The Stranger You Know (7 page)

All of which made me sound like any other copper, I thought. It was a commonplace to complain about not being appreciated, across all ranks, in all branches of the service, across all the different forces. It wasn’t a job to do if you liked being praised or if you wanted to earn a lot of money. It was a job to choose if you couldn’t see the value in doing anything else. It was a fundamental part of what made me who I was: without it, I wouldn’t know myself.

And the reason why I put up with the terrible hours and disappointing pay and sometimes miserable working conditions was staring out of the windows on either side of the road. The neighbours were starting to realise what had happened, staring at the news come to life in their very own street. Later some of them – the more sensitive ones – would think about the fact that a murderer had walked past their doors not long before, on his way to kill. Somehow it was worse to think about him leaving after he had finished, dragging his slaked desire behind him. It made
me
shiver and I didn’t have to sleep on Carrington Road. It wasn’t my home that had been defiled.

DCI Burt parked the car, humming under her breath. Godley heard the engine and turned to glance in our direction. I saw his eyebrows twitch together in a frown, but I couldn’t tell why.

I let her walk across to him on her own as I took a detour to drop my coffee cup in a bin. The wind stung my face and I huddled inside my coat, dropping my chin down to hide behind my collar. Carrington Street was lined with maple trees, which were shedding their leaves as if foliage was going out of fashion. The gutters were clogged and the air had that vinous smell of decay that I associated with autumn. A mordant technician in wellies and a boiler suit was working his way along the road, raking through the piles of leaves, filmed by the handful of news cameras that had made it to the latest crime scene. Someone had tipped them off that it was a murder but so far, judging by the questions they were shouting at me, they didn’t know there was anything to connect it to the other deaths. And they wouldn’t find out from me. I turned to walk back to the house and my bag vibrated against my hip.

Shit
.

I don’t know why I looked at the screen because I knew who it was going to be, and why. The ringing was somehow more insistent, the vibration stronger, because it was Derwent on the other end of the line, hating me for making him call back. I simply didn’t dare answer it when DCI Burt had specifically told me not to. I looked up and saw she was watching me, as was Godley. I made it very clear that I was rejecting the call, dropping the phone back into my bag with a flourish so they couldn’t miss what I had done. The part of me that rebelled against authority and hated working in a hierarchical organisation was outraged that I was obeying orders blindly, without being offered any explanation as to why it was necessary.

If it had been pissing off anyone other than Josh Derwent, I might even have said so.

‘I spoke to the uniforms. They’ll be around later if you want to ask them anything,’ Godley said. ‘We shouldn’t have too long to wait now.’

On cue Kev Cox appeared at his elbow, a small balding man with a pot belly his boiler suit did nothing to hide and a sweet nature that survived routine exposure to the worst things people could do to one another.

‘Two more minutes, folks. Thanks for the patience. You might like to get ready.’

‘Gloves and shoe covers?’ Godley checked.

‘Suits too, please. Got to be careful here.’ Kev knew as well as any of us that there would be ferocious interest in Anna Melville’s murder. No one wanted to get it wrong.

‘Glenn’s just been in touch. He’s stuck in traffic, but he’s on his way.’ Godley set off towards the house. Over his shoulder, he threw, ‘Keep it in mind, you two. He won’t want anyone to touch the body before he sees it.’

I wouldn’t have dreamed of it. I went out of my way to avoid it, usually. The loose, yielding feel of dead flesh, especially through rubber gloves, was developing into a phobia. Never a great cook, I had abandoned cooking meat altogether since I’d started working on murders. The rawmeat aisle at the supermarket was the stuff of nightmares, even if it was sanitised in cling-film.

They had set up a tent in front of the door and it functioned as an airlock between the real world and the crime scene. I hurried to get dressed in the protective gear Kev had specified. Beside me, Godley was doing the same. Burt had been about to get changed when her phone rang and she stepped back out to answer it. I wondered if Derwent had started calling her instead. Then I wondered what she didn’t want to say in front of me. Then I decided that was pure paranoia, and self-absorbed to boot.

‘Where’s Harry Maitland?’

‘Coordinating the house-to-house. I’ve got plenty of uniformed officers at my disposal to cover the area but I want them asking the right questions. Maitland’s putting the fear of God in them for me.’

I found myself hiding a smile at the unconscious pun. Godley was nicknamed ‘God’ in the Met not just for his name but also because of his looks and his perfect, untouchable record. It wasn’t something he encouraged, and it was used mainly by people who hadn’t worked with him. There was nothing grand about the way he did his job – nothing showy – and he had time for the youngest, the least experienced, sometimes the least promising officers he encountered. In turn, he got undying respect and dedication, and very often results no one else would have. And yet he was as dirty as they came. The thought wiped the smile off my face, and when I looked up Godley was watching me. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly what I had been thinking.

‘Do you want to wait for DCI Burt?’ I asked.

‘She knows where we’re going.’ Courteously he held the door open for me, letting me walk into the flat first, and I scanned the hall as I passed through it, starting to form an opinion of Anna Melville from the things she had chosen to keep around her. The hall was painted a faded green and a collection of twelve vintage mirrors hung on one wall, spaced out exactly in rows of four. The floor was polished wood and the cream runner that lay on it was pristine. It wasn’t even rumpled. I looked for – and found – the shoe rack by the door. No one was allowed across the threshold without taking their shoes off. If she had let him in, the killer had been in his socks or barefoot, so we wouldn’t get shoe treads or soil fragments to match against an eventual suspect. The rack was neatly arranged with shoes that were predominantly pretty rather than functional – delicate, spindly high heels on everyday court shoes, embellished ballet flats for casual wear. Even her wellies were pale pink with silver stars. A girly girl.

‘No blood,’ I observed to Godley, who nodded. He moved past me into the sitting room.

‘Let’s start in here. Una will be in soon.’

The room wasn’t large but the furniture was expensive. The grey velvet upholstery on the two-seater sofa and armchair looked as if no one had ever sat on it. There was a fireplace, with candles sitting in the grate, and the alcoves on either side of the chimneybreast were shelved. They were filled with vases and ornaments rather than the books or DVDs that might have told us something about her personality. The fact that there weren’t
any
books or discs made me think she worked long hours and didn’t have time for entertainment. The giant grey wicker heart above the sofa made me suspect she was a romantic. The armfuls of cushions arranged on the sofa itself were impossibly feminine and dainty; I couldn’t imagine a man sitting there to watch television. And on another wall, there was a framed poster: the word ‘Beauty’ in elaborate writing. Pin your colours to the mast, I thought. If that’s what matters to you, why not frame it? And what harm was there in any of it? Still, something made me feel I wouldn’t have got on with Miss Melville. The array of photographs on the shelves gave me one reason.

‘What is it?’ Godley was watching me instead of looking around, which made me feel like a canary in a mine. ‘You’re frowning.’

‘Is this her?’ There were probably thirty pictures on the shelves and the same dark-haired woman appeared in almost all of them.

‘I believe so.’

‘She must have been massively insecure, then. Who has framed pictures of themselves when they live alone?’ I picked up one which was of a group of girls ready to go out, dressed to the nines. Two of them were talking, their mouths twisted halfway through a word, and one wasn’t even looking at the camera. The dark-haired girl was looking right at the lens with a dazzling smile. ‘And look at this. She’s the only one who looks good in this picture. Why would you choose to frame that?’

‘Being insecure isn’t a crime.’

‘But it makes you susceptible to flattery. The three women lived alone. They were all heading towards thirty and not in a relationship. That has to be one way he could have got in. Do we know if any of them did online dating?’

‘I’ll ask the other SIOs this afternoon.’

‘He’s seeing something vulnerable in them. This woman was hyper-feminine and very conscious of how she was perceived. What do you look for in a man if you are like that?’

‘Someone who comes across as traditionally masculine,’ Godley suggested. ‘Someone strong.’

‘And forceful. Someone who would take control. Sweep you off your feet. Someone confident.’

‘Confidence fits in with murdering them in their own home. He’s comfortable in their environment. He takes his time, too.’

‘What makes you say that?’ I asked.

‘How the bodies are left.’

I was staring at the only thing that was out of place in the room: a vase half-filled with greenish water and a few bits of leaves. ‘Where are the flowers?’

‘I think we’re about to find out.’ Godley checked his watch. ‘Come on, Una. Wind it up.’

She came through the door as if she’d been waiting for the invitation, rustling importantly in her boiler suit. ‘Sorry. All done.’

‘Are we finished in here?’ Godley asked me and I nodded, watching Una Burt scan the room.

‘Lead on,’ Godley said to her, and I followed her through the hall, past a small bedroom that was primrose yellow and obviously for guests, past a tiny bathroom where the SOCOs were climbing over each other to collect swabs and empty U-bends, past a kitchen with red tulips in a vase on the table and the washing-up neatly stacked on the draining board. No secrets here – nothing that Anna would have been ashamed for us to see. It reminded me of a flat that had been tidied for viewing, down to the matching tea towels hanging neatly on their rail and the cutesy blackboard with ‘Nearly the weekend!’ written on it, above a shopping list. Organised, careful, feminine, self-conscious. And there was nothing wrong with being like that – I wished I was more like that myself – but I felt it had marked her as a victim and I wondered how he’d seen it, and known her, and calculated how he could have her.

How he had had her was laid out for our inspection in the main bedroom, as neatly and obsessively as everything else in Anna Melville’s home. I stopped short in the doorway despite myself and Godley collided with me, then leapt away as if I was burning to the touch.

‘Sorry. I just—’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said shortly. ‘Take your time.’

Burt had gone ahead and was leaning over the bed, peering intently at the body that lay on it. I skirted the bed, not quite looking at what lay on it. The floor was wood, painted white, and Kev was lying down shining a torch through the cracks between the boards. On the other side of the room another SOCO was doing the same, crawling on hands and knees. I recognised her – Caitriona Bennett, the pretty, soft-spoken technician whose work had led us to a killer during the summer. It was a slight comfort to me to know that Anna Melville was getting the best of everything in death. It gave us a chance to get something like justice for her.

Godley stepped over Kev’s prone body. ‘Found anything?’

‘Dust.’ He didn’t even look up, working his way along the gap inch by inch. ‘Stuff. We’ll have these up later to collect anything that seems interesting.’

I stopped beside the window, which was draped in gauzy voile panels. There was a hand-span gap between them where I assumed the uniformed officer had peered. Turning, I saw that the room showed the same feminine attention to detail as the rest of the flat, with a white-painted carved wooden beam nailed to the wall above the bed. Curtains hung down from it, draping the bed head. The bedclothes were white and embroidered with tiny stars, also white, but they had been drawn down to the end of the bed and folded over, out of the way, leaving a clean white sheet underneath the body. A mirrored bedside table had a carafe of water on it, an old-fashioned alarm clock and an iPad that I knew we would be taking away with us. I itched to start looking through it but there were protocols to observe. And a body, I reminded myself, forcing my eyes to where she was waiting.

She lay with her head pointing towards the foot of the bed, her feet together on the pillow. She wore white – a silk nightdress so fine I could see a dark shadow at the top of her thighs and the two faint smudges of her nipples through the fabric. She was small and slim, her bones fragile, her kneecaps sticking up like a child’s. Her hands were by her sides, palms up, loosely holding what he had cut out of her head. Her face was horrendous – dark with blood, her tongue protruding – but mercifully for me he had closed her eyelids over the empty sockets. The marks on her neck stood out like splashes of paint on snow. Her hair – her long, glossy dark hair – was gone. He had cut it off close to her head. She looked more vulnerable with her collaborator’s crop, and young, and I wondered if he’d cut it before she died or after. Was it to torment her? For his own gratification? Or something more complicated?

‘Did he take the hair away with him?’

‘Nope. Found it in the bathroom. He dumped it in the bath,’ Kev said cheerily. ‘But he cut it in here. We found a lot of loose hairs over here in this corner.’

Two candles stood on either side of her head and on either side of her feet – fat ones, about eight inches high.

‘Did he bring these, do we think?’ Godley asked, pointing at them.