The Other Woman’s House Read online

  ‘No, it isn’t. What am I supposed to do, ring the police and say, “Excuse me, but I saw a dead body on a property website, except now it’s disappeared?” Who’s to say it was ever there at all? No one would have believed me. I’d have looked like an idiot.’

  ‘And yet you did come forward,’ Sam pointed out.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t just leave it, could I? I mean, maybe I imagined it, maybe it was never there at all, but I’ve still got to tell someone, haven’t I? What if I didn’t imagine it? I worried about it till it did my head in, asked all my mates – waste of time, they all gave me different advice. Some said, “Don’t be daft, you couldn’t have seen it”, some said, “You’ve got to tell someone”. Most just laughed at me, to be honest. It wasn’t funny, you know,’ she said indignantly, as if Sam had said it was. ‘Monday morning, I woke up and thought, this is going to bug me if I don’t get it off my chest. It shouldn’t be my responsibility, should it? No one pays me to worry about people getting murdered. So I rang the police.’ Her accent sounded like Essex to Sam, but perhaps it was Cambridge. Was there such a thing? he wondered. If so, it wasn’t one of the better known regional accents, like Brummie or Scouse.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he said.

  Jackie nodded. ‘I’ll swear to you right now: I didn’t imagine it. That’s just not me, I’m not an imagination sort of person. Do you know what I mean?’

  Sam did. Jackie Napier was about as different from Connie Bowskill as it was possible to be. They were at opposite ends of the scale. With a dead woman lying in her own blood smack bang in the middle of the space between them.

  ‘Two things about me…’ Jackie counted them off on her fingers. ‘One: I’m as loyal as they come. If I’m on your side, I’m on your side for keeps. Two: I live in the real world, not fantasy land. I don’t get ideas, I don’t kid myself about my life, pretend it’s better than it is: I prefer to see things how they really are.’

  Did she mean she didn’t get ideas above her station? Sam wondered. Fancy, far-fetched ideas? Or ideas, period? She’d given him one: maybe he could garnish his deficiencies with a bit of inverted boasting. He imagined himself saying to Proust, ‘Two things about me, sir: I avoid confrontation wherever I can, and I let my DCs run rings around me.’ That would go down well – about as well as Sam’s having devoted today to helping Ian Grint with his maybe-real-and-maybe-not murder, as if he had no cases of his own to attend to.

  ‘What time was it when you saw the woman’s body on Roundthehouses?’ he asked Jackie.

  ‘I told DC Grint: about quarter past, twenty past one.’

  And Grint could have told Sam. But Sam was glad he hadn’t, now that he’d got this far, now that Jackie was looking at him, finally, and no longer grimaced at everything he said. When, earlier, he’d asked to be debriefed, Grint had chuckled and said, ‘Too much effort, not enough time.’ Sam had walked into the interview room knowing only Jackie’s name, and that she claimed to have seen what Connie Bowskill had seen. As a result, he was experiencing her first-hand, undistorted by whatever conclusions Grint had drawn based on his prior meetings with her.

  Grint was right: it was a better way to do it. Sam wasn’t fooled by the outward flippancy; Grint cared about 11 Bentley Grove’s disappearing dead woman. When you were in the presence of someone who really cared about something – above and beyond professional conscientiousness – you could feel it in everything they said and did. In Grint’s company, Sam had that feeling – as if there was adrenaline in the air, in the walls, in the furniture – and he knew he wasn’t the one generating it. Grint’s like Simon Waterhouse, he thought. He’d have put money on the two detectives hating one another.

  ‘Do you normally go on the internet late at night?’ he asked Jackie.

  ‘Lord, no. I’m a nine-o’-clock-to-bed person, me. I was jet-lagged. I got back from holiday last Thursday, and I’m never right for a few days afterwards, if it’s long-distance.’

  ‘Where did you go on holiday?’

  ‘Matakana in New Zealand. You’ve never heard of it, have you?’

  Sam had, but he pretended he hadn’t, guessing that Jackie would enjoy enlightening him.

  ‘My sister lives there. It’s a pretty little place. She runs a café. Well, it’s an art gallery, really – but they do cake and coffee and stuff. It doesn’t know what it is – it’d make more money if it did. I always say, it’s great for a holiday, Matakana, but you wouldn’t want to live there.’

  Same wondered how often Jackie had said this in the presence of her sister, while enjoying her hospitality.

  ‘Do you mind my asking what you do for a living?’

  Jackie jerked her head in Grint’s direction. ‘Hasn’t he told you anything?’

  ‘It’s helpful for me to hear it from you,’ Sam told her.

  ‘I’m an estate agent. I work for Lancing Damisz. We’re the ones selling the house where the body was, 11 Bentley Grove. Why do you think I was looking on Roundthehouses?’ She frowned. ‘Are you one of those people who hates estate agents?’

  ‘No, I…’ Sam heard a scraping sound, and turned; Grint had chosen this moment to adjust the position of his chair. An estate agent. That was the last thing Sam had expected, as Grint well knew; it explained the hint of a smile on his face.

  ‘When I couldn’t sleep Friday night, I thought I’d have a look at what had come on the market while I was away,’ said Jackie. ‘I knew 11 Bentley Grove’d be there – I knew she was selling it, the doctor that owns it, Dr Gane. I’d have dealt with the sale myself, only I was due to go to New Zealand, so I handed it over to Lorraine – my colleague, Lorraine Turner?’

  ‘So…’ Sam felt as if he was lagging behind. ‘Sorry, you might have to clarify something for me: you said you were looking at Roundthehouses to see what had come up for sale while you were out of the country…’

  ‘That’s right. To see what had sold, too, and what was under offer. Keep an eye on our competition, check they weren’t selling more than us. The property market’s strong in Cambridge. The downturn didn’t hit us as badly as it did some places, and things are really picking up now. Any house or flat in the city centre that comes on for less than about six hundred grand gets snapped up within days, unless it’s a huge refurb job or on a busy road. It’s a supply and—’

  ‘Sorry, if I can just stop you there.’ Sam smiled to compensate for the intrusion. ‘So essentially you were trying to get up to speed before you went back to work.’

  ‘Yeah. See, the thing about me is, I love my work – it’s a vocation more than a career for me. I even miss it when I go away. There’s no job I’d rather do, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

  ‘I think that might answer the question I was about to ask.’ The question I’d have asked some time ago, if you weren’t quite so keen on the sound of your own voice. ‘Why did you play the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove? I suppose you need to see a house’s interior to know whether it’s fairly priced,’ Sam answered his own question, imagining how he might feel if selling homes were his passion in life.

  ‘You do.’ Jackie nodded enthusiastically. ‘Too right you do. Still, I’d already seen inside Dr Gane’s house, twice. I looked at the virtual tour because I was curious to see if she’d moved out like she said she was going to. Just being nosy, really. She told me she wouldn’t be able to stay there after what had happened, said she’d have to go to a hotel. I said to her, “That’ll cost you a bomb – staying in a hotel till you’ve sold, and bought somewhere else.” She’d gone and done it, though – I could tell from the tour. She’d left most of her stuff in the house, but there was no toothbrush, toothpaste or loo roll in the bathroom, no pile of books or water glass on her bedside table.’ Jackie tapped the side of her nose. ‘I’ve got an instinct, when it comes to houses – and the people that live in them.’

  And the people that die in them?

  ‘I remember thinking, “She’s only done it – moved into a hotel, at God knows wh
at cost. Silly woman!” And then the picture of the lounge came up, and I saw that body lying there, all that blood…’ Jackie shuddered. ‘I don’t want to see anything like that again, thank you very much.’

  ‘You said, “After what had happened”. I need you to start from the beginning, I’m afraid.’ Sam could feel Grint watching him.

  Jackie laughed scornfully. ‘That’s a bit of a tall order. Like I said to DC Grint, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, so how do I know when it began?’ Bored with picking her nails, she slotted her earring back through the hole in her ear.

  ‘Start with the phone call on 30 June,’ Grint told her. If Sam had been a different sort of person – if he’d been Giles Proust, for example – he might have turned round and said, DC Grint! So glad you could join us.

  Jackie sighed heavily. ‘I was at work. I answered the phone,’ she recited in a bored, ‘been there, done that’ voice. ‘It was a woman. She told me her name was Selina Gane – Dr Selina Gane. She made a point of saying that. Normally people don’t – normally we ask. So, like, if you rang me and said your name was Sam…’ Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s your surname again?’

  ‘Kombothekra.’

  ‘So you’d say your name was Sam Kombothekra and we’d say, “Is that Mr, Doctor or Professor?” Or, if you were a woman, we’d say, “Is that Miss, Mrs, Doctor or Professor?” We don’t ask about “Ms” – not allowed, orders from on high. The whole traditional image thing.’ Jackie mimed quote marks. ‘I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about it, actually. I’m a Ms – so are most of my colleagues. But Cambridge is Cambridge – a lot of people here don’t realise that change is going to happen to them whether they like it or not.’

  ‘Phone call,’ Grint intoned from the back of the room. ‘30 June.’

  ‘Yeah, so I got this call, Dr Selina Gane she said her name was. Wanted to put her house on the market, 11 Bentley Grove, so I arranged a meeting with her for later that same day at the house. She seemed nice – there was nothing about her that made me suspicious. I looked round, measured up, talked to her about commission, marketing, we agreed an asking price. I took some photos for the brochure…’

  ‘You took the photos?’ Sam asked. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she told me she took them.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s because I deleted mine,’ said Jackie, as if this ought to have been obvious.

  ‘Lorraine took the pictures that ended up in the brochure and on the website,’ Grint contributed from his ringside seat. ‘But let’s not leap ahead. Go on, Jackie.’

  ‘The woman – the one who said she was Selina Gane – she told me she’d pop into the office the next day, to proofread the draft brochure, which she did. She made a few changes, and I said, great, thanks, I’ll send a copy of the brochure when it’s ready. She said not to bother – she didn’t need one. She gave me a spare key, told me to arrange viewings whenever I wanted, let myself in and out. She was going away, she said. I told her I’d ring her to let her know when I was coming, as a courtesy, but she said, no, there was no need.’

  Sam was having trouble concentrating. He knew something was on its way that he wouldn’t be able to predict if he tried for a million years. Would Simon know where Jackie’s story was heading, if he were here? Would he already have a theory? Sam was straining to pay attention to every word, and his awareness of the effort he was making was interfering with his ability to listen. Grint’s looming background presence wasn’t helping.

  ‘By the time the brochures were done, I’d already rung round a few of the buyers on our priority list,’ Jackie went on. ‘Anyone I thought might be interested. Not university people – they all want historical buildings and period features, and there’s not much of that on Bentley Grove. Luckily the science park and Addenbrooke’s lot don’t care – they want square footage, shiny and new, big gardens. I had a family who were gagging to be shown round, the Frenches – they were the first ones I rang, to be honest. I knew they’d be perfect for 11 Bentley Grove.’

  Odd way to look at it, thought Sam. A house needed to be right for its inhabitants, surely, not the other way round.

  ‘When I turned up at the house with the Frenches, I let myself in and walked into this woman I’d never seen before. Except I had – I’d seen a photo of her, a passport photo. She looked terrified, as if she thought I was going to attack her, or something. She asked who I was, what was I doing in her house, how come I had a key? She went white in the face – honest to God, I thought she was going to pass out. I asked her who she was. She said she was Selina Gane – well, she was Selina Gane, I know that now – but she wasn’t the woman I knew as Selina Gane.’ Jackie patted the nape of her neck, as if to emphasise her own identity. ‘She had no idea what I was on about. Some bloody woman had only gone and put her house on the market without telling her.’

  Charlie was taking photographs. As many as she could, of as much as she could: of the pool from every angle, her favourite trees and plants in the gardens, her and Simon’s bedroom. Otherwise known as the site of only one shag. He’d put his arm round her in bed last night – in that way of his, stiff with significance and awkward invitation – but she’d been too upset about Liv and Gibbs, then more upset still because Simon hadn’t seemed to mind her not wanting to.

  She took one picture each of all the empty bedrooms they hadn’t used, a few of the lounge, kitchen, dining room, the various sun terraces. God, she loved this place. How was it possible to love a place when you’d been nothing but miserable there? In the same way that it was possible to love a person with whom you were miserable, she guessed.

  Grudgingly, she included in her photo-shoot the annoying mountain that doggedly refused to show its face to anyone but Simon. She had asked Domingo about it this morning; he hadn’t been able to see it either. From his evident bewilderment, she’d concluded that no other guest had ever mentioned it. Yet again, Simon was the special one. Charlie still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that he was pretending to see something that wasn’t there: another of his twisted thought-experiments.

  Was she going to take a photograph of Domingo’s wooden lodge? Yes, why not? For the sake of completeness, she ought to have one. If she ever spoke to her sister again, she could show her the picture and say, ‘That’s where I was when I found out you were screwing Chris Gibbs.’

  As she approached, she heard Simon’s voice. He’d been talking to Sam for nearly an hour. They were going to have to offer Domingo a contribution towards his phone bill. Charlie listened outside the open door: something to do with Roundthehouses, the property website. And a murder, or a death. Connie Bowskill was involved; Simon had mentioned her name a couple of times at the beginning of the conversation, before Charlie had given up trying to understand what was going on and gone to find her camera.

  She photographed the hut from every angle. Leaning into the dark, stuffy room that smelled of Domingo’s woody aftershave, she pushed Simon to one side so that she could get a shot of the wicker chair through the open door, the blue and red blanket draped over it.

  That’s where I was sitting when you ruined my honeymoon, you selfish bitch.

  ‘I’ll try to get Sam later,’ Simon was saying. ‘I’ll have to go to Puerto Banus, find another phone to ring him from. I feel under pressure here, with the caretaker waiting to get his gaff back. Can’t really concentrate. What? There are no other rooms, only this one and the bog. For as long as I’m on his phone, he has to stand outside.’

  Get Sam later? Charlie frowned. Sam was the person Simon had said he was phoning. Had he rung somebody else afterwards? The Snowman? No; the rigid hatred was missing from his voice, so it couldn’t be Proust. Colin Sellers, then. It had to be.

  Simon grunted goodbye. He didn’t put the phone down straight away. Charlie took a photo of him tapping it against his chin, mouthing words to himself – that was always a sign that his obsession levels were soaring, well on their way to being off the graph. ‘Smile, you nutter,’ she said.
r />   ‘I thought you weren’t taking any photos till the last day.’

  She laughed. ‘You think this isn’t our last day? Don’t kid yourself.’

  Simon took the camera from her hand. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You want to go home.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It’ll be a few hours before you admit it to yourself, a few more while you pluck up the courage to tell me we’re going.’

  ‘That’s crap. We’re going nowhere.’

  ‘Sellers just told you something about a dead woman. You want to be there, where the action is. Where the rigor mortis is, rather.’

  ‘I want to be here. With you.’

  Charlie couldn’t allow his reassurances to penetrate her wall of resentment. It would hurt too much if she believed him and then he went back on it. ‘Why wouldn’t you want to go home?’ she said angrily. ‘Your friend Connie witnessed a murder and wants to tell you all about it. What a coincidence that she just happened to stumble across the body. Is the dead woman her husband’s girlfriend, by any chance?’

  ‘Nobody knows anything.’ Simon sighed. ‘Least of all you. Connie Bowskill saw a dead body lying face down on a bloodstained carpet on the Roundthehouses website. In one of the interior shots of 11 Bentley Grove – the house her husband had in his SatNav as “home”.’

  Charlie stared at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’re actually serious.’

  ‘Friday night, this happened – early hours of Saturday morning.’

  ‘Simon, Roundthehouses is a property website,’ Charlie spelled it out as if for a child or a fool. ‘There aren’t any dead bodies on it, only houses for sale. And for rent – let’s not forget the lettings side of the operation. Apartments, maisonettes…no dead women. Did Sellers…’ Charlie stopped, shook her head. ‘It’s a wind-up, isn’t it? He’s probably been planning it for months.’