The Reckoning

by Jane Casey

  We got out of the car and Derwent led the way across the road. Before we reached the pavement, a tall black man stepped out of the café next door to the laundrette, shrugging on a jacket. ‘DI Derwent? Henry Cowell, Brixton CID.’

  ‘Sorry for keeping you.’ Derwent shook his hand. ‘We got held up in traffic.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Sounds like you’re having a busy day. I’m glad it’s your job now, not mine.’

  ‘Yeah, you must be happy to have palmed this off on us.’

  I leaned around Derwent, who was obviously not planning to introduce me. ‘Maeve Kerrigan.’

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ There was more genuine warmth in the polite smile he gave me than I’d had from Derwent all day. We were about the same age as well as the same rank, but Cowell seemed relaxed at the prospect of briefing two strange officers, one of them an inspector. I doubted I would have been as confident. ‘Sorry it’s just me. My skipper was planning to be here but he got held up.’

  ‘As long as you’ve got a key, we’ll be all right.’

  ‘Not just one key.’ He held up a bunch. ‘Wait until you see this.’

  The door to the street didn’t present too much of an obstacle. One simple Yale lock was all that had stood between Ivan Tremlett’s building and the world outside. I followed Derwent and Cowell up the narrow, dingy stairs to the first floor and stopped on the small landing outside Tremlett’s rooms. ‘There are offices on the top floor, but they’re vacant,’ Cowell explained, as he sorted through the bunch of keys he held.

  ‘This is more like it,’ Derwent said.

  ‘Yeah, these are serious locks with security keys, not standard ones. There are bolts on the other side of the door. The landlord fitted the front-door lock, but Ivan Tremlett took care of this lot.’

  ‘Everything but a barricade,’ I commented. There was no sign on the door, no company branding. It was entirely anonymous and discreet, apart from the CCTV camera mounted above the door and the shiny polished locks at regularly spaced intervals. No letterbox. No peephole. No communication with the outside world.

  ‘You get the feeling Tremlett spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder,’ Derwent said.

  ‘Understandably.’ I pointed at the camera. ‘I take it that wasn’t any use.’

  Cowell looked up to where I was pointing. ‘It’s a live feed that goes to a website, not a TV. Tremlett had it up on one of his computers so he could see what was happening outside his door if he heard any strange noises. The signal is encrypted so only Tremlett could see it – not even the people who run the website had access to the images and they were real-time only. Nothing was recorded. We weren’t able to recover anything.’

  ‘And we don’t have the least idea how the killer persuaded him to bypass his own security to let him in. Speaking of which …’ Derwent shouldered past Cowell as the door swung open, keen to get inside. Amused rather than offended, Cowell tilted his head at me, standing back to let me follow the inspector. I rolled my eyes while Derwent was safely preoccupied and Cowell had to turn a snort of amusement into a not wholly convincing cough.

  Going through the door myself, I went slowly, wary of stepping somewhere I shouldn’t after the frankly hazardous situation in Barry Palmer’s home. Here at least the room had been clean to start with. There was nothing but the slightest taint of blood in the air. My nose wrinkled anyway. There were times when I could have wished for a less sensitive sense of smell.

  The first room was a small reception area with one window to the street. It was almost unfurnished, with just an armchair in the corner. He wouldn’t have needed a reception desk when there were no visitors, but it looked strange all the same. The armchair was old, the upholstery rubbed and faded. It was altogether too domestic for the setting, which was bland in the extreme. The floor was carpeted with cheap, flimsy dark-grey tiles. Forensics had lifted a handful of them for further examination. Underneath, a patch of floorboards made of unvarnished pine had absorbed blood, long trails of it that had dripped between the carpet tiles in a geometric pattern. Ivan Tremlett’s blood.

  ‘We think he was beaten here,’ Cowell said. ‘The blood’s from relatively minor injuries. That’s why there’s not a lot of it.’

  ‘The floor’s been photographed and the blood should be dry.’ Derwent was watching me with a sardonic expression. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry.’ There was no way on earth I was walking on the stains if I could avoid it, even if they had dried out. The thought made my stomach heave again.

  ‘This is where he took his breaks – ate, drank, catnapped in the chair. His wife said he was fanatical about keeping food and liquids out of his office because of the potential damage a spill could do to the computers.’ With one sweep of a long arm, Cowell drew our attention to a bin in the corner, behind the chair. ‘We found an empty paper cup, some used paper napkins and a bag from the coffee shop down the street. It seems that it was Tremlett’s routine to buy a bacon roll and a coffee every morning, and a sandwich for his lunch. He usually didn’t leave again until the end of the day. Looks as if he’d had both meals when he was killed.’

  ‘The PM will confirm it,’ Derwent said.

  ‘Do we know when that will be?’ I asked.

  ‘Some time today.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Might have happened already. Godley wanted Glen Hanshaw to do it as well as Palmer’s so we’re waiting for him to get round to it.’

  I didn’t know how Dr Hanshaw managed to keep on top of his job. There was always another body, another crime scene to attend, another post-mortem with its attendant report, another conference with the officers in the case, another appearance as an expert witness in court. He was scalpel-sharp, completely in command of his material, and rarely wrong. With all of that, it didn’t matter much that he wasn’t actually likable, at least as far as I was concerned. Godley got on well with him, though. And he, like me, would have been annoyed to hear Derwent speak of the pathologist in such an off-hand manner, especially in front of two junior officers. I didn’t quite have the nerve to tell him off, settling instead for saying, ‘He’s reliable. And quick.’

  Derwent grunted. ‘Needs to be.’ He patted the back of the armchair. ‘So this was Tremlett’s canteen. Lovely.’

  I pulled a face. ‘This is pretty bleak.’

  ‘It sure is. And loud.’

  Below us, the machines from the laundrette churned, a reassuring sound in other circumstances. The street was busy with a car or a van passing every few seconds. The narrow carriageway didn’t help as drivers had to wait to drive forward, their engines running noisily. An occasional road-rage spat with raised voices and beeping horns added a touch of variety.

  ‘You’d tune out most of that,’ I said. ‘You’d get used to it. They’re regular sounds, mostly.’

  ‘He had air-conditioning on as well.’ Cowell flipped on the light switch for the room next door and a low hum started up, a fan set to come on automatically with the lights. ‘Everything’s climate controlled.’

  Derwent nodded. ‘It’s good for the computers, but I’d say Ivan Tremlett liked control anyway. Let’s have a look at where he chose to spend his days.’

  Cowell pushed open the door to the computer room. I braced myself, expecting to see horror. In fact, it was not as gut-wrenching as I had imagined. The room had been dismantled in large part, the crime-scene technicians having taken the computers that had sat on the narrow, custom-made table that ran around the edge of the room, leaving only dusty marks to show where they had once been. The table itself was cloudy with black fingerprint powder. Aside from that, most of the surfaces were smeared with brownish swirls of dried blood. The middle of the small room was empty apart from another great wavering bloodstain in the middle of the floor.

  ‘I’m surprised it didn’t leak through to the ceiling below.’

  ‘I’ve seen that before. Down through the light-fittings and drip-drip-drip, someone gets a nasty shock.’ Derwent laughed. ‘Th
at’s why I’d never live anywhere but the top floor if I had to live in a flat.’

  ‘It never occurred to me to worry about that.’

  My new flat was on the ground floor. It was annoying enough to have to keep the windows closed and locked all the time. Cascading body fluids would be a new low, even for me, and I had lived in some ropey places.

  ‘There was a chair here – on castors, so he could move around his work station. He was tied to it when the uniforms broke in.’

  ‘What was he tied with?’

  ‘Plastic ties.’

  Unbreakable and untraceable, they were the restraint of choice for professional criminals, and bad news for us. No fibres to compare, no ends of rope to analyse, no sticky tape to capture a partial print, a hair, a dab of DNA. Criminals weren’t all stupid, unfortunately.

  Cowell gestured around him. ‘The killer or killers started off with the computers, by the looks of things. Smashed them up, pulled out their innards.’

  ‘Standard stuff to intimidate your subject.’

  ‘And take away his livelihood,’ I pointed out. ‘These are the tools of his trade. Without them, he can’t earn anything.’

  That was the sort of thing that would put a man under pressure. Especially if, like Ivan Tremlett, he had built up an income out of nothing. Not a small income, either, Derwent had said.

  ‘It was top-of-the-range technology. Expensive vandalism. Once they’d worked through that, they started on him.’

  I winced. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’

  ‘Bruises. A few teeth knocked out. Broken fingers and toes.’

  I looked across at Derwent. ‘That sounds like a lower level of violence than Palmer. Broken bones are a definite step down from amputations.’

  Derwent shrugged. ‘Maybe he told the killer whatever he wanted to know a bit quicker than Palmer did. I’d have talked, God knows.’

  I didn’t know what I would have done and I hoped never to find out, but I suspected I would have given in at the first hint of violence. At my school the library had a vast collection of lurid religious comics retelling the lives of the saints, the gorier the better as far as the nuns were concerned. I was brought up on illustrated tales of women martyred for their faith – St Agnes, beheaded at thirteen in order to remain chaste; St Catherine, bound to a spiked wheel and tortured. I had been uneasily aware at the time that I wasn’t cut out for sainthood. And sex had never seemed like such a terrible fate if the alternative was beheading. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘His throat was cut.’

  ‘That explains all the blood.’

  Derwent was roaming the small space, poking at things with a gloved finger. ‘You’ve forgotten one detail, haven’t you? DI Lawlor told me about his eyes.’

  ‘What happened to his eyes?’

  Cowell looked at me apologetically. ‘They were gouged out.’

  ‘Like St Lucy,’ I murmured, distracted by the long-suppressed memory of a particularly graphic and literal illustration of bloody eyeballs rolling around on a silver plate. She had never been my favourite.

  ‘What?’ Derwent swung round, staring at me uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Nothing.’ I gathered my straying thoughts. ‘Before or after he died?’

  Cowell shrugged. ‘Sorry, I don’t know.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Derwent demanded.

  ‘I don’t know. Well, actually, yes I do know. If it was when he was alive, it was a way of punishing him. If he was dead, it was meant as a message for someone else. A warning for other paedophiles, maybe.’

  ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t refer to my husband by that word.’ The voice was pure ice and came from the outer room. I jumped, shocked, and Derwent spun around fast.

  The woman who’d spoken came forward to stand in the doorway. Her eyes were fixed on the blood-stained floor, and her face was pale. Claudia Tremlett, the victim’s wife, tall and lovely as an arum lily.

  ‘Mrs Tremlett. I’m DI Derwent and this is my colleague, DC Kerrigan. We’re investigating your husband’s murder.’ Derwent’s tone was considerably more solicitous than it had been when he was dealing with the Gordons, but then Claudia Tremlett was a cut above, socially. She was attractive, too, and I was learning that Derwent was susceptible to that, if not to issues of class. She was unusually tall, about the same height as me. Fair, with high cheekbones, she would have looked ravishing if she’d had some colour in her face other than the raw redness around her eyes. Like Vera Gordon, she had evidently been crying that day, but that was where the resemblance ended. Vera’s thin London accent with its mangled consonants didn’t bear comparison to Claudia’s well-modulated tones and even in her youth Vera wouldn’t have been more than faintly pretty.

  DI Derwent hadn’t finished grovelling. ‘I’m sorry if you were offended by DC Kerrigan’s choice of words.’

  That was big of him. I glared. I can make my own apologies, thanks.

  ‘I just don’t want you to see Ivan as that. He wasn’t that. He was so much more,’ she replied softly.

  ‘I’m sure he was.’ There, there. ‘We were going to come and see you once we’d finished here.’

  ‘Yes, I thought someone might come. I’m glad I met you here instead. I wouldn’t have liked to talk to you about it in the house. It’s my home. Our home. I want to keep it as a place of refuge, not somewhere I can’t stay because of the bad memories. I’m sorry to say that a police interview would count as a bad memory.’

  I could understand what she meant – I might have felt the same way myself. But there would have to be a search at some stage so that we could look through Ivan Tremlett’s belongings. It was intrusive, a sort of official burglary, and I hoped we could persuade her to leave the house for the duration. We were experts at putting things back where we’d found them; she need never know how thorough we’d been.

  Claudia looked past Derwent, craning her neck to take in every detail of the room, just as we had. ‘I wanted to see where he died. I was just going to drive past, but then I saw the light was on.’

  ‘Did you visit your husband here often?’

  ‘I’ve never been here before.’ She must have seen the look of surprise on my face. ‘Ivan kept his two worlds totally separate. He didn’t work at home. He didn’t have anything from home in his office. That included me and the children.’

  ‘How many children?’

  ‘Three. All boys. Four, seven and nine.’ Her face crumpled. ‘They keep asking me when Daddy will be home.’

  ‘That must be very difficult,’ I said quietly, knowing that nothing we could say would be of comfort to her.

  ‘Just give me a minute.’ She turned away, dropping her face into her hands. It was a pose that would have looked melodramatic had it not seemed so natural to her. I wondered if she’d ever been a model. There was a studied grace to her movements, but she was too tall to have been a dancer.

  While Claudia Tremlett was distracted DC Cowell seized the opportunity to flee. ‘That’s all I know, basically. If there’s anything else …’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ Derwent finished for him. Cowell handed him the keys and nodded to me before slipping through the door, and I listened with pure, uncomplicated envy as he ran down the stairs and slammed the door behind him. Escape was a good idea. There was nothing like speaking to grieving relatives to make you feel grimy in your soul. Especially when the questions you had to ask were far from easy.

  With a sniff and a shake of her shoulder-length hair, Mrs Tremlett announced herself as ready to be interviewed. Derwent surprised me by showing a degree of sensitivity as he steered her out of the ransacked office and through the dismal reception area.

  ‘Let’s talk out here in the hall, if you don’t mind.’

  She looked around, at a loss. ‘There’s nowhere to sit.’

  There was nowhere in her husband’s office either apart from his greasy old armchair, but I had enough tact not to point that out.

  ‘You could sit on the windowsill. I�
��ll be okay here.’ As I spoke, I perched on the third-from-bottom step of the stairs that led to the second floor.

  ‘And I’m happy to stand.’ Derwent shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall, the picture of barely tempered masculinity. I was meanly pleased that she hardly glanced at him as she brushed dust off the ledge, meticulous even in her distress. She was wearing pale grey jeans and a denim shirt that occasionally slid off one narrow shoulder. It was carelessly sexy in an unforced, unconscious way and I wondered what Ivan Tremlett had been like in life – how charismatic he would have to have been to marry and keep the aristocratic lovely in front of me, even without the criminal conviction.

  Derwent must have been wondering the same thing. ‘Did you love your husband, Mrs Tremlett?’

  If he’d been hoping to wrongfoot her, he failed. She met his gaze unwaveringly. ‘Yes. Of course I did.’

  ‘You never thought twice about your marriage? Even with the fact that he pleaded guilty to downloading illegal images of child abuse?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ She drew in a breath and let it out slowly; I recognised it as a trick she had probably learnt from a therapist, a means of easing tension and focusing her thoughts. Derwent was going to find it hard to shake her if she insisted on taking her time before answering his questions. ‘I had a difficult time when Ivan was being investigated. Of course I did. But we talked about it, and we had counselling, and our marriage was stronger afterwards.’

  ‘After he came out of prison.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he find it?’

  ‘It wasn’t a holiday. But he was well treated. He was able to teach computer skills to some of the long-term inmates, so they respected him. He was worried, of course, that he would be a target for abuse because of his conviction, but they left him alone. They believed that he hadn’t done it, as did I.’