His fingers hesitated over the keyboard of his desktop computer while he warred with himself, but with a guilty look at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, he bypassed the office and logged on to his favourite chat room instead.
Here, the women loved him. He was no longer plain, middle-aged Colin who lived at home with his ailing mother. Online, he was dashing, he was wanted.
Online, he was another man entirely.
DI MacKenzie tugged her emerald green pea coat around her as she stepped out of her car into the windy afternoon. The sky was bright, but there was a bite in the air to remind her that it may have been summer, but it was still a northern summer.
“Miss Crompton?”
The door to a large, Victorian villa on the edge of a smart area of the city known as Jesmond opened to reveal a woman in her early thirties, dressed in a floaty, multi-coloured kaftan and bare feet. Her hair was bundled on top of her head and had been left to fall in messy blonde ringlets around an angular, expressive face.
“Hello,” she said simply, resting her hip against the doorframe.
“Hello,” MacKenzie replied, drawing out her warrant card. “I’m Detective Inspector Denise MacKenzie. We spoke on the phone?”
“Yep, I remember. Come on in,” she held the door open and led the way along a smart passageway covered in framed poster prints ranging from Che Guevara to the Beatles. “Sorry about the mess.”
It wasn’t so much messy as cluttered, MacKenzie thought. Patterned and cluttered.
A smoky grey cat wound around her legs and blinked at her with bright yellow eyes.
“It’s bloody awful,” Mathilda Crompton said, plopping herself down on one of the easy chairs arranged in a large, open plan sitting room. She tucked her legs up and the cat immediately joined her, curling itself over her toes like a furry hot water bottle. “I can’t believe it.”
“It is sad news,” MacKenzie agreed. “I know that the CSI team have already visited you to take prints and swabs. Thank you for your co-operation with that,” she added politely.
“I hope that they find something. I don’t mean some sort of bloody knife in my knicker drawer,” she tacked on with a nervous laugh. “I just mean – well, I hope there’s something to point you in the direction of her killer.”
“You could help by telling us about Claire.”
Mathilda nodded and stroked the cat methodically as she spoke.
“Claire is … I mean, she was quiet, but then, since I’m so loud most of the time, it worked pretty well. She rented the room upstairs. She’s been my tenant for three years now and I think we’d become good friends.”
“You think?”
“I know,” Mathilda corrected. “I only hesitate because Claire isn’t … wasn’t the demonstrative kind, you know?”
MacKenzie nodded.
“Did she see much of her family?”
“No, not really. They’re over on the Isle of Man and I think Claire was trying to save as much money as she could. Her mum would come across now and then. Last time was in February.”
“What about friends?”
“Um, well, like I say, she could be a bit introverted. I think she found it hard to connect with people and realistically she worked all the time. I mean, seriously, that girl never took a day off.”
“Never?”
“Nope, not that I remember. Never seemed to get sick, either. I used to try and badger her to spend some time to herself, take life a bit easier, you know? But she really needed the money.” Mathilda looked down at the cat, her wide mouth turning sad. “I never put the rent up and, confidentially, I didn’t charge her much for utilities. I didn’t have the heart.”
“That was very decent.”
Mathilda brushed that off with a sweep of her arm and the sleeve of her floral top billowed.
“She wanted to be a nurse and she would have made a good one,” her voice wobbled as the reality of it all began to kick in. “I was happy to help where I could.”
MacKenzie paused for a moment to give Mathilda a chance to collect herself. It wouldn’t help for her to break down; it would take so much longer to find out the things they needed to know.
“When did you last see her?”
Mathilda paused to think.
“It would have been Sunday morning. I was heading over to see my parents for the day and I stayed for lunch. I think she had an afternoon shift from around lunchtime.”
“No calls or texts after then?”
“No, nothing, I’m afraid.”
“When did you first begin to worry that something was wrong?”
“I got home from my parents’ after eight. She was due to get home around half past eleven and I always sort of listen out for her, you know? She kept to a routine, so when it got to midnight and I hadn’t heard her come in, I started to worry.”