Nancy looked up as the door opened again, expecting to see the young man with a broad face and irritating smirk. Instead, a woman came into the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. She seemed about the same age at Nancy herself, perhaps slightly older. Nancy didn’t really know what she expected a detective to look like, but it wasn’t like this: the woman who came swiftly towards her was slim and upright, of medium height. She was dressed in a rust-coloured corduroy jumpsuit, belted at the waist, and sturdy black boots. Her hair was tangle of blonde curls, loosely tied back, and her face, startlingly pale, looked slightly asymmetric. She had several studs in her ears, a large mouth and clear eyes that she fixed on Nancy, a slight frown creasing her forehead.
Maud’s first impression of the woman who Kemp had dismissed as crazy was of a quivering kind of energy. She was small and slight, with large eyes, high cheekbones, a fall of pale brown hair that she kept pushing at impatiently with her fingers. Maud saw she had bitten her nails to the quick. She wore jeans and a moss-green jumper that she had rolled up to the elbows so that Maud could glimpse a small abstract tattoo on the soft skin of her inner arm.
‘Ms North,’ she began gently.
‘Nancy. I’m Nancy.’
‘Nancy, my colleague tells me…’
‘He just thinks I’m mad,’ Nancy said impatiently. ‘He wouldn’t even hear me out, just kept leering at me and saying I should try and keep calm.’
Maud had glanced at the file before coming in. Much as she disliked Kemp, it had seemed he was right, and that Nancy North had conjured up wild suspicions out of a kind of paranoia. Her plan had been to steer this woman away as kindly and courteously as she could. The woman in front of her was clearly desperate, but there were many other desperate people.
‘As I understand it, the situation is this. Kira Mullan was found dead on Monday the fourteenth of November. The investigating police and the coroner decide that she took her own life. But you believe that she may have been murdered. This is based on a brief meeting you had with her, a very brief meeting, on the day she died. You said she seemed distressed.’
‘Scared,’ said Nancy. ‘She seemed scared. I think she was asking for help.’
‘I understand that you were also in the middle of a psychotic episode.’
‘A very mild episode, but yes, and that’s why nobody takes me seriously. But it doesn’t make me wrong.’
‘You see the problem though.’ Maud tapped on the file with a forefinger. ‘There’s no actual evidence.’
‘I felt the same,’ said Nancy. There was a faint tremor in her voice. ‘That’s why I wasn’t going to do anything more. But then a new woman moved into Kira’s flat this morning and I looked at her and I just couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t. I tried to.’
‘You know I’ve got to say this, Nancy, but you’ve just recovered from illness.’
‘I was sectioned again,’ said Nancy. She had made a great effort to be calm. ‘After I’d talked to the police and been dismissed as paranoid and psychotic, the neighbour from next door told my partner, Felix,’ – Maud saw how Nancy’s lip curled as she said his name – ‘that I had threatened to injure or kill myself or someone else. That’s the key thing. If you’re an immediate threat, that’s when they lock you away. Felix told my doctor, and I was dragged off to a mental health ward. I spent weeks there.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not asking for sympathy.’ Nancy took a deep breath. ‘Felix calls me reckless and perhaps he’s right. I’m sure I can be difficult, and it’s true I have an illness, or a condition at least. But it’s under control. I went to my doctor, adjusted my medication and I was okay. But you know, once you’ve had a mental diagnosis, every time you’re a bit impulsive, a bit passionate, if you just raise your voice, people think it’s happening again. Everything’s a symptom. When Michelle, our neighbour, said that, it was enough to have me put away, but it wasn’t true. It was an outright lie.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me out of the way.’ She shook her head. ‘I know, I know. Even to myself that sounds paranoid. I don’t have solid evidence, but it just feels all wrong. I know Kira didn’t kill herself. I met someone who had a crush on her who said she had been happy just before. And everyone’s been lying. Felix said he didn’t know her and then it turns out he knew her quite well. Seamus – he lives downstairs – says I made a pass at him when it was actually the other way round. And who do you believe, the handsome gym instructor or the crazy woman? I heard Michelle tell Dylan – her husband, who’s a fucking shit by the way, and who had a cut on his face the day Kira died – that she had seen the way he looked at Kira and that she couldn’t always be getting him out of trouble.’
Nancy could see the disappointment on Maud’s face.
‘I know. It’s not enough. I tried to find something that was. I broke into Michelle and Dylan’s garden shed to look for the rope.’
‘What? I’m not sure you should be telling me this.’
Nancy shook her head impatiently.
‘It doesn’t matter. I needed to see if there was a rope that matched the fibres I found between the boards in Kira’s room.’
‘Did you break in there, as well?’
‘I sort of pretended to be a prospective tenant. I wanted to see if there was a matching rope in their shed. It was stupid. I nearly got caught.’
‘Stupid is one word for it,’ said Maud. ‘Criminal is another.’
‘I know. You see, people have been calling me mad, and I think I almost have become mad. I can’t seem to let go. It’s hard to describe. When I saw Dylan and Michelle walk by on the road outside and this idea of searching in the shed came into my mind, it was as if I was listening to two voices: the sane and logical voice, telling me not be a self-destructive fool, and the other voice, insisting. Just like now, when I had to come here, for one last go.’
‘When you say voices…’ Maud began cautiously.
‘I do mean voices.’ Nancy’s eyes were fierce. ‘I’m not going to lie about it. I’ve come to the end of everything now. I know how I must sound to you. I know what everyone thinks of me. In a way, I think that about me as well. It’s like something that’s going on inside me and outside of me as well. Dissociation, is that what they call it?’
She put a hand up and clutched her hair.
‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I let things go like other people do? Maybe it was something about Kira. When I met her that afternoon, it was as if she was calling out to me. But maybe everyone’s right and I’m deluded and sick.’
Maud didn’t know what to say. She looked at Nancy’s troubled face and wanted to help her, but she couldn’t think of what to do. When Nancy spoke again, she sounded calm and resigned and sane.
‘When I was in the hospital, it was like a crazy game. I had to say that I believed I had been mad in order for them accept that I was sane and let me out. Coming here is a terrible risk. Felix is just waiting for me to step out of line. He watches over me. Every time I raise my voice, he narrows his eyes and looks concerned. If they send me back, I might be there for years.’
Maud knew what she needed to say to Nancy. She needed to tell her to concentrate on saving herself, getting her life back together, but she couldn’t find the words. She played for time by leafing through the files, glancing at the dry information about the nature of Kira’s death, the cursory interviews with people in the house and with Kira’s boss, the details of her last phone calls and messages, on to photos of the body before it was cut down, then on the slab, the coroner’s report, the interview with Nancy herself.
Nancy waited. For the first time in weeks, she had the sense that someone was dispassionately looking at the case, sifting through facts, neither patronising nor dismissing her as someone whose mind was troubled and whose words could therefore not be trusted, but were merely the wild utterances of a woman who heard voices and saw faces that were not real. She didn’t go as far as to hope that Maud would take up the cause, but she believed she would at least be rigorously fair.
Maud was just flicking through the awful photographs one last time when she stopped. She felt a lurching feeling. Oh no, she thought. She looked at one photograph more and more closely.
She wanted to close the file and be done with it. She wanted to get back to work. She wanted Nancy to get back to healing herself and repairing her life. And now this.
‘What?’ said Nancy.
‘Take a look at this photograph.’
Maud swivelled it round towards her and Nancy stared at the stark image. The noose around Kira’s horribly lengthened neck, her body slack and heavy, her face dark, her eyes open, those green boots with their yellow laces. She blinked and looked away.
‘I know it’s distressing,’ said Maud. ‘But what can you see? Apart from the body.’
Nancy made herself look again.
‘Clothes scattered around,’ she said. ‘An overflowing wicker basket, a guitar, an overturned stool.’
She peered at the objects that were out of focus, the small pine table, the bench-like sofa and dark grey wing-armed chair. There was the wind chime she had seen on the day she had crept in there after the cleaners, the candles and throws and little things Kira had used to brighten the dingy space.
‘The stool,’ said Maud. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me what you see.’
‘It’s just a stool. Three legs. Small.’
‘Imagine it standing the right way up. How tall do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not good at that sort of thing. Eighteen inches?’
‘That sounds about right. And how far are Kira Mullan’s feet from the ground?’
‘More than that, I think.’
‘It’ll need to be checked, but much more.’
‘But if that’s true, then…’
Nancy stopped, her eyes wide and shining with sudden hope.
‘It has to be checked, of course. But if true, it indicates that she couldn’t have stood on the stool.’
‘Does that mean it was murder?’ Nancy asked.
Tears were running down her cheeks.
‘It means that it needs investigating,’ Maud said. She considered this. ‘My colleagues are not going to be happy. Danny Kemp is going to be very unhappy.’
‘What happens now?’
‘We’ll need to talk to you further.’
‘I’ve left the Fielding Road flat – well, I’m in the process of leaving it. That won’t matter, will it?’
‘I’ve got your details. Are you leaving London?’
‘I’m going to be in West Hampstead for a bit. What about the other people in the house? Will they need to know?’
‘Yes, they’ll need to know.’