‘Did you find anything else in the house?’ Colin Vale asked. ‘A passport? Bank cards?’
‘We found her passport and her wallet,’ I said. It had been in the kitchen, on top of the microwave, complete with her bank cards and gym membership and supermarket loyalty cards. ‘No mobile phone, though we’ve asked her service provider to let us know if it’s in use. No keys.’
‘You’d want the keys,’ Derwent observed, ‘so you could shut the front door without making a big noise and drawing attention to yourself. If you’d killed her, I mean.’
‘The more I hear the more I think we’re right to treat it as murder,’ Una Burt said gravely. ‘What else did you find that might be of interest?’
‘A bag of dirty clothes,’ I said.
‘I know Kerrigan’s not exactly domesticated, but I didn’t think she’d get excited about laundry.’ It was a whisper, but a loud one, and it came from Pete Belcott.
‘It wasn’t laundry.’ It was Belcott’s habit to be rude to me but I absolutely refused to let him ruffle my feathers, especially when I was senior to him now. I described where I’d found the clothes and the condition they had been in. Una Burt’s eyebrows were raised.
‘Sexual assault?’
‘Potentially. I think we have to be careful about it, though. She might have kept them as a souvenir of a particularly – er – passionate encounter.’ I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as everyone in the room turned to look at me, with the exception of Derwent. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t. But you never know.’
‘Indeed.’ Burt made a note. ‘But it’s of interest.’
‘Even if she was raped,’ Chris Pettifer said, ‘it doesn’t get us all that much closer to a killer, does it? If she killed him, that would be something else.’
Burt checked her watch. ‘I’m waiting to hear back from the forensic team about the blood. Keep working on the basis that Kate is the victim for the time being. We need motives and suspects and we’re already a few days behind the killer. I can’t waste any more time.’
‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘There’s no obvious reason for anyone to want to kill her. Everything we’ve found out so far points to her being a person who minded her own business, who worked hard, who was determined but slightly unscrupulous and maybe a little unwise, but it doesn’t add up to a motive.’
‘There’s the ex-husband,’ Derwent said.
‘Yes, but why kill her now? They divorced over a decade ago. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘She was a bit lively in her personal life,’ Georgia Shaw said.
‘According to one neighbour,’ I pointed out. ‘But she was attractive. Maybe she was playing two men off against one another and it went wrong. Maybe she made the wrong person jealous.’
Una Burt nodded. ‘I’ll mention it when I do the press conference later. If I appeal for her boyfriends and associates to come forward in confidence, we might get a better picture of what was happening in her life. What do we know about local suspects? Anyone of interest?’
‘I checked with the local coppers,’ Belcott said. ‘It’s a quiet area. They couldn’t think of a similar incident locally in the past five years.’
‘Oliver Norris told me we should look at a guy called William Turner.’ I said it quietly, knowing Belcott would take it as a criticism of his work, and maybe it was. Fairness made me add, ‘I don’t think he can be relevant, but Norris said he lives nearby and knows Chloe. He was arrested for attempted murder a few years ago but never charged.’
‘Why not?’ Burt asked.
‘Insufficient evidence, I think. I’ll look it up and speak to the SIO before I go back to Putney.’
‘You should certainly speak to him. Get some idea of what he’s like. I don’t want to ignore anything at this stage.’
Speak to SIO I wrote in my notebook, so Burt could feel reassured that I was listening to her.
‘So where does this leave us?’ Burt looked around the room.
‘I’d like to know more about Oliver Norris,’ I said. ‘He’s a bit too helpful and he keeps coming up with important information at the precise moment we need it.’
‘And you said he was paranoid about explaining why his fingerprints might be all over Kate Emery’s bedroom,’ Derwent said. ‘Nothing suspicious about that, is there?’
‘He’s ultra-religious, though.’
‘So? Repressed.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Chris Pettifer said.
‘But possibly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t like him.’
‘Whoever did this was at ease in the property,’ Derwent said. ‘They knew where to find drain cleaner. They knew where they could shower off the blood. They knew where to take a body so they could dispose of it without being seen, and they were strong enough to handle a body. This wasn’t a stranger who blundered in off the street. This was someone with a plan and they executed it pretty perfectly.’
I nodded. ‘As far as I can see, only one thing went wrong for them. If Chloe hadn’t come back early, no one would even know yet that Kate Emery was gone.’
I was on my own when I arrived at William Turner’s address, and glad to be. Georgia had gone to collect CCTV footage from the local shops and show Kate Emery’s picture around, trying to reconstruct Kate’s movements before the attack. She had gone with bad grace.
‘It feels like admin.’
‘That’s exactly what it is.’
‘It’s not going to help us find who killed her.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘But I want to see William Turner.’
‘Do you? Because I don’t.’ I picked up my phone. ‘It’s going to be more of a waste of time than looking for CCTV, I promise you.’
‘He sounds interesting. Oliver Norris thinks he’s the devil incarnate.’
‘I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything Norris said to us.’ I started dialling the number I’d found for the SIO in the Turner case.
‘Then we should talk to him again.’
‘About what? The weather?’ I leaned back. ‘The next time we talk to Norris, we need to know exactly what happened to Kate Emery so we can find out how his version differs from the truth. At the moment, all I can say to him is that I don’t believe him. I’ve got nothing to throw at him. When the forensics come back, we’ll see if there’s anything to make him feel uneasy, but as things stand we have to let him go about his business. And you should do the same.’
She had gone, but she hadn’t liked it. I had other things to worry about, like William Turner. I thought about him on the drive to Putney, and the incident that had earned him his reputation. The SIO had remembered the case well. It wasn’t the kind you forgot.
I found a parking space on the other side of the street from Turner’s house and walked across. I would have liked a second to collect my thoughts but there was a young man standing in the doorway, smoking a