Let the Dead Speak

by Jane Casey

  ‘You said you thought they were spending too much time together,’ I said. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘They’re too close,’ Oliver Norris said. ‘They live in each other’s pockets. They spend their time whispering together. Bethany shuts us out.’

  ‘Bethany isn’t all that different from other teenagers,’ I said carefully, avoiding the word ‘normal’. ‘But most of them have mobile phones and access to the internet. They spend most of their time communicating with their friends even if they’re not actually with them. But you said they’re close … are they in a relationship?’

  ‘What?’ Oliver looked baffled as Morgan threw his head back and laughed.

  ‘Nothing like sticking the cat among the pigeons, is there? She’s asking if your daughter’s a lesbian, Ollie. Try to expand your mind to imagine such a thing.’

  ‘That’s a disgusting suggestion.’ Norris had gone red. ‘Eleanor, tell her.’

  ‘They were friends. That’s all. There was nothing strange or perverse about it.’

  Perverse. I was glad Liv wasn’t with me.

  ‘What about you?’ Time to put Morgan Norris on the spot. ‘Did you ever think that might be the case?’

  ‘Me? No. But I didn’t know them all that well,’ he said. ‘If I had to say, I’d guess they were both more interested in the lad down the street.’

  ‘Turner?’ Oliver Norris stood up so quickly his chair tipped back. His brother caught it before it could hit the ground and set it back down delicately.

  ‘The one who’s always smoking on his front step. I saw them talking to him a few times.’

  ‘Bethany was talking to him? I forbade her to go near him.’

  ‘So her being in his house wasn’t allowed.’ Morgan pulled a face. ‘Naughty Bethany.’

  ‘She was in his house?’ Norris started for the door and I stuck my hand out, planting it in the centre of his chest. He collided with it hard enough to jar my arm and wind himself a little.

  ‘You don’t talk to him, Mr Norris. Leave that to me.’

  ‘Is that an order?’

  ‘It’s good advice and you should take it.’

  He said something under his breath that sounded a lot like fuck that and went to pass me. I didn’t go so far as to trip him up deliberately, but I certainly didn’t move my foot out of his way. He plunged across the room and went down on one knee. I was right behind him, murmuring in his ear that the only thing that would happen if he went over to Turner’s house was that he’d end up getting arrested, by me, for breach of the peace, and he’d spend the night in a horrible police station cell that smelled of sick, listening to the regular prisoners screaming threats against themselves and others, while Turner got on with his life and none of it would help Bethany in the slightest …

  Something I said got through to him. He shook his head, getting to his feet slowly.

  ‘I never liked him. I never wanted him here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I said he was trouble.’

  ‘You did.’

  Oliver Norris turned to me and his eyes were haunted. ‘Can you go and see him? Make sure that my little girl isn’t there? Make sure he doesn’t have her?’

  ‘That was the next thing on my list,’ I said.

  19

  My head was ringing, the sound vibrating through the bones of my face. I lifted my head, half-panicked and wholly confused, then fumbled under my pillow for my phone. I squinted at the screen. Half past nine. An hour since I’d got to bed.

  And it was Derwent calling me, on a Sunday morning.

  No way.

  I put it down on the bedside table and buried my head in the pillow again, listening to it humming in a frenzy of bad temper until it went silent. I was probably imagining that it sounded angrier when it started ringing again, though I knew he’d be swearing up a storm. The third time the phone rang I gave in.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘In bed.’ I still had my eyes closed. ‘I told Burt I’ll be in later.’

  ‘Yeah, so she said. But you need to get here now.’

  ‘What? Why?’ I stuck the heel of my hand into my eye socket and rubbed gingerly. My throat felt raw and every bone in my body ached. ‘I was up all night.’

  ‘This is important. Unless you want to miss it.’

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘The mark on the inside of the freezer at the storage company.’

  ‘Blood?’ My eyes came open properly.

  ‘Dead right. Want to go for two out of two?’

  ‘Kate Emery’s blood?’

  ‘The very same. So we’re going over to the storage company to check it out and ask Mr Yawl a few more questions.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Me and DC Shaw.’ He said it too casually.

  ‘You fucker,’ I muttered.

  ‘What was that? Sorry, I didn’t quite catch it.’ I could hear the grin in his voice.

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘Half an hour.’

  I groaned. ‘I’ll never make it.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you there.’ It wasn’t a question, and I couldn’t even mind too much that he’d taken it for granted I would turn up. I’d have had to be a lot more than tired to stay in bed when, at long last, we’d caught a break.

  I walked into the yard of Martin Yawl’s storage company holding on to my cup of bitter petrol-station coffee as if my life depended on it. I should have been tired – I was tired – but I felt alert. The place hadn’t changed since we’d been there the previous day, but it seemed completely different now that the Met had arrived in force. The crime scene examiners were currently crawling over every inch of the storage unit Kate Emery had rented, while Martin himself sat in his miserable office watching as the team bagged up his paperwork, his ancient computer and anything else that could possibly help to disentangle the knots of the case.

  Derwent jumped down the steps of the trailer and crossed the yard.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you?’

  ‘I was up all night looking for the girls.’

  ‘I know that, but I’d still expect you to look a bit less …’

  ‘Less what?’ I snapped, knowing it was a mistake to ask.

  ‘Undead.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’

  ‘That’s why you join CID, Kerrigan – so you don’t have to stay up all night looking for people.’

  ‘The teams got swamped. Three high-risk mispers in addition to the girls, plus two domestics, plus a burglary. There was no one left to look for them so I went out by myself. You’d have done the same.’

  He flashed a grin at me instead of answering, and made a grab for my coffee. I jerked it out of his reach.

  ‘No way. Get your own.’

  ‘It’s bad for you. Bad for your ulcer.’

  ‘So is stress, and yet you’re still here.’ I gulped a mouthful of it: too hot and it tasted of burnt cardboard. Pry it from my cold, dead hands. ‘I have a warrant to search Oliver Norris’s house if you’re interested in joining me.’

  ‘He made you get a warrant?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘What a cock that man is.’

  ‘He doesn’t like us.’

  ‘And I don’t like him. Doesn’t he want us to find his daughter?’

  ‘He thinks he can do it himself.’ I stifled a yawn. ‘What have I missed?’

  ‘It’s a tiny amount of blood. You saw it.’

  I nodded. ‘A smudge.’

  ‘But it’s definitely Kate’s. And it’s not from a scrape – it looks like it leaked into the ice over time. They found more when they took the ice off the side of the freezer. So it’s a fair guess that this is where the body was.’ Derwent counted on his fingers. ‘Last sighting is Friday of last week, according to Norris. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Yesterday, which was Saturday, there was very definitely no body in the freezer. That leaves a week for someone to come and drop the body here, then retrieve it and mo
ve it wherever it is now.’

  There was a faded sign on the wall, promising that the place was constantly monitored by CCTV. ‘No cameras?’

  ‘Not one. Martin says he doesn’t need cameras because he’s always here.’

  I looked at the miserable prefab in horror. ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘No, but I think he sleeps here sometimes. He spends every waking hour in the office and when he’s not here, that gate’s locked.’

  I twisted to see it: ten feet high and topped with razor wire.

  ‘He says no one could have interfered with the gate’s lock without him noticing, and no one could have come in or out without him seeing them when he was here.’

  ‘He was pretty sharp when we were here yesterday,’ I said. ‘He heard the car straight away.’

  ‘And this morning.’ Derwent stretched. ‘He says no one has been here in the past week except his regulars. Pettifer is getting in touch with all the other customers to check they’re all above board and not homicidal lunatics.’

  ‘She could have met him here,’ I said, shivering.

  ‘She could have met him anywhere.’ Derwent ran a hand over his head. ‘That’s what bothers me. We’re looking at all these men who knew her – her ex, her neighbour, his brother – and we have no idea what we don’t know. We only know about them because we’ve fallen over some lucky evidence. What about the blokes we haven’t come across? The ones who didn’t grab the headboard or leave their DNA in compromising places? The ones who can vanish a body to a chest freezer and out again without the human guard dog spotting them, or getting caught on CCTV, or making a mistake?’

  ‘They will have made a mistake.’ I sounded certain about it, slightly to my own surprise. ‘We just need to spot it.’

  They will have made a mistake. Easy to say. Harder to believe when the white-suited technicians emerged from Kate Emery’s unit shaking their heads. They had swabbed and photographed and measured every inch of the place, and found nothing. There were footprints: mine and Derwent’s and Martin Yawl’s and a pair of size five trainers. Kate Emery had worn size five shoes, I confirmed when Kev Cox asked. He sucked his teeth.

  ‘Maybe she walked over to the freezer and tidied herself into it. To be helpful, like.’

  ‘What about Yawl?’ Una Burt had demanded, her face strained.

  ‘They only found his footprints in the doorway,’ Georgia said. She had spent most of the morning with Yawl, listening to his interminable explanations of how he conducted his business. ‘He said he looked in after we left.’

  ‘That’s consistent with what we found,’ Kev said happily. He was the only person looking remotely cheerful. He liked it when the facts lined up neatly, when the evidence confirmed people’s stories. And I should have too, because what I wanted was the truth, not a convenient suspect I could call a killer.

  Una Burt sighed. ‘So this is a dead end.’ The skin around her eyes looked bruised, up close.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Derwent said. ‘Now what?’

  ‘There’s the search warrants for Oliver Norris’s house.’ I was so tired, I felt as if the ground was moving under my feet.

  ‘You should go home,’ Burt said. ‘There’s no point in exhausting yourself.’

  ‘I know.’ I could leave it to the others for a day and the world wouldn’t end. It was always there, though – that fear that I’d miss something I should have seen, that someone would get away with murder because I was indulging myself with a luxury like sleep. And it was worse now that I was a sergeant. One step up the ladder and the view was giving me vertigo.

  I blinked the tiredness away. Focus. Search the houses. Go home. Sleep like the dead. Get up and do it all over again.

  ‘We can do the search in Valerian Road.’ Georgia smiled at Derwent.

  ‘You can probably manage it by yourself, if it comes to that.’ Derwent looked at his watch, so missed Georgia’s glare.

  ‘I’d like to do it,’ I started to say, but Burt was frowning at her ringing phone. She held up a finger and moved away to answer it.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Derwent said, leaning in too close to me.

  ‘I’m tired. Someone woke me up early this morning.’

  Burt returned. ‘DNA results on the sheet from Harold Lowe’s house. Contributions from Chloe Emery and an unknown male.’

  ‘So Chloe was using the house too,’ I said. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Her mum had the keys. She must have nicked them. When you’re a teenager, you’d give a lot for a house of your own,’ Derwent said, his expression remote. Trotting down memory lane, I assumed.

  ‘Who was she with?’ I said.

  ‘She spent a lot of time with that boy down the road, Oliver Norris said.’ Georgia looked at me with a frown. ‘What was it – Turner?’

  ‘Didn’t we get a DNA sample from him?’

  Blank faces all round. I rubbed my forehead, wondering if I’d forgotten to put the request through.

  ‘We can get it now,’ Derwent said. ‘We’re going to Valerian Road for the searches, anyway. Might as well drop in on Turner and see what he has to say for himself.’

  ‘Then I’m definitely coming with you,’ I said.

  ‘We can manage,’ Georgia Shaw said.

  ‘I’m sure you can.’ I smiled at her. ‘But he likes me.’

  I should have known better.

  I stood on the doorstep and hammered on the door with the side of my fist, not for the first time. Derwent leaned against the gatepost, his hands in his pockets, smirking.

  ‘I’m glad you think this is funny.’

  He shrugged. ‘You have to laugh, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’ I shaded my eyes to look down the street. At least Georgia had gone into number 32, armed with her search warrants. An audience of one was bad enough.

  I bent down and peered through the letterbox. Turner was sitting on the stairs, rolling a cigarette.

  ‘Open the door, William.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A chat.’

  ‘Mum said you were here last night. It’s beginning to feel a lot like harassment.’

  ‘It’s not harassment,’ I said patiently. ‘And where were you last night?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘With some mates.’

  ‘What time did you get back?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He leaned back against the step behind him. ‘She said you asked to search the house.’

  ‘It’s routine.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel routine to me.’

  ‘I’m worried about Chloe and Bethany, William. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  ‘They’ll come back.’

  ‘Are you saying that because you know where they are and you know they will be back or because you want it to be true?’

  ‘I don’t know where they are.’ He sniffed. ‘Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘That and some other things. I need your DNA.’

  He had been licking the edge of a cigarette paper, but he stopped. ‘Why?’

  ‘To rule you out.’ Or in. ‘I told you we’d be needing DNA from you.’

  ‘I thought you’d given up on that.’

  ‘Nope. And I could lift it from one of the cigarette ends you’ve scattered around out here, but I’d rather do it properly so there’s no mistake about it. You don’t have a problem with giving me a DNA sample, do you?’

  He sighed. ‘Look, I’m cooperating.’

  ‘So open the door.’ My patience was running out.

  Slowly, with bad grace, he uncoiled himself and came down to open the door. He leaned against the frame, his face sullen.

  ‘You haven’t found the girls.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But your priority is coming round and bothering me. That makes sense.’

  ‘There are other people looking for them,’ Derwent said. ‘Have you heard from them since yesterday morning?’

  ‘No.�
��

  ‘Are you in a relationship with either of them?’

  ‘No.’ The amber eyes moved from Derwent to me. ‘I told you that already. Don’t you two talk to each other?’

  ‘As little as possible,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Are you going to let us in?’

  ‘Not unless I have to.’

  ‘Then we can take your DNA here.’ I took out the kit we used for taking samples and showed him the tool like a large cotton bud inside a plastic case. ‘I need to swab the inside of your cheek.’

  ‘Why don’t you want us in your house, sonny?’ Derwent was frowning.

  ‘I just don’t.’

  ‘Makes me think you have something to hide.’

  ‘You can think what you like,’ Turner said.

  ‘Is your mum here?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s at her knitting club.’ He grinned. ‘I still don’t want you in my house.’

  I was tired of the bickering. ‘Open wide.’

  He did as I asked and I swabbed his cheek carefully. A car drove past, slowing almost to a stop. Turner’s eyes went dark and I glanced over my shoulder.

  It was Oliver Norris’s Volvo. He was driving in the company of two other men I didn’t know. There was something about a car full of men that always made me suspicious but I fought the feeling down. Sunday: they would be coming back from church, more than likely.

  I was expecting them to park near Norris’s house but the car carried on down the street, turning at the end, out of sight.

  ‘Has he spoken to you?’

  ‘Norris? No.’

  ‘He thinks you know something about where the girls might be.’

  ‘Him too?’

  ‘They spent a lot of time with you.’

  ‘Only because I’m always here.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a job?’ Derwent, the question bursting out of him as if he couldn’t hold it in any more.

  ‘Bad lungs. All winter, it affects me. I do a bit now and then but cash-in-hand, like, or I’d lose my benefits.’

  ‘Couldn’t have that.’

  ‘I’m entitled to them.’

  Derwent’s mouth twisted but he let it go, to my relief.

  ‘Do you know any reason why they would run away, William?’ I asked.