But he could not pinpoint whatever it was that disturbed him and several cups of strong coffee later he had decided that this was something he would have to pursue on his own, whatever Michael Thackeray said. By eight-thirty he was parking on the Heights and, head down against the driving rain, dodging through the hooded teenagers and mothers with push-chairs and small children in tow who were battling their way from the flats to schools and nurseries on the periphery of the estate. The third floor walkway was deserted when he reached it, slightly breathless from the climb, and the police tape which had been stretched across Donna’s doorway flapped forlornly in the wind. He detached the other end and stuffed it into his jacket pocket before using his credit card as before to gain easy entrance to the flat. He leaned against the front door, wiping the rain from his face and out of his eyes and breathing heavily, trying to reconstruct in his mind exactly what he had done the day before when he had come looking for his lover.
As he made his way from room to room, he found that little had changed. If his colleagues had conducted any sort of a search it had not been a very thorough one. He glanced into some of the drawers and cupboards in the living room, but there was no sign of the files and computer discs Joyce said she had kept at the Project. Perhaps the police had found and taken those already, he thought.
In the bedroom, Donna’s deep blue nightdress still lay where she had evidently tossed it onto the pillows at the top of the bed. He picked it up and held it against his cheek, smelling her perfume and remembering occasions when he had helped her slip out of it. One strap, he noticed, was held in place only by a thread, as if it had been pulled too hard to take some strain. Was that, he wondered, why Donna had apparently taken it off and walked to her death in the bathroom naked. Or could there be a more sinister explanation?
He stood for a long time in the bathroom doorway. The room was empty now, the bath-water drained away leaving only a brownish tide-mark and some dark stains on the corktiled floor. But he could still see Donna as she had lain almost afloat in the brimming tub, eyes half open, her face surprisingly peaceful for someone who surely must have known that her life-blood was draining inexorably away. Had she taken enough pills, he wondered, to make the whole procedure stress-free, a painless exit from a life which had suddenly splintered apart? Or had she taken enough pills to make it easy for someone else to take her from her bed and put her into the bath with the minimum resistance? Why, if she had walked alone from her bed to the bathroom had she discarded her nightdress? It seemed an unlikely thing for a woman who knew she was going to be found dead to do, to choose to be found naked rather than even lightly clothed. Was it simply the lack of dignity in her death which made him so uneasy? Or something else?
And then suddenly, he had it. He banged his fist on the door jamb in fury and turned the light off and then on again. It had been almost dark in the bathroom when he had arrived the previous day, he thought, even though it had been midday and he remembered now that he had pulled the lightswitch on without thinking. Again this morning he had found the room gloomy and had switched on the light automatically as he had gone in. But if Donna had died much earlier, as seemed likely, then this small airless room must have been pitch dark when she had got into the bath and slit her wrists if the light had not been switched on. That, Mower thought, was not just unlikely, it was almost impossible. Someone must have turned out the bathroom light after Donna died and before he arrived the next day to search for her. And that someone had more than likely killed her.
The wave of red hot anger which threatened to overwhelm him subsided gradually and he splashed his face with cold water at the bathroom basin and dried himself roughly on one of Donna’s towels before going back into the living room and flinging himself into a chair. His first instinct was to call Michael Thackeray and insist that he launch a full scale murder inquiry. But a moment’s thought told him that might be counter-productive. He needed more, he thought, to break through the scepticism with which his new certainty would be greeted at police HQ. His credibility was already minimal, he thought, blown away by his difficulties over the last few months. It would take more than a sudden intuition in an empty flat to convince Thackeray that what looked like a perfectly comprehensible suicide was anything more. Superintendent Longley and the drug squad would be even harder to shift. What he needed was more evidence, and that might be hard to come by.
He glanced at his watch and pulled out his mobile phone. Amos Atherton started work early but he caught him before he had moved into the lab.
“She’s scheduled for eleven,” Atherton said in response to Mower’s inquiry about the post-mortem on Donna Maitland’s body. “There’s what’s left of two lads who drove into a lorry last night I’ve to look over first. I thought the Maitland women was a routine suicide. There’s nowt else I should know about, is there?”
Mower hesitated. He knew that whatever he said to Atherton would get back to Thackeray, probably sooner rather than later.
“Just a niggle,” he said. “There were people who had it in for her. I want to be sure that no one helped her on her way. She told me she was going to take some sleeping pills and get an early night.”
“Friend of yours, was she?” Atherton asked. “Close friend?”
“You could say.”
“I’ll take a close look, then, lad,” Atherton said. “A blood test for the pills, any road. But the wrist wounds looked bad enough to have taken her out pretty quickly, I reckon, from a first glance yesterday. Down to the bone on her left wrist.”
“Unusually deep? For a razor blade? That’s all I found in the bathroom with her.”
Mower heard Atherton’s slight intake of breath at the other end followed by a long silence.
“I’ll let you have the report a.s.a.p,” he said at last.
“I’m not in the office,” Mower said and was unsurprised when this piece of information was greeted by another silence.
“So you’ll not see it there?”
“Can I call you?” Mower asked, knowing he was putting his head into a noose.
“At home,” Atherton had said eventually, giving him a number and hanging up.
Mower’s second call was to a mobile and was answered instantly.
“Yo,” Dizzy B said when Mower had explained what he was doing. “Strikes me you’re taking all sorts of chances here, bro.”
“I need your help,” Mower said. “Where are you? Can you come up to the Heights?”
It took five minutes hard talking to persuade Sanderson that it was a good idea to return to the scene of his arrest and in the end it was only Mower’s conviction that Donna could have been murdered which overcame his reluctance.
By the time he had finished his calls, the fire in Mower’s belly had turned to ice. He took one last look around the flat, let himself out of the front door, reattached the police tape and began his hunt for witnesses to anything untoward which might have happened along Donna’s walkway, or anywhere else in the block, the night Donna died. He was halfway down the concrete staircase when he caught a glimpse of movement below and began to hurry down two steps at a time. In the entrance hall he caught up with a skinny youth in a hooded top, grabbed his shoulder, spun him round and slammed him hard against the graffiti-covered wall.
“What’s your problem?” he whispered in the boy’s ear. “Live here, do you?”
“Who wants to know?”
Mower tightened his grip on the boy’s neck and forced his head back against the rough concrete until he knew the pressure was hurting.
“Live here, do you?” he asked again. This time the boy nodded, as he tried ineffectually to unlock Mower’s grip.