The low, windblown bungalow crouched alone in flat grassland, where the roads petered out towards the distant edge of Sheppey. It faced the Swale, a channel of the Thames estuary that cut the island off from the Kent mainland. There was nothing to protect the house from the salt-laden sea breeze that tugged at our clothes and blew my hair into confusion – no trees, no shrubs, no other houses in sight. There was nothing around us but the vastness of the sky filled with the whirling flight of the plovers and harriers that thrived in the wetlands.
It took Mila Walsh a few seconds to make sense of what she saw when she answered the door. I suppose it was hard for her to place me when I was so out of context. She was wearing ancient jeans and an oversized white shirt and flat sandals: her off-duty look, I guessed.
‘Sergeant Kerrigan. What are you doing here?’
‘Following up on a few things. Can we come in?’ I didn’t wait for her to answer but pushed the door wide open and trooped into the hall followed by Liv, Derwent, Pettifer, Georgia, Pete Belcott and Kev Cox carrying a toolbox full of forensic kit. Behind us, outside the house, two other forensic investigators were pulling on protective shoe covers. We were there in force and it was designed to intimidate her.
‘You can’t just come in here. You have to take off your shoes.’ Her hands fluttered helplessly. ‘You can’t be in here, all of you.’
‘I’m afraid we have to be.’
‘Mila? What’s going on?’ A man emerged from the back of the house. He had huge, rough hands that were coated in something white and dusty, and his arms were muscled and scarred. He had a deep tan, as if he spent a lot of time out of doors. His hair and beard were longer than they had been in the picture I’d seen of him in a magazine, but still a gleaming silver-grey.
‘Harry Parr?’ I checked.
‘Yes?’ He turned round blue eyes on me.
‘We’re Metropolitan Police detectives.’ I showed them the paperwork as most of the others fanned out through the house, beginning to work room by room. ‘We’ve got a warrant to search this address.’
‘Why? What are you looking for?’ His voice was a low rumble.
‘Tools,’ Derwent said. ‘Cutting tools.’
‘Plenty of them out in the studio,’ Harry said with an attempt at a laugh.
‘Stop it, Harry,’ Mila snapped. ‘Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything.’
I sat with them in the small living room, the two of them perched on a mid-century daybed covered in white leather, holding hands in silence. The murmur of conversation made Mila flinch from time to time, and I watched her eyes darting around the room as she licked her lips nervously, chewing off her lipstick, fidgeting with her hair. Harry sat still with his eyes closed and a half-smile on his face, meditating. I used the time to admire a huge abstract painting over the fireplace and a giant bit of driftwood that filled the hearth. Otherwise the room was bare, like Mila’s London home. I was sitting in a plywood chair that curved around me and was surprisingly comfortable. It looked like a classic Danish design, in keeping with the spare artist’s aesthetic the couple favoured. One big window faced on to flat fields and the infinite sky. Somewhere beyond the horizon, invisible, was the sea.
Footsteps rustled through the hall and I looked up to see Derwent and Kev, who waved an evidence bag at me, triumphant.
‘I’ve swabbed a few of the saws and cutting tools out in the studio and then did a quick Kastle-Meyer test. I got a positive reaction for blood from three of them so far. We’ll take the lot.’
Harry opened his eyes and blinked as Mila began to cry.
‘I do cut myself sometimes,’ he said mildly. ‘When I’m working.’
Kev gave him a little bow. ‘We’ll test for DNA. There’s very little that’s visible to the naked eye but it’s enough for our purposes.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Mila Walsh and Harry Parr, you are both under arrest for the murder of Paige Hargreaves. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
‘Harry,’ Mila said, dissolving into tears. ‘Harry.’
‘It’s all right, my darling.’ He leaned his head against hers, his eyes closed again. Then he made a quick, furtive movement, palming something from his pocket, and I was too far away to reach him, and too slow.
‘Watch him!’
Before the words were properly out of my mouth Derwent had caught hold of his wrist, using all his force to turn the sculptor’s hand away from his body as the tendons stood out under Parr’s skin and his muscles bulged with effort. A tool clattered onto the bare wooden floor: a chisel, small and lethally sharp. For a moment we were all still, staring at it. Mila’s mouth was open and her eyes were wide with horror. I wondered if it had been intended for her, after all, but then Harry settled the question.
‘I can’t go to prison. I’d rather die than go to prison.’ His anger made me shiver. Mila hung around his neck like a garland, limp, getting in the way as we attempted to handcuff him for his own safety, and ours.
‘I don’t understand,’ Mila said dully. It was the first thing she’d said since we got to London, to the office and the small, windowless interview room where Derwent and I were preparing to take her apart.
‘Neither did I, until I thought about the dates,’ I said.
‘What dates?’
‘The first time I met you, you told me about the detective who searched Paige Hargreaves’ flat. He told you his name was John Spencer, but he was actually a guy called Sam Williams.’
A flash of the old Mila: ‘I’ve never heard that name before.’
‘That’s all right. I assumed you didn’t know him. I tracked him down, though, and he told us that while he was there, you asked him if anyone knew who killed Paige.’
‘That’s right. He was very convincing, I told you. I believed he was a police officer.’
‘Yes, you did. But that doesn’t explain how you knew Paige was dead.’
‘What?’ Mila was frowning, still lost.
‘She hadn’t even been reported missing, officially. You could have been aware of not seeing her for a few days. You could have been concerned that she was missing, even though you told me that Paige came and went and kept odd hours and you weren’t really aware of her too much, so even realising she was missing would have been a stretch. But to know she was dead before we’d found so much as a scrap of her body in the river – that means you had to have been involved.’
‘I must have misspoken.’ She had a hand to her throat, her elbow braced in the fingers of her other hand. ‘Or he’s misremembered it.’
‘He remembers it very well. You frightened him.’
‘Ridiculous.’ Mila’s voice was flat. ‘How would I know she was dead?’
‘Because you killed her.’
‘No. Absolutely not.’ She gave a strained laugh. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘There are parts we have to guess,’ Derwent said. ‘I’ll admit we don’t know exactly what happened.’
I took over. ‘We know she had been drinking – lying in bed, swigging champagne from the bottle, celebrating the fact that she’d found a brilliant source for the story she was working on. She thought it was going to make her career. I suspect she told you about it when you knocked on her door. She was a little self-obsessed. Life had taught her to be selfish, to be her own hero. She wasn’t remotely interested in talking about what you wanted to talk about.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Mould.’ I had expected her to bluster, to laugh, to sneer at the very suggestion, but she didn’t. The colour was gone from her face and I didn’t think she could speak, even if she had anything to say. ‘I looked your partner up after we spoke the first time. Harry Parr. I found an interesting article about him. A profile of the celebrated sculptor, who had come through a period of life-threatening poor health. The piece was about how he had fled London to live in Kent, because the bungalow was new and clean.’
‘What of it?’
‘He left London because he was sick. He started having scary symptoms – aches, pains, dizziness, loss of appetite, depression and anxiety. His immune system was overreacting to everything. He said it felt as if he was allergic to the modern world. You couldn’t get a diagnosis for him, no matter how many doctors saw him. Then he realised he felt better at the bungalow. He found an expert in environmental allergies who confirmed your worst fears – he had developed an auto-immune disease as a reaction to the mould he had been exposed to. The house in London was toxic. He couldn’t live there with you.’
‘So what?’ Mila still sounded truculent but it was a half-hearted effort.
‘So you completely stripped your whole place and had it redecorated. You’d taken it back to the bricks and lifted the floorboards to be absolutely sure you’d eradicated every trace of mould.’ I sounded sympathetic because I was, a little; they had fought hard for Harry’s health. ‘You couldn’t do anything about Paige’s flat though. You went in to her flat at least once, by your own account, to check whether she’d left a tap running – water leaks are the worst source of mould, so it must have been a real concern for you. You saw the black mould that was all over her kitchen wall, right above the bedroom you and Harry had shared. No wonder he got sick. I got hold of the landlord, by the way, and he confirmed he was prepared to allow you to go ahead with renovating the flat as long as you paid for it, but Paige refused. The mould didn’t bother her and when you begged her to reconsider she said no. She didn’t care. She wanted to be left alone to work and she didn’t want the disruption of the building work you wanted to do.’
Mila swallowed, and said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on mine.
‘I’ve heard a lot about Paige, and formed my own opinion of her. She was single-minded to a fault. She was the cat that walked by herself – and as a result she’d taught herself that she didn’t need anyone. When you spoke to her she was drunk enough to be chatty, but she only wanted to talk about her work, her exciting project that was occupying all of her time and energy. She flatly refused to pay any attention to you. And so you killed her.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Mila spat.
‘There was no sign of a struggle in the flat, which confused me. It wasn’t until I went there again on a sunny day and the front door was propped open that I noticed the paint on the walls in the stairwell. A quick job, poorly done according to an expert I consulted.’ The decorator was an expert, I thought. And he’d been right about the shoddiness of it. ‘The flat hadn’t been redecorated in years. Why would someone want to paint the stairs in a hurry?’
‘We found a few specks of blood spatter on the ceiling in the stairwell,’ Derwent said. ‘Tiny, but they were there, when we looked.’
‘You did a good job of cleaning it up but not good enough. We are sure Paige died there, on the stairs. Did you shove her, or stab her, or hit her over the head?’ I waited, but Mila said nothing.
‘You could say it was an accident,’ Derwent prompted. ‘Most people go for that option. But then you’d have to explain why you didn’t help her.’
‘People kill for lots of reasons.’ I looked at her with some sympathy. ‘Wanting to protect the person you love most is a big one. Harry must have been so touched that you were prepared to kill for him.’
Her face was unreadable, remote.
‘What we think you did after she died was to call your boyfriend,’ Derwent went on. ‘Between the two of you, you came up with a plan. Paige had told you enough about her story that you knew she was investigating the murder of a girl whose body was cut up. You decided to make use of that so we would assume it was connected with her work instead of paying attention to the downstairs neighbour who had keys to Paige’s home and a motive growing all over the walls of Paige’s flat. Your boyfriend is good at anatomy. He knows how bodies fit together. That means he knows how to take them apart. He also has a large collection of tools.’
‘There’s that picture of him in his studio. Loads of hand tools, ideal for cutting up the wood and bone he uses in his pieces.’ I smiled. ‘All you had to do was cut her up, leave the pieces somewhere we’d find them and wait for us to jump to the wrong conclusion. Unfortunately, Sam took Paige’s computer and everything that related to the story, so it took us a while to find out about the other dismembered girl. In the meantime, we were looking far too closely at the flat for your liking. But first time round we missed the blood in the stairwell. It was only when we went looking for it with luminol that we found traces of it.’
‘You only missed a couple of places,’ Derwent said encouragingly. ‘Really, you had done a good job. But the places you missed lit up like the night sky.’
‘It was you who took the carpet away,’ I said. ‘I did wonder how you could bear to have Paige running up and down uncarpeted stairs because it was so noisy when we were there and that obviously bothered you, but of course you didn’t have to bear it before she died.’
‘You went and bought plastic sheeting and tape from your local DIY store, and quite a lot of bleach, and some magnolia paint, and a roller set. We’ve got CCTV of that.’ Derwent played the short film clip on his laptop. Mila watched herself as she moved quickly around the DIY shop. On the screen she looked harried. In real life her face was stony. ‘That was nine days before Paige’s disappearance was reported to us,’ Derwent said, and clicked it off.
‘Harry cut up Paige’s body on the hall floor, where we spoke the first time I met you. You had covered the whole place with plastic sheeting but afterwards you cleaned it with bleach, in case you’d missed any blood, and lit a candle to hide any remaining smell. I noticed the candle when I was there, but nothing else. By the time we came to look around, the new paint smell was gone. Anyway, the flat upstairs stank.’
‘You did a much better job in your own flat. When we went and looked at it yesterday, we didn’t find blood there, but we did find tape residue on the walls.’ Derwent shrugged. ‘And then you slid her body piece by piece into the Thames, some of it near the Chiron Club, some of it in other places. Maybe you dumped some at sea while you were in Kent. The advantage of cutting her up was that she was easy to carry around. Worth the effort, as far as you were concerned.’
‘This is all a fantasy.’
‘Harry will admit his part in it. You know he will. He’s terrified of going to prison for a long time. He’ll talk if there’s a reduced sentence on the table. But all the evidence we have points towards you as the killer.’ I stared at her. ‘We know what you did, Mila.’
Her face was white in the harsh overhead light. She leaned forward, and through clenched teeth she snarled three short words. ‘Then prove it.’