‘Not for someone who was defrauding her customers. Not for someone who would stop at nothing to get money – even making out that her daughter was more vulnerable than she actually was, so her ex-husband would keep paying to support her. Chloe was far from helpless according to everyone but Kate.’
‘Manipulative,’ Una Burt observed.
‘Desperate, maybe. She grew up in poverty, according to her aunt. She knew what it was like to be poor and she didn’t want to go back to that. She had two bits of bad luck: she divorced Brian Emery before he made his fortune and she put all her money into the house. If she’d inherited it, she’d have been set up for life, but it didn’t work out the way she’d planned.’
‘Where was Eleanor getting the money to pay her off?’
‘Oliver gets a nice salary from the church and I found statements for a joint account among his papers. As long as Eleanor was careful, she could skim money off the housekeeping and keep Kate off her back. But if Kate got greedy or desperate, Eleanor wouldn’t have had anywhere to turn.’
‘Do you think Eleanor killed her?’
‘No.’
‘Who then? Oliver?’
‘Not him either.’
‘We wondered about the girls,’ Derwent said. ‘Bethany and Chloe working together. We ran through it earlier at the house. The blood-spatter evidence is contradictory at best. We thought two attackers might explain it.’
‘But now I have a better explanation,’ I said. ‘And that’s the bad news.’
‘Go on,’ Una Burt said.
‘The reason we haven’t found Kate’s body is because there isn’t one.’ I paused as the chief inspector’s face paled. ‘Kate’s still alive.’
31
‘That’s impossible,’ Una Burt snapped. ‘She can’t be. You saw the house.’
‘It was staged,’ I said, almost apologetic. The time, the resources expended on a major murder investigation, the press conferences, the phone calls with senior officers: I could see Una Burt calculating the cost to her career and coming up with a figure that was unacceptably high. ‘Among the items we removed from Kate’s house was a needle. Liv sent it off to be tested for drugs. According to the lab, it was used to draw Kate’s blood.’
‘So?’
‘Kate was a nurse. Kate knew how to draw blood, and how to store it. Her body was never in the freezer – but her blood was. And when she was ready, she took the blood out of the storage unit, thawed it, and covered her house in it. There was so much blood. No one could have survived losing so much in one go, so we’ve spent ten days looking for a corpse. She made it look as if she had been murdered and we investigated it as if it was murder.’
‘Why? What good did it do her to be dead?’
‘She left her life insurance policy for Chloe to claim once the death certificate was issued,’ Derwent said. ‘If she’d just disappeared it would have taken years to get the certificate. With us ready to confirm she was dead, the process would have been much, much quicker. Chloe was supposed to stay with her father until the insurance paid out.’
‘Kate didn’t know about Chloe’s stepbrother molesting her. The plan started to fall apart as soon as Chloe came home. Instead of being out of the way, she was right in the middle of the investigation, surrounded by the very people Kate had been manipulating before she left.’
‘And then someone killed her,’ Burt said. ‘But Kate being alive – and the blackmail – none of that is a reason to kill Chloe, is it?’
‘Not directly. I don’t see how it would benefit Eleanor Norris to kill Kate’s daughter. That’s why I don’t think we should talk to the Norrises about the blackmail until we’ve tracked Kate down. She might have a better idea than us as to who killed Chloe and why,’ I said.
‘Where do we start looking?’ Burt ran her hands through her short hair. ‘She could be anywhere.’
‘She left her passport behind,’ Derwent pointed out. ‘Makes sense. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave the UK. She’d have been too far from Chloe, and we’d be more likely to spot her going. Crossing borders is risky. It would have been far easier to lie low in this country, especially since no one was looking for her.’
‘So how do we find her?’ I asked. ‘A public appeal?’
‘I don’t think we should give away that we know she’s alive yet. She might run again, for starters. And it might put her in danger,’ Derwent said.
He didn’t mean it as a dig but I felt it all the same; I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Chloe’s death was my fault.
‘Sorry to interrupt.’ Liv, leaning through the doorway. She was holding a printout. ‘There’s something weird about Chloe’s phone records.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘She didn’t use it much for making or receiving calls – it was mainly texts and picture messages. After she disappeared, she started getting a lot of calls – like, thirty or forty – from payphones in Sussex and Hampshire.’
‘All payphones?’ I checked.
‘Yeah. Different ones every time and all over the place. I haven’t mapped it out properly yet but if it was the same person they were going around in circles.’
‘Kate,’ Una Burt said. ‘When did the calls start?’
‘Sunday.’
‘After the public appeal to find Chloe,’ I said. ‘Kate must have been panicking.’
‘Did Chloe answer any of the calls?’
Liv shook her head. ‘Her phone was off.’
‘Were there any voicemails?’
‘Nope.’
‘So either she couldn’t answer her phone or she didn’t want to,’ I said. ‘And somehow the phone ended up in Bethany’s possession but she didn’t answer the calls either.’
‘Sussex and Hampshire are big counties,’ Derwent said. ‘Lots of people, lots of places she could be hiding out.’
‘It’s a start,’ I said.
Colin Vale positively glowed when I informed him that Kate Emery was no longer a victim, but a suspect.
‘Give me a live person to hunt for any day.’ He wheeled his chair closer to his desk so his nose was practically touching his computer screen. ‘Now, she didn’t take her car so we don’t know what she’s driving or even if she is driving. She didn’t take her phone. Let’s make sure her bank accounts haven’t been used.’ He didn’t even have to look up the number, dialling it with the fluency of a concert pianist. ‘Ah, Miriam. DS Colin Vale here again. Yes, indeed, as usual! How are you today?’
Not banter. Please, save me from banter.
The expression on my face must have communicated what I was thinking. ‘A quick enquiry, Miriam. Won’t take long.’
It didn’t, thankfully: she hadn’t used any cards or made any payments since she disappeared. Colin hung up. ‘So she’s using cash. But you can’t use cash for everything these days. She’ll need another bank account. And you can’t set up a bank account without proof of identification and proof of address.’ He leaned back. ‘Let’s start with aliases. What’s her maiden name?’
‘Try Charnock.’
‘Kate Charnock.’ He logged on to a credit-rating service, and put in the name. ‘Same date of birth … nothing.’
‘Try Katherine Charnock. Try both spellings of Katherine,’ I suggested.