by Jane Casey
He barrelled past me and down the hall. I let him go, addressing the three who remained outside the door.
‘Thanks for coming. I’m Maeve Kerrigan – I work with Superintendent Godley.’
‘Nice to meet you.’ The speaker was lugubrious, sallow and in his mid-forties. ‘DI Carl Groves. This is DS Burns. Frank by name and nature,’ he added.
The sergeant waved a gloved hand at me instead of shaking mine. ‘Thanks for laughing at the boss’s little joke. I did too, the first thousand times I heard it.’
I grinned at the pair of them. They were a double act – one fat, one thin, around the same age, old in their very souls and as cynical as murder detectives are supposed to be. The third man introduced himself as James Peake, a detective from the East End where Andy Bradbury worked and where Maxine Willoughby had died. He was about my age, a big handsome redhead.
‘Did you want to speak to Superintendent Godley first, or …’
‘Probably more use to have a look round, isn’t it?’ Groves said. ‘That’s why we’re meeting here, after all.’
I agreed with Groves. Only Bradbury, it seemed, had missed the point.
They were quiet as soon as they entered the flat, taking in everything it could tell us about poor Anna and her aspirations. DI Burt appeared in the kitchen, dispatched by Godley, and there was another round of introductions.
‘Are you seeing similarities?’ she demanded, and all three nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
‘Same type of victim, definitely.’ Burns lifted a fold of curtain material and weighed it. ‘Better off than Kirsty, I’d say.’
‘Didn’t she live in Blackheath?’ I had noticed it in the Standard article because it was a nice part of south-east London, close to the river at Greenwich and rich in green open spaces. It was on my list if I ever managed to save enough money for a deposit for a place of my own, assuming – as I tended to – that I was buying it alone, Rob having gone the way of all men. It was emphatically not the sort of place where you expected to be strangled in your bed.
‘It was Blackheath in estate-agent speak. It was more like Lewisham.’
‘Lewisham’s all right,’ Groves said. ‘What’s wrong with Lewisham?’
‘Where do I start?’ Burns rolled his eyes. They’d be doing a music-hall number next. Una Burt could see the warning signs as well as I could and cut in.
‘What about Maxine Willoughby? Where did she live?’
‘She had a one-bed flat in Whitechapel,’ Peake said. ‘This place is a big step up from what she could afford.’
‘Anna was in HR in the City,’ I said. ‘I’d imagine she was earning a fair bit.’
‘Living simply, though,’ Una Burt said. ‘Quietly.’
‘Not attracting attention to herself,’ I agreed.
‘Whether she wanted attention or not, she attracted the wrong kind,’ Groves said.
‘The worst.’ Burt looked around. ‘Shouldn’t DI Bradbury be in here too? I thought he was following me. Where’s he got to?’
‘Have a look in the superintendent’s arse,’ Peake suggested, very quietly, so that only I could hear, and I smothered a laugh, converting it into a cough that made everyone stare at me. To do something worthy of everyone’s attention since it was on me anyway, I asked about the vase. Kev Cox had made sure it was removed since Godley and I had noticed it, but I described it.
‘Did you have anything like this in either of the other flats?’
‘Flowers, yeah.’ Groves’s face was twisted in thought. ‘Don’t know if we ever worked out where they came from.’
Peake was flicking back through a folder of photos he’d been carrying under one arm: pictures from Maxine’s flat. I looked over his shoulder, seeing rooms that were neat but IKEA-unimaginative, and all painted the same shade of cream.
‘There. On the draining board.’ I put out a hand to stop him as he flipped past the kitchen. ‘That’s a vase, isn’t it?’
It was turned upside down, as if it had been washed out.
‘Do you think he left it like that?’
‘Could be. He definitely cleaned up after he’d finished with Maxine. He wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He even vacuumed the place, we think, and took the bag away with him. He must have been feeling very confident. If there was more noise here – didn’t you say a neighbour called 999? – maybe he didn’t feel it was worth his while to tidy up after himself.’
‘You could be right.’
Groves and Burns were conferring in low tones, and concluded that there might have been a vase. They couldn’t remember.
‘What’s your theory?’ Peake asked.
I squirmed. ‘I don’t really have one yet. Maybe he delivers them and that’s how he gets to check out the victims and their homes. Or maybe he brings them flowers to get them to trust him.’
‘Well, he must be fucking charming is all I can say. They let him in. They don’t fight back.’ Groves shook his head. ‘Maybe he buys them chocolates too.’
‘And offers to fix a few things around the house,’ Burns suggested. ‘And tells them he hates football.’
‘But he loves shopping.’ Peake was grinning.
Burt looked as entertained as I was, which is to say not very. Poor silly women, pinning their hopes on Prince Charming, trusting the wrong man. ‘I hate to interrupt, but I think we’d better move on. Dr Hanshaw is going to want to move the body, so if you want to see it in position …’
The three of them fell into line and we toured the rest of the flat, including the small bathroom, now SOCO-free, where I noticed the shower curtain was decorated with tiny yellow ducks. It was the kind of detail that reminded me why we were there. The person who had chosen it and hung it up and looked at it every morning was now stiff and dead and lying exposed to anyone’s view in her own bedroom, because someone else had decided she should be.
The bedroom itself was getting crowded and I hung back, watching Caitriona extract herself from the room with the urgency and purpose of a cross wasp fighting its way out of a bottle. Glenn Hanshaw had finished and Godley was listening, patiently, to Andy Bradshaw’s self-important account of the Maxine Willoughby crime scene and how it had been different.
‘I thought we’d discuss this at the local police station. I’ve asked them to let us have a room,’ he said when he could get a word in. ‘We need to see your crime-scene photos. And I’d like everyone to hear what you have to say, not just me.’
‘Of course.’ Bradshaw sounded as if that was only natural, not appreciating perhaps that it was meant to apply to everyone.
‘Then, Kev, I think we’re finished here. Can you let them know they can take the body?’
Kev nodded cheerfully. ‘We’ll finish up.’
As I followed the others out of Anna Melville’s flat I felt bleak. Someone would come and tidy it up, once we’d taken all of the evidence we required. Someone would decide to throw out or sell or keep the things Anna had chosen. The flat would be sold to a buyer who wasn’t squeamish or didn’t know what had happened there. Someone would take Anna’s job. She had no children to mourn her. She had been an only child and her parents were dead: the next-of-kin contact we had been given for her was a godmother who hadn’t seen her for five or six years. Anna’s life would be undone and she would be gone.
It just didn’t seem fair.
Chapter 8
The room at the local police station was on the small side but it had a projector and, importantly, blinds to cover the windows and the glass in the door. It would be a very bad idea indeed to let anyone else see or hear what we were discussing. We sat around the table like well-behaved children at a party. The heating was on full and the room was stuffy even before we’d begun. I started to undo the buttons on my jacket but changed my mind halfway through, when I noticed Peake looking at me with a little bit too much interest. I would have to swelter.
‘Right. I think it would be useful to go through what we know from the beginning,’ Godley said,
taking charge. ‘Carl?’
Groves flipped open the file in front of him. ‘Kirsty Campbell. Lovely girl. She was twenty-eight. Broke up with her fiancé a few months before she died but it was because they’d grown apart, not because he was cheating or she was or anything of that sort. We considered him as a suspect, obviously, but he had an alibi and a new girlfriend and he wasn’t the type to do something like that.’
Burns was nodding. ‘Stephen Reeves, his name was. We interviewed him twice, just to make sure. Never got a bad feeling from him. Honest and straight down the line.’
‘What about Kirsty? Had she found anyone else?’ Burt asked.
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? We asked, believe me. Some friends said yes, others not. She’d said she didn’t want to date for a while – she was hurt that the ex had moved on as quickly as he did. She broke up with him, but it seemed like it was worse for her than for him.’
‘Biological clock ticking,’ Burns said wisely.
His boss carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘According to her colleagues, she cried at work sometimes.’
‘Which was where?’ Godley asked.
‘Westminster Council. She was a planning officer.’
Being a planning officer meant she had to see people face to face. ‘Did you manage to trace all of the applicants she’d been dealing with at work?’ I asked.
‘We went back twelve months,’ Burns replied. ‘Didn’t find anyone with a grudge against her, or anyone who acted weird when her name was mentioned. A few had criminal records, but for fighting and fraud, not stalking or anything sexual. We did follow them up.’
Godley smiled. ‘No one is suggesting that you missed anything, Frank. I want to make that clear to you too, Andy. This isn’t about going over old cases to see what you didn’t do. It’s about finding common ground for the victims.’
‘What was Kirsty like as a person?’ I asked.
‘Gentle. Soft-spoken,’ Groves said. ‘She was from Edinburgh originally. Not a strong accent, though. One of her colleagues said she had the most beautiful speaking voice he’d ever heard.’
‘Bit of an odd remark,’ Bradbury said.
‘Do you think so?’ Groves’s face wrinkled as he thought about it. ‘He was an older man, her boss. Married. Nothing dodgy going on with her. And I think he was actually out of the country when she died.’
We had so little to go on, we were chasing the slightest hint of a lead. Godley drew Groves back to the point. ‘Was she popular at work?’
‘Very. No one had a bad word to say about her. She was very attractive.’ Groves held up a picture of her, not one I’d seen before, and proved his point. The main impression was of tumbling red hair and a smile that was shy but endearing. ‘She worked hard. She volunteered for a charity that works with inner-city kids on improving their reading.’
‘And we traced everyone else who was involved with it, and the teachers she met, and the parents of the kids she worked with,’ Burns added.
‘Her parents said she was always a credit to them. Very stable background. We spoke to all her ex-boyfriends and there weren’t that many of them. They all said the same thing: gentle, fair-minded, a perfectionist. Much harder on herself than anyone else.’
‘Any history of depression or mental health issues?’ I asked.
‘Why do you ask, Maeve?’ Godley said.
‘Being a perfectionist, crying at work, being hard on herself – that all sounds as if she was quite fragile. She broke up with her fiancé, but then she took it harder than him. Maybe she thought she wasn’t good enough for him.’ I wonder how that feels.
‘That’s what her mum said,’ Groves agreed.
‘They were planning to get married and then suddenly they weren’t. That changed how her life was going to be, completely. Maybe she needed counselling. Or a support group,’ I suggested.
‘She wouldn’t necessarily have told anyone she was doing that kind of thing,’ Peake said. ‘She might have hidden it.’
‘We didn’t think of that,’ Groves said.
‘Look into it,’ Godley said to me. ‘Check out the area near to her home. Local churches and the library.’
‘Can we look at the pictures from her flat?’ Una Burt asked.
Burns got up and fiddled with his laptop, which he had linked to the projector. ‘I hope this thing works.’
‘It was easier in the old days,’ Grove said. ‘When we were young. Stick some pictures up on the wall and no one had to worry about technology. I’ve yet to see anything that’s actually improved by computers.’
The screen flickered and a desktop appeared. We watched as Burns slowly, painfully tracked the cursor across to the folder of pictures on the desktop. He was breathing heavily, concentrating as if he was doing something exceptionally difficult. There was a universal sigh of relief when he succeeded in double-clicking it.
‘Ground-floor flat in a purpose-built block,’ Groves said, as the first picture in the slideshow appeared. ‘She’d lived there for six months.’
‘Since the break-up?’ Burt asked.
‘Exactly.’
The block was red brick and rather nice, with grey-framed windows and some low shrubs around it.
‘Communal hallway. The front door was supposed to be locked, but the lock wasn’t working.’
‘Suspicious,’ Peake commented.
‘Yeah, it was. The contacts were damaged so it didn’t engage the magnetic lock when the door was closed. It broke a couple of days before the murder. The managing agent had been told, but they hadn’t actually done anything about getting it fixed. Wasn’t the first time it had gone wrong, so no one was too bothered. Each flat has a front door and they weren’t allowed to keep personal belongings or bikes in the stairwells anyway.’
‘How big is the building? How many other residents were there?’
‘There were six flats, nine other residents. All checked out. No one heard anything. No one made it on to the suspects’ list.’
The image on screen was a front door, green-painted but inlaid with frosted glass. ‘This is Kirsty’s.’
‘CCTV?’ Bradbury asked.
‘No.’
‘Shame.’
‘Yeah, it was.’ Groves waited for the next image, a closeup of the door locks. ‘No damage here. No damage to any of the windows.’
‘She let him in.’ Godley sounded grim.
‘Indeed she did.’
‘Do we know where she’d been the evening before she died?’ I asked. ‘What day of the week was it?’
‘A Friday. She went for a drink after work with a colleague who was celebrating her birthday. Didn’t stay long, apparently. Wasn’t drunk. Got the train back. We have her on CCTV walking through the station and later passing her local pub. No one seems to be following, for what it’s worth.’
A living room. Bookshelves. A huge collection of DVDs and maybe twenty novels.
‘Was she in a book club?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know.’ Groves looked at Burns, who shrugged.
‘Try and find out, Maeve,’ Godley ordered. ‘What else did she do?’
‘Went to the gym – one in Blackheath. She didn’t have a car, so she walked everywhere. She’d joined a knitting group, believe it or not, in a local pub, but she’d only been to a couple of sessions and no one really remembered much about her.’
‘Knitting?’ Peake rolled his eyes.
‘It’s very trendy, apparently,’ I told him.
‘Not the sort of thing you do if you want to meet blokes.’
‘I thought we’d established she didn’t.’
‘Settle down, you two,’ Bradbury said. ‘She liked knitting.’
‘Didn’t travel much,’ Burns said. ‘She went to Edinburgh to see her folks when she had time off. Liked baking.’ The picture on screen was the kitchen, a bland pine one accessorised with red tea towels, a red teapot and red storage jars.
‘Anna was very feminine too,’ I observed.
&nbs
p; ‘That plays into them doing what they’re told,’ Una Burt said. ‘Used to taking orders from men.’
The next picture was the bedroom door, left ajar, a glimpse of the bed beyond offering a clue to the horror that was the reason for our knowing anything at all about Kirsty. There was a vacuum cleaner on the floor outside the door, tipped over, and a bucket with cleaning products in it.
‘It was her cleaner that found her. She was actually one of the other residents in the block who was looking for a bit of cash because she was a single mum and Christmas had cost a lot. Kirsty got her to do her ironing and cleaning. Bit of charity, I reckon. She said the place was always spotless.’
‘Had she cleaned the rest of the place before she got to the bedroom?’ Godley checked.
‘Yeah.’
There was a groan around the room and Groves nodded. ‘We didn’t have much luck with this one. We got nothing on the forensics, even in the bedroom itself. What she didn’t clean, the killer did.’
‘And on the body?’
‘Nothing. He didn’t have sex with her, either with a condom or without, with permission or without. He only touched her to kill her.’
The next few pictures were of the bedroom and the body, both from a distance and in close-up. Her bedclothes had been blue, but he had piled them in the corner of the room and spread a white sheet on the mattress. She wore white too, something that looked like a sundress, with ties on the shoulders and a tiered, mid-calf skirt. Her head had been roughly cropped, as in Anna’s case. It was pillowed on roses, white ones, the petals splayed and the leaves brown at the tips.
‘Those flowers aren’t fresh,’ I observed. ‘Do we know where they came from?’
‘No. It was the thirtieth of January and all the florists were on a post-Christmas comedown. They’d have remembered someone buying roses, but no one did.’
‘Where did he leave her hair?’ Burt asked.
‘In the bin in the kitchen. In a bag. Neat, like.’ DS Burns sounded sour.
Her injuries were very similar to Anna’s. I asked Bradbury, ‘How does this compare to how Maxine was found?’
‘She was dead too.’
