by Nick Louth
‘Let’s look at the mugshot,’ Gillard said. Mulholland pulled it onto the screen and maximized it. The beard and moustache failed to hide the characteristic miserable expression. ‘That’s him. Let’s pull him in for questioning. I’ll get Townsend to make a request to Ljubljana to see if he’s got previous over there. What about DNA?’
‘We’re still waiting for the results.’
‘It would be good if it was his DNA that turned up as the sixth person in the Knights’ house.’
‘You mean the glass?’ Mulholland asked. ‘It had lipstick on.’
Gillard shrugged. ‘You never know these days, do you?’
Mulholland smiled. ‘You know, walking round the house on Saturday, with Oliver and Chloe, I got to thinking about timings. The professor may not have meant to kill Liz, and may have been in a panic. So he covers her absence by telling everybody that she is in Dungeness for the weekend. He must have hidden her body somewhere in the house, and then realized he had to get it out once everybody started phoning up wondering where she is.’
‘Having a garage attached to the house helps, doesn’t it?’ Gillard said.
‘Yes. He could carry her body out of the house, wrapped first in the rug, then a bin bag, through the kitchen side door, and stow her in the boot without any danger of anyone in the houses opposite seeing what he is doing.’
‘So then he drives her down to Dungeness, a much more remote house, where he can set to work dismembering the body so she will be easier to dispose of,’ Gillard said.
‘Exactly,’ Mulholland said. ‘But why did he wait from Friday morning to Tuesday afternoon to do it? There’s the danger of visitors to the house, Oliver or Chloe or someone else, and the deterioration in the body to think about.’
‘Ah, but he needs a reason to be seen heading down to Dungeness,’ Gillard said. ‘We gave him that when I spoke to him on the train, and he said that’s where she would be. Any other trip to Dungeness, say in the middle of the night, would have left him with a car journey to explain. But this way, he was actually appearing to be helping us, when in fact he was using it as a cover to dispose of the body. The fact that he answered the phone there when I rang gives him a kind of alibi. He was exactly where he was supposed to be.’
Mulholland nodded. ‘If he’d had the nerve to reappear on Tuesday, drive back to Coulsdon and so on, I don’t think we’d have even been looking at CSI, at least not yet. Liz Knight is a non-vulnerable adult, not a missing child. With her background of depression we might just have assumed that she’d decided to leave him.’ She shrugged. ‘Instead, he panicked. Instead of taking his time to cover his tracks a bit better, he just bolted for it. Almost amateur!’
‘Not that amateur,’ Gillard said. ‘We still don’t have a clue where he is.’
Chapter Eighteen
Monday, 24 October
It was Chloe Knight’s 19th birthday, and liaison officer Gabby Underwood was spending the morning with her at Oliver’s house while she cried intermittently. Oliver, signed off from work with stress, alternated between comforting his sister and attempting to extract the latest information on the investigation from Gabby. ‘They really don’t tell me more than the basics,’ Gabby protested. ‘It’s partly to protect you both.’
‘How do you protect us by keeping us in the dark?’ Oliver asked, his face ruddy with anger.
‘An investigation moves forward, often slowly with various theories advanced and then disproven until we get to the truth. We don’t want to make you anxious by letting you know every twist and turn until we’re sure,’ she said.
Oliver stamped off to his study, where he was composing a magnificently officious letter of complaint to the chief constable. Gabby sighed and was walking back into the kitchen to make coffee when the doorbell rang. Chloe opened it, and a thickset uniformed male constable was standing there with a large cardboard box. ‘Post from your parents’ house, Miss,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would give it to your liaison officer. No parcels or packages. It all appears harmless, but if there is anything offensive we suggest you immediately put it to one side for our perusal.’ He smiled and added, ‘I gather it may be your birthday, so perhaps I could add my own congratulations. Despite the sad circumstances.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, and closed the door.
The box contained a huge sheaf of birthday post. Since the publicity over the murder, there had been an unending stream of correspondence to the Knights’ home, much of it offering sympathy. Teddy bears and flowers had appeared on the drive, notes and photos had been taped to the lamp post, conspiracy theorists posted on Facebook and Twitter… Only a tiny number of the communications were offensive or accusatory, and Gabby Underwood had succeeded in intercepting most of them. It was less easy to deal with the intermittent stream of gawkers and ghouls who wandered up to the house, some even straying onto the drive for selfies or in search of souvenirs.
Chloe quickly flicked through the post, and gasped at the handwriting on one envelope. She quickly stuffed it down the back of her jeans, only just in time before Gabby came in from the kitchen with mugs of coffee in hand. ‘Ah, birthday post,’ Gabby said, smiling at Chloe, whose eyes were once again brimming with tears. Gabby smiled wanly at her. ‘When you feel ready, we can go through these together. It’s best if I take a quick peek before you see them, just in case there’s something nasty. But I expect almost everyone will be sending you their very best wishes at a difficult time like this.’
Chloe nodded. ‘I’m going to the loo first,’ she said, and scampered off to the downstairs toilet. She closed the door behind her, bolted it, and pulled out the envelope from her jeans. It was postmarked France. As she opened the envelope and slid out the card, her chest start to convulse and she had to clamp a hand to her face to muffle her sobs. The handwriting was a complete giveaway.
It was from her father.
She opened the card and began to read.
* * *
Gillard had arranged to interview Dr Natalie Krugman at King’s College London, where she was a visiting professor. She had made it clear that it had to be brief, as there was only a nine-hour stopover on her flight from New York to Sydney. As part of yesterday’s research he had read the first 20 pages of her breakthrough essay ‘Rape, Fatherhood and the Male Mythos’. It had posited a mirror-image world in which women had the sexual aggression of men, where perfect male bodies were everywhere in the media, where out-of-shape women stood around in groups to loudly comment on, leer at and grope young and even underage men. For all its exaggeration for effect, Gillard found the gender-reversed vision she conjured powerful, and profoundly unsettling. It made him very nervous about today. This was a woman who, as one reviewer had put it, could probably emasculate simply by telepathy.
Gillard and Mulholland were shown into a small room in King’s Department of War Studies, which had been the only private space available at short notice. Krugman stood to greet them. Tall and raven-haired, with a streak of white hair which hung over one ear, she was dressed in a black trouser suit. There was a lean, hawk-like intensity to her which her huge amber-green eyes magnified. Gillard made the introductions, while Krugman offered them seats on the other side of a small desk.
‘I am profoundly shocked by this whole business,’ she said, playing with her iPad. ‘I’m just not sure I can be of much help.’
‘Can I ask how long you have known Martin Knight?’ he asked.
She leaned back in her chair, letting it swivel slightly from side to side.
‘I was an undergraduate when I first met him in Oxford in 1996, I think.’
‘So he was already a professor?’
‘Yes, he taught at a couple of the lectures on my course.’ She smiled, revealing a generous mouth. ‘He really liked to shake things up. There was nothing dusty or academic about his teaching.’
‘Did you meet him one-on-one at that time?’
‘At departmental parties, probably. I don’t really recall. I’m not sure what the
niceties of Oxford academia in the 1990s have got to do with all this,’ she said, turning her hands outwards and stretching her long, talon-like fingers. She was wearing black glossy nail varnish.
‘I’ll get straight to the point, then,’ Gillard said. ‘We understand that you and Martin Knight had an affair, is that correct?’
She didn’t seem surprised to be asked. ‘It was a few years ago, but yes, we did.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘Exactly? I couldn’t tell you. It started in May 2010, but when exactly it ended I couldn’t really say. I mean, what is the definition of an affair? We have kept in touch, on and off, for years, and the affair, if you want to call it that, was just a few months. I’ve been in my own partnership now for a few years so it has definitely been more casual.’
‘But it’s still sexual?’
‘Yes, when it suits me.’
‘Did you ever meet Mrs Knight?’ Gillard asked.
‘Sure. Several times.’
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Bright woman, I guess, was my first reaction. A bit dowdy. Not quite single-minded enough. But it must have been hard being married to him. There isn’t room for too many egos in that marriage, I guess.’
‘Did she ever threaten you?’
‘Threaten me?’ Krugman laughed as if the concept was absurd.
‘When she discovered the affair, we have heard that she was pretty angry. And we have a witness who claimed she had warned you off.’
Krugman smiled coldly. ‘She made some drunken remarks to me at some LSE party we were at, but to be honest, I didn’t take it that seriously. My relationship with Martin was already winding down when she found out about it. She seemed more upset that Martin and I had used their holiday home in Dingyville or wherever…’
‘Dungeness…? Mulholland said.
‘Somewhere like that. Yeah, it was her family place, a shack on the beach. But she was mad that we’d used her bed.’
‘How did she know?’ Mulholland asked.
‘Martin said she found one of my earrings on the bedroom floor. I must have been careless.’
‘What did she say?’ Gillard said, aware that he too had made love to Liz in that very same bedroom.
‘She said that I had better leave him alone “or else”, whatever that means.’
‘What was your reaction?’
‘I told her she was drunk. Which she was. And I also told her that since I’d finished with him, that she could have him back. Which wasn’t strictly true. I guess I was drunk too.’
‘Can you remember exactly when that was?’
‘No.’
‘So, just to be clear, you had finished with Martin Knight, but you still had sex?’ Gillard asked.
‘Boy, you Brits only think about one thing. Sure. I think I screwed him most times we met. But you have to understand, I didn’t want to own him. Emotional empire-building isn’t my shtick. I didn’t want to take him away from her or anything like that. Whatever she might have said.’
‘She may have thought otherwise,’ Mulholland muttered.
‘Mrs Knight’s friends did implicate you as the cause of a series of rows she and her husband had in the last few years,’ Gillard said.
Krugman shrugged her shoulders. ‘Yeah, Martin told me about the rows. It was up to him to balance his domestic situation with what we had. If he’d wanted to stop seeing me, he would have.’
‘Is there anything else you would like to tell us?’ Gillard asked.
Krugman stared coolly at them for a long time. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘So you don’t know where he is?’ Mulholland said.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she responded. ‘I live on another continent.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘We had dinner in London about two weeks ago.’ She prodded and flicked at her iPad for a minute. ‘Wednesday, October 14.’
‘Where did you have dinner?’
‘Someplace in Covent Garden.’
‘Do you have the name?’
‘No, I don’t. White linen, Italian fusion, sexy waiters. He paid, so look it up. You have his credit card records, right?’
Gillard looked at Mulholland, who shook her head. ‘He may well have paid cash,’ she added.
‘Whatever,’ Krugman responded.
‘But we do have copies of your recent email correspondence,’ Gillard said. ‘There are certain things that we would like you to clarify.’
Krugman’s eyes locked onto Gillard as if peering into his skull and finding something of interest. ‘I have absolutely nothing to hide, I can assure you.’
Gillard retrieved a file from his briefcase, then set before her a printout of the email exchanges from April. ‘Do you recall sending these messages?’ She picked up the sheet and scanned them, saying nothing. ‘You talked about seeing him in Spain. And he talked about “dealing” with Liz. Do you know what he meant by that?’
Krugman sighed, and then smiled. ‘He meant that he wanted to get a divorce. He was going to discuss it with Liz. And yes, there was a time back in April when I did consider letting him live with me, on a kinda exploratory basis.’
‘Where? In Spain?’ Mulholland asked.
‘Yeah, maybe in Spain. As you know, he’d come into some money, and wanted to buy a luxury place in Spain. He had shown me some property plans when I saw him in… March, I think. The places looked pretty cool, and enormous. But I soon realized it was never going to work and told him.’
‘There’s nothing in the email traffic to support that assertion,’ Mulholland said.
‘Honey, I’m not in the habit of offering audit trails of my private relationships,’ Krugman growled. ‘Especially to the agents of the surveillance state.’
‘Ms Krugman, a woman has been murdered,’ Mulholland said, her voice steely.
‘Not by me. And, I am overwhelmingly convinced, not by Martin either.’ She locked eyes with Mulholland. ‘Look. We talked it out on the phone. I called him and explained that it wasn’t going to work. If he’d have been willing to come to the States, then maybe. I wasn’t going to be in London enough, and certainly not in Spain enough, to make it work. If it could have worked at all.’
‘But you were aware of how much money Martin had come into?’ Gillard asked.
‘Sure, but it made no difference. I’ve got money too.’
‘Your email said you had a fight with Thibault, which I take it is Thibault Gregory, your ex-partner, about a house in Los Angeles,’ Mulholland said.
‘Well, sugar, I see you do your research in the National Enquirer, how diligent. But if you read a little wider you would also know that Thibault moved out in June, two months after that email, and I sold the house. So I do have the money. Look, I’m not going to deny that Martin was keener on living together than I was, but he did accept in the end that it wasn’t going to work.’
‘Do you have evidence of that? It might help your case,’ Gillard said.
‘I don’t need any damn evidence. There is no case. I’m an innocent party.’
‘That remains to be seen,’ Gillard said. ‘To go back to last Wednesday, after the meal did you go back to Knight’s home with him?’
‘No I did not. I’ve never been to his home, I mean the home in Surrey.’
‘But you have been to the holiday home?’ Mulholland asked.
‘Sure, I told you. Just the once, and not since 2012.’
Mulholland turned to her briefcase and removed her DNA swab kit. ‘As we explained, we need to take a DNA sample for elimination purposes…’
Krugman leaned over, grabbed a Q-tip and quickly swabbed the inside of her own cheek. ‘There you go,’ she said, offering the object back before Mulholland had even donned her latex gloves.
‘So where did you stay that night?’ Gillard said.
‘At the Kensington Place Hotel.’
‘Did Martin Knight stay with you?’
‘For a few
hours. And yes, before you ask, as I know you will, we had sex. In fact I screwed him so hard and so long I had trouble waking him up to go home to his frigid little mouse of a wife. There, is that enough detail for you?’
It was at that precise moment that Gillard knew he hated this woman.
* * *
Gillard and Mulholland had a coffee at the King’s refectory, finally finding a table away from the throng of students. ‘So what did you think?’ Mulholland said.
‘She appeared to have nothing to hide. And she couldn’t easily be implicated, if the details of her movements are correct. She hadn’t been in the country for two months, then she was in for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and flew out at a time when Liz Knight was still alive. I’ll get Rob Townsend to confirm the details with American Airlines.’
‘I could easily imagine her as inspiration for murder, couldn’t you?’ Mulholland asked. ‘She radiates a kind of predatory self-confidence that most women can’t match, and would find intimidating.’ She scrutinized Gillard expectantly as she blew on her coffee.
‘You’re asking if I find her attractive?’ Gillard let his gaze drift to the high ceiling and the mezzanine floor, where a group of female students were looking over the edge, files and papers shielding their chests. ‘She’s got a striking face and a good figure along with a sort of exotic allure, but I think most men would simply find her terrifying.’ The thing that stuck most deeply with Gillard was that Krugman hadn’t merely been factual about the nature of her ‘screwing’ Knight, she had used the verb transitively, the male being the passive recipient of her attentions.
‘She could tell that we didn’t like her,’ Claire said.
‘She pressed some buttons for Martin, though,’ Gillard said. ‘I’d love to put her at the murder scene, but I doubt we can do it.’
A call from Kent Police’s CSI chief broke into the conversation. ‘Go ahead, Nigel,’ Gillard said.
