“A bar near Westminster Bridge. I wanted a public place.”
Rathe nodded, acknowledging the intelligence of her actions. “And you want me to come with you, is that it?”
She smiled, awkwardly. “Moral support.”
“Why me? After all this time, Ally, why me?”
She lowered her gaze once more. “I know it’s a lot to ask. And it’s taking advantage, I can see that too… ”
“Then why?”
She looked back to his dark eyes. She never remembered them looking this sad. “Because Gilchrist said it was personal and private, whatever it is he wants to talk about. And nobody knows me like you do. No one ever has.”
Rathe felt he ought to try to take her words as flattery, designed to prick his vanity so that he would feel compelled to agree to help her, but he could not bring himself to do it. There was something honest in her eyes, in the delicate tinge of shame in her cheeks for daring to ask him to help her, that he could not accept that she was being manipulative and not candid. Just as he had known he would accept her invitation to the Artesian, he knew that he would accept her plea for support in meeting Roger Gilchrist.
“Of course I’ll come,” he said, so quietly that she almost didn’t hear it.
She fell back into the comfort of the chair, as though the relief at hearing his agreement had exhausted her. She gasped a word of thanks to him but he shrugged it off with a shake of his head. He pointed to her glass and said, “Another?”
She looked back at him and smiled. This time, there was no awkwardness in it, and a measure of warmth had come back into her eyes. Rathe wondered whether there was a similar softening of his own gaze.
“Yes,” she said. “But let me buy.”
She was on her feet before he could protest. As she walked towards the bar, he held out a hand to stop her.
“Alice, if a private detective gets in touch with you out of the blue,” he said; “and I mean you specifically, not just anybody, and if he says he needs to talk to you about a personal matter, and he says he can only do it in person… ”
She stared into his eyes, giving a small nod of her head, as though he had put into words the same thoughts which danced around her head and which had given her more hope than she had dared wish for.
“Alice, I think he’s found Kirsty… ”
* * *
Kirsty Villiers: missing since Christmas 2012. Twenty-two at the time of her disappearance, last seen walking towards the Devil’s Gate nightclub in Kensington. Officially still a missing persons case, no body having ever turned up, but nor had there been any new leads. Appeals, campaigns, television interviews, newspaper stories, magazine articles, but all with the same negative result.
Kirsty Villiers on a festive night out one moment; swallowed up the next by the city which was supposed to be her home.
Rathe had never known Kirsty. She had disappeared three years before he and Alice had met, but it hadn’t been long into their relationship that Alice told him the family’s darkest sadness. She had kept her summary brief, confining it to dates and basic circumstances, and following that with a dismissive overview of the little which the police had managed to achieve. Rathe had listened with a dutiful concern, but he had not felt any emotional engagement with the facts. Not then. He hadn’t known the girl, so it had not been difficult to assure himself that it was neither his loss nor his place to do anything about it. If he remembered correctly now, he had listened and allowed Alice’s tears to flow, remaining silent whilst she composed herself, and then changing the subject. When he had met the parents, he had barely registered any sense of grief or loss which they might be feeling. He had been too eager to ensure that he made a notable first impression and that Alice’s parents were aware of his past achievements and his future prospects. Beyond his talk about himself, however, the details of that first meal had been hazy even on the following day, let alone three years after the event.
Today, he was a changed Anthony Rathe, he felt sure of that, and it was this alternative version of himself who wondered whether he would approach the subject differently now if he were hearing it for the first time. Would he be more sensitive to the sadness of those photographs which he had once seen in the Villiers’s household? Would he recognise the sense of loss which the parents must feel whenever they looked at Kirsty’s face, framed in silver or wood? He felt sure he would. Rathe wondered whether the uncertainty of not knowing if a child was alive or dead was not, in its own way, a crueller torment than having to accept that a child is dead, violently or otherwise. He did not feel qualified to give an opinion on that himself, but he knew that in those past years it was a question which he would never have asked, let alone tried to answer.
The memory of himself in those days before the Marsden case were capable of turning him sick.
It was these thoughts, and imaginings like them, which had occupied the majority of his afternoon and evening once Alice Villiers had left his company. They had remained in the Artesian for the duration of that second drink, but they had not mentioned either Kirsty or Roger Gilchrist again, not once Rathe had assured Alice for a final time that he would accompany her to meet the detective. Rathe had taken details of the bar which Alice had chosen for the rendezvous and they had arranged to meet each other outside it at ten to seven.
“I’ll be there for quarter to,” Rathe had said.
Alice had not replied, but within her she felt something approaching her initial attraction to the man. He was the same, but different. He had changed, certainly, lost his easy confidence and magnetic swagger which once she had found so irresistible, but it had been replaced by an uncertain introspection, an almost awkward sensitivity which impressed her just as deeply but in a different place in her soul. She had the impression that he felt he had let her down in the past and that he could not bear for history to repeat itself. As soon as the thought occurred to her, her mind recalled the name of Kevin Marsden to her and she made a sudden connection between Rathe’s approach to the dead boy and her request for help.
He had walked her out of the hotel bar, where she had thanked him again. She had reached up to his cheek, drawing him down slowly, and she had kissed the place where her hand had touched. He had made no response, and she had not expected one, but if she had turned back at any time as she walked away towards Regent Street, she would have seen him standing looking after her, as the world went about its business around his motionless figure.
Rathe spent his afternoon in lonely consideration. He ambled across London and had a look at the offices of RPG Investigations. He was not overly impressed but neither was he appalled. The premises were not exclusive but, likewise, they were not so squalid as to suggest incompetence or unreliability. He sat in a coffee house with a strong, bitter Americano, scrolling through his phone’s Google search results on Kirsty Villiers. The images of her face which had been used in all the media coverage confronted him at once. He was not surprised to find that his memory of Kirsty had been woefully inadequate. Her hair was dark, where Alice’s was blonde, but the eyes shared that clear, emerald intensity. She was attractive, Rathe was in no doubt about that, but her appeal was different to Alice’s. Kirsty was more conventionally beautiful, her lips more prone to pout as well as smile, and her habit of looking at the camera almost side-on suggested some aspirations for the screen or the catwalk. Alice’s attraction was in her subtlety, her diffidence, and her inability to see that she was beautiful. From what he could tell from these photos, however unfair a basis that might be to judge, Rathe was sure Kirsty Villiers had known how stunning people would say she was. Alice, he knew, would never be so sure of her own beauty to be able to take it for granted.
The articles he found on Kirsty told him very little about the circumstances of her disappearance beyond what he could remember Alice telling him all those years ago. Kirsty had been on a Christmas night out with friends. Cocktail bars, music, dancing, taxi home with or without a takeaway, depending on her mood and her b
ody’s requirements. She had got separated from the group of friends by a need for more money, so she had gone to a cash machine further down the road from the Devil’s Gate club. One friend had said she would come with her, but Kirsty had said there was no need. In hindsight, the friend knew she should have insisted, but at the time she had taken Kirsty at her word. The police had ascertained that Kirsty had withdrawn £100 from the cash machine and the CCTV in the area showed her doing it. The grainy image on the footage and the entry on her online banking statement were the last pieces of physical evidence of Kirsty Villiers’s existence in the world because she had not been seen since.
Rathe took a moment to consider the friend. Not surprisingly, she had been interviewed more times than anybody else in the group who were out that night and Rathe wondered how she felt now about her decision to let Kirsty go off alone. He thought about how often she might lie awake, wondering if things might have been different if she had told Kirsty she was coming with her for money, no matter what anyone else said about it. He could not be sure but he suspected she had let that unanswerable question loiter in her mind for some considerable time. It might linger there still, of course, and Rathe could not help but think how quickly a bad decision could crumble into a sense of guilt.
The conclusion of his researches was predictably vague. He could not hope to solve a disappearance with a couple of Google searches and some introspective thoughts when a dedicated police team had failed to turn up any clue after a major enquiry. Nevertheless, that evening, as he sat with a glass of Merlot in the company of Mahler, he reminded himself that some new information must have come to light. Roger Gilchrist was proof enough of that. But it was useless to speculate and, for the rest of the evening and much of the following day, Anthony Rathe gave no more thought to Kirsty Villiers, although he was unable to prevent his mind from detaching itself entirely, or at all, from the past memories and restored contact which he had made with her sister.
* * *
By quarter past seven the following evening, Rathe had made up his mind. He had been outside the bar at quarter to the hour, as arranged, but when the time for Alice to arrive had come and gone, Rathe had found himself with a dilemma. It did not take him long to determine that going into the bar alone was not a viable option. For one thing, he had no idea what Roger Gilchrist looked like and he had no way of being able to guess which one out of the many patrons of the place would be him. For another, it was not Anthony Rathe whom Gilchrist was expecting to meet, so there was no reason why he would speak to Rathe alone in any event. It was Alice alone to whom Gilchrist wanted to speak. But she had not shown up for the meeting.
Without any more thought being given to abandoning Gilchrist, Rathe hailed a taxi and gave Alice’s address as his destination. Let Gilchrist sit alone and draw his own conclusions, thought Rathe; when it was obvious she was not going to show, the detective surely would have enough presence of mind to contact her the following morning and demand an explanation. Gilchrist could be left to his own devices. For now, Rathe’s mind was more concerned with the reason for Alice’s failure to keep her appointment. With a possible lead in her sister’s disappearance in sight, Alice would surely be eager to find out all she could from Gilchrist. And yet she had not shown up. That conflict of her own interests was the reason Rathe spent the entire taxi journey with an ominous sense of dread knotting up in his stomach.
Alice’s house was in darkness. It was the last property in a small cul-de-sac, sheltered from the main road by a fringe of trees which lined the street. It was a modest but respectable area, a haven of secluded peace in the heart of London, and Rathe felt that the increasing darkness of his purpose ought to have no place in the calm, suburban tranquillity of the estate. He waited for the taxi to disappear before he approached the house. He knocked once on the front door, but got no reply. He did not bother looking through the front window because he had already noted that the Venetian blinds were drawn. Instead, he walked down the narrow alleyway which Alice shared with her neighbour, making his way past the variously coloured wheelie-bins which lined the passageway, towards the back of the house.
It too was in darkness, but Rathe could look into the kitchen window as he passed, although he saw nothing untoward inside. He reached out to try the back door, but he was stopped at once in his tracks by the soft crunch of broken glass under his feet. His gaze drifted to the glass panel of the door and, with a quickening of his breath, his eyes took in the small hole above the handle. His sense of dread intensified and, for a moment, he wished he was anywhere else but standing at Alice Villiers’s backdoor. He wanted to be doing almost anything other than finding that door unlocked and stepping into the kitchen into the silence of the house.
He resisted the temptation to call out her name. Something deep within him told him that it was probably a futile response to his situation. Refusing to speculate about what he might find the further into the house he went, Rathe walked softly across Alice’s kitchen tiles. His fists were clenched and his jaw locked in a concentrated effort to make as little noise as possible. In the blackness, his sense of smell became more acute and he could detect Alice’s scent lingering in the air, the faint traces of perfume and female domesticity seeming so vivid to his heightened senses as to be almost overpowering. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and he could tell now that there seemed to be no trace of any disturbance. The kitchen through which he moved, and the long hallway which he passed as he walked through the house, were as neat and organised as he would have expected from Alice’s personal habits. Any suggestion that the glass panel had been broken for the purpose of burglary seemed to dissipate with each step he took.
From the kitchen, he walked through a communicating door into the living room. She had had it knocked through, he could see that, so that the lounge and dining room were one large space. It was modern, decorated in a contemporarily fashionable style, and in a brief moment of misplaced pride, he found himself thinking of how happy Alice must have been living here. It was cosy, comfortable, and hers; an area which she had been able to make her own. On one wall, he noticed large wooden letters which spelt the word HOME; on another wall, he would see later when the darkness had been illuminated, there were framed pencil sketches of tasteful studies of naked couples, celebrations of the human form rather than any sordid depiction of lust. The black and white of the furnishings were complimented by the occasional and well-chosen splash of colour of cushions, throw-overs, and the hearth rug on the laminated floors.
All those details, Rathe noticed afterwards. Almost at once, as he walked into the living room, his attention was seized by the grim horror of the figure which lay sprawled out in front of him. She lay on her side, her legs outstretched and crossed over one another, one arm splayed out to the side and the other buried under the weight of her body. Even in the absence of light, he could see the blood pooling around her, horribly black in the darkness, and he knew that she would never again reach up and kiss his cheek, or smile at him when he promised to help her, or show him the gap in her teeth with a coy smile. How long he stood staring at the lifeless body of Alice Villiers, of the girl he had loved once and might have loved still, Anthony Rathe could not say. But he was aware that it was long enough for the tears to well in his eyes and for him to become aware of the urge to drop to his knees and scream at the sky.
Suddenly, he was aware of light. A shaft of silver which broke through the darkness of the room, illuminating the horror which was spread across the living room floor, sending a cruel blend of fear, shock, and pain through Rathe’s senses. He spun around in this abrupt spotlight, particles of dust dancing in the beam, but all he succeeded in doing was blinding himself. Behind the torch’s light, he could make out the figure of a man, but it was no more than a silhouetted outline which was masked by the glare which assaulted Rathe’s vision. There was a sharp curse in the confusion, followed by a small click, which preceded the living room lights bursting into life. Rathe’s eyes took a mome
nt to come to terms with the change in focus from profound darkness, to the glaring brightness of the torch, to the softer illumination of the ceiling lights. When his vision had settled, he found himself staring into the face of Detective Inspector Terry Cook.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” hissed the detective.
Rathe dumbly pointed to what had once been Alice Villiers. “I knew her. Alice. I knew her.”
Cook moved past Rathe and approached the body. Forcing himself to look, Rathe saw the dark contusions around her throat and the darker, more terrible stains of death on her back.
“Stabbed to the back,” said Cook, as much to himself than to Rathe. “Three… four times. Marks to the throat. He must have grabbed her from behind, half choking her so that she couldn’t fight back, then used the knife. Four quick stabs.”
He got up from his knees and turned round. Rathe was no longer there. For a second, Cook wondered where he could have gone, but almost immediately he heard from the kitchen the sound of gentle sobbing and Cook found that all he could do for the present was lower his head and allow a few private moments to pass unhindered.
* * *
An hour later, Rathe and Cook stood in the night air, leaning against the bonnet of Cook’s car. They were watching the initial process of a murder enquiry unfold before them, illuminated by the flickering blue lights of the emergency vehicles. Alice’s house had lost its peaceful contentment. It was now a crime scene, a place of official scrutiny and scientific sterility, a home no longer. The cold calculation of forensic analysis had usurped the domestic harmony which Rathe felt sure Alice had enjoyed in that small semi-detached house she had called home, a physical manifestation of the invasion of personal privacy which murder demanded.
“Did you know her well?” Cook asked now.
“We were a couple,” Rathe replied. “Together. Once. Before… But we split up.”
“Recently?”
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 17
