Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  I knew he blamed me.

  ‘We didn’t find much cash when we searched the house,’ Derwent said. ‘No safe. Nothing in the teapot, even.’

  Burt’s attention swung around to Derwent, and it was like seeing an artillery piece wheeling into position. ‘Yes, tell us about what you found out.’

  Derwent cleared his throat. ‘Um. We searched the property—’

  Burt interrupted. ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘Me and Kerrigan.’

  ‘What about the dog?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That was before. It didn’t find much, to be honest with you.’

  I resisted the urge to kick the back of his chair. Get it together. You’re making both of us look bad.

  As if he’d heard me, he sat up straighter. ‘If you have a map of the area, I can show everyone the route the dog picked out.’

  Of course Una Burt had a map of the area – a satellite photograph of it, in fact, and it was on her laptop so it could be projected on the wall behind her. Derwent got out of his chair and sloped up to the front of the room, the picture of a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework properly. As he’d done the previous evening, he described where the dog had alerted and why it was possibly significant.

  ‘What do we know about the owner of this property?’ Una Burt tapped the house three gardens over.

  ‘He’s a pensioner. His name is Harold Lowe and he’s been in a nursing home for a few months according to the neighbour. I don’t know of any connection between him and Kate Emery.’

  ‘Is the house obviously unoccupied?’

  ‘Yes,’ Derwent said slowly, thinking about it. ‘But the house is in pretty good condition and the garden is fairly neat. The neighbour I spoke to still cuts the grass for him and trims the hedges. He has a key to the gate but it’s not a very secure lock.’

  ‘Any CCTV nearby?’

  ‘Not that I saw. It’s a nice residential road. No one that I spoke to saw anything out of the ordinary but I’d like to go back there and try again when we get a better idea of when all of this took place. It’s hard to pin people down when you’re asking about a five-day period.’

  ‘We can narrow that down a bit,’ I said from the back of the room. ‘The last sighting of Kate Emery that I’ve heard about was Oliver Norris, the neighbour who was with Chloe when she discovered the crime scene. He told me he saw her on Friday evening. The only other sighting I heard about was Norris’s wife, and she saw Kate on Wednesday night.’

  There was a ripple of interest around the room. Norris was just a little too involved to be believed without question.

  ‘Did anyone else see her on Friday?’ Burt asked.

  ‘Not as far as I know.’ I waited but there was nothing from the front of the room. ‘Georgia, did you find any neighbours who remembered seeing Kate?’

  ‘Oh – no. No, I didn’t. They couldn’t remember. No one noticed anything strange.’ It sounded weak and she knew it. ‘I didn’t really get to talk to that many people. DS Kerrigan sent me home.’

  ‘It was getting late.’ I was doing you a favour, you stupid bint. ‘We’ll go out again today and see if we can get any corroboration of Norris’s story.’

  ‘All right. I don’t want to assume anything at this stage.’ Burt frowned. ‘I’m not sure how Friday fits in with what we know about the cat. But then, I don’t know how much the cat … er …’

  ‘Shits?’ Derwent suggested, sitting down again.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘The other thing we found that might help us narrow down when she disappeared,’ I said hastily, ‘was a receipt in the kitchen bin. Someone went shopping on Thursday and bought a lot of food.’

  ‘A week’s worth for a normal person,’ Derwent said with a glint in his eye. I ignored him.

  ‘It was all put away but not eaten. There were no wrappers in the bin – nothing to say she’d used anything she bought.’

  ‘That’ll be a time-stamped receipt,’ Colin Vale said happily. ‘I can check the CCTV from the supermarket. Make sure it really was her who went shopping. See if she was alone. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Good idea. We’re getting a list of transactions from her bank, aren’t we? Try and find her on the CCTV in every shop that would have it. I want to see her and I want to see if anyone was with her, or following her,’ Burt said. ‘I want to know if she looked tense or if she was the same as ever. I want to know if there was anything strange about the last twenty-four hours before she disappeared.’

  ‘Did you find anything else in the house?’ Colin Vale asked. ‘A passport? Bank cards?’

  ‘We found her passport and her wallet,’ I said. It had been in the kitchen, on top of the microwave, complete with her bank cards and gym membership and supermarket loyalty cards. ‘No mobile phone, though we’ve asked her service provider to let us know if it’s in use. No keys.’

  ‘You’d want the keys,’ Derwent observed, ‘so you could shut the front door without making a big noise and drawing attention to yourself. If you’d killed her, I mean.’

  ‘The more I hear the more I think we’re right to treat it as murder,’ Una Burt said gravely. ‘What else did you find that might be of interest?’

  ‘A bag of dirty clothes,’ I said.

  ‘I know Kerrigan’s not exactly domesticated, but I didn’t think she’d get excited about laundry.’ It was a whisper, but a loud one, and it came from Pete Belcott.

  ‘It wasn’t laundry.’ It was Belcott’s habit to be rude to me but I absolutely refused to let him ruffle my feathers, especially when I was senior to him now. I described where I’d found the clothes and the condition they had been in. Una Burt’s eyebrows were raised.

  ‘Sexual assault?’

  ‘Potentially. I think we have to be careful about it, though. She might have kept them as a souvenir of a particularly – er – passionate encounter.’ I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as everyone in the room turned to look at me, with the exception of Derwent. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t. But you never know.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Burt made a note. ‘But it’s of interest.’

  ‘Even if she was raped,’ Chris Pettifer said, ‘it doesn’t get us all that much closer to a killer, does it? If she killed him, that would be something else.’

  Burt checked her watch. ‘I’m waiting to hear back from the forensic team about the blood. Keep working on the basis that Kate is the victim for the time being. We need motives and suspects and we’re already a few days behind the killer. I can’t waste any more time.’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘There’s no obvious reason for anyone to want to kill her. Everything we’ve found out so far points to her being a person who minded her own business, who worked hard, who was determined but slightly unscrupulous and maybe a little unwise, but it doesn’t add up to a motive.’

  ‘There’s the ex-husband,’ Derwent said.

  ‘Yes, but why kill her now? They divorced over a decade ago. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘She was a bit lively in her personal life,’ Georgia Shaw said.

  ‘According to one neighbour,’ I pointed out. ‘But she was attractive. Maybe she was playing two men off against one another and it went wrong. Maybe she made the wrong person jealous.’

  Una Burt nodded. ‘I’ll mention it when I do the press conference later. If I appeal for her boyfriends and associates to come forward in confidence, we might get a better picture of what was happening in her life. What do we know about local suspects? Anyone of interest?’

  ‘I checked with the local coppers,’ Belcott said. ‘It’s a quiet area. They couldn’t think of a similar incident locally in the past five years.’

  ‘Oliver Norris told me we should look at a guy called William Turner.’ I said it quietly, knowing Belcott would take it as a criticism of his work, and maybe it was. Fairness made me add, ‘I don’t think he can be relevant, but Norris said he lives nearby and knows Chloe. He was arrested for attempted murder a few years ago but never charged.’
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  ‘Why not?’ Burt asked.

  ‘Insufficient evidence, I think. I’ll look it up and speak to the SIO before I go back to Putney.’

  ‘You should certainly speak to him. Get some idea of what he’s like. I don’t want to ignore anything at this stage.’

  Speak to SIO I wrote in my notebook, so Burt could feel reassured that I was listening to her.

  ‘So where does this leave us?’ Burt looked around the room.

  ‘I’d like to know more about Oliver Norris,’ I said. ‘He’s a bit too helpful and he keeps coming up with important information at the precise moment we need it.’

  ‘And you said he was paranoid about explaining why his fingerprints might be all over Kate Emery’s bedroom,’ Derwent said. ‘Nothing suspicious about that, is there?’

  ‘He’s ultra-religious, though.’

  ‘So? Repressed.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Chris Pettifer said.

  ‘But possibly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Whoever did this was at ease in the property,’ Derwent said. ‘They knew where to find drain cleaner. They knew where they could shower off the blood. They knew where to take a body so they could dispose of it without being seen, and they were strong enough to handle a body. This wasn’t a stranger who blundered in off the street. This was someone with a plan and they executed it pretty perfectly.’

  I nodded. ‘As far as I can see, only one thing went wrong for them. If Chloe hadn’t come back early, no one would even know yet that Kate Emery was gone.’

  7

  I was on my own when I arrived at William Turner’s address, and glad to be. Georgia had gone to collect CCTV footage from the local shops and show Kate Emery’s picture around, trying to reconstruct Kate’s movements before the attack. She had gone with bad grace.

  ‘It feels like admin.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

  ‘It’s not going to help us find who killed her.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘But I want to see William Turner.’

  ‘Do you? Because I don’t.’ I picked up my phone. ‘It’s going to be more of a waste of time than looking for CCTV, I promise you.’

  ‘He sounds interesting. Oliver Norris thinks he’s the devil incarnate.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything Norris said to us.’ I started dialling the number I’d found for the SIO in the Turner case.

  ‘Then we should talk to him again.’

  ‘About what? The weather?’ I leaned back. ‘The next time we talk to Norris, we need to know exactly what happened to Kate Emery so we can find out how his version differs from the truth. At the moment, all I can say to him is that I don’t believe him. I’ve got nothing to throw at him. When the forensics come back, we’ll see if there’s anything to make him feel uneasy, but as things stand we have to let him go about his business. And you should do the same.’

  She had gone, but she hadn’t liked it. I had other things to worry about, like William Turner. I thought about him on the drive to Putney, and the incident that had earned him his reputation. The SIO had remembered the case well. It wasn’t the kind you forgot.

  I found a parking space on the other side of the street from Turner’s house and walked across. I would have liked a second to collect my thoughts but there was a young man standing in the doorway, smoking a tiny, pungent roll-up. He watched me stop at his front gate, and his expression was wary under a veneer of insolence. He was mixed race and had the kind of good looks that suited a sullen expression: high cheekbones, a full mouth, a face saved from being too feminine by a square jaw and strong, dark eyebrows. What was it Oliver Norris had said? Good looking and he knows it? He had close-cropped hair that showed off the shape of his head, and skin like honey. He wasn’t big – slight was the word that came to mind – but he was wiry and I thought he was probably stronger than he seemed. He wore a grey V-necked T-shirt with jeans that were skin-tight and ripped at the knee. His feet were bare.

  ‘William Turner?’

  He took a long drag before he replied in a slow, husky drawl that I thought he’d probably practised. ‘That depends. Who’s asking?’

  I held up my warrant card and he stepped down from the doorway to inspect it, moving with feline grace.

  ‘Maeve Kerrigan,’ he read.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Maeve Kerrigan,’ I said. ‘I’m part of the team investigating what happened up the road.’

  ‘Yeah, what did happen? I saw all the excitement. Everyone coming and going. Very intriguing. Nothing much ever happens here.’ He flicked the butt of his cigarette away then folded his arms across his chest, pushing his biceps with his fists to make himself look bigger.

  ‘Do you know the residents of number twenty-seven?’

  ‘A little. I know what they look like.’ He had stepped back a bit and found some high ground on a loose brick that was by the gate so he could stare into my eyes. His irises were light brown, almost gold, like a lion. Like a predator. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Humans were still animals when all was said and done.

  ‘But to speak to?’

  ‘No. You know what London is like. No one knows their neighbours.’

  ‘Depends on the area.’

  ‘And the neighbours.’ He laughed softly. ‘No one wants to know us so we don’t know them. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because someone told you to come and talk to me. Because I’m the local scum so if something’s happened in the street it must have been me.’

  ‘It’s my job to talk to potential witnesses. You live in this street and I’m told you spend a lot of time out here watching people come and go.’

  ‘You’re told that.’ A slow smile spread across his face. One of his front teeth was crooked, overlapping the other by a couple of millimetres, and it was strangely charming. ‘Let me guess. Who could have told you? So many suspects. This is like doing your job, isn’t it? I can see why you like it. It could have been Narinder across the way, but I think she likes to see me out here. She’s always watching.’ He lifted a hand and waved. I turned in time to see a curtain fall back into place in the house opposite. ‘It could have been the bitch next door but she was away for the weekend. Anyway, she’s too snobby to talk about me. She likes to pretend we don’t exist. So who hates the fact that I dare to show my face in public?’ Turner stroked his chin, pretending to ponder it. He had a few days’ worth of stubble but it was sparse and fine. ‘Who doesn’t like me talking to his daughter?’

  ‘Mr Turner—’

  ‘Got it, haven’t I?’ He leaned out so he could look down the street, towards Oliver Norris’s house. ‘I’ve tried to explain it to him. It’s not me making the running. Bethany’s the one who talks to me. It’s not as if I’m all that keen on hanging around with a fifteen-year-old. That’s the kind of thing that could get me in trouble.’ He took a tin out of his back pocket and set it on top of the gatepost. The sweet raw smell of tobacco floated out of it when he popped it open and picked out a cigarette paper. His hands were shaking very slightly as he made the roll-up. It was thin, with no filter, and the back of my throat ached at the thought of smoking it.

  ‘Mr Turner, I do need to talk to you. I wonder if we could go inside.’

  ‘We could go inside.’ He ran his tongue slowly along the edge of the paper to glue it together. ‘But you’ll have to put up with my mother if you do that. There’s a reason why I spend a lot of time out here and if you go in there you’ll find out what it is.’

  ‘I can cope.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can.’ He lit the cigarette and drew on it, coughing as he exhaled. ‘What a terrible rollie. It’s an embarrassment. I usually do much better than that.’

  ‘It’s bad for you, you know.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock.’ He picked a shred of tobacco off his lower lip. ‘I like to live dangerously.’

  ‘I spoke to DCI Gordon,’ I said softly.

  Turner went very still.
‘That was quick.’

  ‘I’m investigating a serious incident.’

  ‘You didn’t say what it was.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Is it murder?’ He pulled at his lower lip again, nervously this time.

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Because. Because of the fuss. Because of the guys in white suits going in and out. I didn’t see a body bag.’ He over-balanced and almost fell off the brick.

  ‘There wasn’t one.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ His eyebrows went up, sky-high. ‘Doesn’t usually stop the cops from talking to the press, does it?’

  ‘In your experience.’

  ‘In my very unpleasant experience.’ It was warm in the sunshine but I could see goosebumps on Turner’s arms and he shivered. ‘You’re right. I don’t want to talk about this out here. Come in.’

  At his invitation, when he was good and ready. I recognised it for a power play and tried not to feel irritated. Derwent would have found some reason for saying no but I followed Turner to the door, where he stopped.

  ‘Just so you know, my mum is upstairs and I’d like her to stay there.’

  ‘I might need to speak to her.’

  ‘No. No, you don’t.’ He swallowed. ‘She won’t be able to help you, anyway. She’s not – she doesn’t notice things. She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t look out the window. She doesn’t even know anything’s happened.’

  ‘I still might need to speak to her.’

  He bit his lip, then went into the house. It was cooler inside, the air still. A fly buzzed somewhere, the sound swinging from loud to soft and back again. There was an all-pervading smell of vinegar and lemon and the place was absolutely spotless.

  ‘You need to take your shoes off,’ he threw over his shoulder and padded into the sitting room. I did as I was told and followed him, blinking against the sunlight that streamed into the room. It was neatly furnished with a leather sofa and armchair, and a couple of small tables. What was mainly remarkable, though, was what I couldn’t see when I looked around. No ornaments. No books. No cushions. No rugs on the wooden floor.