Chapter 30

Mutti’s shocked to see what a state I’m in when I get back home. She wants me to go to the doctor’s although I assure her there is nothing whatever wrong that a couple more painkillers, a cup of tea and some chocolate biscuits won’t fix. She knows I’m lying. Not one of those casual lies I tell every day about where I’ve been and who I’ve been with, but a big huge massive lie that I’m telling myself as well as her. That I don’t care. That it’s for the better. That it wasn’t really a proper baby yet, just a bunch of cells.

Of course it wasn’t just a bunch of cells. And now that it’s gone, I realise for the first time how curious I am…was…about the baby and whether I’d be any good at all as a mother. But now I’m gripped by a terror that I’ll never, ever be able to get pregnant again. After all, I deserve to pay the price for being such an idiot.

Mutti knows all this without asking. She doesn’t want me to talk about how I feel, just wraps me in a big fluffy blanket and sits there holding my hand. The following day she’s still treating me like an invalid. She’s even phoned work on my behalf. I don’t protest.

We’ve got an unspoken pact not to discuss the broken window and what is now an unsettling series of silent phone calls, because it spooks us out. I need to find out what was in that scribbled Hebrew note, and the best hope for that has to be Morrie, but I haven’t got the energy to call him now. I’m hoping that the new arrest for Bruchi’s murder will have sorted the problem, but when Mutti’s not about I can’t help stealing the occasional furtive glance out of the window. And I’m screening my calls again. I really will have to talk to Jenkins. When I’m ready. For now, I lie back on sofa while Mutti fixes foul smelling herbal tea that must have been in the cupboard for years. I’m sniffing the steam rising from the cup when there’s a ring on the doorbell.

“Are you expecting someone?” she asks, pressing the intercom. We look at each other, and in that instant I regret not calling Jenkins. I most certainly am not expecting anyone. Who on earth is it?

“Delivery ma’am.” I haul myself up and go to the speaker.

“Have you got ID?”

“Yes, ma’am. But first, you might want to take a look out the front.” There’s a van on the kerb inscribed with the logo SINCLAIR SPECIALIST DELIVERY, and then in smaller letters underneath “Transport you can trust”. I open the door to find a man in blue overalls.

“Miss Mueller?”

“I haven’t ordered anything.”

“Larry mate,” he calls out. “Young lady says she hasn’t ordered anything. Check the docket, will you?”

“Look,” I say, “I’m sure it’s a mistake. Do you want to come back when you’ve sorted it out? I’m really not up to this today.”

“It’ll only take a minute, Miss. Hang on.” As he says that, the driver gets out of the van, holding a clipboard, the edge of its paperwork fluttering in the breeze.

“Nope, mate, it’s all kosher. I spoke to Ed, and it’s the right place.” I’m still musing on the fact that he’s got no idea at all what “kosher” really means, when he rolls up the back of the van. The two men start unloading a picture covered in many layers of bubble wrap.

“Where do you want them, Miss?”

Mutti’s gone back to her crosswords. She gets to her feet when she sees the men in overalls coming into the room carrying a substantial canvas.

“Bring it here. On the sofa.”

“I don’t advise putting an artwork on the sofa, Madam. How about the table?”

“Ja, good. Put it down.” He lays the painting flat. Mutti starts fumbling at the bubble wrap with shaking hands.

“Hold on now, madam. That’s no way to handle an oil painting. Do you want me to remove the packaging?” She nods. He takes out a Stanley knife, and neatly snips the sellotape on the package. Layer after layer falls away, until the gold frame pokes out of the wrapping. Then the painting itself emerges. It’s the woman next to the table, with the bowl of fruit. Mutti groans.

By the time the men have finished, there’s a row of  pictures of different sizes, arranged in a careful row along the wall of the lounge, still in their bubble wrap. As he puts down the last one, the delivery man asks me to sign a document on his clipboard. He unclips an envelope from underneath it and gives it to me. It’s heavy, laid paper, the kind you get in old-fashioned stationery shops. Mutti’s name is written in elegant handwriting on the front, by someone who uses an expensive fountain pen. I look round, but she’s not there. I find her on the balcony, breathing heavily and swaying.

When I give her the letter, she just looks at it as though she’s forgotten how to read. So I open it for her. The card is headed ANDRIS KOVÁCS in small, square black embossed capitals. The content is brief. No “dear” anybody, not even “For the attention of”. But in the middle of the page are the words,

I know ‘sorry’ doesn’t really cover it. Kindest regards, Andris.

When the men have driven off in their delivery truck, we sit on the bench together, watching the darkness eat up the back garden. Rush hour traffic grumbles on Camden Road. We’ve left the paintings in the front room still swathed in their layers of wrapping while we enjoy this moment of calm. One by one, lights come on in neighbouring flats, as their owners return from office, studio and workshop. Whirring, banging and grinding tell us that kitchens have come to life once more. And discordant chorus of voices chatter and hum from televisions, radios and CDs.

“Don’t you want to have a look at the rest of them?” I ask. Mutti looks surprised.

“Ja, why not?”

We unpick the bubble wrap, bit by bit, dropping layer upon layer onto the floor. As the last piece drops away, a curlicued gold frame emerges, and finally the canvas itself. A magnificent likeness of a lady, looking as though it dates from the mid-nineteenth century. The regal blue gown is corseted at the waist, skirts spread over a vast crinoline, with silk fabric looking soft enough to touch, each fold and scallop catching the light in a different way. Mutti nods.

We unwrap the next and the next. There are landscapes and portraits, interiors and still life, like a potted history of the styles and techniques of European art through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – impressionist, expressionist, and even one abstract. A nod to Picasso there, to Degas there. After we’ve looked at them all, we carefully replace the bubble wrap, and leave them stacked against the wall.

“They probably aren’t worth anything, anyway,” I say to Mutti.

“No,” says Mutti. “Nothing at all.”

“But there’s a lot of sentimental value.”

“Ja,” says Mutti. “Very much sentimental value.” And she flicks a long pillar of ash into the ashtray.

When I catch up with Jenkins, he tells me that they’ve arrested a man called Germaine Jones. He was working for a local estate agent.

“He was just the guy who went round putting up the For Sale signs. He had a heap of them in an old white minibus.” I gasp.

“I saw him!”

“You didn’t say anything. When?”

“Well I had no idea – I mean I didn’t suspect… It was the very first day I came up to Stamford Hill to have a nose around. I’d gone into an estate agent to see if I could get any information about the area, and that bloke was bodging about there, coming and going. It must have been him.”

“I bet you didn’t give him a second thought.”

“Not one. He was just in the background. But how did you work it out? I don’t remember him being on your list of possible suspects.” Jenkins looks momentarily embarrassed. Hardly surprising if there’s stuff they don’t want to – or can’t share, I suppose.

“In the end, the white van was the clue. You think there are dozens of them in the area, but each of them criss-crosses the same streets a couple of times a day, so you think there are far more than there really are. It wasn’t all that difficult to track them down, and that was it, really.”

“So no real link to the community, nothing sinister there?”

“Just opportunity, I imagine.”

I congratulate DI Jenkins, and we shake hands. I’d like to give him a hug, but that would be unprofessional in the extreme. Walking out of the station into “Stokey” High Street, it’s still going round in my head. It was just some regular guy. Well, a regular weirdo anyway. That’s real. Not like a TV drama where the killer turns out to be one of the cast members who you’ve already been ploddingly introduced to, and whose motive is suddenly revealed by a clever twist of the plot. But this is real life. You couldn’t have guessed. There was no conspiracy. Just one of those awful things that happen, and Bruchi was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, stupid bloody cliché that it is.