He called her number again, and again it rang out. He thought about her return to the house the night before, tried to remember if it had been before or after ten. He thought after. He remembered her red eyes, her distraction. He’d told her to take a shower. She’d come down afterwards and put her clothes straight into the washing machine.
Nausea crawled its way up Cormac’s belly, clutched at his throat, though he forced it ruthlessly back and back. Memories of those old crime scene photographs played themselves across his mind in a grim slide show. She’d killed once in self-defence, had been deeply traumatised by it. Could that have eroded her boundaries, made murder seem like an option? But why? He could think of no possible reason for Emma to murder Della Lambert or Carline Darcy, two young women who’d had little to do with her and no motive or ability to hurt her. But the fear was so real, so overwhelming, that he felt as if he had slipped somehow sideways, so that everything in the world was slightly off-kilter. He kept coming back to the thought that Emma hadn’t been herself since the night Della had died. He’d known it, and he’d let it go. Why? Why had he let things go? Cormac put his foot to the accelerator and concentrated on getting there.
Cormac abandoned the car on the verge outside the lab and made for the entrance door. He knocked and waited. Knocked and waited again. Eventually the door was opened by a man he didn’t recognise.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Where’s Josep?’ Cormac asked.
‘What’s it to you?’ the man responded. He had dirty blond hair, too long, and a beer belly that strained the fabric of his shirt. An English accent this time.
Cormac showed him his badge, and the man – he gave his name as Roland Swaine – backed down.
‘Where’s Josep?’ Cormac asked again.
‘I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ Roland said. Cormac gave him an I’m not in the mood for bullshit look and he said, ‘If you mean the last guy, I was told that he went back to Poland. His mother’s sick or something.’
Cormac sent Roland off to call Emma. It took a couple of minutes for her to appear.
‘Corm?’ she said. She was wearing a lab coat, hair tied back. ‘Did you want to get lunch?’
‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’
She took in his expression and didn’t ask any questions, just removed her lab coat, hung it in a locker and collected her bag. As they walked away from the lab he reached automatically for her hand. Her grip on his was warm and dry, firm. Her skin was soft.
‘I heard about Carline,’ she said. ‘John Darcy has been closeted away with Dr Murtagh all morning. Everyone’s talking about it at the lab. It’s just awful. That poor, poor girl. Are you okay? I’m so glad you came. I’d rather be with you than with anyone else.’
‘Emma,’ Cormac said again. ‘Where were you last night?’
She didn’t seem to have heard him at first. Then she processed what he had said and turned a puzzled face in his direction.
‘What?’
‘You got home just after ten. Before that where were you?’ He needed to look at her, should be reading her reaction to his question, but he couldn’t do it. He looked away. The silence lasted too long. Then she spoke in a low, horrified voice.
‘What are you asking me, Cormac?’
‘Please,’ was all he said.
‘Carline Darcy was murdered last night,’ she said slowly. ‘Are you asking me where I was? Are you asking me for an alibi?’
‘Emma, please. Just answer me, all right?’
‘I told you last night. I was in the lab, all night. I came straight home. What’s happened? Cormac, look at me.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yes.’ She put her hand on his arm. He flinched, and she removed it.
‘Let’s talk at home. Okay? Let’s just wait until we get home.’
She didn’t say anything, just turned away from him, folded her arms around herself protectively and followed him to the car.
The house was cold. In the living room Emma went straight for the couch, curled into the corner and wrapped a throw around herself as if it were armour.
‘Carline Darcy may have been murdered by a woman,’ he said. ‘There’s video footage of a car pulling in outside the apartment building not long before she was killed. A woman with dark hair gets out of the car and enters the building. The car is a Mazda3. It had a broken brake light, just like yours, Emma. They haven’t been able to read the numberplate yet, but that’s just a matter of time. The image enhancement guys will get it.’
‘It’s not me, Cormac.’ She looked outraged. Her voice was steady, controlled, but full of anger. ‘It’s not me and I don’t even know who you are, if you think I could have murdered that girl. What is wrong with you?’
‘Emma. I just need you to answer some questions. Please, Emma.’ He was pleading. ‘Fisher recognised the car. He’s sure it’s yours. Even the coat. He said it was a long, green coat. You were wearing your green coat when you came in last night. You have to tell me the truth now. If you went there for another reason you can tell me, but I can only help you if you tell me the truth.’
Her mouth opened, her expression was horrified. ‘I wasn’t there. That wasn’t me. Jesus. What is going on?’
‘You haven’t been yourself, ever since you found Della Lambert’s body. You’ve been having nightmares, you’ve been talking in your sleep.’
‘I … no.’
‘You have, Em.’ Cormac wanted to go to her but he held himself back. He couldn’t help her if he fell all over her like a schoolboy. ‘You’ve been off. You’ve been different. You’ve been hiding things from me.’
‘Cormac,’ she said, shaking her head, tears starting to well. She forced them back with an obvious effort of will, blinking strongly and scrubbing her eyes with one hand. ‘You are so wrong. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong you have this.’
‘You have to talk to me. Please. Please just talk to me.’
‘I have been having nightmares. I’ve been dreaming about Roisín, about that day. Except in my dreams I don’t get there in time. Flynn kills her.’ Emma shook her head, swallowed. ‘The same dream, almost every night. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d worry. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to think we were going backwards. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel guilty about not coming home with me that night, you absolute, utter fucker.’
‘Emma …’
Emma spoke across him. ‘And things have been rough at work. Nothing’s coming together the way it should be, and I haven’t been able to figure out why. I didn’t want to tell you until I had fixed it, until things were going better. You were so caught up in your case. So fixated on making a great success of everything after what happened last year. I thought I was being supportive. Jesus. And all the while you’re going around building a picture in your head of me as a murderer. Based on the fact that I’ve been a bit withdrawn, and on some shitty video footage. It’s not me, Cormac. It’s not my car.’
Cormac’s phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Carrie. Eyes on Emma, he answered the call.
‘Carrie,’ he said.
‘Fisher came to me,’ Carrie said. ‘He doesn’t know what to do next. He says that he trusts you to do the right thing. Is he right to trust you, Cormac?’
It was on the tip of his tongue, a quick, insincere assurance. He even opened his mouth to deliver it, then found he couldn’t do it. Knew in any case that it wouldn’t work.
‘I don’t know,’ Cormac said.
‘You’re with her now?’
He paused. ‘Yes.’
‘If she did this, we won’t look away. There’ll be no hiding it.’
Cormac closed his eyes.
‘I’ll give you an hour,’ Carrie said. ‘I’ll be waiting for your call.’
Carrie hung up and Cormac turned to Emma. His phone buzzed again, and he looked at the screen. It was a message from Peter Fisher. A black and white image, enhanced, s
howing a numberplate. Slowly, Cormac turned the screen around so that Emma could see the picture. She looked at it, then raised disbelieving eyes to his.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Cormac and Emma stared at each other. He read her reaction in her eyes. Shock. Disbelief. Horror. But no guilt. She leaned towards him.
‘Cormac. Look at me. You know me. You know me.’
And he did know her. Knew her, and loved her, and felt the truth of her words echo through him. And yet, and yet … The two sides of his personality warred within him. The part of him that loved her knew, absolutely, that she could never have done this. The policeman in him said that she was guilty. He had to choose.
He looked at her and knew. Emma hadn’t done this. Emma could never have done this. What the hell had he been thinking? Relief made him giddy, loose, and he flopped into the chair. He wanted to reach out to her, but his mind was still going, working and working. If Emma hadn’t done this, then someone was doing a very good job of making it look like she had. She was under attack. He needed to wake the fuck up and start thinking strategically. He left the room, went to the hall, where Emma’s coat still hung from the end of the banisters. He took it back into the living room, spread it open over the back of the couch. There was an obvious blood stain at the hem of the coat. Emma came to stand beside him. She saw the blood and clenched her fists.
‘That’s just … I don’t know where that came from. I didn’t do anything.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know, Emma.’
She was shaking her head, pale and frightened, eyes fixed on the bloodstain.
‘Someone took your coat, your keys, drove to Carline Darcy’s apartment and murdered her. Right now, my team, they think that’s you in that video. So we need to figure this out and we need to do it quickly.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense. Who would do that?’
‘Someone at the lab. It had to be someone who had easy access to your coat and your car keys. Someone who knew your movements and could be confident that you wouldn’t decide to head for home at the wrong time.’ Cormac said. He stared down at the bloodstain on Emma’s coat. Della Lambert’s laptop was the key to this thing.
‘Della had access to the lab,’ Cormac said. ‘Could she have stolen something? Taken valuable or embarrassing information, something that would damage the company or an individual if it was made public?’
‘No. I mean, I can’t see how. Everything is locked down, all the data. You can’t download anything from the lab’s computers, you can’t carry anything out of the building. I have a company laptop so that I can work from home sometimes, but that’s encrypted and I’m not allowed to put any of the really sensitive stuff on it. And anyway, even if she did manage to get her hands on something, what would she do with it? She couldn’t sell it.’
Cormac rubbed at the stubble on his cheek. ‘The break-in at the lab,’ he said. ‘Only James Murtagh’s office was trashed, right?’
‘Yes. But you can’t think James had anything to do with this.’
But he did think it. ‘On the night that she died Della Lambert was found without a handbag, or a backpack or even a phone. Della definitely had a computer – there was a docking station in her apartment – but we never found the laptop that went with it. I think whoever killed her took it from her body that night. Carline Darcy had that computer in her possession yesterday afternoon. What if the person she took it from came to get it back?’
‘What are you saying, Cormac?’
‘I’m saying I think there’s a solid chance James Murtagh killed Della and took her laptop, which he then hid in his office. Carline knew, or somehow figured it out, and she broke into his office to take it back.’
‘And then what, James murdered Carline too?’ Emma looked bewildered. ‘Christ Cormac, you …’
‘James Murtagh had access to your coat, your keys. He could easily have taken them from your locker and driven to Carline’s apartment. His wife has cancer. Do you know if she owns a wig?’
‘I don’t know.’ Emma was shaking her head.
‘If he had access to the security cameras at the front desk Murtagh would have known that you were still safely in the lab, and he could return keys and coat to your locker with you none the wiser.’
‘But Jesus, what a risk. What if I had decided to leave an hour earlier and had come out to find my coat and my keys missing?’ Emma said.
‘I don’t think he felt he had a choice. Killing Carline was an enormous leap. Once he made the decision to do that he was long past the point of playing it safe. Besides, he must have felt the odds were good. You’ve been working longer and longer hours lately.’
Something sparked in Emma’s eye. ‘He sent me something,’ she said slowly. ‘Yesterday evening. Some new data. He suggested that it might hold the key to the problems we’ve been having lately. I spent hours last night trying to untangle it.’
‘Was it?’
‘Was it what?’
‘A solution.’
‘It was nothing,’ Emma said. ‘It was a dead end.’
‘He used it to keep you there, so he could set you up. Christ, but he’s played this well. He’s smeared enough evidence around to confuse things nicely, and I am … or was, the lead investigator, which makes it so much worse. I’ve got zero credibility in this.’ Cormac pushed his hands through his hair in frustration. ‘I’ve fucked this up. I thought I was helping you by staying on the case, by keeping it away from you, but all I did was paint a target on your back.’
‘Am I going to be charged?’ Emma asked. She was evidently afraid, but she asked the question with a kind of shaken bravery that made him fiercely proud of her.
He couldn’t lie to her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
She nodded grimly. ‘But I didn’t do this and in the end we’ll be able to prove it. I mean, I had to swipe my way out when I left the lab. There are cameras. When all of this is looked into, if he did this he’ll be caught. James is not a stupid man. If he did this he couldn’t have thought he would get away with it. Unless maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. He’s old. His wife has terminal cancer.’
Cormac’s mind flashed to the photograph Murtagh kept in his office. The photograph of his frail, thin wife, her head wrapped in a silk scarf. He thought of Murtagh driving Emma’s car, wrapped in Emma’s coat, with his dying wife’s wig on his head. Cormac’s stomach twisted in disgust.
‘He cares, Emma. He cares all right. He doesn’t just want to survive. He wants to come out on top.’
Emma picked up the hem of the coat, held it so that her hands were either side of the bloodstain. She looked at him. ‘I … I could wash it,’ she said.
The words hung between them for a moment.
‘No, Em,’ he said. ‘I think that would be playing into his hands. There’ll be trace evidence all over your car.’ He looked around the room. ‘There’s probably a fair amount of it in this house too. You drove the car home last night. You wore the coat. We can’t undo that.’
Emma let the coat drop back down onto the couch. She shuddered, wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Then what?’ she asked. ‘What am I supposed to do? Wait here until Peter Fisher comes to arrest me? Or make a mad dash for the airport, hide in South America for the rest of my life?’ She gave a disbelieving laugh.
Cormac took her hand. ‘He’s underestimated us, Emma. We are going to take that fucker down. All right? We are going to take that fucker down and we are going to bury him.’ Cormac saw the fear in Emma’s eyes, and thought of the two dead girls Murtagh had already left in his wake. Fury boiled inside him but he tamped it down for later.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Emma asked.
Cormac took a moment, gathered his thoughts. ‘I need your help, Em. If I’m right there must be something awfully valuable on that computer. Something he thinks worth the taking of two lives. And right now you’re my best chance of figuring out what that is.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Emma wit
hdrew a little as she thought. She walked the room, tied her hair into a ponytail, loosened it, tied it up again. Eventually she turned to him.
‘You asked me if Della could have stolen something, or if she could have found something embarrassing.’
‘Yes.’
She hesitated. ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to think … but I could be way off.’
‘Tell me, Em. Even if it’s just a thought.’
‘Right, well, I’ve told you that the work hasn’t been going well. I’ve thought the problem is with the mesh design. All the simulations show that it works very well. We’ve come at it from every angle and it works. But we’re not getting the results from the prototype that we should be and I haven’t been able to find the problem.’
‘Okay,’ Cormac said.
‘What if the problem isn’t with the mesh, but with the drug? I mean look, this could be completely wrong …’ Emma let her voice trail off.
‘No, keep going.’
‘It’s just, if I assume that you’re right about James, and I assume that he had Della killed to cover something up at the lab, well, there are only a few options. Financial or sexual misbehaviour of some kind, or fraud.’
‘And you think it could be fraud?’
‘Well, Carline and Della aren’t likely to have any visibility of the money side of things, and there’s never been any hint of any kind of sexual impropriety. But James invented the drug. The design, all his research, it’s commercial in confidence. No one has access to his underlying data. I’m just saying, what if he made it up and the girls found out?’
Cormac shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. How could he get away with that?’
‘I’ll tell you how.’ Emma’s voice grew more confident. ‘He bloody knew that the company would throw a party at the very idea that he had designed a drug that would solve this huge problem we have of clotting around the device. He had enough seniority within the company that no one was going to look too closely at his background research, and he knew that no one outside the company would get even a glimpse of something with this much potential value. We’re talking about something worth hundreds of millions, probably even billions.’
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