by Jane Casey
‘I know all of that.’ He looked away from me as I doggedly continued with the words I could have said in my sleep.
When I’d finished, I said, ‘Mr Mitchford, I’m going to come up the steps, all right?’
‘If you come any closer I’ll throw myself down.’ He gripped the railing at the top.
‘Mr Mitchford, please.’
‘I mean it.’ He put one foot on the bottom railing and levered himself up so he was sitting on the edge.
A hand gripped my ankle and I almost screamed. Derwent looked up at me, his face strained. ‘Paramedics are here. We can’t get into Mitchford’s office. I’ve got the fire brigade on the way.’
‘Mr Mitchford, I’m going to ask you to you go back inside. I’m going to come with you. We’re going to unlock the door, okay, and then we’re going to go down the stairs together.’
‘Not going to happen.’ He was still staring at the horizon. ‘If you ask me to go inside again, I’ll jump.’
‘You don’t have to do this. You can talk to us. Talk to me.’ I hesitated, then carried on. ‘I know you loved Diana.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘Well, tell me about it. Help me to understand.’
‘She betrayed me. She betrayed my trust. She wanted to leave the firm. Leave me. I made her what she was. I gave her the chance to make something of herself. She was a grubby little girl with bad teeth and cheap shoes when I met her. Without me, she’d have been nothing.’
‘You helped her.’
‘I created her. I shaped her into the perfect woman. I paid for her to have her teeth fixed, I paid for her to go to the best hairstylists, I paid for her to dress the part. Appearances matter. You have to look right to be successful.’
‘What did you want in return?’
He shrugged, irritated. ‘What I was entitled to. Some respect. A little affection. A little gratitude.’
‘Diana didn’t owe you anything. She made herself what she was.’
‘You sound just like her. But she knew the truth of it. She knew she was a fraud. She knew that without me, she’d have been working in some grimy suburban solicitors’ firm, doing conveyancing and probate – not excelling. I made the difference between good enough and being exceptional.’
‘Why did you help her?’
‘She was everything I ever wanted. She owed me a chance to show her how much I loved her. But when I finally told her how I felt, she just wanted to be friends.’ His face darkened. ‘That bitch. She took everything and gave me nothing. And then she told me she was leaving the partnership. Leaving me.’
There was a sound halfway between a gasp and a groan from the room behind him.
‘Is that Stephen?’
He nodded.
‘He’s still alive, Paul. He needs help.’
‘I don’t care about him. He’s irrelevant.’
‘He hasn’t done anything wrong.’ I was gambling on Mitchford not knowing about Stephen’s relationship with Diana.
‘I wasn’t going to kill him. He found the knife in my office.’ Mitchford shrugged. ‘We fought. I won. I’m a winner, you see. I don’t know how to lose. I never give in. I told Diana that. I told her I’d never give up. I told her she’d never get away from me and I was right.’
I stood on that fire escape and I tried to coax Paul Mitchford into giving in. I stayed there for over an hour as the firefighters and police struggled to open the reinforced office door and Stephen Hawkson bled slowly to death, as out of reach as if he was on the dark side of the moon. And Derwent sat with Stephen, on the other side of the door, listening to him die.
I talked to Mitchford until my throat was raw, until I was swaying with fatigue, until a proper negotiator arrived and took over from me. I hauled myself up to where Derwent sat on the floor beside the still-locked door, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when I stopped beside him.
‘Go away.’
‘Josh—’
‘No. Go.’
I went. I trailed down to the street, where I dredged up some words to explain what had happened to every senior officer who was there. It was a disaster, they said. It was a situation that should never have occurred. The logic was cast-iron: any death that happened while police officers were involved was a death that shouldn’t have happened, so it had to be our fault, somehow. There would be an investigation and we would be cleared of any wrongdoing but, just in case, they were voicing their disapproval, loud and clear.
The negotiator talked to Mitchford for another hour, as the sun slid below the crowded London skyline and the sky faded to darkness. Then Mitchford jumped anyway, onto the cold unforgiving concrete four storeys down.
IV
I put music on when I got home: the most cheerful, bass-heavy music I could find. It was loud enough to vibrate the glass in the windows but the neighbours didn’t complain. Maybe they were used to it. Maybe that was how Derwent had drowned out the noises he couldn’t forget. I sang in the shower and stayed in it for much longer than normal, knowing I was hiding. Eventually I got out and pulled on comfort clothing: a giant sweatshirt and leggings. I made an omelette and concentrated on it so hard I managed not to burn it or leave it runny in the middle. I grabbed a bag of salad from the fridge and poured myself a glass of wine. My plan was a night in front of the TV and then bed, and a good night’s sleep, just as if I’d had a normal day at work.
I headed to the sitting room with the plate in one hand, my glass in the other and the corner of the bag of salad gripped between my teeth, and of the three things I carried it was, inevitably, the wine I dropped when I saw Derwent sitting on the sofa.
‘What the fuck?’ I said when I had put everything else down. ‘Did you let yourself in?’
He nodded and I felt my mood swerve towards dangerous.
‘You can’t do that, you know. You can’t just walk in here even if you do have keys.’
‘Then you should put the chain on.’
‘I shouldn’t have to. What are you doing here?’
‘Welfare check.’
‘What?’
‘I wanted to make sure you were okay. After today.’
‘Hold on.’ I went to get a tea towel for the wine that was soaking into the carpet. When I came back, I snapped off the music. The silence was loud. ‘I’m fine. Or I was.’
‘Sorry.’ He watched me scrub the carpet.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really?’ I sat back on my heels. ‘Because you’re watching me do a shitty job of cleaning this up and you haven’t said anything.’
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then, after I’d given up expecting him to answer: ‘I can’t stop thinking about it.’
‘I know.’
‘He said he didn’t want to live without her. He said there was no point if she was gone. He loved her so much.’
‘Did it remind you of Melissa?’ I asked tentatively, and got a glare in return.
‘No. Of course not.’
He got to his feet and prowled around the room, back and forth. There was something about the way he moved that was a little off.
‘Did you go to the pub after work?’
‘Just for a few.’ He stopped to rub his face with his hands, his back turned to me and I watched him sway.
Oh God. A lot more than a few, I guessed. I’d thought the smell of alcohol was from the wine I’d spilled. I stood up, edging towards my bag. ‘Listen, why don’t you head home? I can get you a cab.’
‘I don’t want to go home.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want to take this home. I don’t want to tell Melissa what happened and I don’t want to lie.’ He swung around and almost fell over. ‘She’ll ask me what I did today and I don’t want to tell her I listened to a man die and couldn’t do anything to help him. Christ …’ He unleashed a kick that connected with the living room wall so hard the plaster came away, leaving a substanti
al hole. He bent over, walking in a tiny circle. ‘Oh, shit. I think I broke my toe.’
‘You idiot.’ I took him by the hand and helped him to sit down on the floor, and with my other hand I snapped my handcuffs on his wrist. Before he focused on it I hooked the other side of the cuffs to the radiator pipe.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You can stay there until you’ve calmed down and sobered up.’ I was checking his pockets briskly, locating his phone and his keys. ‘And you’re lucky that’s all I’m doing. You’ve come here uninvited and damaged the property and I’m still not sure why.’
‘I was worried about you.’
‘You should have been worried about yourself.’
‘Sorry.’ He looked up at me with puppy-dog eyes. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘I wouldn’t mind but the landlord is a total wanker. He’s not going to be happy about that hole.’
‘Yeah, all right, Maeve.’ He rattled the cuffs. ‘You’ve made your point. Let me go.’
‘Nope.’ I stood up. ‘I’m going to make you a cup of tea, and you’re going to drink it, and eat something, and then I’m calling you a cab and unlocking the cuffs. Then you’re going home.’
‘What am I going to tell Melissa?’
‘You’ll think of something.’ I left him sitting there and took my own sweet time making his tea. I was still angry, but it faded away. I knew he wanted to protect Melissa from the worst of the job but now and then you had to take something home with you. She needed to understand that. She needed to understand him. She needed to know he had stayed with Stephen until the very end, that he had listened to his last words and comforted him as best he could. That was who he was, and it was to his credit, I thought. I had tried my hardest to talk Mitchford down, and it had taken its toll, but there were times it was harder to listen than to talk.
By the time I came back with the tea and a vast ham sandwich, Derwent was asleep. I threw a blanket over him and left the handcuff key on the carpet where he could reach it, and then I went to bed.
In the morning the hole in the wall was still there, but Derwent was long gone.
Keep Reading
Read on for the opening of Cruel Acts, the next book in Jane Casey’s fantastic series following DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent, out now!
How can you spot a murderer?
Leo Stone is a ruthless killer – or the victim of a miscarriage of justice. A year ago, he was convicted of the murder of two women and sentenced to life in prison. But now he’s free, and according to him, he’s innocent.
DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent are determined to put Stone back behind bars where he belongs, but the more Maeve finds out, the less convinced she is of his guilt.
Then another woman disappears in similar circumstances. Is there a copycat killer, or have they been wrong about Stone from the start?
Click here to order a copy of Cruel Acts
1
The house was dark. PC Sandra West stared up at it and sighed. The neighbours had called the police – she checked her watch – getting on for an hour earlier, to complain about the noise. What noise, the operator asked.
Screaming.
An argument?
More than likely. It’s not fair, the neighbour had said. Not at two in the morning. But what would you expect from people like that?
People like what?
A check on the address had told Sandra exactly what kind of people they were: argumentative drunks. She’d never been there before but other officers had, often, trying to persuade one or other of them to leave the house, to leave each other alone, for everyone’s sake. It was depressing how often she encountered couples who had no business being together but who insisted, through screaming rows and bruises and broken teeth, that they loved each other. Sandra was forty-six, single and likely to remain so, given her job (which was a passion-killer, never mind what they said about uniforms) and her looks (nothing special, her father had told her once). Generally, she didn’t mind. It was peaceful being on her own. She could do what she wanted, when she wanted.
Sandra had a look in the boot of the police car and found a stab vest. Slowly, fumbling, she hauled it around her and did it up. It was stiff and awkward, made to fit someone much taller than Sandra. Still, it was in the car for a reason. She walked up the path to the front door. Everything was quiet. Hushed.
Maybe one of them had taken the hint and left before the busies arrived. Sandra shone her torch over the window at the unhelpful curtains, then bent and looked through the letterbox. A dark hallway stretched back to the kitchen door. It was quiet and still.
A screaming argument that ended with everyone tucked up in bed an hour later? Not in Sandra’s experience. She planted her feet wide apart, knowing that she had enough bulk in her stab vest and overcoat to intimidate anyone who might need it. Then she rapped on the door with the end of her torch.
‘Police. Can you open the door, please?’
Silence.
She knocked again, louder, and checked her watch. God, nights were hard work. It was the boredom that wore you down, that and the creeping exhaustion that was difficult to ignore when you weren’t busy. She wasn’t usually single-crewed but some of her rota were off sick. She never got sick. It was something she took for granted – the colds and viruses and stomach bugs all passed her by. It made her wonder if everyone else was really sick or if they were faking, and whether she was stupid not to do the same. She tried to suppress a yawn with an effort that made her jaw creak. It was tempting to call it in as an LOB. Sandra smiled to herself. It wasn’t what they taught you at Hendon, but every police officer knew what it stood for: Load of Bollocks. Then she could get back into the car and go in search of refs. She hadn’t eaten for hours, her stomach hollow from it. Knowing her luck, she’d be about to bite into what passed for dinner and her radio would come to life.
The trouble was, there was a kid in the house. You couldn’t just walk away without finding out if the kid was safe. Not when there was a history of domestic violence and social services being involved. Chaotic was the word for it: not enough food in the house, patchy attendance at school, the boy needing clean clothes and haircuts and a good bath. How could you have a kid and not take responsibility for him? OK, Sandra’s parents had been short on hugs and they hadn’t had a lot of money to spend on her and her brothers, but they’d been reliable and she’d never once gone hungry. Nothing to complain about, even if she had complained at the time.
She bent down again and peered through the letterbox, moving the torch slowly across the narrow field of view this time. It cast stark shadows in the kitchen and across the stairs. But there was something … she squinted and changed the angle of the torch, trying to see. There, on the bottom step: light on metal. And again, two steps up. And again, three steps above that.
Knives. Kitchen knives.
They were stuck into the wood of the stairs, point first. All the way up, into the darkness at the top.
Sandra wasn’t an imaginative person but she had an overwhelming sense of fear all of a sudden, and she wasn’t sure if it was her own or someone else’s.
‘Hello? Can you hear me? Open the door, please, love. I need to check you’re all right.’
Silence.
Oh shit, Sandra thought, but not for her own sake, despite being scared at the thought of what might confront her inside the house. Oh shit something very bad has happened here. Oh shit we probably can’t make this one right. Oh shit we should have come out a lot sooner.
Oh shit.
She got on her radio and asked for back-up.
‘With you in two minutes,’ the dispatcher said, and Sandra thought about two minutes and how long that might be if you were scared, if you were dying. She’d asked for paramedics too, hoping they’d be needed.
The second police car came with two large constables, one of whom put the door in for her. His colleague went past him at speed, checking the rooms on the ground floor.
Sandra was halfway up the stairs, listening to her heart and every creak from the bare boards. The torch was slick in her hand.
‘Hello? Anyone here?’
The thunder of police boots on the steps behind her drowned out any sounds she might have heard. Bathroom: filthy in the jumping light from her torch, but no one hiding. A bedroom, piled high with rubbish and dirty clothes. No bed, but there was a pile of blankets on the floor, like a nest. A second bedroom was at the front of the house. It was marginally tidier than the other one, mainly because there was almost no furniture in it apart from a mattress on the floor. Shoes were lined up neatly in one corner and a collection of toiletries stood in another.
The woman was lying across the mattress, half hanging off the edge, a filthy blanket draped across her. Her head was thrown back. Dead, Sandra thought hopelessly, and made herself smile at the small boy who crouched beside the body.
‘Hello, you. We’re the police. Are you all right?’
He was small and dark, his hair hanging over his eyes. He blinked in the light, his eyes darting from her to the officer behind her. He wasn’t crying, and that was somehow worse than if he’d been sobbing. Sandra was bad at guessing children’s ages but she thought he could be eight or nine.
‘What’s your name?’
Instead of answering he huddled closer to the woman. He had pulled one bruised arm so it went around him. It reminded Sandra of an orphaned monkey clinging to a cuddly toy.
‘Can I come a bit closer? I need to check if this lady is all right.’
No reaction. He was staring past her at the officer behind her. She waved a hand behind her back. Give me some room.
‘Is this your mummy?’ she whispered.
A nod.
‘Is your daddy here?’
He mouthed a word. No. That was good news, Sandra thought.
‘Was he here earlier?’
Another nod.
