‘Maybe she prefers eating out.’
‘Maybe she does. You know, Steve, there’s no personal papers in this flat. Birth certificate … passport … no bills or letters … no photos, except for the one in the frame …’
‘There could be lots of explanations for that, Sir. She gets her bills online … and who writes letters any more? It’s all emails and texts, isn’t it? As for photos, maybe she’s not the sentimental type …’
‘Or maybe, contrary to what her sister says, she had to get away from her boyfriend in a hurry, and took what she could. How much of this stuff came here with her, and how much was purchased after? I’ll be very interested to find out more about this Gordon Renfrew, and the sort of relationship they had.’ He glanced around. ‘Well, we’ll get Forensics in, let them give the place a good going over. Then we’ll let the sister in and see if she notices anything.’
‘She told you she hasn’t been in the flat, didn’t she?’
‘She did, so if Forensics find her prints on anything we’ll know she was lying.’
‘You have a very suspicious mind, Sir,’ said Steve admiringly.
‘It’s the first requisite for the job, isn’t it?’
Back at the station Neil deployed people to check Katie Campbell’s bank account, find out if she’d ever purchased that mobile phone. In the direction Katie had been heading there were bus stops, a train station – without knowing where she was going it was pointless trying to trace her route, and with five weeks gone by there was little hope of finding her on any CCTV. Nevertheless, he tasked someone with getting on to Wandsworth Council, just in case. He organised for some uniformed officers to go back to the flats that evening, speak to all the other residents, in all the four buildings. Ask around the local pubs and shops, too, he said. He’d alert the Brighton police, but Brighton contained hundreds of hotels, guest-houses, B&Bs, it would be an enormous job to check them all. And if the obvious was correct, and Katie had chosen the wrong man to go away with, she may not have ever made it to Brighton in the first place. He hoped Andrew Bryson’s conscience would get the better of him, and he’d come forward with the name of that hotel. Then he picked up the phone and made a call to the Greater Glasgow Police.
Chapter 2
Neil got home at seven o’clock that evening. Janey had fallen asleep on the couch and it suddenly dawned on him how tired she had been looking lately. She woke with a start as the door shut behind him, then rose and went into his arms, kissing him.
‘Hello,’ she murmured.
‘Hello.’ He hugged her tightly for a few seconds, then held her slightly away from him. ‘You’ve changed your dress.’ She was wearing one of his favourites, a green silk mini dress printed with blue and yellow dragonflies.
‘Oh! Well … well … it’s nice to get out of your work clothes when you get home, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. But,’ he said gently, ‘this used to be one of your work dresses, didn’t it?’
‘I … I …’ she wouldn’t look him in the eye. ‘This isn’t really suitable for a DCI’s partner, is it?’
He felt a huge surge of disappointment. ‘No … no, don’t do that … please … be honest with me. Janey …’ he took a deep breath. ‘Janey … is this about making yourself look unattractive? Because rape has nothing to do with how attractive you are. OK, you looked stunning that night, but …’
She wrenched herself free with a cry and sank down onto the couch, then immediately reached for him again. He sat beside her and took hold of her hands.
‘Janey, talk to me. Please. How long have you been hurting like this? Why haven’t you said anything?’
‘Because I’m failing you! I’m …’
‘What? Of course you’re not! How on earth could you …?’
‘I am! I’m not the woman you fell in love with! Not any more! And I couldn’t … I couldn’t say anything because … because … because I don’t want to lose you.’
She was trembling violently. ‘Janey, look at me. Look at me.’ He gazed deeply into her eyes. ‘You’ll always be the woman I fell in love with. I’ll never stop loving you. Let me be a part of this. Let me help.’
Slowly, hesitantly, she began to talk.
‘After it … after it happened, and I went up to Wales for a while, I thought I was better, I’d got over it. It was a small town, people were friendly, I felt safe. And when you joined me, we had that time together, I really felt ready – ready to come back to London with you, to start our life together.
‘But when you went back to work and I had to go out by myself, back to my job, things started to go wrong. I felt people were looking at me, that I was on display, exposed … I felt … vulnerable … and … and … oh God, this is going to sound so crazy – when you saw me today, I wasn’t going for a walk before going to work, I was going to work. I … I can’t … oh, God, I was raped outside, in the open air, but I can’t go down in the Tube, I feel trapped … so I take the train to Waterloo, and walk, I go that way. It takes me twice as long but it’s the only way I can get to work. And it’s starting to get worse. I feel so unsafe when I’m not with you, it’s getting harder and harder to go out the door. I’ve started to miss days at work – Marina’s getting really fed up – but I … sometimes when I go outside I feel really, physically ill and I can’t do it … I can’t do it … I’m sorry, Neil, I’m so sorry …’
He held her close. ‘Ssh … ssh, my love …’ He felt helpless. “Let me help,” he had said, but how did you deal with something like this? He was a policeman, not a psychologist. Is that what she needed? Professional help? Well he would get it for her. And he felt ashamed, too, appalled at himself. How could he not have noticed that something was so terribly wrong?
‘Oh God Janey …’ he said hoarsely. ‘These past few months … I wake up, you’re beside me, I come home, you’re here … we go out, I feel ten feet tall, because you’re by my side … my life has been so perfect, so astonishingly beautiful, and all the time you’ve been living in this hell … I’m the one who should be saying sorry, for not …’
She put her fingers to his lips, shook her head. ‘Neil, when I’m with you, everything is fine … lovely … I’ve never known such happiness. It’s out there …’ she waved her hand, ‘that things go wrong. And I know it’s irrational, I know you caught the man who hurt me, he’s been put in jail, but I can’t seem to stop these fears from crowding in on me …’
He looked down at her hands, gently stroking her wrists, his fingers passing over a faint scar. ‘We … we’ve never really talked about that night, have we? I mean … professionally … of course, when you gave your statement. But personally … we’ve never referred to it, and so I’m wondering … Janey, do you feel you’re in any way to blame? Because of course you’re not. That man was looking for a victim, anyone would do, and through sheer bloody bad timing he found you.’
‘I know that, Neil! I know! Don’t you see that that is what’s so terrifying? The sheer randomness of it. And … and now … I walk outside, into those crowds of people, hundreds and thousands of them, and I know … there are more like him out there, and I’m afraid. The world has become a bad place.’
‘Yes.’
‘And … and so … I thought … if I dressed in unflattering clothes, didn’t look at people, make eye contact, I’d become invisible, no-one would notice me.’
He remembered Constable Kendall’s derisive remarks. It seemed cruel to tell her the opposite was the case.
‘What about work?’ he asked. ‘Is that going all right? Has Marina noticed anything? Have you spoken to her?’ Marina was the manager at the youth centre near Leicester Square where Janey worked, conducting arts and crafts workshops.
‘She’s spoken to me a few times about the days I’ve missed, asked if everything’s all right. But I haven’t really been honest with her, either. I’m making a complete mess of things, aren’t I?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not. You have been through a terr
ifying experience and you’ve been struggling to deal with it all by yourself. But not any more. We’re going to beat this, Janey, but together, OK? If you feel that you’d benefit from some more counselling, specific to what you’re going through, then I’ll help you organise it, support you through it. But the main thing is, from now on you talk to me, share things with me. No more secrets, OK?’
‘No. I … I’m sorry.’
Over dinner, she told him how she felt she was living two separate lives. She would wear those dresses to and from work and then, the minute she was home, pull them off and shower, literally “wash away the day”. By the time Neil got home she would be calm again, happy, so why dredge it all back up? At work, she would change again, into jeans and an art smock. But her work was giving her less enjoyment – always there was the underlying anxiety about the journey home, and she was starting to feel intimidated by some of the bigger youths, by their energy, their physicality. What had once been her dream job, was now becoming an ordeal.
Later, in bed, she reached for him, took him into her, wrapping him with her body so he was held tight against her. And as he moved in her, listening to her gentle sighs, he knew the revelations of the day had not changed anything, but had only reinforced this fierce love he felt for her. Afterwards, he cradled her in his arms. But while she fell asleep quickly, her head resting against his chest, he lay awake for a long time.
It was the rape that had brought them together. At a mutual friend’s wedding, Janey had walked out into a dark and deserted courtyard, and become the third victim of a serial rapist, a man who was now behind bars and would hopefully stay there a very long time. It was Neil who had found her after the attack, Neil who had taken her statement the following day, Neil who had tracked down and apprehended her attacker. But they had been friends before that, a friendship which, unacknowledged by either of them, had deepened into love as their respective marriages had deteriorated. Then Neil discovered his wife having an affair – one of several as it turned out – and left. Janey’s husband Dan was an abusive man who had been a constable at the same station as Neil. On the night of the rape he had walked out on her, telling her she had brought it on herself. It was only then, when they were both free, that they had realised the depths of their feelings for each other, and acted on them.
Janey had gone up to North Wales for several weeks to recover, to put the past behind her, and after a time Neil had joined her. He thought of how, from the moment she opened the door to him, a huge smile on her face, there had been no awkwardness between them, not even when they first made love that same night. In the town of Llangollen, where she was staying, she had already made several acquaintances, people called out to her in the street, the local shopkeepers knew her by name, she was the same confident, vibrant young woman he had always known. Was he now to believe that that had all been an illusion?
After a couple of weeks spent exploring the Welsh countryside, he had brought her back with him to London, the boot of the car filled with the paintings she had produced – landscapes, streetscapes, the flowers in her cottage garden. He had helped her to find a local gallery that would display them and already she had made several sales. They had spent a few days together doing touristy things – the London Eye, galleries, shopping at Harrods. He had shown her the “lie of the land” around his flat – the local shops, parks, the library, where the Tube station was, the bank. And then he had had to go back to work. As he said goodbye the first morning, he had asked if she was going to go to the youth centre, discuss returning to her job. She had seemed enthusiastic. But when he got home that evening she said that she had changed her mind, that she still needed time to adjust to being back in London, she would leave it for a few days. He had accepted this, but now he could see that that had been the start – he pictured her going outside, getting as far as the Tube, imagined her experiencing the first wave of the fear which was now engulfing her.
Little things came back to him – in a café in the Kew Gardens he had left her to go to the Gents. Unusually there had been a queue, he had taken longer than expected, and returned to find her looking anxious. She had changed her seat so that her back was against the wall. Little things … the sudden tightening of her grip on his hand when they passed a building site, or walked along a crowded pavement. Such little things … but they turned his memories on their head, and he cursed himself once again for being a blind, complacent fool.
Chapter 3
The following morning, Neil called the team together.
‘What have we found out?’
They pooled the snippets of information they had. Katie Campbell had made withdrawals from her account every few weeks, at a variety of ATMs around South London, each time for three hundred pounds, the daily maximum. The last withdrawal had been on May the thirteenth, and no amounts had been paid in since November the previous year. As expected, there was no CCTV to be found dating back that far. The emails to her sister had been sent from an Internet café two streets away from her flat. The manager remembered her from her photo but had never really spoken to her. Likewise the other residents of the flats in Ellesmere Road – unsurprisingly, no-one in the other three buildings knew her, but even in the block of twelve where she lived, they only knew her by sight. All remembered seeing her on occasion – though none could be specific as to dates – but no-one had actually got to know her, or spoken to her beyond a cheerful “Good evening” or “Have a nice day”.
‘That’s not unusual though, is it?’ said Steve. ‘People are always coming and going at the flats where I live. I probably only know two of them by sight at any given time. Just because we’re living in close quarters to each other, doesn’t mean we have to be one big happy family, does it?’
Neil, who knew everyone at his apartment block by name, went out for the occasional drink with the couple upstairs, and always helped their eighty-two year old neighbour with her weekly shopping, kept silent. Maybe he was the anomaly.
‘Anything else?’ he asked. ‘Any sign of that mobile phone?’
‘None,’ said DC Tony Pavel. ‘Doesn’t mean she didn’t have a pay as you go, though.’
‘No. OK, she withdrew three hundred pounds every few weeks. Her sister says she was doing casual work, she was “getting by”. Maybe these jobs were cash in hand, she lived on that, and when the cash ran out, she’d resort to her savings. Get on to the local employment agencies and see if she’s at least listed with any of them.’
‘Maybe she was tomming,’ suggested Steve.
‘Well if she was, it wasn’t at that flat. I don’t see Andrew Bryson putting up with a steady stream of “gentleman callers”. Still, it’s worth looking into. Show her photo around, see what comes of it.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
At that moment, PC Angela Havers came through the door. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she breezed. Angela was new to the station, a probationer. She was twenty-four years old, with thick, glossy hair gathered into a loose bun, and a curvy figure which some of the men turned openly to admire.
‘You’re very late,’ said Neil.
She turned her large brown eyes directly on him. ‘My mother slipped in the bath and I had to take her to hospital – Sir.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Is she OK?’
‘Just a sprained ankle, thank goodness.’
‘Yes. Well – that’s good. All the same, a phone call wouldn’t have gone amiss.’
‘No Sir.’
‘Do you have anything for us?’
Angela brightened. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. The landlord at the “Sacred Swan” recognised her. She’s been in a few times. The last time he remembers seeing her was late April, and of course there’s no CCTV that far back. And although he remembers her talking to lots of people he can’t describe anyone in particular.’
‘OK. Good work. Did you talk to any of the customers as well?’
‘No, Sir. I went round about a dozen pubs last night, and only got to speak to the people behind the ba
r. The “Sacred Swan” is the only one I found where she’s been seen.’
‘Right. Well, go back there tonight and speak to some of the regulars, see if you can find out any more. Take Tony with you.’
‘Yes, Sir,’ she said enthusiastically.
‘OK. Well – theories, anyone?’
‘He done her in,’ said Tony in a theatrical voice. Everyone laughed.
‘Thank you, Tony. But without a full name and description we’re going to have very little chance of ever finding him. If you and Angela don’t have any luck tonight, I’ve applied for access to Katie’s email account, maybe they communicated that way. Anyone else?’
‘Maybe the sister did it,’ suggested DC Soumela Georgiou.
‘Yes. It’s not unknown for the perpetrator to report their victim as missing. Sheila Campbell says she has a well-paying job, that the family inheritance wasn’t up to much, but we only have her word for that. Check it out, Soumela, see if she’s telling the truth. Check out what date she arrived in the country, and any previous trips she might have made.’
‘Sir.’
‘What are your theories, Sir?’ asked Steve.
‘I’m not discounting the idea that her break-up with Gordon Renfrew wasn’t as amicable as her sister makes out. Maybe he didn’t want her to leave, and tracked her down, things got ugly, etcetera etcetera. That’s the line of enquiry I’ll be following. Thank you, everyone, I think we’ve all got enough to be going on with. Let’s get to it.’
He returned to his office, glanced at his watch. Janey should just be getting ready to leave. He rang her up.
‘About to head off?’
‘Y-yes, I suppose so … Neil, I … I …’
‘Let me walk with you. Metaphorically speaking, of course.’
The Woman in the Peacock Patterned Coat Page 3