‘I don’t want to talk to you about that.’
I was starting to lose my temper. ‘Why don’t we talk about her stepbrother, Nolan? He sexually assaulted her. Did you know that? That’s why she didn’t stay with her father. She wasn’t safe there. She wasn’t safe anywhere.’
‘Shut up. I won’t listen to you. I won’t.’ Her expression was stubborn, unyielding.
Derwent stood up and jerked his head towards the hall. I followed him out, leaving Georgia to sit with Kate.
‘We’re not getting anywhere,’ Derwent said, dropping his voice so it was barely audible.
‘She knows more than she’s saying,’ I said. ‘I know she does. Maybe she’s afraid to incriminate herself. If she had a solicitor—’
‘They’d tell her to go no comment.’
‘Not if we promised to leave the fraud charges out of it.’
‘What fraud charges? She’s right, we’ve got nothing concrete against her on that. Not yet, anyway,’ Derwent added. ‘I haven’t given up on it.’
‘And the blackmail – if Eleanor Norris makes a complaint.’
‘That’s a big if. She’d have to tell her husband about it, for starters. We have no proof as it stands.’ Derwent rapped his knuckles on my head. ‘You’re not getting this, are you? We’ve got a lot of guesswork at the moment, not facts. And she knows it.’
‘She’s going to run again if we leave her. I’m surprised she hasn’t gone already.’
‘We should arrest her. Keep her while we try to dig up some more on the insurance thing. There has to be something incriminating on her computer or in her papers. It’s not as if we’ve been investigating this as an insurance fraud from the start – we’re bound to have missed something.’
‘But they won’t keep her in custody for long, and it will piss her off. They’ll get her first account, assuming she cooperates with an interview, and then she’ll be out on bail.’
‘Better than nothing.’ He started back towards the door and I caught his arm to stop him.
‘It bloody isn’t. If we arrest her for insurance fraud and she turns out to be the key witness in a murder trial, we’ll have shot ourselves in the foot. Any defence barrister would make use of it. That’s the best way to discredit whatever she tells us.’
‘Assuming she’s around to tell us anything.’ Derwent chewed his lip. ‘If we don’t lock her up, they’ll say we went easy on her.’
‘She knows something about Chloe’s death. I know she does.’
‘That’s why you told her about Turner and the stepbrother. Looking for a reaction.’
‘And I didn’t get one.’
‘We need to arrest her.’
‘We can’t.’
‘Fuck this,’ Derwent said loudly enough that Kate must have heard it.
‘Shut up, for God’s sake.’ I took out my phone. ‘Let’s call Burt. Let her policy this.’
‘That’s not actually a bad idea for once, Kerrigan.’
‘Thanks. It would be an even better idea if I had any reception,’ I said, staring at the screen.
‘Radio?’
That wasn’t working either.
Derwent checked his own phone. ‘I fucking hate the countryside. Is there a landline?’
There was an old-fashioned phone on a table by the stairs. I lifted the receiver and listened. ‘Nothing.’
‘Christ almighty. I’ll have to drive back to civilisation.’
‘Or find a payphone.’
‘Did you see one on the way here?’
I tried to remember. ‘I think so. On the way out of the village?’
‘I won’t be long.’
‘No, wait. I think I should go.’
He glowered. ‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t trust you to put both sides of the argument to Burt fairly.’
He pressed his hand against his chest, wounded. ‘That hurts, Kerrigan.’
‘Am I wrong?’
‘Yes, you are. I can be fair.’
I folded my arms. ‘OK then. Why don’t you let me go on my own?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘You don’t trust me and I don’t trust you.’
‘But I outrank you.’
I raised one eyebrow and waited until he sighed. ‘So what do you want to do? Leave Georgia here?’
‘She can look after her,’ I said. ‘We won’t be long.’
‘All right. But let’s not make a big deal of it. At the moment, legally, Kate could walk out at any second and there’s nothing we could do to stop her. I don’t want to give her the idea to give it a whirl.’
33
It took longer than I had anticipated to find a phone and to persuade Una Burt to make an actual decision. Much longer than I would have liked, considering I spent a lot of it jammed up against Derwent in a phone box that was fogged with condensation and smelled, regrettably, of piss.
To give Burt her due, she heard both sides of the argument and considered them with care. It wasn’t entirely a surprise to me that she decided we should arrest Kate, but I was disappointed.
‘I think we’ll lose any chance of getting her to cooperate, boss. And it’s going to cause us problems further down the line.’
‘We’ll have to deal with that when we get that far. At the moment we don’t have anyone to put on trial so there’s very little point in worrying about it.’
I disagreed, profoundly, but there was nothing I could do about it. At least it was no longer our decision. Now that I was more senior I was discovering that policing was at least as much about covering your arse as locking up bad guys.
This time we drove all the way up the winding drive and parked in front of the house. I beat Derwent to the door, running up the steps to get out of the rain that was heavier than ever.
‘Did you leave the door open?’ I pushed it without waiting for him to reply, and as I stepped into the hall I knew that something was wrong. I put a hand up to warn Derwent who checked his progress just a little too late, colliding with me.
‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.
I shook my head, trying to work it out. Silence, that was one thing. The door to the sitting room was open, a breeze stirring the curtains, but there was no sign of Kate and Georgia.
‘Kitchen?’
‘I’ll have a look.’
He sidestepped me and slipped down towards the back of the house, not making a sound on the tiled floor. I stayed where I was, listening. A tiny noise broke the silence, a sound that could have been claws on wood or a soft fall of dust or the house settling. Probably a rat, I thought, or a mouse. The riverbank would be teeming with them. The gardens ran all the way down to the river, the letting agent had said. When it was cold, or they were hungry, the rodents would surely come to the house, to feast on threadbare carpets and faded curtains and old upholstery. I imagined them nesting in the innards of armchairs and mattresses and suppressed a shudder.