The Last Girl (8 page)

Before Derwent could answer, my phone rang. ‘Bit late for a call, isn’t it?’

‘It’s Rob.’ I headed for the hall, the phone still ringing in my hand. At least being out of the room gave me the illusion of privacy. I leaned against the wall and answered
it.
As always, the sound of his voice was enough to make me smile.

‘Still at work?’

‘Yeah, but hopefully not for long.’

‘Wish I could say the same. Listen, I’m going to be out until breakfast. We’re set up on these ramraiders and it looks like they’re planning something tonight.’

‘You sound happy about it.’

‘You know me. Always at my best when I’m stuck in the back of a van, weeing into a bottle.’

In the background, someone made a comment I couldn’t quite hear and Rob laughed, covering the phone to reply.

‘That’s fine.’ I said it quite loudly.
Hey
, you’re
the one who rang
me
… The least you could do is pay attention
. ‘As I said, I’m still working. And I’ve got to be in the office by eight, so I might not see you in the morning.’

I waited for him to ask me what I was doing, and where, but instead he said, ‘Well, I suppose I’ll see you when I see you.’

‘As usual.’

‘It’s a bit like that, isn’t it? Talk to you later, mate.’

‘Bye.’ I disconnected and looked at the phone.
Mate?
I hadn’t expected ‘I love you’ or ‘darling’, but
mate
?

When Derwent spoke, he was standing so close behind me that I jumped a mile. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, it sounds as if you and Vita had a fair bit in common.’

‘I do mind, and you’re completely wrong,’ I snapped.

‘Not getting what you want, are you? Here. This might help. I won’t tell anyone.’ He handed me a book.
Justine
, by the Marquis de Sade. The pages were soft and the spine ridged with much reading and re-reading. It looked as if it was one of Vita’s favourites.

‘In six hours, we have to be at a conference with the boss. I don’t have time to indulge your little jokes.’ I slapped the book against his chest and he grabbed on to it
automatically.
‘Now, if we’re finished, I’d like to go home. If we’re not, I suggest we get on with it.’

Derwent looked thoughtful and I recalled with a sinking feeling that every now and then he liked to remind me that he was a senior officer. Moreover, he took great pleasure in putting me in my place. And he could manage on very little sleep.

‘We still haven’t found that phone, have we?’ He checked his watch and sighed. ‘Oh dear. Looks as if we’re going to be here for a while.’

‘Do you really think we need to find it now?’

‘No.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘I think
you
need to find it. Let me know how you get on.’

Chapter Four

‘AND KENNFORD WASN’T
able to give you a list of people who wished him harm.’ The speaker was Una Burt, Godley’s latest DCI, and the first woman who had held that position. Proof that women didn’t need good looks to get onto Godley’s team, she had the long face and square features of a particularly plain horse, if that horse was short-sighted enough to need thick glasses. She was also exceptionally good at her job, tremendously serious and a massive pain in Derwent’s arse. I didn’t know her well enough to like her but I admired her, not least for being deaf to the comments that were made about her. The mildest one I’d heard was, ‘Someone told me Burt was born a female but you’d never know by looking.’ She was too bright not to notice the sneers but she had perfected the expression of someone whose mind is on higher things. And maybe it was; she came with an impeccable track record from her previous job on another murder squad. There had been murmurs when Godley told us she was joining the team, both from within and outside the squad. He was getting a reputation for being a poacher, which was starting to piss off people. Bringing in new talent from outside made it harder for anyone in the team to move up the ladder, and DCI Burt was nothing if not talented. As for why she wanted to work with him, there was no great mystery about it. He was the best the Met had to offer. She’d have been mad to turn him down.

One person who absolutely wished she’d done that was
sitting
beside me, shifting irritably in his chair. Spoiling for a fight, I recognised, and was glad I had managed to keep my temper through the long hours of searching through Kennford’s house, and the mordant drive back through building traffic that had left me just enough time to shower and change before heading out again. I had also had time to notice that Rob wasn’t home, that he hadn’t been home, and that the milk had gone off. Domestic bliss it wasn’t. And not what I had signed up for when I moved in with him, I reflected on my way to the station, where a hot, overcrowded train left me short-tempered and crumpled. The meeting room was airless too and I struggled to keep a yawn in, my jaw creaking with the effort. I’d never fallen asleep in a conference yet, but there was always a first time for everything. Dog tired was no way to start a murder investigation and I would have given a lot to curl up for a snooze somewhere peaceful, like under the table.

‘He didn’t want to talk to us about his enemies and we weren’t really in a position to twist his arm. We’re seeing him today at his chambers. Either we’ll get it out of him there or we’ll find someone willing to tell us what he doesn’t want us to know.’ Derwent was aiming for bored but his tone actually came out as sulky. He rocked back so his chair teetered on two legs.

‘But I’m interested in why he wouldn’t tell you straightaway.’ DCI Burt twirled a biro through her fingers, spinning it from one end of her hand to the other and back again. She was looking down at the notes in front of her, not at Derwent, who was now probing the inside of his cheek with his tongue. ‘Most grieving relatives cooperate. Unless they have something to hide.’

‘Remember, Kennford is a lawyer,’ Godley pointed out. ‘It’s second nature with them to watch what they say.’

‘I would have thought he would want to rule out a few avenues of investigation for us.’

‘And I would have thought anyone who was targeting
him
would have made a better job of smashing his head in.’ Derwent snorted. ‘God knows it’s big enough. Never met anyone so arrogant.’

‘Takes one to know one.’ The comment was made in an undertone but Derwent still heard it. He glowered at Harry Maitland, who looked not remotely abashed. Colin Vale moved his chair away from Maitland a little.

‘You can’t rule him out, obviously, but I agree, the killer could have done a better job of dealing with Kennford.’ She tapped the end of her biro on her pad. ‘Unless they were under pressure and ran out of time. Maybe they realised the other daughter was still alive and made a run for it before she discovered them.’

‘She’s not what you’d call intimidating,’ Godley said. ‘If the killer could handle her twin and her mother at the same time, I don’t think Lydia would have posed too big a problem. It bothered me a lot that Kennford wasn’t stabbed, especially given that we didn’t find the knife in the house. The killer should have been able to use it on him and I don’t know why he didn’t. It makes me wonder if we have two attackers.’

‘Or one. Philip Kennford himself.’ No one around the table looked particularly shocked, I thought, as Derwent outlined the theory we’d discussed in the small hours, Kennford staging an attack on himself by headbutting the mirror in his room. ‘He could have broken the glass first to limit the amount of damage he did to himself. I didn’t see a bruise on the back of his head – did you?’

‘His hair is too thick.’ Godley made a note. ‘We can ask the paramedics what they made of him when they examined him. Colin, can you track them down?’

Colin nodded morosely, which meant nothing. He always looked morose. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that he always got the worst jobs, the grinding routine bits of investigation that had to be done but rarely threw up interesting results. It was a shame for him that he was
good
at that sort of work, painstaking and diligent in a way that Derwent, say, was not.

‘We still need to get that list from Kennford, though.’ Godley checked the clock on the wall. ‘I’ve got the PMs on Vita and Laura this morning.’

‘We’ll be there too.’ Derwent was speaking for me as well, I realised with a sinking feeling. I would give a lot to miss the autopsies.

‘Good. Let’s arrange to see Kennford this afternoon at his chambers. I want to be there. I want to show him we’re taking it seriously.’

And make up for losing his temper the night before. He was also aware of the need to keep his DI under control, I guessed. Derwent was rocking on his chair, smirking. ‘I’m going to make Kennford wish he’d never picked a fight with me.’

‘I think Kennford isn’t telling us everything he knows, but I don’t think we should make the mistake of concentrating on him and him alone.’ Everyone around the table turned to look at me with varying degrees of interest. ‘We’ve got two victims who might equally have been the real targets. We don’t even know if it was one of them or both of them. Maybe Laura was collateral damage and Vita was the one who was meant to die, or maybe it was the other way round. Either way, we need to know as much as we can about them.’

‘Did you find anything useful last night?’ Godley asked.

‘Define useful.’ Derwent yawned widely before going on and I felt my jaw creak in sympathy. ‘We found that Laura had been making amateur porn with an unidentified male, and that her mother had a keen interest in the professional kind. She had quite a collection.’

‘Any diaries? Letters?’

‘No, but it is the twenty-first century, boss. We were looking for phones and emails.’

I didn’t wait to see if Godley was amused or annoyed by
Derwent’s
smart-arse remark, hurrying in with, ‘Without success. Laura must have had a phone but I couldn’t find it, and I turned the place upside down. I really don’t think it’s in the house. Vita’s was in her handbag, switched off. No idea what the PIN is – we tried all the obvious ones but no luck. We need to get it unlocked so we can track down her friends, find out if they knew anything about her personal life.’

‘Computers?’

‘Vita didn’t seem to have one, but we’ll check that with Kennford. He has a laptop – we let him take it away with him as he needed it for work. And he’s not a suspect, officially.’

‘Yet,’ Derwent interjected.

‘Both girls had laptops too. We’ve got Laura’s and I’ve sent it for analysis.’

‘Laura had every gizmo going,’ Derwent said. ‘Her room looked like the stockroom at a branch of Comet. But there wasn’t anything that takes us much further, on first examination. Mind you, we haven’t got into her emails yet.’

‘That’s something I want to ask Lydia about this morning,’ I said. ‘She might know her sister’s password. She might also know where Laura was supposed to be last night. Kennford said he was expecting her to be out. I’d like to know where, with whom, and why she changed her plans.’

‘Teenagers are unreliable by nature,’ Maitland said. ‘I should know, I’ve got two of them. Never tell you half the things they get up to and never get around to doing most of what they plan to.’

‘It’s a change in their routine,’ I countered. ‘Something different. Something unexpected. So far it’s the only strange thing we can be sure of, and even though there’s nothing to say it’s connected, I still think we should find out where she was meant to be.’

‘With the boyfriend, maybe.’ Derwent clicked his fingers. ‘But she broke up with him instead and went home, so he killed her, and her mum for good measure. Case closed.’

It was a good thing I was used to sarcasm from that quarter. ‘I’m not suggesting it’s as straightforward as that. It’s just an anomaly. Anything out of the ordinary should be investigated.’

‘It’s worth finding out more,’ Godley said. ‘Do we know who the boyfriend is?’

‘He’s Mr Faceless McAnonymous in the pictures and I bet Kennford didn’t have a clue he existed.’ Derwent scrawled something in his notebook. ‘We’ll have to ask Lydia who her sister was banging.’

Alarm bells were going off in my mind. If Derwent took that line with her we could forget finding out anything at all. ‘I’m not going to ask her that straight out. She’s not likely to tell me, even if she knows.’

‘How would she not know? They were twins.’

‘Doesn’t mean they were close.’ I looked at Godley instead of Derwent, hoping he would referee. ‘When we went and searched their rooms, Laura’s was a mess, but it gave you the feeling she enjoyed life. She certainly had everything any teenager could want in the way of gadgets and toys. Lydia’s was like a nun’s cell. I don’t know how much they had in common apart from DNA and shared womb space, but they definitely led different lives.’

The superintendent nodded. ‘She sounds shy, from what her dad said. Josh, you should take a back seat for that interview. Actually, don’t go. I don’t want you scaring the girl out of talking. Maeve has a better chance of gaining her trust if she goes on her own.’

‘So you’re keeping me out of it again.’ Derwent’s chair thudded down on the carpet. ‘It’s a pretty important interview and you want to send Kerrigan alone?’

‘She’s more than capable.’

I tried to look more than capable. Una Burt was frowning at me but not with disapproval; more as if she’d never really noticed me before. Maitland had crossed his arms across his barrel chest and was grinning, all set to enjoy the show. Colin looked bored, but then he was generally uninterested in human interaction.