The Stranger You Know (Maeve Kerrigan Novels)

by Jane Casey

  “Because I still owe some loyalty to my boss and he told me not to. My career is already in tatters. What do you think Godley would have done if I’d warned you about the surveillance?”

  “Sacked you.” Derwent shrugged. “Not my problem. My problem is being lied to.”

  “Get over yourself.” I turned to the plain-clothes guys. “What did you see?”

  “We were parked on the corner. We saw matey here having a look at the place a couple of hours ago and then wander off. He didn’t look dodgy enough to stop—all he did was look. We didn’t know who he was, obviously, or we’d have had him. He went over the wall at the back about ten minutes ago and in through the bathroom window.”

  “Damn it,” Derwent said. “I bet he’s broken it.”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “Ten minutes ago?” I was stuck on the timings. “Was that all?”

  “He was only in here for a minute before I put the light on,” Derwent said. “I heard him in the hall. Knew it wasn’t you because you don’t make that much noise, walking around. He came in to the sitting room first but I wasn’t in a position to tackle him then.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Behind the sofa.”

  I tried not to laugh, and failed.

  “I wasn’t hiding. I was trying to sleep there.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I believe you. You thought you’d wait until he was distracted and then take him down.”

  “I am just out of hospital,” Derwent said, hurt. “I’m not at my best.”

  “You did all right,” the larger of the two policemen said. “Not a bad effort.”

  Derwent’s chest expanded a couple of inches. “My trouble is I don’t know when I’m beaten. I keep fighting even when the odds are against me.” He looked at me. “That’s the definition of a winner, Kerrigan.”

  “Sounds like the definition of a moron to me.” I was sailing very close to the edge of what Derwent considered acceptable repartee. I rushed to change the subject. “So why was he trying to kill me?”

  “That’s what we’ll have to find out.” Derwent looked down at the body at his feet. Shane groaned, but kept his eyes closed. Derwent stuck a toe in his ribcage experimentally and got no response. “If he ever comes round. Bloody hell, Kerrigan, how hard did you hit him?”

  “Very. I imagined it was you.”

  * * *

  Although the paramedics tutted over Shane’s head and took him to hospital where he was scanned, tested, prodded and poked, he was concussion-free when he woke up, and passed as fit to be interviewed later that afternoon. I sat in the nearest police station to Derwent’s house in a room that was too small for comfort, with Derwent, Maitland, Godley and Una Burt. Derwent was in an edgy mood, inclined to bicker, and more than once Godley had to tell him off for being rude.

  “Sorry, guv. This is pissing me off, though. I don’t understand why you won’t let me speak to him.”

  “Because you are far too involved. Maitland and I will handle this and you can watch the video link.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Derwent said under his breath.

  “If you want, you can give us some idea of how you would handle the interview. We might find it useful.”

  “Ask him why he wanted to find me in the first place. Ask him what all of this has to do with Angela. Ask him if he killed her and the other women. Ask him why he started killing last year.”

  “This is revelatory,” Burt said, borrowing Derwent’s trademark sarcasm and making it work for her. “No one would have thought of asking such comprehensive questions without your input.”

  “Okay, so maybe I’m not coming up with anything you haven’t thought of, but you can’t ask it the way I can. You walk into the room and he’ll be … I want to say appalled, but it won’t be because he’s intimidated by you. He’ll laugh at you.”

  “Josh,” Godley snapped. “I’m warning you.”

  Derwent ignored the interruption. “When it comes to me, on the other hand, he’s scared shitless. I go in there and ask him these questions and he’ll give up. I can make him angry. Get under his skin. I know him.”

  “You used to know him,” Godley said, glancing up as Colin Vale came in holding a file. “You haven’t spoken to him for twenty years. You knew him when he was a teenager and now he’s a successful businessman.”

  “You’re talking about Poole?” Colin checked. “Well, if now’s a good time, I can tell you exactly how successful he is.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s turned the bar from a seedy local to one of the reliable earners in that street. Talking to the neighboring businesses, it’s all his hard work. He works insane hours, lives for the business, spent a long time putting any profit back into the bar rather than living it up. He’s meticulous about his records, which is useful for me, and as a business the place is on the up. It’s also on the market.”

  “Since when?”

  “January. Not a good time to sell, unfortunately, with the downturn in the economy. He’s got a high price tag on it, but he’s right, according to those who know. He’s prepared to wait until someone comes along who’ll pay him what he deserves and in the meantime he’s keeping back more of the profit to divert into savings and investments. Or he was.”

  “What do you mean?” Godley asked.

  “Well, it’s a funny thing. You noticed the cash thing, Maeve, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “He doesn’t seem to use his bank card for personal purchases; everything is in cash, in-person transactions that we can’t trace.”

  “That’s a relatively recent development,” Colin said. “He started that last year too. So something made him start hiding what he was doing then.”

  “Getting ready to start killing,” Burt said.

  “Or putting the business on the market,” I pointed out, playing devil’s advocate. “If it sold, the due diligence would have involved all of his records. Maybe he wanted to keep a few things to himself.”

  “But this is his personal account we’re dealing with,” Burt snapped. “Nothing to do with the business.”

  “You don’t know he wasn’t paying some casual employees cash in hand to keep down the staff costs and make the place look more appealing to an investor,” Colin said. “Staff are the curse of catering because even on the minimum wage they cost a lot, and you have to cover their National Insurance contributions. If you’re just taking some money out of the till, on the other hand, they don’t have to pay income tax and you can make your overheads a lot smaller.”

  “That sounds possible,” I said, remembering the Nigerian cleaner who had looked scared of me.

  “He’s trying to hide something to do with the killings,” Derwent said, sounding bored. “Do we really have to fanny about providing him with innocent reasons for using cash all the time?”

  “I hate to agree but I feel the same way.” Burt turned to Godley. “You must think he’s a credible suspect.”

  “Must I?” Godley looked amused. “He could be. I’m going to wait until I’ve spoken to him to see.”

  “I want to sit in on the interview.” Burt didn’t look at Derwent as she said it, but it was her loss because his face was a picture. It was an obvious power play—a reminder that she was senior, and closer to Godley than him as well. To give him his due, Godley saw it a mile off.

  “I don’t want anyone there who doesn’t have to be. I want to speak to him. I want Harry with me because he’s a trained interrogator and the best I have on my team.”

  Maitland looked pleased. “Too kind, boss.”

  “Please, both of you—all of you—watch the interview. We’ll take breaks so you can give us a steer if we miss something. I do value your input but I don’t want you in there.”

  Burt got up, muttering something about having to make some calls, and stumped out of the room. Godley and Maitland followed, heading for the interview room to set it up as they wanted it. Derwent laughed and stood up, wobbling as he foun
d out the hard way his leg wasn’t working well enough to pace about.

  “He doesn’t want Burt in there because she’d frighten the wits out of Shane. She’s mentioned specifically in the UN mandate against torture, you know. Cruel and unusual punishment, just looking at her.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “She doesn’t like you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Gave you evils when you were speaking. Shot down your point about the bar records being up for inspection. That wasn’t altogether stupid, I thought. Well done you.”

  “I live for your praise,” I said dryly.

  Derwent sat down again, this time beside me. “Answer me one thing. It’s been bothering me.”

  “What?”

  “Do you always sleep fully clothed?”

  “I didn’t pack pajamas.”

  “I’d have lent you something.”

  “There was no need. I don’t mind sleeping in clothes.”

  “Seems a bit extreme. Must save on wear and tear on your hangers, I suppose. But I thought it might be because you didn’t trust me. I meant what I said. You are flattering yourself if you think you’re my type, Kerrigan.”

  I was saved from answering by the video link flickering into life. Beside me, Derwent fell silent, thinking his own thoughts as Godley and Maitland got ready for Shane to be brought in.

  It took the usual age for the cast to be assembled—the solicitor was taking a call in the corridor and Shane elected not to enter the room without her—but when they were finally seated around the table, Maitland began, and his technique was a joy to behold. Gentle, persistent, friendly, he was a world away from the table-thumping rhetoric that was popularly supposed to be effective. He persuaded Shane to trust him inside the first three minutes just by talking to him like a human being, and I could sense Shane’s confidence growing as his brief became more and more uneasy.

  It didn’t take long to get to the events of the previous night.

  “You broke in.”

  “Yes, I did.” Shane seemed relieved to agree.

  “What were you planning to do when you broke in?”

  The solicitor was a large woman with spiky hair and long, red nails. She leaned over and spoke softly to her client, who shrugged and answered in a matter-of-fact way.

  “I wanted to find Josh Derwent and kill him.”

  Derwent didn’t so much as blink.

  “Why?” Maitland asked.

  “Because he was responsible for murdering my sister and no one would listen to me when I told them. Because there’s a fucking conspiracy of silence just because he’s a copper.”

  Godley sounded infinitely reasonable when he replied. “If there was evidence of him having committed a crime, we would take that very seriously. More seriously than if it was a civilian, not less.”

  “Tell me another fairy tale.” The bitterness on Shane’s face was clear even on the smudgy video.

  Maitland took over. “Why did you attack DC Kerrigan?”

  “She was in his bed,” he said, as if that explained everything. I really wished I could explain, for the benefit of the transcript, that I’d been alone, and fully dressed, and not expecting him to join me.

  “Was that a good enough reason to try to kill her?”

  “No.” He swallowed. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s very shaken,” Godley said, his voice cold.

  Derwent leaned over and patted my hand. “Poor dear.”

  “Save it.” I touched the scarf around my neck that was hiding a technicolor display of bruises. “This is all your fault.”

  On the screen, Shane put his hands over his face. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. It was dark in the bedroom and I didn’t know it wasn’t Josh until I felt that it was a woman. She’d woken up—I thought she’d scream—and I panicked. I was trying to work out what to do even when I knew I was going to kill her. Then I thought, ‘Well, what does it matter? He’ll find out what it’s like to lose someone he loves.’”

  “You decided to kill her.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  The solicitor wrote something on her notepad.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill your sister?”

  “No! Of course not.” His voice had risen, the veins standing out in his neck. Godley put a hand flat on the table, a signal to Maitland to let him take the lead again.

  “Let’s come back to that. I want to know why you disappeared the day before yesterday, Shane.”

  “I saw him on the news. Josh, I mean. Being shot in the playground. I realized he was in hospital and I could get at him. I stayed in a hotel near the hospital while I was working out what to do, how to get in to his room. But when I saw the footage of him leaving the next day I thought I’d missed my chance, and I would have if it wasn’t for him punching that Pace guy.”

  “How did that help?”

  “The reporter who followed him filmed his house and then I saw a street name and checked it on Google Maps, and it looked right. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  “Nor can I,” Derwent said darkly. “You get on the news a couple of times and you’re a sitting duck. How fair is that?”

  “Maybe this will teach you to stop punching people on camera,” Burt observed.

  “Name one person I hit who didn’t deserve it,” Derwent demanded, and was rewarded with silence.

  They took a break before they asked Shane about his switch to cash (“to avoid getting ripped off”), about why the business was on the market (“I’ve had enough of this country. I want to live somewhere warm”) and about the timing of both. He denied any knowledge of the murders beyond the conversation he’d had with me about them.

  “Were they in your bar? The women?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “DC Kerrigan said you told her you’d show their images to your staff. Did you?”

  “Yeah. No one knew them.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pin on me. I’m admitting what I did last night but that’s it. I have nothing else to tell you.”

  “Do you have alibis for the nights of the murders?” Maitland reeled off the dates.

  Shane put one hand up to his face and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. I’d have to check my diary.”

  “We’ll need you to do that.”

  “You have trouble with alibis, don’t you?” Godley observed. “You had to invent one for Angela’s death.”

  “What? How did you know that?” His face darkened. “Did Claire tell you—?”

  “Did you kill Angela?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Angela wasn’t sexually assaulted. That always makes us think it could be a family member who did the killing. You. Your father. Someone who wanted to punish her, not rape her.”

  “Please. My dad was on the other side of town and I wasn’t even there until after the police came.”

  “Why did you need to lie?” Godley asked, intent.

  “I was terrified of the copper who was investigating—I thought he’d crucify me for smoking dope. And I didn’t want my parents to know I’d been doing drugs instead of looking after Angela. They’d have been mortified, and they’d have hated me for it. I hated myself.”

  “Very moving,” Una Burt said in a voice that indicated she thought the exact opposite.

  Derwent glared at her. “You don’t know him. He means it.” Shane could hate Derwent all he wanted, but Derwent was still loyal to him, even after so long.

  “When did you decide to lie?” Godley asked.

  “It was Vinny’s idea. The policeman had been giving Vinny a hard time and he knew I wouldn’t be able to cope.”

  The story matched Claire’s version of events, at least. I was starting to think we had got through all the murky lies to the solid truth, or at least an approximation of it.

  “Tell us about Vinny,” Godley said
. “He was in the army, I understand. When did you hear about his death?”

  It was an easy question but Shane looked wary. He turned to his lawyer. “Can we take a break?”

  “We’ve just had a break,” Maitland said quickly.

  “My head hurts. I want some painkillers. I need to see the doctor.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. “I’m getting double vision.”

  Godley reached out to the tape recorder. “Interview suspended at 16:22.”

  “He didn’t like that,” Derwent said. “He didn’t like that at all.”

  “Why not?” Burt asked. “You’re the one who knows him, after all.”

  “I don’t want to speculate.” Derwent got up, found his crutches and limped out of the room, banging against most of the furniture on the way. He was clearly heading for Godley and Maitland so he could talk it over with them, and I wasn’t surprised Una Burt looked put out, or that she made an excuse to go after him a few seconds later.

  Colin Vale was still working through the numbers, shuffling paper behind me, as happy as a child in a sandpit. I was silent. It was nice to have some time to think. I thought about the little group, the relationships, the complicated dynamics of it all. And about Vinny, who’d also had no alibi but held up to Orpen’s questioning. Vinny, who’d run away, first to travel and then to join the army. Vinny, whose death came before the current run of murders. Shane, and his cash-based lifestyle. The hospitality industry and its hidden workers. A face I had seen and not recognized at the time, because it was out of context and impossible and wrong.

  “I’ve just got to make a phone call,” I said to an oblivious Colin, and left.

  * * *

  It took a long time to get the information I needed—longer than I’d expected. One phone call became two, and then I had a long wait for someone to get back to me, swiveling on a chair at a borrowed desk and fielding questions from the local CID. It was torture but I made myself wait until I knew the story, or as much of it as I was likely to find out from third parties. I hung up the phone for the last time and gave myself a second to process what I’d found out. Then I headed back to our little room, where the atmosphere was pure poison and Colin Vale looked desperate for someone to referee the Burt/Derwent bitch-off that was in progress. On screen, the interview was continuing.