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Cruel Acts
Jane Casey
From award-winning author Jane Casey comes another powerful Maeve Kerrigan crime thriller which will keep you on the edge of your seat until the final page!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 murder 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?
Copyright (#u28ee208f-6cba-5ad7-aa6c-e4e06d661814)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Jane Casey 2019
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (forest and yellow tape)
Jane Casey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008149031
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008149055
Version: 2019-02-13
Dedication (#u28ee208f-6cba-5ad7-aa6c-e4e06d661814)
For Sinéad and Liz, my wise women
Epigraph (#u28ee208f-6cba-5ad7-aa6c-e4e06d661814)
The investigator should pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry, whether these point towards or away from the suspect.
Code of Practice for Investigators
Contents
Cover (#u362e4aac-1b60-54ab-9590-13215aa5920a)
Title Page (#u7f0026c8-9ce9-53b2-808f-3d4c0b548235)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Jane Casey
About the Publisher
1 (#u28ee208f-6cba-5ad7-aa6c-e4e06d661814)
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.
