As she drove the now familiar route between Borough High Street Station and Park Street, Gemma glanced at the dashboard clock and gave a little groan of dismay. It was already midafternoon. She should be home; the boys would be back from their outing with Wesley, and she’d let the weekend slip by without doing any of the things necessary to prepare for the coming week. Tomorrow would be especially difficult, as she planned to take the afternoon off for the court hearing.
“Are you okay?” asked Doug Cullen, beside her.
“The boys will be home on their own by now. I never meant to abandon them for the entire day.”
“If you need to go, go,” he said, with his usual earnestness. “I’ll do the search, then wait for Duncan. No one could expect you to do more on this case-”
“And I should mind my own business, at least according to Detective Inspector Bell.” She softened the words with a smile. “Can’t say I blame her.” She wasn’t used to encountering such obvious hostility from other female officers, and she was surprised by how uncomfortable it made her feel.
“She’s all right, really,” Doug said quietly. “When you get to know her a bit.”
When she glanced at him, he was studying the spots on her windscreen with great deliberation. Gemma seemed to remember hearing him say the same thing once about Stella Fairchild-Priestly, but with less conviction.
“I suppose you’ve not had much time for Stella this weekend,” she ventured, her curiosity roused.
“She’s away. Another country house party.” Doug didn’t meet her eyes. “And I suppose I’m in the doghouse for not joining her.”
Gemma had always wondered what the very polished Stella saw in a lowly detective sergeant who didn’t share her social aspirations, but if he was developing an interest in prickly Maura Bell, he might be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. “Doug,” she began, meaning to deliver the standard warning about the pitfalls of relationships on the job, then realizing how absurd that would sound coming from her. And besides, Doug and Maura didn’t normally work on the same patch, and who better to understand the demands of the job than another copper?
Having reached Park Street, she pulled up the car in front of Laura Novak’s house and said instead, “I want to come in with you, Doug, just for a bit. But thanks for the offer.” She’d come too far not to see for herself if the house held any clues that would tell them what had happened to Laura and Harriet.
Nor could she go home until she’d done one other thing. Fanny Liu would have to be told that her flatmate was alive, and that she might have abducted a child.
Gemma knocked and rang the bell, then stood listening for a response. The air was hazy and still, the neighborhood quiet, as if its inhabitants had all decamped for fresher climes. She heard the rustle of Doug’s jacket as he shifted beside her, and the quick rhythm of her own breath, but there was no sound from within the flat. Next door, the curtains were drawn.
Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, Gemma put the key in the lock and called out, “Police! We’re coming in.” Her voice echoed back at her, an intrusion into the close silence, and she felt a bit silly.
The door swung open easily and they stepped into the hall. The house smelled stale and a little musty, as if no one had been home in several days, but there was no dreaded hint of decay.
Gemma let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d held.
“No body, then,” said Doug, and she knew he’d been thinking the same thing. “There’d be no question, in this warm weather.”
“I thought, when Laura left Harriet with the sitter on Thursday night and lied about having to work, that she might have meant-”
“To kill herself?” Doug’s eyes widened behind his round glasses. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I was thinking more along the lines of Novak having conveniently forgotten to tell us he’d offed his wife when he stopped by on Friday morning.”
Gemma stooped to gather the mail scattered on the tile floor. There was nothing more personal than a few advertising circulars and credit card solicitations – one still addressed to Dr. Antony Novak – and a couple of bills. The postmarks bore Thursday’s and Friday’s dates, so Gemma assumed the mail represented both Friday’s and Saturday’s deliveries.
On a narrow table against the wall, more mail was neatly stacked, but when Gemma examined it she found only envelopes marked “Resident” and a few pizza delivery menus.
An umbrella stand in the corner contained a large black umbrella and a cricket bat, while a few pegs mounted on the wall held a woman’s fleecy jacket and a smaller Gap anorak in dark green. Harriet’s, Gemma thought, her heart contracting. Kit had one that was identical.
Doug moved forward, opening doors, peering into empty rooms, and Gemma followed. The house was long and narrow, with the same beautiful proportions and detailing as the neighbors’ next door, but here no effort had been made to highlight the period features. A sitting room faced the front of the house, then came a dining room, then the kitchen – all neat enough, but none showing any evidence of visual or sensual flair. The furniture was of good quality, and a few pleasant prints were hung haphazardly on the magnolia walls, but Gemma saw little that reflected a personal life. The house obviously belonged to a woman whose interest lay in other things. For the first time, Gemma wondered about Laura Novak’s background. There were no family photos, not even of Harriet.
“No sign of a struggle or of a hurried exit,” she said as they reached the kitchen. Nor was there any obvious sign that a child inhabited the house. The refrigerator, unlike her own, held no school reports or drawings, and there was no sign of a calendar marked with family schedules. “Look, Doug,” Gemma added, frowning, as she drew closer to the sink. “This is odd, don’t you think? For a woman this tidy, she’s not done the washing up.”
Two plates, two glasses, and a saucepan had been stacked and hastily rinsed. The pot still bore traces of what looked like marinara sauce, and there was a very faint smell of spoiled food.
“Maybe she meant to come back and finish up?” suggested Doug. “That’s what you do, when you’re in a hurry. Or at least that’s what I do.”
Was this Thursday evening’s supper? wondered Gemma. Mrs. Bletchley said Harriet had already eaten when she arrived. Had Laura meant to come straight back after she’d dropped Harriet at the sitter’s? And if so, what had prevented her?
“Let’s have a look upstairs,” she suggested, and let Doug lead the way back to the stairs in the entrance hall. The first floor contained two bedrooms and a bath, the front-facing room obviously Laura’s. It was more feminine than Gemma had expected, papered in pale blue and cream, with cream curtains at the window and a cream quilt on the double bed. The bed was made, but a blouse and trousers had been left tossed across a chair. Beneath the chair lay a pair of shoes, one turned over on its side. There was no sign of packing, or indication that anything had been removed from the room or the wardrobe.
A white-painted dressing table held a few cosmetics and a hairbrush, and in a silver frame, a black-and-white photo of a toddler with curly dark hair. Harriet, wondered Gemma, or Laura herself?
Lifting the brush with a gloved hand, Gemma saw hair nestled in the bristles. “Doug-”
“I’ve got it,” he said, opening the evidence collection bag he’d brought with him and taking the brush from her.
Gemma thought of all the times she and her sister had sat at their mother’s dressing table, using her hairbrush and trying out her lipsticks. “We can’t be sure that some of the hair doesn’t belong to Harriet,” she said.
Using a pair of tweezers, Doug carefully transferred the dark, curling strands into the bag. “It should be a close enough match, regardless.”