‘Get out.’ I threw a pencil at him and he sauntered off, chuckling. I put my headphones back on but before I started the video again, I looked for Kate’s picture. It was pinned up on the wall, fuzzy from being blown up to A4 size. Dark hair in the corner of the picture was Chloe’s, though someone had cropped her out. Kate was squinting, her face screwed up. Her hair had blown across her nose and mouth, but she was smiling. Full of life. She had been attractive enough to make men abandon their principles, break their vows, humiliate themselves to please her. She had stuck up for her daughter in the face of institutional indifference. She had started a business and tried to make it work. She had done her best, I thought.
Or she had used strangers for sex, and tormented her pious neighbour for her own amusement, and pestered her ex-husband for money, and victimised her daughter because she needed her to be dependent on her. Two totally different pictures. Two sides of the same coin.
Except that in Kate’s case it was heads you lose, tails you lose. Whether she was good or bad, she was dead. It didn’t really matter whether she had done anything to bring it about. The only person responsible for Kate’s death was the person who killed her. I wasn’t going to sit in judgement on her. The only reason I needed to know what she was like was so I could work out why she’d died.
17
‘I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time to get the two of them in for questioning but it doesn’t get us that much further, does it?’ Derwent looked around the room where the team were sitting. Most of us were slumped in our chairs, exhausted and fed up. Saturday morning. No weekend for us. ‘All that we’ve got from it is that Kate had sexual relations with at least two of her neighbours.’
Una Burt nodded. ‘That’s not illegal and not necessarily a motive for murder.’
‘If Eleanor Norris knew about it, it might have been,’ I observed.
‘But did she?’
‘I don’t think so.’ I tried to remember how she had been the first time I’d met her. Nervy. Tense. Shocked. Not like someone who was braced for the horror of an investigation. ‘She was still ironing her husband’s shirts. I don’t think she’d have been doing that if she’d known he’d cheated on her.’
‘What about if Norris had found out about his brother?’ Georgia said. ‘He could have killed Kate in a jealous rage.’
‘But let Morgan stay in his house?’ Derwent frowned. ‘He’d have started off by kicking him out. And I thought he looked properly shocked when I mentioned it.’
Colin Vale cleared his throat. ‘I do have one new lead. I was going through the information we got from Kate Emery’s bank. She was living right at the edge of her income, incidentally – she had a fair amount coming in but she dipped into her overdraft every month and she only paid off the minimum on her credit cards.’
‘So she was depending on Emery’s financial support,’ I said. ‘Even though it was really intended for Chloe.’
‘Unless she had some other source of income that was going into a different bank account. I haven’t found anything to suggest that.’ Colin smiled happily. ‘What I did find was a direct debit she cancelled last week. It was a business name I didn’t know so I asked the bank for more information. Turns out it’s a small storage company in Roehampton. She had an account with them. It’s paid up to the end of this month.’
‘Storage space for her products?’ I suggested. ‘If she was trying to save money that would be one place to start.’
‘Maybe. But the timing’s interesting,’ Burt said. ‘Anything that happened right before she died could have triggered her murder. Maeve, take Georgia and check it out. See if you can find out what she was keeping there.’
I was more than glad to go, even with Georgia in tow. I would take any excuse to get out of the office and the slow death of hope that we’d be ending this investigation any time soon.
In the car park, Georgia went to the passenger door of the battered Vauxhall pool car.
‘Do you want to drive?’ I asked.
She looked terrified. ‘No, that’s OK.’
I unlocked the car, wondering if I’d scared her and if so whether it was worth trying to mend fences. I hadn’t tried very hard with Georgia and I couldn’t work out why.
I was putting my seatbelt on when the door behind me opened. Derwent swung himself into the back seat.
‘What the—’
‘Get out of here before Burt notices I’m gone.’ He was keeping low, peering out through the window as if he was worried about snipers.
‘You must have something better to do,’ I said, not moving.
‘Nope. Only boring paperwork.’ He reached around the side of my seat and pressed down on my thigh. ‘This leg is for the accelerator – that’s the pedal at the end of your foot. Pushing it makes the car move.’
‘Don’t touch me.’ I adjusted the rear-view mirror so I could glower at him.
‘Most of the inspectors I’ve worked with never went out on enquiries,’ Georgia observed. She was transformed, her eyes bright as she stared back at Derwent.
‘I’m not like most inspectors.’
‘He says, as if that’s a good thing.’
‘Oh, cheer up, Kerrigan.’
‘Get out of the car.’
‘No.’ In the mirror his eyes were steady, daring me to argue.
Georgia tried, not very hard, to suppress a giggle. I debated whether I should order both of them out of the car, or just get out myself and leave them to it. In the end, I reversed the car out of the space and drove to Roehampton in silence.
I almost overshot the road that led to the storage company and had to make a sharp turn. Georgia braced herself on the dashboard and Derwent swore.
‘Sorry.’ I concentrated on driving up the narrow lane between the high walls of two industrial units. The entrance to the storage company’s yard was concealed around a bend and led into a small yard with a row of garages on one side. The car lurched over the old, broken concrete, loose stones crunching under the wheels as I parked outside a Portakabin with a tattered sign in the window: OFFICE.
‘You’d never find this unless you knew it was here,’ Derwent commented. ‘We passed two other storage companies on the way here – big places with proper car parks and lifts. Why pick this one?’
‘Cheaper?’ I suggested.
‘It wasn’t, though. She was paying a couple of hundred quid a month.’
‘For this?’ Georgia wrinkled her nose. ‘That seems a bit steep.’
‘Maybe it was the customer service that sold her on it.’ I was looking at the elderly man who was standing on the steps of the Portakabin. He yawned and scratched his belly through the thin T-shirt that was stretched over it. His tracksuit bottoms were perilously low-slung, his trainers unlaced. You couldn’t have said his expression was welcoming. I got out of the car and walked over to him, Georgia beside me.
‘What’s your name, sir?’
‘Yawl.’ He spelled it for me. ‘First name’s Martin. I ain’t got no criminal convictions so don’t bother looking.’
‘I didn’t say I was a police officer.’
‘I knew you were Old Bill as soon as I saw you. Even pretty girls like you can’t hide it.’ He leered at Georgia who smiled as if she was genuinely pleased by the compliment. ‘What have you done now, Martin, I thought to myself. What do they want with an old bloke like you? I ain’t done nothing wrong, miss.’
‘Do you know this woman?’ I showed him Kate Emery’s picture.
‘Why?’ He looked past me, watching Derwent, who was wandering around inspecting the garages like a dog trying to decide where to wee.
‘Never mind why. Do you know her or don’t you?’
‘I know her.’