Page 20 of The Love Letter

‘Search me,’ Muriel said. ‘I’ve still got the key. Want to go and take a look for yourself? Smell’s not too bad now. Whoever took the stuff gave the place a thorough going over with disinfectant too.’

Joanna followed Muriel out of her flat and into the passage, and watched as she unlocked the opposite door.

‘Be glad when they get another tenant. A young family would be nice, breathe some life back into the place again. You don’t mind if I leave you to it, do you? That place still spooks me.’

‘Of course not. I’ve disturbed you long enough anyway. Would you mind if I took your telephone number, just in case I need to get any other details?’

‘I’ll write it down for you. Come collect it when you drop the key back in.’

Joanna stepped inside Rose’s flat, pulling the door to behind her. She switched on the light and stood in the tiny entrance hall, looking up at the steep, uneven staircase to her right. And knew that the woman she had helped out of the church two weeks back was no more capable of mounting those stairs than a newborn baby. Slowly, Joanna walked up them, each step creaking noisily. At the top of the stairs was a small landing. Two deserted, damp rooms lay beyond, one on each side. She paced them, finding nothing save four walls and bare boards. Even the windows had been cleaned recently, and she looked down into a weed-filled courtyard at the back of the building. She left the room and stood on the landing, her toes on the very edge of the top step. The drop was no more than fifteen feet, but from here it seemed much, much further . . .

She walked back downstairs and entered the sitting room where Rose had lived for the last days of her life amongst her tea chests. She sniffed. There was still a faintly unpleasant aroma in the room, but that was all. As Muriel had said, the room had been stripped bare. Joanna got down on her hands and knees and crawled across the floorboards, looking for anything that previous eyes might have missed. Nothing.

She inspected the bathroom and the kitchen, then went and stood again in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, where Muriel had found poor Rose.

. . .I don’t have long now . . . I am warning you, this is dangerous . . . if I have already gone. . .

A shiver of fear ran down Joanna’s spine as she realised there was every possibility Rose had been murdered.

The question was,why?

The car parked across the street started its engine as Joanna came out of the front door. The traffic was solid all the way down Marylebone High Street. He watched her as she stood outside uncertainly for a few seconds, then turned to her left and walked off.

6

Joanna spent a long, wet afternoon in the driving rain, standing huddled with other journalists and photographers outside the Chelsea house of ‘The Redhead’, as she was nicknamed by Joanna’s fellow hacks.

The flame-haired supermodel, who was reportedly love-nesting with another female model, finally made a run for it through her front door. The flashbulbs popped as The Redhead broke through the crowd and ran for her waiting taxi.

‘Right. I’m off to follow her,’ said Steve, Joanna’s photographer. ‘I’ll call you when I find out where she’s going. My bet is the airport, so don’t hold your breath.’

‘Okay.’ She watched the other photographers climbing onto their motorbikes, and the cluster of reporters dispersing into the rainy night. Groaning in frustration, she headed for Sloane Square tube station. All along King’s Road, the shops were full of end-of-season sale signs – it felt as depressed with post-Christmas fatigue as she did. On the tube, she stared blankly at the advertising panels above her.

Doorstepping was such a thankless task. All that hanging around for hours, sometimes days, when you knew the most you’d get out of the person was ‘No comment’. And it affronted her sense of basic human decency. If The Redhead wanted to have a rampaging affair with asheep, for God’s sake, surely it was no one’s business but her own? However, as Alec constantly reminded her, there was no room for morals on the news desk of a national paper. The public had an insatiable appetite for all things salacious and sexy. The Redhead’s picture on the front page tomorrow would sell an extra ten thousand copies.

At Finsbury Park, Joanna left the tube and headed for the escalator. At the top she checked her mobile. There was a short voicemail from Steve.

‘I was right. She’s on a plane to the States in an hour. Night.’

Joanna tucked away her mobile and headed outside for the bus queue.

Too busy at work since her conversation with Muriel to think through everything she had found out, Joanna wanted to pick Simon’s brains about it. She’d scribbled everything she could remember down on her notepad on the journey back and prayed there was nothing she’d forgotten.

Eventually, the bus arrived near Simon’s apartment building. Joanna alighted, then walked briskly along the street, so lost in her thoughts she didn’t notice a man melt into the shadows behind her.

Simon’s flat was on the top floor of a large converted villa at the crest of Highgate Hill, with wonderful views over the green spaces and rooftops of North London. He’d bought it two years ago, saying that what it lacked in footage on the inside was more than made up for by the feeling of space on the outside. Living in London was an enormous sacrifice for both of them. They still held Yorkshire in their hearts, yearning for the peace, tranquillity and emptiness of the moors on which they had been raised, which was probably why they had both ended up only a ten-minute bus ride apart in a leafy outpost of London. Joanna envied his view here, but was content in her own quirky little flat at the bottom of the hill in cheaper Crouch End. Granted, double-glazing and a decent bathroom suite were luxuries her cantankerous landlord had never bothered with, but her neighbours were kind and quiet, which was worth a great deal in London.

Joanna rang the buzzer and the security lock opened. She trudged up the seventy-six stairs and, panting, arrived on the small landing that led to his home. The door was open, delicious cooking smells wafting out, with the sound of Fats Waller on the CD player.

‘Hi.’

‘Jo, come in,’ Simon called from the small kitchen in one corner of the open-plan space.

Joanna plonked a bottle of wine down on the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen and the sitting room. Simon, face pink from the rising steam of a saucepan he was stirring, put down his wooden spoon and came to give her a hug.

‘How are we?’

‘Er . . . fine. Just fine.’