The Watcher (5 page)

‘Yes,’ said Keira. ‘For the last ten years.’

‘Are you in contact with your father? Was your mother?’

‘No.’ Keira shook her head. ‘We don’t even know where he is. He had a building supplies company. We always lived well and thought everything was all right. But then it came out that he was massively in debt. Everything collapsed and he fled abroad – to avoid his creditors.’

‘But before he did so, your parents divorced?’

‘Yes. When the bankruptcy came out into the open, so did my dad’s relationship with a younger colleague. My mum applied for a divorce immediately.’

‘But you can’t be sure he is still abroad?’

‘No. That’s just what we assume.’

‘And you’re certain he hasn’t been in touch with your mother?’

‘Yes. She would have told me if he had been.’

Fielder made a note. ‘We’ll try to find your father. Do you know the name and address of his lover from back then?’

Keira shook her head. ‘I think her first name was Clarissa. I can’t remember her surname. I wasn’t living with my parents at the time. I was studying in Swansea. I didn’t know all the details. I mean . . .’ She suddenly began to cry. ‘My mum called me all the time back then,’ she sobbed. ‘She was in a really bad way. Her life had fallen apart. My dad had been cheating on her for years, and now the money was gone too and the house was going to be repossessed . . . She was feeling rotten, but I often fobbed her off with excuses. I wanted . . . I suppose I didn’t want to have anything to do with it all.’ Her sobbing grew louder.

Greg stepped over and stroked her hair awkwardly. ‘Don’t blame yourself so much. You were studying. You had your own life. It wasn’t your job to sort out your parents’ problems.’

‘I should have been there more for my mum. Then and now. She was lying murdered in her flat for days and no one knew! That shouldn’t have happened!’

The baby started to cry upstairs. Almost with relief, Greg left the room. The situation was too much for him, which was, thought Fielder, no wonder. Something had broken into the Joneses’ lives that they could never have seen coming. They would never really get over it.

Keira reached for her handbag, pulled out a handkerchief and blew her nose.

‘Greg was also never very keen to visit my mum or invite her over,’ she said, nodding towards the door through which her husband had gone. ‘He works hard and he wants to relax at the weekend . . . You know, my mum was never exactly someone who spread sunshine wherever she went. She was always moaning. Because of the divorce, the bankruptcy, everything. That made her . . . rather demanding. In my opinion, that was why it was so hard for her to make friends. Most people . . . just couldn’t bear her after a while. It sounds terrible, what I’m saying, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to speak badly of her. And anyway, no matter how much she could get on people’s nerves, she didn’t deserve to die like that. Never!’

Fielder felt for her. He had seen her mother lying in her living room, her hands and feet bound with masking tape. The murderer had stuffed a bunched-up bit of cloth down her throat. A checked tea towel, as it turned out. The first investigation had revealed that it must have made Carla Roberts throw up. She must have been trying to retch enough to force the cloth out of her mouth.

‘And normally she would have managed,’ said the pathologist at the scene of the crime. ‘It looks to me as though the murderer kept the cloth pressed into her mouth until she suffocated on her own vomit.’

Fielder hoped that Keira never asked him for these details.

‘Mrs Jones,’ he began. ‘Yesterday you said that when no one opened the door after you rang the bell a number of times, you used your spare key to open the door to your mother’s flat yourself. How did you enter the block? Do you have a key for the main door too?’

‘Yes I do, but it was open downstairs. I rang the bell, but I didn’t wait. I just got into the lift. Up at her flat I rang again. And again. In the end I unlocked the door.’

‘Were you already thinking that something might have happened?’

Keira shook her head. ‘No. I hadn’t said I was coming and I just thought my mum wasn’t at home. That she was shopping or out for a walk or something. I just thought I’d wait for her in the flat.’

‘Does anyone else have a key to the flat apart from you?’

‘Not that I know.’

‘It looks,’ said Fielder, ‘as though your mother let her murderer into the flat herself. There are certainly no traces of a forced entry. Of course it is still too early to draw any definite conclusions, but it could be that your mother knew her killer.’

Keira looked at him in horror.

‘Do you know who your mother’s friends were?’

He could see that tears were flooding Keira’s eyes again. For the moment, she managed to keep them back.

‘She didn’t have any, actually. That was the problem. She lived in complete isolation. The evening I . . . last spoke to her, I even had a go at her about it. About her sitting at home, about her not making friends, never doing anything . . . She listened to me patiently enough, but I didn’t have the impression that anything was going to change.’

Fielder nodded. That fitted the picture he was building up. Someone with an active social life did not lie dead in their flat for ten days without anyone noticing the fact.

‘How long has it been since your mother stopped working?’

‘Almost five years. She found a job in a chemist’s after the divorce, but she didn’t enjoy it. In the end she retired at sixty. Luckily she had worked early in her marriage, so her pension wasn’t disastrous. She got by.’

‘Did she ever have any problem with her colleagues in the chemist’s?’

‘No. She got on with everyone all right. But she lost touch with them after leaving. I don’t think she still sees anyone she met there.’

‘And apart from that – wasn’t there any hobby that meant she sometimes met other people?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘And in her block? Was there anyone whom she knew a little bit more closely?’

‘No, not even that. Everyone there seems to live their own little life without knowing their neighbours’ names. And my mum wasn’t the kind of person who could approach people. She was too shy and unsure of herself. But she had also never done anyone any harm. She was a good person. A friendly person. I just can’t understand how
anyone
could have had such hatred for her. I don’t understand . . .’

Fielder thought of the brutality with which Carla had been murdered. Perhaps the murderer had not had a problem with Carla specifically. She was only a timid, somewhat self-pitying pensioner. Maybe he just had a problem with women. A deeply disturbed man. The crime suggested as much.

‘Is there anything else I should know?’ he asked.

Keira thought for a minute. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, then added quickly, ‘Yes, there is. I don’t know if it’s important, but on the night I last talked to my mother, she mentioned something strange . . . or at least it seemed strange to her. She said the lift came up to her floor a lot. But no one ever got out.’

‘She was sure of that? That no one got out?’

‘Yes, apparently she was. She would have heard if anyone had got out. And as she was the only person who lived on the top floor, it all seemed rather strange to her.’

‘Since when had she noticed this? Did she say?’

‘She said something about one or two weeks. And that it hadn’t been like that before. Because I had said that maybe the system was set up so that the lift went to different floors at regular intervals. But she didn’t say any more about it. She realised that I wanted to end the call.’ Keira bit her lip.

Fielder leant forward. He felt sorry for the young woman. It was bad enough to lose your mother. That would affect anyone deeply. To lose her through a brutal crime was almost unimaginable. But then on top of that to carry with you for the rest of your life the certainty that you were distracted and annoyed when you talked to her last . . . That would prove an almost unbearable burden for Keira Jones, he was sure.

‘Mrs Jones,’ he said. ‘Did you have the impression that your mother felt threatened?’

Keira’s eyes filled with tears again. ‘Yes,’ she blurted out. It sounded like a sob. ‘Yes. I think she was afraid. She just couldn’t say what she was afraid of. She did feel threatened. And I didn’t do anything to help her.’

Her head sank on to her lap and she started to scream.

Diana was baking muffins.

Why are mothers always baking nowadays? Gillian wondered. Her thought was accompanied by the first insistent stabs of a headache. Who would actually eat all the muffins the millions of mothers were baking every day?

Diana spooned the dough from the large ceramic mixing bowl into the muffin trays. The kitchen smelt of chocolate, butter and almonds. There were thick red candles on the table, and a pot of vanilla-flavoured tea. A little bowl of crystallised sugar stood next to it.

‘Have some more tea,’ Diana said.

She was attractive: blonde and slim. She played tennis and golf well. She was a fantastic cook. She knew how to give a house a homely feel. Her daughters loved her. She volunteered to help with putting up decorations for school parties and she liked to be an accompanying parent on school trips. So the teachers loved her too.

And she baked muffins.

However, at the moment she had one topic on her mind, which had little to do with the cosy Advent atmosphere in her kitchen – the murder of an old lady who lived on her own in London. Apparently everyone was talking about it. Only Gillian had not heard about it yet. Gillian and Becky had come over because Becky wanted to give Darcy her homework. The girls had retreated to Darcy’s room and Gillian had been invited to have a cuppa. She had actually wanted to say no. She had just got home from work, was exhausted, and had only accompanied her daughter because she didn’t want her walking around on her own in the dark. She didn’t fancy a chat at all. But the first thing Diana said to her at the door was ‘And? So what do you think of that
horrible
murder?’ Of course Gillian had asked what she meant, and with that her fate was sealed. Diana, who was always keen to find someone for a gossip, had pulled her into the kitchen and told her in minute detail everything she knew.

‘Apparently she lay in her flat for over a week before anyone realised! Isn’t that dreadful? I mean, to be so alone that it takes forever for someone just to think you might be dead?’

‘It’s more dreadful to be murdered in your own flat, I’d say,’ replied Gillian. ‘How did the murderer get in? Do they know?’

‘Well, it seems there were no signs of forced entry. People say she let him in herself. So it could have been someone she knew. Because no one is so careless that they just throw open the door to the flat when someone rings the bell – especially if you live on your own!’

Diana again turned her full attention to her muffin dough and Gillian drank her tea, thinking about the London murder and perfect mothers. She tried to breathe calmly. Sometimes that helped when she could feel a headache coming on.

Diana had filled the trays. She put them in the oven, set the timer and then sat down at the table and poured herself a cup of tea too.

‘Apparently she has a grown-up daughter. That’s who found her.’

‘How horrible!’

‘Yes, but until then the daughter hadn’t noticed that her mother hadn’t been in touch for ten days. Odd, that. With my daughters, that wouldn’t happen to me.’

Gillian thought about Becky’s challenging behaviour to her. Would she be able to say the same thing about her daughter in the same convinced tone?
That wouldn’t happen to me?

‘And how . . . was she murdered?’ she asked anxiously.

‘The police haven’t revealed that,’ said Diana regretfully. ‘You know . . . so there is knowledge only the murderer would know. And to make sure there aren’t copycat acts or false statements. That’s what the paper says. But it seems she was killed in an extremely brutal way.’

‘It must be someone depraved,’ said Gillian, repulsed.

Diana shrugged. ‘Or someone who felt an enormous hatred for the woman.’

‘Yes, but you can hardly hate someone that much. At least, it’s not normal if you do. I hope they catch the culprit soon.’

‘Me too,’ said Diana fervently.

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Diana changed the subject abruptly.

‘Are you coming to the tennis club Christmas party on Friday?’

‘I didn’t know there was one. A party?’

‘Becky doesn’t tell you anything!’ said Diana, not realising how painful this truth was to Gillian.

‘Maybe she did tell me and I wasn’t really listening,’ said Gillian, but she knew that wasn’t true. She listened when Becky told her something. But Becky barely ever did. That was the problem.

‘But you’re coming?’ checked Diana. ‘Everyone should bring a few biscuits or crisps or something. It’ll be nice.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it will.’
And you’ll bring your stupid muffins!

I’ll get through it, she thought; somehow I’ll get through it!

Saying that Tom was about to arrive home and she had to get supper ready, Gillian finally managed to make her getaway a quarter of an hour later. She felt free when she and Becky were finally on the other side of the road. The cold wind did her good. After a certain point she had barely been able to stand the festively decorated kitchen, the smell of cooking, and oh-so-perfect Diana.

‘Why didn’t you tell me there’s a Christmas party at the tennis club the day after tomorrow?’ she asked when they were almost home. As usual, they had walked in silence.

‘Didn’t want to,’ mumbled Becky.

‘Didn’t want to what? To tell me? To go?’

‘To tell you.’

‘Why not?’

Becky walked up their drive silently. Tom’s car was parked in front of the garage. He normally drove to London earlier than Gillian and came home later. Gillian had to fit Becky and the housework into her routine, so they had decided to each make their own way to work.

Gillian grabbed her daughter’s arm. ‘I want an answer from you!’

‘To what?’ asked Becky.