In her old flat – her poor old flat – Alice had been used to the distant rumble of traffic, the chatter of pedestrians on the pavement, and most definitely the boom-boom bass of her neighbour upstairs.
The room she’d been given in the Messents’ attic was eerily silent in comparison. But lovely too, she supposed, in its small but perfectly formed way, with its sash window overlooking the trees in the back garden, and its large, comfortable bed with linen in muted greys. The en suite bathroom was the cleanest and most modern Alice had ever used and was stocked with expensive toiletries and the fluffiest of towels.
Perhaps Enya had been similarly impressed at this level of luxury after living wherever she previously had – which certainly hadn’t been The Dorchester, Alice now knew. She hoped she’d at least had a few decent nights’ sleep before her life had been cut short in the deplorable way that it had.
Alice sighed under the heavy duvet and picked up her telephone. It was 2 a.m. She missed her little alarm clock and her own bed. In fact, she missed everything about her old life. Apart from Jinx’s slightly pongy duvet. But even surrounded by all this luxury here, and exhausted from faking her new role as housekeeper, she still couldn’t sleep, her mind anxiously whirring.
She glanced at the little black suitcase she’d brought with her. She’d filled it with essentials after visiting what was left of her flat. The fire chief had been as good as his word and had made the front door secure for her and had left the padlock key for it with Mr Mantis. She could barely believe the devastation she’d witnessed inside.
So many of her lovely little things had been ruined or outright destroyed. And big things too. The ceiling had come down in whacking great clumps of plaster, all over her sofa and ottoman. But what had broken her heart the most was her bookcase face down in the soggy mess. Fortunately, her Christies, being on their own separate case, had been salvageable, and were now holidaying on Jinx’s bookshelves. And her Mrs Beeton tome had been protected by having its own kitchen cupboard. But so much else had been lost.
Mantis himself had been next to useless, somehow managing to stonewall just as much in the flesh as he had done on the phone and online. He’d hidden behind his lawyer again, another odious creature, Alice had learned now she’d finally spoken to him. Alice had been given no option other than to employ – again, at vast expense – her own lawyer to deal with the matter from here on in.
She turned on the night light and picked up her book, but Barney had been right about it. The detective was in the ‘scratching their head phase’, as Alice liked to call it, ruminating on clues and going round in circles. Alice was tempted to skim forward – although she knew she’d miss something vital if she did. Being stuck in the middle was part of the process. Like the point you got to when mixing a cake, when one’s arm was aching and it was tempting to give up, but you still knew that the extra effort to get all the ingredients combined to their proper consistency was going to be worth it in the end.
Alice got up and put on the dressing gown that had been hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Thrusting her hands deep into its pockets, she momentarily wondered whether Enya had worn it and if she might find something she’d left. But they were empty. In fact, the entire suite seemed to have been cleared of all traces of her predecessor. Leaving it now as impersonal as a hotel room.
Solving the real-life crime of who’d killed Enya was looking like it was going to be a lot, lot harder than Alice had anticipated. How she wished she could just set up her whiteboard in here and somehow magically figure it out. But living in the very building in which Enya had been murdered was having the reverse effect of the one she’d expected, blurring the details, rather than clarifying them.
She needed clues. Clues, that, if she were in a crime novel, would almost certainly turn out to be right under her nose. Detective Rigby would already have searched this room with his team, of course. But Jinx was right. How thorough had they really been?
Turning on all the lights, she surveyed the room. Agatha growled from where she was curled up on the little chair in the corner, clearly annoyed that her beauty sleep had been disturbed, as Alice set about searching under the bed, and through the empty wardrobes and drawers.
Finding nothing, she turned her attention to the cubbyhole shelving opposite the bed. Many of the books on display in the compartments were the kind of random second-hand hardbacks that Alice already knew interior designers bought as job lots.
What was the name of that delightful young designer Alice had once got in for one of her clients? Ah, yes. Belinda Monteray. She’d been all the rage ten years ago and Alice had once accompanied her to a car boot sale to buy books just like these – ones with stylish spines and covers that people hardly ever opened, but that added an artistic or cultured feel to a room.
But whilst these books might once have been on proud display in, say, the drawing room downstairs, they were now evidently deemed sufficiently out of fashion to have been relegated to the staff quarters.
One by one – well, you never could be too thorough, could you? – Alice pulled each out and examined them, flicking through their unloved pages, rather hoping that a clue might simply fall out and land in her lap.
It didn’t. She’d almost given up hope of finding anything interesting, when she noticed a clutch of what she at first thought were clothes shop labels simply staring right up at her from the floor beside the little wicker bin, next to a lollipop stick – all presumably spilt there by whoever had last cleaned this room.
The labels turned out, in actual fact, to be ticket stubs. And for London museums, of all things. The top one was for the Tate Modern and was dated … just after Enya had started working here. Then there was one for Tate Britain a day later. Then one for the Victoria & Albert Museum dated just a couple of days after that.
What to make of them? Had Enya simply been an art fan? Or maybe she’d been meeting someone? A friend — or maybe even a lover? Alice thought, her pulse now starting to race. Because it hadn’t occurred to her before, but someone as attractive as Enya could hardly have been short of attention, could she?
Blimey, what if she did have a partner and they didn’t even know what had happened to her? Or what if they did? What if they’d somehow been complicit in her death?
Whoa! What if what if what if … What if, Alice reprimanded herself, instead of letting your imagination run away with you, you simply try sticking to the facts instead?
Doing just that, she put on her glasses and turned the Tate Britain stub over to see if there was any other information that she’d missed, like perhaps some credit card details printed there. But whilst there was nothing like that, which might reveal Enya’s true identity, her heart did skip a little beat, as she noticed that something was written there, in tiny handwriting.
Trying to decipher the slantways scrawled words, she could just about hazard they weren’t written in English, but beyond that she was flummoxed. Even when she used her phone’s magnifying glass app, the handwriting was too difficult to read. Then she remembered — Barney had that whopping great illuminated magnifying glass he used for making his matchstick models and examining all those stamps he was obsessed with collecting. That would probably do the trick. And he’d once worked for GCHQ, so he’d probably cracked all sorts of codes. Surely he’d have no trouble with some scrawled handwriting like this?
Alice called up Enya’s CV on her phone, to see if she’d included painting or art history amongst her interests, but she hadn’t. Plus, Alice promptly reminded herself, this whole CV was probably no more than a pack of fibs.
But what if – go on, surely she was allowed just one more? – the reason for Enya’s interest in art was not just personal, but something to do with the Messents themselves?