‘I thought you didn’t see him as a credible suspect,’ Georgia said.
‘At the moment, everyone’s a suspect. Off you go.’ I waited while she stripped off the shoe covers again, very slowly, and gathered her things. Derwent was watching too, his hands in his pockets, whistling silently to himself. It was his habit when he was thinking, and a thinking Derwent was never good news.
As Georgia left I blew my hair out of my face. ‘Hot in here, isn’t it?’
‘That’s the warm glow you get from giving orders, DS Kerrigan. How do you like it?’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He grinned. ‘It suits you, I have to say. I always saw you as more the submissive type, but maybe I was wrong.’
I looked around, peering up the stairs. The lights were off and it was shadowy up there, the horrors half-hidden in the dusk. The house was quiet. Waiting. ‘Where do you want to start? Down here and work up?’
He dropped the mockery straight away. ‘Fine by me.’
My skin was slick with sweat and my hair was sticking to my neck. The crime-scene tents at the front and now the back of the house meant that no air was circulating through it, and the temperature seemed to have gone up as the shadows lengthened. I took off my jacket.
‘Did you iron that?’
I looked down at my top. ‘Yes. Well, I didn’t. I paid someone else to do it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I find ironing boring and I have better things to do with my time. She cleans too.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Not really.’
‘It is to me,’ Derwent said simply. ‘You usually look as if you’ve just rolled out of bed. Why the change of image?’
‘I do not look scruffy usually. Anyway, what’s wrong with wanting to look professional?’ I was tying my hair up, scraping it back.
‘All of a sudden. Because now you’re a detective sergeant.’ He stressed the last word, grinning at me.
‘You can’t get over it, can you?’
‘I can believe you passed the sergeant’s exam. I can’t believe you managed to swing it so you got to stay on the team.’
I didn’t say anything. He knew as well as I did that the detective sergeant’s place had come up because Chief Superintendent Charles Godley had insisted on it, that he had personally intervened to make sure I stayed exactly where I was. He might be working elsewhere but he was still fully engaged with his team, much to Una Burt’s disappointment. So he had insisted that we needed another detective sergeant on the team. And since we were a man down after one of our colleagues had died the previous year, he’d got his way. Dead men’s shoes. Opportunities carved out of tragedy. I’d found it difficult to celebrate, all in all. It was a death we’d all taken hard, but I’d taken it harder than most.
Then again, it was my fault.
As if Derwent knew what I was thinking, he dropped an arm around my shoulders. ‘It’s good to be back. Did you miss me?’
‘Every day. It was so quiet and peaceful without you.’
‘That’s no fun.’
‘None at all,’ I agreed, and I actually meant it.
We split up on the ground floor. Derwent took the kitchen while I concentrated on the living room. They weren’t readers but there was a big TV and a cupboard full of DVDs – film classics, cartoons, nothing edgy or unexpected. I met Derwent in the hall and we moved up to the next floor, to Chloe’s bedroom where again I found no books, a small amount of make-up, a lot of clothes and a pile of junky jewellery in a drawer. Some of it was unworn, still labelled; one heavy necklace had a security tag on it. I stirred the collection with my finger. Shoplifted? Or was it my suspicious mind? I opened a drawer and found a stack of medicine: Ritalin and six months’ supply of the pill. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Chloe was sexually active but it did. Then again, maybe her mother had thought it was better to be safe than sorry. Preventing pregnancy was a lot better than dealing with an unwanted one. I gathered up all of the medicine to give to her.
Swearing, Derwent dealt with the guest room at the front of the house, without finding anything of interest. The cat-shit smell seemed to have got stronger instead of fading away, and I left him to it without the slightest twinge of conscience. There was a tiny box room at the front too, just big enough for a single bed. It was piled high with sealed boxes, all labelled Novo Gaudio Imports, shipped from China. I sliced one open with a key and found packages of pills. The contents matched the customs declaration on the side of the box though and I assumed it was all legal and above-board, even if I didn’t know what the pills were.
Kate Emery’s bedroom was right at the top of the house along with another bathroom and a study, and we went up there together. The blood trail ran out on the first floor, as we’d thought. Here it was the SOCOs who’d left their mark with traces of fingerprint dust that made the surfaces look grimy. Like the rest of the house it was extremely neat and very feminine – pale pink bedclothes, pink curtains, pink towels in the bathroom. The pillows were piled high on the bed, three on each side and one particularly ornate one in the middle.
‘Melissa would love this,’ Derwent said.
‘Does she like the new house?’
Derwent slid open a drawer in the bedside table and started to work through the contents, setting everything he found on the bed. ‘She keeps putting cushions everywhere. What is it about women and cushions?’
I picked up a picture that was on top of the bedside table: a much younger Chloe and Kate hugging one another, smiling, windswept on a beach. Happy memories. ‘It wasn’t a very girly place, your flat.’
‘No, it was not.’ He glanced at me. ‘The house is better.’
‘Nothing quite compares to the suburbs.’
‘You should know. Sutton’s not far from your mum and dad.’
‘I wondered if you remembered they lived nearby. I have to say, I was surprised you chose to move there.’ I’d left it behind without a flicker of regret.
‘We needed to find a good school for the boy. And he needed a garden. Somewhere he can run around.’ His face brightened. ‘I want to get him a playhouse. They do one that looks like a command post.’
I hid a smile. Once a soldier, always a soldier. ‘Sounds nice.’
‘Yeah. Well. It’s good.’ I knew he’d be snappy for a couple of minutes, having given away more than he intended. The way Derwent behaved, you would think the worst thing in the world was to be liked.
Derwent, domesticated. It was strange, but it suited him. I’d never have thought that out of the two of us he would end up settling down first. But then I would never have thought my handsome, loving boyfriend, Rob, would sleep with someone else and leave me without so much as a goodbye, let alone an apology. It was more than a year since he’d disappeared and I still missed him more than I was willing to admit. I’d loved him enough to want to be with him for the rest of my life, and I’d lost him, and I couldn’t help hoping against hope that I might get him back somehow.
I watched Derwent as he returned to the search, running his hand all the way around the back of the drawer and coming up with something that he inspected.
‘What have you got there?’
‘Two condoms. They must have been a pretty recent purchase, looking at the use-by stamp. But no sex toys. No handcuffs. No whips.’
‘So, much less kinky