Tuesday's Gone

Eighteen

For Yvette, it was mainly a matter of bureaucracy and logistics, like most of her job. Early in the day she obtained confirmation in writing that, since Flat 2, 14 Waverley Street, was associated with an indictable offence, no search warrant was required. She contacted the police station in Balham where the disappearance had been reported. From there she got a number for the woman who had reported Poole missing. She phoned Janet Ferris, and when she told her that a body had been found, the woman started to cry. From her, Yvette got the number of the landlord, a Mr Michnik. She arranged to meet Janet Ferris at the address, then phoned Mr Michnik and asked to meet him there as well. She had just booked the scene-of-crime team when her phone rang and she picked it up. A female voice told her that she had Commissioner Crawford for her. Yvette took a deep breath.

‘Is that DC Long?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where’s Karlsson?’

‘He’s in Gloucester. At a funeral.’

‘Family?’

‘No,’ said Yvette. ‘It’s Katherine Ripon.’ There was a pause. ‘The woman Dean Reeve snatched.’

‘Oh, her.’

‘The one we didn’t find,’ said Yvette.

‘There was a pause. She stared out of the window and waited.

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘What’s happened with that murder charge? The Deptford lunatic case.’

‘We’ve got the file back, sir. From the CPS.’

‘I thought that one was finished,’ he said, his voice deepening ominously. ‘I made it quite clear.’

‘There was new evidence. It’s turned out to be a bit more complicated.’

‘Really?’

‘We know who he is.’

Crawford sighed.

She could hear a pen tap-tapping and knew the grim expression on his face. ‘Do you want me to tell you the details?’ Yvette asked.

‘Anything I need to know? Anything operational?’

‘No.’

‘Just get on with it, then.’

Before she had a chance to say yes, the line had gone dead. She was left with the feeling she had done something wrong but she wasn’t sure what it was.

Her car was late picking her up and they got stuck in traffic on Balham High Street. By the time she arrived at the house, she saw that the scene-of-crime van was already there. It was an ordinary pebbledash house on a residential street. A man wearing an anorak was standing outside.

‘Mr Michnik?’ she said.

‘I am the owner of the house.’ He had an accent she couldn’t place exactly. Something Eastern European. ‘I let the people in already.’ Yvette looked up. The window on the first floor was illuminated by the lights they’d set up inside. ‘Is he dead?’

‘We’ve found a body,’ she said. ‘We think it may be Mr Poole’s. Did you know him?’

‘He is my tenant. I meet him.’

She took a notebook. ‘At some point we’ll need a proper statement from you,’ she said, ‘but, first, can I ask when you last saw him?’

‘Two months,’ Michnik said. ‘Maybe three. I don’t know. I meet him just a few time. He pays the rent regular. He’s not trouble, so I don’t see him.’

‘When did he move in?’

‘I check that when you ring. He come here in May last year. The beginning.’

‘Do you know what his job was?’

Michnik thought for a moment. ‘A businessman, maybe. He wears a suit.’

‘What kind of person was he?’

‘He pays the deposit, he pays the rent. He’s not trouble. He’s polite. He’s good.’

‘How many people live in this house?’

‘There are three flats.’

‘I talked to Janet Ferris.’

‘Yes, she is on the ground floor, and there is a German on the top floor. He is a student but he is a good student. He is an older student.’

‘Are the flats furnished?’

‘Not the ground, not Miss Ferris. But the others. All the chairs and tables and pictures, they are all mine.’ He seemed to remember something. ‘What is happening to the flat?’

‘We’ll be sealing it,’ said Yvette. ‘We’re treating it as a crime scene for the moment. You shouldn’t go in there and I should warn you that it is an offence to take anything away or move things around.’

‘How long is this for?’

‘It shouldn’t be too long. Is Janet Ferris here?’

Michnik frowned. ‘I will take you inside.’

Janet Ferris answered the knock at the door so quickly that Yvette suspected she’d been standing inside, waiting. She was a middle-aged woman, red hair streaked with grey, a thin, anxious face. ‘Is it really true?’ she said. ‘He’s dead?’

‘We need to confirm it,’ said Yvette. ‘But we think so.’

‘Oh, God.’ She pressed her ringless left hand to her chest. ‘That’s terrible.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘It must have been about the twentieth, twenty-first of January. I remember because I met him when we were both going out and I said something about posting a card to my niece for her birthday, which is on the twenty-fourth.’

‘Did he seem worried about something?’

‘No, he was completely normal. His usual friendly self, always so helpful.’ Her voice wavered slightly. ‘I was on holiday. I went to see my sister and her family in the south of France. I always go at this time of year. He was supposed to look after my flat while I was away, water the plants, pick up the mail, things like that. It was our arrangement: he would look after mine and I would look after his. I always fed his cat for him. When I came back, I saw at once he hadn’t been in. All my mail was piled up, and when I went into the flat, my plants were shrivelled. It wasn’t like him to forget. He was very thoughtful. Then I noticed his mail was piled up too.’ She pointed to a bundle of letters in the corner. Yvette knelt down and picked through them. It was all junk mail.

‘I went and knocked at his door,’ Janet Ferris continued, ‘but, of course, he didn’t reply. I let myself in, and I knew at once something was wrong. That’s why I went straight to the police.’

‘Did people come to visit him here?’ she asked.

‘I never saw anyone,’ said Janet Ferris. ‘But he was out at work a lot, and I work in the day. He was away sometimes.’

‘Were you friendly with him?’

‘He came in for coffee several times. We used to talk.’

‘Did he say anything about himself?’

‘He wasn’t like that,’ Janet Ferris said. ‘He seemed interested in my life, my work, where I came from, why I moved to London. He didn’t talk about himself at all.’

Yvette arranged for Janet Ferris to give a full statement, then walked up the stairs. She was met at the door by Martin Carlisle from the scene-of-crime team. Gawky, with untidy dark curly hair, he looked as if he belonged in a sixth-form chemistry lab. ‘There’s nothing to see here,’ he said. ‘No stains, no signs of a struggle. And it looks like a place where he perched, rather than lived, if you see what I mean. Too neat. We’ve got a toothbrush and a hairbrush for DNA.’

Yvette pulled the little cloth bags over her shoes, put on a pair of plastic gloves.

‘I’m not finished,’ said Carlisle. He handed her a notebook. ‘I had a peek inside. There’s some names. And, even better,’ he brandished some printed papers, ‘we found some bank statements. How much do you think he had in the bank?’

‘I’m not going to guess,’ said Yvette.

‘Whatever you guess, it’ll be less than he had,’ said Carlisle. ‘He was rich, your Mr Poole.’

Yvette stepped inside. She moved cautiously: her feet felt too big in the cloth bags and her hands sweated inside the gloves. She remembered her mother – a petite, flirtatious creature – telling her she was clumsy. ‘Look at you,’ she’d say, but Yvette never wanted to look at herself. She didn’t like what she saw in the mirror: someone big-boned, brown-haired, noticeable only when she dropped things or spoke abruptly and out of turn, which she often did. She would hear herself saying words she hadn’t known she was going to utter, especially when she was with Karlsson.

Carlisle was right: Robert Poole’s flat was too neat, nothing like the mess she lived in. There was nothing homely about it. She stood in the doorway and looked around, trying to imitate Karlsson when he entered a crime scene. He would stand very still and alert, his eyes moving from object to object as if he had become a camera. ‘Don’t make up your mind,’ he’d say. ‘Just look.’ She saw a sofa, a chair, a table, some pictures, a shelf with a few books ranged in order of size, a rug. It was like a hotel room.

The kitchen was the same – matching mugs on a hook, a saucepan and a small milk pan on the side, an electric kettle. She opened the fridge and saw half a packet of butter; a piece of cheddar cheese, shrink-wrapped; two chicken drumsticks with a green tinge; a plastic bottle of tomato ketchup and a jar of low-fat mayonnaise. That was all.

After she had walked round his bedroom, opened every drawer and every cupboard, looked under the bed, then stood for a while in the clean, empty bathroom (razor, shaving foam, spray deodorant, liquid aloe-vera soap, paracetamol, blister plasters, nail clippers), she returned to the sitting room and sat down.

First of all she thought about what there was not: there was no passport, there was no wallet, there were no keys, no phone, no driving licence, no birth certificate, no certificates of qualifications, no National Insurance number, no photographs, no letters, no computer, no address book, no condoms, no drawer stuffed full of the odd bits and pieces of a person’s life.

She opened the notebook Carlisle had given her. Robert Poole’s writing was neat and pleasing, easy to read. She turned the pages. There were lists, perhaps shopping lists, but more specific than the usual shopping lists she drew up. One, for instance, was made up of names of plants – though she recognized only a few. Another looked like book titles, or maybe they were films.

Then there were names, spaced apart with doodles and exclamations and asterisks next to some. A few had addresses or partial addresses beside them – that was useful. She flicked through the notebook to the end. There were a few sums and, on one page, what looked like a sketched plan of a house. There were numbers that might have been phone numbers without the area code.

Then she looked into the A4 brown envelope Carlisle had handed her and drew out the wad of bank statements. She looked at the top one, which was the most recent, dated 15th January. She squinted at the number, blinked, then slid it carefully back into the envelope and stood up. It was going to be a long day.