He looked around him, for a moment seeing things as a stranger would see them. It was a mess, no doubt about it, but an obsessive mess. The walls were covered with maps, photographs of girls and young women, Post-it stickers with numbers scribbled on to them. It made him seem like a stalker, a psychopath. If his wife walked in now, or his children … He could picture their expressions of dismay and disgust. He was wearing shabby clothes, his face needed shaving, his hair needed cutting, he reeked of tobacco and drink. But if he was right, if these faces that stared at him from his walls had all been killed by the same person, then all of that would be justified and he would be a hero. Of course, if he was wrong, he would be a lonely fool and a pathetic failure.
It was no good thinking like that: he’d come too far and done too much. He just had to hold on to his original instinct and keep going, holding his doubts at bay. He sighed and picked up his overnight bag, his car keys, his cigarettes, and shut the door on his stale, untidy house with relief.
Brian and Tracey Gibbs lived in a first-floor flat in south London, at the point where the density of the city was petering out into suburbia. They were poor, Fearby could tell that at once. Their flat was small and the living room they showed him into needed a fresh coat of paint. He knew from the cutting that they were in their forties, but they looked older – and he felt a surge of anger. The comfortable middle classes can cheat time, while people like the Gibbses are worn down by it, rubbed away. Brian Gibbs was thin and apologetic. Tracey Gibbs was larger and at first more aggressive. She wanted to tell Fearby that they’d done their best, been good parents, never done anything to deserve this. Their only child. It wasn’t their fault. All the while, her husband sat mute and thin beside her.
‘When did you last see her?’ asked Fearby.
‘Six weeks ago. Give or take a few days.’
‘And when did you report her missing?’
‘Three and a half weeks ago. We didn’t know,’ she added quickly, defensively. ‘She’s an adult. She lives with us but she comes and goes as she pleases. Days could go by …’ She faltered. ‘You know how it is.’
Fearby nodded. He did.
‘Could I see a picture of her?’
‘There.’ Tracey Gibbs pointed and he saw a framed photograph of Sharon: a round, pale face; dark hair in a neat, glossy bob; small mouth smiling for the camera. Fearby had seen too many young women smiling for the camera recently.
‘Is she going to be all right?’ Brian Gibbs asked, as if Fearby was God.
‘I hope so,’ he replied. ‘Do you think she went of her own accord?’
‘The police think so.’ This, bitterly, from the mother.
‘You don’t?’
‘She got into bad company.’
‘What company was that?’
‘The worst was this Mick Doherty. I told her what I thought of him but she wouldn’t listen.’
She plaited her hands tightly together; Fearby saw that the wedding ring was biting into her finger and that the varnish on her nails was chipped. She looked uncared-for. There were moth holes in Brian Gibbs’s ancient pullover. There was a hairline crack running up the mug of tea they had given him and a chip on its rim.
‘I see,’ he said, trying to sound neutrally cheerful.
‘I know where he works. The police weren’t bothered but I can tell you where to find him.’
‘All right.’
He took the address. It wouldn’t do any harm, he thought, and there was nothing else left for him to do, nowhere else to go.
FORTY-TWO
Karlsson opened the file. Yvette was writing in her notebook. Riley and Munster looked bored. Hal Bradshaw was sending a text. He noticed Karlsson’s fierce glance and put the phone down on the table but continued to steal glances at it. Karlsson took his watch off and laid it next to the file.
‘We’re going to talk about this for five minutes,’ he said, ‘because that’s about all I can stand and then we should go our separate ways and try to solve this case. Do you know what I wish? I wish Billy Hunt had killed her and that he was safely in prison and that we hadn’t lifted the rock and found out about all the adultery and drink and drugs and underage sex.’
‘Maybe Billy Hunt really did it after all,’ said Riley.
‘Billy Hunt didn’t do it.’
‘Maybe his alibi is flawed. Maybe the timing on the CCTV wasn’t right.’
‘Fine,’ said Karlsson. ‘Check it out. If you can break his alibi, you’ll be a hero. Now, back in the real world. Remember when we first saw the body, all those days ago? I wondered who would kill this nice mother of three. Now the queue goes out the door. Who shall we start with? There’s Russell Lennox: betrayed husband, drink problem, tendency to violence.’
‘We don’t know it was him who beat up Paul Kerrigan.’
‘No, but I’d lay a bet on it.’
‘And he didn’t know about his wife’s affair,’ said Munster.
‘You mean he said he didn’t.’
‘His print was on the cog along with Billy’s,’ put in Yvette.
‘Because he owned it. But, still, that sounds most likely. Confronts his wife, picks up that cog thing. There’s the awkward matter of his alibi, of course. So let’s keep leaning on him. Their children were at school and they’re children. But now we’ve got Judith and her every-parent’s-nightmare boyfriend. Ruth discovers about him. Arranges a meeting at their house. Threatens him with the law. He picks up the cog. I don’t like Zach Greene. I don’t like him at all. Which unfortunately isn’t evidence. Any comments?’ He looked around. ‘Thought not. But we should lean on him some more. Where did he say he was that afternoon, Yvette?’
Yvette turned pink. ‘He didn’t actually say,’ she muttered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I asked him. But, now you mention it, he didn’t give me an answer. He went on about them being consenting adults or something. He distracted me.’
Karlsson stared at her. ‘Distracted you?’ he repeated pleasantly, coldly.
‘Sorry. It was stupid of me. I’ll get back to him.’
He stared down at his papers for a moment. He didn’t want to shout at her in front of Riley and Bradshaw but it took an effort.
‘Moving on. We have the Kerrigans. He wants to break off with her. Or she discovers about his office affair. Confronts him. He picks up the cog.’
‘Would she do it at her house?’ said Yvette. ‘Wouldn’t the flat be more logical?’
‘She might have threatened him at the flat,’ said Bradshaw. ‘She could have said she would inform his wife. For him to confront and kill her in her own home would be a tit for tat. Exposing her in her own family home.’
Karlsson frowned at Bradshaw. ‘I thought your theory was that the murderer was a loner, of no fixed abode, that he had no family connections, that the murder was a kind of love.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Bradshaw. ‘But in a real sense Kerrigan was a loner, estranged from his family, and because of this rented flat, he actually was of no fixed abode and the murder was, arguably, a last, desperate expression of love, the end of love.’
What Karlsson really wanted to do was to lean across, take Bradshaw’s smart-phone and hit him over the head with it repeatedly. But he said nothing.