by Jane Casey
‘Oh yes. I knew all about it. That’s why I couldn’t talk to you in the office. Kate came back to do a bit of work here a couple of years ago. Not nursing – reception work. I was off sick to recover from an operation and she covered for me. I was all right about it because I knew she wouldn’t want to take my job, and she didn’t. But she took something else. Our mailing list.’
‘Without asking?’
‘She didn’t ask because she knew the answer would have been no. Then she started sending people letters about their fertility issues, selling her stuff. We had complaints from clients straight away. We had to send out letters of apology and our lawyer sent Kate a warning not to use the list any more. Management were furious. But I always thought it was her way of getting back at them for firing her.’
‘They fired her before the theft of the mailing list came to light?’
‘She was supposed to do six weeks here but she got fired halfway through the second week. She got caught going through the files. They’re strictly confidential.’
‘Which files?’
‘Old ones from when she worked there. I don’t know, maybe she was curious about patients she’d treated. But the requests got flagged up by the archive system. It’s not like going through a filing cabinet. They’re all computerised, you see.’
‘What records were they, do you remember?’
‘I can find out for you.’ A pause while a lorry thundered past. ‘Do you think it’s relevant to what happened?’
‘No idea,’ I said cheerfully. ‘But I’d like to know.’
‘What did she say?’ Georgia asked as soon as I got off the phone.
‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead but Kate was downright unscrupulous about developing her business.’ I told her about the mailing list.
‘It’s not a motive for killing her though, is it?’ Georgia sounded disappointed.
‘Probably not. You can’t have everything.’
Georgia returned to the paperwork, speed-reading efficiently, commenting now and then on anything that struck her as unusual. Her comments were perceptive, I thought; she was good at this, even if she didn’t have the right instincts on the street. Strengths and weaknesses. We all had them. The trick was to work with people who were strong where you were weak. Maybe that was why Derwent was so keen that I shouldn’t become just like him. He needed me to be his conscience since he was entirely without one.
I was looking at a lab report when my phone rang again: Anita. It was a short conversation. I sat for a minute after I hung up, thinking. Then I went looking for Liv.
‘This lab report.’ I showed it to her.
‘What about it?’
‘What are they talking about?’
‘The needle.’
‘What needle?’
‘You should know. You collected it.’
I frowned at her. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It came with all the rest of the stuff you collected from Kate Emery’s house. I think it was from the bin in her bedroom.’
‘I collected that,’ Derwent said, coming over to tweak the report out of my hand. ‘There was nothing in it. Cotton wool, used tissues.’
‘And a button and a needle.’ I shook my head. ‘I saw the button and I assumed it was a sewing needle, but it wasn’t. It was a medical one.’
‘I thought you knew that,’ Liv said, her face blank. ‘That’s why I sent it off for analysis. But it didn’t have anything illegal in it.’
‘No. It didn’t.’ And Liv hadn’t realised the significance of it any more than I had, until I’d read the lab report.
Derwent frowned at me. ‘But …’
‘One phone call,’ I said. ‘Then we need to talk to the boss.’
‘What have you got?’ Una Burt looked up, expectant.
‘Good news and bad news,’ I said.
‘What’s the good news?’
‘I’ve solved one mystery. When Kate Emery was temping at the clinic, she looked up one archived file. That file belonged to Eleanor and Oliver Norris. They were treated at the clinic for fertility issues when Kate was working there as a nurse.’
‘When they moved in, Kate must have recognised them,’ Derwent said. ‘As soon as she heard the story that Bethany was a miracle baby, she’d have known one of them was lying.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Oliver Norris is completely infertile,’ I said. ‘I’ve checked with the lab and they confirmed it from the used condom we found in Harold Lowe’s house.’
‘So Bethany isn’t his daughter,’ Derwent said. ‘No miracle. And Kate knew it. Whatever Eleanor did to get pregnant – whether it was a donor or an affair – she didn’t want her husband knowing about it.’
‘Do you think Kate was blackmailing her?’ Una Burt asked.
‘Why else would she have looked them up on the system?’ I said. ‘It had to be more than curiosity. She must have known she was taking a risk, so it was worth it to her to forfeit her temporary employment at the clinic to find out about Eleanor. Her business was already in trouble then. She needed cash, urgently, and her ex-husband wasn’t going to be any use when his wife was arguing over every penny he handed over.’
‘But blackmail is a big step,’ Burt said.
‘Not for someone who was defrauding her customers. Not for someone who would stop at nothing to get money – even making out that her daughter was more vulnerable than she actually was, so her ex-husband would keep paying to support her. Chloe was far from helpless according to everyone but Kate.’
‘Manipulative,’ Una Burt observed.
‘Desperate, maybe. She grew up in poverty, according to her aunt. She knew what it was like to be poor and she didn’t want to go back to that. She had two bits of bad luck: she divorced Brian Emery before he made his fortune and she put all her money into the house. If she’d inherited it, she’d have been set up for life, but it didn’t work out the way she’d planned.’
‘Where was Eleanor getting the money to pay her off?’
‘Oliver gets a nice salary from the church and I found statements for a joint account among his papers. As long as Eleanor was careful, she could skim money off the housekeeping and keep Kate off her back. But if Kate got greedy or desperate, Eleanor wouldn’t have had anywhere to turn.’
‘Do you think Eleanor killed her?’
‘No.’
‘Who then? Oliver?’
‘Not him either.’
‘We wondered about the girls,’ Derwent said. ‘Bethany and Chloe working together. We ran through it earlier at the house. The blood-spatter evidence is contradictory at best. We thought two attackers might explain it.’
‘But now I have a better explanation,’ I said. ‘And that’s the bad news.’
‘Go on,’ Una Burt said.
‘The reason we haven’t found Kate’s body is because there isn’t one.’ I paused as the chief inspector’s face paled. ‘Kate’s still alive.’
31
‘That’s impossible,’ Una Burt snapped. ‘She can’t be. You saw the house.’
‘It was staged,’ I said, almost apologetic. The time, the resources expended on a major murder investigation, the press conferences, the phone calls with senior officers: I could see Una Burt calculating the cost to her career and coming up with a figure that was unacceptably high. ‘Among the items we removed from Kate’s house was a needle. Liv sent it off to be tested for drugs. According to the lab, it was used to draw Kate’s blood.’
‘So?’
‘Kate was a nurse. Kate knew how to draw blood, and how to store it. Her body was never in the freezer – but her blood was. And when she was ready, she took the blood out of the storage unit, thawed it, and covered her house in it. There was so much blood. No one could have survived losing so much in one go, so we’ve spent ten days looking for a corpse. She made it look as if she had been murdered and we investigated it as if it was murder.’
‘Why? What good did it do her to be dead?’
‘She left her life insurance policy for Chloe to claim once the death certificate was issued,’ Derwent said. ‘If she’d just disappeared it would have taken years to get the certificate. With us ready to confirm she was dead, the process would have been much, much quicker. Chloe was supposed to stay with her father until the insurance paid out.’
‘Kate didn’t know about Chloe’s stepbrother molesting her. The plan started to fall apart as soon as Chloe came home. Instead of being out of the way, she was right in the middle of the investigation, surrounded by the very people Kate had been manipulating before she left.’
‘And then someone killed her,’ Burt said. ‘But Kate being alive – and the blackmail – none of that is a reason to kill Chloe, is it?’
‘Not directly. I don’t see how it would benefit Eleanor Norris to kill Kate’s daughter. That’s why I don’t think we should talk to the Norrises about the blackmail until we’ve tracked Kate down. She might have a better idea than us as to who killed Chloe and why,’ I said.
‘Where do we start looking?’ Burt ran her hands through her short hair. ‘She could be anywhere.’
‘She left her passport behind,’ Derwent pointed out. ‘Makes sense. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave the UK. She’d have been too far from Chloe, and we’d be more likely to spot her going. Crossing borders is risky. It would have been far easier to lie low in this country, especially since no one was looking for her.’
‘So how do we find her?’ I asked. ‘A public appeal?’
‘I don’t think we should give away that we know she’s alive yet. She might run again, for starters. And it might put her in danger,’ Derwent said.
He didn’t mean it as a dig but I felt it all the same; I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Chloe’s death was my fault.
‘Sorry to interrupt.’ Liv, leaning through the doorway. She was holding a printout. ‘There’s something weird about Chloe’s phone records.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘She didn’t use it much for making or receiving calls – it was mainly texts and picture messages. After she disappeared, she started getting a lot of calls – like, thirty or forty – from payphones in Sussex and Hampshire.’
‘All payphones?’ I checked.
‘Yeah. Different ones every time and all over the place. I haven’t mapped it out properly yet but if it was the same person they were going around in circles.’
‘Kate,’ Una Burt said. ‘When did the calls start?’
‘Sunday.’
‘After the public appeal to find Chloe,’ I said. ‘Kate must have been panicking.’
‘Did Chloe answer any of the calls?’
Liv shook her head. ‘Her phone was off.’
‘Were there any voicemails?’
‘Nope.’
‘So either she couldn’t answer her phone or she didn’t want to,’ I said. ‘And somehow the phone ended up in Bethany’s possession but she didn’t answer the calls either.’
‘Sussex and Hampshire are big counties,’ Derwent said. ‘Lots of people, lots of places she could be hiding out.’
‘It’s a start,’ I said.
Colin Vale positively glowed when I informed him that Kate Emery was no longer a victim, but a suspect.
‘Give me a live person to hunt for any day.’ He wheeled his chair closer to his desk so his nose was practically touching his computer screen. ‘Now, she didn’t take her car so we don’t know what she’s driving or even if she is driving. She didn’t take her phone. Let’s make sure her bank accounts haven’t been used.’ He didn’t even have to look up the number, dialling it with the fluency of a concert pianist. ‘Ah, Miriam. DS Colin Vale here again. Yes, indeed, as usual! How are you today?’
Not banter. Please, save me from banter.
The expression on my face must have communicated what I was thinking. ‘A quick enquiry, Miriam. Won’t take long.’
It didn’t, thankfully: she hadn’t used any cards or made any payments since she disappeared. Colin hung up. ‘So she’s using cash. But you can’t use cash for everything these days. She’ll need another bank account. And you can’t set up a bank account without proof of identification and proof of address.’ He leaned back. ‘Let’s start with aliases. What’s her maiden name?’
‘Try Charnock.’
‘Kate Charnock.’ He logged on to a credit-rating service, and put in the name. ‘Same date of birth … nothing.’
‘Try Katherine Charnock. Try both spellings of Katherine,’ I suggested.
‘There’s a Catherine Charnock in SW15. That’s not her address, though, is it? Constantine Avenue?’
‘That’s Harold Lowe’s house. She must have been using it as her alternative address.’ I thought back to the pile of post in his hall, which I’d stepped over without a second glance. Stupid … but even if I’d seen the name I wouldn’t have made the connection with Kate Emery. It had been a safe place for her to use as her address, better than any PO box. Untraceable.
More and more I thought that police dog had earned his Bonios.
‘It’s a Nationwide account.’ He rang their call centre and explained what he wanted. They found her accounts within seconds. ‘And that’s active, is it? Whereabouts is she using her card? Where’s that? Hampshire? Never heard of it.’
He was tapping a name into his computer as he spoke – Groves Edge. I leaned over his shoulder to see the results. It was a hamlet that consisted of a few shops and a handful of houses strung out along a minor road. He flicked between the satellite image and the map, zooming out so I could see how remote it was. Narrow country lanes. Not many houses. The middle of nowhere. The largest settlement nearby was Lymington, and I’d never heard of that either, though it seemed to be a pretty seaside town.
‘And she’s used it to pay a sum of money to a lettings agent. All right. Thanks.’
‘It’s tiny,’ I said. ‘She’d stand out as a stranger.’
Colin was shaking his head. ‘They always go rural. Never stay in the cities. It’s so stupid. I know they want to get well away from other people, but if they found somewhere big enough and used cash all the time, they could lie low. We’d have no chance of catching them.’
‘Lucky for us.’
‘Indeed. Now to talk to the lettings agent.’
‘I wonder if she’s still there?’ I said. ‘Surely she’d run again once she knew Chloe was dead?’
‘Speaking for myself, if anything happened to my kids, I’d be inconsolable. I wouldn’t be thinking about getting away. I’d want to kill whoever hurt them. That would be my number one ambition.’ He sounded matter-of-fact. I didn’t doubt he would do exactly that.
‘I never knew you had it in you, Colin.’
‘You put everything you have into your kids. You’d do anything for them. Sacrifice anything.’ He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t hold back.’
‘What have you got?’ Derwent leaned on the desk beside me, making me jump.
‘She’s somewhere near a village called Groves Edge. It’s in Hampshire,’ I said. ‘Straight down the A3.’
Derwent raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Fancy a road trip?’
I was washing my hands when the door to the ladies’ room opened. I looked up at the mirror and saw Georgia Shaw standing behind me, her face set.
‘Are you OK?’
‘You made fun of me.’
‘What?’ I twisted round to look at her properly. ‘When?’
‘When I suggested it might not be murder. The first night, when we were at Valerian Road. You laughed at me, and I was right.’
‘DI Derwent laughed at you,’ I said, and it was true, but guilt sent a chill over my skin. She had suggested it wasn’t murder. I’d ignored her.
‘You didn’t exactly stand up for me. You sent me away.’
‘That’s right, I did.’ I picked up a paper towel and started drying my hands. ‘There was no reason at that stage to think you were right. We had no idea it was staged. And you didn’t either.
’
‘No, but—’
If you’d stayed, Derwent would have ripped you apart and he’d have enjoyed it.’
‘Why?’
‘For fun.’ I sighed. ‘Look, I did you a favour by getting you out of his way.’
‘You didn’t want me to be around him.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Do you feel threatened by me?’
‘Absolutely not.’ I threw the paper towel in the bin and leaned back against the sink. ‘But if you think I’m going to mentor you, you’re mistaken. If you do your job properly – and it’s a big if, considering how I’ve seen you behave – I’ll back you up, every time. I’ve been looking out for you, believe it or not. I didn’t say anything to Una Burt about how you froze on the street.’
‘But you told her you didn’t want to work with me.’ Her bottom lip was quivering. ‘You’ve always had special treatment on this team and you don’t like sharing the limelight.’
‘That sounds like something Pete Belcott would say.’ I saw her eyes flicker: got it in one. ‘Choose your allies carefully, Georgia. He’s a shit.’
‘And Derwent isn’t?’
‘He has his moments.’
‘You act like you own him.’
‘I most certainly do not.’
‘Everyone knows you slept together.’
‘No, that never happened. It was a rumour, that’s all,’ I said patiently. A rumour that Derwent hadn’t done anything like enough to dispel. I had been angry that Georgia was challenging me, but I couldn’t hold on to that feeling. I looked at her, flushed and struggling for composure, and I remembered what it was like to be the new girl on the team. To feel insecure all the time. To worry about opening your mouth in case you said the wrong thing. To wonder about people’s loyalties, people’s histories. To say the wrong thing without meaning to.
Don’t try to be me. I’d thought I was doing enough by not being as hard on Georgia as Derwent had been on me, but that wasn’t right either.
‘I think we should start again. A clean slate.’ I cleared my throat. ‘You did a good job on the paperwork. Better than good. I wouldn’t have found the Rosebery Clinic letter for hours, and I might have missed its significance.’
‘Thanks.’ She sounded wary.
