The Stranger You Know (8 page)

‘They’re the same as the ones in the living room,’ I said, my voice metallic in my ears. Robotic. Emotionless.

‘Were they burning when the uniforms got here?’ Una Burt asked.

‘No. He seems to have put them out when he was leaving,’ Godley said.

‘Never leave a naked flame unattended,’ floated up from the floor where Kev was approaching Godley’s feet.

‘I’m not sure that was his priority.’

‘There were candles at Maxine’s house as well. None at Kirsty’s,’ Burt said. ‘So he makes do with what he can find.’

‘It makes her look like a sacrifice,’ I said. A memory drifted to the surface: helping one of the nuns to prepare the altar for an early-morning Mass. White linen altar cloth. Pure white candles in their low holders. And flowers, rammed by me into a brass container too small for them, because I was bored and wanted to be finished. The nun had taken them from me, tutting under her breath, and cut away the bruised stems with a short, stubby knife she’d produced from the folds of her habit, until the arrangement looked perfect. I moved forward to stand just behind Anna’s savaged head and looked down at her. From this angle I could see what I’d missed before: she was lying on a handful of lilies. Their heavy scent drifted up, mingling with the bitter smell of the burnt candles.

‘These will be the flowers from the living room.’

‘Probably,’ Godley said, leaning over beside me. His sleeve brushed mine and again I was aware of him flinching away. Not the way to convince people we weren’t having an affair, I thought sourly. Since I had no way of actually saying that to him without stepping a long way outside what was appropriate for my rank, and his, I affected not to notice.

‘What do you think the flowers signify?’

‘No idea. Part of the ritual, I suppose, along with the candles.’

‘Being outside?’ Burt suggested.

‘Did he do this with the others?’

Godley nodded.

‘With lilies? Or other flowers?’

‘Other flowers, I think.’ He frowned. ‘I have crime scene photos in the car.’

‘We should have a look,’ Burt said. ‘With the other SIOs.’

‘How did he know there would be flowers here?’ I bent down: from what I could see of the petals they didn’t look fresh. One or two were brown and coming away from the flower. Even allowing for them being crushed under the victim, they weren’t in the best condition. ‘Did he deliver these, maybe, earlier in the week? Is that how he saw her first?’

Una Burt didn’t hide her scepticism. ‘Why would she let him in again, though? There was no sign of a break-in. Even if she recognised him, she’d never let a delivery man into her house.’

‘Unless he was carrying something heavy.’

‘Like what?’

There was no evidence of anything having been delivered and I subsided, feeling squashed. But Una Burt was right, and she wasn’t trying to put me down, unlike Derwent. She was just saying what she thought.

‘What did he use to cut her hair? Scissors?’

‘Not that we found.’ Kev surfaced beside the bed. ‘If you ask me, looking at the way he left it, he used a knife.’

‘The same knife he used on her eyes?’ Burt suggested.

‘It’s possible.’

‘Did she fight?’ I asked. ‘What did the neighbour hear?’

‘Unusual noises, he said. Moving furniture. Thumps and bumps.’ Godley scanned the room. ‘Not that you’d know.’

‘If he made a mess, he took the time to tidy up afterwards. This was important to him – making this image.’ I stepped back to look at it as he might have, wondering what he wanted us to see. ‘He took the hair out of this room. He could have left it.’

Godley was using his torch to examine the woman’s face, peering at it from a distance of a couple of inches. He looked disturbingly like Prince Charming leaning over Sleeping Beauty, ready to wake her with a kiss.

‘Stop. Go back.’ Something had caught my attention. ‘Where you had the torch before – I saw something.’

He turned it back to the side, shining it across her bloodless skin, and again I saw a glint.

‘There’s something under her neck. A hair.’

‘Not surprising,’ Godley said, disappointment colouring his tone very slightly. ‘You’d expect him to miss a few.’

I reached over and took the torch out of his hand, shining it directly on what I had seen. Caitriona swooped in with tweezers and drew the hair out, holding it up so she could slip it into an evidence collection envelope. Now that I could see it properly, I could tell it was maybe fourteen inches long. It hung in an elongated ‘S’, the bottom curling out and up as if it had been styled to flick up. It was pure gold in colour.

‘Not one of hers,’ Kev said happily. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘Him?’ I said, dubious. My mental image of a serial killer didn’t really include styled, shoulder-length hair.

‘One of the other victims?’ Burt suggested.

‘They weren’t blondes either,’ Godley said. ‘Let’s hope it’s relevant.’

‘We’d have got it on the bedclothes,’ Caitriona pointed out, as defensive as if someone had told her she’d failed. ‘We were going to take the sheets away once the body was moved.’

‘No one is moving anything without my say-so.’ Glenn Hanshaw’s voice was grating as it cut through the room. We scattered away from the bed like cockroaches surprised by a light going on. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’

He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded livid. I edged back, towards the door, as he folded his tall, bony frame into a crouch beside the bed and began unpacking his equipment. I appreciated that he was good at his job, but the snap of his rubber gloves going on and the rattle of the thermometer as he took it out of its case made me clench. He was exceptionally professional but his patients were beyond feeling and he was businesslike about the way he examined them, quick and somehow brutal. I felt it was uncomfortably close to a violation and as I watched him lever Anna Melville’s legs apart – moving quickly because he was late, and angry, and she was beyond caring if he was gentle – I felt a wave of unease that was close to distress. I went and stood in a corner of the hall, taking deep breaths, waiting for my heart rate to drop.

‘Are you okay?’ Una Burt’s face was close to mine when I looked up.

‘I hate that bit.’

‘So do I. But it’s not Hanshaw’s fault. He’s not the one who put her there.’

‘I know.’ And I did know it. ‘I don’t blame him. It’s just – this case feels a bit close to home. You were right. I do feel something for these victims. Not that it could be me.’ Although it nearly had been me when I’d thought my stalker Chris Swain was just a friendly neighbour. He had got closer than I liked to recall. ‘It could be someone I know. One of my friends. Someone more trusting than me.’

‘You think he gains their trust.’

‘She wasn’t tied up. She wasn’t beaten up. She was killed. How did he control her before that? The only thing I can think is that he had some authority over her. She did what he said because he asked her to.’

‘You could be right.’ She looked away from me, into the room where Anna Melville still lay, and the next thing she said proved I wasn’t following her train of thought at all, because I couldn’t tell why it had occurred to her. ‘If DI Derwent attempts to talk to you about this case, refer him to me.’

She was gone before I could ask why.

Chapter 7

I was just about to go back in to confront the body and whatever Glenn Hanshaw was doing to it when I heard voices outside the front door. I scooted down the hall to see four men pulling on protective suits, watched by a crime-scene technician who had his arms folded. His name was Pierce, I recalled, and his voice was both camp and carrying.

‘It’s even more important for you guys to be careful about what you’re walking into the property, given who you are. One of you brings in some material from another crime scene and we are screwed, do you know what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, I think we have the idea.’ The testy response reminded me how uncharming I found Andrew Bradbury. He was thin and unsmiling behind glasses with heavy frames. Some men made going bald look good: Bradbury was not one of them.

‘I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I’m just doing my job. I’d be skinned alive if I let you in.’ If anything, Pierce sounded rather pleased to have a reason to tell the detectives what to do. I cleared my throat and he twisted around. ‘Oh, here’s DC Kerrigan. She’ll look after you.’

I was expecting some glimmer of recognition from Bradbury but it seemed I had made no impression on him at all. Since I encountered him he had been promoted, though he’d been one of the least impressive detective sergeants I’d ever met. Getting him out of harm’s way by pushing him up the ladder, Derwent had suggested. Derwent had given him quite a hard time, and Bradbury had conceded in a hurry to the alpha male. If Derwent had been there, Bradbury would have thought twice about pushing past me. As it was, he didn’t even say hello.

‘Where’s Superintendent Godley?’

‘The bedroom at the back, on the left.’

He barrelled past me and down the hall. I let him go, addressing the three who remained outside the door.

‘Thanks for coming. I’m Maeve Kerrigan – I work with Superintendent Godley.’

‘Nice to meet you.’ The speaker was lugubrious, sallow and in his mid-forties. ‘DI Carl Groves. This is DS Burns. Frank by name and nature,’ he added.

The sergeant waved a gloved hand at me instead of shaking mine. ‘Thanks for laughing at the boss’s little joke. I did too, the first thousand times I heard it.’

I grinned at the pair of them. They were a double act – one fat, one thin, around the same age, old in their very souls and as cynical as murder detectives are supposed to be. The third man introduced himself as James Peake, a detective from the East End where Andy Bradbury worked and where Maxine Willoughby had died. He was about my age, a big handsome redhead.

‘Did you want to speak to Superintendent Godley first, or …’

‘Probably more use to have a look round, isn’t it?’ Groves said. ‘That’s why we’re meeting here, after all.’

I agreed with Groves. Only Bradbury, it seemed, had missed the point.

They were quiet as soon as they entered the flat, taking in everything it could tell us about poor Anna and her aspirations. DI Burt appeared in the kitchen, dispatched by Godley, and there was another round of introductions.

‘Are you seeing similarities?’ she demanded, and all three nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

‘Same type of victim, definitely.’ Burns lifted a fold of curtain material and weighed it. ‘Better off than Kirsty, I’d say.’

‘Didn’t she live in Blackheath?’ I had noticed it in the
Standard
article because it was a nice part of south-east London, close to the river at Greenwich and rich in green open spaces. It was on my list if I ever managed to save enough money for a deposit for a place of my own, assuming – as I tended to – that I was buying it alone, Rob having gone the way of all men. It was emphatically not the sort of place where you expected to be strangled in your bed.

‘It was Blackheath in estate-agent speak. It was more like Lewisham.’

‘Lewisham’s all right,’ Groves said. ‘What’s wrong with Lewisham?’

‘Where do I start?’ Burns rolled his eyes. They’d be doing a music-hall number next. Una Burt could see the warning signs as well as I could and cut in.

‘What about Maxine Willoughby? Where did she live?’

‘She had a one-bed flat in Whitechapel,’ Peake said. ‘This place is a big step up from what she could afford.’

‘Anna was in HR in the City,’ I said. ‘I’d imagine she was earning a fair bit.’

‘Living simply, though,’ Una Burt said. ‘Quietly.’

‘Not attracting attention to herself,’ I agreed.

‘Whether she wanted attention or not, she attracted the wrong kind,’ Groves said.

‘The worst.’ Burt looked around. ‘Shouldn’t DI Bradbury be in here too? I thought he was following me. Where’s he got to?’

‘Have a look in the superintendent’s arse,’ Peake suggested, very quietly, so that only I could hear, and I smothered a laugh, converting it into a cough that made everyone stare at me. To do something worthy of everyone’s attention since it was on me anyway, I asked about the vase. Kev Cox had made sure it was removed since Godley and I had noticed it, but I described it.

‘Did you have anything like this in either of the other flats?’

‘Flowers, yeah.’ Groves’s face was twisted in thought. ‘Don’t know if we ever worked out where they came from.’

Peake was flicking back through a folder of photos he’d been carrying under one arm: pictures from Maxine’s flat. I looked over his shoulder, seeing rooms that were neat but IKEA-unimaginative, and all painted the same shade of cream.

‘There. On the draining board.’ I put out a hand to stop him as he flipped past the kitchen. ‘That’s a vase, isn’t it?’

It was turned upside down, as if it had been washed out.

‘Do you think he left it like that?’

‘Could be. He definitely cleaned up after he’d finished with Maxine. He wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He even vacuumed the place, we think, and took the bag away with him. He must have been feeling very confident. If there was more noise here – didn’t you say a neighbour called 999? – maybe he didn’t feel it was worth his while to tidy up after himself.’

‘You could be right.’

Groves and Burns were conferring in low tones, and concluded that there might have been a vase. They couldn’t remember.

‘What’s your theory?’ Peake asked.

I squirmed. ‘I don’t really have one yet. Maybe he delivers them and that’s how he gets to check out the victims and their homes. Or maybe he brings them flowers to get them to trust him.’

‘Well, he must be fucking charming is all I can say. They let him in. They don’t fight back.’ Groves shook his head. ‘Maybe he buys them chocolates too.’

‘And offers to fix a few things around the house,’ Burns suggested. ‘And tells them he hates football.’

‘But he loves shopping.’ Peake was grinning.

Burt looked as entertained as I was, which is to say not very.
Poor silly women, pinning their hopes on Prince Charming
,
trusting the wrong man
. ‘I hate to interrupt, but I think we’d better move on. Dr Hanshaw is going to want to move the body, so if you want to see it in position …’