by Denise Mina
“Thomas,” he said, uncertainly, and Thomas had the feeling that he was talking off the cuff, “we are very sorry for your recent troubles. We know how difficult things have been for you but rest assured, whatever happens, you will finish your education at this school. Grants are available and we can make inquiries into replacing the funding so that you can stay here.”
Goering almost expressed an idea. One of his eyebrows bobbed a fraction. Doyle ground his teeth and looked through Thomas. They were all thinking the same thing.
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Doyle,” Thomas spoke carefully, “but I think it would be inappropriate when the collapse of my father’s business has been the cause of several other boys having to leave the school. It would be…unfair.”
Goering agreed with him, he could see that. Doyle accepted it graciously. “We don’t hold our boys liable for the sins of their fathers, Thomas. God forbid. Your behavior here has been exemplary.”
Thomas looked at him. Doyle believed that. He actually believed that he knew anything about him. Thomas opened his mouth to speak and a sob barked out of him. He clamped his hand over his mouth but the sudden sound was like a shout, a bark, a howl. He pressed his fingers into his cheeks, pushed hard, cramming it all back in again as his mouth flecked spittle and let off little screams. He caught his breath and held it.
They stood, frozen, until it passed. Cautiously, Thomas took his hands away.
“Sorry,” he said. “About…”
Doyle tilted his head sympathetically but Goering stepped in. “We should go and pack.”
Thomas shuffled towards the door, slipped back into the dull gleam of the chapel corridor and a world forever changed.
SEVEN
Morrow and Harris stepped carefully past the body as they made their way upstairs. The splatter was everywhere, shoe prints, crisp and bloody, like a child’s stamper set.
The staircase was straight and wide, carved from beautiful wood, fitted to the wall.
The steps themselves were wide and deep, Morrow’s size fives could have fitted twice on the tread. These were not stairs to hurry down, they were for sauntering. The carpet was well fixed to the back by rods and the pile was thick, rugged enough to exclude a slip at the bottom and a head injury on the banister. If the woman had died from an accidental head injury and the intruder then mutilated the body, they’d be looking at a different charge, for a different kind of man altogether.
When she got to the top of the stairs she looked back down. The body was almost hidden behind the fat newel end, just the bare knees visible. Despite the paper shuffle of the forensics guys and the muttering of the coppers, she felt an ache of quiet, a throb of history pressing the house inwards. This was not a house many young women would live in alone if they had a choice. Too big, too old, too heavy.
At the head of the stairs, between two doors, sat a small table with a series of silver framed photographs propped up on it, crowding each other: a program for a play with a cast of three. An elderly man and slightly younger wife at weddings, in gardens, on a boat. There was only one young person in the play: she was seen once as a girl and once again as a young woman.
As a girl she smiled miserably in a pink dress with a tight orange cummerbund.
As a woman she was slim and tall, statuesque, but not pretty. Her jaw was weak, her nose squint at the tip, her eyes small. She stood outside on a sunny day, possibly on the steps in front of this house, holding a glass of piss-yellow wine, smiling awkwardly. From the chic jacket and shoes in the porch, Morrow guessed it wouldn’t have been Sarah’s favorite picture of herself and she thought it telling that the unflattering photo had been chosen by her family to represent her.
She turned to the SOCO and found him staring at a small green object on the floor. A leather cube with three heavy duty zips across the top, each with a distinctive green leather tag on it: one with a silver hoop, one with a big square stud, one a riveted hole. On the front, punched into the leather, a large D&G logo. It was a purse, open and empty, discarded on the hall floor.
“Dust it?” she asked and caught herself. “You have, I know, just running through…” He nodded, appreciative. “It’s empty?”
“Aye.”
She gestured to Harris. “Cards?”
“Phoned in,” he said. “They haven’t been used.”
Morrow frowned. “Don’t think this is about money, somehow.”
“Aye, too much.” Harris wrinkled his nose and nodded back downstairs at the bloody body.
Together they turned towards the bedroom door. A rosy pink glow came from inside. The door was ajar and she pushed it open from the hinges, avoiding possible sites of fingerprints.
The oval room was low and cozy. Small windows sat all around the curve, white wooden shutters closed, pink flowery wallpaper and a tiny white fireplace with a black iron grating. Across from it was a rumpled double bed, a luxurious white duvet thrown back. The air felt thick in the room, as if someone had been sleeping in here moments before and had sucked all of the oxygen out.
On the floor lay a dropped-and-stepped-out-of black dress with a racer back. A pair of shocking-pink lacy underpants with a pale blue ribbon threaded around the waist, the legs perfect circles where they had slipped down perfect thighs.
This woman made no sense in this house. She looked at Harris and he shook his head, bewildered too, but also slightly enchanted by the prettiness of the underpants.
“Those’re…kind of whory, aren’t they?”
“What,” she said, “the knickers?”
“Aye. Could give the wrong impression.” He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off them. “Or not.”
Morrow looked at them. She had knickers a bit like that, she wore them to cheer herself up on grim days, give a kick to her walk when she felt beleaguered. “You thinking she was…” She couldn’t think of the word for prostitute now. Prostitute was wrong, sex worker was wrong too, for some reason. Frustrated, she pointed at the knickers. “Working?”
He stared hard at the pants, his eyes circling the thighs. “Maybe. Maybe where the money comes from?”
She looked at the jolly knickers again. “Lots of women wear cheeky pants to cheer themselves up.”
Harris blushed, looked quickly away from the pants on the floor. “OK, ma’am.”
She had hinted at her own underwear habits, breaking the sexless rule of the force. Wrong. It might have been hormonal, it could have been the realization of how stupid it was that she couldn’t share an insight about underwear without causing an incident, but she smiled quietly where before she’d have been angry at herself for getting it wrong. “Or they might have been the only clean pants in the place. Could be a few things, is what I mean.”
Harris nodded and looked nervously around the room, willing her to move on. She liked Harris, but he did seem to put a sexual connotation on everything possible. She couldn’t work out if he was very repressed or had a crippling libido.
Turning back to the bed, she could see the twist on the sheet where a bottom had turned to the side and feet had dropped to the floor. She looked at the duvet. The cover was very clean and expensive. As she looked at it, wondering whether it was one of those high-count linens and what the count was actually of, she spotted a dull silver glint in among the folds. She stepped forwards, pinched the edge of the cover and pulled it back. A mobile phone, silver backed, broad but slim, lay face down on the bed.
“iPhone,” smiled Harris. “That’ll have her whole life on it.”
Morrow frowned at the silver. “I thought they were black or white?”
“It’s an original.” He pulled out a plastic bag for it, thought better of it and called in the SOCOs to fingerprint it first.
As they busied themselves dusting the phone, Morrow looked down at the handbag on the floor. Again, good leather, good deep mustard color, quirky design with big zips and slightly outsized fastenings. Morrow bent down awkwardly and flicked the top of the bag open with her pen. A set of key
s sat at the bottom: four keys clustered around a simple silver hoop. She was pleased to see shop receipts littering the bag. Most tills printed the time and date and their shop address. They’d be able to retrace Sarah’s movements from them.
Morrow stood up and watched as they dusted the iPhone carefully, flicking black dust all over the white linen.
She looked back at the door to the room, thought her way down the stairs to the porch and imagined Sarah Erroll coming into an empty house. Her face was a hazy cloud of blood, her body slim and lithe in the fitted black dress.
Sarah left the suitcase by the wall, dropped her keys into the mustard bag and pulled her shoes off by the heel. Morrow imagined the gentle pwup as the hard heels fell to the tiled floor. She saw Sarah reaching into the baggy handbag, feeling around the rubble in the bottom for the taser phone, stepping across the hall to drop it carelessly by the other wall. Or stand at the top of the stairs and throw it down.
Morrow started again with the taser: it was near the site of her death. She’d been going for it or someone else had it and dropped it there. It could have been in her handbag and someone had taken it, thought better of it and dropped it on the way out. “Check the taser for prints.”
“Aye.”
“Check it for fiber traces too,” she said. “See if it came out of this bag.”
She saw the faceless woman drop her shoes and climb the stairs, imagined the aches and strains of sitting on an airplane for seven hours, imagined her pleasure at taking off the lacy underpants, pulling on a T-shirt and being swallowed by the big bed.
They walked back downstairs, holding the wall as they stepped carefully past the body. Harris was in front this time and she saw him actually look straight at the mess for a moment, not flinching, and hoped it was because of her example. He tiptoed between the red footsteps and stopped at the bottom, holding out a hand to help her. She brushed his hand away.
“Shoe prints?”
“Aye,” he said. “Found black fibers in them, probably made of suede.”
Harris tipped his head and looked back up as Morrow came to stand by him. The footsteps were a mess of red, smeared over steps, some crisp prints, some spaces where the deep green carpet showed through.
“They about a size eight?” said Morrow.
They looked for a moment, angling their heads, stepping one way and another to discern a pattern.
Finally Harris said, “Two sets?”
“Is it?” She stepped over to where he was standing and saw a perfect print next to another, both right feet, one bigger than the other but the same sole markings. “God, you’re right. Shit.”
Two was bad. If there were two it wasn’t enough to show that they’d been there and been splattered with blood. It meant they would have to show a jury that each of the co-conspirators had been actively committing the violence. They’d have to charge them with conspiracy to commit murder, which had a lesser tariff. It was unsatisfying, especially if one of them had been standing at the side shouting at the other one to stop. If the defense could plant a doubt they could both walk. Morrow felt it reduced the process to trial by combat: that the stand-off was usually won by the stronger party, not the innocent one. The best they could hope for was physical evidence that proved the case.
She squinted at the footsteps again. “Shit. They’re the same. We need to find something, marks on the sole or something.”
“They’re the same though, is it a uniform?” said Harris.
“Mibbi.” She waved at the stairs. “Can we break these steps down, reconstruct the movements? Take out the interview roulette.”
“Dunno. I’ll ask.”
Morrow shook her head and looked closer.
Both sets of soles had the same pattern on them: three circles on the pressure points and straight stripes leading towards them. “Can we trace those soles?”
Harris didn’t seem convinced. “We can ask in shoe shops.”
“Let’s see the cash.”
He led her past the body, turning away from the main hall, taking her through a small door and down a step to the kitchen. A cast-iron cooking range sat in a chimney breast. The room was cold because the walls and roof were solid concrete and the back window long and wide, looking out onto a tangle of naked bushes.
A white-suited scene-of-crime officer was shuffling around, picking fibers off the window sill and the sink and bagging them up. Gobby was parked in a corner, staying out of the way. He greeted her with a silent nod, keeping his eyes steady on the table.
“Right, Gobby?”
He didn’t say anything. Gobby didn’t talk much.
Morrow looked around the kitchen.
It was a large room, bigger than they would build now but not at all grand. Tired red linoleum covered the floor, rips carefully mended with silver electrical tape. The units were workaday as well: a solid pine dresser, painted white but badly chipped, one of the glass panels mended with the same silver electrical tape: another job for another day. An old-fashioned fridge gave off a hard, high whir. The cooker was unimposing and electric, immaculate but the glass cover slightly dusty. No one cooked in here. The center of the room was occupied by an old teak kitchen table, cup-stained and knife-sliced, a seam across the middle where it could be extended. A smattering of chairs were pushed up tight against it except at the sink side where they had been pulled out.
Harris gave a dry cough behind her. She turned to see him nodding a gentle warning at a corner of the room.
She hadn’t seen him there, the man sitting in an armchair by the range, hugging his briefcase and facing into a corner. He was young, in his thirties, but dressed old in a dark pinstripe with a mustard waistcoat and red tie. His body was formless, flattered by the clothes but still portly, and his face was round too, his eyes wide and watchful of her.
“Hello,” she said.
He stood up quickly, stepped across to her and held his hand out, leaning hard towards her, as if he was hanging over a cliff and wanted her to pull him up. “Donald Scott.”
She took his hand and shook it. “DS Alex Morrow. You’ve had a shock.”
He panted a yes, glancing to the hall, to the table, back to her, pumping her hand, holding tight.
“You knew the victim?”
“Yes, yes. Yes.” He considered the question and added, “Yes?”
“You were her solicitor?”
“Mmm.” He looked wildly around the kitchen, panting, building up to an outburst of emotion that they didn’t need. Morrow took charge. “OK, we’re going to take you to the station and speak to you there. When you get there I want you to have some biscuits, something with sugar in it, for the shock. Understand?” She wasn’t sure sugar did help with shock but knew that giving people a task did, something to focus on, a small thing to achieve. “Understand?”
“Yes.” But he was staring over her shoulder to the doorway, afraid they were going to make him go out that way, pass the body again.
“Out the back,” she told Harris.
Harris led the man out by the elbow, careful that he didn’t stagger on top of anything important, pulling the back door shut behind him.
Everyone in the kitchen relaxed, coming out of character. The raw horror of an outsider shamed them into reverence. It was uncomfortable, it reminded them how scarred they all were. Morrow rolled her head back to relieve the tension in her neck. Her shoulders had been creeping up to her ears since she turned the corner and saw the mess at the foot of the stairs.
She looked around. A window above the sink had been jimmied open crudely, bending the metal outwards at the fastening, and it had been left hanging open. Not a professional job. Not even a careful job. A housebreaker with any experience would attempt to cover the mess and make it look as if the window was shut once they were in. Outside in the overgrown garden, she could see the top of a copper’s head, checking below the window for footprints. It was one of the benefits of having coppers who weren’t seeking promotion: they were brighter than the l
eft-behinds used to be, thought of things before they were told to.
She took a breath and stood back against the wall, taking in the room and imagining the path of the intruders: through the window, over the metal sink and draining board, clamber down to the ground. If they knew the house they’d go straight to the hallway but the pantry door was ajar, and next to it a door sat open into a shallow utility room with the washing machine, dryer and rusting mangle. Across the room another door sat open into a deep-shelved cupboard full of tins.
Morrow approached the pantry and stood in front of the doorway. A cold room for keeping food in before the advent of refrigeration. She could feel a bitter draft licking her ankles. The person who lived here would take care to keep that door shut. The intruder had been looking for the door out of the kitchen.
On the worktop near the cooker an old radio had been unplugged from the wall, a flex dangling over the edge of the worktop, not sitting under the wall socket the way someone who was about to plug it back in might leave it. The radio had been on, they’d turned it off to orientate themselves.
“Dust that plug,” she said to the SOCO.
As if aggrieved, she turned to Gobby and demanded, “Where is it, then?”
He grinned and pointed to the table.
Morrow looked at it. “Under?”
“Aye.”
“Shit.” Morrow looked at the table, planning her route. Her body was changing so quickly every new position was an experiment.
She asked the SOCO, “Is it all right…?” She put her hand out to the table top, asking if she could lean on it.
“No, better just…” He held out his own hand and Morrow reluctantly took it, leaned on him heavily as she got down first onto one knee and then onto the other. She couldn’t bend to the side without her ribs digging into the babies: she had to go down on all fours and peer up like a dog asking for a biscuit.
She didn’t think it could get more humiliating but then Harris came back into the kitchen—she could see his feet behind her.