To his great disappointment, he wasn’t dead – he just felt that way. A bird had woken him, singing frantically in the tall trees that screened the house from the road, throwing an alarm call into the still silence.
(And how did he know about the trees? It had been dark when they got there, piling out of the car onto the gravel drive, and he had been drunk already. Whose house? Whose idea to go there? Who had been with him in the car, jammed up against his legs, a high-heeled sandal digging into his instep when the girl moved carelessly? Who had stolen the champagne, handing him a bottle that he’d tipped down his front in the dark, on the motorway?)
Waking up properly was slow, a process of adjustments. He had a temperature, but no, he didn’t, it was the room that was hot. He felt dreadful. He was ill. No, hungover. The thumping headache, the nausea, the felted surface of his tongue, the burning dryness of his eyeballs: all of that was a hangover. There was someone lying beside him, but no, there wasn’t, it was a coverlet rucked up into a ridge that pressed against his thigh companionably. His watch had been stolen – no, he hadn’t worn a watch. He had dreamed such a strange, exciting dream, weird and utterly wrong—
Not a dream. He sat up. He remembered.
The bird was quiet now, stunned into silence by the heat of the day. The curtains were open, limp in the airless warmth. The sun struck into the room, across the floor. And here came fear, like an unwanted guest swaggering into the room to sit on the edge of the bed and chatter.
The small injuries that told him what he remembered was true. Here, a bruise. There, a bite mark.
white teeth in the dim light grinning as he hissed in pain and pleasure and reached out—
He couldn’t get away from the shards of memories that kept slicing into his brain.
Kissing, too aroused to be wary.
The taste, wine edged with tobacco and salt from the sweat that glazed them both.
Full lips, a probing tongue, a tattoo that covered one beautiful arm from shoulder to wrist, a flat stomach, long legs.
He had been clumsy, fumbling with a button. A laugh in his ear that he felt as much as heard, and then a whisper.
‘Come on. Let’s go somewhere else.’
Which meant that part had been in front of everyone. Anyone could have seen.
Stumbling into the bedroom, kissing already, his clothes coming off, until they were both naked.
We don’t have to
I want to
Say if you want to stop
Please
You’re hurting me
Oh God
The door had been open. He remembered that. He remembered someone standing, watching them for a while.
What had he done?
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