As the car drew up on double-yellow lines outside the café the hazard lights started to blink, the universal acknowledgement that the driver is doing something unacceptable and knows it, but is going to do it anyway. Derwent opened his door into the path of a scooter that tooted indignantly as it swerved. As he got out, his jaw was tight with irritation. I slid down a few inches in my seat as he slammed the door. Temper, temper. He shouldered his way into the café, yanked his sunglasses off and glared around, visibly unimpressed with the charms of Carlo’s. I lifted a hand and waved to attract his attention. The sight of me did nothing to improve his mood.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Having a break?’ I slid a coffee across the table. ‘I got you this.’
‘I don’t want it.’ He slid it back. ‘I want to know why you’re in Greenwich conducting enquiries instead of at home with your feet up.’
‘I got bored. I wanted to work.’
‘I thought you’d had enough of that on Monday. I only let you come to arrest Gley because I knew I’d be there to keep an eye on you. When you come back to work officially – which should be when you’re fully recovered, and not before – you’re supposed to be on restricted duties. That means paperwork. That means being in the office, not wandering around using your own initiative to get yourself into trouble.’
‘I know,’ I said quickly, ‘and I’m absolutely going to take things easy from now on. But I had an idea.’
He frowned. ‘What kind of idea?’
‘How to find out who impersonated a police officer at Paige’s address and removed her computer and notes. But I need you to help me.’
‘Go on.’
I passed him my set of photographs and explained how I’d shown it to Mila Walsh. I tapped the top one. ‘This is the guy she picked out, which is exactly what I thought would happen. I want to go and see him. I think if we confront him, he’ll admit it.’
He picked the page up, then held it to one side as the picture below caught his attention. ‘Is that …’
‘That’s Luke.’
He stared at the picture intently, almost hungrily, as if he hadn’t had the chance to look at him properly before.
‘Did you look like that when you were twenty-five?’ I asked eventually.
‘I was better looking. Obviously. Like now.’
‘All right, handsome.’ I nodded at the window. ‘Let’s see if your looks can work some magic on the traffic warden that’s about to give you a ticket.’
Ticketless, because Derwent was jammy like that, we drove across the river while I explained who we were going to see and why I thought he had taken Paige’s notes. When I got to the end, Derwent nodded.
‘Makes sense. Were you planning to do this by yourself before you had a funny turn, as a matter of interest?’
‘No, I was going to ask for help even before that.’ I looked at him sideways. ‘I’m not reckless. Besides, this is right up your street. You’re far more intimidating than I am.’
‘You have your moments.’
‘I would have to say now is not one of them.’ I leaned against the headrest and shut my eyes. ‘I’ve felt perkier.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’
‘Yes. I don’t think we’re going to find out what happened to Paige otherwise.’
‘And that’s more important than how you feel.’
‘Of course.’ I looked at him, surprised. ‘You’d be the same.’
Derwent shook his head, but said nothing more to try and put me off.
When we arrived in Whitechapel, he looked up and down the street. His lip curled. ‘I don’t know how any coppers patrol around here. You wouldn’t get five feet before you had to nick someone. How would you even pick which criminal to arrest first?’
‘Don’t arrest anyone yet.’ The intercom crackled beside me. ‘Bianca? Maeve Kerrigan.’
‘Come on up.’ She sounded cheerful and Derwent raised his eyebrows as he followed me into the hallway.
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Not much. She thinks I’m here to update her on the investigation.’
‘Which is true, in a way.’
‘I would never lie.’ I blinked innocently at Derwent, who grinned back. There were lies and lies, as we both knew.
She was waiting for us with the door open when we reached her floor. She looked at me with open curiosity. ‘I heard you were off sick – what happened?’
‘An accident. I’m on the mend now.’ I moved past her into the small, cluttered sitting room and nodded to her boyfriend. ‘Hi, Sam.’
‘Hi.’ He jumped up, wiping his hands on his jeans nervously. ‘Do you want to talk to Bianca on her own? I can go somewhere else.’
‘Actually, I want to talk to both of you.’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’ He tried to laugh.
‘What’s this about?’ Bianca looked from Derwent to me, her eyes wary.
‘It’s about someone going to Paige’s flat after she disappeared and removing her computer and her notes for the story she was working on. The story that was going to transform her career. The one that made her so excited, she couldn’t stop talking about it, even though she wouldn’t tell you what it was about.’ I smiled. ‘She didn’t trust you, did she? And she was right. Because the first chance you got, you went to her flat and took everything you could find that might be of any use to you, so you could write Paige’s story yourself.’
‘That’s not fair. I didn’t want all her hard work to be for nothing.’
‘Not when you could benefit from it yourself, no. Even if it slowed our investigation into Paige’s death – even if it distracted me from finding her killer – your career and the story was more important. That’s how you knew about Antoinette. She didn’t contact you, you contacted her. I called her and checked this morning and she confirmed the story you told me was a lie.’
‘I made sure you knew about Antoinette. If I hadn’t let you know I was meeting her, you still wouldn’t know she existed.’
‘That was only because you were worried about your own safety. It suited you very well to have police back-up while you were investigating the Chiron Club. You knew about the Bishops Avenue house because Paige had found out about it and you were following her lead.’
‘They took me there.’
‘They did not. We’ve found CCTV from the area near the club that shows you following Carl Hooper when he left the club but he drove off without you.’ One of my phone calls the previous day had been to Colin Vale, who was happy to describe the little scene he’d cut together from various cameras, and how very annoyed Bianca had looked to be left behind. ‘You made your own way to the house, knowing that we would probably turn up sooner rather than later and come to the rescue if you needed us. They found you poking around and shut you away while they tried to work out what you wanted, but you didn’t even know what you were looking for. The only reason you were there in the first place was because of Paige. But of course you couldn’t give that away to anyone without revealing that you were the person who stole the files from her flat.’
‘I didn’t. I wasn’t even there!’ Bianca said.
‘No. You sent Sam instead.’
He had been following the conversation with his mouth hanging open, alarm written all over his face. ‘What?’
‘We have a witness who saw you. She spoke to you. I showed her your photograph and she identified you, even though you had changed your appearance by slicking your hair back and wearing a suit.’
‘The woman downstairs. She scared the shit out of me, asking if we knew who’d killed Paige.’ He looked wildly at Bianca. ‘You said they would never find out. You promised me I wasn’t doing anything wrong.’
‘Shut up, Sam,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t say anything else.’
‘I didn’t know I was going to get in trouble.’ He turned to me. ‘We had a key. Paige had given us a spare set because she kept losing hers and locking herself out. So it wasn’t burglary, was it?’
‘Maybe it was murder.’ Derwent had his arms folded; he looked very big and very stern. ‘Did you kill Paige Hargreaves?’
‘No!’ Sam stared at Bianca. ‘Tell him! Tell him I didn’t!’
‘What do you do for a living, Sam?’ I asked, knowing the answer already.
‘I’m a tree surgeon. Why?’
‘Tree surgeons have access to all kinds of tools. From the body parts we recovered, we know Paige was dismembered by someone who knew how to use tools.’
‘Not me.’ He shook his head. ‘Not me. Please, Bianca. Tell them.’
It was crystal clear that Sam was not the sharpest tool in his own van, and that Bianca made all their decisions. I looked at Bianca.
‘Well?’
‘She was already missing when he went to her flat. That’s why we knew it was safe for him to let himself in and look around. I persuaded him to dress up as a detective in case someone saw him, as a cover story. He thought it was funny. It was all my idea.’ Bianca’s voice was harsh. ‘I told him what to look for. He took her computer and her notebooks and a load of other stuff, in case I needed it.’
‘I didn’t touch anything else,’ Sam said, slightly desperately.
‘Where is the computer now?’
‘In a storage unit down the road. I didn’t want to keep it here in case someone found it.’
‘We’re going to need it.’
‘You can have it. And the notes. I’ve read it all now.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ Derwent glowered at her and she quailed.
‘You’ve found out what she knew, I swear it. She was trying to find out what had happened to Iliana. She’d got hold of someone who used to work for the club who saw them bringing in bodies and cutting them up at the Bishops Avenue house. He would only talk to her off the record so I don’t know who he is – she used a code name for him and I never tracked him down. But it’s all there in her files. She was really close to getting to the truth when they killed her. When you said she was cut up, I knew what had happened. I knew they’d got her too.’ Bianca’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘I shared as much as I could with you. I did what I could to help, honestly I did.’
‘No, you obstructed the investigation by stealing key evidence that could have helped us find her killer.’ I didn’t bother to keep the contempt out of my voice. ‘And you just admitted you already knew she was missing when you went to her flat. You deliberately delayed reporting that to us until you’d retrieved the information you wanted. Our investigation – and Paige’s safety – mattered less than your career. Unless you knew she was already dead and there was no point in looking for her.’
‘I had no idea what had happened to her, I swear. All I knew was that I had one chance to find out what she was investigating before we reported her missing. If I hadn’t taken it, she’d have died for nothing. The story would have gone nowhere. I was making sure her work counted for something.’
‘Very noble,’ Derwent said.
‘I don’t expect you to understand, but it wasn’t self-interest. I really believed she had found out something important. People need to know how the world works. The self-interest. The lying and cheating. There’s one rule for the rich kids and another for the rest of us.’ Bianca’s eyes had filled with tears. ‘It’s not fair, and it’s my job to reveal that. Paige would have wanted me to have her notes. She would have wanted me to carry on where she left off.’
‘That’s what you told yourself,’ I said.
‘It’s true.’
‘Are you going to arrest us?’ Sam’s eyes were huge.
‘We haven’t decided,’ Derwent snapped. ‘We’ll need you to make a statement about what you did. Every detail.’
‘Why should we help you?’ Bianca was starting to recover, which meant she needed squashing again.
‘If there’s something on that computer that could have got us a conviction and we lose it because you nicked it and disrupted the chain of evidence, that’s going to come back to you. Your best bet is to cooperate or you’ll be even more screwed than you are already,’ I said.
‘This is so unfair.’
‘No. It’s the law. And though you might not want to believe me, it applies to everyone.’