‘She makes a move. She’s holding on to the bannisters this time because she’s half-dead.’ Derwent ran down the stairs, dragged a hand up to the latch of the front door but stopped. ‘For some reason she doesn’t go out.’
I followed, looking over his shoulder at the smear of blood, at the lock underneath it. ‘It makes sense if someone was chasing her. She wouldn’t have had time to undo the locks.’
‘But not if the killer or killers are scrubbing the blood off.’
‘Unless there was something she needed from the kitchen.’
‘More than she needed someone to call her an ambulance?’ Derwent raised his eyebrows. ‘I think not.’
‘Maybe she was afraid to go out the front. Maybe she thought there was an accomplice waiting for her.’
‘Maybe there was.’ Derwent sighed. ‘OK. For whatever reason, she doesn’t go through the front door.’ He turned and walked down the hall towards the kitchen. ‘If you’re chasing her, you haven’t caught up with her yet, by the way. She has time to bleed all over the hall but no one attacks her here.’
In the kitchen he draped himself over the counter. ‘She stops here for a rest.’
‘Did we find her phone?’
‘It was in her bag.’
‘Maybe that’s why she came in here. Maybe she was looking for her phone while she stood here and bled.’
‘There’s a landline in here too.’ It was on the counter. ‘She didn’t try to call 999 from that either.’
‘So she didn’t want the police.’ I swallowed. ‘Because it was her daughter who was trying to kill her?’
Derwent shrugged. ‘She makes it to the kitchen door, unlocks it, pushes the bolts back and opens it. You still haven’t caught up with her, if you’re chasing her.’
‘I’m not chasing her. I can’t be.’
‘She runs out into the night, unobserved by any neighbours. She doesn’t scream or call for help. She runs through the garden because there’s no access to the street from here.’ Derwent stepped out onto the patio and looked down the garden. ‘And then she disappears without a trace, despite having lost most of the blood from her body.’
‘The rain didn’t help us.’
‘Nope.’
‘She couldn’t have got away,’ I said. ‘Even if they were distracted by cleaning up.’ They. I’d almost accepted it was the girls. ‘She’d have collapsed.’
‘And their accomplice picked her up.’
‘And took her to the storage unit until they were ready to dispose of her body.’
I shivered, thinking about Kate running for her life, too afraid to call for help. To see someone you love turn on you …
‘Meanwhile I’m having a shower,’ I said, pulling myself back to my role. ‘I clean up after myself using only what’s available to me in the house, so there’s no chance of tracing me via anything I brought with me.’
‘Clever you.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Yeah.’ He came back in, frowning. ‘This is either a highly organised, competent murder—’
‘Or an absolute shambles,’ I finished.
‘Either everything went according to plan, or nothing did.’
‘And if it was Chloe and Bethany, with the help of an accomplice, why did Chloe have to die?’
‘They couldn’t trust her not to talk.’
You don’t know what I am – did she mean a murderer? It was possible.
I sat down at the kitchen table and propped my chin on my hand. Derwent leaned back against the island, watching me, not interrupting. Eventually I sighed.
‘All of the evidence tells us a story but it doesn’t make any sense and it’s never made any sense. Every time we think we’re making progress, we run into a brick wall.’
‘I’ve noticed. So?’
‘So maybe it’s because we’re being pointed at the brick wall.’
A clatter at the front door made my head snap up. I stared at Derwent, the two of us surprised into immobility. The front door closed and footsteps moved slowly through the hall: high heels clicking on the tiles, keys jangling. Derwent headed towards the kitchen door, as silent as it was possible for him to be. I was right behind him, my hand on my radio.
She was in the sitting room, opening and closing cupboards, trim in a black suit and spike-heeled black patent court shoes.
‘Can I help you?’ Derwent said. The woman whirled around, her eyes wide with horror. She was a total stranger, I registered, in the split second before she started to scream.
29
Neela Singh wasn’t much reassured by the news that we were police officers rather than murderers waiting for a new victim. It took a long time for her to regain her composure enough to explain that she was entitled to be in the house – more entitled to be there than we were, in fact, because she was there at the request of the homeowner.
‘I’m an estate agent with Miller Hamilton.’ With a flash of pride, she added, ‘We’ve been retained as the sole agents to bring this property to the market.’
‘Congratulations,’ Derwent said. ‘You’ll have buyers queuing down the street for this one, given what happened here.’
‘You’d be surprised. Get it cleaned up, take up the carpets that are too stained, touch up the paintwork …’ She flicked her hair so it fell smoothly down her back. ‘This is London. Buyers want what they want. This is a sought-after area and a house in this location is always going to sell. A house this age is going to have history anyway, that’s what I say. Plenty of people probably died here over the years. It’s just that we know about this one and it’s recent. But once the place is cleaned up no one will think twice about it.’
She was very pretty when she wasn’t screaming her head off, and probably good at her job. She certainly didn’t seem to be put off by the bloody smears all over the kitchen, which I put down to lack of imagination rather than heartlessness. The state of the house jangled my nerves though. I should have been used to it, but I wasn’t.
Something else was bothering me, too. ‘When you say you’re here at the request of the owner, who do you mean? Kate Emery?’
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ She looked from me to Derwent. ‘She was only the tenant. The house never belonged to her.’
‘It didn’t?’ Derwent frowned. ‘So who does it belong to?’
‘A lady named Phyllis Charnock. I think she’s Kate Emery’s aunt? Between you and me, she’s an old witch. She lives down in Cornwall somewhere in a massive house. She must be in her seventies.’ Neela said it as if that was unimaginably old. She herself was probably twenty-five at the most.
‘So she heard her niece was dead and decided to put the house on the market?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘People will never cease to amaze me.’
‘No, that’s the thing. She’d already decided to put it on the market. She retained us months ago. She’d given her niece formal notice to quit and everything.’ Neela grinned. ‘Can’t deny it would have been easier to sell the house before someone was murdered in it. It’s a good thing I like a challenge. But at least the tenant looked after the place. She renovated it, actually.’ She ran her hand over the kitchen counter, avoiding the blood. ‘These kitchens don’t come cheap. That’s a Corian worktop she put in and they cost a fortune. She’s kept the house lovely. She looked after it like it was her own, she said.’