Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller. Jane Casey

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       2

      I sat in the car, not moving. The rain danced across the empty street in front of me. It was unusual for it to be so quiet at a crime scene. Murder always attracted crowds, but the rain was better at dispersing them than any uniformed officer. The journalists were hanging back too, sitting in their cars like me, waiting for something to happen. Walking across the road would count as something happening, so I stayed where I was. The less attention I attracted, the happier I was.

      The light wasn’t good, the dark clouds overhead making it feel like a winter day. I checked. Not quite six o’clock. More than three hours to sunset. Two and a half hours since the 999 call had brought response officers to the address. Two hours and ten minutes since the response officers’ inspector had turned up to get her own impression of what they’d found. Two hours since the inspector had called for a murder investigation team. Ninety minutes since my phone had rung with an address and a sketchy description of what was waiting for me there.

      What I saw was a quiet residential street in Putney, not far from the river. Valerian Road was lined with identical red-brick Victorian townhouses with elaborate white plasterwork and black railings, their tiled paths glossy from the rain. The residents’ cars were parked on both sides of the street, most of them newish, most of them expensive.

      The exception: a stretch about ten houses long where blue-and-white tape made a cordon. Inside it, police vehicles clustered, and an ambulance, the back doors open, the paramedics packing up as they prepared to move off. And halfway along the cordoned-off bit of street, a hastily erected tent hiding the doorway of the house that was my crime scene.

      A stocky figure emerged from the tent, yanked down a mask and pushed back the hood of her paper overalls. Una Burt. Detective Chief Inspector Una Burt, acting up as our superintendent. The guv’nor. Ma’am. My boss. Her hair was flattened against her head: rain or sweat, I guessed. My skin was clammy already, the shirt sticking to my back, and I hadn’t done anything more energetic than drive across London on a wet Sunday afternoon. It was warm still, despite the rain.

      Beside me, Georgia Shaw shifted in her seat. ‘What are we waiting for?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘So let’s get going.’ She had her hand on the door handle already.

      ‘We are murder detectives. By the time we turn up at a crime scene, by definition, nothing can be done to save anyone. So what’s the rush?’

      She cleared her throat, because when you’re a detective constable you don’t say bullshit to a detective sergeant. Not unless you know them very well indeed. Even if the detective sergeant is so newly promoted she keeps forgetting about it herself.

      ‘We’re not going to find the murderer by sitting in the car, though, are we?’

      ‘I once caught a murderer while I was sitting in a car,’ I said idly, more interested in the crime scene in front of me than in talking to the newest member of the murder team.

      ‘Who was that?’ Georgia narrowed her eyes, trying to remember. She had read up on me, she told me on her first day, and made the mistake of saying it in front of most of the team. If we’d been alone, I might have been able to be nice about it. As it was, I had turned on my heel and walked away, too mortified to say anything. I didn’t need to. I knew my colleagues would say plenty once I was out of earshot.

      Some of what they said would even be true.

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said now. Be nice. ‘Ancient history. The thing to remember is that it’s not a waste of time to take your time.’

      Georgia smiled, but in an irritable stop-telling-me-what-I-already-know way. She was strikingly self-possessed for someone who’d been a member of the team for two weeks. Maybe it was just that I expected everyone else to be as diffident as I had been. Self-confidence had never really been my strong point but it was irrational to dislike Georgia simply because she was assertive.

      It was a lot more rational to dislike her because she was absolutely useless. A graduate, she was on a fast-track scheme and had been moved to my team straight after her probation. She was young, she was pretty, she was articulate and confident and ambitious and not all that interested in hard work, it seemed to me. She was a filled quota, a ticked box, and I didn’t think she deserved to be on a murder investigation team.

      Then again, that was exactly how the other members of the team had felt about me when I joined.

      So I disliked her, but I sincerely tried not to.

      Kev Cox emerged from the house, his face shiny red. He scraped back his hood and said something to Una Burt that made her smile.

      ‘Who’s that?’