The Stranger You Know (13 page)

‘How many people signed up?’

‘About fifteen. There was this little circle of chairs and I was just so embarrassed to even be there that I sat down in the first one I got to and it happened to be beside Kirsty.’

‘And the two of you got talking?’

‘Not then. Afterwards. We came out and I didn’t feel like going home straight away, because all these ideas were just buzzing around in my head and I didn’t want to be on my own staring at the walls, you know? And I suppose Kirsty felt the same way because she came over and asked if I wanted to get a drink and talk about why we were there and what we wanted to get out of it.’

‘What did Kirsty want?’

‘She was trying to put her life back together after breaking up with her fiancé.’ Jonty sighed. ‘It was really hard on her. She was so brave to break it off. They were all involved in planning the wedding and inside she was just like …’ She dragged her fingers down her cheeks, her mouth open in a silent scream.

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t love him enough, she said. She felt smothered. She felt like he was going to run her life for her, or try to. It made her uncomfortable. She wanted to be on her own for a while to work out what she actually wanted to do.’

I’d had that smothering sensation myself. I knew exactly the chord of guilt, frustration and resentment that it struck, and it was the death knell for relationships. Rob was very careful to back off when he noticed I was getting claustrophobic. He was almost too good at backing off. Hence the paranoia.

I dragged my mind back to Kirsty. ‘So, she wanted to be on her own. She wasn’t trying to meet men.’

‘No. Well, not then.’ Jonty looked down at her tea. ‘This is disgusting. I wonder if it would be better with sugar.’

She reached to take a packet from the jar on the table and I put out my hand and stopped her. ‘Okay, firstly, no, it wouldn’t help. Secondly, what do you mean by “not then”?’

‘Because of the guy.’

‘What guy?’ I was leaning forward.

‘The guy she said she was meeting the last time I saw her.’ Jonty drew one leg up onto the chair and retied the laces on her Doc Marten. I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood, fighting the urge to tell her to hurry up. ‘The third week she couldn’t come for a drink. She said she had to meet someone afterwards, and she was really sorry but it was the only day he could do.’

‘A date?’

‘I don’t think so. I said “ooooh”, you know, as you do, when she said she had to meet someone and she was really short with me. She just said, “Not like that” and then she gave me her number and told me to give her a call if I was at a loose end and wanted to meet up. Look.’ She flicked through her contacts until she came to Kirsty’s name and showed it to me, like a child proud of her homework.

‘When was this?’

‘Towards the end of January. The twenty-sixth.’

‘And she died—’

‘On the thirtieth.’ Jonty nodded. ‘I saw it in the paper. I couldn’t get my head around it. I almost texted her – can you believe that? Even though I knew she was dead? Crazy.’

‘It’s not that unusual. People call their loved ones’ phones after they’re gone. They leave messages for them to say the things they didn’t get the chance to say.’

‘That makes me feel a bit better. I thought I was mental.’ She gave me a rueful grin.

‘Can we get back to the man? Had she mentioned him before?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Did you see him? Did she tell you anything about him? A name? How they met?’ I made myself stop. I could see the barrage of questions was confusing her.

‘I didn’t see him. She was meeting him somewhere else. She didn’t tell me why they were meeting but it seemed more like something she had to do than something she was excited by. Like he was a chimney sweep or a plumber or something and she had to let him in.’

‘To her flat?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jonty frowned. ‘That was just the impression I had. When she said he couldn’t do any other night she sounded a bit irritated but business-like.’

The flats’ management company was supposed to sort out tradesmen for the tenants. I made a note to check with them to see if she had made any complaints in the couple of months before her death.

‘And you’re sure she didn’t use a name.’

‘She might have, but I’m crap with names.’ Jonty gave a tiny, panicky laugh, knowing that it was a terrible name to have forgotten. ‘It was something short and simple. Not a foreign name. Geoff or John or something. But it wasn’t Geoff or John.’

I wrote them down anyway. Not foreign, one syllable, possibly with a ‘J’ sound. ‘Jack. James. Jim.’

‘None of those.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember. I’ve tried and tried.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I succeeded in keeping the frustration out of my voice. Mostly. ‘One of those things. Just let me know if it comes back to you. You’ve been really helpful.’

‘Have I?’ She looked piteous. ‘I wanted to help but I thought it would just be a waste of everyone’s time.’

‘Far from it,’ I said. ‘Would you be willing to give a statement to the local detectives who investigated Kirsty’s death?’

‘I don’t mind.’ She looked terrified.

‘They’re nice. Nothing to be frightened of. Let me call and check when they’d like to see you.’ I rang Groves, who was pleased to hear from me but went quiet when I explained what I’d found out. He wanted to speak to Jonty immediately, he said. At the police station, if she could present herself there. He’d try not to keep her too long.

I passed it on to Jonty who agreed without any difficulty, being the good girl she was. Her eyes were troubled, though, and she drained her glass of tea without apparently remembering it was disgusting.

She was winding her scarf around her neck again in long, misshapen loops when she asked the question I’d been dreading.

‘Do you think the man she mentioned was the one who – you know.’

‘Killed her?’

A nod.

Yes
. ‘I don’t know.’

She swallowed. ‘Do you think I should have come forward earlier? When they were appealing for witnesses?’

‘You’re not responsible,’ I said, seeing where this was going. ‘You didn’t make him kill anyone else. You could have come forward earlier, but I don’t think it would have made any difference.’

In the overall scheme of things, a small lie sometimes made more sense than the truth. It might have made a huge difference, but she didn’t need to know that.

Chapter 11

It was late by the time I got back to my desk, getting on for nine. The office was emptying out after a busy day. It smelled stale, despite the air conditioning, and the large windows were filled with dark skies and bright lights like sequins on velvet. Nightfall changed the atmosphere in the office. The desk lamps – so much better than fluorescent overhead lighting – marooned each of us who remained on our own individual island, and the noise level had dropped to a murmur of a few phone conversations, most of them winding up.

The door to Godley’s office stood open. His desk was vacant, but his coat still hung on its hook and his computer was on. Una Burt’s desk was similarly unoccupied, and she wasn’t answering her mobile. I hoped I would see them before I left for the day, so I could share what I’d found out in Lewisham. There was no reason to dash home, anyway. I had had the best of intentions about how I would live while Rob was away: eating properly, going to bed early, painting my nails and writing emails to friends I hadn’t seen in ages, catching up on reading books that had sat beside my bed for months. It was the first day and already I could tell my intentions were going to fall by the wayside. I would eat when I could and work as much as was humanly possible and the books would remain unread.

Too bad. There were more important things than manicures.

Being out of the office all day meant that I had to deal with what seemed like thousands of emails. I skimmed through them, trying to keep track of cases that had no press attention, no clamour for a result. Princess Gordon’s death had passed almost unnoticed, and not just because it had been solved so quickly. There was no media interest in a young black woman being beaten to death by her partner, even if she had been pregnant. But she was just as dead as the Gentleman Killer’s victims.

DS Burns had come up trumps with the number for Method Management, the company that looked after Kirsty Campbell’s apartment building. I was gratified to discover that they had an emergency hotline number and I rang them straight away, even as I was reading through the rest of my emails, to ask about Kirsty’s property. I explained who I was to the bored-sounding man who answered the phone.

‘Is it possible to check if Kirsty had any issues with her flat, or the building? Any complaints?’

‘In what period?’

‘Let’s start with December and January.’

‘I’ll have to look it up. Do you want me to call you back?’

‘I’ll hold on.’

He put the phone down beside his keyboard and I listened to the tapping, hoping he was doing what I’d asked rather than updating his Facebook status.

‘I’ve just got to go and check something.’ He didn’t wait for me to reply, dropping the phone again with a clatter. His chair squeaked as he pushed it away from his desk and I imagined him walking across the office, giving him a crumpled white shirt that was pulling out of the waistband of wrinkled trousers and scuffed shoes. My version of him needed a haircut and had a weakness for pies. He was probably whippet thin and bandbox neat in real life.

While I waited I dealt with the remaining emails. Just as I was getting to the end, a new one popped into my inbox. It was from James Peake, the DS on the Maxine Willoughby case, which in itself wasn’t that odd; I had given him my card when I was distributing them to all and sundry after the meeting. The bit that made my heart sink was the subject line.
Drink?

‘You still there?’

‘Yep,’ I said, dragging my mind back to Kirsty.

‘Just to say, I’ve had to speak to my boss about releasing this information and he wants me to make sure you realise that we aren’t liable for anything.’
Anyfing
.

‘That’s not why I’m ringing. I just want to know her concerns.’ I wiggled my pen between my fingers, tapping the end on the desk. The tapping was getting faster the longer he delayed.

‘He wants to speak to you.’

‘Fine. Give me his number.’ I would speak to anyone if they could just tell me something helpful.

The phone didn’t even ring before he picked up with a sharp-sounding ‘Hello?’

‘This is Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan.’

‘I’m Kevin Montrose, the owner of Method Management.’

Good for you
. ‘I’m investigating the murder of Kirsty Campbell.’

‘So I’m told. Just so you know, there was no damage to the property and no sign of forced entry.’ He sounded anxious as well as sharp. Something was up.

‘I’m aware of the lack of damage.’

‘There was going to be an investigation of Miss Campbell’s concerns and we were actively engaged in organising that at the time she died.’

‘I see. And what were those concerns?’

‘According to the file, Miss Campbell raised some issues about the quality of the locks used on the external doors and the internal front doors in the building. She was also concerned about the window locks and the provision for escape from the property in the event of a fire. Obviously we are very careful to maintain smoke alarms and carbon monoxide monitors in the properties we manage, as I informed her.’

‘When did she contact you about this?’

‘Twenty-seven one.’

It took me a second. ‘The twenty-seventh of January? Three days before she died?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Was there anything else?’

‘She said she had been advised we should have CCTV fitted on the outside of the property, to cover the front and rear exits and the car park area. There is a bike rack at the flats too and she was worried about bikes being stolen from there. I told her a determined thief won’t be put off by locks or CCTV but she wasn’t impressed.’ He gave a thin laugh. ‘And she wanted us to install a video entryphone so the residents could see who they were buzzing in to the building.’

‘That’s recommended on the Metropolitan Police website.’

‘Well, they can come up with the money, then. I told her it would cost a fortune and I also told her she’d have no chance of persuading everyone else in the building to pay their share. The landlords don’t want to be bothered with that sort of thing and the owner-occupiers have enough to worry about with the basic charges.’ He sounded smug as he said it, and since his company set the charges, I could see why he might.

‘Anything else?’

‘Letterbox shields on the back of the door to stop people fishing through the letterbox. Security lighting outside. And she wanted the doorframe reinforced on her flat.’

‘It sounds as if she was desperately concerned about her security.’

‘Something had made her aware of potential security issues.’ Montrose’s version was a much blander, safer one than mine.

‘Did you speak to her yourself?’

‘The call was transferred to me at Miss Campbell’s request.’

‘How did she seem? Was she upset?’

‘No. It wasn’t an unpleasant call. She was calm. It was as if someone had given her a list and she was just working through it. She didn’t seem to know or care if it would be expensive to make those changes.’

‘Maybe she thought it was worth any money to be safe in her own home,’ I said. ‘But she wasn’t safe. And you had no intention of making any of the changes she requested.’

‘That’s not so. We listed them as I’ve just proved since it was all in the file, and we were working on a costing when her body was found.’

‘Do you have the costing on file?’

‘I think we didn’t complete it. Under the circumstances—’

‘I would have thought the circumstances would have made it more urgent, not less.’
And it’s ‘
in
the circumstances
’,
you greasy little twerp
. ‘I was at the flats today, Mr Montrose. Do you know what I saw? No CCTV. No security lighting. No video intercom at the front door. I didn’t examine the locks but I bet they’re the same ones that were in use when Kirsty Campbell was alive.’