Georgia nodded and set off, huddled against the rain. I followed Derwent down the path to the left, noting a smudge on the wall and a drip of red on the outside of a planter, sheltered from the rain by its overhanging lip.
A wall of tall, whispering reeds confronted us on the riverbank. I could smell the water but I couldn’t see it. A muddy path ran along the edge of the river, the ground rutted and uneven and hopeless for footprints. Trees lined the river, their branches forming a dense, dark canopy over our heads, and it was dark enough that I missed her the first time I looked. It was only when I was almost on top of her that I realised what I was seeing.
‘Shit.’
She was curled up at the base of a tree, her head tipped back to lie on her shoulder. Her eyes were open, her mouth slack. One hand lay on the ground beside her, the fingers coated in red, the nails clotted with it. There was something in the way she lay that told me she was dead even before Derwent had pressed his fingers against her throat for a few seconds and looked up, his face grim.
‘Not faking this time.’
Protocol said that we should start CPR, that we should work on her until paramedics came to confirm her life was over. I had no heart for it and neither, it seemed, did Derwent. We were too late and all that we would achieve was the destruction of any evidence her killer had left behind.
I had spent so long thinking of Kate as a dead woman that it almost felt inevitable that she was lying at our feet, as if we’d been speaking to a ghost all along. The life in her had been like light shining from a dead star: finite and illusory.
I was putting on gloves. Gingerly, I lifted her jumper. It was starting to stick to the blood that coated her torso from at least two deep stab wounds. Plenty of force.
Plenty of anger.
‘No way is that self-inflicted,’ I said. Calm professional assessment was what was needed, not shock. ‘She’d never have got the knife back out after the first injury. No shallow wounds. No practising.’
‘If you were going to kill yourself with a knife you’d go for the throat or try to sever an artery. And Kate was a nurse so she would have known that.’
‘How long ago, would you say?’
‘She feels cold, but in this weather …’ Derwent shook his head. ‘No idea.’
I slipped my hand down the back of her neck, where the body heat was ebbing away more slowly than in her exposed hands and face. ‘Half an hour, maybe? Less?’
‘He could still be here.’ Derwent said it casually, as if it wasn’t a problem.
‘That occurred to me.’ I was shaking, angry. The trees seemed to press in around me. Was this what Kate had been waiting for? A blood sacrifice in memory of her beautiful daughter? Or was it an accomplice who’d decided she was too dangerous to leave alive? And under our noses, too, while we had argued about who was going to take the fall for a decision that was suddenly irrelevant. ‘She knew he was coming, didn’t she? That’s what she was waiting for. That’s why she told us we couldn’t stay for long. I wondered why she looked at her watch.’
‘Find Georgia,’ Derwent said, taking charge. ‘Send her to call for back-up. I want dog units and a boat, if they’ve got one. Tell her to get a scene log started and set up a cordon. We need to make sure the local CID know what’s happening. They’ll need to get their crime scene techs here.’
‘What about me?’
‘I need you to help me look for whoever did this.’ He looked left and right, chewing his lip. ‘I reckon he’ll have gone downstream. That’s what I’d do. If I go that way and you check the other, we’ve got the best chance of finding him.’
I nodded, not thinking about the danger or the cold or the fact that we were going to be in a world of trouble for letting Kate die, or even the fact that Kate had died. There was a job to do. Everything else could wait.
‘Get going,’ Derwent said, his face stern and I’d already turned to go when he added, ‘And Maeve … be careful.’
34
I didn’t waste time staring at Kate Emery’s body when I got back to the riverbank. I could recall every detail of how she looked and what she had suffered.
Our fault.
My fault for insisting on going with Derwent, for fighting to be heard when really my voice didn’t matter. If I had stayed instead of Georgia. If I had stayed with Georgia.
If I had done just about anything differently, Kate would still be alive, and the knowledge of it was pure bitterness in my mouth.
There was no sign of Derwent, or anyone else for that matter. He had gone left, following the river downstream. Left was towards Groves Edge, towards civilisation and people and main roads. Right was back along the river towards farmland, scattered houses, a whole lot of not very much. He had been certain that the killer would go that way, but I wasn’t so sure. Colin Vale had said it: people always ran away from crowds. Instinct was a stronger imperative than common sense, and instinct insisted on bolting for the wilderness. I jogged along the path. The worn brickwork of the boundary wall for Crow Lane House was blank and solid on my right, while the reeds sighed on my left. I felt hemmed in, trapped.
What would I do if I had recently killed Kate Emery? Run, obviously. I wouldn’t wait around for the police to find me. There was no need to worry. The killer, I told myself, was long gone.
At a bend in the river the reeds gave some ground so I could see out across the water for the first time. The river was wider than I had expected, swollen with rainwater and a lot of debris from further upstream. In the centre it flowed fast, the current dimpling the surface. The water looked cold and grey and wholly threatening. I swore as I tripped on an exposed root and almost fell.
Get a move on, Maeve.
I began to run again, scanning my surroundings as I went for anything human but no, a tree trunk, a bump in the path, a drift of leaves in a hollow, the rain striking down between the trees … Every shadow might have been the killer. Every gleam might have been the light catching on a blade, not a wet, glossy leaf.
He had left his knife behind, that was one thing. He probably wasn’t armed any more. And I had my ASP.
Ahead of me the path took a sharp turn and I slowed, wary of what might lie beyond it. What I found as I rounded the bend made me stop in my tracks, but it wasn’t the killer.
It was a car. Someone had driven it down a narrow track to the river; I could see the mud on the wheels and sprayed up the sides of the car, and the rain hadn’t yet washed away the tyre-marks on the track itself. Someone had turned the car so it was ready to drive away again.
Someone.
I could give him a name, now, the man we were looking for – the man who had stabbed Kate Emery to death. The man, I guessed, who had killed Chloe, even though I knew he’d loved her.
Maybe he’d killed her because he loved her.
William Turner. I would have known his little blue Corsa anywhere.
Why did it surprise me? He was intimately familiar with stabbings, after all.
I took out my torch and shone it through the windows, checking that the car was empty. The doors were locked and a blanket lay rumpled on the back seat.