Woman Last Seen(44)
I am alone.
18
DC Clements
Friday 20th March
“Did I wake you?” Detective Constable Clements asks as the doors of the lift gently swoosh open and she is faced with Daan Janssen bare chested, wearing nothing other than tracker bottoms. He yawns, stretches, raises his arms above his head, treating her to a flash of blond thatches of pit hair. Other than those, and a gentle trail that disappears down from his navel, he is smooth. Her preference is for smooth men. She can smell his pheromones; it disconcerts her.
“I haven’t slept. Coffee?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but walks through to the kitchen. She follows. She already has the sense that this man leads, others follow. She mentally adds it to the profile she is drawing of him. “I haven’t slept well for days,” he tells her as he starts to move around the kitchen preparing coffee in a big, shiny, no doubt top-of-the-range Nespresso machine. “Normally when my wife is away visiting her mother, I throw myself into my work, take the overseas meetings, visit the gym, catch up with one or two people to keep myself busy. But this week it has been different. I’ve been agitated. First, because I thought Pam was ill, and then because I became increasingly certain something was off. I am not wrong, am I? That’s why you are back here.”
Clements chooses not to answer the question straightaway, instead she asks one of her own. “So, Kai is regularly away from home?”
“Yes. Most weeks she’s away for half the week, looking after her mother.”
“How do you both manage? Her being away so much? It must affect your relationship.”
“You know, our friends occasionally ask the same question. I am quite used to it—normally I even enjoy it. Truthfully, I guess we’re a little smug about it.”
“Smug?”
“We’re secretly convinced that somehow we are in a better place than couples who need to live in one another’s pockets. You know? Cooler than people who do not respect each other’s independence.” He grins, almost apologetically, probably for using a word like cooler, thinks Clements harshly. “The space between us works well for us.”
He hands Clements a coffee. He hasn’t asked her how she takes it. She likes an Americano. She sees that is what he has prepared for her. She takes one sugar. She sips. It is sweetened. She doesn’t know how he guessed. Is she that predictable? Or is he that brilliant? There is something about him that makes you believe he knows you, understands you—which is always seductive. This power is both flattering and bewildering. Clements is glad she has clocked it, armed herself against it. Could he perhaps be drawing a profile on her, the way she is on him? Clever people do that with one another: assess, surmise, in order to stay in control, stay a step ahead. It’s a talent. A skill.
A problem?
Clements watches him very carefully as she explains how much his charming skill of knowing a person—staying a step ahead—failed when it came to his own wife, the person he should be most intimate with. She breaks it to him that it is not just a matter of him not knowing where Kai is, it is a matter of him not knowing who she is.
His wife’s name is not Kai Janssen. She is Leigh Fletcher. Formally Kylie Gillingham. Daughter of Pamela Gillingham, who does exist but does not live in the north of England and is not beleaguered with Alzheimer’s. She lives in Perth, Australia—moved back there two years ago—and is in hale health. Clements tells him, as gently as is possible, that rather than tending her mother Kai, Leigh, Kylie—whatever you want to call her—was living just a few miles away, for half the week, every week with her other husband, Mark Fletcher. Clements concludes, “But she is missing from that home too.” And as she is revealing this information, Clements is carefully studying Daan Janssen as though he is a cell under a microscope. Because Clements wants to know, is this news to him? Or was he already aware of his wife’s treachery?
He doesn’t react. He doesn’t move or break eye contact, he doesn’t swear, punch a wall or cry. Clements notes his remarkable self-control. When Clements stops speaking, there is a silence that stretches for two or three minutes. He breaks it. “I see. Another coffee?” Clements nods. Not because she wants another coffee but because she recognizes his human need to do something, occupy himself. When his back is to her and he’s putting water into the machine he asks, “Are there any children?”
“Two stepsons. She adopted them when she married Mark Fletcher as their birth mother is deceased.”
He turns to her. Excited? Relieved? “You see, that can’t be right. Kai has never wanted kids.” Clements waits a beat. Doesn’t have to add, she didn’t want them with you. She didn’t want any more so as to avoid complicating things further. He is a clever enough guy to work it out. She watches his face as he takes just a fraction of a moment to reach the realization.
“You’re sure about all this you are telling me?”
“After you showed me Kai’s photo last night, I went back to the station to do some digging. We’ve checked phone records, employment records, birth and marriage certificates, National Insurance numbers. There is no room for doubt. Kai and Leigh are one and the same woman.”
He nods, draws himself up a little taller. Other men might have collapsed, deflated. Daan grows.
“Why do you think she did this?” he asks.