by Jane Casey
‘Now you’re talking. So where do the Brothers Grim work? Are they brothers in real life?’
‘Drew and Lee Bancroft, aged twenty-seven and twenty-nine. They don’t have an office as such. Lee has a flat in Hampstead and they work out of the spare bedroom. Josh has the address.’
‘I’ll go and find him.’ I stood up.
‘He’s on his way in. He’s not such an early riser as you.’
‘Oh, he gets up early enough,’ I said seriously. ‘It just takes him ages to do his make-up.’
Godley laughed. ‘I won’t tell him you said that.’
‘I don’t think I would survive the day if you did.’
I closed the door behind me carefully as the superintendent reached out for his phone, his mind already on the next job on his list. I turned to find Liv Bowen standing in front of me, holding her mobile up so she could read what was on the screen.
‘“Hung-over. Just getting in shower. Pity me.”’ She blinked twice, all innocence. ‘Sounds as if he had a good time, doesn’t it?’
I couldn’t stop myself. ‘You know he was meeting that lawyer last night, don’t you? Is getting drunk on a first date a good sign or a bad one?’
‘Bit of both, probably. You’re not annoyed, are you? Given that you were never really together? According to you?’
The door opened behind her and Derwent swung into the squad room in a somewhat ill-advised brown leather bomber jacket. For once I was truly pleased to see him. My face must have shown something of what I was feeling because Liv twisted to see where I was looking.
‘Oh.’ There was doubt in her eyes when she turned back. ‘You must be getting on better with him.’
‘Well, we could hardly have been getting on worse.’ She clearly thought I had abandoned Rob in order to make a move on Derwent and, revolting though that thought was, I decided not to enlighten her. Instead, I gave the inspector a dazzling smile as he came towards us and Liv trotted away to allow us our privacy. Derwent looked singularly unimpressed but that wasn’t really the point.
‘Me and you again, Kerrigan. Saddle up.’
‘By which you mean get my stuff.’
‘By which I mean stop standing around posing and get a move on. You don’t seem to think what we have to do is important but this is a murder investigation.’ He walked away towards the door, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe my attitude.
‘I’m aware of that. Going to Hoddesdon was not my idea.’ I grabbed my bag and went after him, taking long strides to catch up. ‘Besides, what happened to you yesterday? Did you come over all faint in the break room?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He slammed through the door.
‘You ran out of there like you were going to lose your breakfast. You’re not pregnant, are you?’
‘Don’t try to be funny, Kerrigan. Women aren’t funny.’
‘That’s a bit of a sweeping statement, isn’t it? It’s like me saying all men are shits.’
Derwent rattled down the stairs. ‘Yeah, but you’d be right.’
‘Really?’
‘All men are shits because all women have unrealistic standards. We all get called that at one time or another, no matter what we’re like. I would always assume that someone you thought was a shit would turn out to be a good bloke.’
‘Charming.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s how it is. I’m just being honest.’
‘And unpleasant.’ I looked sideways at him as we marched across the car park. ‘Seriously, what is it with you? Do I bring out the worst in you or something?’
‘You said it, not me.’
‘All right, that’s it.’ I stopped. ‘I am not getting into that car until we resolve this. You seem to have a massive problem with me, apparently because I’m younger than you and female. You haven’t stopped putting me down since we started working together and I’m not really sure why that is, but I am sure that if you’ll let me, I’ll prove I’m a good copper, first and foremost.’
‘You don’t have to prove anything to me, darling. I told you. You just have to look pretty and stay out of the way. Full marks on the first part, by the way. I like the new hairdo.’
‘Look, I don’t need protecting. I don’t need patronising. I can be just as useful to you as any other DC. And I am never going to react to your baiting by getting upset and storming off, so I suggest you just drop it.’
Derwent was leaning his elbows on the roof of the car, listening with a wry expression. ‘All right.’
‘All right what?’
‘All right, I’ll drop it. As far as I’m concerned, from now on you’re just one of the blokes.’
‘Does that mean I get to drive?’
He grinned. ‘Not in this lifetime.’
Well, I couldn’t expect miracles. I got into the passenger seat and hooked out the A–Z from the seat pocket behind me.
‘Where are we off to?’
‘No need for the map or sat nav. I can find my own way to Hampstead High Street from here.’
‘Ooh, swanky.’
‘The street is. Not so sure about the flat. It’s above a mobile phone shop, apparently. On the third floor.’
‘Let me guess. After never living on the ground floor, Derwent’s second rule of flat-renting is never live above retail premises.’
‘Got it in one.’ He pulled out of the car park. ‘You never know who’s going to move in there. You could end up above a sex shop.’
‘Yeah, in your dreams. Think how convenient that would be.’
‘You’ve got me wrong, darling. I don’t like kinks. Vanilla is good enough for me.’
‘Just as a matter of interest, is this the way you talk to other blokes?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, that explains a lot.’
‘Something tells me I’m not going to hear what your sexual preferences are.’
‘You’re so right.’ I judged it was time to move the conversation on. ‘I’m dying to know, though, what are your other flat-renting rules?’
‘Never move in with a new girlfriend. You just can’t be sure what they’re hiding.’
‘Rule four?’
‘Never let a new girlfriend move in with you. They’re harder to shift than rising damp.’
‘Rule five?’
‘Don’t move in with anyone you’ve been seeing for longer than six months.’
‘That doesn’t leave you much of a window.’
‘If you haven’t moved in by then, the only reason to do so is to demonstrate you’re capable of making a commitment. Next thing you know, you’re looking in jewellers’ windows, calculating how much of your salary you can spare while she’s pointing out the rings of her dreams. And all you wanted was to save money on the rent.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a slippery slope. Don’t start on it in the first place.’
‘You’re not married, are you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Live with anyone?’
‘Still looking for Miss Right.’
‘But you’re such a catch,’ I murmured.
‘I get plenty of pussy. I’m just picky, that’s all.’
‘You know, I think I’d rather go back to how things were.’ I put my hands over my ears. ‘Stop thinking of me as one of the blokes. I don’t want to hear another word about your love life. I’ve heard about as much as I can take.’
‘There’s no going back, Kerrigan. And I’m in a chatty mood.’
We couldn’t arrive in Hampstead soon enough as far as I was concerned. Mercifully, traffic was light, and once we found the address Derwent was all business.
‘Remember, they’ve been interviewed before. They’ll have some idea what to expect. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions out of left field. Shake them up a bit.’
‘Got it. What did the Brixton lot say about them?’
‘Not much. They were pretty cooperative, apparently. Smooth talkers, though. “Terrible to think something like that happened at ou
r event, if there’s any way we can help, blah, blah, blah.”’
He rang the buzzer and waited by the intercom. A disembodied voice said, ‘Yes?’
‘DI Derwent.’ The door clicked and Derwent pushed it open. ‘Very welcoming, I don’t think.’
‘They probably didn’t want you announcing your business in the middle of the High Street,’ I whispered, following him up the stairs. ‘Not everyone likes to advertise that they’ve got the police around.’
‘It’s probably on Twitter already.’
The third floor seemed an awfully long way and I was gasping like a freshly landed flounder by the time we reached it.
‘You need to work on your cardio,’ Derwent said, knocking on the door. ‘That’s terrible.’
‘I know.’ I was trying to get my breathing under some kind of control. It was warm in the stairwell and I was bitterly regretting not wearing a shirt, since I couldn’t exactly undo my jacket. Hi, I’m here to interview you about the murder of a teenager, and have you seen my norks?
I forgot all about that as soon as the door opened. It was as if everything had snapped into focus. I was there to do a job, and do it well, and that job was finding out what the man in front of me knew about the night Cheyenne Skinner met her killer. He was barefoot, wearing board shorts and a Superdry T-shirt that was tight on his chest and around his extremely well-developed biceps. He had light-brown curly hair that was long enough to spiral in corkscrews, and a surfer’s tan. It was all most unexpected considering we were in the middle of North London, and particularly considering I had been anticipating someone more like Chris Swain. The Brothers Grim were supposed to be Internet geeks – social-networking nerds, not athletes.
‘Come in. Welcome.’ His voice was deep.
Derwent strode into the hall, making up in self-confidence what he lacked in height, but it had to annoy him that he needed to tilt his head back to look up at the guy. ‘I’m DI Derwent, and this is DC Kerrigan. Which Bancroft are you?’
‘Lee.’ He stepped back so we could move into the living room of the flat, where another man was standing by the sofa, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. ‘This is Drew.’
They were strikingly similar, but as I came closer to Drew, I started to see the differences between them. He was a shade shorter and slighter than his brother, with a narrower jaw and a longer face. They had the same mouth and nose, but Drew’s eyes were set closer together. He looked friendly, though, and exactly as fit as his brother even if he wasn’t quite as massive; his arms were ropey with muscle. They had the same hair, too.
Derwent was rotating, admiring the room. ‘Which one of you lives here?’
‘Me.’ Lee was a man of few words, it seemed.
‘Not bad. You’ve got a nice view down the street. And it’s big, isn’t it?’ He looked around. ‘Two sofas and a dining table but it’s not cramped.’
‘That’s why I chose it.’ It was a brusque enough answer but not intended to be rude, I felt; he was just stating the facts.
‘Not everyone wants to live above a shop but there are compensations.’ Drew’s voice wasn’t as gravelly as his brother’s – a tenor rather than a bass – and he was more polished. I guessed that the ‘Smooth talker’ comment had referred to him and him alone.
‘I must remember that.’ Derwent sat down on one of the sofas without being invited to.
Lee turned to me. ‘Please. Take a seat.’
They waited until I had sat down beside Derwent before they sat too. It was a slightly old-fashioned courtesy, but I appreciated it nonetheless.
Derwent had adopted an off-hand tone, as if he was bored with the interview already. ‘I know you’ve already spoken to our colleagues, but this is a new investigation. The missing girl’s body has been found, so we are now treating it as murder.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Drew frowned. ‘That’s really terrible. Poor girl.’
‘Where was the body?’ Lee asked.
‘I’ll come to that.’ Derwent yawned. ‘Sorry. Late night.’
He hadn’t been sleepy in the car, and I happened to know for a fact that he had worked until the evening with Godley, so he hadn’t been out drinking. The tiredness was a trick to make them think he wasn’t really listening. He turned to me. ‘Do you want to start, Kerrigan?’
‘Sure. Of course.’ I smiled at the brothers but my mind was running away from the questions I wanted to ask in favour of second-guessing my boss. I knew enough about Derwent’s penchant for mind games to recognise that letting me take the lead was another way of reassuring the brothers. I was, after all, the junior officer. I was the younger one, the one who lacked experience, the one who was being allowed to try her luck on an interview that fundamentally didn’t need to be done. It was clever of him to make them think that. I just needed to quieten the nagging doubt at the back of my mind that he felt the same way himself.
I cleared my throat. ‘I’d just like to ask a few questions about you to begin with. Can I take your date of birth?’
‘The fourth of June, 1984. Lee’s is the ninth of November, 1982,’ Drew added with a wide white smile.
‘Do you both live here?’
‘No. I live in Archway.’ Drew raised his eyebrows. ‘Not as plush but I like it.’
‘I’m going to need your address.’ I passed him my notebook and he wrote it down. His handwriting was untidy, the letters lazily formed, and it sloped in both directions. The graphologists would probably make something of that; all it suggested to me was that he didn’t do a lot of writing by hand.
‘Have either of you ever been in trouble with the police? Any convictions?’
‘No. Nothing at all. We’ve been good.’
‘Not even a licensing offence? I hear you got done for not having one for the nightclub.’
Drew looked at his brother for a split-second, then laughed. ‘You know, we tried to cut a few corners with the admin. It didn’t work out too well. We were more interested in making it a really great event than in filling in forms and making applications to the council. Our mistake.’
‘Have you run that sort of pop-up nightclub before?’
‘No comment. I don’t want to get us in trouble again.’
‘Assume that we’re not interested in breaches of licensing law,’ Derwent drawled from beside me.
‘Okay, then. Not exactly the same. But we did run a speakeasy in a basement off Brick Lane for a week. The punters dressed up as prohibition-era lushes – suits and hats and seamed stockings, you know the thing – and we staged a raid every night for fun.’ Drew turned to his brother. ‘Hey, we could have saved money on hiring the actors if we’d known the police would have done it for free.’
Lee mustered a half-smile. He was more watchful than his brother, more wary, and I had a feeling he hadn’t been taken in by Derwent’s laidback approach. He was chewing on his thumbnail and when he took it out of his mouth to smile I saw that the nail was damaged, twisted and warped as if it wouldn’t grow properly.
‘What made you decide to run a pop-up nightclub in a derelict warehouse?’
‘It didn’t cost us anything to rent,’ Drew said candidly. ‘And clubs are easy. Loud music, booze, low lighting, enough of a dance space that people can get their groove on. You make it feel exclusive by having passwords and complicated directions and all that shit.’
‘People buy into exclusivity,’ Lee explained. I tried to control my sense of wonder that he was able to manage a full sentence with a verb and everything.
‘Nothing exclusive about a rat-infested pigeon graveyard that’s halfway to falling down, if you ask me.’
Lee looked at Derwent assessingly. ‘You’re not our target demographic. Too old.’
Drew cut in before Derwent could recover himself to respond. ‘We’re too old too. Don’t feel bad. We’re aiming at the student crowd, pushing up into the recently employed – nineteen to twenty-five, basically. They’ve got time on their hands and they want to find interesting ways
to entertain themselves. The ones who are working have money; the students make us look good by dressing up and really going for it. Everyone’s a winner.’
‘How did you find the warehouse?’
‘The Internet. There are a few websites about derelict buildings – everyone’s interested in something, am I right? It was featured on one as easily accessible, no security. We’re always looking for interesting spaces – new challenges. An industrial space was perfect for this party. We liked the contrast between the dereliction and the glamorous people. That’s where we got the theme. The Beautiful and the Damned. Everyone who came was supposed to be one or the other, but preferably both.’
‘F. Scott Fitzgerald,’ I said. ‘Have you read the book?’
‘No.’ Drew laughed. ‘Does that shock you? We’re not that thorough. Besides, there’s no need to read it if you’re just borrowing the title. I don’t think our night was what he had in mind when he wrote it.’
‘How much do you charge?’
‘Depends on the event. If it’s a big one, fifteen or twenty quid will cover it. The smaller ones, like the speakeasy – they were more expensive. Up to fifty quid but if you booked in a group of six you got a reserved table and a bottle of champagne thrown in. Those events cost a lot to set up. But it’s worth it, believe me. We don’t get complaints.’
‘How do you spread the word about your events?’
‘Email,’ Lee said.
‘May we have a copy of your mailing list?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s commercially sensitive.’ Drew sounded genuinely sad not to be able to help and I had to remind myself that he was bullshitting us.
‘Do you really think the Met police are planning to go into event management for teenagers?’ Derwent snorted. ‘Do me a favour. Give us the fucking list, Drew, and stop pretending you can’t.’
Another glance passed between Drew and his brother before he sighed. ‘Right. We’ll let you have it. But you must promise to keep it out of the public domain.’
