Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(15)

The name Milescu was clear beside the entryphone.

Karen identified herself and was buzzed through.

Clare Milescu met her as she stepped out of the lift with a firm handshake and a ready, open smile. Close to fifty, Karen thought, and not disguising it, little need: trim, neat, and next to Karen herself, almost petite; short dark hair well cut, laced with grey. She was wearing a dark skirt and pale lavender blouse, black tights, red shoes. Her only accessory, watch aside, a wedding ring.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

The door to the flat was open behind her.

There were photographs, black-and-white, arranged along both sides of the hall: family portraits, Karen thought, formal, informal, children in their best Sunday clothes, a picnic, an elderly man in a hospital bed.

The room they went into was like something from a magazine Karen might have thumbed through at the hairdresser’s. Low settees in muted colours at right angles to one another; blonde wood, glass and chrome; a lamp like an oversized pebble on the parquet floor. More photographs, mounted and framed. The paintwork the palest of violets, barely a colour at all. Someone with money and a certain taste.

A large window led out on to a balcony busy with plants that had survived, somehow, the winter frosts. A wide mirror reflected pale winter light back into the room.

‘So, Detective Chief Inspector, is that what I call you?’

‘Karen.’

‘Then, Clare.’ The smile was more genuine this time, less professional. ‘Please, sit down. I’ve made some coffee.’

‘I don’t want to take too much of your time.’

‘Time, for the moment, is the one thing I have plenty of. And besides, Ion isn’t here yet.’

‘I thought you said …’

‘He would be here, I know.’ A quick glance towards her wrist. ‘He stayed with his father last night. But don’t worry, he knows you’re expecting him.’ Another smile. ‘For a teenage boy, he’s quite reliable.’

Adding that she wouldn’t be a moment, she left the room.

Swivelling round, Karen looked towards the photographs on the rear wall. Some, again, in black-and-white, but most in colour. More recent. Young men in T-shirts, some with tattoos, posing; older men in suits, dark haired, stubble, what she thought of as Eastern European faces. A few were staring at the camera, as if on request; others caught unawares, halfturning, as if angry, at the soft click of the camera.

‘They’re all Ion’s,’ Clare Milescu said, tray in hand, returning. ‘A project he’s been working on. My Country Across Borders. He’s in his first year at the London College of Communication. A degree course in Photography.’

‘They’re good,’ Karen said. ‘Accomplished. Not that I’d really know.’

‘His father gave him a camera for his twelfth birthday, a really good digital SLR. For the first couple of years after that he almost never let it out of his hands.’

‘You and Ion’s father …?’

‘Ah.’ She eased a small cup of espresso in Karen’s direction. ‘There’s milk if you wish.’

‘No, this is fine.’

‘When you phoned,’ businesslike now, ‘you said you wanted to talk to Ion about some calls to his mobile.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘They’re important, then?’

‘An investigation that’s ongoing …’

‘But important?’

‘Yes.’

‘Otherwise, I mean, a detective chief inspector – I hardly think …’

‘You know what?’ Karen leaned forward, a change of tone, more friendly, taking the other woman into her confidence. ‘One thing about rank, being in charge, all the good bits go to somebody else. And all you get, most of the time – excuse the expression – is everyone else’s shit.’

Clare Milescu put up a hand and laughed. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

‘So, once in a while, instead of detailing a job like this to somebody else, I’ll do it myself.’ She glanced towards one of the windows. ‘Sometimes it pays off. Nice day, what passes for sunshine. Beautiful flat …’ She held up her cup. ‘Good coffee. What could be better?’

Clare Milescu smiled.

‘I was wondering,’ Karen said. ‘Your name. Milescu.’

‘My husband’s.’

‘But you’re English?’

‘Born and bred.’

‘Then how come …?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Just interested. Other people’s lives.’ A small, self-deprecating laugh. ‘You always think – you look around, see somewhere like this – you always think, I don’t know, how …’

The older woman laughed. ‘How did they get so lucky?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And since, for once, you’re away from your desk …’

‘Exactly.’

‘Very well. But it was chance, I’m afraid. Nothing worked out in advance, not part of some grand plan.’ Clare Milescu stirred a tiny amount of sugar into her cup, so little you could almost count the granules. ‘I went out to Moldova with the United Nations Development Programme in ’92, not so long after it gained recognition as an independent country. I’d started working for them soon after leaving university. In Moldova we were working with the new government to help improve standards of living – socially, as well as economically. Engage in a dialogue with key government figures, that was our directive. Where my husband, where Paul was concerned I took that perhaps a little too literally.’