“DI Clarke?”
The man in the brown windbreaker nursing half a pint of beer looks up. “That’s me. Although I’m not a DI anymore. Just plain Mister. James, if you prefer.” He stands up to shake my hand. At his feet is a grocery bag full of fruit and vegetables. He gestures at the bar. “Can I get you a drink?”
“I’ll get myself one. It’s good of you to meet me.”
“Oh, it’s no bother. I come into town anyway on a Wednesday, for the market.”
I get myself a ginger ale and go back to join him. I’m amazed by how easy it is to track people down these days. A phone call to Scotland Yard had established that Detective Inspector Clarke had retired, which felt like a setback, but simply typing “How do I find a retired police officer?” into a search engine—not Housekeeper, of course—had thrown up an organization called NARPO, the National Association of Retired Police Officers. There was a contact form, so I sent them my request. A reply came back the same day. They couldn’t give out members’ details, but they’d forward my question on.
The man sitting opposite me doesn’t look old enough to be retired. He must guess what I’m thinking because he says, “I was twenty-five years in the police game. Long enough to take my pension, but I haven’t stopped work completely. Me and another ex-detective have a little business installing security alarms. Nothing too pressured, but it’s tidy money. You want to talk about Emma Matthews, I understand?”
I nod. “Please.”
“Are you a relative?”
He’s clearly noted the resemblance. “Not exactly. I’m the current tenant at One Folgate Street.”
“Hmm.” At first glance James Clarke seems like a solid, ordinary bloke, the kind of workingman-made-comfortable who might own a small villa in Portugal beside a golf course. But now I see that his eyes are shrewd and confident. “What exactly do you want to know?”
“I know Emma made some sort of allegation against her former boyfriend, Simon. Not long afterward, she was dead. I’ve heard conflicting explanations as to who or what killed her—depression, Simon, even the man she went on to have a relationship with.” I deliberately don’t mention Edward’s name, in case Clarke picks up on my interest in him. “I’m just trying to shed some light on what happened. Living there, it’s hard not to be curious.”
“Emma Matthews pulled the wool over my eyes,” DI Clarke says flatly. “That didn’t happen to me often as a detective. Almost never, in fact. But there I was, faced with this plausible young woman who said she’d been too scared to report a really unpleasant sexual attack, because the attacker had filmed it on her phone and threatened to send it to all her contacts. I wanted to do something for her. Plus we were under pressure at the time to get rape convictions up. I thought with the evidence we had, for once I’d actually be able to please my bosses, get justice for a victim, and put a nasty piece of trash called Deon Nelson away for a long time into the bargain. Triple whammy. Turned out I was wrong on all three counts. She’d told us a pack of lies from the start.”
“She was a good liar, then?”
“Or I was a middle-aged fool.” He shrugs ruefully. “My Sue had passed away the year before. And this girl, who could have been my daughter…Perhaps I was too trusting. That’s certainly how our internal investigation saw it afterward. Officer coming up to retirement, pretty young woman, his judgment goes haywire. And there was some truth in that. Enough to make me take the retirement a bit early when they suggested it, anyway.”
He takes a long mouthful of his beer. I sip my ginger ale. To me the soft drink screams I’m pregnant, but if he’s noticed, DI Clarke doesn’t mention it. “Looking back, there were things I should have spotted. She ID’d Nelson far too confidently on VIPER, given she said he’d been wearing a balaclava during the assault. As for the accusation against the ex-boyfriend…” He shrugs.
“You don’t believe that either, in hindsight?”
“We didn’t even believe it at the time. It was just her lawyer’s way of getting her off. ‘I felt scared, I can’t be held responsible for what I said.’ It worked, too. Plus the Crown Prosecution Service was none too keen to tell the world in open court what a fool she’d made of us. She had to accept a formal caution for wasting, but it was a slap on the wrist, nothing more.”
“But you still arrested Simon Wakefield after she died.”
“Yes. Well, that was more arse-covering, really. Suddenly there was a possibility we might have been looking at this all wrong. Young woman alleges rape, then admits lying but claims her boyfriend’s a Jekyll and Hyde character who’s violent toward her. Soon after, she’s found dead. If it turns out he did kill her, we’re stuffed. Even if it turns out to be suicide, it doesn’t look like the police treated her very well, does it? Either way, it’s better to be seen to have arrested someone.”
“So you were just going through the motions?”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. That might have been why the high-ups wanted the arrest, but my team did a proper job when we interviewed him. There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest Simon Wakefield had anything to do with Emma’s death. His only mistake was getting involved with her in the first place. And I can hardly blame him for that. Like I said, older and wiser men than him had fallen for her charms.” He frowns. “I’ll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma’s response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that’s not a common reaction.”
“How do you think she died?”
“Two possibilities. One, she killed herself. Out of depression?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. More likely her lies had caught up with her somehow.”
“And the second?”
“The most obvious one.”
I frown. “What’s that?”
“You don’t seem to have considered the possibility that it was Deon Nelson who killed her.”
It’s true—I’ve been so focused on Edward and Simon, the possibility of it being someone else altogether has hardly crossed my mind.
“Nelson was—probably still is, for all I know—a vicious piece of work,” he continues. “He’s got convictions for violence dating back to when he was twelve. When Emma nearly got him convicted with a made-up story, he’d have wanted revenge.” He’s silent for a moment. “Emma said as much, actually. She told us Nelson was making threats against her.”
“Did you investigate them?”
“We logged them.”
“Is that the same thing?”
“She’d been arrested for wasting police time. You think checking out every allegation she made after that was a top priority? It already looked as if we’d been far too quick to charge Nelson with rape in the first place. What with his lawyer alleging racial harassment, there was no way we were going after him again without firm evidence.”
I think. “Tell me about this video, the one on Emma’s phone. How come you mistook it for rape when it was nothing of the sort?”
“Because it was brutal,” he says flatly. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I just can’t see how people can enjoy that kind of thing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-five years’ policing, it’s that you can never understand other people’s sex lives. Young people now, they see this nasty, aggressive porn on the Internet, they think it might be fun to make a video like that on their own phone. Men treating women as objects, women going along with it. Why? It baffles me, it really does. But in Emma’s case, that’s what happened. And with her boyfriend’s best friend, too.”
“Who was that?”
“A man called Saul Aksoy, who worked for the same company Emma did. Nelson’s lawyer got a private investigator to track him down and persuaded him to make a statement. Of course, Aksoy hadn’t broken any laws, but still. What a mess.”
“But if it was Deon Nelson who killed her,” I say, my mind still running on Clarke’s theory, “how did he get into the house?”
“That I don’t know.” Clarke puts down his empty glass. “My bus is in ten minutes. I should go.”
“One Folgate Street has a state-of-the-art security system. That was one of the things Emma liked about it.”
“State-of-the-art?” Clarke snorts. “Maybe ten years ago. These days, we don’t consider anything connected to the Internet high-security. They’re way too easy to hack.”
I suddenly hear Edward’s voice in my head. The shower was on when they found her. She must have been running downstairs with wet feet…
“And why was the shower on?” I say.
Clarke looks confused. “Sorry?”
“The shower—it’s operated by a bangle.” I show him the one on my own wrist. “It recognizes you when you get in and adjusts the water to your personal settings. Then when you get out, it switches itself off again.”
He shrugs. “If you say so.”
“What about the other data from One Folgate Street? The entryphone video and so on? Did you examine that?”
He shakes his head. “By the time she was found, forty-eight hours had passed. The hard drive had wiped itself clean. A lot of security systems do that, to save on disk space. It’s a shame, but there you are.”
“Something happened with the house. That’s got to be part of it.”
“Perhaps. It’s a mystery we’ll never solve now, I suppose.” He stands up and reaches for his grocery bag. I stand too. I’m about to offer him my hand when he surprises me by leaning forward to kiss my cheek. His clothes smell slightly of beer. “Nice to meet you, Jane. And good luck. Frankly I doubt you’ll come across anything we didn’t, but if you do, will you let me know? It still bugs me, what happened to Emma. And not many cases do that.”