The Burning

by Jane Casey

  ‘DI Judd was in charge of the investigation into Rebecca’s death,’ I began, but the superintendent shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry about Tom. He’s busy with other things. I didn’t get the impression that he was giving this as much attention as you were, anyway. I have a feeling you’ve got the answers, Maeve, if you just give yourself a chance to realise it.’

  ‘I appreciate your faith in me, but I’m not sure I do,’ I stammered, feeling anything but insightful.

  ‘You might surprise yourself.’ He caught my mother’s eye. ‘Don’t work too hard, of course.’

  I had promised not to tire myself out, but I was determined not to let him, or myself, down. If that meant having to sit on the file in the car and sleep with it under my pillow so Mum didn’t get a chance to spirit it away – well, that was just what I had to do.

  Back at home, in the inhumanly tidy surroundings of my parents’ semi-detached house in Cheam, I took over the mostly unused dining room. I spread out the contents of the file on the table, organising things into neat piles as if that would help to make sense of them, as if by making a pretty pattern I could see the truth. Two boxes arrived a day later, delivered by Rob, who watched me rifle through them with a resigned expression on his face. He thought, and said, that I shouldn’t be trying to work, for which my mother absolutely adored him. I sent him off to have a cup of tea and indulged in an orgy of organising. One pile was interviews that Judd had ordered other officers to do with Rebecca’s neighbours, her ex-clients and a couple of old flatmates. One pile dealt with Oxford. I wavered over it – I still wasn’t sure it deserved to be so prominent – but in the end, Tilly Shaw’s words, and her serious face, came back to me. ‘She said she owed her life for someone else’s and she’d have to pay sometime.’ If Adam’s death had set Rebecca on a path that led to her murder, I wanted to trace her footsteps. One pile was the material from the investigation into Rebecca’s death: forensic reports, the autopsy notes, photographs, CCTV logs, witness statements, mobile phone records, financial documents. Lastly, there were my own notes from the interviews I’d done. I needed to review it, all of it, in case there was something I’d missed, something someone else had noted and not understood. Godley was right. If I couldn’t find the answers he needed, no one would.

  Rob poked his head in halfway through. ‘I’m going to head off.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sounded far too disappointed. I forced myself to smile. ‘OK. I thought you might have had enough by now. Prolonged exposure to Mum will do that for a person.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She’s a poppet,’ he said with a grin.

  ‘Oh yeah? If you ever see Ian again, ask him about her. He’ll tell you the truth.’

  ‘I’ll make up my own mind, thanks. Good luck with the work and take it easy.’ He waved from the doorway and disappeared.

  I caught up with him as he unlocked his car. ‘You still haven’t told me what Ian said to you at the hospital.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ He looked down at me for a moment, then leaned in for a kiss that took me completely by surprise. I managed not to splutter but couldn’t stop myself from turning when it was over to check whether anyone in the house had seen us.

  ‘Don’t get cold,’ Rob said, as calm as if nothing had happened. ‘You aren’t dressed for being outside.’ He sat into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine.

  I wrapped my cardigan around myself more tightly, trying to match his composure even though I was tingling all over. ‘I’m fine. Tell me what he said. I mean it, Rob.’

  ‘If you must know, he wished me luck. He told me I’d need it.’

  I didn’t know what to say, and Rob didn’t help me. With a raised eyebrow he shut the car door and reversed out of the drive, speeding away leaving me with a million unanswered questions and a stack of paper to read through.

  It took days to get through all of it, scribbling notes as I went, fuelled by endless cups of tea and diverted by occasional spats with my mother, purely from habit. Dad took refuge in the front room where there was a vast TV and Sky Sports, and for a little while, it was just like being a teenager again. The effect was heightened when Mum enlisted my brother Dec to help her retrieve my belongings from Ian’s flat. My life amounted to pathetically little when it was in bags and boxes. Dec carried the lot up to my old bedroom where it sat in a heap, because I refused to unpack.

  Dec being Dec, of course, he attempted to persuade me to stay. ‘Mum and Dad would love you to be around more. They don’t see enough of you.’

  He was four years older than me but seemed middle-aged already. He had got married when he was twenty-five and already had two kids, girls. He lived in Croydon, not far from Mum and Dad, but I knew – because he had told me – that he thought I should pull my weight more where they were concerned. He had responsibilities, after all. I, it seemed, did not.

  You would have thought that the grandchildren would have been distraction enough for my mother, but she managed not to lose her sense of grievance if I didn’t call her often enough. I had a feeling that Dec was hurt that his devotion wasn’t recognised as it should have been. But then, he’d never really learned the lesson that life wasn’t fair. I ignored Dec’s comments. Being at home was temporary, I promised myself. I would be off on my own again soon, even if I didn’t know where I was going to go.

  This wasn’t the only thing on my mind, of course. Generally, the things I didn’t know vastly outnumbered the things I did, both personally and professionally, but the difference was that police mysteries didn’t make my head hurt. But all the time, my mind was working away on what I had read, what I had seen, what I had heard. And when I pushed the last pile of paper away from me on the third day of reading, I had a sheet of paper in front of me that was dense with notes and scribbled questions, and a growing conviction that I was tantalisingly close to a definite answer. I had a list of suspects who had clear motives to kill Rebecca Haworth: she had many more enemies than the average twenty-eight-year-old. I knew that some of them had lied, and lied again – I could prove it. But I couldn’t yet prove which one of them had murdered her.

  I dug through the boxes I hadn’t yet unpacked until I unearthed DCI Garland’s fat dog-eared folder of notes on Adam Rowley. I sorted through it until I found the inspector’s account of Adam Rowley’s life up to its early termination, specifically his family background, and read it with renewed interest before picking up my phone. Belcott answered on the second ring.

  ‘Belcott.’

  ‘Peter, it’s Maeve Kerrigan. I understand you’re working on the Haworth murder. I’ve got something I’d like you to follow up.’ I was at my silkiest, knowing that it would irritate him almost beyond endurance to be working for me.

  ‘Of course,’ he said stiffly. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘A twenty-year-old man named Adam Rowley’ – I spelled it – ‘drowned in Oxford in 2002. I want to trace his older brother. I don’t have a first name or any other details but he would have lived in Nottingham and his parents’ names were Tristan and Helen Rowley. Tristan Rowley was a doctor, if that helps.’

  ‘Not a lot, as it happens. Any idea if the parents still live in Nottingham?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said cheerfully. ‘And call me back when you find out about him. If you get hold of him, I’d like to talk to him.’ I wanted to find out who else might have mourned for Adam, apart from Rebecca. I wanted to know who might have wanted revenge.

  He hung up without saying goodbye, which I didn’t mind. I was occupied with searching through my notebook for what I’d taken down during my interview with Caspian Faraday when he rang back, surprisingly quickly.

  ‘Adam Rowley’s brother Sebastian is thirty-one, married, and lives in Edinburgh. I’ve just spoken to his wife. Seb is in surgery, apparently, but he will call you when he’s free, she said. He’s a vet. Small-animals practice.’

  ‘You found out a lot.’ I was actually impressed.

  ‘Mrs Rowley junior likes to ta
lk. Was there anything else?’

  ‘Yes. I want you to find out everything you can about Delia Faraday, Caspian Faraday’s wife. Specifically, where she was on the twenty-sixth of November and in the days leading up to it, and what kind of car she drives. And anything else I might be interested in.’

  ‘Right.’ He hesitated. ‘Do you really think she was involved?’

  ‘I want to rule a few things out.’ I was deliberately vague; I wasn’t ready yet to tell anyone what I was thinking, let alone Belcott, who would hijack my ideas in a heartbeat.

  ‘I live to serve,’ he said, and hung up.

  A pleasant-sounding Seb Rowley called me a couple of hours later, cheerful, intrigued and not a little surprised about being contacted by the Metropolitan Police. I asked him a few questions about his brother’s death and got no new information from him, except that Adam had been a difficult child, inclined to sulk, and that he and his brother had never got on.

  ‘Three years is a big gap at that age. Maybe if he’d lived longer we’d have got to know one another a bit better as adults.’ The shrug travelled down the phone line. ‘Never happened.’

  I persevered. ‘Was Adam particularly close to anyone in the family? A cousin, someone like that?’

  ‘No. We don’t have a big extended family. My parents were both only children, so no cousins.’ He sounded puzzled but unguarded and I had to believe he was telling the truth. He didn’t know anyone named Gil Maddick. Dead end.

  Belcott had left me a voicemail, I discovered on winding up my conversation with Seb Rowley. Delia Faraday didn’t have a UK driver’s licence, but there was a black Range Rover Vogue registered to the Highgate address in addition to the Aston Martin.

  I headed back to the table, to the CCTV logs. We had searched far and wide for clues and there was a lot of CCTV, pulled in from the surrounding streets. Colin Vale, a tall, cadaverous detective who looked as if he hadn’t seen daylight in years, had spent weeks running the plates from all of the Operation Mandrake CCTV through the PNC and DVLA databases and then following up, tracing drivers, ruling them out because they had alibis for Burning Man murders. Then he had to do it all for Rebecca’s murder in the light of Godley’s decision to run the enquiry alongside the main investigation. If there was one thing DC Vale was good at, though, it was organising information. The spreadsheets he’d produced were things of beauty. I had looked through them already in my trawl through the file, but now I looked again, and this time I concentrated on the cars that had been tagged as ‘not of interest/untraced’, looking for the Range Rover. About halfway down the fourth page, I saw something completely unexpected, something that made my heart jump with shock. A make and model that I recognised. One occupant.

  Godley, or whoever had assembled the file on his behalf, had been thorough enough to include three disks of CCTV, and Vale had lovingly cross-referenced each entry in his log with a timestamp and location. It was simple to find the right disk, slightly harder to persuade Dad to part with the remote control for five minutes – ‘Why? What is it? Is it a film? I’ll put it on for you’ – and the work of seconds to select the right part of the recording. It was a tape from a petrol station near the New Covent Garden market, the angle acute enough to show the traffic passing for a second or two. I held my breath as the car I wanted to see crossed the bottom of the picture, one occupant visible in no great detail, but clearly enough, especially on Dad’s giant TV, that I could guess at the features and know who I was looking at. It might not have been enough to convince a jury, but it had convinced me.

  And it changed everything.

  LOUISE

  After the incident on the stairs, I made up my mind that I had to end it with Gil. Not because I couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done – strangely, I took it for granted that he would treat me that way: it was his nature. I’d known he was as dangerous as a naked flame; I had only myself to blame for acting the part of the moth. Belatedly, I’d learned my lesson, grateful for the reminder that came in time to stop me from trusting him or even falling in love with him. Not, I assured myself, that there had been any danger of that. I had just been doing a good impression of it. But I was tired of playing a part, tired of being the version of Rebecca that he could have loved for ever. The novelty had worn off. And I was a little bit ashamed of myself that I’d let it go on for so long. Fun though it had been to try out being his girlfriend, it was past time to call a halt.

  I gave him twenty-four hours, though. A whole day to think that I had been brought to heel. Mastered. Taught a lesson. He believed it, too. I found him in the spare bedroom, sanding the window frame as if it belonged to him, whistling through his teeth. He was doing it the old-fashioned way, with a bit of sandpaper wrapped around a block, getting into every crevice of the old frame so all the traces of yellowing paint had been removed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Finishing this off for you. You haven’t exactly been making much progress.’

  He was right. I had shut the door on the room after stripping it bare. There was nothing left of it as it had been, just gaping bare floorboards and the off-white, bumpy old plaster on the walls. The redesigned interior only existed in my head.

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to get back to it. I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Haven’t you, though.’ He half-turned to grin at me. I didn’t smile back. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Fine. Look, leave that, would you? I’ll get round to it some time myself.’

  ‘No time like the present.’ He kept sanding and I felt anger start to burn through me. How dare he behave as if it was his house? How dare he ignore me when I told him to stop?

  ‘You look good,’ he said without turning around. ‘I like that colour on you. You should always wear blue.’

  I plucked at the sky-coloured T-shirt I was wearing. ‘Glad you like it. This was Rebecca’s favourite colour.’

  That got his attention. He set the sandpaper down on the windowsill with deliberate lack of haste and turned to face me. ‘I thought we talked about that. Why do you keep bringing her up?’

  ‘She’s on my mind,’ I said simply.

  ‘Well, she shouldn’t be. She belongs to the past. You should only be thinking about the present, and the future.’ He walked over to me and tugged up the hem of the T-shirt, pulling it over my head. ‘You should only be thinking about me.’

  I let him take my top off – not that he would have stopped if I had resisted him, I could tell. Instead of dropping it to the floor I held on to it, hugging it to my chest. ‘Actually, I have been thinking about you. And the future.’

  ‘Really.’ He had a quizzical expression on his face, guarded, as if he wasn’t sure where this was going.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re going to be a part of it. My future, that is.’ The direct approach seemed best.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’m finished with this. I don’t want to play any more.’

  His face darkened. ‘Is that what we were doing? Playing?’

  ‘Sure.’ I shrugged. ‘You weren’t taking it seriously, were you?’

  It was absolutely impossible for Gil to believe that I might be breaking up with him. ‘You’re very funny.’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ I said softly. ‘And I’ve made it easy for you. I’ve packed up your things.’ I took a step back, wary of what he might do.

  ‘What?’ He folded his arms. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘While you were in here, I was collecting your things,’ I explained. ‘They’re in a bin liner outside the front door. I’d hurry down if I were you; it would be terrible if someone mistook the bag for rubbish.’ I had thought that putting his things outside might make him leave, and quickly.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ He took a couple of steps towards me and I put out my hand to stop him, showing him the pepper spray I had ordered from the Internet. I almost hoped he’d give me an excuse to use it. He looked down at it, stunned
, but he didn’t come any closer.

  ‘It seemed the best way to make sure we had a clean break.’ I threw him the T-shirt. ‘Here you go. When you find the new girl you want to make into another Rebecca, give her this with my love. And wish her luck. She’ll need it.’

  I turned and walked to the door, leaving him standing in the middle of the room, at a loss.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ he called after me. ‘I won’t let you.’

  I stopped at the door. ‘No, Gil, I really can. You don’t get a say in the matter, I’m afraid. You had your fun; I had mine. Now take a hint and get lost.’

  He was a bully, and a coward. The pepper spray was enough to make him think twice about trying to argue with me. He wasn’t the sort who’d risk being hurt. I thought he was pathetic. I wished I’d never allowed him into my life in the first place. But having made that mistake, I wasn’t going to make another now. I didn’t stay to hear what else he had to say.

  I heard him walk past my bedroom door while I was putting on another top.

  ‘Gil.’

  ‘Yeah.’ There was an undertone of hope in the single syllable.

  ‘Make sure you leave the key when you go.’

  I heard the front door slam a couple of seconds later, and the rustle of the bin bag as he picked it up. Under my breath, very softly, I said, ‘Goodbye.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  MAEVE

  Godley had told me to give him a call if I had anything to discuss, but I hadn’t expected him to come to see me that day. It was flattering and nerve-racking in equal measure. He stood in the dining-room doorway, looking too tall in the context of my parents’ house, and surveyed the scene in front of him.

  ‘Plenty to look at. I wondered how long it would take.’

  ‘I’m not saying I’ve worked everything out,’ I warned him. ‘But I’m pretty sure we have enough to warrant an arrest, if not to get a conviction. It’s circumstantial, mainly, but I just don’t think there’s any other way of explaining what I’ve found out.’