Chimera (8 page)

Chapter Nine

That night, Kate bent to her books again and felt a little better about her chances of passing the exam. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t, she told herself as she sipped camomile tea and made careful notes on one of her many lined note pads. I can always retake them. But the humiliation of failing… Kate didn’t
fail
at things. Relationships, yes; but never
work
things. She took a deep breath and tried to focus back on the text that was blurring before her tired eyes.

She called it a day at midnight and went straight to bed, not stopping to shower as she normally did at the end of the day. Despite all her anxieties, she passed a dreamless night and awoke refreshed the next morning. So much so that when her phone rang before she’d even switched on the kettle, she managed not to groan. It was Olbeck.

“Fancy coming with me to re-interview Arlen?” he asked. Kate could hear traffic noise faintly in the background and hoped he was using the hands-free if he was driving.

“I thought you and Anderton were doing that?”

“He’s bailed on me. Something about a meeting back at the station. Will you come?”

“Of course,” said Kate, pleased to be asked. She flew around getting ready and was waiting on the doorstep, bag in hand, when Olbeck pulled his car into the kerb outside her house.

“By the way, Jeff says can you do the night of the fourteenth for dinner?”

“That’s my exam day,” said Kate. She felt another jump of anxiety and vowed that she would spend the whole of the evening studying, no matter how tired she was after work.

“Oh,” said Olbeck. “Right. No matter. We’ll do it another time.”

“Actually,” said Kate, thinking aloud. “I’d like to come over. It’ll be something to look forward to after the horrors of the day.”

Olbeck grinned. “That’s the spirit. Great – that’s settled then. Dinner at ours on the fourteenth.” He seemed about to say something else, but clearly changed his mind. Kate was aware of the sense of suppressed excitement that she’d noticed before. She opened her mouth to ask him outright and then closed it again. If he wanted to tell her, he would.

The crowd of paparazzi at the Arlens’ farmhouse had diminishedSulta to a solitary car parked by the entrance gate, with a man leaning disconsolately against the bonnet, a camera dangling from his hand. He perked up a little as Olbeck drove closer and indicated for the farmhouse lane but slumped when he realised that the car didn’t contain anyone famous. He still took a few shots of them as they drove past him. Kate fought the urge to give him the finger as they went by.

“Paparazzi have thinned out a bit,” remarked Olbeck as they drove nearer the farmhouse, stating the obvious.

“A week’s a long time in show business,” said Kate.

“Wait until the funeral next week. You can imagine what that’s going to be like.”

Kate made a noise of agreement. She thought of the thronging crowds that would no doubt be there, the famous names and faces, the attendant media, the footage that would no doubt make it onto the BBC. What a contrast it would be to the funeral of John Miller. Yet Trixie and John had died of the same thing, disparate as their lives had been. It was strange.

“It’s so strange,” she muttered to herself.

“What is?” asked Olbeck.

Kate shook herself back to reality. “Oh, nothing.”

Olbeck parked the car next to the black Range Rover that had been parked there on their previous visit. Jacob Arlen opened the farmhouse door before they’d even locked the car and stood on the doorstep, as if guarding it, his arms hugged across his body. He was dressed in a sombre grey suit and looked much older than he had on the day he’d found his wife’s body.

“The children are still with my parents,” he said as the officers approached him. “I didn’t want to talk with them around.”

Did that mean he had something significant to impart? Kate wondered as she followed Arlen and Olbeck through to the kitchen. Possibly not. She would have to wait and see.

Arlen didn’t offer them any refreshments. Kate imagined that he had an assistant who took care of that side of things in his office, and he didn’t look like the kind of man who knew his way around his own kitchen. He sat down in the chair at the head of the table too quickly, as if the strength had left his body without warning.

Olbeck always started this type of interview with an expression of condolence. Arlen didn’t say anything but nodded almost impatiently, as if wanting to dispense with the pleasantries and get straight down to business.

Olbeck didn’t beat around the bush. “Were you aware that your wife was taking heroin, Mr. Arlen?”

Arlen visibly winced. He was silent for a long moment and then said slowly, as if the words were being pulled out of him, “I was – I became aware that she was doing that.”

“How long have you known?”

“Not long.  A matter of months, if that.”

“It didn’t worry you?”

Arlen looked up, incredulous. “Are you insane? Of course it worried me. It worried me
sick
. When I found out she was using again, I – I – she swore it was a one-off. That she’d just got so bored being at home all the time, that it was an impulse thing.”

Trixie Arlen took heroin on impulse? Kate tried not to let her scepticism show. That was a lie, but was it Trixie’s or Arlen’s?

Olbeck probed Arlen for more details. “You first found out she’d taken heroin when, exactly?”

Arlen briefly closed his eyes, as if in pain. “It was a couple of months ago. Things hadn’t been – we hadn’t been getting on very well, and I’d been away a lot. I found a box of syringes at the back of her bedside table drawer and an empty plastic bag.” He looked away. “She swore blind it was a one-off.”

“Did you believe her?” asked Olbeck.

“I don’t know,” Arlen replied, again slowly and painfully. “I wanted to believe her. I hadn’t ever known her when she was – was involved in that kind of world. Trixie said that when Ivo – her first husband – died, she never touched the stuff again. Ever.”

“So why would she start using it again, do you think?”

Arlen was shaking his head. “I don’t actually know that she
was
using it again. Not regularly.” He paused and his brows drew down in a frown. “I searched the bedroom a couple of times. I didn’t tell her that’s what I was doing. But I didn’t find anything.”

Probably because Trixie had got better at hiding it, Kate thought but didn’t say. Was it likely that Trixie had told the truth? The reality was that she had taken heroin again at least once more – the night she died. But had there been other times?

Arlen was still speaking. “A couple of times I came home and she was – well, there was just something a little off about her. She didn’t really drink much but it was sometimes as if she was, well, a little drunk. But I couldn’t smell it on her or anything like that.” He looked directly at Kate. “I was worried, very worried, because she was on her own a lot with the children.”

“Did you address this with her again at any time?” Kate asked.

Arlen’s gaze dropped to the table. “There wasn’t really anything I could say. I couldn’t find anything to actually accuse her of.”

“Did any of Trixie’s friends, like Kyla Mellors for example, ever mention any concerns to you?”

Arlen’s eyelids flickered minutely. He cleared his throat. “No, not that I can recall. No one said anything to me.”

There was a hint – just a hint – of evasiveness in his reply. Kate frowned, wondering whether to take him up on it. But even as she was wondering, Olbeck asked Arlen something else, moving on to another subject.

“We’ve eliminated most of the fingerprints that our scientists found in the bedroom, Mr. Arlen. There’s one though that you might be able to help us with.”

Arlen looked faintly alarmed. “I would?”

Olbeck gave him the rundown from the fingerprint report. “So you can see, it’s this unknown female we’re looking for. Would Trixie’s friends ever go up to your bedroom?”

Arlen’s cheeks were faintly mottled. “That’s rather presumptuous, Detective Inspector, isn’t it? What are you implying?” Before Olbeck could answer, Arlen’s face suddenly cleared and he went from looking mortified to looking relieved. “I’m sorry, how stupid of me. I didn’t even think – it’s almost certainly our cleaner. Rosa. She comes in every week.”

Of course the Arlens would have had a cleaner, thought Kate. No doubt a gardener too, a dog-walker, an ironing service. It was only surprising that there hadn’t been a nanny, but that particular bit of domesticity hadn’t appear to have been outsourced. Again, Kate found herself doubting the evidence of her own eyes. Was it really likely that Trixie Arlen, earth mother and domestic goddess, would have risked being under the influence of a class A drug when she had the responsibility of three small children? Wasn’t it more likely that someone – some unknown someone – had forced her to inject herself? But why? What possible motive would there be?

Olbeck asked Arlen for Rosa’s details. Kate could have advised him to save his breath; there was no way that a man like Arlen would have been involved in hiring or supervising a domestic servant when even making coffee for visitors appeared beyond him.

As expected, Arlen didn’t have a clue where Rosa lived, what her surname was, or even if she worked for an agency.

“Would you expect her to come to work again?” asked Kate quickly. “Considering what’s happened? When does she normally come here?”

Arlen looked more confused than the simple question warranted. “I’m not sure. I was never really here when she was here. Wait a moment—” He got up and walked over to a noticeboard, thickly plastered with children’s drawings, takeaway leaflets, school notices and business cards, on the opposite wall. He peered at it more closely and then carefully pulled a drawing pin free. Several other pieces of paper fell to the floor but he didn’t bother to pick them up. “Here you are,” he said, handing the little card to Kate. I knew I’d seen something before – that’s the agency Rosa comes from, I think.”

“Thank you, Mr. Arlen,” said Kate, who looked at it briefly before tucking it away in her bag. It was pink, with the logo of the company in a flowery black script spelling out
Home Angels, Domestic Cleaning
. “It will be very useful to be able to eliminate another person from our enquiries.”

Jacob Arlen nodded, looking serious. Kate glanced at Olbeck, wondering if he was going to bring up the most serious point of the interview. He gave her a minute nod, tacit permission to go ahead.

“There’s something else that we need to discuss with you, Mr. Arlen,” Kate said. “As far as we’re aware, bearing in mind we’re still waiting for the results of the toxicology tests, it seems fairly clear that your wife died of an overdose of
diacetylmorphine
– heroin, in other words.” Arlen was watching her face intently, utterly focused on her words. Kate continued. “The problem is that despite that, we found no drugs, no drugs paraphernalia, no syringes, nothing at all with your wife’s body.”

There was a moment of silence. Kate watched Arlen’s expression keenly. She could have sworn that the revelation came as an utter surprise to him.

“My God,” Arlen said softly. “How - how is that possible?”

Kate cleared her throat before she spoke again. “It’s possible, Mr. Arlen, because someone removed all evidence of drug use from the scene.”

“What are you saying? It couldn’t – Trixie couldn’t have moved it, hidden it or whatever before – before she died?”

Both Kate and Olbeck had considered that possibility. They’d had the benefit of advice from Doctor Telling on the likelihood of just that happening. Kate explained to Arlen what Doctor Telling had told them.

“I’m afraid not. Your wife would have died very quickly after the injection – a matter of minutes. She wouldn’t have been physically able to move far, let alone go to the trouble of hiding drugs and syringes in a place where we’ve not been able to find them.”

Arlen’s head had lowered and he was staring at the table again. “That means there was someone else here with Trixie. Doesn’t it?” he concluded, looking up at them both. “Do you know who?”

“Our enquiries are continuing,” Olbeck replied. “But there’s another possibility, Mr. Arlen.”

“There is?”

Kate and Olbeck exchanged glances. If this guy was lying, he was pretty good. “You could have removed whatever was there yourself, Mr Arlen,” said Kate. She paused for a moment to let it sink in, watching Arlen’s eyes widen with shock, and then went in for the kill. “Did you?”

“No!” Arlen sat back in his chair, looking from one face to another, wide-eyed. “I had no idea – I didn’t see anything. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Arlen,” Kate said mildly. “Perhaps you were worried about your wife’s reputation. You didn’t want it known that she’d died of a drug overdose. Perhaps you were worried that your children would come into the room and get hold of whatever was lying around.”

Arlen raised a shaking hand to his temple. He was breathing quickly but Kate could see that he was gradually regaining self-control. “I touched nothing, I saw nothing,” he said and his voice was quite firm. “You have to believe me. I can’t prove it, but I promise you I didn’t see anything like that. There wasn’t anything like that. And I—” He stopped speaking abruptly.