Jigsaw Man (34 page)

There had been no phone calls at all until that morning. He'd assumed Gunner had
a mobile, although he'd never heard it ring or noticed him using a phone. It was
odd that people had suddenly started calling him now on the landline. Was he feeling
more secure, more master of the house? Was he intending on staying for a while? The
thought made Adam seethe. He was also surprised that Gunner hadn't rushed to answer
the phone, seeing as how he'd been giving out the number so freely and must know
the calls were for him. Maybe he'd gone out again. And maybe, for once, he'd forgotten
to lock the bedroom door . . .

Adam finished tidying away his lunch things in the dishwasher and went upstairs.
The door to the sitting room on the
first floor was wide open and the room was empty.
On the landing above, he paused and listened. All he could hear was the distant drone
of traffic and the clatter of the Tube as it passed under the street further along.
Maybe Gunner was asleep. He took off his shoes and crept up to the second floor,
treading carefully on the old stairs, hoping that the creaks weren't too audible.
The door to Kit's bedroom was ajar, daylight coming from within. He put his head
around the door and peered inside.

The curtains were open and the bed was a mess, sheets and duvet half on the floor,
as though Gunner had had a bad night. But there was no sign of him. He paused again
and listened, just in case Gunner was in the bathroom, but there was no sound coming
from inside. Apart from the bed, the room looked tidy, Kit's pictures and bits and
pieces from his travels displayed exactly where they were before. But although he
scouted around, there was no sign of Gunner's clothes, his shoes or large rucksack.
He checked the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, which were still full of Kit's
winter things, then went into the bathroom. The towels had been thrown in a pile
in the middle of the floor. He picked them up and felt them. They were still damp.
Otherwise there were no clothes or other personal items belonging to Gunner, only
the few things of Kit's that Adam hadn't chucked away. A small puddle of water on
the floor by the bath, and a smear of toothpaste in the sink, were the only other
signs of recent occupation. It seemed that Gunner had gone.

He sat down on the bed and gazed around the room, not sure whether he dared celebrate.
Gunner's departure had been as sudden and unannounced as his arrival. Did it mean
anything? Or was he reading too much into things as usual? From his point of view,
the timing of Gunner's leaving was
perfect. Perhaps he should just accept it as a
stroke of luck, although he knew not to trust in such things. Luck had a way of biting
you back if you got too complacent. The visit from the policeman, coupled with the
mysterious Mr Ripley book, had unnerved him. Even with Gunner gone, he couldn't relax
back into the house, much that he'd like to. It was risky staying there any longer,
but all he needed was one more night.

Forty-one

‘I can't believe anyone's that vague,' Hannah Bird said with feeling, as she and
Tartaglia started to walk back to the office after leaving Rosie. ‘She doesn't even
have her mobile switched on half the time. She said she lost it, which is why it
took me so long to get hold of her. Then she found it in the fridge. Can you believe
it?'

He smiled. ‘She does seem a bit daffy and some people just have better recall than
others.' He paused for a moment, taking refuge in a doorway to light a cigarette.
Bird's broad face was etched with tiredness and he sensed her frustration. They were
all working flat out, sifting through whatever came in, however nonsensical, spurred
on by the desperate hope of turning up the one thing that would prove to be pivotal.
He knew from experience it was out there somewhere; it was just a matter of time.
They were making good progress, he reminded himself. But Bird, being new to the roller
coaster ride of a murder investigation, didn't yet have that conviction.

He took a deep drag on his cigarette and started walking again, skirting around a
group of shoppers who were gathered outside Barnes Bookshop, admiring the window
display.

‘Look,' he said after a minute, as they approached the pond. ‘If there was something
material Smart was worried about, and he told Rosie, she'd have gone straight to
whoever was running the Missing Person investigation. And the other daughter, Isobel,
would've done the same. It could easily be just some little thing that he spotted
somewhere when he was out and
about and he poked his nose into the wrong place. Maybe
he didn't even realise something was wrong until it was too late.'

His breath plumed out on the air as he spoke. It was just beginning to get dark and
the temperature had dropped. He turned up his collar and jammed his free hand into
his pocket. As they passed the pond, he heard a loud quacking and flapping of wings.
A group of small children and adults stood by the edge of the water feeding bread
to the ducks.

‘But where, then?' Bird asked.

‘Where what?'

‘Where do we start looking for whatever was troubling him? It wasn't like he had
an action-packed life.'

‘It could be something small and it could be anywhere. His photography certainly
took him all around town. Maybe he was taking photos at the wrong time and somebody
saw him. It could be something as simple as that.'

They walked on in silence along Station Road and had nearly reached the entrance
to the office car park when he turned to her. ‘I know it feels like we're going nowhere,
at least as far as John Smart's concerned, but we just have to keep plugging away.
Something will come up. It always does.'

She gave him a wan smile, but said nothing. She clearly didn't buy into the glass
half full theory.

‘Look, once you've finished the paperwork, why don't you go home and get an early
night? You'll feel much fresher in the morning.'

She was saying she might just do that when his phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket
and saw it was Sharon Fuller.

‘What have you got?' he asked, following Bird through the gates into the yard at
the back.

‘I spoke to Dave Simpson's parole officer,' Fuller said. ‘He told me Simpson had
some sort of a nervous breakdown in
prison. When he came out, the address he gave
for next of kin was his ex-wife's.'

‘Was she the one who reported him missing?'

‘Yes. She's no longer living at that address but Nick's trying to trace her.'

‘OK. While he's doing that, I want a full background report on Dave Simpson.'

He was sitting at his desk half an hour later, scanning his backlog of emails, when
his desk phone buzzed. It was Hannah Bird's extension.

‘I've got Rosie Smart on the phone, Sir,' she said, as he picked up. ‘She wants to
talk to you. She wouldn't say what it was about.'

He sighed. ‘OK. You'd better put her through.'

A few seconds later he heard Rosie's voice. ‘I'm at the Sun Inn and I've just thought
of something Dad said. You told me to call, even if it's something small . . .'

She sounded as though she'd had a few glasses of wine in the interim. ‘What is it
you remember?'

She gave a long, heavy sigh. ‘It was what you were saying about Dad's daily routine
and his hobbies.'

‘His photography,' he prompted.

‘That's right. And his gardening. He used to help out at a house near here. It belonged
to an old lady and he grew veg and stuff for her. He was really into it. I often
used to meet him in here after he'd been working there. It's only a few blocks away.'

‘Yes. We know where it is.'

‘That evening, after the film, he was telling me all about what he'd been doing that
day and he said he was worried about the woman who owned the house and that he might
not be able to go there for much longer.'

‘Worried? In what way?'

‘I think he said she was ill, or something had happened to her.'

‘But she was old.'

‘Yes, but she was still quite together, mentally I mean. She couldn't do her garden
any longer as she had really bad arthritis, but she used to bring him out coffee
and homemade biscuits every time he went over. Then one day she wasn't there any
more, or if she was, she didn't come and see him. The next day too, and the next.'

‘She may have gone to hospital,' he said, thinking of the woman in the wheelchair
that the neighbour had seen.

‘Maybe. All I know is he was worried about her. He said she always used to let him
know if she was going away somewhere, so he could keep an eye on things. When she
didn't reappear, he didn't know what to do.' He could hear from her tone that she
was disappointed. ‘You asked me to tell you if there was anything, however small,'
she added.

He thanked her and hung up. He pushed back in his chair, one foot up on his desk,
staring at the computer screen for a moment. Maybe it was worth taking another look
at the house. He called Minderedes but he wasn't answering. He left a message saying
where he would be and, grabbing his jacket, headed back out of the office.

Five minutes later he was standing in Castelnau, outside the house. It looked much
the same as before, although the piles of leaves had been cleared away, an old, red
VW Polo was now parked in the drive. He went up to the front door and rang the bell.
He waited a minute before ringing again, but there was still no answer. As he stepped
back onto the gravel and looked up, he thought he saw a shadow pass across one of
the first floor windows. It might have been a trick of the fading light but he had
the feeling somebody was at home. He rang again,
this time pressing the bell for
a good thirty seconds, but nobody came to the door. He looked through the ground
floor window into the large sitting room. The newspaper and the mug had gone, but
there was nothing much else to see.

He went over to the car and felt the bonnet. It was still warm. The car was nine
years old but looked in good condition, the paintwork clean and shiny. Stickers for
the RHS and the National Trust were fixed to the back window, along with the slogan
‘Save a Cow, Eat a Vegetarian'. He rang the office and got through to Dave Wightman.
‘I want to run a check on a vehicle.' He gave the make and registration number and
waited while Wightman called it through on another line. Inside, the car was equally
clean and tidy. Apart from a few CDs in the driver's seat pocket, the only visible
contents were a couple of empty plastic shopping bags, neatly folded into squares,
and a box of tissues on the back seat.

Wightman came back on the line. ‘The car's registered to a Mrs Jane Waterman.' He
gave the Castelnau address, adding that the insurance was current. ‘Anything else
you need, Sir?'

‘No. That's all for now.' He tucked his phone away in his pocket. It wasn't a crime
not to answer the door and there were certainly no grounds for a search warrant,
but something niggled. And instinct told him that whoever was in the house was watching
him. He went over to the garage and tried the door but it was locked, as was the
side gate leading to the garden. It was about two metres high, with a row of trellis
above, running between the wall of the garage and the boundary. Without a ladder,
it was impossible to see over the top.

Something made him look up at the house again. This time he saw someone at one of
the windows, looking down at him, then the face disappeared behind a curtain. In
the evening
gloom, it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. He was wondering
whether to call on one of the neighbours to see if he could look into the back garden
from their house, when his phone rang again. It was Minderedes.

‘I've found Ellie Simpson. What do you want me to do?'

‘Keep her there. I'll be over as quickly as I can.'

‘I don't know where Dave is, or how he is, and I don't bloody care,' Ellie Simpson
said with a toss of her curly brown hair.

Tartaglia studied her for a moment, wondering if she was so emphatic because she
was hiding something or if it was just a defence mechanism. ‘But he came here straight
after he got out of jail, didn't he?' he asked.

‘I took him back for Daisy's sake. He said things would be different. More fool me.'

She compressed her lips into a line of disapproval. Yet he sensed there was more
than simple bitterness running below the surface. They were sitting at the small
kitchen table in her flat in Clapham. Her daughter Daisy was with a friend in the
next room, watching one of the Harry Potter films, the sounds of which reverberated
loudly through the thin wall. He'd had a quick nose around the flat when she went
out for a minute to speak to a neighbour who'd rung the bell, but he couldn't see
any sign of a man's things anywhere.

‘You reported him missing a couple of months later. What happened?'

‘He went out to the supermarket to get some stuff for dinner but he never came home.'

‘Had anything happened to make him go off ?'

She shrugged. ‘We'd had yet another row that morning before I went to work.'

‘What was it about?'

She sighed. ‘He'd got this idea in his head about opening a restaurant on his own,
that one of his old clients was going to back him. But nothing seemed to be coming
of it. I thought it was all pie in the sky and he needed to give it up and get a
job.'

‘You mean as a chef ?'

‘Yes. I wanted him to go to Richard English, to ask for a second chance.'

‘Really?' He looked at her sceptically. She had a pleasant, open face, the most striking
feature being her eyes, which were an unusual greyish green. She didn't look a fool,
but sometimes emotion blinded people to the obvious. ‘After everything that had happened,
you really thought that would've worked?'