Cruel Acts. Jane Casey

Our best chance is to be positive about connecting Rachel Healy to Leo Stone and work to that end.’

      ‘This is a man who kills without spilling blood, though. The only blood we found from the other victims was a speck on some plastic. He’s incredibly disciplined about it. You’ve seen the pictures – the room was spotless. So you have to believe he took Rachel to his house and for some unknown reason killed her in a messy and uncontrolled way, and that he was sufficiently excited by that to go back and take another woman off the street nineteen days later.’

      ‘Maybe it went wrong.’

      ‘Maybe it was nothing to do with him,’ Derwent countered, and my throat tightened with irritation.

      ‘Well, the blood had to come from someone. Even if it wasn’t Rachel Healy, and I think it was, someone died violently in that room and bled through the floorboards. How does that fit in with your incredibly disciplined killer?’ My voice was a shade too loud and Derwent grinned.

      ‘Shh. You’ll scare the barman.’

      ‘He’s not listening.’ I leaned sideways to check, all the same. His girlfriend was still talking, although she had moved on to the tattoo she was planning to get and where it should go.

      I took a grip on my temper and returned to Derwent. ‘If it wasn’t her blood, where did Rachel Healy go?’

      ‘Someone else killed her. A boyfriend. An ex. A stalker. I don’t know.’ Derwent tapped the beer mat against the edge of the table. ‘It’s more of a stretch to believe it was Stone than that someone else wanted her dead. Two women a week die at the hands of partners or ex-partners. Did we look at her boyfriends?’

      ‘I don’t know. I assume so – at least before Whitlock got involved. There was a whole month where nothing much happened on the investigation, remember.’

      ‘That won’t have helped.’

      ‘No. No one helped Rachel, alive or dead.’

      Derwent leaned back, watching me with that close attention I slightly feared. ‘Don’t get hung up on her.’

      ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

      ‘You need to keep some perspective on it. She’s been missing for years. Your chances of finding her at all are slim, let alone making a case that Leo Stone killed her. If she’s dead, it doesn’t matter to her.’

      ‘She has a family. Friends.’

      ‘And you can’t bring her back for them.’

      I looked away instead of at his face. I didn’t want to admit that he was right, but I knew he was. The CD changed to piano music, cool notes drifting through the dusty air like snowflakes. The barman dropped the cloth he had been using to polish glasses and leaned across the counter, drawing his girlfriend’s face towards him so he could kiss her. She held on to his wrists and closed her eyes and I found I was holding my breath …

      ‘You’re quiet.’

      I came back down to earth with a bump. It was just as well Derwent had his back to the bar because he would probably have heckled, or at the very least criticised the barman’s technique. ‘It’s this case. It looks solid from a distance but it all falls apart when you poke it.’

      ‘Don’t tell me you’re having doubts about Stone.’

      I shook my head. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence to think his van was here and Willa’s blood was in his house by chance. But Miss Middleton never saw Leo Stone at the van. No one did. They didn’t trace a building company that was using him around here. According to him he’d been off work for a month because of back pain and Miss Middleton got the VRN wrong when she wrote it down.’

      ‘Back pain my arse. His van was here. He was hunting in this area. It’s perfect. No CCTV. No nosy neighbours. Plenty of footfall from the pubs, people coming home late. Easy access to main routes out of the city centre.’

      ‘That’s a good point. We’re not far from Euston and King’s Cross. The Euston Road is the A501 and if you stay on it and keep heading west, it turns into the Westway.’

      ‘See? It all fits. He was using that as his main route through the city and dropping off it anywhere that seemed quiet and residential. This is exactly the sort of place where no one is going to notice you hanging around. You heard what Miss Middleton said about the area. It’s a backwater between busy areas. It’s not unusual to have strangers passing through, or hanging around for a few days at a time. No one is going to look twice at a man in a white van unless they’re an elderly lady with nothing better to do.’ Derwent drained the last of the liquid in his glass and burped. ‘Come on. Back to the car. It’s time to go and talk to Dr Early about body dumps and decomp.’

      ‘I can hardly wait.’

       8

      Derwent breezed into Dr Early’s office. ‘Knock knock, Doc. What have we got?’

      She looked up from her paperwork. The desk was, as usual, piled high with folders. Some of them had slid sideways, spilling their contents: forms, lab results, photographs … I had trained myself to look anywhere but at the pathologist’s desk. It was all right if you were prepared for what you might have to look at, but a glance could be scarring. Once seen, some horrors couldn’t be unseen. ‘Too much work and not enough hours in the day.’

      ‘Same,’ I said. ‘Is this a bad time?’

      ‘Not if you’re here to talk about Leo Stone.’ She stood up and with unerring confidence hooked a file out from the middle of the cascade of papers on her desk. There was a system to the chaos. ‘I’ve set things up in the meeting room next door.’

      We followed her obediently, in my case wondering what she meant by things and suspecting I wasn’t going to like whatever it was. I was much too experienced now to be worried about fainting or vomiting at a grisly post-mortem, but I couldn’t claim to take every detail in my stride.

      ‘Here we are.’ The room was dim, the blinds closed. Dr Early tutted impatiently as she adjusted them, turning the slats so we could see the images on two large noticeboards that filled one end of the room. As light flooded in, the shadowy pictures leapt into focus. ‘I’ve done one side for Sara Grey and the other for Willa Howard. You wanted a quick catch-up, I take it?’

      ‘Ideally.’ Derwent’s attention was on the noticeboards. He strolled down to look closer, his hands in his pockets, but the way he stood – his absolute focus – told me he was concentrating on what was in front of him, and that he was by no means as casual about it as he pretended to be.

      ‘I’ve pulled this together from the files and the evidence that was presented at trial. I’m going to explain all of this to you as I would explain it to a jury, so if I use too much jargon, feel free to stop me and ask any questions you might have. Also, some of this isn’t my speciality. If you really want the details on this, you need a forensic entomologist.’

      ‘You’ll do for now,’ Derwent said, and Dr Early ran the end of her pen along a series of photographs that filled the top left corner of Sara Grey’s noticeboard.

      ‘This is the body where it was discovered in the nature reserve. It was actually the second one that was located, I believe, but she died first so I’m going to start with her.’

      The photographs were taken from every possible angle and all showed the same thing: the skeletonised remains of a human being who had been left to disintegrate on open ground. The grass was trampled in front of the body but it had grown up to a height of four or five feet around her, and through her. There was something almost beautiful about the grass, the tiny wildflowers, the leaves and the bones, especially in the close-up images where it was possible to forget that these were the mortal remains of pretty, shy Sara Grey, whose face smiled back at me from the centre of her board.

      ‘I