“Was that normal, to be locked in your room?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said, shrugging. “Sometimes they want private time.”
“So Bogdana didn’t sleep in your room that night?”
“No, no.”
“Maybe Bogdana left with Mrs Galbraith? If she was going to the station?” I glanced at her and she shrugged.
“No. But Mrs Kristina come back very late. Three in morning.”
“How do you know?”
“I hear car. Her car sound different to his car. Then she leave again five in morning.”
“Is that normal?”
“No, sometimes she leave at night but not come back.”
“Did anyone else see Bogdana that night? Any of the guests?”
“She mostly work in kitchen. But people like that not see people like us. You understand?”
Yes, I understood. People like her, people making and serving the food, cleaning up afterwards, remained invisible to people who attended that sort of dinner.
I now understood why Bill was so keen to see Aurora leave the country and why Kristina was so worried about what Aurora might have told me. Of course Aurora hadn’t realised the significance of what she’d seen until this morning. If it was significant – for all I knew Bogdana had gone home that night. At the very least The Willows was one of the last places she’d been seen alive. The Galbraiths would see Bogdana’s photo in the paper at some point today, as would Badem. My hope was that they’d assume Aurora had already left with her new family.
“Will I have to talk to police?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I have to get advice.”
“My daughter is sick,” Aurora said.
“Yes I know,” I said. “Leukaemia?”
“Yes. But she is very sick. Not recover. You understand?” Her eyes welled and I put my hand on hers.
“You need to get home to see her,” I said. She nodded, unable to speak.
As I left I asked Sandra to keep Aurora at her house until I sorted out a meeting with Rhianna.
“What’s going on, George?”
“In a sentence: Aurora saw the girl found at Byron’s Pool at the Galbraiths.”
* * *
At Parkside police station, after announcing myself and waiting for Stubbing to summon me, I sat and read Linda’s story on Bogdana. According to her parents the seventeen-year-old had befriended a woman in Poland who convinced her that if she parted with some money she could find work in the UK as an au pair. Her parents refused to give her the cash and she left without their blessing, saying she would work off the debt. They alerted the Polish authorities. The rest was what Linda had told me on Saturday, but more dramatically put. What Linda didn’t know was that somewhere along the line between leaving home and being found dead at Byron’s Pool, she’d ended up at the Galbraiths’ house.
As I looked up from the paper who should walk into the police station but Kristina Galbraith’s handsome boyfriend. He carried a brown briefcase in one hand and a cardboard takeaway cup in the other. He smiled charmingly at the woman behind the glass and she reciprocated, buzzing him through the steel door which he opened by pushing on it with his backside, facing me as he went through – but showed no sign of recognition. I considered asking the woman behind the glass who he was but the door opened and Stubbing appeared.
“Let’s go on to Parker’s,” she said, striding purposefully out of the building ahead of me.
“Have you had any luck with the hit and run?” I asked when I caught up with her. It was a sun-soaked morning as we crossed the road.
“You’re not my boss, Kocky.”
“Did you manage to get any traffic camera footage from the A14?”
“Annoyingly persistent for this time of the morning, aren’t we? Yes, but since it was raining at the time and it’s at a distance I didn’t get a licence plate or even the car model. But that’s not why I asked you here,” she said, as we found a bench under the line of lime trees that edged the green. She unbuttoned her jacket and we sat down. “Last night we stopped the Ford Focus you mentioned, and picked up one Leonard Diski.”
It took me a few seconds to realise that she was referring to our conversation about the Cherry Hinton episode when I’d given her the licence plate number. I hadn’t thought she’d follow through on it.
“You guys are on the ball,” I said.
“The plate was in the system, the traffic cops did the rest. I’ve got a nice photo of him and another man crossing the railway tracks in the Focus after the barrier started to come down. To be fair, it was his companion who was driving, but it does corroborate your story about the altercation outside the church.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said.
“I’ve got questions, before you get too smug.”
I waited expectantly, watching a couple of older joggers trudge round the perimeter.
“He says they were there to retrieve a briefcase from this Aurora de la Cruz. That she’d stolen it from local hero Bill Galbraith.”
“Stolen is a pejorative word,” I said.
She snorted. “It’s also a fairly black-and-white term, with little room for ambiguity.”
“Aurora thought her passport was in it. Her employers were keeping it from her.”
“So she hired you to get her passport back and they were hired by Bill Galbraith to get the briefcase back?”
“I don’t know that they were hired. They somehow inserted themselves into the situation.”
She shook her head. “I’ll be inserting something into you if you don’t start talking.”
I sighed, working out how I could neutralise Leonard and Derin without Badem knowing it was me. “Maybe Bill Galbraith did hire them, maybe he needed someone else who was less, shall we say, squeamish, about picking the briefcase up. I was on my way to meet her outside the church so we could have a face-to-face with Galbraith to exchange the briefcase for her passport when those goons turned up. Afterwards Galbraith apologised. He said wires had been crossed and things had gotten out of hand.”
She turned to stare at me. “How does someone like Galbraith even know people like that?”
I shrugged. “Through a patient? He told me there were some patients’ notes in the briefcase.”
“And were there?”
I shrugged again.
She kept her gaze on me and it was becoming uncomfortable. I’d wanted to wait until tomorrow but she was forcing my hand, or rather I’d forced my own hand since I was the one who’d pointed her in the direction of Leonard and Derin. But of course that was before Badem had issued threats against Linda if I involved the police.
“Don’t you have more important things to worry about? Like a murder case?” I said.
“Unlike you I have to worry about more than one thing at a time. Come on, stop stalling and spill whatever beans are giving you wind.”
“You couldn’t identify the car the woman jumped out of on the A14, right?”
“I just told you that.”
“What if I told you that it was the Ford Focus, with this Leonard Diski driving.”
“I’d ask you to fucking elaborate.”
“Did you find a Taser on him, or in the car?”
She just looked at me and I have to say she’d be good at the poker table. She scratched behind her ear, which I took as a tell.
“Let’s assume you did,” I said.
“What I will mention is that he’s lawyered up way beyond his financial capability.” That would be Badem, I thought, protecting his interests.
“He used the Taser on the woman before she jumped out of the car,” I said.
She thought about that. “There’s a witness presumably, someone who was in the car?”
“Yes, but they won’t talk to the police, for good reason.”
“They? I’m assuming it’s Aurora de la Cruz, who I’ve just learnt has outstayed her welcome in the UK by several months.”
It was my turn to try and remain inscrut
able.
“You think she’s believable, this woman, the one you’ve seen naked?”
I rolled my eyes and she raised her eyebrows at me. Her phone beeped. She retrieved it and squinted at the screen.
“We haven’t finished but I’ve got to go back into the factory,” she said, standing up. “I expect you to bring me something a bit more substantial by the end of the day.”
“How about tomorrow morning?”
She stared at me while she buttoned her suit jacket. Her phone rang but she ignored it.
“End of day,” she said.
42
STANDING AT THE OFFICE WINDOW SIPPING A COFFEE BOUGHT at Antonio’s on the way back from Stubbing I thought about what she’d told me. I didn’t know what Kristina and Badem had cooked up in his car yesterday, but either she’d known he had no intention of delivering Aurora to me (maybe she hadn’t even asked him to) or he’d told her that he was going to do it and she believed him. But there was something about how she’d wagged her finger at him that made me think she was playing Badem. And now, knowing what Aurora had seen, things had a more sinister edge. I’d rung Rhianna and left a voicemail, so hopefully she’d get back to me soon.
Looking back outside, I saw Kristina’s Range Rover pull onto the drive, parking where I could see that the scrape on top of her car was starting to rust. She got out, dressed in white, and disappeared from view before ringing through on the intercom.
“I’m on the top floor,” I said. This would be interesting. I tidied up a bit but couldn’t fix the worn carpet or the flaking paint. The Argus was face up on the desk, so I covered it with a sheet of paper – if she hadn’t seen it, it was a card I could play to get a reaction.
She appeared upstairs dressed in an off-white linen trouser suit and black shirt with the buttons undone enough to allow for the long pendant at her neck to rest against the pale skin. She smiled, but it was the sort of smile you put on when you go in to see the dentist. We didn’t shake hands. I waited for an ugly head to pop out of her large bag.
“No Misha?” I asked, just to have a crack at the ice.
“He’s in the car.”
“Didn’t want to come up? I get the sense that he doesn’t like me.” Unable to raise a smile I tried a different tack. “You know you’ve lost the antenna from the top of your car?” I gestured to the window.
“Really?” We went to look. I pointed. “It would explain why the radio has stopped working,” she said, her voice soft, like melting butter. She exuded a musky, jasmine smell that rendered me immobile. “I must have done it in the multi-storey car park,” she added, as we stared down at the car. Was the Russian accent thicker again? I was aware of her pushing stray hair from her face.
“There are a couple of places where it’s lower than the stated height,” I said. My voice seemed to have dropped a register. She turned to face me and was too close but I couldn’t bring myself to step back. Pull yourself together, George.
“I came into town to buy a new record player from that place round the corner on Trumpington,” she said, “to replace the one I broke yesterday. Bill will be back from the States this afternoon.”
“You don’t want him to know.”
“It might be difficult to explain how it happened.”
“I can see that. You want to park on my drive?”
She grinned sheepishly, in the way attractive people do when trying to charm you into a favour. “Do you mind? It’s double yellow lines on Trumpington.”
“Of course not,” I said. This wasn’t why she was really here of course. I pulled myself out of my reverie by reminding myself of who I was dealing with and led her to the chair across the desk from mine.
“Is that today’s newspaper?” She pulled it out from under the sheet I’d covered it with.
I could discern no reaction on her face, which meant she must have already seen it; no one was this good at playing it straight.
“Horrible business,” she said, tapping Bogdana’s photo. “Do you think the police know what happened?”
“If they do, they’re not saying.”
“I thought you might have contacts in the police?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t have wished for a smoother segue into the topic of Bogdana being at her house. But I didn’t – forewarning her about any police interest in her and her husband was out of the question.
“You know this reporter?” she asked, looking at me from under those long black eyelashes.
“No, why would I?” I asked, every ounce of my being on alert.
She shrugged and put the paper back on the desk, but with Bogdana face down so the bottom half with the picture of the makeshift shrine to the dead girl was visible.
“I’m surprised to see you here, I must say, Mrs Galbraith.” In the office of this seedy little Armenian.
“You mean after yesterday? You did what you had to do, I guess.” A strained smile settled on her lips as she worried at the pendant.
“It didn’t work though,” I said, again studying her reaction. She didn’t even pretend to be surprised.
“I’m sorry Badem didn’t deliver on his promise,” she said. “But I fulfilled my side of the bargain.”
“You don’t seem surprised. That he didn’t deliver, I mean.”
“I would have been more surprised if he had kept his promise, to be honest.”
“What do you think he’s done with her?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea,” she said, shrugging – she obviously didn’t give a shit. I could feel the impatience rising in me.
“Why are you here, Mrs Galbraith?”
She leant forward and whatever sparkly thing was on the end of the pendant swung free over the desk. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“You’re wondering about the photos?”
“Yes, you know I am.”
“Nothing will happen to them until Aurora is back with her dying daughter.”
“Do you want me to speak to Badem?” she asked, her lips thin with anger.
“It didn’t work the first time, why would it work again?” I asked.
She just stared at me and it took a few seconds for what she was saying to sink in.
“I see, you think he might have better luck getting the photos back from me. The photos are safe. I’ve deleted them all from my system and sent them to a lawyer. When Aurora is safe then the lawyer will be instructed to destroy them. If anything happens to her, or me, then the pictures will be released to the tabloid press. The lawyer doesn’t know what’s in the files I’ve sent, by the way.” This was all off the cuff and I’d done none of it of course, but saying it out loud actually made it sound like something I should do.
She attempted a relaxed smile, but it barely suppressed the emotional agitation churning away. “That all seems a little over the top for some photos,” she said.
“Everything about this case seems a little over the top.”
When she left I tried to work out why she’d come – surely she had bigger concerns than having a lover on the side exposed, like the identification of Bogdana. Maybe she thought Aurora was safely out of the way and harmless, or maybe someone like her understood that exposing one secret often led to the exposure of others – that like a house of cards the carefully constructed lies would come tumbling down.
I went to the window to watch her leave. She had the car door open and was standing on the sill to examine the damaged roof, but she still wasn’t high enough to get a proper view. She glanced up at the window, saw me and got down. Opening her cavernous bag she let Misha jump in, locked the car and walked down towards Trumpington Street, making a call as she went. I just hoped it wasn’t to Badem.
I remained at the window, watching a man cycle onto the drive, presumably a client of one of the therapists. It reminded me of the dream last night, about cycling in a low tunnel. Something niggled, something brewing in my unconscious that had yet to be handed over to the part of my brain that could make sense of it. I went to th
e desk, saw the newspaper with the photo of the makeshift memorial at the car park barrier at Byron’s Pool. The barrier was a height restriction barrier: 1.8 metres, it said on the middle of the bar. I took it back to the window and looked down at the car. I looked back at the photo. I shook my head. I told myself to get a grip.
43
I QUICKLY LOOKED UP KRISTINA’S MODEL OF RANGE ROVER AND checked the height: 1.835 metres. I took a small evidence bag from my desk drawer and ran downstairs; Kristina was unlikely to be that long at the hi-fi place. The Range Rover was a beast and the only way to get access to the roof was to stand on one of the large wheels. With the evidence bag in one hand I took the small tweezers from my Swiss army knife, then clambered onto the back wheel. I wanted to remove a flake of paint to check against the barrier at Byron’s Pool car park, because it looked like a lot of it had been left behind. My thinking was that it might be enough to convince Stubbing to have a more forensic test done. Up high I could see the scrape was down a raised bit of the roof in the middle. I spotted a bit of paint I could peel off but it was just out of reach. I had to move onto my left foot and then on tiptoe in order to stretch. I got the tweezers underneath the flaking paint.
Because I’m an adult I don’t wear trainers; I wear leather shoes with leather soles. They’re designed for pavements, pubs and to go with adult trousers, but they don’t really provide enough grip when clambering on cars. I slipped, and my foot got caught in the wheel arch as I went down, twisting me onto my back as I hit the tarmac. My lungs had the air forced out of them and I lay there, fighting for breath, unable to move, the tweezers and evidence bag still in my hands. I chuckled to myself, looking up at the sky: cloud cover with no chance of rain. I put the tweezers away in the penknife. I heard someone’s feet approach the car on the other side. Turning my head left I could see, under the Range Rover, a woman’s shoes and ankles: another client of one of the therapists. Something caught my eye underneath the Range Rover, near the passenger door – a small box with some gold markings on it partially obscured by mud. At first I thought someone had fixed a GPS tracking unit to the car but when I rubbed off the dirt the gold marking turned into a picture of a key. I slid the box open and a car key dropped out. I stood up and brushed myself off.
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