I stumbled in through the front door and turned on the hall light. There was a letter on the doormat. I picked it up and looked at the handwriting. I didn’t recognize it. Neat black italics: Ms. Nadia Blake. I slid my finger under the gummed flap and slid out the letter.
FOUR
“Did he ransack the flat as well?”
“What’s that?”
Links gestured at the mess, the cushions on the floor, the papers piled up on the carpet.
“No,” I said. “It’s just me. I’ve been a bit busy. I’m going to deal with it.”
The detective looked nonplussed for a moment, as if he had just woken up and wasn’t exactly sure where he was.
“Er, Miss er…”
“Blake.”
“Yes, Miss Blake. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
I rummaged around and found an ashtray, carved, as it happened, in the shape of the island of Ibiza. I suddenly started worrying about possible drug connotations, but Detective Chief Inspector Links apparently had more urgent things on his mind. He didn’t look a well man. I’ve got an uncle who’s had three heart attacks and still smokes, even though he has difficulty exerting enough suction to keep the cigarette alight. And a friend of Max’s is recovering from a major nervous breakdown that involved him being institutionalized. That was a year ago but he still talks in the quavery voice of somebody trying not to cry. Links reminded me of both of them. Watching him light his cigarette was an exercise in suspense. His fingers shook so much that he could barely get the match together with the end of the cigarette, and then only for an inadequate microsecond. He looked as if he were trying to light it in the crow’s nest of a North Sea trawler rather than in my relatively draft-free living room.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Can I get you something? Would you like some tea?”
Links started to speak but was seized with a fit of bronchitic coughing that sounded very painful. All he could do was shake his head.
“Some honey and lemon?”
He carried on shaking. He took a dirty-looking handkerchief from his side pocket and wiped his eyes. When he spoke it was in quite a low voice, so I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying.
“It’s a matter of…” He paused for a moment. He kept losing the thread of what he was saying. “Of establishing access. That is, who has access.”
“Yes,” I said wearily. “You already said that. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to over one sick letter. It’ll be a big job. I have people to stay quite often. My boyfriend was here a lot. There are people in and out all the time. I was just away for a couple of months and a girlfriend of mine stayed here. Apparently it was virtually open house while she was here.”
“Where is she now?” Links asked in what was not much more than a miserable gasp.
“I think she’s in Prague. She was doing some work there on her way back to Perth.”
Links looked round at his colleague. The other policeman, Detective Inspector Stadler, looked a better insurance risk than Links. A bit wasted maybe, in an oddly attractive way. He was just completely impassive. He had straight hair combed back over his head, prominent cheekbones, and dark eyes, which he kept focused on me every second as if I were very very interesting but in a slightly odd way-I felt more like a car crash than a woman. Now he spoke for the first time:
“Have you any idea who the note may have come from? Have you had anything similar? Any threatening calls? Any strange encounters with people?”
“Oh, endless strange encounters,” I said. Links perked up and looked very slightly less like one of the undead. “My job involves going into different houses every week. I should explain that I’m not a burglar.” They didn’t smile at all. Not remotely. “Me and my partner, we entertain at children’s parties. The people you meet-honestly, you wouldn’t believe it. I can tell you that being hit on by the father of the five-year-old you’ve just done a show for while the mother is in the kitchen lighting the candles on the cake-well, it lowers your view of human nature.”
Links stubbed out his cigarette, which he’d only just half smoked, and lit another.
“Miss, erm…” He looked down at his notebook. “Miss, erm.” He seemed to be having trouble reading his notes. “Erm, Blake. We have, erm, reason to believe that, currently, or as of the more recent, er, months, there may have been, er, other women also targeted by this person.” He kept darting glances toward Stadler, as if in search of moral support. “So one aim of our inquiries will be to establish, or, that is, to attempt to establish, possible connections between them.”
“Who are they?”
Links coughed again. Stadler made no attempt to fill in for him. He just sat and stared at me.
“Well,” he said finally, “it may not be appropriate, as of this stage of the inquiry, to, erm, furnish precise details. It may hinder aspects of the investigation.”
“Are you worried I might try to get in touch with them?”
Links took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. I looked across at Stadler. For the first time he wasn’t looking back. He seemed to be finding something of great interest in a notebook.
“We’ll keep you as in touch with our progress as we can,” Links said.
“Investigation?” I said. “It’s just a letter.”
“It’s important to take these matters seriously. Also, we have a psychologist, a Dr. Grace Schilling, who is an expert on, er… She should be here”-he looked at his watch-“at any minute, really.”
There was a silence.
“Look,” I said. “I’m not stupid. I had a break-in about a year ago-well, nothing was taken. I think I disturbed them. But it took the police about a day to get here and they did sod-all about it. Now I get a single nasty letter and it’s a major operation. What’s going on? Don’t you have real grown-up crimes to solve?”
Stadler snapped his notebook shut and put it in his pocket.
“We’ve been accused of not being sufficiently sensitive to offenses targeted against women,” he said. “We take threats of this kind very seriously.”
“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s good, I suppose.”
Dr. Schilling was the kind of woman I rather envied. She’d obviously done really well at school, got fantastic grades, and still looked rather intelligent. She dressed pretty elegantly as well, but even that was in an intelligent sort of way. She had this long blond hair that looked great but that she’d obviously pinned up in about three and a half seconds to show that she didn’t take it all too seriously. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d catch standing on her head in front of a group of screaming tots. If I’d known she was coming I really would have tidied up the flat. The only thing that irritated me was that she had this air of extremely serious, almost sad, concern when she addressed me, as if she were presenting a religious TV program.
“I understand you’ve been in a relationship which ended,” she said.
“I can tell you that that letter wasn’t written by Max. For all sorts of reasons, including the fact that he would have trouble composing a letter to the milkman. Anyway, he was the one that walked out.”
“All the same, that might mean you were in a vulnerable state.”
“Well, a pissed-off state, maybe.”
“How tall are you, Nadia?”
“Don’t rub it in. I try not to think about it. Just a little over five foot. An emotionally vulnerable dwarf. Is that the point you’re trying to make? You should be all right, then.”
She didn’t even smile.