Tom closed his eyes and tried to still his breathing. He forced his hands off the keyboard and onto his knees, where he dug his nails into the skin. ‘You don’t want to do this,’ his mother’s voice whispered in his ear. ‘You have so many other ways to occupy yourself, so many talents.’ She was persuasive, even now she was dead. ‘You can’t risk it, not even one time.’

  Shutting his eyes had not kept her out. Tom could see her inside his head, just in front of him, blocking the doorway to his room. She was wearing her favourite olive green t-shirt with ‘Merci Beaucoup’ written across it and her hair was wet from the shower. ‘Listen to me, Tom. You are so much better than this.’

  Tom opened his eyes and his mother’s face disappeared. All he saw was the screen looming, gigantic and alluring, the characters beckoning him in. ‘You don’t want to do this,’ his mother’s voice remained, but her tone was pleading, her strength was waning.

  ‘I do,’ he muttered. ‘I do want to do this.’

  For a brief moment, the word ‘sorry’ formed in his head, but he didn’t articulate it. He couldn’t risk being distracted again by the sounds of the real world, the tug of human obligations. He pushed it away almost as soon as it came to him. Because he wasn’t sorry. Not now, and he wasn’t sure he had ever been sorry for playing. The only thing he had been sorry for was any hurt he caused her; nothing else. And now she was gone, there was no one left to hurt.

  He inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled through his mouth, feeling the power which came from preparing his body for battle. He placed his fingers on the keyboard and then he began to play.

  7

  ‘Interview with Jaden Dodds, solicitor present, starting tape at 4.06pm, Tuesday 5th November. Hello Jaden. How did you sleep?’

  Jaden sat next to Constance in the subterranean police interview room, their shoulders almost touching. It was chilly and she pulled her jacket tight around her. Jaden was surprisingly well-groomed, given a night spent in the cells, and he was wearing the change of clothes which his flatmate, Nathaniel, had sent in, another pristine white t-shirt and joggers. His eye was almost healed.

  In contrast, Dawson looked a mess, his shirt hanging loose around his newly scrawny neck. Whatever had caused his dramatic loss of bulk, he hadn’t followed it up with a wardrobe update. Dawson felt the heat of Constance’s gaze and fiddled with his collar. Jaden ignored Dawson’s question.

  ‘All right. Let’s get started,’ Dawson continued. ‘You are here as part of the investigation into the murder of Dr Elizabeth Sullivan, who lived right across the street from you. You raped her, killed her, robbed her and then left her to be found the next morning, hoping that we’d all think she died in her sleep.’

  ‘Rape?’ Constance asked, managing to control her voice, given her heart had just leapt into her mouth. ‘That’s new.’

  ‘You’re right. It is.’

  Jaden’s eyes shifted a fraction towards Constance. ‘You can’t try to scare my client like that,’ she said, touching one hand to her throat, to help calm herself. ‘You have no evidence of any of this,’ she said.

  Dawson passed some papers to Constance. ‘Post-mortem shows a few things of interest,’ he said. ‘First, faint marks on each of Dr Sullivan’s wrists. One of my lads picked them up and it’s been confirmed, by the pathologist, on close examination, that her wrists were bound, only loosely, but they’re definitely rope marks. Do you know anything about that, Jaden?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t tie her up then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you did have sex with her?’

  Constance shook her head.

  ‘No comment,’ Jaden said.

  Dawson pointed to the papers he had handed Constance. ‘Elizabeth Sullivan had sex in the hours before her death,’ he said, ‘without protection, with…guess who? Jaden, you may as well admit it; the science doesn’t lie.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘What happened? You tied her up, raped her, but she wouldn’t keep quiet, said she would tell on you, so you had to kill her?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘What’s the cause of death then?’ Constance asked, both surprised and relieved that her client, the subject of Dawson’s barrage, had retained his composure. ‘Originally, you said heart attack, said, what was it? That she had a family history. Is that no longer the right diagnosis?’

  ‘Still a heart attack,’ Dawson said, ‘but brought on by being terrorised in her own home. You’ll have time to read all the gory details the pathologist has discovered. Plenty of time in your case, Jaden. Who says “dead men tell no tales”? Not me, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Why is my client supposed to have killed Dr Sullivan?’

  ‘To stop her talking, like I said. Is that what happened, Jaden? You had to shut her up. Or maybe you just meant to scare her, but you didn’t realise your own strength. Lift weights do you? In your spare time, you and Nathaniel? I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, so you can’t surprise me any more.’

  Jaden closed his mouth and folded his arms.

  ‘And robbery,’ Dawson continued. ‘You know her bag was taken. We’ve since discovered her credit card was used the following day, to run up bills on various sites. You must have thought you were so clever. The police there, searching her flat, looking for the killer, you were out spending her money. You knew you had – what? – forty-eight hours at most before all the cards were stopped, so you wanted to ensure you made the most of your spree.’

  ‘No,’ Jaden said.

  ‘So, just in case it isn’t clear, we have a warrant and my team are searching your flat, ooh...’ he looked at his watch, ‘right now, in fact. Maybe we’ll find a few more clues, while we’re at it. If you’ve nothing else to say for now, you can come back here in a couple of hours, when we’ve seen what else we can find. Interview terminated at 4.11pm.’

  Dawson nodded to each of them, rose stiffly and exited the room.

  ***

  ‘How can I help you if you lie to me?’ Constance berated Jaden, once Dawson had gone and the door was firmly closed behind him.

  Jaden had lowered his head into his hands and was sitting so motionless that Constance wondered if he was still breathing.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me your life story, you don’t have to volunteer information. You don’t even have to pay me, but if I ask you a direct question, you don’t lie to me. That’s not how it works.’

  She was surprised at the sharpness of her own voice, how wound up she was. Her clients were often economical with the truth and it didn’t touch her. But, as she’d try to articulate to Judith, she had sensed something different with Jaden in their first, short meeting. He had seemed more refined, more modest. And with that reserve had come a natural reluctance to explain himself. Why, then, had his failure to tell all, to share all the details of his evening with Dr Sullivan, bothered her to this degree?

  ‘Did you think they wouldn’t find out about you and Dr Sullivan?’ she said. ‘You know about DNA, don’t you? Now I’ll ask you again. What was your relationship with Elizabeth Sullivan?’

  Jaden lifted his head and tapped his hands together lightly, one, two, three times.

  ‘It’s like I said,’ he said. ‘She was a neighbour. Look. I’ve lived there nearly a year and I never noticed her. Then, about ten days ago, she knocked at the door, asked if I could jump-start her car. We got talking and then…’

  He covered his face with both hands for a few seconds, before dropping them down to his sides. ‘She asked me why people were often around, outside. Sometimes, me and Nathaniel, we have special guests on the show, to lift the ratings, and kids come and hang out, so they can get to see them. So, I told her. She seemed interested.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Nothing for a couple of days. Then she baked us a cake. Brought it round. Said it was a thank you for the car. And then…’ Jaden shrugged.

  ‘You had sex. Just like that?’ Constance said, completing his sentence, her contempt barely hidden.

  ‘What are you? My mother? She wanted to and…I couldn’t see no problem.’

  ‘At her flat?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Anywhere else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Twice. The first time was the day she brought the cake over, around a week ago. Then nothing. Then, she came around that night, said she’d made too much dinner, did I want to come over and share it with her. I wasn’t doing nothing, so I did.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was really nice. We had dinner together, lots of wine. I don’t normally drink wine. It made my head spin. We went to the bedroom. I left around nine. Then I saw the police there next day. I asked someone what was going on and they said she was dead.’

  ‘You didn’t think, then, to tell the police that you knew Dr Sullivan?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Why would I do that? Look, I didn’t kill her. I did nothing wrong, except feel a bit sorry for her. She told me she was on her own, no husband, her son was away. She did seem like a really clever lady, but she never said she was no doctor. She told me she was in HR. I didn’t ask anything else.’

  ‘You didn’t steal from her?’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me. No, I didn’t steal from her and I didn’t use her credit card.’

  ‘And what about the ropes? Tell me the truth now.’ Constance knew she was pushing him, but she had to know what he would say, not only for his defence, but to judge, for herself, if she believed him.

  ‘No ropes!’ he shouted. ‘I ain’t into that stuff. And it’s crap what the police said. I mean, why would I tie her up? Unless she was struggling. And if she was struggling, I’d’ve thought she would’ve had big marks on her wrists, not something that’s only uncovered under some microscope or whatever the pathologist does, but that’s just my opinion. And, if I’d tied her up, what was my plan? To wait around till she was asleep and then untie her? It’s bullshit, total bullshit. We had sex. It was nice. She was nice. She said nice things to me. Then I went home and me and Nath, we did the show.’

  8

  Constance headed straight to Hackney Hospital from the police station. It was only a few streets away, but the clouds, which had persisted throughout most of the day, had cleared and it was bitterly cold. She crossed to the sunny side of the street, to try to soak up any vestiges of warmth, but her breath appeared in great white clouds, and she increased her pace and shifted her scarf further up her neck.

  ‘Dr Williams, I’m Constance Lamb. Thanks so much for agreeing to see me.’ She extended a gloved hand to the doctor and he led her down the stairs the way she had come and back towards the entrance, to the hospital café.

  ‘You’re looking into Liz’s death, is that right? But you’re not the police.’ Dr Williams sat down at a corner table, folding his arms and his legs simultaneously. Given his informal dress – blue jeans and a Fair Isle jumper – she would not have taken him for a doctor, had she passed him in the street, perhaps even in the corridors of the hospital. But, once he began to speak, she appreciated, at once, the extent of his powers. Although quite a large man, his voice was soft and lilting and he inclined his head as he engaged with her, to emphasise his capacity for listening.

  ‘I’m a lawyer, representing the young man accused of her murder,’ Constance said, unbuttoning her coat, then deftly extracting her tablet from her bag and powering it up.

  ‘And I’m happy to speak to you, like I said on the phone, but I have told the police all I know. I can’t imagine hearing it all again is a very worthwhile use of your time…or mine for that matter.’

  ‘Sometimes the police don’t ask the right questions or make notes of the right answers. I’m sure anything you tell me will be valuable. You were one of her colleagues?’

  ‘We worked together on various research projects over the last eight years, although we’ve known each other much longer. We did our first placement together back in the early noughties.’ Dr Williams glanced at his phone before stuffing it back into his pocket.

  ‘What kind of work did she do?’

  ‘She was a psychiatrist, as you know. She had a daily clinic here and, on Wednesday evenings, she saw private patients in the City, near Liverpool Street.’

  ‘Did she have a speciality? The papers talked about addictive behaviour.’

  ‘Most of Liz’s patients were fighting addiction of one kind or another: alcohol, gambling, pornography. She was an expert in the control of impulsive behaviour, with a particular interest in the impact on young men. We were working together on a research project when she died.’

  ‘And did you know her personally?’

  ‘Of course. We spent so much time together and she was a lovely person to be around; great fun, with a wonderful, dry sense of humour. Sadly, she’d been alone for almost ten years. I don’t know how she didn’t meet anyone else.’

  ‘Her husband died?’

  ‘In his early thirties, an aggressive cancer. I don’t think she was short of offers, but she couldn’t replace him.’

  ‘She has a son?’

  ‘Thomas, yes, but he’s away at boarding school. After Will died, she decided it was the best thing. She was travelling a lot with work, conferences in the States, China. She didn’t want to leave Tom alone or with carers.’

  ‘Do you know which school he attends?’

  ‘It’s fairly near. I’ll remember what it’s called in a second. It’s named after some do-gooder. She didn’t want him far away, so they could spend weekends together whenever possible. If you’re going to see him, you should know he’s not the easiest boy – although who am I to judge? The boy’s father died when he was six years old.’

  An elderly man wearing faded pyjamas brushed Constance’s arm on his way to sit down at a neighbouring table. He chewed on a stray thread from one of his buttons while he turned his eyes to the heavens and the dusty skylight, and then slumped down into his chair. His face was an intricate web of red lines, radiating out from his purple-tinged nose. Behind him, he dragged a bag of fluid, connected at one end to a mobile stand and, at the other, it disappeared into his sleeve.

  ‘Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt Dr Sullivan?’ Constance continued.

  ‘No, of course not.’ Dr Williams checked his phone again, this time leaving it on the table, face down.

  ‘No patients who were unhappy with their treatment?’

  ‘No one she mentioned, although we are sometimes threatened by patients. But we’re very careful to keep home addresses private, that kind of thing. If you work in crime, it may be hard for you to believe, but medicine, on the whole, it’s a pretty safe profession.’

  ‘No rival doctors or disputes with drug companies, then?’ Constance attempted a smile.

  ‘You’ve been watching too much TV,’ he said, rewarding her with a smile in return. ‘We do work with drug companies – of course we do. Both Liz and I believe in a combination of medicine and therapy to treat our patients. But none of them killed Liz. I’m telling you that for a fact.’

  The old man was now joined by a skeletal woman, carrying a tray bearing two scones, a pot of jam and a second pot overflowing with grey-tinged cream. She walked slowly and deliberately, like she was navigating a tightrope; heel, toe, heel, toe, with the occasional wobble, her hospital gown gaping at the back, to reveal a pale and saggy buttock. Constance almost reached out to tug at the loose straps, but then the woman sat herself down and the chair back covered her modesty.

  ‘That still leaves a lot of other potential suspects, though. I am also interested in understanding a bit more about Dr Sullivan’s research.’

  Dr Williams picked up his phone again and checked his screen. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have time to talk about that now. If you can imagine, Liz built up a fair body of work.’

  ‘I understand. I’ve arrived in the middle of your day and you have patients to see. Is there any way I could take a look myself? Is her work…accessible to the general public?’

  ‘I can provide you with copies of the papers she wrote and we co-authored a book. You could have that too, if you like. Hardly a bestseller, but that wasn’t the point.’

  ‘Thank you. And I heard what you said, but also the names of any partners on your research projects please, for completeness.’

  ‘They’re usually disclosed in the papers themselves, but I’ll double-check.’

  ‘I’m very grateful.’

  ‘No problem. It’s always nice to have someone taking an interest in your work, even if it is for such a macabre reason.’ Dr Williams’ mouth turned down at the edges for a second, before he brightened up again. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said.

  ‘Just one more thing, I forgot to ask. When was the last time you saw Dr Sullivan?’

  ‘Oh, gosh. Whenever her last clinic was. It must have been Friday, the day she was killed. She probably left here around five.’

  ‘How was she getting home?’

  ‘She usually walked, although there is a bus.’

  ‘Was there anything different about her, that day? Anything she was worried about?’

  ‘Nothing. Same old happy-go-lucky Liz.’ He sniffed and his mouth drooped a second time.

  ‘And what did you do once she left?’ Constance asked.

  ‘I finished up and went home.’

  Constance tucked her tablet into her bag. Dr Williams was already weaving his way between the chairs and tables, occupied by patients and visitors and the occasional member of staff by the time she looked up. Then he turned around.

  ‘Mill Hill. That’s where Tom’s at school,’ he called out. ‘He boards. But I’m damned if I can remember the name.’