The Kill (34 page)

I caught up with him in the little clearing he’d found. He was leaning against a tree, his expression giving nothing away.

‘Can we stop walking now?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

I took a minute to get my breathing under control. ‘Right. What are we doing here?’

‘Two reasons,’ Derwent said. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Your desk is three feet away from mine.’

‘Not in the office.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I won’t get anything out of you in the office.’

I frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve been a zombie for the past two days. I want to know what’s going on.’

‘Ugh.’ I turned and started to walk away.

‘Kerrigan, you’ll get lost.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Come back and face the music. I am going to have this conversation with you sooner or later.’ His voice got louder as I got further away. ‘It’s a long walk back to the office.’

And he wouldn’t drive me there unless I cooperated.
Shit
. I trudged back. ‘You’ve basically kidnapped me to make me talk to you.’

He shrugged. ‘The end justifies the means. What’s going on?’

‘Remind me why you care?’

‘Because you’ve been going through the motions and that doesn’t work in this job. Emma Wells doesn’t deserve it, does she? She should be getting the best investigation we can manage, not you being half-hearted and snappy.’

He always knew how to get me. ‘So?’ I said, but the fight had gone out of me and he knew it.

‘So talk. Tell me what’s going on.’

I sighed. ‘Why would I confide in you?’

‘You don’t have anyone else to talk to. You’re missing Liv.’

‘I have other friends,’ I pointed out.

‘And you’d have spoken to them by now if you thought they could help. Either you did speak to them and they didn’t help, or you need someone who understands your world. Someone who does the job.’

He was right, annoyingly enough. I kicked at a fallen log, considering my lack of options. Obviously I preferred to keep Derwent at arm’s length. Even more obviously, this was a delicate conversation about matters that were highly personal. But Derwent had been open with me in the past, when he needed to be. He hadn’t held back. And with his background – his experience of being the one responsible for a dead colleague in the army, his years in the police and his slightly disturbing familiarity with the ins and outs of my private life – he was just about the best person I could talk to. I knew what my friends would say; they would be solidly on my side, even before I’d finished telling them what had happened. Derwent wouldn’t hold back. He’d tell me what he really thought.

Derwent fidgeted, impatient. ‘Think of it as going to confession.’

‘Okay, definitely not. I can’t believe I was even contemplating it.’

‘I’ll absolve you of your sins.’

‘What makes you think I have sins?’

‘Just a guess. You’re usually harder on yourself than on anyone else. If someone had done something to you, you’d have shrugged it off by now. You haven’t got over it. You feel guilty about something.’

‘You are making some pretty big assumptions.’

‘Come on, Kerrigan.’ Derwent’s voice softened. ‘Talk to me.’

I would regret it, I thought. I should run as far and as fast as I could.

‘This doesn’t go any further,’ I said.

‘Cross my heart.’

‘And I don’t really want to talk to you about it so don’t push me, okay? None of your interview tricks.’

‘Would I?’

‘Yes, you would.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Right. The thing is, I think Rob and I have broken up.’

‘You think.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘I don’t know.’

He folded his arms and settled himself against the tree trunk, getting comfortable. ‘This is interesting. Go on.’

‘Yesterday morning, before work, I went around to Deborah Ormond’s flat.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘How did you know the address?’

‘I am a detective,’ I said loftily. ‘Rob walked out in the middle of the night. At that hour there was no public transport to speak of and I had his car keys so I knew he’d have to walk to wherever he was going, or get a cab. I went to our local cab office and made some enquiries. They told me where they’d taken him. I actually got the same driver so he was able to show me exactly where Rob had gone.’

‘Did you tell them you were a cop? Did they think you were asking for work?’

‘Of course. They wouldn’t have done it otherwise.’

Derwent shook his head admiringly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d do that, Kerrigan.’

‘Well, I did. I didn’t know it was Debbie’s flat, obviously, but I wasn’t surprised.’ I felt the slow swell of nausea that had been affecting me since the previous morning and tried to suppress it. I hadn’t eaten anything. I couldn’t.

‘Did she let you in?’

‘Of course. She was delighted. She couldn’t have been more welcoming. She was very keen for me to see Rob sleeping in her bed.’

‘Whoa.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Sleeping, though. That doesn’t mean shagging. You’ve slept in my bed.’

‘I wasn’t naked and you didn’t sleep in the same bed with me,’ I pointed out.
Thank God
. ‘It was completely obvious what they’d been doing. I’m not an idiot. I’m not jumping to conclusions.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. She admitted it. I barely had to ask before she told me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘I left before he woke up.’

Derwent whistled soundlessly. ‘Does he know you know?’

‘If she told him. I haven’t heard from him.’

‘Fuck.’

‘That is a really helpful comment. Thanks for getting me through this difficult time.’ I started back towards the path again.

‘No, come back. You’re not finished.’

‘I think I am.’

Derwent was too shrewd for that. ‘You’ve left out a big chunk of the story. The last time I saw you, you were on cloud nine because he wasn’t dead. You were going to take him home and look after him. You’re in love with him and he’s mad about you. How did he end up in Debbie’s bed a few hours later?’

‘Don’t ask,’ I said, using my I-mean-it tone of voice, which, of course, didn’t work on Derwent.

‘I just don’t believe it. I don’t know why you’d take Debbie’s word for it. She’s lied about it before. Maybe it was all innocent.’

I shook my head, annoyed at the tightening in my throat that told me I was getting close to crying, again. I wasn’t going to tell Derwent about the way the flat had smelled of stale sweat and wine dregs, or the condom wrappers on the bedside table, or the scrapes on Rob’s back from Debbie’s long nails.

‘So now you hate him, is that it?’

‘No. I want him to come back. I don’t blame him. They’d had most of three bottles of wine, by the looks of things. She got him drunk and took advantage of him. I know he was upset when he left our flat. He wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘Why did he leave?’

I looked at Derwent with pure loathing. ‘You came back to that one.’

‘Trained interrogator. I can’t switch it off.’

‘Try.’

No chance. ‘Why did he leave? Did you have a fight?’

‘No.’ I hesitated, trying to find a neutral way to put it. ‘I let him down.’

He tilted his head to one side, intrigued. ‘How?’

‘I can’t talk to you about this,’ I said flatly. ‘There’s no way.’

‘Who else are you going to talk to? Come on, this is the thing that bothers you. You talked about Rob shagging Debbie like it was nothing and now you’ve clammed up again. Get it out.’

I walked around in a tiny circle, feeling trapped.

‘Whatever it is, it’s not as bad as you think it is.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I said.

‘You hold yourself to a high standard, which is something I happen to appreciate in a woman. I’m interested to hear what counts as letting your boyfriend down.’

‘Stop joking about it,’ I said hopelessly. I turned my face away so I could blot the tears away against the back of my hand. When I turned back again, it was as if I’d flipped a switch. Derwent had been relaxed, leaning back, amused and curious and infinitely mocking. Now he had straightened up and he was watching me with the focus of a hunter.

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t want anyone to know what happened.’

‘Why not?’

‘I think people might misinterpret what happened and it wouldn’t be fair.’

‘Fair to whom?’ Derwent’s patience never lasted all that long. ‘For God’s sake, Kerrigan, I’d get straighter answers from a Jesuit. Just tell me what happened.’

I wavered. On the one hand, hideous embarrassment. On the other, getting a man’s perspective might not be such a bad idea. Derwent was nothing if not experienced, after all, and brutally frank. He would tell me what he thought without sparing my feelings.

I sat down on a tree stump, folded the skirt of my coat around my knees and told him everything, without looking at him once. In short terse sentences I described how Rob had been that night, and how I had tried to do and say the right thing, and how I had failed. Then I told him what had happened in the middle of the night.

‘And I got upset. It wasn’t … It wasn’t what I wanted, or how I wanted it.’

‘Did he rape you?’ he asked. It was a policeman’s question, trying to define what had happened in a technical, legal sense. There was no outrage in his voice and that made it easier, somehow, to answer the question I’d asked myself.

‘No. Definitely not. He’d been drinking a lot and he was really upset. He wasn’t being rough with me deliberately. He stopped the second I told him to. It was just bad.’ I went back to looking at the leaves in front of me. ‘It was my fault. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I got panicked. I felt trapped.’

‘Why would you panic? You said he stopped when you told him to. You must have known he would.’

‘Yes, I knew he would, but I still felt like I was depending on him to do what I asked. There was nothing I could do if he didn’t. I just got into a state.’ My heart was thumping as if I’d been running. I only seemed to be able to take shallow, gulping breaths that didn’t give me enough air. Back to feeling trapped. Back to feeling vulnerable and pathetic.

‘That’s not like you, Kerrigan.’

‘I know. I—I had a bad experience.’ Why was this harder to talk about than how my relationship had fallen apart?

‘Recently?’ Derwent suggested.

‘On the Maudling Estate.’

‘I knew it.’ Pure triumph. For Derwent, there was nothing better than the high of being right. He’d waited for this, like the cat by the mouse hole.

‘Of course you knew,’ I snapped. ‘I didn’t want to talk about it then, and I don’t want to talk about it now. I’m just explaining the context, that’s all.’

‘Did some little shitbag try it on with you?’

I shook my head. Then, because he wouldn’t have let it drop, ‘Four of them.’

‘In the stairwell, where I found your button.’

‘Yes.’

Derwent’s face darkened. ‘What happened?’

‘They cornered me and threatened me with various horrible things. I scared them off. The end. I just wanted to forget about it afterwards and I thought I had, but it just – came back.’

‘Trauma is like that.’

‘Let’s not overstate it. I was fine.’

‘Bullshit.’ Just for a second I caught a flash of the blazing anger inside Derwent. ‘You walked out of there looking like a ghost. I should have made you tell me what happened. I should have insisted.’

‘I wouldn’t have told you. It was over. I dealt with it. I got myself into trouble and I got myself out of it.’

‘And now you’re completely fine,’ he said softly. ‘You didn’t think it should be investigated?’

‘I thought it would waste time and divert resources that were needed elsewhere.’

‘You didn’t think you needed counselling?’

I laughed. ‘
You
think I should have had counselling? Is this the devil quoting scripture? You think it’s bollocks.’

‘It doesn’t work for me. It might work for you. I can arrange it for you, if you like.’

‘No.’

‘Kerrigan, when are you going to learn that it’s okay to ask for help? You can’t always deal with things on your own.’

‘You are a fine one to talk.’

He took a step towards me, jabbing a finger for emphasis. ‘When I was in real trouble, I came to you.’

‘You used me to get the inside track on an investigation you should have known nothing about.’

‘Yeah, all right, but that was still me asking you for help.’ The anger faded out of his face, replaced by something that looked a lot like affection. ‘And you did help me, and I was grateful.’

I was increasingly immune to the shouting and the sarcasm. It was always, always when Derwent was nice to me that it got under my defences. I put my hand over my eyes so I didn’t have to look at him as I cried. They were proper, heaving sobs, the kind you can’t hide, the kind that generate torrents of snot and end up in red-nosed hiccups. I had tissues in my pocket, thankfully, so I wasn’t reduced to wiping my nose on my sleeve. That was as close as I got to keeping my dignity.

When I finally got control of myself and dared to look at Derwent again, he was staring into the middle distance, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

‘Sorry, am I boring you?’

‘A bit,’ he admitted. ‘Finished?’

‘For now.’ I blew my nose. ‘If this is you being a shoulder to cry on, I’m not sure you’re all that effective.’

You criticised Derwent at your peril. The result was instant belligerence. ‘What do you want me to do? Do you want a hug?’

The way he said it was awfully close to
do you want a fight?
I didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Well, what would make you feel better?’

I cleared my throat, afraid to look at him again. At least he would tell me the truth. ‘Do you think – in your view – was it my fault?’

‘You are so thick sometimes,’ Derwent said. ‘Why should you take responsibility for something you didn’t do? Why can’t you admit it’s Rob’s fault?’

‘It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know about the Maudling Estate. He was confused and drunk and hurt, probably.’

Derwent frowned at me, interested. ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’