‘Who lives in that house?’ It stood out because the lights were off.
‘It’s unoccupied. The neighbours said the owner is in a nursing home. I had a look at the doors and windows, but it looked secure.’
‘Access to the front of the house?’
‘There’s a gate. You could climb it.’
‘Even me? It must be easy. But could you get a body over it?’
‘Very possibly. And if you didn’t want to, you could pick the lock in about ten seconds.’
‘Did the dog seem to think someone had done that?’
Derwent shrugged. ‘The dog had lost interest by then.’
‘But our killer could have parked in front of the unoccupied house and taken the body away in his car.’
‘He could indeed.’
‘It seems like a lot of trouble, though. If you want to move the body, why not take it out the front door?’
‘With all the neighbours watching?’ Derwent shook his head. ‘What you don’t know about that house is that there’s a front garden.’
‘Is there?’
‘With a high hedge.’
‘Now you’re making more sense.’
‘So it’s worth dragging a dead weight all the way over there if you know the area.’
‘If you do,’ I said. ‘You’d have to know it was unoccupied, though, and about the gate. You’d have to be local.’
‘Mm.’ Derwent stared out at the houses across the way where the silent scenes played out, as unreal as television. ‘I might not know where to find Kate Emery’s body but I do have some idea where to start looking for her killer.’
Monday mornings are the same the world over, no matter the job or the city. It was a pale and bleary-eyed group of detectives who gathered in the meeting room for an early briefing about the Putney crime scene. I’d seen Una Burt outside the room, pacing up and down, eager to get started. I wished I could feel as keen. I tried not to yawn, my jaws quivering as I fought it back. Georgia Shaw was sitting near the front of the room in a grey trouser suit, silver Tiffany heart earrings, her fair hair sleekly groomed.
I would not allow myself to glower at her. I was better than that.
‘Hi.’ Liv Bowen slid into the seat beside me, immaculate in black, her hair folded into a complicated knot at the back of her head. She was a detective constable and a good one, and she was my friend. I felt myself relax.
‘Hi, yourself.’
‘You look knackered. What time did you leave the scene?’
‘Getting on for one.’ And then I’d gone back to my empty flat. I hadn’t gone to bed straight away. I’d stopped for long enough to eat a bowl of cereal while I watched the news headlines. That already represented something like a victory. One: I had bought cereal. Two: I owned milk that hadn’t gone off. Three: I’d remembered to eat them. I sensed that Liv would be underwhelmed, so I didn’t bother to tell her about it. She lived in domestic harmony with her girlfriend in a pretty little house near Guildford and she had long since despaired of my sketchy home life. I also didn’t tell her how I’d wandered through my flat looking at all the tidy rooms where nothing had moved since the cleaner left two days before. The tracks of the vacuum cleaner were still visible in the carpet. You spent a few hours judging someone else for how they lived and it gave you perspective on your own life, whether you wanted it or not.
The investigation had been on the news, but the details remained under wraps. The media only knew it was a murder investigation. The report was heavy on footage of police officers searching the area in the rain, lifting drain covers, poking bushes with sticks. I had been on screen for a split second. The camera had lingered on Georgia’s fair hair.
I could get to like working with Georgia if she took some of the unwanted attention off me.
‘How did you get on?’ I asked Liv.
‘Bits and pieces. Background stuff.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing you could call an obvious motive to kill Kate Emery.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘I thought so.’
Derwent took the seat in front of me with a sigh. He barely nodded hello, which didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a morning person.
He wasn’t an afternoon or evening person either.
‘Right.’ Una Burt marched in and put her folder down on the desk. ‘We’re here to talk about Kate Emery. She’s a forty-two-year-old mother of one, who lived at Valerian Road in Putney with her daughter, Chloe Emery. Chloe is eighteen. She was staying with her father and his family for the last few days. She left London on Wednesday and returned yesterday afternoon. Five days.’ She looked around the room meaningfully. ‘When Chloe left, everything was normal. When she returned, the house was covered in blood and her mother was gone. We need to know what happened to Kate Emery in those five days, and we need to know where she is now. Who wants to start?’
‘I can fill in some of her background,’ Liv volunteered.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Kate Emery has lived at that address for twelve years. She moved there after her divorce from Brian Emery, Chloe’s father. She had custody of Chloe, who went to the local state schools.’
‘Mainstream education?’ Burt checked.
‘Yes, although with support. Chloe has some educational disabilities,’ Liv explained to the rest of the room. ‘Kate was a stay-at-home mother for the majority of the last twelve years. She started her own business four years ago. It’s called Novo Gaudio Imports. She was importing traditional herbal supplements for childless couples to boost their fertility.’
‘Did she have a medical background?’ Burt asked.
‘She was a nurse before her marriage. She’d let her registration lapse so she was no longer allowed to practise. The imports were classified as dietary supplements rather than medical ones so she was able to supply them legally.’
‘And did they work?’ Burt asked.
‘Lots of grateful customers left feedback on her website. I don’t know how many of them were real,’ Liv said. ‘Many of them seemed very similar in tone, but then there probably isn’t that much to say about getting pregnant. At least, there are probably lots of things to say about it, but not on a website selling fertility drugs.’
I made a note of it all the same. Unsatisfied customer? I was still at the stage of being grateful every month for the definitive proof that I wasn’t pregnant, but I could understand something of the terrible hunger for a child. I’d seen it in others and I feared it. There wasn’t much I could do about it when I was single and likely to remain so.
‘How was the business doing?’ The question came from Colin Vale. I could see he was straining to get at the papers, to scrutinise the accounts. I might have felt guilty that he always got landed with every boring, repetitive task involving hours of paperwork or scouring CCTV, but it made him happy.
‘I can’t say for sure because I don’t have this year’s accounts and the computer guys haven’t analysed her PC yet,’ Liv said. ‘I have the impression it wasn’t doing as well as she’d hoped. She had a lot of stock in her house. Her initial sales were good but they had tapered off over time – the profits for last year are a long way down on the previous year. I looked