‘Calm down,’ Whelan cut in.
‘Calm down? Are you serious?’
‘We fucked up,’ Ward said bluntly. She looked around the crowded waiting room. ‘Let’s go and get a cup of tea. I’ll make sure they send for us if there’s any news.’
We found an empty table in a corner of the hospital cafeteria. My insides still felt coiled with tension, an anger that was directed at myself as much as anyone else.
‘I called you straight away, as soon as we got the DNA results back,’ Ward told me, her face strained. ‘We honestly thought the woman in the car was Grace Strachan.’
Until that moment I hadn’t stopped to think what it had to mean for Grace to be alive. It felt like another punch to the heart. ‘Who was she?’
‘Her name’s Belinda Levinson, a freelance web designer. Her boyfriend’s a journalist who… What’s wrong, are you OK?’
I’d bent over, suddenly feeling sick. A rushing like water filled my ears. ‘Is his name Francis Scott-Hayes?’
The police had found the journalist’s body at his isolated cottage in the Kent countryside. He’d died from multiple stab wounds and the condition of the body suggested he’d been dead for several weeks. As far as they could tell, Grace had been living on her boat since returning to the UK earlier in the year, when she’d hitched to London and made her abortive attempt to break into my flat. The Oare Marshes, where her yacht was found, were only a few miles from where Scott-Hayes lived. He’d returned to the UK early from a two-month stint covering the war in Yemen, and it was thought he must have given her a lift at some point.
‘We don’t know why he took her back to his cottage instead of her boat,’ Ward had said. ‘Can’t rule out sex, but he’d got a long-term girlfriend and by all accounts wasn’t the sort to go for casual pick-ups. And he was a lot younger than Grace. If she still looked like she used to it might be different, but… Well, you saw how she is.’
I had. The Grace Strachan I remembered had exuded a powerful sexual appeal, but there had been nothing of that evident in the pathetic scarecrow on my kitchen floor. ‘Do you think she pulled a knife or forced him somehow?’
Ward gave a shrug. ‘It’s possible, but he’d still have to have stopped for her first. I think it’s more likely he just felt sorry for her and took her to his house to freshen up. We’ve checked the weather reports, and there was heavy rain around the time he came back to the UK. A middle-aged woman, wet through and on her own at the side of the road wouldn’t have looked much of a threat.’
No, she wouldn’t, I thought. Freshly back from a war zone, the journalist must have felt safe in the familiar landscape near his home. Bloodstains showed Scott-Hayes had died in the hallway of his house, probably not long after returning with his guest. His decomposed body was found in a small stone outbuilding behind his cottage, a former piggery now used for storage.
‘How badly decomposed?’ I’d asked automatically.
‘Bad enough. And the answer’s no, so don’t even think about it.’
I hadn’t been going to ask to take a look myself. Not right then, anyway. I’d not interrupted again as Ward explained how Grace had abandoned her boat and moved into the journalist’s cottage. Isolated and quiet, it made a perfect hideaway, well away from social contact where her erratic behaviour might have been noticed. There was no immediate danger of Scott-Hayes being missed. He’d set up an automated email response before his trip — the same one I’d received myself — and the volatile nature of his job meant he was prone to changing his plans at short notice. Even his lack of social media posts didn’t raise much concern at first, since he frequently worked in remote and inhospitable regions far from any wi-fi or internet connections. And, while she was unlikely to have planned it, at some point Grace must have realized that her dead host’s occupation presented her with a rare opportunity.
Living in his house, it wouldn’t have been difficult to gain access to his email account. While his phone and laptop required fingerprint verification, that would hardly have posed a problem with his body there. So Grace had stolen his identity as well as his life, emailing me in the hope of drawing me out. And when that had initially failed, another opportunity had offered itself.
‘We found Belinda Levinson’s car outside the cottage,’ Ward had told me. ‘Her friends say she was concerned when Scott-Hayes missed her birthday. She tried contacting his editors but no one seemed sure if he was back in the country or not, so she went to check on him. When she didn’t come back her friends assumed the two of them must be enjoying their reunion.’
I rubbed my temples. ‘Did Grace stab her as well?’
‘The fire made it hard to tell if there were any stab wounds on the body, but we found a second blood type at the cottage. We can’t say yet if it’s Levinson’s or not, but we’re assuming it is. The likeliest scenario is that Grace killed her as soon as she turned up at the cottage, and then… Well, when St Jude’s hit the news we think she probably put the body in the boot of Scott-Hayes’s car and took it to London.’
I shut my eyes. Jesus. Grace had never planned far ahead when I’d known her before, but then she’d never had to. Her brother had always been there to look after her.
‘You thought Scott-Hayes’s car had been stolen,’ I said, trying to keep the accusation from my voice. ‘Didn’t anyone go out to his house to check on him?’
‘Of course they did. We asked Kent police to look into it. But at that time Jessop was still the chief suspect for the hit-and-run and there was no reason to think anything might have happened to the car owner. We knew Scott-Hayes worked abroad, so when there was no one at home…’
Ward gave an apologetic shrug. I didn’t have the energy to argue, and I wasn’t blameless myself. I’d agreed to be interviewed without bothering to speak to the journalist in person. Even emailed Grace Strachan my address. When the concierge had called through on the intercom I’d heard only what I’d expected: Francis, not Frances, the female variant of the name she’d given him. And Rachel had simply assumed I’d made a mistake over the journalist’s gender. She’d never met Grace, so had no way of knowing who was outside the door. If I’d been the one to answer it, I doubted I’d have recognized her straight away either.
Then it would have been a whole different story.
Rachel’s injuries hadn’t been serious. The scalding to her hand was superficial, and although the knife had sliced through the muscle of her upper arm almost to the bone, the doctors assured us that there would be no long-term nerve or tendon damage. Even so, because she’d lost enough blood to need a transfusion, she’d been kept in hospital overnight.
It gave me a chance to clean up the apartment. By the time I collected Rachel in a taxi next morning, there were no visible signs of what had happened. But the less tangible effects were harder to erase.
In the days following the attack, we’d tried to pretend everything was normal, but it was a strain for us both. Rachel found it hard to sleep, growing quiet and short-tempered. I’d never liked the luxurious apartment and now, even with its alarms and concierge, she no longer felt safe. We’d had a blazing row over moving back to my flat, and while we made up afterwards, things were never quite the same.
By mutual consent the registry office was quietly cancelled. We pretended to ourselves it was only postponed, but we both knew it was more than that. We just didn’t want to admit it.
One evening two weeks after the attack, Rachel had been even more subdued than usual. It was during dinner. She’d been pushing her food around listlessly on her plate when she set down her fork.