“Is he expecting you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I hope there’s nothing wrong.” The concierge is insincerely obsequious, but Clements doesn’t judge. She thinks that arguably it’s a necessary quality of the job if you have to suck up to the rich and entitled all the time. Obviously, something is wrong if a cop turns up at your door, unless it’s the strippergram variety. There is nothing about Clements that suggests she is a strippergram. She doesn’t reply, just smiles politely. She wants to keep him onside, in case she needs his help later; busybodies often make great witnesses, but she has nothing she wants to share with him yet. After a beat he gives up, recognizing he is not going to get anything out of her, and calls Mr. Janssen. After a brief exchange he says, “You just tap in the code. It’s 1601. The lift takes you right up to Mr. and Mrs. Janssen’s penthouse.” Clements nods her thanks and heads off to the lift.
As promised, the lift doors swish open directly into the penthouse apartment ensuring that any visitor’s first impression is that the place is enormous and incredibly luxurious. It is also dark, not pitch-black, but lit only by a scattering of table lamps—and because the place is so huge, they don’t do much to illuminate. The size and sleekness steals Clements’s breath away. She doesn’t come across many people who live like this. “I thought everyone was over the minimalist thing,” she mutters to herself. Sometimes she does that, when she is working on her own. It makes environments less threatening to hear a voice, even if it is her own voice. And somehow this stark space, while large and luxurious, is threatening. She automatically scans the mostly open-plan area. There are various living spaces. A sitting area, a dining area, an office and a kitchen. All spacious. There are four doors to closed-off rooms. Bedrooms and bathrooms, presumably.
Most people live like Leigh Fletcher, in among a comfortable amount of clutter. They want their homes stuffed full of color, vintage rugs and mirrors, endless mismatched prints on the walls. Not this place. Although, Clements notes, you would need a lot of stuff to fill this apartment—a lot. So maybe minimalism is the way to go. The walls are painted a dark slate gray. All the floors are a dark wood or marble, the furniture is various shades of graphite. A man steps out of the shadows. Clements doesn’t scare easily, but she flinches all the same. The man is tall and broad, bearlike. He looms over her. It is not his physicality that is alarming, it’s his emotional state. Clements sees at once that the man has been drinking, perhaps crying—he looks agitated, anxious.
“Mr. Janssen?”
“Daan Janssen. Thank you for coming.” He stretches out a hand and doing so—despite his emotional state—underlines the fact he has impeccable, unshakable manners, the sort of manners that are drilled into a child at an early age and forever trump everything—warmth, sincerity, distress. No doubt some headmaster—or perhaps his father—repeatedly told him that “manners maketh man.” Maybe they do prevent us from falling into animalistic savagery, thinks Clements.
His grip is firm.
“Come, come in.” He leads her through the open-plan apartment to the kitchen area. Clements knows that even in exquisite luxury apartments such as this, the kitchen is the heart of the home. Although she doesn’t find any signs of cooking; all the surfaces are clear from clutter and gleaming as though newly installed that day. There are no condiments, crockery or cutlery—clean or dirty. It looks like a show home. There is a sleek laptop, open and on, emitting an eerie blue light into the darkness. The only thing on display that suggests offering any degree of sustenance is an open bottle of malt whisky, with an empty glass next to it. There’s ice melting in the glass, it has been used. The rattling ice suggests the alcohol was knocked back at some speed. Daan Janssen pours himself another generous measure and then turns to Clements, shakes the bottle at her. “Do you want one?”
“I’m on duty, Mr. Janssen.” And it’s midafternoon. She doesn’t add that.
“Yes, of course. Sorry. Really, please call me Daan.” Clements nods but doubts she will. Best to keep a distance, at least at first. Sometimes, it is helpful to forge intimacy, but she likes to decide when that will be expedient. Morgan was right about something, Daan Janssen’s accent is barely perceptible. His foreignness is detectable only by his crisp manner. There’s something about his elegant well-cut clothes—he is still wearing the jacket to his suit, even though he’s in his own home—and his precise but staccato sentences that suggest a formality, an otherness, that isn’t very British. Maybe his particular brand of handsome also marks him out. People think because she is a police officer, and investigating, that she’s impervious to the things that matter to other women, but she’s not. Clements sees attractive men and notes them the way any thirty-five-year-old woman might. It’s just that she also wonders if the handsome men she finds herself face-to-face with are thieves, arsonists, fraudsters.
Killers.
Daan Janssen is a very attractive man. He is tall, broad, green-eyed, with blond hair; he wears it brushing his collar, a little longer than most men his age （at a guess she’d put him late thirties）。 His cheek bones are chiseled. You could lose an eye on them. Even if he wasn’t standing in the kitchen of his enormous London penthouse, he would be identifiable as wealthy. If Clements saw him on one of the dating sites that she occasionally—in a fit of optimism over experience—signs up to, she would definitely swipe right. But he’d never be on a dating site. Not this man. There would never be a need. If she wanted to get to this man she’d have to climb over women, a mountain of them. No doubt that’s what Kai Janssen did. Clements is keen to look at a picture of her. She’s guessing the wife will be a glacial beauty, tall like him, blond, possibly androgynous. Certainly hard-bodied, lean.
It’s been a good day for hot husbands who have lost their wives because Mark Fletcher is also an attractive man. He has brown eyes, dark, almost blue-black hair with only a whisper of gray at the temples. He has a strong, muscular, almost stocky build that makes him appear quite the force. Clements had him down as someone who always enjoyed sport and has never allowed the habit of staying fit to slip. Probably he cycles, runs, possibly lifts weights now; as a boy he will have played rugby and football, possibly captained the teams. There would have been women throwing themselves at Mark Fletcher too, before Leigh. But not women who are seduced by credit cards—women who wanted to have families and to see their husband carry their kids on his shoulders, kick a football with them, pitch a tent. If Clements had to make snap judgments—and she did sometimes—she’d say Mark Fletcher is a family man, whereas Daan Janssen is a ladies’ man.
She puts the attractiveness of these men out of her mind and gets back to the job in hand. That is perhaps where she differs from other women—and possibly the reason she has never maintained any long-term relationships—she’s never yet met a man who is attractive enough to completely distract her from her work. Family men, ladies’ men, none of them can provide a high that equals the one she gets when cracking a case. “You called about your wife,” she says.