It is busy with nose-to-nose traffic, crowded. It’s the sort of street where groups of morose teens loll on the low walls at the end of the scraps that pass as gardens, tired parents dash their kids to and from school and football practice, pensioners slowly but determinedly saunter to the corner shop, prepared to pay a bit more for their milk as it guarantees a chat to the person behind the counter. It’s an area where the recycling bins overflow, the paintwork on the doors blisters and peels. You get the sense that the people who live on the street are too strapped – by time and money – to bother with DIY. However, there is something appealing about the sense of enduring community. It’s the sort of place where all the kids go to the same local school, and the residents don’t shoo away the teenagers from the walls because it’s silently and tacitly acknowledged, they could be up to a lot worse, elsewhere.
Kai Janssen’s part of town is immaculate. The pavements are litter-free, there are landscaped walkways, fountains and green spaces. Although there is not a single soul around to enjoy these features. Clements looks about her and shivers, made cold by a sense of isolation. Personally, she’d rather live with the peeling paintwork and the streets that teem with life. This rarefied atmosphere of wealth is paradoxically suffocating. Clements rings the bell and is allowed into a large glass-and-marble foyer where she is greeted by a man in his fifties sat behind a concierge desk. This makes the place seem more like a hotel than a home.
Clements flashes her badge. ‘Can I help you?’ the concierge asks, not managing to hide the frisson of excitement he is so clearly feeling on having a police officer visit the premises. Cops don’t expect cheers and genial greetings from many people, but they can always depend on a warm welcome from a nosy busybody. Clements asks for Mr Janssen.
‘Is he expecting you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I hope there’s nothing wrong.’ The concierge is insincerely obsequious, but Clements doesn’t judge. She thinks that arguably it’s a necessary quality of the job if you have to suck up to the rich and entitled all the time. Obviously, something is wrong if a cop turns up at your door, unless it’s the strippergram variety. There is nothing about Clements that suggests she is a strippergram. She doesn’t reply, just smiles politely. She wants to keep him onside, in case she needs his help later; busybodies often make great witnesses, but she has nothing she wants to share with him yet. After a beat he gives up, recognising he is not going to get anything out of her, and calls Mr Janssen. After a brief exchange he says, ‘You just tap in the code. It’s 1601, the lift takes you right up to Mr and Mrs Janssen’s penthouse.’ Clements nods her thanks and heads off to the lift.
As promised, the lift doors swish open directly into the penthouse apartment ensuring that any visitor’s first impression is that the place is enormous and incredibly luxurious. It is also dark, not pitch black, but lit only by a scattering of table lamps – and because the place is so huge they don’t do much to illuminate. The size and sleekness steals Clements’ breath away. She doesn’t often come across many people who live like this. ‘I thought everyone was over the minimalist thing,’ she mutters to herself. Sometimes she does that, when she is working on her own. It makes environments less threatening to hear a voice, even if it is her own voice. And somehow this stark space, whilst large and luxurious, is threatening. She automatically scans the mostly open-plan area. There are various living spaces. A sitting area, a dining area, an office and a kitchen. All spacious. There are four doors to closed-off rooms. Bedrooms and bathrooms, presumably.
Most people live like Leigh Fletcher, in amongst a comfortable amount of clutter. They want their homes stuffed full of colour, vintage rugs and mirrors, endless mismatched prints on the walls. Not this place. Although, Clements notes, you would need a lot of stuff to fill this apartment – a lot. So maybe minimalism is the way to go. The walls are painted a dark slate grey. All the floors are a dark wood or marble, the furniture is various shades of graphite. A man steps out of the shadows. Clements doesn’t scare easily, but she flinches all the same. The man is tall and broad, bearlike. He looms over her. It is not his physicality that is alarming, it’s his emotional state. Clements sees at once that the man has been drinking, perhaps crying, he looks agitated, anxious.
‘Mr Janssen?’
‘Daan Janssen. Thank you for coming.’ He stretches out a hand and doing so, despite his emotional state, underlines the fact he has impeccable, unshakeable manners, the sort of manners that are drilled into a child at an early age and forever trump everything – warmth, sincerity, distress. No doubt some headmaster, or perhaps his father, repeatedly told him that ‘manners maketh man’. Maybe they do prevent us from falling into animalistic savagery, thinks Clements.
His grip is firm.
‘Come, come in.’ He leads her through the open-plan apartment to the kitchen area. Clements knows that even in exquisite luxury apartments such as this, the kitchen is the heart of the
