Flyte stalked off down the towpath.
Flaming fishcakes! The girl was the absolute limit!
After she’d calmed down a bit she had to acknowledge that her exasperation with Cassie was partly anger at herself. She should have been the one to uncover evidence that Green-Eyes’ – aka Sean Kavanagh’s – death was suspicious – especially as he’d been a cop. Now she was in a worse position than before: she couldn’t tell anyone about Cassie’s discovery and she still had nothing to go on. No motive, no weapon, and no clue regarding Kavanagh’s last movements or recent contacts.
She slept badly that night and woke with a headache and a sense of the inevitable: now she knew that this was no accidental drowning, walking away from the case simply wasn’t an option – which, of course, Cassie must have known. Flyte had to find some above-board evidence that would demand a forensic PM – and fast.
Sure, Steadman wouldn’t be happy to discover she’d been working the case on the QT, as Pops would have said, but the fact that Sean had been a police officer who’d almost certainly been murdered should take the edge off his anger.
She needed to establish exactly when Sean had returned to the UK and her only lead was Sean’s ex-fiancée – the tawny-maned Bethany Locke. She’d scoured online social media sites with no luck, but lots of people used different names online. Had she gone to Canada with Sean after all? But if so, why hadn’t she raised the alarm over her missing fiancé?
As she was rostered off that day Flyte was able to put in some calls unobserved.
‘Hi, Sebastian, it’s Phyllida . . . Sorry. Seb . . . I’m fine, thanks. Did I hear that you did a stint in Special Branch? . . . Look, I need a favour. There’s a name I need running through flight manifest records for London–Canada . . . No, just helping CID with ID-ing a John Doe.’ Which wasn’t exactly a lie.
After agreeing to help out, Seb said, ‘How about a drink? Tonight, if you’re free?’
A micro-pause before she replied, ‘Sure, let’s do that.’ It would be the first time she’d ever gone on a date with anyone from work – with good reason. She’d heard male cops bragging about having ‘nailed’ a female colleague, while predictably the woman was branded a slut. But it was getting on for two years since she and Matt had parted and high time she dipped her toe in the dating waters. Seb was undeniably good-looking and smart – unlike the other sexist morons in the office – and she was fairly confident she could trust him to be discreet.
Her next call was to Josh at CID to ask him to run a search on the Police National Computer: if Bethany or Sean held driving licences their addresses would be listed.
Ten minutes later, he called her back. ‘No joy with Sean Kavanagh,’ he said. ‘There are hundreds of them in north London alone. But I did find a Bethany Violet Locke about the right age. No criminal record. Last driving licence issued two years ago. She lives in Seddon House, EC2.’
*
Within an hour Flyte was wending her way through the labyrinth of the Barbican – a sprawling development of brutalist concrete design. She knew that it was popular with wealthy City types who had weekday pieds-à-terre here, before they scuttled off to places like the Cotswolds at the weekend. It was also infamous for its sky-high rents. To her it looked pretty much like any other sixties or seventies council estate – albeit less scruffy and with slightly nicer planting.
Seddon House was one of the low-rise blocks. Not wanting to try Bethany Locke’s buzzer – too easy to get brushed off that way – she hovered outside until a youngish, hipsterish-looking guy arrived and used his key to enter the building. As she followed him in, he shot her a curious look, so she said, ‘I’m with the police,’ ready to pull out her warrant card if necessary. But her businesslike look was clearly enough to deter further questions and he scurried off up the stairs, leaving the lift to her.
Bethany opened the flat door swiftly, as if she were expecting a visitor, but looked confused to see Flyte standing there. ‘Oh . . . you’re not Amazon.’ Her voice was unusually low-pitched for a woman, making her working-class London accent sound even harsher.
On seeing Flyte’s ID Bethany’s expression turned wary. But not before Flyte thought she detected a flicker of another emotion: resignation. Almost as though she’d been expecting this visit for a long time.
In the living room, she declined Bethany’s offer of coffee and took the only chair with its back to the window, forcing her hostess to take the sofa in the full glare of daylight. Facing the light put people on edge, like those old cop movies where they trained an anglepoise lamp on their interviewee. There was a faintly fruity smell in the air that Flyte couldn’t place.
Bethany wore her thick tawny hair in a plait, and she was still striking-looking nearly a decade on from her tiger photoshoot. But her features had a hardness about them and her complexion beneath her make-up had coarsened, perhaps from too much smoking and drinking – or disappointment. As if to confirm the former, Bethany picked up a vaping device from the coffee table. ‘How can I help?’ she asked, her accent markedly more ‘proper’ now that she knew she was talking to a police officer.
Luckily, Bethany showed no sign of recognising her.
‘Nice place,’ said Flyte insincerely, glancing out at the windswept piazza. Funny how the architects who had erected these concrete people-silos in the sixties and seventies seemed to prefer living in Georgian townhouses themselves. ‘I imagine the rent must be pretty scary?’
‘I own it,’ said Bethany, a hint of challenge in her uplifted chin. Her lips looked unnaturally pillowy for someone who had to be around Flyte’s age – mid to late thirties.
Flyte made a politely impressed expression, filing away the information. ‘I’m afraid I’m here in connection with a death,’ she said.
Bethany’s expression appeared to be frozen in ‘helpful mode’, but then her lack of facial mobility might be due to an overenthusiastic use of Botox.
‘Can I ask if you are still in contact with Sean Kavanagh?’ Flyte had to resist the impulse to wave away the sickly cloud of fruit-fragranced vape.
‘Not for years,’ said Bethany quickly. No hesitation, no ‘Why do you ask?’
Flyte waited a moment, but Bethany said nothing more. ‘We recovered the body of a man from the canal last week. I’m sorry to say we have reason to believe that it might be Sean’s.’
Bethany’s hand, the nails long and French-polished went to her mouth. But the expression in her eyes seemed more guarded than surprised.
‘Would you be happy to look at an artist’s impression?’ Flyte asked.
Bethany shrugged her assent and Flyte reached for the phone to pull up the image that Luke Lawless had put in the Camden Gazette, pushing it across the coffee table between them.
After taking a deep draw on her vape, Bethany took a long look at the image – conflicting emotions playing out across her face. ‘I think so. We split up eight years ago. And he looks . . . different.’ She pushed the phone back across the table.
‘We know that he was a police officer before emigrating to Canada but his colleagues are no longer in touch with him, so we’re trying to find out when he came back to the UK and whom he might have been in contact with.’
‘Sorry, but I have no idea. Like I say, I haven’t seen or heard from him in years.’
‘What about his next of kin? Parents, siblings?’
‘He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and his dad died when he was young.’ Bethany’s foot, crossed at the ankles, jigged up and down. ‘His mother was Irish. Lived in London but I couldn’t tell you where. They weren’t close, so I never met her.’
‘I understand you were engaged? Did you live together?’
‘Yeah, for almost a year, in my tiny flat off the Holloway Road.’
Halfway between Sean’s nick at Finsbury Park and the gym he and Zeke had attended.
‘Can I ask why you two broke up?’
Bethany’s carapace of make-up couldn’t hide a flash of anger. ‘He was cheating on me. And more than once, as it turned out. So I dumped him. A few weeks later, I heard he’d gone to Canada. Emigrated.’ She shrugged. In spite of her bravado it was clear to Flyte that the betrayal still hurt. And she would bet that it was Sean who had done the ‘dumping’.
‘Did you have any further contact?’
She dropped her eyes to fiddle with her vaping device. ‘No. That was the last I heard of him.’
‘How long were you engaged?’ Flyte pulled a sympathetic smile.
‘Five months.’ She lifted a shoulder ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’
‘If I can’t find a next of kin, would you be prepared to officially confirm his identity?’
A complicated series of emotions – wariness, regret, something else Flyte couldn’t name – flitted across Bethany’s face. ‘Would I have to go see him?’
‘No, you could do it from a photograph.’ Television dramas loved to portray the grieving relative bending over a body in a starkly lit mortuary, but, in real life, it was common practice to ID the dead from a post-mortem photo, especially if the body was decomposed.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
Flyte had no power to insist on a formal ID. She put her notebook away. ‘If you think of anyone at all he might have been in contact with when he came back from Canada, would you let me know?’
As they swapped numbers, Bethany asked, ‘Where is he, now? Who is going to bury him?’ From her look, the unspoken bit being Not me, I hope?
‘For the time being he’s in the general mortuary attached to Camden Hospital. If I can’t track down a next of kin, the local authority will have him cremated.’
Flyte got up to go. ‘I saw that ad you were in, with the tiger, on Facebook? Are you still modelling?’
A look of pride crossed Bethany’s face. ‘That was fun while it lasted. I’ve got my own beauty salon now.’
At the door, Flyte paused and turned back to her. ‘Oh, by the way, did you ever hear Sean mention someone called Zeke?’
‘No,’ said Bethany, shaking her head, but her improbably lashed eyes had blinked a few times.
As Flyte took the stairs down she replayed Bethany’s reaction. It was no more than a hunch but she would swear that the name Zeke had meant something to her.
Back out on the concourse, she ran an online check on the history of property prices in the Barbican. Eight years ago, a flat in Seddon House would have changed hands for a little over £400,000, which raised an interesting question. Even allowing for the proceeds of her ‘tiny flat’, how had Bethany been able to go ahead with the purchase without Sean around to contribute?