The Stranger You Know (Maeve Kerrigan Novels)

by Jane Casey

  “Isn’t that him on the news?” Groves said from his position by the window. “What’s he done now?”

  As one, every head in the room turned to the television screen, where a Breaking News banner ran along the bottom of the screen. By the time I looked, the video clip they’d been playing had come to an end, and the screen was filled with a newsreader. Her mouth was moving, the studio lights gleaming on her lipgloss.

  “Turn it up,” Godley said tightly.

  “… we’re going to stick with the story and speak to our reporter, who was there when this incident actually happened. Tom, are you there?”

  “Yes, hello, Carly.” Tom was young, easy on the eye and wryly amused by whatever had taken place. For a journalist, there was nothing better than being in the right place at the right time, and he was looking more than happy to tell the world what he’d seen. He was standing on a street corner that looked faintly familiar and I frowned, trying to place it. He was in front of the sign, so all I could read was the word “Street.” Not helpful.

  “What can you tell us about what happened this afternoon?”

  “Well, extraordinary scenes at St. Luke’s hospital in London, where Detective Inspector Josh Derwent was recuperating after being shot in the leg yesterday in that incident in a playground. Today he was well enough to be able to discharge himself from hospital, so obviously making a good recovery. We were here around three o’clock this afternoon at the invitation of Philip Pace, the leader of the Dads Matter pressure group, who were of course blamed in some quarters for the actions of the playground gunman, Lee Grimes. Philip Pace was hoping to see DI Derwent to thank him for resolving the situation safely.”

  And hoping to use Derwent as a means to getting some much-needed good publicity. I had a feeling of impending doom.

  “But things didn’t go according to plan,” the newsreader prompted, a tiny smile hovering around her mouth.

  “Indeed they did not. DI Derwent was not keen to speak to Mr. Pace, and refused to see him inside the hospital. Philip Pace is not someone who likes taking no for an answer, as we know, and he managed to find out which door the policeman was going to use when leaving the hospital. He approached him and I think our footage probably tells the story better than I can.”

  The screen flickered and showed a hospital doorway, with Philip Pace standing to one side of it. The door opened and Derwent hobbled through, on crutches, as unshaven and unkempt as he had been that morning. He glared at the assembled press.

  “What are you lot doing here?”

  Philip Pace reached out and put a hand on Derwent’s left arm. “On behalf of Dads Matter, I wanted to—”

  “I told you, I’m not interested.” He shook the restraining hand off.

  A quick glance from Pace to the journalists: you could see him calculating the damage to his reputation, the wheels whirring as he tried to come up with a graceful way out of it. “Oh, ha ha ha, DI Derwent. It’s nice that you still have such a good sense of humor.”

  “Who’s laughing?” Derwent gave him the most intimidating glower in his repertoire.

  Pace misjudged things to the extent that he dropped a chummy arm around Derwent’s shoulders before he replied. Derwent was injured, but not incapacitated. He dropped his left shoulder and swung with his right hand, pivoting as the crutches fell to the floor. His fist connected with Pace’s nose, making an obscene crunching sound that was followed by a shriek from Pace and a murmur from the journalists off-camera. The leader of Dads Matter slid to the ground, screaming, both hands to his face where blood was seeping through his fingers, and the camera followed him. In the corner of the screen, someone retrieved one fallen crutch, and Derwent was heard to limp off, refusing all questions. The cameraman turned from Pace at the last minute and caught the back of Derwent’s head as he disappeared into a police car. Pace was altogether better box-office, writhing in agony and moaning inarticulately.

  Someone in the bar—I couldn’t see who—began to applaud, and soon the entire room was cheering. Godley was grinning, I was relieved to see. The police officers quietened down as the newsreader appeared again.

  “What’s going to happen now? Is DI Derwent under arrest?”

  Tom looked amused. “You may have noticed him getting into a police car. That was actually his lift home, but he delayed his return to his house to speak with officers who were on duty nearby and made a statement to them about what had happened. He wasn’t arrested. My understanding is that Philip Pace is unlikely to press charges. He seems rather embarrassed by the whole affair and has refused to take any calls from members of the media, or issue a statement.”

  “How bad were his injuries, Tom?”

  “I believe he had a broken nose and some severe bruising, Carly. He received immediate treatment in St. Luke’s accident and emergency department.”

  “Has DI Derwent had anything to say, Tom?”

  “Well, we dared to ask him about it when he returned home, and this happened.”

  The screen again switched to the shaky handheld camera, which was now focusing on a police car drawing up on the street outside Derwent’s flat.

  “Inspector Derwent, sir, hello. Could you come and speak to us about the incident with Philip Pace, please?”

  Derwent was extracting himself from the car. He turned, looking exhausted, and shook his head.

  “Did you want to say anything at all?” Tom appeared in the frame, microphone extended to Derwent with the sort of timidity I’d associate with someone hand-feeding a tiger.

  “Plenty,” Derwent said. “But not on camera.”

  The screen flickered and went back to Tom on his street corner. He laughed. “That was all we got, I’m afraid, but at least no one got hurt.”

  “Oh, Josh,” Godley said, shaking his head. “You do have a knack for getting into trouble. I imagine I’ll be getting some calls about that before long. Mute it again, please.”

  I watched the screen as the reporter signed off. There was a buzz of conversation in the room, most of it approving but some of it very disapproving indeed. No prizes for guessing who was complaining about Derwent’s behavior. Godley clapped his hands.

  “Okay. That’s enough. Does anyone have any suggestions?”

  James Peake raised a hand. “Release Shane Poole’s picture to the media and tell them to report that we want to question him as we think he might have useful information for us. He wasn’t planning to go too far, I’d say, especially if he left his passport and didn’t clear out his bank accounts.”

  “Worth a try. Anyone else?” Godley looked around the room. “Right. I’ve asked for details of Shane and his car to be added to briefings across the South-East. All ANPR cameras will be looking for his plates, but he’s been canny about other things that might draw our attention so I’d expect him to be using fake ones. We’ll keep Derwent on our list and keep digging into their backgrounds. Harry is taking over the cold case, by the way, so address any questions to him.”

  Maitland looked terrified. I gathered my things together. Forgiveness only went so far, I could see. I had proved myself to be a useful member of the team but Godley was a long way from reinstating me.

  “Where are you going?” Peake strolled over, hands in his pockets.

  “Home. Bed. Maybe a bath first.” I wound my scarf around my neck. “I need a rest.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  I wasn’t in the mood. “No fun. Just sleep. And plenty of it.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  In spite of myself I smiled: he was looking at me from under worried eyebrows, biting his lip, overselling the anxiety just a tad but damn cute with it. “Good luck. I’ll see you when Shane lands in custody.”

  “If not before,” Peake said, and stood back to let me go. I nodded to Godley as I went, and he nodded back, as if to say: yes, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve seen you do today.

  I wouldn’t have admitted it, but I thought the s
ame.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It was dark outside, and raining hard, and the air was raw. I reeled, feeling as if I’d walked into a wall of pure exhaustion. I took a roundabout route to the tube, dodging news cameras. It was unlikely that I’d do a Derwent but not impossible.

  I had to battle delayed and crowded trains and edgy fellow commuters. I took the shortest possible route from the station to the flat, checking behind me in a cursory way, but far more focused on getting some sleep than on my personal safety. My hair was soaking, the rain seeping down between my coat collar and my neck. It had saturated my shoulders already and the cold struck up through the thin soles of my shoes.

  Things didn’t get a lot better when I got home. The air in the flat chilled me and something definitely smelled off. I squeezed rainwater out of my hair and tied it back, then went through the kitchen while the kettle boiled and the heat came on, finding nothing in the fridge or cupboards or even the bin that might be responsible. I moved on, searching every other room in the flat, winding up in the sitting room. The light was blinking on the answering machine and I pressed play, letting it squawk in the background while I kept looking. There had to be something. A plate with leftover food under a chair. A mug growing exciting mold. God knows, I wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world but just forgetting I’d abandoned food somewhere was a new low.

  “Maeve, it’s your mother. I was just wondering if you’d had a chance to write to your aunt Niamh. I—”

  I cut her off. Next message.

  “Maeve. You’re not back yet. I was just ringing to see if you’d got my earlier mess—”

  I stabbed at it irritably. My mother’s refusal to come to terms with the modern world meant she hated ringing me on my mobile. It suited me fine—otherwise my voicemail would have been solid with calls about nothing much that I would never, ever return. But on this occasion, it would have been vibrating on its own, wherever it had ended up, lonely in its evidence bag, and I would have been wonderfully out of range.

  “Maeve Áine Kerrigan, what have I just seen on the news? Call me when you get this, please. At once.”

  She sounded really cross. I winced and let the next message play in full.

  “You could have been killed. I don’t know what possessed you to go in there with no gun or anything. And they say your nice boss was shot. Well, it’s no more than he deserves, dragging you into a dangerous situation like that and you with no more sense than a day-old chick. Call me as soon as you get this message.”

  She was less angry, more scared in the next message, and then in the next one said she’d tried my mobile number but had got no answer, and then in the one after that I got the full, cold, “Of course, we’re the last people who matter but it would be nice if you’d acknowledge our existence now and then.”

  I put out my hand for the phone and then stopped as the answering machine beeped again. I put my finger on the delete button, but pulled back when I realized it was Rob. He sounded tense. “Maeve, I got your message. I’ve been trying to call you on your phone but you’re not picking up—I don’t know why. I’ve left a message for you at work, too, so maybe you’ll get that first. Maeve, don’t be scared, but get a bag—now—and go somewhere safe.” He was striving for calm but the urgency kept breaking through, and I stopped lifting sofa cushions, looking for the rogue prawn sandwich that had to be the source of the stench. I stared at the machine as if it could tell me in advance where this was going.

  “Your message—you thanked me for the flowers, but I didn’t send you any and I don’t know who did. I know you’ll want to find out who it was, but don’t waste any time, please. Just go.”

  It was all very well for Rob to tell me to leave without further delay, but it was human nature to examine the flowers to see if there were any clues, and I was only human. The smell was far stronger as I bent over them. The roses had opened fully now, and they were packed so tightly together it was hard to see what was going on—until the overhead light struck a gleam of something that was clearly, obviously flesh. Not needing to put on a brave face since I was alone, I screamed and dropped the vase. It shattered, sending little bits of glass everywhere. In among the glass shards and leaves I saw white, squirming things. Maggots. The smell was strong enough to make me gag. With gloves on, the kitchen scissors in hand and a wooden spoon for poking purposes I managed to pull the bouquet apart so I could see what was at the heart of it: a piece of meat wedged in tightly, surrounded by stems. It was chicken, I thought, or pork, but green with decomposition and alive with maggots. I turned my head away, convinced I was going to be sick. It wasn’t just that the meat smelled revolting. Someone had pretended to be Rob to send me a message. They knew where I was. They knew I was alone. And they wanted me to know that they knew.

  It didn’t take a genius to leap to the same conclusion as Rob. Chris Swain, the guy who had seemed so harmless when he was just my neighbor, had an uncanny ability to track me down, no matter how hard I tried to stay hidden. Up to now, he’d been happy to play games with me. He got his kicks from taking me to the edge of terror and letting me see just how powerless I was to stop myself from falling over. He had marked me out as a victim and I couldn’t seem to shake off the role, no matter how much I hated it, and him. He was a sneak, a voyeur, a rapist whose style was to drug his victims to avoid the possibility of them fighting back. A coward.

  Dangerous.

  And the thing that really bothered me about the game he was playing was that I had no idea what constituted a win. Humiliation? Aggravation?

  Death?

  I went into the bedroom and changed into jeans, boots and a thick sweatshirt, all too aware of the possibility that I was being watched or filmed with the sort of secret camera Swain had used before. I put a change of clothes and some toiletries in a backpack, then got ready for the hard work: two layers of gloves and the dustpan and brush. I got a bag from the kitchen and shoveled the whole pile into it: the oozing meat and broken glass and bent stems and every last one of the maggots. I excavated the cellophane and tissue paper that had been wrapped around the bouquet from the kitchen bin and folded them into a brown-paper parcel. I got an envelope and went through the recycling to find the florists’ card, aware that I had missed a collection the previous day. If I had just been a little bit more efficient, the evidence would have been long gone.

  “Score one for me,” I said aloud, trying to keep my spirits up. Trying to keep the fear at bay because I had things to do before I could leave and every instinct for self-preservation I possessed was pushing me toward the door.

  I needed the evidence, because I was reporting this as a crime. I wanted it on record. Swain was on the Met’s wanted list already because of video evidence we’d seized of him sexually assaulting dozens of unconscious women, but when we caught him—and we would—I wanted him charged with the crimes he’d committed against me. He owed me that much, even if I wasn’t going to be first on the indictment. Others had suffered more than me, but I had endured quite enough from Swain. I would have my day in court, and he would hopefully have a decade or so in prison when we finally caught up with him.

  I put the bag inside another bag and left it in the hall, hoping it wouldn’t stink too badly the next day. There was no point in calling it in now. The response team would never consider it a priority at that time of night; I’d be in a queue behind every domestic and suspected burglary and bar fight in east London, and I wasn’t inclined to wait around in the flat for hours, wondering when or if I was going to be attacked. Better to wait until early turn started for the local CID and hand it over to a nice, friendly detective who could take a statement and file a report. I wanted to be free to leave as soon as I was ready to go. Just being in the flat was close to unbearable. My jaw ached and I realized I was clenching it, and my fists, as the adrenalin played on my nerves. What else did I need to do?

  Oh yes. That was it. Find somewhere to go. Which was where I ground to a halt for the second time. I d
idn’t know anyone nearby: Rob and I had chosen Dalston in part because we never socialized around there so we could keep a low profile. I had no mobile phone so no numbers for anyone I could trust not to panic, which would teach me to learn some off by heart. I only knew Rob’s, my parents’ and my brother’s. I was not going to involve my parents in this particular flap; I couldn’t go to my brother either, because someone—a niece or his wife or even Dec himself—would be bound to let it slip to Mum and then I would be in even more trouble for not having told them in the first place. The rain rattled as the wind caught the drops and flung them against the windows. I couldn’t stay in the flat; it wasn’t safe. I didn’t want to leave without knowing where I was going.

  I stood in the middle of the living room, shivering, and considered my options, none of which were appealing. Back to the office, where there was nowhere to sleep at all. Stay where I was and hope Swain had sent the flowers because he couldn’t get past our security arrangements. But I already felt I was being watched, and I’d never sleep. Trek to Liv’s house, though she lived in Guildford, miles outside London, and it would take me an age to get there. I didn’t want to risk it without knowing she’d be in. Call the office, get put through to Godley and let him take over—but he was fully occupied and I couldn’t divert him from a murder investigation for the sake of a sick prank, even if it had me terrified. Stay in a hotel—somewhere cheap and soulless but with decent locks on the doors. It wasn’t an appealing option. I didn’t want to be on my own with my fears, even if it was somewhere other than the flat. I would never relax enough to close my eyes, let alone sleep. But it looked as if I was out of luck.