Читать книгу The Cutting Place - Jane Casey - Страница 11

I couldn’t see the river from where I stood, but I knew it was there. The harsh squabbling of seagulls cut through the air, louder than the traffic rumbling past the end of the quiet street. The morning light had a pearly quality, hazy as an impressionist painting, and the breeze carried a faint, dank suggestion of briny water and black mud. I wondered if the woman had been drawn to the river in life as in death – if that was why she had chosen Greenwich as a home, if she had been fascinated by the dark water sliding endlessly towards oblivion in the sea, or if she had had any inkling that one day it would take her too …

‘Maeve.’

I pulled my mask back up to give myself some protection from the smell before I turned away from the window and faced the room. Liv was making her way towards me carefully, picking her way over boxes and the legs of a crime-scene officer who was lying on the floor, inspecting the area under the kitchen cupboards.

Two tedious days of file-sifting and phone calls and river-dredging had ended with a positive DNA match, the miracle of forensic science coming to our aid with an unarguable answer that should have made my life easier. The woman in the river had a name and a face now, as well as an address and a job: Paige Hargreaves, 28, freelance journalist. I could congratulate myself that she had at least featured in one of the piles of possible victims. I might have tracked her down eventually, without the DNA match, but it would have taken weeks, and it would have been a provisional identification. DNA left no room for doubt.

Being in her home should have given me a proper insight into the murdered woman. In my experience, there was no quicker way to get to know someone than to see where and how they lived. On this occasion, though, I was finding it hard to concentrate, which explained why I was lurking by the window instead of searching. Partly it was the smell: the unemptied bin, the fridge full of sour milk and greenish meat, a bowl of blackened bananas and soft brown grapes complete with orbiting fruit flies. Partly it was the forensic investigators who were tripping over one another in their efforts to examine every inch of the small flat’s rooms. Mainly, though, it was the mess that was frustrating me.

Liv made it to my side, swamped in her paper suit. ‘This is grim, isn’t it? When was she reported missing?’

‘Eight days ago.’ I flipped through the notes I’d taken when the phone rang that morning. ‘Her best friend made the report.’

‘Not the neighbour downstairs? Or an employer?’

‘Nope. She was a freelancer. No one knew she was gone.’

‘And the break-in?’

‘That wasn’t reported at all.’

Liv looked around. ‘I mean, I suppose there was a break-in. This isn’t how she lived, is it? No one could live like this.’

I might have been finding it irritating but it was causing Liv acute distress to stand in a room where every surface had disappeared under miscellaneous objects: open letters, piles of books, unframed canvases and stacks of photographs, shoes, clothes, dirty plates and mugs, magazines and newspapers in teetering, disorganised columns, a cascade of empty suitcases in the corner. Everywhere there were notebooks and pens and make-up jumbled together, and headphones tangled up with chargers like mating snakes.

‘I think it’s possible she was burgled,’ I said carefully. ‘There are chargers everywhere but I haven’t found a computer or mobile phone. She was a writer, a journalist – there’s no way she didn’t have her own computer.’

‘She might have had them with her though. If she was out somewhere, working, I mean.’

‘Her wallet was here. Her passport.’

‘No keys.’

‘There’s a set of keys behind the door in the hall.’

‘They could have been her spare set.’

‘They were on the floor as if she’d dropped them there on her way in or out. There was a key for her bike lock on there. You wouldn’t have one of those on a spare set, would you?’

Liv shrugged. ‘Dunno. Depends on how often you lose your main keys, I imagine. So you think she was taken from here?’

‘Maybe.’

‘No sign of a struggle.’ That was true. The flat was heroically untidy but there were no overturned chairs, no smashed glasses or plates, no damage. No blood, notably. There would have been blood, I thought, unless she hadn’t been able to fight back because she was overpowered too quickly, or because she was drugged or drunk.

Two dusty windows looked out over the street. A table stood in front of one, while the other had a small, sagging armchair beside it. There was no television, I noted, thinking of the possible burglary, but then again there was nowhere obvious where it might have stood. The rear wall of the room housed the kitchen, which had seen better days even before everything in it had rotted. The laminate was peeling off the cupboard doors and the cooker was missing two burners. I had already noted the sink was piled high with mugs and glasses; impossible to guess whether Paige had had visitors or if she’d been the sort of person who washed up once a month. A clothes horse was draped with bedsheets and clothes that had dried as stiff as cardboard. I could picture her flinging the damp laundry over it with careless haste.

‘Did you look at the bathroom? My pet hate is mildew.’ Liv shuddered delicately. ‘And underwear everywhere. I suppose everything was clean, but …’

I shrugged at the thought of the straggling tights looped over the shower curtain rail and the squadron of knickers hanging on the rusting radiator. ‘No garden. Nowhere else to dry them. Heaven preserve us from being murdered on laundry day.’

‘Amen.’ Liv’s eyes were solemn above her mask. ‘What do you think this place cost her?’

‘More than it was worth.’ I was looking at the area of black mould that had gathered in one corner of the ceiling, above the fridge. A tongue of it extended down the wall, out of sight, and I didn’t like to think what we might uncover when we pulled the fridge out to check behind it. ‘Presumably the landlord didn’t mind the mess if she didn’t complain about the condition of the place.’

I moved across so I could look through the open door into the small bedroom, which had a bed and a bedside table and a clothes rail jammed into the corner. Half of the hangers had shed their dresses and jackets so they puddled on the floor, and the drawers hung open, spilling a waterfall of clothes in bright colours. She had worried about her image in public but behind closed doors she hadn’t cared enough to keep her home tidy. Well, everyone had their guilty secrets about which domestic tasks they shirked. Paige had simply chosen to ignore all of them.

The crime scene manager, bulky and red-haired and short-tempered, was lifting a champagne bottle off the bedside table with exquisite care.

‘Found anything, Adrian?’

He grunted. ‘One set of prints. It’s half empty. Looks as if she was drinking in bed.’

‘On her own?’

‘You’ll have to wait for DNA and trace on the bedclothes. My crystal ball isn’t working.’ He carried the bottle out of the room, holding it in front of him reverently.

‘So maybe she was alone and maybe she wasn’t.’ I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand, hating the feel of the latex glove against my skin. ‘Too early to say. In fact, it’s too early to say much about her.’

‘She had expensive taste in clothes and shoes.’ Liv peered into a knee-high boot. ‘Dior. Very nice.’

‘I didn’t think journalists got paid that well any more.’

‘Family money?’

‘Or she could have been doing something else on the side to make some cash.’

‘Like what?’

‘Dealing? Prostitution? Stripping?’

Liv raised her eyebrows. ‘Based on what?’

‘Nothing? It’s a possibility, that’s all, and I don’t think we should rule it out straight away. Sex work is something young women get drawn into from time to time, and it’s high risk. They encounter the kind of men who are used to chopping people up. I’m not judging her – I just think it’s worth finding out if she had some extra income to fund her lifestyle.’ The photographs I’d seen of her in the missing person file showed a thin woman, tanned and groomed, her eyes heavy-lidded, her nose long, her face narrow. Her hair had been blonde with the kind of sheen that took regular salon appointments to achieve. She had dropped her chin to her chest in all three pictures, peering up at the camera with insouciant sensuality. It looked like a studied pose, practised.

‘No boyfriend to get in the way if she did do sex work,’ Liv mused. ‘Or girlfriend, as far as we know.’

‘Which means no main suspect for us to question.’ I flipped my notebook shut. ‘I’d guess she left here in a hurry, maybe to meet someone, possibly for work given that her computer isn’t here.’

‘And she never came home.’

‘I wonder what she was working on.’

‘I’ll have a look to see if I can find any notes.’ Liv flexed her small hands in her gloves. ‘I can’t wait to get this place straightened out.’