Read Online The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey - Free Book Online Page A

cutesy blackboard with ‘Nearly the weekend!’ written on it, above a shopping list. Organised, careful, feminine, self-conscious. And there was nothing wrong with being like that – I wished I was more like that myself – but I felt it had marked her as a victim and I wondered how he’d seen it, and known her, and calculated how he could have her.
    How he had had her was laid out for our inspection in the main bedroom, as neatly and obsessively as everything else in Anna Melville’s home. I stopped short in the doorway despite myself and Godley collided with me, then leapt away as if I was burning to the touch.
    ‘Sorry. I just—’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he said shortly. ‘Take your time.’
    Burt had gone ahead and was leaning over the bed, peering intently at the body that lay on it. I skirted the bed, not quite looking at what lay on it. The floor was wood, painted white, and Kev was lying down shining a torch through the cracks between the boards. On the other side of the room another SOCO was doing the same, crawling on hands and knees. I recognised her – Caitriona Bennett, the pretty, soft-spoken technician whose work had led us to a killer during the summer. It was a slight comfort to me to know that Anna Melville was getting the best of everything in death. It gave us a chance to get something like justice for her.
    Godley stepped over Kev’s prone body. ‘Found anything?’
    ‘Dust.’ He didn’t even look up, working his way along the gap inch by inch. ‘Stuff. We’ll have these up later to collect anything that seems interesting.’
    I stopped beside the window, which was draped in gauzy voile panels. There was a hand-span gap between them where I assumed the uniformed officer had peered. Turning, I saw that the room showed the same feminine attention to detail as the rest of the flat, with a white-painted carved wooden beam nailed to the wall above the bed. Curtains hung down from it, draping the bed head. The bedclothes were white and embroidered with tiny stars, also white, but they had been drawn down to the end of the bed and folded over, out of the way, leaving a clean white sheet underneath the body. A mirrored bedside table had a carafe of water on it, an old-fashioned alarm clock and an iPad that I knew we would be taking away with us. I itched to start looking through it but there were protocols to observe. And a body, I reminded myself, forcing my eyes to where she was waiting.
    She lay with her head pointing towards the foot of the bed, her feet together on the pillow. She wore white – a silk nightdress so fine I could see a dark shadow at the top of her thighs and the two faint smudges of her nipples through the fabric. She was small and slim, her bones fragile, her kneecaps sticking up like a child’s. Her hands were by her sides, palms up, loosely holding what he had cut out of her head. Her face was horrendous – dark with blood, her tongue protruding – but mercifully for me he had closed her eyelids over the empty sockets. The marks on her neck stood out like splashes of paint on snow. Her hair – her long, glossy dark hair – was gone. He had cut it off close to her head. She looked more vulnerable with her collaborator’s crop, and young, and I wondered if he’d cut it before she died or after. Was it to torment her? For his own gratification? Or something more complicated?
    ‘Did he take the hair away with him?’
    ‘Nope. Found it in the bathroom. He dumped it in the bath,’ Kev said cheerily. ‘But he cut it in here. We found a lot of loose hairs over here in this corner.’
    Two candles stood on either side of her head and on either side of her feet – fat ones, about eight inches high.
    ‘Did he bring these, do we think?’ Godley asked, pointing at them.
    ‘They’re the same as the ones in the living room,’ I said, my voice metallic in my ears. Robotic. Emotionless.
    ‘Were they burning when the uniforms got here?’ Una Burt asked.
    ‘No. He seems to