Fatal Witness (Detective Erika Foster #7) (12)

‘It looks like a person, standing with their back to us,’ said Moss. Erika moved to the coat stand and gently lifted off the black trilby. The hat felt weighty and posh, and the label inside said JUNIPER & BROWN HATTERS ST JAMES STREET, LONDON.

‘Avocado alert!’ said Moss. Erika carefully put the hat back on the coat stand, and turned and followed her into the small musty-smelling bathroom. There was a brown carpet with an avocado toilet, sink and bath. A row of crispy dry orange flannels hung on a small wooden stand by the bath.

Erika moved to the sink and opened a small square mirrored cabinet above. There were three bars of Imperial Leather soap stacked on the bottom shelf, a crusty bottle of Old Spice aftershave, denture tablets, a bag of plastic disposable razors, and an array of prescription medications. There were eight bottles in total and the labels had all been torn off, leaving the paper residue. Erika took a photo of them with her phone.

‘Pity he took off the labels. We could have seen what’s wrong with him, and there’s something very wrong with him,’ said Moss, coming to join her at the sink. ‘Look. I haven’t seen a magnetic soap holder in years. My nan had one,’ she added, indicating the bar of soap attached to an arm on the wall, with a small magnetic disc pressed into it.

Erika was troubled by the anonymous medication. She picked up a few of the bottles and peered at the pills inside and then closed the cabinet. She looked around. The bath mat hung over the shower curtain pole, with its octopus-like suckers facing out. The fibres of the grey pedestal mat around the toilet were compacted in two footprints. It smelt damp and fusty. The carpet was dry.

‘If Charles stabbed Vicky Clarke, and it was a frenzied attack, he would have had to clean himself up in a hurry. It doesn’t look or smell like he did it in here,’ said Erika.

They came out of the bathroom, through the hallway into the living room. Moss flicked on the light, and again, there was a single overhead light with a heavy flowery shade, which gave the room a cave-like gloom.

‘Where’s his telly?’ asked Moss. The room looked like something out of the 1950s, with a brown three-piece suite with lace covers on the back. A heavy wooden record player was in one corner, under a fringed standard lamp. There was a loud ticking, and Erika saw a tiny cuckoo clock high on the wall next to the door. A small gas fire sat on the floor in front of the armchair. Next to it was a round lace-covered occasional table where a tin of Newcastle Brown Ale sat next to a half-full pint glass of the brown liquid. Erika touched the can with her gloved hand. It still felt cool. Down the side of the armchair was stuffed a well-thumbed lingerie catalogue.

Erika picked it up. The women in the catalogue all wore large, transparent, fussy lace bras, and high-top lace knickers with suspenders. There was a big box of tissues balanced on the arm of the chair.

‘This is an old catalogue,’ said Erika, recoiling slightly at the crinkly pages.

‘Looks like he’s jerking off, 1970s style,’ said Moss. Erika put it back where she’d found it.

A series of framed photos on a sideboard showed a lady with two boys. The photos must have been taken over a period of twenty years, but even in the early photos when the boys were tiny, the woman seemed severe and older than her years, with a short, greying bob of hair parted at one side and fixed with a hair grip. In the first photo she was pictured paddling in a rock pool with the two tiny boys, who barely reached up to her knees. In subsequent photos, the boys grew older, through teenage years to adulthood, and the pictures were of picnics and days out on the beach. In the last photo, the woman sat in a hospital bed next to a window where sunlight poured, glinting off her grey hair. She looked thin and frail and the two boys now looked to be in their early twenties. In all of the photos, Erika recognised Charles and even as a small boy, he had the same sheepish-yet-sinister smile. The other boy was handsome in comparison, with a broad confident smile.

A large bookshelf was filled with rows and rows of wine-coloured, leather-bound Reader’s Digest novels, and the whole bottom shelf was devoted to books about Hitler and the two world wars.

They moved past a small, neat kitchen with ancient-looking grey Formica cabinets. At the back of the flat was the bedroom, sparsely furnished, with a single bed and a wardrobe.

‘There’s the telly,’ said Erika, pointing to an old TV with a built-in video machine sitting in a corner unplugged, with the cable and plug neatly looped up and fixed with tape. The blank screen was covered in a thick layer of dust. ‘I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got a telly.’

‘I heard Madonna doesn’t own a telly,’ said Moss. ‘Does that help?’

Erika rolled her eyes.

‘Yeah. Hugely,’ she said.

‘And this is the window he tried to jump out of,’ said Moss. There was a set of heavy red drapes, and a net curtain hung over the glass. Erika slid the net curtain to one side, and opened the large, single-pane window. There was a drop of just a few feet onto a small patch of grass outside, and an alleyway running behind the houses.

‘That’s where he hit his head,’ said Moss, pointing up at the rusting edge of the window frame.

Erika noted a muddy footprint on the windowsill, and some mud stains on the carpet.

‘Why did he have mud on his shoes? We saw him talking to Tess in the lobby with the bin bag. Did he go outside and find the dead cats? No, they were part-frozen.’

‘Perhaps we should check his freezer,’ said Moss.