by Nicci French
He looked at the mugs as if they were a part of his evaluation. Chris Munster tore a sachet of sugar and tipped it into his.
‘No,’ Newton said. ‘No. I think I’ll pass on that.’
Yvette took packets of sandwiches from a plastic bag. ‘Cheese and celery for you, boss. Tuna and cucumber for you, Chris.’ She tossed the packets across the table. ‘Chicken for me.’ She looked at Newton. ‘Sorry. I didn’t know you were coming.’
‘I’m just a fly on the wall,’ said Newton. ‘You don’t need to feed me.’
‘Flies on the wall still have to eat,’ said Yvette. While Newton looked puzzled by that, as if he was trying to work out whether there was an insult behind it, she continued, ‘Is Frieda coming to the meeting to explain her theory?’
‘She’s seeing patients this afternoon,’ said Karlsson.
‘How does the arrangement with her work?’ said Newton.
‘Good question,’ said Yvette.
‘This isn’t really the time or the place,’ said Karlsson, ‘but she receives a small retainer and she is entitled to expenses. None of which she has actually claimed. But I can provide you with details later, if you want.’
‘Thanks,’ said Newton. ‘I’d like that.’
‘She is also entitled to confidentiality,’ continued Karlsson, ‘which, unfortunately, she did not get when someone in this building leaked details of the investigation to the press.’
‘Whoops,’ said Newton, cheerfully.
‘Nor did she receive proper support,’ added Karlsson, staring at Yvette, who turned pink and dropped her gaze.
‘So,’ said Munster, ‘why does Frieda think Janet Ferris was murdered?’
‘It’s partly an instinct,’ said Karlsson. ‘She felt that Janet Ferris wasn’t in a suicidal frame of mind. She should really be here to put her own case, but she said it was partly based on an assessment of her mood. Also, she had left her cat locked in. She didn’t seem the sort of woman who would do that.’
‘I guess that the point about being suicidal,’ said Yvette, ‘is that you don’t worry about things like that any more. If you want to look after your cat, you don’t kill yourself. Have they done the autopsy yet?’
‘I just got off the phone with Singh.’
‘And?’
‘He said that death was caused by asphyxia. That and the state of the body …’
‘What do you mean “state of the body”?’ asked Newton.
‘You don’t want to know,’ said Yvette.
‘She shat herself,’ said Munster.
‘Really?’ Newton’s eyebrows went up.
‘Loosening of the sphincter is a feature of hanging,’ said Karlsson. ‘As it is of other forms of death. It wasn’t so much the evacuation of the bowels as the, er …’ He made a gesture with his hands.
‘The disposition,’ Yvette supplied.
‘The splatter,’ added Munster.
‘Please,’ said Karlsson. ‘Singh said there were no signs of any other injury, no bruising on her body. So, he said his view was that the death was a suicide. I asked him if he was sure Janet Ferris hadn’t been strangled before she was hanged. He said one could never be sure. I asked him if it was possible that she was hanged forcibly. He said it wasn’t impossible, but in that case he would have expected bruising, perhaps on the upper arms, and there wasn’t any.’
‘So what was his final opinion?’ asked Yvette.
‘His provisional opinion is that it was suicide.’
‘Well, there we are.’
‘His job isn’t to provide a theory,’ said Karlsson. ‘It’s to report on the state of the body. Our job is to keep options open.’
‘We’ve got lots of options open,’ said Yvette. ‘They’re all bloody open.’
‘That’s why we’re having this meeting.’ Karlsson took an angry bite from his sandwich and the others waited for him to swallow. ‘At any moment, Crawford is going to ask where we’ve got to and, to be honest, I don’t exactly know what we’re going to say. We don’t know who Poole really was. We don’t know within five days when he was killed, so we can’t check alibis in any useful way. We don’t know where he was killed, so we’ve got sod-all forensics. We know roughly how he was killed but we don’t know why his finger was cut off.’ He paused for thought. ‘We know too bloody much about why he might have been killed. He was a conman and a thief. If someone fucked my wife, I’d want to kill them. If someone fucked my wife and got her to steal my money, I’d want to cut his finger off, feed it to him and then strangle him with my bare hands. If someone cheated my mother I’d want to kill him. If someone tried to get my mother to change her will so that she’d leave everything to a fucking conman, I’d want to kill him. If someone blackmailed me over my drinking problems, I’d also want to kill him. So …’
‘But the Orton sons’ alibis check out. Jeremy Orton was tied up day and night with some company takeover deal, and Robin Orton was in bed with flu.’
‘Alibis,’ said Karlsson, wearily. ‘I don’t know. He could have got out of bed. And aren’t there high-speed trains from Manchester?’
‘Two hours and five minutes,’ said Yvette. ‘What about Jasmine Shreeve?’
Karlsson gave a sour laugh. ‘From the sound of the TV programmes she used to make, I’d give him a free pass for conning her.’
‘House Doctor wasn’t that bad,’ said Munster.
‘It bloody was,’ said Yvette. ‘Looking at people’s psychology from their wallpaper.’
‘It was more of a guilty pleasure.’ Newton was in a good mood today, positively bouncy.
‘Enough of the TV reviewing,’ said Karlsson. ‘However good or bad she was, she seems to have got off lightly. Maybe he really liked her, maybe he hadn’t got around to conning her or maybe he conned her in a way we haven’t found out about yet. And then there’s the possibility that he conned the wrong person, someone we don’t even know about, perhaps someone in the past, and they caught up with him and taught him a lesson.’
‘That’s a lot of maybes,’ said Yvette.
‘And our main witness is insane and delusional. And our other main witness is dead.’ He took another bite of his sandwich. ‘None of this is good. But the question is: what do we do now?’
There was a long silence in which the only sound heard was of sandwiches being chewed.
‘Well?’ said Karlsson.
‘All right,’ said Yvette. ‘There are actually lots of things we know.’
‘Go on.’
‘We know that he earned his money by conning rich people. We know he slept with Aisling Wyatt and that he was probably going to blackmail Jasmine Shreeve. He fleeced Mary Orton and tried to make her change her will. As you say, there are lots of motives here – although the Jasmine Shreeve motive appears to be like the one for the Orton sons, a motive she didn’t yet know about. We know he had a shed-load of money that someone stole – or he put somewhere else, and we haven’t managed to find out where.’ She paused. ‘Yet. We also now know how he found his victims.’
‘Do you?’ Newton leaned forward. ‘I didn’t know about this.’
‘Sorry,’ said Karlsson. ‘I wasn’t aware we had to keep you up to date with all the details of our cases.’
‘They all used the same bank?’ guessed Newton. ‘Or they all shopped at Harrods?’
‘The second guess is warmer. They all bought very expensive items made of wood from a company where Poole briefly worked. When he left, he took the list of clients with him, presuming – rightly, it seems – that they all had money to spare.’
‘That’s clever,’ said Newton.
Karlsson thought he was enjoying himself far too much. ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t get us much further on.’ He turned to Yvette. ‘What do you think we should do next?’
‘We lean on Aisling and Frank Wyatt. Separately.’
‘Lean on?’ said Karlsson. ‘Meaning?’
‘Give me some time alone with Frank Wyatt and put the following scenario to
him: you confronted Robert Poole with what he’d done, you had a row, there was a struggle, you killed Poole by mistake, panicked, dumped the body. If he owns up to that, the CPS might well go for manslaughter, possibly even a suspended sentence if the judge is sympathetic.’
Karlsson thought for a moment. ‘What about the missing finger?’
‘Maybe there was a ring that would identify him.’
‘So he cut the finger off in a panic?’
‘That’s how we’ll put it to him.’
‘And what about the money that was cleared out of Poole’s account?’
‘Poole could have done that himself to hide the trail.’
‘And it’s now where?’
‘Buried somewhere. Lost forever. Or in an account abroad.’ There was another silence. ‘Well, you never clear up everything.’
‘And Janet Ferris?’
‘Suicide,’ said Yvette, promptly. ‘While the balance of her mind was disturbed.’
Karlsson gave a grunt. ‘All right. We pull the Wyatts in for questioning. Before that, we dig up everything we can find about them.’ He looked at the desk diary. ‘Wednesday morning,’ he said. ‘First thing. Chris, you go and check out alibis for both of them before then.’
‘I think it’s Jasmine Shreeve,’ said Newton.
There was a silence and a slow smile grew on Karlsson’s face. ‘What?’
‘Sorry,’ said Newton. ‘Ignore what I said.’
‘Well, we’ve already got a psychotherapist working on the inquiry. Why not a management consultant as well? Why do you think it’s Jasmine Shreeve?’
‘She’s got more to lose than the others. I’ve seen interviews with her. She still has a hopeless fantasy that she’s going to have a comeback. If she was humiliated by a conman, it would ruin any chance of that. And anyone who’s seen her on TV knows how needy she is. If she felt she had been betrayed, she could have done anything.’
‘Thank you for that,’ said Karlsson. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t send you off to interview Jasmine Shreeve for us. I’ll talk to her myself. And if your theory turns out to be right, then Yvette and Chris will cook you a slap-up dinner.’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ said Yvette.
‘That wouldn’t be much of a reward.’
‘And what’s Dr Klein going to be doing?’
‘I think she was on the verge of dropping out.’
‘Why?’ said Yvette. ‘Did she get fed up?’
‘It looks like she took it out on that photographer.’ Munster grinned at Yvette, then caught Karlsson’s eye and stopped grinning.
‘She told me about it,’ said Karlsson. ‘It wasn’t her, it was two of her friends.’
‘It’s not very professional,’ said Munster. ‘She gets into the papers. Then there’s a fight with a photographer and she’s in the papers again. It’s like having Britney Spears on the inquiry.’
Karlsson shook his head. ‘I think she felt too involved. She felt she’d let Janet Ferris down.’ He screwed up the sandwich wrapper and tossed it at a bin. It bounced off the rim on to the floor. ‘It’s not as if we’re doing such a good job ourselves.’
There was a knock on the door and a woman put her head round. ‘There’s someone to see you, sir,’ she said apologetically.
Lorna Kersey was in her mid- to late-forties, Karlsson guessed, with cropped brown hair and round glasses. She was wearing no makeup, but had chunky earrings and several rings on her small hands. She was wrapped in a voluminous orange cardigan and was wearing snow boots, but she still looked cold. Her husband, Mervyn, was a small, plump man with silvering hair who looked older than her. He sat upright and still in his chair and pressed his hands together, as if he was praying. Every so often, Lorna would reach out and touch him gently – on his shoulder, his arm, his thigh – to reassure him, and he would glance towards her and smile.
‘I don’t want to waste your time,’ she said.
‘I understand it’s about Robert Poole. I’m in charge of the case and would be interested to hear anything you have to say.’
‘Well, that’s the thing. The man we know isn’t called Robert Poole. He might be someone different.’
‘What is he called?’
‘Edward Green.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was the poster. It was so like him.’
‘And this man, Edward Green, you haven’t seen him for a while?’
She grimaced. ‘It’s to do with our daughter.’
‘Hang on. Your daughter’s not called Sally, is she?’
‘Sally?’ She looked bewildered. ‘No. She’s Beth. I mean, she’s Elizabeth really but she’s called Beth. Beth Kersey.’
‘Sorry. Go on, then.’
Lorna Kersey leaned towards him. Close-up, Karlsson could see the creases and lines on her face.
‘We’ve got three daughters. Beth is the eldest. She’s nearly twenty-two now. Her birthday is in March. Her sisters are younger. They’re still at school, and I don’t think that helped much.’ Karlsson saw her swallow, saw how her fingers pressed against the rim of the desk. ‘She’s always been a troubled girl, from the moment she was born, you could say. A worry to us.’ She glanced at her husband, then back again. ‘She was unhappy, you see, and angry. She just seemed made that way.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Karlsson. ‘Where is your daughter now?’
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We don’t know. I’m trying to explain things, how we got here. What I’m trying to say is that she was always troubled. School was a problem for her, though she liked things like art and practical subjects, things she could do with her hands. And she was strong. She could run for miles and swim in the coldest water. She didn’t make friends easily.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear about all of that. What’s relevant is that she had a wretched adolescence. She thought she was ugly and stupid and she was lonely and very needy but hard to help. We did everything we could, but it just became worse as she got older. It was tearing us apart as a household. Then she started getting into trouble.’
‘What kind?’
‘The trouble that teenagers get into. Drugs, probably, but there was always an anger, an unhappiness. She could be violent, to other people and to herself as well.’
‘Was she arrested?’
‘No. There were police sometimes, but she was never actually arrested. We took her to see people. Doctors. Psychiatrists. She was referred to a counsellor at the hospital and then we went to someone private. I don’t know if it was doing any good. Maybe we were just making her feel even more of an outsider and bad about herself. You don’t know until it’s too late if what you’re doing is right or wrong, do you? There’s no magic answer to things like this – you just hope that bit by bit something may change. It was all so – so mysterious. Baffling. We didn’t know what we’d done to make her like this and – oh, it got so bad, we didn’t know where to turn.’ She blinked and Karlsson saw her eyes were full of tears. ‘I’m making this too emotional,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s probably not relevant. Sorry.’
‘Then she met this man.’ They were Mervyn Kersey’s first words. He had a faint Welsh accent.
‘The man you knew as Edward Green?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did she meet him?’
‘We’re not sure. But she used to spend time just walking, sometimes all night. I think she met him then.’
Karlsson nodded. This sounded like Robert Poole.
‘We didn’t know about him at first. She didn’t tell us. She just changed. We both noticed it. At first we were glad: she was calmer, less volatile with us and her sisters. She went out more. We were just so relieved.’
‘But?’
‘She was very secretive – furtive is the word, really. We started suspecting that she was stealing money from us. Not much, but there’d be cash missing from our wallets, stuff like that.’
‘And her sisters’ savings,’ put in Mervyn Kersey. He spoke
as if he could hardly bear to squeeze the words out. Karlsson thought he was ashamed.
‘Did you meet him?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Yes. I couldn’t believe it,’ said Lorna Kersey. ‘He was so – what’s the word? – polite, personable. He was sweet to the girls and lovely with Beth. I should have liked him more than I did. This will sound awful. I didn’t trust him because I thought he could have had anyone so why would he choose Beth? I loved my daughter, but I couldn’t see why a handsome, successful young man like him would go for a plump, unhappy, unglamorous, under-achieving and angry young woman. It didn’t make sense. Does that sound callous?’
‘No,’ said Karlsson, untruthfully. ‘So, what did you think?’
She looked at him unflinchingly. ‘I won’t say that we’re rich …’ she began.
‘We are,’ said her husband. ‘By most people’s standards.’
‘The point is,’ she continued, ‘that he would have known we were comfortably off.’
‘You thought he was after your money?’
‘I worried.’
‘And now she’s gone.’
‘She stole my bank card, emptied my current account, took a few clothes and went.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. She left a note saying we had controlled her for too long and tried to make her into someone she didn’t want to be, and now she was free at last.’
‘Did she go with Robert … Edward Green?’
‘We assume so. We never saw him again and we haven’t seen her.’ She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘We haven’t seen our daughter for thirteen months. Or heard from her, or heard anything about her. We don’t know if she’s alive or dead, happy away from us or wretched. We don’t know if she wants us to find her, but we’ve tried and tried to. We just want to know if she’s all right. She doesn’t need to come home, she doesn’t need to see us if that’s what she wants. We contacted the police but they said there was nothing they could do about a twenty-year-old woman who had gone of her own free will. We even hired someone. Nothing.’
‘Did she have a mobile phone?’
‘She did, but it doesn’t seem to be operational.’
