Die With Me by Elena Forbes

out a receipt for the items she was taking. He held the door open for her as she climbed behind the wheel, then handed her a folded piece of paper.
    ‘That’s the list you wanted,’ he said. ‘I’ve written down a couple of names but I can’t believe any of them would…’ He shook his head, clenching his lips, unable to finish the sentence.
    She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘Thank you, Mr Kramer. We just have to check every angle you know. We wouldn’t be doing our job properly otherwise.’
    He nodded slowly as if he accepted this, resting his arm heavily on the edge of the door as if he wanted to keep her there. ‘So, Sergeant. What do you think happened to our Gemma? It was an accident, right?’
    ‘It’s too early to tell, Mr Kramer,’ she said, noncommittally, hoping he’d let her leave without probing any further. Kramer was still a suspect, even though in her heart she didn’t believe he had had anything to do with it. She started the engine but he was still holding on to the door as if he wasn’t finished.
    ‘You know, they thought it was suicide,’ he said leaning towards her and speaking in a whisper, as if he was worried that someone might overhear. ‘But I told them it can’t be. Gemma would never do that. It would break her mum’s heart, it would.’
    ‘It’s not suicide, Mr Kramer. You can be sure of that,’ she replied, surprised again that he seemed unable to understand that Gemma’s death was suspicious.
    He nodded once more, looking strangely relieved, and stepped back from the car. Something about his reaction didn’t feel right and she was aware of him watching her as she closed the door. Turning to reach for her seatbelt, she glanced over at him again and caught a glimmer of something on his face that puzzled her. He looked like someone who had just pulled off a trick, although for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

5
    It was evening and the investigation into Gemma Kramer’s death was well under way. Tartaglia yawned and locked his fingers in front of him, cracking his knuckles and stretching his neck forward to ease the tiredness that had suddenly overwhelmed him. There had been the team to assemble from various other on-going cases, actions to be assigned and a further debriefing and file handover with the DI at Ealing CID. Until he heard back from Donovan, the priority was St Sebastian’s. Everyone who was available had gone over to Ealing to conduct interviews, starting with the vicar and the people who used the church regularly, and going on to knock on doors in the area. Local CCTV footage was being checked, although in such a residential district, cameras were few and far between, and the tube station was their main hope. Somehow, they had to try and come up with more witnesses and get a better description of the man seen with Gemma.
    As acting SIO, Tartaglia had decided to move out of the cramped quarters he normally shared with Gary Jones, the other DI on Clarke’s team. It wasn’t an issue of his new seniority. He needed a quiet place where he could gather his thoughts and think through things clearly without interruption.
    Standing in the doorway of Clarke’s office, he wondered how long it would take him to sort out the mess of papers, files and miscellaneous possessions Clarke had left behind. He felt a pang of sadness as he thought about Clarke lying motionless in his hospital bed but he couldn’t work in such chaos. How Clarke had ever managed so effortlessly was beyond him.
    The room was little more than a shoebox at the front of the building, the single grimy window facing onto the road that led from Barnes Pond to the common, opposite the backs of a row of expensive period houses, with neat gardens; suburban Barnes in all its glory. Judging by the icy temperature, the heating was on the blink again. Nothing in the bloody building ever worked properly. But at least he didn’t have to put up with Jones’s BO any longer, the