Suddenly at Home

by Graham Ison

  ‘What else have you found on that infernal machine, Lee?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ Jarvis leaned back and folded his arms. ‘I’ve been right through it and there’s not a scrap of information except for these four folders. I can’t believe that’s all he had on there. I reckon someone must’ve hacked into it and cleaned the hard drive, but I don’t know why they left these.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, that’s your problem, Mr Brock. I shouldn’t think it was your victim, though.’

  ‘Why d’you say that, Lee?’

  ‘Well, Mr Brock, what’s the point of cleaning off your hard drive and then locking the laptop in a safe that Mrs Mitchell told me was very difficult to get into? Whoever it was had to have been a master locksmith and be as good at computer technology as me,’ he added, and laughed again.

  ‘Well, where the hell did he keep all the stuff about his enquiries and the names he sent de Jonker?’ I was actually thinking aloud.

  ‘Now we know what we know about Cuyper and de Jonker, there won’t have been any piles of information, anyway. It was all make-believe,’ said Dave. ‘I don’t think there was ever anything more than those four names on that computer.’

  ‘You could be right at that, Dave,’ I said, and turned back to Jarvis. ‘Can you print off those four folders or files, or whatever you called them, Lee?’

  ‘Haven’t got a printer,’ said Jarvis, ‘but I can send them through to your incident-room desktop as attachments and they’ll be there in a second. D’you want to send any message with it?’

  ‘Yes, Lee, ask DS Wilberforce to do a search of records on those names,’ said Dave, knowing that anything to do with computers finished up making me downright bad-tempered.

  ‘Well, that’s all I can do for you, Mr Brock,’ said Jarvis, having tapped a few keys, which I presumed was all that was involved in the esoteric art of message-sending. ‘What d’you want done with the laptop?’

  ‘I’ll take it back to Belgravia and put it in the property store,’ said Dave.

  I rang Colin Wilberforce at the incident room and passed on Lydia Maxwell’s description of Cuyper’s visitor. I told him to arrange for further house-to-house enquiries to be made of the residents of Cuyper’s block at Cockcroft Lodge as a matter of urgency. It was an outside hope that someone else may have seen the unknown woman, or even have spoken to her or perhaps made a note of her car number. But I knew from experience that was the least likely piece of information we’d receive, although we might get really lucky and find her arrival was recorded on the gate CCTV.

  ‘On second thoughts, Colin, cancel that. Dave and I are here, so we’ll do it ourselves. It shouldn’t take too long unless we strike gold. What did the house-to-house reports say about the other residents in Cuyper’s block?’

  ‘One moment, sir.’ Wilberforce spent a few moments reading the summary of those enquiries that were entered on his computer under H2H. ‘Negative, sir. No one heard anything or saw anything, and none of them received any visitors at about that time. Do you want the names of the residents, sir?’

  I noted the names as Wilberforce read them out, thanked him, and turned to Dave. ‘I think it’s time we had a talk with the people in this block, Dave.’ I told him what Wilberforce had said about the initial house-to-house enquiries.

  ‘There’s always the possibility that it was one of them who topped Cuyper, I suppose, guv.’ It was Dave’s way of saying that he didn’t think the house-to-house team hadn’t done their job properly and, by implication, that I hadn’t either. But as I’ve said before, Dave is my right hand and thinks of the things I haven’t thought of.

  We started on the ground floor.

  The woman who answered the door of Apartment A was, I guessed, pushing fifty. Barefooted, she was wearing a very short leopard-print satin bath wrap and had untidy blonde hair that almost reached her waist. She looked very embarrassed to find two men on her doorstep, one of whom was very large and menacing.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, at the same time giving the impression that she didn’t really want to.

  I glanced briefly at the list Dave had in his hand. ‘Mrs Webb? Mrs Fiona Webb?’

  ‘Er, yes. What is it?’ The woman glanced apprehensively over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Brock, Mrs Webb, and this is Detective Sergeant Poole. We’re investigating the murder of your upstairs neighbour Richard Cooper. May we come in?’

  ‘It’s not really convenient right now.’ Even though Fiona Webb spoke in the sort of cultured tones that hinted at a private education, she lacked the confidence that usually goes with it.

  ‘It really is very important, Mrs Webb,’ said Dave.

  ‘Oh, all right, then.’ Fiona Webb was clearly reluctant to admit us, and in what I took to be a fit of irritability shut the front door more firmly than I imagined she would normally have done. ‘Please sit down,’ she said as we followed her into the living area of her apartment. She sat in an armchair opposite, and tugged at the hem of her short bath wrap in a vain attempt to cover her thighs. ‘I don’t know how I can possibly help you. I told the policewoman who came here the other day that we hadn’t heard anything.’

  ‘Who was that, Fi? I ’eard the bleedin’ door slam. Oh bloody ’ell!’ The man who had entered was wearing a short towelling wrap and he too was barefooted. A good ten years younger than Fiona Webb, he was shaven-headed and spoke with a cockney accent. From our knowledge of the layout of Cuyper’s flat, Dave and I knew that he had come from the bedroom.

  ‘Are you by any chance Mister Webb?’ Dave’s impish sense of humour always seemed to take control of him on occasions such as this.

  ‘Er, yeah, that’s right mate. Andy, er, Webb.’ The man spoke hesitantly and glanced at Fiona.

  ‘Yes, he’s my husband.’ Fiona Webb was beginning to sound more confident. ‘Don’t either of you ever have a bit of fun with your wife in the middle of the day?’

  ‘We’re police officers, Mr Webb,’ said Dave, a statement that brought about a noticeable intake of breath from the man. ‘It looks as though the officer who came here before got the names wrong.’ He glanced down at the list. ‘I understood that your husband’s name was Dudley, Mrs Webb.’ He managed to look wide-eyed and innocent, but I knew he was just playing this couple along.

  ‘Oh God! Look, we’re—’

  ‘Can I save you a bit of time, Mrs Webb?’ I said. ‘If you and this young man are having an affair, it’s no concern of ours. Our concern is to learn how the man in the apartment above this one happened to get himself murdered last Friday.’

  ‘I said when you arrived that I—’

  ‘Let me finish,’ I said. ‘One of the residents in this block claims to have heard gunshots at about one o’clock last Friday, the day of the murder. Did you hear anything?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘What about you?’ I turned to Fiona’s paramour. ‘What is your name, by the way? Your real name.’

  ‘Andy Curtis.’

  ‘Were you here last Friday, Mr Curtis?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Curtis. ‘I was at work all day.’

  ‘Was anyone here with you last Friday, Mrs Webb?’

  ‘I don’t see that that’s anything to do with you,’ said Fiona crossly.

  ‘I’m afraid it is, Mrs Webb. This is a serious matter and I would advise you not to prevaricate.’

  ‘Oh hell!’ Fiona Webb chewed her lip and glanced across the room, as if trying to think how she could excuse what would undoubtedly prove to be her immoral behaviour.

  ‘It don’t worry me ’ow many other guys you’ve been screwing, Fi,’ said Curtis and leered at her exposed thighs.

  ‘D’you have to be so bloody coarse, Andy?’ Fiona’s use of swear words sounded out of place, spoken in her cultured tones. ‘And I don’t like being called Fi.’ She turned angrily on her lover. ‘Why don’t you put some clothes on and get the hell out of here?’

  ‘That makes a bleedin’ change,’ replied C
urtis. ‘Thirty minutes ago you almost tore me kit off. Now you want me to put it back on.’ He gave an exaggerated sigh as if to emphasize the unpredictable whims of women.

  ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind,’ said Fiona. ‘Make sure you shut the bloody door on your way out and don’t bother coming back.’

  Curtis returned to the bedroom to reappear a couple of minutes later attired in jeans, a tee shirt and a denim bomber jacket. He didn’t acknowledge Fiona as he crossed the sitting room, and he ignored us. Seconds later we heard the front door slam.

  ‘Oh well, I suppose that’s goodbye to takeaway pizzas,’ said Fiona.

  ‘I take it he was the delivery man,’ said Dave.

  ‘That’s how I met him. Good in bed, brain dead.’ Fiona sighed. ‘Does my husband have to know anything about this, Inspector?’

  ‘It’s Chief Inspector, Mrs Webb. And as I said before, it’s no concern of ours what you do as long as it’s legal. However, I take it that you had a visitor on the day of the murder.’

  ‘You don’t have to beat about the bush,’ said Fiona. ‘OK, I was in bed with a man who wasn’t my husband.’

  Dave handed her his pocketbook. ‘If you’d be so good as to write down his name and address, Mrs Webb, we shall be discretion itself.’

  Fiona scribbled the details in the book and returned it, her glance lingering on Dave longer than was necessary. I firmly believe he would have been in serious danger had he been here alone.

  Dave handed it to me without comment. The name Fiona Webb had written down was Dennis Jones and a Petersham address.

  ‘How did you meet this Mr Jones, Mrs Webb?’ I asked.

  ‘In the pool downstairs.’

  ‘You’re a keen swimmer, then?’

  ‘Not really, but I like the atmosphere.’

  I think the ‘atmosphere’ that really attracted her was the availability of men.

  ‘How long did the affair with Mr Jones last?’

  ‘It was a one-off, and I do mean off. When it came to it, he couldn’t perform.’ For a moment or two, Fiona Webb looked pensively at the floor. Eventually she looked up, a worried expression on her face. ‘I suppose I ought to tell you, Mr Brock, before you hear it from someone else, that I had an affair with Dick Cooper.’

  ‘Did you also meet him in the pool?’ I wondered if Fiona Webb was the woman Lydia Maxwell said she saw letting herself into Cuyper’s apartment.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘And how long did that last?’

  ‘We got together approximately five or six times over a period of about two weeks.’

  ‘Did one of you end it, or did it end because he was murdered?’ I asked.

  ‘I ended it about a month ago.’ A solitary tear rolled down Fiona’s cheek.

  ‘Amicably?’

  ‘Hardly. It was when I discovered that he was a sadist. I don’t have to elaborate, do I?’

  ‘No, I think I get the picture, Mrs Webb.’ However, it made me consider the possibility that if Lydia Maxwell had had an affair with Cuyper and ended it for the same reason, she might’ve taken more drastic action than just walking away. ‘Have you ever seen a woman visitor in this block who’s been described to us as wearing a camel-coloured coat with wide lapels and collar, black knee boots, and a loosely tied brown-, cream-and-black scarf?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘While your affair with Richard Cooper was going on, did he come down here or did you go up to his apartment?’

  ‘It depended. Sometimes he came here and sometimes I went up there. I had to be careful, though. It was all right for Dick because he wasn’t married, but I didn’t want anyone to see me going into his flat. I’d told him to ring my mobile three times in quick succession if the coast was clear, but not to leave a message. And he always made sure the door was open.’

  It was evident that Mrs Webb was a practised serial adulteress. ‘When you were in his apartment, did you ever meet another woman there?’

  Fiona Webb laughed scornfully. ‘If you mean did he arrange a threesome, the answer’s no. I’m not into that sort of thing.’

  ‘I’ll get an officer to call to take your fingerprints, Mrs Webb,’ I said, having decided that I’d got all that I could get out of her.

  ‘Whatever for?’ Fiona started in alarm at this statement.

  ‘For elimination purposes. As you’ve admitted being in Mr Cooper’s apartment, we need to eliminate your prints from all the others.’

  ‘But suppose my husband’s here when you come to do it?’ Fiona’s alarm had not abated.

  ‘We’ll take his as well, Mrs Webb,’ said Dave, waving a nonchalant hand. ‘And we’ll say we found a number of prints on the main door and are eliminating all the residents, then any that are left could belong to the murderer.’ He paused. ‘Or the pizza-delivery man.’

  ‘I’m sorry we intruded,’ I said as Dave and I rose to leave.

  ‘Actually you did me a good turn getting rid of the pizza man, Mr Brock. He was beginning to get boring.’ She laid a hand on my arm as I turned to leave. ‘You promise you won’t say anything to my husband about my, er, visitors, will you?’ she implored. I assumed that a divorce would put paid to her current lifestyle, and that would certainly not suit this lady.

  ‘That woman didn’t have to wear an animal print bath robe to prove she was a cougar,’ observed Dave drily as we knocked at Apartment B. However, neither there nor at any of the other apartments in the block did we learn anything that would push our hunt for Cuyper’s killer any further forward, and no one had seen the woman thought by Lydia Maxwell to be quintessentially French.

  ‘All we’ve achieved is to add another suspect to our list, Dave.’

  ‘But we still haven’t got enough evidence to nick any of them.’

  ‘Back to the factory, then,’ I said. Detectives always call their offices ‘the factory’. Don’t ask me why, although years ago an old and somewhat jaundiced detective sergeant told me it’s where CID officers manufacture evidence. That may have been true in days gone past, but the Department has undergone a thorough cleansing since then. A former Commissioner once said that a good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Regarding the women whose details were found on Cuyper’s laptop, sir,’ said Wilberforce, the moment I stepped through the door of the incident room. ‘There is no trace of any of them in Met Police records nor on the Police National Computer.’ He handed me a printout of the names. ‘It looks as though one of them is either French or Walloon.’ He paused and looked up. ‘A Walloon is a French-speaking Belgian, sir.’

  ‘I do know what a Walloon is, Colin.’ Sometimes Wilberforce was guilty of providing too much information.

  ‘Yes, of course, sir. Her name is Chantal Flaubert. Then there are three with Flemish or Dutch names: Margreet Kloet, Roos Groenink and Lotte Skyper.’

  ‘What else does it say about these four women?’

  ‘The three Flemish women,’ said Wilberforce, glancing up from the computer screen, ‘are recorded as being prostitutes who originally operated in Brussels, where they were in great demand among EU personnel, but are now brothel keepers in various parts of London. There’s a brief life story of each, but regrettably no addresses and no photographs. Cuyper, if he made the entries, has marked all four of them as “Opposition”. I presume they’re people on the other side in this turf war. It doesn’t say whether Flaubert is a prostitute, but he’s put a note in her folder to say that she’s particularly dangerous.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d go further afield with your searches, Colin, starting with the DVLA. If those women are resident here, they’re bound to have a driver’s licence.’

  ‘Already in hand, sir,’ said a rather smug Wilberforce and tugged at his cauliflower ear, ‘but the DVLA takes a long time to come back. By the way, sir, I’ve located the whereabouts of the four people whose names were given to you by de Jonker.’

  Grabbing the printout, I went along
the corridor to Kate Ebdon’s office and sank into her armchair. In view of what we’d learned about Cuyper, I didn’t attach too much importance to the four suspects named by him. The question of their whereabouts could wait until later. Instead, I brought Kate up to date with the latest developments, such as they were. ‘It would be useful to find this woman who was seen calling twice at Dirk Cuyper’s place, Kate, if in fact she exists.’ And I repeated my suspicion that Lydia Maxwell might be more devious than at first she seemed.

  ‘I think it’s more likely that Mrs Maxwell’s mystery woman, if she exists, was one of Cuyper’s sleeping partners,’ commented Kate. ‘In which case, as Dave suggested, he might’ve given her a key.’

  ‘Yes, maybe, Kate. We seem to do nothing but speculate in this job. But first, we’ll see Dennis Jones. I know you interviewed him immediately after his discovery of Cuyper’s body, but it may be that he’s remembered something else since then.’ I told her what Dave and I had learned that morning from Fiona Webb. Kate shrugged and expressed the view that Fiona Webb wasn’t very choosy if she picked someone like Jones. Nor was she surprised that Jones had failed to please the promiscuous Mrs Webb.

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Half past five. Knowing what I do about advertising agencies, there’s a good chance Jones will be at home by now, guv.’

  ‘I don’t think he does work in advertising, Kate. According to Appleby, Jones didn’t visit anyone at Heathrow as he claimed to have done.’

  The Munstable Street address in Petersham that Dave Poole had copied from Dennis Jones’s driving licence was a three-storey Victorian house overlooking the River Thames. The house had been converted into flats and Jones’s flat was on the top floor. Needless to say, there was no lift.

  I was surprised that a young woman answered the door. In view of Judy Simmons’s condemnation of Dennis Jones as a tight-fisted wimp, I wondered what attraction he possessed that enabled him to have installed a live-in lover. If that’s what she was.

  ‘Hi!’ The girl appeared to be no more than seventeen or eighteen, if that, or it may have been the little-girl effect of being bare-legged and wearing a very short denim skirt, the sort Dave called a pelmet. But Kate needed only a glance at the girl’s inexpertly applied and excessive make-up to decide that she was not all that she hoped we would think she was. And that immediately raised questions in my mind, and doubtless in Kate’s too.