‘This is nice,’ said Forrester, as flinty hills rolled past them, leafless woods, rushing streams and grey stone buildings. ‘One day I’d like to live somewhere like Yorkshire.’
‘Derbyshire.’
‘When I’m settled and have a wife and kids,’ he said complacently. ‘I wonder what houses cost up here.’
‘Much less than in London, that’s for sure.’
‘What about you?’
‘You mean, would I want to live somewhere like this? No.’
‘You want to stay in London?’
‘Yes. Turn off here.’
Maud had to admit that Hathersage was an almost ridiculously lovely village, nestled in a shallow valley and surrounded by gritstone edges and sweeping moorlands beyond. Ruth Mullan didn’t live in its historic centre, but on the edge, in a modern bungalow that had a view of the church.
Forrester drove up the driveway in a splutter of gravel, and before they had come to a halt, the front door opened and Ruth Mullan stood there. She was quite tall and had long, greying hair and a face that was pouchy, with a grey pallor to it. Maud knew she was in her fifties, but she looked ten years older, as if grief had prematurely aged her. She didn’t come out to meet them, but beckoned them in, wrapping her arms around her to keep off the cold.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘To where it’s warm.’
They stepped into the hall, which smelt of pine disinfectant. Everything was shinily clean. The wood floor glowed. The living room was also immaculate, cushions plumped up on the sofa, every surface polished. On the mantelpiece over the wood-burning stove was a gilt-framed photograph of Kira.
‘I’m very sorry that you’ve lost your daughter,’ Maud said.
Ruth Mullan nodded in acknowledgement. Tears stood in her tired eyes.
‘Me too,’ said Forrester.
The door opened and a young woman stood there. She was so like Kira that for a moment it was as though a ghost had entered the room.
‘This is Connie,’ said Ruth Mullan. ‘Kira’s sister. These are the detectives, Connie.’
Connie ducked her head at them, scowled.
‘I’m really sorry about Kira,’ Maud said to her.
‘Do you want some tea?’ Ruth asked Maud and Forrester.
‘If it’s no bother.’
‘I’ll make it,’ said Connie.
‘She’s at university, doing a masters,’ said Ruth Mullan as her daughter left the room. ‘But she’s lost the heart for it. She’s very angry. With the dog, with me, with Kira, with everything. She hasn’t cried yet. She didn’t even cry at the funeral.’
‘Have you been offered help?’ said Maud.
‘Yes. Are you going to tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘What happened to Kira.’
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’
‘But you’re sure she didn’t do it herself?’
‘Yes. This must be hard for you to hear.’
Ruth Mullan shook her head fiercely, and her long, limp hair swung around her face.
‘What’s worse? Thinking your daughter took her own life, or thinking she was killed?’ Her eyes glittered. ‘Is it terrible to say I’m almost glad she was killed? Because then I don’t have to think she was in despair and I could have saved her, but I didn’t.’
‘It’s not a terrible thing to say.’ Maud paused, then said: ‘She sent you a WhatsApp on her last day alive.’
Ruth Mullan nodded, blinking away tears furiously.
‘She told you she loved you.’
Again, a wordless nod.
‘Was that characteristic?’
‘She was very affectionate. Guileless. That’s what one of her teachers called her. She got herself into scrapes, but she always meant well.’ She blinked. ‘Sorry. The message. Usually she sent lots of emojis as well. Hearts and smiley faces and champagne bottles, you know.’ She put out a hand and gripped Maud’s arm. ‘You’ll find out who did it?’
‘Yes,’ said Maud, with a firmness that made Forrester glance at her in surprise.
‘How can I help?’
‘We want to look through the things you collected from her flat. Have you kept them?’
Ruth Mullan led them out of the living room, down the corridor past the kitchen where Connie was noisily making tea, banging mugs and slamming cupboard doors, and into a small bedroom whose window looked out onto the moors.
‘This is Kira’s room,’ she said.
The curtains were drawn back to let in the winter light. The bed was made up, and there was a dressing gown hanging on the back of the door and slippers under a wicker chair. A wind chime, similar to the one that had been in her London flat, hung from the ceiling.
Ruth Mullan pointed at the four loosely knotted bin bags on the floor, and next to them a wicker basket that Maud had seen in the photos, and a guitar.
‘It’s all there.’
‘You’ve not unpacked anything?’
Tears stood in Ruth’s eyes again and she rubbed them away with the back of her hand.
‘I was waiting. Till it was easier.’
‘Is this everything that was there?’
‘Everything. Will you have to take it all away again?’
‘Not if you don’t mind us having a look through it here.’
Ruth Mullan looked down at the bags and shook her head.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Will you put things back in the bags?’
‘Of course.’ Maud turned to Forrester. ‘Can you get the kit, please?’
Maud slid on plastic gloves, squatted and opened the first bin bag. It was full of bed linen and towels, and also a balding teddy bear with only one button eye. She carefully folded them again and replaced them. The second bag was bulkier, splitting at its seams, and it contained a mish-mash of objects: that wind chime, a few mugs wrapped in newspaper, some books and magazines, a capacious make-up bag stuffed with cosmetics, an assortment of deodorant, body and hand lotion, shampoo for dry hair, several bottles of perfume, a hair dryer, a hair straightener, and multiple pairs of shoes: trainers and boots and sandals with thin, precarious heels.
‘What are we looking for?’ asked Forrester.
‘Her phone, for a start.’
The phone, without a charger, was in the third bag in a felt case that also contained her laptop. She took the phone out and tried to turn it on, but it was dead.
‘Bag it,’ Maud said.
She went into the living room and asked Ruth Mullan if she knew if her daughter had a PIN to unlock her phone once the battery was charged. The woman looked at her as if she was talking nonsense and shook her head.
‘I don’t know.’
Back in the bedroom, Maud started removing clothes, garment by garment, from the remaining bags. Kira had owned a lot of them. Most of them were flamboyant: a yellow jumper, a pink mohair one, a red satin shirt, a red dress with a plunging neckline, a couple of pairs of jeans, tee-shirts with happy mottos on them, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ or ‘Choose Love’. The wicker basket was stuffed with hats and scarves and, under them, underwear and a little drawstring bag of jewellery. Maud looked at everything and put them to one side.
‘Not here,’ she said.
‘What isn’t?’ asked a voice behind them.
Connie came into the room with two cups of milky tea, which she put on the bedside table, slopping liquid over the brims.
Maud looked up at her.
‘A dress.’
‘Which dress?’
‘One she’d just bought, a sheath, green and sequined.’ An idea occurred to her. ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’
Connie shook her head. Her voice sank to a whisper.
‘Don’t tell Mum or she’d go mental, even more than she is already, but I did take a few things of Kira’s for myself.’
Maud nodded.
‘Is that bad?’
Maud shook her head.
‘We always shared clothes. Kira loved clothes. I wanted to have things that belonged to her. You know.’
‘Yes.’
‘A shirt. A necklace. Her favourite jumper. But nothing like that.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. Why do you want it?’
Maud hesitated before she answered.
‘We think it was one of the last things she wore.’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘I don’t know if it does.’
‘Her PIN is 140999 by the way.’
Forrester wrote the number down.
‘Her birthday?’
‘Yep. There’s nothing much there, though.’
‘You looked at it?’
‘Of course I looked at it. I kept on going through it, if you want to know. It made it seem like she wasn’t really dead. Wouldn’t you have done the same if it was your dead sister?’
‘Probably. Did you use it at all?’
Connie shrugged.
‘I forwarded some photos of her and me together to my phone. And I nearly sent a WhatsApp to a guy called Ollie who was messaging her all the time, wanting to hook up. But then he suddenly stopped, so I didn’t. Does it matter?’
‘No.’
‘I keep seeing her,’ said Connie abruptly.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes. Does that kind of thing happen to other people?’
‘I think it does, sometimes. Grief takes people in all sorts of ways.’
‘Do you think there’s something wrong with me?’
‘Nobody should lose their sister at your age. That’s what’s wrong.’
‘I dream about her. Every night I dream about her, and sometimes she’s in trouble, but sometimes she’s just normal, as if nothing’s happened to her. Sometimes we’re arguing about stupid things, just like we used to. I wake thinking she’s still alive and then have to remember all over again that she isn’t and I’m an only child and my mother is slowly going mad and it’s all fucking horrible.’
‘It is,’ said Maud.
‘It’s odd,’ she said to Forrester five minutes later as they were pulling out of the driveway in the gathering gloom, ‘that the dress has disappeared.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said vaguely. Then: ‘Was it wise to tell the mother we’d find out who did it? How can you be so sure?’
‘Because,’ said Maud, ‘I know who did it.’
She looked at the time on the dashboard. She was going to be late for Stuart.
She arrived back at her flat after seven and only just had time to have a quick shower and pull on her jumpsuit and her sturdy biker boots before racing out again. Her hair was still slightly damp when she arrived, eleven minutes past eight, at the little Vietnamese place Stuart had chosen.
‘Sorry,’ she said, sliding into the seat opposite his.
‘At least you haven’t stood me up.’
‘It’s been one of those days. I had to go to Derbyshire.’
‘Pottery county,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about you.’
‘I was seeing the mother of a young woman who died.’ She studied his expression. ‘I don’t want there to be an elephant in the room,’ she continued. ‘You work in advertising and I think I can cope with that. I’m a detective in the Met: that’s what I do. If you can’t deal with it, I might as well leave right now.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘I know what people think of the Met.’
‘Are they wrong?’
‘Only because it’s worse than they imagine. They just hear the stories that make the news. It’s a toxic culture. Sometimes I agree with the people who say we should get rid of it and start again.’
‘How can you bear it?’
Maud considered. A waiter came and handed them both menus.
‘I sometimes think I can’t. Or I shouldn’t,’ she said slowly.
‘But?’
‘But I’m good at it,’ she said. ‘I know I am. I do my job well and carefully. The case I’m working on now, one of my colleagues screwed up, he didn’t care enough and he just didn’t see evidence that was staring him in the face. But I’m on the point of solving it, and I think things will be a little bit better because of that. If I left because I was worried about compromising my precious integrity, that wouldn’t have happened.’
Stuart nodded, his brow furrowed.
‘Sometimes I’m angry,’ Maud said, ‘and sometimes I’m exhausted and feel defeated by it all. But in the end, it comes down to this: I’m a good detective.’
‘I bet you are,’ said Stuart. ‘Let’s order.’
‘I already know I want sesame noodles. And broken rice.’
‘Have you been thinking about me?’
Maud had been thinking about Kira Mullan and Nancy North, about the occupants of 99 Fielding Road, about a condom and a dress, a cracked phone and those watertight alibis, about the name that she now held in her mind.
She just smiled and touched his hand.
An hour later, they stood in the dark street together. He kissed her and his lips were cool and tasted of chilli and ginger and beer. She put a hand against the nape of his neck and he ran his fingers through the wild tangle of her hair.
‘Shall we go to my place?’ he whispered. ‘Or yours?’
Maud stepped back.
‘Not tonight,’ she said.
‘When can we meet again?’
‘Soon,’ she said.
Because soon this case would be over and she would be free for a while, until the next one got into her brain and fizzed away there.
‘What are you doing on Saturday?’
‘Seeing you?’