June 2012
Adrian sat on a hard plastic chair in the waiting area of Kentish Town police station. He had a meeting booked with DI Ian Mickelson at 10:15 a.m. and it was currently 10:25 a.m. In his hands he had his laptop zipped into a rubberized envelope and a print-off of the e-mails that Luke had given him upon his breathless arrival at Caroline’s on Saturday afternoon.
He had no idea what this might achieve. There had been no criminal investigation into Maya’s death; the coroner’s verdict plus two witness statements and a toxicology report had seen to that. Death by misadventure. She’d drunk too much. She’d fallen under a bus. These things happen.
DI Ian Mickelson finally appeared in the doorway. He was tall, as tall as Adrian, but young and remarkably good-looking. He apologized and apologized again; he shook Adrian’s hand and then he led him to a small interview room, where he directed a younger plain-clothed policeman to get them both some tea.
“So,” he began, glancing down at a notebook in his hand, “this is . . . cyber-bullying? Yes?”
“Well, yes, sort of. My wife, Maya, she died in April last year. She got knocked down by a night bus on Charing Cross Road.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“Yes,” said Adrian, “and, well, the circumstances of her death always struck me as totally out of character. I mean, she was drunk, for one. Eight times over. Enough to kill her. She was tiny. And not only that but drinking alone, it appears. Or at least none of her friends ever came forward to say they’d been with her. So, we must assume . . .” He lost his momentum for a second, imagining again the sheer wretchedness of Maya drinking vodka shots on her own. “Anyway”—he brought himself back—“Maya died, we buried her, we tried to get on with our lives and then my son came to live with me, just over a week ago. He was using my laptop on Saturday. And he found a folder, hidden somewhere in the bowels of my home drive, filled with pages of these . . .”
He passed the papers across the table to DI Mickelson, who pulled them closer to himself with the tips of his big fingers and cleared his throat. Adrian watched him, silently, monitoring his facial expressions for signs of shock and distaste.
A few moments later, DI Mickelson pushed the papers away from himself an inch or two, again with his fingertips, and leaned back in his chair. He pulled a breath in through his teeth and said, “Very unpleasant. Very unpleasant indeed.”
“So,” said Adrian, “what do you think? Is there anything we can do?”
“Well, yes, we can certainly look into this. I assume you have the original e-mails?” He nodded at Adrian’s laptop.
“Well, no,” he replied. “It looks like Maya deleted them all. I’m not exactly a technical whiz kid but I’ve had a root about, and I can’t find the originals anywhere. Just these cut-and-pasted copies. But it’s all definitely connected. I mean, look”—he pointed at the last e-mail—“right there. April the eighteenth, that was the day before she died. And there were no other e-mails from this person. I went straight into Maya’s e-mail account after her death, looking for clues, you know, and this person, this Dear Bitch person, never showed their face again. Clear evidence that they were involved somehow in Maya’s death.”
“Yes,” said DI Mickelson, running his fingertips around a button on his bright white polo shirt. “I can absolutely see that there must be some connection. But I’ve looked at the files, Mr. Wolfe, and whichever way I look at it, nobody was directly responsible for killing your wife. Two separate people saw her fall into the path of the bus; it was three thirty in the morning; the streets were virtually empty. If there’d been another person involved, the witnesses would have seen it. The bus driver would have seen it. Someone would have seen it. So while I can look into this for you, open a file, see if we can track this person down, I’m not sure we’ll be able to use it to open an inquiry into your wife’s death. It would be a separate crime. Assuming”—he looked directly at Adrian—“we can get anything out of your laptop to lead us to this person. As it stands, without any hard data,” he sighed, “these could just be a creative-writing exercise.”
Adrian flinched at these words.
“Leave it with me.” DI Mickelson tapped the edge of the laptop with his fingertips, signifying that the meeting had reached its natural conclusion. “I can get someone to have a look at this over the next twenty-four hours; you can come back for it tomorrow. We’ll call you.”
“Oh,” said Adrian, clutching the arms of his chair, bringing himself up to standing. “Right.”
“We’ll just need your password, if you’re happy to let us have it.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He dictated it to the DI, who scribbled it down on his notepad. “I guess if I can’t trust you lot with my password, we’re all doomed.”
Ian Mickelson looked up at him, half-amused, and said, “Yes. Indeed.”
And then he left, emerging into an unexpectedly hot Kentish Town, feeling strangely euphoric. Something was happening. The events of April 19, 2011, were taking some kind of form. For so long it had felt like a sick joke, a hiccup in the space-time continuum. Maya, walking in front of a bus eight times over the limit when she should have been lying next to him in bed. It lacked context. It lacked depth. It simply was not supposed to have happened. And now, maybe, he could start to shade it in, make it look like something he could comprehend.
And he knew, he just knew, that beautiful, glittering, disappearing Jane had something to do with it.