Free The Last Girl by Jane Casey

mirror in his room. ‘He could have broken the glass first to limit the amount of damage he did to himself. I didn’t see a bruise on the back of his head – did you?’
    ‘His hair is too thick.’ Godley made a note. ‘We can ask the paramedics what they made of him when they examined him. Colin, can you track them down?’
    Colin nodded morosely, which meant nothing. He always looked morose. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that he always got the worst jobs, the grinding routine bits of investigation that had to be done but rarely threw up interesting results. It was a shame for him that he was good at that sort of work, painstaking and diligent in a way that Derwent, say, was not.
    ‘We still need to get that list from Kennford, though.’ Godley checked the clock on the wall. ‘I’ve got the PMs on Vita and Laura this morning.’
    ‘We’ll be there too.’ Derwent was speaking for me as well, I realised with a sinking feeling. I would give a lot to miss the autopsies.
    ‘Good. Let’s arrange to see Kennford this afternoon at his chambers. I want to be there. I want to show him we’re taking it seriously.’
    And make up for losing his temper the night before. He was also aware of the need to keep his DI under control, I guessed. Derwent was rocking on his chair, smirking. ‘I’m going to make Kennford wish he’d never picked a fight with me.’
    ‘I think Kennford isn’t telling us everything he knows, but I don’t think we should make the mistake of concentrating on him and him alone.’ Everyone around the table turned to look at me with varying degrees of interest. ‘We’ve got two victims who might equally have been the real targets. We don’t even know if it was one of them or both of them. Maybe Laura was collateral damage and Vita was the one who was meant to die, or maybe it was the other way round. Either way, we need to know as much as we can about them.’
    ‘Did you find anything useful last night?’ Godley asked.
    ‘Define useful.’ Derwent yawned widely before going on and I felt my jaw creak in sympathy. ‘We found that Laura had been making amateur porn with an unidentified male, and that her mother had a keen interest in the professional kind. She had quite a collection.’
    ‘Any diaries? Letters?’
    ‘No, but it is the twenty-first century, boss. We were looking for phones and emails.’
    I didn’t wait to see if Godley was amused or annoyed by Derwent’s smart-arse remark, hurrying in with, ‘Without success. Laura must have had a phone but I couldn’t find it, and I turned the place upside down. I really don’t think it’s in the house. Vita’s was in her handbag, switched off. No idea what the PIN is – we tried all the obvious ones but no luck. We need to get it unlocked so we can track down her friends, find out if they knew anything about her personal life.’
    ‘Computers?’
    ‘Vita didn’t seem to have one, but we’ll check that with Kennford. He has a laptop – we let him take it away with him as he needed it for work. And he’s not a suspect, officially.’
    ‘Yet,’ Derwent interjected.
    ‘Both girls had laptops too. We’ve got Laura’s and I’ve sent it for analysis.’
    ‘Laura had every gizmo going,’ Derwent said. ‘Her room looked like the stockroom at a branch of Comet. But there wasn’t anything that takes us much further, on first examination. Mind you, we haven’t got into her emails yet.’
    ‘That’s something I want to ask Lydia about this morning,’ I said. ‘She might know her sister’s password. She might also know where Laura was supposed to be last night. Kennford said he was expecting her to be out. I’d like to know where, with whom, and why she changed her plans.’
    ‘Teenagers are unreliable by nature,’ Maitland said. ‘I should know, I’ve got two of them. Never tell you half the things they get up to and never get around to doing most of what they plan to.’
    ‘It’s a change in their routine,’ I