‘Thanks.’
I see her staring at me as the lift doors close. I decide to give her my card when I leave, if I get an opportunity. You never know.
‘Come in, Daniel. Dead on time, I see!’
She’s wearing pale blue jeans and a yellow sweat top which is slightly too large for her. Beautiful without makeup, shorter as she’s not wearing shoes and her pupil size is back to normal. She seems pleased to see me.
‘Would you like a coffee?’
I nod and we make out way into her kitchen. This is a big, big place and must have cost a packet. At a glance, there’re no carpets; everything is pine floors. Slightly more difficult for an intruder to remain silent, particularly at night. You’d have to take your shoes off or wear crêpe soles. Big purple abstract prints in the wide, white hallway and a long glass table with a few pieces of junk mail on top.
The kitchen is to our immediate left. I sit down at a big wooden table and watch her as she prepares the coffee things. I realise that I’m observing her in a different way after the theories I’ve heard about her possible mental state and finding out about the breakdown.
It’s cruel, but I’m now watching for signs of mental instability. When we met yesterday, I had no doubt at all she was telling the truth. Now I wonder if she was just telling the truth as she perceived it.
She stops in mid preparation and turns her head to the left, sniffing once.
‘Is that you?’
‘Is what me?’
‘That smell; Taif Rose, Pink Pepper – is it Amber Mystique?’
I have to laugh. ‘You’ve caught me out. But very good.’
She sits across from me and places the coffee cups on a couple of flowery William Morris coasters. ‘Eventually I’m hoping to create my own perfume brand, just like Coco Chanel. Well, she chose it rather than created it, but you know what I mean. I’ve been on a couple of courses, so I recognise all the individual notes in well-known brands. Why do you wear it?’
I’m speechless for a couple of seconds, then laugh out loud. ‘I don’t wear it.’
‘Ah. I see. Sorry. A lady friend, I assume.’
‘No. I just hang around Selfridge’s perfume department a lot. I can’t resist the free samples.’
She giggles and holds her coffee cup in both hands and takes a small sip. ‘So what do you want to do? What do you want to look at?’
‘I’d like a tour of this place and I’d like you to tell me what the police said when they were here.’
‘They said that there was no sign whatsoever that anyone could have broken in.’
‘Did they check outside?’
‘No. They said there was no need to. There were no signs of forced entry on any of the windows. The only door is the one you just came in through and they said that seemed fine.’
‘Did they check for fingerprints?’
‘Yes. The only ones they found were mine.’
‘And what about the things that you said had been moved?’
‘No prints on them either. Just mine, though I had washed the coffee cup I was telling you about before the police came. I wasn’t thinking straight. It was only my prints which appeared on the drawer in my bedroom and there were poor quality prints on one of the magazines, but still identifiable as mine.’ For a moment, the brightness disappears from her face. ‘I’m not lying about this, you know. I realise that it looks bad for me.’
You can say that again. ‘Don’t worry yourself about that. OK. The police are making a couple of assumptions here, which may not be correct. Firstly, they’re assuming that the only way into this building is by passing through the reception area, something we know didn’t happen during the night-time visit because of the CCTV footage and the statements of reception security staff.
‘Secondly, they are then logically assuming that the only way of gaining access to your flat would be through the windows, which they couldn’t find evidence of, and would, in any case, require astounding burglarising skills by whoever did it. Someone of that calibre would not be doing it to leave a drawer open.’
I’m thinking there has to be an easier way of getting in here, but I can’t imagine what it could be. I’ve got a headache. I start thinking of last night and Isolda. I take another sip of coffee.
‘Right, Miss Holt,’ I say, brightly. ‘Let’s commence the tour. Which room do you want to start with?’
‘Let’s have a look in the living area,’ she says, downing her coffee in one.
This is a large, pine-floored room with a single white sofa in front of a fireplace that’s never used, with big black stereo speakers on the right and left. CDs scattered on the floor; Björk, Diana Krall, Louie Bellson, Annette Peacock. Above the fireplace is a large print of Avenue de l’Observatoire by Brassaï. I’m slightly surprised she has well-known stuff on the walls in print form. I somehow imagined she’d always be buying originals.
The wide, high window overlooks the street. There isn’t an inch of the windowsill that isn’t covered in piles of books. Even if you managed to scale the wall outside, coming in through a window like this would be a nightmare, even for a professional. There are white venetian blinds, but they’re pulled up.
‘Is this window always locked?’
‘Yes. I never open it, mainly because those books are in the way. There are three parts to it with three different keys. I think I’ve opened these windows once since I’ve been here. It took me and the police ten minutes to get all of those books out of the way so they could take a detailed look at the windows and the locks.’
It’s the same story with the kitchen and bathroom. These have windows which are opened from time to time, but, once again, they are usually locked and the keys in envelopes in a kitchen drawer. Like the living area, all of them have windowsills that are covered with stuff that you’d knock over if you entered this place through the window. In the bathroom it’s shampoo, bath oils and feminine stuff and in the kitchen it’s indoor plants, potted herbs, framed photographs and a Hawaiian Munny.
You could, of course, put these items back if you knocked them over, but it would be unlikely they’d be in the right place and/or position and someone as bright as Sara would notice the change immediately. Plus, it would be too obvious and not creepy enough.
Sara’s bedroom is another large room, very cool in black and white with a king-size bed and a wall-sized wardrobe, but unlike the others I’ve seen, the window is on the side of the block, overlooking the enormous, forest-like back garden of the house next door. I check all of the windows and they’re secure.
Sara tells me that she does open these windows from time to time in the spring and summer, but usually they’re closed and locked. There aren’t any curtains, but there are four big sections of black metal venetian blind which are worked by a remote control I can see on the bedside table.
Any burglar would make a hell of a noise negotiating these, but that wouldn’t necessarily matter in the daytime when she wasn’t here. I get her to open one of the windows for me so that I can look down.
The drop is well over a hundred feet and, like the front, there are no drainpipes or anything similar that anyone could scale up, even if they had the skill, motivation and nerve. Besides, it’s concrete at the bottom; you slip this high up and you’re more than likely dead.
The blinds are left half open, and I wonder for a moment if anyone has a direct view of Sara’s bedroom, perhaps some solitary perv with a pair of binoculars watching her getting undressed, but nothing overlooks this section of the flat and the tall evergreens growing next door prevent all direct views.
‘How many flats on each floor here?’
‘Two. When you get out of the lift you turn left to get to me and right to get to my neighbour.’
‘Who’s your neighbour?’
‘An old lady. Mrs Antúnez. She’s a widow. I don’t know her, really. Rarely see her.’
There’s a large, airy, second bedroom immediately next to Sara’s, filled with piles of magazine
s, half a dozen racks of shoes and huge wardrobes. There’s a large bed, which doesn’t look as though it’s ever been slept in. Prints on the wall; Braque, Matisse and a couple I don’t recognise. I do the same checks on that one, once again getting her to open the window so I can look down. Same result. No way up, no way in.
A professional mountaineer might be able to climb up here using the gaps in between the bricks as a gripping aid, but that would be an insane amount of risk and effort just to move some magazines around, it would take a long time, and once again you’d be noticed.
If I was trying to break in to somewhere lower down, say the second or third floors, I might use a grappling hook if I was confident that it would fasten itself on a window ledge effectively enough that I could pull myself up. But even then, there’d be the problem of getting through a locked window without leaving a trace.
There’s another large room, which I suppose is a work area, except it has comfy-looking velvet sofas, a wide screen television and another big stereo. The walls are all bookshelves except for one gap where there are a couple of Paul Klee prints.
In stylistic contrast to everything else in here, there’s an enormous glass and metal desk, which is piled high with yet more books. I spot two about Basquiat that have been left open and have pink Post-it notes stuck to the pages. This room also has windows on the same side as the bedroom, but the story’s still the same – securely locked and no access from outside.
I start thinking about my perv with the binoculars theory again, and it makes me go back into the living area/room and look out of the window.
Across the road is a church, and either side of it are two four-storey buildings; one of them modern flats and the other discreet offices. Nothing that can be seen from here is high enough to get a good view into the flat so I discount the idea that someone creepy is observing her.
I close my eyes and try to think how I would get into this place without passing through the reception area and without scaling the walls. Well, if they didn’t or couldn’t come in through the windows, the only possible alternative is through the front door, so I’ll check that now, just so I get a feel for how easy it would be.
Sara follows me as I take a look at the inside of the door. There’s a security chain, a mortice lock and a rim cylinder lock. Let’s deal with the security chain first. Obviously, it’s not going to be on when she’s at work, but what about when she’s here?
‘Do you put this security chain on at night?’
‘Yes. Always.’
‘You never forget?’
‘No. I told you. Once you’ve been burgled you become a little obsessive about these things.’
‘And this chain was definitely on the night that someone came in here and moved those magazines?’
She shivers a little as she remembers and crosses her arms across her chest. ‘I told the police. Yes, the chain was on. I think that’s when they started to have doubts about my story. They said you couldn’t get past a security chain like that without someone opening it from the inside or maybe kicking the door down.’
‘Not necessarily true, madam. Do have any string? Dental floss will do if you haven’t got any.’
She looks baffled, as well she might. ‘I’ve got some string in the kitchen. How much do you need?’
‘Four or five feet.’
‘Hold on.’
I can’t remember the last time I did this, but I’m assuming I haven’t lost the knack or the speed. It isn’t really showing off, it’s just making a point, for me as well as her. Sara returns with the string and hands it to me.
‘OK. I’m just going to deal with this one first. I’m going to go outside and I want you to put the chain on. Don’t do anything with the other two locks. When I knock, I want you to open up but keep the chain in place, OK? Then walk five paces away and turn your back on the door.’
She frowns slightly, but humours me anyway. As soon as I’m outside, I quickly make a small noose on the end of the string and then knock on the door. I hear the rim cylinder lock turning and the door opens. It’s tight. There’s maybe three inches to play with, but that’ll do. As quietly as I can, I slide my hand through the gap, hook the noose over the end of the chain and pull it tight. I can see Sara standing several feet away as requested.
I feel with my fingers to make sure the noose is secure on the chain, then loop the string over the top of the doorframe and pull it slowly and carefully to my right. There’s no noise, but I can feel the chain sliding across the track and when there’s nowhere left for it to go, I stick my hand through the gap and catch it, so it doesn’t clatter against the door. I open the door wide, take a few paces forward and tap Sara on the shoulder. She jumps.
‘Jesus!’ She turns to look at me in amazement, then laughs.
‘That took about twenty seconds. How much noise was there?’
‘Nothing. Well – a few small noises. Nothing you could identify.’
‘Would that have woken you up if you’d been asleep in your bedroom?’
‘Definitely not. That was amazing. But you’d have to be able to get past those other two locks to be able to do that in the first place, wouldn’t you?’
‘You’ve got a Chubb 3g114 mortice lock here. It’s one of the best for preventing forced attacks. That means someone trying to kick the door down wouldn’t have much success with this model. The lever pack inside makes it problematic to pick, but a professional could do it in a couple of minutes, even if you’d locked it from the inside.
‘The cylinder lock – the Yale you stick your key in when you come home – is even easier. You could do it with a tension wrench and a paper clip in about thirty seconds, maybe less. A professional burglar would probably carry a tension wrench on his key ring; it’s just a thin strip of metal, as thin as a hacksaw blade.
‘The whole process, from arriving outside the door here to undoing the security chain and coming inside would be a job lasting under five minutes, a little longer if you were trying to limit the noise.’
Sara goes pale. ‘It’s that easy? Oh my God. Is that what happened here, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. There are small scratches around the exterior of both locks, but those could have been caused by you and your keys. The only way I could check to see if someone had picked these would be to take them apart and look for unusual damage inside, but I’d need special tools and a magnifying glass. But we don’t have to do that. I think it just makes the point that even though no one could have come through the windows, as far as I can see, they could have come through your front door.
‘This door can’t be seen from your neighbour’s place. If she came out unexpectedly, or the lift was ascending, anyone working on these locks could just walk to the end of the corridor, open that fire door and go down the stairs.
‘As you said yesterday, you’d need a helicopter to get up this high, and I think that would attract a little bit of attention. Any intruder would have to have come through your front door. Now all we have to find out is how they got past reception. Can I just ask you one thing? The coffee cup you said had moved. Can you just show me where it was and where it should have been? I’d just like to see an example of their handiwork.’
We walk into the kitchen. On one side there’s two sinks, a dishwasher, fridge and all the rest of it, and on the other side cupboards, food preparation areas and a bookshelf crammed with cookery books.
‘OK,’ she says, stretching her fingers out. ‘First of all, I have to tell you that I’m very organised and relatively tidy. I can’t stand things not being where they should be. You saw my study and I know it looked a bit of a mess, but I still know exactly where everything is.’
She produces a dark orange Pantone mug from one of the cupboards opposite the dishwasher. ‘This is the mug I was telling you about. The famous moving mug. The poltergeist mug. I make coffee over there by the kettle. That’s the only place I make it. It’s where all the coffee things are.
‘I drink coffee
in a variety of places; I drink it in the bedroom, I drink it in my study, I even drink it in the bath, but wherever I’ve been drinking it, when I’ve finished, I always rinse the grounds out in the sink straight away and stick it in the dishwasher. Always. I never leave things hanging around the place making clutter. Never.’
‘OK. So…’
‘So once the dishwasher has enough stuff in it, I stick a dishwasher tab in it and turn it on. When it’s finished, I open the door for five minutes to let the steam dissipate, then I put all the clean things back where they came from. I do it all in one go. I don’t leave some stuff and then do the rest later, OK?’
‘OK. And the coffee cup in question would have gone straight into that cupboard.’
‘Exactly. That shelf in there is the coffee mug shelf. Nothing else goes on it. There’s no coffee mug halfway house that it would have rested in before going in that cupboard and onto that shelf.’
‘And where did this coffee mug turn up that time you came back from work?’
She takes my wrist in her hand and quickly walks me over to the far side of the kitchen. There are three pine shelves attached to the wall. The top one has a couple of plants, the middle one has a traditional and never-used Chinese teapot in dark grey clay and the bottom one has various bottles of herbs and spices in a neat row. She takes the coffee mug and places it carefully next to the teapot.
‘That’s where it was. There is no way on earth that I would have taken that coffee mug out of the dishwasher and put it there. Absolutely no way.’
‘OK. Come with me. You’re going to tell reception that I’m a nice guy and can be trusted.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m a convincing liar.’
9
GOT YOU
As we leave Sara’s flat and she closes the door behind us, I take a quick look down the corridor. I was wondering if there were security cameras here, but there are none. That’s not unusual. Nobody wants to be under surveillance the whole time, especially when there seems to be no real need for it, and if you bought a place here, you’d be reassured enough by the measures taken at reception. There aren’t any cameras in the lift either, probably for the same reasons.
Death is the New Black Page 8
