The incident room was empty when she arrived; it was early. She checked the corridors. No one was in. She wouldn’t be disturbed for a while. So, alone at her desk, she dialled Whitechapel CID.
‘Oh,’ said David Colquhoun, when she was finally put through. ‘It’s you.’ Then, to someone else in the room, ‘Excuse me a minute. I just need to take this call.’
‘Is it a bad time?’
‘Diary meeting with the Commissioner’s office.’ He lowered his voice and added, ‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘Superintendent now, I hear? Things must be bad there, then?’
‘Let me just close the door,’ he said, and the noise of the office behind him vanished. ‘How great to hear from you. I’ve been wondering how you are. Pretty much on a daily basis. How are you settling in down there?’
It was good to hear his voice again as well. It was always full of warmth and enthusiasm; she used to mock it, saying he sounded like a vicar. ‘It was you calling the other night, wasn’t it? Zoë picked up the phone.’
A short pause. ‘God, yes. I’m sorry. I’d had a couple of drinks. Normally I resist. Did she know who was calling?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Daft. Sorry. Shouldn’t have.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t.’
‘Neither should you.’
‘This,’ she said, ‘is work.’
‘If it was work, you’d have called my assistant.’
‘What’s the use of friends in high places?’ she said.
When she’d split from Zoë’s father she’d slept with a few men. None were real relationships. They were just a series of one-night stands, sometimes with the same man; the kind of life it was easy enough to fall into on the force, when the hours were long and the days intense. But David had been different. As with so many affairs between coppers, alcohol had been involved. They had both been at an excruciatingly dull, day-long Home Office seminar on digital crime, and in the bar afterwards they’d waited side by side for ten minutes to be served. All she’d said was, ‘Denial of Service Attack,’ and nobody had got it but David Colquhoun, who’d laughed so loudly, even though the joke was pretty thin, that she insisted on buying the drink for him when the barman finally arrived.
David had been a rising senior officer in a different department. He had a boyish face she found oddly sexy and claimed to know the words to every Black Grape song. He was kind, understanding and discreet. And because he was happily married to Cathy, who regularly posted photos of them and their three children on Facebook, he’d wanted to keep it that way – which just how Alex had liked it. At first he would say how guilty he felt about the affair. ‘End it then,’ she had said. But he hadn’t. He enjoyed catching her eye in the canteen, or passing in a corridor, sharing a space in a lift, knowing that nobody knew. She had enjoyed it too.
They had been careful. The weekends that Zoë visited her father, he would sometimes come over and they would drink wine and have sex. They would go and see Xavier Dolan films at the Renoir, knowing that there was little risk of colleagues being at an art house movie.
But somebody had found out. Somehow. No surprise, really. They were working in a job where everyone around them was paid to suspect and to see through lies and deceptions.
One day, her boss called her into the office, and there was some woman from the Practice Support Team standing next to him. She asked if Cupidi was having an affair with a married officer. In front of the DCI, she had had to deny it. And that had been the end of it. She never knew how they’d been found out, but because he was married and a senior officer, they had ended up deciding it was too risky. The best thing would be for her to move away. They ended it, and that was that. She was not sorry. It was done.
‘I need a favour,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’m looking for a homeless woman who’s been seen on your patch. Mid-forties. May have given her name as Hilary Keen, but that’s not her real name.’
‘What is, then?’
‘We don’t know.’
Cupidi gave him the description of the woman Julian and Lulu Keen had given her.
‘I’ll see what I can do. If she’s still around here it shouldn’t be too difficult.’ He paused. ‘It’s actually good to hear your voice.’
‘Yours too.’
‘Tell me why you need this. It’s not just about a homeless woman, is it?’
‘It’s a case. A dead woman who this woman was impersonating. I think it’s going to be mothballed unless I can find something good.’
‘Oh. One of those.’
‘What do you mean.’
‘I know you. The way you become sometimes. It’s one of your babies. The ones you don’t want to let go.’
‘You make it sound like something irrational, David. It’s not at all. The woman was murdered. We may have found her killer, but…’
‘But what?’
‘But… just but. It doesn’t quite make sense to me. I need to know why she died.’
‘I like it when you’re passionate.’
She laughed.
‘I’ll see what I can do. I promise.’
‘OK.’
They faltered.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Got to go.’
‘Me too,’ she said, put down the phone and stood. The office around her was still empty; it felt suddenly very provincial here, and far away from the fast-paced, busy offices she had worked in in London.
Fifteen minutes later, at 8.30 in the morning, she stood on a sodden carpet dressed in her protective suit, addressing officers.
‘First, anything that explains who Hilary Keen was and what she was doing living in Eason’s backyard.’ They were gathered downstairs in Stanley Eason’s front room, armchairs piled to one side, damp wallpaper peeling off the walls. ‘Any property that might have belonged to her. Any mentions of her name or who she was. Bank statements, a rent book, anything. It’s possible that Eason took her mobile phone. Look for cash. It’s also possible that he stole money from the victim at some point.’
She had been in enough of them to know the stink of burnt houses, of charred wood and every pungent chemical stench set loose by flame. The windows had been opened, but it made little difference. It clung.
The house was surrounded by tape; its entire ground floor was still wet from the water the firemen had poured onto the house. They had pulled a tarp over the wrecked roof to protect it from the elements.
Two constables stood waiting for her to tell them what to do. A bigger team would have helped.
‘Secondly, anything that might relate to or explain her murder. That is going to be harder. We are still not sure how she died. The current theory from the pathologists is some kind of asphyxiation. Any material that hints of a sexual motive for the killing. Hilary Keen was not sexually attacked, but rule nothing out.’
‘Jesus. Is that a rat?’ One of the policemen pointed at a sodden dark shape in the corner of the room. Evidently Eason wasn’t the only victim of the fire.
‘Fortunate we’re all wearing protective clothing, isn’t it?’ said Cupidi.
‘This paper suit ain’t protecting me from nothing.’
‘I hate rats.’
‘Boys.’ She clapped her hands. ‘Come on. Pay attention. Finally, use your instincts. This whole case is a weird one. We don’t know how she was killed or why. We’re looking for anything that might give us an insight into this man and his relationship with the murdered woman.’
‘Instincts?’ said the older of the constables.
‘He didn’t have a computer, but is there a diary? Letters, photographs, mementoes. Right?’
‘So. Pretty much anything,’ said the man.
‘I suppose that’s a reasonable way of putting it,’ said Cupidi. ‘Pretty much anything.’
‘So we don’t know what we’re looking for at all?’
‘Socrates would say that is an advantage,’ said Cupidi.
‘Who’s that when he’s at home?’ asked the younger copper.
‘He’s that new Crime Commissioner,’ said the older one. Cupidi wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.
As they started their work on the ground floor, she went upstairs to the bedroom where Eason had set fire to himself.
The sunlight filtering through the tarp bathed the place in blue light. Up here the reek of smoke penetrated everything. Everything – sheets, carpets, clothes, furniture – was covered in a black oily film. It was a double bed, spread with a pile of blankets.
On the bedside table, next to a radio, was a photograph, entirely obscured by the blackness. She picked it up and wiped the glass with her blue plastic glove.
A black-and-white picture emerged of a man and a woman at a wedding. In it, a young Stanley Eason stood stiff-backed, unsmiling but proud, next to a black-haired woman, shorter than him, with a plain face, who squinted into the camera. It must have been taken outside one of the local Marsh churches. Keeps himself to himself since his wife died, Cupidi remembered the man in the garden centre saying.
She pulled open the bedside drawer; it contained a Bible, a blister pack of indigestion pills and a box of buttons. She left them; one of the constables would later come and record this room methodically.
Underneath the layer of soot, the place looked neglected. There were piles of newspapers and farming magazines lined up along the wall and a collection of old wellington boots in another corner. She wandered to the bathroom and opened the smoke-blackened window, leaning out.
The caravan where Hilary Keen had lived would have been parked beneath it.
One of the coppers emerged from the back door with an armful of coats and dropped them down onto the ground. He then picked one up and started going through the pockets.
‘Anything?’ she called down.
‘Pile of his bank statements, that’s all so far. I’ve bagged them. Reckon we’ll find anything?’
‘We won’t know until we do,’ she said, though she wasn’t any more certain than he was that there was anything here to find.
Outside, she was grateful for clean air. She lifted up the tape and was walking under it as a car pulled up. ‘Is he going to be OK?’ the driver called from his window.
Cupidi recognised him as the cashier from the garden centre whom she had spoken to the day before. ‘I hope so.’
‘They’re saying he killed someone, is that right?’
‘We were trying to speak to him in relation to a possible murder. That’s all we’re able to say at present, sir.’
‘Same thing, though, isn’t it?’ The man didn’t drive off; just sat there with the engine running as if waiting for something. ‘Terrible, isn’t it? I mean, you’d never have guessed. Always seemed such a quiet chap. Still waters. There was always something odd about him.’
Only yesterday, according to this man, Eason had been a victim of police harassment.
She paused, wondering if there was something else he wanted to say. You had to be open. People volunteered their part of the story in many ways.
But he just sat there staring at her, and she stood by the car, until it became embarrassing. He was just another rubberneck.
‘Oi, Sarge! Something you should see.’
She turned and went back into the house. ‘Here, in the kitchen.’
She followed the voice. It was dark in there. Someone had secured the window she’d smashed by screwing a large sheet of chipboard over the frame. Her feet crunched on broken glass.
The man was holding the door to Eason’s old freezer. Thick pink blood was oozing out, down the pale door and onto the floor.
‘This lot’s going to start stinking,’ he said.
‘Meat?’
‘Yeah. But it’s not that.’ He shone a torch into the compartment. Next to the packets of defrosting meat was a blue plastic bag full of rolled banknotes. There had to be several hundred pounds there. ‘Bingo,’ he said, grinning.