‘I only saw him at the bottom of the stairs,’ Caelan said. ‘Did you see him walking down them?’
Ewan shook his head. ‘When I looked over, he was there.’ He paused. ‘You don’t think he went up there at all? He would’ve been taking a hell of a risk.’
‘Looking at the body, I think Nathan fell and hit his head. Whether he was pushed or punched is another matter.’ Reuben could have shoved his brother, not meaning to really hurt him. It was possible.
‘But how would he have known Nathan was going to leave the club? He only went because Mulligan told him to. He looked like he was in a daze, like he was shocked by what he’d done,’ Ewan said. ‘Isn’t it more likely Stefan Harris was waiting for him outside?’
‘Probably,’ Caelan said. ‘But Nathan hadn’t taken much of a beating before he died, as far as I could see.’
‘Which is why we wait for the post-mortem.’ Penrith glanced at her. ‘It’s taking place this afternoon.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
He held up his hands. ‘I accept you might have a point about speaking to Lucy’s housemates. Go to the house, see if any of them are around. Remember you’re her cousin, without access to any of the information you’d have as a police officer. I don’t want Mulligan anywhere near them. He can stay at Acton until I decide what to do with him. I’ll let you know.’
‘And you’ll speak to Brady?’
He scribbled on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. On it was scrawled an address in Camden. He made a ‘go away’ gesture with his hands. ‘If I can. She’s no doubt fairly busy, with the murder case and all. Probably won’t be happy about being bothered.’
‘I want to help.’
He didn’t reply, just folded his arms.
Caelan picked up the address and pushed back her chair, Ewan doing the same. ‘You want us to report back here?’
‘If I could trouble you.’ Penrith was already stabbing at the screen of his phone, but Caelan hadn’t finished. She had irritated him already, why not go for broke? She had concerns, and he was her supervisor, or had been. Who else could she go to?
‘The timing of all this, though…’ She thought back to what Mulligan had said when she’d first spoken to him in the cell at Enfield: that there were officers who would sell what they knew.
Penrith’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowing. He had accused Caelan of following her own wild theories before. ‘What?’
‘Mulligan’s released from hospital and custody without charge, as he keeps telling everyone. His sister, who’s already been threatened, disappears.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s as though someone did know Mulligan had wangled himself a deal.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ Penrith spoke quietly, but there was no mistaking the steel. No officer liked a suggestion of corruption.
‘Nothing.’ She paused, as though thinking aloud. ‘But sometimes information is shared that shouldn’t be, whether by accident or not. You know that.’
‘You think there’s a leak? That whoever’s threatening Mulligan and his sister is paying someone on the force for information?’ He had both hands on the desk, palms down, as though he was going to vault over it.
Did she? Caelan found it as hard to accept as Penrith apparently did. ‘I don’t… No. I don’t think so. But you have to admit, the timing’s worrying. It’s happened before.’
‘That was different.’ Penrith blew out a long breath. ‘You can’t make these accusations without evidence. I shouldn’t need to tell you that.’
‘It’s not an accusation. It’s a suggestion.’
‘Do you have a suspect in mind?’ He leant forward. ‘The commissioner, perhaps? Adele Brady? Tim Achebe? Me?’
Caelan got up. ‘I wanted to discuss this with you, but it seems you’re not willing to listen. Forget it.’
Penrith waited for her to reach the door before he said, ‘Caelan.’
Furious, she turned.
‘I’ll keep it in mind.’
15
There was a cafe on the corner of the road where Lucy Mulligan lived. Knowing that Ewan must be as exhausted as she was, Caelan suggested they make a quick stop for food.
‘We can see the house from here,’ she said quietly. ‘We’ll observe for a while.’
Ewan grinned as they headed towards it. ‘We would still have stopped to observe if there hadn’t been a coffee shop nearby?’
She laughed. ‘This is London, of course there was going to be a coffee shop. Why don’t you grab a table?’
He held open the door and she touched his cheek as she passed. They’d walked hand in hand since leaving the Tube, knowing that any of the people around them could be Lucy’s housemates. Behaving like colleagues on the way to the house and then a couple once they arrived wasn’t a good plan. Ewan smiled at her, and she remembered Mulligan teasing him about realising Caelan wasn’t really his girlfriend. She felt a flicker of unease, hoping it had been nothing more than Mulligan trying to provoke a reaction. Anything else could affect the working relationship, the friendship she and Ewan were building, and she didn’t want that. It wasn’t easy to pretend to be closer than you were, or to give the impression of being colleagues and nothing more, as she and Nicky had learnt to. The lines sometimes blurred, for one person or the other. Occasionally both.
‘Coffee and a bacon butty?’ she said, making sure she spoke naturally.
‘Read my mind.’ Ewan shot her another smile and made for a table by the window, where they’d be able to see Lucy’s house. The cafe was deserted, which suited their purposes.
Caelan turned to the counter, saw the woman behind it watching Ewan. She hid a smile as the woman blushed, realising she’d been caught staring at someone else’s boyfriend. Caelan allowed a little frostiness into her tone as she asked for their breakfasts, as though unimpressed by what she’d seen. Still red-faced, the woman hurried towards the kitchen, muttering that someone would bring their order over.
Ewan was gazing out of the window, oblivious. As Caelan sat down, she murmured, ‘You’ve got a fan over there.’
He looked across at the counter, then back at Caelan. ‘What do you mean?’
She grinned at him. ‘Never mind. Has anyone left the house?’
‘No, but everyone living there’s a student, so I’m guessing they’re either in lectures or still in bed.’
‘Lucky them.’
‘And we could be wasting our time.’
‘But we couldn’t call ahead and check they were at home. Mulligan might have Lucy’s address, but not the phone numbers of everyone who lives there.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ He brightened. ‘Still, at least we’re not stuck babysitting Mulligan again.’
‘For a while, at least.’
‘You really think trying to find out what he knows is pointless?’
Caelan lifted her shoulders. ‘Do you? I think he’s doing everything he can to stay out of prison. We know he lied about the scale of his business, and he didn’t mention the money he owed. He’s concerned about his sister, but not as much as he is about protecting himself.’
Ewan nodded. ‘And he still won’t give us any names.’
‘None worth having, anyway.’
‘Do you think he’s too frightened to tell us what he really knows?’
Caelan thought back to Mulligan curled on the bed in the cell at Enfield police station, describing the torture he knew would be inflicted on him if the people he had been working with discovered he had betrayed them. Remembering his descriptions gave her an idea, and she was angry with herself for not thinking of it before. She resolved to mention it to Penrith when they were back in his office.
‘Nathan Nash, though…’ Ewan rubbed his chin. ‘Surely Reuben wouldn’t be stupid enough to kill him on their own doorstep, even if it was an accident? And Stefan Harris would be stupid to attack Nathan so soon after what happened in the club.’
‘The Nash brothers are probably involved in all kinds of things we don’t know
about yet. There could be hundreds of suspects.’
Ewan screwed up his face. ‘Do you think Penrith will talk to Detective Chief Superintendent Brady?’
Caelan saw a burly man in a chef’s jacket and blue and white checked trousers emerge from the kitchen carrying a tray. He went to the coffee machine and poured two cups, scowling towards the kitchen as he grabbed a small milk jug from the cold cabinet. Caelan smiled to herself. Seemed Ewan’s admirer wasn’t brave enough to face them.
‘I think he’ll speak to her. Whether Brady will want us anywhere near her case is another matter.’
Ewan glanced at her. ‘Us?’
She nudged him. ‘We’re a team, aren’t we?’
He spotted the chef approaching and picked up the tomato ketchup. ‘Definitely.’
* * *
The house where Lucy Mulligan lived was three storeys of red brick. It was well maintained, the black gate newly painted, blue ceramic planters filled with heathers standing guard at either side of the matching black front door. Ewan stepped back as Caelan knocked, looking up at the floors above.
‘Not like any student house I’ve seen before,’ he muttered.
Caelan had to agree. In the cafe, she’d had a look online at rooms being offered for rent in the area and guessed Lucy Mulligan would have to be forking out between seven and nine hundred pounds a month to live here, more if her room was en suite.
‘How’s she affording this place?’ Ewan wondered. ‘She’s a postgraduate student, so she’ll have been studying for years.’
‘Student loans, I assume.’
‘She’ll be paying them back forever.’
‘Isn’t everyone?’ Caelan knocked again, then put her ear to the door. Nothing. She squatted, poked her fingers into the letter box so she could hold it open and peer inside. She heard Ewan shuffling his feet and knew he was uncomfortable with what she was doing.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
She straightened. All she’d been able to see was a few pairs of shoes and a stretch of wooden flooring that needed washing. ‘No.’
Hands on hips, she turned and surveyed the street, then stepped away from the house and looked at the upstairs windows.
‘Curtains are closed up there,’ she pointed out. ‘I bet someone’s at home but still asleep.’
‘Or they just didn’t open their curtains when they went out this morning. Or they’re ignoring us.’
She nodded, acknowledging the point. ‘This is stupid. Bloody Penrith, we could be waiting around for hours. He could have given us a couple of names, or some clue about who lives here.’
‘Wouldn’t that be against protocol?’ Ewan said the word self-consciously, as though afraid she would laugh at him.
‘So’s looking through letter boxes. Anyway, Penrith’s not above breaking the rules when he feels like it.’ Caelan moved back towards the gate, hands in pockets, and glanced up the road, a plan forming. She grinned.
‘How about using your charms, Ewan?’
* * *
There were more people in the cafe now, workers on early lunch breaks calling in for a sandwich or snack. Ewan waited behind two women wearing fleeces, work trousers and safety boots. They were chatting in a language he guessed was Polish, though he couldn’t be sure. Despite travelling all over the world with the army, he could only speak English, some Welsh and a little half-remembered schoolboy French. The thought embarrassed him when he realised he could hear several different languages being spoken in this small cafe alone.
There were four people waiting in front of the women, plus another two behind Ewan. The place was full, and Ewan didn’t see how he was going to be able to do what Caelan had asked.
Two suited men left the front of the queue, takeaway coffees in hand, and everyone shuffled forward. The woman who had taken Caelan’s order was back behind the counter, joined now by a surly-looking teenage boy. He was on the till while she doled out the food, and they scrambled around each other to make drinks as needed. It looked a chaotic system, but it seemed to be working.
There was only one person in front of Ewan now, and he licked his lips, rehearsing in his head what he wanted to say. This was the part of the job he worried about, that made him nervous. It was all very well shadowing Caelan, staying a pace behind her and out of the action, but she had asked him to do this alone.
It was a fishing trip – they had no idea whether Lucy or her housemates had ever been in the cafe. Thinking back to his own days as a student, before he joined the army, he wouldn’t have had the money to buy coffee on his way to college. Caelan had thought it worth a try, though, and there was a newsagent’s shop further down the road she was going to check out too. In Ewan’s opinion it was a long shot, but unless someone answered the door of Lucy’s house, what else were they supposed to do? Now that Penrith had agreed to allow them to poke around, they had to make the most of the chance.
Ewan was in no hurry to go back to being Mulligan’s childminder. The bloke was stringing them along, he was sure of it. Caelan had told Penrith as much, and Ewan agreed with her. But a brick had been thrown through Mulligan’s window, and his sister had apparently been snatched. Unless it was all part of an elaborate ruse Mulligan had dreamed up to delay his return to jail, there was someone else involved, someone skulking in the shadows. And now the murder of Nathan Nash had rattled Ewan more than he wanted to admit.
‘Take your order?’ The teenager on the till was staring at him, his hand poised over the order pad.
‘Oh, a latte and a…’ Ewan glanced up at the menu board, ‘toasted teacake, please.’
‘Eating in?’
He confirmed he was and handed over his money. Sitting back at the table where he’d waited for Caelan, he took out his phone, just any other customer. He had no real texts, no genuine emails, because this wasn’t his phone. It belonged to Owen Davison, and everything on it was a lie. The phone numbers would ring but never connect, and the texts were sent by someone at headquarters. Ewan wanted to speak to his sister, to text Holly, a woman he’d been out with a few times recently. He’d explained he was going to be working away and she’d been miffed when he’d said he wouldn’t be able to keep in touch. Like an idiot, he’d mentioned he was being partnered with a female officer, which had annoyed her all the more. He smiled to himself, knowing there was no chance of Caelan ever looking at him as anything other than a colleague. She didn’t even seem to have friends.
He put the phone on the table, wondering if he had made the wrong decision when he joined the undercover unit. Already he was missing his family and friends, and his freedom. He was used to doing as he was told – you didn’t last long in the army if you didn’t – but constantly pretending to be someone else, thinking about every word and action, was taking its toll. Maybe this job wasn’t for him.
He saw the woman from earlier heading his way with a tray and made eye contact. For now, Caelan was relying on him and he wasn’t going to let her down.
‘Still hungry?’ the woman said as she set the mug and plate down in front of him.
He nodded, smiling at her. ‘My girlfriend’s gone to the newsagent’s, so I thought I’d come back here.’ He lifted his mug. ‘Great coffee, and the service is pretty good too.’ Shut up, Ewan, he thought, but she laughed.
‘Don’t let your other half hear you saying that.’
He gave an exaggerated eye roll. ‘She’s not happy. We’ve travelled across London to visit her cousin and she’s not at home.’
The woman put a hand on her hip, leaning towards him. ‘Selfish madam.’
‘She lives down the road, though I’m guessing she doesn’t come in here. She’s a student, and you know how they’re always pleading poverty. No money for cafes.’
He took a bite out of the teacake and waited.
‘We do have a few students come in.’ She pursed her lips. ‘You hear them talking about uni as though no one’s ever been before.’ Her smile was sad. ‘I wanted to be a nurse, but here I am.’
>
Ewan swallowed. ‘I joined the army as soon as I could,’ he said. ‘Not my first choice, but when you need to earn some money…’ He saw the teenager glaring from the counter as the queue grew even longer, and knew he had to hurry. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen her? Long auburn hair, green eyes?’
She was losing interest, conscious of the queue. ‘There’s a lot of student houses on this road, and we get hundreds of people in here, sweetheart. I’m sorry.’
‘The students, do they come in for breakfast, or lunch?’ He didn’t even know why he was asking. She was backing away, frowning now.
‘Breakfast, I think. Look, I need to get on.’
She hurried back to the counter, leaving Ewan red-faced and furious with himself. He felt like leaving but knew he would look even more suspicious if he did, so he took his time nibbling the teacake, sipping his coffee.
He definitely wasn’t cut out for this.
Eventually he finished. He set the cup tidily on the plate and got to his feet. As he turned towards the door, he noticed a man sitting at a nearby table watching him. He was mid twenties, bearded, dressed casually in a hoody, jeans and a padded jacket. Ewan ignored him, kept moving towards the door.
Outside, drizzle was falling and he stopped to button his coat.
‘Why were you asking about students?’
He turned, knowing who he would see. ‘Sorry?’
The other man folded his arms. He was shorter than Ewan, and slim. No threat. ‘You were asking questions about students,’ he said. ‘Seems a bit weird to me.’
Ewan stepped closer, remembering he was supposed to be a thug. ‘Why do you care?’
‘Because I’m looking out for my friends. And I’m two seconds away from calling the police.’
‘Friends? You mean you’re a student too?’
Blushing now, aware that he’d given himself away, the man pulled at his beard. ‘What if I am?’
‘Listen, mate, I’m not up to anything dodgy. We came here looking for my girlfriend’s cousin. She’s missing, you see.’
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