Watching from the Dark

by Gytha Lodge

  One particular observation interested Jonah, and that was the lack of any visible blood around the bath. If she had been held down and attacked, you might, the pathologist commented, expect some blood spray. Bloody fingerprints. And probably watered-down blood from the bathwater sprayed around the room.

  “So that’s looking more like suicide,” Jonah said, not quite sure how he felt about that.

  “Yes, though there may be other reasons for it,” the pathologist said.

  At the point where the pathologist leaned in and seemed to sniff close to Zoe’s mouth, Jonah felt momentarily quite nauseous.

  “Interesting. There’s a chemical smell around the face.” He reached for the small kit he had placed next to the bath and pulled out a plastic tube with a bright-blue lid. “I’m going to take a swab.”

  “Can you define what you mean by ‘chemical’?” Jonah asked as the pathologist unscrewed the lid and pulled it out, complete with a small cotton-padded stick.

  “Well, it’s hard to define the substance just yet, but there’s a distinctive aroma. Slightly sweet but astringent.”

  “Not something she’s eaten?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, moving the cotton-padded stick over Zoe’s skin. He took another and did the same gently to the inside of her nose. “I’d guess something in the chloroform family.” He straightened up and glanced around. “Which may well explain the lack of any struggle, and if true, would rule out suicide.”

  “How long until we know?”

  “The swab would normally be back next week, but perhaps your forensic science officer…”

  “I’m sure she’ll be able to help,” Jonah said with a grin. McCullough might not be particularly enthusiastic about spending her Friday evening in the lab, but he knew she’d do it anyway.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON COULDN’T HELP feeling relieved that the pathologist had completed his examination by the time she arrived at the scene. The Scene of Crime team was already getting Zoe ready to be moved.

  Not Zoe, she thought. The body. Just the body.

  But relief or not, she wanted to have the same insight that the DCI and O’Malley would have, and so while Sheens was being shown around the various fingerprints and footprints by McCullough, Hanson borrowed the forensic photographer’s camera and scrolled through the pictures.

  It was disturbing to look at, even on the small screen. The blood-drained arms. The stark red against the white of the bath. She saw what the DCI had meant about the lack of splashing. The only blood was in the darkly stained water, which was so red that it looked solid, and in a small, long-dried trickle from the knife down the edge of the bath.

  She clicked onward to different views of the bathroom. The fourth one showed the sink. It had what was clearly a box of medication on the edge of it.

  She couldn’t read the label, but clicking some more she found a close-up. The prescription was printed in the name of Zoe Swardadine, 7.5mg of zopiclone to be taken once daily.

  “Have you seen this?” she asked Sheens, and brought the camera over to him. “It’s Zoe’s, for zopiclone.”

  The DCI peered at the camera. “Yes,” he said. “I was going to look it up.”

  She couldn’t help blushing as she said, “It’s a sleeping medication. I used to take it at university sometimes. I was a useless sleeper back then.”

  The DCI gave her a nod. “Is this a recent prescription?”

  “A week ago,” Hanson said, checking the date. “And she’s unlikely to have been on it for long before that. It stops working if you keep taking it. They told me no more than four weeks.”

  Sheens nodded again. “Interesting.”

  There wasn’t much else to see in the bathroom photographs. She could see Post-its and arrows where the forensics team had marked a series of fingerprints on the door handle, the edge of the bath, and the wall.

  She drifted over to where McCullough and the DCI were crouched by the front door, looking at further prints. The fingerprints were scattered around the lock and the doorjamb, the tiny Post-its like colorful bunting.

  Sheens stood upright and turned to Hanson. “It’s a Yale lock.”

  “So either it was on the latch,” Hanson replied, “or the killer had a key.”

  * * *

  —

  VICTOR DUMPED HIS bike in the small yard at the back of the coffeehouse, fed up with the grinding noise the pedals were making. It had been going on for weeks and was getting steadily worse. But it only ever occurred to him that he should get it fixed when he set out somewhere on it. And it was a piece of crap anyway. He was always on the verge of ditching it and getting a new one.

  He let himself in by the staff door at the back, and nodded to tiny Mieke, who was shifting boxes in the cramped store cupboard.

  “Hey, Victor. Could you hold this a second?” she asked, and heaved a plastic-wrapped pallet of coffee beans into his arms. “I just need to…”

  He stood and waited while she shifted several things.

  “It’s chaos in here,” she said tetchily. “I didn’t have time for chaos this morning.”

  “Was it crazy busy?” Victor asked her, shifting his grip on the coffee beans. The slippery surface made them hard to hold.

  “It wasn’t so much busy as me being on my own,” Mieke said. “Didn’t you hear from Luca? Zoe didn’t show.”

  Victor felt suddenly very uncomfortable. His voice was hoarse as he asked, “Is she ill?”

  “Not that she told us,” his colleague answered, finally taking the packets of coffee from him and dumping them back onto a pile of boxes. “Just didn’t come, and didn’t answer her phone. I thought Luca was going to ask you to come in early.”

  “He didn’t say anything,” Victor said, and then cleared his throat. “I’ll try and message Zoe. It’s not like her.”

  “You think? I seem to remember her doing this quite a lot last year when she was with her new man and not really sleeping.”

  Mieke locked up the cupboard grumpily. Victor wanted to defend Zoe, but he’d hated that time, too. The whole idea of her being with someone made him…what? Angry? Hurt? Heartbroken?

  All of those things, he thought as he swung his bag around in front of him and started pulling his phone out. All of those things.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A painfully bad class. Aidan knew that, but he couldn’t make himself focus on it. Three or four times he found himself flicking through textbooks with no idea of what he was looking for or what he had meant to say. He’d looked up to find his students gazing at him with a range of expressions. Some looked worried about him. Others were clearly trying not to laugh.

  “Sorry,” he said in the end. “I’ve got a cracking headache. I’m open to anyone pushing the debate in a better direction.”

  The laughter broke out at that, and then Leena, who was one of his favorites, said sympathetically, “Do you want some Nurofen?”

  “I’m OK…” he said, and then realized he sounded like those people he hated. The ones who complained that they had a headache but “didn’t take painkillers.” Which Aidan was happy for them to do, as long as they admitted it forfeited their right to complain. “Actually, that would be great,” he corrected himself, not sure why he cared about how he came across. He waited while she rooted in her bag for them, and leaned over to pop two of them noisily out of their blister pack into his hand.

  She gave him a small smile, and he nodded his thanks.

  “OK,” he said, once she’d sat down again. “Thoughts, then. Let’s see who’s doing better than I am today.”

  And then his phone was buzzing and he felt almost disembodied with anxiety as he pulled it out of his jacket pocket, trying not to drop the red capsules that he hadn’t yet swallowed. The display had lit up with a mobile number he
didn’t recognize.

  “Sorry, I need to take this,” he told the class, who were watching him uncertainly. He answered and stood up all in one motion. “Hello?”

  He was walking to the door as a male voice on the other end of the line said, “Is that Aidan Poole?”

  “Yes,” he said, walking through the door and closing it behind him, still feeling as though his legs and arms were floating in thick liquid.

  “I’m DCI Jonah Sheens. I believe you reported witnessing violence toward your girlfriend, Zoe Swardadine.”

  He didn’t know what to say for a moment. He didn’t know whether he ought to deny it. But they’d called him. They knew who he was.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did. Is she…?”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Zoe has died in suspicious circumstances,” the voice told him levelly. “I know that must be distressing news.”

  “Yes,” he said again, sounding like some sort of stupid echo, even to himself. “Yes, I…”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say, but the police officer was talking. He was asking him to come to the station to talk to them.

  “OK,” he said. “I’m teaching until…I suppose I can be there for six, if…”

  And he meant: If I can face it.

  “Six will be fine,” the officer said. “Thank you, Mr. Poole.”

  He was left listening to nothing except a wash of blood back and forth inside him. His gaze had fallen on the candy-red Nurofen, and he shoved them into his mouth and swallowed with a strange surge of belief that they might help him.

  Then he moved slowly back into the room and sat in his chair in front of his students. It was hard to look at them. Hard to focus on anything, really.

  “Right. I’m going to do what I should have done before and reschedule for when I’m not such a useless git.” There was laughter again, and he said, “I’ll be in touch. Enjoy forty minutes of unexpected freedom. Use it wisely.”

  Hal and a couple of the other more work-shy students in the group were gone within seconds and most of the rest of them followed. Leena packed her essay and notebook away more slowly, and said, “I hope you feel better.”

  “Thank you,” Aidan replied, nodding at her. He couldn’t bring himself to smile as he normally did at Leena. She usually went slightly pink when he did it, and he’d always found it heartening to know that he could have that effect on a pretty nineteen-year-old.

  She left, and there was almost total silence for a minute in the seminar room. He listened to the retreating conversation of his students for a moment.

  After that, he leaned over in his chair until his head almost touched his knees. And then he collapsed farther, his whole body tipping sideways and sliding, sliding as he cried.

  * * *

  —

  “SO WHAT’S OUR game plan?” Hanson asked after Jonah had ended his call with Aidan Poole. They were all standing out there while the forensics team continued their work.

  O’Malley put his own phone away, and Jonah wondered whether his sergeant had been looking something up or browsing the Internet out of boredom.

  “I’d like you to call Zoe’s friend Angeline, who has a key and let us into the flat. She may know of others who have keys, too, and I’d like a list of all Zoe’s close friends from her. She’s a little fragile, so…”

  Hanson nodded. “I’ll go carefully.”

  “And after that, CCTV cameras, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Sure.”

  “Domnall, can you start doing background checks on the family and the boyfriend? Juliette, if you could pass on any contact details for Zoe’s other friends that Angeline gives you, Domnall can go and see them, too.”

  “So we think the boyfriend who reported it might actually have done it?” O’Malley asked.

  “Eighty percent of women,” Hanson said meaningfully, pulling out her mobile to take down Angeline’s number, which made Jonah smile. They’d talked about that particular finding the week before. The fact that four out of five murdered women were killed by a partner had hit the headlines, and the research had been a kind of validation of how they already approached murder inquiries. You always looked at the partner. Always.

  “Statistically less likely if it turns out he was actually Skyping her from home at the time,” O’Malley pointed out with a grin.

  Jonah realized that they were all now thinking of this as a murder. Between Aidan Poole’s report and the chemical smell, it seemed pretty much a given. But it still made Jonah feel uneasy. He had a hardwired hatred of jumping to any conclusions.

  McCullough called over from the entrance to the flat. Jonah made his way back inside to her. “Nothing drastic, but I’ve got the case the knife came from. We’ve printed it, so I’ve taken a look inside and it’s definitely the right one.”

  He followed her over to one of the boxes in the corner of the flat, which had the flap pushed back. Beneath it was the tin box of the Stanley knife. It lay open, the high-density foam showing the empty shape where the knife would have sat.

  “Was it open when you found it?”

  “No. It was all closed up and put back in the cardboard box,” McCullough said.

  “Pretty tidy,” Jonah said.

  “For a killer?” McCullough asked. “You mean if you wanted people to be positive she’d done it to herself, you’d want to leave the box out so it was clear it was hers?”

  “Possibly,” Jonah said, refusing to be drawn into any assumptions. It was McCullough’s greatest joy to shoot down the brilliant theories of overconfident officers. “But it would be pretty tidy for a suicide, too. So it doesn’t tell us much. It’s just odd.”

  “People are, I find,” McCullough answered. “Even the non-criminals.”

  * * *

  —

  ANGELINE PROVED TO be hard going. Hanson called her from the ground floor of the building, sitting on a window ledge with her notebook balanced on her lap. It was obvious that Angeline was already crying when she answered the phone.

  “I only have a few things to ask,” Hanson said soothingly. “My DCI tells me you have a key to Zoe’s flat. Was that for a particular reason?”

  “So I could feed her cat.” And then Angeline had given a sobbing wail. “Oh God. What’s happened to him? I didn’t— The police might have let him out, and he could have…could have been run over, or…”

  “I’ll check on him,” Hanson replied quickly. “It’s OK. What’s his name?”

  “Monkfish,” she said in a voice that shook. “He’s a Persian.”

  “Is that…white?” queried Hanson, whose knowledge of cats was limited to stroking any that her friends happened to own.

  “Yes,” Angeline said. “Like…like Blofeld’s cat, Zoe said.”

  “Thank you,” Hanson said, and wrote that down, too, for no good reason. “Did anyone else have a key?”

  “No,” Angeline said. “I don’t…Oh, well, maybe Felix.”

  “Felix?” Hanson thought for a moment of another cat.

  “He’s the landlord.”

  “Ah, right. Do you have his address?”

  “He lives downstairs.”

  “The floor below Zoe’s?” Hanson asked, thinking that that was a pretty unusual setup.

  “Yes,” Angeline said. “I don’t know what number but…if you turn right onto the first-floor landing, it’s the first one on the left.”

  “That’s really useful, thank you,” Hanson said in the kind of voice she would have used to talk to a child. “Did she have any other close friends?”

  “Yes. Maeve. She used to live with her. And Victor. From the coffee shop.”

  “The coffee shop. Did she work there?”

  “Yeah,” Angeline said, and her voice broke again. “She should have been there this morning.”

 
“I’m sorry” was all Hanson could say before asking for their contact numbers, which Angeline gave over readily enough, though Hanson could hear that she was still barely holding it together.

  “Oh,” Angeline said suddenly. “I’m not sure that’s Victor’s newest number. He changed it and…I always forget to save them.”

  “I’ll try it,” Hanson told her. “Don’t worry. One last question, and then you can be left in peace for a while. When did you last see Zoe, and how did she seem?” Which was obviously two questions, but Angeline seemed not to notice.

  “Yesterday morning,” she said. “I keep thinking…I got upset with her. I was only there to model, and she…she hurt my feelings, and the more I think back over it, the more I think it was just me…being stupid.”

  “How so?” Hanson asked. For once the words were coming out quite quickly, and she wondered if Angeline had been waiting to make this small confession.

  “She said it was my…my brokenness that she liked about me. When I sat for her drawings and paintings. And it hurt. I thought she was going to tell me I was beautiful.”

  “Was that…unusual behavior for Zoe? To say something a little harsh?”

  There was a pause, and Angeline said, “Yes. Well…I don’t know. Maybe not recently.”

  “You think she’d changed recently?” Another pause. “Become angrier? Less kind?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t know. She just retreated into herself a bit, you know?”

  “Was there any obvious reason?”

  There was another pause, and then Angeline said shakily, “That relationship really damaged her. I mean, he did nice things, but he also made her feel bad about herself.”

  “Was he…abusive in any way?”

  “No, no,” Angeline said hastily. “I’m not saying it was that. Just…sometimes people aren’t good for each other.”

  * * *

  —

  O’MALLEY LET THE chief dwell on things in the car. He’d learned long ago not to interrupt the DCI when he was thinking things through. It suited O’Malley, too, who liked to let impressions settle in silence.