TRACE - CSI Reilly Steel #5 (Forensic novel Police Procedural Series)

by Casey Hill

  I need all my energy for this. My creation for Constance must be the most spectacular yet.

  So it seems as though everything is coming together. My only wish is that I could see Ruth when they tell her of her daughter’s fate. I want to see the horror and grief rush up on her. I want to see all of her worst nightmares come true.

  If there’s anyone I’m leaving this legacy for, it’s her. Soon she can see the result her selfishness has wrought, so that she can know my pain.

  Just in case you forgot about me, Ruth.

  Constance sighed and stirred the soup she was making for her mother. She didn’t have a hamstring injury. The truth was, her mother had fallen into one of the black depressions that sometimes seized her and Constance had made the journey over to Oxford to look after her. She had just wanted to reach out and talk to someone normal, so she had messaged Danny from the running group. There was something kind of calming about him. Constance wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship, but she didn’t think he was either.

  When her mother got into a place like this, she was hard to deal with. ‘You just had to wait it out,’ is what the doctors said. She spent the night before telling Constance: “I’ve done such awful things, Connie, such terrible things.”

  It was a common theme of her depression. She would never tell Constance exactly what it was that she had done. Constance didn’t think it could be that bad. She was a lecturer, for goodness sakes. It wasn’t exactly a life of sin. She had been a good mother, for the most part. Constance knew that her mother had seen a psychologist before she was born, to talk through various issues, but that was her business. She knew that Ruth had mixed feelings about becoming a mother. She wanted it, but feared that she might not be very good at it. Constance had to reassure her a lot on that score.

  ‘Connie? Are you in here?’ Her mother appeared at the kitchen door, weak and pale.

  ‘Sure, Mum. I made soup. You have to eat something tonight, ok?’

  Ruth nodded. This meekness usually indicated that she was getting back to normal and Constance was relieved. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could handle, to be honest.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  Ruth nodded again. ‘I feel that there are things you should know,’ she said. ‘About me. Things I’ve done.’

  ‘Mum, like I said before, I don’t want to know. You don’t need to tell me anything. This is your business. What happened in the past has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But it does,’ said Ruth. ‘I feel that you know me as a better person than I really am.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ said Constance. ‘You’re flawed. I’m flawed. Everyone is flawed. We just have to do our best to overcome those things and to live with them and move on. You need to stop beating yourself up for something that happened in the past.’

  ‘You really, really don’t want to know?’ asked Ruth.

  Constance shook her head. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘OK. Then let me just say this: never do something out of a sense of duty, because you will not be good at it. You will disappoint yourself, and everyone around you. Promise me that.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Constance. ‘No promises. Making a promise is just another way to let someone down.’

  Reilly and Gary pulled up to the industrial block of flats where Janey Smith lived.

  ‘I’m still not sure this is a productive use of our time,’ said Reilly.

  ‘Well, look at it this way. The chef case is closed, we’ve got a little more time on our hands for the moment. So we might as well use it.’

  There was rubbish clogging the stairwells, but Reilly refused to take the lifts. ‘Those things look like death traps,’ she said.

  ‘You know that people get stabbed in stairwells like this one?’

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ said Reilly.

  After climbing seven floors, Reilly was puffing lightly but Gary was breathing like a wounded wildebeest.

  ‘You really need to get fit,’ she commented.

  ‘Do you think it would improve my chances with Lucy?’

  ‘I think it will improve your chances of not having a heart attack in an abandoned stairwell.’

  Gary pretended to consider. ‘Nah, I don’t think it’s worth it.’

  They knocked on the door of 742. This was a place where dreams came to die. You could feel it in the air. Old people that no one cared about ended up here. Poor families who earned minimum wage and had to feed five kids. And then there were the users, the small time criminals. It wasn’t a nice place. Gary and Reilly looked at each other. Why live here if you had a choice? At the last minute, Reilly considered that it might be some kind of set up, but then the door opened to reveal a shriveled older woman of indeterminate age.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, with a great amount of forced cheer. ‘I was just tidying up.’

  The place was indeed spotless. It had been made as nice as a place like this could be. There was furniture from what were clearly better times, pot plants and pictures on the wall. Less cosy were the creepy knitted dolls that were dotted around the room, but there was no accounting for personal taste.

  ‘We have to be honest with you,’ said Reilly, taking an offered seat on a plush couch, ‘We haven’t come here because we were interested in buying the house.’

  ‘You haven’t?’ said Janey, sinking into a chair opposite Reilly. It was impossible to tell her age. Her hair, which would have once been black, was stone grey. Her face was crisscrossed with lines, everything about it which would once have been full was now collapsed and sunken. She look at Reilly with resignation in her watery blue eyes. ‘What have you come about then?’

  ‘Your brother’s house was the site of a crime scene investigation,’ said Reilly. ‘Has anyone come and talked to you about it?’

  ‘They rang me,’ said Janey. ‘Wanted to know if I knew who was living in it after my brother died. Sure how would I know that, I said, when I didn’t even know my own brother had passed away? Must have been squatters. They’re terrible common, all over the place here. An abandoned house wouldn't be abandoned for long.’

  ‘The house was in very neat condition,’ said Reilly. ‘If it was squatters, then they were very clean squatters.’

  ‘I wouldn't know; I haven’t seen the place in years.’

  ‘You never went to see the property you inherited?’

  ‘I didn’t see the point,’ said Janey.

  ‘We found a number of items in the house. Women’s things, like wigs, jewelry and the like. Would any of those be yours or your brother’s?’

  ‘No,’ said Janey. ‘I never wore a wig in my life. And Martin … I doubt it.’

  ‘When was the last time you were at your brother’s house?’

  ‘Donkey’s years. When my husband was still alive I think. I’ll be honest, my brother and I weren’t exactly close.’

  ‘Do you have family yourself, Mrs Smith?’ Gary asked, looking around the room which was curiously bare of furniture. ‘Children?’

  ‘Yes, my boys,’ said Janey.

  ‘Where are your boys now?’ Reilly asked. ‘Why aren’t you leaving the sale of the house to them?’ It seemed a lot for such a frail old woman to take on, considering she could barely walk.

  Janey’s eyes narrowed. ‘You know where they are,’ she spat. ‘Do you think I want to talk about this over and over? I don’t. I hate it. I’ve already tried to help.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Reilly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve been asked again and again about that Gorman girl all those years ago,’ said Janey, tears forming in the corner of her eyes. ‘But I just don’t know anything else, other than I know what it’s like to lose a child.’

  Reilly took a moment to regain some control. She held her breath. ’Wait a second,’ she said, realising suddenly. ‘Your boys are Darren and Brendan Keating?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said
Janey. ‘I thought that was why you were here.’

  Reilly didn’t want to come out and say that they hadn’t actually made that connection. But now she knew she was close. She could feel that Gary too was rigid with anticipation beside her.

  ‘Can you tell us what you know about Grace Gorman’s disappearance?’ asked Gary. ‘We know that you’ve been through it all a thousand times now, but I’m new to this case and I really like to hear from people themselves.’ He gave her a winning smile, playing up the eager newbie charm.

  ‘Well, all I can tell you what I remember,’ said Janey. ‘It was a long time ago. But first let me put the kettle on. I need a cup of tea.’

  Chris took a long lunch break and went for a swim. He enjoyed the peace of it, the way his body felt when he was slicing through the water. He knew that Reilly felt the same way about running. That it made you your best, most calm self.

  He let the water take him completely, basking in the cool, unchanging blue. He powered up and down the lane, touching the end of the pool and flipping under to start a new length without even thinking about it. It was automatic for him, though at times like these he wished for the endless nature of the sea. How nice it would be to swim for as long as you wanted with no impediments.

  It looked as though everything had closed up nicely. They had caught their man, though Nico Peroni was still refusing to speak, and apparently refusing to eat too. They needed more details from him, but they might have to wait until he had undergone a psych test. But for now, they could all concentrate on other work. Sadly, hardly a day went by in this city where there wasn’t a serious crime committed, or a body found somewhere. He wished sometimes that his job was unnecessary, but it never would be.

  The message from Reilly was loud and clear: give me some space. He could understand that, he really could. It was hard, when they had been getting so close, but he would do his best. He could understand that her world had been tipped upside down. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what he would do if he was in her shoes. Would she go back to the States? Surely that would be the wisest decision. She had her father there. And the baby’s father of course.

  Chris wasn’t sure what the nature of that relationship had been. Had she and Todd Forrest been truly close? Had they fallen in love? Or was it just a physical thing? He didn’t know why, but knowing would make him feel better. Maybe it would just give him some clarity as to whether something had truly been starting between him and Reilly, or whether she had just been confused and vulnerable.

  More than anything, he wished that he knew how she felt about what was happening. Was she in shock? Was she at least a little bit happy? Or did she simply not know how to feel? Chris’s heart went out to her. He knew she would dislike the inevitability of it all at least, hate that loss of control that was so important to her.

  In truth, it was just one of those days when Chris felt beaten. Beaten by the endless tide of horror that kept washing up on his desk, beaten by his inability to control his feelings in an impossible situation. It would pass, he knew.

  He just had to plough on through it.

  Something was bugging Pete Kennedy. He was a thoughtful man, but not given to over-analysis. Things went the way they went, that was all, and sometimes it didn’t pay to look too closely into them. The Chef murder investigation was closed, and the second after it did, about ten new files were dropped onto his desk, all as urgent and troubling as the last. He kept his head down, getting on with work the best way he knew how: attack it head on.

  But something felt a little lacking to him. The end of the latest murder investigation just didn’t sit right. It wasn’t simply that Peroni must have been the man who’d tried to have him killed. He was more of a professional than that. Pete Kennedy had stared down the barrel of a gun more than once and he had tried very hard to let those incidents go. Carry those around with you, and you would be a dead man walking, waiting for the crack of the next trigger.

  Nico Peroni was guilty of something, no question. But the man just seemed more broken to Kennedy than evil. He was no psychologist, obviously. He couldn’t look inside a man and see his soul. Kennedy believed unquestionably in the soul, and in good and evil. He believed that some of the criminals they’d death with in the past were just born evil. He and Reilly would have agreed on that score.

  They had dealt with serial killers before. Men who got a desperate thrill from killing, from making death into a kind of art form. They took pride in their work, and more often as not, once they were caught, they liked to wax lyrical about how clever they had been, how they had gotten away with it for so long. But Nico Peroni wasn’t doing that. In fact, he wasn’t saying anything, just sitting in his cell, as silent as a bell in an abandoned church tower.

  It didn’t sit right with Kennedy, but then the evidence was there, wasn’t it? Maybe this bloke was different. Not everyone followed the same pattern.

  Kennedy would have liked to know one thing, though. It was the same thing he wanted to know in all of his cases: Why? Why would anyone do this?

  Of course, the motives never satisfied him. So silly, bordering on petty.

  But still, he wanted to know.

  Hazy memories were coming back to him from the night he staked out Harry McMurty. He remembered sitting in his car, anticipating his meal. He remembered the knock at the window, the smile of the man who handed him his food. It could have been anyone, of course. Anyone would knock on a window and deliver a meal if you gave them a few quid. But whoever it was, it wasn’t Nico Peroni.

  Of that, he was sure.

  The lab’s analysis of the burger had proven that the oil used to cook the mushroom was different from that used to cook the meat. That had been cooked in standard bulk buy canola oil. The fast food restaurant said they used that on all of their food. The mushroom though, had been cooked in virgin olive oil. No surprises there, really. Just confirming a forgone conclusion. But still, that night continued to worm away at him, no matter how he tried to shake it off like he did with his other brushes with death.

  He might have to talk things over with Chris, see if he could give him some perspective. That’s what having a partner was for.

  Chapter 35

  ‘My boy Darren started seeing the Gorman girl when he was about fifteen. He was a good boy then, for the most part. He was only getting into some of the mischief that all young boys will. The music, my goodness. All that noise.’

  She paused and took a sip of her tea. Reilly knew there was no point trying to hurry her through. Janey Smith had an audience for the first time in years. Besides, Reilly knew you sometimes got the nest out of people by just letting them ramble.

  ‘Grace was a good girl. I liked her, but I thought she was a bit young. At fifteen, young boys are looking for things that a younger girl just shouldn’t be expected to give, if you catch my drift. But I kept an eye on them and they seemed happy enough. Her parents were very strict so there was no chance of hanky panky around there.’

  Janey had put out a packet of custard creams for them. Gary was dunking them, one after another into his tea, transfixed on Janey as though she was telling him a priceless secret.

  ‘They used to do all the usual things kids of that age do, go to the pictures, listen to records, get milkshakes from the chipper. But then,’ she paused, looking pained. ‘My oldest son, Brendan came back from his dad’s place. I want you to understand,’ she said, ‘I would never have left him with his father if I didn’t have to. But he wouldn’t let me go without leaving one of the boys behind. Darren was my baby. And Brendan liked his father. They were one and the same.’

  ‘Did you have contact with Brendan while he lived with his father?’ asked Reilly.

  ‘On and off. As much as I was allowed. I thought, when he came back, that he wanted us to have a relationship. To heal. But he just wanted to use us, to wreck our lives. When I say I lost a child, this is what I mean. Brendan I had lost already, but Darren was mine. He was a good boy
and we were a family. Him and me and his stepfather. But Brendan came back and I lost Darren. Watching him change was like watching someone die. I couldn’t reach him, no one could.’

  ‘How exactly did he change?’ asked Reilly.

  ‘He got mean, like his brother. He began to steal from us, to threaten us. He told us that we had ruined his life. He started getting in trouble. I heard him shouting at young Grace, calling her awful things. I told her to get out and not to come back. I didn’t want her mixed up in it all. I knew Brendan was behind it but I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t make it stop.’

  She struggled to retain her composure. Reilly could see that Janey Smith was a good woman, who had been worn away by the circumstances of her life. It took all the strength she had now, just to get through each day. It was a monumental effort for her even to tell them this story.

  ‘If I could go back in time,’ she said, ‘I never would have let Brendan back into our lives. I would have shut the door on him. I would have shunned him, if it had stopped all the damage he caused.’

  ‘Do you remember if Brendan and Grace knew each other at all?’ asked Reilly.

  ‘Of course they did. Wherever Darren went, his brother followed. Didn’t let them have a moment’s peace. Brendan called Grace his “little golden girl”. He was nicer to her than anyone else. I thought she might have been a good influence on him actually.’

  Reilly winced at what she guessed was a completely misguided assessment. No one could have been a good influence on Brendan Keating. Maybe he was obsessed with Grace, and maybe he used her as a way to break down his brother even further, but he didn’t care about her. She had no power to change him.

  ‘Do you remember any incidents from around the time of Grace’s disappearance? Did Darren and Brendan fight at all?’

  Janey thought for a while. ‘There was one time,’ she said, ‘when Darren held a steak knife to his brother’s throat. “Leave her alone,” he said. Brendan just laughed.’