After You Die (3 page)

‘Don’t come any closer,’ Kate Jenkins said, from behind her face mask. ‘We’ve had enough big, clumsy feet in here already.’

She straightened up from bagging Dawn’s left hand, preserving what, if anything, was under her fingernails.

‘How bad is it?’ he asked.

‘Worse than it looks. If you can believe that.’ She gestured to the blood, a few inches away from Zigic’s feet. ‘The grunts weren’t careful when they came in, we’ve got partials, police-issue boots, fire-issue.’

‘And the good news?’

Jenkins pulled her mask down to her chin, frustration written clear on her face. ‘Thin on the ground, I’m afraid.’

‘Murder weapon?’

‘No sign of it,’ she said. ‘But there are a couple of knives missing from the block. Might be in with the washing-up – she wasn’t exactly a domestic goddess.’ She stopped him as he went to speak. ‘It’s my next job.’

Ferreira looked at the sink, full of water, a few plates and wooden handles poking up through the surface. The worktop beside it was scattered with crockery and she imagined the moment the explosion jabbed through the wall, sending a pile of dirty dishes flying, how they would have splintered, slivers of cheap whiteware shooting in all directions.

Her calf started to itch again and she fought the urge to reach down and scratch it.

‘Mel, time of death?’ Zigic asked, his tone suggesting it wasn’t the first time he’d said it.

‘No less than forty-eight hours,’ she said quickly. ‘He wouldn’t commit to anything more precise before the PM.’

She filled him in on the basics from the pathologist; ten distinct wounds to the chest – frenzied – some quite shallow, the angles varied, one to the throat, a direct hit on her windpipe, just a nick but enough to kill her. Defence wounds on her hands but they hadn’t slowed down her killer.

‘Any signs of forced entry?’

‘Fire crew found the back door closed but unlocked. After they’d kicked the front door in. So she either let them in or they had a key.’

‘Or she kept the back door unlocked.’

‘Not very security-conscious of her.’

‘Not everyone thinks like a copper.’

Zigic didn’t look up from the body, brows knitted together above his mask. ‘Is there a boyfriend?’

‘Dawn didn’t mention one when I talked to her,’ Ferreira said.

‘What about the daughter?’

‘I seriously doubt it.’

As she spoke the floor overhead creaked and all eyes followed the noise.

‘You need to change before you go up,’ Jenkins told them.

They went out onto the driveway again, sucked down lungfuls of fresh air. In the rear garden two more suited figures were making a fingertip search of the grass, a challenging job when there was so much rubbish out there from the neighbouring house and the building work in progress.

Ferreira stripped out of her suit and pulled on another one, aware of Zigic watching her, something he was doing more often now that she’d returned to work.

‘How far did you get with this?’ he asked, as they headed for the front door, taking a clean route back into the house.

‘I did a preliminary interview. She didn’t have any idea who was responsible. There was no real evidence we could use.’

‘You told her to start a log, though?’

‘Yeah. I made a couple of follow-up calls but she seemed to lose interest in the whole thing.’

Zigic nodded at the PC stationed on the long, shallow ramp which led up to the front door and he let them inside.

‘That’s common with harassment. They want you to come in and fix the problem straight away, then when they find out you can’t they get dejected.’

‘It was minor stuff,’ Ferreira said, thinking back to the conversation, how unaffected Dawn Prentice was, more irritated than scared. ‘There was nothing to suggest it would escalate to this.’

Zigic paused at the bottom of the burgundy-carpeted stairs. ‘It isn’t your fault, Mel. These cases are unpredictable.’

‘Yeah, I know that, thanks.’

She went up ahead of him, pushing away the annoyance, eyes on the family photos hung on the wall, ones going back to before Holly’s birth, people who must have been Dawn’s parents and grandparents, bleached images, old Polaroids in frames the wrong shape for them, beach holidays and birthday parties, Holly growing up in her school photos as the stairs rose, until she hit her early teens and they stopped abruptly, the last one hanging above the stairlift Dawn had used to move her severely disabled daughter.

On the landing the crime-scene photographer was packing away his equipment, wiping each piece with a soft cloth before it went back into the case, and he looked up briefly as they approached, inched over so they could squeeze around him.

‘Don’t touch anything in there. We’re not done yet.’

This room was exactly as Ferreira remembered it. Undisturbed by the blast. Nothing but the dust floating in the air to suggest what had happened. An ordinary teenage girl’s bedroom, painted sunflower yellow, posters on the walls and a desk with a closed laptop on it. Unremarkable except for the wheelchair in the corner and the hospital bed with raised bars which was tucked under the window, placed so Holly could see the sky and feel the sun on her skin as she lay, unable to move, hour after hour, day after day.

She was still there, propped up in a sitting position, a tiny, half-wasted figure in light cotton pyjamas covered with soaring birds. Her hands were in her lap, a purple iPod by her fingertips, earphones still in place. Holly had a limited range of movement after the accident, couldn’t raise her arms, just use her hands enough to manipulate whatever devices Dawn gave her.

Zigic stood over her, one fist pressed to his mouth.

‘She hasn’t been dead as long as her mother.’

‘No,’ Ferreira said. ‘Twelve hours, not much more.’

‘Because of the gas leak?’

‘He doesn’t think so. Again – wouldn’t commit. But he thinks it’ll turn out to be natural causes.’

‘This isn’t natural,’ Zigic said.

Neither of them spoke for a few minutes, as he worked through the implications and Ferreira waited, knowing he was picturing the same sequence of events she’d worked through as she waited for the pathologist to arrive.

‘There’s no sign of violence,’ he said. ‘Could she talk?’

‘Yes.’

‘So she could have raised the alarm?’

‘If there was anyone to hear her, yes.’

Ferreira looked at the iPod, one of the few connections Holly had to her old life, and wished it was a phone in her hand, or her laptop, something that would have allowed her to call for help.

Instead she’d been forced to lie there, alone, scared, wondering where her mother was, why the house was so quiet, wondering what the smell rising up from the kitchen was.

Did she think Dawn had abandoned her?

Or did she hear everything? Know exactly what had happened and realise that she was absolutely alone and helpless?

‘How did she get like this?’ Zigic asked quietly.

‘Rock-climbing accident. Holly’s rope wasn’t tied off properly, she fell, broke her back. Her spinal cord was completely severed. That was about two years ago.’

He moved away from the bed, eyes pinkish above his mask, and went over to a pine shelving unit where Holly’s trophies were lined up. Cups for cross-country running and windsurfing, junior championships, county-level competitions. Medals for netball and hockey. In the team photographs she was always front and centre, dark hair pulled into a high ponytail, smiling triumphantly, a short but powerfully built young woman; a natural athlete.

Two years’ incapacitation had whittled her away to a pale and shrunken version of herself.

‘Was she having physio?’

‘Yeah, once a week. Dawn said it was helping.’

‘How did she seem?’ Zigic asked. ‘Holly? Was she coping?’

Ferreira shrugged. She’d barely spoken to her at the time. Came up and poked her head around the door, felt a clenching discomfort when she saw the drip and the catheter, said ‘hello’ and all but bolted out of the room again.

It was a moment of selfishness she hated herself for now.

If she’d put aside her awkwardness and actually talked to the girl would things have gone differently? It was easy to dismiss Dawn’s complaints because she didn’t seem bothered by what was happening. Would Holly’s version of events have been more compelling? Stirred Ferreira’s sympathies enough to drive the investigation on?

A scenes-of-crime officer was hovering in the doorway, waiting for them to take the hint and leave.

They took it.

Zigic waited at the bar while Ferreira went out into the Black Horse’s beer garden, a ten-pound note clutched in his hand, listening absent-mindedly to the conversations going on around him; two couples, already drunk, talking about a shared holiday, a small group of middle-aged men at a nearby table discussing some football match. Quieter, underneath the carefree chatter, he caught a woman regaling her lunch companion with the moment she heard an almighty bang and thought a plane had come down in the village.

He turned slightly, saw her sitting in the front window, head bent close to another woman who might have been her mother, white haired and frail, but neatly put together, paying scant attention to the story as she picked at her cheesecake.

Right now it was just a shocking accident with no fatalities, but the uniforms arrived while he and Ferreira were in the house and he deployed them in three teams to canvass the village, wanting to make an early start on the door-to-door, catch people while they were at home, no excuses not to take the necessary few minutes to answer questions.

Within the hour news would start to filter out. Two deaths. Unthinkably brutal. Here, of all places.

When Ferreira first gave him the address on the phone he thought he’d misheard her. It was so far away from their usual territory, socially if not geographically, the last place he expected to find a hate-crime report filed from. And it was a naive assumption for a detective, he knew that, but Elton seemed too comfortable and moneyed to be a breeding ground for aggressive prejudice.

Perhaps that was why Ferreira hadn’t pursued it. ‘What’re you having?’ The barmaid waited with her hands on her hips.

He ordered two Cokes, wanting something more astringent to wash the taste of the crime scene off his tongue but aware that the day wasn’t over yet, even if the constraints on overtime meant the real work wouldn’t begin until tomorrow morning.

‘Did you see?’ she asked, nodding away to the north end of the village. ‘That explosion? Crazy. My mate reckoned he heard it all the way over in Oundle. That’ll be five-twenty.’

‘You know who lives there?’ Zigic asked, handing her the tenner.

‘Yeah.’

She took her time scooping his change out of the till and dropped it into his palm already looking for her next customer, only to find there wasn’t one.

‘They weren’t home when it happened,’ Zigic said. He showed her his warrant card and it softened her expression but not very much. ‘We need to talk to them, let them know the situation so they can make arrangements.’

‘Was it an accident?’

‘We believe so.’

She still looked dubious but she slipped her mobile from the pocket of her black tabard. ‘Luke – he did our website when we had the refit.’

‘Surname?’

‘Gibson.’ She gave Zigic the number and he keyed it into his phone. ‘He’s a nice guy. He wouldn’t have done something like that on purpose.’

Zigic thanked her for her help and went out through the bustling dining room into the beer garden, a north-facing terrace bordered by a high stone wall and wallowing in shadows deep enough to have driven the afternoon trade inside. Ferreira had claimed the table furthest from the door and he was glad they wouldn’t have an audience for their conversation.

‘Is there anything in that?’ she asked, as he put down her drink.

‘No, thought we’d be better keeping clear heads.’

‘It’s going to take way more than a shot of rum to drive that lot out of my head.’

He sipped his Coke, resisted the urge to ask if she was okay. A year ago it would have been a flippant comment, now he was looking for a buried cry for help in it.

‘Holly must have heard everything,’ Ferreira said. ‘Can you imagine what that must have felt like? She would have heard her mother getting murdered, then she had to lay there knowing she couldn’t do anything about it. For days.’

‘Didn’t Dawn have people coming in to help with her?’

‘A nurse, yeah. Not sure if she came in every day though.’

‘Still, we’re talking, what, two days with nobody visiting the house or coming to check up on them.’

‘She seemed isolated when I talked to her. It was just a feeling I got, but living like that, having to be a twenty-four/seven carer … people stop visiting, I guess. They don’t want to keep listening to the same old complaints, do they?’ Ferreira started rolling a cigarette, one butt already in the ashtray. ‘I don’t know how she coped with it.’

‘You look after your kids, no matter what,’ Zigic said. ‘That’s the deal when you have them.’

Ferreira kept shredding tobacco, more than she needed. ‘Yeah, but you’re signing up for eighteen years, maybe a couple more, not the whole of their life.’

She didn’t understand and she probably never would.

‘What about the father?’

‘They’re separated. Divorce was in progress when I spoke to her.’

‘Acrimonious?’

‘Not according to her.’

‘You think he might have been behind the harassment?’

She sealed her cigarette. ‘He lives in the village, so he’s near enough to make a nuisance of himself if he wants to. Dawn didn’t accuse him, though, and most dumped women are pretty quick to put the finger on their ex.’

‘He definitely did the leaving?’

‘Oh, yeah, Dawn was very clear on that.’ She lit up. ‘He had a total breakdown when Holly got injured, fucked up his business, went completely off the rails. Dawn reckoned it must have been going on for a while before that, though. The other woman took him in. She owns that boarding kennel down near the green.’

Zigic knew the place. It was less than five minutes’ walk from Dawn’s home, straight through the centre of the village. Not a good route to take if you were covered in blood but the street lights in Elton were few and far between and by early evening the place was silent.