She’d had large prints made of some of the crime scene photographs, and with these she formed a collage on her wall reproducing the display on Marion’s pinboard. Was this something she should follow up? Until the woman’s picture disappeared she would have said it was, literally, academic. It occurred to her that she could construct her own version of this, with the images of the people involved in Marion’s death. She sorted through her papers and began to stick their photographs-Keith Rafferty’s stark police file photo, a brooding image of Anthony da Silva from the back of his Rossetti book, a snap of Nigel Ogilvie from his own phone camera, looking owlishly startled, and, at the centre, the black and white photograph of Marion herself. Was there some sort of parallel here?
She gathered up her file and noticed her bag in the far corner of the room, still only half unpacked from the weekend. It seemed a long time ago now. She thought again of Guy Hamilton, in Dubai or Qatar or wherever it was, and at precisely that moment, as if by induction, her phone rang and with a jolt she heard his voice.
‘Kathy, hi. It’s Guy. Guy Hamilton, from Prague? Is this a bad time?’
‘No… no, not at all, Guy. How are you? Are you in the Gulf?’
‘No, they delayed the trip for a few days. I’m just waiting, twiddling my thumbs. I wondered if you felt like going out for a drink or something.’
‘Sure. When?’
‘Well, now, if you’re free.’
‘Okay… yes! That would be good.’
‘Great. You live in Finchley, right? I’ll come and pick you up. What’s the address?’
She told him and hung up, feeling her cheeks burning. Then she jumped to her feet and started to get ready.
When he pressed the buzzer she took the lift down to the ground-floor lobby, and saw him waiting on the other side of the glass doors, stroking the ginger cat that was curling round his ankles. He was wearing the soft suede jacket she remembered from Prague. He looked up as she opened the door, and they grinned at each other and exchanged a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘I think she likes me,’ he said, and it took Kathy a second to realise he meant the cat.
‘She belongs to Jock, the manager. Basically she vets everyone who calls.’
He led her to a little Porsche parked near the gate, and when he said he didn’t know the area she directed him to a wine bar she thought would be all right, not too far away. As he drove they tentatively re-established contact, feeling different now on home ground. He was quiet, grateful that she had been free at such short notice when he’d been at a loose end, waiting to go away.
He corrected himself when they settled themselves in the bar. He hadn’t meant that he’d called her because he was at a loose end. The fact was that he’d intended to do that anyway, but assumed he wouldn’t be able to until after this trip.
‘Same here,’ Kathy said, feeling unexpected pleasure at the confession. ‘I was going to call you.’
‘Oh, great! Well… cheers.’
They talked about the weekend, casting it in a retrospective glow that reflected on their evening now, warming them with shared intimacy as Kathy remembered the characters they’d met at Rusty’s show and Guy recalled the one with the dark glasses, falling over the dustbins outside.
‘I’ve been so flat out since I got back,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘Busy time, eh?’
‘Always.’
‘The same case? The girl who was poisoned?’
‘That’s right. I should have moved on, but I can’t seem to shake it off.’
‘But it was suicide, didn’t Nicole say?’
Kathy hadn’t realised that Nicole had been talking about it. ‘That’s what it looked like, but…’
‘You’re not so sure?’
Kathy shrugged.
‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘Reason tells you that you’ve got the answer, but it doesn’t feel right, eh? I get that all the time.’
‘But surely, as a structural engineer, you have the maths to tell you if you’re right or not.’
‘I wish. No, you have the maths to tell you if it’ll work, but is it the best answer? Is there another way of looking at it you haven’t thought of?’
‘That’s exactly right. And I think Marion was struggling with the same problem.’ She told him about Marion’s pinboard, its network of relationships, and how she felt she needed to do a similar thing.
‘But you’ll have computer programs for that sort of thing, in the police, don’t you? I’ve seen it on TV, the murder wall, glowing in gothic darkness.’
She laughed. ‘Yes, we have one of those, but I need something at home, that I can think about over a glass of red.’
‘We have programs we can put on our laptops, for analysing complex relationships of things-people, cash, construction events. I use that sort of thing all the time.’
‘Maybe I need someone like you to give me a few lessons,’ she said.
‘I think you do.’ He grinned.
They talked some more about his job with a big international firm of engineers, based near the BT tower. He also began to open up about himself, his family in Esher, mentioning a three-year relationship that had recently ended.
‘How about you?’
Kathy hesitated. ‘It tends to be difficult, with the job. The last two men in my life’-no three, she thought, God -‘were police officers, and that made it easier in a way…’
‘But also like living over the shop?’ he offered. ‘Yeah, I had a girlfriend in the office once and it was a bit claustrophobic. Bloody difficult actually, when things went pear-shaped.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, remembering.
‘Maybe you need to branch out a bit. Sample some other profession.’
He was right, she thought. Time for a change. The others hadn’t done her much good.
After midnight she began to stifle yawns, and he drove her home. ‘Listen,’ he said as they got out of the car and walked to the glass door, ‘I could show you some of the software we use for creating networks. We could download it onto your laptop and you could work out your own pattern, like Marion’s. If you’re busy I could just drop a disk into your letterbox…’ He stopped and stared at the bank of letterboxes that was built in next to the door. She followed his gaze and saw what looked like a cat’s tail protruding from one of the slots.
‘That’s my box,’ she said.
‘It looks…’ They went closer. ‘Isn’t that your manager’s cat? How did she manage to get in there?’ There was no way the cat could have squeezed through the opening.
‘It’s a joke,’ Kathy said. ‘Jock’s always fooling around.’
But she felt uneasy as she opened the door and they went into the hallway, from which the residents had access to the backs of their boxes. She pulled her keys from her bag, but already she’d seen the trickle of dark liquid oozing from the lip of hers. She slipped the key in the lock, swung the small door open, and then jumped back as a cascade of bloody offal spilled out onto the floor.
‘Aww!’ Guy gagged at her side as the sickly smell hit them. ‘What the?’
The bloody mess was all over the floor and the back of the other boxes-and her shoes, Kathy noticed.
‘Is it Halloween or something?’ Guy said. ‘Is it kids? Tell me that’s not the cat.’
As if in answer, something slowly slid forward out of the box and tumbled to the floor. It was the rear end of a cat, its hips and two legs, dragging behind it the ginger tail.
They stared at it in horrified silence for a moment, then Kathy pulled out her phone and rang a number. ‘Jock? It’s Kathy Kolla from 1203. I’m in the front lobby. I think you should come.’