Times Bestselling Author

by Jane Casey

  ‘They’ve been informed. Response officers went around earlier, as soon as we had an ID for her.’ Maeve was gathering her notebook and pen, distracted. ‘They said no to having an FLO and they don’t want a police presence outside the house if they can avoid it. I think they’re hoping to preserve their privacy as much as possible.’

  ‘We’ll make this quick,’ Derwent said over his shoulder to me. I was sitting in the back seat, like a child. ‘They won’t want to talk to us for long and they won’t be much help, more than likely. Still, we have to see if they’ve anything useful to tell us.’

  ‘Was Minnie an only child?’ I asked, and of course Maeve knew the answer.

  ‘No. Older brother, younger sister.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Is it? That makes up for losing one, does it?’ Derwent shook his head at me. ‘Wrong attitude.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’ I wouldn’t have said it to the parents, anyway, I thought, but surely it made sense that it would be worse to lose your only child than one of three.

  ‘If you say anything stupid, you’ll get us kicked out. Keep your mouth shut and just take notes.’

  I opened my mouth to protest but thought better of it after seeing the look on his face. There were times you could talk DI Derwent around, and times you should do exactly what he said.

  Maeve raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Are you OK?’

  He grimaced and a muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘Not looking forward to this.’

  She touched his arm lightly with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  ‘It’s so kind of you to come and talk to us. Really, it is.’

  There was no correct way to behave when your child was murdered, I reminded myself, but Gail Charleston wasn’t what I would call devastated, at least outwardly. She sat on a sofa in the big kitchen at the back of the house, swathed in a cashmere jumper that she wore over leggings and flat knee boots. Soft lighting from underneath the cupboards and a few lamps that were dotted around the room made it feel strangely intimate, an effect heightened by her manner. She had long, expensively tinted hair, very good skin, subtle make-up and a trick of blinking extremely slowly while she spoke.

  ‘Where is Mr Charleston?’

  ‘He went to the hospital for the formal identification.’ Blink. Blink. ‘Can I offer you a drink? I feel like such a bad hostess.’

  ‘They don’t want a drink, Mum.’

  I looked over to where Robbie Charleston was gripping the edge of the marble kitchen counter. He was short and slight but made up for that with excellent posture and good looks: untidy black hair and high cheekbones and the same thick black eyebrows as his sister, before she got her hands on them. He was wearing a black jumper that was unravelling at the cuffs with skinny black jeans. Unlike his mother, he looked as if he had been crying. The skin under his eyes seemed bruised and his knuckles shone as white as the work surface.

  ‘I still can’t take it in.’ Gail waved a hand with a graceful movement. ‘It seems unreal. Impossible.’

  ‘Who did it?’ Robbie again. He had plenty of confidence, I thought and a deep, expensive voice to match.

  ‘We don’t know yet, but we’re going to find out.’

  ‘I knew it was a bad idea for her to get the bus.’ He shot a vengeful look at his mother. ‘You should have collected her from school and taken her to hockey yourself. It’s not safe. Everyone knows that. Thousands of gang members wandering around here armed to the fucking teeth. Little white kids like Minnie are easy targets.’

  ‘Not just white kids,’ Derwent said levelly. ‘More often than not we’re looking for the killers of little black kids.’

  Robbie shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Had she been threatened?’ Maeve asked.

  ‘Not specifically.’ He held her gaze, his eyes burning with hostility. ‘Not as far as I know. But she got mugged for her phone a couple of times.’

  ‘Did she report that?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘No. What was the point?’

  ‘Catching them?’ There was an edge to his voice and Robbie’s chin went up, defensive.

  ‘That’s not what happens, though, is it? You take a statement and then nothing. No one ever gets caught for it. Just hassle, that’s all.’

  ‘Did this happen recently?’ Maeve asked quickly, before Derwent could get into a proper argument with the boy. Robbie sniffed.

  ‘Not that recently. One last year, one just after Christmas. I guess they know people get phones for Christmas. It was a brand-new iPhone. She was gutted.’

  ‘Well, that didn’t happen this time,’ Maeve said. ‘We found her phone in her pocket.’

  ‘Can I have it?’ Minnie’s little sister, Audrina, hauled herself onto a high stool at the kitchen island. She was a smaller version of the girl from the bus, stocky rather than slender like her brother. She was ten, she had informed us.

  ‘Shut up, Audrina.’

  ‘Mine is shit, you know that.’

  I looked to see if her mother reacted to the swear word, but her beautiful face was impassive.

  ‘Because you keep dropping it.’ Robbie ran his hands through his hair, clutching his head as if it ached. ‘I’m not talking to you about your stupid phone.’

  ‘Anyway, can I have it?’ Audrina turned her round eyes to the three of us, as if we might give her permission.

  ‘It’s gone off for analysis,’ Maeve said. ‘We need to see what was on it and who Minnie might have been talking to. We’re going to need to keep it for the time being, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you think it was someone who knew her?’ Robbie demanded.

  ‘We don’t know yet. It’s a possibility.’

  ‘So strange,’ Gail murmured, and Robbie’s expression darkened.

  ‘What’s that, Mum? Is it time for another pill?’ He glowered at us. ‘Don’t think she’s just like this because of Min. This is how she is all the time, isn’t it, Mum? Little pills that make life bearable. That’s why you couldn’t drive Minnie to hockey. It would have interfered with your lovely drugs.’

  ‘It’s medication, Robbie.’ She blinked at us sleepily. ‘He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what it’s like to live with anxiety. There are days I can’t leave the house. There are days I can’t even get out of bed.’

  ‘The au pair used to get me ready for school,’ Audrina volunteered. ‘Now I’m old enough we don’t need one any more. We never see Mum in the mornings.’

  ‘So you didn’t see Minnie this morning?’ Derwent asked Gail, who shook her head slowly. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ She didn’t sound certain. ‘Or was it— what day is it today?’

  ‘Christ,’ Robbie said explosively. ‘What sort of mother are you? I saw Minnie this morning. She was fine. She was running late.’ His face twisted. ‘She took toast off my plate and I told her to fuck off. That was it. The last time I saw her.’

  Audrina slipped off her stool and went to hug her brother as he crumpled, sobs shaking his body.

  ‘Did Minnie have any particular friends?’ Maeve asked, and Gail raised her voice to be heard over her son’s weeping.

  ‘She was popular. She was out a lot. She didn’t often ask people to come and stay here, but she seemed to have sleepovers and parties to go to all the time.’

  ‘Any fallings-out with anyone at school?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘Ups and downs, like you would expect from any group of teenage girls.’ Gail ran her tongue over her upper lip. ‘You could ask the school.’

  ‘Would your husband know more?’ I suggested, and she laughed.

  ‘Heavens, no. He wouldn’t have a clue.’

  ‘He’s a lawyer,’ Robbie said. His eyes were swimming in unshed tears, but he was back in control. ‘We never see him. He’s at work all the time.’

  Gail nodded. ‘He loves to work.’

  ‘I don’t know why he went to identify her,’ Robbie said, folding his arms across h
is skinny chest. ‘I really doubt he could pick her out of a line-up unless she was wearing a name badge.’

  ‘Would you rather have money or love?’ I asked Maeve as we climbed the stairs to the second floor, without Derwent. He had decided, with the privilege of rank, that he didn’t need to stick around. The three children of the family had their own bathroom and bedrooms on the second floor, well away from their parents, as well as a small room that had belonged to the au pair. It was now a tiny sitting room with a TV in it. The door to Robbie’s room was firmly closed but the hot, rank sharpness of cannabis smoke hung in the air nearby.

  Maeve had been considering my question. ‘Being poor is awful but I’d never pick money.’

  ‘They don’t seem to have been keeping a very close eye on Minnie, do they?’

  ‘To say the least.’ She pushed open the door of Minnie’s room and we stood for a moment, contemplating the truly magnificent mess. ‘I’ve seen neater burglaries.’

  ‘Robbie said the cleaner refused to come up here. I can see why.’

  The room had a sour smell overlaid with perfume and a sickly-sweet odour I traced to drifts of spilled make-up on top of the chest of drawers. Pictures torn from magazines covered the walls, the edges rough and tattered. Clothes overflowed out of a fitted wardrobe in the corner and the bed was a lavish double sleigh bed; someone had chosen curtains and lampshades and paint colour with care, but I felt it hadn’t been Gail or her husband. Neither of them had cared enough. Dust hung in the air and clouded all the surfaces.

  ‘There’s her computer.’ Maeve shook out an evidence bag and set about sliding the laptop – a top-of-the-range Mac – into it. ‘Have a look at the bedside table.’

  I was planning to, actually. I held the words back and did a thorough search, widening my area of interest to the bed itself once I’d finished going through the clutter of books and keyrings and rubbish that had collected there. The sheets hadn’t been changed for a long time. I noticed she had drawn the zig-zag symbol on the side of her bedside table in wavering felt tip, where it would be next to her when she slept. Under the bed was grim and I gave it the quickest look possible after almost putting my cheek down on a toenail clipping that was stuck in the carpet.

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Maeve turned from the chest of drawers.

  ‘Nothing.’ I was still kneeling beside the bed. ‘Found anything?’

  ‘Not really. No drugs, no contraceptives, nothing that we should be concerned about. Some cash – not a lot. A bank card. An old phone.’

  ‘More than I found,’ I said. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? You’d think she had everything she wanted, but she seems to have been almost neglected.’

  ‘If this was a council house, we’d probably be making a report to social services about the youngest one. They have everything material you could possibly need and no family life at all. Even putting the kids up here is all out of sight, out of mind.’ Maeve shook her head. ‘Poor Minnie. I wonder if she was doing anything to get their attention.’

  ‘School might be able to tell us.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Maeve checked the time. ‘Pete’s gone to the hospital to deal with Mr Charleston, so I don’t think we need to hang around.’

  ‘Definitely not.’ I caught sight of myself in the mirror that hung behind Maeve and reassured myself that I still looked OK – no dirt on my clothes or face, my make-up still mainly in place. I had chewed off the lip gloss, I saw.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Maeve twisted to see, and her tone changed as she spotted the mirror. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I wasn’t really looking at anything,’ I said quickly, aware that my face was warming. ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘About what?’

  I shrugged, at a loss. ‘About Minnie being given so much freedom, I suppose. I’d have loved that when I was a teenager, but I needed rules.’

  ‘Everyone needs rules, even if it’s just to have something to rebel against.’ She jumped. ‘What’s up, honey?’

  I realised that Audrina was standing in the doorway, watching us.

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked around. ‘I want to move into this room. It’s much bigger than mine.’

  ‘We have to leave it as it is for now.’ Maeve crossed the room and ushered her out onto the landing.

  ‘Do you want me to do anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘I think we’re finished here. There’s nothing to point us towards a motive, as far as I can see.’

  ‘OK.’ I hurried to join her on the landing.

  ‘It could have been a chance encounter. She could have said the wrong thing to the wrong person on that bus, or just looked at someone the wrong way,’ Maeve said, almost to herself.

  ‘Always a possibility.’

  ‘Maybe she was mean to someone.’ Audrina had retreated to the top of the stairs, but no further. Her hair had an oily sheen to it, as if it needed a wash, and her lips were chapped. She swung on the bannisters, careless of the drop behind her. ‘She was always mean to me.’

  ‘That’s big sisters for you,’ I said lightly.

  ‘No, she was really horrible.’ The girl’s bottom lip stuck out for an instant, as if she was going to cry, but it was self-pity rather than grief that had brought tears to her eyes. ‘She never talked to me or let me go into her room. She never helped me. She used to kick me and pinch me, and she ripped my favourite dress once, to teach me a lesson. She was a cow, and I’m glad she’s gone.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘Of course we are all very, very shocked about Minnie.’ Doctor Karen Chang shook her head slowly, with sorrow. The headmistress of Lovelace School was a tall woman with a long oval face and glasses. Her neat dark bob was threaded with silver that she hadn’t attempted to dye. Her eyes were intelligent and her manner was full of confidence; I could imagine her making all the difference for parents who were considering whether to pay the £9,031 fees per term at Lovelace. ‘It’s a horrible way for us to lose a member of the school. We are so careful to brief the girls about safety, but these things do happen, sadly.’

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t have a minibus to transport the girls from this place to the sports campus.’ Derwent, brutal as ever and unimpressed by the surroundings. He was sprawling in his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him. Something about being in front of the headmistress seemed to bring out the badly behaved schoolboy in him. Privately, I thought he could stop showing off and be a bit more respectful. The school had stunned me from the moment I walked into it. The buildings were modern, with floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows affording us a view of the wide, lead-coloured Thames flowing past. In the distance I could see the straggling grey branches of trees in Battersea Park, still bare. It was clean, elegant, quiet and the exact opposite of the school I’d attended.

  ‘We do have a minibus,’ Dr Chang said calmly. ‘We transport our year 7 and 8 girls by bus. But we prefer to encourage the older girls to go out into the community. It’s all too easy to live in a bubble when you are from a particular social background. We do music and drama projects with the local state schools, for instance. And remember, they do travel to school by public transport, for the most part, so they’re quite used to navigating the local trains and buses.’

  ‘I’d have thought they were all dropped off by chauffeurs.’

  ‘Some of them are.’ She held his gaze, not intimidated in the least by his grumpiness.

  ‘Tell us about Minnie,’ Maeve said. ‘What sort of girl was she?’

  ‘She was academically gifted, if not outstanding – we have a competitive exam for applicants to the school, so the standard is extremely high. She was at an acceptable level of attainment in all her classes. None of her teachers had mentioned any issues with her performance.’ Dr Chang opened the file that was on the table in front of her and sifted through the contents, considering it. ‘Really, she was doing quite well. Slightly below average in general, but the average here is not the same as in other schools. She was o
n track to do very well in her GCSEs.’

  ‘Were her parents pleased about that?’

  ‘I’m sure they were.’ A certain reserve had entered Dr Chang’s manner.

  ‘Did you see a lot of them?’ Maeve asked.

  ‘No. No, I wouldn’t say that. Some of the parents are more available and engaged than others. I wouldn’t have expected to see Mr and Mrs Charleston at school performances or sports days, for instance, but he did come to parents’ evenings. And they made a major financial commitment to the school in the form of a donation for our new building.’ She waved a hand at an architect’s model in a glass case that stood near the window. ‘We’ve been fundraising for several years and Mr Charleston’s donation put us over the line. He has been very generous.’

  ‘Did you ever need to speak to them about anything else to do with Minnie?’ Maeve asked. ‘Mrs Charleston mentioned there were some ups and downs.’

  Mrs Charleston had been completely dismissive of that, I thought, and wondered why Maeve was even bothering to raise it. But as the silence lengthened from the other side of the headmistress’s wide desk, I began to reassess it.

  ‘There were … issues. At times. Suggestions that unfortunate things might have been said. It’s regrettable, but of course teenage girls are still developing. Their brains aren’t fully formed. They can lack empathy, and it’s something we work on with them.’

  ‘Bullying?’ Derwent suggested.

  Dr Chang gave an elegant shrug. ‘What counts as bullying for one child can be enjoyable banter for another. Occasionally people overstep the boundaries that we would like them to respect, whether it’s to do with physical appearance or wealth or something else.’

  I felt a wave of sympathy for poor neglected Minnie, a real poor little rich girl. What had her mother said? She went for sleepovers and to other people’s houses, but she never invited anyone back. That told its own story. She was ashamed of her mother and probably self-conscious in a hundred other ways. The coat she had worn was oversized, massive, something to hide inside. She had tried to change her appearance, but her genes hadn’t been kind. I’d seen a picture of her father now and she’d inherited his heavy, bulldog physique. Her brother was the one who’d taken after her delicate mother, and I doubted it made him happy either.