Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  “I’m assuming you’re from the police?”

  Felix was poised in the doorway. Hanson took in the pale-gray suit and open shirt. The immaculately groomed hair and trimmed beard. He looked as though he’d either just got back from work or got dressed for an upmarket evening out.

  Hanson gave him a smile. “How did you know?”

  “It’s just your manner,” Felix said, and then grinned. “And maybe the squad cars and vans outside. My kitchen window looks out onto the road.”

  As Hanson opened her mouth to suggest that they talk inside, he said, “You look like you have something sensitive to ask. You’re welcome to come in. If I’m going to shop my neighbors, I’d rather do it in private.”

  He stood back to let her into the flat. The layout was the inverse of Zoe’s, Hanson saw. It was probably the exact same size, but thanks to being fully furnished, it seemed smaller. A big sofa sat in the middle of the room and a huge square bookshelf dominated one wall, full of neatly marshaled paperbacks, with hardbacks below. There were a few pictures, too. Some seascapes and a few certificates in frames on two walls, plus a couple of smaller pictures standing on a high bookshelf. And Felix had a huge plasma screen on a unit with DVDs lined up neatly beneath it.

  Where Zoe’s flat had had surface mess, however, Felix’s had none. The place was spotless, and the cloths that hung over the sink and on the oven-door handle were utterly straight. They looked as if they might have been ironed.

  “Here,” he said, pulling a kitchen chair over toward the sofa. “You take the sofa.”

  “Thank you.” Hanson sat herself down carefully. “I believe you’re Zoe Swardadine’s landlord. Is that right?”

  There was a pause, while Felix stalled in the act of sitting. And then he continued to sit smoothly, as if nothing had happened.

  “Yes,” Felix said. “Is this…is she all right?”

  “I’m afraid Zoe has been found dead,” Hanson said. “I’m so sorry to have to give you the news.”

  “Are you…are you serious?” There was a look in the man’s eyes that was almost hunted. “I only spoke to her yesterday.”

  “We were called in by a friend who was worried about her,” Hanson said, choosing her words with care. “And on entering her flat, we found her dead.”

  “Jesus,” Felix said, and then, again, “Jesus.” He stood and put a hand on the counter. “Did she…did she do it to herself?”

  Which Hanson thought was a strange question. “I’m afraid it’s too early to tell,” she said. “Did you have any reason to think that she was suicidal?”

  “No, of course not,” Felix said, and then added, “I would have…I would have done something…”

  There was a silence, and Hanson got the impression he was deeply immersed in some kind of memory.

  “I think you have a key for her flat?” she said eventually.

  “Yes, of course. I need to be able to get in and fix things. Or let workmen in.” Hanson wondered at the defensive tone. Felix was looking toward the door now, where a row of hooks had been installed on the wall. “Do you need it…? I could dig it out. But I do only have the one…”

  “I’ll check with the chief,” Hanson replied. “It’d probably be worth having it to hand. You said you spoke to her yesterday. Could you tell us when?”

  “In the afternoon,” he said quickly. “Just a quick phone call.”

  Hanson smiled. “Do you talk to your tenants often?”

  “Oh, no. I only have one flat that I let out, and Zoe was a friend rather than just a tenant. I knew her from the coffee shop before she moved in. God.” He seemed to lose strength suddenly. His arms sagged down by his sides.

  “How was she when you spoke?” Hanson asked.

  Felix shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Busy, I suppose. She didn’t seem to have as much time as usual.”

  “And you didn’t see her after that conversation?” Hanson pressed.

  “Well…I suppose I saw her. I saw her coming back home.”

  “Saw her…?”

  “Down there,” he said, nodding through the kitchen window, which gave a view over the road. Hanson rose to check, wondering whether the door itself would be visible. Standing to the far right, she could only see the pavement that must have been outside the door, but it would be easy to keep track of anyone coming and going.

  “What time was that?” she asked him.

  “I’d say eightish, maybe eight-thirty.” He gave another shrug. “It was dark. I don’t think I checked the time, but it had been dark awhile.”

  Hanson pulled her pen out of her notebook and wrote that down, and then slid them both back into her jacket pocket.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s really helpful. The chief would like you to come into the station to give a full statement. Probably this evening, but we’ll let you know. Will that be OK? Do you have…work?”

  There was a brief pause, and then Felix said, “No. No, that’s fine. I can free myself up.”

  He showed Hanson to the door, and she left thoughtfully. Halfway down the stairs, she stopped and sent a quick summary of the chat to the chief in a text message, and then headed out to start looking for CCTV cameras.

  * * *

  —

  O’MALLEY RETURNED TO the station before Aidan Poole or Zoe’s parents had made it, and gave Jonah a rundown of his brief chat with Victor Varos and Maeve Silver at the coffeehouse.

  “There’s a lot of emotion there,” he said in summary. “Particularly Victor. I’d say he held a candle for Zoe. We’re going to want to talk to both of them properly.”

  Jonah had agreed, and asked him to sort it. And then he’d started rereading the transcript of Aidan’s first call, comparing it to the crime report that had been logged earlier. The blindingly obvious question was why Aidan had called the police instead of going to check on Zoe himself. More than twelve hours had passed between the two calls, and Aidan Poole had apparently known no more about his girlfriend’s well-being at the end of that time than he had at the start.

  Several possible explanations had occurred to Jonah. The first was that Aidan and Zoe had argued about something, and she was deliberately not answering his calls or visits. Such an argument would have been another reason for him to worry about her, of course. This theory presupposed that the apparent witnessing of a murder had been pure fabrication to force the police to check on her.

  His second thought was that Aidan knew full well that Zoe was dead, because he’d killed her. Thinking he would look suspicious if he were the one to find her, and wanting to cast suspicion in another direction, he had reported it in the hope that the police would charge in there, and had then tried again when nothing seemed to have happened.

  The third thing that occurred to him was a lot simpler, and chimed in with the way Aidan had written “Southampton” under the location of the crime. This third theory was that Aidan hadn’t gone round there because he didn’t actually know Zoe’s address. And although it was the simplest option, it might raise just as many questions as the other two. If Zoe had been there for five or six months, how had he not known where she lived?

  * * *

  —

  AIDAN EVENTUALLY ARRIVED before Zoe’s parents, which was a relief. There were a lot of questions Jonah wanted answers to before he started talking to Mr. and Mrs. Swardadine.

  Dr. Aidan Poole was, in person, a great deal less suave than he’d been in his photo, though Jonah was prepared to accept that a large portion of that might be circumstantial. The jacket and jeans were tidy enough, but his skin looked sheeny, and what should have been a reasonably healthy tan seemed sickly. The glassy, bloodshot eyes did him no favors, either. Touches of grief, all of them, that had scuffed and smudged the perfect portrait until it looked tatty and unappealing.

  “I should have given my name when I called,
” the lecturer said, the moment the tape was running. “I’m so sorry. Did it…did the delay make a difference?”

  Jonah glanced up from the pages of the transcript that he’d taken in with him. “It’s hard to say,” he said neutrally. “It might have made some difference.”

  Aidan’s jaw twisted, and he looked away as he nodded.

  “So Zoe was your girlfriend?” Jonah said when Aidan failed to say anything more. When the lecturer nodded, he went on, “I need you to take me through what you saw. As clearly as you can.”

  “Yes,” Aidan said. His jaw muscles stood out, and Jonah could almost feel his teeth grinding together. The tension.

  Aidan went through what he’d already reported, his voice shifting pitch frequently with apparent stress. The Skype call. The sudden intruder he’d never seen. The sounds of a struggle.

  From Jonah’s perspective, it didn’t sound rehearsed. There were frequent pauses while Aidan considered his words. And, in fact, those were what interested him the most.

  “So you called the police?”

  “Yes.” He gave Jonah a slightly desperate look. “I didn’t do a very good job of telling them what to do and I…I really regret that.”

  He tailed off and Jonah watched him carefully, assessing. And then he said, “You know this is a murder investigation now. So other things are less important than they would be.”

  Aidan sat back, instinctively moving away from him.

  “I need you to tell me what you’re hiding,” Jonah continued.

  Aidan shook his head. “She’s…a student.” He grimaced. “I’m a lecturer. We kept the relationship secret because it shouldn’t have been happening. There’s no question that the university would take a poor view, and if something’s happened to her, and I’m implicated…”

  Jonah gave him a long, steady look. Aidan returned it for a moment, and then looked away again.

  “Do you have any reason to think that anyone wanted to harm Zoe?” Jonah asked quietly.

  “I don’t,” he said. “But I keep wondering if she had met someone, you know? If there was someone else, and that’s why she wasn’t available earlier…Maybe she was going to tell me that night. Could they have killed her? If there was someone else? Someone she’d given a key to?”

  “She never said anything that implied that?”

  Aidan shook his head. But then he added hesitantly, “But there were people who were, you know…interested. One in particular. Her friend Victor, who worked at the coffee shop with her.”

  “What makes you think he liked her?”

  “It was pretty obvious,” Aidan said with a touch more strength. “The day he realized we were dating, he tried to square off against me, and then he wrecked my laptop. He should have been bloody fired. He wouldn’t socialize with the two of us for months after he knew, and he clearly hated me.”

  Jonah looked at Aidan thoughtfully, and asked, “Do you happen to know Zoe’s address?”

  He saw a slight heat appear in Aidan’s cheeks.

  “Not her new one, no,” he said.

  “When did she move in there?”

  “I…A few months ago?”

  Jonah simply looked back at him, and Aidan’s gaze slid away.

  “I know it’s a bit weird. When we had a break a while ago, she moved away, wanting a new start. But then when we started things off again, we did what we’d done right at the start. We had dates, and they always ended up back in my hotel…” He closed his eyes briefly. “Which makes it sound…it makes it sound awful. But it wasn’t. It was…wonderful.”

  The glowing glimmer in his eyes started to spill over, and Aidan rubbed at them with an embarrassed anger. Jonah decided to call it a day. He had the strong sense that Aidan Poole was holding back a great deal, but he was also aware of how attacking a witness who was clearly grieving would sound on the tapes. How everything Aidan said might be needed if this came to trial.

  “That’s all I want to ask for now,” he said. “I’ll need you to have prints taken, though. Let me see if someone’s available.”

  “Why?” he asked, and Jonah could see instant tension running through him. “You know it wasn’t me.”

  “We need to rule yours out,” Jonah said. “Even if you hadn’t been to the flat, you will have touched possessions belonging to Zoe.”

  “Oh,” Aidan said. “Of course. Sorry.”

  Jonah rose. “I’ll take you downstairs.”

  * * *

  —

  HANSON’S HUNT FOR security cameras had produced two potential results. The flat block had a camera in the rear car park that pointed toward the gates. It showed the road through the archway under the building. The door to most of the flats was next to the archway, so there was a good chance of snapping anyone coming and going from the direction of town.

  Down at the bottom of Latterworth Road, toward town, there was also a CCTV camera positioned on a lamppost. It should catch anyone walking up the road from the city center. Unfortunately the other end of the road had no coverage at all, so with both of the cameras, they were only going to catch people who had come from the south side.

  It had, naturally, rained throughout her reconnaissance. With only a jacket and scarf, she was soaked through by the time she made it back to her car. She climbed in and cranked up the heat, so she was at least halfway to dry by the time she got back to the station.

  DI Walker, one of the detectives who covered East Hampshire, grinned at her sympathetically as she walked in. “Did you get sent door-knocking?”

  “Close,” she said. “CCTV hunt.”

  “It’s worth keeping a coat and waterproof trousers in your car,” he said quietly. “They look shit, but…” He shrugged. “It’s better than spending the whole day freezing your arse off.”

  “That’s a good tip,” Hanson said. She didn’t go on to say that she’d had waterproofs in the car for weeks, packed into the overnight bag she used to drive around with. It had been there because she’d needed to know she could escape from the abusive boyfriend she’d been living with. Finally being free of him and feeling she could take it out of the car had been a very good step psychologically. It was unfortunate that it had also been a bad move practically speaking.

  She booted her desktop and went through the crime-scene photos once again. At one of the kitchen photographs, which showed two bowls on the floor, she paused. She’d forgotten about the cat.

  She was readying herself to tell the DCI about it when she saw him emerge from an interview room with a dark-haired, slightly pouty-looking man who was probably somewhere in his late thirties. Underneath a haggard expression, he was a good-looking guy, she thought. Sulky and artistic, as she’d always imagined Byron must have looked.

  She realized that this must be the boyfriend. The one who had apparently witnessed his girlfriend’s death online. She watched him intently from behind her screen as he drifted toward the door, trying to tell whether the grief was real, whether he’d been telling the truth. It was a pretty hard one to call.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH LET AIDAN into the lift instead of walking him down the stairs, an instinctive note of care for him. The lecturer seemed to be drifting apart while Jonah watched, his eyes off somewhere in the distance and a hopeless sag to his shoulders.

  Aidan’s expression remained unfocused until the lift doors opened, and then a sudden jolt ran through his whole body.

  “Oh God,” he said very quietly.

  He had just as much of an impact on the couple standing outside. It took Jonah no time at all to recognize Martin Swardadine and to guess that the attractive, beautifully groomed black woman beside him was his wife. The look they were giving Aidan was nothing short of horrified.

  Jonah gave a small sigh. He wouldn’t have chosen to have Aidan Poole meet Zoe’s parents at this point.
Though he couldn’t deny that the strength of each reaction was interesting.

  Jonah walked ahead of Aidan and held his hand out to each of the Swardadines in turn.

  “I’m DCI Sheens. I’m so sorry. I just need to show Mr. Poole out.”

  Zoe’s mother gave a rapid nod, her eyes sliding immediately to Aidan. It wasn’t a friendly look.

  Jonah decided, as he walked Aidan to the door, that he would find a tactful way of asking what that look meant in the privacy of the relatives’ room, but he didn’t have to wait that long. The moment he’d returned to the couple, Zoe’s mother said in a low, urgent voice, “What’s he doing here?”

  Deciding that the reception area wasn’t the right place for this, he said carefully, “Mr. Poole was the one who reported that she’d been attacked.”

  Zoe’s mother gave her husband a strange look. It was full of anger and hurt.

  “Let’s talk upstairs,” Jonah said in as soothing a tone as he could.

  April—nineteen months before

  Zoe was full of a sense of well-being, and it only increased during lunch with Aidan at the Mercure. They’d agreed to eat at the hotel, and it had been a move that would unquestionably end in sex. Aidan didn’t have any seminars until four, and Zoe was already thinking about heading upstairs with him as they started eating tagliatelle. She’d been daydreaming about their night together the week before. She had blazed with frustration for the six days he’d been away again, and the feeling had mounted into an uncharacteristic impatience to get him back to the room.

  The wine didn’t help. She wasn’t sure why she’d asked for a second glass of rosé, except perhaps that being around him made her feel like doing all the wrong things, over and over.

  They were close to finishing when Zoe’s phone rang.

  “Angeline,” she said briefly, and tried to keep her smile in place.

  “You’re not thinking of answering, are you?” he asked with slightly narrowed eyes.

  “I—I don’t…” She made a frustrated noise. “She’s not very well and I don’t think she’s getting the help she needs. She does stupid things. Well…” Zoe sighed. “She drinks, and sometimes she cuts herself. Not stupid, I guess, if you’re desperate.”