Simon Kernick - The Crime Trade

We stopped in front of her body, and Jackson finished writing and looked up. ‘I know what you’re going to ask,’ he said.

‘Are you going to answer it, then?’ replied Knox, with the beginnings of a smile.

‘They’ve both been here a while, I can tell you that,’ he said, sounding like he was thinking very carefully about what he was saying. ‘Rigor mortis is well advanced, and the body temperatures are low enough that it’s at least twelve hours, possibly as long as twenty-four. I’ll be able to get a more exact time when I’ve conducted more tests and made the necessary calculations, but that’s my first estimate.’

‘Is there any significant difference between the two body temperatures?’ I asked. ‘That might suggest they were killed at different times?’

‘This victim’s is slightly lower, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Not on its own. There are a number of factors that could have contributed to it. Their size difference for a start.’

‘Do you think they were killed separately then, John?’ asked Knox.

‘I’m not sure, but if they were killed together, I would have thought there would have been more of an obvious struggle. Robbie doted on his grandma. He would have tried to protect her, and with his size there would have been one hell of a mess.’

‘The killer could have tidied up after himself,’ pointed out Tina.

I nodded. ‘True, but then why did he move her body, which he must have done?’ I pointed out the scuffing on the carpet. ‘What would have been the point? If he killed them together, why not simply leave them where they fell? And why move one without the other? On the other hand, if he killed her first, then moved the body so it was out of sight, before taking out O’Brien when he arrived, that would suit the scene we’ve got here.’

‘There’s no sign of forced entry on the door to this apartment,’ said Knox, ‘or the door of the building, so it’s possible that he was let in. Most likely by her. Then he finishes her off, and waits for O’Brien. Yes, I quite like the sound of that one.’ I had no doubt that he’d take the credit for it as well, but that was Knox for you. He hadn’t got to the position of DCI on the back of his laid-back, generous approach to the job.

‘Who says he was let in?’ said Tina, pointing at the bedroom window, which was slightly open at one end. We hadn’t spotted this before since the view had been obscured by one of the SOCO, who’d now moved. ‘He could have come in through there.’

We approached the window, not touching it, and peered down into the small, neatly trimmed communal garden some fifteen feet below. There didn’t appear to be any obvious means of climbing up from the garden to the window, and it would have taken a very agile killer indeed to have made it without a step ladder, and there wasn’t one of those in evidence either. Nor would it have been very easy to take it away with him afterwards. Because the house we were in was terraced and its garden backed directly on to the gardens of the houses on the next street, the killer would have had to cross through a number of properties to reach its rear, a task that would have been very noisy and time-consuming if he’d been carrying a ladder with him.

Knox made exactly that point, and it was hard to argue with him. ‘No,’ he said, turning away. ‘I think we can assume he came through the front door.’

I leant forward to take one more look outside, which was when I noticed something sticking out of the wall several feet below the window. I pushed the glass with my gloved hand and it opened further.

‘What is it?’ asked Tina, who was still beside me.

I craned my neck to get a better view.

It was a rusty nail. Not only that, but a rag, or piece of cloth of some kind, barely a couple of inches across, was hanging from it, drifting idly in the early-morning breeze. It could have been nothing, but it didn’t look like it had been there that long, and I doubted that Robbie’s grandma would have caught her clothes on it while hanging out the window.

‘Take a look at that,’ I said, motioning towards my find.

Tina and Knox both squeezed in beside me and looked down.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Tina.

‘Hmm,’ said Knox.

‘Maybe he came out this way,’ I ventured. ‘And caught his clothing.’

‘Maybe,’ said Knox. ‘We’ll bag it up anyway. You never know.’ He turned away for a second time and informed the nearest SOCO of my discovery, then walked towards the bedroom door. ‘Good work, John,’ he added as an aside.

Personally, I thought that it merited a bit more than that, but I could understand him not getting too excited. Even if it was connected to what had happened, it was hardly a ‘smoking gun’. Still, from small seeds and all that.

We both followed Knox out of the room. ‘Who alerted us this morning, then?’ I asked him.

‘Robbie’s sister, Neve. The female victim, Mrs MacNamara, looks after her two-year-old every Tuesday and Thursday. She came round to drop him off, then, when there was no answer from inside, or from Robbie’s place, she let herself in.’

‘God, poor thing,’ said Tina. ‘Where’s she now?’

‘DC Hunsdon and one of the WPCs have taken her down the station. They’ll get a statement from her. Luckily, she called in straight away, as soon as she saw her brother’s body. She didn’t take the child inside or touch anything.’ He paused, then moved on swiftly, which was a long-standing habit of his. ‘We need to find out who was here yesterday afternoon and evening. See if anyone let the killer in, or at least saw or heard anything. You two can take a statement from Miss Williams downstairs. As soon as we’ve got some more numbers down here, we’ll get statements from everyone else. There’s another apartment on the ground floor but I think the occupants may be away. We haven’t heard anything from them this morning. There’s also someone on the top floor as well. A retired widower named Carlson. I’ve told him to stay inside and we’ll get someone up to him as soon as we can. We’d better deal with Miss Williams first, though,’ he added. ‘You know what these high-flyers are like.’

Tina and I spent half an hour with Dana Williams, who, it turned out, was a financial recruitment consultant for Barnes and Penney (apparently, the largest and most profitable such consultancy in the City of London), but didn’t get a huge amount out of her, other than an idea of her company’s balance sheet. She hadn’t been that shocked to learn that Robbie had been murdered, having heard enough rumours of his involvement in organized crime to know that he was always going to have enemies, and had freely admitted to not liking him much anyway; but when we’d told her about his grandma, her tough exterior had cracked a little.

‘She was a nice person, she didn’t deserve to go like that,’ she’d told us solemnly, and then, after a three-second pause for reflection, she’d launched into a diatribe about the extortionate cost of the brand-new double-lock they’d had put on the front door and how ineffective it had been, until we’d told her that the killer had been let in by someone. ‘I wasn’t here,’ she’d told us quickly, as if we were about to accuse her of being the one. ‘I didn’t get back until eight o’clock last night. We’re very busy at work at the moment.’ She’d then taken a none-too-subtle look at her watch and begun fidgeting noisily, the shock of finding out that two of her neighbours had been murdered obviously not getting in the way of Barnes and Penney business.

It was quarter past nine by the time we finished with Dana Williams, and she hurried out of the room after us, already jabbering into her mobile.