The Helper

NINETEEN

‘I’ll make some tea,’ says Mrs Whatever-with-a-z, and she toddles off to the kitchen.

Doyle is relieved to be apart from her for a short while, but at the same time he feels a little awkward. Tabitha Peyton looks like she could break down at any second, and he is not good at dealing with females who go to pieces on him. He never knows what to say or do. He wishes now that Holden or one of his other male colleagues had come down here with him, so that at least if she did start bawling he could join with the other cop in a manly show of rolling his eyes at the weakness of the female sex.

‘You mind if I sit down?’ he asks.

She nods, and he takes his seat.

‘Your roommate,’ he says. ‘Helena, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Helena Colquitt. I’ve known her a long time. I still can’t believe she’s. .’ She wipes her nose again.

Don’t cry, thinks Doyle. Please don’t cry.

‘It’s okay to be upset. I understand,’ he says. And then he thinks, Why the hell am I saying that?

‘It’s just that. . I don’t know why anyone would do this to her.’

Doyle doesn’t comprehend it either. The logic — if there is any — still escapes him.

‘Tell me what happened here tonight.’

She stares at her hands while she casts her mind back. ‘We were in the apartment together — Helena and me. I ordered a pizza and then I asked her to run a bath for me while I came down to see Bridget — Mrs Serafinowicz. She’s been suffering with her arthritis lately, and so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do for her. She’s been so good to me since I moved here. She’s looked after me like I was her own daughter. I only intended to stay for a few minutes, but we got talking, you know? Maybe if I’d gone straight back upstairs. .’

Her voice starts to break, and so Doyle urges her on before the floodgates can open: ‘So eventually you did go back up. Did you pass anyone on the stairs? See anything unusual?’

‘No. Everything was normal. I got to the apartment, I opened the door. Everything was as it should be. I didn’t suspect a thing. Only there was no sign of Helena. I called her, but there was no answer. And that’s when I went into the bathroom.’

The word ‘bathroom’ comes out as a squeak that is so high-pitched it is almost inaudible. Doyle thinks it’s not going to take much more to make her lose it altogether, but he has to press on.

‘Okay, you’re doing great. Tell me what you saw.’

She clears her throat. ‘I saw Helena. In the bathtub. In the water she’d run for me. Her head was. . she was under the water. She wasn’t moving.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I ran over to her. I tried to pull her out of the water. When her head came up, I could see blood all around her nose, and her eyes were wide open. I’ll never forget that look she was giving me. She was dead — I just knew it — and the shock of it made me drop her back in the water. That’s when I started panicking. I ran out of the apartment, screaming for help. Mr Casey, my neighbor from across the hall, came out to see what the noise was. He’s pretty old now, but he used to be a cop many years ago. I don’t remember what I said to him — it must have sounded complete nonsense — but he went into my apartment to check it out. I walked back into the living room, but I couldn’t go any farther. I could hear the movement of water in the bathroom for a few minutes, and then Mr Casey came back out. His arms were dripping wet. He didn’t have to say anything. The look on his face. .’

The dam gives way then. She brings her hands to her face and her shoulders start to heave as she sobs.

Oh, Christ, thinks Doyle. He starts to reach out a hand to her shoulder, then pulls it back again, not sure what to do.

He is saved by the bell. Or rather the rattle of crockery announcing the return of Mrs S, now burdened with a silver tray. She takes one look at the pair on the sofa, then says, ‘What did I tell you? She’s too upset for this.’

She sets the tray down on a dark wooden table in front of Doyle, then tells him to move over. Doyle shuffles along the sofa to allow Mrs Serafinowicz to squeeze in and console the distraught Tabitha.

While this is going on, Doyle busies himself with jotting a few things down in his notebook. The girl’s story seems entirely kosher. Casey would have been the old guy Doyle had seen talking to the detectives upstairs. As an ex-cop himself, Casey would have been equipped to confirm that the girl was dead, and he would have known to put the body back exactly as he found it.

When the sniffling has subsided, Mrs Serafinowicz moves off the sofa and starts pouring the tea. Doyle takes a cup from her out of politeness.

‘I won’t take up too much more of your time,’ he tells Tabitha. ‘Just a few more questions, okay?’

He gets a nod from Tabitha and a tut of disapproval from Mrs Serafinowicz.

‘Tell me about Helena. How did you meet? How did she become your roommate?’

‘I think it was, like, fate, you know? I moved to New York about a year ago, hoping to make a fresh start. See, both my parents were killed a few months before that in a car crash. I thought that maybe by making the move, taking a new job, meeting new people, I could move on with my life. Only it didn’t work out like that. I was a mess. I started drinking, hanging around with guys I didn’t really know. If it hadn’t been for Bridget here, taking me under her wing. .’

Doyle looks across at Mrs Serafinowicz, and for the first time sees her for what she is: a woman who genuinely cares about the people living under her roof. It’s a rare thing, and Doyle is touched by it.

‘It was Bridget who told me that I needed to make some real friends, that I needed companionship. So I thought about a roommate. That way, I’d have company and someone to help with the rental. Not that Bridget charges me anywhere near the rent that some places ask.’

Mrs Serafinowicz doesn’t react. Doesn’t appear smug or holier-than-thou. She simply looks Doyle in the eye, and he feels that he is actually starting to like this woman.

‘So I started searching. On the Internet mostly, until my computer broke down. But none of the women I interviewed seemed suitable. Some were downright flaky. The rest, I just didn’t see myself being able to live with them for God knows how many years. So I gave up. And then, about six weeks ago, I got a phone call. From Helena. We were at university together. Carnegie Mellon. We were best friends at the time. We dressed the same, we had the same interests. She even bought a Harley Davidson that was like mine. People used to call us the Turbo Twins. And here she was, calling me up. You know why? Because she was moving to New York and needed somewhere to stay. Just when I thought I was out of luck. See, that’s what I mean by fate.’ She reflects on that for a moment, then adds, ‘But I guess fate can work both ways. If I hadn’t asked her to move in with me. .’

‘You can’t think like that,’ Doyle says. ‘You can keep coming up with what-ifs till you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t change things. What happened is what happened. You couldn’t have done anything to change that.’

‘First useful thing you’ve said since you arrived,’ says Mrs Serafinowicz.

‘Helena wasn’t running away from anything, was she? She didn’t come to New York to get away from someone who might want to hurt her?’

‘Not as far as I know. She seemed happy enough. Nothing was troubling her. I was the one who needed the emotional support.’

‘What about after she arrived here? She get on the wrong side of anyone?’

‘No. We went out, we shopped, we had fun. There was no trouble at any time.’

It’s the answer Doyle expected, and the answer he didn’t want. He hoped there would be someone else he could tag for this, or at least hang a question mark over their head. As it is, it’s looking increasingly likely that Helena Colquitt is just the latest victim in a deadly sequence.

‘What about a key to the apartment? You or Helena ever give it out to anyone?’

‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘What about you, Mrs, uhm. .’

‘Serafinowicz. Maybe you should put it in your little notebook there. And don’t forget the z. But to answer your question, no, I do not give keys out to anyone but my tenants.’

Which is also the response Doyle expected and feared. What confounds him is that the only sign of a struggle was in the bathroom. How does a complete stranger manage to talk his way into the apartment of a beautiful girl who isn’t even properly dressed, and then get her into the bathroom without a fight of some kind? How the hell does he do that?

Doyle is starting to think that if there has been any satanic activity going on in this building, then maybe he should be looking upstairs for signs of it.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘Thank you. I’ll leave you alone now.’

Mrs Serafinowicz looks surprised. ‘That’s it? You have no more questions? The other cops asked a lot more than you did.’

Doyle has plenty more questions, but he knows he isn’t going to find the answers here.

‘I’m sure there’ll be other things we’ll need to ask at a later stage, but I’m done for now.’ He turns to Tabitha. ‘You got somewhere to go tonight?’

It’s Mrs Serafinowicz who answers. ‘She’s staying here. I have a furnished apartment available on the second floor. She can move in there for as long as she wants.’

Doyle wants to smile appreciatively at her and maybe even pass a compliment, but he suspects she’ll find a way to use it against him. Like most people, she has appearances to maintain.

‘Thanks for the tea,’ he says, and leaves it at that.

When he exits the apartment he stands in the hallway alone for a while. Something is troubling him, and it takes a minute or two for him to figure out what it is.

Helena was running a bath for Tabitha, and there was a pizza on the way. That means Tabitha had every intention of returning to her apartment pretty soon. She said so herself: I only intended to stay for a few minutes.

So why did the killer take such a huge risk? Why did he choose that moment and that location and that method — drowning isn’t always the quickest or tidiest of deaths — to murder a woman whose roommate could come back and disturb him at any second? Didn’t he care? Was he assuming that he could just as easily cope with overpowering and killing both of them?

It occurs to Doyle that this act seems a leap beyond anything the killer has done before in terms of daring. In fact it seems almost uncharacteristically rash.

Has the killer become more unhinged? Or is this simply his way of stepping up the game?

Whichever it is, there’s only one man who can give Doyle the answer.