“Do you know who this man is?” She pointed to the bearded man with glasses sitting at the table next to him.
Michal squinted and frowned. “I don’t remember him.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
She put another picture on the coffee table before him. “Does this help?” She showed him a picture of Michal with his arm around the shoulders of the same man as they sat at the table. They were both smiling into the camera. Both held drinks in their hands and were clearly toasting something.
Michal still frowned. “I’m sorry. No.”
“This is Alan Parr. Does the name mean anything to you?” She watched closely for any flicker of recognition. For the slightest spark.
“I’m sorry, no.”
She saw none. She put the picture down on the table. “Alan Parr was found murdered.” She was increasingly certain that the old man had been killed and wanted to see his reaction to the news. She was hoping for some sort of give away. A twitch. A spasm. Maybe even a slight grin. All she saw on Michal’s face was shock. This was not the guy. But she had to continue with the interview. They had so little evidence that witness testimony was going to be defining in this case. “If you remember anything, anything at all, about him or about things happening here at that time, it’s important that you tell us. His family deserves that much. Don’t they?”
Their research had shown that Michal was a devoted family man. Every month he sent the lion’s share of his wage back to his family in Poland. She’d known this one would be a long shot. Why would he send so much of his own funds if he was sending £1,600 a month to them anyway? Playing to his family loyalties was their best chance at getting him to open up, but also to maybe getting him to make a mistake if they were wrong. If he knew Alan had no family, would he slip up and point that out to her?
“Yes, they do. But I’m sorry. I don’t remember him.” He picked up the picture of the two of them making a toast. “There are forty-three residents in here at all times. Forty-three. Do you know how many residents I have cared for here since 2013?”
Kate shook her head.
“Me neither. I couldn’t even begin to work it out. But I can tell you, it’s a lot of people.”
“I’m sure it is, Michal.”
“I work nights. I work six nights a week. By the time I come on shift, most of the patients, they are in bed already. They are old and want to sleep, so they go to bed early. And most of them don’t get up until the morning shift starts. If this man followed that same pattern, I may have only met him this one time.” He held the picture out to her. “I may have changed his pad if he messed himself. I don’t know. But I don’t remember this man. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you, or his family.”
His words made sense. It was perfectly logical. They came across witnesses every day who they could prove had contact with such and such person, but they had absolutely no recollection of it. The more she thought about it, the easier it was to believe that someone like Michal wouldn’t be able to remember Alan.
“Okay, thank you for your time and I’m sorry we disturbed your rest.”
He inclined his head and scuttled out of the door.
“You sure it wasn’t him?” Gareth asked.
“As sure as I can be.” She turned her neck, trying to get it to crack. “I couldn’t see any spark of recognition and he didn’t correct my errors in regards to Alan’s family.” She shrugged. “Without evidence, at the moment that’s about as sure as we can get.”
“Who do you want next?”
Kate thought about who seemed relaxed and who was sweating in the room. Eeny-meany-miny-moe. “Let’s go with Anna. She seemed pretty relaxed.”
Gareth frowned and then smiled. “I get you. Let the ones who are nervous about something sweat it out longer. It’ll play on their nerves even more while we tick off the ones who don’t seem to have anything to hide.”
“Smart cookie, Gareth. Now, chop-chop.”
Neither Anna nor Krystyna had anything they could add. They didn’t remember him, had no knowledge of anything about him, and seemed to have nothing else to hide. Given the records they’d found on them both, just what Kate expected.
Ola on the other hand wasn’t nearly so forthcoming. Every question was answered with no comment. Clearly someone had been watching too many police dramas.
Ola was a young woman, only twenty-three years old, but she had a look on her face that said she’d lived a hard life. The lines etched around her mouth and on her forehead were deep, like they’d been cut in stone, and her eyes were just as grey and hard as granite.
“You know, Ola, if you keep telling me no comment to even the most basic questions, I’m going to think you have something to hide. And then I’m going to have to go looking for whatever that is. Do you know why?”
“No comment.”
“Probably a good job. I don’t think I’d like it if you tell me I’m a nosey bitch. But that’s probably what you think, right?”
“No comment.”
“Right. So why do I feel the need to go looking if I think you’ve got something to hide?”
“No—”
“That was a rhetorical question. I was going to give you the answer. And the answer’s simple, Ola.” She waited a beat. “It’s my job. Some people have the great pleasure of wiping shitty arses for a living. I get to figure out what people are hiding. And you know what, Ola?”
“No comment.”
“I’m good at it.” She opened an A4 wallet and pulled out a page. She glanced at it then placed it on the coffee table.
A trickle of sweat rolled down Ola’s neck and disappeared beneath her tunic.
“I don’t think you do remember my friend. Unfortunately.” She tapped the picture of Alan Parr. “But I do know that you’re hiding something.”
“No comment.”
“And I think it’s this.” Kate tapped the picture she’d put down. It was a photocopy of Ola’s passport that was held on file by the nursing home from when she started working for them. “Am I right?”
“No comment.”
Kate sighed. “Okay, looks like we’ll be doing this the hard way. You know, I’d never seen a passport from Poland before today. Now I’ve seen seven of them. Well, six actually. Because this one,” she said and tapped the picture again, “well, this one’s a fake.”
Ola’s eyes widened and her face paled. “No comment.”
Kate waved off the response. “I know it is, because you see here?” She pointed to the code at the bottom of the page. “That’s a number assigned to another person.”
Ola crossed her arms across her chest, but the move only served to highlight her shaking hands rather than hide them. “No comment.”
“That’s fine. You don’t need to comment to me. Immigration services will be taking over with this. I just have one more question for you?”
Ola didn’t say a word, but her eyes locked on to Kate’s. She was clearly waiting to hear what else she’d have to say “no comment” to.
“Did Alan find out you were here on a fake passport so you killed him to keep your secret?”
“Killed him? I didn’t kill anyone. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Well, except the whole false passport thing. Right?”
Ola squirmed in her chair.
“Is your name really Ola?”
“I thought you said you were done with your questions.”
Kate smiled. “I lied. Just like you. So is it?”
Ola smiled back. “No comment.”
“Beautiful. Detective Constable Collier, are our friends from immigration here yet?”
“I believe they are, sarge.”
“Excellent. Please take Ola here to meet them.”
Gareth stepped forward. “With pleasure.” He ushered Ola out of the room.
One left. That was all. Just Eva Kutenova. The woman who sat in the room sweating, fidgeting, and constantly glancing out of the window. All signs of so
meone looking for a way to escape. Signs of someone who was in trouble, and knew it. She decided not to take her upstairs to the small, comfortable room. She decided to go in with Tom.
She glanced at the PCSO when she walked into the break room and indicated for him to step out. Tom didn’t move. He just kept staring at Eva. Kate suppressed a shudder and sat on the chair adjacent to Eva’s.
“Good to see you again, Eva.” She smiled what she hoped was a sweet, innocent, disarming smile. Kate placed the portable recorder on the table. “I need to record this interview.”
Eva nodded. Her brow creased and her cheeks paled as she swallowed hard. Kate wrinkled her nose. She could smell the fear that clung to the woman like the cheap eau de toilette her gran used to wear. It was thick and cloying, filling her nostrils and penetrating her brain. It was almost enough to give her a headache.
Kate pressed record. “Detective Sergeant Brannon in the room with Detective Constable Thomas Brothers and Eva Kutenova. We are at Brancombe House Nursing Home—”
“Why am I still here? I have much to do, I must be getting back to work.”
“I have some questions for you and I need you to answer them. Honestly.”
“I have always been honest with you.” Her voice was quieter and she seemed unable to meet Kate’s gaze.
Honest? Yeah, as the man said, my arse. “Then we shouldn’t have any issues here. Do you recognise this man?” Kate held up the original facial reconstruction of Alan Parr.
Eva shook her head, but her eyes betrayed her. “I don’t know him.”
Kate took the image with the added beard and glasses. “What about now? Do you recognise him now?”
She shook her head again, but still her eyes betrayed her. The sweat that had beaded on her brow trickled down beside her ear before continuing down her neck.
Kate placed a picture of Eva with Alan on the table but didn’t say anything.
Eva swallowed hard, her fingers twisting at the button on her cardigan.
Kate put a second picture next to the first. Clearly they were taken at a different time as they were wearing different clothes and Eva’s hair was longer. The third picture was taken at the Christmas party in early December 2013. Eva was handing a knife and fork to Alan.
“I thought you said you’d only worked here a week when the storm hit. That’s why you remembered it so clearly.”
“I did.”
“And in that week you managed to get photographed with this man on three separate occasions. But you don’t recognise him.”
“It was first week. There was much to learn. Much to remember. I don’t remember him.”
Kate leaned closer to her. “You’re lying,” she said quietly. “Don’t you think so, Detective Constable Brothers?”
“Definitely,” Tom said, no doubt the first word he’d spoken since walking into the room.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, why someone would lie about knowing an old man?”
“It does, sarge.”
“I mean, we only asked if anyone recognised him. Knew his name. That’s all.”
“That’s all we did, sarge.”
“So why would anyone lie about not knowing him?”
“Got something to hide, sarge.”
“You think?”
“Not a doubt in my mind.”
“So, what do you think Eva here’s hiding?”
“Well, we’ve got a dead victim, missing three years and not reported missing, and a woman who lies to us about knowing who he is.” He paused and sniffed loudly. “Only says one thing to me, sarge.”
“And that is?”
“She’s our killer.”
“What? No! I didn’t do that. I couldn’t. I liked Alan!” Eva said and then slapped her hand across her mouth as she realised what she’d just done.
Bingo.
Panic filled Eva’s eyes and spilled out as she sobbed. Guilt and snot flowed freely as she started talking. “I didn’t hurt him. I swear. I never knew what happened to him. I just know that one night he was gone and didn’t come back. And no one missed him. No one seemed to even notice that he was gone. I didn’t hurt him. I thought he’d just wandered off somewhere.”
“And you thought that doing nothing about an elderly man wandering off somewhere was a good idea?” Kate said incredulously.
“I had no idea how long he was gone when I first noticed that he wasn’t around. In all the commotion with the floods and Annie passing, it was a few days before I noticed that he was gone. But already no one had mentioned him. I couldn’t find some of his things, but things always went missing in the laundry. So I didn’t really worry. I thought sister would have been dealing with it, and that it was not talked about because someone was probably in trouble for letting him wander off.”
Kate plucked a tissue from the box on a small table beside the chair. “Say I did believe you, that you didn’t hurt Alan. Why didn’t you go to the sister and ask her about it?”
“I did.”
Kate looked at her sceptically.
“No, really, I did. As soon as I realised he was missing. It was maybe the Wednesday or the Thursday after.”
Five or six full days, and no one else rang the alarm? What the hell kind of state was this place in? “Was the home evacuated? In the flood?” Maybe in a confusion like that she could understand how someone could be lost.
Eva shook her head.
“Then why was he never reported missing? Why did no one else ever notice that he was gone?”
“I can’t answer for anyone else. We had lots of agency staff here at that time. More even than we have now. I only know that I tried.”
“Then what went wrong? Because we’ve no record of Alan Parr being reported missing, and you lied to us and said you didn’t recognise him.”
“I pick wrong time to talk to sister.”
“I don’t understand, Eva.”
“Sister was drunk. Very drunk. When I ask what she had done about it the next day, she looked at me blank then said it was all taken care of. That everything was fine.” She blew her nose loudly. “It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I realised that meant she didn’t even know what I was talking about. She was so drunk that she didn’t even remember.” She wiped her eyes. “No one seemed to remember.”
“See, that’s what I don’t understand. This is a modern nursing home. A modern facility. How could a resident just go missing and no one notices?”
She shrugged. “I was very new then, but most staff were agency staff. Very few working full-time. Some of the people who work here full-time now got jobs here after they started with the agency.”
“And the agency staff were different all the time?”
“Some. But those who were the same weren’t here all the time. They didn’t comment if a patient was missing. They assumed they had died since they last worked at a place. One girl told me that happened all the time and it was too sad to try and remember all the people who were gone, so she just worked with the patient in front of her and then never thought about them again.”
Kate’s phone pinged. “Excuse me.” She flipped through the e-mail from Grimshaw. Apparently the Polish bank wanted a case of international fraud sorting out as soon as possible. She nodded to Tom as she looked up from the device. He’d follow her lead. He was always good like that. “Okay, so I can see that with the transitory staff, but that doesn’t account for the full-time staff or the records? Or his stuff?”
“When I noticed that he was gone, so were his belongings.” She clicked her fingers. “Just like that, gone. So was his patient folder from the rack where we keep all the notes.”
“Are those the only records?”
Eva shook her head. “They were the paper ones we had access to. So we could write in things that happened, medication records, fluid balance sheets, bathing schedules. That sort of thing. The rest of the records are kept on the computer.” Eva’s lip quivered.
The net was closing in on Eva. Kate could feel it,
smell it closing as Eva talked herself tighter and tighter into it.
“And what about the computer records, Eva? Because they’re gone now.”
Eva stared at her lap and started to twist the button on her cardigan again.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
“Me? How would I know anything about that?”
“I was hoping you’d ask that. Weren’t you, Detective Brothers?”
“Definitely, sarge.”
Kate laced her fingers together, inverted her hands, and cracked her knuckles loudly. “So, Eva Kutenova, thirty-two years old. Worked in the UK since 2013 after gaining a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Warsaw. Married Peter Kutenova in 2010 and had a little girl in 2011. Shortly after which your husband was killed in a car accident, leaving you alone to provide for your daughter.”
Eva stared at her wide eyed.
“How am I doing so far?” Kate asked.
Eva just continued to stare but her face paled even further and her fingers wrung the hell out of her cardigan.
“Good, good. So after you were widowed, I’m guessing you needed to find work and fast. I’m also guessing that your options were limited in Poland so you came to the UK to try and find a job in the IT sector. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“But they wouldn’t recognise your credentials?”
“Yes.”
“Bummer. So you end up working here.”
“Yes.” Eva wiped at her eyes again.
“So what happened next, Eva? How did you get from new worker to stealing the money that was supposed to pay for Alan Parr’s care? The missing person that only you seemed to be aware was missing.”
Eva covered her mouth like she was going to be sick.
Kate moved back a little but didn’t relent on her questions. “Did the sister give you computer jobs when she found out about your skillset? Ease her workload and make extra time for drinking?”
Her cheeks puffed out, and Kate grabbed the waste paper bin. Thankful that it was a solid metal one with a bag in. Not like those useless wicker ones. She held it in front of Eva.
“You do realise that the innocent don’t throw up when they’re caught, don’t you?”
Under Parr Page 21