But it’s a wise man who knows when to keep his gob shut, and so we spent what felt like a really long time in silence until finally Lady Ty’s head jerked round to face the front of the house.
‘Well, that’s you off the hook,’ she said. ‘Your Lord and Master has arrived.’ A couple of moments later Nightingale opened the kitchen door and stepped in. He gave Lady Ty a formal little nod.
‘Cecelia,’ he said. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘Oh, I’m just gratified to be getting the personal touch,’ she said.
‘Why don’t you come with me,’ said Nightingale, ‘and we’ll see if we can sort this out.’
It’s what you say, even to people standing over the bleeding body of their significant other with a claw hammer in their hand. And the weird thing is that most people, even the ones that have got to know that whatever happens it isn’t going to end well for them, come along quietly and let themselves be sorted out.
I didn’t think that Lady Ty was going to stay quiet indefinitely but, sometimes, that’s the joy of being a lowly constable. You get to foist your problems onto your elders and betters.
Before he left the kitchen Nightingale caught my eye and gestured upwards – he wanted me to check Olivia’s bedroom before the main search team got there.
The problem with forensics is that the better it gets, the more inconvenient it is to work around. In the old days the police could get away with clomping around in their size twelves and poking things with a pencil. Now they can pull a viable DNA result off a sample the size of ladybird’s eyeball and you’ve got to be wearing gloves at the very least. I used to walk around with a spare pair of gloves in my pocket, but now I’ve got a set of booties in there as well – just to be on the safe side. You’ve got to watch those booties when walking on polished wood though, so I left them off until I’d located Olivia’s room on the second floor.
It was a big room, expensively wallpapered in a subtle blue and lavender pattern with reconditioned sash windows that looked out over the street. The high ceiling had its original plaster mouldings and it was, if you threw in the en-suite bathroom, about two thirds the size of my parents’ flat. Her walk-in wardrobe was easily the size of my old bedroom and totally wasted because, as far as I could tell, the bulk of Olivia’s clothes were spread out in a nice even layer across the floor.
I stooped to check some of the labels – mostly high-end high street with a couple of designer bits. In contrast, her shoes were neatly ranked on a set of purpose-built shelves at the foot of the bed. Some of the heels were a bit outrageous, especially a pair of blue Manolo Blahnik pumps that looked like an invitation to ankle damage to me.
There was no way Lady Ty didn’t have a cleaner, and judging from the absence of dust in the gaps between the bannisters, he or she was coming in at least four days a week. Still, I doubted that our hypothetical cleaner had been in early enough that morning to change the linen on the neatly made bed. I looked closer – there was a dent in the coverlet and the pillows had been scrunched up. My guess was that Olivia had come back and slept on top of her bed, briefly, before me and Guleed had arrived to brighten up her day. She’d been casually dressed and freshly laundered when we’d interviewed her, which meant she must have showered and changed.
I checked the en-suite bathroom and there, on the floor, was last night’s party gear and her bath towel. I kept my distance and made a note to inform the follow-up search team so they could bag them up. I stepped back into the bedroom and tried to get a feel for Olivia.
There was a poster of Joan Armatrading facing the bed. It was a blow up of her 1976 album cover, custom framed and hung with care. It seemed a bit retro for Olivia. I mean, I only knew about Joan because she was one of the few non-jazz LPs that my dad had allowed in his collection, alongside Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a few very early Jethro Tull’s. I’d played the shit out of it when my dad wasn’t home until I’d got old enough to bootleg my own taste in music.
Next to Joan was a photo-montage sprawled across the metre or so of wall between the poster and the wardrobe door. Most of the pictures were inkjet hardcopies on standard gauge printing paper and pasted to the wall with Evo-Stik but some had obviously been cut from magazines. Fashion magazines, judging by the glossy quality of the paper – I recognised Alek Wek, Azealia Banks and a smattering of white pop stars and actors. The other photos were phone snaps – mostly selfies – Olivia at parties, clubs and school. Olivia out and about in London.
I got out my phone and took reference pictures of all the people featured in the snaps and made a rough note of how many times they appeared. One white girl was the out and out favourite – wide set blue eyes, a mass of curly black hair that either flopped untidily over her face or was pulled back into a variety of pigtails, bunches and, in one instance, elaborately piled up on her head. The latter saw her and Olivia posing in formal dresses outside somewhere gilt-edged and posh looking – they had their arms comfortably wrapped around each other’s waists and were grinning mischievously at the camera. Best Friends Forever, I decided. None of the other boys and girls turned up with anything like the same frequency and all, with the exception of one snap of her brother and another of her mother, were white.
On top of her sturdy work desk, textbooks and folders were arranged with obsessive neatness. English, Geography and French. I flicked through them looking for hidden notes, but all I found was Post-it notes and a lot of colour coded highlighter pen. One thing was for certain, Olivia had no intention of failing her A-levels. With what her mum was like I didn’t blame her. Her bookshelves were interesting, pre-teen at the bottom mixed in with a couple of board games, older books above them – Roald Dahl, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Harry Potter graduating up to Twilight, The Girls’ Book of Excellence, Malorie Blackman and, surprisingly, Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris in the original French. Because it stuck out, I opened it up and found it was full of pencilled notes in the margin – mostly English translations of difficult words. My French is actually worse than my Latin, but even I could tell that this was advanced stuff for an A-level student.
I went back to the collage and looked again – judging by the design of the frontage they were posing before, the picture of Olivia and her BFF in formal dress could well have been taken in a French city. A couple of the others definitely had Beaux-Arts architecture in the background – possibly France again. If I’d been standing in anything but a multi-million Mayfair terrace I might have been thinking of possible importation routes. But rich kids don’t need to hoof drugs over the border themselves. The rich have people for that sort of thing, and disposable people at that.
There were two mains sockets in the room, both with their own tangle of chargers and extension cords and I spent a couple of minutes matching them to her laptop, printer, her high end playbar, one spare for an iPhone that I suspected even now was being placed in front of the custody sergeant at Belgravia nick, and another spare that might have been for a different brand of phone. I made a note to check what Olivia carried, and whether it or a second phone had been handed in. A black lacquered wooden tray on the desk held paper-clips, a Post-it pad and scatter of USB sticks – those I decided to leave for the technical forensics guys from Newlands Park.
I sat on the bed, took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
I hadn’t found any controlled substances, or drug paraphernalia. It might have been hidden away, but if it was the follow-up POLSA team would find it. I couldn’t feel any vestigia in the room either. I’d always felt something with the various gods and goddesses of the rivers – even when they were reining it back on purpose – but there was nothing here apart from the usual background.