‘Can I make you a cup of tea? Do you drink tea?’ asked Moss. Maria nodded. Erika moved through to look at the back bedroom. There was a neatly made bed with a patchwork quilt and a pile of teddy bears leaning up against the pillows. Another rail was stuffed with clothes, and there was a line of shoes underneath, and as in the living room there was another crucifix above the doorway.
The window had a net curtain and big thick black curtains. Erika moved closer to the window and lifted the net. She could see a strip of grass behind the block of flats. Concrete fence posts ran along the back of the building, strung with three lengths of wire, which barely came up to waist height. Beyond this was the alleyway which ran between the back gardens of the houses opposite.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Maria. Erika turned and saw her in the doorway with Moss.
‘Sorry. I was just looking. Is this your room?’ she asked.
‘Me and Sophia alternate having this room every month, and the other sleeps on the sofa bed. This is my month,’ she said.
‘Maria would like to change, before I take her to the hospital,’ said Moss.
‘Of course,’ said Erika. Maria changed into a long black dress and black coat, and they helped her to her car outside.
‘I’m going to stay here and take another look at Vicky’s flat,’ said Erika to Moss when Maria was safely in the back of the car. ‘I’ll see you back at the station.’
‘Okay. And I’ll call you, as soon as I know for sure about the identification,’ said Moss.
She got into the car and Erika watched them drive away. Maria’s pale face seemed to float in the back of the police car as she looked out through the window, and it pained Erika that she still seemed to have hope in her eyes, that the body in the morgue wasn’t Sophia.
21
Erika went back to Vicky’s flat, and opened the door using her key from forensics, breaking the tape seal put in place by the police. When she switched on the light, the blood-soaked mattress in the living room seemed to blaze back at her. She heard Isaac’s words from the morgue:‘If she was fighting to get away, the rate of blood loss would have increased with her heart rate.’
Erika leant down next to the partial hand print on the wall beside the sofa. It was the fleshy part at the base of the thumb and the forefinger, and the crease of the skin between the forefinger and the thumb was imprinted on the wall. Erika put her right hand up against the wall, and then her left. The print was of a left hand. The long curved crease in the skin was what psychics called the ‘lifeline’。 Erika compared the edge of her hand with the bloodied print on the wall. The hand was a similar size to hers, but Erika’s hands were quite large for a woman.
‘Whose hand is that?’ she said to herself. She felt for her notebook and then remembered she’d left it at home. The sheets and the mattress on the sofa bed were with forensics, and she could now see the bed frame and through to where the blood dripped to the carpet underneath. Erika tested the frame, and then climbed onto it and lay face-up. She tried reaching up with her hand to the door from the lying down position. The door was to the right of the sofa bed. When she reached up with her left hand, it fitted the print on the wall.
‘Was there a struggle, and she tried to get to the door before she was rolled up inside? Is that her hand? Or someone else’s?’ There could have been a struggle – the candle holders and a Scrabble game had been knocked off the bookshelf onto the floor. Erika lay on the bed frame for a moment, and tried to imagine the terror and the pain. What had she been doing before? Was she lying here when the intruder came through the front door? Did they have a key? Or did she get up and open the door?
‘Why would she be lying in Vicky’s bed?’ said Erika, sitting up and hearing the springs creak in the old bed frame.
She got back up off the bed and looked around the room. There were grey deposits of the ash-fine fingerprinting dust over every surface; the door frame and handle, the front window, and the coffee table. Erika moved past this and looked at the kitchen. The block of knives had been removed and there was a small plastic number marking where they had been. Had the killer grabbed the knife, or did Sophia try to defend herself? Erika went into the bedroom at the back that was Vicky’s studio and switched on the light.
The desk and chair were black, and there was more of the fine fingerprint dust, prominent and silvery across the surface. Vicky’s computer had been taken away by the forensics team, and Erika made a mental note to prod them for details of the data on the hard drive. The sound was odd in the room, strangely muffled. Erika looked at the ‘studio’ section of the room where the egg boxes lined the walls, and then back at the window. She moved over to the uneven blocks of polystyrene, which were packed in, filling the window space. One of the bricks had been pulled out by the forensics team. Erika picked it up and slid it back into place. As far as she knew, the killer hadn’t left through the bedroom window. How would someone leave and then pull the huge piece of polystyrene back into place? The killer would have had to leave through the lobby and then the main glass doors, but there was no residue or blood spatter on those doors. Forensics had checked with a luminol lamp, hadn’t they? Again, she cursed that she didn’t have her bloody notebook.