LITMIR.BIZ

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Her initial sales were good but they had tapered off over time – the profits for last year are a long way down on the previous year. I looked up the company name and found a pretty damning thread on an infertility message board – Don’t use these, they’re rubbish, waste of money, that kind of thing. There were multiple users complaining about the lack of results and quite a lot of responses were from people saying they wouldn’t try them as a result. Kate actually posted a message asking for the customers to apply to her for a refund, but she said she would only pay up if the thread was deleted. That did not go down well at all, as you can imagine. Then there were a few messages in defence of the Novo Gaudio products. Again, they read very much like the positive comments from the website and the users were pretty sceptical about them. The accounts have all been suspended for “abuse of the website’s terms and conditions”.’ Liv looked up and smiled. ‘That means they were fakes. Sock puppets, they call them. Kate got caught out lying about her products.’

      ‘So she was struggling to make ends meet,’ Burt said.

      ‘Well, no. Not really. Her current account was in credit. She had a small savings account – I think she invested a lot in the business but there was a tiny bit of cash left over.’ Liv leafed through the documents in front of her. ‘She was getting something like three grand every month from a personal bank account. I haven’t traced it back yet but that could be Chloe’s dad.’

      ‘Chloe’s eighteen,’ I said. ‘Would he still have been paying to support her?’

      ‘Worth asking.’ Burt nodded to me. ‘Get the address from me after the briefing. You can talk to him.’

      I nodded. ‘I was going to ask if I could. Chloe came home early from her visit and I’d like to know why. She wouldn’t tell me.’

      ‘Or couldn’t,’ Georgia said. ‘She seemed quite intimidated.’

      Intimidated? I knew exactly what Georgia was implying and so did the rest of the room. She didn’t look in my direction, and it took a practised back-stabber to slide the knife in without checking for a reaction.

      ‘I think it’s far more likely she was in shock,’ Una Burt said, coming to my rescue, much to my surprise. ‘Maeve is only ever intimidating when she means to be.’

      ‘How was Kate paying the mortgage?’ Pete Belcott asked. I didn’t like Belcott but I recognised that he was a good police officer when he could be bothered and on this occasion he’d asked precisely the right question.

      ‘She wasn’t paying a mortgage,’ Liv said. ‘I haven’t found any payments to a bank or mortgage company. Which is why I’d say she wasn’t in desperate need of cash. She could easily have borrowed against the value of the house, even to shore up her business.’

      ‘Did she have any other payments into her current account?’ I asked.

      ‘Nothing significant. Refunds for things she bought and returned. A transfer from the savings account, for a few hundred pounds.’ Liv shrugged. ‘What were you looking for?’

      ‘Another source of income. One of the neighbours mentioned that she had a lot of gentlemen callers when her daughter was away. I was wondering if it was professional or strictly amateur.’

      ‘If she was on the game she might have been cash only. A lot of them are. They’re not the kind of people who file detailed tax returns.’ Belcott looked around the room. ‘I mean, that’s what I hear.’

      Chris Pettifer snorted at that, but it was a pale imitation of his usual mockery. He’d aged ten years in the last few months. He hadn’t been the same since we’d lost a team member. Maybe he blamed himself.

      I knew he blamed me.

      ‘We didn’t find much cash when we searched the house,’ Derwent said. ‘No safe. Nothing in the teapot, even.’

      Burt’s attention swung around to Derwent, and it was like seeing an artillery piece wheeling into position. ‘Yes, tell us about what you found out.’

      Derwent cleared his throat. ‘Um. We searched the property—’

      Burt interrupted. ‘Who’s “we”?’

      ‘Me and Kerrigan.’

      ‘What about the dog?’

      ‘Oh, yeah. That was before. It didn’t find much, to be honest with you.’

      I resisted the urge to kick the back of his chair. Get it together. You’re making both of us look bad.

      As if he’d heard me, he sat up straighter. ‘If you have a map of the area, I can show everyone the route the dog picked out.’

      Of course Una Burt had a map of the area – a satellite photograph of it, in fact, and it was on her laptop so it could be projected on the wall behind her. Derwent got out of his chair and sloped up to the front of the room, the picture of a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework properly. As he’d done the previous evening, he described where the dog had alerted and why it was possibly significant.

      ‘What do we know about the owner of this property?’ Una Burt tapped the house three gardens over.

      ‘He’s a pensioner. His name is Harold Lowe and he’s been in a nursing home for a few months according to the neighbour. I don’t know of any connection between him and Kate Emery.’

      ‘Is the house obviously unoccupied?’

      ‘Yes,’ Derwent said slowly, thinking about it. ‘But the house is in pretty good condition and the garden is fairly neat. The neighbour I spoke to still cuts the grass for him and trims the hedges. He has a key to the gate but it’s not a very secure lock.’

      ‘Any CCTV nearby?’

      ‘Not that I saw. It’s a nice residential road. No one that I spoke to saw anything out of the ordinary but I’d like to go back there and try again when we get a better idea of when all of this took place. It’s hard to pin people down when you’re asking about a five-day period.’

      ‘We can narrow that down a bit,’ I said from the back of the room. ‘The last sighting of Kate Emery that I’ve heard about was Oliver Norris, the neighbour who was with Chloe when she discovered the crime scene. He told me he saw her on Friday evening. The only other sighting I heard about was Norris’s wife, and she saw Kate on Wednesday night.’

      There was a ripple of interest around the room. Norris was just a little too involved to be believed without question.

      ‘Did anyone else see her on Friday?’ Burt asked.

      ‘Not as far as I know.’ I waited but there was nothing from the front of the room. ‘Georgia, did you find any neighbours who remembered seeing Kate?’

      ‘Oh – no. No, I didn’t. They couldn’t remember. No one noticed anything strange.’ It sounded weak and she knew it. ‘I didn’t really get to talk to that many people. DS Kerrigan sent me home.’

      ‘It was getting late.’ I was doing you a favour, you stupid bint. ‘We’ll go out again today and see if we can get any corroboration of Norris’s story.’

      ‘All right. I don’t want to assume anything at this stage.’ Burt frowned. ‘I’m not sure how Friday fits in with what we know about the cat. But then, I don’t know how much the cat … er …’

      ‘Shits?’ Derwent suggested, sitting down again.

      ‘Quite.’

      ‘The other thing we found that might help us narrow down when she disappeared,’ I said hastily, ‘was a receipt in the kitchen bin. Someone went shopping on Thursday and bought a lot of food.’

      ‘A week’s worth for a normal person,’ Derwent said with a glint in his eye. I ignored him.

      ‘It was all put away but not eaten. There were no wrappers in the bin – nothing to say she’d used anything she bought.’

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