Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(32)

She shook her head. Her daughter came to stand next to her mum. Her clear brown eyes were sharp and inquisitive.

‘Did you see anyone you didn’t recognise? Anything not quite right, someone hanging about?’ She shook her head in response. ‘Thanks for your help, Mrs Aziz. We’ll need a statement from you, one of my officers will be calling around in the next few hours.’

She nodded and reached down to lift her daughter onto her hip, watching Willis walk away.

Carter was speaking with Laptop when Willis got back to him.

‘What else did the vicar say about her?’ she asked.

‘That she never socialised, he didn’t think she had anyone else in her life, nothing but the church.’

Willis stuffed her jacket into her backpack and left it at Laptop’s feet as she prepared to go inside the flat by putting on a forensic suit.

‘Did he like her?’ asked Carter, getting into his and covering his feet with protective booties.

‘He seemed to.’

‘Look after that.’ Carter handed Laptop his expensive Armani coat. ‘Guard it with your life.’ Laptop smiled.

As Laptop held the door open for them, Carter squatted down to take a better look at the doorframe. ‘No sign of a forced entry,’ he said, ‘and the key question is why did she open the door? She has a spyhole, so it must be someone she trusted or what they said made some sense to her. She had to have decided to let her guard down.’

Willis pulled up her mask and took the first step inside the small flat and into the hallway. The stillness was heavy in the half-light. Carter stepped inside behind her. Willis’s eyes were on the hallway ahead. She’d already made up her mind about the doorframe. Laptop closed the door behind them. They stopped at the bathroom door on the right and Willis nudged it open with her foot.

‘She didn’t get this far, then,’ said Carter as he peered over her shoulder into the neat and tidy bathroom, clean water in the bath and pink shells along its rim. A glass was on the side of the bath.

Willis smelt it. ‘Gin.’

Back in the hallway, they took a few steps to the sitting room. There was a large window straight ahead; beyond it was the strip of communal gardens to the front of the block. From somewhere outside there was the sound of a child laughing and still the drone and hiss of the steady stream of traffic on the wet road beyond the hedge. Willis’s eyes came to rest on a vase of fresh flowers standing defiantly beautiful, against all odds, on the window ledge. Lilies, their pungent smell had turned into decaying perfume. Carter hung back; he let her do her own thing. Her world was not his, and he was glad of it. In his world things added up or they didn’t, in Ebony’s they just kept unravelling. She didn’t build; she split into atoms and then split again. She didn’t observe the tragedy; she lived it with the victim.

He walked into the kitchen. ‘No blood in here, but there is a knife missing from the rack.’ He returned to the sitting room to stand next to Willis. From where they were standing at the entrance of the room, they could see right into the bedroom and the back of a woman’s bare legs, one twisted over the other.

‘Things went wrong in here,’ said Willis. ‘No blood in the hallway, kitchen or bathroom, but furniture knocked over in here.’

The woman’s body was lying on its side, turned away from them. Blood had turned the pale blue bedding a deep reddish-brown. Puncture wounds in the woman’s back had opened up and bled out whilst she still had blood pumping through her veins. They walked into the bedroom, and Carter went around to the head of the bed.

‘Christ . . .’ he said as he looked up on the wall. Heather? was written there in blood.

‘Do you see her wrists?’ Carter asked.

Willis nodded. Ignite the fire was on one and a red chain on the other.

‘This is another disciple.’

‘Not just any disciple – this is Nicola Stone,’ said Carter.





Chapter 20


Inside Flat 6, Sandford had arrived and Dermot was photographing the papers strewn across the floor when they heard Carter and Willis returning after talking to the vicar. A tent was now erected around the front door. Laptop was still on duty. He’d managed to blag a cup of tea from the neighbour.

‘Get suited up and come in. Step on the plates,’ he said to Carter and Willis as they reached the door. Sandford moved back from the hallway into the sitting room. ‘I heard that we have a connection here,’ he said.

‘Yes, we are sure this is Nicola Stone,’ Carter answered.

‘We’re going to need all of this furniture taken out of here before we can examine this place thoroughly – carpets, curtains, everything has to come out. We’re in the process of bagging up,’ added Sandford.

They walked into the bedroom where Dermot was still preparing the body to be moved by placing plastic bags over the victim’s feet and hands.

‘Heather isn’t a name you hear any more, is it?’ said Dermot, staring at the wall in the bedroom where he was working.

‘No,’ Sandford answered.

‘Heather?’ he repeated, as if trying it out. ‘Pretty name though. I had a cousin who was called Heather.’

‘Was she Scottish?’ asked Sandford.

‘Yes, she was actually. She was flame-haired and freckly. We used to play together.’