by Sabina Manea
‘He looks knackered. What’s he been up to?’
‘Nothing much, as far as I know. We had a meal out last night.’ The last bit was blurted out unintentionally, but it couldn’t be undone. There was something about Trinh’s face that got people talking, an aesthetically pleasing reliability that didn’t take any prisoners. Lucia chided herself for not knowing better. After all, it was a trick that she herself employed; all you had to do was sit there, look sympathetic, and they’d all blab for England.
Trinh raised an eyebrow. Lucia could see that she was seriously mulling over what to say next. In the end, Trinh nodded approvingly and patted Lucia on the knee. ‘Nice. About bloody time too.’
Lucia never blushed, but she came way too close this time. ‘It was just dinner between friends.’ Miraculously, she had managed to get away with it – no hangover to speak of, and she had been fast asleep well before one the night before. Admittedly, there was a small part of the evening that, for some unclear reason, stubbornly chose to remain hazy in her recollection. She and the inspector had been waiting for a taxi outside the restaurant. She remembered touching his face. There may have been a kiss. But maybe she’d imagined it all.
‘Nothing wrong with dinner between friends.’
‘Anyway, I thought we were heading back.’ Lucia didn’t want to let the conversation go any further. She trusted Trinh, of course she did. The DS wasn’t a gossip, unlike most of their colleagues, but Lucia had no desire to risk becoming the subject of renewed snide remarks at the station.
When she had first arrived as a freshly minted, bushy-tailed civilian investigator just over two years previously, she hadn’t exactly been welcomed with open arms. Few of the so-called ‘proper coppers’ understood what her role was: being the DCI’s shadow and ferreting out details that nobody else seemed to see. What’s more, Lucia knew full well that sharing an office with her boss had gone down like a lead balloon. It only seemed to add insult to injury, like she was getting preferential treatment. In time, the antipathy waned, and she was reluctantly accepted as a permanent fixture. She wasn’t planning to let anything spoil that.
Even if Trinh was on her side, Lucia knew she had to keep her wits about her. For one, DC Harding couldn’t wait to see the back of her. Lucia knew a wily upstart when she saw one, and he was definitely in that category. Unfortunately, he’d got it in his head that she was trying to cramp his style and somehow stand in the way of what he was certain would be a stellar career. Lucia, along with the DCI, as far as she could tell, was less certain of the success of his trajectory. Harding was an arrogant meathead, and she’d seen plenty of them before.
It had been the same when she started off as an interior designer. The job description sounded a great deal more pretentious than the reality. Lucia had enjoyed the fripperies that came with the territory – plying the bored housewives of Hampstead with colour palettes, fabric swatches and so on – but she had taken even more pleasure in doing a lot of the manual labour herself. She had learned quickly, and that meant spending a lot of time around the competition, which was mainly male and in the building trade. Some of them hadn’t been best pleased to have an ‘uppity posh bird’ steal their thunder, and Lucia became well practised in choice put-downs to counteract meathead behaviour.
There were barely a hundred yards between the cafe and the police station, and so the two women decided on a small detour, unwilling as they both were to relinquish the joy of being outside on such a perfect early spring day. The modified route took them along the lived-in messiness of Kentish Town Road, past a succession of shopfronts that flipped nonchalantly between manicured and decrepit. Trish’s Nail Bar was somewhere in the middle. It had a newish, thickly painted sign in a cheap font and epilepsy-inducing flashing lights spelling ‘OPEN’ in the window. Inside, a small army of young Vietnamese women were engrossed in their assignments, efficiently processing through a spectrum of locals and a more rarefied smattering of office workers.
Trinh and Lucia veered onto Anglers Lane and then, almost immediately, Raglan Street, part of the Kentish Town ‘Crimean’ area, developed in the 1850s to commemorate the Crimean War. On one side stood Raglan House, a solid, unprepossessing block that had served various welfare-related purposes for a large part of the twentieth century and was now left closed and empty. On the other side of the street stood orderly terraces in various states of repair, many with skips outside indicating that they were in the process of becoming expensive accommodation for the professional classes.
Lucia took in the Victorian terraced cottages with their delusions of grandeur and decided that she much preferred the council estate buildings that stood opposite them. The Raglan Estate comprised the three blocks of Monmouth House and Alpha Court Blocks 1 and 2. The latter two followed the convention that the first letter of the Greek alphabet was used to name the first part of a new development to be built. It was a familiar sight: the tidy, rectangular boxes with well-kept communal greenery stretching generously around them, while the apparently more desirable accommodation across the street had to make do with patios or a small patch of decrepit lawn at best.
The council buildings reminded Lucia of the home she had grown up in, the small flat up on Grove Place in Hampstead where she and her mother had made so many happy memories. Denise Steer had passed away, and nearly six years on, Lucia had finally got around to selling the place. Contracts had recently been exchanged and, since it was an uncomplicated transaction on Lucia’s side, completion was imminent. She occasionally felt a pang of nostalgia that she didn’t allow herself to dwell on for very long. She was perfectly comfortable in her modern, soulless flat, a fashionable rental in a recently converted red-brick block. Her neighbours, mainly young professionals who were hardly ever at home, passed each other like ships in the night and barely stayed for more than the standard twelve-month tenancy agreement. Precisely for those reasons, the place suited her just fine.
The street was eerily quiet save for the dull whirr of a power tool somewhere out of sight, no doubt wielded by a conscientious Eastern European builder who took few tea breaks and had even fewer demands for enhanced health and safety procedures. As they approached the end of the terraces, Lucia noticed that the very last building was different from the others: a narrow strip that boasted similar-looking brick to the rest of the terrace, but which was ostensibly a more recent imitation. As a generous estimate, it had to be barely ten foot wide, and probably less. It sported a narrow door, incongruously painted in racing green. There were two windows, one at ground level and the other on the first floor, both with the curtains open. Lucia thought she glimpsed, at eye level, a dark-coloured fireplace topped with an indistinguishable picture.
Just as the two women had left the bizarre edifice behind them, the peace was suddenly shattered by an ear-splitting scream. It felt as if the serene tableau had suddenly been smashed with a ruthless sledgehammer. As the sharpness of their professional personas immediately kicked in, Trinh and Lucia turned around simultaneously to see a young woman dart out of the green door and onto the pavement, arms outstretched in supplication.
‘Help me, help me! She’s dead. She’s dead, she’s gone…’ The shocking utterance faded into speechlessness as the woman started panting heavily.
Trinh instantly recognised the symptoms of shock. She didn’t hesitate to take charge of the situation in a gentle but firm manner, the way she had been trained to do. She took the woman’s arm gently by the elbow and led her to the stone step in front of the door. The woman steadied herself as she sat down. As Trinh whispered some comforting platitudes, the woman’s breathing began to slow a little, though her eyes were those of a hunted animal.
Lucia decided to stay back and let her colleague do the pacifying, as she proceeded to observe whom they were dealing with. The woman must have been somewhere in her twenties. There was a childishness in her features that not even the clumsily applied, overdone make-up and unnaturally red hair, piled high and secured by a haphazard coll
ection of clips, could disguise. She wore stone-washed jeans, ripped at the knees, and a skin-tight, bright pink T-shirt declaring its wearer to be ‘SEXY’. Together with the Slavic accent, Lucia surmised that she must have been the cleaner.
As her charge started to regain some colour in her cheeks, Trinh asked, ‘Better now?’
‘Yes, yes. Thank you.’ The woman looked around her, terrified, as if someone were on her trail. ‘I need to call the police. She’s dead.’
Trinh pulled out her warrant card, which the woman examined at length with a disbelieving look on her face. ‘We’re the police. DS Cam Trinh of Kentish Town station, and this is my colleague Lucia Steer.’ Trinh beckoned to Lucia, who dutifully produced her own warrant card. It got considerably less scrutiny than Trinh’s. The woman had evidently been persuaded that the two young, attractive females in plainclothes weren’t merely passing themselves off as coppers.
‘Who’s dead?’ Lucia asked.
‘My customer. Genevieve. She’s inside. Come.’
Chapter 3
Trinh and Lucia followed the woman into the house with the careful steps of two police officers, conscious that they were entering an alleged death scene, though yet unverified. Luckily, they both carried disposable gloves in their handbags as a matter of routine. Given the young woman’s distress, it was to be assumed that the demise had been unexpected.
Inside, the place was as narrow as the façade had suggested, although it didn’t feel as claustrophobic as first appearances would have it. What it lacked in width it only just managed to make up for in ceiling height. As soon as the two detectives stepped inside, Lucia identified the house as a rental. Floor to ceiling, it was painted landlord white. The thin strip of a side table that housed a chipped bowl with assorted keys and a few unopened letters – bills and adverts by the looks of things – was discernibly cheap. The stairs leading up to the first floor had been adequately though economically carpeted. Straight ahead was a narrow hallway that led to what looked like a long box kitchen, practically wedged under the staircase. On the right-hand side, an open door partially revealed a similarly poky sitting room that appeared sparsely furnished.
The young woman, who had given her full name as Ana Dineva, led the way up the stairs, hesitating a little as she walked and grabbing the handrail for comfort. A small landing gave way to a closed door on the right and an open one straight ahead. Lucia stared at the oversized sash window in front of them. The interior designer in her noted the peeling paint, while the sharp-eyed lawyer and civilian investigator remarked that the glass was opaque – to be expected in a bathroom.
‘In here. She’s in the bath.’ Ana pointed towards the room with the large window and turned her head away to one side. She stood firm against the wall, unwilling to take another step. She looked like she was about to be sick.
‘Wait here,’ instructed Trinh in her most officious voice. The last thing they needed was a fainting witness on their hands.
Lucia followed the DS into the bathroom and couldn’t suppress a horrified wince at the sight that stretched before them. She had grown inured to the horrors of death scenes that came with the territory in her line of work, but you would have had to be an unfeeling psychopath not to be touched by the sight of a lifeless shell that had once housed a living, breathing human being. Lucia stared, first at the body in the bath, and then at the rest of the room. White, like the rest of the house that they had managed to glimpse, solid but run-of-the-mill fittings: a small sink, topped with an oval mirror whose gilded silver frame suggested it might have been a personal touch chosen by the tenant. Lucia willed herself to turn her gaze back to the bath, which had a shower attachment at one end but no screen.
After making a brisk call to the ambulance service, Trinh returned the phone back to her bag, and with a small sigh she said, ‘Poor girl. Pending official confirmation from the paramedics, I think we can safely assume she’s dead.’
Lucia stared at the body of a female anywhere between mid-twenties and mid-thirties, wholly submerged in the water. Her short, straight blonde hair cut into what looked like a bob floated upwards, and her eyes were only half-closed, as if she were a life-size doll that a child had thoughtlessly cast aside. Except this doll was naked and vulnerable for all to see, and soon she would be fished out and prodded by a succession of medical professionals. But what particularly stood out and sent cold, paralysing shivers down Lucia’s spine were the angry red welts that covered the whole surface of the body, starting with the once beautiful face and all the way down to the feet.
‘Fuck. What the hell happened here?’ Trinh wasn’t a habitual user of foul language, at least not unless the situation really warranted it. This was serious.
A muffled wail came from the hallway. Lucia turned on her heels and walked out of the bathroom to find a distressed Ana curled up in a ball on the floor, her face buried in her knees. Lucia stroked the woman’s back gently. Reinforcements as well as an ambulance crew were on their way. They would kickstart the process of unravelling what exactly had happened in that small bathroom, on the first floor of an improbably narrow house in Kentish Town on a quiet, dazzlingly bright morning in early spring.
Chapter 4
Before too long, the cramped house was seething with activity. Lucia was glad to have had just enough time to conduct a thorough observation of the death scene as well as of the rest of the house. The medical findings were categorically beyond her remit, but her sharp eyes were what made her so indispensable to the Unusual Deaths Team. And this was, undoubtedly, a very unusual death indeed.
Consulting her notebook carefully as she spoke, Trinh said, ‘We’ve found her ID and other paperwork. Our woman is called Genevieve Regina Taylor, and she’s twenty-seven. She has a New Zealand passport with a UK work visa. We’ve also got her work security card. One of yours, by the looks of things. Solicitor. She works for a firm called Creasy & Gotts LLP.’
Lucia’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘Heard of them?’
‘I used to work for them. What are the chances?’
Lucia had spent her entire legal career at Creasy & Gotts, ever since she graduated from law school. She had left that particular life behind, or so she thought. She willed herself to snap back to the present. ‘How long has she been in this country?’
‘Only four months. She’s got a tenancy agreement for this house. Not cheap given how tiny it is, I’m telling you. And it’s just her in this place; no housemates. They must pay well, your lawyers.’
‘Oh, they do. And they get their money’s worth. They work the young associates into the ground.’
‘Not as glamorous as it sounds then, corporate life. All that money and no time to spend any of it. Let’s have a good look around this bathroom then,’ said Trinh.
As her keen, very dark brown eyes scanned around expertly, Lucia narrowed in on the tumbler sitting on the floor, in the middle of the room by the side of the bathtub. On the windowsill was an empty bottle. Judging by the label, it had contained pre-mixed passionfruit martini, a drink that had become popular in recent months due to an aggressive marketing campaign. But it was the item next to the bottle that particularly interested Lucia.
‘Temazepam,’ she said, picking it up and reading out the writing on the packet.
‘Those are some seriously strong sleeping pills. She must have been at her wits’ end if she’d been prescribed those. My mum used to be a pharmacist before she and Dad moved here from Vietnam, so I’m pretty good with drugs. Not that sort of drugs, of course,’ Trinh hastened to add, not that Lucia would have ever suspected her squeaky-clean colleague of dabbling in anything remotely illicit. By contrast, the same couldn’t be said about Lucia, though she kept her small vices under tight wraps.
‘Quite a few missing,’ Lucia said. She turned over the packet with knotted eyebrows. ‘Strange, don’t you think?’
‘What’s strange?’ asked Trinh.
/> ‘No sticker. You know, with details of the patient and the prescribing doctor.’
‘Do you want to know what I think?’
‘Go on.’
‘It looks like suicide. That, or an unfortunate accident,’ said the sergeant with some conviction.
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Lucia.
‘No obvious signs of violence on the body. She’d obviously been drinking and taking strong sleeping pills at the same time.’ Trinh pointed at the glass and the bottle.
Lucia bent down as low as she could and sniffed the glass, which was a dark purple colour. There was a little congealed sticky residue at the bottom, only just distinguishably yellowish in colour, that appeared consistent with what had been in the bottle.
Trinh wrinkled her nose. ‘Looks disgusting. I’m not much of a drinker myself, as you know. Give me a pint of lager or a nice glass of wine any day over these sickly-sweet concoctions.’ She straightened her back and ran her fingers through her ponytail, a gesture she often employed to give herself a little more thinking time. ‘The thing with these cocktails is that it’s hard to taste the booze for the sweet juice. Before you know it, you’ve had one too many.’
Trinh shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. ‘I don’t want to get things wrong, but I guess what I’m trying to say is, it looks like the poor woman passed out in the bath. It might have been intentional, or perhaps not. We’ll know more after the PM, in any case.’
Lucia bit her bottom lip as she pondered what to do next. She took a couple of small, careful steps backwards and positioned herself in line with the end of the bathtub, leaving enough space so as not to touch the glass. She sat down and reclined slightly, then stretched out her arm. The glass remained out of reach. She sat up straight and bent forwards, stretching out the same arm again. The glass was still, though only just, out of reach.
Trinh watched her with a mixture of fascination and confusion. ‘I know you’re famous for your unorthodox methods, but please put me out of my misery, will you? What on earth are you trying to do?’