Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  ‘Assuming she’s around to tell us anything.’ Derwent chewed his lip. ‘If we don’t lock her up, they’ll say we went easy on her.’

  ‘She knows something about Chloe’s death. I know she does.’

  ‘That’s why you told her about Turner and the stepbrother. Looking for a reaction.’

  ‘And I didn’t get one.’

  ‘We need to arrest her.’

  ‘We can’t.’

  ‘Fuck this,’ Derwent said loudly enough that Kate must have heard it.

  ‘Shut up, for God’s sake.’ I took out my phone. ‘Let’s call Burt. Let her policy this.’

  ‘That’s not actually a bad idea for once, Kerrigan.’

  ‘Thanks. It would be an even better idea if I had any reception,’ I said, staring at the screen.

  ‘Radio?’

  That wasn’t working either.

  Derwent checked his own phone. ‘I fucking hate the countryside. Is there a landline?’

  There was an old-fashioned phone on a table by the stairs. I lifted the receiver and listened. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Christ almighty. I’ll have to drive back to civilisation.’

  ‘Or find a payphone.’

  ‘Did you see one on the way here?’

  I tried to remember. ‘I think so. On the way out of the village?’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘No, wait. I think I should go.’

  He glowered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t trust you to put both sides of the argument to Burt fairly.’

  He pressed his hand against his chest, wounded. ‘That hurts, Kerrigan.’

  ‘Am I wrong?’

  ‘Yes, you are. I can be fair.’

  I folded my arms. ‘OK then. Why don’t you let me go on my own?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘You don’t trust me and I don’t trust you.’

  ‘But I outrank you.’

  I raised one eyebrow and waited until he sighed. ‘So what do you want to do? Leave Georgia here?’

  ‘She can look after her,’ I said. ‘We won’t be long.’

  ‘All right. But let’s not make a big deal of it. At the moment, legally, Kate could walk out at any second and there’s nothing we could do to stop her. I don’t want to give her the idea to give it a whirl.’

  33

  It took longer than I had anticipated to find a phone and to persuade Una Burt to make an actual decision. Much longer than I would have liked, considering I spent a lot of it jammed up against Derwent in a phone box that was fogged with condensation and smelled, regrettably, of piss.

  To give Burt her due, she heard both sides of the argument and considered them with care. It wasn’t entirely a surprise to me that she decided we should arrest Kate, but I was disappointed.

  ‘I think we’ll lose any chance of getting her to cooperate, boss. And it’s going to cause us problems further down the line.’

  ‘We’ll have to deal with that when we get that far. At the moment we don’t have anyone to put on trial so there’s very little point in worrying about it.’

  I disagreed, profoundly, but there was nothing I could do about it. At least it was no longer our decision. Now that I was more senior I was discovering that policing was at least as much about covering your arse as locking up bad guys.

  This time we drove all the way up the winding drive and parked in front of the house. I beat Derwent to the door, running up the steps to get out of the rain that was heavier than ever.

  ‘Did you leave the door open?’ I pushed it without waiting for him to reply, and as I stepped into the hall I knew that something was wrong. I put a hand up to warn Derwent who checked his progress just a little too late, colliding with me.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.

  I shook my head, trying to work it out. Silence, that was one thing. The door to the sitting room was open, a breeze stirring the curtains, but there was no sign of Kate and Georgia.

  ‘Kitchen?’

  ‘I’ll have a look.’

  He sidestepped me and slipped down towards the back of the house, not making a sound on the tiled floor. I stayed where I was, listening. A tiny noise broke the silence, a sound that could have been claws on wood or a soft fall of dust or the house settling. Probably a rat, I thought, or a mouse. The riverbank would be teeming with them. The gardens ran all the way down to the river, the letting agent had said. When it was cold, or they were hungry, the rodents would surely come to the house, to feast on threadbare carpets and faded curtains and old upholstery. I imagined them nesting in the innards of armchairs and mattresses and suppressed a shudder.

  Derwent was back in a few seconds, shaking his head, the tension visible in the line of his mouth and the set of his shoulders. If she’d gone … And where the hell was Georgia? If something had happened to her …

  I started up the stairs because I was closer, and because I knew Derwent wanted to go first. I would break him of his desire to protect me if it was the last thing I did, I thought, stepping as quietly as I could on the wooden treads. I hugged the wall, my eyes straining to make sense of the landing: a chair, an ornate chest of drawers, a door on the right that was slightly ajar. I turned back to check whether Derwent had seen it and he gave me a look: Get on with it but be careful. I didn’t often regret that I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun but the weight of it would have been a comfort. A torch and a metal baton weren’t really all that reassuring when you came down to it. Nor was the hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward. Derwent, protective? Not today, apparently.

  I pushed the door open gingerly and waited one … two … three. No attack. I pushed harder, letting it swing back against the wall with a hollow thud. No one standing behind the door, waiting for me. I stepped smartly through it and swung around, trying to take in every noteworthy detail of the room in a single sweep. A bay window, the curtains open on the gloomy weather outside. There was a lopsided dressing table in the window, with a three-part mirror on the top reflecting three tense versions of me. A chair. A wardrobe, the doors ajar to show it was empty apart from a couple of pairs of jeans and a jumper.

  Kate’s room.

  If she’d gone, she’d gone without packing. I went back to the hallway, where Derwent was emerging from another bedroom shaking his head.

  ‘Nothing.’

  We checked the remaining rooms together, finding a dim bathroom and a single bedroom but no sign of Kate or Georgia. I had more or less ordered Georgia to take more risks. I had insisted on leaving her alone with Kate, who was prepared to be ruthless when she needed to be. What had I done?

  As I came back down the stairs to the hall I heard the sound again and this time I had more luck in placing it: a door beside the stairs. I crossed over to it and listened, my own breathing filling my ears unhelpfully. Then I turned to Derwent and nodded. He tapped very gently on the door and there was a distinct sob from behind it.

  ‘Georgia?’ I hissed.

  ‘Maeve? I thought – I wasn’t sure it was you.’ She sounded terrified, on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Where’s Kate?’

  ‘I don’t know. She – she locked me in here.’

  Derwent rattled the door. ‘No key. Can you stand back a bit?’

  ‘I’ll try.’ There was a shuffling sound. Derwent took a step back and kicked the door as hard as he could. The wood splintered. He kicked it again and the lock gave up. He pulled the door open and it swung back to show a tear-streaked, dusty face blinking at us from the depths of a cupboard that was full of old coats, deckchairs, a croquet set and cobwebs.

  ‘Come on. Out you come.’ Derwent took her by the arm and helped her out. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were in the kitchen – I was making a cup of tea – and she put all the lights on. It must have tripped a fuse. The fuse box is in here. She asked me if I’d mind sorting it out because she was scared of spiders. The next thing I knew, she’d locked me in.’ Georgia held out shaking hands: brok
en nails, skinned knuckles. ‘I tried to open the door. I couldn’t get any purchase on it. There was nothing to hold on to.’

  ‘No, once you were in there you had no chance,’ Derwent said. ‘The trick is not getting locked up in the first place.’

  ‘Has she done a runner? Is her car still there?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a silver Seat at the back of the house. I saw it from the kitchen window,’ Derwent said. ‘Hasn’t moved.’

  ‘Maybe she went on foot.’ Georgia was shivering. ‘My hands really hurt.’

  ‘Did you hear her moving around, Georgia?’

  ‘I couldn’t hear anything. I heard the two of you moving around. I wasn’t sure if I should call out or not. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘OK. No one’s blaming you,’ Derwent said, quite obviously blaming her. I was holding on to my temper with difficulty. ‘Kate had a plan and you didn’t spot it.’

  ‘She was always going to run. Why hadn’t she gone before, though? What was she waiting for?’ I was trying to puzzle it out. ‘As soon as she heard Chloe was gone she should have packed up and left.’

  ‘Why don’t we find her and ask her?’ Derwent said, heading for the kitchen. ‘If she went on foot, she can’t have gone far.’

  We scoured the outbuildings quickly and found nothing.

  ‘Road or river?’ I said as the three of us gathered in the small yard next to the house.

  ‘She didn’t know where we were going but she’d have known we were coming back by road. Let’s go with river first,’ Derwent decided.

  If anything, the rain was heavier now, drumming on the parched earth. Weeks of drought had made the ground steel-hard and the water was sitting on top of it rather than sinking in. We hacked across the gravelled terrace behind the house and onto the sodden grass, our feet sending up a fine spray as we hurried towards the dense evergreen hedge at the end of the lawn. I was the first to reach the wrought-iron gate set into it. I stepped onto flagstones that were slippery-green with algae, and found myself in a walled garden. The beds were overplanted, the paths half-hidden under wildly flourishing plants that smelled sweet and fresh under my feet. There was a pergola at the centre, raised up a little, smothered in a mantle of some sort of creeper. I headed straight for it to orientate myself and decide where to go next.

  That decision was made for me as soon as I got close enough to see the floor.

  ‘Over here!’ I yelled. ‘Blood.’

  There was a substantial amount of it – more than a scratch, I thought – and it was smeared in places, as if there had been a struggle. And in the middle of it all lay a battered kitchen knife, the handle smeared red, the blade snapped off at the tip. It was such an ordinary thing, domestic and familiar, the metal dulled with age.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Derwent snapped, looking over my shoulder. ‘Not again.’

  It was hard to see the blood that had splashed on the paving slabs: the rain had diluted it, turning it brown, and had washed it away almost everywhere. The trail seemed to lead to the left, where there was another gate out to the riverbank.

  ‘You go that way,’ Derwent said to Georgia, pointing right. ‘In case this is another of her tricks.’

  Georgia nodded and set off, huddled against the rain. I followed Derwent down the path to the left, noting a smudge on the wall and a drip of red on the outside of a planter, sheltered from the rain by its overhanging lip.

  A wall of tall, whispering reeds confronted us on the riverbank. I could smell the water but I couldn’t see it. A muddy path ran along the edge of the river, the ground rutted and uneven and hopeless for footprints. Trees lined the river, their branches forming a dense, dark canopy over our heads, and it was dark enough that I missed her the first time I looked. It was only when I was almost on top of her that I realised what I was seeing.

  ‘Shit.’

  She was curled up at the base of a tree, her head tipped back to lie on her shoulder. Her eyes were open, her mouth slack. One hand lay on the ground beside her, the fingers coated in red, the nails clotted with it. There was something in the way she lay that told me she was dead even before Derwent had pressed his fingers against her throat for a few seconds and looked up, his face grim.

  ‘Not faking this time.’

  Protocol said that we should start CPR, that we should work on her until paramedics came to confirm her life was over. I had no heart for it and neither, it seemed, did Derwent. We were too late and all that we would achieve was the destruction of any evidence her killer had left behind.

  I had spent so long thinking of Kate as a dead woman that it almost felt inevitable that she was lying at our feet, as if we’d been speaking to a ghost all along. The life in her had been like light shining from a dead star: finite and illusory.

  I was putting on gloves. Gingerly, I lifted her jumper. It was starting to stick to the blood that coated her torso from at least two deep stab wounds. Plenty of force.

  Plenty of anger.

  ‘No way is that self-inflicted,’ I said. Calm professional assessment was what was needed, not shock. ‘She’d never have got the knife back out after the first injury. No shallow wounds. No practising.’

  ‘If you were going to kill yourself with a knife you’d go for the throat or try to sever an artery. And Kate was a nurse so she would have known that.’

  ‘How long ago, would you say?’

  ‘She feels cold, but in this weather …’ Derwent shook his head. ‘No idea.’

  I slipped my hand down the back of her neck, where the body heat was ebbing away more slowly than in her exposed hands and face. ‘Half an hour, maybe? Less?’

  ‘He could still be here.’ Derwent said it casually, as if it wasn’t a problem.

  ‘That occurred to me.’ I was shaking, angry. The trees seemed to press in around me. Was this what Kate had been waiting for? A blood sacrifice in memory of her beautiful daughter? Or was it an accomplice who’d decided she was too dangerous to leave alive? And under our noses, too, while we had argued about who was going to take the fall for a decision that was suddenly irrelevant. ‘She knew he was coming, didn’t she? That’s what she was waiting for. That’s why she told us we couldn’t stay for long. I wondered why she looked at her watch.’

  ‘Find Georgia,’ Derwent said, taking charge. ‘Send her to call for back-up. I want dog units and a boat, if they’ve got one. Tell her to get a scene log started and set up a cordon. We need to make sure the local CID know what’s happening. They’ll need to get their crime scene techs here.’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘I need you to help me look for whoever did this.’ He looked left and right, chewing his lip. ‘I reckon he’ll have gone downstream. That’s what I’d do. If I go that way and you check the other, we’ve got the best chance of finding him.’

  I nodded, not thinking about the danger or the cold or the fact that we were going to be in a world of trouble for letting Kate die, or even the fact that Kate had died. There was a job to do. Everything else could wait.

  ‘Get going,’ Derwent said, his face stern and I’d already turned to go when he added, ‘And Maeve … be careful.’

  34

  I didn’t waste time staring at Kate Emery’s body when I got back to the riverbank. I could recall every detail of how she looked and what she had suffered.

  Our fault.

  My fault for insisting on going with Derwent, for fighting to be heard when really my voice didn’t matter. If I had stayed instead of Georgia. If I had stayed with Georgia.

  If I had done just about anything differently, Kate would still be alive, and the knowledge of it was pure bitterness in my mouth.

  There was no sign of Derwent, or anyone else for that matter. He had gone left, following the river downstream. Left was towards Groves Edge, towards civilisation and people and main roads. Right was back along the river towards farmland, scattered houses, a whole lot of not very much. He had been certain that the killer
would go that way, but I wasn’t so sure. Colin Vale had said it: people always ran away from crowds. Instinct was a stronger imperative than common sense, and instinct insisted on bolting for the wilderness. I jogged along the path. The worn brickwork of the boundary wall for Crow Lane House was blank and solid on my right, while the reeds sighed on my left. I felt hemmed in, trapped.

  What would I do if I had recently killed Kate Emery? Run, obviously. I wouldn’t wait around for the police to find me. There was no need to worry. The killer, I told myself, was long gone.

  At a bend in the river the reeds gave some ground so I could see out across the water for the first time. The river was wider than I had expected, swollen with rainwater and a lot of debris from further upstream. In the centre it flowed fast, the current dimpling the surface. The water looked cold and grey and wholly threatening. I swore as I tripped on an exposed root and almost fell.

  Get a move on, Maeve.

  I began to run again, scanning my surroundings as I went for anything human but no, a tree trunk, a bump in the path, a drift of leaves in a hollow, the rain striking down between the trees … Every shadow might have been the killer. Every gleam might have been the light catching on a blade, not a wet, glossy leaf.

  He had left his knife behind, that was one thing. He probably wasn’t armed any more. And I had my ASP.

  Ahead of me the path took a sharp turn and I slowed, wary of what might lie beyond it. What I found as I rounded the bend made me stop in my tracks, but it wasn’t the killer.

  It was a car. Someone had driven it down a narrow track to the river; I could see the mud on the wheels and sprayed up the sides of the car, and the rain hadn’t yet washed away the tyre-marks on the track itself. Someone had turned the car so it was ready to drive away again.

  Someone.

  I could give him a name, now, the man we were looking for – the man who had stabbed Kate Emery to death. The man, I guessed, who had killed Chloe, even though I knew he’d loved her.