Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  ‘DI Derwent and I are going to look for Kate Emery in Hampshire.’ I would regret this, I thought. ‘Do you want to come?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

  ‘OK. Good.’ I hoped Derwent wouldn’t mind. ‘But watch yourself around Derwent. He’s tricky.’

  A glimmer of a smile lightened her expression. ‘I’ve noticed.’

  Fairness compelled me to add, ‘He’s a good person. I mean, if you expand your definition of good to include quite a lot of bad behaviour.’

  ‘You trust him.’

  ‘Never,’ I said, and meant it.

  ‘But you like working with him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t work it out.’

  ‘I’m used to him. I know what to expect.’ I checked my watch. ‘For instance, I know that he is already in the car and if we don’t get a move on, he’ll leave without us. Let’s go.’

  32

  We were twenty minutes into our journey when the heavy black clouds above us began to seep rain. Derwent flicked on the windscreen wipers as a flash of lightning made me jump.

  ‘This is all we need,’ he growled.

  ‘It was forecast,’ Georgia said from the back seat. ‘Thunderstorms across the south-east. And a possibility of flooding.’

  ‘No shit.’ Derwent switched the wipers to their fastest setting as the rain poured down the windscreen in a near-opaque sheet. Water rattled on the roof of the car, so loud that I could barely hear the thunder, or Derwent swearing beside me. He slowed down a little, and then a little more, until he was only going approximately twice as fast as I would have liked.

  ‘We’re going to get soaked,’ I predicted.

  ‘Maybe it’ll have stopped by the time we get there,’ Georgia said.

  Incorrectly, as it turned out.

  Groves Edge would have been easy to miss in the best of circumstances: it was a straggle of houses and shops that flashed past the car in the strange, stormy half-light that was closer to dusk than it had any right to be halfway through a July afternoon. Low buildings lined the main street: a teashop, a post office, two pubs, a handful of cottages with well-tended gardens. The rain had settled to a steady, heavy downpour that tore green leaves off the trees and plastered them onto the road. The gutters were rivers clogged with debris and every puddle sent a spray of water up from the wheels to smack against the side windows.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Crow Lane House.’ I flattened out the map. ‘Crow Lane is on the left in about a quarter of a mile.’

  We were all watching for it and we still almost missed it: a gap in the high hedges that barely deserved to be called a lane.

  ‘That’s it,’ I exclaimed.

  Derwent braked hard, reversed, spun the wheel and accelerated up Crow Lane as leaves and twigs rattled against the side of the car. I thought of skeletons dragging bony hands against the paintwork and maybe it wasn’t so farfetched; we were on our way to see a dead woman, after all …

  ‘It should be up here, I think.’ The scattered trees suddenly bunched together in a solid mass, dense and forbidding, and as the road turned towards it I saw a brick chimney through the leaves. The driveway was a narrow opening in the trees. Derwent shone the headlights on the gate and the ghost of words appeared, the paint faded to the point of invisibility: Crow Lane House in all its faded glory.

  ‘Hop out and open the gate,’ Derwent said to me.

  ‘I don’t think we should drive up to the house.’

  A gout of water tipped from the leaves overhead and splattered on the windscreen.

  ‘Yeah, why not,’ Derwent said. ‘It’s a nice afternoon for a walk.’

  ‘I don’t feel like giving Kate a lot of warning,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to run again.’

  ‘Where would she go?’

  ‘I don’t know. But do you really want to chase after her in this?’

  He nodded. ‘All right.’

  ‘I’m glad the plan meets with your approval,’ I said tartly.

  ‘Don’t be like that.’ He opened his door and climbed out. I looked back at Georgia, who was biting her lip. It’s awkward when Mummy and Daddy argue in the car …

  I got out of the car and stared at him across the roof. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Snappy.’

  ‘I’m not being snappy.’

  ‘You’re probably nervous,’ Derwent guessed, accurately. ‘Worried she won’t be there. You put yourself under too much pressure.’

  ‘Because you’re completely relaxed.’

  He grinned at me, his teeth very white in the gloom. ‘Have you got your radio?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What about you, Georgia?’

  ‘Yep.’ She pulled the hood of her anorak over her head and zipped it up.

  ‘Did you tell the locals we were here?’ Derwent asked me.

  ‘They were completely uninterested.’ Locating someone who had probably committed blackmail and fraud – even someone who had been, for a time, dead – wasn’t the kind of thing that let you call in favours from another police force. Hampshire Constabulary had wished us well and left us to it.

  Derwent grunted. ‘As long as they know we’re on their patch I don’t mind them staying out of it.’

  The three of us picked our way carefully up the drive. It was mud and stones all the way, and the rain made it as slippery underfoot as glass. The trees should have kept off the worst of the rain but it was a fickle kind of shelter. Every breeze sent heavy drops of water cascading down on us and I was aware of the cold water seeping through my anorak across my shoulders and down my back.

  ‘Careful now.’ Derwent’s voice was a breath in my ear as he put his hand on my arm. ‘The house is close.’

  We rounded the corner of the drive and saw it: a Victorian house, red brick and half-timbered, with bay windows and a front door set back in a large porch. It was grand at first glance and then less so as we got closer: damp streaked the brickwork and the coloured glass around the front door had a gaping hole in it, roughly boarded up. The trees came too close to the house, dense and overgrown as they were, and I felt uneasy, as if anyone could be hiding behind their bushy branches.

  We stood for a second on the edge of the trees, not quite hiding but not announcing our presence either.

  ‘Try the front. I’ll go round the back.’ He was gone, drifting over the uneven ground like a ghost. Georgia and I went up the steps side by side and I knocked on the door, the sound reverberating through the house. Somehow, even though I was confident we’d found Kate’s hiding place, I wasn’t expecting her to be there and the sight of a shadow approaching the door made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

  The door opened and I held up my warrant card, conscious of Georgia doing the same.

  ‘Kate Emery?’ It was worth asking. The woman who stood in the doorway was dark-haired, not fair, and her hair was cut into a neat jaw-length bob with a deep fringe. She looked pale and tired. Her top and trousers seemed loose on her, as if she hadn’t eaten much lately. I had been staring at photographs of her for the best part of two weeks and I would have walked straight past her in the street.

  She nodded. There was no surprise in her heavy-lidded eyes. Resignation, I thought, and a degree of wariness. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We want to talk to you, Kate. We need your help with a few things.’

  ‘Help,’ she repeated, her voice flat. ‘Are you here to arrest me?’

  ‘No,’ I said, although it was a distinct possibility. ‘We want to talk to you about Chloe.’

  Something tightened in her face. ‘Chloe.’

  ‘You’ve heard about what happened.’ I didn’t phrase it as a question because I knew she had: the public appeal to find Chloe, the panicked phone calls to her number as Kate criss-crossed the local area, covering her tracks as best she could, not quite reckless with fear but close to it.

  ‘That she’s dead? I saw it on the news
.’ Her chin quivered but she held on to her composure, barely. ‘I don’t think I want to talk to you.’

  ‘We’re looking for the person who killed Chloe,’ I said. ‘You must want us to find them.’

  A flash of anger made her pupils snap to pinpoints. ‘Must I?’

  ‘I assume so. She was your only child.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ Her eyes widened at the sound of footsteps crunching the gravel: Derwent, returning with less care to be silent and a lot more speed.

  ‘Kate Emery, I presume.’ He jogged up the steps and peered at her. ‘You’ve changed. But then I suppose that was the idea.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’ She made to shut the door and Georgia stopped her.

  ‘We can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘We know you had your reasons for running away and we even know what some of those reasons were. But we need to hear your side of it.’

  She looked at the watch that hung loosely from her wrist. ‘You can’t stay for long.’

  ‘Got somewhere to be?’ Derwent asked, and she glared at him briefly, then stepped away from the door and disappeared into the shadows of the house.

  As I crossed the threshold I felt a chill that seemed to seep all the way through to my bones. The rooms on either side of the hall were dim. The air smelled of cold ashes and damp. I tried to imagine it blazing with life and warmth, sunlight streaming in through the big windows, the breeze from the river tossing the trees.

  ‘Cheerful,’ Derwent muttered in my ear and I nodded before following Kate into the room on the right of the hall: a sitting room. It was a pleasant enough room, or it would have been if there had been a fire in the hearth. The armchairs and sofa were upholstered in faded chintz that felt damp when I touched it. Kate seemed oblivious to the cold and when Derwent switched on a lamp she jumped, surprised at the yellowish light that flooded the room. We sat down, Georgia and me on the sofa, Derwent in an armchair that sagged under his weight. He leaned forward.

  ‘So, Mrs Emery. Seems to me you have some explaining to do.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain anything to you.’

  ‘That’s not technically true, is it? You’ve got yourself into a right old mess, love. Why did you do it? Why fake your death?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You left your house looking like an abattoir. You left your belongings, your keys, your phone. What else were we supposed to think?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘I can’t help the assumptions you made.’

  ‘People usually have a few reasons for pretending to be dead,’ I said. ‘They’ve done something terrible, they want to claim life insurance without the inconvenience of actually dying, or they’re scared of someone. Which is it, Kate?’

  ‘Insurance, obviously,’ Derwent said. ‘That would have been a hefty payout, Kate. Well worth losing a few pints of blood.’

  ‘I didn’t claim anything. I have a life insurance policy but so do lots of people.’

  ‘You didn’t get the chance to claim it.’ Derwent smiled. ‘I didn’t come down in the last shower, Kate.’

  ‘You can’t prove it because I didn’t do it. Are you arresting people for crimes they might commit now?’

  ‘It’s common sense, Kate. And if we put in a bit more work, we’ll be able to prove it.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ She was tightly coiled like a snake about to strike. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

  ‘No, what’s nonsense is expecting us to believe you’d stage your own death for no reason.’

  ‘You’re not being fair to Mrs Emery,’ I said. ‘I did mention some other reasons for wanting to disappear. Like having done something terrible. Like being afraid.’

  Her attention switched back to me, her eyes unblinking. ‘Afraid of whom?’

  ‘Morgan Norris, for one?’

  I thought she was going to be sick then and there. She swayed, then gathered herself together. ‘What about him?’

  ‘We found the clothes. Your clothes.’ I tilted my head, considering her. ‘But I think we were meant to find them. You didn’t want him to get away with what he did to you.’

  She didn’t answer straight away. Then she said, ‘He did it to scare me. And it worked.’

  ‘Why did he want to scare you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was wary now.

  ‘You were having an affair with his brother.’

  I had the impression that something that had been held taut slackened within her: relief. We knew about the affair and not about the blackmail. ‘You know about that.’

  ‘We found some forensic evidence. And Oliver told us.’

  ‘He was very forthcoming. He seemed proud of himself,’ Derwent said. Kate’s mouth curled into a smile, but not a pleasant one.

  ‘I’m sure he was happy to tell you all about it.’

  ‘One thing that’s been bothering me.’ Derwent leaned forward, his arms on his knees. ‘Why did you make him use a condom?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oliver. Why make him use a condom? You knew he was shooting blanks.’

  ‘I – I didn’t. I couldn’t have known.’ She was on high alert again, her hands clasped together in her lap. ‘It was healthier. For both of us. I always insist on it with all my partners. It’s safer.’

  ‘Morgan didn’t wear a condom,’ I said. Did we know about the blackmail or not? The tension had to be tormenting her. ‘Because he raped you. You didn’t get the chance to make him put one on.’

  ‘Did you arrest him?’

  ‘I’ve interviewed him but, without your testimony, I can’t take it further. Believe me, I’d like to.’

  ‘I can’t help you.’ Her face was shuttered, remote.

  ‘He’ll do it to someone else,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not my problem.’

  ‘All about the self-interest, our Kate,’ Derwent said. ‘It’s what’s best for you all the time, isn’t it? You didn’t even stick around to make sure your daughter was all right. You left Chloe behind, Kate. That’s cold.’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk to me about my daughter. You have no right.’

  Derwent carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Chloe’s dead, Kate. DS Kerrigan and I went to her post-mortem. Someone killed her and threw her body away like she was nothing.’

  ‘We don’t know why it happened, let alone who did it,’ I said. ‘We’ve wasted a lot of time looking for your killer, but it hasn’t got us very far with finding Chloe’s.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘She drowned.’

  ‘Did they – did they hurt her?’ she whispered.

  ‘She had some injuries.’ Pity made me add, ‘But she didn’t have defensive injuries. She wasn’t assaulted. It looked as if she didn’t fight.’

  Kate pressed her hand over her mouth, physically holding back the sobs that shook her fragile frame. Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Do you know what happened to her, Kate? Can you help us? That’s more important than anything else at this moment.’

  ‘We want to find the person or people who hurt your daughter,’ Derwent said, his voice softer now. I’d known him a long time but I’d never got used to the way he could switch from flippant hostility to the purest kind of empathy. ‘They don’t deserve to get away with it. You don’t want them to get away with it.’

  ‘No.’ She dragged in a breath, gasping a little. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘So please, Kate, help us.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. You obviously loved Chloe.’

  ‘More than you can imagine. More than anything.’

  ‘Then why won’t you talk to us?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘She ran away with Bethany Norris and Bethany tried to kill herself after Chloe died,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask Bethany.’

  ‘Chloe was sleeping with William Turner, did you know that?’
/>
  Kate flinched. ‘I – no.’

  ‘They were in love.’

  ‘Chloe didn’t understand love.’

  ‘William says she did.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you about that.’

  I was starting to lose my temper. ‘Why don’t we talk about her stepbrother, Nolan? He sexually assaulted her. Did you know that? That’s why she didn’t stay with her father. She wasn’t safe there. She wasn’t safe anywhere.’

  ‘Shut up. I won’t listen to you. I won’t.’ Her expression was stubborn, unyielding.

  Derwent stood up and jerked his head towards the hall. I followed him out, leaving Georgia to sit with Kate.

  ‘We’re not getting anywhere,’ Derwent said, dropping his voice so it was barely audible.

  ‘She knows more than she’s saying,’ I said. ‘I know she does. Maybe she’s afraid to incriminate herself. If she had a solicitor—’

  ‘They’d tell her to go no comment.’

  ‘Not if we promised to leave the fraud charges out of it.’

  ‘What fraud charges? She’s right, we’ve got nothing concrete against her on that. Not yet, anyway,’ Derwent added. ‘I haven’t given up on it.’

  ‘And the blackmail – if Eleanor Norris makes a complaint.’

  ‘That’s a big if. She’d have to tell her husband about it, for starters. We have no proof as it stands.’ Derwent rapped his knuckles on my head. ‘You’re not getting this, are you? We’ve got a lot of guesswork at the moment, not facts. And she knows it.’

  ‘She’s going to run again if we leave her. I’m surprised she hasn’t gone already.’

  ‘We should arrest her. Keep her while we try to dig up some more on the insurance thing. There has to be something incriminating on her computer or in her papers. It’s not as if we’ve been investigating this as an insurance fraud from the start – we’re bound to have missed something.’

  ‘But they won’t keep her in custody for long, and it will piss her off. They’ll get her first account, assuming she cooperates with an interview, and then she’ll be out on bail.’

  ‘Better than nothing.’ He started back towards the door and I caught his arm to stop him.

  ‘It bloody isn’t. If we arrest her for insurance fraud and she turns out to be the key witness in a murder trial, we’ll have shot ourselves in the foot. Any defence barrister would make use of it. That’s the best way to discredit whatever she tells us.’