Let the Dead Speak: A gripping new thriller. Jane Casey

shit.’

      I’d moved on to the chest of drawers, which was neatly arranged and completely full. ‘I can’t tell if there’s anything missing, but I’d be surprised. She had good taste in underwear.’

      ‘Let’s see.’

      ‘How did I know that would get your attention?’ I held up a bra: Italian, lacy, insubstantial as cobwebs. ‘That’s not for wearing. That’s for taking off.’

      ‘Naughty Kate.’

      ‘Single Kate. She must have been young when she had Chloe.’ I stopped to do the sums. ‘Twenty-four. Maybe she felt she had some catching up to do after her divorce.’

      The drawers lower down had T-shirts and jumpers arranged by colour, rolled rather than stacked, organised as precisely as if she’d known they’d be scrutinised by strangers. I checked there was nothing caught in the folds or underneath the clothes or even under the drawer liners. Then I took out each drawer and checked underneath it, and along the sides and back.

      ‘Think she was hiding something?’

      ‘You never know.’

      I carried on searching, checking between layers of clothes, looking in every box, every container, patting down the clothes on hangers to check there was nothing in the pockets. There was no way to know what I was looking for until I found it. I had searched chaotic and dirty houses, derelict buildings, squats and sheds: this was at least clean. But it was also frustratingly normal.

      Right at the back of the wardrobe, though, there was something that gave me pause: a plastic bag folded over. I opened it and sat back on my heels. ‘God.’

      Derwent was tipping the contents of the bin into an evidence bag. He glanced up, distracted, and half of it fell onto the floor. ‘For shit’s sake.’

      ‘Come and look at this,’ I said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Clothes.’ I was holding the bag at arm’s length, the back of one gloved hand to my mouth.

      He came over and peered into the bag, then recoiled. ‘Fuck. That stinks.’

      It was a strong and brackish smell, like unwashed exercise kit or dirty bed sheets.

      I squeezed the bag, shuffling the clothes around inside it without touching them. ‘Looks to be a top, skirt, bra, knickers. A whole outfit.’

      ‘A whole outfit that she couldn’t be bothered to wash?’

      ‘Or she had some reason for keeping it like that.’ I offered him the bag. ‘I don’t want to take them out in case we lose trace evidence, but look at her underwear.’

      He leaned over. ‘Ripped.’

      ‘Badly.’ I closed the bag again carefully. ‘Why would you leave a bag of unwashed, torn clothes in your otherwise im- maculate wardrobe?’

      Derwent looked down at me, his face grave, but he didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t have to. ‘Bag it up.’

      I edged the bag into a brown paper sack. It might be connected with what had happened in the house and it might not, but I wanted to know whose DNA was on the clothes and how it had got there.

      Derwent retrieved the scraps of cotton wool and other rubbish that had tumbled away from him. I pointed out a stray button and a needle that was silvery invisible in the pile of the carpet. The more we took now, the less chance there was that we’d miss something important, but clogging up the lab with irrelevant material was not going to make us popular.

      Derwent headed to the study while I dealt with the en-suite bathroom. It was clinically clean. The SOCOs had been here too but the dusting of fingerprint powder had caught only smudges and the wide swinging arc of a cloth used to polish glass. The air smelled of bleach and something else, more acrid. I bent over the sink and inhaled gingerly: definitely stronger. Drain cleaner, used for legitimate drain-cleaning purposes rather than destroying evidence. The bathroom cabinet was so well organised that I could see at a glance there was nothing of interest in it. One container held spare razor blades with plain black casings, not the pastel colours of women’s toiletries. Which meant nothing, I decided. There was no other sign of a man having lived in the house. Kate herself could just as easily have used the blades. Similarly, the stack of unused toothbrushes still in their packets didn’t mean she had frequent visitors, despite what Oliver Norris had suggested. She was the sort of person who stockpiled essentials like toothbrushes. There was a basket under the sink filled with rolls of toilet paper, and I’d found at least two of everything in the bathroom cabinet. Everything spoke of planning, care, preparation, organisation. It didn’t suggest chaos, terror, impending disaster. It didn’t make me think she had fled in a hurry after killing someone downstairs.

      It didn’t make me think she had left at all. At least, not by choice.

      ‘What have you got?’ I stood in the doorway of the study, mainly because it was very much a one-person space. The computer was gone from the desktop, leaving a labelled void behind, and some of the files and folders were missing from the shelves, the spaces tagged to show that it was the police who’d removed them. Otherwise it was the same as the rest of the house – organised and orderly.

      ‘Nothing.’ Derwent didn’t bother to look up from the filing cabinet he was flicking through. ‘But Liv’s got the good stuff already.’

      ‘Is there anything about her daughter?’

      ‘A fuck of a lot of correspondence with the local educational authority.’ He was skim-reading it. ‘This goes back a long way. She had a fight to get Chloe educated around here. She wanted her to stay in mainstream education and the local council didn’t want to have to pay for the extra learning support.’

      ‘What’s does it say about Chloe?’ I was curious about her. She had been distant but lucid when I spoke to her. And shock could do that to you.

      ‘Speech delay. Developmental delay. Attention deficit disorder. Anxiety. Oppositional defiant disorder.’ Derwent snorted. ‘That just means you don’t like doing what you’re told.’

      ‘What else does it say?’

      ‘Depends who you ask. According to the Council, she was fine. According to her mother and the educational psychologists she consulted, Chloe needed a full-time classroom assistant to help her, extra tuition, extra time for tests …’ Derwent sighed. ‘Makes you realise how lucky you are if your kid is normal.’

      ‘I don’t think we’re supposed to say normal any more. There’s no such thing.’

      ‘Bullshit.’ He pushed past me and disappeared into the bathroom.

      I listened to him rooting through the cupboards even though I’d already searched there. ‘Did you find a passport?’

      ‘In a drawer.’

      ‘Cash?’

      ‘Nothing significant.’

      ‘Jewellery?’

      ‘No. But she’s not wearing much in the pictures I’ve seen of her.’ Derwent reappeared. ‘Anyway, do you see this as a burglary?’

      ‘No, I don’t.’

      ‘Come and look at this.’ He led me back into the bedroom and opened the French windows. A waist-high railing ran across the space. It was dark now, the lights on in the houses all around. The rain had stopped for the time being but the air was sweet with it and night scents rose up from the gardens that stretched as far as I could see. The trees were plumy with leaves and from where I stood the gardens blended into one enormous space framed with houses, the walls and fences invisible.

      ‘We need to ask the neighbours if they saw anything.’ I had a perfect view across to the houses behind, to the domestic dramas playing out in brightly lit windows. Life going on, as it tended to.

      ‘Especially at the back. We think