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‘Which reminds me.’ He took out his tin of tobacco again, opening it on his knee this time. ‘Almost time for another coffin nail.’
‘Will-i-am. I wish you wouldn’t call them that.’ The voice came from behind me and I jumped; I hadn’t heard anyone approach. A thin, withered woman stood in the doorway holding a cloth with gloved hands.
‘Mrs Turner?’ I stood up. ‘I’m DS Maeve Kerrigan. I’m here to ask some questions about what happened up the road.’
‘I don’t know anything.’ Her eyes were fixed on her son who was concentrating on his cigarette. ‘Don’t do that in here, William. You’ll drop bits of it everywhere.’
‘Then you can sweep them up.’ He winked at me. ‘Got to give her a reason to live, don’t I?’
Mrs Turner sighed. ‘You’re terrible.’
‘You love it.’
She squeezed the cloth in her hands, still watching him. It was as if I didn’t exist. I could see what William had meant when he said she didn’t notice anything that happened outside their home. DCI Gordon had been forthright about her. ‘She can’t imagine her boy doing anything wrong. She thought I was a bully and a liar. Little Willy never did anything to hurt anyone.’ A snort. In his opinion, Mr Turner had been fully justified in doing a runner before William was born. ‘She had money because her parents were very well off – they bought the house, for instance – but money isn’t everything, is it?’
I had agreed that no, it was not and Gordon had laughed. ‘It helps though.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Well, Turner didn’t stick around to see his son. Maybe the boy would have turned out better if he’d been around. He had too much attention, that was the problem. He thought he was the centre of the universe because, for his mum, he is.’
‘Do you know Kate Emery, Mrs Turner?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘The lady who lives at number twenty-seven. She has a daughter, Chloe, who’s almost the same age as William.’
‘Oh. I know her a bit. Not properly.’ She was folding the cloth over and over, mindlessly. ‘She used to be a nurse.’
‘Once upon a time.’
‘She helped me with William once, when he was younger. He had a bad attack and I ran out into the street in a panic. She helped me before the ambulance came. She was nice then. But I don’t know her.’ She blinked. Her eyelids and the end of her nose were pink and looked raw, as if she’d been crying. She had none of her son’s looks, and I couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive. Mr Turner had to have been a stunner.
‘You still haven’t said what happened,’ William Turner said. ‘Is Chloe OK?’
‘Physically.’
‘So that leaves her mum.’ A muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘Let me guess. She was stabbed.’
‘Why would you say that?’
‘Because you’re asking me about something that happened four years ago, that was thoroughly investigated at the time, as if it’s suddenly important.’
‘Well, it might be.’ I stood up. ‘I can’t tell you what happened at number twenty-seven yet. At the moment we’re still investigating. But I can tell you that we’ll need a sample of your DNA and your fingerprints.’ And while they were at it, I was going to apply for a warrant to search his house.
‘Am I a suspect?’
‘You said yourself you couldn’t remember if you’d been in the house. We need to rule you out.’ Or in. ‘That’s why we need your prints and your DNA.’
Turner nodded. ‘Then come back and get them. I have nothing to hide.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said, and left.
8 (#ulink_b54795be-7853-5eda-b826-4e5d749a254a)
I stepped out of the house with a profound feeling of relief that evaporated instantly. Derwent was leaning against the bonnet of my car, his legs crossed at the ankle, his hands in his pockets.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.
‘Waiting for you.’
‘For any particular reason? Or because you missed me?’
‘Funny.’ His mood was like a black cloud hanging in the air around him. ‘I recognised the car. Who were you talking to?’
I came closer so I could speak more quietly. ‘William Turner. And his mother.’
‘And did he ping your freak-o-meter?’
‘I’m not sure. He was trying hard to impress me, so there was a lot of showing off.’
‘I bet he was,’ Derwent said softly. ‘How old is he?’
‘Twenty.’
‘And he still lives at home.’
‘He has bad asthma. I doubt it would be safe for him to live alone. Plus, I imagine he’s on benefits. He doesn’t work.’
‘What a prize.’
‘You wouldn’t have liked him.’ But then you don’t like anyone. I tried again. ‘Why are you waiting for me?’
‘Harold Lowe has given us permission to look around his house.’ Derwent held up a set of keys and shook them at me. His expression, if anything, had darkened.
‘I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.’
‘He said that he knew Kate Emery well. She used to bring him cakes, cook him meals, that kind of thing.’ Derwent’s mouth tightened. ‘Guess how she used to come round?’
My spirits sank. ‘Through the back garden?’
‘Got it in one. And get this: she used to use it as a shortcut to get to the shops. She had a key to the side gate and everything.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘So what the dog told us doesn’t mean much, does it? Back to square one. No body, no suspects and no ideas.’
‘Still no sign of the body.’
‘They’re looking. They’ve been out on the river, checking the places the bodies usually wash up. But if she went in the water, she’ll be long gone. All that rain.’
I shuddered, thinking of the cold grey waters of the Thames. Countless bodies had disappeared into it, never to resurface. ‘Risky, throwing a body into the water, though. There’s always someone watching in a city like this.’
‘You’d think so.’ Derwent yawned. ‘She’s probably in an outhouse somewhere, or a ditch.’
‘Or some leafy bit of countryside where she won’t be found for a year or two.’
‘By a dog walker who will never get over the shock of Rex digging up an actual human bone to chew.’ Derwent grinned. ‘That’s one reason why I’m never getting a dog. It’s not as if I need more corpses in my life.’
‘This one would be nice to find.’ I was looking at Kate Emery’s house where there was a uniformed officer standing guard. Flapping tape still cordoned off the house. ‘Where would you dump a body if you killed someone here?’
‘I wouldn’t. I’d leave it where it is. Move a body and you contaminate your car or van. You transfer trace evidence to the body and the car, and yourself. Your risk of being discovered goes up massively. Unless you’ve got an amazing place to hide it, the body will be found eventually. There’s no good reason to take the body away.’
‘Unless you know you left evidence of yourself on the body and you’re not sure you can clean it up.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘If Kate was raped before she died. Or after.’ I said it calmly, professionally, not allowing myself to imagine her pain, her fear, the moment when she realised she was going to die.
Derwent nodded. ‘There is that. She put up a hell of a fight, by the looks of things.’
‘But it wasn’t enough.’
‘Not this time.’ He turned away abruptly and I wondered if he was thinking about Melissa, who had been attacked over and over again by her handsome husband. Some cases were too close to home, for both of us.
We could have taken the shortcut to Harold Lowe’s house – through the bloody hallway at number 27, across the garden, through the gate and down the alley – but Derwent wanted to take the long way round, by road, in my car, which would take a couple of minutes. It seemed like unnecessary hassle to me but I went along with it. The only way to survive working with Derwent was to pick your battles.
‘Is it the house?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Kate Emery’s house. Does it bother you? The blood?’
‘Nah.’ He leaned back in the passenger seat, folded his arms and closed his eyes. ‘Drive slower.’
‘Seriously? You usually complain about how slowly I drive.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Well, it’s not naptime.’
His answer was a snore. I hit the brakes a bit harder than I needed to at the next junction and he startled awake, his hands flying up.
‘What?’
‘Why are you sleeping?’
‘Because I’m knackered.’ He did look tired, I thought, with shadows under his eyes that weren’t usually there. ‘Thomas hasn’t been sleeping well.’
‘He has to get used to the new house.’
‘It’s not that. He’s been having nightmares. Night terrors, actually.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘It’s like sleepwalking except he’s in bed. Screaming.’ He shivered. ‘It’s fucking creepy. He can be sitting there with his eyes open, shouting at the top of his voice about monsters and people chasing him, and there’s nothing you can do to comfort him. He doesn’t even know you’re there.’
‘What does Melissa think?’
‘She wants to take him to see a sleep specialist.’ He sighed. ‘I think she’s overreacting but I can’t say that, can I? He’s not my kid. Google says it’s normal at Thomas’s age.’
I pulled up outside Lowe’s house, on the road. The high beech hedge screened the front of the house completely from anyone walking past. ‘What did you say he screams about? Monsters?’
‘Monsters, baddies, someone watching him, you name it. I put the light on to show him there’s no one there but he’s not conscious really, so he doesn’t register it. You have to wait for him to calm down by himself and go back to sleep and it takes hours.’ He yawned so widely I heard his jaw crack. ‘It’s happening two or three times a night. And in the morning he doesn’t remember any of it.’
‘Maybe moving house will sort it out.’
‘Maybe. The flat was too small for the three of us. That didn’t help. But Melissa thinks it might make it worse. He’s had a lot of disruption in the past year.’
‘Yeah, but with a happy ending. He got away from his dad, didn’t he?’ Mark Pell had beaten and intimidated his wife until she took Thomas and ran away to London, to what should have been a safe place. It wasn’t her fault that it had turned out to be the opposite.
Derwent nodded soberly. ‘That could be part of the trouble, though. He must miss his dad. Melissa never let him see any of the violence. He didn’t know about her injuries. As far as he’s concerned, his mummy and daddy loved each other very much and then Mummy took him away. Daddy disappeared out of his life from one day to the next.’
‘But you’re there.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Isn’t it? He adores you, you know that.’
Derwent put a hand up to his eyes, rubbing at them with his forefinger and thumb. ‘Fuck’s sake. I’m not crying. My eyes are watering because I’m tired.’
‘Yeah, of course. I think we drove past someone chopping onions, actually. That’s probably it.’
‘Don’t take the piss,’ he mumbled.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘I want to look after him. That’s all. And I don’t know how to make it better for him.’
‘It’s a phase.’
Derwent squinted at me. ‘What do you know about it?’
‘That’s what my brother says about every annoying thing his kids do. Everything’s a phase. In a month’s time he’ll be sleeping beautifully and you’ll have something else to worry about.’
He thought about it. ‘Thanks, mate.’
‘Any time.’ I got out of the car and looked up and down Constantine Avenue. The houses were detached, set back from the road and there were no pedestrians. It was quiet, and private. ‘This is going to be rubbish for witnesses.’
‘Come on.’ Derwent led the way through the gate and paused to scan the gravel in front of the house. ‘What do you think? Tyre marks?’
‘None to speak of.’ I crouched down, trying to see. ‘Nope. There isn’t enough gravel for that.’
