Friends to Die For (39 page)

‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked. ‘I’ll put Clarke in the picture, you get us a couple of uniforms and organize a car. Then let’s bring Kristos in. We need the
devious bastard to tell us exactly what he’s up to.’

Parlow beamed. ‘You bet, boss,’ he said, taking off at a run to do Vogel’s bidding.

Vogel called after him. ‘One more thing, Parlow.’

The young man looked anxiously back over a shoulder.

‘Bloody well done,’ said Vogel.

Vogel called his superior officer, who had not yet arrived at Charing Cross, on her mobile to bring her up to speed. Then he rushed out of the station to catch up with Parlow, who was already
behind the wheel of a CID car.

It took them only minutes to get to George’s apartment block. George was dressed, in jeans and a black sweater. There was a bag of pastries on his kitchen table. He said he’d been
out to buy them fresh, and was about to take them round to his neighbour Marnie, as was his habit.

At almost exactly 9 a.m. Vogel again formally arrested George, who seemed more baffled than angry.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked. ‘You only released me yesterday afternoon.’

‘We will discuss that during a formal interview back at the station,’ said Vogel.

Greg finally dropped off at dawn, though it was more of a doze than proper sleep. He was woken by Karen going into the kitchen just after nine. Usually they were both up much
earlier, getting the kids off to school and themselves ready for work. He wondered if she had really slept until then, or lain fitfully awake for most of the night as he had done.

He listened to the usual morning noises, the clatter of crockery and cutlery, the hiss of the kettle. It all sounded so normal, even though this horrible morning was anything but normal. Then he
heard Karen talking on the phone. He couldn’t catch what she was saying so he had no idea who she might be speaking to. He decided he would just stay put rather than risk inflaming matters by
making the first approach. Eventually Karen came into the sitting room. There was a faint pink mark down one side of her face. Greg felt ashamed of himself. It had been unforgivable for him to
strike out at her, and he still couldn’t believe what he had done.

Karen was carrying two mugs of tea, one of which, rather to his surprise, she handed to him.

He felt momentarily encouraged. Maybe things would turn out OK after all.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

‘I think we need some time to ourselves. I do, anyway, while I sort myself out and decide what to do next,’ she said. ‘I certainly don’t want to be with you right now,
Greg. So I’m going to spend the day with Sally.’

Sally was Karen’s sister. She lived with her lesbian partner in Hounslow. Karen would have said she was the last person in the world who could ever be accused of being homophobic; she had
gay friends, and was totally opposed to any kind of prejudice based on people’s sexuality. Nonetheless Greg suspected that she’d never quite come to terms with her own sister’s
sexuality. The two women weren’t entirely comfortable with each other. And yet, on the very first occasion there had ever been a problem in their marriage, it was to her sister that Karen now
turned.

He knew better than to argue. He tried to remain calm, to appear affectionate and concerned without attempting to get close. But he hated the thought of Karen discussing their differences with
her sister rather than him. He wished she would stay at home so that they could sort things out together, just as they had always done.

Karen, it seemed, was not interested.

She showered, dressed, spent some time putting on rather more make-up than she usually wore, and an hour or so later bade him a cursory goodbye as she prepared to leave the flat.

She was wearing her best, and tightest, jeans, with the shiny black ankle boots he had given her for Christmas, and that chunky black leather waistcoat with the little steel spikes on the
shoulders which was quite butch, yet, Greg reckoned, somehow made her appear all the more feminine.

She had washed her spiky red hair and it gleamed in the morning sun. Greg loved Karen’s retro punk look, and he thought she looked even sexier than usual. Certainly her appearance betrayed
nothing of the events of last night and the previous day.

Irritated by this, he stood in the doorway, blocking her exit. ‘Won’t you at least try to talk things through for a bit, before you go?’ he asked. ‘We could go across the
road to Starbucks, if you like. Their cappuccinos always give you a lift, don’t they? A change of scene might do us good. What about it, darling?’

‘No,’ said Karen. ‘Right now, Greg, I’m not up for a cosy chat with you over a cup of coffee.’

Greg’s irritation grew. All he wanted was to put things right. And he had tried. Really tried. He’d even made that phone call to Kwan in an effort to appease her, totally against his
better judgement. He was prepared to do anything, risk anything, for the good of his marriage. But Karen didn’t want to know.

Perhaps because he was afraid, he allowed his temper to get the better of him again.

‘Oh go fuck yourself,’ he said.

Vogel conducted the interview with George himself, backed up by Parlow, who sat to his left in the small, windowless interview room. George sat opposite Vogel, alongside his
lawyer, Christopher Margolia, who’d arrived at the station within half an hour of his presence being requested by George.

Vogel stared hard at George while Parlow went through the preliminary formalities of stating the names of those present, and the time of the start of the interview, for the video record.

Could this be their murderer? Vogel thought George still looked more bewildered than anything else. From the moment of his second arrest he had proclaimed his total bafflement, insisting he had
done nothing to warrant further questioning, and that he had no idea what could have led Vogel and his team to re-arrest him. At least he appeared to have shed his earlier arrogance.

Now he sat in his recycled paper suit looking around the interview room, waiting for the interview to begin. He did not appear unduly distressed. He certainly wasn’t in a panic. Indeed, he
seemed quite calm.

Vogel once more placed the photograph found in George’s wallet in front of him.

‘Would you please tell me again, Mr Kristos, who this young woman is?’

A flicker of annoyance passed over George’s face, but when he replied his voice was level and conversational. ‘My girlfriend, Carla,’ he said.

Vogel then placed in front of George a piece of paper bearing the printed phone number George had earlier pointed out on his impounded phone.

‘And do you recognize this phone number, Mr Kristos?’

George nodded.

‘So would you like to tell me whose number it is?’

‘I told you already, it’s my Carla’s.’

Was it Vogel’s imagination or was Kristos blinking more rapidly than was normal? He wasn’t sure.

‘Mr Kristos, we have managed to trace that number, and presumably you will not be surprised to learn that it is the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile phone which you bought last year with
your Visa credit card, the last four digits of which are 5006. We have also traced a later payment you made for that phone from the same card.’

George shrugged. Vogel noticed that he was frowning.

‘Would you like to comment on that, Mr Kristos?’

George seemed to be making an enormous effort to look nonchalant.

‘So what?’ he asked eventually.

Vogel kept his manner easy.

‘Mr Kristos, it would seem that this phone does not belong to the woman you say is your girlfriend. Moreover, we have reason to believe that Carla Karbusky does not exist. We have made
extensive enquiries and been unable to trace the young woman whose picture you keep in your wallet. Perhaps you would like to clear this matter up for us?’

George’s frown deepened. He remained silent.

‘My client does not wish to answer that question at this stage,’ said Margolia.

Vogel ignored him. It was his turn to frown.

‘Mr Kristos,’ he persisted. ‘I do not believe that this photograph is of your girlfriend. Perhaps you do not have a girlfriend. And perhaps you would like to tell us who the
woman in this picture really is? Would you do that for me, Mr Kristos?’

George leaned forward in his chair and looked down at the photograph on the desk before him. It was almost as if he were seeking inspiration from it.

Margolia seemed about to interject again, but George suddenly looked up at Vogel and said, ‘OK, I suppose I’d better tell you. I don’t have much choice, do I? Carla
doesn’t exist. And I don’t have a girlfriend. People tell me I’m a good-looking bloke, but I never seem to be able to keep a girl for more than five minutes. All the Sunday
Clubbers, my mates, they tease me rotten about it. Have done for ages. So last year I thought I’d put a stop to it. I invented Carla. I bought the pay-as-you-go and programmed the number into
my own phone so I could be seen to be calling my girlfriend, leaving her messages and so on. It wasn’t as if I could bring her to meet ’em, could I?’

George’s cheeks had turned pink. He looked flustered. But then, he was an extremely proud young man. Indeed, Vogel had found him arrogant. Perhaps, having gone to such lengths to create a
fictional girlfriend, Kristos was simply embarrassed at being caught out.

Vogel looked down at the photograph on the desk. He’d been frustrated by it from the start. He still had a feeling that he knew the young woman, but he was no nearer to recalling who she
was.

‘So who is this woman in the photograph, Mr Kristos?’ he asked.

George held out both hands, palms upwards. ‘I’ve no idea. I cut it out of some magazine, scanned it into my computer and reprinted it. That’s all.’

‘Which magazine did you find the picture in?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t buy magazines, so it must have been one I found somewhere. Probably someone left it lying on a seat on the tube, or a bus.’

‘I see. Why this particular picture?’

‘No reason. I thought she looked nice, that’s all.’

‘So you gave her the name of Carla and built up all this pretence around her, even to the extent of buying a second telephone so you could call this non-existent person. All because you
wanted your friends to believe that you had a girlfriend when you didn’t. Is that so, Mr Kristos?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

‘Mr Kristos, could you tell me please where you were in 1998?’

Vogel had changed tack without warning and he watched the reaction of his interviewee extremely closely.

‘What?’ asked George. He just looked puzzled.

Vogel repeated the question.

‘Uh, 1998.’ George did some counting on his fingers.

‘I was in college, studying drama,’ he said eventually. ‘I left in 2000.’

‘Could you tell me the name of this college?’

‘The Willesden Academy of Performing Arts,’ he said. ‘Manchester.’

Manchester, thought Vogel, getting on for three hours away from London’s King’s Cross in 1998. Those kind of logistics obviously did not mean that Kristos couldn’t have been
responsible for the earlier murders, but it did make it more unlikely. Vogel continued to study George carefully. The other man continued to look merely puzzled. Vogel would get it checked out, of
course, but he suspected George was telling the truth.

‘I think you’ll find the place has closed down,’ said George, almost as if he were reading Vogel’s mind.

‘You haven’t asked why I wanted to know where you were in 1998,’ said Vogel.

George shrugged. He did quite a lot of shrugging. ‘I assumed you’d tell me when you were good and ready,’ he said.

He has not totally lost his arrogance, thought Vogel.

‘Two young women were murdered in the King’s Cross district of London in October and November 1998,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe that their killer may also have
murdered Marleen McTavish, and perhaps Michelle Monahan.’

George raised both eyebrows.

‘So you thought you might try to pin that on me too, did you?’ he asked. ‘Just because I claimed to have a girlfriend when I didn’t.’

‘It’s a bit more than that, Mr Kristos,’ said Vogel, unsure whether it was or not.

‘I think you are clutching at straws, Detective Inspector,’ said George.

You really are an arrogant little bastard, thought Vogel. But unfortunately you’re not far wrong.

You should realize that everything you have told us concerning your fabrication of the fictional Carla Karbusky will be fully investigated,’ said Vogel, trying to ensure that neither the
tone of his voice nor his facial expression gave any indication of his inner frustration.

‘I don’t see what the big deal is. OK, so I invented a girlfriend to get my mates off my back. I know it was daft, but it made me feel better about myself. But, it’s not a
crime to say you have a girlfriend when you haven’t. It’s not illegal, is it Mr Vogel?’

George seemed ingenuous enough. But there was something unnerving about him, as if, even when under arrest, he was playing a game. Vogel didn’t know what to make of it all.

‘No, it’s not illegal,’ he replied evenly.

‘No. And it doesn’t make me a murderer, either, does it?’

‘No,’ said Vogel again. And with that he got up from his chair and walked out of the interview room, leaving Parlow to complete the formalities.

Kristos was dead right. The man’s behaviour was curious. A little weird even. But that didn’t make him a murderer. And Vogel had no real evidence against him. Not yet anyway.

He marched resolutely into the large office which had been designated for the use of MIT. Vogel had a feeling about George Kristos. His gut instinct told him they could very well have found
their man. But his gut instinct wasn’t going to persuade a judge and jury.

‘I want Kristos’s flat turned over again,’ he said. ‘Get the SOCOs there, and tell them to take the floorboards up, I want them over everything like a rash. And
let’s dig into his background. Where are his parents? Are they alive? I want everyone in his life spoken to. Let’s go right back to his drama school days, and before.’