The Stranger You Know (27 page)

Before I left the flat I hesitated over the window in the sitting room, which was open a few inches. With Rob gone, and since I was out all the time, I’d noticed the flat was developing a stale smell. I’d checked the fridge for horrors and emptied the kitchen bin but there was still an unpleasant undertone to the atmosphere. We were too high up to be afraid of burglars but I still didn’t want to take the risk and leave it open – locking all the doors and windows was part of the security routine that left me able to sleep at night. I slammed it in the end and double-locked it. Smells I could deal with; my own fears were not so easy to tolerate.

I got my head down to work once I got into the office. It was after eleven before Stuart Sinclair got back to me and it took me a second to change gears when the phone rang. I sounded vague rather than competent.

‘Oh. Right. Yes, it was regarding—’

He interrupted. ‘You rang me, originally. I hope you know what it was about because I haven’t got a clue.’

I was used to Derwent; Stu Sinclair didn’t stand a chance of flustering me. ‘As I was saying, I would like to interview you regarding the witness statement you made in 1992 about the murder of Angela Poole.’

I heard him blow out a lungful of breath. ‘Going back a bit. I was just a kid then. Any particular reason why this is urgent now?’

If he had been more pleasant I might have told him it was connected to the recent murders. ‘I’ve been carrying out a review of the case file and there are some anomalies. I’d like to speak with you in person. Today, preferably.’

He sounded borderline scared when he replied, which was good: it was the reaction a normal person should have to being involved in a murder investigation. Something had told me the hard-arse routine was a fake. ‘Oh, okay. It was a long time ago and I don’t remember everything in as much detail as I did then, obviously, but if you think it would help, I’ll try. I’m actually looking after my kid this afternoon so if you don’t mind interviewing me with a toddler running around, you could come to my house.’

‘That’s fine. What’s the address?’

‘Eighty-two Danbury Road, West Norwood. That’s SE27.’

‘I know the area,’ I said, writing it down. ‘Two o’clock?’

He hesitated. ‘Make it half past. And I can’t let you stay for long, I’m afraid. If it’s going to take longer than half an hour or so, we’ll have to rearrange it.’

‘I’ll be quick,’ I said, meaning it. I had a short list of questions for Stuart Sinclair, but they were important, and I’d have promised him the moon and stars if it meant I could see him sooner rather than later.

Danbury Road was a terrace of Victorian houses, but not the grand, four-storey kind – the narrow ones built by the hundreds and thousands for high-ranking clerks and managers with small families. Roads like it snaked through London’s outer suburbs, the late Victorian middle-class desire for a bathroom and garden manifested in red brick. Norwood had never been fashionable and Danbury Road was indefinably shabby, but quiet. Lots of families with small children, I thought, noticing pushchairs parked in the bay windows of several houses as I walked to number 82.

Without giving it too much thought I was expecting to see a grown-up version of Fat Stu, the buck-toothed unfortunate Derwent had described to me, so when a dark-haired, well-built man opened the door I immediately assumed I’d got the wrong address. His first words made it clear that I was in the right place.

‘Bang on time. I’m impressed, DC Kerrigan.’

‘Mr Sinclair?’

‘None other. Come in.’ He stood back and I hurried into the narrow, dark hallway where a jumble of wellies and tiny shoes told me the house was run for and by the child who lived there.

‘He’s still having his nap,’ Sinclair explained in a low voice. ‘We might be able to talk uninterrupted.’

I nodded and followed him into a heroically untidy sitting room, with wall-to-wall toys littering the floor and a pile of sofa cushions in the corner.

‘Sorry. We were playing hide and seek after lunch.’ He started dismantling the stack and I muttered something about there being no need to tidy up, distracted by his appearance. It wasn’t the muscles flexing in his forearms or his lean, gym-honed torso that made me stare as he rearranged the room. It was more the fact that, like Shane Poole, he had conformed to the Derwent template as he grew into adulthood. I tried to work out what made them look similar. He was better-looking than Derwent but his hair was cut the same way and his clothes were the sort Derwent wore off duty, as I now knew. He had a very white, very perfect smile, an ad for his orthodontist if what Derwent had said was true. Despite the resemblance to Derwent I thought he was attractive – a handsome face with blue eyes, a square jaw and a straight nose. He turned around at just the wrong moment and caught me staring: I deserved the smirk I got. I sat down on the restored sofa and took my time over getting my notebook out, spending ages looking for my pen although I knew exactly where it was. Derwent would never let me live it down if I let Stuart Sinclair get the upper hand, I thought, and sat up a little bit straighter.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me at such short notice.’

‘Glad to help,’ he said, sitting down in an armchair and propping his right ankle on top of his left knee. I could hear Derwent’s opinion of that:
only a total plonker sits like that, Kerrigan, no matter how pretty he may be
. He wore thick-soled boots and I wondered if he was sensitive about his height. He was a shade shorter than me – five nine to my five eleven, a difference that was negligible when he was wearing such heavy boots. Far from small, anyway, but I remembered Derwent’s description of him and while diet and exercise could put manners on your genetic heritage, height was pretty difficult to change. Being tall myself I couldn’t quite understand why anyone would care; it wasn’t all that amazing to be leggy.

Quickly, I filled him in on the possible connection between Angela Poole and the three current murders. Each victim got a two-second look from under eyebrows twisted with pity, but no reaction beyond that.

‘And what makes you think there’s a connection?’ He handed the three pictures back to me.

‘The MO. That’s modus operandi.’

‘I know. I watch a lot of crime dramas.’ A big grin. ‘Bet you avoid them.’

‘Like the plague. I don’t know how much you remember about Angela’s death—’

‘More than I thought,’ he said promptly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since you called. It’s all coming back.’

‘Great. Because you’re one of the only people who might have seen Angela’s killer, and I was wondering if you’d managed to recall anything that you didn’t tell the police at the time.’

He shook his head. ‘I told them, and I’m telling you now, I saw her boyfriend walking off, just after midnight. Something woke me up a few minutes before that – must have been the poor girl screaming, I suppose.’

There was something dispassionate about how he spoke about her, especially compared to Derwent’s raw grief. It had been a long time since she died, though. ‘Did you know her? Angela?’

‘She was the girl next door. I knew about her more than I knew her.’

‘Did you have a crush on her?’ I saw him look surprised for the first time and explained what I’d meant. ‘Because she was the girl next door. That’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t remember that.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway, she wouldn’t have looked twice at me. I was short and fat and ugly. And as I said, she had her boyfriend. The one the police wouldn’t arrest for killing her.’

‘He had an alibi.’

‘That must have been wrong. He did it. I saw him.’ His eyes were unwavering. He sounded sure and I had to resist the urge to argue with him, to defend Derwent.

‘What exactly did you see? When you got up, before twelve – did you see anything in the garden?’

‘No. Or hear anything. It was summer and my window was open. I leaned out, didn’t hear anything, gave up. That’s why I went back to bed.’

‘And then …’

‘I got worried. I thought I’d go and look out of another window.’

‘At the front.’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s the main bedroom, isn’t it? Your parents’ room?’

‘My mum’s. My dad had left us.’ A flash of the white teeth. ‘I’ve got over it now, but I missed him at the time.’

‘So you went in and looked out.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And she was in bed, asleep, or …’

‘I don’t remember.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re very interested in the details, aren’t you?’

There was no easy way to say it. ‘I don’t believe you really did look out of the window upstairs at the front.’

‘Are you calling me a liar?’ His voice was still pleasant but his fingers were digging into the uppermost leg, his knuckles white.

‘I think you’ve told the story so often you almost believe it yourself, but you didn’t see anyone walking away at a minute after twelve. You didn’t like Angela’s boyfriend and you wanted him to get into trouble, so you said you’d seen him. You didn’t know about his alibi, and once you’d said it, you had to keep saying it.’

He was shaking his head. ‘No. Wrong.’

‘He was mean to you, wasn’t he? He bullied you. Called you names. You had a massive grudge against him but you were scared of him and this was your chance to get him into trouble like you couldn’t believe. You were fifteen – you probably didn’t even realise how serious it was and that the last thing you should do was lie.’

‘Oh, spare me the psychology.’ His face was red now. ‘I saw someone and I thought it was Josh Derwent. It looked like Josh Derwent.’

‘In what way?’

‘He was tall. Moved fast. He – I don’t know. I was expecting it to be Josh. I thought it was him.’ He looked at me again, back to the wide-eyed sincerity. ‘I really thought it was him.’

‘Thinking again, can you add anything to the description that you didn’t say before?’

‘Nope.’

‘You’d seen Der— Josh Derwent earlier in the evening. Did you describe the clothes you’d seen him wearing? Or was the person you saw really wearing the same colour T-shirt as Josh Derwent and similar jeans? Could you tell, in the streetlight, when he was walking away from you at speed?’

‘Okay. Okay. You’re right. I just saw a silhouette, really. He might have been wearing black. Dark colours, anyway.’ Stuart touched a hand to his upper lip and looked at it. ‘I’m actually sweating. You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?’

‘I do all right.’

‘But you gave something away. You started to call him by his surname. You know him, don’t you? Josh Derwent? He’s a copper, I know that much. Are you mates?’ He waited a beat. ‘Lovers?’

‘I know him. I work with him sometimes. But I’m here because my guv’nor wanted me to find out about Angela’s death, not because of Derwent.’

‘You must get asked that a lot. If you’re in a relationship with him, I mean.’

‘Surprisingly often,’ I agreed. ‘Especially since he’s not my type.’ The understatement of the decade.

‘I’ll do you the courtesy of believing you if you’ll do the same for me. I really did think I saw him. I wouldn’t have been able to keep lying about it.’ He shuddered. ‘I’d almost forgotten that guy – Orpen, his name was. He was a beast. A real old-fashioned copper. I was terrified every time he spoke to me. He always seemed to be trying to stop himself from lashing out. Met him?’

‘A pleasure that awaits me,’ I said with a smile.

‘You’re in for a treat.’ He checked his watch. ‘Wow. Time marches on. Is there anything else?’

I ran through my usual questions about seeing strangers or strange cars, to which he replied in the negative.

‘Do you recall anything else from that night? Even after the body was discovered? The noise and lights must have disturbed you.’

‘They must have. I don’t really remember.’

I found that very hard to believe, but then I had been fascinated by the police and their work since I was about five. A murder next door would have been more entertaining than the best soap opera. ‘Did you see the police? The ambulance?’

‘Yeah. I did.’

‘What about Angela’s body?’

‘No.’ He looked edgy. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘There are similarities in the crime scenes we’ve been processing. It looks as if someone familiar with how Angela’s body was left is perpetrating these crimes. I’m just trying to work out how many people could have seen her there. But you said you couldn’t see anything from the window.’

‘No.’ He pulled at his lip. ‘Is this important?’

‘Very. Do you know if there were photographs circulating in school, or outside it? Were you aware of people talking about it, even?’

‘No. But …’ He went into the hall and came back with a brown leather messenger bag, an expensive man bag that Derwent would have described, instantly and implacably, as gay, and would not have meant that as a compliment. He took out a battered iPad and tapped at the screen before handing it to me. ‘If you want to know who’s seen Angela’s body, you’d better see this.’

I stared at it, not understanding for a second. There, filling the entire screen, was the close-up of Angela’s face that I’d seen in the file, her hair caught up in flowers, her eyelids drawn down over empty sockets. ‘What the
fuck
?’

Instead of an answer a long, miserable wail cut through the air and I jumped.

‘It’s the monitor. Oliver’s up.’ Stuart picked up a white handset and poked at it until the noise stopped. ‘Thank God for mute.’

In the distance there was a faint shadow of a scream, coming from the top of the house.

‘Do you think you should go and get him?’ I asked.

‘Probably.’ He was still staring at me, trying to read me. ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’

‘A crime-scene picture of Angela Poole.’

‘Scroll down. There’s more. I could not believe it when I saw it. I’m sure you feel the same way.’

I did as he suggested, distracted by the crying from upstairs. It was getting louder and more high-pitched by the second. ‘How did you find this? What is this website?’

‘It’s a blog called Crime-scene Shots. I’d never heard of it. After we spoke I was thinking about Angela and I don’t know, I just thought I should search for her name online to see if there had been any developments I didn’t know about, and
that
came up.’