The Burning (11 page)

The thought of a needle plunging into the victim’s eye nearly did for me. And when Hanshaw picked up a scalpel and slit her head from ear to ear, peeling the skin down over her face to expose her skull, I had had enough. Mumbling an excuse, I walked with purpose to the door and slipped through it, not caring what anyone thought of me. I could not stay in that room for one moment longer. I would read the pathologist’s report, but I didn’t need to see any more.

In the reception area I stood by the water cooler and drank cup after cup until my stomach settled a little bit and I felt more like myself. I had to wait for Godley to come out so I could apologise to him. I felt as if I had let him down in front of Dr Hanshaw. Not tough enough, as usual. Not hard enough to be a murder detective. The gibes from the uniforms early in the day came back to me and I swore under my breath, hating the doubts I couldn’t manage to dispel. Men didn’t question themselves so much. Men didn’t worry all the time about how they were perceived. Men did their jobs and went home, untroubled by what they’d seen – or if they were troubled, they didn’t show it. And I had practically fainted. There were plenty of senior officers who were female, but I was the only one flying the flag for feminism in Godley’s team, and a pretty small, ragged flag it was too.

To give him his due, Godley didn’t say anything particularly reproachful when he finally came out with Dr Hanshaw.

‘Feeling all right?’

‘Much better.’ I looked at the pathologist. ‘I’m sorry. It was really interesting.’

‘Next time you should stay for the big finish. You missed the best bit. There’s nothing like seeing the brain for the first time when the top of the skull is taken off.’

Never, never, not in a million years
. I smiled politely. ‘What did you find?’

‘Three blows to the back of the skull with a blunt object. From the angle, you are looking for someone right-handed. The first blow when the victim was either sitting or kneeling, the other two were struck when she was lying down. I can’t tell you which one killed her, but it would have been quick. She was dead before the fire was lit.’

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

‘The question is whether we’re looking for one killer or two,’ Godley said, sounding grim, and I looked up at him quickly.

‘A copycat do you mean, sir?’

‘I think we have to keep an open mind. Keep it within the squad, anyway, so I can keep an eye on it, but I want you to concentrate on Rebecca Haworth, Maeve. That way, if it does turn out to be the same killer, we’ll know about it first. I don’t want to make the press suspicious that there are two killers – they might be if I handed it over to another SIO. We don’t want them to cause a panic. One serial killer is bad enough; two is unthinkable. I don’t want that getting out, not least because Rebecca’s murderer, if he isn’t our serial killer, needs to think that we’ve been completely fooled. Lull him into a false sense of security and watch him make mistakes.’

I could see the sense in what he was saying. The next part, however, left me cold.

‘I’m going to put Tom in charge of this investigation and I want you to work on it full-time. Report to him; he’ll keep me up to speed. He can pull a couple of people from the squad to give you a hand. We’ll see where you are in a week’s time.’

I should have been pleased to be singled out for attention, to have an opportunity to shine, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was a bit unfair that the price I had to pay was working for Inspector Judd. I didn’t want to be left out either.

‘Can I still work on the rest of Operation Mandrake? If I have time, I mean?’

He looked amused. ‘If you have time, of course. But Rebecca Haworth should be your first priority.’

‘I’ll copy you in on the report,’ Hanshaw said, dismissing me. ‘Charlie, are you free for a quick half?’

The superintendent looked at his watch. ‘Not really, but why not.’

I watched them leave together, the pathologist talking animatedly as Godley bent his silver head to listen. They made an odd couple, the one so polite, the other so brusque and awkward. What they shared was an obsession with doing a good job. And that was what I cared about too. So instead of feeling sidelined, I should get on with it.

Because if we found enough evidence to tie Rebecca’s death to the Burning Man, I could get back to where I belonged.

In fact, I didn’t make any more progress that day; I drove home after the post-mortem and went to bed. Blame it on lack of sleep, blame it on the chilling weather, blame it on the fact that I would otherwise have had to go to Camilla’s dinner party with Ian, but I had the shivers and felt like death, and all I wanted was to sink into oblivion for a minimum of twelve hours. I took some flu medicine, carefully selecting the kind with a drowsiness warning on the box, and tipped myself into bed with my mobile phone under my pillow. I woke up briefly when Ian came home. He stood in the doorway for a long moment, silhouetted against the light. I didn’t speak, but neither did he, and I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry when his footsteps receded in the direction of the guest room. It was what I had wanted, but somehow not that either. What I really wanted was for things to be wonderful between us. What I wanted was the relationship we had once had. I didn’t want to give up on Ian. I had liked him, a lot. I still did. But he couldn’t understand why my job was so important to me, and I couldn’t understand why he needed to compete with it.

I slipped out of the flat early the following morning and went to work, even though it was Saturday. I found myself thinking of Louise North as I pushed open the door of the incident room and headed to my desk. Maybe she was at work too. There was nothing weird about it, whatever Sam thought. I was getting things done – and dodging my personal issues at the same time, admittedly. But that wasn’t urgent, and getting my career on track was. I devoted myself to ransacking Rebecca Haworth’s personal life instead of my own and was moderately successful at tuning out the little commentary playing in the back of my mind that insisted I was making a mistake. It spoke with my mother’s voice, so I was experienced at ignoring it.

The search team had done their work at Rebecca’s flat and someone had collected a box of personal papers that was waiting on my desk. There wasn’t much – bank statements, frightening credit-card statements, unpaid utility bills that had got as far as final demands. Obviously she was careless about her finances as well as housework. I set aside the phone bills for her landline and mobile with a view to going through them at my leisure. A folder marked WORK contained a company handbook for a PR agency named Ventnor Chase, a contract, and some information about Rebecca’s package of benefits – salary, company pension, and health and life insurance. I skimmed it, my lips pursed in a soundless whistle. She had been well paid for what she did. No wonder she could afford her expensive flat and her drug addiction.

I flipped through the remaining pages in the file, then stopped. At the very back of the folder, I found a severance letter and a P45. Her employment at Ventnor Chase had come to an end in August, but they had paid her off with a small lump sum and continued her benefits until the end of the year or until she found another job, whichever came sooner. She had signed a confidentiality agreement, promising not to talk about the company or why she had left it. I sat and frowned at it, trying to remember if Louise had said anything about where she worked. Did she have another job? Or was she out of work? That might explain the unpaid bills. On the other hand – I checked the most recent bank statement – she had a couple of thousand pounds in her current account. And people did live with massive credit-card debt hanging over them. I had been brought up to pay off my card every month; I came out in a cold sweat at the thought of having to pay interest on the balance. But I was in the minority. Like everything else in Rebecca Haworth’s life, her financial status was turning out to be more complicated than it first appeared. I piled everything back into the box with a sinking feeling, and went off to talk to someone who might be able to tell me what was really going on.

Gil Maddick lived in the East End near Columbia Road flower market, and sounded extremely wary about letting me into his flat when I phoned him.

‘Can’t we meet somewhere else? I’d prefer to talk to you in a café, or something.’

‘I’d rather have our conversation in private, Mr Maddick.’ I was fed up with people acting as if I had scabies just because I happened to be a police officer. It was almost a point of honour to get inside his front door. He backed down with bad grace when it became clear to him that I was implacable, much to my delight, though I managed to keep a lid on it. Undisguised triumph would not have been professional.

I arrived at his flat on time and with every intention of being civil, but something about Gil Maddick raised my hackles from the start. He lived in a small street of early Victorian houses with shops on the ground floor – art, clothes, handbags, hats, all exquisite and all far outside my price range. His flat was above a tiny dress shop with one perfect white dress in the bow-fronted window. It was as flawless and crisply curved as a tulip, and I longed for it, pointlessly, as I had no reason to buy it even if I could have justified the extortionate cost. The door to his flat was painted navy blue with polished brass fittings and I gave it a crisp rap with the owl-shaped knocker, enjoying its cool weight in my hand.

The door was opened by a tall, spare, dark-haired man whom I recognised from the picture I’d seen in Rebecca’s apartment. He stared at me expressionlessly and turned away, leaving me to come in and shut the door before following him up a narrow flight of stairs. On the first floor there was a sitting room with a minute kitchen behind it. Another set of stairs climbed to a second floor where I assumed he had a bathroom and bedroom. Every inch of wall that I could see was covered in bookshelves. The doors and window frames were black, the floor painted grey boards. He had two chairs, a desk and a music system in his sitting room, and nothing else, but the chairs were leather and chrome and I recognised them as design classics of the kind Ian liked. No expense spared. No excuses made. It was the home of a man who knew what he liked and rejected what he didn’t – uncompromising. And mildly uncomfortable if, like me, you were not welcome there.

I sat down without waiting to be asked in one of the chairs and cleared my throat. ‘I explained to you on the phone why I’m here.’

‘That’s not strictly true. You told me you wanted to talk to me about Rebecca. You didn’t say why.’ He went over to the window and leaned against the frame, staring down into the street. It was a graceful position but not posed, and the cool winter daylight fell on his face so I could see it clearly. He was handsome – very – with a straight nose, a determined jaw and expressive black brows over blue eyes. Everything about his demeanour conveyed extreme reluctance to engage with me and I started to wonder how long it would be before he threw me out.

‘You knew she was dead when I phoned you.’ I had been expecting to break the news, but he had interrupted my carefully prepared explanation before I got very far.

‘I’d been told. One of her friends called me. She thought I would want to know. I can’t think why.’ He spoke rapidly and the light caught a muscle that was flickering in his jaw.
Tense, are we?

‘Which friend?’ I asked. ‘Louise North?’

‘Louise?’ He shook his head, looking amused. ‘No. Louise would never call me. It was Tilly Shaw. She was Rebecca’s best friend.’

‘I thought that was Louise.’ I was writing down Tilly Shaw’s name nonetheless.

‘So did she.’ He shrugged. ‘Tilly was more like Rebecca. I could never really understand why Bex and Louise were still friends. They didn’t have much in common any more. Louise was a bit needy, always trying to get Rebecca’s attention. Tilly’s more her own person. The two of them didn’t like one another. All very petty.’

‘So which of them was really her closest friend?’

‘Both, I suppose. Neither.’ He yawned. ‘It was boring. I tried not to get involved.’

‘Louise said that you and she didn’t get on very well. She said you tried to shut her out of her friendship with Rebecca.’ I was trying to provoke a reaction.

‘Did she?’ He sounded interested. ‘Why did she say that, I wonder?’

‘Have you been in touch with Rebecca recently? Did you see her before she died?’
Cards on the table
.

‘The last time I saw her was in July. Technically, before she died, but I don’t imagine that’s what you were implying.’

‘So you weren’t with her on Thursday night.’

‘No.’ He was looking at me now and his eyes were icy. ‘Is that what Louise told you?’

‘She suggested it. She wasn’t sure.’

‘She was wrong.’

‘Where were you on Thursday night?’

‘Are you really asking me for an alibi?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘Why would I want to kill my ex-girlfriend?’

‘You haven’t answered me.’ I gave him back the expressionless stare he’d greeted me with.

‘I was here. Alone.’

‘All night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can anyone confirm that?’

‘I really doubt it. I didn’t go to the trouble of ensuring that someone knew my whereabouts because I didn’t know I was going to need an alibi. If I had been involved in killing Bex, I would probably have thought of that and I might have a story for you.’ His tone was pure acid.

‘What happened with you and Rebecca?’

‘I don’t see what business it is of yours.’

‘Everything is my business. I’m a police officer. Rebecca was murdered. It’s my job to find out as much as I can about her.’

‘It’s not relevant.’

‘It’s up to me to decide that, I’m afraid.’

‘You want all the messy details, do you? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there aren’t any. Nothing happened. Nothing except that she and I wanted different things and it became apparent that staying together was going to make neither of us happy. We had no option but to go our separate ways.’

‘Whose decision was that?’