And Justice There Is None (7 page)

“What about your wife’s family, Mr. Arrowood? Have you notified them?”

“Yes.” He grimaced and sat reluctantly. “I’m meeting them at the mortuary this morning. I’ve told them there was no need, that I could arrange everything, but they insisted.”

“Perhaps they need to feel involved? It does provide closure of a sort. You realize, of course, that the pathologist won’t release your wife’s body until she’s completed her examinations.”

“I’ve scheduled the funeral for Tuesday, at Kensal Green. Surely that’s time enough.”

“Tell me about your wife’s family.”

The grimace came again, fainter but unmistakable. “They live in East Croyden. Name of Smith.”

“Any other children?”

“No.”

“This must be quite difficult for them.”

“I suppose so,” Arrowood said, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. “But I don’t see—”

“I’ll need to talk to them, as well as to Dawn’s close friends.”

“What can that possibly have to do with my wife’s murder? She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when some psychopath—” He swallowed, losing his composure for the first time.

“That may be the case. But even if your wife’s killer had no personal connection with her, he may have been watching her, and someone she knows may have noticed something odd.”

“Watching her?” Arrowood’s skin paled beneath his artificial tan.

“It’s a possibility we have to consider.”

“My wife … was she sexually assaulted?”

“No. The pathologist found no indication of that.”

Arrowood met Gemma’s eyes, looked away. “Dawn … Do you think she had time to be frightened?”

Gemma thought of the few signs of struggle on the woman’s body and answered truthfully, “I think it must have been very quick.”

“I keep seeing—” Blinking, Arrowood gave a sharp shake of his head, as if discarding an instant of weakness. “There’s no point dwelling on it. It’s just that she told me once she thought she would
die young. She was always worried about cancer, things like that. But this …”

“Mr. Arrowood, did you know your wife was pregnant?”

“What?”

“The postmortem revealed that your wife was about six weeks pregnant.”

“But that’s—No, I’d no idea. I knew she hadn’t been well lately, but that possibility never occurred to me.…” He seemed to wilt, his body settling into the curvature of the plastic chair.

“I’m very sorry.” Thinking of her own case of prolonged denial, Gemma said, “Perhaps she hadn’t realized herself.”

Karl Arrowood contemplated this for a moment. “Perhaps not. But I rather hope she knew. She very much wanted a child.”

Gemma thought again of the children’s books and dolls, carefully hidden away. “And you didn’t?”

“No. I’ve two grown sons already that are trouble enough.” His lips had curled in obvious distaste.

Two grown sons who might be counting on their father’s money, thought Gemma, and might not have appreciated a young stepmother mucking up their prospects. “I’ll need their names and addresses, please. And their mother? Is she living?”

“Sylvia? There have been times I wished she weren’t”—his smile held grim humor—“but yes, she’s living. And living well, I might add, in Chelsea.”

“Did you provide for your sons in a will, Mr. Arrowood? Or did Dawn inherit your estate?”

He glared at her. “I’ve poured money down those boys’ throats since they were children, with no thanks and less result. Of course I’ve left the bulk of my estate to Dawn; she was my wife.”

“And your sons knew this?”

“I never particularly discussed it with them. But what you’re suggesting is absurd—”

“Absurd or not, these things happen, and we have to explore every possibility. Did Dawn work, Mr. Arrowood?”

“My wife had no need to work.”

How very antiquated of you
, thought Gemma, exchanging a glance
with Melody, but she asked merely, “Then what did she do with her days?”

“She had the house to manage. She helped in the shop occasionally. She saw her friends.”

“Any friends in particular, other than Natalie?”

“I didn’t keep her social calendar,” Arrowood answered so sharply that Gemma suspected he hadn’t a clue what had filled the long hours of his wife’s day.

“And yesterday, I believe you said you had just arrived home from a meeting when you found your wife?”

“I’d had drinks at Butler’s Wharf with a European dealer.”

“His name?”

Arrowood’s eyes widened in surprise, but he shrugged and answered, “Andre Michel.”

Gemma wrote down the man’s name and London address, as well as the time Karl Arrowood claimed he’d left his friend, although she knew there was no way to prove how long the drive from Tower Bridge to Notting Hill would have taken in evening traffic; nor, once he arrived home, would it have taken Arrowood more than five minutes to murder his wife and call for help.

“Mr. Arrowood, did you notice anything odd about your wife’s movements or behavior in the past few days? Did Dawn give you any indication that she might be frightened?”

“She did seem a bit distracted yesterday morning. But I thought it was just because the damn cat was off-color.”

“That’s Tommy?”

“Rotten little beast. I’ve told Dawn a thousand times to keep that cat out of the …” Arrowood trailed off, as if realizing he’d have no more opportunities to chastise his wife. The muscles in his strong face sagged abruptly, and he rubbed a hand across his mouth. “I can’t believe she’s really gone.”

K
INCAID HAD RISEN WITH
G
EMMA AND SEEN HER OFF IN A GRAY DAWN
that presaged rain. She’d been pale and pinched with exhaustion,
but he knew it would serve no purpose to nag her about getting more rest.

After fixing Toby his favorite breakfast of fried eggs, Kincaid deposited the boy at Hazel’s and drove to his office through a steady downpour. He had always liked the Yard on a Saturday. Although the place was never truly quiet, the normal cacophony of activity was reduced to a hum, the ringing of telephones intermittent rather than constant, and he often took advantage of the opportunity to catch up on unfinished business. First, he called the prospective tenant he had lined up for his flat and arranged a viewing; then he rang Denis Childs, telling him they would be occupying the Notting Hill house as soon as possible.

Then, after a token shuffling of papers, he came to the conclusion that he could no longer delay acting on the disquiet that had niggled at him since the previous evening, despite his fear that Gemma would feel he was undermining her authority. Retrieving Marianne Hoffman’s file, he read it from beginning to end. When he had finished, he picked up the phone and rang Denis Childs back, requesting permission to liaise with Notting Hill CID in the investigation of the murder of Dawn Arrowood.

S
HE JUST COULDN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT MADE HER NEW NEIGHBOR
tick. Betty, her name was, Betty Thomas. If you spoke to her, she smiled and answered in her soft Caribbean accent, but that was all. If you tried to continue the conversation, she’d dig her toe in the pavement and look away, and after a minute you’d give up
.

The father was an upholsterer, she’d learned that much, and the family came from Trinidad, in the West Indies. They kept themselves to themselves, but sometimes on the warm evenings she could smell their cooking, so different from the food her own family ate
.

The summer days were warm and long, the air filled with the smell of the moldering rubbish that piled up on the pavements, and the rats grew fatter than the neighborhood cats. She took to gazing out
her window, elbows on the sill, making up stories to herself about the Thomases and a rather pimply boy across the street called Eddie Langley. Everyone else she knew had to share a bedroom with brothers and sisters or grandparents, sometimes even aunts and uncles, but that only made her feel lonelier. Her mother hadn’t been able to have any more children because of some sort of female problem that was never properly explained, and her grandparents had died in Poland during the war
.

She felt connectionless, as if her little family had failed to pass some basic but secret test. She began to imagine that she was adopted, that somewhere she had another family, not Polish, not Jewish, and much more glamorous than the family in which fate had chosen to place her. Taking refuge in the library, she devoured biographies of film stars and long romantic novels with invariably tragic endings. In that way the summer passed, and it was not until the start of school in the autumn that she thought much about Betty Thomas again
.

The previous year the old school on Portobello Road had been reorganized as boys only and renamed Isaac Newton. Girls were shunted out of the neighborhood to the comprehensive in Holland Park, and she and Betty Thomas were placed in the same class
.

It seemed only natural that the girls should fall in together on the long walk home that first day, silently at first, then in desultory conversation
.

“She’s all right, don’t you think, the new teacher?” Betty offered in her soft voice. “But the subjects, we did them two years ago in Trinidad.”

“What’s it like there? Trinidad.”

“Warm. Like this, but more so, all the time. But a lot of the folks are poor, and my daddy, he thought he could do better here. Now he says we shoulda stayed at home.”

“Do you want to go back?”

Betty shrugged. “Not for me to say.”

“There are some nice things here,” she said, feeling a bit defensive. “And school will be easy for you if you’ve already done the subjects.” It was a clear day, just hot enough to make the pleated woolen uniform
skirt itchy on bare thighs, and as they walked on she began to perspire. “It’s not fair, the boys getting to stay at the old school. And my mother wouldn’t give me bus fare, said she wouldn’t waste the money when I had two good feet.”

“My mother said I mus’ be havin’ a fever to even think such a thing.” Betty rolled her eyes in imitation, and both girls giggled
.

Emboldened, she asked, “Why won’t you ever talk to me at home?”

“Your family don’t like coloreds living next door. Though my daddy, he says the Polish Jews are better than some.”

“It’s not that they don’t like it,” she said, torn between embarrassment and a desire to defend her parents. “It’s just that they’re afraid of trouble, like what happened over in Elgin Crescent last year. But I don’t really see what that has to do with us.”

Betty gave her a skeptical glance. “You don’t mind if the other kids in the neighborhood won’t talk to you?”

Shrugging, she answered, “I’m used to being alone. And besides, I’d rather talk to you.”

They walked in silence for a bit, then Betty stopped and looked full at her, as if she’d come to a decision. “When I saw you, that first day, I thought you looked like the painting of an angel they had in our old church, in Trinidad.”

“Me? An angel?” No one had ever said anything like that about her before. Her oval face was ordinary; her soft brown hair neither strikingly blond nor brunette; her eyes were too pale for beauty. A warm glow began in her midriff and spread outwards. “I wish I could see the painting,” she said wistfully
.

“Oh, she is that lovely, with her sweet face and the sky all blue and gold behind her. Of course,” Betty gave her a sly smile, “I don’t know if you wanna be that good. Or if your mother and father, they would let you go in a Catholic church.”

“No, and no,” she answered, laughing
.

“I think I’m going to call you that. Angel. It suits you.”

“Angel,” she repeated, trying it out on her tongue, liking the sound, and the image of the painting in her mind
.

And so she became Angel, to Betty, to Betty’s brother, Ron, and to
all the friends that came after. This small thing constituted not only the cementing of her friendship with Betty, but the beginning of an identity that would separate her finally from her family. What she didn’t realize was that the image of the angel in the painting would stay with her long after she had lost touch with all who had known her by that name
.

G
EMMA CHECKED THE ADDRESS OF
D
AWN
A
RROWOOD’S FRIEND
in the
A to Zed
she kept in her car, locating the flat near the South Ken tube station. Near enough that she thought she would drive there unannounced, and informal enough to justify her going alone.

The rain began to slacken as she pulled away from the station, and it seemed natural to her that she should drive down the hill and stop for a moment in front of the house on St. John’s Gardens.

It looked larger than she remembered from the previous evening. More solid and prosperous. She thought of her parents’ flat over the bakery, the cheap digs she had shared with a friend in her first days on the force, the tatty semidetached in Leyton she had bought with Rob, and now her tiny garage flat. Doubt flooded through her. Was she up to this house, with the expectations and commitment it represented?

Then she thought of her friend Erika Rosenthal’s home a few
blocks away, and of the sense of contentment and homecoming she’d experienced in those rooms. It came to her that with this house she was being offered a chance to create that life for herself; she would be a fool to pass it by.

She closed her eyes, gathering herself for her next task, and in that instant she had a vision. Distant and silent, as if viewed through the opposite end of a telescope: They were all together in the house, she and Kincaid, the boys, and a child whose face she could not see. The image vanished as abruptly as a bubble popping, but the sense of home and family stayed with her like a half-remembered dream.