Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  ‘Yeah, but you don’t trust them.’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘Well then, let’s get on with ruining their day,’ Derwent said.

  Ruining their day meant extending mine long beyond the point where I was ready to go home. I took a small team, including Pete Belcott, Liv and Georgia, and turned the house upside down. We found nothing useful, again, while Morgan Norris stood in the garden and smoked, watching us with thinly veiled hostility. I stayed away from him, sending Belcott out to talk to him whenever we needed to ask a question. It annoyed both of them, which was a win for me however you looked at it, since neither was a paid-up member of my fan club.

  Searching the house was enough of a distraction that I didn’t have to think about the way my knee throbbed, the way my shoulder ached – nagging reminders of what had happened earlier in the day. It could have worked out differently. I could have been in hospital myself, instead of at work, and that would still have counted as good luck.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Liv asked me quietly as I helped her lift the mattress on Bethany’s bed to check there was nothing underneath.

  ‘Fine. Why?’

  ‘I heard what happened. Burt wanted to send you home.’

  ‘There was no need.’ I let the mattress fall back into place.

  ‘You were brave.’

  ‘It’s only brave if you’re scared.’ I flashed a grin at her. ‘Otherwise it’s blind stupidity.’

  ‘But you must have been scared.’

  I thought about it. ‘There wasn’t time to be scared. I just needed to stop her.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Nothing bad happened.’

  ‘It could have.’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Yes, you would.’

  But she shook her head and I thought she meant it. I didn’t really want to think about it at all, let alone to consider whether or not I’d been reckless. I concentrated on the search, bringing new meaning to the word thorough as I combed through every room, every drawer, methodically hunting even if I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  By the time I got back to the flat I was clumsy with tiredness. It was quiet in the flat. Too quiet; the low hum of remembered fear that had been the background to my day buzzed in my ears. I put on some music to drown it out. I didn’t really want to eat anything but I boiled water for pasta, conscious that I’d missed dinner. I’d been running on empty for too long. I was better than that. The new me had regular meals, wore ironed clothes, lived in a clean, orderly flat that contained more or less edible food. The new me could look after herself. Self-care, my counsellor had told me, was part of being a competent adult. Taking responsibility for my own life. Making good, healthy decisions. Valuing myself.

  I burnt my tongue on the pasta when it was done, because the way I did self-care was a lot like self-harm.

  28

  The text message telling me to meet Derwent at a café on the high street in Putney was typically brief and didn’t give much away. I braced myself, expecting the worst as I pushed open the door and scanned the room for him. He was right at the back, reading the paper, immaculate in a dark suit. A plate smeared with egg and ketchup told its own tale: I had missed breakfast, for better or worse. He glanced up and nodded to me, unsmiling. I ordered tea in a takeaway cup and a bacon sandwich and threaded through the buggies and pensioners to sink into the chair on the other side of the table.

  ‘You look better than I expected.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘What did you get up to last night?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘I thought you’d have a hangover the size of a house.’

  ‘I didn’t even have a drink.’

  ‘So what did you do to celebrate still being alive?’

  ‘I finished work late. By the time I got home I only wanted to go to bed.’

  Derwent frowned. The bruise on his cheek was fading to green, the edges blurring as it healed. His eyes were unblinking, surveying me at the same time as I stared at him. The waiter brought my breakfast and I took the interruption as a chance to change the subject.

  ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘This.’ He lifted the newspaper to reveal a cardboard folder that he slid across the table. I flicked it open.

  ‘The blood-spatter report.’

  ‘The preliminary one.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘I was in the office this morning.’

  ‘What time did you get up?’ I asked around a mouthful of food.

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I stared at him, awed.

  ‘Yes, seriously.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I didn’t sleep well.’

  I thought about asking why but the expression on his face was a warning: Stay out of it, Kerrigan.

  He tapped the folder. ‘Have a read of that.’

  ‘What about Chloe Emery?’

  ‘Still waiting for lab results and phone records. In the meantime, you need to look at this.’

  I ate my breakfast while I read about angles of spatter impact and points of convergence and inconsistencies and felt an ache start to tighten around my head. There was a lot of information in the report, a lot to absorb and interpret. And this was the preliminary version. I was glad it would never be my job to explain it to a jury. Eventually I looked up, frowning. Inconsistencies.

  Derwent nodded. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You wanted another look at the house.’

  ‘No time like the present.’ He was already standing. I picked up the end of my sandwich and my tea. He glanced at them. ‘Good thing you got a takeaway cup.’

  ‘I have worked with you before.’ I led the way out of the café. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my jacket.

  Kate Emery’s house was silent as the grave and about as appealing. It was a sultry day, the sky heavy with the promise of rain, but inside the house the air was chilled and unwholesome. I followed Derwent into the hall and closed the door gently behind me, avoiding the dried blood on the paintwork as best I could. Even with gloves, I didn’t want to touch it, partly from legitimate concern about destroying evidence and partly because I was squeamish. It was more than a week since I’d been inside the house and it smelled foul: the ripe reek of decaying blood overlaid with rotting fruit and a bitter note of old cat shit. I put the back of my hand to my mouth as a precaution against the nausea swelling inside me.

  ‘OK?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘I just need to get used to it.’ I frowned at him. ‘How come you don’t mind it?’

  ‘Smelled worse.’ He’d left his jacket in the car, I noticed. I should have done the same. The smell would cling for the rest of the day, though it would catch in my hair as much as my clothes. Derwent was rolling up his sleeves. ‘So?’

  I looked around, at the dark smudges that told a story of violence and savagery written in Kate Emery’s blood. ‘Walk it through?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  ‘Killer or victim?’

  He took a coin out of his pocket and balanced it on his thumb. ‘Heads or tails?’

  ‘Tails.’

  He frowned. ‘I thought you’d go for heads.’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  The coin spun in the air and he caught it, then showed me. ‘Tails.’

  ‘Killer, then.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So where did it start?’

  ‘The hall,’ Derwent said instantly. ‘Here. By the door.’

  ‘Someone arriving. Someone unwelcome.’

  ‘OK.’ Derwent took up a position inside the front door. ‘What happened?’

  I pulled my pen out of my jacket pocket and held it up. ‘Imagine this is a blade.’

  ‘I’m feeling scared already.’

  I mimed stabbing him, pulling the pen back and swinging it towards him a couple of times. He held his hands up, fending me off.

&nb
sp; ‘Drops of blood on the ground and on the walls. Small wounds.’

  I nodded. ‘She was fighting the attacker off, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Trying to make some space for herself.’ Derwent turned and started up the stairs, one hand trailing an inch away from the wall where there was a long streak of blood. ‘So she runs up here.’

  ‘And I catch up with her—’ I took the stairs three at a time and reached out to grab Derwent’s ankle as he neared the top. ‘Trip her …’

  He pitched forward, landed on his hands and flipped himself to the side, avoiding the actual bloodstain. He lay on his back and I bent over him to stab him again.

  ‘You need to get a lot closer than that to inflict the kind of damage she sustained here. Look at the stains on the carpet.’ He sat up and pointed. ‘Body here. Attacker on top. Those look like knee prints on either side of the main bloodstain.’

  He was right; there were two smudges on the carpet fibres where the blood had pooled under the attacker’s knees.

  ‘Lie down again.’ I knelt carefully with one thigh on either side of his torso and pretended to stab him in the chest.

  ‘Lower.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She got up and ran from here. You just stabbed me in the heart. No one gets up from that.’

  I shuffled back a little, moving down to his hips. It was inevitable, I think, that it felt as if we weren’t acting out a murder any more. Embarrassment brought heat to my face. I couldn’t look at him but I knew Derwent was laughing.

  ‘All right, love, no need to enjoy it.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  He grinned up at me. ‘Professionalism, Kerrigan.’

  I stabbed him in the stomach with the pen, hard enough that he caught his breath and my wrist. He held it for a moment, looking up at me with a challenge in his eyes.

  ‘You are supposed to be fighting me off,’ I pointed out, in command of myself again. ‘I was wondering when you were going to start.’

  He let go of me and closed his eyes, his hands falling to the floor.

  ‘She’s getting weaker. You’ve injured her seriously now and she stays here for a while, bleeding into the carpet.’

  ‘Agreed.’ I stood up. ‘Maybe I think I’ve done enough. I stand up and have a breather.’

  ‘But she’s faking.’ He twisted, jumped to his feet and jogged into the bathroom. I followed and put the lights on. The blood screamed at me from every surface, darker now, just as horrible.

  ‘Burt was right. This is a terrible place to try to hide.’

  ‘She didn’t have time to get any further away.’ Derwent stood in the middle of the small room, his face sombre. ‘Let’s take it that you spend a fair amount of time here making sure you’ve done enough damage to kill her.’

  ‘But she didn’t die here, as far as we can tell.’ I stayed in the doorway. ‘How did that work? She was trapped. Then she ran past her attacker, even though she was bleeding profusely and had to be weak, disorientated – in no position to out-think anyone. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the blood in the kitchen. Unless the attacker was injured, or incapacitated somehow, I don’t see it.’

  ‘More faking?’ Derwent pointed to a concentration of blood beside and behind the toilet. ‘If she lay here and pretended to be dead, maybe it looked as if the job was done.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I tapped the pen on my cheek, thinking about it. ‘Or there were two attackers and they distracted each other.’

  Derwent nodded. ‘Which would explain the inconsistencies in the blood-spatter report. Two attackers, one taller than the other. Working together. Taking it in turns. Different blades. Different angles of attack.’

  ‘Maybe one was trying to stop the other,’ I said.

  Derwent shook his head at me. ‘Stop trying to make excuses for her.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘Come off it, Kerrigan.’

  I sighed. ‘OK. Bethany and Chloe, working together or arguing, killed Kate.’

  ‘And whoever helped them to get rid of the body turned on Chloe later. Maybe because he couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.’

  It was plausible and I didn’t like it. Not at all.

  ‘We don’t know it was them.’

  ‘We don’t know it wasn’t.’ Derwent leaned back against the door frame, squinting a little as he tended to when he was tired. ‘Depends on how much you trust the blood lady to have got the report right.’

  ‘I trust Kev Cox. He says she’s good.’

  ‘Well, then. What other explanation is there?’ He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I looked down at the bloodstain at my feet. ‘Let’s finish this.’

  ‘OK.’ He stepped away from the bathroom. ‘Whatever happens, she makes it downstairs.’

  ‘What about this: the killers go downstairs to clean up. While they’re in the shower room …’

  ‘She makes a move. She’s holding on to the bannisters this time because she’s half-dead.’ Derwent ran down the stairs, dragged a hand up to the latch of the front door but stopped. ‘For some reason she doesn’t go out.’

  I followed, looking over his shoulder at the smear of blood, at the lock underneath it. ‘It makes sense if someone was chasing her. She wouldn’t have had time to undo the locks.’

  ‘But not if the killer or killers are scrubbing the blood off.’

  ‘Unless there was something she needed from the kitchen.’

  ‘More than she needed someone to call her an ambulance?’ Derwent raised his eyebrows. ‘I think not.’

  ‘Maybe she was afraid to go out the front. Maybe she thought there was an accomplice waiting for her.’

  ‘Maybe there was.’ Derwent sighed. ‘OK. For whatever reason, she doesn’t go through the front door.’ He turned and walked down the hall towards the kitchen. ‘If you’re chasing her, you haven’t caught up with her yet, by the way. She has time to bleed all over the hall but no one attacks her here.’

  In the kitchen he draped himself over the counter. ‘She stops here for a rest.’

  ‘Did we find her phone?’

  ‘It was in her bag.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why she came in here. Maybe she was looking for her phone while she stood here and bled.’

  ‘There’s a landline in here too.’ It was on the counter. ‘She didn’t try to call 999 from that either.’

  ‘So she didn’t want the police.’ I swallowed. ‘Because it was her daughter who was trying to kill her?’

  Derwent shrugged. ‘She makes it to the kitchen door, unlocks it, pushes the bolts back and opens it. You still haven’t caught up with her, if you’re chasing her.’

  ‘I’m not chasing her. I can’t be.’

  ‘She runs out into the night, unobserved by any neighbours. She doesn’t scream or call for help. She runs through the garden because there’s no access to the street from here.’ Derwent stepped out onto the patio and looked down the garden. ‘And then she disappears without a trace, despite having lost most of the blood from her body.’

  ‘The rain didn’t help us.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘She couldn’t have got away,’ I said. ‘Even if they were distracted by cleaning up.’ They. I’d almost accepted it was the girls. ‘She’d have collapsed.’

  ‘And their accomplice picked her up.’

  ‘And took her to the storage unit until they were ready to dispose of her body.’

  I shivered, thinking about Kate running for her life, too afraid to call for help. To see someone you love turn on you …

  ‘Meanwhile I’m having a shower,’ I said, pulling myself back to my role. ‘I clean up after myself using only what’s available to me in the house, so there’s no chance of tracing me via anything I brought with me.’

  ‘Clever you.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He came back in, frowning. ‘This is either a highly organised, competent murder—’
/>   ‘Or an absolute shambles,’ I finished.

  ‘Either everything went according to plan, or nothing did.’

  ‘And if it was Chloe and Bethany, with the help of an accomplice, why did Chloe have to die?’

  ‘They couldn’t trust her not to talk.’

  You don’t know what I am – did she mean a murderer? It was possible.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and propped my chin on my hand. Derwent leaned back against the island, watching me, not interrupting. Eventually I sighed.

  ‘All of the evidence tells us a story but it doesn’t make any sense and it’s never made any sense. Every time we think we’re making progress, we run into a brick wall.’

  ‘I’ve noticed. So?’

  ‘So maybe it’s because we’re being pointed at the brick wall.’

  A clatter at the front door made my head snap up. I stared at Derwent, the two of us surprised into immobility. The front door closed and footsteps moved slowly through the hall: high heels clicking on the tiles, keys jangling. Derwent headed towards the kitchen door, as silent as it was possible for him to be. I was right behind him, my hand on my radio.

  She was in the sitting room, opening and closing cupboards, trim in a black suit and spike-heeled black patent court shoes.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Derwent said. The woman whirled around, her eyes wide with horror. She was a total stranger, I registered, in the split second before she started to scream.

  29

  Neela Singh wasn’t much reassured by the news that we were police officers rather than murderers waiting for a new victim. It took a long time for her to regain her composure enough to explain that she was entitled to be in the house – more entitled to be there than we were, in fact, because she was there at the request of the homeowner.

  ‘I’m an estate agent with Miller Hamilton.’ With a flash of pride, she added, ‘We’ve been retained as the sole agents to bring this property to the market.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Derwent said. ‘You’ll have buyers queuing down the street for this one, given what happened here.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Get it cleaned up, take up the carpets that are too stained, touch up the paintwork …’ She flicked her hair so it fell smoothly down her back. ‘This is London. Buyers want what they want. This is a sought-after area and a house in this location is always going to sell. A house this age is going to have history anyway, that’s what I say. Plenty of people probably died here over the years. It’s just that we know about this one and it’s recent. But once the place is cleaned up no one will think twice about it.’