Blood, Salt, Water (5 page)

9

Robin Walker was furious when he opened the front door. He chewed his cheek as Morrow and McGrain showed their ID. They spoke to him on the phone? Half an hour ago, about the call this morning? They asked to come in to talk about his missing partner, Roxanna Fuentecilla?

‘Yes. Come in.’ He karate-chopped a hand at the hall carpet, ordering them to move, snorting with annoyance as Morrow and McGrain sidled into a narrow hallway.

Policing meant spending a lot of time with angry people, not all of them members of the public. Morrow knew anger well, its moods and its nuances. She found that anger was usually just fear with its make-up on, so her question was this: was Robin Walker frightened because his partner was missing, or was he frightened because someone had called the police?

‘You said it was an anonymous call?’ He was tall and lean and loomed over them, avoiding eye contact, giving sharp, rhythmic pissed-off little nods.

‘Yes,’ said Morrow, taking in his thick dark hair and pale blue eyes. Smeary footage from distant cameras didn’t do him justice. ‘Yes, is Ms Fuentecilla missing?’

Walker caught his breath, dropped his chin to his chest and looked back up. When he spoke his voice was thick with emotion: Yes, she is missing.

‘And you are . . . ?’

‘Robin Walker. I’m her partner. Boyfriend.’

‘Can we go through? Talk to you there?’

He waved an impatient hand at the living room door and stormed off through it.

Morrow let McGrain go ahead of her, glancing down the narrow corridor to a rack of coats and saw a green parka with a fur-trimmed hood.

Heading into the living room, Morrow’s eye was drawn to the carpet. It was new and white. She glanced at the skirting board, checking for carpet worms, telltale strands of wool that worked their way out as a carpet settled. She couldn’t see any and found that reassuring: Robin hadn’t beaten Roxanna to death and replaced the carpet. Probably.

Compared to the narrow hall, the living room was dazzlingly grand. A chandelier the size of a shopping trolley hung from the ceiling. Two enormous floor-length windows framed heavy-boughed trees nodding gently in the street. Robin and Roxanna’s furniture was designed for a small London flat and the couch and coffee table, the dining table and chairs were dwarfed to doll-size in the high Victorian room. It looked as if the family were squatting in the lower third of a fish tank. Morrow was so distracted by the clash of scale that she didn’t notice the children at first.

They were on the couch, watching her come in, sitting completely still. Martina and Hector Vicente. Their ankles were crossed, hands folded in laps, backs poker-straight, one a mirror to the other. They looked at Morrow and McGrain with the composed disinterest of Gainsborough portraits. Blonde like their mother, long-limbed and lush-lipped. Neither had a flicker in their expression. She looked at Hector and wanted to smile, remembering him with his mum in the bakery, but he dropped his gaze to the floor and she remembered herself. He was wearing the grey skinny-leg jeans.

She told them her name, that she was here about their mother, and stood near them. She wanted them to speak. She had a voice recorder running in her pocket so that the bosses and the bosses’ bosses could read every word once it was transcribed. The audio would be useful too though: they could compare their voices to the call file.

‘Don’t you have school today?’

‘Our mother is missing,’ said Martina. ‘We thought it would be best if we remained at home.’

‘I see.’ She wanted a sample of Hector’s voice too. She nodded at him. ‘Don’t you have school, son?’

‘I do also but my sister’ – he gestured to Martina very formally, it was clear he was talking in his second language – ‘thought it would be best if I stayed home today.’

Morrow nodded. ‘I see. Thank you.’

He was still on the child side of twelve, his voice high. The caller could have been either one of them but Martina’s jeans were blue.

Morrow felt she had to respond to the strained situation. ‘Sorry, Robin, were you having a chat in here, before we arrived?’

Walker glowered at the children. Hector opened his mouth but his eyes flicked to Martina and she gave him a stare that told him to shut up. No one spoke. It had taken twenty seconds to reach deadlock.

‘OK.’ McGrain clapped his hands with synthetic cheer, making everyone jump. ‘Here’s a plan: how about you kids go and have kick-about next door and let us chat to your dad for a minute?’

Everyone panicked in the silence. Then Hector spoke. ‘Robin’s not our—’

‘Shut up, Hector.’ Martina stood up, her eyes firmly on McGrain. ‘That man said for us to go.’

She stood, gestured for Hector to get up and led him out. They moved like despondent dancers making the long walk off stage after a bad performance. Walker scowled and followed them, slamming the door, and came back, sitting in their place.

‘Were you talking to the kids before we arrived, Mr Walker?’

‘Yes. After you called I asked them and they told me Hector phoned you. About their mum.’

McGrain smiled gently, ‘You don’t seem very pleased about that.’

Suddenly animated, Walker looked up. ‘I’m fucking furious. Why did they think they
had
to go behind my back? I’ve been up all night, worried sick. Just
tell
me – that’s what I’m angry about.’ He raised his voice reproachfully at the door, continuing the interrupted argument. ‘
That’s
what I mean. I’m not an ogre.’

His eyes reddened suddenly, but not with the slow grind of worry, not with sadness, something more intense than fear. It looked like panic. He wasn’t behaving like someone who had murdered his girlfriend the day before and then let the police into his house. He wasn’t trying to act innocent at all.

Morrow looked away, giving him a private moment. She found herself staring straight at the sixty-four thousand quid display cabinet. It looked smaller than it did in the photographs, but just as ugly.

‘That’s a one-off. A Larkin and Sons.’ Walker took a deep breath. ‘A design icon, actually. Handcrafted.’

‘Nice,’ said McGrain politely.

Morrow nodded and hummed as if she agreed. ‘What is “a design icon”? I’ve never really understood that.’

Walker struggled to explain. It was a special design. Sort of a very good one? One that other people copied, he thought. He attempted a charming smile. The mouth managed it but his eyes stayed sad and angry. Walker was out of his depth. He was young. Being so handsome wasn’t making him less sympathetic.

Morrow remembered who she was pretending to be. She opened her briefcase, took out the missing person form and a pen.

‘So, Mr Walker. Let’s see if we can find her, put an end to your worry. When did you last see Roxanna?’

Robin Walker looked into the near distance, clutched his hands together and told them that Roxanna had left for work yesterday morning, dropping the kids off at school. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since. It was very out of character.

McGrain nodded encouragingly as Morrow wrote.

‘You’ve just moved here?’ she asked.

‘From London. Two months ago.’

‘And how are you enjoying Glasgow?’

‘Great,’ he said, but a twitch in his jaw suggested otherwise. Morrow tried not to smile. Glasgow was strong cheese: not to everyone’s taste.

How did Roxanna seem yesterday morning? Fine, normal. She took the kids to school at the normal time but then didn’t go into work, didn’t call anyone, had not been back to the house. None of her clothes were missing and her passport was still here: he’d found it in a drawer in the bedroom.

She asked him: Had they argued? Most couples argue sometimes. He smiled. We argue
all
the time. But no. Nothing special. Do your arguments ever become physical? She hit me with a pizza once . . . He hurried to correct himself: but it was funny, she was trying to be funny because we got, sort of, you know, stuck, fighting about something. He refreshed his smile, wrung his hands.

McGrain echoed the smile.

Walker was giving a very bad account of himself. If Morrow had no previous knowledge she would be suspicious. The pizza story rang true. If Walker had killed his girlfriend he would be trying to misdirect them. He’d say they didn’t fight, theorise that she had run away. He would have hidden her passport.

‘Why didn’t you call us?’

He looked her straight in the eye and, unblinking, said he didn’t know, he just didn’t know. That part wasn’t true: he did know. He hadn’t called because they were doing something illegal. Morrow noted his tell: the long, unblinking stare. He had the grace to wring his hands as he lied.

She began to work her way through the set questions on the missing persons form: did he have a recent photograph of her? Walker stepped over to the mantelpiece and lifted a silver-framed photo of Roxanna. He handed it to Morrow. Roxanna, head and shoulders, grinning lovingly into the camera lens, a soft spring light behind her. She was gorgeous: high cheekbones, olive skin, scarlet lips. Her thick blonde hair was pulled up loosely, pinned with a feathered fascinator.

‘Is this your wedding?’

‘No. We’re not married. We were just at a wedding.’

‘We might do better with a more workaday one.’ As she handed it back, Walker’s eye fell on the image and yearning, unbidden, overwhelmed him. He turned away and laid the picture face down on the mantel. ‘I’ll get you another one.’

He left the room. They heard him walk down the hall and then return, hesitating behind the living room door. He came in holding an original iPad, round-edged and lumpy. He sat down next to Morrow, turning it on and opening the iPhoto file.

McGrain craned to see it: a checkerboard of pictures, most of Roxanna alone but some with her children, all from the past year. It must have been Walker’s iPad because they were nearly all of her: Roxanna on a white beach, Roxanna in a dark London street and, in all of them, Roxanna craning into Walker’s gaze, radiating love. In the manner of digital photography the same view had been captured several times, less an attempt at bettering the image than an articulation of the photographer’s enthusiasm for the moment.

One or two were of the couple together. Robin and Roxanna standing together in a park, stiff-smiling for whichever kindly stranger took the snap. Some were of Robin and Roxanna with either Martina or Hector, the other child presumably behind the lens. In the group photos where Martina was the photographer Robin’s head was invariably cut off by the top of the frame. She had some of her mother’s pugnaciousness.

Morrow scrolled down to the more recent ones, taken since they had arrived in Glasgow. Roxanna in the orchid house at the Botanical Gardens. She was standing in the foreground, the light dusky and yellow. Behind her, at opposite ends of a long bench, were Martina and a man Morrow knew as Mr Y.

Mr Y was an unidentified but recurrent character in the CCTV of the Glasgow PINAD investigation. He was one of the first people Roxanna made contact with when she arrived. He’d been seen going into the office, the house, sitting in cars, always with Roxanna. He was slim, around sixty, dressed carefully and had a neatly trimmed moustache. They’d been trying to put a name to him for weeks.

In the photo Martina sat as far away from everyone as she could, hard up against the arm of the bench.

Morrow asked Robin to print that picture. He took the iPad from her, tapped the screen a couple of times and a printer snapped awake out in the hall.

Morrow referred back to her list of missing persons questions: friends and relatives?

He told her, only being somewhat cagey: Roxanna’s parents were from Madrid but had died some time ago. She had a sister who lived in Boston. They called each other once a week. They were close. Morrow had listened to the Met’s recordings of the stilted calls. The sister was a snide bitch and Roxanna was warm. ‘Close’ was overplaying it but that didn’t make it a lie: most families were held together with myths. He said Roxanna hadn’t made any friends in Glasgow yet but she hadn’t been in touch with friends in London since she disappeared, he’d called everyone the night before.

Morrow asked the next question on the form: Did Roxanna have any medical conditions they should know about?

No, she was healthy. She had a heart murmur but it was being monitored and she exercised around it. It was a stable underlying condition, he said, using an insurance-form phrase.

She was thinking about the recorder in her pocket, really, imagining herself heard by her bosses, so she read out the next question without thinking: Could they have a DNA sample for Roxanna?

Walker froze.

If Morrow had been a real missing persons cop she would have been aware of the emotional impact of the question. She would have tiptoed into it, dropped the tone of her voice or something. She back-pedalled: Only so that they could rule out anyone who happened to be found, not because they had any reason to think anything, you know . . .

Walker’s voice was husky: Where would he even get a DNA sample? McGrain suggested a hairbrush. Walker stood up slowly and left the room. He came back, his eyes smarting, holding a heated hairbrush reverently in two hands. Morrow took it and thanked him. It was completely useless, heat killed DNA, but she hadn’t the heart to say that to him. If necessary she could ask for something else later.

She bagged the pointless item and slipped it into her briefcase, asking as she did so for Roxanna’s bank account details and her mobile number, his mobile number and the kids’ numbers too, if they had mobiles.

He baulked. ‘What do you need her bank account number for?’

‘To see if she’s taken any money out. That’ll tell us where she is and if she’s safe. We need her mobile number too.’

He chewed his lip, thinking, and then flashed a cagey smile. ‘Honestly, Rox hasn’t
called me.’

McGrain explained that it wouldn’t just help them check her calls. If the phone was turned on they could track her movements from it. It would really help.

Walker agreed to give them all of the information but seemed to change his mind when Morrow handed him the form. There was a deal of fumbling with the pen, an overly elaborate writing-out of names. He was reluctant, but in the end he gave them everyone’s numbers: his, Roxanna’s, the kids’. It made Morrow think he was concerned enough about her to give them information he thought potentially damning.