Free The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey Page A

reminded me how uncharming I found Andrew Bradbury. He was thin and unsmiling behind glasses with heavy frames. Some men made going bald look good: Bradbury was not one of them.
    ‘I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I’m just doing my job. I’d be skinned alive if I let you in.’ If anything, Pierce sounded rather pleased to have a reason to tell the detectives what to do. I cleared my throat and he twisted around. ‘Oh, here’s DC Kerrigan. She’ll look after you.’
    I was expecting some glimmer of recognition from Bradbury but it seemed I had made no impression on him at all. Since I encountered him he had been promoted, though he’d been one of the least impressive detective sergeants I’d ever met. Getting him out of harm’s way by pushing him up the ladder, Derwent had suggested. Derwent had given him quite a hard time, and Bradbury had conceded in a hurry to the alpha male. If Derwent had been there, Bradbury would have thought twice about pushing past me. As it was, he didn’t even say hello.
    ‘Where’s Superintendent Godley?’
    ‘The bedroom at the back, on the left.’
    He barrelled past me and down the hall. I let him go, addressing the three who remained outside the door.
    ‘Thanks for coming. I’m Maeve Kerrigan – I work with Superintendent Godley.’
    ‘Nice to meet you.’ The speaker was lugubrious, sallow and in his mid-forties. ‘DI Carl Groves. This is DS Burns. Frank by name and nature,’ he added.
    The sergeant waved a gloved hand at me instead of shaking mine. ‘Thanks for laughing at the boss’s little joke. I did too, the first thousand times I heard it.’
    I grinned at the pair of them. They were a double act – one fat, one thin, around the same age, old in their very souls and as cynical as murder detectives are supposed to be. The third man introduced himself as James Peake, a detective from the East End where Andy Bradbury worked and where Maxine Willoughby had died. He was about my age, a big handsome redhead.
    ‘Did you want to speak to Superintendent Godley first, or …’
    ‘Probably more use to have a look round, isn’t it?’ Groves said. ‘That’s why we’re meeting here, after all.’
    I agreed with Groves. Only Bradbury, it seemed, had missed the point.
    They were quiet as soon as they entered the flat, taking in everything it could tell us about poor Anna and her aspirations. DI Burt appeared in the kitchen, dispatched by Godley, and there was another round of introductions.
    ‘Are you seeing similarities?’ she demanded, and all three nodded with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
    ‘Same type of victim, definitely.’ Burns lifted a fold of curtain material and weighed it. ‘Better off than Kirsty, I’d say.’
    ‘Didn’t she live in Blackheath?’ I had noticed it in the Standard article because it was a nice part of south-east London, close to the river at Greenwich and rich in green open spaces. It was on my list if I ever managed to save enough money for a deposit for a place of my own, assuming – as I tended to – that I was buying it alone, Rob having gone the way of all men. It was emphatically not the sort of place where you expected to be strangled in your bed.
    ‘It was Blackheath in estate-agent speak. It was more like Lewisham.’
    ‘Lewisham’s all right,’ Groves said. ‘What’s wrong with Lewisham?’
    ‘Where do I start?’ Burns rolled his eyes. They’d be doing a music-hall number next. Una Burt could see the warning signs as well as I could and cut in.
    ‘What about Maxine Willoughby? Where did she live?’
    ‘She had a one-bed flat in Whitechapel,’ Peake said. ‘This place is a big step up from what she could afford.’
    ‘Anna was in HR in the City,’ I said. ‘I’d imagine she was earning a fair bit.’
    ‘Living simply, though,’ Una Burt said. ‘Quietly.’
    ‘Not attracting attention to herself,’ I agreed.
    ‘Whether she wanted attention or not, she attracted the wrong kind,’ Groves said.
    ‘The