The Stranger You Know (Maeve Kerrigan Novels)

by Jane Casey

  “Did you know Anna well? Had she worked here for long?”

  “About five years.” She tilted her head from side to side, thinking. “Yes. Five.”

  “Would you say you were friends?”

  “Close colleagues. We had a good working relationship.” Vanessa laid a slight emphasis on the word “working.”

  “Would you know what was happening in her personal life? Any boyfriends?”

  She shook her head. “She went on a couple of dates but nothing serious. She wanted to get married, not have a boyfriend, and it was a bit hard to have one without the other. She was quite well off, you know, and someone had told her she’d be a target for gold-diggers.”

  “What about her social life? Friends? Classes or groups that she went to after work?”

  Vanessa’s face was blank. “I really don’t think so. She watched television a lot. And she shopped.”

  I’d looked through Anna’s wardrobe before leaving the flat and it was all color-coded and neat and dry-clean only. None of it was showy, though. If anything, she’d dressed so subtly as to be almost invisible, and the clothes seemed to be made for someone older than she was. Looking at Vanessa, languid in gray cashmere with a pencil skirt, I thought Anna had been dressing to impress her boss.

  “How did she travel to work?”

  “No idea.”

  “Was she popular at work?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she ever make people redundant?”

  “She helped to process redundancies, but it wasn’t her responsibility to do it alone.”

  “Was she involved in disciplinary proceedings?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did she have any enemies that you know of?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What sort of person was she?”

  “Efficient. Competent. Dedicated.” The words came without prior thought and I realized I was getting the short form of the eulogy that would be emailed around the office along with confirmation that the rumors were true, it really was Anna Melville from the sixth floor who had been murdered … “She was liked by everyone who knew her,” Vanessa finished, as if that was the last word on the subject.

  “Would you describe her as attractive?”

  “Yes. Of course. I mean, I never thought about it.”

  “Did she ever have meetings with anyone from outside the company?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “What was her speaking voice like?”

  Vanessa stared at me, floored.

  “Did she have a regional accent?”

  “No. She sounded normal. Totally normal.” Vanessa herself sounded extremely posh, nay for no and yah for yeah. I was getting more nays than yahs, I thought.

  “There were two other murders in London in the last twelve months that we’re looking into. There may be a connection with Anna’s—it’s one of our lines of inquiry. Did Anna ever mention knowing anyone who’d been murdered? Did she ever mention the names Kirsty Campbell or Maxine Willoughby?”

  A slow headshake.

  “Did she ever spend time south of the river, or in the East End?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did she ever say she was scared of anyone?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Yesterday, around four. I had to leave early. I’m supposed to be going on holiday tomorrow. Anna was going to look after things while I was gone. I just don’t know how I’m going to manage to get away now.”

  I wrapped things up pretty quickly, asking if I could have a look at Anna’s desk. Without enthusiasm, Vanessa led me through a corridor of glass-walled offices to an area filled with cubicles, where every head was bent over a desk and every single person was aware of every move I made. Vanessa stood beside the cubicle, watching me, which didn’t really help my concentration either. I thanked her for her time and told her I would be in touch if I had any other questions.

  “You need a widget to make the lift work and I don’t have a spare one I can give you. When you want to leave, just mention it to…” She looked down at the cubicle on her right.

  “Penny,” a voice supplied from within the cubicle.

  “Yes. Penny. Of course. She’ll show you out.”

  I nodded my thanks and waited until she was out of sight before starting to go through Anna’s work station. She had decorated the wall of her cubicle like a hermit crab, sticking random bits and pieces on it as they took her fancy. A sample of Chanel Mademoiselle from a magazine. A pair of dangly pearl earrings—costume jewelry, but pretty. A postcard from the Maldives seemed to be from a friend and I pocketed it so I could pass it on to Harry Maitland. He was working through her address book and email contacts. I hoped he was having more luck than me.

  I sat in her chair to go through the drawers of the desk, finding neat stationery, an empty notebook, a zipped make-up bag and hairbrush, dry shampoo, a toothbrush, high heels, flat shoes … all the essentials for someone who spent long hours at work. Or someone who went out after work on dates. I swiveled on the chair, swinging from side to side. It wasn’t completely professional, but it always helped me to think. I spun around 180 degrees and looked straight at an interested face that was peering over the side of the cubicle. She was young and fair-haired and had a wide mouth that made her look sulky and a little bit cheeky.

  “Penny?”

  “Just checking you didn’t need anything.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you do.”

  I watched her disappear. “Penny.”

  “Yep.” She bounced back as if she was on a spring.

  “Do you know the password Anna used for her computer?”

  Instead of answering, she disappeared again and I heard scuffling before she arrived beside me, holding out a crumpled Post-it. “I had this stuck to my monitor. She gave it to me the last time she was on leave in case I needed to look at her files. I don’t know if she’s changed it since, but the IT department creates them and we’re not supposed to change them.”

  I took it from her. “Thanks.”

  “Do you need anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.” Lowering my voice, I added, “Unless there’s anything you know that you think might be useful for us to know.”

  “About who killed her?”

  “Ideally. Or about her life. Anything strange or out of character she did.”

  Penny shook her head regretfully. “She was so straight it was unbelievable. She never did anything strange or unexpected.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Yeah, I suppose. I worked with her for two and a half years.”

  “Did you like her?”

  Penny had been speaking quietly too, but now her voice dropped to something close to a whisper. “I couldn’t stand her. She was so self-centered. Really precious and self-absorbed. She used to suck up to Vanessa but she’d never even talk to anyone else. She never so much as asked me if I’d had a nice weekend.”

  That was the base level of in-office communication; it was what you said to the receptionist, the post-boy, your boss, the managing director when you bumped into them on a Monday morning. Even Derwent had been known to ask me that question, though I always felt it was in the hope of getting some salacious details about what Rob and I had been up to. Not saying it was pretty much a mortal sin.

  “What about her love life? Do you know if she was seeing anyone recently?”

  “I presume so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she made enough of a fuss about the flowers he sent her last week. White lilies.” Penny wrinkled her nose. “That’s a funeral flower, I always think. And the smell. They stank the office out.”

  “I quite like them,” I said.

  She shuddered. “Not for me, thanks. But Anna was delighted.”

  “When did the flowers arrive?”

  “Umm … Thursday?”

 
; “Was there a card with them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she know who they were from?”

  “I think so. She wouldn’t say, though. Someone said—” Penny laughed, then looked guilty and a little scared.

  “What did someone say?”

  “That she might have sent them to herself.” She looked edgy. “Sorry. That was mean.”

  “Well, she might have. But I think she probably didn’t.” I think they were a prop disguised as a gift. I think they were window-dressing for her corpse, a present from her killer. “What sort of a person was she? What words would you use to describe her?”

  “Cold. Manipulative.” Penny thought some more. “But sweet too, in a fake way. Needy.”

  I asked Penny a few more questions but got no further and let her go, clutching one of my business cards. She might remember something, or she might not. I hoped she would try, even though she hadn’t liked Anna.

  I turned to the computer and looked at the Post-it Penny had supplied. A_Melville, with Xanna0Melv underneath. I put them in the required fields and lo, my brilliant detective work was rewarded with access to all of Anna’s files. I worked through folder after folder looking for anything personal and finding nothing remarkable. In some cases, finding literally nothing. The Internet history had been wiped, which made me curious. Everyone used the Internet for something, whether it was work-related or personal. I checked with Penny, who confirmed that it was Anna’s habit to wipe her history every day “in case her identity was stolen or something.” On a hunch I checked the preferences and found that she had forgotten or not known about the cookies that tracked visits to websites. I scrolled through at speed, seeing lots of shopping websites and fashion blogs. Internet banking. A couple of newspapers featured. YouTube. Amazon. eBay. It was like a greatest hits of the Internet, and nothing I saw was remarkable.

  Except.

  I had scrolled past it before I registered that I’d seen it, because it was so familiar to me. Familiar to me, but I didn’t know why it would be on Anna’s computer. Without the Internet history I was missing the whole story and I didn’t know enough to be able to track it back any further, but alarm bells were ringing loud enough to deafen me.

  Three days before she died, starting at 5:53 p.m., Anna Melville had spent twelve minutes looking at the website for the Metropolitan Police.

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t go back to the office after my trip to the City, though I’d planned to. I called Una Burt first.

  “I don’t think she was all that popular in the office. A bit self-absorbed and cold. She was more focused on work than interested in her colleagues.” Too late I realized I could have been describing DCI Burt herself, who was legendary for her lack of interest in other people’s lives, unless they were dead. If she noticed, she didn’t mention it.

  “Sounds quite different to the others, then. Kirsty was gentle and sociable. Maxine was reclusive and immature.”

  “Anna was stuck-up and self-centered. Mind you, none of them was having much luck with men.”

  “Don’t assume that’s why they let him in,” she said sharply. “Everyone in that room this morning thought they were desperate old maids, but it’s got us nowhere with this investigation so far. Think of the other things they had in common.”

  Desperate old maids … I wondered if this was all a bit too close to home for the chief inspector, who was single and had apparently been so forever. I felt I was letting her down even by just thinking that. There were plenty of police officers her age who were unmarried but it wasn’t worthy of comment if they were men.

  Besides, the victims had more in common with me than with Burt. I was their age, more or less. I could have walked into Kirsty’s place and set up home without changing a thing, from what I’d seen in the crime-scene pictures. Usually the crime scenes I visited were the places no one wants to go—the festering one-bed flats in bleak, poverty-stricken areas, the sad, dated homes of forgotten pensioners, the back alleys and abandoned buildings and bits of secluded waste ground where bodies were dumped. Murder was a great leveller and I had been to lavish, multi-million-pound properties as well as the dives where you didn’t want to touch anything, where you knew if you sat down you’d stand up with fleas. But I had never been so conscious of the hair’s-breadth difference between me and the victims as on this case. I was luckier, and hopefully wiser, and I was very definitely not single any more, but I didn’t have to work too hard to know these girls.

  “Did you get the results from the technical examination? Did they find anything on Anna’s iPad?”

  “It was wiped. The history was cleared.” I could hear the frustration she was feeling. “They’re trying to retrieve data from it but they told me there wasn’t likely to be much. It was almost new, apparently.”

  “Do you think it was the killer who cleared the history?”

  “We can’t speculate about that. We’ll never know.”

  I felt reproved. She was right, of course. Unless we found the murderer and he was cooperative enough to tell us if he’d done it. “It could have been Anna. It was her habit to clear it at the end of a session. Her computer at work was the same.”

  “Was it? Damn.”

  “Yes, but it’s still worth recovering and examining. I’ve told Anna’s colleagues not to touch it until someone comes to collect it. Because guess what Anna had been looking at before she died.”

  Burt listened as I outlined what I had found, the trail that led to the Met website. Without seeing her face I couldn’t even guess what she thought about it. There was something massive about her silence, something more than concentration. But her only comment when I had finished was, “Where are you going now?”

  “Back to the office. I’ve got some paperwork to do, and—”

  “What about following up those leads in Lewisham? The book club and support groups.”

  “Oh,” I said lamely. “I could.”

  “It may seem insignificant to you but it’s the sort of legwork that can make a case. And it was your idea.”

  “No, I think it’s definitely worthwhile. It’s just that I wasn’t planning—”

  “You might think it’s not time-sensitive given that Kirsty has been dead for almost a year, but we have an active serial killer at work in the city and I don’t need to remind you that the intervals between murders are getting shorter. Make no mistake about it, this needs a prompt response.”

  “Yes. Of course. I understand that. But I thought it was a bit of a long shot.”

  “This late in the day, they’re all long shots.” Burt sounded tired. “Get it done. And Maeve?”

  “Yep.”

  “I thought the others did a good job, from their presentation, even though they didn’t make this particular connection. They were thorough. Make sure you don’t tread on any toes while you’re on their patch.”

  I rolled my eyes. Being lectured on politeness by Una Burt was like taking makeup advice from Barbara Cartland. “I’ll keep it in mind. But I think if we have problems with anyone it will be Andy Bradbury.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Because he’s a dickhead. “Because he’s recently promoted and he seemed defensive at the meeting earlier.”

  “So he did. Was he like that when you met him before?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She made a noise that after a moment of sheer disbelief I identified as a chuckle. “Rest assured I will take great pleasure in going through his work on this case and finding out what he has done wrong.”

  “Without treading on his toes.”

  “Some toes deserve it.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

  * * *

  I’d armed myself with a few pictures of Kirsty Campbell, given that she’d been dead for nine months, but I didn’t need to remind anyone in Blackheath about her. The article in the evening paper had brought her right to the forefront of most people’s minds. Anna’s death had led the news all day
and there was a strange, unseemly excitement in the air, a kind of suppressed thrill that something was actually happening, right there and then, something potentially historic in a Jack the Ripper sort of way. I was too close to the reality of violent death to see why it was exciting.

  I walked from the station to the flat where she’d died, following in her footsteps, seeing what she had seen. More than ever I found myself identifying with her as I walked along the busy main street and into the quieter residential roads where the lights were starting to come on in the houses. I recognized the block of flats from some way off and walked around the outside of the building. There was no value in demanding to see the flat where she’d died. I was too late to see it as she’d arranged it, and I had the crime-scene photos to study. But I noted that Kirsty’s flat was at the front, and not overlooked. The security on the building wasn’t all that impressive either. I wondered if the killer had started with where she lived when he was thinking of choosing a victim. It had been pretty much perfect for his purposes.

  I made some progress once I started talking to people, finding the place where she had her dry-cleaning done and the shop where she always bought the paper on Saturdays. A smart, newly painted pub with squashy leather sofas and a huge collection of board games was the venue for the knitting club Kirsty had briefly attended, though the landlord couldn’t remember her.

  “We get so many in, you see.” He eyed me, as much on edge as if I was going to blame him for what had happened, and take away his license.

  “Do you have any other groups that meet here?”

  “Rugby club on a Tuesday night. Bitching Stitching on Wednesday, which is the quilting group—their name for it, not mine,” he said, noticing the look on my face. “Knitwits is on Mondays. Thursday to Sunday we’re too busy to spare the space.”

  “No book clubs?”

  He shook his head. “The library might.”

  I thanked him but not effusively. Derwent would have said something sarcastic to him about joining the Met with brilliant ideas of that sort. He hadn’t been much help. Kirsty was a pretty, nicely spoken woman and it bothered me that he couldn’t recall her, probably because she’d been gentle and polite and hadn’t made a fuss about anything.