Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller
‘Cast-off.’ The words came from behind me, and I’d have known Derwent’s voice anywhere, even if I hadn’t been expecting him, but I still jumped. Georgia gave a stagey gasp.
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ I said. And hello to you too, DI Derwent. ‘Was it a knife, Kev?’
‘Possibly. We’re still looking for the weapon,’ he called from his position at the back.
I could picture it: a knife swinging through the air, wet with blood after the first contact with the victim, shedding droplets as it carved through space and skin. And those droplets would tell us a multitude about the person who’d held the weapon: how they’d stood, where they’d stood, which hand they’d used, how tall they were – everything, in short, but their name.
So I understood why Una Burt was particularly determined to preserve the finer details of this crime scene, and if possible I walked a little more carefully as I moved through the hall, stepping from one mat to another to avoid touching the floor. It wasn’t a large space and there were five of us standing in it, rustling gently in our paper suits.
‘Has this been photographed?’ I asked.
‘Every inch,’ Kev said. ‘And I’ve got someone filming it too. But the blood-spatter expert won’t be here for an hour or so and I want her to map it before anything changes.’
I nodded, glancing into the room on the right: a grey-toned living room, to my eye untouched, although there was a SOCO rotating slowly in the middle of the room holding a video camera. Film was much better than still photographs for getting the atmosphere of a crime scene, for putting things in context. Juries liked watching films. I moved back, not wanting to appear on camera. ‘Where’s the body?’
‘She always asks the right questions, doesn’t she?’ Kev nudged Una Burt happily. She didn’t look noticeably thrilled behind her mask.
‘Have a look upstairs.’
Derwent was closer to the bottom of the stairs and he went first. Georgia went next, followed by me. She put her hand out to take hold of the rail and I caught her wrist. ‘Don’t touch anything unless you have to.’
‘Sorry.’
The lights were on in the hall and at the top of the stairs, and it was too bright for comfort. Blood flared off every surface, dried and dark but still vibrating with violence. I didn’t know anything about the victim and I didn’t know what had happened here, but fear hung in the air like smoke. Don’t think about it now. The facts came first. The emotions could come later.
‘What happened here?’ Derwent had stopped at the top of the stairs, moving to one side to let the rest of us join him. A huge wavering bloodstain had soaked into the sisal carpet that covered the floor.
‘We think this was possibly where the first major injury was inflicted. There’s a lot of blood downstairs but in small quantities up to this point,’ Una Burt said. ‘Maybe defensive wounds. Maybe transferred from up here on the attacker’s clothes and hands.’
‘Or the victim’s,’ Kev said, and got a glare from Una Burt. Interesting.
The blood had settled into the weave, spreading out so it was hard to tell how much there was. Not enough to be an arterial injury. Survivable, potentially, I thought. ‘This isn’t a great surface for us, is it?’
‘Nope.’ Kev gestured at smudges on the woven surface. ‘Those are footprints and kneeprints. No detail, no definition. Give me a nice tiled floor any day.’
‘You’ve got the hall downstairs,’ Derwent said.
‘Except that we had people in and out with wet feet before I got here. The coppers had the sense to step carefully but the others …’ Kev raised his eyes to heaven. ‘You’d almost think it was deliberate. If it hadn’t been for the rain we’d have a lot more to go on.’
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘One of the two residents – a female aged eighteen – and one of the neighbours,’ Una Burt said. ‘He gave her a lift back from the station. They came in and found this. You’ll need to talk to both of them.’
I nodded and followed the trail to the small bathroom on the right, staying in the doorway because there was nowhere to stand that wasn’t covered in brownish red residue. The shower curtain hung down, ripped off most of its rings, streaked and splattered like the walls, like the ceiling, like the cracked mirror where we were reflected like a gathering of particularly awkward aliens. There were partial handprints on the sink, which was chipped, and the toilet. The seat had come away from the hinges on one side, so I could see the blood ran down inside the bowl, where it had settled thickly under the water.
It had been a white room, once.
‘Christ,’ Derwent said. ‘How many victims did you say there were?’
Una Burt ignored him. ‘This is the main location for the attack. It’s human nature to want to hide and there’s a lock on the bathroom door but this was the worst possible place to run to. It’s a small space with one exit and not much you could use to defend yourself. The attacker was able to stand in the doorway and cause maximum damage at his or her leisure.’
‘His, surely,’ Georgia said. Her eyes were round and very blue above the white mask, but her voice didn’t tremble.
‘Sexist,’ Derwent observed under his breath and she turned to look at him.
‘You can’t assume it was a man,’ I said. ‘You can’t assume anything.’
‘Indeed not. Come on.’ DCI Burt led us back towards the front of the house. ‘Down the hall beyond the bathroom there’s a further bedroom but it’s not disturbed and the blood trail doesn’t lead down there. It belongs to the daughter. This seems to have been used as a guest room.’
It was a large room with a bay window and a cast-iron fireplace on the wall opposite the door. The bed was rumpled. There was a chest of drawers in an alcove, but the bottles and brushes on top of it had been knocked askew. I couldn’t see any blood, but something else was all too evident.
‘What the fuck is that smell?’ Derwent stepped backwards.
‘Watch where you put your feet. The cat was shut in here,’ Kev explained.
‘For how long?’
‘That’s the interesting thing,’ Una said. ‘The daughter left here on Wednesday. It’s Sunday now. It would appear the cat defecated on three separate occasions and it obviously urinated as well, quite copiously.’
‘You’d think it would have run out of piss after a while.’ Derwent was crouching down, peering under the bed at the carpet.
‘Yes, but look at this.’ Una pointed to the corner of the room where there was a half-full bowl of water. I went over for a better view and saw short, fine hairs suspended in the liquid. I nudged the bowl with a gloved knuckle to check the carpet underneath, and the single circular mark told me that it was a one-off arrangement.
‘Someone locked the cat in here deliberately, but they didn’t want it to suffer. They didn’t bother with a litter tray but they left enough water that it could survive until the cavalry came. It could manage for three days without food but it couldn’t have lived without water.’
‘The girl was away from Wednesday,’ Derwent said. ‘Did anyone know she was coming back today?’
‘I don’t know. Maeve, you can ask her about that. I want you to interview her.’
I nodded as Derwent flashed me a look that said Don’t think I won’t try to come along just because you’re a detective sergeant now. I ignored him. He was still getting used to the idea of me being a little more senior, with more responsibilities and, crucially, more independence from him.
To be honest, so was I.
‘Who else lives here?’ I asked Una.
‘The girl’s mother, Kate Emery, aged forty-two. Her bedroom is upstairs.’
I leaned back to check: no blood on the stairs. ‘Was it disturbed?’
‘Not as far as we can tell. Not during or immediately after the attack, anyway. No blood.’
‘Is she the victim?’ Derwent asked.
‘We don’t know.’
‘Don’t you have a photograph of her?’ Georgia hesitated. ‘Or – or is the body too badly damaged to be identifiable?’
Una Burt exchanged a look with Kev that seemed to amuse them both. ‘Come downstairs and tell me what you make of it.’
It was strange how quickly you got used to the blood, all things considered. We picked our way down the stairs and already it was more like a puzzle than an outrage. That was how it would stay for the moment, and it was useful to have that detachment even if I knew it wouldn’t last. I followed Una Burt down the hall, Derwent treading on my heels he was so keen to see what lay ahead. On the left, under the stairs, there was a small shower room. She threw open the door and stood back.
‘Voila. What do you make of that?’
‘Is this where the attacker cleaned up?’ I scanned the walls, seeing faint brownish streaks on the tiles. ‘I smell bleach.’
‘And drain cleaner. Highly corrosive, designed to dissolve hair and dirt that blocks pipes. I found the bottle in the kitchen, in a cupboard. Homeowner’s property.’ Kev’s eyes crinkled as his mask flexed: he was actually smiling. ‘We know they were in here. We know they tidied up after themselves. What we don’t know is whether we’ll get anything useful from it.’
‘Great,’ I said, meaning the opposite. ‘What else?’
‘The blood trail goes into the kitchen and through the kitchen.’ Kev guided us into a smart white kitchen, pristine apart from the dried blood that dragged across the wooden floor and marked the corner of the cabinets. It was smeared across the doorframe and the handle of the back door. ‘And then it disappears. I’m not going to open the door because it opens outwards. It’s still raining cats and dogs and I don’t have a tent set up there yet. I don’t want to lose any of the marks on the inside of the door, but I can tell you what I found – or didn’t find. There’s a patio out there and I can’t currently locate a trace of blood, or a usable footprint, or anything that might tell us where our victim ended up. The rain has obliterated everything.’
‘So no body,’ I said.
‘No body,’ Una Burt confirmed. ‘At this stage we can’t even be certain who we’re looking for. We won’t be sure of that until the DNA results come back. What we do know so far is that Kate Emery hasn’t been seen since Wednesday night. We could run this as a missing person inquiry but I don’t want to waste time. She’s left her phone, her handbag, her wallet, her keys and a whole lot of blood behind. There’s no way someone loses that much blood and walks away. We’ll hope for a sighting of her alive and well, but what we’re really looking for is a corpse.’
3
The girl’s name was Chloe Emery. I checked it twice on my way across the road to the neighbour’s house where she was waiting, 32 Valerian Road. The ambulance I’d seen earlier had been for Chloe, Una Burt explained as we stripped off our protective gear in the tent outside the front door.
‘Went to pieces. Unsurprising, really. But she didn’t want treatment and she wouldn’t let them take her to hospital. They couldn’t force her. The girl needs a gentle conversation about her weekend plans – in particular who knew about them. She was with her dad in Oxfordshire, as I understand it. The parents are divorced. Dad’s remarried. Mum wasn’t.’
‘Seeing anyone?’ Derwent asked.
‘That’s something we need to find out. Obviously, I also want to know if anyone had a reason to harm her mother or her. Or if her mother had a reason to harm anyone, I suppose. Can’t rule that out.’
Derwent had patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’ll let you take the lead on that conversation, Kerrigan.’
‘You will, because you won’t be there. I want you to stay here,’ Una Burt said crisply. ‘You need to look after the crime scene for me.’
‘But I want to go and talk to the daughter.’
‘Kerrigan can take care of that on her own.’ To me, she said, ‘Take Georgia Shaw with you.’
Derwent frowned. ‘Who the fuck is Georgia Shaw?’
‘New DC,’ I said.
‘The blonde?’
I nodded.
‘What’s she like?’
‘You’ll have to decide that for yourself,’ Georgia said, coming to stand beside me. I hadn’t noticed her but of course she was within earshot. She smoothed her hair, which was already immaculate. I was all too aware that no amount of finger-combing was going to sort my own hair out. Heat and rain were a deadly combination.
‘Georgia Shaw, Josh Derwent,’ Una Burt said. ‘He’s my detective inspector.’
My detective inspector. I hid a smile. It was a nice way of reminding Derwent who was the boss, in case he’d forgotten about it during his two weeks off.
Georgia put out her hand and I thought for a brief moment he was going to ignore it but he shook it, without enthusiasm.
‘We haven’t met. You’ve been on holidays since I joined the team.’
‘And now I’m not.’ He turned back to Una Burt. ‘Please let me go and talk to the girl.’
‘Don’t wheedle,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it and it won’t work.’ Her face softened very slightly. ‘NPAS is going to be overhead shortly and they need someone on the ground to help coordinate the search for the body.’ NPAS was the police helicopter; she was pulling out all the stops on this investigation. ‘There’ll be a dog unit and a search team. It’s not just babysitting Kev Cox.’
‘Great.’ He stretched, frustrated. ‘A search through a million gardens in the rain, looking for a missing body. What a welcome back.’
‘Don’t say I don’t find interesting murders for you to investigate.’ Una Burt nodded to me. ‘Get on with it.’
Which left me trying not to mind that Georgia was walking right behind me, leaning to read the notes I’d scrawled on my clipboard.
‘Are you going to ask her why she walked all over the footprints in the hall?’
‘I don’t expect to.’
‘Why not?’
I stopped and faced her. ‘Because I want to get to know her first. I want to get her to trust us. If I need to ask some hard questions, I will, but that’s not why we’re here. She’s the one person who can tell us what happened in that house before she left it last Wednesday, but she’ll only do that if she wants to help us.’
‘What if she did it?’
‘Did what? We don’t even know what happened.’ I turned away. ‘If she doesn’t want to help us find out where her mother is, that tells us something too. But I don’t want to give her a reason not to talk to us. That’s why DCI Burt found something else for DI Derwent to do.’
‘He seems fairly aggressive.’
‘Mm,’ I said, and Georgia could make of it what she liked. Derwent would either piss Chloe Emery off until a day after the end of time or win her heart forever. Extreme reactions were his speciality, and too high-risk for this particular situation.
‘Whose house is this?’ Georgia had dropped her voice to a whisper now that we were right outside the address, which was already a lot more subtle than Derwent would have been.
‘The neighbour who gave her a lift from the station and called 999.’ I checked my notes again. ‘Oliver Norris.’
‘Shouldn’t she have been kept away from him? Until we’ve spoken to them, I mean? In case they’re getting their stories straight.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Don’t you trust anyone? Ring the bell.’
She did as I asked. ‘But—’
‘They were kept separate. There’s an FLO with the girl. Burt said the officer was a dragon and she wouldn’t let Norris near Chloe.’ I grinned. ‘Burt doesn’t trust anyone either.’
The green-painted door swung open to reveal a slim woman with light brown hair and a worried expression, which was fair enough when there were two police detectives standing on her doorstep. She was wearing a long-sleeved white blouse buttoned up to the neck and an ankle-length skirt. I glanced down at her feet to see flat, round-toed shoes in soft blue leather, and buff-coloured tights. I was wearing my lightest trouser suit over a sleeveless top and I was melting. I would have collapsed from heat exhaustion after five minutes in that outfit.
‘Mrs Norris?’
‘Yes, I’m Eleanor Norris.’
‘We’re here to interview Chloe, Mrs Norris.’
‘She’s upstairs in my daughter’s bedroom.’ She looked back as if she was expecting to see the girl standing behind her. The house was a mirror image of the one I’d just visited and I studied it with interest, trying to imagine what the Emery house had been like before most of the contents of a human being had been emptied out all over it. It was hard to see through the clutter of family life – the coats slung over the end of the bannisters, the keys and post on the table by the door. The house I’d left behind me was immaculately tidy, apart from the blood. Here the wallpaper was dated and rubbed, the carpets old-fashioned, the house badly in need of a makeover.
‘Have you spoken with Chloe?’ I asked.
‘No. I mean, I asked if she wanted anything to eat or drink.’ Eleanor Norris squeezed her thin hands together as if they were cold. ‘My husband told me about the house. About what they saw.’
‘Very unpleasant,’ I said blandly.
‘Do you think you’re going to be finished across the road soon?’ Eleanor’s voice dropped so it was whispery low. ‘Only, I think it would be good for Chloe to know when she can go home.’
‘Not soon,’ I said.
‘Even if she wanted to,’ Georgia added. ‘I wouldn’t want to, would you?’
‘She can stay here for a few days, but …’ Eleanor shrugged helplessly. But I can’t accommodate a neighbour in my house indefinitely. Her cheeks were flushed.
‘We’ll know a lot more in the morning,’ I said soothingly. It was true, but probably not relevant to Chloe’s plans. Eleanor Norris didn’t need to know that though. ‘Has Chloe spoken to her father?’
‘No. She won’t call him.’
He’d been informed, I knew. Una Burt had asked Thames Valley Police to speak to him, to get the measure of the man at the same time as breaking the bad news. I hoped for his sake he’d reacted with the requisite shock and horror, and for our sake that he hadn’t, that he had no alibi, that he had been nursing a grievance, that there was a murder weapon conveniently located in his car along with a few telling bloodstains … Ex-husbands made good suspects in murder investigations.
‘Do they get on? Chloe was visiting him, wasn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ Eleanor looked past us to where the police helicopter was hovering. It was shining its searchlight into the garden behind number 27, the beam piercing the unnatural gloom. ‘What are they looking for?’
‘It’s just part of the investigation,’ I said quickly, before Georgia could say anything about the body, or rather the lack of one. ‘When was the last time you saw Kate Emery, Mrs Norris?’
‘Oh – I don’t know.’ She bit her lip. ‘Wednesday night, I think. We were putting out the bins at the same time.’
I made a note. ‘Did you speak?’
‘No. I waved at her. I had no idea – I mean, I couldn’t know.’
‘Of course. Do you know her well?’
‘Not really.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘My daughter is friendly with Chloe.’ It came out in a rush, as if she didn’t want to say anything about it but knew we’d find out anyway.
‘What’s your daughter’s name?’
‘Bethany.’
‘How old is she?’
‘She’s fifteen. Just turned fifteen, actually.’
‘Younger than Chloe,’ I observed.
‘Yes, but Bethany’s very mature and Chloe—’ she broke off and gave me an embarrassed smile. ‘You’d probably like to speak to her.’
‘Yes, please.’
‘It’s the door straight ahead of you at the top of the stairs.’
I was aware of her watching us as we went up. I didn’t look back at her, even though I was wondering about a couple of things, like her choice of clothes and whether that was why she had sweated through our conversation, and why she had been so concerned about her daughter’s relationship with Chloe. And yet people did behave weirdly around the police, especially on the periphery of a murder investigation, and parents did worry about protecting their children even if they had nothing to hide, and the shock of being close to a violent crime could send your body’s thermostat out of whack. Trust no one … It was a reasonable enough approach, all things considered.
I knocked on the door at the end of the hall and a suspicious face appeared. ‘Yes?’
I showed her my badge. ‘Can we speak to Chloe?’
She was short and middle-aged with close-cropped hair and kind eyes, and I wouldn’t have dared to try and persuade her to do anything against her orders. She peered at me, and then at Georgia behind me, before she nodded.
‘Come in.’
‘Has she said anything?’ I asked in a whisper as I passed the officer, and got a shake of her head in response.
Chloe Emery was curled up on a chair, staring at the rain that was sluicing down the window. She didn’t look round when we walked in. I took a moment to scan the room, more out of habit than anything else, noting amateurishly painted white walls, a crammed bookcase, a single bed, a bedside table with nothing on it but a lamp. Then I shifted my attention to Chloe. She was tall, with slender limbs and long dark hair.
‘Chloe?’
She turned to look at me. Her face was beautiful but somehow blank, with heavy dark eyebrows over blue eyes. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m Maeve Kerrigan. I’m a detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’
She shook her head but she drew her legs up to her chest. She looked nothing short of terrified.
I sat down on the bed opposite her. Start with an easy question. ‘How old are you, Chloe?’
‘Eighteen.’
She seemed younger to me, like a child. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed an appropriate adult to be with her.
‘I know you’ve had a difficult day, Chloe, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I need to ask you some questions. Is that OK?’
She nodded, but warily.
‘Can you state your address for me?’
‘Twenty-seven Valerian Road, Putney, SW15.’
‘And that’s where you live most of the time, is that right?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was toneless and her eyes wandered around the room as she spoke. I felt she was working hard to stop herself from fidgeting.
‘Who else lives there?’
‘My mum.’
‘And what’s her name?’
She thought for a second. ‘Kate.’
‘Kate Emery.’
‘Yes, Kate Emery.’
‘Do you have the same last name, Chloe?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that the same name as your father?’
‘Yes.’
‘But your parents are divorced.’
‘Yes.’ Her answers were getting softer. I felt I was wandering onto dangerous ground without knowing why.
‘You were away for the weekend, is that right?’
Another nod.
‘Where were you?’
‘With my dad.’
‘Were the two of you alone?’
‘No.’
I waited but she didn’t say anything else. ‘Who else was there, Chloe?’
‘My stepmother.’ There was a pause and I was about to ask another question when she added, ‘And Nathan. And N— his brother.’
‘Who’s Nathan?’
‘My stepbrother.’
‘And his brother,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’
She stared at the corner of the room, pressing her lips together. No answer. It wasn’t a question that was designed to trip her up – quite the opposite. These were the easy, factual questions, the ones that gave people confidence, that settled them into an interview. But I was hitting a wall I hadn’t even known I’d find.
‘Do you have any other brothers and sisters?’
‘No.’
‘So you live with your mum. Does anyone else live in the house?’
‘No.’
‘Can you tell me when you left home for your weekend with your dad?’
‘Wednesday. In the afternoon.’
‘Did you see your mother before you left?’
A nod. ‘She was at home.’
‘Did she say anything unusual? Anything that concerned you?’
Another helpless shake of the girl’s head. ‘I don’t remember anything.’
‘Did she seem worried or preoccupied?’