‘This is very inconvenient.’ Mila Walsh, Paige Hargreaves’ downstairs neighbour was forty-four, small of stature, and clearly all heart. Her demeanour was as chilly as the décor in her sparsely furnished home. Unlike the flat upstairs, it was newly decorated and immaculate. ‘When are your people going to be finished upstairs?’
‘It’ll be some time yet, I’m afraid. This is a murder investigation.’
‘I understand that. But I’m not used to having people traipsing up and down the stairs. It’s very noisy and disruptive. Not to mention waiting for you to finally get around to talking to me.’ She checked the gold watch that peeped out from under the cuff of her immaculate white shirt. ‘I’ve had to rearrange several meetings this morning already. My clients are important people.’
‘What is it you do?’
‘I’m an independent financial advisor. I tell rich people how to look after their money.’ She glowered at me from under a millimetre-perfect black fringe. ‘You probably think that’s not a worthy job.’
‘I can think of worse ones.’
A thump from upstairs made her look up; something heavy had fallen to a chorus of cheers and muffled applause. If it turned out to be a breakage, someone would be buying doughnuts for the team.
‘They need to be more careful. They’ll crack the plaster if they carry on like that.’
‘I’m sure it sounded worse than it was,’ I lied. ‘There isn’t a lot of room up there so they’ve been tripping over each other. But really, they’re very good at what they do.’
‘I just wish they weren’t doing it in my house.’
They weren’t technically in Mila’s house, I thought, but in the flat above it. Mila’s home was a maisonette that occupied the bottom two floors of the house, the one raised slightly above street level and the basement. At some point a separate door and staircase had been installed so the occupant of the top-floor flat had their own entrance, though the partition was paper-thin and every footstep on the stairs echoed through Mila’s stark rooms. All the surfaces seemed to be hard, even in the sitting room I could see through an open door. I had not been invited to sit down on the firm-looking sofa so I couldn’t say for sure, but it appeared to have the cuddly consistency of a block of granite. At the end of the hall was the main bedroom. Downstairs, she’d explained, were the kitchen, bathroom and a tiny second bedroom.
‘Do you know who owns the flat upstairs? I’d like to speak to the landlord.’
She snorted. ‘Good luck with that. I have an email address for him but he never seems to check it. He lives in Dubai. The flat belonged to his uncle, I think, and he left it to him when he died. It must have been five or six years ago. He takes absolutely no interest in it. All he does is pocket the rent. We share the freehold but forget trying to get anything fixed.’
‘Did Paige find that frustrating?’
‘I don’t think she noticed.’ Mila looked up at the ceiling, her mouth tight, as someone walked over our heads with a heavy tread. ‘She used it as a base but she really only slept here, as far as I can tell. She often came home very late – two, three in the morning. The curtains were never open in the morning and I never heard her moving around before I left for work. Speaking of which—’
‘I only have a few more questions,’ I said quickly. ‘Did she have friends over? A boyfriend?’
‘Not that I heard. But I’m generally not here at weekends. I spend quite a bit of time out of London. And I really didn’t keep track of her comings and goings.’ A sigh of disapproval. ‘If I’d known it would lead to this …’
‘Tell me about Paige,’ I said, losing the very small amount of patience I’d had for the woman’s grievances. ‘What was she like?’
‘She seemed completely normal at first. Pleasant. Warm. I had occasion to talk to her about the state of the flat upstairs after she moved in and she seemed quite considerate.’
‘But that changed?’
Mila Walsh gave a tiny shudder. ‘She settled in, I suppose. She was terribly absent-minded about her keys. I had her spare keys for a while but I lost count of the number of times I had to let her into her flat in the middle of the night. She had to have the locks changed four or five times when she claimed to have lost her keys altogether, and then of course they would turn up a day or two later, and she would laugh. It was exceptionally irritating.’
‘Did you complain about her to the landlord?’
She glared at me. ‘I thought about it.’
‘And decided not to … why?’
‘I rarely saw her and she was fairly quiet most of the time. She didn’t keep the same hours as me. She was out in the evenings, and slept in the mornings, and I was away most weekends, so it suited me that she lived upstairs. She didn’t have many visitors. She didn’t even cook much. No loud music.’ A shrug. ‘I don’t know. I was afraid I’d end up with someone worse, I suppose.’
‘When you say she didn’t have visitors, you were out a lot of the time. You wouldn’t have known if she had people here.’
‘No, I suppose not. We were just neighbours, you know. I tried not to bother her much. This is London, after all. We live here so we don’t have to make awkward conversation with strangers,’ Mila said tightly. Her nails and lipstick matched, I saw. I was willing to bet her underwear matched too.
‘Where do you spend your weekends?’
She looked surprised before her whole face softened. ‘With my boyfriend, Harry. Harry Parr.’
She produced the name with the smug air of a poker player revealing their winning hand. If she was waiting for me to recognise the name, she was going to be waiting a long time. I shook my head.
‘He’s an artist. A sculptor. Very successful. He has a place in Kent, in the middle of nowhere.’
It wasn’t a bad life all round, I thought, with her neat little house in a neat little street in pretty Greenwich, her job in the City that paid for the tailored suit and gold watch and the expensive furniture in the artfully bare rooms, and access to a bolthole in Kent. There was quite a contrast between the cluttered upstairs flat and the clean walls and empty space on the floors below.
‘Did you ever go up to Paige’s part of the house when you had keys?’ The change of tack made her jump.
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘Once or twice – to see if she’d left a tap running.’ She gave a tight brittle laugh. ‘I’m a worrier. I found it hard to trust her. I didn’t like the idea of her doing something careless and causing me problems.’
‘We’ll need to take your fingerprints and a DNA sample.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because you’ve been in her flat,’ I explained patiently. ‘It’s routine. We need to be able to rule you out as a suspect. It doesn’t hurt.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ She folded her arms defensively. ‘But I regard it as an invasion of my privacy.’
‘This is a murder investigation. Although you don’t seem too worried about that.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’ She gave a tut of irritation as footsteps thudded on the stairs going up to Paige’s flat. It sounded as if someone was hitting the wall with a hammer. I’d noticed the lack of carpet on the stairs to Paige Hargreaves’ flat but I hadn’t anticipated how annoying it would be for anyone who lived in the same building. It could almost justify Mila’s lack of sympathy for her murdered neighbour.
‘You didn’t report her missing.’
‘Someone else did that. It was nothing to do with me. It wasn’t until you lot came round the last time that it all felt real. Since then, of course, I’ve had to try to disguise the stench of rotting food as best I can.’ She wafted a hand over the three-wicked candle on the sideboard behind her that was filling the air with the scent of green figs. ‘I suppose everything is going to be left up there once you’re finished. It’s been horrible, knowing it’s empty and full of rubbish.’ For the first time, she faltered at the look on my face. ‘But I didn’t touch anything. I left it as it was, I promise. I haven’t gone in since you told me she was missing.’
I was frowning at her, I realised. ‘It’s not that – you said the last time we came round. Are you saying the police were here before?’
‘A detective was here about ten days ago. Of course I spoke to him to find out if he’d heard anything about her. He had a look around to see if she’d left any clues.’ Mila looked confused. ‘Isn’t there a note about this on the file about her disappearance?’
‘There should be.’ There wasn’t, I knew very well. No one had been overly concerned about Paige before parts of her started to wash up on the river shore. She was an adult in full possession of her faculties, without a regular job or dependants and she was able to do whatever she liked. Cutbacks meant there were too many claims on police time to send a detective around to investigate an unexpected absence without any signs of violence. ‘What can you tell me about this detective?’
‘Nothing much. I was home early that day and I ran into him on the doorstep. He was letting himself into the flat.’
‘Did he show you ID?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Do you remember his name? Or what station he was attached to?’
‘His name was John Spencer. I have no idea where he came from.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Like an estate agent.’ She smiled, not pleasantly. ‘Or a police detective, I suppose. Cheap suit, ugly shoes, too much aftershave, too much hair gel.’
I ignored the dig. ‘How old was he?’
‘I didn’t ask.’ She relented. ‘Early thirties?’
‘How long was he here?’
‘Not long. Ten, fifteen minutes.’
‘Did you see him leave?’
She reddened. ‘I happened to glance out of the window, yes. I was curious.’
‘Did he take anything?’
‘Her phone and her laptop, and a lot of paper – files, notebooks, that kind of thing. He put it all in a see-through bag and took it out to his car.’
‘Did you see his car?’
‘No. I thought he was coming back – he’d said he was going to give me his contact details once he’d put everything in the car. But he never came back.’ She checked the time again and sighed irritably. ‘Look, why are you asking me all these questions about him? Surely you can look him up and ask him yourself. There must be a register of detectives. A phone book, at the very least.’
‘If he really was a detective, I could.’
That broke through the carapace of self-absorption at last. She put a hand to her throat. ‘You don’t think … he wasn’t … Could he have been the killer?’
‘I have no idea if he was or not,’ I said. ‘But look at it this way. You survived.’