Fatal Witness (Detective Erika Foster #7) (5)

‘It’s okay. I knocked something over. There’s no one here,’ shouted Erika.

She didn’t have much time to think why the bedroom had been turned into a recording studio, only acknowledge that the room was empty. The flat was small, and the woman’s furniture outside the recording studio all looked very cheap.

She turned back to the living room and moved closer to the body lying on the sofa bed. It was difficult to tell the victim’s age. The woman had long dark hair, but it hung over her shoulders and the side of her face, and large patches were matted with dried congealed blood. Half of her face was badly battered and her left eye was swollen shut. Her neck hung at an odd angle, it looked like it could be broken.

Erika slowly moved around the body. The curtains in the room were closed, and there was no sign that anyone had broken down the door, but a chair was turned over and there were magazines and a few items strewn across the floor; a candle in a glass holder, a pot of pens, and, bizarrely, a Scrabble box which had been knocked open, discharging the tiled letters across the carpet.

There’d been a brutal struggle, but no sign of a break-in. Did she know her attacker?





3





Erika checked to make sure she hadn’t disturbed anything in the crime scene, and she came back to the front door. Tess was standing outside.

‘What was the noise?’ she asked. The terror of what she’d seen still clung to her face.

‘I knocked something over. Please, you need to sit down.’ Erika led her back to the sofa and then called into Lewisham Row police station for police backup and forensics to attend the scene.

When she came off the phone the hallway was eerily quiet. The other two doors in the hallway remained closed.

‘Does your sister live in the flat?’ asked Erika, thinking of the recording studio set up in the bedroom.

Tess nodded.

‘Is it her flat?’

‘No. It’s mine. My husband’s. Ours. Vicky rents it from him… Us.’

‘Do you live locally?’

‘Round the corner. I own a restaurant, Goose, with my husband in the village.’

It took Erika a moment to work out what she meant. Some of the more well-heeled locals called Blackheath ‘the village’.

Erika asked her how old Vicky was. Twenty-seven, Tess told her. And Tess explained that Vicky hadn’t turned up to work her shift at the restaurant; that’s why she came to the flat.

‘And is your pub just around the corner?’ She was trying to keep Tess talking until the ambulance arrived, she didn’t want her to go into shock and collapse.

‘It’s not a pub,’ said Tess. ‘Goose is a quality restaurant.’

Only in England, thought Erika, would a person still think to add on that detail, moments after witnessing the brutal slaying of a sibling. She wondered how close they were. She looked back at Tess, sitting with her back straight and her ankles crossed in a finishing-school pose, which seemed to contradict her scruffy clothes and the Crocs.

There was a knock on the glass and Erika looked up to see Detective Inspector James Peterson standing outside. He was a tall, lean black man in his late thirties, but he looked much younger. His hair was shaved close to his scalp at the back and sides, and he had short spray dreadlocks on top. His perfect posture always made Erika think of a toy soldier, standing so upright. He wore jeans, trainers, and a thick purple fleece jacket. She got up and opened the glass door, stepping outside and pulling it shut behind her.

‘Hey, I was just leaving the cinema in Greenwich when I got the call from control…’

‘Yes. Jesus. It’s a young woman’s body. Looks bad. Her sister found her,’ said Erika, indicating Tess sitting inside. He went to say something when an annoyed voice shouted, ‘James, you’ve got Winky Bear!’

He turned and Erika saw there was a car parked at the kerb. The interior light was on, and Fran, an attractive blonde-haired woman with very pale skin, was searching the back seat next to a young mixed-race boy strapped into his car seat.

Peterson put his hands into his jeans, and Erika spied a little white piece of material poking out from the pockets of his fleece.

‘Is this what she’s looking for?’ she said, reaching over and pulling out a tiny white teddy bear with a cute face, and winking one eye.

‘Yes. He’s Kyle’s favourite, thank you,’ he said, and went rushing back to the car. Up until Fran appeared on Peterson’s doorstep last year with his son, Kyle, Erika and Peterson had had an on-off love affair. Erika had tried to put Peterson out of her mind, and for the most part she’d succeeded, but it was difficult when they worked together. She’d hoped that one day they would be ‘on’ full-time and make a go of it. She shook the thought away.

An unmarked police car pulled up in front of Fran’s with the blue lights flashing, and Detective Inspector Moss got out. She raised a hand to Peterson, and walked up the path towards Erika. She was a short stocky woman with shoulder-length red hair, and her face was a mass of freckles.

‘All right, boss? I was just on the way home when I got the call,’ she said. ‘Is Peterson on duty or off?’ she added, looking back at him clipping Kyle into his car seat.

‘On. They couldn’t find Kyle’s teddy bear.’

Moss raised an eyebrow.