There was a small dresser beside the table, displaying earthenware ornaments, and a photo of Harry and his daughter. Lindsay had shared his pale, serious eyes, and his strong nose, but the rest of her face had been more vivacious and joyful. She was beaming in the photo, and strands of her long brown hair had blown across her father’s face. Jo had once remarked on the picture, telling Harry that Lindsay had been a beautiful young woman. He’d surprised her by being only too happy to talk, and he’d told her the photo was taken on the beach in Hove on the south coast, on a trip the family had taken just prior to her first year at university. A year before she died. Even though Jo had never met the girl, it was almost heart-breaking to look at the image. What it must have felt like to her dad, to see her everyday, so alive, Jo couldn’t grasp.
She tugged open the right-side dresser drawer. Inside was a collection of pens, keys, batteries, a small torch. The left side contained what she was looking for – a small leather-covered address book. She opened it, and flicked through the pages. Harry’s handwriting was dreadful, and some parts were indecipherable. Several sections were crossed out, and Jo wondered if that meant the addressee had moved on, or was deceased. Many of the names had ranks attached in abbreviated code – old colleagues from Harry’s thirty years on the job. He’d been in Oxford for all of it.
Jo found what she was looking for under G – Jessica Granger. He’d always called her ‘Jess’ in conversation, but the address was unlikely to be a coincidence – ‘Ashbourne, Derbs’. The writing here was perceptibly neater too, as if he’d taken extra care inscribing it. There was no phone number, but a local officer could be sent to deliver the news. Hopefully Jessica was still at the same address. Jo made a note in her own copybook.
Directly beside where the address book had lain was a stack of paperwork, and she lifted it out to leaf through. The pile contained receipts, utilities correspondence, a recent bank statement, and the instruction booklet for the mobile phone she’d convinced him to purchase about a year ago. The second item down caught Jo’s attention. It was an invoice sheet, signed by Harry himself, for £65, paid to a local glazier called PJ Adams Ltd, based on the Iffley Road. It was dated just over two weeks prior on March 29th. The work completed was handwritten – ‘Single pane, rear door.’
Jo looked across the kitchen and saw the results. The back door had two panes of glass in its upper half. On closer inspection, she saw the lower one, just above the mortise keyhole, was new – with cleaner sealant around its rim. Jo remembered from the briefing notes Heidi had prepared for her return that there’d been a spate of opportunistic burglaries in the area, presumably addicts taking what they could. The warren of streets made the neighbourhood easy pickings. Mostly elderly residents, simple to sneak in from the back, hopping a fence, and nick what you could to flog elsewhere. It didn’t take a leap of logic to work out the same might have happened here – someone could have knocked the glass through, then used the key in the lock to open the door. Pretty much a gift to a petty criminal. Jo pulled out her phone, and called the station, asking if there had been any recent reports from Harry’s address about a break-in. The answer came back negative. Maybe she was jumping to conclusions. Harry didn’t have much of value anyway. No computer, no jewellery. The TV would be more trouble than it was worth. And the key was in the lock still, which struck her as odd. If you’d been robbed in that way, why leave yourself open to exactly the same crime? Besides, she told herself, if the break-in happened two weeks ago, it seemed unlikely to be connected to the murder anyway.
She opened the door on to the small cobbled yard with a tiny outbuilding that would once have housed the toilet when the house was first built. There was a tall fence, but nothing that would keep out a determined burglar.
Jo retreated indoors and, on a hunch, she checked the fridge. It wasn’t particularly well stocked, but there were two types of milk. More evidence that he was sharing the house with someone else. She opened the cupboards too, to find plenty of tins, but also a sweetened breakfast cereal alongside the porridge oats that seemed a better fit for her friend.
There was a noise from the living room, and she returned that way to find CSO Mel Cropper arriving, suited up, along with two technicians clad in similar white attire. One carried a digital camera on a loop around her neck.
‘Jo,’ he said in greeting.
She gave a nod rather than shaking hands, and filled him in on what she’d found so far, including the blood near the ceiling and the mugs in the kitchen. Mel showed no signs of acknowledgement that the victim was a friend of hers. The buffer of professionalism actually made things easier. Mel would do his job as thoroughly as always, gathering everything he needed with the corpse in situ before releasing the body to the morgue. There, the forensic pathologist would take over the evidence gathering.
Jo headed up the steep and narrow staircase. She’d never ventured this way other than to use the first-floor toilet. The house had once been a two-up, two-down, but the back bedroom had been split to accommodate an indoor shower room and WC. Harry’s bedroom door, at the front of the house, had always been closed, and the rear bedroom door was shut now. She went first to the front. It felt strange, entering his private space like this. He’d usually presented himself carefully, in a suit and tie, even if the clothes were a bit shabby. But here, in his inner sanctum, hung a dressing gown, with a pair of slippers tucked neatly beside the double bed. A chest of drawers, and a solid-looking wardrobe; a beside table with a digital alarm clock, a pair of spectacles and a science fiction novel, splayed open to mark the page. There was no sign of another recent occupant. Indeed, there was only a single pillow on the right-hand side of the bed. Here though, Jo noticed, the signs of recent cleaning were absent. Dust coated the top of the bedside lamp, and the carpet’s perimeter was discoloured with the same. The table where the book lay was marked with several rings where a mug or glass had overflowed its rim. Years of drinking had left Harry with a mild case of the shakes that he himself had joked about. She’d seen it in the pub herself a few times. It got to the stage where the barmaid at the Three Crowns would carry his drink over.
‘Table service!’
‘Just looking out for my carpet, Harry.’
She felt distinctly nosy opening up his wardrobe and drawers, but unsurprised to find a conservative collection of shirts and trousers, neatly folded and hung. Among the garments, wrapped in transparent plastic, was a police officer’s uniform from the eighties, before he went into plain clothes.
Making her way back onto the small landing, she opened the door to the remaining bedroom. This one she’d entered before, by accident when looking for the toilet on her first visit, and she remembered it mostly being given to storage, with several cardboard boxes and plastic containers, as well as an old exercise bike. The bike was still there, but the boxes had gone, and a camp-bed was extended across the wall, with bedding made. A towel hung across the radiator too. Someone was staying here for sure. Jo moved the bedding aside carefully with a gloved hand, crouched down, and spotted a single long strand of blond hair beside the pillow. This was someone hastily accommodated, with little thought given to good impressions or comfort.
The room contained nothing else of interest, but as Jo put her head into the bathroom, she saw a floral washbag that looked completely out of place. Checking its contents, she found a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush with more blond locks, scrunchies, woman’s deodorant, some foundation and blusher in a separate bag, plus half a dozen loose tampons. Jo’s mind readjusted to the evidence. Not the possessions of an elderly friend, then, and the fact of the sleeping arrangements suggested this wasn’t a romantic connection at all. A much younger woman. Was this the same person who’d wielded that poker so ruthlessly, felling Harry with what looked like a single blow? If she hadn’t known the victim, she might have seen something creepy about the set-up, an old man giving shelter to a young woman, but that picture was so far out of keeping with what she knew of Harry Ferman, she couldn’t countenance it.