Silent Kill
JANE CASEY
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Jane Casey 2020
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Jane Casey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008149154
Version: 2020-07-21
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Note on Chronology
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Jane Casey
About the Publisher
A Note on Chronology
Silent Kill is set in the spring after the events of Cruel Acts, before The Cutting Place.
Chapter 1
‘Here we are. That must be the bus we’re looking for.’
‘What makes you think that, Georgia?’
I looked at Pete Belcott, trying to judge whether he was being sarcastic. He was staring out at the single-decker bus, his expression deadpan. It didn’t take a detective to work out it was the bus we were looking for; it couldn’t have been anything else. The vehicle was stopped at the side of the road, flanked by police cars. The hazard lights were blinking yellow and canvas sheeting covered some of the windows to hide whatever was inside. Someone had strung police tape around the bus, carving out space for the emergency crews on the pavement. Uniformed officers kept the crowds back, and there were crowds: there was clearly nothing better to do on a cold March evening on Clapham Common than stare at a parked bus.
Of course, what was inside it was interesting, but the most they could hope to see was a body bag on a stretcher, manoeuvred out through the door of the bus before the stretcher was loaded into a private ambulance for transportation to the morgue. I would be getting a front-row seat at the crime scene itself. I was lucky. This was the dream, wasn’t it? Murder investigation team, detective constable in the Met Police, solving crimes, locking up bad guys, taking charge. Everything I had wanted when I signed up for fast-track direct entry, skipping the tedious bits of the job. I was the elite, the best and the brightest, and I could have been doing a more lucrative job with better hours if I wasn’t happy.
And I was happy, I told myself.
I couldn’t admit, even to myself, that the job wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be.
I was leaning forward now, trying to take in every detail of the scene before I even got out of the car. Every new crime scene was a chance to prove myself, to do better. The tension was a knot in my stomach.
‘Pull in here. There’s a space,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I was going to, actually.’
I felt a twinge of irritation at the wounded tone in Pete’s voice. He made it his business to be offended by just about everything. He particularly disliked being told what to do by someone who was younger than him, and less experienced, and female. I knew I had a tendency to sound bossy. People had told me that often enough, and told me that I came across as a know-all. I thought wistfully of the stack of self-help books by my bed, bristling with Post-its, fat with folded-down corners, every margin crisscrossed with notes. The books were all concerned with effective communication and working as part of a team and being confident and self-assured, which were some of the things I struggled with. For the sake of a good working relationship, I knew I needed to stop ordering Pete around. I should ask his opinion now and then, and let him speak first. The trouble was, Pete hadn’t read the same books as me. He was quite capable of sitting in silence for an entire shift if I didn’t talk.
‘Are we the first ones here?’
Pete shook his head and pointed, proving my point about not using his words. I followed the direction he was indicating and saw a broad-shouldered man in a long dark coat. He was towering over a small figure wearing a driver’s uniform, who was shaking his head dolefully.
‘Oh, Derwent. Brilliant.’ I put a note of world-weariness into my voice and Belcott picked up on it instantly.
‘I thought you liked him.’
I said nothing. I knew what Pete was trying to imply and I wasn’t going to rise to it. Yes, of course Josh Derwent was attractive. He had the kind of tough good looks that always appealed to me. His confidence, his square, strong hands and the way he moved suggested – to me at least – he would be a huge amount of fun in bed, not that I would go there because an office romance would complicate life far too much. That didn’t mean I liked him.
On the other hand I didn’t dislike him, despite his reputation for being difficult. No, my problem with him wasn’t what he did, but what he didn’t do. Before I started working with the team I’d been warned he was a massive flirt, and maybe he was, but not with me. I would never admit it to Belcott, or anyone else, but I resented the fact that Derwent had a glint in his blue eyes that he never wasted on me. I might as well have been invisible to him, or even a man. He just wasn’t interested. At all.
I took out my phone and flicked to camera mode, turning on the front-facing camera with practised ease. My face looked back at me, immaculate. My foundation wasn’t smudged, my eyelashes were starry with expensive mascara. Blusher gave me a flush of colour and a neutral lip gloss made my lips look fuller without being unprofessionally bright. I looked fine. I looked the way I was supposed to look.
‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall.’
I turned the camera off and glared at Belcott. ‘Appearances matter, Pete.’
‘Turning up matters. Being there on time. Doing the job when you get there. How you look – that doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, I can see that’s what you think.’ My voice was as cold as the raw wind that greeted me when I got out of the car. Scattered raindrops blew into my face, stinging my eyes. I slammed the door and walked across to the officer who was managing the scene, to give him my details. I was aware of the crowd watching me and held my head high, pretending I didn’t even notice them.
‘Detective Constable Shaw. Right, thanks.’ The PC was young, black and painfully earnest. I gave him a dazzling smile of thanks and ducked under the tape, getting my bearings. Josh Derwent might be here but I hadn’t seen Detective Sergeant Maeve Kerrigan yet. I scanned the scene casually, wondering where I might find her. She always seemed to know where to be, how to look busy, how to look as if she was needed, while I stood around with gloved hands dangling at my sides. There was no sign of her, though, which meant I couldn’t take my cue from her.
Well, there were advantages to that too. I felt my spirits lift slightly: if she wasn’t here, maybe I’d have more to do. Not that I would take her place – not exactly. But if Derwent needed to discuss the case with someone, maybe he’d come and find me. Maybe he would sit on the edge of my desk, listening to my theories with respect and gain a new insight into me. You’re not just a pretty face, I imagined him saying in the low, warm voice that he never bothered to use on me.
It was a fantasy as comforting as a hot bath, but it evaporated like steam as I looked into the bus: she was in there after all. I should have known she would be right at the heart of the scene.
A stocky figure stepped out of the bus: Kev Cox, crime scene manager.
‘All right, Georgia? Got shoe covers to put on?’
‘Yeah.’ I pulled them out of my pocket, wishing I didn’t have to step into them in front of the crowd. If I overbalanced and someone caught it on a mobile phone I could end up all over social media, and that was my worst nightmare. ‘What have we got? They were a bit discreet over the radio.’
Kev turned so his back was to the crowds and the press. ‘Understandably. It’s a child.’
‘A child?’
‘A teenager. Schoolgirl. She’s in the second row from the back, left-hand side.’
Even I could probably find a dead body on a small, empty bus, but I didn’t say that. I was still processing what he’d told me: a teenage girl. That wasn’t what I’d expected, though I couldn’t have said what I had expected. I hadn’t been thinking about the victim much, to be honest. It made sense of the close-lipped radio transmissions, and the grim look on DI Derwent’s face, and the quiet murmuring of the onlookers. Not a standard day at the office. A tragedy. I modified my expression accordingly, and thanked Kev as I pulled on my gloves.
The bus was a single-decker vehicle with twenty-four seats, mainly arranged in rows at the back, and it was as cold as a fridge. An emergency exit halfway along the bus hung open, the door dangling like a broken wing. The windows were pebbled with moisture, inside and out. Even though the doors were wide open the condensation from damp passengers hadn’t yet evaporated, and the air was stale. I wrinkled my nose at it, so I was pulling a very unfortunate face when Maeve straightened and looked over her shoulder. She raised her eyebrows.
‘All right?’
‘Yeah. It’s stuffy, that’s all.’
She stared at me for a long moment and I fought the urge to fidget or apologise under the scrutiny from those wide grey eyes. The lighting in the bus was that particularly flat fluorescent light that deadens the best complexion and highlights every flaw. Maeve’s skin was clear and delicately flushed. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were dark enough that she didn’t need to add anything to them to look human, unlike me. It took me twenty products to create something approaching a natural look, and she did it by getting out of bed. It wasn’t fair.
She turned back to what she had been doing: going through the bags that presumably belonged to the girl slumped on the seat near the back of the bus, where the window was covered with canvas sheeting. I guessed she was no more than five foot two or three, but not slight: her body was solid and her face was rounded with puppy fat. Most of her was hidden inside a giant navy-blue parka with a fur-lined hood, but underneath that she wore her school uniform – pleated skirt, V-neck jumper, white shirt, and a blue tie that was loosely knotted. Her nails were bitten, I noted, and her skin was marked with livid scarring: acne had dappled the area around her mouth and chin, and across her forehead. Black eyeliner was smudged underneath her eyes and the remains of foundation clung to her cheeks. Her make-up had a harsh peach tone under the bus’s lights, especially compared to the pallor of her skin.
‘Who’s our victim?’
‘Her name is Minnie Charleston. She’s a student at Lovelace School in Battersea.’
‘Is that a state school?’
‘Private,’ Maeve said shortly. ‘She was fifteen, according to her school ID.’
‘Can I see?’
She held the card out in a gloved hand and I studied it: in life, Minnie had a cheeky grin, complete with dimples. Her eyebrows had been plucked since the picture was taken. Two uncertain arches straggled across her face now, in place of the thick dark eyebrows on her card. A typical teenager, trying to turn herself into something she wasn’t.
Maeve was sorting through the contents of the girl’s bag. She paused to study an asthma inhaler, one of three that had been shoved in a side pocket of the bag.
‘So are we sure it’s murder? It couldn’t have been natural causes? If she had asthma, that could have killed her.’
‘Not unless it was armed with a knife.’ She pinched the edge of the girl’s coat and drew it back so I could see that the side of her torso was saturated with blood. ‘She was stabbed.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you think the response officers and paramedics would have called us in for an asthma attack?’
‘No, of course not.’
She laid the coat back into place with a gesture that looked almost tender and went back to taking things out of the bag. ‘House keys. Phone – that’s useful, that can go to the lab for downloading. School diary …’ She flipped through it, reading the entry for today. ‘Right, so she was going to extra hockey training at a club in Wimbledon. This bag has her kit in it, and this one has her hockey stick, gumshield and shin guards. That backpack is what she used for schoolbooks.’
‘She wasn’t travelling light, was she?’ The girl must have been surrounded by clutter, I thought, hemmed in by it.
Maeve started unfolding the contents of the kitbag, which I privately thought was a waste of time. A hockey shirt, a hockey skirt that was crumpled from being wadded into the bag, thermal leggings and a white T-shirt with a black logo on it. The logo was a heat transfer that was threadbare from washing it: a zig-zag shape like a slanted Z with a line through the oblique. Maeve held it up so I could look at it. ‘What do you think that is?’
‘No idea. Band merchandise of some sort? She looks like an emo kid.’
‘Maybe. She doodled it on her homework book too, and on her bag.’ Maeve pulled out her phone and took a picture of the T-shirt, then folded it back into the bag. ‘I’ve checked everything now except her body – I’ll leave that for the PM. No drugs, no knife, nothing gang-related or illegal.’
‘Were you expecting to find something gang-related?’
‘When a kid gets stabbed on a bus in South London? Of course.’
‘She’s not exactly the gang type, is she? I mean, she’s white, upper-middle-class, posh private school, plays hockey …’
‘And she could have a boyfriend who deals drugs, or she could be letting a gang use her bank account to launder money or she could be earning a bit of extra pocket money by selling dope to her pals.’ Maeve looked amused. ‘You don’t know many private-school kids, do you? They’re just as likely to be up to no good as the poorer ones, I promise you.’
‘She just doesn’t seem the type.’
‘Hard to tell.’ Maeve’s face changed and she sighed. ‘I’ll have to ask the parents about it, I suppose, when I go round later. That sort of conversation always goes well.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Um …’ she drew the answer out until my nerves were jangling like wire hangers in an empty wardrobe. ‘OK. Why not.’
‘Great. What can I do now?’ I was distracted by a face at the window nearest me: Derwent. He was looking at Maeve, not me. She had no idea he was there until he tapped on the glass.
‘What is it?’
He mimed drinking and she shook her head, but with a smile. With a nod he stepped back, out of range of the interior lights, and disappeared into the darkness. He hadn’t asked me if I wanted a coffee, I thought, and pushed the hurt far down inside me so it didn’t show on my face.
‘Go and talk to the rest of the passengers,’ Maeve said. ‘We’ve managed to get hold of the ones who were still on the bus when someone raised the alarm, but they want to go home, understandably enough. Find out when they got on, if they saw her involved in a confrontation, if they noticed the girl seeming upset – that kind of thing. We’ve got good CCTV from the bus but we don’t know yet when she died, which seems quite important.’
I nodded. ‘Is that it?’
‘For now.’ She had paused to read the back of a book, a novel with a girl against a background of snowy pine trees on the cover. The book’s spine was threaded with white from reading and rereading. ‘“Brought up in hiding, Narya is a walking target for the men who killed her family. But with nothing to lose, she’s about to fight back.” I wonder …’
‘What do you wonder?’ I was trying to follow her train of thought.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘I’ll get going.’
She nodded, and there was something suspiciously like relief in her eyes now at the prospect of me leaving. I hesitated, wanting to say something useful or insightful, but I’d missed my moment. Maeve was staring into space, with the abstracted air that made you want to know, passionately, what she was thinking.
But whatever it was, she wasn’t going to share it with me. I went back outside, whipped off the shoe covers and went in search of the disgruntled passengers. They, at least, might be susceptible to a little bit of charm, even if my colleagues were immune.
Chapter 2
‘Do they know?’ I asked as the car pulled up outside the house: a double-fronted Victorian red-brick that was immaculately kept, from the Farrow-and-Ball tastefulness of the pale green front door to the pruned bay trees on either side of the porch. The curtains were drawn in all the windows, blocking out the night, but there was no sign of anything amiss.
‘They’ve been informed. Response officers went around earlier, as soon as we had an ID for her.’ Maeve was gathering her notebook and pen, distracted. ‘They said no to having an FLO and they don’t want a police presence outside the house if they can avoid it. I think they’re hoping to preserve their privacy as much as possible.’
‘We’ll make this quick,’ Derwent said over his shoulder to me. I was sitting in the back seat, like a child. ‘They won’t want to talk to us for long and they won’t be much help, more than likely. Still, we have to see if they’ve anything useful to tell us.’
‘Was Minnie an only child?’ I asked, and of course Maeve knew the answer.
‘No. Older brother, younger sister.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Is it? That makes up for losing one, does it?’ Derwent shook his head at me. ‘Wrong attitude.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ I wouldn’t have said it to the parents, anyway, I thought, but surely it made sense that it would be worse to lose your only child than one of three.
‘If you say anything stupid, you’ll get us kicked out. Keep your mouth shut and just take notes.’
I opened my mouth to protest but thought better of it after seeing the look on his face. There were times you could talk DI Derwent around, and times you should do exactly what he said.
Maeve raised her eyebrows at him. ‘Are you OK?’
He grimaced and a muscle tightened in his jaw. ‘Not looking forward to this.’
She touched his arm lightly with the back of her hand. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
‘It’s so kind of you to come and talk to us. Really, it is.’
There was no correct way to behave when your child was murdered, I reminded myself, but Gail Charleston wasn’t what I would call devastated, at least outwardly. She sat on a sofa in the big kitchen at the back of the house, swathed in a cashmere jumper that she wore over leggings and flat knee boots. Soft lighting from underneath the cupboards and a few lamps that were dotted around the room made it feel strangely intimate, an effect heightened by her manner. She had long, expensively tinted hair, very good skin, subtle make-up and a trick of blinking extremely slowly while she spoke.
‘Where is Mr Charleston?’
‘He went to the hospital for the formal identification.’ Blink. Blink. ‘Can I offer you a drink? I feel like such a bad hostess.’
‘They don’t want a drink, Mum.’
I looked over to where Robbie Charleston was gripping the edge of the marble kitchen counter. He was short and slight but made up for that with excellent posture and good looks: untidy black hair and high cheekbones and the same thick black eyebrows as his sister, before she got her hands on them. He was wearing a black jumper that was unravelling at the cuffs with skinny black jeans. Unlike his mother, he looked as if he had been crying. The skin under his eyes seemed bruised and his knuckles shone as white as the work surface.
‘I still can’t take it in.’ Gail waved a hand with a graceful movement. ‘It seems unreal. Impossible.’
‘Who did it?’ Robbie again. He had plenty of confidence, I thought and a deep, expensive voice to match.
‘We don’t know yet, but we’re going to find out.’
‘I knew it was a bad idea for her to get the bus.’ He shot a vengeful look at his mother. ‘You should have collected her from school and taken her to hockey yourself. It’s not safe. Everyone knows that. Thousands of gang members wandering around here armed to the fucking teeth. Little white kids like Minnie are easy targets.’
‘Not just white kids,’ Derwent said levelly. ‘More often than not we’re looking for the killers of little black kids.’
Robbie shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
‘Had she been threatened?’ Maeve asked.
‘Not specifically.’ He held her gaze, his eyes burning with hostility. ‘Not as far as I know. But she got mugged for her phone a couple of times.’
‘Did she report that?’ Derwent asked.
‘No. What was the point?’
‘Catching them?’ There was an edge to his voice and Robbie’s chin went up, defensive.
‘That’s not what happens, though, is it? You take a statement and then nothing. No one ever gets caught for it. Just hassle, that’s all.’
‘Did this happen recently?’ Maeve asked quickly, before Derwent could get into a proper argument with the boy. Robbie sniffed.
‘Not that recently. One last year, one just after Christmas. I guess they know people get phones for Christmas. It was a brand-new iPhone. She was gutted.’
‘Well, that didn’t happen this time,’ Maeve said. ‘We found her phone in her pocket.’
‘Can I have it?’ Minnie’s little sister, Audrina, hauled herself onto a high stool at the kitchen island. She was a smaller version of the girl from the bus, stocky rather than slender like her brother. She was ten, she had informed us.
‘Shut up, Audrina.’
‘Mine is shit, you know that.’
I looked to see if her mother reacted to the swear word, but her beautiful face was impassive.
‘Because you keep dropping it.’ Robbie ran his hands through his hair, clutching his head as if it ached. ‘I’m not talking to you about your stupid phone.’
‘Anyway, can I have it?’ Audrina turned her round eyes to the three of us, as if we might give her permission.
‘It’s gone off for analysis,’ Maeve said. ‘We need to see what was on it and who Minnie might have been talking to. We’re going to need to keep it for the time being, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you think it was someone who knew her?’ Robbie demanded.
‘We don’t know yet. It’s a possibility.’
