CHAPTER 10
About half the estimated total of 5.1 million murders of Jews by the Nazis were committed in the year 1942.
—Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948
“We’ll have to start with the parents,” Kincaid said as they pushed through the salesroom doors back out into the ordinary hustle of the Old Brompton Road, where passersby untouched by this particular tragedy bumbled past on their own urgent errands, and the lunchtime scent of pizza and kebabs wafted from the open doors of restaurants and cafés.
Gemma knew he hated such interviews as much as she did, but he was better at concealing it. She stopped him with a touch on his arm, having remembered a fragment of conversation. “Wait just a sec.”
She ducked back into Harrowby’s and emerged a moment later. “I’ve got Kristin’s friend Giles’s address from Mrs. March. If he was cut up enough to go home, we should have a word. Especially if Giles might have sent the flowers.”
“Where does he live?” Kincaid asked.
“Fulham.”
“We’ll see the parents on the way, then.” He turned to Cullen. “Doug, can you go back to the Yard and get a start on that warrant? I want to know who put that brooch up for sale, whether Mr. Khan likes it or not. And, Gemma, about those flowers—”
“Already on it,” Gemma said as she pulled Melody up on her mobile. She’d got the name of the florist from Mrs. March along with Giles’s address, and when Melody answered, she asked her if she could use her powers of persuasion to get the name of the sender without a warrant.
“That’s asking a lot, boss,” Melody said, but she sounded more amused than aggrieved. It might save them valuable time, and she knew it.
“I’ve no doubt you can do it.” Gemma gave her the information and rang off, her smile cut short as she saw the play of emotions on Doug Cullen’s face as he watched her.
There was resentment—she guessed as much at her involvement in general as at being given the tedious job of getting a warrant—combined with what might have been a flicker of relief. He was probably glad not to have to cope with Kristin Cahill’s parents, she thought, but then again, she’d never seen Cullen display much empathy in interviews.
But he merely nodded at Kincaid and said, “I’ll find a sympathetic judge,” before handing Kincaid the car keys and heading off towards the tube station.
While Gemma had come via tube, Kincaid and Cullen had come in a Yard Rover, and now Kincaid took over the wheel as he and Gemma made the short drive to World’s End. The car was silver and anonymously discreet—nothing obvious to set the neighbors gossiping, Gemma thought as they pulled up to the block of flats just to the west of Edith Grove.
The address they had been given was not in the monolithic seventies-era block of flats that dominated the skyline between the King’s Road and the Thames, but rather a more modest council estate that Gemma guessed had been built not long after the war. It looked well tended and comfortable, an image marred by the orange stripes of paint on the street and the Sokkia team working the accident site.
When Kincaid had found a spot to park the Rover, they walked over to speak to the lead investigating officer.
“Don’t often get the Yard in an accident reconstruction,” the officer said when Kincaid had introduced them.
“Anything interesting yet?” Kincaid asked.
“The laser’s faster, not miraculous. I’m Bill Davis, by the way.” Davis was a stocky man with a bristle of gray hair and lines round his eyes that suggested he liked a joke. “And there’s not much to work with here. Still might have been a drink driver who didn’t even see the poor kid. Except that from what we can see of the tire marks, it looks like the driver might have swerved towards the pedestrian.” He nodded at the camera mounted over the traffic light. “Maybe you’ll get something off the CCTV.”
“I’ve got the Yard on it now,” Kincaid told him.
“Going to interview the family?” Davis shook his head, said, “Don’t envy you,” and went back to his laser.
They found the flat easily. Gemma rang the bell with a slight tightening of the throat and a sympathetic smile at the ready, but the woman who answered almost immediately gave them a quick assessing glance before saying quietly, “Homicide team, then?” and motioning them in.
“Yolanda Fish.” She extended a firm, dark-skinned hand to each of them as they introduced themselves. “Detective constable. Family liaison officer.” She had a competent sort of compassion about her, just the right balance for family liaison.
It was not a job Gemma envied. The liaison officer was there to provide support and information about an ongoing investigation for the families of victims, but they were also police officers, and bound to report anything they learned in confidence that might have an impact on an investigation.
“Mr. Cahill is taking a bit of a…rest. Not feeling too well.” DC Fish glanced towards what Gemma assumed were the bedrooms and lifted a hand to her mouth in a quick but unmistakable mime of drinking. “But Mrs. Cahill—Wanda—is in the kitchen. I’ll just tell her you’re here before I take you back.”
Gemma stopped her. “Is she—”
“Holding up as well as you’d expect. Kristin was an only child, and there aren’t any close relatives nearby. Nor a priest, although I know someone who might come in for a bit.”
Yolanda’s momentary absence gave Gemma a chance to look round the flat, and although the block may have originally been owned by the council, it looked as though this flat had been bought by the owners and refurbished. The sitting room was beautifully proportioned, fitted with expensive hardwood flooring, and arranged with a pleasing assortment of antiques and contemporary furnishings. The walls had been hand finished in a pale buff that set off the artwork and furniture.
The kitchen, when Yolanda beckoned them in, confirmed Gemma’s opinion. Pale blue walls set off the collection of antique china on a Welsh dresser and the warm woods of contemporary cupboards and a refectory table.
But then her attention was taken by the woman who sat at the table’s end. Gemma put her age in the mid to late forties, and with her chin-length dark hair and her daughter’s slight build, she might have passed for a good deal younger on a different day. But on this morning her face was ravaged by grief. The eyes she raised to Gemma’s were swollen, her stare blankly uncomprehending. A mug filled with untouched tea sat before her.
Yolanda went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Wanda, these are the police officers I told you about. They need to ask you a few questions.” She glanced up at Gemma and Kincaid, adding, “I can make you a cuppa—”
Shaking his head, Kincaid pulled out a chair and sat facing Wanda Cahill. “We won’t trouble you long.” Yolanda nodded and, moving back to the sink, began drying cups with a tea towel.
Gemma felt a stab of relief at Kincaid’s declaration, then was ashamed of her reaction. But the pain in the room was palpable, a miasma in the air that made it seem hard to breathe. She slid into a chair at the opposite end of the table, as if the physical distance might provide some barrier.
As Gemma watched, Wanda Cahill made a visible effort to focus on Kincaid. “I don’t understand,” she whispered, and her voice sounded rusty, as if sobbing had rasped her throat. “They rang the bell. At first I thought it was a dream, the same dream I’d had since Kristin was a child, whenever she was away from home. And always I would wake up and know it was a dream, and then I could go back to sleep. But it didn’t stop, the sound, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t—I knew—” She looked from Kincaid to Gemma, her brow creased, her fingers pinching at the edge of her unevenly buttoned cardigan.
Gemma knew the dream, had had it herself, waking with a jolt and thumping heart in the darkest hour of the night to the imagined sound of a knock or the bell. She would sit up in bed, listening, and when she realized the dogs were quiet, she’d know that she had imagined it, that the children were safe. But for this woman, the nightmare had become real.
She stood and went to Wanda Cahill, kneeling and taking the woman’s unresisting hand in her own. “Mrs. Cahill, tell me about last night. Was Kristin at home?”
Wanda Cahill looked at Gemma with the same baffled expression she had turned on Kincaid, but after a moment a spark flared in her eyes, and she spoke, her voice stronger. “She came home after work, for dinner. It’s hard for her sometimes, living at home. Her father still treats her like a child, and I try to buffer things as much as I can.” Her face came alive as the recollection moved her into the past.
“Did she talk to you about anything in particular, at dinner?”
“No. But her mobile rang while we were eating, and Bob made a fuss over no phones at the table—you mustn’t think he doesn’t love her,” she added, suddenly entreating. “He just wants things to stay the way they were when she was younger. Maybe he loves her too much—”
As Wanda’s face began to crumple again, Gemma said quickly, “Do you know who rang her on her mobile?”
“No. She didn’t answer. But I assumed it was the young man who called just afterwards on our phone. It was her friend from work, Giles. He was very polite, but she didn’t seem particularly happy to talk to him.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, he must have been asking her to do something, because she said thanks, but she couldn’t, really. But Bob was grumbling at her by that time, so she left the room…”
“She didn’t say anything about work? Or tell you where she was going?”
Wanda shook her head slowly, and Gemma could see the grief swamping her again, a rising tide. “No. She kissed me, the way she always does when she goes out, and said she loved me. But she was that aggravated with her dad. If he hadn’t—if she hadn’t—When he asked where she was going, she said out with friends, and that she wouldn’t be late…”
Kincaid, who had been listening intently, spoke for the first time. “Mrs. Cahill, I’m sure that your daughter’s little tiff with her father meant nothing at all. These things happen in families all the time.”
“They do, don’t they?” said Wanda Cahill, latching on to the offered crumb of comfort. “And she never ordinarily said, you know, who she was meeting, or where she was going. It was…she was defending her independence, I think.”
“Did she ever talk about work?” asked Gemma.
“To me, sometimes. I run a small antiques shop, just across the way, so I know a bit about the business.”
“Did she mention a brooch, an Art Deco diamond brooch that she’d taken in for sale?”
“Kristin? A diamond brooch?” Mrs. Cahill looked at Gemma so blankly that the answer was obvious.
“Never mind,” Gemma said gently. “I’m sure it wasn’t important.” She started to rise. “We’ll leave you to—”
“There was one thing.” Wanda Cahill squeezed her hand, hanging on. “That phone call she took. She was friendly enough, at first. But when she went to her bedroom, before she closed the door, she said again, ‘No, I don’t want to come over,’ but this time she sounded angry.” Frowning, she seemed to search for a word. “Not just angry. Final.”
“She won’t forgive him.” Kincaid slammed the car door harder than he’d intended.
“Who?” asked Gemma. “Who won’t forgive who—I mean whom?”
“The mother. She won’t forgive the father. And the poor bastard will probably spend the rest of his life blaming himself as well. I’ll give you odds that marriage won’t last a year.”
“It was bad. It will be bad.” Gemma touched his cheek. “I’m sorry.”
“No.” He covered her hand with his for a moment. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you. And you were brilliant with Mrs. Cahill, by the way. It made me miss you, miss doing this together, every day.”
Reaching for the ignition, he glanced at her. “You hungry?”
“After that?” Gemma shook her head. “Can’t bear the thought.”
“All right. We’ll give it a bit. No word from Doug, or from the Yard on the CCTV or Kristin’s phone records, so let’s pay a call on Kristin’s mate Giles. Do we have a last name for him?”
Gemma checked the notes she’d made at Harrowby’s. “Oliver.” She gave him the address.
It was a fairly well-heeled area in Fulham, near enough to Stamford Bridge that you’d not be able to get through the streets before or after a football match, nor get a foot in the door of the local pub on a match day. Kincaid thought the young man must be doing quite well for himself as a sales assistant at the auction house, unless he, like Kristin, still lived with his parents.
But when they reached the address Gemma had written down, they found a terraced house in bad repair, obviously a rental property. Paint flaked off the cream stucco and peeled from window and door trim; dead plants drooped from a first-floor window box, and the small yard attached to the garden flat was littered with empty crisp packets and beer bottles, and smelled of rotting food and cat pee.
“Lovely,” Gemma muttered under her breath as Kincaid rang the bell for the top flat. A release buzzer sounded for the main door—there was apparently no intercom system. Kincaid opened the door for Gemma with a flourish. “Oh, you’re going to make me go in first?” she said, teasing. “Very gallant of you.” But as they entered the communal hall, she wrinkled her nose in real distaste. The ambience was on a par with the yard in front, but there was less fresh air to dilute it.
They climbed, Kincaid leading the way, passing scarred doors and treading on ever more threadbare carpet. A small, smudgy window on the landing let in much-needed light and air.
They reached the top floor, but before Kincaid could raise a hand to the door, a great woofing roar shook the corridor. Gemma started visibly and even Kincaid took a step back. “What the hell does he have in there, a bloody lion?”
“Get back, Mo, you great oaf!” came a shout from inside the flat, but the voice lacked a reassuring element of command.
Then the door swung open and a young man faced them, panting, hanging on to the collar of the largest dog Kincaid had ever seen. “Don’t worry,” the young man said. “He won’t do anything worse than drool on you.”
From the size of the dog’s drooping jowls, Kincaid didn’t doubt the drooling, and as the beast’s tail was whipping back and forth in a frantically friendly wag, he decided to take the owner’s word for the rest. “Mr. Oliver? We’re from the police. We’d like to talk to you about Kristin—”
“Mo, sit.” Giles Oliver dragged the dog into a sitting position away from the door, giving them room to step inside, although Kincaid noticed Gemma stayed a pace behind him. “You want to talk to me about Kris—Kristin?” Oliver’s voice broke on the name. The dog stopped straining towards the visitors and leaned against his master’s leg, looking up at him with a furrowed canine brow.
“If you don’t mind. I’m Duncan Kincaid and this is Gemma James.” The young man’s face, Kincaid saw, was almost as puffy with weeping as Wanda Cahill’s, and he suspected that, for the moment, sympathy would be more persuasive than rank.
Oliver gestured towards a small sofa. “Here, sit down. I’ll just give it a brush—”
“We’ll be fine,” Kincaid said, preferring the risk of dog hair on trousers to the possibility of being bowled over if Oliver let go of the dog.
“He’s a mastiff, isn’t he?” asked Gemma, apparently unfazed by the dog’s size. “He’s lovely.” While Kincaid gingerly took a seat, she dropped into a crouch and added, “Can I stroke him?”
Giles Oliver’s rather weak-chinned face lit in a smile. “You don’t mind? Most people would rather not. Just let me bring him to you so he won’t knock you down.”
Kincaid imagined Gemma saying a prayer for her newest Per Una skirt and layered cardigan, but she weathered the onslaught heroically, even to the slurp across her cheek with the longest pink tongue Kincaid had ever seen. Then she gave the dog a last scratch behind his floppy ears and joined Kincaid on the sofa, arranging her skirt demurely over her knees and obviously making an effort not to brush at the wet streaks.
Her exercise in canine bonding had given Kincaid a chance to examine the flat. Although small—the back of the sofa served as a divider between the living and sleeping areas—it didn’t share the dilapidated state of the rest of the building. The place was clean and freshly painted—although there was a definite odor of dog—and the few pieces of furniture were of good quality, as was the rich-hued oriental carpet. But the studio’s outstanding feature was a solid wall of shelving filled with vinyl LPs. To one side stood a double turntable and mixing station. It was apparent that Giles Oliver had at least one passion other than his dog, and he wondered where Kristin Cahill had figured in the equation.
“I know you,” Giles said to Gemma as he settled into a squat, using an arm over the dog’s shoulders as a prop. “You came into the salesroom, to talk to Kris. That’s why she got a bollocking from Mr. Khan,” he added, his tone becoming less friendly.
“I didn’t mean to get her into trouble,” answered Gemma. “Was he very cross?”
“More than usual. Although he’s always harder on Kris than on anyone else. Was.” His chin wobbled, giving him a fleeting resemblance to his dog. “Was harder on her.”
“Have you any idea why?”
“No. I asked her, as a matter of fact, and she said she’d no idea. I wondered, though, if he, you know…fancied her. And if she’d turned him down…”
“Does Mr. Khan have a reputation for chatting up the female assistants?” asked Kincaid, interested.
“Well, no. But Kristin—I mean how could he not want…” His arm went a bit tighter round the dog, who groaned and slid down into a fawn-and-black mound on the carpet. The poor kid really had been besotted with Kristin Cahill, Kincaid thought with a flash of sympathy, and would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell. But that made him all the more viable as a suspect.
Oliver righted himself, left the dog, and perched on the edge of a chair with smooth, curving, burnished wooden arms. Furniture design was not Kincaid’s forte, but he guessed the chair was expensive, and original. “He’ll be all right now,” Oliver said, with a look at the dog. “Once he’s out, he’s out.” As if in answer, Mo began to snore, and his owner looked at Gemma and frowned. “I don’t understand. What were you doing at the salesroom yesterday, and why do you want to talk to me about Kristin?”
“Giles,” said Gemma, “are you sure it was after I was there that Mr. Khan was upset with her?”
His face darkened. “Well, before…all this…I thought it might have been because of the roses. They came just after you left.”
“Mrs. March said someone sent her roses. It wasn’t you?”
“Are you kidding?” His laugh was bitter. “I just barely manage to pay the rent on this dump. There’s no way I could afford flowers like that.”
Priorities, Kincaid thought—Oliver apparently managed fine furniture and collector’s vinyl on his pittance quite well.
“Do you know who did send the flowers?” asked Gemma.
Giles shook his head, tight lipped. “No.”
Kincaid picked up the questioning, changing tack. “Did Kristin talk to you about the brooch?”
“What brooch?” Giles looked from Kincaid to Gemma.
“The Jakob Goldshtein diamond brooch,” Gemma answered.
“Oh, that. She helped Mr. Khan catalog it. That’s her job.” Giles merely looked puzzled.
“She didn’t tell you she was getting a bringing-in fee?”
“Kristin? Where would Kristin come across something like that?”
“We thought you might be able to tell us. That Kristin might have talked to you about it.” Gemma leaned forward, inviting him to confide in her.
He colored, an ugly flush that brought out splotches on his neck. “No. She never said anything.”
“What about when you called her last night?” asked Kincaid, taking the opportunity to play bad cop. At the sharpness in his voice, the dog raised his head and gave a low rumble, and Kincaid suddenly remembered reading that mastiffs were very protective of their owners.
But Giles Oliver seemed unaware of his dog’s distress. “What?” he said, staring at them, but the blotches deepened in color.
“We talked to her mum,” said Gemma. “What was it that you wanted Kristin to do?”
“I—I just wanted—I thought she might want someone to talk to about Khan giving her such a hard time.”
“You asked her out?”
“No, not out, exactly. I thought she might want to come over. Listen to some records. You know, chill a bit. But—” He looked round the flat, as if seeing it through their eyes. “I should have known, shouldn’t I?”
“That she’d say no?”
“She said she was going out,” he retorted, as if trying to recover a shred of pride. “Meeting someone. At the Gate. That’s why she couldn’t come over.”
“The Gate in Notting Hill?” Kincaid asked, frowning. The Gate was the nightclub in the basement of the cinema of the same name, a Notting Hill landmark.
“Yeah. I guess. I don’t go places like that. Can’t afford the drinks, and I’d rather make my own music.” He gestured at the records and turntable.
“Did she say who she was meeting?”
“No. Maybe the same guy who sent her the roses. She was on her mobile with someone, after she argued with Mr. Khan.”
“Or maybe you’re making it all up,” Kincaid said slowly. “Maybe when she turned you down, let you know you were a stupid git to even think she would consider going out with you, you decided to get even. You drove over and waited for her to come home, then gunned the car at her. Maybe you just thought you’d teach her a lesson.”
“What?” Giles stood, and the dog rose onto his massive haunches, growling. “Are you saying someone ran Kristin down on purpose?”
“You had good reason.”
“Me? Why would I do that? I loved her!” He began to laugh, with a hint of hysteria. “And I don’t have a bloody fucking car.”