The Kill: (Maeve Kerrigan 5)

by Jane Casey

  ‘My first car was a Nissan,’ I said, and swung an elbow back to hit her just under the chin, so hard that I heard her teeth click together. I turned and made a grab for her wrist in the same movement: I had no idea which hand had the knife and the tea towel was in the way so I couldn’t see. I caught the blade through the fabric as it flew towards me and felt a sharp sting on my palm but I ignored it, holding on for dear life. The material slipped, the blade sliding free no matter how hard I tried to grip it. I let go and caught her hand instead, squeezing hard. My free hand went for her face, shoving her nose back, reaching for her eyes with my fingers. Anything to distract her from my main objective, which was getting her to drop the knife. I was scared, though I couldn’t allow myself to admit it. I flashed back to Liv lying in hospital, to the stitches that crawled across her abdomen from the surgery she’d had after getting stabbed. She had almost died. She still wasn’t herself.

  I didn’t like knives. Not one bit.

  Amy was a fighter, lashing out in a flurry of kicking and punching and biting. I was taller than her and heavier, and I had been trained in unarmed combat so I should have had the advantage, but she was hellishly strong. Somehow she got a hand up and raked her nails across my cheek, grabbing at my mouth and clawing my skin. I kicked her legs out and fell on top of her, pinning her to the floor. The knife was somewhere between us and we both reached for it, all elbows and cursing and a good hard knock to my nose that made the world flare white, then dark. I shook the pain off, desperate to get control. She was trying to move me off her and I leaned as hard as I could, not giving her enough space to get her hand around the knife, let alone bring it up. I got hold of her wrist again and dug my fingers in so she hissed in pain. More by luck than skill I managed to knock the knife away so it rattled into the corner, out of reach of either of us.

  ‘Listen to me.’ I sniffed, feeling warm liquid gush out of my nose, tasting hot metal from the blood that was filling my sinuses. ‘I know what you did.’

  ‘Get off me.’

  ‘No chance.’

  My blood dripped on to her jumper in coin-sized splashes. She squirmed beneath me, trying to bite my hand as I searched her. I had jammed her up against the bottom step of the stairs so she didn’t have anywhere to go.

  ‘Stop that,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me angry.’

  She twisted to lie on her front so I had to pull hard to get one of her arms out from under her.

  ‘You can’t do this.’

  ‘It’s my job.’ I clicked my handcuffs on to one of Amy’s wrists, got up with some difficulty and hauled her to her feet with my fingers hooked in the other cuff, to cause her maximum discomfort.

  ‘You’re insane,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You attacked me for no reason.’

  I hauled her over to the keys. ‘Tell me about the car keys on the bottom row, Amy. The ones with the Ford logo and the Metropolitan Police fob. Terence Hammond’s keys went missing – did you know that? I’ve got a funny feeling they’re the ones we’ve been looking for. You must have taken them with you when you got out of his car. Habit is a funny thing. You put them on the board because that’s where keys go.’

  She twisted and spat in my face.

  ‘That’s not nice.’ I wiped the saliva off with my sleeve, then pulled her down to the kitchen, holding her arms behind her, and stood her next to the Aga. I slid the solid bar of the cuffs behind the long rail that ran along the front of it, and clicked the open cuff shut on her other wrist. She could run away if she liked, but she’d have to take five hundred kilos of cast iron with her.

  ‘You can’t do this.’

  ‘I’m going to go and look at your car. Then I’m going to call the police,’ I said, examining the palm of my hand, which had a two-inch gouge across it that was seeping blood at a worrying rate. I picked up the abandoned tea towel and used it as an impromptu bandage, blotting my nose with it once my hand was wrapped up. ‘I’m going to arrest you for murdering Terence Hammond.’

  She started to cry. ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘It is true, and I will prove it. I will admit that I didn’t think you were the type to have sex with married men in public places, but I was wrong.’ Irritated by the heavyweight duet that was wailing out of the radio, I switched it off. ‘That’s better.’

  Her face was white, her eyes huge. ‘Switch it back on.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Why would you even ask—’ I stopped. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought I heard something strange.’

  ‘It’s an old house. It makes noises.’ She rattled the cuffs. ‘Please let me go. I’m sorry I hit you but you scared me.’

  I listened again; heard nothing. I went around the kitchen switching off everything I could find that was on. The washing machine was running through its cycle with an empty drum. I raised my eyebrows at her.

  ‘I was cleaning it. You’re supposed to run it empty every so often.’

  ‘And the dryer?’ It was empty too.

  ‘I must have forgotten I’d emptied it. I put it on automatically.’

  While I’d been standing outside the front door waiting for her to answer it. I frowned, trying to work out why. The water was still thundering down and rattling out into a drain outside the back door.

  ‘Where’s that coming from?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘It’s just the plumbing.’ Her face was streaked with tears now. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing. Why are you so angry with me? The things you’re saying about Mr Hammond are insane.’

  ‘You tried to stab me.’

  ‘You attacked me. And those keys belong to my brother. I have a spare set for him in case he loses his or locks them in the car.’ She started sobbing loudly. ‘You’re being horrible to me and I don’t understand why. I haven’t done anything to you.’

  ‘Shut up.’ I headed for the door.

  ‘The cuffs are too tight. I can’t move my hands.’

  ‘I find that very unlikely. I didn’t sever your spine,’ I snapped.

  She wailed even louder.

  ‘Don’t leave me here like this. Please. Come back. Come back. You’re crazy. I didn’t do anything. You can’t prove anything. You’re just trying to make me look guilty.’

  I went outside, stopping to pick up the keys to the garage. I levered the door up. Two cars stood there, one covered in a dust sheet. The other was a small green Nissan. I stared at it, knowing I’d seen it somewhere before. Not at the school. I closed my eyes and remembered: Derwent leaning forward, vomiting his guts up at the firing range. I dropped to my knees by the boot and shone my torch on the paintwork, seeing the small splashes that were fogged with dirt now. If we dusted it for prints, we’d find his palm print on the boot, where he’d leaned. It put her car at the gun club. The gun club was where she had found the weapon. It would be where she had recruited her shooter. Slowly but surely, the evidence was stacking up.

  I took out my phone to call for backup. And stopped, halfway through putting in the code to unlock it. I was looking down at the car next to the Nissan, at the logo on the hub cap. It was horribly familiar.

  Moving fast because I was scared of what I would find, I dragged the dustsheet off the car and stared at Derwent’s Subaru, sitting there with its keys in the ignition. I ripped open the door and took them out, checking the front, the back, the boot for signs of life.

  But no Derwent.

  Just a young woman who liked killing coppers, and a house full of places to hide a body.

  Chapter 28

  I ran back into the kitchen to find Amy Maynard dry-eyed, tugging at the cuffs with all her might. I took hold of a handful of her hair. ‘What have you done with him? Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  ‘I really could
n’t say.’

  I pulled on her hair, hard, and she grinned as if it tickled her. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m serious. You might be in time. You might not.’

  I was shaking with fear and rage and the terrible, agonising worry that I was much too late already. I flipped up the hotplate cover on top of the Aga and put a hand out to feel the heat radiating from it. ‘Think. Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I bent her over the top of the Aga and pressed her down so her cheek was an inch away from the plate. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  I thought about Derwent, and what he would do for me in the same circumstances. He wouldn’t hesitate.

  But I wasn’t him, and I couldn’t do it.

  That didn’t mean I couldn’t fool Amy Maynard into thinking I would.

  I leaned on her, just a little bit, and felt her suck in her breath just before her face touched the hot metal.

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Bitch,’ she spat and I made to lean on her again. ‘No, stop. Upstairs.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The bathroom at the top of the stairs.’ She started to laugh again. ‘He won’t have gone anywhere.’

  The temptation to jam her head down on the plate for the sake of it was overwhelming. I left her cackling there and hared back out, up the stairs, on the edge of tears. If he was dead, I thought, I would never forgive myself for not working it out sooner. The terrible, tearing anxiety made my legs weak as I pulled a wheelchair out of my way and hurled myself at the door at the back of the hallway, the only one that was closed. The sound of running water was louder here, and there was another sound too, a weak kind of knocking that I’d half-heard in the kitchen and wondered about. I’d been distracted. I hadn’t known I should have been paying attention. It was no consolation.

  The door, of course, was locked. I looked for a key and found nothing: spinning around I saw only doorways to rooms I didn’t have time to search. I ran back down to the kitchen. Amy was sitting on the floor with her arms stretched up, still cuffed around the bar.

  ‘This is very uncomfortable.’

  ‘Where’s the key to the bathroom door?’

  ‘Lost it.’

  I didn’t have the time or the heart to hurt her until she told me where it was. I ran out to the garage and hunted until I found a crowbar. Back at the bathroom door I stuck the end of it into the gap between the door and the frame and began to work it back and forth, sobbing under my breath, until finally I’d got it in far enough that I could lever the door open, the lock breaking through the flimsy wood of the door frame, leaving it splintered.

  The door swung open and I understood what she had meant about him being where she’d left him, and why she’d found it funny, though I couldn’t laugh. He was chained to a hook that was set into the ceiling. It had originally been fitted to accommodate the invalid hoist that swung over the bath. His feet were high up, his legs straight. He was resting on his shoulders, his hips suspended so he couldn’t get any purchase to sit up. That meant his head was lower than the level of the water that was filling the bath, and filling it, and filling it, from the taps that were turned on full. His hands were chained behind him so he couldn’t use them to lift himself either. Somehow, he had managed to turn sideways and get an elbow under him, raising him far enough that by making a huge effort he could stretch his face above the surface of the water to snatch some air for a second or two, but he couldn’t do that indefinitely. When he was too weak to fight any more, he would drown. When he gave up, he would die.

  Derwent was not the sort of person to give up easily, but he wasn’t moving.

  He wasn’t moving at all.

  I had a second of pure panic before my brain came back to life.

  The first thing to do was to turn off the taps that were keeping the bath full, despite the water spilling down through the overflow. Frantic to get Derwent out from under the water, I pulled the plug, then put a hand under his head to lift him up. He broke the surface with a noise like a gasp crossed with a groan, dragging air back into his lungs. He didn’t speak – couldn’t, I think. His chest was heaving, his eyelids fluttering, and although my arms were breaking from the weight of him I couldn’t let go of him again. I couldn’t let him sink back into the water that had almost killed him. I knelt beside the bath, cradling him, the water soaking through my clothes. He felt amazingly alive in my arms, warm and vital, and I could have wept over him if I hadn’t been so annoyed that he’d got himself into such trouble in the first place.

  Gradually, the bath drained enough that I could lay him back down without endangering him. His eyes flicked open and stayed open.

  ‘What are you doing?’ It came out shouted, but coherent.

  ‘I have to work out how to get you out.’ I looked at the chains. They were padlocked in three different places, and the chain itself was a heavy gauge. No keys anywhere in the bathroom.

  ‘Always the fucking keys with this one,’ I said, mainly to myself.

  ‘What?’ Derwent said, still groggy.

  ‘Nothing. Stay there.’ I didn’t really think about whether he had any choice about that.

  ‘Maeve.’ The desperation in his voice was as close to begging as Derwent could get.

  ‘I won’t be long, I promise.’

  I started looking into rooms, finding a master bedroom that smelt of greasy hair and old clothes. No one was using it currently. The bed was stripped back, revealing a stained mattress and yellowed pillows. A few family photographs stood on top of a chest of drawers. I took two seconds to peer at a smudgy wedding picture from the early eighties of a couple who looked middle-aged and unglamorous. The woman was giving a lopsided smile, not looking at the camera. She had sloping shoulders and a heavy bosom that her wedding dress didn’t flatter. The man was small and neat, with greying hair. There was something reminiscent of a rodent in the way his features were laid out. I could see a likeness to Amy in them, although she’d got the best of what was on offer from both of them.

  Next to it there was a holiday snap of two children and two adults, all wearing thick glasses and unflattering clothes: the wedding couple ten years on as his hair receded and her chest sagged a little further. Amy was giving the camera a gappy grin, her shorts pulled up too high and her T-shirt a horrible shade of blue. The girl beside her was sullen. Not a picture I would have framed, personally, but it was the whole family I guessed. No bother, obviously. The last was a school photograph of the older girl, fair-haired, with a wide, sensitive mouth and vulnerable eyes.

  What I didn’t see were any keys.

  The next bedroom was draped in sheeting, a room full of ghosts. I looked under a couple of them: a chest of drawers covered in old make-up and jewellery. A single bed, again stripped. Occupying one corner of the room, a screen.

  ‘Holy shit.’ The screen was in three parts, dedicated to two different things: the attack on Philip Gregory and the shooting of Terence Hammond. It was disconcertingly similar to our noticeboard, with one major difference: most of it was devoted to planning rather than reconstructing what had happened. This was Amy Maynard’s command centre. I skim-read the information she had collected on Gregory and Hammond, reading email chains between Gregory and ‘Laura’ from LonelyHeartSeeksAnother.com, a dating website. He’d given her his place of work, his neighbourhood, his date of birth – everything she had needed to track him down. For Hammond, the rules of netball and information about gun competitions. A map of Richmond Park spread over two panels of the screen, with a route marked on it and a star sketched where the murder had taken place. There was nothing about an accomplice, from a first look at it. She would give him up, though, I thought. She would give us anything to save herself.

  The third room had a double bed in it. I assumed it was hers, from the clothes and shoes that lay around the place. I saw the hideous green jumper she’d worn in school. She wasn’t tidy at
home any more than in her office, but that wasn’t the main problem with the room. The bedclothes were in a chaotic state, as if it had been the scene of a struggle. Blood spattered the carpet and a broken lamp lay close by. Derwent’s clothes were in a crumpled heap by the bed. His mobile was on top of the pile, switched off.

  I went back to the bathroom. ‘Did she whack you over the head?’

  ‘She must have. It hurts.’

  I leaned to look. The water had washed the blood away so I hadn’t noticed it at first, but through his hair I could see a nasty gash above his left ear and it was still seeping all along its length. ‘That’ll need stitches. What were you doing in her bedroom?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He sounded very irritated now, and he was starting to shiver. It wasn’t all that surprising when he was only wearing a very soggy pair of pants. They had a clinging quality that I was trying very hard not to notice.

  ‘So she wasn’t asexual, but she was a homicidal maniac. Does that make her better or worse, in your view?’

  ‘Kerrigan, I don’t mean to complain, but could you find the motherfucking keys and get me out of here? It’s actually less pleasant now that there’s no water in the bath. I think my shoulder is breaking.’

  ‘Right. On it.’

  I went down to the kitchen. ‘Padlock keys.’

  She was sitting where I’d left her. She must have known that Derwent was alive, and that the house was full of evidence that would be difficult if not downright impossible to explain in court. Somehow, she smirked. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re just wasting everyone’s time. I’ve turned the water off. He’s not dying. He was fine.’ Stretching a point, perhaps, but I wanted her to stop grinning at me.

  ‘He’s a prick. He thought he could walk in here and click his fingers and I’d be happy to fuck him while he was on duty. As if it was his right. As if I would have enjoyed it.’

  ‘Did you enjoy fucking Terence Hammond?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Did you fuck him when he was on duty?’

  ‘He liked anything that made him feel like he was being bad. On duty. Behind his wife’s back. In the back seat of the car with his vegetable of a kid in the front. He liked to come on my tits, or on my face. Up my arse. He liked to hit me. Swear at me. Anything, as long as it was degrading for me and fun for him.’