Steven picked up a little book of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work and moved through it until he found the one that had been Lisa’s favourite. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ He lingered over the last line, ‘And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death’, and felt a lump come to his throat. He replaced the book and noticed there was a triangular gap a little further along, as if one had been removed, so that the books to the right of it had flopped back. He looked around the room and noticed a small blue-covered volume lying on the lamp table beside the chair that Ann Danby had used most, judging by the letter and newspaper racks beside it.
Steven went over, picked it up and saw that The Sonnets of William Shakespeare had been her last reading companion. He checked for a bookmark, to see if he could find the last poem she’d read, but didn’t find one. He did, however, note with some surprise that the flyleaf had been ripped out. It had not been cut out, because a jagged remnant of paper had been left, as if it had been done in anger.
Puzzled as to why such a meticulous woman would do such a thing, he looked for the missing page in the waste-paper basket but found nothing. Then he noticed a piece of paper lying on the window ledge. It had obviously been crumpled up at one point, but had been smoothed out in order to make examination possible. He suspected that the police had found it on the floor but had assigned no significance to it. It was the missing flyleaf. There was some writing in light-blue ink on it. It said simply, ‘My love for ever,’ and was signed ‘V’. The initial had been done with quite a flourish, the sign of an extrovert personality perhaps?
Steven sat down for a moment and wondered why there had been no mention of a boyfriend before. Had this been an oversight or… a secret? A secret lover might explain a lot, but why had she kept him secret? Could V be a woman? Not everyone was comfortable with openly gay relationships, even in these enlightened times.
Steven remembered the policeman’s recollection of Ann’s last words, ‘All men are bastards.’ Not terribly original but now it made sense, and it was conveniently significant because it suggested strongly that V was a man. The fact that the relationship had been kept secret also suggested that he might be married, but, whatever the personal details, finding out the identity of V was now going to be a priority, particularly if it should turn out that he had been on the Ndanga flight.
Steven put the book back in its place on the shelf and glanced quickly through the other titles. There were a number of biographies, mainly of politicians both past and present, half a dozen reference books, a number of illustrated books about French Impressionist painters and fiction ranging from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before. The right-hand corner of the very bottom shelf was given over to books on hill-walking. Lakeland, Snowdonia and the Scottish mountains were all featured, but there was also a guide to trekking in Nepal. Why had there been no mention of a love of outdoor pursuits in the file on Ann Danby? Or had she kept that a secret, too? Perhaps this had been an interest that she had shared with V: it might even account for the weekends away. On the other hand, it could be that she had just been an armchair enthusiast for the outdoor life.
The question was resolved when he found hill-walking gear in the walk-in wardrobe in the main bedroom. There were two expensive shell jackets, one in red and one in blue Gore-Tex fabric, and two matching fleeces hanging on the rail beside a range of good-quality business and leisure clothing. A pair of Scarpa mountain boots sat on the floor with boot stockings stuck inside them. A Berghaus rucksack was propped up against the back wall, along with two Leki walking poles.
The smaller of the two bedrooms had been used by Ann as a study, and featured a pine desk and a wide range of computer equipment. There were two small metal filing cabinets and a swivel chair in light-cream leather with a matching footstool. Steven didn’t like the thought of doing it, but he would have to search the desk drawers for more information about Ann Danby’s life, not least for clues as to who V might be.
The fact that she had been an almost obsessively tidy person proved to be a big help. All her bank and credit card statements were filed neatly together in an A4 binder. There was a separate binder for household bills and another for mortgage and insurance details. Within minutes, he was able to establish that Ann Danby had had no money worries. Her salary, paid directly into her cheque account on the thirtieth of each month, had been more than sufficient to cover all outgoing expenses and had left enough for a monthly transfer of five hundred pounds into a savings account with the Halifax Building Society. This account currently showed a balance of something over fifteen thousand pounds. In addition, she had tended to pay off her credit-card accounts, three in all, in full every month.
Steven paid particular attention to the credit-card statements because of what the doorman had said about Ann going away for the weekends. He could not, however, find any pattern of spending to support this or give any clue as to where she had gone. Did this mean that her trips had been connected with work, in which case they would have been paid for through a company account? Another possibility was that someone else — V for example — had been paying.
He found a leather-bound diary in the bottom desk drawer and opened it hopefully, only to find that it was merely an appointments diary. Better than nothing, he reassured himself, and started looking through it to see if the weekends featured. He found that they did, but without any detaiclass="underline" Ann had simply written in the letter V approximately every third or fourth weekend. There had, however, not been any weekend featuring V for the last six weeks then suddenly V popped up on a weekday, the Thursday during the week before Ann Danby died. He had been pencilled in for p.m. and she had put three concentric rings around the initial.
Steven felt a small surge of excitement as he realised that a meeting on that particular day would make V a possible suspect for having given Ann the virus. The subsequent incubation period would have been about right. But what had happened to V himself? Why hadn’t he gone down with the disease? Steven decided there was no point in wasting time worrying about that at the moment. His first priority must be to find out if there had been any passengers on the Ndanga flight with a first name starting with V. The passenger manifest had not been included in the Sci-Med file, so he requested the information by mobile phone, asking that the list be e-mailed to him as soon as possible.
The sound of a key being inserted in the front door broke Steven’s concentration. He had been led to believe that the police and health authorities had no further interest in the apartment. He was about to get up from his seat at the desk to investigate when an elderly couple appeared at the room door.
‘Who the devil are you?’ exclaimed the man, clearly startled to have found him there. The woman’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with alarm.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Steven, realising the couple must be Ann Danby’s parents. He felt more of an intruder than ever. ‘I’m afraid there’s been some kind of a mix-up. I’m Dr Steven Dunbar from the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I’m part of the investigating team. The police gave me your key. I understood that you wouldn’t be picking it up until tomorrow. I had no idea that you’d be coming here today.’
‘The police gave us a key yesterday,’ said Mr Danby. ‘It was the spare that we were going to pick up tomorrow. It’s just one damned misunderstanding after another with you people,’ he complained. ‘What more is there to investigate, for God’s sake? Haven’t my wife and I suffered enough?’