Page 50 of Dead Fall

‘You mean sexual assault?’

His brow crinkled. ‘Maybe. She hinted on the phone that he was a bit .?.?. handsy. But when she came back from Berlin she was .?.?. different. Distant, jumpy, always losing her rag. And she refused to talk about him.’

It did sound suspicious. Or was that what Ethan wanted her to believe?

‘Something happened there,’ he said. ‘She was never the same again. She went totally off sex, for one thing.’

Their eyes met for a little too long. Cassie stood up. ‘OK, here’s the deal.’ Indicating the dining table, she said crisply, ‘This turns into a bed. The top collapses like this. You can fix the bolts while I get the mattress.’

‘OK, boss.’ He grinned. When she came back from the forward cabin carrying the foam mattress he took it from her with a half-smile in those dark eyes.

‘Are you sure you don’t need a bed warmer?’ he asked.

‘Positive,’ she said. ‘And if I hear anyone creeping around in the night I’ll shout for Gaz.’ Seeing his forehead crinkle, she added, ‘My personal minder, who you met earlier?’

He laughed at that and, taking her hand, kissed the back of it, but with a jokey flourish that saved it from being creepy.

As Cassie got into bed, her pulse was still bumping in her throat. She could hear Ethan turning over in bed barely two metres away through the plywood wall. She found herself replaying the night in the squat aged seventeen, the one and only time she’d done smack. Why was she remembering that? Because she recognised that just like the heroin, Ethan Fox could be fatally addictive; and just like the heroin, she really shouldn’t go there.

FLYTE

The next morning Becca, the DC who struck Flyte as seeming a bit unsure of herself, came over to Bacon’s desk in the incident room. Flyte overheard her saying that she’d got hold of the Chinese couple who’d been staying in the Airbnb above Bronte’s flat the night she’d died.

‘I booked a Zoom call for 10 a.m. our time – 6 p.m. over there. In the email the husband says he speaks English. I thought better to grab them quickly than wait till we’ve found a Mandarin interpreter?’

Bacon waved a hand. ‘Courageous and correct,’ he said. ‘Do you want to sit in?’

Becca shook her head. ‘Now we’ve got a warrant I need to trawl Bronte’s emails.’

‘Fair dos,’ he said, getting to his feet and hitching his trousers up. Turning to Flyte he asked, ‘Care to join me?’

‘Sure.’ She had to admit that despite his eighties throwback act, Bacon appeared genuinely to value the female angle.

Half an hour later, they were in the conference room facing a screen which showed a middle-aged Chinese guy and his wife seated at an island in a swanky kitchen. After the introductions, Bacon said, ‘As you know, Mr and Mrs Chen, we are investigating the tragic death of a young woman who lived in the apartment directly beneath you, on the final night of your stay in London. Did you see or hear anything unusual that evening after coming back from the restaurant?’

Mr Chen did the talking, his wife smiling but silent beside him. He spoke like a man used to addressing minions – apparently he was a Party bigwig – but despite what he’d told Becca, his English was hit and miss to say the least. He was able to make one thing clear though: they had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary that evening either when they returned from dinner or during the night.

Flyte thought she detected something a bit too definitive about his claims – no hesitation, no racking his memory, no asking his wife – as one might have expected. No doubt the Party wouldn’t be ecstatic at the prospect of one of their officials getting entangled in a UK murder case.

Flyte could see Bacon’s leg starting to jiggle under the table as he grew impatient, although his manner remained calm and polite. After a while, he turned to the wife. ‘What about you, Mrs Chen?’ But Mr Chen raised a hand. ‘My wife doesn’t speak English,’ he said, sweetening it with a smile.

‘No problem,’ said Bacon – before launching into a stream of fluent Mandarin. Flyte couldn’t stop herself from turning to stare at him.

Mrs Chen was talkative and seemed keen to help, despite her husband’s increasingly meaningful sideways looks. Flyte couldn’t understand a word, but it was clear from their back and forward that she was telling Bacon something of possible significance. Bacon asked a supplementary question and she nodded vehemently, and touching her neck, made a guttural sound as if she was trying to clear something stuck in her throat. This brought a furious look from her husband who cut in, clearly trying to bring the conversation to a close. Bacon was laying on the charm when Mr Chen leaned forward and cut the connection.

He and Flyte looked at each other.

‘You got the gist?’ he asked.

‘She heard someone coughing? Choking?’

He nodded. ‘She got up in the night for some water, stepped out onto their balcony and heard someone – she couldn’t say if it was a female – gasping for breath from the floor below. But the noise stopped quickly and she went back to bed.’

‘Did she hear anything else? A scuffle? The fall?’

‘Nothing. Just the gasping. We can’t know whether it was just before Bronte fell or earlier of course.’ He frowned. ‘And as we know there was no post-mortem evidence of someone strangling her.’

‘Suffocation? Plastic bag over the head?’

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