Dead Gorgeous (A Mystery for D.I. Costello) (4 page)

Angela looked at Sandra Hodges for a moment and recognized what she had seen many times before in people caught up in murder. The shock was beginning to wear off. Very soon now, Sandra would realize the time had come for her fifteen minutes of fame and she would make the most of it. From this Angela deduced that she hadn’t been overly close to her flatmate.
Hmm,
she thought.
I can see you can’t wait to point the finger, Sandra. This could be interesting; but I’ll set the pace of this interview, thank you very much.

“That’s an intriguing statement and I’ll come back to it,” she said. “But I’ll need to get a few preliminaries out of the way first.”

A hint of disappointment flared and died in Sandra’s eyes. “Yeah,” she nodded.

“Where were you this afternoon?”

“I… I was with my boyfriend, at the gym.”

Angela noted the curious hesitancy in the way she said these words. “May I have your boyfriend’s name?”

“Darren. Darren Carpenter.”

“And where is the gym?”

“It’s the Tone-Up Gym in the High Street.”

So, less than two minutes away
, thought Angela. “What time did you come home?”

“Four o’clock.”

“Was Darren with you?”

Again she detected the curious hesitancy in Sandra’s voice. “No,” she said.

Angela made another note and looked up at Sandra. “Did Darren drop you off outside the house or did you leave him at the gym?”

“I left him at the gym.” The hesitant note had completely disappeared.
Hmm, no problem answering that question,
thought Angela as she made another note.

“Will you describe to me exactly what you saw?”

Tears welled up in Sandra’s eyes again and Angela had no doubt they were genuine. “I found her just like you saw when you went in,” she replied. “I didn’t touch anything.”

“That’s very helpful for us, thank you. Could you go through what happened from the time you came home?”

Sandra wiped her eyes. “Just as I was putting my key in the lock, Mel and Jon came through the gate. We said ‘hello’ and that, and they went into their flat.”

Angela nodded. The house comprising the two flats had been built in the thirties as a family home. In the conversion process, the original front door giving on to a wide hall had been taken away. Two front doors, each opening on to a narrower passage, one containing the staircase, had taken its place. “So, then what?” she prompted.

“I came up to our flat. Kirsty had her door shut. The whole place was very quiet.”

“Is that normal?”

Sandra thought for a moment. “It depends. One of us might have the telly on, or the radio. Sometimes we like to play computer games, which can be a bit noisy.”

Angela nodded.
I wonder if Maddie’s going to make a noise about the place,
she thought. “But you were struck by the quietness,” she said.

“Well, you never know with… never knew with Kirsty. She could’ve had a guest in her room with her. She sometimes brought people home.”

“So the fact that it was quiet made you wonder if she wasn’t alone?”

“Not necessarily, but it was possible. Normally, even when
someone’s in there, if you wait a minute you catch a sound – a laugh or a bit of conversation.”

“Yeah, of course; so what made you think differently about this quietness today?”

“Well, I had this weird feeling that I was alone in the flat but, kind of, not alone.”

“So what happened then?”

“I went closer to her room and then I saw the door wasn’t shut, just pulled to; so I called out her name, just in case.”

“Yes?”

“She didn’t answer, so after a minute – well, it might not have been as long as that – I pushed the door open and looked into the room and that’s when I saw… saw… you know.” Sandra gave a shudder at the memory and the tears started to flow again.

“It’s OK, Sandra, you’re doing fine. You’re quite sure you didn’t touch anything at all?”

Sandra shook her head. “It’s the one thing I was clear about. I just thought, Mel and Jon, I must get down to Mel and Jon. They’ll tell me I’m being stupid or they’ll say it’s a joke and they’re in on it. I was already thinking about what I would say if it turned out to be just a joke after all. I was going to go right ballistic, I can tell you.”

“Yes, some jokes are just not funny. Do you know who Kirsty’s next of kin is?”

“Yeah, that’ll be her mum and dad. Their number is in our telephone book, by the phone in the hallway. We’ve got each other’s parents’ numbers and GP and all that, there.”

“Very sensible. We’ll take the details in a minute.” Angela caught Gary’s eye and he nodded. Angela turned back to Sandra. “There seems to be a photograph missing from around Kirsty’s mirror. Would you know anything about that?”

Sandra shrugged. “No, I mean, I know she had pictures there but I don’t know what they were of – well, Kirsty would have been in them all, of course.” Sandra rolled her eyes a little. “But we weren’t in and out of each others’ rooms. We’re not – weren’t – that type of flatmates.”

Angela nodded. “I think that’s all we can reasonably get out of this line of enquiry at the moment, but you do realize that we’ll probably need to see you again, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

OK,
thought Angela,
I’ll let you out to play now.
“So,” she said, “tell me what you meant earlier when you said there would be no shortage of candidates.”

Sandra made herself a little more comfortable. “The thing is,” she said, “Kirsty liked being the centre of attention. With her looks she never had any trouble getting boyfriends, and she didn’t always bother to finish with one before she started with another.”

“We’ll need to know the names of Kirsty’s boyfriend or boyfriends.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Kirsty was very cagey about them. She’d become very secretive lately… and excited.”

“Excited?”

“Yeah, she’s always been ambitious, ever since I’ve known her. She’s a model – when she gets the work, which isn’t as often as she likes – but lately I think she’d broadened her ambitions. She talked about going places.”

“What did she mean by that?”

A look of frustration passed across Sandra’s features. “I don’t know. I got the feeling she’d managed to land some important boyfriend, and it was giving her ideas.”

“But you don’t know who he is?”

“No, someone she’d met through her office, I suppose.”

“In the office? You said she’s a model.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not that regular and she has to pay her share of the rent, so she has – had – a regular job. But that’s in the fashion industry as well. She reckoned working there would give her inside knowledge of any jobs going. Lately, though, she’d started saying she wasn’t going to be a clothes horse for much longer; she would be moving on to better things. I’m a model too; that’s why someone introduced us, at the gym, thinking we’d have something in common. But recently she seemed to look down her nose at me a bit, even though I get a lot more work than she does. And she boasted about the posh
showbizzy
parties she got to go to.”

“But her boasting didn’t include giving you any names?”

“No.” Sandra cast a knowing look at Angela. “You can make things seem better than they are if you keep a bit of mystery about them, can’t you? And whoever she was seeing, she wasn’t bringing him – or them – back to the flat.”

OK,
thought Angela,
you’ve thrown in enough key words now. I’ll take the bait. I’ve got to know anyway.
“Where did Kirsty work?” she asked.

The satisfied look of a teacher, pleased with a promising pupil, passed across Sandra’s face. “She worked for Ivano King.”

Angela raised her eyebrows. Gucci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Balenciaga; and Ian King, the man behind the Ivano King label. He was right up there with them.

“You can see why Kirsty had such big ideas,” Sandra said as she saw Angela’s recognition of the name.

Angela nodded “And you don’t know who she was seeing?”

Sandra shook her head. “No. She was always throwing famous names about when she wanted to impress me, but she could be very cagey when it suited her. She took a lot of calls she said were to do with work, when she wasn’t actually in work.”

“Oh, really?”

“Well, that’s what she said, but it could have been a cover if she was seeing someone from the office.”

“Or more than one person, as you suggested,” replied Angela, pleasantly.

“Yes, of course.”

Angela made a couple of notes.
You’ve definitely tried to point me in the direction of Kirsty’s workplace, Sandra,
she thought.
And I have to ask myself why.
She smiled at Sandra, on whose face the pleased teacher’s expression was still in evidence.

“So, you met Kirsty at the gym?”

“Yes.”

Angela nodded, taking in again the honed physique and sports clothes.

“How long ago?”

There was a pause as Sandra pulled back a stray hair. “About a year,” she said. The pleased teacher had disappeared and Sandra had stopped meeting her eyes.

“Was Kirsty very keen on fitness?”

The expression on Sandra’s face now became almost a sneer; but, Angela reflected, she did look as though she took fitness very seriously. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not really. She did enough to make it worth her while paying the fees, but that was about it. She knew she looked good in a leotard. You’ve seen her. Well, you can’t take it away from her, not now. She was beautiful. And she knew it. You get a lot of blokes coming through a gym and they all liked to look at her. She enjoyed that.”

Out of the corner of her eye Angela saw Gary shift in his seat. It was his way of asking permission to speak.

“Go on, Gary,” she said.

“Was there any rivalry among the men, over Kirsty?”

Angela nodded her approval of the question.

“I don’t think so… not seriously,” said Sandra. “They all knew she was… spoken for.” Angela looked sharply into Sandra’s face but the other woman was gazing down at her fingernails.

Oh, you’re definitely not comfortable parting with that snippet of information,
thought Angela.

“Spoken for? Was she engaged?” asked Gary.

“No… nothing like that,” Sandra looked up at him. “Kirsty was the sort of girl who was always spoken for. As I say, if you want to find out about the current man I suggest you talk to the people where she worked.”

Oh, steer us away from the gym, why don’t you? We’ll leave things on that ambiguous note for now,
thought Angela.
You’ll keep, Sandra.

“Thank you,” she said. “I think that’s all for the moment. I’ll get back upstairs. Just give Detective Houseman your contact details – and Darren’s, please, because we’ll need to chat to him, too.” Angela watched Sandra closely as she said this, but the prospect of bringing Darren into the investigation didn’t seem to produce any further tension in her. “Is there a key to Kirsty’s room?”

“Yeah, it should be in the lock on the inside of the door.”

“OK. We’ll lock the room for now, but obviously you’ll need to come and go in the rest of the flat. I’ll just check with our crime scene people and ask them to let you know when they’ve seen all they need to.”

“I’ll have to get my clothes and stuff, for tomorrow.”

“Yes, of course. We won’t keep you waiting any longer than we can help.”

Angela emerged from the downstairs flat. She rang the bell to be let in upstairs, and as she waited she discovered that word of “something going on” had reached the neighbours. A couple of people were leaning on the front gate of the house
across the road, ostensibly chatting to each other, though their eyes were fixed on the door to Kirsty and Sandra’s flat. A dog walker hovered nearby. Casting her glance a little wider, Angela saw a couple of curtains twitch. A few more people walked past looking pointedly at the house, quickly averting their eyes when they saw Angela looking at them. By the time Jim opened the door, Gary had joined Angela and they all made their way up to the living room.

“OK, what have you got?” she asked.

“Jonathan and Melanie Bingham,” replied Rick, flicking through his notebook. “Moved in about six months ago. Said Kirsty and Sandra already lived here then; nice pair, all got on OK, had a drink and a meal together now and again – nothing too heavy, but they were friendly. They thought there’d been a bit of tension between Kirsty and Sandra recently. They don’t know details, but they think it might have been over a bloke.”

“Hmm,” said Angela. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re right. I’m sure the flatmate’s got more to tell us.”

“And the scene of crime team need to get in here as well, Angie,” said Rick.

“Yes, of course they do. Just before we clear out of their way, what do we know about the scene?”

“No sign of forced entry,” came three voices very nearly in unison.

Angela laughed. “Wow, we have a chorus; a couple of tenors and a bass if I’m not mistaken. OK, there’s not much more we can do here at the moment, so let’s get back to the incident room and feed what we’ve got into the computer.”
I might even get to sit down to dinner with Patrick and Maddie,
she thought, realizing with a pleasant surprise that she looked forward to the prospect. From outside came the sound of a vehicle pulling into the kerb. Angela stepped over to the window. An undertaker’s van had just drawn to a stop in the street. The few neighbours
in evidence earlier had now swelled to a small crowd and abandoned all pretence of being anything other than intensely curious about whatever was going on. This reminded Angela of something she hadn’t set up yet. “Rick and Jim, will you get house-to-house enquiries underway?” she asked. She turned back to a study of the people outside, but couldn’t see anybody who looked like a journalist.

Her three colleagues joined her at the window. “No sign of the press as yet,” said Rick.

“Just what I was thinking,” answered Angela. Below them, two men were pushing a wheeled stretcher through the garden gate. “I think we’d better go while the going’s good,” she added.