The Last Girl

by Casey, Jane

  ‘What didn’t happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. And neither do you.’ He walked away, chewing gum aggressively, and none of the journalists outside the final cordon were stupid or desperate enough to attempt to draw him into conversation.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  IT WAS A frankly toxic journey back to the office, made worse by the morning traffic. The delay didn’t bother me as much as it might have, and nor did the silent rage emanating from the seat beside me. With nothing to do but mind the map I could sit quietly and rest, half-asleep as the sun streamed into the car. I was chronically short on sleep, not functioning at anything like my best, and I assumed Derwent was in the same condition. We stopped for petrol after travelling a mile in just under an hour, and Derwent came back to the car with a bottle of aspirin.

  ‘Fucking childproof cap.’ He wrestled with it, spinning the top ineptly.

  ‘Give me that.’ I twisted the cap off on my first attempt, having actually looked at the bottle and worked out how to do it. ‘How many do you want?’

  ‘What’s the maximum dose?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Read the label, then. Whatever it is, double it.’ He started the car and pulled out of the petrol station, using the entrance instead of the exit. The traditional volley of horns and shouted abuse followed.

  ‘If you ever get tired of being a policeman, why don’t you set up as an unlicensed minicab driver? You have all the skills.’

  ‘Because I don’t like the smell of those little air fresheners that look like Christmas trees, and I can’t stand drunk people when I’m sober.’

  ‘No need to drive sober, is there? I’m sure most of them have a drink or two before they start work.’ I was skimming through the instructions. ‘I don’t think it would be safe to double the dosage. Headache?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve got one already.’

  ‘Along with a cracking sense of humour.’

  ‘That’s me. Funny and clever and handsome. It’s not right that one man should have so many advantages in life.’

  ‘They sit lightly on you.’ I gave him two pills and a bottle of water. ‘Drink the whole thing. You’re probably dehydrated.’

  ‘I’m not hung-over,’ he snapped.

  ‘I didn’t say you were. It’s a hot day.’ I looked at him curiously. ‘Did you have a drink last night when you got back?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘It was late for that.’

  ‘It helps me to sleep. I bet you found your own way to relax, didn’t you? Nothing like sleeping in a strange bed to make you feel frisky.’

  I could feel myself blushing despite wishing quite fiercely to remain unmoved. ‘Sorry. You’re way off.’

  ‘Am I? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I should call Philip Kennford.’ I said it more or less at random, to change the subject. ‘I promised Lydia and Savannah I’d let him know what happened last night.’

  Derwent groaned. ‘Don’t involve him. He’ll just want to give me a bollocking about something or other. I can’t be arsed, honestly.’

  ‘We should talk to him about Niele too.’

  ‘I’d rather stick my bum in a beehive.’

  ‘He might know something.’

  ‘About what, exactly?’

  ‘Why she died.’ I shrugged. ‘How do we know he’s not a viable suspect?’

  ‘It doesn’t connect.’ Derwent was scowling. ‘For one thing, no one is mad enough to wipe out five people for the sake of shutting up one who had already spilled her guts to the police. If Niele was the sole target, she would have been the only one to die. There was no reason to kill anyone else when they were all tucked up nice and quietly in bed. Anyway, I had a chat with one of the other detectives while you were upstairs with Godley. The word is that Niele’s house was the headquarters for the Eastern Europeans Skinner recruited to do his dirty work.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Not at all. That’s why Godley was involved.’

  ‘You mean those men killed the Clapham boys?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not involved in the investigation, remember?’ He relented a little. ‘Probably. They’re going to try to match the ballistics. The weapons are the right calibre, so that’s a start.’

  ‘So who killed them? Ken Goldsworthy’s lads?’

  ‘If he has anyone that slick on his team, which I doubt.’ Derwent’s forehead was furrowed. ‘It looked familiar to me, that crime scene. I’ve seen killing like that before. Cold, clinical, detached. Not getting excited, even though there are five of them to slot. I went to a crime scene in Shepherd’s Bush once that was just like this – straight shooting, no messing. Three dead that time.’

  ‘Did you catch the killer?’

  ‘Couldn’t put a case together, but I was pretty sure who’d done it.’

  ‘And it was?’

  ‘Someone who worked with John Skinner. A guy named Larch. Tony was his first name. One of those people who looks like a killer – mad eyes, the bloke had, ice-blue and staring. He was bald by choice, I always thought to avoid shedding hairs at crime scenes, but also because it made him look like a hard bastard. He wasn’t a big lad but he scared the crap out of me. When Skinner moved to Spain, Larch left the UK too. He spent a bit of time in South America, then the Caribbean, and then we lost track of him. Kept his nose clean so we didn’t really have a reason to follow him around, more’s the pity, because he had good taste in holiday destinations.’

  ‘Do you think it’s worth finding out if he’s back in the country?’

  ‘Probably. But it’s not my case, remember? Anyway, why would one of John Skinner’s associates take out his new partners in crime? I can’t see him doing Goldsworthy’s work for him.’

  ‘Maybe because Skinner’s lost control of them and even he’s worried about it.’

  ‘John Skinner doesn’t care about what happens to his empire. He doesn’t care if there’s a shooting a day for the next year. He’s in prison for the duration. His best chance to get out is to come down with something terminal and get compassionate release so he can die in relative comfort.’ Derwent shrugged. ‘Can’t happen to a more deserving person. I won’t be weeping for him.’

  ‘It must be difficult to give up on it. He’s worked hard all his life – on the wrong side of the law, but he’s still a businessman, when all’s said and done. I can’t under stand why he handed over the fight to the Eastern Europeans in the first place.’

  ‘Because they were the only thugs more brutal than his own, I reckon.’

  ‘And then he changed his mind?’

  ‘Or someone changed it for him.’

  ‘Like who?’ I started to say, but I knew who. My boss. Superintendent Charles Godley, a man who was above suspicion, a man who couldn’t be bought, you’d have said. And unless I was very much mistaken I had heard him make the suggestion that had resulted in Niele Adamkuté’s death. Not half an hour before, I had unwittingly assisted him to destroy evidence, because whatever had been on the phone had to have been important for him to turn up at the crime scene like that to delete it. I couldn’t deal with it at that moment. I pushed it out of my mind with an almost physical effort.

  ‘Anyway, Kennford. Do I call him?’

  ‘You do not.’

  ‘Then Lydia is going to wonder why he doesn’t care enough to get in touch with her.’

  Derwent snorted. ‘No guarantee he’d follow it up anyway.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘No. That’s an order.’

  I could see there was no point in arguing when Derwent had made up his mind, but I wasn’t happy about it, and when we got to the office and found Philip Kennford there, I was relieved.

  ‘DI Derwent.’ He had been waiting in reception, watching the door, and when we walked in he got to his feet with a jerk, as if he was spring-loaded. Derwent stopped for a second out of sheer surprise, then continued towards the lift.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Kennford. I don’t have time to talk
at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t walk away from me.’

  Derwent turned around but kept moving, walking backwards. ‘I really do need to go.’

  ‘You don’t even know why I’m here.’ There was a note of desperation in Kennford’s voice, a strain I hadn’t heard before. I looked at him curiously, noting that he was red-eyed and pale with fatigue. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  Derwent might not have been the most sensitive of people, but even he was able to spot that Kennford was in difficulties. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘I’ve got a few minutes. Start talking.’

  ‘Here?’ Kennford looked around. ‘Like this?’

  ‘I could try to find us an interview room so we can talk to Mr Kennford in private,’ I suggested.

  Derwent glowered at me. ‘What a good idea.’ To Kennford, he said, ‘Come up to the team’s room. But I meant what I said. I don’t have much time this morning.’

  The barrister followed us into the lift. ‘I gather you were at a major crime scene in Poplar. That’s what your colleague said when I rang.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Derwent popped a piece of chewing gum into his mouth.

  ‘Who were the victims?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  The lift was moving especially slowly, it seemed. Derwent chewed his gum. Kennford waited. He was good enough at asking questions to let the silence grow until Derwent couldn’t stand it any longer.

  ‘I’m sorry, but it was Niele. And the men she was living with. Five bodies.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘They were shot.’

  ‘Did she suffer?’

  ‘Looked like it was instant. She didn’t get much time to react anyway.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a consolation.’ Derwent gave it maximum sarcasm.

  Kennford shook his head. ‘You play with fire, you have to expect to get burned.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The lift doors opened and Kennford followed us out. ‘I mean that she was up to her neck in organised crime when I knew her. I’m presuming nothing had changed.’

  ‘Seems not.’

  ‘Poor old Niele.’ There was something perfunctory about his impromptu epitaph, something unfeeling, and it nettled me.

  ‘She could have been the mother of your child.’

  ‘Not her. She got rid of it at the first opportunity.’ He looked down at me. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t have had anything to do with the child.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you care about it?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What about the fact that someone you helped to create was making their own way in the world?’

  ‘She was on the pill, she told me. I took her word for it. I didn’t want another child and it was nothing to do with me that she made a mistake and got pregnant. I can only take responsibility for things that are actually my fault.’

  ‘It must be lovely to be so free of guilt.’

  ‘I have plenty of guilt about other things.’ The shadow was back on his face. ‘Look, I can make this quick, but I do need to tell you a few things I should have mentioned before.’

  ‘You surprise me.’ Derwent held open the door for him. ‘Have a seat, Mr Kennford, and I’ll let DC Kerrigan work her magic to get an interview room.’

  I turned to do as I was told and saw Godley in the conference room with Kev who was talking at a hundred miles an hour, and a very pretty forensics investigator I recognised from the Kennford house. Godley glanced up at more or less the same moment and beckoned me to join them, leaning sideways to see if Derwent was at his desk. He saw Philip Kennford beside him and frowned, then held up two fingers and beckoned again. Both of you, in here, now.

  Taking the view that Kennford didn’t need to know where we were going I leaned down and muttered in Derwent’s ear that we were wanted, and for once he didn’t bother to argue.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, shutting the door of the conference room behind us so Kennford couldn’t overhear anything.

  ‘Kev has some preliminary results he thought we needed to know about from Philip Kennford’s house.’

  ‘Thanks to my brilliant investigator here.’

  ‘Caitriona Bennett.’ She shook hands with me and Derwent. She was a bit younger than me and tiny, with bobbed fair hair and clear freckled skin that blushed easily. With a name like Caitriona she probably had one Irish parent, if not two, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask about it. ‘I didn’t do anything particularly brilliant.’

  ‘I disagree.’ Kev was bursting with pride. ‘Have a look at this.’ He handed me an evidence envelope, brown paper with a plastic window so I could see a small silver shape inside it.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s called a bail.’

  I folded the bag so I could see it more clearly, a triangle of metal with a loop on top. The whole thing was no more than five millimetres long. It had a delicate pattern chased into it. ‘What does it do?’

  ‘It’s a jeweller’s fixing. You attach it to something you want to make into a pendant and that’s how it’s suspended from the chain. This one is actually platinum, which is pretty unusual. It’s the sort of thing you would use for high-end design. Specialist stuff.’

  ‘That’s what it is! I thought it looked familiar.’ It was strange how seeing it out of context made it hard to recognise. I looked up. ‘Something you use to make jewellery?’

  ‘Yep. But it gets more interesting,’ Kev said. ‘Tell them about where you found it.’

  ‘It was on the stairs to the first floor of Endsleigh Drive, in a footprint.’ I remembered her working on the stairs when we were touring the crime scenes, meticulously examining every inch of the tread where she was sitting. ‘Looking at it, I think it had been caught in the tread of a boot in some mud – we recovered some dried dirt in the same place. Chalky soil. We’re analysing it to try to narrow down the area it might come from.’

  ‘Would Sussex fit?’ Derwent asked.

  ‘I’m not an expert on soil.’ And she wasn’t going to speculate. I knew Derwent was thinking of the great chalk escarpments of the South Downs, and I knew why.

  ‘To be honest, that’s not the most exciting thing about it. Tell them about the DNA.’ Kev was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  ‘We recovered some skin cells from inside the loop. We only have enough for a partial profile at the moment but we’re working on that too. It’s taken us a few days to get this far but the initial results show that the DNA belongs to someone related to Laura Kennford, but not to her mother. A half-sibling.’

  ‘If we got DNA from a half-sibling could you match it to the sample?’

  ‘That would be ideal.’

  Derwent looked at me. ‘We know about a half-sibling, don’t we?’

  ‘One who lives with a jewellery designer.’

  ‘One who was her father’s favourite before his pesky new wife intervened.’

  ‘One whom he might have wanted to protect.’

  ‘Time to talk to Mr Kennford, I think, since he’s here,’ Godley said. ‘And this time, no more crap. I don’t mind arresting him for attempting to pervert the course of justice, if that helps to jog his memory.’

  Kennford actually needed very little in the way of persuasion to tell us what he knew, especially when Caitriona had run through her account of finding the bail and what it signified. His face crumpled, and I thought it was the first time I’d seen him experience an honest emotion since I’d met him.

  ‘What could I do? I love Savannah. I didn’t want to believe she was involved.’

  ‘What made you think she was?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw her. In the mirror. Before she hit me.’ There was a short, meaningful silence. ‘Not properly. Not enough to be sure it was her.’

  ‘You must have been fairly sure or you wouldn’t have bothered to lie to us.’

  ‘I only saw her for
a moment. Just her arm, really, and she was wearing gloves. I wasn’t sure, but the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it was her. It was the way she moved, and the height, and the fact that she was so slim. I’m going on my instinct here, but I don’t think I was wrong. I know her well, you know.’

  ‘Not as well as you used to before you dumped her.’

  ‘I made a mistake about that. I should have stood up to Vita.’ He began to sob again. ‘My poor little Savannah.’

  ‘What about poor little Laura? And Vita?’

  He nodded. ‘I got it wrong. They paid the price. Vita brought it on herself, but Laura was an innocent bystander.’

  ‘Maybe not such a bystander.’ I turned to Derwent. ‘The messages Seth Carberry saw on Laura’s phone – “I want to see you”, that kind of thing – they could have been from Savannah. Not a boyfriend.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Turning back to Kennford I said, ‘What if Laura was trying to set up a meeting between Savannah and you and Vita to confront you because she was fed up about being kept away from her sister? Savannah could have taken advantage of that to get into the house and attack your family.’

  ‘Only half of it.’

  ‘Because Lydia was out of sight in the pool. And Laura was supposed to be out, wasn’t she? Maybe Savannah thought Laura was Lydia and Laura was the one who was supposed to survive.’

  ‘Or maybe she was looking for Lydia when she encountered you.’ Derwent’s forehead was crinkled with worry. ‘And she didn’t keep searching after she hit you since she couldn’t take the risk of hanging around until you woke up. You wouldn’t be so easy to attack if you were on your guard.’

  ‘She didn’t hurt me. Not really. She loves me.’

  ‘It’s a strange version of love, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ Derwent was chewing rapidly. ‘What are we going to do about Lydia? She’s got to be in danger.’

  ‘That’s why I was trying to stop you from letting her move in with Savannah.’

  ‘It might have helped if you’d been honest with us,’ Godley said heavily. ‘As it stands, we have a teenage girl living in the same house with someone who wanted to kill her not quite a week ago.’