The Burning by Jane Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

talking to, Kerrigan. You don’t have to pretend.’
    ‘Yeah, well. Bit of a shitter, isn’t it?’
    ‘You’re telling me. I thought we were done with this.’
    We both spoke lightly, but I knew he was feeling the way I was. Somehow, it made it worse that we’d had a break from the sick tension that was now pooling in my stomach and clenching my jaw, the tension that had been turning my days into marathons, stealing my sleep, keeping me at work. I’d done my best – we’d all been doing our best – to make sure this didn’t happen again. And we’d failed.
    ‘Jesus. Good parking.’
    The car was skewed across two spaces. ‘I was in a rush, OK?’ I unlocked the doors. ‘Get in, and less of the chat, or you’ll be walking to – where is it?’
    ‘Stadhampton Grove. It’s somewhere behind the Oval cricket ground. Part of an industrial estate.’
    ‘Do you know how to get there from here?’
    ‘Consider me your sat nav for the journey.’
    ‘Twat nav, more like,’ I muttered, shooting a grin at him before pulling out of my space. Well, spaces.
    The traffic had built up in the time I’d been in the hospital, and the trip from Kingston to the Oval was torture. Rob got on the phone as soon as we were on the road, calling Kev Cox, who was at the scene already. He was head of the forensic team and had managed the last four crime scenes; if you wanted one person to keep everything under control, Kev was your man. I’d never seen him anything less than relaxed. I wasn’t even sure it was possible to upset him.
    ‘Who found it? Just walking past, was he? Did uniform get his details? Oh, he’s still there? Good one.’
    I caught Rob’s eye and tapped my watch. He got what I meant straightaway.
    ‘What time was that, then?’
    He had his notepad on his knee, balancing on a big London A–Z that was, I noticed, on entirely the wrong page. Some help he was. He scrawled ‘3.17’ on the pad in big numbers, tilting it to show me. That settled it. Not that there had really been any doubt in my mind about Victor Blackstaff’s innocence.
    ‘No sign of anyone there, I suppose? Nothing left behind? Yeah, he’s just not making any mistakes. How long is it since the last one?’
    I could have told him that. Six days. And before that, twenty days. And before that, three weeks. Just over three weeks between the first and the second ones. He was speeding up, and that was bad news. The less time we had between killings, the more likely it was that more women would die.
    On the other hand, he had to be killing more frequently for a reason. Maybe he was feeling agitated. Unsettled. Maybe he was losing control and he’d start making mistakes.
    But he hadn’t made any so far.
    Rob was asking Kev about who else was at the scene but I tuned out, concentrating on the traffic. When he finally hung up, he turned to me. ‘How much of that did you get?’
    ‘The important bits. Not the parts where you were finding out what the competition was up to.’
    He had the grace to look ashamed. ‘I just like to know who else I’m going to be working with.’
    ‘Bullshit. You like to know who else is going to be trying to get the boss’s attention.’ And I know that because I am exactly the same …
    ‘No sign of Belcott yet.’ He couldn’t suppress a grin of triumph. Peter Belcott was one of the more irritating members of the team: ambitious, ruthless, awkward if you gave him the opportunity. Much too keen. Omnipresent, usually. There was some comfort in the thought that he’d been caught napping this time.
    I tapped the map. ‘Come on. Concentrate. Where do I go from here?’
    He peered at the street signs, then down at the page, flicking frantically as he realised he was looking at Poplar, not Vauxhall.
    ‘Left at the lights. No, straight on.’
    ‘Sure?’
    ‘Sure,’ he said, sounding anything but. I went with it anyway, and as far as I could tell, we didn’t double back on ourselves more than a couple of times on the