Jane Casey - Let the Dead Speak

‘I can fill in some of her background,’ Liv volunteered.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Kate Emery has lived at that address for twelve years. She moved there after her divorce from Brian Emery, Chloe’s father. She had custody of Chloe, who went to the local state schools.’

‘Mainstream education?’ Burt checked.

‘Yes, although with support. Chloe has some educational disabilities,’ Liv explained to the rest of the room. ‘Kate was a stay-at-home mother for the majority of the last twelve years. She started her own business four years ago. It’s called Novo Gaudio Imports. She was importing traditional herbal supplements for childless couples to boost their fertility.’

‘Did she have a medical background?’ Burt asked.

‘She was a nurse before her marriage. She’d let her registration lapse so she was no longer allowed to practise. The imports were classified as dietary supplements rather than medical ones so she was able to supply them legally.’

‘And did they work?’ Burt asked.

‘Lots of grateful customers left feedback on her website. I don’t know how many of them were real,’ Liv said. ‘Many of them seemed very similar in tone, but then there probably isn’t that much to say about getting pregnant. At least, there are probably lots of things to say about it, but not on a website selling fertility drugs.’

I made a note of it all the same. Unsatisfied customer? I was still at the stage of being grateful every month for the definitive proof that I wasn’t pregnant, but I could understand something of the terrible hunger for a child. I’d seen it in others and I feared it. There wasn’t much I could do about it when I was single and likely to remain so.

‘How was the business doing?’ The question came from Colin Vale. I could see he was straining to get at the papers, to scrutinise the accounts. I might have felt guilty that he always got landed with every boring, repetitive task involving hours of paperwork or scouring CCTV, but it made him happy.

‘I can’t say for sure because I don’t have this year’s accounts and the computer guys haven’t analysed her PC yet,’ Liv said. ‘I have the impression it wasn’t doing as well as she’d hoped. She had a lot of stock in her house. Her initial sales were good but they had tapered off over time – the profits for last year are a long way down on the previous year. I looked up the company name and found a pretty damning thread on an infertility message board – Don’t use these, they’re rubbish, waste of money, that kind of thing. There were multiple users complaining about the lack of results and quite a lot of responses were from people saying they wouldn’t try them as a result. Kate actually posted a message asking for the customers to apply to her for a refund, but she said she would only pay up if the thread was deleted. That did not go down well at all, as you can imagine. Then there were a few messages in defence of the Novo Gaudio products. Again, they read very much like the positive comments from the website and the users were pretty sceptical about them. The accounts have all been suspended for “abuse of the website’s terms and conditions”.’ Liv looked up and smiled. ‘That means they were fakes. Sock puppets, they call them. Kate got caught out lying about her products.’

‘So she was struggling to make ends meet,’ Burt said.

‘Well, no. Not really. Her current account was in credit. She had a small savings account – I think she invested a lot in the business but there was a tiny bit of cash left over.’ Liv leafed through the documents in front of her. ‘She was getting something like three grand every month from a personal bank account. I haven’t traced it back yet but that could be Chloe’s dad.’

‘Chloe’s eighteen,’ I said. ‘Would he still have been paying to support her?’

‘Worth asking.’ Burt nodded to me. ‘Get the address from me after the briefing. You can talk to him.’

I nodded. ‘I was going to ask if I could. Chloe came home early from her visit and I’d like to know why. She wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Or couldn’t,’ Georgia said. ‘She seemed quite intimidated.’

Intimidated? I knew exactly what Georgia was implying and so did the rest of the room. She didn’t look in my direction, and it took a practised back-stabber to slide the knife in without checking for a reaction.

‘I think it’s far more likely she was in shock,’ Una Burt said, coming to my rescue, much to my surprise. ‘Maeve is only ever intimidating when she means to be.’

‘How was Kate paying the mortgage?’ Pete Belcott asked. I didn’t like Belcott but I recognised that he was a good police officer when he could be bothered and on this occasion he’d asked precisely the right question.

‘She wasn’t paying a mortgage,’ Liv said. ‘I haven’t found any payments to a bank or mortgage company. Which is why I’d say she wasn’t in desperate need of cash. She could easily have borrowed against the value of the house, even to shore up her business.’

‘Did she have any other payments into her current account?’ I asked.

‘Nothing significant. Refunds for things she bought and returned. A transfer from the savings account, for a few hundred pounds.’ Liv shrugged. ‘What were you looking for?’

‘Another source of income. One of the neighbours mentioned that she had a lot of gentlemen callers when her daughter was away. I was wondering if it was professional or strictly amateur.’

‘If she was on the game she might have been cash only. A lot of them are. They’re not the kind of people who file detailed tax returns.’ Belcott looked around the room. ‘I mean, that’s what I hear.’

Chris Pettifer snorted at that, but it was a pale imitation of his usual mockery. He’d aged ten years in the last few months. He hadn’t been the same since we’d lost a team member. Maybe he blamed himself.

I knew he blamed me.

‘We didn’t find much cash when we searched the house,’ Derwent said. ‘No safe. Nothing in the teapot, even.’

Burt’s attention swung around to Derwent, and it was like seeing an artillery piece wheeling into position. ‘Yes, tell us about what you found out.’

Derwent cleared his throat. ‘Um. We searched the property—’

Burt interrupted. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me and Kerrigan.’

‘What about the dog?’

‘Oh, yeah. That was before. It didn’t find much, to be honest with you.’

I resisted the urge to kick the back of his chair. Get it together . You’re making both of us look bad.

As if he’d heard me, he sat up straighter. ‘If you have a map of the area, I can show everyone the route the dog picked out.’

Of course Una Burt had a map of the area – a satellite photograph of it, in fact, and it was on her laptop so it could be projected on the wall behind her. Derwent got out of his chair and sloped up to the front of the room, the picture of a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework properly. As he’d done the previous evening, he described where the dog had alerted and why it was possibly significant.

‘What do we know about the owner of this property?’ Una Burt tapped the house three gardens over.

‘He’s a pensioner. His name is Harold Lowe and he’s been in a nursing home for a few months according to the neighbour. I don’t know of any connection between him and Kate Emery.’

‘Is the house obviously unoccupied?’

‘Yes,’ Derwent said slowly, thinking about it. ‘But the house is in pretty good condition and the garden is fairly neat. The neighbour I spoke to still cuts the grass for him and trims the hedges. He has a key to the gate but it’s not a very secure lock.’