Suddenly the dirty glasses and bits of clothing, the piles of papers and envelopes scared him. People hardly ever came to the house, but the thought of anyone coming into this room and feeling some part of what he had felt in George Conley’s flat made him flush with a sort of shame. For the next hour he picked clothes up, washed glasses and plates, wiped surfaces, vacuumed. At the end, he felt it was closer to some sort of normality. It needed more. He could see that. He would buy a picture. He could put flowers in a vase. Maybe he would even paint the walls.
He took a lasagne from the freezer and put it into the oven. The back of the packet said fifty minutes from frozen. That would give him time. He went to his study. This was the one part of the house that had always been tidy, clean and organized. He took the map from the desk, unfolded it and laid it out on the floor. He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out the card covered with red stickers. He peeled off one sticker and carefully placed it on the village of Denham, just south of Oxford. He stood back. There were seven of them now and a pattern was clearly forming.
Fearby took a sip of whisky and asked himself the question he’d asked himself many times before: was he fooling himself? He’d read about murderers and their habits. How they were like predatory animals that operated in territories where they felt comfortable. But he’d also read about the dangers of seeing patterns in random collections of data. You fire arbitrary shots at a wall, then draw a target around the marks that are closest together and it looks as if you were aiming at it. He examined the map. Five of them were close to the M40 and three to the M1, no more then twenty minutes’ drive from a motorway exit. It seemed completely obvious and compelling. But there was a problem. As he’d read through newspapers, checked online, for missing teenage girls, one of his main criteria in weeding them out was looking for families near motorways, so maybe he was creating the pattern himself. But he thought of the girls’ faces, the stories. It felt right to him. It smelled right. But what good was that?
FORTY-FIVE
Karlsson sat down opposite Russell Lennox. Yvette started the recorder and sat to one side.
‘You know you’re still under caution,’ Karlsson said, ‘and that you’re entitled to legal representation.’ Lennox gave a faint nod. He seemed dazed, barely responsive. ‘You need to say it aloud. For the tape, or chip, or whatever it is.’
‘Yes,’ said Lennox. ‘I understand. I’m fine.’
‘You’re quite a family,’ said Karlsson. Lennox looked blank. ‘You seem to do damage to everyone you come into contact with.’
‘We’re a family in which the wife and mother was killed,’ said Lennox, hoarsely. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘And now your daughter’s boyfriend.’
‘I didn’t know about that, until I heard about the death.’
‘The murder. Zach Greene was hit with a blunt instrument. Like your wife.’ There was a pause. ‘How did you feel about him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘About your fifteen-year-old daughter’s relationship with a twenty-eight-year-old man.’
‘As I said, I didn’t know about it. Now that I do, I feel concern for my daughter. For her welfare.’
‘Mr Greene died some time during the day yesterday. Can you tell us where you were?’
‘I was at home. I’ve been at home a lot lately.’
‘Was anyone with you?’
‘The children were at school. I was there when Dora came home at about ten past four.’
‘What did you do at home?’
Lennox seemed terribly tired, as if even talking was a great effort. ‘Why don’t you just ask me if I killed that man? That must be why you brought me in here.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘All right, so what did you do at home?’
‘I pottered around. Sorted through some things.’
‘Maybe you can help us by coming up with something we can check. Did someone call round? Did you make any calls? Did you go online?’
‘Nobody came round. I probably made some calls and went online.’
‘We can check that.’
‘I watched a bit of TV.’
‘What did you watch?’
‘The usual rubbish. Probably something to do with antiques.’
‘Probably something to do with antiques,’ said Karlsson, slowly, as if he was thinking about it as he repeated it. ‘I’m going to stop this now.’ He leaned forward and pressed a button on the recorder. ‘You’re going to go away and have a think, maybe talk to a lawyer and come up with something better than what you’ve said. And meanwhile we’ll make our own checks on who you were phoning and where you were.’ He stood up. ‘You need to think of your children, your family. How much more of this are they meant to take?’
Lennox rubbed his face, like a man checking whether he’d shaved. ‘I think about them every minute of every day,’ he said.
Chris Munster was waiting for Karlsson in his office. He had just returned from Cardiff where he had been interviewing Josh Kerrigan’s girlfriend, Shari Hollander.
‘Well?’
‘She just repeated what Josh Kerrigan said: that he’d probably been with her, they’d spent practically every minute of the day together since they’d started going out, she couldn’t quite remember. But she was pretty sure that there wasn’t a time when he was away for a large chunk of the day or night.’
‘It’s a bit vague.’
‘He didn’t use his credit card to buy any kind of transport to London on that day. But he did take a hundred pounds out in cash a couple of days before, so he could have used that.’
‘But he’s not looking very likely, is he? Not that he ever was.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Karlsson looked at Munster more attentively. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There was something his girlfriend mentioned that I thought might interest you.’
‘Go on.’
‘She said Josh was furious with his father. Spitting mad, she said. She said he’d had a letter, telling him his dad was not the happy family man he set himself up as.’
‘So he knew.’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Good work, Chris. We need another talk with him. Right now. And his little brother while we’re at it.’
Josh Kerrigan had got himself a haircut – or maybe, thought Karlsson, looking at the uneven tufts, he’d done it himself with clippers. It made his face seem rounder and younger. He sat in the interview room and couldn’t keep still, but drummed his fingers on the table, twisted in his chair, tapped his feet.
‘What now?’ he asked. ‘More questions about my whereabouts?’
‘We spoke to Shari Hollander.’
‘Did she say I was with her, like I said?’
‘She said you probably were.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘She also said that you knew about your father’s affair.’
‘What?’
He suddenly looked scared.
‘Is that true? Did you receive a letter telling you about the affair?’
Josh stared at Karlsson, then away. A heaviness settled on his young face, making him resemble his father. ‘Yes. I got a letter sent to me, care of my physics department.’
‘Anonymous?’
‘That’s right. So whoever sent it didn’t even have the courage to admit who they were.’
‘Who do you think it was?’
Josh gazed darkly at Karlsson. ‘Her, of course. Who else?’
‘You mean Ruth Lennox?’
‘That’s right. Though I didn’t know that at the time.’
‘Do you still have the letter?’
‘I tore it into little bits and threw it in the bin.’