‘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 move 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.’