the computer, so Bianca could take advantage of her missing friend’s research. They had known she was dead.
They had known she was dead because they had killed her and then cut her up, using Sam’s tree surgeon tools.
No.
We had looked at Sam’s (filthy) tools. There was no trace of blood on them. Bianca and Sam were both adamant that they hadn’t harmed her. And Bianca had pointed out that she’d known nothing about the cut-up bodies until she got her hands on the computer because Paige hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her about it.
I’d looked again at the Chiron Club. With better tech at my disposal, I’d found out that the inside source Paige had found was a grey suit who had worked at the Bishops Avenue house before being fired. His replacement was the charming Frenchman who had tipped me off about where Bianca was hidden. A bitter ex-employee repeating rumours as fact wouldn’t have been enough to scare the club into killing a freelance journalist, I thought. Not when they had covered their tracks so well. And the very fact that the bathroom had been left in such a poor condition proved to me that they thought they had got away with it. Their first act to cover it up should have been to strip out any evidence of the dismemberment and dispose of it. Arrogance, laziness and (I suspected) the thought that they might do it again had kept them from replacing the bath, to our benefit. But we still hadn’t identified the three unknown sources of blood we’d found. They’d got away with more than I’d have liked.
Orlando still denied having anything to do with Paige’s death. Could Roddy have killed her? I puzzled through possible motives: if she rejected him sexually, after all the time he’d spent wooing her, if she found out about his lap dance from a young teenage girl, if he lashed out in frustration or fear.
People killed for money, or because they were humiliated, or because they were frustrated. And people killed to protect themselves or those they loved.
Maybe it had been the father of a Chiron Club member who feared their son’s evil doings being exposed. A contract killing, efficient and controlled. No personal connection between the victim and killer.
Untraceable.
I had no evidence to suggest it was a contract killing but I believed they were capable of it. To the kind of men who frequented the Chiron Club she would be insignificant – an obstacle that had to be removed.
Standing in her home, I thought I’d never known a murder victim as entirely alone in the world as Paige. No parents, no friends she could trust. Unlike me, she had nowhere to go when life had kicked her in the teeth, except to her small, grim flat. No wonder she had thrown up walls around herself. No wonder she had celebrated and grieved and lived behind closed doors. And now, when she was gone, every trace of her passage through this world was being eradicated under a coat of fresh paint. Her belongings had been cleared out and scattered like the parts of her body, absorbed into an uncaring world.
I walked through the flat, my heels echoing on the bare floorboards, remembering how Mila had objected to the officers pounding up and down the stairs. This would be worse. I hoped she was away, because it would take the painter a while to work through the whole flat on his own. At a guess, it had been a long time since the flat was redecorated.
So why would anyone redecorate the stairs – the tiny, narrow passage up to the flat – instead of tackling the serious refurbishment the rest of the flat needed? The stairwell was the sort of place that never got painted. It shouldn’t have been anyone’s first priority.
I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down, and thought about motives and deceit and covering up, and how we had followed a trail that had been created for us to follow from the very start. Clues, hints, suspects, helpful remarks, all pointing us in the wrong direction, and I had gone willingly down that path, pleased to find it was so easy.
Who killed Paige, and why?
The answer had been right in front of me all the time.
46
The low, windblown bungalow crouched alone in flat grassland, where the roads petered out towards the distant edge of Sheppey. It faced the Swale, a channel of the Thames estuary