Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  Later that day – much later – I stood outside Oliver Norris’s house again. This time I had Georgia with me. It was Una Burt’s idea. I knew Derwent had kicked off about it and I knew he had got nowhere. It was hard for me to mind when Burt had said, in no uncertain terms, that Georgia and I didn’t need protecting from anyone. That was the message I had wanted him to absorb for years, after all.

  And now I was at the house, ringing the doorbell. Eleanor came to open the door. When she saw me, she faltered.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Where’s Bethany? Still in bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has she said anything yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I need to talk to her.’

  Eleanor shook her head. ‘You can’t. She needs to rest.’

  The kitchen door opened and Gareth Selhurst came into the hall, his face grave. ‘Are you all right, Eleanor?’

  ‘Yes, but they want to talk to Bethany.’ She was holding on to her elbows, her fingers digging into her arms.

  ‘I hope you explained it’s impossible.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ I said, losing patience finally. ‘It’s an essential part of a murder investigation.’

  Selhurst came forward, pushing Eleanor behind him. ‘You must understand that our only wish is to help.’

  ‘In that case, move out of my way and let me speak to Bethany.’

  ‘I don’t understand the urgency.’ He smiled. ‘It’s late. You may be working, but Bethany is resting. Why don’t you come back tomorrow?’

  ‘Because I need to speak to her now.’ Confrontation wasn’t getting me anywhere. Trickery might. I dropped my keys so they clattered on the hall floor, sliding behind Selhurst and Eleanor. They both looked down – it was a reflex; they couldn’t help it – and while they were distracted I ducked past the preacher, heading for the stairs. Georgia was right behind me. The door to Bethany’s room was closed but I pushed it open. Bethany was exactly where I’d left her, her eyes closed. Her breathing was uneven and I knew she wasn’t asleep. I switched on the light.

  ‘Look at me, Bethany.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Look at me.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, she opened her eyes.

  ‘We found Chloe, Bethany.’ I waited to see what her reaction might be: hope first, then fear. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s not good news.’

  ‘Is she—’

  ‘She’s dead.’ That was Georgia, from the doorway.

  ‘It’s not true.’ Bethany looked up at me, her face pinched. ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Someone found her body earlier today in woodland near Heathrow Airport.’

  She started to sob, her body shaking.

  Oliver Norris slammed into the room, pushing past Georgia without so much as a sideways look. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t tell her that kind of thing.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ I said quietly. ‘She deserves to know the truth.’

  ‘She deserves to know what happens when she doesn’t trust people who are trying to help her.’ There was that edge in Georgia’s voice again, and it was frustrating to know that Bethany could have helped us, and Chloe, but I couldn’t let her take it out on the girl.

  ‘I think you thought you were doing the right thing, Bethany. I think you thought you were doing what Chloe wanted you to do. But now we need to find out who did this to her. Who harmed her, Bethany? Who dumped her body as if it was nothing more than rubbish?’

  ‘Leave her alone. She can’t help you.’ Oliver Norris’s face was white. ‘You’re torturing her for no good reason. You want someone to blame because you didn’t find Chloe in time to save her, and you’re picking on Bethany.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ I said. ‘We never had a chance to find Chloe. I don’t feel like I need to blame anyone. But I do feel, very strongly, that we need to find the person who killed her.’

  ‘Bethany could be in danger,’ Georgia said and Oliver made a movement towards her as if he wanted to hurt her for even thinking such a thing. I wished she hadn’t said it out loud, even though I’d been thinking – and hinting – the same thing.

  ‘Georgia, can you go downstairs and wait for me there?’

  I thought she was going to argue with me, but she went, her face mutinous. I waited until she was gone before I spoke again.

  ‘Bethany, you’re the only person who can help us work out what happened to Chloe. You need to talk to us. To your parents, even. Someone you trust. You can’t hide from this by keeping silent and hoping it goes away. Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk about what happened.’

  ‘Please. Leave.’ Oliver’s voice was brittle with tension. I didn’t want to go, but one look at Bethany’s face told me I hadn’t got through to her – that she wasn’t ready or able to talk yet.

  I walked out past him and stood in the hall, waiting. He closed the door behind him and glared at me.

  ‘You shouldn’t have talked to her like that.’

  ‘I’ve spent the afternoon with Chloe’s dad. He had to identify her body.’ He had wailed in my arms, grief tearing at him like a wild animal.

  Oliver flinched. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was hard.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That you cared so much. I thought it was just a job.’

  ‘Sometimes it is.’ I looked down, embarrassed to have shown how much it got to me. ‘Sometimes it’s a lot more than that.’

  Georgia was waiting for me on the doorstep and I didn’t blame her for avoiding any further conversation with Gareth Selhurst, who was brooding in the hall. She shook her head as she handed me my keys and anger made the blood sing in my ears. I waited until we were both in the car, the doors closed.

  ‘What’s the problem, Georgia?’

  ‘You sent me downstairs as if I was a child. That’s not how you treat a colleague. It’s disrespectful.’

  ‘You don’t get my respect as a right. You have to earn it,’ I said icily. ‘And you were completely unprofessional in there.’

  ‘Don’t you dare lecture me about professionalism. You of all people.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You disappear off with a suspect and take your time about getting him to hospital, and when he gets there, oh look, he’s eating out of your hand.’ She glared at me. ‘I don’t know what you did but I have some ideas about it.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re way off.’

  ‘Am I? DI Derwent didn’t think so.’

  For a brief moment she was in real danger. I felt the anger surge up and it was only the fact that I knew she wanted me to lose my temper that enabled me to keep it. ‘I’ve talked to DI Derwent about it. And I’m glad you brought him up because I’ve been meaning to discuss him with you. You hung back when DI Derwent needed back-up. You were more worried about saving your own skin than helping a fellow officer.’

  ‘I was running comms.’

  ‘That is a very grand way of saying you called for help.’

  ‘Well, someone had to keep their head. The two of you were behaving like this was the Wild West. You don’t do that. You call for back-up. You wait. You don’t take stupid risks.’

  ‘No, you calculate the risks and you behave accordingly. You put yourself in harm’s way. That’s the job, Georgia, and if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be trying to do it. And if you won’t do it properly, I don’t want to work with you.’

  ‘Standing between the monsters and the weak.’ It was a police officer’s saying, the job in a nutshell, and most cops didn’t say it with a sneer in their voice.

  ‘If you like,’ I said coldly. ‘It’s a lot better than bullying the weak because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do. Bethany is as much of a victim as Chloe and if she doesn’t trust us, she’ll tell us nothing.’

  She pressed her lips together. ‘Did you mean what you said ab
out getting rid of me?’

  ‘I—’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to work with you if I can’t rely on you.’

  ‘Give me a chance.’

  ‘I already did,’ I said softly.

  ‘Then I’m going to have to tell DCI Burt about what you did with Turner. About how you behaved.’

  ‘Is that it? That’s what you’ve got?’

  ‘She won’t be pleased with you.’

  ‘Possibly not,’ I acknowledged. ‘But she’ll understand why I did it. Una Burt is a cop, not an administrator. She’s not your teacher and she’s not your mother. She plays by the rules because she has to, but she wants to win. She believes all that guff about standing between the monsters and the weak, Georgia, because when you get down to it she’s just like me.’ I started the car. ‘I’m leaving it up to you to decide whether you want to stay on the team or not. You pick.’

  ‘What if I decide to stay?’

  ‘Then you’d better make sure you do the job.’

  25

  I stood outside the morgue watching the clouds scud across the sky on a stiff summer breeze that plucked at my clothes and ruffled my hair. It was one of those times when I would have liked to be a smoker, to have a reason for standing there on my own. The door opened behind me, and Derwent stepped out.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You made it all the way through.’

  I half-laughed. ‘Were you hoping I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Nope. I thought you’d be OK.’

  ‘OK is debatable.’ I risked a look at him, expecting to see judgement on his face, or pity, and unsure which I’d prefer.

  What I got, naturally, was neither. He was frowning at the middle distance. ‘No one enjoys it. Maybe the pathologists do, but no one normal.’

  ‘I know that. I’ve been to enough PMs.’

  ‘It’s different when it’s someone you know.’

  ‘It makes you realise we’re all just meat.’ I was trying not to think about it: the organs and how they fitted together, the surprising untidiness of what was inside a human being once you unpacked it.

  Derwent winced. ‘You’re making it very hard for me to look forward to the next time I eat steak and kidney pie.’

  ‘She was alive on Sunday.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘While we were poking around the storage unit and dealing with Turner and Oliver Norris. While I was interviewing her stepbrothers.’ I swallowed. ‘What if something I did or said made it too risky to let her live?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Oh, thank you very much for the comfort.’

  ‘What? You know it’s true.’

  ‘She was drugged.’

  ‘Diazepam.’ Derwent frowned. ‘Enough to make her drowsy and confused, the doctor said.’

  ‘So she had less chance of fighting him off,’ I said, biting off the words. ‘She was slight, wasn’t she? I don’t think she would have caused too much trouble even if she hadn’t been drugged, but someone didn’t want to take the chance.’

  ‘If she was drowsy and confused, maybe she didn’t know what was happening.’

  ‘It explains the lack of defensive wounds.’

  ‘Three broken ribs,’ Derwent said, and I shivered.

  ‘I wish I’d done more for her. I should never have left her with the Norrises.’

  ‘She was an adult. It was her choice.’

  ‘Still. The obvious place for her to be was with her dad.’

  ‘And she wouldn’t go near him,’ Derwent said.

  ‘She was afraid of her stepbrother.’ I thought for a second. ‘Maybe not afraid enough.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Nolan had a car. He went missing from school. Maybe he was supposed to pick her up and take her somewhere.’

  ‘And he killed her instead?’

  ‘It’s possible, if she was blackmailing him into helping her. Maybe he decided it was too risky to let her live.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more likely that he’d have strangled her or beaten her to death?’

  ‘He’s not all that athletic. Maybe he didn’t want to take the chance of her fighting him off.’ Her lungs had been saturated with clean water – no dirt, no grit. ‘Holding her down in a full bath would have done the job. He was out on Sunday night, according to his dad. And where she was dumped isn’t a million miles from the M40, his road home.’

  ‘Does his story about why he left school check out?’

  ‘Funnily enough, the drug dealers don’t remember him specifically and don’t want to make any statements, helpful or otherwise. Of course, if they sold him the diazepam they’re not going to say.’ I sighed, frustrated. ‘We could look for his car on CCTV in Oxford but he didn’t go through the city centre. If we don’t find him, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there.’

  ‘Bit weird that he chose that night of all nights to be out of school.’

  ‘Coincidences happen. If he was looking for an alibi deliberately, he probably wouldn’t have chosen the one involving illegal activity, expulsion and a gang of dealers as his main witnesses.’

  ‘He might if he was a moron.’

  ‘He might, and he might well be a moron.’ I hugged myself. ‘What about Morgan Norris?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s a predator.’

  ‘Then he’d have raped her before he killed her.’

  ‘Maybe he miscalculated. Or he decided we knew too much about his DNA to risk it. I spent a lot of time telling him about DNA. I might as well have held up a giant warning sign.’ I shivered again. ‘If she was living in the same house as her murderer, I’m not sure I can live with myself.’

  ‘It’s not about you. You weren’t in charge of her just because her mum was dead.’ He frowned at me. ‘Why does this bother you so much?’

  ‘Because …’ I swallowed. ‘Because no one ever taught Chloe the rules. No one ever looked at her and saw a beautiful young woman who needed to know them.’

  ‘What rules?’

  ‘That your body is public property, if you’re young and female. That men will take advantage of you, if they can.’

  ‘Some men. Not all men.’

  ‘It only takes one. And they don’t always announce themselves until it’s too late.’

  ‘Is that why you dress like that?’

  ‘Like what?’ I looked down at my very plain trouser suit, my high-necked top. ‘I’m at work.’

  ‘I’ve seen you off-duty too. You dress like you don’t want to be noticed.’

  ‘And you dress like you have shares in North Face clothing. It’s almost as if you want everyone to know you’re an off-duty copper. So what?’

  ‘It’s interesting, that’s all.’

  ‘To you, maybe.’

  ‘She wasn’t raped.’ Smoothly, he’d returned to Chloe. ‘She didn’t fight. She might not have known what was happening, if she was drunk or drugged.’

  ‘I hope she didn’t.’ I could imagine her horror, as someone she’d trusted turned into something unrecognisable. A monster.

  ‘Do you think it was the same guy who killed Kate?’

  ‘I hope so, or we’ve got two to catch.’

  Derwent grinned. ‘It would be a lot neater.’

  ‘Chloe trusted him, whoever he was. And Kate was taken by surprise, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s how it looked.’ Derwent rubbed his chin. ‘Do you fancy another look at Kate’s house to see if it gives us any ideas? I’ve got the keys.’

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to be going back to the office?’

  ‘Burt will understand.’ Off-hand, casual, infuriating. I felt sorry for Una Burt now and then.

  ‘OK. Putney it is.’

  We both parked right beside Kate’s house, even though it wasn’t coned off any more and the police guard was long gone from the door. The windows were boarded up against burglars and the press alike, the door taped off. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like
parking in front of it either.

  I walked over to Derwent, who was digging in the boot of his car for shoe covers and gloves. ‘If you give me the keys, I’ll open the door.’

  He turned, rummaging in his pocket, looked past me and frowned. ‘What’s this now?’

  William Turner was limping towards us at speed. His face was strained under the bruises, and one hand supported his ribcage.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Bethany called me.’ His chest heaved, the notch between his collarbones deeper with every breath. ‘What did you say to her last night?’

  ‘Why? What did she say?’

  ‘Did you tell her it was her fault Chloe died?’

  Derwent twisted to look at me, his eyebrows climbing.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said, thinking of Georgia, ‘but she might have drawn that conclusion.’

  Turner coughed. ‘You’ve really upset her.’

  ‘I’ll go and talk to her.’ I started towards the house.

  ‘She’s not there.’ Turner was patting his pockets, not finding what he was looking for. No inhaler. Great.

  Derwent stood up and took him by the arm. ‘Let’s get you home, fella.’

  ‘Not yet.’ He held up his phone. ‘I just spoke to her. She said she couldn’t live with herself. She said she’d called me to say goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye?’ I repeated, stupidly. ‘Where was she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did she call you?’ I remembered that the Norrises hadn’t let her have a mobile phone of her own. ‘From a payphone?’

  He shook his head, coughing again. ‘She’s got Chloe’s phone.’