“This does look like a costume,” Clio said.
“We’re looking online to see if we can find it, but we’re also considering whether it was specially made to match the clothes in the portrait of St. Katherine you sent us.”
The professor’s underwear was of a completely different quality: black lace and silk. Sexy. Expensive.
“How do you afford this stuff on a professor’s salary?” Clio asked.
Izzy shrugged. “She had no husband, no kids. Her salary was her own.”
“Even so. Are these real?” Clio held up a bag containing two pearl earrings.
“We think so. And the necklace.”
“That’s a big diamond.”
“She definitely had money to spend on herself.”
“Unless someone bought these things for her.”
“We’ve found no sign that she was in a relationship. Her parents are deceased so maybe she inherited money. We spoke to her colleagues this morning, and according to them she was wedded to her work. They seem to be the closest thing she had to a family. We’re working on getting into her phone still.”
Clio picked up the sewing kit that had drawn her here. It was the cheapest of things, the kind of kit hotels give out for free, a needle threader and needle attached to a soft piece of cardboard. A few loops of yarn in black, blue, and white. The needle was threaded with a short length of black cotton.
“She used this,” Clio said.
“Somebody did.”
Clio couldn’t shake a gut feeling that there were connections to be made between Eleanor Bruton’s sewing of her letter into the curtain, and the embroidery, and this, but she kept the idea to herself for now because she wanted to impress Izzy. It was good for women in the police force to make connections with one another; she wasn’t going to start saying anything Izzy might think was outlandish or stupid.
Diana’s handbag was black, also expensive. It was by Chanel. Clio inspected it, looking for places where it might have needed asmall repair, but it was in good shape, and it would have been hard to sew, if not impossible, with such a flimsy needle. Besides, nobody repaired handbags in an emergency. You repaired sweaters or shirts. You sewed on buttons that had fallen off. Because there were no bloodstains on the dress, it was likely that whatever Diana had been wearing when she was killed had been removed and replaced with this costume. Perhaps the repair had been to some item of clothing they were yet to find or might never find.
Unless.
Izzy’s phone rang. “Excuse me, I need to take this,” she said.
Clio reached for the evidence bag containing Diana’s black underwear. The panties were skimpy, with no visible repairs. The bra was lightly padded, the cups covered in lace.
Izzy’s conversation got heated, quickly. “Sorry,” she mouthed to Clio, and stepped out of the room.
Clio removed the bra from the evidence bag. It looked normal, but when she ran her fingers along the seams and around the underwire, they caught on something beneath one of the cups, and the cup itself felt different from the other one. It was slightly more padded.
Clio peered at it closely. At the base of the cup, there was a very small, very neat row of hand-stitching. She had nothing to unpick it with and couldn’t remove her gloves without contaminating the evidence. She tugged at it gently, and the flimsy thread snapped, allowing her to ease her fingertips inside, and remove a very fragile piece of embroidery.
She caught her breath.
Anya
I told Sid everything and he did the same.
It was overwhelming. So many things didn’t make sense to us,but we could barely process them while Mum’s body was fighting so hard and while Viv was fussing around us. For the first time, I found her overbearing.
“Do you think Viv only feels good when she’s caring for people?” I whispered that night. We were in the small sitting room in the cottage. I’d told Viv she could go home, but she said she preferred to stay, that she wouldn’t be able to relax while Mum was so sick. She was in the kitchen, preparing us a meal we hadn’t asked for, didn’t want, and knew would taste like ashes in our mouths.
“I don’t know,” Sid said. “I think it’s odd.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Everything feels disturbing.”
