JANE CASEY

  One in Custody

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in the Tesco 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 © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008275037

  Version: 2019-01-02

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One in Custody

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Jane Casey

  About the Publisher

  One in Custody

  Some murders solve themselves and some remain mysteries forever. Harry Gleeson’s death was the straightforward kind. It really didn’t take much investigative genius to work out who had killed him. Not when the murderer herself called 999. Not when the first thing she said to the response officers who turned up on her doorstep was, ‘I’ve killed my husband.’ Not when she handed them the filleting knife she’d used, wrapped in a tea towel. She had even warned the officers to be careful with it because it was sharp. She had carefully preserved the fingerprint evidence for us, and that didn’t leave much room for ambiguity.

  But obvious or not, the case still needed to be investigated. The evidence had been there to be collected in the small, cramped flat on the borders of Somers Town and Camden. The blood-soaked sheets on the bed. The bloody nightie Sheila had been wearing when she did the deed at the dead hour, three in the morning, while Harry was at his most vulnerable. The palm print on the wall above the head of the bed, where she’d braced herself as she knelt by him and stabbed him over and over again. And Sheila’s own confession, which spilled out of her in interview with the slightest nudge of encouragement, as if her guilt was water and she was an overfilled glass.

  ‘I killed him. I waited until he was asleep, then I got my knife and I stabbed him until he stopped breathing and I was sure he was dead.’

  Premeditated murder, and that was the end of the story.

  Except that it wasn’t. Not at all. I hung up the phone, stared at the computer screen and sighed.

  ‘So, DS Kerrigan, what’s up?’ There was a thud as the speaker collided with my desk, having rolled across the room on his chair. I shifted away, irritated.

  Josh Derwent, Detective Inspector. Six feet of lean, muscular bad temper wrapped around a good heart that was his only saving grace. He was also the senior investigating officer in my current case. He had been letting me run it more or less unsupervised because ‘even you couldn’t balls this one up’, although that was precisely what I was about to do.

  ‘Just making some calls about the Gleesons.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Sheila didn’t give me the whole story.’

  Sheila, who had been fragile in a paper boiler suit by the time I met her at Albany Street nick. Sheila, who had wept into the cup of tea they’d given her, the tremor in her hands obvious from the other side of the room. Sheila, who was forty-two and looked sixty, who smoked constantly, the cigarette nipped between the very tips of her withered fingers. Who had almost no formal education and was barely literate. Who had never had a job. Who had never had a bank account. Who couldn’t drive and owned one pair of street shoes and had met Harry when she was fifteen. Sheila, who hadn’t had a chance.

  ‘She gave you enough of a story that the CPS were willing to charge her.’

  ‘I know. But I’m not happy.’

  Derwent jammed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, as if the conversation was exhausting him. ‘She pleaded guilty. That’s all you need. You’re not going to do better than a full confession, Kerrigan. Stop wasting your time.’

  ‘I am not wasting my time,’ I said with dignity. ‘I’ve just got off the phone with the social worker who was handling the Gleeson family.’

  Derwent pulled a pasty out of his suit pocket. It was still wrapped in its cellophane, and as he listened to what I’d found out so far he gnawed at the edge of the plastic. I fixed my eyes above his head and refused to be distracted while I recited what I had been told.

  Sheila Gleeson had had no life outside the home. She was totally dependent on her husband, and he had made sure she stayed that way throughout twenty-three years of marriage. She had given birth to six children, all of whom had been in care at one time or another. She was, like him, an alcoholic, dependent on a number of pharmaceutical drugs, and profoundly depressed, to the point where she could neither look after her children nor herself. And Harry had systematically, thoroughly abused her, for decades, to the certain knowledge of their friends, neighbours and social services, not to mention the police who were called to the address time and time again, until the Met got serious about domestic violence and someone finally persuaded her to give evidence against him, promising her that she’d be looked after. She’d come to no harm, they’d said. She could tell the truth about what had happened to her and put an end to the years of misery. Everyone had gone to court. Harry Gleeson pleaded guilty to actual bodily harm, despite the fact that the original charge had been attempted murder. Some prosecutor had taken the easy way out, rather than risk a jury trial. And then the judge had listened to the defence’s mitigation, believed that Harry was a changed man, and given him a twelve-month sentence. Suspended, naturally. He hadn’t spent a day in prison.

  Instead, Harry had come home. And if Sheila had thought her life was bad before the court case, it got a lot worse afterwards.

  ‘Fifteen instances of domestic violence in the past three years that we know about. She was hospitalised twice with broken bones and concussion. She also attended a walk-in clinic for minor injuries on numerous occasions. He told her he’d kill her if she ever left him, but she was absolutely sure that he’d kill her if she stayed. She had to account to Harry for every minute of her day and literally every penny she spent.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m talking about this.’ He waved the pasty at me. ‘I can’t get it open.’

  I picked up a pair of scissors from my desk and held them out to him. He stabbed the packaging from a height and an off-putting smell wafted across my desk. I’d schooled myself to cope with seeing repulsive things and smelling the worst kinds of decay, but the things Derwent volunteered to eat were in a class of their own.

  ‘Problem solving,’ he said, preparing to bite into the pastry. ‘It’s what you’re good at. When you’re not making problems for yourself, obviously.’

  ‘How am I making problems?’

  ‘You’ve got an easy one. A full confession. Yeah, it’s heart-breaking that she went to court and couldn’t get rid of him, but that happens.’

  ‘But Sheila Gleeson’s statement isn’t complete or accurate. It’s a matter of public record that he beat her. Why wouldn’t she mention that when she talked to me? She should have wanted to explain why she did it, but all she wanted to do was confess. She told me she’d done it before I got the tape machine running.’

  ‘No point in trying to hide it, was there?’

  ‘She didn’t try, though.’ I swivelled from side to side on my chair, troubled. ‘She wanted to be caught and she wanted to avoid talking about the real reason it happened.’

  ‘Murder is murder, even for the best of reasons. Some people can’t live with themselves afterwards. You’ve met enough killers to know I’m right.’

  ‘I have met a few. And none of them was like Sheila. She just seems like a classic victim to me.’ I felt sorry for Sheila in a way I couldn’t begin to explain to Derwent. She had blood in her hair when I interviewed her, from a gash that had needed stitches. She had injured herself on the corner of the kitchen table, she’d said, when she tripped and fell over, and I didn’t believe her about that either.

  ‘So what do you think?’ I said.

  ‘About what?’ A shower of pastry crumbs as he spoke.

  ‘About Sheila Gleeson being a victim of domestic violence.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Really? You don’t think it’s significant?’

  ‘For the defence, yeah. Not for you. She confessed, Kerrigan. She did it. Don’t try to complicate it. One in custody. You know and I know that Sheila’s done the world a favour by getting rid of Harry.’ He stuffed another bit of pastry into his mouth. ‘One of them was going to end up dead sooner or later. If it hadn’t been for her, we’d have had Harry up in Albany nick covered in blood and I bet he wouldn’t have been crying about it.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Only you could have a crisis of confidence about a full confession.’

  I kept looking at him.

  He lost patience long before I did. ‘Okay. You’re not happy. What do you want to do about it?’

  ‘Go back to the crime scene.’

  ‘Right.’ He stood up, adjusting the waistband of his trousers.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Coming with you.’

  ‘There is absolutely no need,’ I said.

  ‘I know. But you’ve got me interested now.’ He pushed the remains of the pasty across the desk. ‘Here you go. Keep your strength up.’

  It could have been a genuine attempt at a peace offering, but I was pretty sure he’d licked the bit he was offering me.

  ‘No, thanks.’ I grabbed my jacket. ‘Let’s go.’

  The flat was still sealed with police tape and Derwent slit it with a penknife, holding the door open for me afterwards.

  ‘Are the SOCOs finished here?’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  We had both gloved up anyway; it was second nature. I never minded. Given the places we generally ended up, touching things with my bare hands wasn’t a good idea.

  I wandered through the Gleesons’ home. A small living room, cold and bleak. Every surface was covered with overflowing ashtrays and empty lager cans. Next door was a bedroom with two sets of bunk beds. The mattresses were thin and lumpy, the ticking stained by years of use. There were no bedclothes, apart from a blanket thrown across the bottom bunk on the left. The wallpaper was peeling and someone had scribbled in orange crayon under the window, where limp green curtains hung down. No toys. No clothes.

  The next room along was the main bedroom, our crime scene. I skipped it for the moment, heading to the kitchen and the bathroom that lay beyond. Neither was what you could call clean, which was useful for me: if it had been wiped recently I would notice. I squatted down beside the kitchen table and peered at it. The top was laminate, the edges bound with metal. There was no sign of blood on any of the four corners, or hair, or anything that might prove Sheila had been telling the truth.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Looking for the place where Sheila got her head injury.’

  ‘Why would she lie about that?’ Derwent watched me, not attempting to help.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ I moved on to the area by the cooker – dirty but entirely lacking in a cutting edge – and then the bathroom. There was blood in the sink and the bath, all photographed and swabbed by the crime-scene techs, so I didn’t have to worry too much about where I was standing or what I was touching. That didn’t necessarily mean I wanted to touch anything. I stood in the middle of the small, windowless space, smelling mildew and sour towels and wondering what I was missing. ‘What do you make of this?’

  He came to stand in the doorway. ‘Someone nicked themselves shaving? I don’t know, Kerrigan.’ Then he snapped his fingers. ‘Wait a second. Wait. A. Second. Do you think it might be where Sheila washed the blood off after knifing her husband to death?’

  ‘Sarcasm,’ I said. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Well, seriously.’

  ‘Seriously, tell me when she washed the blood off.’

  ‘After she killed him.’

  ‘Before she called 999? While she was waiting for them to turn up?’

  ‘I don’t know. What does it matter?’

  ‘Because when they got here, she was covered in blood. So did she clean herself up, then change her mind? Did she get dressed again in her bloody clothes? Or put on clean nightwear and then roll all over the body?’

  Derwent was standing very still, his eyes fixed on the pink porcelain of the bath. ‘Damn.’

  ‘Someone else was here.’

  ‘Someone who got covered in blood.’

  We moved back to the bedroom, the actual crime scene. The bedclothes were gone, folded up carefully to preserve any fibre-evidence we might need. The great wavering dark-red stain on the right-hand side of the mattress was where the victim had been lying when he died. The first thing I did was to examine the hard surfaces in the room: the bedposts, the bedside locker on Harry’s side, a chair that stood against the wall. Anywhere you might bang your head.

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘What’ve you got?’ Derwent came to see, breathing across my face.

  ‘Careful. We need to get Crime Scene back here to recover that.’ That was two grey hairs caught in the cracked laminate on the edge of the table that was on Sheila’s side of the bed, along with a smear of blood. ‘Thank God the place was still sealed or we’d have trouble with the forensic evidence.’

  Derwent nodded, moving back with his hands held out from his body, not touching anything if he could help it. There was a new narrative to prove. The evidence we wanted could be somewhere in the flat, uncollected, vital. Or it wasn’t, and none of our precautions mattered.

  ‘Did they take the carpet by the bed on the other side?’

  Derwent leaned sideways. ‘Yeah. Must have been saturated.’

  ‘Okay. Good. Can you go and stand there?’

  He did as he was told, waiting to see what I was thinking.

  ‘If you were stabbing someone who was lying there’ – I pointed at the silhouette of the victim – ‘you’d be leaning over.’

  Derwent nodded.

  ‘And if I was on this side of the bed and I was trying to stop you, I might put a hand on the wall to support myself.’ I knelt gingerly on the dry half of the mattress and put my gloved palm just above the bloody smear Sheila had left. I put my right hand up to block Derwent’s swinging arm, and I leaned over where the body had been.

  ‘You’re a lot taller than Sheila.’

  ‘So I’m not in exactly the same position. But we don’t know how tall the murderer is either, so you’re probably not matching him or her exactly either.’ I looked down at myself. ‘I would get pretty much covered with blood, wouldn’t I? Leaning on him, I mean.’

  ‘More than if you were stabbing him,’ Derwent agreed. ‘Unless you hit an artery and stood in the spray.’

  ‘Her clothes were soaked.’

  ‘Right,’ Derwent said. ‘Hold it there.’ I heard his phone click as he snapped a picture and I twisted to glare at him. He smirked. ‘That pose suits you and I bet it’s even better from behind, but you can get off the bed now.’

  I couldn’t have moved more quickly if the mattress had been in flames.

  ‘So Sheila didn’t do it. How are you going to find out who did?’

  I blew a breath out slowly. ‘You’ve got to start with the family. You can see why they’d want Harry dead, and you can see why Sheila would lie to save them.’

  Back in the sitting room, Derwent unhooked a photo frame from the wall. It was one with oval spaces for individual pictures – the whole Gleeson family in fact – including Harry and Sheila in happier times.

  ‘That must be when they got together first,’ I said. ‘Look how young Sheila is.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The early nineties.’

  ‘Shit,’ Derwent said. ‘That makes me feel old.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Twenty-seven years. Why did she stay with him?’

  ‘No money. No job. No training. No confidence. She was terrified of him.’ I shook my head. ‘Where else could she go?’

  ‘How many kids did you say there were?’

  ‘Six.’ I consulted my notes. ‘Kim is the eldest. She’s twenty. She moved out when she was sixteen. She has three kids now.’

  ‘Same dad?’

  ‘I didn’t ask because I am not a Daily Mail journalist and it wasn’t relevant.’ I flipped over the page. ‘Ricky is nineteen. He lives in Acton and is training to be a plumber.’

  ‘Good for him. That’s where the money is.’

  ‘Sarah is seventeen and lives in a care home in Chingford. She’s been in trouble with us for drugs, truancy and a little bit of petty thieving, according to the social worker. Then Aaron. Fifteen.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Foster family in Park Royal.’

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘Legions, I should imagine. It’s his fourth foster placement. The social worker said she couldn’t imagine this one would last either.’

 

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