‘What are you doing?’
She spun round. Fox was standing at the French doors, glaring at her.
‘Lara, get back in here,’ he said. ‘This is a bloody crime scene.’
He glanced across at the uniformed officers, then lowered his voice. ‘I thought we had an understanding.’
There was a moment’s silence.
‘Did you see the scratch-marks on the balustrade?’ she said, glancing back to the terrace.
‘Lara, this isn’t a story,’ said Fox, his voice tight. ‘I let you in here as a favour.’
‘I know and I owe you, but listen. You asked me about Sandrine’s state of mind in the pub? Well she didn’t go from sociable to suicidal in a few hours. Those scratch marks suggest she was trying to scramble back onto the balcony. This wasn’t deliberate, Ian. She must have fallen.’
Fox pressed his lips together.
‘Last time I looked Lara, I was the investigating officer.’
He didn’t say it unkindly. He was too experienced to argue with a grieving friend, but he had a job to do.
‘I just wanted to point it out,’ said Lara, trying to hold herself together. Fox’s phone started to ring and Rob Monaghan was hovering. ‘Look,’ said the chief inspector. ‘You should go home and get some sleep. We’ll take it from here, okay?’
‘I want to help,’ she said, her eyes darting around the apartment, trying to take in every last detail before she was asked to leave.
‘I know that, Lara. But we’ve got this,’ said Fox. ‘We’ll find out what happened.’
She nodded.
‘Sure Ian, thank you,’ she said. But deep down she didn’t believe him.
Chapter 4
Alex turned his face into the needle-point shower jets. That felt good, he thought to himself, turning his broad back to take the full blast. It reminded Alex of the time he’d been to a Turkish bath house in Istanbul, where he’d been pummelled by a 20-stone dude with a moustache, but came out feeling fantastic. This bathroom had been one of the selling points for this flat. Yes, it had been ridiculously expensive – a swanky modernist flat complex right on the Thames, it wasn’t going to be cheap – but Alex could admit he had been completely seduced by the boy-toy mod-cons, especially when they helped you feel wide awake at 6am.
Having spent most of his twenties as a frontline foreign correspondent roughing it in roach-infested rooms in Delhi or bouncing in the back of a Jeep near Kandahar, it was a hoot to have a video intercom, motorised curtains and a kitchen like the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek. Alex had made an offer for the flat the same week he’d been promoted to Deputy at the Chronicle, justifying the eye-watering cost by telling himself he needed to be close to the office. The truth was, living here Alex felt like James Bond. The Roger Moore version, obviously: ludicrous perhaps, but oh, so much fun.
He shut off the water and grabbed a towel from the rail, then pulled on his monogrammed robe, a Christmas present from his girlfriend Alicia. Alex still wasn’t sure whether she was playing along with his ironic Hugh Hefner fantasy or whether she actually saw him as the sort of man who liked his initials stamped onto his clothes.
Surely she hadn’t missed the shelves in the open-plan living room, filled with mementoes from his time living abroad and on the edge – a chunk of wall from Berlin, a Chesapeake oyster shell from DC, the head of a spear he’d had to smuggle back from Sudan. It was still how Alex thought of himself: flak jacket and combat pants, even if his shrapnel scar was now hidden by a crisp white shirt. He missed those days, but there was only so long you could stay on the front line, especially when your dream was to edit a national newspaper. So he had come back to London, his ambition propelling him from the foreign desk to head of news and then up to Deputy. Alex smiled as saw the monogram in the mirror: his journey from the son of a newsagent to a captain of the media industry was almost complete.
Still towelling his dark hair, Alex crossed to his desk, strategically placed against the tall windows to take full advantage of the view from the eighth floor. He’d been here well over a year now and that picture never got old. The apartment building hugged the river on the south side of Chelsea Bridge and at this time of the morning London was grey-blue and beautiful, the lights still twinkling on the water.
If he was totally honest, it wasn’t just the gadgets and the parquet floors that had attracted him to this building, it was the view of the river. He’d spent countless evenings on Lara’s houseboat and it had always been a sure-fire way to decompress after a hard day at the paper. His job was full-on, but a cold beer and the sight of the Thames from the deck of Misty? Nothing like it.
Snapping into work mode, Alex opened his laptop and began his morning routine, scanning through the news feeds. Alicia was always pushing to stay over at the flat more often, but on work days he liked to wake up alone. Alex had his morning routine down pat, catching up on any stories which had broken overnight, sifting through the speculation and PR spin, looking for anything they could use. Today there was mudslide in Argentina, a violent protest in Chicago and some B-list movie star in trouble over an outburst on social media: nothing out of the ordinary. Alex glanced at the time and scowled. He needed to get moving; he’d spent too long in the shower.
Alex was half out of his seat when he switched to the domestic news wires, just in case there had been a flood or crash: hard news could be a morbid business – people complained about the news cycle but no one wanted to read fluffy stories about rescued kittens, not really. He was just about to close the laptop when he saw it.
London, 4:30AM, French journalist falls to her death: W1. Met Police report.
It was the occupation of the victim that caught his eye. The media industry was a small world, and Alex knew most of the senior players. Clicking on the title, he sat back down, running a hand through his still damp hair.
‘Oh no.’
Woman identified as Sandrine Legard, writer for Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Neighbours alerted the emergency services, but Ms. Legard was declared dead at the scene.
He stared at the words, black on a white background, the cursor mindlessly blinking on, his heart thumping in time. And then he thought of Lara.