Free The Reckoning by Jane Casey Page A

Derwent lock up after us. It was time to go home.
    The inspector, naturally, had other ideas. ‘Get a move on, Kerrigan. The traffic is going to be shite all the way back into town. We need to get going.’
    I fell into step behind him. My feet were aching, my neck hurt and I could barely think straight, but I didn’t dare opt out. ‘Where are we headed?’
    ‘Back to the nick. I want to brief Superintendent Godley before the close of business. You might as well come too. Someone has to read through the files on Palmer and Tremlett and it’s not going to be me.’
    The files would be dense, the material contained in them would be upsetting, and it wasn’t really fair of Derwent to palm the lot off on me. But that wasn’t why I went down the stairs slowly, painfully, as if my shoes were soled with lead. Bad though spending the day with Derwent had been and grim the things I’d seen and heard, I would happily have done another twelve hours of it rather than spend any time at all in the office. There was unfinished business there – business I didn’t want to finish. Business I didn’t even want to think about.
    But then, maybe I would be lucky. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it today. It was getting late. Most people would have gone home already. I made the most of a tiny burst of energy generated by wishful thinking and hurried across the road after Derwent. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe everything was going to be all right.
    I really should have known better.

Chapter Four
    As it turned out, we needn’t have rushed back. The superintendent was in a meeting that dragged on into the evening, a meeting that involved several senior officers and DI Bryce at Godley’s side. The other officers were so senior that I had never seen them in person before, just in pictures on the Met website. Something big was going on and, whatever it was, Godley wasn’t pleased about it. On the rare occasions when the door to his office was open, I had a grandstand view of him from my desk. His expression was that of a man under intense strain, with lines entrenched across his forehead and around his mouth. I had never seen him look like that, even at the height of the hunt for an active serial killer. The media had turned on him like dogs running wild and still I hadn’t ever seen him look upset. Tired, yes. But not hunted, as he was now.
    On the bright side, the delay meant I had plenty of time to get very familiar indeed with the details of the murdered men’s files. The transcripts of the interviews with the two girls in Palmer’s case showed that their evidence was contradictory and confused, as Derwent and Vera Gordon had said. It was hard, though, to fault the CPS for proceeding. Children were not usually good witnesses, especially about something as traumatic as sexual abuse. They were likely to blur the outlines of the truth, to agree too readily with suggestions from those interviewing them, to forget key details from one interview to the next. So you could spin it both ways. Either they were lying deliberately, or they were too upset to remember accurately. If they were lying, there was something depressingly plausible about the details of their accounts; the conclusion was inescapable that they had done the things they described, even if it wasn’t with Barry Palmer. That lent them credibility even though their stories were weak in places. They didn’t have to be accurate for them to be telling the truth, and the jury had believed them. I tried to shake off the creeping gloom that was starting to affect me. It wasn’t up to me to retry the case following the death of the defendant, I reminded myself. Guilty or not, he had been singled out as a child molester and that had probably sealed his fate. But whether or not he was obviously, rampantly guilty, wasn’t the issue here. What I thought of him mattered not at all. He had been murdered, and it was up to us to find out who did it.
    A whiff of bullshit