Page 44 of Dead Fall

He frowned. ‘They’re party people aren’t they? Communist Party I mean, not the fun kind.’ Bringing a titter from his audience. ‘That could be problematic.’

‘What about the printing of Bronte’s phone?’ Flyte jumped in, drawing hostile looks.

‘Thanks, Phyllida,’ said Bacon, with a tight smile. ‘I was just coming to that. Clearly it was Bronte’s killer who sent the fake suicide message from her phone. And so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to find the handset had been cleaned of all prints.’

‘Which, had it been discovered at the outset, would immediately have prompted suspicion’ – Flyte couldn’t resist pointing out.

There was a silence you could eat with a spoon.

Ignoring the jibe, Bacon went on, ‘Moving forward .?.?. Obviously it tells us that the killer was known to Bronte. Close enough to know her phone passcode.’

‘It tells us something else as well,’ said Flyte, failing to hide her impatience.

‘Enlighten us, Phyllida,’ said Bacon, starting to sound irritated.

‘Assuming that the killer arrived at her flat planning to murder her, he would surely have expected the phone to be fingerprinted. And knowing that a clean phone would look suspicious, he – or she – must have planned to put Bronte’s prints on it after he’d sent the suicide text. He was hardly going to tip her over the balcony then take the lift down and do it on the towpath, was he? So he must have been planning to kill her inside the flat.’

‘Maybe she was trying to get away from him and ended up going over accidentally,’ said Bacon. ‘But once she caught hold and was hanging there, he had to finish her off.’

‘You said yourself that given the height of the balcony her killer would need to have lifted her to tip her over.’

‘And if you’re saying his initial idea was to kill her in the flat and make it look like suicide how exactly would he have pulled that off?’

Flyte made a face. ‘I don’t know. Get her stoned on the psychoactive cannabinoid, then make it look like a hanging, or slash her wrists?’

‘Her tox screen came back negative for drugs,’ Bacon pointed out.

Fair point. ‘Maybe something went awry with his plan,’ was all she could say.

After the meeting broke up he caught up with Flyte in the corridor, and leaning towards her said in a conversational tone, ‘IOPC or not, if you try to fuck me over in front of the team again, I’ll tear you a new one.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Slap! The wake of a passing boat hitting the wooden hull beside Cassie’s ear jerked her from sleep and left Dreamcatcher rocking violently. Going too fast – especially this early in the morning. The warming weather was bringing out the amateur boaters who had zero grasp of canal etiquette.

Rolling over, she was about to moan to Archie before remembering with a scalpel stab under the ribs that they were done – for good this time. But already the sharp pain of separation was easing down into the settled ache that she knew from experience would pass – eventually. She counted off in her head the number of relationships she’d had as an adult that hadn’t gone the distance. After reaching five she stopped and stretched out across the bed, luxuriating in her recovered space. Maybe it was just time to accept that she was a loner, by character and inclination.

Finding no sign of her fellow lone wolf Macavity, she pulled on some clothes and went into the cockpit. Gaz, her ex-roadie mate and neighbour, was already up on deck next door smoking his morning fag, intent on his phone.

‘Hey, Gaz. You seen that disloyal beast of mine this morning?’

Ignoring the question, he nodded to the phone. ‘You seen the latest?’

Shaking her head, she pulled up her own newsfeed. One of the fringe news sites was running the headline: ETHAN FOX ACCUSED OF BRONTE ABUSE. It didn’t take many clicks to find the whole story: @Charly_Detective had posted a vid on TikTok. She had dug up an old selfie of Ethan and Bronte when they were still a couple, which she claimed showed ‘clear bruising to Bronte’s throat’. Zooming up the darker area, Cassie decided they were a long way short of clear-cut throttle marks.

Charly shared ‘new and shocking information’ suggesting that Ethan had a kink for strangling his girlfriends during sex. She went on to recycle the misleading ‘evidence’ that the hyoid bone in Bronte’s throat had been broken. It was all framed piously as ‘questions police need to get answers to: now’.

The post had gone viral, with @BinkyBinks96 summing up the calibre of comments with the insightful comment: ‘Your telling me that someone with bone broken in throat wasn’t strangulated? Poor Brontes druggie ex has a SHITLOAD of questions to answer.’

Cassie snorted derisively.

‘So was she strangled?’ asked Gaz.

‘No! it was the fall that killed her. The world’s gone barking mad.’

‘True,’ said Gaz, pinching out his cig. ‘By the way, I gave that cat of yours a tin of mackerel this morning,’ he said with a cackle that revealed a gold molar.

‘Oh thanks a bunch, Gaz.’ She shook her head. ‘He’ll be demanding poached salmon next.’

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