The Truth Will Out Read online

  So, this wasn’t a burglary gone wrong, Helen thought. The offender was looking for something specific, something worth killing for.

  She looked down, glimpsed something on the floor and bent down to examine it. The frame was broken, the edge torn, but it was definitely a picture of the victim, with the same flaming hair pulled back from her face with sunglasses. She had her arm around a blond girl. They were both in jeans and bright fleece tops, smiling broadly. Both girls looked in their early twenties. The photo oozed youth, vitality, opportunity.

  She looked back at the body. “What about time of death?”

  “Pathologist’s best guess is between six and eight o’clock at this stage.”

  “He’s already been?” Helen flashed her eyes to the door.

  “You just missed him. Dr Gooding arrived same time as me, about eight forty.”

  “Great.” She rolled her eyes. Out of the two pathologists that covered their area, Gooding was the least thorough. And he hated being on call. They were unlikely to get anything solid out of him until the morning. She turned and called across the room, “Alan, okay if I take a look around?”

  Alan Jones was the CSI supervisor, a slim, bespectacled man with sharp, pointy features. He was bent over the bullet in the skirting board, examining the surrounding area. He glanced sideways. “Yes, but stay on the white paper. We’ve taken some preliminary photos, but they’ve been all over the house.” He sniffed. “Looks like we’ll be here for days.”

  “Okay.” She gave Pemberton a quick nod and wandered out through the hallway into the kitchen alone.

  Many of the cupboard doors were open. Broken dishes, pans and tins of food spilled out onto the floor. Again, Helen tried to look past the devastation. The galley style kitchen was partially fitted with pine veneer cupboards. It looked like somebody had run out of money to finish it off. A folding table sat in the far corner with two collapsible chairs leant against it. No dishes in the sink, no coffee cups on the side. Two wine glasses sat on the drainer.

  She rubbed her purple, gloved hands together. The pungent aroma of red wine filled the air. A drawer hung out containing appliance instructions. Another drawer that looked as though it had been derailed in the search contained a messy host of mobile phone chargers. A third, an array of new birthday cards.

  Helen made her way up the steep stairs, carefully keeping her feet to the metre wide strip of white paper rolled over the carpet, her knees aching as she reached the landing. She counted three rooms on the first floor. She bypassed the bathroom and headed for the spare bedroom. The pink floral duvet and pillows were pulled off the bed and the empty drawer beneath sat askew with blankets, throws and spare pillows strewn across the floor.

  She moved into the main bedroom. Books had been swept from the bookshelf and jumpers, t-shirts, underwear from a nearby chest of drawers filled the floor. She opened the closet. At the bottom, shoes had been tipped out of boxes and sat haphazardly on top of one another. Helen looked up to see dresses, suits and casual wear hanging neatly from their rail. The stark contrast between the orderly hung clothes and the disarray of shoes surprised Helen. She stared at them for a moment, her eyes working from one to another. The arrangement of the clothes was the real Naomi, before someone had blasted through her home in their search.

  As she stared at the hangers she thought about her own wardrobe, packed tightly, about three quarters of the clothes never seeing the light of day - either they didn’t fit her anymore, or she hadn’t found the time to sort them out. But Naomi was tidy, ordered. No doubt the rest of the house usually followed the same suit.

  Helen sighed and remembered her own mother nagging at her when she was a child. ‘A tidy house is a tidy mind,’ she used to say. Well Naomi Spence had a very tidy mind. So what went wrong?

  She headed back towards the top of the stairs and entered the bathroom. Towels spilled out of the linen cupboard in the corner. The contents of the medicine cabinet filled the white sink, door still ajar. Even the top to the toilet cistern had been removed.

  Speckles of white on the windowsill caught her eye. Helen leant forward, focusing on the area. There were more grains, white in colour.

  She turned to the door and shouted for Pemberton.

  Within seconds he had taken the stairs, two at a time, and was standing next to her. “What is it, ma’am?”

  “What does that look like to you?” She pointed at the grains of powder.

  He bent down to take a closer look. “Are we thinking cocaine? It’s definitely the remnants of a line of something.”

  “Ask CSI to come up here and bag it up, will you? I think we might have a victim with a habit.”

  As Pemberton disappeared, Helen chewed the side of her mouth. She was just wondering if the killer could have been searching for drugs, when she heard a faint noise. Her body stiffened to listen. Nothing. Just as Pemberton walked back in, it came again. She tried to place it. Pemberton moved towards the windowsill and she grabbed his arm to hold him still. He looked at her curiously, opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head to silence him. It seemed to be coming from the landing. She let go of his arm and followed her ears out there, eyes darting about, searching for the source. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  There it was again. A faint tap. A scratch. She stopped.

  “It’s just CSI… ”

  “It’s coming from up there.” Her eyes rested on the loft hatch. The cover sat crooked. She narrowed her eyes to focus on a few small tufts of fibreglass that poked through the hole. When she looked down she could see more wisps littering the floor beneath.

  “It’s been disturbed recently,” she said quietly.

  They both stood still and listened to the intermittent rustling that grew louder and softer, then louder again. It was a strain to hear it at times, with all the noise from downstairs.

  “Something’s up there. Let’s take a look.” She grabbed a chair from Naomi’s bedroom and placed it underneath the hatch.

  Pemberton met her gaze. He continued in a hushed tone, “You’re not suggesting…?”

  “More likely a mouse or rat.”

  “Can’t stand rats.” He shook his shoulders.

  Helen snorted, smiling fleetingly at how a bear of a man like Pemberton could be frightened of such a small creature. Rats weren’t her favourite animals either, something to do with the tails, but it wasn’t the possibility of facing a rat that bothered her right now. Whatever the killer was looking for could be hidden up there.

  “Hold up.” Pemberton said. He reached out his arm to stop her as she tried to board the chair. “You’re never going to see, even if you stand on that.”

  She looked at him and raised a brow.

  He rolled his eyes and pulled a small Maglite torch out of his pocket. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  The chair wobbled as he climbed on. Helen had to clasp it with both hands to keep it steady. He lifted the hatch slowly, and raised his head through the open space. A raw draft wafted through the gap. All was quiet. She watched him shine the torch.

  “Well, well, well… ” he said.

  “What is it?”

  Suddenly there was a fluttering noise. It grew urgent and louder until within a split second, Pemberton had toppled off the chair and onto the floor. Helen just managed to duck out of the way in time.

  The whole house shook under Pemberton’s weight.

  She gaped at him for a moment, letting out a sigh of relief when he raised his head and rubbed the back of it. “Sean, are you okay?”

  He squirmed around on the floor for a bit, twisted his back this way and that then swung his feet around to a seated position. “No harm done. Good job it was a soft landing.”

  She stared at him and the thin carpet beneath.

  “Believe me,” he continued, grinning. “When you’re this size, it’s always a soft landing.”

  “Everyone alright up there?” Alan shouted from below.

  “Yes, thank
you,” she called back. “Sergeant Pemberton’s just testing out the floorboards.”

  “Make sure you keep to the white paper!” Steve called back.

  Pemberton pulled a face as he shuffled back onto the paper. She watched him rub the base of his back. “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine.”

  They turned their attention to the source of the noise. A small blackbird fluttered around their heads in panic. “Must have been looking for a warm place to roost, away from the snow,” he said. “Come in through a gap in the roof tiles, I bet, and got stuck.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Anyway,” she looked back up at the hatch, “what did you see up there?”

  He rubbed his back some more, but when he met her gaze she could see a twinkle of recognition in his eye. “I think we need to get the ladders in and take a closer look.”

  ***

  Eva screwed up her eyes to focus on the road as she drove north, the soft snowflakes almost mesmerising her as they floated into the windscreen. Naomi. Why hadn’t she responded to her calls, her messages? Unless she couldn’t. A hard lump expanded in her throat as her mind switched back to last Friday, the day this nightmare began.

  It was the end of their week’s holiday. They were driving through France, en route to the ferry port, breaking the journey intermittently to photograph pleasant views, ancient churches, old farmhouses.

  They stopped for lunch in a little town on the top of a hill, an hour north of Paris. It was a bright spring day, the sky a milky blue. Neither of them spoke French apart from the odd word and she recalled her chagrin at not being able to read the menu or converse with the locals. When she was young, her mother and stepfather had taken language courses before their annual holidays. It was one of her stepfather’s pet peeves and she could still hear his words now, ‘If a visitor to another country makes an effort to speak a little of the language they will be treated with respect by the locals.’ He would have been very disappointed.

  She remembered their apprehension at what they’d chosen to eat. Afterwards they howled with laughter when croque-monsieur turned out to be a toasted cheese and ham sandwich. It was a rare moment of real belly laughter. Tears flooded Naomi’s eyes and ran down her cheeks. Eva’s breath caught in her throat. The merriment continued back in the car afterwards as they drove down the road to the petrol station.

  Naomi refuelled the car and Eva leant back in her seat. She wound the window halfway and stretched her hands to the roof, enjoying the rush of fresh air on her face. As Naomi rejoined her, she ignited the engine and tried to wind the window lever. It wouldn’t budge.

  She pressed harder. It moved an inch and then faltered. This was a special edition Mini, only 20,000 miles on the clock. The shiny blue paintwork and Paul Smith interior were in excellent condition. She pushed again and heard a single clunk.

  “Oh, great!” Naomi said. “That’s all we need!”

  Eva sighed as they both jumped out. Naomi was right to be frustrated. This was a car they were delivering to the UK for a friend, a bargain struck in return for a free holiday. He would not be pleased if it was delivered with a faulty window. They both played with the winder to no avail. Eva tried to prise the door panel apart, flinching and jumping back as she caught her nail.

  They stared at each other. “We can’t leave it like this,” Naomi said.

  Eva scanned their surroundings. They were in the middle of the small French town. Opposite was a patisserie with a colourful window display, flanked by a boulangerie on one side, a coiffure on the other. She turned and glimpsed a garage, set back from the road, a single grey car parked out front. She couldn’t read the sign but it had to be worth a try.

  They drove across and parked next to what they now recognised as an old grey Peugeot outside. Although the workshop door was open, it looked deserted. They left the car and stepped over pools of dried oil in the entrance into a dimly lit garage. The walls were lined with cans containing lubricants and ancient-looking tools. A strong smell of diesel hung in the air.

  “Hello?” Naomi called out. Her voice echoed back at her. The girls glanced across at each other, bewildered. Eva had just decided to give up and retreat to the car when she heard a scraping noise and spied a body rolling out from beneath the single Renault parked at the far end, bright torch in hand.

  They crossed the garage and towered over the olive skinned man who stood to face them. Smears of grease covered his blue overalls, oil marks were set into the crows’ feet around his eyes. He spoke in a deep French accent and both girls stared at him, momentarily baffled. Eva pointed to the Mini and the French man followed as they walked across to it. With a series of strange noises and actions she showed him the window.

  He nodded and moved into the workshop. When he returned he held a screwdriver and jemmy. He pointed at the lever and nodded in approval. Eva imagined that he didn’t get many modern cars with electric windows in here. In fact, she couldn’t imagine he got many cars in here at all. The girls stared as he unscrewed five screws and prised at the panel.

  The process took less than three minutes.

  The panel wobbled as he lifted it away, and then he gasped. Eva jolted forward. Tucked into the door casing were several brown parcels, tightly wrapped in shrink-wrap, bound in the centre with duct tape.

  The world closed in around Eva. She was aware of the French man’s presence. Excited words spilled out of his mouth, his arms waved about animatedly. Naomi clutched her arm…

  A car swerved in front, snapping Eva’s attention to the present and forcing her to brake. In normal circumstances she would curse the driver. But not right now. Right now, she was still reeling from the memories of last Friday. Tears welled up in her eyes. How could their lives change irrevocably in the course of one day? And now this. She lifted a hand from the steering wheel and raked her fingers through her long blond hair. Not for the first time, did she wish they hadn’t taken that holiday.

  Chapter Three

  Helen glanced around the room at her sparse team. With Hamptonshire being a small force, she was often pressured to lend detectives out to sub-divisions to assist with local operations. But at least, with the current pressure to solve the cold cases, she had the comfort of most of her own team back with her at the moment, even if wide scale reductions in the policing budget had reduced her civilian support by half. And, as it was the closest office to the crime scene, they would be able to adapt their own offices at Hampton Headquarters where computers, phone lines and white boards were already set up into an incident room. At times like these you had to be thankful for small mercies.

  “Right then, everyone,” she said winding up her briefing, “what motivates somebody to climb through the open loft space to gain access to a property, ransack the house, fight the occupant and then kill her?”

  Following Pemberton’s discovery, a thorough search of the terrace revealed that somebody had broken into the back of an empty house, three doors down. They had crawled through the open loft space that linked the adjoining properties and dropped down onto Naomi’s landing using her extendable, folding ladder; carefully folding it back as they left.

  “Why creep through loft space? Why not break a back window?” Rosa Dark, a petite detective in her mid-twenties with short dark hair, olive skin and an attractive face asked as she looked up keenly from her pile of notes.

  Pemberton shrugged a single shoulder from his position at the back of the room, “Element of surprise.”

  “They could have skulked about upstairs for ages without her knowledge,” Dark said. “Maybe they’d even searched first?”

  Helen thought back to Naomi’s house: the drawers pulled out, the bookshelves emptied. She shook her head. “The state of the victim’s house indicates a frenzied search. They made no attempt to keep quiet. The victim would have heard them, gone to investigate.” She hesitated for a moment, percolating her thoughts. “And the tussle between the victim and the killer was restricted to the lounge. We’re pretty sure
of that.”

  “So, it looks like they searched the house after she was killed?” Helen followed the voice to DC Steve Spencer, a short slender man perched on the edge of a desk in the corner. Spencer’s time as a detective preceded Helen’s ten-year career in the police service.

  “I think we’ll work on that premise for the moment,” she said. Helen felt the onset of a shiver and fought to suppress it. The idea of Naomi locking her doors and checking her windows before settling down for the evening, unaware that a killer lurked upstairs waiting to pounce, made her skin crawl.

  “They must have known her habits, been aware that the house down the road was empty, that the loft space of that terrace was open,” Pemberton said. “A lot of terrace attics are bricked up, isolating each house these days. Often it’s a stipulation for house insurance.”

  “I agree,” Helen said. “They knew the area, were armed, prepared that she may be home. A well planned attack.” The room was silent. “We also need to find out what the killer was so persistently looking for.”

  Helen’s mind turned to number two Brooke Street, where the killer accessed through a broken window. An immediate search of the garden had discovered a couple of footprints in the smattering of snow. These were quickly measured and photographed. They suggested that the killer escaped over the fence, their prints joining a plethora of others on the main pavement beyond. As she shared this information, something puzzled her - CSI estimated the footprints were size eleven. The informant was female, but surely few women could claim such a shoe size?

  “We’ve sealed off the house three doors down. It appears to be empty, but we’ll need to contact the landlord, find out who has keys and get details of previous tenants that may know about the open loft space.”

  “Right,” Helen continued. “Let’s find out everything we can about Naomi Spence.” She raised her eyes to the clock. Ten thirty. “We’ll focus initially on where she had been today. Had she been to work? Who are her friends there? Who would she confide in? What time did she leave? What sort of mood was she in? I want to know her every movement right up until we were called out this evening. Memington Hall is a hotel so there should be somebody there around the clock.”