Juana crossed to the doors with her bloody bundle, calling back, ‘You show her round, Jose.’
Lorraine turned back to Jose. ‘Is this the master bedroom?’
‘No, this is a guest suite.’
She asked to see Cindy’s bedroom, and Jose indicated that it was the next room along the corridor. According to him, it was Mrs Nathan’s own suite. When Lorraine asked if Cindy had slept alone or with her husband he shrugged. ‘I think it depended on how Mr Nathan felt.’
There were no photographs or knick-knacks in the ice-blue bedroom, but Cindy’s wardrobe made Lorraine gasp. She had never seen so many designer labels, not even in the smartest department store, row upon row of evening gowns, daywear, a whole closet of beach and casual wear, and racks of shoes. The walk-in wardrobe was more like a room, the size of her own bedroom, and from the sales tickets still attached it was obvious that many of the items had never been worn.
‘Mrs Nathan likes to shop,’ Jose said, with humour.
‘Obviously,’ Lorraine murmured, and looked around. ‘She’s surprisingly neat and tidy.’
Jose raised an eyebrow. ‘Tell that to my wife and she’d split.’ He gestured to her to follow him from the dressing room. ‘My wife spends hours every day just tidying up after her.’
Lorraine looked back at the pale blue room. It felt cold, empty and unused. It was hard to imagine Cindy sleeping in there, let alone dressing and... ‘What about her bathroom?’
Jose paused, already at the door. ‘Through the mirrored wall beyond the bed.’ He moved soundlessly across the thick blue carpet, passed his hand across a certain area of the mirror and the door slid back electronically to reveal yet more ice-blue, this time stained floor-to-ceiling marble. Again, the room was obsessively neat. The only thing that seemed out of place was a single toothbrush left beside one of the washbasins. Jose opened one of the cupboards underneath, took out a spray of glass polish and a cloth, cleaned carefully around the washbasin, replaced the cleaning fluid and cloth and put the toothbrush neatly into a pale blue glass holder.
He caught Lorraine watching him. ‘Mr Nathan hated anything out of place. He checked every room every day.’
‘You mean she couldn’t even leave a toothbrush out?’
‘Water stains the marble. He even used to check under the taps. He was quite obsessive about cleanliness.’
Jose ushered Lorraine back across Cindy’s bedroom. ‘He showered sometimes six, seven times a day, and changed his clothes as often. But he worked out a lot, and he would need clean clothes to work out in, clean clothes to change into, and then he would start the whole process again.’
Lorraine followed him across the landing. ‘Must have been tough to work for him.’
‘Not really, you got into his routine. This is his room — the master bedroom.’
Lorraine waited as the pine doors opened, then said softly, ‘Well, I think you’ll have quite a job in here, Jose. I’m sure Mr Nathan never left his room in this state.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Jose whispered.
The lurid orange linen had been torn from the twelve-foot-square bed and strewn over the floor. The rugs had been drawn up in places and pulled into the centre of the room, throwing a tall metal chair onto its side. A glass coffee table had been broken, as had a lighting fitting. A canvas had been dragged from the wall and the drapes on the lower windows had been torn down. A marble plinth lay on its side, and what had been a Chinese famille rose peach vase lay shattered in tiny fragments.
‘Well, Cindy was right. Somebody has been here, and this must have taken quite a while,’ Lorraine said, watching Jose carefully. He seemed genuinely shocked by the destruction in the huge room.
There was a dressing room similar to that of the guest suite, Lorraine noticed. Its electronic door was ajar. ‘Can I go in here?’ she asked, and the man nodded without speaking. At first sight, Harry Nathan’s dressing room was untouched, the clothes neatly stored.
‘I think I should check the entire house, Mrs Page,’ Jose said, ‘if you would care to come downstairs with me.’ Lorraine wondered if there was some reason why he wanted her out of the room. ‘Could I just see his bathroom?’ she asked.
Jose pointed towards it as he surveyed the bedroom. ‘I just don’t see when this was done. My wife and I left the house for such a short while.’
Lorraine glanced into the bathroom, another room with the charm of a meat safe, then did a double-take. ‘Oh, my God...’
The blood was in pools, not even dried, and there was a heap of blood-sodden towels in the centre of the otherwise spotless bathroom. Jose stepped past her, bent down to the towels, then recoiled. He leaped to the washbasin and retched. That reaction clearly wasn’t faked, Lorraine noted. He had not been with Cindy when she had lost her child.
‘Let’s take a look round the rest of the house,’ she said, already heading out, not turning back when she heard Jose vomiting. The wreckage in the bedroom made her wonder if Cindy herself had caused the damage — perhaps that was what had made her miscarry, unless she had walked in on someone else and been attacked. Lorraine was still deep in thought as she crossed the landing towards the stairs. Suddenly she paused. Had she seen all the rooms on this floor:
‘What’s that room?’ She indicated a closed door.
‘No one is allowed in there. Mr Nathan never let anyone in even to clean it.’
‘Mr Nathan is dead now, so let me see in there, Jose, would you? ‘
‘It’s always locked.’
But Lorraine had turned the handle as he spoke and the door opened.
This was Nathan’s office: here, at least, the walls were still intact, though covered with two-foot-square wood tiles stained red and black in an ugly checkerboard effect. There was the usual office equipment, a photocopier, fax machine, computers and telephones, and a bank of four television sets, like monitors, was recessed into the wall. Two shelves that had previously contained videotapes were now empty, the tapes removed from their cases and thrown on the floor. Lorraine saw that they were labelled with the names of Nathan’s films and of TV shows he had appeared in — someone had clearly gone through them to check that the contents of the boxes matched the labels outside.
There was something in this house for which someone had been searching desperately, that much was obvious to Lorraine. The fact that the phone tapes had been destroyed suggested that it might have been a recording, but it hadn’t been on any of the tapes she had listened to or, presumably, the ones that had been destroyed, or the burglar wouldn’t have bothered looking any further. Nor could it have been on any of the videotapes in front of her, or they, too, would have been destroyed or removed. There was, however, a cache of tapes from the security cameras, which Cindy had mentioned but which had never been found, and these must be the object of the search.
‘What did Mr Nathan do with the tapes he recorded on the security cameras?’ Lorraine asked.
‘He took care of all that himself,’ Jose said. ‘I thought he kept them in here, or just used them over and over.’
‘When was all the security put in the house?’
‘A couple of years ago. The same firm did some of the decorating.’
‘Oh, really?’ Lorraine asked casually. ‘Any work on the walls or floors?’
‘Wall panels. Like in here,’ he said.
What a surprise, she thought, scanning the checkerboard walls. ‘Jose,’ she said, with her sweetest smile, ‘could you get me something with a flat blade — like a big knife or a chisel?’ She had a good idea that she would not need any implement to open the hidden compartment she was sure was in the wall, but she wanted him out of the room. He nodded and disappeared.