and he certainly seemed to be in a far better mood than he’d been since the case broke. The frostiness of the previous two days seemed to have been consigned to the past.
‘So what’s new?’ asked Trave once he’d hung up his jacket and sat down, adjusting himself to his favourite position, with his chair teetering on its back legs and his feet lightly resting on the edge of his desk. Clayton had never once seen him lose his balance.
‘Ballistics report is as you expected,’ said Clayton, picking up the top file from his desk. ‘The bullets in the door and the wall at the end of the corridor match Claes’s gun; the one that killed Miss Osman doesn’t. It’s a standard bullet apparently — could be fired from most types of handgun.’ Trave nodded, looking unsurprised. ‘And the rest of the fingerprint evidence has come back,’ Clayton went on. ‘There are matches to Swain’s prints on the desk in the study and on the reading lamp…’
‘What about on the photograph?’ asked Trave.
‘The one beside the reading lamp?’
‘Yes, the one of Katya.’
Clayton turned a page, running his finger down the list of items. ‘No, nothing. Just Osman’s prints — they took them for elimination.’
‘Interesting. Carry on.’
‘Well, upstairs you already know about. Swain’s prints are on the candlestick and the door of Katya’s room.’
‘On the handle?’
‘Yes. And the door itself.’
‘So he was there. Well, that’s not exactly a surprise, is it? We knew that already, but it’s curious he didn’t wear gloves, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Perhaps he couldn’t get hold of them in the prison.’
‘Maybe. But he got himself a gun, didn’t he? A little bit more difficult to lay your hands on inside than a pair of gloves I’d say.’
Clayton nodded, picking up another pile of reports. ‘Clothes,’ he said, looking at the top one. ‘They’ve matched the torn piece of clothing that we found in the rose bushes outside the study window to a standard-issue prison shirt.’
‘So what?’ said Trave dismissively. ‘It doesn’t add anything, does it? Like I said, we already know Swain was there. Have you seen the autopsy report?’
‘No.’
‘Not as bad as the autopsy itself,’ said Trave with a grimace. ‘I thought I’d spare you that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Clayton, and he meant it. He’d always had a queasy stomach, and he still hadn’t got used to attending post-mortems. He still remembered with shame the first one he’d been to with Trave when he’d had to run out of the room to stop himself being sick.
‘Anyway,’ said Trave. ‘It didn’t help us. She ate a small amount of supper — chicken and peas — about four hours before she died, and then got killed with a single shot to the head at about twelve thirty, give or take fifteen minutes either way. There’s no evidence she took drugs in the forty-eight hours before her death or that she was sedated.’
‘What about the needle marks on her arm?’ asked Clayton. ‘Did you find out anything about them?’
‘Yes, sources say she was a drug addict for most of last year and the first half of this, although I doubt she was injecting all that time. Anyway that means there’s no way of knowing whether Jana Claes is telling the truth about only sedating the girl on two occasions,’ said Trave, sounding disappointed.
‘But Osman was telling us the truth then, wasn’t he? About why he brought her home for her own good?’ asked Clayton. It hadn’t escaped his attention how Trave appeared to be downplaying Katya’s drug use as if it was an inconsequential detail rather than important corroboration of the history of events that Osman had given them when they’d questioned him after the murder.
‘Yes, I suppose he was,’ said Trave, looking irritated. It was clearly a reluctant concession.
‘The crime-scene guys found nothing of significance in Katya’s room,’ Clayton went on after a moment, glancing down at the last report he had in his hand.
‘Yes, someone had been doing some spring cleaning out of season in there, I’d say,’ said Trave with a hollow laugh. ‘Well, none of that seems to have taken us much further,’ he added with a sigh. ‘I better tell you what I’ve dug up. The woman at the telephone exchange says there were two calls to Blackwater Hall that evening, both from the same public call box in the centre of town. Came through at 12.20 and 12.21. Both times the phone rang six times; both times nobody answered. Interesting, eh? I went out to Blackwater and asked Osman about the calls, and he says he doesn’t know anything about them — says he must’ve been asleep, and there are no phone extensions upstairs. He’s right about that — I checked.’
‘What about Claes and his sister?’
‘Jana says she was asleep too, but Franz is a different story. You remember he said he was still awake when he first heard Swain in the corridor outside his room and that his door was slightly open, so he could hardly say he didn’t hear the phone. But he told me each time he went to go downstairs the phone stopped ringing and so he went back to bed. And then when I asked him why he hadn’t told us about the calls the bastard said it was because I didn’t ask him. Can you believe it? Anyway that’s not all. It turns out there’s been trouble out at the Hall already this summer — an attempted burglary back in July. Yes, exactly,’ said Trave, responding to Clayton’s look of surprise. ‘Another piece of information our friends out there decided to keep to themselves. Harrison, one of the uniforms, came and told me about it yesterday. There was an emergency call in the afternoon from a woman with a thick foreign accent — obviously Jana, so Harrison went out there and the burglar was gone. Claes said he’d caught him in Osman’s study and punched him a couple of times before the bloke hit him back and got away through the window. The burglar was wearing gloves, unlike our friend, Swain, and so it went down as an unsolved.’
‘Did he take anything?’
‘Osman says not.’
‘What’s the description?’
‘Well built, six foot, Caucasian male in his early twenties, clean-shaven with short dark hair, wearing jeans and a dark blue jersey — could be anyone, could be you apart from the clothing. Oh, and the glasses: he left them behind apparently. They fell off when Claes punched him. Harrison checked them out — they’re a German make, but the burglar didn’t say anything, so there’s no way of knowing where he’s from.’
‘He got in the same way as Swain?’
‘Yes, through the study window, although it was open at the time — the burglar probably thought no one was home because Osman’s Bentley was out being serviced and the gates had been left open for some reason. I agree — the house is isolated and it’s an obvious target, and this burglary’s probably got nothing to do with the murder. But still, it’s interesting — something else that doesn’t add up, like that note I told you about — the one Swain got before the first murder. Here, I made a copy,’ said Trave, opening the top drawer of his desk and handing Clayton a piece of paper. ‘The original’s in London locked up with the other trial exhibits, but this is on the same kind of writing paper. And it’s definitely Ethan Mendel who wrote it. We did a comparison.’
The sheet of thin, light-blue paper was about five inches by four and looked like it had come from a standard-size, unlined letter-writing pad, but almost all of the top third had been torn off in a strip running diagonally from high on the right side of the sheet to lower on the left. The paper was wrinkled as if from frequent handling, and the ink had begun to fade a little, but Clayton clearly recognized the handwriting as Trave’s, even though Trave had sloped his letters to imitate the original.
I need to see you.
Meet me at the boathouse at five.
Ethan.
Clayton read the note twice, turned it over, and saw that there was nothing written on the other side. He handed it back to Trave with a puzzled look on his face.
‘What do you make of it?’ asked Trave.
‘Written in a hurry…’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The handwriting’s rushed. The paper’s torn…’
‘Yes, but look carefully: the sheet of paper’s taken from the top edge of the writing pad; it’s not torn across
