The rain has held off on her walk home but steel-coloured clouds gather ominously. There is a blossom tree on the patch of grass next to their driveway, not yet in bloom. Elliot planted it when they first moved in, and it still hasn’t reached its full height. Its branches are stark and naked without their frothy dressing. As she walks past she notices something swinging from one of the upper branches. Her eyesight isn’t as good as it was and she squints, but as she gets closer she can see, from the dirty yellow hair standing up in a peak, the hard body and scrunched-up face, exactly what it is. A troll doll. Hanging from the neck by a piece of string. She stands and watches it for a few seconds, gently swinging in the wind, her mind racing. Was it left there at the same time as the package? She hadn’t noticed it when she left the house earlier. The glow she had felt from her coffee with Jonas extinguishes as quickly as a wet match.
The troll dolls are from her second Miranda book, His Calling Card, about a serial killer who left them hanging from trees.
After he’d murdered his victims.
Elliot.
She sprints around the side of the house, into the garden and straight to Elliot’s office. She can’t see him through the glass doors but she wrenches them open anyway. He’s not there. She stands in the doorway, confused. He wouldn’t just go out and leave the office unlocked, not with all his expensive equipment. The mug she’d brought him earlier is lying on its side on the floor. She darts across the lawn to the house, fumbling with her key as she unlocks the bifold doors. ‘Elliot!’ she yells. ‘Elliot!’
But there’s no answer.
9
‘See here,’ says Celia, pointing at the open skylight in the hallway. ‘I’m certain this is where the perpetrator got in.’
I look up. It’s a big skylight, easy for a slim-ish person to wedge through and not too high for them to jump down from. Although they’d have to be reasonably fit and agile. Was the victim known to him or was it opportunistic? I think back to the other victims. Each one had been killed when they were alone in the house, usually in the early hours of the morning, and the killer had entered the building through either a skylight or a window. The only victim where we’d never understood how he’d broken in was the second, Jennifer Radcliffe. No doors or windows open or smashed. That had been perplexing, but it had been very early in the case, when we were just realizing we had a serial killer on our hands.
We turn at the sound of a heavy tread on the stairs. Saunders is lumbering up them, puffing. ‘Ma’am … just been speaking to the woman in the bedsit below, Lorraine Butterworth, who raised the alarm. She was away last night but has said the victim is Trisha Banks, aged thirty-nine. Single with no kids. Worked at Poundland.’ He consults his notebook. ‘Apparently she was quiet, kept herself to herself, and had only been living at this address for six months. Before that she was in London. Lorraine realized something was wrong when she went to give her a parcel this morning and the door was ajar. She pushed it open and saw her lying on the bed. She ran out of the room and contacted the police.’
‘Great. Can you go door-to-door, find out if the neighbours saw or heard anything or know her? Where is Lorraine now?’
‘She’s downstairs, ma’am, being comforted by Michelle … DC Doyle.’
‘Good.’ I like Doyle. She gets the job done with minimal fuss and she’ll keep Saunders in line even if he is a rank higher. It’s nearly five thirty and it’s already started to get dark. I watch as Saunders retreats and is swallowed into the bleak hallway.
Trisha Banks is lying on the bed in her dank bedroom, the wallpaper peeling off. Her body is in shadows now and the powder-white soles of her feet are all I can see. I’ll get Doyle and Saunders to inform her next of kin. It’s the job I hate most.
As I make my way down the stairs, I see Forensics and the police photographer, Ray, and they stop to let me pass before clustering as one mass into the building.
I stand on the doorstep, watching, as Saunders, his back to me, talks to a group of neighbours who all want to know what’s happened. I turn away, light a fag and take a few puffs before stubbing it out against the brick wall. A gull skims the surface of the sea.
Then I head back into the building, which smells of damp and death, to talk to Lorraine Butterworth.
10
‘Fuck, that sounds terrifying. And then what happened?’ Louise is staring at her, hazel eyes wide, hand gripping her wine glass.
‘It was horrible. I didn’t know what to do. I really thought …’ Emilia shakes her head. ‘I don’t actually know what I thought. That I’d find Elliot in the house somewhere, stabbed, like in my book. Anyway, I rang his mobile and, thankfully, he answered straight away. He’d popped out to get petrol because he knew he had a long journey today. The relief I felt at hearing his voice. Shit, I can’t even tell you. He was angry with himself for not locking the door.’
‘Fuck,’ says Louise again, and swigs some wine. They’re sitting in a restaurant they love in Richmond – it’s chintzy with velvet-flock wallpaper, padded pink velvet chairs and huge chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling. Louise says it makes her feel glamorous and always follows up with ‘Because God knows I need glamour in my life.’
‘It freaked me out,’ says Emilia, toying with the stem of her wine glass, ‘especially when I saw his favourite mug on its side on the floor. He said he must have knocked it when he left. Thank goodness it’s not broken.’
‘You thought it was a sign of a struggle.’ Louise leans towards Emilia with her elbows on the table. ‘I’d have thought the same. So that’s two things now, the seagull with the broken neck and the troll doll.’
‘That it’s happening at the house is what’s unnerving me most. I mean,’ Emilia leans back in her chair and sighs deeply, ‘whoever is doing this knows where I live.’
‘But it’s harmless. Nuisance stuff, really. What did Elliot say?’
‘The same as you. I think the fact I knew I was meeting you tonight stopped me really losing my shit yesterday. But today leaving the house … I was a bit worried about what I’d find.’
‘I think you should report it. Just to be on the safe side. Just with your local police station, which is Twickenham for you.’
Emilia’s stomach turns and she pushes away her unfinished salmon. ‘Really? But you said you don’t think it’s serious.’
‘Don’t panic,’ says Louise. ‘I’m not saying you should be worried. It’s some idiot messing with you. Some fan, probably. But I think better to log it. Have you got one of those Ring doorbells? Or cameras or anything?’
She’s sure Louise has asked her that before. She’s as security conscious as her father-in-law. ‘I’m crap at that sort of thing. Elliot’s dad is always telling us to have more security around the place.’
‘Didn’t you say he was once in the police?’
‘Years ago. Before your time.’
‘Why did he leave?’ Louise picks up her knife and fork and continues to eat her steak.
‘I don’t actually know,’ says Emilia, refilling her wine glass, thankful she’s getting a taxi back. She’s already starting to feel a bit light-headed but she needs this tonight after the stress of the last few days. ‘Elliot said not to interrogate him.’ She laughs. ‘You know what I’m like. Nosy.’