‘Keep up, Sergeant.’
‘Sorry.’ Troy hurried across the second landing. The chief and Hetty Leathers were about to ascend a much more steep and narrow set of stairs covered in fawn haircord. There were only about a dozen steps leading to a white painted door. This was of the cheapest type, available from any B & Q. Plywood, hollow inside, with a silver-coloured oxide handle. It was closed.
As Hetty reached out, Barnaby touched her arm.
‘Have you been in here since Carlotta disappeared?’
‘No. She wouldn’t let me - Mrs Lawrence. Said she’d see to it.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘It certainly is.’ Hetty clucked gently. ‘I was quite put out, I don’t mind admitting.’
‘And has she? Seen to it?’
‘Not to my understanding. But then, I don’t live in so I wouldn’t know everything she does.’ She turned the handle and opened the door. All three stood staring into the room’s interior.
Eventually Hetty said, ‘Well! I’ve seen some messes in my time but I’ve never seen anything like this.’ She sucked in another highly indignant breath. ‘Filthy young madam.’
Troy, never one to create a newly minted epigram when a well-worn one was to hand, muttered, ‘Looks like a bomb’s gone off.’
Barnaby said nothing. He was recalling what the Lawrences had said at their first interview. He remembered Lionel putting the blame for Carlotta’s departure on his wife. There had been a disturbance. She and the girl had had ‘an argument’. Some argument.
Once again he put his hand on Hetty’s arm, this time as she was about to step inside the room.
‘I think the fewer people walking around the better, Mrs Leathers.’
‘If that’s what you want, Inspector.’ Hetty positioned herself firmly in the centre of the doorway. She kept her eye on both policemen while they were together and on Troy when they had separated to different parts of the room. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.
If Barnaby had not known the circumstances he would have assumed he was looking at the aftermath of a burglary. There was the same sense of wild, angry searching, clothes ripped from hangers and flung all over the floor, magazines - Minx, Sugar, 19 - torn to shreds, posters ripped off the walls and torn across. He picked up a couple. The names - All Saints, Kavana, Puff Daddy - meant nothing to him. Since Cully had left home eight years ago, he was totally out of touch.
All the drawers from a small chest had been pulled out and flung across the room, the contents lying where they fell. Cosmetics, underwear, a loose tangle of tights, a pink plastic hair dryer. Brushes, rollers, combs. The place smelt pungently of cheap hair spray overlying a more pleasant, peachy fragrance.
Troy, agitating the corner of the prettily flowered duvet, released a cloud of tawny dust. Then he saw several little piles of it on the bed and the floor. If this was junk it was a new one on him. He bent down and sniffed.
‘She’s been chucking face powder about, chief.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be much that she hasn’t chucked about.’
‘That girl always did have a paddy on her,’ said Hetty. ‘There’s the box - look.’
Barnaby picked up the box, Rimmel’s Honeybun, and put it carefully on the bedside table. Troy, noticing this, went to the far side of the room, retrieved a cushion that belonged to the single armchair and just as carefully replaced it.
‘Don’t touch anything, Sergeant.’
The times I have to bite my tongue, thought Troy, it could double as a sieve. He watched the chief, who was standing by the little porthole window, apparently lost in thought.
But Troy knew what the DCI was really doing. And there was a time, some years since admitted, when he would have attempted to do the same. To observe the scene, noticing every minute detail, to attempt to bring the drama which had brought such destruction about to life. To put flesh on the antagonist’s bones.
Yes, Troy had had a go at all that. But he had so rarely been right and so often monumentally wrong (once he had arrested a shady antiques dealer on suspicion of stealing the local church’s ornaments, only to find it was the vicar) that he soon gave up. As he put it to Maureen, ‘With an ace fishmonger on the doorstep why struggle to catch your own?’
Barnaby was wondering if he had made a mistake asking Mrs Leathers to show him Carlotta’s room. He thought about the coming interview with Ann Lawrence and was beginning to feel it might have been better to arrive with a search warrant and enter the place with her at his side. He would have had a reaction then. Been able to watch the play of expression on her face as he moved around. Getting warmish, warm, warmer! Getting cool, no - cold, icy, brrr!