‘I’m on duty, Mr Janssen.’ And it’s mid-afternoon. She doesn’t add that.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry. Really, please call me Daan.’ Clements nods but doubts she will. Best to keep a distance, at least at first. Sometimes, it is helpful to forge intimacy, but she likes to decide when that will be expedient. Morgan was right about something, Daan Janssen’s accent is barely perceptible. His foreignness is only detectable by his crisp manner. There’s something about his elegant well-cut clothes – he is still wearing the jacket to his suit, even though he’s in his own home – and his precise but staccato sentences that suggest a formality, an otherness, that isn’t very British. Maybe his particular brand of handsome also marks him out. People think because she is a police officer, and investigating, that she’s impervious to the things that matter to other women, but she’s not. Clements sees attractive men and notes them the way any thirty-five-year-old woman might. It’s just that she also wonders if the handsome men she finds herself face to face with are thieves, arsonists, fraudsters.
Killers.
Daan Janssen is a very attractive man. He is tall, broad, green-eyed, with blond hair; he wears it brushing his collar, a little longer than most men his age (at a guess she’d put him late thirties). His cheekbones are chiselled. You could lose an eye on them. Even if he wasn’t stood in the kitchen of his enormous London penthouse, he would be identifiable as wealthy. If Clements saw him on one of the dating sites that she occasionally – in a fit of optimism over experience – signs up to, she would definitely swipe right. But he’d never be on a dating site. Not this man. There would never be a need. If she wanted to get to this man she’d have to climb over women, a mountain of them. No doubt that’s what Kai Janssen did. Clements is keen to look at a picture of her. She’s guessing the wife will be a glacial beauty, tall like him, blonde, possibly androgynous. Certainly hard-bodied, lean.
It’s been a good day for hot husbands who have lost their wives because Mark Fletcher is also an attractive man. He has brown eyes, dark, almost blue-black hair with only a whisper of grey at the temples. He has a strong, muscular, almost stocky build that makes him appear quite the force. Clements had him down as someone who always enjoyed sport and has never allowed the habit of staying fit to slip. Probably he cycles, runs, possibly lifts weights now, as a boy he will have played rugby and football, possibly captained the teams. There would have been women throwing themselves at Mark Fletcher too, before Leigh. But not women who are seduced by credit cards – women who wanted to have families and to see their husband carry their kids on his shoulders, kick a football with them, pitch a tent. If Clements had to make snap judgements – and she did sometimes – she’d say Mark Fletcher is a family man, whereas Daan Janssen is a ladies’ man.
She puts the attractiveness of these men out of her mind and gets back to the job in hand. That is perhaps where she differs from other women, and possibly the reason she has never maintained any long-term relationships, she’s never yet met a man who is attractive enough to completely distract her from her work. Family men, ladies’ men, none of them can provide a high that equals the one she gets when cracking a case. ‘You called about your wife,’ she says.
‘I should have called you sooner.’
Clements pulls out her notebook. ‘Well, I’m here now.’ She starts with the standard things: name, age, then, ‘So, when did you last see your wife?’
‘Last Thursday morning.’
Inwardly she takes a breath. ‘A week ago?’ She tries not to allow any judgement to leak into the tone of her voice.
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ve waited until now to report her missing?’ It is impossible not to hear the echo of the same question that was asked of Mark Fletcher earlier today. What the fuck is it with these men who lose their wives? Why are they so slow to become alarmed? Clements thinks that the next time she’s romanticising the great institution of marriage, she’ll remind herself of these conversations.
‘Oh, but she hasn’t been missing all that time,’ Daan interjects. ‘No, of course not. She has been at her mother’s. Her mother is very ill. Kai devotes a lot of time to her care. Kai’s mother – Pamela, Pam – is in a home, in the north of England. Kai is staying there with her.’
‘I see. So, when did you last hear from your wife? Have you spoken on the phone whilst she has been visiting her mother?’
‘Yes, we have. We last spoke on Sunday afternoon.’
‘But not since then?’
‘We swapped WhatsApp messages. I received one at lunchtime.’
‘So, you are in contact with your wife? She’s simply not at home. That’s not missing.’ Clements was too eager to come here. She should have called him first, established some facts. She’d jumped the gun on the back of coming straight from Leigh Fletcher’s house, thought there was a pattern, a connection. She should be moving
