The Family Remains(45)

‘Of course. Yes.’

Donal and I follow him to the hallway

‘Please, just wend your way. Go wherever you like. Open anything you like. I’ll be down here if you need me.’

The grey and white dog follows us eagerly. It is almost as if he is showing us the house himself. Donal fusses the dog, but I find him a bit big for my liking. If he were a foot shorter, I would feel more comfortable.

The house has poetic symmetry. Everything mirrors everything so it is easy to feel our way from room to room and floor to floor. There are four bedrooms and four bathrooms on this first floor. From the back windows I look out at the garden. I look up at the trees and I take some photos, for the arboreal forensics guy, because of course I do not know what a London plane or a tree of heaven might look like.

A smaller staircase takes us to the top floor. Here the ceilings are lower and doors open from a narrow landing that goes from one side of the house to the other. Each door opens to a small bedroom with a sloped ceiling and windows overlooking either the garden or the street. Donal calls to me from one of the other bedrooms.

‘Look, boss,’ he says when I enter, pointing at a spot on the skirting board.

There is something scratched into the wood here. I crouch down to look and see the words: ‘I AM PHIN’. I take a photo.

In the long hallway outside a small metal ladder stretches up towards a hatch in the ceiling. I follow Donal’s large behind up the ladder and we emerge on to a tiny roof terrace. I take more photos of trees and of the roof itself.

There are a couple of channels up here, running between the pitched roofs. Although it is summer, they are filled with dead leaves, and I use the toe of my shoe to gingerly sift them. Mulch is underneath. I walk through the mulch to a chimney pot and peer behind it. Another channel filled with more dead leaves and mulch, but here the mulch appears to have been displaced and moved about. I take more pictures and then we make our way back through the house and to the hallway.

Oliver Wolfensberger sees us off at the door, expressing complete willingness to help us in any way possible. He furnishes us with the name of the firm of solicitors who had been in charge of the trust that Libby Jones had inherited, and then he allows me to take more photographs of the front of the house and the trees in the gated strip of garden just opposite. Then we return to the car.

Donal pulls his seatbelt across in the driver seat of the car.

‘Helpful?’ he asks.

I make a noncommittal noise and say, ‘Well, I am ninety per cent certain that that is the house where Bridget Dunlop-Evers met her end.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes. What do you think?’

‘It had that vibe. It’s definitely a possibility.’

I nod. ‘I’d like you to drop me at the solicitors’ office please, Donal. It’s just over in Pimlico, not far. And if you could head back to the station after that and do some research into this Guardian article, that would be great. Right now, I’m going to get these photos off to the trees guy and hopefully, by the end of today we will have accelerated our investigation. Hugely.’





37





I have Phin in my eyeline for a full thirty seconds before he gets swallowed up by a group of young men loitering outside a music venue. By the time I get to the other side of the group, Phin is gone. I look right, I look left, I look upwards. To the right of the music venue is a pair of ornate wooden doors with brass art nouveau curlicues and a stained-glass fanlight. Through the stained glass, I just catch the shadow of a figure leaping up a staircase. I step away from the building to improve the angle of the view and see that I am looking at a grand apartment block that flows in both directions over the bars and shops below, all with leaded, bowed windows topped with swagged ribbons of sage-green Portland stone.

I see a figure pass across the stained glass of the central window on the first floor. I watch the windows in the apartments on that floor until one lights up. I see the suggestion of movement, but I do not see a figure. Across the street is a bar with a decked terrace. I sit here and I order a glass of champagne and I stare and I stare but I see nothing and who even knows what I’m looking at. But my gut tells me that it is Phin up there. That he is unpacking his organic groceries, unscrewing the cap from a bottle of organic wine, making small talk with some shadowy imagining of a person who may be a friend or an Airbnb host, chopping up vegetables, cubing tofu. (I assume that Phin is vegetarian as he loves animals. And of course we were all forcibly vegetarian in our house of horrors; to this day I have a phobia of dhal.)

The champagne arrives and I smile at the waitress and thank her.

‘How’s your day been?’ she asks as she places the glass in front of me.

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘it’s been … nice.’

‘Great,’ she says. ‘Are you just visiting?’

‘Yes, I am. I’m trying to track down an old friend.’

‘Wow.’ Her eyes grow wide. ‘Any luck?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Well, keep looking. I’m sure they’ll be so excited to be found!’

‘Yes,’ I say, my eye still firmly on the first-floor apartment across the street. ‘I’m sure they will.’

Then my phone vibrates, and I see a call coming through and I smile at the nice waitress apologetically and pick it up. It’s Kris Doll.