Die With Me by Elena Forbes Page B

front. But it had revealed nothing new, the wording being identical to what Tom had ordered Gemma to write. Kramer and his two friends’ alibis had checked out and they had let him go with a severe bollocking for withholding evidence. Kramer was a dead end. They would have to look for Gemma’s killer elsewhere.

9
    Monday, six thirty a.m., and Tartaglia sat at Clarke’s desk in his large, comfortable corduroy chair, struggling to focus on the file in front of him, a half-drunk mug of lukewarm black coffee at his side. He had had no sleep in the previous twenty-four hours and was finding staying awake a challenge. Contrary to Tartaglia’s initial hopes, Cornish had continued to refuse to give him any additional resources to scour the registers at the coroners’ offices in the various London districts. It wasn’t clear whether this was because he doubted Tartaglia’s instincts or whether he feared what might be found, although Tartaglia suspected it was a combination of both. In the end, Tartaglia’s team had spent the last couple of days painstakingly going through the books page-by-page, clocking up hundreds of man-hours, complaining vociferously that it was all a complete waste of time. Eventually, they had turned up two suicides that appeared to fit the pattern. The case files had been retrieved from central records and, after Tartaglia had read through the documents in detail, Donovan and Dickenson had been immediately dispatched to interview the families.
    Laura Benedetti, aged fifteen, had fallen to her death eight months before in a church in Richmond, her body found by a local woman coming in to change the flowers. Laura lived in a council flat in Islington, several miles away, very close to Tartaglia’s sister, Nicoletta’s house. According to Donovan, Laura was the only child of a couple from Sardinia who seemed to work all hours of the day and night, the mother cleaning houses in the smarter streets of the area, the father a head waiter in the restaurant of a West End hotel. The photo Tartaglia had seen of Laura reminded him instantly of Nicoletta at the same age, oval face, soft brown eyes and long, dark hair, although there was something dreamy about Laura’s expression which was very different to Nicoletta’s. Donovan had told Tartaglia how Laura’s father had wanted to return home to Sardinia immediately after the tragedy but her mother had so far refused. She was unable to leave the country where her daughter had died, making a shrine of Laura’s tiny bedroom and visiting her grave almost daily. Donovan seemed more than usually affected by what she had heard, stating with glistening eyes how some people found it impossible to move on in any way from such a tragedy.
    The other girl, Elinor Best, known as Ellie, had died four months after Laura in similar circumstances in a church in Chiswick, her body discovered by a tramp taking refuge inside during a storm. Ellie had lived several miles away in a prosperous residential part of Wandsworth with a younger brother and sister. Her father was a solicitor, her mother a journalist, and her background couldn’t have been more different to Gemma and Laura’s. Aged sixteen, with reddish-brown hair, a rash of freckles and a pert, turned-up nose, she had been a budding violinist, chosen a few weeks before her death to play in one of the London youth orchestras. Her parents had recently separated and Donovan and Dickenson had only been able to see the mother so far, who was living alone with her two remaining children in the house in Wandsworth, apparently blaming the father for what had happened to Ellie.
    But most striking of all had been the fact that both girls had left brief suicide notes and the wording was almost identical to the note left by Gemma Kramer. No doubt they too had been dictated by Tom. There were no witnesses to either Laura’s or Ellie’s death and with nothing to arouse suspicion, no further investigation had seemed necessary. The