Page 1 of Indefensible
CHAPTER 1
DAY ONE
The two bodies lay slumped together on an elderly green velvet sofa, their shoulders touching. On the coffee table in front of them, two lines of white powder were neatly arranged next to a straw. A discoloured spoon and some small, empty baggies littered the floor. The male body, dressed in a well-worn tracksuit, had a tourniquet around his arm, and a syringe hanging from the skin just below it. The woman next to him, in leggings and a strappy top, was equally dead. Her arms showed the marks of frequent injections. Her lips were blue, and there was a smear of foam around her mouth. Both corpses had their eyes open, staring at nothing. Both had the grey skin and greasy hair of people who had given up caring. Spring was in the air, and it seemed unreasonable that they had endured winter and died before the summer.
The house was typical of the area: a small terrace faced with dressed stone, front door opening into a tiny hallway with the stairs to the first floor, a door to the lounge, and through the lounge another door, which led to a kitchen at the back. The front door was white PVC, matching the window frames. The place looked neat enough from the outside, but on closer inspection, the net curtains were in need of a wash, and dustcoated the windows. Growing up in the village, DC Deryn Kent knew that these were important social signifiers. Sparkly windows and freshly washed nets indicated respectability.
“Oh my God,” said the next-door neighbour from behind Deryn. She’d been waiting for him on the pavement outside, a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Eira and ignored his instruction to stay outside. Now she was paying the price for her concern. Which Deryn absolutely understood. A baby’s cries of anguish came down the stairs, fading to sobs before increasing in volume again.
“Go and get the baby,” Deryn told her. He heard her retch once, then the sound of her feet running up the narrow stairs. He got out his phone and called it in. “We’ll need social services, as well,” he said. “There’s a baby in the house. That’s what alerted the neighbour. I don’t think they’ve been dead long.”
“Stay where you are, Kent,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “No one in or out, you know the drill.”
“The neighbour is getting the baby,” Deryn said, “I’ll ask her to take it home until social services arrive.”
“It, DC Kent?It?"
“Sorry, boss, I don’t know the family or the gender of the baby.”
“Well, you’d better start finding out about them, hadn’t you?”
Deryn said that he would. The woman came back downstairs, carrying a very smelly and damp-looking baby, with a bright red face under a few wisps of dark hair. He or she had been wrapped in a blue fleecy blanket.
“Poor little bugger,” the woman said. “Hold him a minute while I nip back up for his things.” She held the baby out, giving Deryn no choice. He carefully supported the baby’s head, hoping the smell of urine (and worse) didn’t transfer itself to his clothes before the woman returned. The child looked up intoDeryn’s face, and he began to howl. Deryn felt dampness seeping through the blanket and through his shirt. Great. Just great.
An hour later, the baby was asleep in Eira’s arms. She sat at one end of a leather sofa, which was much too big for her small front room. Deryn perched at the other end, notebook open on his lap and phone ready to record. Photographs of Eira, with and without a man who Deryn assumed to be her husband, a younger couple on their wedding day, and dozens of a small boy and girl adorned every flat surface. Eira’s net curtains looked brand new.
“What can you tell me about the people next door?” he asked, noting that the baby was wrapped in a different blanket, and appeared much less damp. Even the few wisps of hair had been brushed.
“Sammi and Ky,” she said, “and this little one is called Joe. They haven’t been here long — a year, maybe. Baby’s about three months old. House is one of those buy to let things. Couple of lads came and put a new kitchen in and some carpet down, splashed the paint around, and next thing those two moved in.” Eira pursed her lips, whether at Sammi and Ky, or the lads, Deryn couldn’t tell. She reminded Deryn of his own mother. Both had large chests above slim waists and elegant legs. Both had well-coiffed hair, dyed blonde. Both spoke with the local Valleys accent. But Eira showed signs of poverty: cheap clothes that didn’t quite fit or flatter, hands reddened by work and washing, and slippers that had needed replacing several years before. His mother might live only a few streets away, but she shopped in upmarket Cardiff shops, had regular spa days so that her skin glowed with health, and always wore heels in a colour to match her outfit. If his mother possessed slippers, Deryn had never seen them.
“Were they good neighbours?” he asked.
Eira shrugged. “Pleasant enough. Said hello if I met them. Smoked too much weed around the baby. The garden stank of the stuff.” She gave Deryn a dark look through narrowed eyes. “You’d be aware of that, I expect.”
“You knew them well enough to know the baby’s name.”
“Of course I do. I gave them a load of baby things, didn’t I? Our Stacey insisted on buying all that blue stuff for her Geraint, and then she had Kelly and went out and got all pink.” Eira sighed at the profligacy of the younger generation. “Mind, Stacey and Rob can afford it. They’ve got one of those new houses down in Ponty.” She sighed. “This one’s parents didn’t work. Just watched telly and smoked weed. Fair play, there isn’t much round here, but still.”
“So, you didn’t know they used hard drugs?”
Eira clutched the baby more tightly. “You think I’d have left this one with them if I’d known that?”
“But you called us when you heard the baby crying?”
“Because I thought they’d gone out and left him or had an accident or something. Not because I thought they weredead.”
There was a rattling at the front door and aYoohoo, Mrs Jones!
Deryn got up to open the door to be greeted by a young woman in a long patchwork skirt, baggy black sweater, Dr. Martens boots, and pink hair. She held out her hand.
“Brooke Daniels, Glamorgan Children’s Services,” she said. “I’ve come for baby Joe.”
Outside, there was a white tent around the front of the house next door. Police cars and a mortuary van were parked in the narrow street. Deryn’s boss, DI Irene Glover, dressed as always in completely unmemorable clothes, hair cut short and face free of make-up, was chatting to one of the scenes of crime officers.People Deryn recognised as locals were gathered where they could see what was happening. As Deryn watched, the black mortuary van backed up towards the tent. The driver got out and opened the back doors. Everyone in the street bowed their heads as the two covered bodies of their neighbours were loaded up. There was a collective lightening of the atmosphere as the van drove away, until one of the spectators saw Deryn, and whispered to the man next to him. The man looked straight at Deryn and deliberately spat onto the pavement.
“I guess they don’t like the police round here,” said a voice from Deryn’s left. He hadn’t realised that the social worker was still there, with baby Joe in her arms.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Deryn said, though he was fairly certain she wasn’t. Yes, he was recognisable as a copper, but he was also recognisable as the brother-in-law of the man who had almost certainly supplied the drugs. Not that he could do anything about it.
