Jane Casey - Let the Dead Speak

Kate Emery’s bedroom was right at the top of the house along with another bathroom and a study, and we went up there together. The blood trail ran out on the first floor, as we’d thought. Here it was the SOCOs who’d left their mark with traces of fingerprint dust that made the surfaces look grimy. Like the rest of the house it was extremely neat and very feminine – pale pink bedclothes, pink curtains, pink towels in the bathroom. The pillows were piled high on the bed, three on each side and one particularly ornate one in the middle.

‘Melissa would love this,’ Derwent said.

‘Does she like the new house?’

Derwent slid open a drawer in the bedside table and started to work through the contents, setting everything he found on the bed. ‘She keeps putting cushions everywhere. What is it about women and cushions?’

I picked up a picture that was on top of the bedside table: a much younger Chloe and Kate hugging one another, smiling, windswept on a beach. Happy memories. ‘It wasn’t a very girly place, your flat.’

‘No, it was not.’ He glanced at me. ‘The house is better.’

‘Nothing quite compares to the suburbs.’

‘You should know. Sutton’s not far from your mum and dad.’

‘I wondered if you remembered they lived nearby. I have to say, I was surprised you chose to move there.’ I’d left it behind without a flicker of regret.

‘We needed to find a good school for the boy. And he needed a garden. Somewhere he can run around.’ His face brightened. ‘I want to get him a playhouse. They do one that looks like a command post.’

I hid a smile. Once a soldier, always a soldier. ‘Sounds nice.’

‘Yeah. Well. It’s good.’ I knew he’d be snappy for a couple of minutes, having given away more than he intended. The way Derwent behaved, you would think the worst thing in the world was to be liked.

Derwent, domesticated. It was strange, but it suited him. I’d never have thought that out of the two of us he would end up settling down first. But then I would never have thought my handsome, loving boyfriend, Rob, would sleep with someone else and leave me without so much as a goodbye, let alone an apology. It was more than a year since he’d disappeared and I still missed him more than I was willing to admit. I’d loved him enough to want to be with him for the rest of my life, and I’d lost him, and I couldn’t help hoping against hope that I might get him back somehow.

I watched Derwent as he returned to the search, running his hand all the way around the back of the drawer and coming up with something that he inspected.

‘What have you got there?’

‘Two condoms. They must have been a pretty recent purchase, looking at the use-by stamp. But no sex toys. No handcuffs. No whips.’

‘So, much less kinky than Oliver Norris was imagining it would be. What’s that?’ I picked up a leather holder and opened it to find a Kindle. ‘Damn. I was hoping for a diary.’

‘Make-up, moisturiser, eye cream …’ Derwent shrugged. ‘Usual female shit.’

I’d moved on to the chest of drawers, which was neatly arranged and completely full. ‘I can’t tell if there’s anything missing, but I’d be surprised. She had good taste in underwear.’

‘Let’s see.’

‘How did I know that would get your attention?’ I held up a bra: Italian, lacy, insubstantial as cobwebs. ‘That’s not for wearing. That’s for taking off.’

‘Naughty Kate.’

‘Single Kate. She must have been young when she had Chloe.’ I stopped to do the sums. ‘Twenty-four. Maybe she felt she had some catching up to do after her divorce.’

The drawers lower down had T-shirts and jumpers arranged by colour, rolled rather than stacked, organised as precisely as if she’d known they’d be scrutinised by strangers. I checked there was nothing caught in the folds or underneath the clothes or even under the drawer liners. Then I took out each drawer and checked underneath it, and along the sides and back.

‘Think she was hiding something?’

‘You never know.’

I carried on searching, checking between layers of clothes, looking in every box, every container, patting down the clothes on hangers to check there was nothing in the pockets. There was no way to know what I was looking for until I found it. I had searched chaotic and dirty houses, derelict buildings, squats and sheds: this was at least clean. But it was also frustratingly normal.

Right at the back of the wardrobe, though, there was something that gave me pause: a plastic bag folded over. I opened it and sat back on my heels. ‘God.’

Derwent was tipping the contents of the bin into an evidence bag. He glanced up, distracted, and half of it fell onto the floor. ‘For shit’s sake.’

‘Come and look at this,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Clothes.’ I was holding the bag at arm’s length, the back of one gloved hand to my mouth.

He came over and peered into the bag, then recoiled. ‘Fuck. That stinks.’

It was a strong and brackish smell, like unwashed exercise kit or dirty bed sheets.

I squeezed the bag, shuffling the clothes around inside it without touching them. ‘Looks to be a top, skirt, bra, knickers. A whole outfit.’

‘A whole outfit that she couldn’t be bothered to wash?’

‘Or she had some reason for keeping it like that.’ I offered him the bag. ‘I don’t want to take them out in case we lose trace evidence, but look at her underwear.’

He leaned over. ‘Ripped.’

‘Badly.’ I closed the bag again carefully. ‘Why would you leave a bag of unwashed, torn clothes in your otherwise im- maculate wardrobe?’

Derwent looked down at me, his face grave, but he didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t have to. ‘Bag it up.’

I edged the bag into a brown paper sack. It might be connected with what had happened in the house and it might not, but I wanted to know whose DNA was on the clothes and how it had got there.

Derwent retrieved the scraps of cotton wool and other rubbish that had tumbled away from him. I pointed out a stray button and a needle that was silvery invisible in the pile of the carpet. The more we took now, the less chance there was that we’d miss something important, but clogging up the lab with irrelevant material was not going to make us popular.

Derwent headed to the study while I dealt with the en-suite bathroom. It was clinically clean. The SOCOs had been here too but the dusting of fingerprint powder had caught only smudges and the wide swinging arc of a cloth used to polish glass. The air smelled of bleach and something else, more acrid. I bent over the sink and inhaled gingerly: definitely stronger. Drain cleaner, used for legitimate drain-cleaning purposes rather than destroying evidence. The bathroom cabinet was so well organised that I could see at a glance there was nothing of interest in it. One container held spare razor blades with plain black casings, not the pastel colours of women’s toiletries. Which meant nothing, I decided. There was no other sign of a man having lived in the house. Kate herself could just as easily have used the blades. Similarly, the stack of unused toothbrushes still in their packets didn’t mean she had frequent visitors, despite what Oliver Norris had suggested. She was the sort of person who stockpiled essentials like toothbrushes. There was a basket under the sink filled with rolls of toilet paper, and I’d found at least two of everything in the bathroom cabinet. Everything spoke of planning, care, preparation, organisation. It didn’t suggest chaos, terror, impending disaster. It didn’t make me think she had fled in a hurry after killing someone downstairs.

It didn’t make me think she had left at all. At least, not by choice.