The Last Girl (2 page)

Both sides of the road were fully parked up but Derwent refused to drive out again.

‘It’s not far. And you run marathons, so you can’t be that lazy.’

‘I don’t mind the walk. I mind people not knowing I’m a big-shot police inspector.’ He settled for blocking in a car that I recognised as belonging to the pathologist, Dr Hanshaw.

‘Glen’s not going to be pleased.’

‘Glen is going to be here for a while. And I’m not exactly scared of him anyway.’ Derwent got out and stretched, revealing a damp patch that took up most of the back of his shirt so the material clung to his really quite impressive muscles. I plucked my top away from my skin, knowing that it would be translucent where it had been pressed against me. The heat was like a coat wrapped around me. I pulled a face, then bent down to look for the water bottle I’d stashed at my feet. It was too light when I picked it up. Empty, but for a few drops at the bottom.

I was still looking at it when Derwent leaned down. ‘Are you getting out or what?’

‘Did you drink my water?’

‘What?’

‘I had half a bottle of water here. Did you drink it?’

‘You must be hallucinating, Kerrigan. You finished it yourself.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Really. I watched you.’

I knew he was lying but I still hesitated, doubting my memory for a moment. He sounded so sure of himself – which was usually a dead giveaway that he wasn’t telling the truth. As if to confirm it, his face twisted into a grin, at my expense.

‘Come on. Time to go.’

There had been a time when I was scared of Derwent and I still wouldn’t argue with him, but not because he intimidated me. He was a senior officer and I would never win. Plus, he liked it too much. I threw the bottle into the back of the car with extreme bad temper and slammed the car door as hard as I could. Derwent led the way up the path, past two PCs who were suffering in their body armour. The stab vests were miserably uncomfortable in the heat, I recalled with sympathy, glad that I only had an equipment belt, and that was slung over my shoulder. It was one of the perks of being in CID. The fact that I didn’t usually go out on arrest raids or anything that was expected to be violent meant that I hadn’t had to wear body armour for a very long time. It was especially hard on the uniforms when there was almost no chance they would need the vests. Whatever violence had been done at number 4 Endsleigh Drive, the danger had been over for hours.

We stopped inside the canvas screens in front of the front door, shedding shoes and pulling on paper suits to avoid contaminating the crime scene. An extra layer was exactly what I didn’t need and I wriggled crossly, already stifling.

‘What do we know about the victims?’

‘Mother and daughter. Vita and Laura Kennford. Mum’s
forty-nine,
Laura’s fifteen.’ Derwent recited the details from memory, without hesitation. He was a far better police officer than casual acquaintance with him might have suggested. The bluff misogyny was a large and unfortunate part of his personality, but he was also razor-sharp and totally dedicated to his job.

‘And they were stabbed?’

‘You know as much as I do about that.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘You’re not trying to spin this out, are you? Trying to find a reason to stay out here until the bodies are gone and the place has been tidied up?’

‘Of course not. Why would I do that?’

‘Because you don’t trust yourself.’

He wasn’t completely wrong, which made it all the more annoying that he’d spotted what I was doing. I was getting used to dead bodies – I had seen enough of them since I’d started working on Godley’s team – but I still couldn’t quite take them in my stride. It wasn’t the blood or the spilling intestines, the splattered brain matter or the smell of decay, though all of those things had the potential to turn more experienced officers than me pea-green. It was the violence that made me stop in my tracks. The desire to destroy another human being, the will to carry it through, the ruthlessness or thoughtlessness we encountered every day. The waste. And all we could do was sling the killers in prison, if we caught them. I’d never been a fan of the death penalty, but murdered children made me think depriving someone of their liberty was a pretty pathetic punishment.

Meanwhile, Derwent was waiting for an answer. I squared my shoulders. ‘I know you like to think of me as a shrinking violet, boss, but I’m just not.’

‘You’re hard as nails, Kerrigan. We know that.’ He took my arm and steered me out of the tent and up to the front door. ‘Come on. Feel the fear and do it anyway.’

Inside the house, I looked past the usual organised chaos
of
crime-scene technicians and police officers coming and going, searching for signs of what had taken place there. The hall was huge, double-height, with a very modern chandelier suspended in the middle – lozenges of textured glass stuck together at haphazard angles. Wide stairs swept up to an open gallery with rooms leading off it, but all the doors were closed. Bedrooms, I presumed, and bathrooms. Nothing to see from where I stood, anyway. There was no furniture in the hall at all, just a set of double doors on either side and a glass door at the back. The only colour came from a tapestry that hung on the wall by the stairs, six feet by ten at a guess, and fiercely abstract in tones of grey and orange.

It was the only colour, that is, apart from the red tracks that marked the cream carpet. Blood, still harshly bright in the glare from the chandelier, not yet darkened to brown. Fresh. There was a story there, a narrative that some specialist would unravel, but I couldn’t help trying to fathom it. Footsteps coming from the right-hand side of the hall, fading as they got closer to the door at the back, spreading and blurring where water had mingled with blood. Coming back towards the front door, much fainter now. And then a set of smudges on the stairs, where someone or some people had run up two or three at a time, moving fast. A forensics officer was crouching five steps from the top, minutely examining something and then sealing it in a paper envelope. Her concentration was total as she peeled a sheet of sticky film off the carpet. Trace evidence. There’d be a lot of it.

Through the doors on the right I could hear the murmur of conversation and the crack of camera flashes. Derwent made a move towards them but stopped dead when someone said his name. We both turned to see Superintendent Godley coming through the doors on the other side of the hall, looking grim. He had had his silver hair cut since the last time I’d seen him, and a thin line of
paler
skin traced his hairline. He had just been on holi days, sailing in Croatia, and his tan made his teeth very white and his eyes extra blue. At that moment he was very far from smiling and his eyes were narrow with disapproval.

‘You took your time.’

‘The traffic was terrible. We got here as soon as we could,’ I explained, cringing a little in spite of myself.

Derwent shrugged. ‘We’re here now. What’s going on?’

‘Have you ever come across Philip Kennford?’ Godley was speaking in a low voice.

‘As in the barrister? The QC? That Kennford?’

‘Got it in one.’

Derwent whistled. ‘This is his house? Fuck me, there’s money in getting criminals off the hook, isn’t there?’

‘Who is he?’

The inspector turned to look at me, unimpressed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never come up against him, Kerrigan.’

‘I haven’t been doing this for very long,’ I reminded him. ‘Only a few of my murders have gone to trial yet.’

‘But you must have heard of him.’

‘Vaguely,’ I said.

‘Do you “vaguely” recall the Catford strangler? That freak who was raping and murdering women in their own homes? He did for eight of them before he got arrested.’

I ignored the fact that Derwent had dialled the sarcasm up to eleven. This one I did actually know. ‘Because his son got done for aggravated assault and the DNA showed he was related to the killer.’

‘Yeah, they’d got DNA from inside one of the victims and it was a near match to the son – close relation – so it was only a matter of going through the family and finding the guilty party. They only got DNA off one body, and only a trace of it at that because he used condoms most of the time – just couldn’t resist dipping into the last one he killed bareback, or he decided it was worth the risk. Maybe he thought he was in the clear because no one had ever
come
knocking on his door. Peter Harbold his name was, an accountant by profession, a pillar of the community – no one you’d ever have suspected. Twisted bastard, as we found out.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Godley warned, glancing behind him. ‘Kennford’s in there.’

‘I don’t care if he hears what I think of his client,’ Derwent snapped. ‘I don’t care if he hears what I think of the defence that got him off.’

‘He got off?’ I hadn’t remembered that.

‘He did indeed. The DNA sample wasn’t collected properly, according to Kennford. He found an expert to say it could have deteriorated before it was analysed so it couldn’t be relied upon. And Harbold had been very careful about covering his tracks so everything else was circumstantial. No confession, no difficulty in handling cross examination, no criminal record. The jury wouldn’t convict, even after a majority direction. Split down the middle. Cretins on one side, decent people on the other. The prosecution wanted a retrial but the judge said no go. No chance of winning unless there was new evidence, and there wasn’t.’

‘Are you that sure they were wrong?’ I asked, genuinely curious. I knew that Derwent didn’t have a lot of time for the jury system but he sounded particularly vehement.

‘I knew the officer in the case. Mate of mine. He wasn’t in any doubt about it. Couldn’t shake Harbold in interview. The guy had an answer for everything. He was prepared, my mate said. Just too smooth to be right.’

I nodded. I had done interviews like that, too. Innocent people got flustered. They tended to ramble, to answer at great length, trying to be as helpful as they could. Innocent people were nervous, generally. It was the guilty ones who took it in their stride.

‘You can’t blame Kennford for doing his job,’ Godley said. ‘And in this case, he’s a victim.’

‘Or a suspect.’

‘If you like, Josh. But you should probably speak to him before you make up your mind about that.’

‘Fair enough. Let’s have a crack at him.’

‘Crime scenes first.’ Godley led us across the hall. ‘I want you to get a look at them so you know what to ask.’

‘Scenes? So they weren’t killed in the same place?’ I asked.

‘No, Vita and Laura died in here.’ Godley pushed open the door. ‘But they weren’t the only ones who were attacked.’

I wasn’t really paying attention to the superintendent any more. I was fully occupied by scanning the room, seeing the before and after, order and disorder, life and death. The pristine chill that I’d noticed in the hall was here again, the pale colours and lack of ornament, except for the art on the walls. It was a large room and minimally furnished – a couple of designer chairs that looked more like sculpture than seats, black lacquered tables on either side of the fireplace, chrome and glass lamps. Modern, expensive, to my eye over-designed – and now disturbed. Two huge rectangular sofas faced one another at right angles to the fireplace, but one of them was pushed out of alignment and its cushions were scattered over the floor. A body lay in front of it, on carpet that was saturated with blood. She was on her back, her head tilted to stare blindly at the fireplace, which was itself painted with arterial spray. One leg was thrown negligently onto the sofa so her legs were splayed, but her clothes didn’t look as if they had been disturbed. She was lying as she had fallen, as if maybe she had been curled up on the sofa and had toppled off during the attack. The angle of her head was so extreme that I couldn’t see her face, but from the skinny jeans and camisole top, I thought it was the younger victim. Laura. Laura, who had evidently had her throat cut, right down to the bone. Laura, whose killer had only just stopped
short
of decapitating her. Laura, whose hair was matted with blood, whose clothes were soaked, who had died horribly. Laura, who had been fifteen. I swallowed and looked away, searching for the other victim.

She was at the other end of the room, at the centre of chaos. Vita had made it further than her daughter, probably trying to escape through the French windows that led to the garden. The curtain pole had come down on one side, the heavy silk material pooling under the body. I walked towards her, leaning to see. I had only spotted one injury on Laura’s body but Vita’s was a different story: multiple slashes and stab wounds that Dr Hanshaw was busy annotating. As far as I could judge, Vita had been slim with bobbed fair hair. Her trousers and top had once been pure white, linen and silk respectively. One of her shoes lay on its side by my feet and I bent over to look at it. A caramel-coloured suede loafer with a gold snaffle. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to see it was made by Gucci.

‘Blood.’ Derwent’s nose was wrinkled. ‘Like a butcher’s shop.’

I had been trying to ignore the smell, breathing shallowly through my mouth. It was exceptionally strong, and somehow worse for being fresh. The room was saturated. There was a trail leading from Laura’s body to where Vita lay, in scattered droplets and in small pools. A table lay on its side, the lamp that had been on it shining an oval at the opposite wall where a constellation of blood spatter gleamed. The base of the lamp had broken and porcelain shards littered the floor. Vita had fought hard for her life, and lost.