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“Thanks, you can take him,” James said.
Jandicott waved to his men and then turned back as they disappeared down the stairs with the stretcher. “I’ll start the PM this afternoon, any time after four o’clock.”
“Looks like we’re straight back in the swing of things,” Hartridge said as they heard the front door close behind the pathologist.
“Yes.” James loved his job, but after last night with Gabriella, he wanted to see her again, and a post mortem starting at four made that very unlikely. “Let’s search this room first, and then do the rest of the house.”
The room where their victim had died was neat, but as James had already observed, it looked like the spare room, nice enough but more or less empty except for a bed, two side tables and an armchair beside the large wardrobe.
The victim had fallen onto the carpet between the chair and the wardrobe, which was half open and contained two pairs of trousers and three shirts, along with a woolen navy blazer.
A small suitcase was tucked inside.
James pulled on gloves and took the suitcase out onto the landing and opened it.
Hartridge hovered over his shoulder.
It was empty.
“We’ll send it for fingerprinting,” James said as he rose up. “Check the pockets of the clothes in the wardrobe, and look in the drawers and under the bed. I’ll have a look at the other bedrooms.”
The main bedroom belonged to a man whose wife had either left him or had passed away.
James could see echoes of her presence in the dust-covered perfume bottle on the dresser, and the leather jewelry box in a drawer, beautifully gold-tooled with flowers and birds on the lid.
Inside was a set of pearls and two pairs of earrings, one diamonds, one sapphires.
He gave a low whistle. These were serious stones, and the pearls looked like they were of the highest quality.
“Found something?” Hartridge poked his head in.
“Only a couple of thousand pounds worth of jewels,” James said. He carefully pulled the jewelry box out and set it on the dresser, then moved on.
“So it wasn’t a robbery,” Hartridge said. “Unless the box was hidden?”
“It was in a drawer, but not hidden.” James moved across to the bedside tables.
On one side, there was a glass of water and a romantic Western thriller with a bookmark about halfway through. There was nothing in the drawer.
On the other side, the table was empty, but there was a framed photograph in the drawer, of a man, a woman, and what looked like their daughter, posing in a studio.
The man looked a lot older than the wife and daughter.
The wardrobe was full of clothes, more than half belonging to a woman, so James concluded the wife had passed away rather than left. The style of the clothes was about two years out of date.
There were two other rooms on the second floor. One belonged to the daughter, he’d guess. It was very feminine, and looked as if she’d gone out this morning and was due back any moment.
The bed was unmade, but the rest of the room was neat enough and there was a laundry basket with a day’s worth of clothing in it, and a well-organized closet.
“They’re going to arrive home any minute, aren’t they?” Hartridge asked. “That’s what it looks like.”
There was a small pile of letters on the white dressing table in the daughter’s room, and the name Sarah Bicton and the house address were on the envelopes.
James didn’t have a warrant to look through the contents, but he noted two of them were from a company with a Chelsea address. “Do you know Park Walk? It’s in Chelsea.” James asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m not that way much.” Hartridge rose up from his search of the chest of drawers.
They found the fourth room, probably meant to be a child’s bedroom, had been turned into a sewing room, but unlike the daughter’s room, it didn’t look like it had been used in a while.
