Love Lies Bleeding Read online

  JANE CASEY

  Love Lies Bleeding

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in the Asda edition of Let the Dead Speak by Jane Casey, published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

  Copyright © Jane Casey 2017

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

  Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

  Jane Casey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008149147

  Version: 2019-03-13

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Love Lies Bleeding

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Jane Casey

  About the Publisher

  Love Lies Bleeding

  I

  ‘There was nothing I could do. He ran right past me.’ The receptionist was twenty-something, five foot nothing and delicately built. She scrubbed her eyes with a soggy tissue and looked up at me piteously. ‘If I’d known, I’d never have let him in.’

  That went without saying, I thought. ‘Just talk me through it again. You said he rang the bell.’

  ‘Yes. He was just out there.’ She stared in the general direction of the glass door that was the office’s only line of defence against a threat they hadn’t anticipated. Mitchford Bexley was a small solicitors’ firm housed in a narrow Georgian house on a quiet street behind Gray’s Inn. Everything about it spoke of quiet wealth and good taste.

  Everything except the bloody footprints on the pearl-grey carpet and the red-brown smears along the edge of the glass door. It stood open so a crime scene technician could photograph the marks on the door. I had left Derwent upstairs, standing over the slight, huddled figure of Diana Bexley, the 48-year-old solicitor who had given her surname to the firm she co-founded. Her designer suit had looked a lot better before it was saturated with blood from a deep stab wound in her chest and shallower injuries to her hands and forearms. She had put up a fight, and lost. Even in death, her face was beautiful: high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, her pale lips parted to show white, even teeth.

  ‘He was dressed like a courier. I thought he was a courier. He was holding an envelope and he gave me a thumbs-up through the door.’ The receptionist blinked. ‘They’re supposed to take their helmets off but a lot of them don’t. I didn’t think it was strange, you know? It was normal. And then it wasn’t.’

  Understatement of the year.

  ‘Does that camera work?’ I pointed up to where it blinked in the corner.

  ‘It’s motion activated. It records to my computer.’

  ‘I’ll need to see the footage. And if there are any other cameras in the building I’d like to see what they recorded too.’

  ‘The one at the back of the building isn’t working.’ She sniffled. ‘I only noticed it this morning. I was going to get it fixed. But it’s just a yard out there. A couple of us use it for smoking. Anyway, he didn’t go near that area.’

  And when I watched the CCTV, I saw she was right. He had entered the building at twenty-three minutes past eleven and left four minutes later, before anyone had time to react, but after Diana Bexley’s last breath had left her body. He had moved straight through the hall towards the stairs, not looking left or right, heading for Diana’s office, a large room at the front of the building. ‘Do you think he had been here before? A client, maybe?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t recognise him. But he was in leathers. He just looked like a courier.’

  ‘So you said.’ I said it gently, though. I knew the receptionist felt guilty about the part she had played in the tragedy. ‘Did you know Mrs Bexley well?’

  ‘Not well. She wasn’t the sort of person who was chatty.’ She brightened. ‘She got me a card for my birthday, though.’

  ‘How many people work here?’

  ‘Eight. Two partners, two associates, three assistants, me. Mrs Bexley had the whole first floor for her office. The next two floors are shared between the associates and assistants. Mr Mitchford is right at the top on his own.’

  ‘Does the firm handle anything controversial? Any cases that might involve organised crime or sensitive subjects?’

  ‘No. It’s mainly commercial stuff. Licensing. I don’t really understand it. I’ve only been working here for six months.’

  ‘I presume Mrs Bexley was married.’

  ‘She’s divorced.’ That made sense: the dead woman had worn a big, showy aquamarine on her right hand but nothing on her left. ‘She lives on her own in Chelsea. It’s a gorgeous flat. She had it all done up. Antiques and everything. Lots of books. I never went there myself but Stephen did.’

  I ran my pen down the list of staff members. ‘Stephen Hawkson? A paralegal?’

  She nodded. ‘He got on well with Mrs Bexley, I think. They worked together a lot.’

  ‘He’s very efficient.’ The comment came from behind me where an ashen-faced man in a close-fitting dark suit was standing.

  ‘Mr Mitchford,’ the receptionist breathed reverently. ‘Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water? A cup of tea?’

  He waved the suggestions away. He was bald, with deep-set dark eyes and a hawkish look. I noticed the signifiers of wealth – the tailored suit in an undoubtedly expensive fabric that had creased rather badly, the silk tie, the handmade shoes.

  ‘Paul Mitchford.’ He held out his hand with a flash of metal from the heavy Rolex he wore on his right wrist. All the better to show it off, I thought, even if an allergy to the metal had raised a welt on his skin. What did that matter when you were impressing people with your wealth?

  ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Maeve Kerrigan.’

  ‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  He nodded. ‘Of course. Of course. This is just such a shock to us all.’

  ‘You were Mrs Bexley’s partner.’

  ‘In business. Not in life.’ The hollows under his cheekbones deepened a fraction. ‘We worked together for fifteen years. I admired her so much. She was a wonderful colleague. Humbling. A remarkable woman. She studied for her law degree in her spare time, you know, after she got divorced. She came up the hard way. Everything she had was down to hard work and a little bit of good luck.’

  Luck that had evidently run out this morning.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’

  ‘No. I was in my office. It’s on the top floor, away from everyone else.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘When I’m working I shut my door and listen to music through some very effective headphones. I find it helps with my concentration. I didn’t hear or se
e anything at all. I didn’t know it had happened until it was all over. I came downstairs and found them all gathered around her. But it was too late.’

  ‘Was Mrs Bexley worried about anything? Was she behaving as normal?’

  ‘She was the same as ever. Absolutely committed to the business. A total professional.’ For an instant I saw his eyes go dark with pain. ‘I have no idea how we’re going to manage without her.’

  Stephen Hawkson was tall, fair and not quite handsome: his chin a fraction too long, his forehead too broad. He had small, close-set eyes that were fixed on the wall behind me rather than my face as he explained he had spent a lot of time with Mrs Bexley – Diana. In fact, he had been in a relationship with her, although it wasn’t commonly known in the office. They had kept it quiet, at her request.

  ‘Did you live with her?’

  ‘No. I share a house in Hackney with some friends.’ He swallowed. ‘She didn’t like coming to stay with me. We always spent time together at her place.’

  ‘She was a lot older than you, wasn’t she?’ Derwent was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, his expression remote. Anyone might have thought he didn’t care about this case. Anyone might have been wrong. Experience had taught me that the more distant he seemed, the more he really did mind. ‘Sixteen years is a hell of an age gap.’

  ‘I never noticed it. She was beautiful.’ Hawkson’s throat worked convulsively. ‘She never made a big deal out of being older and I never mentioned it.’

  ‘How long had you been together?’ I asked.

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘And you still hadn’t moved in?’ Derwent again.

  ‘I didn’t – she didn’t ask me to.’ He dropped his head. ‘She didn’t want anything conventional. Marriage, you know. She’d done it before, she said, and it was a mistake.’

  ‘Did she have children?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Her parents died when she was a teenager. She had a brother but he lives in Canada, I think.’

  ‘So you must have been important to her,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem that way, to be honest with you. I was useful to her. Discreet. She didn’t want to date. She didn’t even want to be seen in public with me. No meals out, no concerts, no hand-holding.’

  ‘How did it start?’

  ‘She invited me to her flat one night. I thought it was for work but she asked me if I minded if she seduced me.’ A smile that transformed his face for an instant: yes, I could see he might be attractive when he wasn’t frozen with grief. ‘And it went on from there. She warned me not to tell anyone at work, or talk about her to my friends. But I hoped she would change. I took her to Paris last weekend, as a surprise, and she was so different. So loving. She kissed me on the Pont Neuf and I told her I loved her. She seemed happy. She told me she wanted to travel. To change her life completely. I thought she was just saying it, though.’ He shook his head, his expression bleak. ‘I knew it would end one day, but not like this.’

  ‘Where were you between 11.20 and 11.40 this morning?’ I asked.

  ‘In a meeting. We have a weekly meeting – not the partners, the rest of us – from eleven to twelve. Everyone talks about what they’re working on.’ He looked down. ‘I can’t even remember what I said this morning. It all seems irrelevant now.’

  ‘So you were there with your colleagues when Mrs Bexley was attacked.’ I wasn’t trying to catch him out. It was a routine, double-checking question.

  ‘I—’ Stephen Hawkson checked himself, his face flushing red. ‘I – well, I had stepped out. I was there for most of the meeting.’

  ‘When exactly did you step out, and for how long?’ Derwent demanded.

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe … after about ten minutes. I wasn’t feeling well. I had stomach cramps. I went to the bathroom and – well, I had to go. Diarrhoea.’

  ‘How long were you out of the meeting?’

  ‘I didn’t make it back. I heard shouting but I wasn’t in a position to leave the bathroom, without going into too much detail. By the time I came out, she was dead. I wanted to hold her but they wouldn’t let me go into the room. Paul – Mr Mitchford – stopped me. Oh God, I don’t have an alibi.’ He looked pleadingly from me to Derwent. ‘That hadn’t even occurred to me when I said I was in the meeting. I wasn’t trying to mislead you. I just didn’t think about why you wanted to know where I was. But I couldn’t have hurt her, ever. I loved her.’

  ‘You probably think people mostly kill each other because of hatred.’ Derwent leaned forward, getting uncomfortably close to Hawkson’s face. ‘Wrong. In my experience, it’s love that brings out the killer in people. That and money. But mainly love.’

  ‘What sort of a world do you live in?’ Stephen seemed to be on the verge of tears.

  ‘The real one.’ Derwent straightened up, towering over him. ‘We’re going to need to take your clothes.’

  II

  Derwent drove to the flat in Chelsea. I sat beside him, the dead woman’s keys in an evidence bag on my knee. It was always the small details of a person’s life that caught me – the keys they carried every day and would never use again, the letters they had intended to post, the voicemail they would never pick up.

  ‘What are you thinking about this one?’ I asked as we turned into the long street of white porticoed mansions that were divided into luxurious apartments.

  ‘She was targeted. No doubt about it. He went straight past other offices – and he could have killed the receptionist or the secretary he met in the hall. He wanted to kill her.’

  ‘No one knew if she’d had any threats.’

  ‘She kept them to herself if she did.’ Derwent glanced at me. ‘What did you make of Loverboy?’

  ‘He seemed sincere.’

  ‘He’s the sensitive type.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said, and Derwent snorted, which annoyed me enough to make me add, ‘It’s better than bottling up your feelings and pretending they don’t exist.’

  ‘Is that aimed at me?’

  ‘Does it sound like you?’

  A muscle flickered in Derwent’s jaw but he concentrated on manoeuvring the car into a tiny space. I leaned forward to look at Diana Bexley’s building, wondering which set of tall windows belonged to her flat.

  ‘Well, why did she want to keep him a secret?’

  I shrugged. ‘Because it wasn’t professional of her to sleep with a junior member of staff? Because she wanted to keep her private life out of the office? Any number of reasons.’

  ‘She was beautiful, accomplished, wealthy. She could have had her pick of men. Why him?’

  ‘He wasn’t a typical alpha male. She could make the rules. Dominate him.’

  ‘In my experience, women like that want to be submissive.’

  I would never break Derwent of his oversharing habit. ‘Is that so?’ I said with what I hoped was conversation-ending lack of interest.

  ‘It’s just something I’ve noticed.’ He switched the engine off and I scrambled to get out of the car. Derwent slammed his door and looked at me across the roof. ‘The more successful they are in their careers, the more they want someone to take charge in the bedroom. They spend all day being ballbreakers. They want to come home to someone who won’t let them get away with it.’

  ‘Absolute horseshit.’

  ‘Just accept I know more about this than you do.’

  ‘Of course. What would I know?’ I walked up the steps of the building, aware that Derwent was on my heels.

  ‘Unless I’m misjudging you, I’ve slept with a lot more women than you have, and I can tell you the more powerful and successful a woman is, the more she likes her men to … make the running.’

  I slid the keys out of the bag and sorted through them, looking for the key to the main door. A Banham lock, I thought with intense concentration designed to drown out Derwent. That should be easy to pick out of the bunch; it would have its own branded ke
y—

  ‘The point is, they don’t want to have to make any decisions.’ His voice was low and so soft that I felt it in the pit of my stomach rather than hearing it. His mouth was close enough to my ear that I could almost imagine his lips grazed my skin. ‘They just want to surrender to what they’re feeling. They don’t want to think about whether it’s a good idea or not.’

  Remember to breathe. My knees trembled and I closed my eyes, just for a second. He hooked the keys out of my hand before I could pull myself together enough to put up any resistance, then reached past me to unlock the door. The metal-on-metal sound from the key turning in the lock scraped across my nerves.

  ‘Wake up, Kerrigan.’ A shove in the small of my back propelled me across the threshold. ‘Get a move on.’

  I stalked up the stairs, furious with him and the fact that his stupid little trick had worked on me for a moment, and even more furious that he’d known it and if he hadn’t known it, the flush in my cheeks would give it away …

  He was, of course, grinning when we reached Diana Bexley’s front door and I had to face him. I gave him a look.

  ‘Oh, cheer up. I was only joking.’

  ‘I should thank you. I haven’t put anything in my sexual harassment file for ages.’

  He chuckled, then switched back to serious again as he scanned the door. Time to get back to work, I thought, and was relieved. I knew why he had done it: a diversion to take his mind off the violence and terror that had ended Diana Bexley’s life. A way of distancing himself from his emotions so cool concentration could take over when it was required.

  ‘No sign of anyone having been here.’ I was pulling on gloves as I said it.

  ‘Safe enough for us to go in.’ He unlocked the door and pushed it open, wary. The door swung back against the wall and we edged inside the flat, scanning the rooms for signs of a threat. The flat wasn’t large but it was lovely and carefully put together: well-chosen antique furniture, a hint of character in the jewel-toned upholstery and the books that lined the sitting room and the scattering of gilt-framed paintings. Derwent made straight for the desk by the window and I turned my attention to a proper search of the rest of the place. There was a tiny kitchen and a bedroom with a vast, hotel-luxurious bed. The bathroom was marble-lined. The towels that hung on the chrome rail were still damp. The whole room smelled of roses threaded with something more complicated. I traced the scent to a silver-topped bottle by the sink: Jo Malone Velvet Rose & Oud cologne. It was sweet but not straightforward – a sophisticated choice made by a woman who took care over every aspect of her life. I stood where she had stood that morning, feeling like an interloper. She had set the bottle back down never imagining that the next hand to touch it would belong to a stranger. Diana Bexley would never look at herself in the heated mirror again, would never smooth Crème de la Mer moisturiser into her skin, would never weigh herself on the high-tech scales near the door. I never got used to the shock of it: the absolute and abrupt interruption of a life because someone had decided it should end. Diana Bexley had deserved more than that, I thought, and headed to the bedroom.