Joanna turns the key of her sister’s old flat and feels her pulse return to normal as she opens the door on to the musty, unlived-in smell. A dark shape over her shoulder and she twists in time to see the man she thought was following her. He strides across the sweep of landing, about to head up to the top floor.
‘Hello again,’ she calls, realising he must be Caroline’s neighbour.
‘Hi.’ The man steps backwards to look at her. ‘I thought I recognised you at the flower stall.’ He swings his bunch of pink carnations through the air.
‘Did you?’ Joanna, a touch embarrassed.
‘Yeah. You’re Carrie’s sister, there’s photos of you in her flat.’
‘Really ?’ Joanna doesn’t have pictures of Caroline. Aside from a single photograph of them as children squirrelled away in her sock drawer, there’s nothing of her sister in her home.
‘You’re Jo, aren’t you?’ The carnations drip water on the black and white floor tiles.
‘I am, yes,’ she confirms, relinquishing her holdall to the tenebrous embrace of the unlit flat. ‘I’ve come to sort things out.’
‘Well, pleased to meet you.’ He extends a broad, hairless hand. ‘Me and Yvonne, we were so sorry to hear what happened. Sorry, too, not to make it to the funeral – I couldn’t get the time off work. We’d have liked to have gone, we sent flowers.’
‘That’s kind of you, thank you.’ Joanna forces a smile. ‘Did you know Carrie well?’
‘Reasonably, yeah. We used to chat now and again on the stairs. Sometimes she’d invite me in for coffee, which I saw as a real privilege.’ He grins. ‘Your sister wasn’t one for visitors.’
‘No, I don’t imagine she was.’
‘She was nice, though, I liked her – we both liked her, me and my wife. She was very kind to us. Last year, we … we, erm, it’s Yvonne actually, she was pretty unwell. Cancer.’ Joanna hears his voice constrict against the emotion. ‘And Carrie, well, she was very kind to us, doing our shopping, checking Yvonne was all right when I was out at work.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that about your wife. She’s okay now though, I hope?’
‘She manages. We’re taking things one day at a time.’
Joanna bows her head, shares nothing of her own health scare. ‘Carrie could be very kind,’ she says instead. ‘And it’s nice to know she had friends – friends like you and your wife – Yvonne, you said?’ Another forced smile as she replays the contents of a telephone exchange she had with her sister during her gruelling treatment, which Mike reminded her of recently. ‘Did Carrie have many friends?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ The man stiffens inside his suit. ‘As I said, she kept herself pretty much to herself. It was odd, though.’ He rubs a hand over his face. ‘Me and Yvonne were saying, after we’d heard what happened in the mini-mart that night, we hadn’t seen Carrie around for a quite a while.’
‘Really – was that unusual?’
‘It was a bit.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Oooh .’ He takes a moment. ‘At least a couple of months before she died. And another thing I noticed, looking up from the street – she was keeping her curtains drawn.’
‘And you didn’t think to find out how she was?’ Joanna pushes, even though she knows it’s a cheek when she hasn’t bothered with Caroline’s well-being for years.
‘We heard her moving around – but you don’t like to interfere.’ He waits for Joanna’s reassurance. ‘But yeah, we thought it was odd, because she was always gadding off somewhere. She’d been losing weight too, probably from all the dog walking.’ He laughs; a jerky, brittle sound. ‘She was working as a volunteer at that animal rescue place the other side of Hyde Park.’
‘Near St James’s, that’s right,’ Joanna confirms.
‘I admired her for that. Not many people happy to give their time for free these days. We brought a stray to her not all that long ago, but they wouldn’t let her keep it – said a flat wasn’t suitable and rehomed the dog elsewhere. A real shame that, it might have been company for her, because she did seem pretty lonely.’ He pinches the end of his nose, looks sad for a moment. ‘I know she liked visiting art galleries. Was always off to the Tate to look at that painting. She talked me and Yvonne through the symbolism of it once, the Christmas before last when she came to us for lunch … She’d bought us a printed tea-towel of it from the gift shop.’
‘Ophelia .’ Joanna smiles. ‘Yes, Carrie loved the Pre-Raphaelites. Especially Millais – she used to drag me along to look at that one when we were teenagers.’
‘Mmm.’ The man holds her gaze. ‘It seemed rather peculiar to us. We asked her to sign a petition once, can’t remember what for now, and she wrote her name as Ophelia, of all things. Anyway.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘You’re a pianist, Carrie said. Pretty famous, we heard.’
‘Did she— she said that?’ Tears prick her eyes.
‘She was very proud of you. Talked about you all the time—’ He breaks off, responding to something in Joanna’s expression. ‘I’m sorry, me and my big mouth; my wife’s always telling me I talk too much.’
‘No. No.’ She tugs her hair off her face, refusing to give in to her emotions in front of him. ‘I want to hear. I want to know everything. Me and Carrie, we lost touch, you see.’
‘Oh, dear. That’s a shame.’
‘You say you hadn’t seen her out and about for a couple of months?’ Joanna steers their discussion to her sister again. ‘D’you have any idea why? Had she been ill, d’you think?’
‘No, I don’t think she was ill – well, not ill like that.’ The choice of words suggests to Joanna her sister might have been suffering in some other way, but she misses the opportunity to ask him to elaborate. ‘Oh, now, hang on, I did see her,’ he mutters to himself. ‘Once. Coming in from work one evening – it must have been the last time I saw her.’ He shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘She would’ve heard the front door go and came out on to the landing. I barely recognised her, it looked like she’d just got out of bed – still in her dressing gown, hair all over the place. She said, but she was rambling a bit, that she’d been getting silent calls, plagued by them in the night. Said they were stopping her from sleeping.’
‘Did she know who they were from?’
A shake of the head. ‘They were silent, weren’t they? I told her to get on to BT, that they’d have ways to block nuisance numbers. But – but … ’ he hesitates, ‘her reaction did seem a bit extreme.’ A frown. ‘I don’t know, I suppose I sensed there was something more serious than a rogue caller bothering her. Getting weird phone calls in the night wouldn’t make you so … so … ’ He fished around for the right adjective. ‘Agitated. And she did seem very agitated. Sweating too, here and here.’ He taps his forehead, his top lip. ‘And so very insistent … wanting to show me her scribbles in a notebook, going on about how she was keeping tabs on him—’
‘Keeping tabs on him ?’
‘It’s what she said.’
‘Who ? Did she say who?’
‘No, she didn’t.’ He lowers his eyes to Joanna’s. ‘But whoever he was, she was obviously very afraid of him. In fact, I’d go so far to say she was so afraid, she’d stopped going out.’