‘I have worked with you before.’ I led the way out of the café. I hadn’t even bothered to take off my jacket.
Kate Emery’s house was silent as the grave and about as appealing. It was a sultry day, the sky heavy with the promise of rain, but inside the house the air was chilled and unwholesome. I followed Derwent into the hall and closed the door gently behind me, avoiding the dried blood on the paintwork as best I could. Even with gloves, I didn’t want to touch it, partly from legitimate concern about destroying evidence and partly because I was squeamish. It was more than a week since I’d been inside the house and it smelled foul: the ripe reek of decaying blood overlaid with rotting fruit and a bitter note of old cat shit. I put the back of my hand to my mouth as a precaution against the nausea swelling inside me.
‘OK?’ Derwent asked.
‘I just need to get used to it.’ I frowned at him. ‘How come you don’t mind it?’
‘Smelled worse.’ He’d left his jacket in the car, I noticed. I should have done the same. The smell would cling for the rest of the day, though it would catch in my hair as much as my clothes. Derwent was rolling up his sleeves. ‘So?’
I looked around, at the dark smudges that told a story of violence and savagery written in Kate Emery’s blood. ‘Walk it through?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
‘Killer or victim?’
He took a coin out of his pocket and balanced it on his thumb. ‘Heads or tails?’
‘Tails.’
He frowned. ‘I thought you’d go for heads.’
‘Get on with it.’
The coin spun in the air and he caught it, then showed me. ‘Tails.’
‘Killer, then.’
‘OK.’
‘So where did it start?’
‘The hall,’ Derwent said instantly. ‘Here. By the door.’
‘Someone arriving. Someone unwelcome.’
‘OK.’ Derwent took up a position inside the front door. ‘What happened?’
I pulled my pen out of my jacket pocket and held it up. ‘Imagine this is a blade.’
‘I’m feeling scared already.’
I mimed stabbing him, pulling the pen back and swinging it towards him a couple of times. He held his hands up, fending me off.
‘Drops of blood on the ground and on the walls. Small wounds.’
I nodded. ‘She was fighting the attacker off, wasn’t she?’
‘Trying to make some space for herself.’ Derwent turned and started up the stairs, one hand trailing an inch away from the wall where there was a long streak of blood. ‘So she runs up here.’
‘And I catch up with her—’ I took the stairs three at a time and reached out to grab Derwent’s ankle as he neared the top. ‘Trip her …’
He pitched forward, landed on his hands and flipped himself to the side, avoiding the actual bloodstain. He lay on his back and I bent over him to stab him again.
‘You need to get a lot closer than that to inflict the kind of damage she sustained here. Look at the stains on the carpet.’ He sat up and pointed. ‘Body here. Attacker on top. Those look like knee prints on either side of the main bloodstain.’
He was right; there were two smudges on the carpet fibres where the blood had pooled under the attacker’s knees.
‘Lie down again.’ I knelt carefully with one thigh on either side of his torso and pretended to stab him in the chest.
‘Lower.’
‘What?’
‘She got up and ran from here. You just stabbed me in the heart. No one gets up from that.’
I shuffled back a little, moving down to his hips. It was inevitable, I think, that it felt as if we weren’t acting out a murder any more. Embarrassment brought heat to my face. I couldn’t look at him but I knew Derwent was laughing.
‘All right, love, no need to enjoy it.’
‘Shut up.’
He grinned up at me. ‘Professionalism, Kerrigan.’
I stabbed him in the stomach with the pen, hard enough that he caught his breath and my wrist. He held it for a moment, looking up at me with a challenge in his eyes.
‘You are supposed to be fighting me off,’ I pointed out, in command of myself again. ‘I was wondering when you were going to start.’
He let go of me and closed his eyes, his hands falling to the floor.
‘She’s getting weaker. You’ve injured her seriously now and she stays here for a while, bleeding into the carpet.’
‘Agreed.’ I stood up. ‘Maybe I think I’ve done enough. I stand up and have a breather.’
‘But she’s faking.’ He twisted, jumped to his feet and jogged into the bathroom. I followed and put the lights on. The blood screamed at me from every surface, darker now, just as horrible.
‘Burt was right. This is a terrible place to try to hide.’
‘She didn’t have time to get any further away.’ Derwent stood in the middle of the small room, his face sombre. ‘Let’s take it that you spend a fair amount of time here making sure you’ve done enough damage to kill her.’
‘But she didn’t die here, as far as we can tell.’ I stayed in the doorway. ‘How did that work? She was trapped. Then she ran past her attacker, even though she was bleeding profusely and had to be weak, disorientated – in no position to out-think anyone. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the blood in the kitchen. Unless the attacker was injured, or incapacitated somehow, I don’t see it.’
‘More faking?’ Derwent pointed to a concentration of blood beside and behind the toilet. ‘If she lay here and pretended to be dead, maybe it looked as if the job was done.’
‘Maybe.’ I tapped the pen on my cheek, thinking about it. ‘Or there were two attackers and they distracted each other.’
Derwent nodded. ‘Which would explain the inconsistencies in the blood-spatter report. Two attackers, one taller than the other. Working together. Taking it in turns. Different blades. Different angles of attack.’
‘Maybe one was trying to stop the other,’ I said.
Derwent shook his head at me. ‘Stop trying to make excuses for her.’
‘For who?’
‘Come off it, Kerrigan.’
I sighed. ‘OK. Bethany and Chloe, working together or arguing, killed Kate.’
‘And whoever helped them to get rid of the body turned on Chloe later. Maybe because he couldn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.’
It was plausible and I didn’t like it. Not at all.
‘We don’t know it was them.’
‘We don’t know it wasn’t.’ Derwent leaned back against the door frame, squinting a little as he tended to when he was tired. ‘Depends on how much you trust the blood lady to have got the report right.’
‘I trust Kev Cox. He says she’s good.’
‘Well, then. What other explanation is there?’ He waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, he raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’ I looked down at the bloodstain at my feet. ‘Let’s finish this.’
‘OK.’ He stepped away from the bathroom. ‘Whatever happens, she makes it downstairs.’
‘What about this: the killers go downstairs to clean up. While they’re in the shower room …’