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Silent Kill: A Gripping New 2020 Detective Novella From a Sunday Times Bestselling Author

Page 11

by Jane Casey


  ‘Mrs Griffiths, your car was picked up on CCTV travelling on the opposite side of the road from the bus that Minnie was on, just before it left the terminus. You were stopped beside it for a couple of minutes, thanks to a lorry blocking the road in front of you. You would have been right beside Minnie, I think.’ Maeve leaned forward. ‘It’s human nature to look around when you’re stopped in traffic somewhere. You found yourself looking at a Nazi symbol that was written on a schoolbag that you recognised as belonging to a Lovelace student. The bag was pressed up against the window, wasn’t it? It was almost as if she had intended you to see it. And you knew immediately who was carrying the bag. The very girl who had tormented your granddaughter. The one who had been able to stay when Rosa was asked to leave.’ Maeve tilted her head, full of sympathy. ‘Minnie turned Rosa from a successful, outgoing, happy girl into someone you didn’t know, someone who starved herself and wouldn’t listen to reason. She broke Rosa’s spirit, and she broke your heart. It’s no wonder you snapped when you saw her there on the bus.’

  Mrs Griffiths looked at the table, refusing to meet Maeve’s eyes. Her expression was stubborn.

  ‘We know you turned your car as soon as you could and headed up to Clapham Common. You took a different route, to get to Northcote Road before the bus did. Maybe you just wanted to talk to Minnie – to understand why she’d done what she did, and to explain what effect it had had on your granddaughter. Maybe you wanted to shout at her. Maybe you didn’t intend to kill her. But after you left the car on a side street – where it would get a parking ticket in due course – you went to a small hardware shop and bought a bradawl.’

  Mrs Griffiths shook her head. ‘I don’t even know what that is.’

  Maeve took out a photo from her file and slid it across the table: no one could say she hadn’t prepared for this interview. ‘That’s the type of tool you bought. A bradawl is used for scoring holes as a guide for a drill – it’s very sharp and narrow, like a long needle with a handle. We spoke to the owner of the shop. He remembered you. You were in a hurry and you snapped at him when he tried to make conversation about the bradawl. You knew what you wanted and you knew you didn’t have long to get it.’

  ‘He’s confusing me with someone else.’

  ‘I don’t think so. We looked at your coat, Mrs Griffiths. The dry cleaning had removed most of the blood, but we found a large rip in the lining of the pocket. The point of the bradawl had gone through the material. The lining of your coat was some sort of synthetic wadding, and Minnie’s blood stained it.’

  ‘Conjecture,’ the solicitor said heavily.

  ‘Evidence,’ Maeve countered. ‘It is conjecture to say that you intended to kill her, Mrs Griffiths. I don’t know precisely what you intended – maybe just to threaten her, maybe to frighten her. Maybe you wanted to lash out and hurt her the way she hurt your granddaughter. But you ran to get on the bus – we have footage of you getting onto the bus and you’re out of breath. You waited until the seat beside Minnie was free. You were prepared to tackle her, but then, once you were sitting beside her, you found she was asleep. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t starving herself to death. She was living her life, completely undisturbed by what she’d done to your granddaughter.’ Maeve opened the file and leafed through it until she found the page she was looking for. Her face twisted in distaste as she read it. ‘In fact, she was proud of it. She boasted about it.’

  ‘That bitch.’ Helena Griffiths had gone white. The lines around her mouth deepened as her lips tightened. ‘She deserved it. She deserved to die.’

  ‘Did you kill her, Mrs Griffiths?’ Maeve asked quietly.

  We had enough to charge her with murder even if she didn’t confess, I thought. There was no need to wait for her to say she had done it.

  Maeve kept her eyes locked on Helena Griffiths, challenging her to answer. Silence filled the room, until the woman gave a deep sigh and bowed her head.

  ‘I thought it would wake her up. I thought I would hold the point of the tool against her while I talked to her, so she couldn’t get up and walk away. I knew she wouldn’t want to listen to me, but I thought I could make her.’ Helena sobbed, a harsh sound that seemed to surprise her. She covered her hand with her mouth as she regained control.

  That’s it, I thought. That’s all we’ll get. She’s finished.

  But she wasn’t.

  ‘It wasn’t fair that she was walking around flaunting her revolting beliefs and no one punished her for it. It wasn’t fair that she was able to get rid of her music teacher and my granddaughter and continue on as if nothing had happened. I’m so tired of it all – the sneers, the nicknames, the rudeness, the loathing. I’ve had a lifetime of it, and I’m tired. It’s not fair that I didn’t have a normal childhood. It’s not fair that my mother was afraid all the time, and taught me to be afraid. It damaged her and me. And it’s not fair that anyone should deny that, to score cheap points against a classmate. That girl needed to understand that what she was doing was cruel and dangerous, in so many ways.’

  ‘What happened?’ Maeve said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I pushed the tip of it against her chest, to wake her up. But then I … kept … pushing.’

  Maeve nodded, encouraging her.

  ‘It was so easy. Too easy. I thought I could control her,’ Helena said dully, ‘but then I couldn’t control myself.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘I feel sorry for Helena Griffiths.’

  Maeve was pouring boiling water into a row of mugs to make a round of tea, which was as close as we were getting to opening a bottle of fizz since it was ten o’clock in the morning. She physically flinched when I spoke, lifting one shoulder as if I’d slapped her across the face. I felt a wave of irritation: God, grow up, woman. If you’re going to mind this much about locking up a murderer, you’re in the wrong job.

  ‘You don’t think we should have arrested her?’ Belcott asked me, and I folded my arms, prepared to defend myself against the sneer in his voice.

  ‘No, Pete, I don’t think that. I can just see why she did it, that’s all. Minnie Charleston was a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘She was just a kid.’ Maeve turned so she could look at me. Her eyes were hollow with exhaustion. I wondered when she had last slept. She had spent the night preparing for the interview; she had been in the office when I left and when I got in.

  ‘She was a horrible anti-Semitic bully.’

  Maeve shrugged. ‘She was, but she would almost certainly have grown out of that. Teenagers do. They get obsessed with something and then they lose interest. She did a terrible thing to Rosa, but she might have changed as she got older. If Helena Griffiths hadn’t seen her on the bus, she would have had a chance to do better. Minnie probably didn’t even know why Mrs Griffiths attacked her. She wouldn’t have recognised her. Anyway, she didn’t know exactly what had happened to Rosa. All she knew was that Rosa had left to go to a new school. The head teacher told me they were very careful not to reveal that she was having treatment for anorexia.’

  ‘Because of her privacy, I suppose.’

  ‘Because it goes through a class of teenage girls like the norovirus. Half of the girls in my year spent their lunch hours throwing up in the school toilets or doing jumping jacks to burn off half an apple.’

  ‘Not you, though,’ I said. Maeve would have been far too strong-minded for that, even as a teenager.

  ‘Not me.’ But she looked sad, and withdrawn, and I felt a twinge of guilt. Every teenage girl had her own shadow of misery to drag round, from what I remembered of school. Just because I didn’t know what Maeve’s problems had been, that didn’t mean she had cruised through unscathed.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘Minnie boasted about getting rid of Rosa. She wasn’t sorry about what she’d done.’

  ‘Did she?’ Maeve asked, working her way along the row of mugs to remove the teabags.

  ‘You said she did. You had the printout in the file.’

  She gave me a half-
smile over her shoulder that warmed into a proper grin when she looked past me, to where Derwent had come to stand in the doorway.

  ‘Don’t tell me you fell for that one, Georgia,’ he drawled.

  ‘Oldest trick in the book.’ Belcott was looking smug.

  ‘She didn’t boast about getting rid of Rosa?’ I was still playing catch-up.

  ‘If she did, we haven’t been able to find a reference to it so far.’ Maeve turned back to the tea-making. ‘I said a lot of her online interactions were encrypted, didn’t I? There’s every chance that when we unscramble them we’ll find out what she said about Rosa on the neo-Nazi message boards. But all I had in the file was a note from Josh.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Unrepeatable, believe me.’ She glanced back at him and laughed. The tiredness and sorrow seemed to drop away from her once Josh Derwent was there. I felt completely and totally excluded. Irritation sharpened my voice.

  ‘It’s not really fair to lie to Helena like that, is it? She loves her granddaughter and wanted to defend her. She’s had a lifetime of grief and suffering, and then you played a cheap trick on her to get her to confess to murder.’

  ‘Georgia—’ Derwent began, but Maeve cut him off. This time she turned around to face me properly, and her face was white from proper anger. I quailed, knowing I shouldn’t have said anything.

  ‘We didn’t need a confession from her, Georgia. We didn’t need to trick her. We had her on CCTV beside the bus, we had the parking ticket that showed she had left her car near Northcote Road in order to get on the bus, we had a witness who sold her the tool she used to kill Minnie, and we had blood inside her coat where she put the tool after she murdered her. The reason I lied to her – the reason I was so desperate to get her to confess – is that her best chance of being given a lighter sentence is if she takes the first opportunity to plead guilty. There is, as you’ve noticed, a stack of mitigation there.’

  ‘They’ll go for a plea to manslaughter,’ Derwent said. ‘Diminished responsibility or loss of control. In the circumstances, I think they’ll get it. She’ll be able to say she has PTSD because of her childhood.’

  The interruption had given Maeve time to recover her temper, and she went on more calmly.

  ‘This way, the judge has to give her full benefit for her honesty in pleading guilty at the earliest opportunity. If she took us as far as a trial for murder, she would lose and she’d spend the rest of her life in prison. That doesn’t seem like justice to me.’

  ‘But you want her to be sent to prison.’

  Maeve sighed. ‘I don’t approve of what Minnie thought or said or did, but she was a child. She didn’t have a supportive family. They let her down long before she and Rosa argued. If it was possible to put her parents in the dock beside Helena Griffiths, I’d do it, because they’re just as guilty as she is. They should have stopped her from getting drawn into that world. They were negligent, and they should be punished.’

  ‘Yes, but—’ I began.

  ‘There’s no happy ending here. There’s the best possible outcome, which is a conviction that acknowledges the facts of the case, on both sides. And remember, even though I understand her actions, Helena was OK with us arresting Ashton. She wasn’t worried about someone else taking the blame for what she did, even though he’s so young and it would have blighted his whole life. He didn’t matter to her any more than Minnie did.’

  I hadn’t thought of that and I suppose it showed on my face.

  ‘I don’t see her as a martyr, Georgia.’ Maeve’s voice was softer now. ‘She wasn’t going to admit to what she’d done because it was the right thing to do. She only confessed because she was angry. I knew she’d lose control if I pushed her far enough, just like she lost control on the bus.’

  ‘You did a good job,’ Derwent said. ‘But then again, annoying people is your special skill, isn’t it, Kerrigan?’

  ‘Rude,’ Maeve observed. ‘I have many special skills.’

  ‘Is tea-making one of them?’

  ‘It’s my greatest gift.’

  He shouldered her out of the way so he could work his way down the row of mugs. ‘Let’s have a look. That one’s too strong. It looks like tar.’

  ‘That’s mine,’ Maeve said, rubbing her arm where he’d barged into her. ‘You can’t have that.’

  ‘Don’t want it. What’s this one? Why’s it so pale?’

  ‘Georgia likes weaker tea.’

  ‘Course she does.’

  I felt the heat wash up into my face. What did that mean? Was he implying something that Maeve understood and I didn’t? What did it matter if you liked your tea a certain way?

  Derwent stopped at the last one. ‘Ah, this looks about right.’

  ‘That’s yours. I made it for you in your special mug,’ Maeve said sweetly, and stepped back as he turned the mug to see MR GRUMPY written on it. He glowered at her, then shrugged.

  ‘Could have been worse, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll try harder next time.’

  ‘Oh, get a room. None of us will get any peace until you finally shag each other’s brains out.’

  It was what I’d been thinking, but Belcott was the one who said it. There was an awkward silence as Maeve picked up her tea and walked out without looking at him. Her face was flaming.

  Derwent sighed. ‘You never fucking learn, do you?’

  ‘It was just a joke.’

  ‘Not the funny kind.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Belcott grabbed his mug and scuttled out, head down. At least it wasn’t me, for once, with both feet wedged in my mouth. Derwent frowned at the empty doorway after he left, brooding on something. Then he turned to me.

  ‘Georgia.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the mentoring thing. If you really want me to, I’ll take you around for a while with me. You could be a good copper one day. You’ve got the basics. You just need a bit of experience.’

  I felt happiness sweep up through me from my toes to the top of my head. I beamed at him. ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘I can’t expect you to learn by leaving you to muddle through on your own.’ He looked at me – really looked at me, as if he was considering me in a new light. I hoped he liked what he saw – not my appearance, this time, but my potential as a police officer. ‘You’re right, it’ll make everyone safer if you’re better at what you do. At the moment you’re a liability. I’ve got to think about the team. I don’t want you letting anyone down.’

  I felt the smile freeze on my face. Of course, it wasn’t about me at all, or my career. For anyone, read Maeve. If I wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t back her up.

  ‘When you get in tomorrow,’ he went on, oblivious, ‘come and find me.’

  ‘I’m not in tomorrow.’ My tone was just short of sulky. ‘I’ve got a day off.’

  ‘The day after then.’ He moved towards the door, then stopped as if he was aware he had sounded unfriendly. ‘Doing something nice?’

  ‘I’m going to see my sister.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

  There didn’t seem to be a good answer to that, so I settled for a kind of shrug.

  ‘Well, have fun.’

  ‘I will,’ I lied. ‘And Josh? Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.’

  The lines around his eyes deepened in amusement. ‘Here’s your first bit of advice. Don’t thank me until you’ve survived it.’

  Chapter 15

  ‘So he’s going to help me to be a better copper. I really think it’ll make all the difference. I need that push to be excellent at what I’m doing. I’ve never felt completely confident, ever since I came out of training, and that makes me scared to take chances. It makes me too nervous to speak up, even when I think I’ve got something to say.’ I tried to laugh. ‘Mind you, I’m usually wrong about that. I was convinced the murderer was Wilf Potter. I’d decided Zach Roth must be his wife’s brother. It all hung together, but it was wrong a
ll the same. At least I didn’t make a big deal out of it to anyone.’

  I had told Maeve, but she hadn’t mentioned it again. She hadn’t used it against me or laughed at me. It was almost as if making mistakes was part of the job.

  A blackbird took off from the tree over my head with a whirring chatter of alarm that made me jump.

  ‘God almighty. My heart.’ I could feel it thudding under my jumper, shaking the thin wool. ‘That’s the sort of thing I mean. I need to be more aware of what’s going on around me. I need to be calmer in the face of danger. At the moment I just get blindsided and then I panic, and flounder, and everyone can tell I’m off balance. You always said the important thing was looking confident, and then everyone would believe I’d know what I was doing. I’m sure you were right about that, but I haven’t got the knack. I don’t know why.’

  Because you’re useless, the voice in my head suggested.

  ‘Because I’m useless. Not like you.’ I put my hand flat on the ground, seeking some kind of connection, some kind of warmth. The grass was cold and rough, still chilled despite the fact that the sun was doing its best to shine. ‘You were always a natural.’

  My sister didn’t say anything. No surprise there; it was eight years now since I’d heard her voice. A clank from the gate to the graveyard was my answer instead, and I twisted to see a woman struggling through it with a huge bunch of lilies. She was slim and elegant in a black coat and her fair hair looked as if she had come straight from the hairdresser, as indeed she probably had.

  I scrambled to my feet and hurried over to her. ‘Can I help with those, Mum?’

  ‘I can manage.’ She held out a cheek for me to kiss, without warmth. ‘What are you doing here, Georgia?’

  ‘The same thing as you. I always come here on her anniversary.’

  ‘Do you?’ She sounded vague. ‘I don’t tend to come at this time of day. I like to be here first thing, but Pam couldn’t fit me in at any other time, so I changed my plans.’

 

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