15

Sarah put the papers she was reading back down on her desk. It was drizzling onto the parade square outside her office window. She pulled on her jacket, slipped down the stairs. In the shelter of the building she lit a cigarette and watched the new recruits marching in the rain. They would be some of the last to tread this ground.

The covered walkways that meandered around the parade ground as if it were a college campus, the cold, echoey gym where Sarah had run the bleep test and revised handcuffing more times than she could remember, the glass-faced canteen where squads gathered on operations: in a year all this would be gone, demolished and replaced by a more compact vision of policing London’s eight million inhabitants.

The rain petered out. She stubbed out her cigarette and started to walk the length of the site, the disused skid pan and then the playing fields on her right.

She needed to clear her head before the next-of-kin identification. She couldn’t believe that Lizzie was going to act as family liaison.

Fedden had explained it to her in his office.

‘Yes, the local officer who tried to arrest Brannon. The family was very impressed by her, as am I, by the way. Her commander’s asking her this morning. I can’t imagine she’ll say no.’ He’d looked down at his notes. ‘PC Lizzie Griffiths. She’s just a training detective with about five minutes’ service in total.’

Sarah had involuntarily closed her eyes. Fedden was still speaking.

‘Very brave, very brave indeed. The mum was very impressed—’

Sarah had interrupted. ‘Jim.’

He’d frowned. ‘Yes?’

‘Lizzie Griffiths. She’s the officer I investigated. The deaths at Portland Tower?’

‘Shit.’

He’d paused, rubbing index finger and thumb together while he thought it through.

‘Well, I can’t see it’s a problem really. She was cleared of misconduct. There are no issues. You both need to be professional.’

Be professional. Had she detected there the suggestion that maybe she wasn’t? Or was that paranoia? Lately she hadn’t been able to tell when it was and when it wasn’t. Of course Fedden hadn’t wanted to delve into the problem any deeper than that, didn’t want to put two and two together about Kieran Shaw’s complaint. He did, after all, have more pressing things on his plate. For her part she hadn’t felt able to say that, apart from anything else, it was simply personally difficult for her to work with Lizzie Griffiths. It would look weak, she believed, to say she couldn’t hack it. She hadn’t even begun to prove herself to Detective Chief Inspector Fedden.

Ahead, the grey student tower blocks loomed into an overcast sky. She remembered the narrow bed, the thin mattress, the window overlooking the tube line. Soon the blocks would be gone too, demolished in a cloud of dust and brick. She could see the proposed future flats in her imagination – the architect’s drawings of trees, of happy figures standing in atriums, a development that could be lifted and placed in any modern city. The Met was contracting, adapting, selling off the silverware, packaging up its relics like the standards of extinct regiments now hanging unloved in alien mess halls. She was surprised how it saddened her.

She turned her thoughts towards the evidence.

At 1100 hours Georgina had sent her mother a WhatsApp: Mark in one of his moods.

More WhatsApps had followed. Brannon was asking her about the statement she had given to police, niggling at her. Did you want me banged up? About an hour later there were a couple of missed calls to her mother, then another chain of WhatsApps.

Please call me Mum.

He’s gone out. Probably drinking.

Can you call me?

I’m going to come over with Skye. Call me if you get this.

Julie hadn’t picked up the messages because her Wi-Fi was down and she didn’t have any data left on her monthly contract. If she had, maybe she would have gone over. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe not.

A CCTV trawl showed that during this time Brannon had visited the local off-licence. He bought two 70 cl bottles of Johnny Walker blended whisky. Cameras showed him drinking in the shopping precinct. An empty bottle of Johnny Walker had been recovered from one of the bins and been sent to the lab for DNA analysis and fingerprinting.

At 1257 hours he returned to the estate.

Another empty bottle of Johnny Walker had been found inside his and Georgina’s flat. There was also a case by the sofa, full of Georgina’s clothes.

Sarah thought through how it might have happened.

He returns home. He sees the packed case in the living room. Georgina perhaps is in Skye’s room packing her bag.

Leaving: the most dangerous thing a victim of domestic violence could do. She could see how his solicitor might try for a lesser finding of manslaughter: Brannon had come home blind drunk, seen the packed cases and lashed out. He’d been so inebriated he hadn’t even been capable of forming the specific intent to seriously harm necessary for a murder charge.

But it hadn’t been like that. Sarah didn’t believe the murder had happened immediately. There was that second bottle of whisky, on the floor by Georgina’s body. On the table an empty glass.

Drunkenness wasn’t such a simple indicator, either in law or in reality. There was the defence option, of course: my client was drunk, not in control of himself. It was manslaughter, not murder. But there was another possibility, the one she favoured.

She had read through Lizzie Griffith’s account of the last failed charge against Brannon. It had been a detailed narrative and would support a prosecution suggestion that Brannon had known perfectly well what he was doing. Georgina had told Griffiths, ‘He’s only like that when he’s drunk.’ She’d said he had promised to stop drinking if she let him come back. And then there was the phrase recorded by Lizzie Griffiths after she’d sat next to him on the bench while they waited for the custody sergeant to become available: ‘I’m a bit of a cunt when I’ve had a drink.’

Brannon hadn’t murdered because he’d been drunk but rather the reverse: he had got himself knowingly, purposefully drunk. He had stood on that concourse drinking steadily, working himself up into an inebriated rage that he knew perfectly well would be satisfied only by violence. And then, after he’d drunk that entire bottle of Johnny Walker outside the shops, standing alone in a developing torment of jealousy and rage, he’d directed his steps back to the flat, able to do whatever he needed to do.

So here he was in the flat, sitting at the table, still drinking – that empty glass – asking Georgina about the bags, telling her what a bitch she was for giving a statement against him. Georgina knew the danger too. Why hadn’t she left then? There was the tray of coloured rubber bands on the table too, and an opened child’s yoghurt. Sarah had checked the protection reports on Skye written by officers over the years. Georgina was meticulously tidy, they all said that. The flat was spotless. If Skye had finished eating Georgina wouldn’t have left a half-opened yoghurt on the table or a dirty spoon on the table. This was a meal that had never been finished, never tidied away. Had he pulled Skye to the table? Insisted she sit? Fucking sit down, Skye. Get her something to eat! Or was Skye crying by her unfinished yoghurt and Georgina fetched the coloured rubber bands to distract her?

It was at the very least believable that he’d made Skye sit with him while he continued to drink. And if Skye had been sitting there with him, a hostage to his sudden violence, Georgina wouldn’t dare do anything, certainly not leave, make a call. Had he had the knife there already? On the table or in his jacket?

Sarah had arrived at the steps leading up to the old classroom block. In front of the white concrete entrance was a little platform on which was mounted a statue of Robert Peel. A nineteenth-century bronze, it was out of place beside the sixties building. There Peel stood, indifferent to the changes around him, patrician and debonair at the top of his plinth; buttoned waistcoat, scroll in one hand, the other hand lightly resting on his hip, verdigris spilling down the folds of his jacket. Apparently when they demolished the classrooms the plan was to package him in bubble wrap and move him elsewhere.

She turned her back on the statue and looked out over the playing fields, remembered her intake kicking a ball about out there, swearing at each other, falling over and laughing with no idea what awaited them out on the streets of London.

She pictured the scene again.

The violence had taken place in the sitting room. She hoped against all the evidence that Skye hadn’t seen it, that she’d been shut in her room, but the yoghurt pot on the table suggested something else. The pathologist’s early report from the scene showed Georgina with three punching stab wounds to the chest. The blood that soaked her T-shirt had been from these rather than the bleed to the carotid artery, which was subsequent to the chest wounds. It wouldn’t have been quick. Before the arterial bleed there’d been a fight. Sarah knew about domestic murders, the unbelievable violence, the savage cruelty and rage.

She saw it. Skye sitting at the table. The dog cowering or barking. Georgina fighting – the punch to the face, the bruising to the arms. Then stabbed in the chest, one, two, three. Falling, perhaps. The slash to the neck that had punctured rather than severed the artery. Georgina on her back, bleeding out in minutes.

It was nearly three quarters of an hour after his return home that CCTV captured Brannon leaving with Skye. There had been a dark time inside that flat.

Brannon, drunk on whisky, soaked in blood, had washed. He’d changed his clothes, profited from the bag Georgina had packed for Skye and put his own clothes in another. Where had Skye been while he did this? How had he controlled her? Sarah saw only the CCTV of them walking away from the flat: Skye in her puffa jacket with her father and the dog. The image had been almost a parody of a family leaving for their holiday.

Sarah bent over her knees. She had had a vision of such cruelty, such a need to control. She’d watched those documentaries where men in suits explained ponderously as to the why. As though they knew! Sarah had seen the bodies on the slabs, the skulls with blunt trauma, the ligature marks. The act always drowned out any explanation. She knew why already and also would never know why.

She stood up and breathed in the moist air, looked across the empty playing fields.

The law, thankfully, was simpler, more binary than such contemplation. The moment they could show that Brannon had chosen this horror, he would be guilty of murder. Acting on your very worst impulse was no defence. She imagined the case files, the disclosure sheets, the numbered exhibits that would coldly detail Brannon’s intention, unpicking any defence he might claim. Before the law there would be no excuse. A mandatory life sentence was all the police could offer Georgina’s family and friends.

But first they had to find Skye. To do that she would be cleverer than her feelings. She would think herself into Brannon, see the world from his fragile, dissonant, furious point of view.

She began to walk the loop again, the playing fields now on her right, the blue Tardis police box, the tube line with its commuters running past parallel on the left.

Back in the office, she glanced quickly through the new statements that had arrived on her desk. There was one from Skye’s friend Irit who had discovered Georgina’s body. Irit had been playing hopscotch with Skye earlier that morning on the walkway and she’d wanted to play again. After lots of impatient knocks at the door, she’d climbed onto Skye’s bicycle and looked through the window. She’d run straight home.

Mum, Mum, Mum. Georgie’s lying on the floor.

Sarah scribbled her thinking in her notebook.

Operation Woodhall. Evidence of degree of premeditation and planning:

1. Drinking.

2. Timeline: 40 minutes at the flat. Protracted scene before Georgina is killed? Takes time to change, etc.

3. CCTV: Brannon leaves in different clothing to that he wore on entering. Carries bags. Takes Skye and dog. Intention to avoid arrest.

4. Discovery of body: earlier than Brannon planned? Did not know Skye had arranged to play with her friend Irit. Believed perhaps he had until the following day before the murder was discovered. Irit’s desperation to see her best friend meant things didn’t go to plan.

She put her pen down and lifted the photocopy of Lizzie Griffiths’ statement from the bundle. One of the homicide DCs had interviewed her at the hospital last night. She skim-read down to the part where Brannon arrived.

The first knock at the door was polite. Brannon spoke quietly. He said, ‘Julie, are you in there? We need to talk.’ It was only when no one replied to him that he began to bang on the door.

She marked the paragraph with a red asterisk and made another note.

5. Evidence of intention to surprise Julie Teel before she became aware of her daughter’s death. (See MG11: PC Lizzie Griffiths.)

She walked quickly down the corridor. Fedden wasn’t at his desk. Lee was alone in the incident room, working at a computer. She pulled up a chair. He didn’t immediately look away from his screen, and when he did, his expression was perplexed, as if he couldn’t understand why she was disturbing him.

‘I’m sorry to ask, but I’ve no time to do it myself. I’ve got to do the identification . . .’

‘Sorry, can’t help. I’m doing a financial production order for Brannon. It’s a priority.’

His tone was implacable. Even though she outranked him, she guessed she’d be a fool to challenge him. ‘OK.’

Having won the point, he softened. ‘What was it?’

‘I need someone to set up emergency temporary accommodation for Julie Teel and her partner. A nice hotel so they’re OK about staying there. And I want an alarm at their flat. I think Brannon had a plan and that killing Julie was part of it. If I’m right, then it’s unfinished business and he may return. My assessment is that he still poses a threat to her.’

Lee didn’t answer immediately, and Sarah felt a rush of irritation. Then he said, ‘Elaine’s about. I’ll get her to do it.’

Lee didn’t outrank Elaine. What was he doing tasking her with the shit he couldn’t do? Still, there was no time for such quibbles. She was already running late.

‘OK.’

‘It’s your name on the authorization?’

‘Yes, don’t wait for anything higher. I’ll talk to the boss about it as soon as I can. I’ll email him before I leave for the mortuary.’

Lee raised his eyebrows slightly but didn’t say anything else. Sarah ignored the scepticism: she’d had to deal with worse.

She went into her office and sent Fedden an email explaining why she thought Julie needed safeguarding. Then she scanned her emails in case there was something live she needed to know about before she left the office. One from Elaine: she’d got a forensic hit on the camera she’d submitted in the cold case.