The Reckoning Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Jane Casey

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Book

  To the public, he’s a hero: a killer who targets convicted paedophiles.

  Two men are dead already – tortured to death.

  Even the police don’t regard the cases as a priority. Most feel that two dead paedophiles is a step in the right direction.

  But to DC Maeve Kerrigan, no one should be allowed to take the law into their own hands. Young and inexperienced, Kerrigan wants to believe that murder is murder no matter what the sins of the victim. Only, as the killer’s violence begins to escalate, she is forced to confront exactly how far she’s prepared to go to ensure justice is served …

  About the Author

  Born and brought up in Dublin, Jane Casey studied English at Jesus College, Oxford, followed by an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. She was working as a children’s books editor when her manuscript for her first book, The Missing, was discovered in her agent’s slush pile. She was signed up by Ebury Press shortly afterwards, and The Missing has been published around the world.

  The Missing was a bestseller in both the UK and Ireland. It achieved widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in the Crime Fiction category. Jane’s second book, The Burning, has also been a bestseller in the UK and Ireland. Married to a criminal barrister, Jane lives in south-west London.

  Also by Jane Casey:

  The Missing

  The Burning

  For James

  The light isn’t good. It’s hard to see much, at first.

  The image on-screen flickers and fades out as the camera struggles to make a picture out of what it can pick up in the dim interior. Handheld, the video jumps and wobbles, catching details that hint at a narrow space, a low ceiling, a dirty tarpaulin laid on the floor. Nineteen seconds in, the curve of a wheel arch tells the viewer that the scene is being filmed inside a van, and not a large one.

  When the camera turns to what is lying on the tarpaulin, the person holding it fumbles for a second before switching on a light. It’s bright enough to send the shadows shrinking blackly to the edges of the picture. This is important. This must be seen in detail.

  This is the reason for the film.

  The camera starts at her feet, which are streaked with dirt and trussed in high-heeled sandals. It tracks up, lingering on thighs exposed by a white dress that was short to begin with. The pleated skirt is pulled up almost to her hips. She’s lying on her side, her hands loose and relaxed, her face veiled in loose curls of fair hair. Tiny artificial flowers wind through the strands. A dusting of glitter winks here and there on her skin, her limbs gleaming in the light. On the tarpaulin, next to her face, a jewelled mask lies abandoned. The long pink ribbons that once tied it spiral in curling disarray. It takes a moment to register that the shading on one is not a trick of the light, but dark-red liquid that has seeped into the fabric.

  On the folds of her dress are minute specks of dark red in droplets shaped like comets.

  And on the full lower lip, just visible through a skein of her hair, a plump bead of dark red swells and slides downwards even as the camera focuses on it, running to join the small pool that spreads under her head.

  It’s the details that are important, and the view isn’t good enough, not with her hair over her face. The camera jerks sideways and a hand enters the shot for a second, reaching out to gather a handful of curls and throw them to one side. Now you can see.

  Now you can see everything.

  Now you can see the bruise that darkens one cheek. Now you can see the eyelashes brittle with mascara, the traces of colour in the creases of her mouth. Now you can see the curve of her breasts. Now you can see that she’s pretty but not perfect, her nose too short and wide, her mouth too full, her jaw just a shade too square. Now you can see that she’s young.

  A tremor, too slight to be called movement, and the camera retreats a pace or two, the focus staying on her face. A frown tugs her eyebrows together, pulls the corners of the full mouth down; her face, for a moment, is that of a sulky cherub in an Old Master’s sketch. And then the eyes blink open, unfocused at first, hazy blue.

  The camera wavers, up and down, uncontrolled. It’s laughter. The person holding the camera is laughing.

  All at once there is sound on the recording, an extra dimension to the viewing experience. A rustle as the girl sits up, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the light. Breathing from behind the camera, shallow and fast – excitement and anticipation.

  The blue eyes are narrow now, focused; she’s awake. She passes a tongue over her lips, licking blood, assessing damage.

  A beat of silence.

  Then, unexpectedly, she smiles – a triangular, humourless smile, but a smile nonetheless. The expression on her face is feline, dangerous. She tosses her hair back, drawing her legs under herself and smoothing out her brief skirt. And when she speaks, her voice is flat. It has no trace of fear in it, a fact that’s almost as remarkable as what she says before the sound cuts out and the screen goes black.

  ‘You are in really big trouble.’

  PART ONE

  ‘It is strange with how little notice: good, bad or indifferent, a man may live and die in London … There is a numerous class of people in this metropolis who seem not to possess a single friend, and whom nobody appears to care for.’

  Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz

  Chapter One

  Wednesday

  MAEVE

  If anyone had asked me, I’d have lied and said that being a detective was like any other job – a lot of routine and a bit of excitement now and then. The truth was, in fact, that it was like no other job in the world, except that there were good days and bad days. But the bad days were really, truly, epically bad. The bad days were spent standing too close to a decomposing body, trying not to gag. The bad days were random acts of violence on empty streets late at night with no witnesses. The bad days were domestic punch-ups that had got out of hand, dead drug addicts in dingy bedsits, elderly shut-ins whose neighbours only cared enough to call the police when the smell was too revolting to bear. I didn’t care to count up how many days were bad ones; I suspected I wouldn’t like the answer. But I could deal with it. I could cope.

  I wasn’t sure, however, that I could cope with my new case. More specifically, I wasn’t sure that I could cope with my new boss. I wasn’t at all sure I could stand it if all the days were bad, if every minute was another minute closer to breaking my spirit. I stared out of the car window as I half-listened to the driver beside me and wished I was somewhere else, with someone else.

  It wasn’t like me to be so unenthusiastic but nothing about my current situation was good. I was on my way to a crime scene I didn’t want to face, accompanied by Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, one of two new
additions to the team at that level. He and the other new DI, Keith Bryce, had worked with Godley before. That was about all they seemed to have in common. Bryce was quietly melancholy, and his face was as rumpled as his suits. Derwent was younger and had a reputation for being obsessively hard working and infinitely aggressive. As far as I could tell, he liked fast driving, soft rock, and the sound of his own voice. Rumour had it he didn’t like junior detectives to answer back. Handle with care was the advice circulating in the office, and I watched him covertly as he drove, heavy on the accelerator, heavy on the brake, swearing and spinning the wheel one-handed as if he was in a games arcade rather than pushing to make time on traffic-clogged London streets. Magic FM blared from the car radio, middle-of-the-road music at its most blandly inoffensive. Derwent sang along occasionally, unselfconscious even though he didn’t know me at all. Not that I was likely to make anyone feel on edge, least of all him. I was the most junior of detective constables and he was an inspector, fifteen years in the job.

  I had been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I had suffered enough from misplaced gossip, from the assumptions made about me based on my looks, my height, my youth, my name. So when Superintendent Godley summoned me to his office and I found Derwent there already, leaning up against the glass wall that separated the boss from the rest of us, I didn’t expect trouble. I should have known better. Even someone as inexperienced as me knew that when the superintendent didn’t meet your eyes, it was time to get nervous.

  ‘Maeve, you haven’t met Josh Derwent yet, have you? He’s taking the lead on a new job we’ve picked up in Brixton – a double murder, of sorts.’

  Derwent acknowledged me with a fleeting look, no smile. He was of average height but thick through the neck and shoulders, muscled like a bulldog. He was too rugged to be called handsome but his close-cropped hair, strong jaw and broken nose, and the tan he’d earned while training for marathons, made him distinctive. You’d certainly think twice before getting into a fight with him. The marathon running was a hobby that had raised eyebrows among my colleagues, most of whom counted a short jog to the vending machine as exercise. According to them, long-distance running was public masochism and a further sign that Derwent wasn’t to be trusted. For my part, I couldn’t work out how he found the time to train, but otherwise I didn’t care. And he was certainly in great shape. It was really only the fact that he was standing in the same room with Superintendent Godley that made him look ordinary, but then there were comparatively few men who could measure up to the boss. Tall, with hair that had turned silver-white when he was still a young man, Godley was startlingly attractive. He must have been aware of the effect he had on people, but he seemed to be utterly without vanity. No one would dare to underestimate him because of his appearance; it was impossible to mistake what lay behind his brilliant blue eyes for anything but a sharp, focused intelligence.

  But today, for some reason, the focus was off. Godley looked strained and sounded distracted, fumbling among his papers for the notes on the new case and not finding what he was looking for.

  ‘I don’t have the details to hand, but we’ve got two men, both tortured to death, bodies found within a mile of each other in the last twenty-four hours. Josh, I know you want to get going, so tell DC Kerrigan what we know so far while you’re on the way.’

  It wasn’t like Godley to be vague. One of the things that made him an outstanding boss was his command of each twist and turn in every case his team worked. I hesitated for a second before following Derwent out of the room. It wasn’t my place to ask the superintendent if he was okay. Besides, I had problems of my own. Derwent could have looked more thrilled at the prospect of working with me. Maybe he had heard something about me from someone else on the team. Maybe I had made a bad first impression. Maybe he was just in a bad mood. Sitting next to him in the squad car, it was difficult to tell.

  ‘Earth to DC Kerrigan. Come in, DC Kerrigan.’

  I jumped. ‘Sorry. I was miles away.’

  Derwent had interrupted his monologue about other motorists’ shortcomings to ask me a question, and I’d missed it. He was looking at me impatiently, tapping his fingers on the edge of the steering wheel as the lights in front of us stubbornly stayed red.

  ‘I asked you what you made of Godley’s briefing. I thought you might have some insight to share.’ The sarcasm was biting and I managed not to wince. Just.

  ‘The boss didn’t say much. Only that there were two similar deaths in the same area.’

  ‘And that didn’t make you think? Didn’t make you wonder what’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know enough about either case yet to make any assumptions,’ I said levelly. ‘I don’t want to jump to conclusions without knowing the facts.’ The facts you were supposed to share with me …

  ‘That’s fair.’ Derwent was nodding as if I’d passed a test I didn’t know I was taking. ‘Let’s talk through the facts. Yesterday evening, Mrs Claudia Tremlett called her local police station to report her husband missing. Ivan Tremlett was a self-employed software designer who lived in Clapham, just off the Common. He rented office space down the road in Brixton because he had three small children and they made too much noise for him to be able to work from home. He had two rooms above a laundrette and it was his habit to lock himself in. He was extremely security conscious, not least because he had quite a lot of expensive computer equipment. He didn’t see clients at his office so he wasn’t set up to receive visitors. Mrs Tremlett became concerned when he failed to return home by six o’clock, because he always followed the same routine – out in the morning by half past eight, back by half past five. She had tried to raise him by phone, but got no reply from the mobile or landline. Mrs Tremlett was extremely distressed on the phone and worried about her husband’s safety. She convinced the sergeant to dispatch a unit to check that all was well.’

  ‘And it wasn’t,’ I said knowing the answer.

  ‘It was not. Mr Tremlett was in the office, all right, with his computers, but neither they nor he were in what you might call a viable condition. Mr Tremlett’s injuries were not compatible with life.’

  It was typical police understatement: the phrase generally meant someone who was so very dead it was hard to recognise them as having been human in the first place. ‘Who took the case? Lambeth CID?’

  ‘They did the initial work. Didn’t take it too far – they just took statements from the people working in the laundrette, and Mrs Tremlett, and secured the scene. In fairness, they didn’t have much of a chance to get stuck in, because this came in at lunchtime.’

  ‘This’ was the crime scene that was our eventual destination, if the traffic ever released us. But Derwent hadn’t finished with the software designer yet.

  ‘The last time anyone heard from Tremlett was around two yesterday afternoon when he spoke to his wife. The computers had been smashed to bits, but we might be able to raise something off a hard disk to tell us when he last used them – that could give us a better idea of when he was attacked, but let’s say it was between two and five yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘No witnesses?’

  ‘Not so far. No one in the laundrette heard or saw anything. It’s a noisy place, apparently – machines on the go all the time, people in and out. Besides, no one really knew Ivan Tremlett was there. He kept to himself, and his office had a separate entrance, so they wouldn’t have seen him or anyone else coming and going.’ The car in front of us braked and Derwent’s face lit up with a demonic glow. He grinned at me. ‘Here’s where it gets interesting.’

  I smiled politely in response. Interesting was never good, in my limited experience.

  ‘Around one o’clock this afternoon, the control room received a 999 call from the address of a forty-three-year-old male, an unemployed gentleman by the name of Barry Palmer. He lived alone in a two-bedroom house. His sister had become concerned about him, not having heard from him for a couple of days, and had gone around to see if he was all right. She
had a key to his front door, so she let herself in. The house had been ransacked. She found her brother in the front room.’

  ‘And he was dead.’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Did he die before Ivan Tremlett or after?’

  ‘Good question. I don’t know the answer, as it happens, but Dr Hanshaw is meeting us there. He’ll be able to tell us more.’

  ‘Why are you linking the two murders?’

  ‘There were similarities between the two crime scenes – obvious similarities, as you’ll see when you have a look yourself. I take your point about not making assumptions, but take it from me, we’re looking for the same killer or killers.’

  ‘So what do Ivan Tremlett and Barry Palmer have in common? Who would want to kill them? Did they know each other?’

  ‘Gold star to DC Kerrigan. Those are exactly the right questions to ask.’

  I felt patronised rather than encouraged, but at least the inspector seemed pleased. I was beginning to feel a mild, fragile sense of optimism. Maybe the new DI wasn’t so bad. He would have to be something special to be worse than his predecessor, the rat-faced Tom Judd, a charmless manipulator who had taken a totally undeserved promotion and was now leading a robbery team in the East End. The team had held a massive leaving party to celebrate. We hadn’t made the mistake of inviting Judd himself.

  ‘I don’t know if they knew one another, but I can tell you one thing Tremlett and Palmer share. They both have criminal records. And there’s no shortage of people who might want to see them dead.’ Derwent paused to let that sink in. I waited patiently for the explanation. ‘Tremlett pleaded guilty to downloading child pornography three years ago. He was working for a small company in Kent and they found it on his computer. He did nine months. Lost his job, not surprisingly, so he set up on his own once the dust had settled. It explains why he kept himself to himself.’