3
THE HEAVY BLACK-PAINTED FRONT door of number 18, Kentigern Gardens, opened on to a marbled lobby. Directly opposite the entrance was a handsome built-in mahogany desk, to the right of which was the staircase, which turned immediately out of sight (marble steps, with a brass and wood handrail); the entrance to the lift, with its burnished gold doors, and a solid dark-wood door set into the white-painted wall. On a white cubic display unit in the corner between this and the front doors was a vast display of deep pink oriental lilies in tall tubular vases, their scent heavy on the warm air. The left-hand wall was mirrored, doubling the apparent size of the space, reflecting the staring Strike and Robin, the lift doors and the modern chandelier hung in cubes of crystal overhead, and lengthening the security desk to a vast stretch of polished wood.
Strike remembered Wardle: “Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a fucking five-star hotel.” Beside him, Robin was trying not to look impressed. This, then, was how multimillionaires lived. She and Matthew occupied the lower floor of a semidetached house in Clapham; its sitting room was the same size as that designated for the off-duty guards, which Wilson showed them first. There was just enough room for a table and two chairs; a wall-mounted box contained all the master keys, and another door led into a tiny toilet cubicle.
Wilson was wearing a black uniform that was constabular in design, with its brass buttons, black tie and white shirt.
“Monitors,” he pointed out to Strike as they emerged from the back room and paused behind the desk, where a row of four small black-and-white screens was hidden from guests. One showed footage from the camera over the front door, affording a circumscribed view of the street; another displayed a similarly deserted view of an underground car park; a third the empty back garden of number 18, which comprised lawn, some fancy planting and the high back wall Strike had hoisted himself up on; and the fourth the interior of the stationary lift. In addition to the monitors, there were two control panels for the communal alarms and those for the doors into the pool and car park, and two telephones, one attached to an outside line, the other connected only to the three flats.
“That,” said Wilson, indicating the solid wooden door, “goes to the gym, the pool an’ the car park,” and at Strike’s request he led them through it.
The gym was small, but mirrored like the lobby, so that it appeared twice as big. It had one window, facing the street, and contained a treadmill, rowing and step machines and a set of weights.
A second mahogany door led to a narrow marble stair, lit by cubic wall lights, which took them on to a small lower landing, where a plain painted door led to the underground car park. Wilson opened it with two keys, a Chubb and a Yale, then flicked a switch. The floodlit area was almost as long as the street itself, full of millions of pounds’ worth of Ferrari, Audi, Bentley, Jaguar and BMW. At twenty-foot intervals along the back wall were doors like the one through which they had just come: inner entrances to each of the houses of Kentigern Gardens. The electric garage doors leading from Serf’s Way were close by number 18, outlined by silvery daylight.
Robin wondered what the silent men beside her were thinking. Was Wilson used to the extraordinary lives of the people who lived here; used to underground car parks and swimming pools and Ferraris? And was Strike thinking (as she was) that this long row of doors represented possibilities she had not once considered: chances of secret, hidden scurrying between neighbors, and of hiding and departing in as many ways as there were houses in the street? But then she noticed the numerous black snouts pointing from regular spots on the shadowy upper walls, feeding footage back to countless monitors. Was it possible that none of them had been watched that night?
“OK,” said Strike, and Wilson led them back onto the marble staircase, and locked up the car park door behind them.
Down another short flight of stairs, the smell of chlorine became stronger with every step, until Wilson opened a door at the bottom and they were assailed by a wave of warm, damp, chemically laden air.
“This is the door that wasn’t locked that night?” Strike asked Wilson, who nodded as he pressed another switch, and light blazed.
They had walked on to the broad marble rim of the pool, which was shielded by a thick plastic cover. The opposite wall was, again, mirrored; Robin saw the three of them standing there, incongruous in full dress against a mural of tropical plants and fluttering butterflies that extended up over the ceiling. The pool was around fifteen meters long, and at the far end was a hexagonal jacuzzi, beyond which were three changing cubicles, fronted by lockable doors.
“No cameras here?” asked Strike, looking around, and Wilson shook his head.
Robin could feel sweat prickling on the back of her neck and under her arms. It was oppressive in the pool area, and she was pleased to climb the stairs ahead of the two men, back to the lobby, which in comparison was pleasant and airy. A petite young blonde had appeared in their absence, wearing a pink overall, jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a plastic bucket full of cleaning implements.
“Derrick,” she said in heavily accented English, when the security guard emerged from downstairs. “I neet key for two.”
“This is Lechsinka,” said Wilson. “The cleaner.”
She favored Robin and Strike with a small, sweet smile. Wilson moved around behind the mahogany desk and handed her a key from beneath it, and Lechsinka then ascended the stairs, her bucket swinging, her tightly bejeaned backside swelling and swaying seductively. Strike, conscious of Robin’s sideways glance, withdrew his gaze from it reluctantly.
Strike and Robin followed Wilson upstairs to Flat 1, which he opened up with a master key. The door on to the stairwell, Strike noted, had an old-fashioned peephole.
“Mister Bestigui’s place,” announced Wilson, stifling the alarm by entering the code on a pad to the right of the door. “Lechsinka’s already bin in this morning.”
Strike could smell polish and see the track marks of a vacuum cleaner on the white carpet of the hallway, with its brass wall lights and its five immaculate white doors. He noticed the discreet alarm keypad on the right wall, at right angles to a painting in which dreamy goats and peasants floated over a blue-toned village. Tall vases of orchids stood on a black japanned table beneath the Chagall.
“Where’s Bestigui?” Strike asked Wilson.
“LA,” said the security guard. “Back in two days.”
The light, bright sitting room had three tall windows, each of them with a shallow stone balcony beyond; its walls were Wedgwood blue and nearly everything else was white. All was pristine, elegant and beautifully proportioned. Here, too, there was a single superb painting: macabre, surreal, with a spear-bearing man masked as a blackbird, arm in arm with a gray-toned headless female torso.
It was from this room that Tansy Bestigui maintained she had heard a screaming match two floors above. Strike moved up close to the long windows, noting the modern catches, the thickness of the panes, the complete lack of noise from the street, though his ear was barely half an inch from the cold glass. The balcony beyond was narrow, and filled with potted shrubs trimmed into pointed cones.
Strike moved off towards the bedroom. Robin remained in the sitting room, turning slowly where she stood, taking in the chandelier of Venetian glass, the muted rug in shades of pale blue and pink, the enormous plasma TV, the modern glass and iron dining table and silk-cushioned iron chairs; the small silver objets d’art on glass side tables and on the white marble mantelpiece. She thought, a little sadly, of the IKEA sofa of which she had, until now, felt so proud; then she remembered Strike’s camp bed in the office with a twinge of shame. Catching Wilson’s eye, she said, unconsciously echoing Eric Wardle:
“It’s a different world, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You couldn’t have kids in here.”
“No,” said Robin, who had not considered the place from that point of view.
Her employer strode out of the bedroom, evidently absorbed in establishing some point to his own satisfaction, and disappeared into the hall.
Strike was, in fact, proving to himself that the logical route from the Bestiguis’ bedroom to their bathroom was through the hall, bypassing the sitting room altogether. Furthermore, it was his belief that the only place in the flat from which Tansy could conceivably have witnessed the fatal fall of Lula Landry—and realized what she was seeing—was from the sitting room. In spite of Eric Wardle’s assertion to the contrary, nobody standing in the bathroom could have had more than a partial view of the window past which Landry had fallen: insufficient, at night, to be sure that whatever had fallen was a human, let alone to identify which human it had been.
Strike returned to the bedroom. Now that he was in solitary possession of the marital home, Bestigui was sleeping on the side nearest the door and the hall, judging by the clutter of pills, glasses and books piled on that bedside table. Strike wondered whether this had been the case while he cohabited with his wife.
A large walk-in wardrobe with mirrored doors led off the bedroom. It was full of Italian suits and shirts from Turnbull & Asser. Two shallow subdivided drawers were devoted entirely to cufflinks in gold and platinum. There was a safe behind a false panel at the back of the shoe racks.
“I think that’s everything in here,” Strike told Wilson, rejoining the other two in the sitting room.
Wilson set the alarm when they left the flat.
“You know all the codes for the different flats?”
“Yeah,” said Wilson. “Gotta, in case they go off.”
They climbed the stairs to the second floor. The staircase turned so tightly around the lift shaft that it was a succession of blind corners. The door to Flat 2 was identical to that of Flat 1, except that it was standing ajar. They could hear the growl of Lechsinka’s vacuum cleaner from inside.
“We got Mister an’ Missus Kolchak in here now,” said Wilson. “Ukrainian.”
The hallway was identical in shape to that of number 1, with many of the same features, including the alarm keypad on the wall at right angles to the front door; but it was tiled instead of carpeted. A large gilt mirror faced the entrance instead of a painting, and two fragile, spindly wooden tables on either side of it bore ornate Tiffany lamps.
“Were Bestigui’s roses on something like that?” asked Strike.
“On one that’s jus’ like ’em, yeah,” said Wilson. “It’s back in the lounge now.”
“And you put it here, in the middle of the hall, with the roses on it?”
“Yeah, Bestigui wanted Macc to see ’em soon as he walked in, but there was plenty of room to walk around ’em, you can see that. No need to knock ’em over. But he was young, the copper,” said Wilson tolerantly.
“Where are the panic buttons you told me about?” Strike asked.
“Round here,” said Wilson, leading him out of the hall and into the bedroom. “There’s one by the bed, and there’s another one in the sitting room.”
“Have all the flats got these?”
“Yeah.”
The relative positions of the bedrooms, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom were identical to those of Flat 1. Many of the finishings were similar, down to the mirrored doors in the walk-in wardrobe, which Strike went to check. While he was opening doors and surveying the thousands of pounds’ worth of women’s dresses and coats, Lechsinka emerged from the bedroom with a belt, two ties and several polythene-covered dresses, fresh from the dry-cleaner’s, over her arm.
“Hi,” said Strike.
“Hello,” she said, moving to a door behind him and pulling out a tie rack. “Excuse, please.”
He stood aside. She was short and very pretty in a pert, girlish way, with a rather flat face, a snub nose and Slavic eyes. She hung up the ties neatly while he watched her.
“I’m a detective,” he said. Then he remembered that Eric Wardle had described her English as “crap.”
“Like a policeman?” he ventured.
“Ah. Police.”
“You were here, weren’t you, the day before Lula Landry died?”
It took a few tries to convey exactly what he meant. When she grasped the point, however, she showed no objection to answering questions, as long as she could continue putting the clothes away as she talked.
“I always clean stair first,” she said. “Miz Landry is talking very loud at her brudder; he shouting that she gives boyfriend too much moneys, and she very bad with him.
“I clean number two, empty. Is clean already. Quick.”
“Were Derrick and the man from the security firm there while you were cleaning?”
“Derrick and…?”
“The repairman? The alarm man?”
“Yes, alarm man and Derrick, yes.”
Strike could hear Robin and Wilson talking in the hall, where he had left them.
“Do you set the alarms again after you’ve cleaned?”
“Put alarm? Yes,” she said. “One nine six six, same as door, Derrick tells me.”
“He told you the number before he left with the alarm man?”
Again, it took a few tries to get the point across, and when she grasped it, she seemed impatient.
“Yes, I already say this. One nine six six.”
“So you set the alarm after you’d finished cleaning in here?”
“Put alarm, yes.”
“And the alarm man, what did he look like?”
“Alarm man? Look?” She frowned attractively, her small nose wrinkling, and shrugged. “I not see he’s face. But blue—all blue…” she added, and with the hand not holding polythened dresses, she made a sweeping gesture down her body.
“Overall?” he suggested, but she met the word with blank incomprehension. “OK, where did you clean after that?”
“Number one,” said Lechsinka, returning to her task of hanging up the clothes, moving around him to find the correct rails. “Clean big windows. Miz Bestigui talking on telephone. Angry. Upset. She say she no want to lie no more.”
“She didn’t want to lie?” repeated Strike.
Lechsinka nodded, standing on tiptoes to hang up a floor-length gown.
“You heard her say,” he repeated clearly, “on the phone, that she didn’t want to lie anymore?”
Lechsinka nodded again, her face blank, innocent.
“Then she see me and she shout ‘Go away, go away!’ ”
“Really?”
Lechsinka nodded and continued to put away clothes.
“Where was Mr. Bestigui?”
“Not there.”
“Do you know who she was speaking to? On the phone?”
“No.” But then, a little slyly, she said, “Woman.”
“A woman? How do you know?”
“Shouting, shouting on telephone. I can hear woman.”
“It was a row? An argument? They were yelling at each other? Loud, yeah?”
Strike could hear himself lapsing into the absurd, overdeliberate language of the linguistically challenged Englishman. Lechsinka nodded again as she pulled open drawers in search of the place for the belt, the only item now remaining in her arms. When at last she had coiled it up and put it away, she straightened and walked away from him, into the bedroom. He followed.
While she made the bed and neatened the bedside tables, he established that she had cleaned Lula Landry’s flat last that day, after the model had left to visit her mother. She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, nor had she spotted any blue writing paper, whether written on or blank. Guy Somé’s handbags, and the various items for Deeby Macc, had been delivered to the security desk by the time she had finished, and the last thing she had done at work that day had been to take the designer’s gifts up to Lula’s and Macc’s respective flats.
“And you set the alarms again after putting the things in there?”
“I put alarms, yes.”
“Lula’s?”
“Yes.”
“And one nine six six in Flat Two?”
“Yes.”
“Can you remember what you put away in Deeby Macc’s flat?”
She had to mime some of the items, but she managed to convey that she remembered two tops, a belt, a hat, some gloves and (she made a fiddling mime around her wrists) cufflinks.
After stowing these things in the open shelving area of the walk-in wardrobe, so that Macc could not miss them, she had reset the alarm and gone home.
Strike thanked her very much, and lingered just long enough to admire once more her tightly denimed backside as she straightened the duvet, before rejoining Robin and Wilson in the hall.
As they proceeded up the third flight of stairs, Strike checked Lechsinka’s story with Wilson, who agreed that he had instructed the repairman to set the alarm to 1966, like the front door.
“I jus’ chose a number that’d be easy for Lechsinka to remember, because of the front door. Macc coulda reset it to somethin’ different if he’d wanted.”
“Can you remember what the repairman looked like? You said he was new?”
“Really young guy. Hair to here.”
Wilson indicated the base of his neck.
“White?”
“Yeah, white. Didn’t even look like he was shaving yet.”
They had reached the front door of Flat Three, once the home of Lula Landry. Robin felt a frisson of something—fear, excitement—as Wilson opened the third smoothly painted white front door, with its glassy bullet-sized peephole.
The top flat was architecturally different from the other two: smaller and airier. It had been recently decorated throughout in shades of cream and brown. Guy Somé had told Strike that the flat’s famous previous inhabitant loved color; but it was now as impersonal as any upmarket hotel room. Strike led the way in silence to the sitting room.
The carpet here was not lush and woolen as in Bestigui’s flat, but made of rough sand-colored jute. Strike ran his heel across it; it made no mark or track.
“Was the floor like this when Lula lived here?” he asked Wilson.
“Yeah. She chose it. It was nearly new, so they left it.”
Instead of the regularly spaced long windows of the lower flats, each with three separate small balconies, the penthouse flat boasted a single pair of double doors leading on to one wide balcony. Strike unlocked and opened these doors and stepped outside. Robin did not like watching him do it; after a glance at Wilson’s impassive face, she turned and stared at the cushions and the black-and-white prints, trying not to think about what had happened here three months previously.
Strike was looking down into the street, and Robin might have been surprised to know that his thoughts were not as clinical or dispassionate as she supposed.
He was visualizing someone who had lost control completely; someone running at Landry as she stood, fine-boned and beautiful, in the outfit she had thrown on to meet a much-anticipated guest; a killer lost in rage, half dragging, half pushing her, and finally, with the brute strength of a highly motivated maniac, throwing her. The seconds it took her to fall through the air towards the concrete, smothered in its deceptively soft covering of snow, must have seemed to last an eternity. She had flailed, trying to find handholds in the merciless empty air; and then, without time to make amends, to explain, to bequeath or to apologize, without any of the luxuries permitted those who are given notice of their impending demise, she had broken on the road.
The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof.
His mobile phone rang as he stood there. John Bristow’s name and number were displayed; he took the call.
“Hi, John, thanks for getting back to me.”
“No problem. Any news?” asked the lawyer.
“Maybe. I’ve had an expert look at Lula’s laptop, and he found out a file of photographs had been deleted from it after Lula died. Do you know anything about that?”
His words were met by complete silence. The only reason Strike knew that they had not been cut off was that he could hear a small amount of background noise at Bristow’s end.
At last the lawyer said, in an altered voice:
“They were taken off after Lula died?”
“That’s what the expert says.”
Strike watched a car roll slowly down the street below, and pause halfway along. A woman got out, swathed in fur.
“I—I’m sorry,” Bristow said, sounding thoroughly shaken. “I’m just—just shocked. Perhaps the police removed this file?”
“When did you get the laptop back from them?”
“Oh…sometime in February, I suppose, early February.”
“This file was removed on March the seventeenth.”
“But—but this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody knew the password.”
“Well, evidently somebody did. You said the police told your mother what it was.”
“My mother certainly wouldn’t have removed—”
“I’m not suggesting she did. Is there any chance she could have left the laptop open, and running? Or that she gave somebody else the password?”
He thought that Bristow must be in his office. He could hear faint voices in the background, and, distantly, a woman laughing.
“I suppose that’s possible,” said Bristow slowly. “But who would have removed photographs? Unless…but God, that’s horrible…”
“What is?”
“You don’t think one of the nurses could have taken the pictures? To sell to a newspaper? But that’s a dreadful thought…a nurse…”
“All the expert knows is that they were deleted; there’s no evidence that they were copied and stolen. But as you say—anything’s possible.”
“But who else—I mean, naturally I hate to think it could be a nurse, but who else could it be? The laptop’s been at my mother’s ever since the police gave it back.”
“John, are you aware of every visitor your mother’s had in the last three months?”
“I think so. I mean, obviously, I can’t be sure…”
“No. Well, there’s the difficulty.”
“But why—why would anyone do this?”
“I can think of a few reasons. It would be a big help if you could ask your mother about this, though, John. Whether she had the laptop running in mid-March. Whether any of her visitors expressed an interest in it.”
“I—I’ll try.” Bristow sounded very stressed, almost tearful. “She’s very, very weak now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Strike, formally. “I’ll be in touch shortly. ’Bye.”
He stepped back from the balcony and closed the doors, then turned to Wilson.
“Derrick, can you show me how you searched this place? What order you looked in the rooms that night?”
Wilson thought for a moment, then said:
“I come in here first. Looked around, seen the doors open. Didn’t touch ’em. Then,” he indicated that they should follow him, “I looked in here…”
Robin, following in the two men’s wake, noticed a subtle change in the way that Strike was talking to the security man. He was asking simple, deft questions, focusing on what Wilson had felt, touched, seen and heard at each step of his way through the flat.
Under Strike’s guidance, Wilson’s body language started to change. He began to enact the way he had held the doorjambs, leaning into rooms, casting a rapid look around. When he crossed to the only bedroom, he did it at a slow-motion run, responding to the spotlight of Strike’s undivided attention; he dropped to his knees to demonstrate how he had looked under the bed, and at Strike’s prompting remembered that a dress had lain crumpled beneath his legs; he led them, face set with concentration, to the bathroom, and showed them how he had swiveled to check behind the door before sprinting (he almost mimed it, arms moving exaggeratedly as he walked) back to the front door.
“And then,” said Strike, opening it and gesturing Wilson through, “you came out…”
“I came out,” agreed Wilson, in his bass voice, “an’ I jabbed the lift button.”
He pretended to do it, and feigned pushing open the doors in his anxiety to see what was inside.
“Nothing—so I started running back down again.”
“What could you hear now?” Strike asked, following him; neither of them were paying any attention to Robin, who closed the flat door behind her.
“Very distant—the Bestiguis yelling—and I turn round this corner and—”
Wilson stopped dead on the stair. Strike, who seemed to have anticipated something like this, stopped too; Robin careered straight into him, with a flustered apology that he cut off with a raised hand, as though, she thought, Wilson was in a trance.
“And I slipped,” said Wilson. He sounded shocked. “I forgot that. I slipped. Here. Backwards. Sat down hard. There was water. Here. Drops. Here.”
He was pointing at the stairs.
“Drops of water,” repeated Strike.
“Yeah.”
“Not snow.”
“No.”
“Not wet footprints.”
“Drops. Big drops. Here. Mi foot skidded and I slipped. And I just got up and kept running.”
“Did you tell the police about the drops of water?”
“No. I forgot. Till now. I forgot.”
Something that had bothered Strike all along had at last been made clear. He let out a great satisfied sigh and grinned. The other two stared.