by Adele Parks
And something else is more wrong. The woman who Dad is thrusting at is not Ellie. She’s a totally different shape. She’s not pregnant for a start, she has huge boobs and my dad is reaching forward and grabbing at them, with the same enthusiasm as he grabs a handful of caramelised peanuts when Ellie puts them in a bowl as a treat.
‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t mean to. The oh must come out quite loud. Maybe I shouted it or screamed it. I must have, to have been heard above their groans. The woman turns my way, she sees me at the door and starts scrabbling away from Dad, reaching for the sheet, pulling it around her. Dad doesn’t notice me at first, he lunges after her, laughing, ‘Come here, you little tease!’ he says.
I run into my bedroom, slam the door behind me.
When Dad comes to see me a bit later, I am not sat on my bed. I feel funny about beds now. I am sat on the floor with my back against the radiator. The warmth is comforting.
‘How’s school?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ I say as usual.
‘Good, good.’ I’m expecting him to tell me to wash my hands, come downstairs to set the table.
‘Who is she?’ I ask quickly, before I can decide not to. I think I deserve to know. I am not like Ellie’s best friend or anything, but if I am going to have a new stepmum, I want some warning.
‘She’s no one. She’s nothing,’ says Dad. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the wall above my head.
‘Nothing?’ I repeat, unsure. Confused.
‘There are women you marry and there are women you do that with.’
‘Make sex, you mean?’ I want him to know I am not a baby. I understand.
‘Have sex with, yes.’ He corrects and I’m embarrassed that I’ve shown I’m not really sure about any of this after all. ‘The women you marry are something. The others are nothing. Remember that. I don’t want a daughter of mine not understanding that.’
I squirm. I feel I’ve done something wrong, but I don’t know what. Surely, he’s the one who has done the wrong thing. ‘Now wash your hands and come downstairs to set the table. And darling, obviously as that woman was nothing, we don’t need to mention this to Ellie. It’s between us.’
He doesn’t often call me ‘darling’ and I can’t help but be happy about it.
14
DC Clements
Thursday 19th March 2020
Back at the station, Tanner returns to his desk, as another senior officer hands him a pile of traffic offences to process. Clements hardly sees her environment anymore; it is familiar to the point of being void. Curling posters on the wall, detailing policies and advertising helplines, no longer catch her attention. She doesn’t know if the walls are beige or grey. She still notices smells though – today the station smells of wet clothes and mud; there have been two sudden downpours this morning. Sometimes there is an energy to the place that overrides what she can see, hear and smell; sometimes she can just feel. Feel danger or excitement. Challenge. Lots of her colleagues have their eyes pinned to their phones or screens absorbing the news from European cities in lockdown. Normal citizens being told to stay indoors, doing so. Locked up, not like criminals exactly, but … Clements can’t process it. It’s too wild. A sense of urgency ripples through her body. She needs to find Leigh Fletcher.
Clements walks swiftly to her desk and starts to fill in the paperwork. There is a myth that the police regard any missing persons case which is not that of a child, or where a crime is not obviously suspected, as beyond their remit. It is not true. Clements wants to find this woman, bring her home – if that is what Leigh wants. Clements uploads the personal details they collated: name, age, marital status, last sighting, physical description. She attaches the photo, noting that Leigh Fletcher is pretty. It shouldn’t matter – it doesn’t really – unless the case becomes something bigger than a missing person and ends up in the papers. Then it will have a bearing. The public are always more sympathetic towards a pretty woman than a plain one, although this one is a bit old to fully catch the nation’s attention. Women over twenty-seven have to work so much harder to exist, even being murdered isn’t enough to incite sympathy, unless you are cute. Clements sighs, frustrated at the world. Frustration is not a bad reaction; it means there is some fight in her, still. Sometimes Clements is furious and wants to kick and punch at the invisible, insidious walls that limit, cage, corrupt. Other days she’s just out-and-out depressed. Those are the worst days.
Leigh Fletcher has long dark hair. In the pic the glossy hair has clearly just benefited from a fresh blow-dry. She’s wearing lipstick, a pale pink shade, but not much else in the way of make-up. She doesn’t need it. Her lashes are thick and fabulous, her skin clear and the only wrinkles on her face are around her eyes. Clements imagines the missing woman identifying them as laughter lines, shunning the miserable description of crow’s feet. She’s smiling in the photo, a huge beam. But there’s something about her big brown soulful eyes that makes Clements wonder. She looks weary. Most working mums are tired – that’s a given – but this is deeper. She’s drained. Done for.
Clements shakes her head. Sometimes she wonders whether she has too much imagination for a cop. She has to keep that in check. It’s perfectly possible that she’s reading too much into the snap.
Suddenly, Clements feels the weight of a hand on the back of her chair, someone leaning in far too close – ostensibly to look at what she is typing – in fact, simply invading her body space because he can. She recognises DC Morgan’s bulk and body odour instantly. Without looking at him, she knows he’ll have food between his teeth or caught in his beard. His shirt will be gaping, the buttons straining to stretch the material across his pale podgy belly that is coated in dark hair. Morgan is not an attractive man anymore, but Clements admits he might have had a charm once. Before his confidence loosened into boorishness, when his mass was the result of muscle not fat. Invasion of body space – and probably much more – is the sort of stunt he has been pulling for twenty-plus years, and no amount of training courses on appropriate workplace behaviour are likely to change him now. In fact, Clements has been on the courses with him and heard him dismiss them as ‘political correctness gone mad. Nothing more than the spawn of limp-wristed liberals’. He is a treat. She would probably hate him if he wasn’t such a good copper.
‘All right, Morgan?’ Clements says in greeting. She rolls her chair away from him, narrowly avoiding running over his foot but forcing him to jump back from her.
He straightens up, arches his back. ‘Must be the day for it.’ He likes starting conversations in an obtuse way, forcing others to ask questions, somehow making him seem more interesting and engaging than he truly is.
‘The day for what?’ Clements asks dutifully.
‘Missing women. I’ve just had one put through to my desk too.’ Clements feels a chill run through her body, her breathing stutters but she manages to keep her outward response to nothing more than raising an eyebrow. So, he was actually reading her screen. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t trying to secretly rub up against her, though, it’s just proof that, despite stereotypes, he is a man who can multitask.
‘Really. Who? Where?’
‘A Kai Janssen. Her husband called it in. Woman in her early forties, boss.’
Clements is not Morgan’s boss. She’s not even his senior. They hold the same rank. However, she is fifteen years younger than him and likely to continue to take exams and be promoted, whereas he is most probably done. The use of the term ‘boss’ is laden with sarcasm. He does not see this ‘slip of a girl’ so much as an equal. It’s her breasts. Not that her breasts are particularly notable. Not especially large or small but their existence – proving she is a woman – is enough to convince Morgan that Clements is inherently inferior. That’s why he laughs at the idea that one day she might outrank him. He jokes about it now, so that when it does happen, it won’t seem threatening or even important.
‘The husband sounded posh, maybe foreign. Dutch? With a name like Janssen. So
me foreigners sound so posh they sound more English than we do, though, eh? I’m just heading over there to talk to him in person. To follow up.’
‘Do you mind if I take it?’ Clements tries to keep the eagerness out of her voice. If he knows she really wants it, then he’s doing her a favour. If he does her a favour, she owes him.
‘You think they are connected?’
‘Maybe.’
Morgan scratches his belly, glances towards the window. It’s raining again. ‘Be my guest,’ he says.
15
DC Clements
Clements doesn’t bother taking Tanner with her. She needs a break from her esteemed male colleagues: their sweat, their opinions, their careless assumptions. Not for the first time she wishes her division had more female officers.
It’s 3 p.m. by the time she arrives at the address Morgan has given her. The property is on the river, one of those flash, multi-million-pound apartment blocks within spitting distance of the shiny financial district. She is a bit surprised because urban legend has it that no one lives in these apartments, that they are all bought up by Russian oligarchs who don’t want to live in the UK but want to protect their cash and so pour it into something tangible overseas. A soulless arrangement. This is a very different part of London from the bit she was at earlier. A few miles in physical distance, worlds apart in reality. Leigh Fletcher’s home is slap bang in the middle of row after row of identical Victorian terraced houses, in a street that has yet to be redeveloped. At some point it will probably become another neighbourhood for people with a lot of money but no roots. Clements would guess that the last time the Fletchers’ street was transformed was in the 70s. Then, the original features – like stained glass, sash windows and black-and-white tiled paths – were ripped out and dug up. Replaced by ugly practical solutions – PVC window frames and doors, cement paths. Their street is not charming or in any way estate-agent ‘desirable’, but it is not without merit.
It is busy with nose-to-nose traffic, crowded. It’s the sort of street where groups of morose teens loll on the low walls at the end of the scraps that pass as gardens, tired parents dash their kids to and from school and football practice, pensioners slowly but determinedly saunter to the corner shop, prepared to pay a bit more for their milk as it guarantees a chat to the person behind the counter. It’s an area where the recycling bins overflow, the paintwork on the doors blisters and peels. You get the sense that the people who live on the street are too strapped – by time and money – to bother with DIY. However, there is something appealing about the sense of enduring community. It’s the sort of place where all the kids go to the same local school, and the residents don’t shoo away the teenagers from the walls because it’s silently and tacitly acknowledged, they could be up to a lot worse, elsewhere.
Kai Janssen’s part of town is immaculate. The pavements are litter-free, there are landscaped walkways, fountains and green spaces. Although there is not a single soul around to enjoy these features. Clements looks about her and shivers, made cold by a sense of isolation. Personally, she’d rather live with the peeling paintwork and the streets that teem with life. This rarefied atmosphere of wealth is paradoxically suffocating. Clements rings the bell and is allowed into a large glass-and-marble foyer where she is greeted by a man in his fifties sat behind a concierge desk. This makes the place seem more like a hotel than a home.
Clements flashes her badge. ‘Can I help you?’ the concierge asks, not managing to hide the frisson of excitement he is so clearly feeling on having a police officer visit the premises. Cops don’t expect cheers and genial greetings from many people, but they can always depend on a warm welcome from a nosy busybody. Clements asks for Mr Janssen.
‘Is he expecting you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I hope there’s nothing wrong.’ The concierge is insincerely obsequious, but Clements doesn’t judge. She thinks that arguably it’s a necessary quality of the job if you have to suck up to the rich and entitled all the time. Obviously, something is wrong if a cop turns up at your door, unless it’s the strippergram variety. There is nothing about Clements that suggests she is a strippergram. She doesn’t reply, just smiles politely. She wants to keep him onside, in case she needs his help later; busybodies often make great witnesses, but she has nothing she wants to share with him yet. After a beat he gives up, recognising he is not going to get anything out of her, and calls Mr Janssen. After a brief exchange he says, ‘You just tap in the code. It’s 1601, the lift takes you right up to Mr and Mrs Janssen’s penthouse.’ Clements nods her thanks and heads off to the lift.
As promised, the lift doors swish open directly into the penthouse apartment ensuring that any visitor’s first impression is that the place is enormous and incredibly luxurious. It is also dark, not pitch black, but lit only by a scattering of table lamps – and because the place is so huge they don’t do much to illuminate. The size and sleekness steals Clements’ breath away. She doesn’t often come across many people who live like this. ‘I thought everyone was over the minimalist thing,’ she mutters to herself. Sometimes she does that, when she is working on her own. It makes environments less threatening to hear a voice, even if it is her own voice. And somehow this stark space, whilst large and luxurious, is threatening. She automatically scans the mostly open-plan area. There are various living spaces. A sitting area, a dining area, an office and a kitchen. All spacious. There are four doors to closed-off rooms. Bedrooms and bathrooms, presumably.
Most people live like Leigh Fletcher, in amongst a comfortable amount of clutter. They want their homes stuffed full of colour, vintage rugs and mirrors, endless mismatched prints on the walls. Not this place. Although, Clements notes, you would need a lot of stuff to fill this apartment – a lot. So maybe minimalism is the way to go. The walls are painted a dark slate grey. All the floors are a dark wood or marble, the furniture is various shades of graphite. A man steps out of the shadows. Clements doesn’t scare easily, but she flinches all the same. The man is tall and broad, bearlike. He looms over her. It is not his physicality that is alarming, it’s his emotional state. Clements sees at once that the man has been drinking, perhaps crying, he looks agitated, anxious.
‘Mr Janssen?’
‘Daan Janssen. Thank you for coming.’ He stretches out a hand and doing so, despite his emotional state, underlines the fact he has impeccable, unshakeable manners, the sort of manners that are drilled into a child at an early age and forever trump everything – warmth, sincerity, distress. No doubt some headmaster, or perhaps his father, repeatedly told him that ‘manners maketh man’. Maybe they do prevent us from falling into animalistic savagery, thinks Clements.
His grip is firm.
‘Come, come in.’ He leads her through the open-plan apartment to the kitchen area. Clements knows that even in exquisite luxury apartments such as this, the kitchen is the heart of the home. Although she doesn’t find any signs of cooking; all the surfaces are clear from clutter and gleaming as though newly installed that day. There are no condiments, crockery or cutlery – clean or dirty. It looks like a show home. There is a sleek laptop, open and on, emitting an eery blue light into the darkness. The only thing on display that suggests offering any degree of sustenance is an open bottle of malt whisky, with an empty glass next to it. There’s ice melting in the glass, it has been used. The rattling ice suggests the alcohol was knocked back at some speed. Daan Janssen pours himself another generous measure and then turns to Clements, shakes the bottle at her. ‘Do you want one?’
‘I’m on duty, Mr Janssen.’ And it’s mid-afternoon. She doesn’t add that.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry. Really, please call me Daan.’ Clements nods but doubts she will. Best to keep a distance, at least at first. Sometimes, it is helpful to forge intimacy, but she likes to decide when that will be expedient. Morgan was right about something, Daan Janssen’s accent is barely perceptible. His foreignness is only detectable by his crisp manner. There’s something about his el
egant well-cut clothes – he is still wearing the jacket to his suit, even though he’s in his own home – and his precise but staccato sentences that suggest a formality, an otherness, that isn’t very British. Maybe his particular brand of handsome also marks him out. People think because she is a police officer, and investigating, that she’s impervious to the things that matter to other women, but she’s not. Clements sees attractive men and notes them the way any thirty-five-year-old woman might. It’s just that she also wonders if the handsome men she finds herself face to face with are thieves, arsonists, fraudsters.
Killers.
Daan Janssen is a very attractive man. He is tall, broad, green-eyed, with blond hair; he wears it brushing his collar, a little longer than most men his age (at a guess she’d put him late thirties). His cheekbones are chiselled. You could lose an eye on them. Even if he wasn’t stood in the kitchen of his enormous London penthouse, he would be identifiable as wealthy. If Clements saw him on one of the dating sites that she occasionally – in a fit of optimism over experience – signs up to, she would definitely swipe right. But he’d never be on a dating site. Not this man. There would never be a need. If she wanted to get to this man she’d have to climb over women, a mountain of them. No doubt that’s what Kai Janssen did. Clements is keen to look at a picture of her. She’s guessing the wife will be a glacial beauty, tall like him, blonde, possibly androgynous. Certainly hard-bodied, lean.