Bleak Water. Danuta Reah

to confirm that, find the next of kin, OK? She was murdered. There may have been an attempt to make it look like suicide, but it was pretty half-hearted.’

      ‘Maybe whoever it was didn’t mean to kill her,’ one of the officers suggested. ‘Panicked and dumped her in the canal afterwards.’

      ‘She drowned in the canal,’ Farnham said. ‘That’s the cause of death. But the initial post-mortem findings suggest we’re looking at something that was planned.’

      Though Cara’s arms and legs had been free when her body was pulled out of the water, there were marks around her wrists and ankles that suggested she must have been tied at some time before her death. A cut cord that matched the marking on the wrists had been found in the water. ‘There’s no flow in the canal,’ Farnham said, ‘so anything that fell off her would still be close by. We haven’t found her bag, or a purse. Her money, her cards, her keys – they’re all missing.’

      The damage to Cara’s hands had been noted when the body had been lifted out of the water. ‘They aren’t defence wounds,’ Farnham said. ‘And she didn’t break her fingers trying to pull the cord off her neck. They were broken before she died – someone twisted them until they snapped.’

      There was a murmur around the room. Farnham held up a cloth sack with a drawstring. ‘This was round her neck, weighted with a stone. It’s the way you drown a dog, throw it in the canal with a brick round its neck. But the post-mortem suggests – this isn’t definite, but it’s probable – that she had already drowned before the weighted sack was put round her neck.’ He explained about the marks from the drawstring that had been twisted round Cara’s neck. ‘There’s very little bleeding into the soft tissue – it might have been an afterthought, make sure that her head stayed under the water just in case. There was no attempt to hide the body – she was caught in the mud. If she’d been pushed away from that, she’d have sunk and we probably wouldn’t have found her for a while.’

      And the immersion had destroyed any physical evidence of Cara’s killer that might have been on her body. ‘What it does mean,’ Farnham had said, ‘is that whatever happened took time, and it wasn’t quiet. It’s unlikely she was attacked in the flat. The woman next door didn’t hear anything. No one heard anything on the canal bank. There’s somewhere else. He spent some time with her.’

      The pathologist had not been able to come up with a close time of death. The cold of the water had made this even less certain than it usually was. Cara could have died any time between midevening and shortly after midnight the night before. She’d been dead for at least six hours when she was lifted from the canal at six-thirty that morning.

      Tina’s mind went back to the flat, the dim room, the light switches that hadn’t worked, the heavy blankets over the windows, the flickering light of the candle. She missed the next bit. West nudged her and she hastily reconstructed what Farnham had asked – what time had Eliza Eliot heard Cara in the flat. ‘Around midnight,’ she said. ‘She’s coming in today to go through her statement.’

      Farnham considered her for a moment then moved on. Tina breathed again. She could remember talking to the Eliot woman the evening before, struggling against a headache and a fatigue that threatened to overwhelm her. Eliot had been emphatic about hearing Cara, but had been uncertain about the time. ‘It was – I think I woke up,’ she’d said. ‘I think I’d been to sleep. So it must have been – I’m trying to think of something to give me a fix.’

      ‘Well, was it before midnight or after midnight?’ Tina had been desperate to get home, lie down, get over the speed hangover that was getting worse and worse.

      Eliot had looked at her. ‘I’m not…’

      ‘We just need to get a general idea.’ If she didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to be sick.

      ‘…before. I think.’

      ‘If I say midnight?’ Tina said.

      Remembering this, she felt her face flush and she concentrated on her notes to hide it. But it sounded like midnight was about right.

      Farnham was winding up. ‘There was some disarrangement in the flat,’ he said. ‘Pillows displaced, stuff hanging out of drawers and cupboards. It doesn’t look like a struggle – but we can’t rule it out, not until we’ve got the forensics anyway.’ The candle had been burning for about eighteen hours – but that gave no indication of the time she had left the flat.

      There was one more thing. Cara Hobson had been picked up on Broad Street and charged with soliciting three weeks earlier. Tina had been aware of a change of atmosphere in the room, a murmur that ran round the team. She thought she detected a certain relaxation in some of the men. A puzzling case had suddenly become a simple one. A prostitute. It was unfortunate, but these things happened. Occupational hazard.

      

      Tina was assigned the job of going through the stuff that had been taken from Cara Hobson’s flat. It was something one of the uniformed officers could have done, and Tina wondered if Farnham had noticed her late arrivals, the signs of hangovers, the lapses in concentration. She had to get her act together. She sorted listlessly through the pile of papers, and tried to stop herself from looking at the clock. Eliza Eliot was coming in later that morning to go over her statement. That would give her a break.

      If only her head didn’t feel so woolly from the sleeping pills. She could try and wake herself up with some…She dismissed the thought. Using the last of her coke might liven her up for the moment, but she’d come crashing down later. She started on the task of going through the stuff the search team had brought from the flat.

      She remembered her first impressions of the flat – a strange, dim nursery lit by the flickering light of the candle. The nursery effect – more of a child’s bedroom effect, Tina thought, came from the toys scattered round the room – toys that were far too old for an infant: a rocking horse, a doll, a teddy bear, all larger than the baby herself; a counterpane printed with nursery-rhyme motifs. Presumably Cara was trying to create some kind of idealized child world for Briony Rose. One that she hadn’t had herself? Hold that thought.

      She sorted through the clothes. Cara had favoured shapeless, baggy clothes, jeans with floppy, flared legs, loose-fitting sweatshirts, but there were one or two unexpected things – a basque, lacy stockings, what looked like an old-fashioned school tunic – odd things for a woman of Cara’s age and tastes to be wearing.

      ‘There’s not much here,’ Dave West observed. He had been taking witness statements, and had come along to offer a hand to Tina more as a gesture of support than because she really needed it. He started sorting through a box of papers.

      According to Eliza Eliot and Jonathan Massey, Cara had lived in the flat for about three months. There should have been bills: utilities, council tax. There should have been some kind of evidence of Cara’s income: bank statements, Building Society books, benefit books. But there was nothing. There should have been personal stuff: addresses, phone numbers, some kind of reference to friends, to appointments. But again there was nothing. No one at the gallery reported seeing anyone visiting her – in fact, Eliza Eliot had specifically mentioned the solitary life that Cara Hobson had lived.

      There was no phone installed. ‘Is there a mobile?’ West said.

      Tina checked. It seemed logical, but there was no sign of one, and no record of any account. ‘That’ll need looking into.’ Tina made a note. A mobile could contain a lot of useful information. Cara’s killer could well have taken it, thrown it away. ‘Do you think someone cleared the flat out before we got there?’

      West shrugged. It was possible. ‘Anything from forensics?’ he said.

      ‘The identifiable prints in the flat were Cara’s. There’s a thumb print that can’t be matched to anyone yet. They’re still looking at that one. Apart from that, there’s no evidence of a break-in.’ But stuff had been pulled out of the drawers, scattered around. A search, or the general mess that nineteen-year-olds tended to