“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson—something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”
“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”
“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her—I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean—and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”
“He was carrying a knife,” Frank pointed out. “What was he planning on, whittling?”
I shrugged. “Threatening her, maybe; scaring her, impressing her, I don’t know. But someone this thorough, if he’d gone out there intending to kill her, he wouldn’t have made such a bollocks of it. The attack came out of the blue, there had to be a moment when she was stunned by what had just happened; if he was aiming to finish her off, he could have done it. Instead, she’s the one who reacts first—she takes off running, and gets a good head start, before he can do anything about it. That makes me think he was almost as stunned as she was. I think the meeting was planned for a completely different purpose, and then something went badly wrong.”
“Why follow her?” Sam asked. “After the stabbing. Why not leg it out of there?”
“When he caught up with her,” I said, “he found out she was dead, moved her and went through her pockets. So I’m betting one of those things was his reason for going after her. He didn’t hide or display the body, and you wouldn’t spend half an hour looking for someone just to drag her a few yards for the hell of it, so moving her seems more like a side effect: he got her into shelter in order to conceal the light from a torch, or to be out of the rain, while he achieved his real goal—either to find out for sure whether she was dead, or else to search her.”
“If you’re right about him knowing her,” Sam said, “and about him not meaning to kill her, then couldn’t he have moved her because he cared about her? He felt guilty enough already, didn’t want to leave her out in the rain ...”
“I thought about that. But this guy’s smart, he thinks ahead, and he was very serious about not getting caught. Moving her meant getting blood on himself, leaving more footprints, taking more time, maybe leaving hairs or fibers on her . . . I can’t see him taking that kind of extra risk just out of sentimentality. He had to have a solid reason. Checking whether she was dead wouldn’t take long—less time than moving her, anyway—so my best guess is that he followed her, and moved her, because he needed to search her.”
“What for?” Sam asked. “We know he wasn’t after cash.”
“I can only think of three reasons,” I said. “One is that he was checking for anything on her that might identify him—making sure she hadn’t written down the appointment in a diary, trying to delete his number off her mobile, that kind of thing.”
“She didn’t keep a diary,” Frank said, to the ceiling. “I asked the Fantastic Four.”
“And she’d left her mobile at home, on the kitchen table,” Sam said. “The housemates say that was normal; she always meant to bring it on her walks, but she mostly forgot it. We’re going through it: nothing dodgy so far.”
“He didn’t necessarily know that, though,” I said. “Or he could have been looking for something more specific. Maybe she was supposed to give him something, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind . . . Either he took it off the body, or she didn’t have it on her in the first place.”
“The map to the hidden treasure?” Frank inquired, helpfully. “The Crown Jewels?”
“That house is full of old bits and bobs,” Sam said. “If there was something valuable in there . . . Was there an inventory done, when your man inherited?”
“Ha,” Frank said. “You’ve seen it. How would anyone inventory that? Simon March’s will lists the good stuff—mostly antique furniture, a couple of paintings—but that’s all gone. The death duties were massive, anything worth more than a few quid had to go to pay them off. From what I’ve seen, all that’s left is your basic attic tat.”
“The other possibility,” I said, “is that he was looking for ID. God knows there’s enough confusion around this girl’s identity. Say he thought he was talking to me and then had doubts, or say she dropped a hint that Lexie Madison wasn’t her real name: your guy might have gone looking for ID, trying to figure out who he’d just stabbed.”
“Here’s what your scenarios have in common,” Frank said. He was lying back with his arms folded behind his head, watching us, and that glint in his eye had got cockier. “Our guy planned to meet her once, which means he might very well want to meet her again, given the chance. He didn’t plan to kill her, which means it’s highly unlikely that there’s any further danger. And he came from outside Whitethorn House.”
“Not necessarily,” Sam said. “If one of the housemates did it, he—or she— might have taken Lexie’s mobile off her body, to make sure she hadn’t called 999 or recorded anything. We know she used the video camera all the time; they could well have been worried that she’d put the attacker’s name on there.”
“Prints from the phone back yet?” I asked.
“This afternoon,” Frank said. “Lexie and Abby. Both Abby and Daniel say that Abby passed Lexie her mobile that morning, on their way out to college, and the prints back that up. Lexie’s are overlaid on Abby’s in at least two places: she touched the phone after Abby did. Nobody took that phone off Lexie’s body. It was at home on the kitchen table when she died, and any of the housemates could have found that out without needing to chase after her.”
“Or they could’ve taken her diary,” said Sam. “We’ve only their word for it that she didn’t keep one.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “If you want to play that game, we’ve only got their word for it that she even lived there. For all we know, she could have had a row with them a month ago and moved into the penthouse of the Shelbourne as the mistress of a Saudi prince, except there’s not one speck of evidence that points that way. All four of their stories match up perfectly, we haven’t caught any of them in a lie, she got stabbed outside the house—”
“What do you think?” Sam asked me, cutting Frank off. “Do they fit the profile?”
“Yeah, Cassie,” Frank said sweetly. “What do you think?”
Sam so badly wanted it to be one of them. For a moment I actually wished I could say it was, and never mind what that would do to the investigation, just to see the drained look evaporate off his face, a spark come into his eyes. “Statistically,” I said, “sure, close enough. They’re the right age, they’re local, they’re smart, they knew her—not just that: they’re the ones who knew her best, and that’s where you mostly find your killer. None of them has a record, but like I said, one of them could have done stuff we don’t know about, somewhere along the way. At first, yeah, I liked them for it. The more I hear, though . . .” I ran my hands through my hair and tried to figure out how to say this. “Here’s the one thing I don’t like taking their word for. Do we have any kind of independent confirmation that she normally went for these walks on her own? That none of the housemates went with her?”
“Actually,” Frank said, feeling on the floor for his smokes, “we do. There’s an English postgrad called Brenda Grealey, had the same supervisor as Lexie.” Brenda Grealey was on the KA list: large, with sticking-out gooseberry eyes, plump cheeks already beginning to droop and a lot of ginger curls. “She’s the nosy type. After the five of them moved in together, she asked Lexie if she ever got any privacy, living with all those guys. I get the feeling Brenda meant it as a double entendre, she was hoping for some kind of wild sex gossip, but apparently Lexie just gave her a blank look and said she went for solo walks every evening and that was all the privacy she needed, thanks, she didn’t hang out with people unless she liked their company. Then she walked off. I’m not sure our Brenda realized she’d been bitchslapped.”
“OK,” I said. “In that case, I really can’t see a way to make any of the housemates work. Look at how it would’ve had to play out. One of them needs to talk to Lexie in private, about something big. So, instead of going about it the inconspicuous way, bringing her for coffee in college or whatever, he goes on her walk with her, or follows her out. Either way, he’s breaking the routine—and those five are all about the routine—and telling everyone including Lexie, loud and clear, that something’s up. And then he brings along a knife. These are nice middle-class intellectuals we’ve got here—”
“She means they’re a bunch of nancy boys,” Frank informed Sam, over the click of his lighter.
“Ah, here,” Sam said, putting his pen down. “Hang on. You can’t rule them out just because they’re middle-class. How many cases have we worked where some lovely, respectable—”
“I’m not, Sam,” I said. “The killing’s not the problem. If she’d been choked to death, or had her head smashed off a wall, I’d be fine with one of them as the doer. I don’t even have a problem with the idea of one of them stabbing her, if he happened to be there with the knife in his hand. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have the knife on him to begin with—not unless he was actually planning to kill her, and like I said before, that doesn’t fit. I’m willing to bet serious money that those four don’t make a habit of carrying knives around; and if they just wanted to threaten someone, or convince someone, it wouldn’t even occur to them to use a knife to do it. That’s not the world they live in. When they gear up for a big fight, they prepare by thinking out debate points, not picking out knives.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, after a moment. He took a deep breath and picked up his pen again, left it hanging above the page as if he’d forgotten what he meant to write. “I suppose they do, sure.”
“Even if we go with the idea that one of them followed her,” I said, “and brought along a knife to scare her with for some reason, what did he think was going to happen next? Did he seriously expect to get away with it? They’re part of the same social circle. It’s tiny, and it’s intimate. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t agree to anything he wanted, then head straight home and tell the other three exactly what had happened. Cue shock, horror, and quite possibly—unless it’s Daniel—our knife-wielder getting thrown out of Whitethorn House. These are smart people, Sam. They couldn’t overlook something that obvious.”
“In fairness,” Frank said helpfully, switching sides—apparently he was getting bored—“smart people do stupid things all the time.”
“Not like that,” Sam said. He left his pen lying across his notebook and pressed two fingers into the corners of his eyes. “Stupid things, yeah, sure. Not things that make no sense at all.”
I had put that look on his face, and I felt like crap. “Do they do drugs?” I asked. “People on coke, say, don’t always think straight.”
Frank snorted smoke. “I doubt it,” said Sam, without looking up. “They’re straight arrows, this lot. They take a drink, all right, but from the looks of them I wouldn’t say they’d even be into the odd bit of hash, never mind the hard stuff. Our girl’s tox screen came back clean as a whistle, remember?”
The wind hurled itself up against the window with a bang and a rattle, fell away again. “Then, unless we’re missing something huge,” I said, “they just don’t add up.”