DC CLEMENTS
There is no body. A fact DC Clements
finds both a problem and a tremulous, tantalizing possibility. She’s not a
woman inclined to irrational hope, or even excessive hope. Any damned hope,
really. At least, not usually.
Kylie Gillingham is probably dead.
The forty-three-year-old woman has been
missing nearly two weeks. Ninety-seven percent of the 180,000 people a year who
are reported missing are found within a week, dead or alive. She hasn’t been
spotted by members of the public, or picked up on CCTV; her bank, phone and
email accounts haven’t been touched. She has social media registered under her
married name, Kai Janssen; they’ve lain dormant. No perky pictures of carefully
arranged books, lattes, Negronis or peonies. Kylie Gillingham hasn’t returned
to either of her homes. Statistically, it’s looking very bad.
Experience would also suggest this sort
of situation has to end terribly. When a wife disappears, all eyes turn on the
husband. In this case, there is not one but two raging husbands left behind.
Both men once loved the missing woman very much. Love is just a shiver away
from hate.
The evidence does not conclusively
indicate murder. There is no body. But a violent abduction is a reasonable
proposition—police-speak, disciplined by protocol. Kidnap and abuse, possible
torture is likely—woman-speak, fired by indignation. They know Kylie Gillingham
was kept in a room in an uninhabited apartment just floors below the one she
lived in with husband number two, Daan Janssen. That’s not a coincidence. There
is a hole in the wall of that room; most likely Kylie punched or kicked it. The
debris created was flung through a window into the street, probably in order to
attract attention. Her efforts failed. Fingerprints place her in the room; it’s
unlikely she was simply hanging out or even hiding out, as there is evidence to
suggest she was chained to the radiator.
Yet despite all this, the usually clear,
logical, reasonable Clements wants to ignore statistics, experience and even
evidence that suggests the abduction ended in fatal violence. She wants to
hope.
There just might be some way, somehow,
that Kylie—enigma, bigamist—escaped from that sordid room and is alive. She
might be in hiding. She is technically a criminal, after all; she might be
hiding from the law. She can hardly go home. She will know by now that her life
of duplicity is exposed. She will know her husbands are incensed. Baying for
blood. She has three largely uninterested half brothers on her father’s side, and
a mother who lives in Australia. None of them give Clements a sense that they
are helping or protecting Kylie. She will know who abducted her. If alive, she
must be terrified.
Clements’ junior partner, Constable
Tanner, burly and blunt as usual, scoffs at the idea that she escaped. He’s
waiting for a body; he’d settle for a confession. It’s been four days now since
Daan Janssen left the country. “Skipped justice,” as Tanner insists on saying.
But the constable is wet behind the ears. He still thinks murder is glamorous
and career-enhancing. Clements tries to remember: did she ever think that way?
She’s been a police officer for nearly fifteen years; she joined the force
straight out of university, a few years younger than Tanner is now, but no, she
can’t remember a time when she thought murder was glamorous.
“He hasn’t skipped justice. We’re talking
to him and his lawyers,” she points out with what feels like the last bit of
her taut patience.
“You’re being pedantic.”
“I’m being accurate.”
“But you’re talking to him through bloody
Microsoft Teams,” says Tanner dismissively. “What the hell is that?”
“The future.” Clements sighs. She ought
to be offended by the uppity tone of the junior police officer. It’s
disrespectful. She’s the detective constable. She would be offended if she had
the energy, but she doesn’t have any to spare. It’s all focused on the case.
On Kylie Gillingham. She needs to remain clear-sighted, analytical. They need
to examine the facts, the evidence, over and over again. To be fair, Constable
Tanner is focused too, but his focus manifests in frenetic frustration. She
tries to keep him on track. “Look, lockdown means Daan Janssen isn’t coming
back to the UK for questioning any time soon. Even if there wasn’t a strange
new world to negotiate, we couldn’t force him to come to us, not without
arresting him, and I can’t do that yet.”
Tanner knocks his knuckles against her
desk as though he is rapping on a door, asking to be let in, demanding
attention. “But all the evidence—”
“Is circumstantial.” Tanner knows this;
he just can’t quite accept it. He feels the finish line is in sight, but he
can’t cross it, and it frustrates him. Disappoints him. He wants the world to
be clear-cut. He wants crimes to be punished, bad men behind bars, a safer realm.
He doesn’t want some posh twat flashing his passport and wallet, hopping on a
plane to his family mansion in the Netherlands and getting away with it. Daan
Janssen’s good looks and air of entitlement offend Tanner. Clements
understands all that. She understands it but has never allowed personal bias
and preferences to cloud her investigating procedures.
“We found her phones in his flat!” Tanner
insists.
“Kylie could have put them there
herself,” counters Clements. “She did live there with him as his wife.”
“And we found the receipt for the cable
ties and the bucket from the room she was held in.”
“We found a receipt. The annual number of cable ties produced is about a
hundred billion. A lot of people buy cable ties. Very few of them to bind their
wives to radiators. Janssen might have wanted to neaten up his computer and
charger cords. He lives in a minimalist house. That’s what any lawyer worth
their salt will argue.” Clements rolls her head from left to right; her neck
clicks like castanets.
“His fingerprints are on the food
packets.”
“Which means he touched those protein
bars. That’s all they prove. Not that he took them into the room. Not that he
was ever in the room.”
Exasperated, Tanner demands, “Well how
else did they get there? They didn’t fly in through the bloody window, did
they?” Clements understands he’s not just excitable, he cares. He wants this
resolved. She likes him for it, even if he’s clumsy in his declarations. It
makes her want to soothe him; offer him guarantees and reassurances that she
doesn’t even believe in. She doesn’t soothe or reassure, because she has to
stay professional, focused. The devil is in the detail. She just has to stay
sharp, be smarter than the criminal. That’s what she believes. “She might have
brought them in from their home. He might have touched them in their flat.
That’s what a lawyer will argue.”
“He did it all right, no doubt about it,”
asserts Tanner with a steely certainty.
Clements knows that there is always
doubt. A flicker, like a wick almost lit, then instantly snuffed. Nothing is
certain in this world. That’s why people like her are so important; people who
know about ambiguity yet carry on regardless, carry on asking questions,
finding answers. Dig, push, probe. That is her job. For a conviction to be
secured in a court of law, things must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. It
isn’t easy to do. Barristers are brilliant, wily. Jurors can be insecure,
overwhelmed. Defendants might lie, cheat. The evidence so far is essentially
fragile and hypothetical.
“I said, didn’t I. Right at the
beginning, I said it’s always the husband that’s done it,” Tanner continues
excitedly. He did say as much, yes. However, he was talking about Husband
Number 1, Mark Fletcher, at that point, if Clements’ memory serves her
correctly, which it always does. And even if her memory one day fails to be the
reliable machine that it currently is, she takes notes—meticulous notes—so she
always has those to rely on. Yes, Tanner said it was the husband, but this case
has been about which husband. Daan
Janssen, married to Kai: dedicated daughter to a sick mother, classy dresser
and sexy wife. Or Mark Fletcher, husband to Leigh: devoted stepmother,
conscientious management consultant and happy wife? Kai. Leigh. Kylie. Kylie
Gillingham, the bigamist, had been hiding in plain sight. But now she is gone.
Vanished.
“The case against Janssen is gathering
momentum,” says Clements, carefully.
“Because Kylie was held captive in his
apartment block.”
“Yes.”
“Which is right on the river, easy way to
lose a body.”
She winces at this thought but stays on
track. “Obviously Mark Fletcher has motive too. A good lawyer trying to cast
doubt on Janssen’s guilt might argue that Fletcher knew about the other husband
and followed his wife to her second home.”
Tanner is bright, fast; he chases her
line of thought. He knows the way defense lawyers create murky waters.
“Fletcher could have confronted Kylie somewhere in the apartment block.”
“A row. A violent moment of fury,” adds
Clements. “He knocks her out cold. Then finds an uninhabited apartment and
impetuously stashes her there.”
Tanner is determined to stick to his
theory that Janssen is the guilty man. “Sounds far-fetched. How did he break
in? This thing seems more planned.”
“I agree, but the point is, either
husband could have discovered the infidelity, then, furious, humiliated and
ruthless, imprisoned her. They’d have wanted to scare and punish, reassert
control, show her who was boss.” They know this much, but they do not know what
happened next. Was she killed in that room? If so, where is the body hidden?
“And you know we can’t limit this investigation to just the two husbands. There
are other suspects,” she adds.
Tanner flops into his chair, holds up a
hand and starts to count off the suspects on his fingers. “Oli, Kylie’s teen
stepson. He has the body and strength of a man…”
Clements finishes his thought. “But the
emotions and irrationality of a child. He didn’t know his stepmum was a
bigamist, but he did know she was having an affair. It’s possible he did
something rash. Something extreme that is hard to come back from.”
“Then there’s the creepy concierge in the
swanky apartment block.”
“Alfonzo.”
“Yeah, he might be our culprit.”
Clements considers it. “He has access to
all the flats, the back stairs, the CCTV.”
“He’s already admitted that he deleted
the CCTV from the day Kylie was abducted. He said that footage isn’t kept more
than twenty-four hours unless an incident of some kind is reported. Apparently
the residents insist on this for privacy. It might be true. It might be just
convenient.”
Clements nods. “And then there’s Fiona
Phillipson. The best friend.”
“Bloody hell. We have more suspects than
an Agatha Christie novel,” says Tanner with a laugh that is designed to hide
how overwhelmed and irritated he feels. His nose squashed up against shadowy
injustice, cruel violence and deception.
“Right.”
“I still think the husband did it.”
“Which one?”
“Crap. Round and round in circles we go.”
He scratches his head aggressively. “Do you want me to order in pizza? It’s
going to be a long night.”
“Is anyone still doing deliveries? I
don’t think they are,” points out Clements. “You know, lockdown.”
“Crap,” he says again, and then rallies.
“Crisps and chocolate from the vending machine then. We’ll need something to
sustain us while we work out where Kylie is.”
Clements smiles to herself. It’s the
first time in a long time that Tanner has referred to Kylie by name, not as
“her” or “the bigamist” or, worse, “the body.” It feels like an acceptance of a
possibility that she might be somewhere. Somewhere other than dead and gone.
Did she somehow, against the odds,
escape? Is Kylie Gillingham—the woman who dared to defy convention, the woman
who would not accept limits and laughed in the face of conformity—still out
there, somehow just being?
God, Clements hopes so.
Excerpted
from Two Dead Wives by Adele Parks. Copyright © 2023 by Adele Parks. Published
by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
