The Start of Everything (22 page)

Maybe Katja and Grace got a lift with Mr. Finley or Mr. Bennet, to a friend’s house or to catch a bus or train. Or maybe one of those two saw Katja and Grace get into the car of someone who’s already lied to us. We had to ask them.

Or maybe Katja and Grace didn’t leave.

“Dr. Holst, one more thing …”

What’s Keene after now?

“Did you ever see this man with Katja?” He holds out a printout of an academic Web page.

“ ‘George Hart-Fraser’?” she reads. “No.”

“Did Grace ever mention him? Did she mention any boyfriend, or problems at Cambridge?”

Boyfriend? George Hart-Fraser was her supervisor.…

“No, I’m sorry, I— We didn’t talk very much.” She shakes her head.

I pull Keene aside on the landing, after the door has closed behind us. “Boyfriend? What haven’t you told me?”

“Nothing. I’m speculating.” He counts off the coincidences: “He was attached to both her and to Mathilde. He was late to the memorial. He wore a dark suit.…”

“You’re wearing a dark suit,” I point out.

“I didn’t get to tell you yet. There was a suspicious death in his family. He was questioned in the matter.”

“What? When?”

“Ten years ago,” he admits, deflating a bit. “In Bristol.”

“Tell me it involved a train or a hammer.”

He shrugs and tilts his head. “Possible arson.”

I hold out my hands, begging for something better than that. “Keene, really? There’s nothing like that here.…”

That’s when we smell smoke.

We bolt downstairs; five closed doors confront us. I sniff, but it’s a subtle tinge to the air, nothing we can follow. What we can follow is the angry shouting coming from behind the middle door on our right, which turns out to be the communal laundry room.

Liliana is yelling at the tumble dryer. The smoky smell is more evident in here, and she tells us that the dryer has broken. She’s in tears, and Daniel is hugging her legs. “Now I’ll have to
hang
all the clothes,” she says, looking aghast at the full bags of clothes and sheets she has yet to wash.

“I’ll help you, Lili,” says Daniel, and she scoops him up just like she did on the playground.

Over Daniel’s shoulder, she asks us, “Why were you asking about the girl who used to work here?” She looks … worried, it must be. But her expression reads to me more like
guilty
.

“We just need to talk to her,” I non-answer.

“Someone called here for her,” she says. “I said I didn’t know where she was, but I gave the name of the au pair agency before Mrs. Finley took the phone. I thought later that I shouldn’t have said anything.” She was bouncing Daniel this whole time, bouncing and patting his back.

“Can you describe the caller?” I ask.

“She was quiet, almost—”

“ ‘She’?” I repeat. I was expecting an ex-boyfriend or stalker.

“Yes, she. I think she said her name was Tilda. She—”

Now Keene interrupts: “
Ma
-thilde?” asks Keene, emphasising the first syllable.

“I don’t know. Maybe. She was quiet.” Liliana got quiet herself. “If something has happened to Katja, it’s my fault.”

I assure her it wouldn’t be her fault, and that in any case we have no reason to believe that Katja has come to harm. That’s actually true; she’s the wrong height for the fen body, which, if Stephen’s reference to the sweater is to be believed, is very likely Grace.

We leave her and Daniel unloading wet socks onto a long row of drying racks. Keene saves his enthusiasm for after the door closes them in, leaving us alone in the main hall. “This is it,” he says. “Mathilde called here. Whoever killed Grace knew someone was on to him. Well, at least on to her—about to identify her.” His energy was nearly manic.

“Slow down, Keene. That doesn’t make sense. Mathilde—if it was her, and I for one believe it was some Tilda, of which there are many in the world—called for information about
Katja
. Our body is most likely Grace. It doesn’t make sense.”

He presses his lips together. I’m convinced he does this to stop himself from saying something he shouldn’t, like telling me off when he knows I’m right. “Well,” he finally says, “if she called the Finley flat, she may have called other places, too. We should get her phone records. The point is, she was stirring things up.”

“Fine,” I concede. I make a note to request a list of Mathilde’s recent calls.

He wants the cases to be linked. I’m not yet convinced Mathilde’s death is a case at all. Her grief and the slippery snow give us two better explanations than murder. And if she was pushed? We’ll never be able to attach that to a specific person. No, the only way that someone would end up punished is if we get them for something else. Like for Grace, so that’s where we should focus.

“Come on,” I say.

“All these doors … Take a look at your map?”

I unfold my sketch and hand it to him. He stands in the middle and
turns, pointing. “Stephen—Help—Laundry … What are these other two?”

“The Bennet teenagers you met earlier. You know, the owner’s family. Probably this one.” I rest my hand on the one most likely to lead to all the space on the east side of the house that Mr. Casey’s small flat doesn’t use.

We knock. I want to ask Mr. Bennet if he knows how Grace and Katja left on the snowy day. No answer.

“And this one?” Keene wonders. Between the laundry and the Bennets. He knocks.

Just then, Liliana and Daniel emerge from the utility room. Daniel is wearing Spider-Man underpants on his head. Liliana says to us, “Don’t bother. If he were in there, you’d know.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Mr. Bennet,” she says. “He’s always working. The hammering is the worst, but the drill is loud, too.”

“What’s in there?” Keene asks.

She shrugs. “Nothing yet. He’s renovating.” Daniel spins in a circle, knocking into Liliana’s legs.

Keene had said it was just the mum and the girls in the car. I ask Liliana if Mr. Bennet’s car is still here. We all step outside onto the stone steps; she points out his Land Rover, in the spot closest to the house. “See, I saw him earlier,” she said. “I told him you were here.”

“You what? When?”

“While you were talking to Mrs. Finley.”

Keene and I go back inside to rap on his door again. No answer, again. “Maybe he wants to dodge a charge of substandard workmanship,” I joke.

“He’s probably on the grounds,” Liliana calls from the doorway, zipping Daniel into a jacket.

“Is he the gardener, too?” I ask sarcastically.

Now she’s the one giggling. “He does
everything
!” She pinkens to her ears. I haven’t seen Mr. Bennet for myself yet, but her reactions are giving me the hint that he’s not bad to look at. “Come on, sweetheart, we have to pick up your sister,” she says to Daniel, bending over to Velcro his shoes. The top of her thong peeks over her belt. Mrs. Finley would be livid.

Keene is anxious to get out of Deeping House. He wants to take a look at the likely dump spots along the B1040, now that the floods are receding back towards January levels, and now that we have Deeping House as a starting point.

“I just want to get this box ticked,” I say, about Mr. Bennet. I don’t want to have to come back. I need to get out myself, to the offices of Happy Mums au pair service. It’s in a PE postcode, so close to here. The woman in charge refused to give me Katja’s or Grace’s info over the phone; she wants to see my warrant card.

Keene again raps on the door to the flat under construction. Again, no answer. “He must be outside,” says Keene.

Stephen’s uncle crosses the hall towards the utility room with a plastic hamper full of dingy whites: socks and shirts and probably underwear in there. “Mr. Casey,” I call after him. “Do you know when Mr. Bennet will be back?”

He swears when he sees the washer in use, and we follow him back into his place. “Don’t know. Maybe he’s driving the daughter to her school. Term starts next week.” But we know that he isn’t. Keene said the mother is driving them. Casey starts up the machine for another coffee. Outside, Daniel is chasing Liliana. No wonder Stephen was distracted by Grace. What else was there to look at?

I look around. “Do you have a television?” I ask. I don’t see one. The door to his bedroom hangs open. “Maybe in there?”

“Don’t be daft,” he chides me.

Fair enough. But Mrs. Finley—here I checked my notes to be sure—had said she sometimes heard television from in here.

No sense being coy about it. “Do you sing in the shower, Mr. Casey?”

He pops his mouth open so wide I fear he’s about to let loose an aria. Instead, he laughs. “Yes!” he says. “Yes, I do!”

“You hear that?” I say to Keene. “We’re on the wrong track.” The Holsts, in the back of the house, hear him sing in the shower. The Finleys, in the front of the house, hear someone’s television. Rory Casey’s place is also at the front, so the Finleys were right to assume they hear it, but: “The Finleys don’t hear this flat. They think they do, because they’re above it, but …” I look up.

“May I?” I ask, indicating the bedroom. Mr. Casey waggles his eyebrows.
I stand inside it, gauging its size. I exit into the hall; the stairs curve up next to the room, and the landing tops it entirely. None of that bedroom is underneath an upstairs flat. The bath is under the Holsts’ entry hall. The Finleys’ lounge is L-shaped. It covers Mr. Casey’s main room, yes, but then it turns and covers …

I send Keene back to Mrs. Finley. He resists. “I don’t know,” I say. “Make something up. Ask her for her husband’s work number, or about the Bennets.” Why not? I just need him up there for a good five minutes.

Back to Mr. Casey’s bedroom. I cast about for something to make noise with, the appropriate kind of noise. Bashing pots and pans from the kitchen wouldn’t really be equivalent. “All right, Mr. Casey,” I sigh, “this is your cue.”

His voice is better than I thought it would be. I don’t understand the Italian, but his face and gestures indicate a melodramatic deathbed scene. He hits the high note sprawled across my feet, one hand reaching up to me, his
“amore.”

He’s getting back to his feet when Keene returns. “She says Mr. Bennet is stingy with the heating and that Mrs. Bennet overindulges her daughters. ‘Even the cancer one’—that is an exact quote. She also says that if we call her husband at work we should remind him that tonight is date night and he had better not be late.” He shudders. “I’m more inclined to tell him to escape while he can. Why did you want me up there?”

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

Mr. Casey grins. He exits to get his coffee.

“The Finleys didn’t hear Grace and Stephen. They can’t. And there’s no television in here. They overhear the Bennets’ flat.” On the other side of this wall.

I mentally list the occupants of Deeping House, stuck in by the weather on the snowy day: The Bennet girls were out with their mum. The Finley children were at Grandma’s. Everyone else was trapped in. I jot the remaining names into my little map, showing where each claims to have gone after the weather started. There are only two people we haven’t accounted for yet.

I’m no longer indignant for Katja. We know from Stephen that she
didn’t have sex with him, as Mrs. Finley had accused. But this was more damning: She’d had sex with the married dad next door.

“What if Grace realised it?” I suggest. “What if she threatened to tell?”

“Stephen didn’t mention anything like that,” Keene reminds me.

“Stephen was off doing a load of laundry,” I remind him right back. I want to get into the Bennet place, to test what can be heard between these two bedrooms, the Bennets’ and Stephen’s.

No point knocking again, though.

“Where’s the recycling centre?” I call out to Mr. Casey. Dr. Holst had said Mr. Bennet drove there on the snowy day to get rid of the Christmas greenery. What a strange job to finish in bad weather instead of waiting.

“Whittlesey,” he says. Yes, that’s what Dr. Holst had said. Whittlesey. I think that’s— “Down the B1040,” he finishes for me. “When it’s open, of course …”

Of course. The B1040 is closed now, but on the snowy day, it crossed over the Nene, right where Grace’s body likely went in.

CHAPTER 20

GRACE RHYS

I
woke up cold.

I curled my knees up to my chest. It was still darkish, which at this time of year meant about seven-thirty? Roughly? The clock was facing away from me. Sunday was a day off for both of us, so we hadn’t set our mobiles to wake us. Every day was about to become a day off for me.

Mrs. Holst had got tired of me. She said I could leave early if I wanted, or stay on and do my own thing; either way, they’d pay me for the week. She said it cheerfully, like it was a favour. If I had someplace to go, it would have been. As it was, it hurried up what I’d been avoiding: that I wasn’t going back to Cambridge the week after next.

Mum was in Jordan now, hot and dry in the desert with Shep. Our house had tenants in it. Someone was sleeping in my room, and all my things were in boxes in the garage. The quilt my grandmother had made was folded up in there, and the afghan I wove in a textiles summer course, and my slippers shaped like two of Santa’s reindeer.