The Last Girl (51 page)

‘Did you watch it together?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes. If we had time. I’m more of a doer, myself.’ He smiled again, obviously thinking that it came across as charming, but the dead eyes would have put me off even if his personality hadn’t been so repellent. ‘Laura was the big fan.’

‘Why was that?’

‘She’d found a collection in her parents’ house when she was thirteen and that got her started on it. It made her curious. By the time I met her, she just wanted to do everything she’d ever seen. She only knew the theory. It was time for the real thing. And I was happy to oblige if I could.’

‘You must have thought all your dreams had come true,’ Derwent said dryly.

‘It was all right. Got a bit boring sometimes.’ He propped one foot up on the other knee. ‘She got a kick out of talking about her parents afterwards, like “what would they say if they could see what I just did?” Earning their disapproval seemed to be the point, you know?

‘Being a rebel was important to her, then.’ I was thinking about what Lydia had told me, about Laura picking fights with her mother and father.

‘It was how she got through the day. She told me her mother was on her case all the time, her dad was never there and had tons of affairs, and her sister was halfway to crazy. I think she was lonely. It wasn’t much of a family, she said. She was looking for something more.’

‘And she ended up with you.’ Derwent shook his head. ‘Poor Laura.’

‘Me or someone else.’

‘Are we back to you not being the star of the photos?’ I asked. ‘Because I would be surprised if it wasn’t you.’

‘Thanks for that.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘She was seeing someone else.’

‘How do you know?’ Derwent asked.

‘Found messages from him on her phone.’

‘Did you indeed?’

‘She was getting texts from someone and she was excited about it – kept going for her phone to check if he’d sent her something and she’d missed it.’

‘Did you find out who he was? A name?’

‘No. They weren’t signed. It could have been anyone.’

‘Someone you knew, though.’

‘She said it wasn’t. She said I was being ridiculous. But I read the messages. It was all “I think about you all the time” and “I need to see you” and “we’ll make them under stand they have to let us be together” – stuff like that.’

‘Sounds like competition,’ Derwent observed.

‘That’s what I thought. To be honest, that was part of what we argued about on Friday. I couldn’t deal with how she reacted when I confronted her. She thought it was funny.’

‘I bet she wasn’t laughing after you hit her,’ I said with a thin smile.

‘No. No, she wasn’t. Um, that was it, really. That was the last time I spoke to her. I saw her on the Sunday but not to talk to her – she was just walking through the village talking on her phone. She didn’t see me.’

‘And you went to the house on Sunday because you thought you could talk to her,’ I said.

‘I went because I thought he was going to be there.’

‘Her father?’ I was lost.

‘No. The guy she was in touch with. Something in one of the messages made it seem as if they’d arranged for him to come to the house that night. I thought it was so she could introduce him to her parents and that made it worse, because she’d told me straight out she was never going to let them know about me, that her dad wouldn’t like me and her mum would be too suspicious of me to be polite.’
He
shook his head, still hurt. ‘I wanted to know what made him better than me. I’m going to Cambridge in October, for God’s sake. I’m not the sort of boy that parents don’t like.’

‘Oh, you’re a real catch,’ Derwent said. ‘What are you going to study?’

‘Law.’

‘You might want to think again, son. A conviction for trespass isn’t going to help your career ambitions.’

‘That had occurred to me.’ His jaw was clenched.

‘I’m beginning to see why you wanted to meet Philip Kennford,’ I said.

‘Yeah, obviously. When I met her first, I thought Laura would be a useful contact. I thought she might be able to arrange some work experience for me with her father. That was why I showed an interest in the first place. But it’s been nothing but trouble from start to finish.’ He was an arrogant little shit, but I could tell he meant what he said next.

‘I wish to God I’d never met her.’

Chapter Twenty-two

THE HOTEL ROOM
door was the sort that was impossible to open quietly, the key card humming and clicking to itself as I slid it into the lock. The handle required brute force to turn it. I slipped in as silently as possible, trying to get the door to close without banging, which proved to be beyond it too. A rustle from the bed behind me made me wince. Busted.

‘What time do you call this?’

‘Time I was in bed.’ I was almost glad he had woken up; it was reassuring to hear his voice sounding normal when nothing else was. I began to take off my clothes without putting the light on. ‘Did you pack pyjamas for me?’

‘Do you need them?’ Rob yawned. ‘There are some, somewhere. I haven’t bothered, myself.’

‘Toothbrush?’

‘In the bathroom.’

It was a small bathroom and the lighting made me look old before my time. I brushed my teeth with my eyes closed and quickly, aching all over. We had finished with Seth at one in the morning. Derwent had then moaned all the way back to the large, soulless chain hotel off the busiest roundabout in Wandsworth where ‘the missing member of Take That’, as he put it, was waiting for me. It had annoyed Derwent that Rob had been wearing running kit, it seemed. Running was his territory. Rob standing around posing in shorts and a vest top had just been
attention-seeking.
I had let him rant, glad of a lift and preoccupied with the interviews we had just conducted. I was worried about Lydia. I was disgusted with Seth Carberry. I was hope lessly confused about the Kennford case. And I was completely out of ideas.

The air conditioning was blasting when I came out of the bathroom in a T-shirt and pants. ‘I think this is the first time I’ve been cold since the hot weather started.’

‘Bliss, isn’t it?’ He mumbled it into the pillow, half asleep again. ‘I could almost be grateful to your stalker for the opportunity to sleep in comfort.’

‘Don’t even mention him to me.’ I got into bed, already bothered by the street lights shining into the room and the red gleam of the standby bulb on the television. Beyond tired, I spent a restless couple of minutes trying to get comfortable.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘The pillow is too soft.’ I thumped it crossly and lay down on my back, staring up at the ceiling. ‘The air conditioning is too loud.’

‘This is a temporary measure. We’ll find somewhere else to stay tomorrow.’ He yawned. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can.’

‘I hate this.’ A tear slid out of the corner of my eye and down into my hair. I sniffed, then sniffed again. ‘I’m so sorry about it.’

He rolled towards me. ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s not your fault.’

‘You should be doing the job you love and enjoying life in your own flat, not camping out in a crappy budget hotel. And all of it is my fault, if you think about it. If you weren’t involved with me––’

‘Spare me the guilt.’ He said it gently, though. ‘I’ve always made my own decisions, Maeve. And one of those was that you were worth a bit of hassle.’ There was a
pause.
‘I could get tired of you trying to break up with me for stupid reasons, though.’

‘It seemed like the right course of action.’ Another tear joined the previous one.

‘It always does.’

‘It’s not because I don’t care about you.’

‘I know.’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Oh, do you indeed?’

‘It’s because you don’t like depending on anyone else. For anything.’

‘Not so.’

‘You like to think you’re too tough to need me.’ He raised himself up on one elbow and grinned down at me. ‘But you’re wrong. It’s too late. You’re committed.’

‘I could walk away at any time.’

‘No chance.’

‘How big-headed are you, exactly?’

‘Oh, very.’ He leaned down so he could kiss me. ‘Completely.’

‘Cocky git.’ I hesitated. ‘We should talk.’

‘About what in particular?’

‘Trust?’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yes, that.’ I imitated his bored tone of voice and it made him laugh. I waited him out, though, wanting a serious answer.

‘I made a mistake,’ he admitted. ‘I thought I could deal with the DI Ormond situation without involving you. I thought I could wait her out and she’d lose interest, but she’s not really like that.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t have freaked out.’

‘Yeah. Except that you did.’

‘Only because I was cross with you for not being honest with me.’

‘I was afraid to be honest. I was afraid you’d leave me.’ He slid his hand along my leg. ‘I would miss you too much.’

‘I bet.’ I picked his hand up and gave it back to him.

‘Like that, is it?’

‘I should go to sleep.’

‘Me too.’ After a moment his hand returned to my knee. This time I let it stay where it was. And move. And linger. And move again.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh yeah? It doesn’t make everything better, you know.’

‘I know. But it’s a good way to pass the time.’

‘So is Scrabble.’

‘Shame we don’t have a board.’ He leaned over and kissed me again. ‘We’ll have to think of something else.’

I made it easy for him sometimes, really I did, but it worked out rather nicely for me too. And I did get to sleep without too much trouble in the end, so there was that. All in all, things could have been a lot worse.

Rather inevitably, they became worse almost immediately. Not very many hours later – before six, it turned out – the two of us sat up at the same time in response to a phone ringing. It was how I woke up more often than I cared to calculate.

‘Where is it?’

‘The floor.’

‘Mine, then.’ I slid off the bed and went hunting through the clothes I’d shed earlier, shaking them out. Rob turned over with a groan and buried himself in the pillow, which was exactly what I would have liked to do. The phone was still ringing, vibrating against the floor and I saw it in the end under the bed because the screen was lit up.

‘What do you want?’ I said it before I answered, not quite brave enough to say good morning to Derwent in those terms, settling for a neutral, ‘Kerrigan.’

‘Woke you, did I?’ His voice was loud and I winced.

‘Of course you did.’ My voice sounded rough; the air conditioning had dried out my vocal cords.

‘Tough shit. No more sleeping. You need to get your arse in gear and meet me. We’ve got a job.’

‘What job?’ I rubbed my eyes, trying not to yawn into the phone.

‘We’ve been invited to a crime scene.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ The tiredness was receding as the old familiar tension flooded my body.

‘It means one of our witnesses just turned up dead.’

The street didn’t look much better for being full of police vehicles instead of builders’ vans. Derwent parked near the end, swearing under his breath, and I decided not to bother teasing him about the distance we had to walk. He had been in a bad mood since he picked me up, a mood that was showing no signs of lifting, and I didn’t feel much like laughing anyway.

We were out of our territory and neither of us knew any of the local CID, so it took us a while to get through the various cordons and get into the house itself. Standing in the hall, I found myself struck by how unchanged the place was, how familiar from our previous visit, the same coat hanging on a hook, the same stack of unopened junk mail in the corner by the door. Then the differences began to filter through. There was a smell in the air that hadn’t been there before, something I recognised from other murders I had attended: blood, chiefly. There were sounds from upstairs – many feet moving around – and boiler-suited SOCOs were working in the living room. This would be a big case for someone and they weren’t stinting on manpower. I stood beside Derwent, waiting to be told where to go. We had paper shoe-covers but that didn’t mean we could or should roam through the house. Everyone who passed us seemed to have something better to do than talk to us.

‘Can I help you?’ It was an officer in a dark-blue suit, a youngish man with thinning hair and heavy-framed glasses who was coming down the stairs at speed. Instinctively I felt I wouldn’t like him – there was something in the timbre of his voice, the tight-arsed posture he affected that made him seem like the teacher’s pet, all grown up.

‘DI Josh Derwent.’ He moved in front of me, which was his usual technique – far be it from him to do anything as useful as introducing me. I stepped to the side so I was still visible.