The Start of Everything (26 page)

I received a conditional offer from Corpus Christi, contingent on
my exam results. Our mother called to confirm that this was correct, assuming there had been a mix-up with our names. But Stephen hadn’t applied to Corpus.

My arrival for the interview had been meek. The bus was dirty. The architecture had seemed too grand, and the saints and founders in the niches to look down on me.

As a student, I arrived by car. My maths teacher from school, Mr. Avery, had driven me there. I was his first Oxbridge acceptance. He shook my hand.

CHAPTER 23

CHLOE FROHMANN

T
he address of Happy Mums au pair service is an ordinary home, not a business address. As I’d been instructed over the phone, I walk behind the house to a large garden shed, one of those expensive “spare room” options garden centres are pushing now, with a porch and windows.

Inside it, Mrs. Heatherly, CEO of Happy Mums, is at work. She looks up from her laptop and comes to the door. I show her my warrant card and get to the point. “Have you spoken with Katja Koskinen since she left the employ of the Finleys at Deeping House?” Maybe Katja knows what happened to Grace. Maybe something has also happened to Katja.

“No. She’s being childish. She’s not taking my calls.”

Or she can’t take your calls
, I think. I take the seat Mrs. Heatherly offers me.

“Mrs. Finley was most disappointed by the whole situation. We’re
lucky she continued to hire through us. Do you know how Liliana is getting on?”

“She’s fine. About Katja—”

“I have work for Katja, but I suppose she thinks she’s too good for it. It’s mostly cleaning,” Mrs. Heatherly concedes. She removes her glasses. “Really, what did she expect? After the Finley incident, my hands were tied. I couldn’t
lie
about it.”

I wonder if Mrs. Heatherly has had sex this week. I wonder how Mrs. Heatherly would feel about spending life as a permanent guest. I wonder how Mrs. Heatherly would like it if she were stuck being an adult to the children, but a child to the parent employers. “Do you know where she’s working now?” I ask evenly.

She answers the frostiness in my voice instead of the question. “It’s not just the sex,” she says. “There was stealing.”

“Stealing?” That seems more Grace’s purview. According to Keene, Grace had a shoplifting past.

“Mrs. Finley reported a digital clock missing from the flat she’d provided. Oh, and a cup. A ‘decorated mug.’ ” She looks up from the page.

“She shared the room. How do you know it wasn’t Grace Rhys?” I ask. Maybe Grace threw those things into her suitcase on top of all her own. No—that didn’t feel right. Shoplifters get a rush from their crimes. Sweeping things up while packing doesn’t seem deliberate enough. But if she’d been killed before she left the house, those are the kind of things the killer, covering for her absence, might accidentally remove along with her things. Yes, it was reading more like Grace had been killed before she left Deeping House.

“Oh, Grace!” Mrs. Heatherly says, face full of smile. “She was just temporary, for a holiday lark. She must be back at Cambridge now. If I had more girls like her …”

“In what way?”

She purses her lips. “Some parents don’t want to take the time to help with English, even though that’s the point of it for a lot of the girls. A British girl takes that out. And parents like the idea of a Cambridge student teaching their toddlers to read and add.” She lifts her shoulders then lets them drop. Her head tilts to the side, as if the snobbery
of doting parents were an acceptable mystery, one she’s apparently willing to go on and on about. I interrupt.

“And do you know where Katja is working now?”

She thumbs the paper-clipped corners of several paper stacks, sliding one out from between the rest. “We can play a little trick,” she whispers, touching a pink fingertip to her lips.

She slides the top paper towards me. It has a photo of Katja clipped to it, and her contact information neatly typed. This is the first I’ve seen of her. She looks young. She
is
young. It says “Age: 22.”

Mrs. Heatherly instructs: “
You
call. She’s avoiding me, but she won’t recognise your number.”

I dial the number. It rings and rings. It diverts to voicemail. I shake my head.

“Well, it doesn’t surprise me. Who knows what she’s up to?” Mrs. Heatherly rolls her eyes. What does she mean to imply? Laziness? Still asleep, past noon? Or more sex in the afternoon, as vilified by Mrs. Finley? Imagine what she would think if she suspected what I did: that Katja had slept with married Mr. Bennet on the snowy day. She would probably think she deserves to be dead. Maybe she is. Maybe Grace found out about them, maybe she went looking for Katja and found her. Mr. Bennet might have silenced her. And what about Katja, then? Might he have silenced her, too?

“It’s a funny thing,” Mrs. Heatherly muses, having no idea how much I despise her. “You’re not the first person to come looking for her.”

“What? Someone came here? When?”

“No, no. Not in person. A woman phoned. Just like you, she wanted to know where Katja was. Of course, I didn’t tell her anything. You can understand why I insisted on seeing your warrant card.”

“This person claimed to be from the police?”

Mrs. Heatherly rolls her eyes again, this time at me. It doesn’t take much to get on her shit list. “No, she didn’t claim anything of the sort. But she wanted information. I respect my clients’ privacy. It’s only right.”

“So who was it?” I cut in, interrupting her preening.

“I have the name here.” She shuffles papers. “Mrs. Finley called
afterward, complaining that this woman had called her at home. She thought I’d sent someone to ask for a reference. As if I would do that without permission. Aha! Here it is. Mathilde Oliver.”

I suppress my incredulity. That was the first thing I learned on the job: Don’t react. I hold my breath for a moment. Everywhere we’ve been, Mathilde’s been there first. Makes me wonder where we’re headed.

“About Liliana,” Mrs. Heatherly prattles on. “Do you think Mrs. Finley is looking for a change? She’d previously requested an older, less … less
fit
au pair, and I think I’ve found one for her. Matching girls with families is a bit like being a detective.” She smirks.

I see myself out through the side gate. I lift my foot to step off the property, but the house hangs on to me. I look back.

Dan hates houses like this. They’re bland and expedient. They iterate down the street, likely to have been carpeted and papered in the seventies. The doors are chipboard. But the contents are a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that they’re fundamentally ugly, and allowed to flourish because they’re cheap. They are architectural weeds.

Dan and I won’t be able to stay in the ex-almshouse. It’s too small. I don’t even know what local schools are like. He wouldn’t even look at houses like this when we decided to buy together four years ago. I don’t think he cares about a garden. Do
I
care about a garden? I think a mother is supposed to care about space outside to play.…

Breathe, Chloe
. I lean against my car.

My phone rings. “Who are you? Why are you phoning me?” a woman berates me.

“I—You phoned
me
,” I stammer.

“You called me before. What do you want?” she demands.

I almost ring off, but I figure it out. “Katja?” I say.

“Who are you? Who gave you this number?”

“Katja, I’m Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann. I need to speak with you.”

No answer. Has she put the phone down? Then: “Is this a joke?”

It’s not a joke, but I almost laugh. Sometimes that’s how relief bubbles up. Katja’s alive. Alive, and scared.

Columns hold a pediment up over me as I enter. The place still has the feel of the university “gentlemen’s club” it started out as. Now it’s a pizza chain.

As soon as I walk in, the smell of cheese gets me. I step back, seriously reconsidering. “Would you like a table?” chirps a cheerful waitress in a long white apron. It wraps around her from breasts to knees, the strings winding twice around her waist before they meet in a little bow at the front. She’s like a column herself. I ask for Katja.

“Katja!” she calls. Potted palm trees waft as she brushes past, her heels clicking on the shiny checkerboard floor. I hold on to the back of a leather club chair and breathe through my mouth.

I must look awful. When they come back, Katja asks me if I’m all right before she asks me who I am. I show her my warrant card and ask if we can talk outside.

We sit on the steps, and she lights up a cigarette. The smoke is bitter and almost overwhelmingly strong. I lean away from her. In any social situation I would ask her to stop, but I don’t want to antagonise her when I need her to talk.

“Tell me about the person who’s been harassing you,” I say. That much had been easy to guess from her reaction to my call. Once I gleaned that it wasn’t someone connected to Deeping House, I let her think I was following up on her complaint, to get her to tell me where she works. I
am
going to prod the officer she originally spoke to, so it’s not a complete lie.

“Ugh, I met him at a club. I told him to get lost, but one of my girlfriends told him where I work. He calls here a couple times a week. When you rang me, I thought he’d got my number.”

I take down the basic information. I add, “Did anyone called Mathilde try to get in touch with you?”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. I’d let myself get superstitious that Mathilde was leading us by the nose around this investigation.
Don’t get sucked in
, I remind myself. No, Mathilde had just followed the same clues, and at this juncture didn’t have the authority to wring Katja’s mobile number out of the au pair service. That’s all. Back to our fen body.

Katja scrunches her nose in disgust when I mention Grace Rhys. “Yeah.” She blows a line of grey smoke straight out towards the street.

“You like her?” I say, deliberately present tense. I turn away to breathe in, then look back at her for the answer.

“We were friends,” she answers cautiously.
Were
. “Did she say something about me?”

“You know Grace,” I commiserate, hoping that might prompt a reaction.

“You’re trying to trick me. If I didn’t want a smoke so bad I wouldn’t talk to you at all.” She sucks on the cigarette. “Ask me more! I have a whole box, and I hate pizza.”

I belly-laugh. “I hate pizza, too.” I used to like it, but now? I shudder.

“You want a cigarette?” she offers.

I shake my head and swallow down the bile that comes up at the thought of it. “I jog,” I lie.

“I hate sweating. The only good reason to sweat is sex.”

“Mrs. Finley says you had sex with Stephen Casey.”

“That bitch. It was Grace. But it doesn’t cross her mind that a
Cambridge girl
would have sex in the middle of the day. That’s what she said! That it was wrong to have sex in the middle of the day. That it was wrong to have sex in the same house as children. She pays a therapist to tell her why she’s unhappy. That’s why.
That’s
why. Stupid bitch.”

“I know it was Grace with Stephen.”

Katja smiles, which plumps up her cheeks. Her teeth are a pale yellow from the cigarettes, and her lipstick clashes with it. “Grace is the bad guy. That’s a nice change.”

“Were you always the—”

“Stop fishing! I’ll tell you.” She adds something exasperated and probably profane in Finnish, then: “I lost my job because of her. Not just my job, but with the Finleys’ complaint I’ve had a hard time getting another one. So now I’m a waitress, which pays better but doesn’t give me somewhere to live. I’m lucky I have friends, but the couch is shit on my back. Why do you want her? What’s she done?”

I remain oblique. “Mrs. Finley says a couple of things were missing from the help flat. Grace take them?”

“What was in there to take? Mrs. Finley is a crazy person.” The
cigarette’s finished. She stubs it onto the stone step and slides out another.

“Did you talk to Grace after you were fired?”