by Jane Casey
‘How did I know that would get your attention?’ I held up a bra: Italian, lacy, insubstantial as cobwebs. ‘That’s not for wearing. That’s for taking off.’
‘Naughty Kate.’
‘Single Kate. She must have been young when she had Chloe.’ I stopped to do the sums. ‘Twenty-four. Maybe she felt she had some catching up to do after her divorce.’
The drawers lower down had T-shirts and jumpers arranged by colour, rolled rather than stacked, organised as precisely as if she’d known they’d be scrutinised by strangers. I checked there was nothing caught in the folds or underneath the clothes or even under the drawer liners. Then I took out each drawer and checked underneath it, and along the sides and back.
‘Think she was hiding something?’
‘You never know.’
I carried on searching, checking between layers of clothes, looking in every box, every container, patting down the clothes on hangers to check there was nothing in the pockets. There was no way to know what I was looking for until I found it. I had searched chaotic and dirty houses, derelict buildings, squats and sheds: this was at least clean. But it was also frustratingly normal.
Right at the back of the wardrobe, though, there was something that gave me pause: a plastic bag folded over. I opened it and sat back on my heels. ‘God.’
Derwent was tipping the contents of the bin into an evidence bag. He glanced up, distracted, and half of it fell onto the floor. ‘For shit’s sake.’
‘Come and look at this,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Clothes.’ I was holding the bag at arm’s length, the back of one gloved hand to my mouth.
He came over and peered into the bag, then recoiled. ‘Fuck. That stinks.’
It was a strong and brackish smell, like unwashed exercise kit or dirty bed sheets.
I squeezed the bag, shuffling the clothes around inside it without touching them. ‘Looks to be a top, skirt, bra, knickers. A whole outfit.’
‘A whole outfit that she couldn’t be bothered to wash?’
‘Or she had some reason for keeping it like that.’ I offered him the bag. ‘I don’t want to take them out in case we lose trace evidence, but look at her underwear.’
He leaned over. ‘Ripped.’
‘Badly.’ I closed the bag again carefully. ‘Why would you leave a bag of unwashed, torn clothes in your otherwise immaculate wardrobe?’
Derwent looked down at me, his face grave, but he didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t have to. ‘Bag it up.’
I edged the bag into a brown paper sack. It might be connected with what had happened in the house and it might not, but I wanted to know whose DNA was on the clothes and how it had got there.
Derwent retrieved the scraps of cotton wool and other rubbish that had tumbled away from him. I pointed out a stray button and a needle that was silvery invisible in the pile of the carpet. The more we took now, the less chance there was that we’d miss something important, but clogging up the lab with irrelevant material was not going to make us popular.
Derwent headed to the study while I dealt with the en-suite bathroom. It was clinically clean. The SOCOs had been here too but the dusting of fingerprint powder had caught only smudges and the wide swinging arc of a cloth used to polish glass. The air smelled of bleach and something else, more acrid. I bent over the sink and inhaled gingerly: definitely stronger. Drain cleaner, used for legitimate drain-cleaning purposes rather than destroying evidence. The bathroom cabinet was so well organised that I could see at a glance there was nothing of interest in it. One container held spare razor blades with plain black casings, not the pastel colours of women’s toiletries. Which meant nothing, I decided. There was no other sign of a man having lived in the house. Kate herself could just as easily have used the blades. Similarly, the stack of unused toothbrushes still in their packets didn’t mean she had frequent visitors, despite what Oliver Norris had suggested. She was the sort of person who stockpiled essentials like toothbrushes. There was a basket under the sink filled with rolls of toilet paper, and I’d found at least two of everything in the bathroom cabinet. Everything spoke of planning, care, preparation, organisation. It didn’t suggest chaos, terror, impending disaster. It didn’t make me think she had fled in a hurry after killing someone downstairs.
It didn’t make me think she had left at all. At least, not by choice.
‘What have you got?’ I stood in the doorway of the study, mainly because it was very much a one-person space. The computer was gone from the desktop, leaving a labelled void behind, and some of the files and folders were missing from the shelves, the spaces tagged to show that it was the police who’d removed them. Otherwise it was the same as the rest of the house – organised and orderly.
‘Nothing.’ Derwent didn’t bother to look up from the filing cabinet he was flicking through. ‘But Liv’s got the good stuff already.’
‘Is there anything about her daughter?’
‘A fuck of a lot of correspondence with the local educational authority.’ He was skim-reading it. ‘This goes back a long way. She had a fight to get Chloe educated around here. She wanted her to stay in mainstream education and the local council didn’t want to have to pay for the extra learning support.’
‘What’s does it say about Chloe?’ I was curious about her. She had been distant but lucid when I spoke to her. And shock could do that to you.
‘Speech delay. Developmental delay. Attention deficit disorder. Anxiety. Oppositional defiant disorder.’ Derwent snorted. ‘That just means you don’t like doing what you’re told.’
‘What else does it say?’
‘Depends who you ask. According to the Council, she was fine. According to her mother and the educational psychologists she consulted, Chloe needed a full-time classroom assistant to help her, extra tuition, extra time for tests …’ Derwent sighed. ‘Makes you realise how lucky you are if your kid is normal.’
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to say normal any more. There’s no such thing.’
‘Bullshit.’ He pushed past me and disappeared into the bathroom.
I listened to him rooting through the cupboards even though I’d already searched there. ‘Did you find a passport?’
‘In a drawer.’
‘Cash?’
‘Nothing significant.’
‘Jewellery?’
‘No. But she’s not wearing much in the pictures I’ve seen of her.’ Derwent reappeared. ‘Anyway, do you see this as a burglary?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Come and look at this.’ He led me back into the bedroom and opened the French windows. A waist-high railing ran across the space. It was dark now, the lights on in the houses all around. The rain had stopped for the time being but the air was sweet with it and night scents rose up from the gardens that stretched as far as I could see. The trees were plumy with leaves and from where I stood the gardens blended into one enormous space framed with houses, the walls and fences invisible.
‘We need to ask the neighbours if they saw anything.’ I had a perfect view across to the houses behind, to the domestic dramas playing out in brightly lit windows. Life going on, as it tended to.
‘Especially at the back. We think she went out the back door,’ Derwent said. ‘The dog took us to the back fence, through a gate and along an alley that runs between the gardens. We went left. We got one … two … three gardens along – that house.’ He pointed. ‘Twenty-two Constantine Avenue, if you were wondering. We took the dog into the garden and it got excited about the fox shit. And then … nothing.’
‘Who lives in that house?’ It stood out because the lights were off.
‘It’s unoccupied. The neighbours said the owner is in a nursing home. I had a look at the doors and windows, but it looked secure.’
‘Access to the front of the house?’
‘There’s a gate. You could climb it.’
‘Even me? It must be easy. But could you get a body over it?’
&
nbsp; ‘Very possibly. And if you didn’t want to, you could pick the lock in about ten seconds.’
‘Did the dog seem to think someone had done that?’
Derwent shrugged. ‘The dog had lost interest by then.’
‘But our killer could have parked in front of the unoccupied house and taken the body away in his car.’
‘He could indeed.’
‘It seems like a lot of trouble, though. If you want to move the body, why not take it out the front door?’
‘With all the neighbours watching?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘What you don’t know about that house is that there’s a front garden.’
‘Is there?’
‘With a high hedge.’
‘Now you’re making more sense.’
‘So it’s worth dragging a dead weight all the way over there if you know the area.’
‘If you do,’ I said. ‘You’d have to know it was unoccupied, though, and about the gate. You’d have to be local.’
‘Mm.’ Derwent stared out at the houses across the way where the silent scenes played out, as unreal as television. ‘I might not know where to find Kate Emery’s body but I do have some idea where to start looking for her killer.’
6
Monday mornings are the same the world over, no matter the job or the city. It was a pale and bleary-eyed group of detectives who gathered in the meeting room for an early briefing about the Putney crime scene. I’d seen Una Burt outside the room, pacing up and down, eager to get started. I wished I could feel as keen. I tried not to yawn, my jaws quivering as I fought it back. Georgia Shaw was sitting near the front of the room in a grey trouser suit, silver Tiffany heart earrings, her fair hair sleekly groomed.
I would not allow myself to glower at her. I was better than that.
‘Hi.’ Liv Bowen slid into the seat beside me, immaculate in black, her hair folded into a complicated knot at the back of her head. She was a detective constable and a good one, and she was my friend. I felt myself relax.
‘Hi, yourself.’
‘You look knackered. What time did you leave the scene?’
‘Getting on for one.’ And then I’d gone back to my empty flat. I hadn’t gone to bed straight away. I’d stopped for long enough to eat a bowl of cereal while I watched the news headlines. That already represented something like a victory. One: I had bought cereal. Two: I owned milk that hadn’t gone off. Three: I’d remembered to eat them. I sensed that Liv would be underwhelmed, so I didn’t bother to tell her about it. She lived in domestic harmony with her girlfriend in a pretty little house near Guildford and she had long since despaired of my sketchy home life. I also didn’t tell her how I’d wandered through my flat looking at all the tidy rooms where nothing had moved since the cleaner left two days before. The tracks of the vacuum cleaner were still visible in the carpet. You spent a few hours judging someone else for how they lived and it gave you perspective on your own life, whether you wanted it or not.
The investigation had been on the news, but the details remained under wraps. The media only knew it was a murder investigation. The report was heavy on footage of police officers searching the area in the rain, lifting drain covers, poking bushes with sticks. I had been on screen for a split second. The camera had lingered on Georgia’s fair hair.
I could get to like working with Georgia if she took some of the unwanted attention off me.
‘How did you get on?’ I asked Liv.
‘Bits and pieces. Background stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing you could call an obvious motive to kill Kate Emery.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘I thought so.’
Derwent took the seat in front of me with a sigh. He barely nodded hello, which didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a morning person.
He wasn’t an afternoon or evening person either.
‘Right.’ Una Burt marched in and put her folder down on the desk. ‘We’re here to talk about Kate Emery. She’s a forty-two-year-old mother of one, who lived at Valerian Road in Putney with her daughter, Chloe Emery. Chloe is eighteen. She was staying with her father and his family for the last few days. She left London on Wednesday and returned yesterday afternoon. Five days.’ She looked around the room meaningfully. ‘When Chloe left, everything was normal. When she returned, the house was covered in blood and her mother was gone. We need to know what happened to Kate Emery in those five days, and we need to know where she is now. Who wants to start?’
‘I can fill in some of her background,’ Liv volunteered.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Kate Emery has lived at that address for twelve years. She moved there after her divorce from Brian Emery, Chloe’s father. She had custody of Chloe, who went to the local state schools.’
‘Mainstream education?’ Burt checked.
‘Yes, although with support. Chloe has some educational disabilities,’ Liv explained to the rest of the room. ‘Kate was a stay-at-home mother for the majority of the last twelve years. She started her own business four years ago. It’s called Novo Gaudio Imports. She was importing traditional herbal supplements for childless couples to boost their fertility.’
‘Did she have a medical background?’ Burt asked.
‘She was a nurse before her marriage. She’d let her registration lapse so she was no longer allowed to practise. The imports were classified as dietary supplements rather than medical ones so she was able to supply them legally.’
‘And did they work?’ Burt asked.
‘Lots of grateful customers left feedback on her website. I don’t know how many of them were real,’ Liv said. ‘Many of them seemed very similar in tone, but then there probably isn’t that much to say about getting pregnant. At least, there are probably lots of things to say about it, but not on a website selling fertility drugs.’
I made a note of it all the same. Unsatisfied customer? I was still at the stage of being grateful every month for the definitive proof that I wasn’t pregnant, but I could understand something of the terrible hunger for a child. I’d seen it in others and I feared it. There wasn’t much I could do about it when I was single and likely to remain so.
‘How was the business doing?’ The question came from Colin Vale. I could see he was straining to get at the papers, to scrutinise the accounts. I might have felt guilty that he always got landed with every boring, repetitive task involving hours of paperwork or scouring CCTV, but it made him happy.
‘I can’t say for sure because I don’t have this year’s accounts and the computer guys haven’t analysed her PC yet,’ Liv said. ‘I have the impression it wasn’t doing as well as she’d hoped. She had a lot of stock in her house. Her initial sales were good but they had tapered off over time – the profits for last year are a long way down on the previous year. I looked up the company name and found a pretty damning thread on an infertility message board – Don’t use these, they’re rubbish, waste of money, that kind of thing. There were multiple users complaining about the lack of results and quite a lot of responses were from people saying they wouldn’t try them as a result. Kate actually posted a message asking for the customers to apply to her for a refund, but she said she would only pay up if the thread was deleted. That did not go down well at all, as you can imagine. Then there were a few messages in defence of the Novo Gaudio products. Again, they read very much like the positive comments from the website and the users were pretty sceptical about them. The accounts have all been suspended for “abuse of the website’s terms and conditions”.’ Liv looked up and smiled. ‘That means they were fakes. Sock puppets, they call them. Kate got caught out lying about her products.’
‘So she was struggling to make ends meet,’ Burt said.
‘Well, no. Not really. Her current account was in credit. She had a small savings account – I think she invested a lot in the business but there was a tiny bit of cash left over.’ Liv leafed through the documents in front of her. ‘She was getting something like three grand every month from a personal bank ac
count. I haven’t traced it back yet but that could be Chloe’s dad.’
‘Chloe’s eighteen,’ I said. ‘Would he still have been paying to support her?’
‘Worth asking.’ Burt nodded to me. ‘Get the address from me after the briefing. You can talk to him.’
I nodded. ‘I was going to ask if I could. Chloe came home early from her visit and I’d like to know why. She wouldn’t tell me.’
‘Or couldn’t,’ Georgia said. ‘She seemed quite intimidated.’
Intimidated? I knew exactly what Georgia was implying and so did the rest of the room. She didn’t look in my direction, and it took a practised back-stabber to slide the knife in without checking for a reaction.
‘I think it’s far more likely she was in shock,’ Una Burt said, coming to my rescue, much to my surprise. ‘Maeve is only ever intimidating when she means to be.’
‘How was Kate paying the mortgage?’ Pete Belcott asked. I didn’t like Belcott but I recognised that he was a good police officer when he could be bothered and on this occasion he’d asked precisely the right question.
‘She wasn’t paying a mortgage,’ Liv said. ‘I haven’t found any payments to a bank or mortgage company. Which is why I’d say she wasn’t in desperate need of cash. She could easily have borrowed against the value of the house, even to shore up her business.’
‘Did she have any other payments into her current account?’ I asked.
‘Nothing significant. Refunds for things she bought and returned. A transfer from the savings account, for a few hundred pounds.’ Liv shrugged. ‘What were you looking for?’
‘Another source of income. One of the neighbours mentioned that she had a lot of gentlemen callers when her daughter was away. I was wondering if it was professional or strictly amateur.’
‘If she was on the game she might have been cash only. A lot of them are. They’re not the kind of people who file detailed tax returns.’ Belcott looked around the room. ‘I mean, that’s what I hear.’
Chris Pettifer snorted at that, but it was a pale imitation of his usual mockery. He’d aged ten years in the last few months. He hadn’t been the same since we’d lost a team member. Maybe he blamed himself.
