‘Oh, yeah. That was before. It didn’t find much, to be honest with you.’
I resisted the urge to kick the back of his chair. Get it together. You’re making both of us look bad.
As if he’d heard me, he sat up straighter. ‘If you have a map of the area, I can show everyone the route the dog picked out.’
Of course Una Burt had a map of the area – a satellite photograph of it, in fact, and it was on her laptop so it could be projected on the wall behind her. Derwent got out of his chair and sloped up to the front of the room, the picture of a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework properly. As he’d done the previous evening, he described where the dog had alerted and why it was possibly significant.
‘What do we know about the owner of this property?’ Una Burt tapped the house three gardens over.
‘He’s a pensioner. His name is Harold Lowe and he’s been in a nursing home for a few months according to the neighbour. I don’t know of any connection between him and Kate Emery.’
‘Is the house obviously unoccupied?’
‘Yes,’ Derwent said slowly, thinking about it. ‘But the house is in pretty good condition and the garden is fairly neat. The neighbour I spoke to still cuts the grass for him and trims the hedges. He has a key to the gate but it’s not a very secure lock.’
‘Any CCTV nearby?’
‘Not that I saw. It’s a nice residential road. No one that I spoke to saw anything out of the ordinary but I’d like to go back there and try again when we get a better idea of when all of this took place. It’s hard to pin people down when you’re asking about a five-day period.’
‘We can narrow that down a bit,’ I said from the back of the room. ‘The last sighting of Kate Emery that I’ve heard about was Oliver Norris, the neighbour who was with Chloe when she discovered the crime scene. He told me he saw her on Friday evening. The only other sighting I heard about was Norris’s wife, and she saw Kate on Wednesday night.’
There was a ripple of interest around the room. Norris was just a little too involved to be believed without question.
‘Did anyone else see her on Friday?’ Burt asked.
‘Not as far as I know.’ I waited but there was nothing from the front of the room. ‘Georgia, did you find any neighbours who remembered seeing Kate?’
‘Oh – no. No, I didn’t. They couldn’t remember. No one noticed anything strange.’ It sounded weak and she knew it. ‘I didn’t really get to talk to that many people. DS Kerrigan sent me home.’
‘It was getting late.’ I was doing you a favour, you stupid bint. ‘We’ll go out again today and see if we can get any corroboration of Norris’s story.’
‘All right. I don’t want to assume anything at this stage.’ Burt frowned. ‘I’m not sure how Friday fits in with what we know about the cat. But then, I don’t know how much the cat … er …’
‘Shits?’ Derwent suggested, sitting down again.
‘Quite.’
‘The other thing we found that might help us narrow down when she disappeared,’ I said hastily, ‘was a receipt in the kitchen bin. Someone went shopping on Thursday and bought a lot of food.’
‘A week’s worth for a normal person,’ Derwent said with a glint in his eye. I ignored him.
‘It was all put away but not eaten. There were no wrappers in the bin – nothing to say she’d used anything she bought.’
‘That’ll be a time-stamped receipt,’ Colin Vale said happily. ‘I can check the CCTV from the supermarket. Make sure it really was her who went shopping. See if she was alone. That kind of thing.’
‘Good idea. We’re getting a list of transactions from her bank, aren’t we? Try and find her on the CCTV in every shop that would have it. I want to see her and I want to see if anyone was with her, or following her,’ Burt said. ‘I want to know if she looked tense or if she was the same as ever. I want to know if there was anything strange about the last twenty-four hours before she disappeared.’
‘Did you find anything else in the house?’ Colin Vale asked. ‘A passport? Bank cards?’
‘We found her passport and her wallet,’ I said. It had been in the kitchen, on top of the microwave, complete with her bank cards and gym membership and supermarket loyalty cards. ‘No mobile phone, though we’ve asked her service provider to let us know if it’s in use. No keys.’
‘You’d want the keys,’ Derwent observed, ‘so you could shut the front door without making a big noise and drawing attention to yourself. If you’d killed her, I mean.’
‘The more I hear the more I think we’re right to treat it as murder,’ Una Burt said gravely. ‘What else did you find that might be of interest?’
‘A bag of dirty clothes,’ I said.
‘I know Kerrigan’s not exactly domesticated, but I didn’t think she’d get excited about laundry.’ It was a whisper, but a loud one, and it came from Pete Belcott.
‘It wasn’t laundry.’ It was Belcott’s habit to be rude to me but I absolutely refused to let him ruffle my feathers, especially when I was senior to him now. I described where I’d found the clothes and the condition they had been in. Una Burt’s eyebrows were raised.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Potentially. I think we have to be careful about it, though. She might have kept them as a souvenir of a particularly – er – passionate encounter.’ I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as everyone in the room turned to look at me, with the exception of Derwent. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t. But you never know.’
‘Indeed.’ Burt made a note. ‘But it’s of interest.’
‘Even if she was raped,’ Chris Pettifer said, ‘it doesn’t get us all that much closer to a killer, does it? If she killed him, that would be something else.’
Burt checked her watch. ‘I’m waiting to hear back from the forensic team about the blood. Keep working on the basis that Kate is the victim for the time being. We need motives and suspects and we’re already a few days behind the killer. I can’t waste any more time.’
‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘There’s no obvious reason for anyone to want to kill her. Everything we’ve found out so far points to her being a person who minded her own business, who worked hard, who was determined but slightly unscrupulous and maybe a little unwise, but it doesn’t add up to a motive.’
‘There’s the ex-husband,’ Derwent said.
‘Yes, but why kill her now? They divorced over a decade ago. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘She was a bit lively in her personal life,’ Georgia Shaw said.
‘According to one neighbour,’ I pointed out. ‘But she was attractive. Maybe she was playing two men off against one another and it went wrong. Maybe she made the wrong person jealous.’
Una Burt nodded. ‘I’ll mention it when I do the press conference later. If I appeal for her boyfriends and associates to come forward in confidence, we might get a better picture of what was happening in her life. What do we know about local suspects? Anyone of interest?’