Tana French: The Trespasser

There’s a wide splotch of blood on the fireplace surround, spreading from under her head, dark and sticky. None anywhere else, as far as I can see. No one bothered to lift her after she went down, hold her, try and shake her awake. Just got the hell out of Dodge.

Fell and hit her head, the caller said. Either it’s true, and Lover Boy panicked and did a legger – it happens, good little citizens so petrified of getting in trouble that they act squirrelly as serial killers – or he helped her fall.

‘Cooper been yet?’ I ask. Cooper is the pathologist. He likes me better than he likes most people, but he still wouldn’t have stuck around: if you’re not at the scene when Cooper shows up to do the preliminary, that counts as your problem, not his.

‘Just left,’ Sophie says. She has one watchful eye on her techs. ‘He says she’s dead, just in case we missed that. Her being right next to the fire messed with the rate of cooling and the onset of rigor, so time of death is dodgy: anywhere between six and eleven yesterday evening.’

Steve nods at the table. ‘Probably before half-eight, nine. Any later, they’d’ve started eating.’

‘Unless one of them works an odd shift,’ I say. Steve puts that in his notebook: something for the floaters to check out, once we have an ID on the dinner guest. ‘The call came in as injuries from a fall. Did Cooper say whether that’d fit?’

Sophie snorts. ‘Yeah, right. The special kind of fall. The back of her head’s smashed in, and the injury looks to match the corner of the fireplace; Cooper’s basically sure that’s what killed her, but he won’t say so till the post-mortem, just in case Peruvian arrow poison or whatever. But she’s also got abrasions and a major haematoma on the left side of her jaw, a couple of cracked teeth – probably a cracked jawbone too, but Cooper won’t swear till he gets her on the table. She didn’t fall on the fireplace from two angles at once.’

I say, ‘Someone hit her in the face. She went over backwards, smacked her head on the fireplace.’

‘You’re the detectives, but that’s what it sounds like to me.’

The woman’s nails are long and cobalt blue, to match her dress, and perfect: not one broken, not one even chipped. The pretty photography books on the coffee table are still nicely lined up; so are the pretty glass whatsits and the vase of purple flowers on the mantelpiece. There’s been no struggle in here. She never got a chance to fight back.

‘Cooper have any clue what he hit her with?’ I ask.

‘Going by the bruise pattern,’ Sophie says, ‘his fist. Meaning he’s right-handed.’

Meaning no weapon, meaning nothing that can be fingerprinted or linked to a suspect. Steve says, ‘A punch hard enough to crack her teeth, it’s got to have banged up his knuckles. He won’t be able to hide that. And if we’re really in luck, he’s split a knuckle, left DNA on her face.’

‘That’s if his hands were bare,’ I say. ‘A night like last night, chances are he was wearing gloves.’

‘Inside?’

I nod at the table. ‘She never got as far as pouring the wine. He hadn’t been here long.’

‘Hey,’ Steve says, mock-cheery. ‘At least it’s murder. Here you were worried we’d been hauled out for someone’s granny who tripped over the cat.’

‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll save the happy dance for later. Cooper say anything else?’

‘No defensive injuries,’ Sophie says. ‘Her clothing’s all in place, there’s no sign of recent intercourse and no semen showed up on any of her swabs, so you can forget sexual assault.’

Steve says, ‘Unless our fella tried it on, she said no, and he gave her a punch to subdue her. Then when he realised what was after happening, he got spooked and did a legger.’

‘Whatever. You can forget completed sexual assault, anyway; is that better?’ Sophie’s only met Steve the once. She hasn’t decided whether she likes him yet.

I say, ‘Attempted doesn’t play either. What, he walks in the door and shoves his hand straight up her skirt? Doesn’t even wait till they’ve had a glass of wine and his chances are better?’

Steve shrugs. ‘Fair enough. Maybe not.’ This isn’t him diving into a sulk, the way a lot of Ds would if their partner contradicted them, specially in front of someone who looks like Sophie; he means it. It’s not that Steve has no ego – all Ds do – just that his isn’t tied to being Mr Big Balls all the time. It’s tied to getting stuff done, which is good, and to people liking him, which comes in useful and which I watch like hell.

‘Her phone show up?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. Over on that side table.’ Sophie points with her pen. ‘It’s been fingerprinted. If you want to play with it, go ahead.’

Before we check out the rest of the cottage, I squat down by the body and carefully, one-fingered, hook her hair back from her face. Steve moves in beside me.

Every Murder D I’ve ever known does it: takes one long look at the victim’s face. It doesn’t make sense, not to civilians. If we just wanted a mental image of the vic, to keep us reminded who we’re working for, any phone selfie would do a better job. If we needed a shot of outrage to get our hearts pumping, the wounds do that better than the face. But we do it, even with the bad ones who barely have a face left to see; a week outdoors in summer, a drowning, we go face-to-face with them just the same. The biggest douchebags on the squad, the guys who would rate this woman’s tits out of ten while she lay there getting colder, they would still give her that respect.

She’s somewhere under thirty. She was pretty, before someone decided to turn the left side of her jaw into a bloody purple lump; no stunner, but pretty enough, and she worked hard at it. She has on a truckload of makeup, the full works and done right; her nose and her chin would be little-girl cute, only they have that jutting look that comes with long-term low-level starvation. Her mouth – hanging open, showing small bleached teeth and clotted blood – is good: soft and full, with a droop to the bottom lip that looks witless now but was probably appealing yesterday. Under the three blended shades of eyeshadow her eyes are a slit open, staring up into a corner of the ceiling.

I say, ‘I’ve seen her before.’

Steve’s head comes up fast. ‘Yeah? Where?’

‘Not sure.’ I’ve got a good memory. Steve calls it photographic; I don’t, because I’d sound like a tosser, but I know when I’ve seen someone before, and I’ve seen this woman.

She looked different then. Younger, but that could have been because she had more weight on her – not fat, exactly, but soft – and a lot less makeup: careful foundation a shade darker than her skin, thin mascara, the end. Her hair was brown and wavy, done up in a clumsy twist. Navy skirt-suit, a touch too tight, high heels that made her ankles wobble: grown-up clothes, for some big occasion. But the face, the gentle snub nose and the soft droop of the bottom lip, those were the same.

She was standing in sunlight, swaying forward towards me, palms coming up. High voice with a tremble in it, But but please I really need- Me blank-faced, leg twitching with impatience, thinking Pathetic.

She wanted something from me. Help, money, a lift, advice? I wanted her gone.

Steve says, ‘Work?’

‘Could’ve been.’ The blank face took willpower; on my own time, I would’ve just told her to get lost.

‘We’ll run her through the system, soon as we get back to HQ. If she came in with a domestic violence complaint…’

‘I never worked DV. Would’ve had to be back when I was in uniform. And I don’t…’ I shake my head. The searchlight sweeps of the techs’ headlamps turn the room sizeless and menacing, make us into crouching targets. ‘I don’t remember anything like that.’