Perfect Strangers (12 page)

Ruth stood and snapped her phone shut, briskly walking back towards the road. Suddenly, she felt a lot better. Suddenly, she was back on the hunt.

11

The policewoman had been very nice. She had given Sophie a blanket for the ride in the car down to the station, and had even brought her a cup of tea.

‘Hot sweet tea,’ she had said cheerily, as if it was a panacea for all the ills in the world.

The drink was nearly cold now, and had done little to make her feel better. Sophie picked up the polystyrene cup and ran her thumbnail across it, scoring lines into the material.
When are they going to come?
She had been sitting in this little room for an hour at least, just her, a table and an old plastic chair with cigarette burns on it.

A policeman had interviewed her briefly at the hotel and asked her if she wouldn’t mind continuing the questioning at the station. She had agreed, coming down to the ugly concrete police station on Harrow Road with the WPC, where she was told to wait for the detective in charge. But where
was
he? The longer Sophie sat there, the more distressed she began to feel.

At the hotel she had been bewildered and in shock, but now, sitting in this empty, soulless interview room, the reality of what had happened was beginning to sink in. Nick was dead.
Dead
. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the image of his lifeless body, the blood from his wounds colouring the water on the wet bathroom floor. She felt numb, confused and just needed to talk to somebody to try and make sense out of what had happened. Who would want to kill Nick? And what for? Was it an ex-girlfriend, jealous of his relationship with Sophie? A business associate? Somebody he owed money to? She knew that she had had a deep and intimate connection with Nick over the last few days, but there was so much she didn’t know about his life. She’d watched enough cop dramas, though, to know that people were most often killed by someone they knew.
Someone like you, you mean?
she thought with a chill.

Just then the door was pushed open and a tall man in his early forties walked in. His smart dark suit did nothing to detract from the tired, unhappy look about him. A slightly older woman carrying an armful of folders came in behind him.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Ian Fox,’ said the man as they both sat down opposite her. ‘This is DS Sheila Field. Sorry to keep you waiting so long,’ he added. The tone of his voice – firm and serious – scared her.

‘What’s happening?’ said Sophie, anxiously looking from one to the other. ‘Have you any idea who might have done this?’

The two police officers exchanged a look.

‘That’s what we’re hoping to work out, Sophie,’ said Fox.

The woman passed the inspector a blue file and he opened it, taking a pen out of his inside pocket.

‘Okay, first of all, we’d like to ask you some questions. Is that okay?’

Sophie was immediately on her guard. The way he’d said it sounded carefully phrased. Did they suspect her of anything? At the hotel, when she had first seen Nick on the bathroom floor, her immediate, instinctive response had been to cradle him. Her hands had tried to knit his wound back together, although even in her distraught state she had known that the gesture was useless. But in the police car over to the station she realised the dangerous position she was now in. She was Nick’s lover. She had found him dead. Her fingerprints were all over the suite and now his body. Even she could see that looked suspicious.

‘Should I have a lawyer?’ she asked quietly.

‘That’s your right. Would you like one?’ said the policewoman flatly.

Sophie hesitated, then shook her head. Lawyers were for people who had something to hide; that’s what her mother had always said. She just wanted to tell them the truth, and the truth was that she loved Nick and had been devastated to find him dead.

‘I’m just here to help you find whoever hurt Nick,’ she said in the most controlled voice she could manage.

Fox nodded.

‘So let’s start with everything you know about Nick and what happened to him.’

Sophie took a minute to compose herself before she had to relive those moments again.

‘It started off a perfect day,’ she said, puffing out her cheeks as she tried to contain her emotion. ‘We woke up at about six forty. He wanted us to spend the day together, but I had to leave early for a meeting. I had a shower and left his suite at about seven twenty and got a cab to High Street Ken. But I had forgotten my phone so I asked the cabbie to take me back to retrieve it.’

She wiped at her cheek, feeling a tear trickle down.

‘I was gone, maybe thirty minutes,’ she said, her voice trembling now. ‘That’s all. When I returned to the hotel room, he was like that.’

Fox looked at her for a moment before he spoke.

‘Why don’t we go back a bit? Tell me how you met, what was the nature of your relationship?’

She watched as Fox turned on a tape recorder. Slowly, haltingly, Sophie told them how she had met Nick at the party, how they had spent the week together, the places they had been, anything she could remember. The woman sergeant was scribbling down notes in one of her files as she unfurled the story. When she had finished, Fox folded his hands.

‘What was Nick’s full name?’

It seemed a strange question to ask.

‘Nick Cooper.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Sophie, do you know why Nick gave you a false name?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.’

‘We opened the safe in the hotel suite. His passport was inside and the name on this passport was Nick Beddingfield.’

Sophie shook her head vigorously.

‘You’re mistaken. His name was Nick Cooper.’

Fox shrugged.

‘His passport said otherwise.’

‘Maybe it was . . . maybe he had changed his name or something. People do, don’t they? For legal reasons, sometimes?’ She looked from Fox to Field and back again. ‘Why would he lie to me?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie. But we’d like to know why too.’

‘Nick Beddingfield,’ she repeated slowly, staring at the grainy wood of the tabletop. Her head was beginning to swim. She felt dizzy now. Sick, wounded. Could it be true? But why would the police lie? So what else had he been lying about? She made a mental trawl of the last few days, looking for clues, contradictions, inconsistencies in what they had talked about. Had it all been lies? Even his feelings?

‘Is he really from Houston?’ she said, feeling her eyes cloud with tears.

‘We’re making enquiries.’

The air seemed to have been sucked out of the room and her tongue was dry.

‘Could I have a drink, please?’

DS Field got up and returned with a plastic cup of water. It didn’t seem to make much difference; it still hurt to swallow.

‘Here’s the problem I have, Sophie,’ said Fox. ‘You claim that you have only known this man, what is it? Five days? You also claim you don’t know anything about him – you don’t really know where he’s from beyond perhaps Texas, you’ve never met any of his friends or family, you don’t even really know what he does for a job. And yet, you’re basically living together.’

‘Not really,’ said Sophie. ‘I mean, I stayed in his room a few times . . .’

‘All a bit quick, isn’t it?’ said DS Field.

‘Quick?’

‘Well, you meet him on the Thursday, by the Monday you’re shacked up together.’

‘We weren’t shacked up,’ protested Sophie. ‘I’d just been seeing him—’

‘And had he been to your place?’ interrupted Fox.

‘No. He didn’t—’

‘So you’re boyfriend and girlfriend, but he’s never been to your flat. Why not?’

‘I never said we were boyfriend and girlfriend,’ said Sophie, her voice rising. ‘And I didn’t . . .’

I didn’t want to take him back to my flat
, she finished the sentence in her head,
because then he would have known that I was just some ordinary girl, scraping a living as a gym instructor
.

‘I didn’t take him home because I was house-sitting for a friend. It didn’t feel right to take him there without permission.’

Fox made a note in his book.

‘What do you do for a living?’

‘I’m a personal trainer. Well, a gym instructor,’ she added with panic.

‘And where have you been house-sitting?’

‘Sixteen Egerton Row, Knightsbridge.’

‘Smart area. Who does the property belong to?’

‘Lana Goddard-Price. She’s out of the country.’

‘Do you have a contact number for her?’

‘In my phone. She’s one of my clients.’

Fox fixed her with his hard gaze.

‘Do you think Nick was targeting the property?’

Sophie glared at him.

‘He was not a thief,’ she said defensively. ‘Nick was smart and generous and rich . . .’

‘So is that why you were interested in him?’ asked Field flatly.

‘No. I was in love with him.’

Tears welled in her eyes. She had a sudden urge to call her mother, but at the thought that she was still in Denmark she felt suddenly, frightening alone.

‘After five days?’

Hostility prickled in the air. All she wanted to do was get out of the room.

‘Did you have sex with Nick this morning?’ pressed Fox.

She felt her face flush.

‘We had sex a couple of times through the night. This morning we just fooled around. Kissed.’

‘There were fragments of a wine bottle on the floor. Do you know where that could have come from?’

She paused to think.

‘Maybe from last night. We had a bath together and ordered some champagne. The bottle would have been left on the side.’

‘And where did you leave Nick this morning? In bed or in the shower?’

‘In bed.’

‘Did you argue?’

‘No.’

Fox looked straight at her.

‘Did you hit him in the bathroom with a wine bottle?’

‘You think I did that?’ she croaked. ‘I told you I loved him.’

‘Please, Sophie, answer the question. Did you hit him?’ pressed Fox.

She felt nauseous, faint. She gripped the sides of the chair, feeling the burns under her fingers.

‘I think I need a lawyer.’

12

Sophie was still shaking as she pushed out through the glass doors of Paddington Green station. She felt dirty and violated, but above all tired. She walked down the steps, filling her lungs. It wasn’t exactly fresh air – she could see cars rushing along the Marylebone flyover in front of her – but it felt good after the stale rooms and corridors of the police station.
Police station
, her mind repeated. How had she come to be here? She was a good girl, she’d never even been in trouble at school, despite Francesca’s best efforts.

All she had done was walk into that hotel room and find Nick, her lover, lying on the floor. That was her only crime. And yet they were treating her as if she were some deranged killer. They had taken swabs from her mouth for DNA and they’d taken fingerprints and made rumbles about doing a police appeal in the Scotland Yard media suite within the next twenty-four hours.

‘Don’t worry. Hopefully you won’t see the inside of that place again for a little while.’

Edward Gould put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. He was one of her father’s old college friends and one of the top criminal defence solicitors in the country, or at least that was what her mother had told her on the phone, when Sophie had managed to contact her in Copenhagen.

‘Bear in mind they haven’t charged you and we have no date for another interview yet.’

She found little comfort in his words.

‘Yet? You mean I’m going to have to go back?’

‘Possibly,’ he said guardedly.

‘You mean probably.’

Gould raised his eyebrows.

‘The truth is that you are going to be on their suspect list until they get more information about Nick’s life. You’ll only be eliminated when they find another lead.’

Panic swelled inside her. She couldn’t go back in there, she couldn’t.

‘But that’s not fair, I haven’t done anything!’

Gould shrugged.

‘No, it’s not fair,’ he said brusquely. ‘Not if you’re innocent. But at the top of any suspect list at the beginning of an inquiry are partners, the person who finds the dead body and the person who last sees the victim alive. You’re unfortunate enough to be all three, Sophie. For now, you’re going to be the one under the microscope.’

She was grateful to Edward Gould for arriving so quickly and for effectively forcing the police to release her, but he did not have a sympathetic bedside manner. She knew his type; most of her father’s friends had been like this, Oxbridge-educated and of a generation that kept a stiff upper lip no matter what.

‘But they think I’m innocent,’ protested Sophie. ‘They want me to do an appeal to ask for witnesses.’

Gould’s head gave a short shake.

‘Doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re innocent. Sometimes they use a press conference to put suspects under the spotlight. They’ll have a criminal profiler watch it, analyse your responses, your behaviour under pressure. It’s a useful psychological tool for creating a suspect profile.’

‘A
suspect profile
. So you think they might arrest me?’

‘The police will certainly be gathering as much evidence as they can: witness statements, forensics, whatever background they can find on the victim. They won’t be idle, you can be sure of that, and as soon as they feel they have enough to prosecute, they will.’

‘But what about me?’ she repeated with panic.

Gould hesitated.

‘Sophie, the British justice system is founded on the strongest principle: innocent until proven guilty, and it will be the police and the Crown Prosecution Service’s task to produce evidence which proves who did this. And clearly, as you did not, they will certainly struggle to find a case against you.’

She wondered whether her solicitor actually believed in her innocence.

‘But they’re going to pin it on someone, aren’t they?’ she said, with an air of resignation. She’d had plenty of time to think about it while the police sorted out her paperwork. A murder at the Riverton was high profile. ‘It’s not good for the Met, it’s not good for the hotel. Not good for London tourists.’