Death Message

A Collins and Griffiths Detective Novel

Kate London

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781782396185
• eBook ISBN: 9781782396178
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

BOOK 2 OF THE TOWER - NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA 'Sensational... A brilliant, high-octane crime novel' Tony Parsons October 1987: the morning after the Great Storm. Fifteen-year-old Tania Mills walks out her front door and disappears. Twenty-seven years later her mother still prays for her return. DS Sarah Collins in the Met's Homicide Command is determined to find out what happened, but is soon pulled into a shocking new case and must once again work with a troubled young police officer from her past, Lizzie Griffiths. PC Lizzie Griffiths, now a trainee detective, is working in the Domestic Violence Unit, known by cops as the 'murder prevention squad'. Called to an incident of domestic violence, she encounters a vicious, volatile man - and a woman too frightened to ask for help. Soon Lizzie finds herself drawn into the centre of the investigation as she fights to protect a mother and daughter in peril. As both cases unfold, Sarah and Lizzie must survive the dangerous territory where love and violence meet.

PART ONE

1

Wednesday 9 July 2014

Acrow – glistening black and iridescent – was jumping about on the flat roof. A small, slim woman stood beside him, smoking. Detective Sergeant Sarah Collins wore polished black Oxford brogues and a grey trouser suit that in recent months had become slightly too roomy around the waist. Her hair was short, her hands tidy, the nails neatly filed but unpolished. From a distance, the simple neutrality of her appearance might have made her seem younger than her years, but close up, the mark of experience on her face aged her somewhere in her mid-thirties. It was a simple face – square-jawed, even-featured – that didn’t look as though it easily broke into a smile but a seriousness and intelligence in the eyes softened any hint of severity.

Sarah extinguished her cigarette and threw the crow one of the nuts she had brought for him. How silly: tears were suddenly rolling down her face. She couldn’t help but think that it said something truly ridiculous about your life when you were sad about saying goodbye to a crow. She pulled the back of her hand across her face, turned away from the bird and looked towards the river.

A cruiser was moving slowly upstream full of sedentary tourists, the sightseers of the megacity skating upon the river’s surface as shallowly as water boatmen. Sarah knew too much about the Thames. She could no longer see it as a place for pleasure cruises. Nor was it any more to her a river of history and literature. Not Elizabeth I making her way downstream on a gilded barge. Not even Dickens’ river of fog and industry, of docks and cranes, toerags, mudlarks and stevedores eking out a living from its dirty but profitable shores. No, policing had made the Thames an impersonal place, a place of physics. The grey-brown canalized river was an inexorable tidal sweep, a mass of cold and filthy water in relentless laminar flow. She knew how young men set off pissed and high-spirited from one bank only to find themselves suddenly in the grip of a current that was accelerating powerfully, sweeping them downstream as small and irrelevant as Poohsticks. She knew how bodies snagged like refuse on the clean-up cages. Unbidden, it entered her mind that perhaps it was those in despair who knew the river best, who came to it as if on pilgrimage with their weighted rucksacks and cast themselves upon its indifference.

For three years, attached to the Directorate of Specialist Investigations, Sarah had had this view of the Thames from the flat roof outside her office window. Deaths in contact with police had been her bailiwick. At the start of her posting it had seemed clear that her job was to contradict the river, to assert the importance of each little life, however small it might be in the scale of the universe. Recently, though, this conviction had threatened to slip away from her, as though her voice were only snatched up and dissipated by the river’s indifferent roar.

She’d joined the directorate with a certain defiance. After all, investigating the police wasn’t a job every officer wanted. Perhaps that was what had attracted her. It was an arena that demanded pure impartiality, an ideal of investigation at its purest. It had been a badge of honour for her to be fearless, impervious to opinion. It was as if she had believed she could put her hand in the fire time and time again and never be scorched.

Well, she’d been wrong.

It was six months since her former colleague, Detective Constable Steve Bradshaw, had let her know exactly what he thought of her, and it had hurt. She’d admired him as a detective and thought of him as a friend. ‘No wonder you’re so fucking lonely,’ he’d told her at the end of their last investigation together. He’d gone further, rubbed it in, said he felt sorry for her. He’d told her to get herself a fucking dog.

Ever since the close of that investigation into the deaths of Hadley Matthews, a male police officer, and Farah Mehenni, a teenage immigrant girl, who had fallen to their deaths from a tower block Sarah felt she had been treading water, trying not to get swept away, knowing she had to move on.

She cleared her throat and turned back to Sid, the crow, who was waiting for her, his head cocked, his eye bright and beady, his beak as hard as galvanized rubber. Crows were cleverer than dogs, she’d read, adaptable. ‘You be good,’ she said, and clamped her jaw shut against any more tears.

All detectives have moments of burnout, she told herself. It’s just the nature of the job.

That morning, she’d picked up an unmarked car from her new team in Hendon. She was making a positive move. She was going on promotion to be a detective inspector on Homicide. She knew the unofficial calls would have gone out as soon as her application was in, checking up on her, finding a way to stymie her move if the words spoken into the phone were sufficiently bad. But clearly the words had been good. The boss had said they were happy with her, and he must have meant it.

She hung up the bag of bird food and ducked under the open window into her office, determined to put her stuff into the car quickly and leave without a backward glance. But Jez, one of her detective constables, was waiting awkwardly for her, shifting his weight from foot to foot, making her think of that stupid crow. There was that bloody painful boiled egg in her throat again, the heat behind the eyes. They must have that red, swollen look. It must be obvious.

She was saved by a flash of humour. How could she not smile at Jez’s flash gold cufflinks, the high-collared white shirt stretched tightly over his no doubt gym-primed chest, the rather nice leather satchel that had probably cost too much. He was young, good-looking. He tried too hard. He’d been supportive, kind to her when she was at her most lonely. She’d come to like him.

She said, ‘I’d better get a move on.’

There was a pause.

‘I got you something.’ Blushing, he pulled a flat package out of the bag. He might have guessed how suddenly close to tears she was because he added, ‘Don’t worry, Sarah. Open it later.’

She nodded. All her stuff was packed away into the blue plastic crate that stood on her desk.

He said, ‘Can I carry that down to the car for you?’

She shook her head. She wouldn’t risk speaking.

He said, ‘I’ll look after Sid.’

She reached out for a piece of paper, took her pen from her inside jacket pocket and wrote, Thanks, Jez.

He put his hand on hers. ‘No worries. I’ll catch you later. They’re lucky to have you. Homicide will be a bit of a break after this, more straightforward.’

Sarah barely noticed the roads she was driving except when they were suddenly peopled by memories from her years of policing. Fulham Palace Road, outside the florist: a posh guy, face-down stone drunk in the street. She’d been at the very beginning of her service, still in uniform. When they’d got him upright, he’d swayed towards her, breathing fumes of vomit, and told her she looked adorable in that hat. She switched lanes, pulled round the Broadway. Hammersmith nick on her left, two police horses waiting for the gates, their tails switching. She had remembered the Shepherd’s Bush Road as launderettes and tatty takeaways, but it was being repainted in a tasteful muted palette that seemed aimed at suggesting country houses rather than Zone 2 Central London. If you had to be rich even to live on a main road, where on earth were the poor going to go? Shepherd’s Bush itself, reassuringly unsalvageable – a brief memory of rowdy Australians outside the Walkabout – then, on the island of scrubby green encircled by choked traffic, the echo of a crying girl with broken fingernails and a bruise to her cheek.

Back on autopilot as she headed north-east, her thoughts returned to their usual obsession: the investigation into the deaths of PC Hadley Matthews and Farah Mehenni.

It had been her last full investigation at the DSI: the one that had made her look around for a new posting. She and Steve Bradshaw had been practically first on scene and found them both smashed against the concrete but still warm from the life that had left them.

Outwardly the investigation had been a success. Inwardly it was anything but. She felt she’d carry it with her all her career. She thought of the pretty young police constable, Lizzie Griffiths, who’d been on the roof when Hadley and Farah fell and who had run away, going missing for days before she and Steve could locate and interview her. She remembered with more discomfort Lizzie’s boss, Inspector Kieran Shaw. If anyone had to pay it should have been him. She couldn’t pinpoint the feeling that slid uncomfortably inside her: dissatisfaction, frustration, anger – yes, anger certainly. Guilt, maybe. Self-doubt. Certainly a darkness. She checked herself. She needed to stop herself circling around these thoughts, stuck in the same place she’d been for months.

She focused back on the road, the here and now. It was just the nature of a detective’s job: some things stayed with you. Some things couldn’t be resolved. You had to accept that. She was doing that. She was moving on.

She was threading her way through residential streets of 1930s semis, Victorian terraces, slowing for speed bumps and winding through the maze of closures that tried to prevent drivers using them as rat runs. Her years as a detective had made her as knowledgeable about cut-throughs as a London black-cab driver. Here, by an arcade of shops, her first homicide as a detective constable. The victim had made it across the street to bleed out in front of his mother as she ran downstairs from her flat above the off-licence. The murderer had been only seventeen, imagining he was in a movie when he killed the other boy over a bag of weed.

Like a homing pigeon she accelerated along the A41 and then turned left down past the big-money residential developments that were forcing their way upwards like big-money Redwoods. She swung into the entrance to the Peel Centre, passed the security check – the civilians at the gate as usual never in any particular hurry – and pulled round under the concrete portico that framed the entrance to the site.

For a moment she stood on the parade ground, allowing the site to seep into her bones, all her love and hatred for the place, acclimatizing herself to the open spac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Epilogue
• About the Author
• Also by Kate London
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright