The meeting with Stewart Martin went about as well as Fros had expected. It confirmed he was not the killer even though the man exuded guilt in abundance. It was all that gambling. And, apparently, this guilt had afflicted him with amnesia.
“It was all a blur,” he told her, picking on a loose thread in his sleeve. “I went there to confront Alok, to tell him I couldn’t pay him back and there was this anger… I got really angry,” Martin said and glanced at his wife who radiated sympathy and contempt in equal measure. It was a mix Fros didn’t encounter frequently and just as well – rotting algae and vanilla did not go well together.
“So you killed them in a fit of range?” Fros asked.
The man shrugged his substantial shoulders.
“I guess so. I really don’t remember.”
“And the knife? What did you do with it?”
Stewart Martin raised his red-rimmed eyes to hers for a second before pinning them back on the table.
“I threw it out of the car on my way back home. I already told the police. I can’t remember exactly where that was.”
A tiny whiff of triumph insinuated itself among the masses of guilt Stewart Martin was currently feeling. He had outwitted the police. If there was no murder weapon, the case hinged on his confession and that confession sounded, well, unhinged.
He could easily plead insanity. After all, the man might look like he’d spent an hour in a working washing machine but he was a partner in a law firm and low as standards had become everywhere, a law firm partnership still told you something about a man’s capabilities. Sometimes.
For a second, Fros entertained the idea that Martin was indeed the killer she was after but the second passed and the idea went down the drain of useless ideas. Martin did smell guilty and he did smell of fear – a lot of fear – but what he did not smell of was a homicide.
Killers had a unique smell that Fros couldn’t get wrong even if she tried. It was a cocktail of spicy, stuffed nose-clearing notes dipped in heavy sweetness and then smoked in dry leaves. Fros had smelled it on every single killer she had encountered in her life. With one notable exception: Tom.
Tom didn’t smell of a killer. Tom smelled like a man who believed in the cause he defended and was not afraid to lay his life down for it. It was the sharp but strangely pleasant smell of righteousness and it had been a while since Fros had caught it off him. Tom hadn’t killed in a long time and that was probably for the best. Stewart Martin, if Fros was any judge, and she was the best one she knew, had never killed in his life.
Unless Tom wasn’t the only exception to the rule of how killers smelled.
She leaned forwards, prompting Martin to draw back with an expression of unease on his face. It was at that moment that Fros registered the bitter taste in her mouth and took a deep breath. Controlling the venom had become second nature but sometimes the grip slipped a little. If Martin died of a sudden heart attack now, they’d never find Meena Damani.
“Where did you take the child?” she asked.
A wave of dread wafted up from the left, where Stella Martin had sat quietly since they’d entered the room.
Martin started shaking his head. The intensity of his fear shot up, burning Fros’s nostrils.
“I haven’t touched the child. I didn’t even know she was in the house. I swear, I haven’t touched her. I don’t know where she is.”
He was now almost all fear, the guilt buried under the dominant emotion that made Martin’s skin slick with sweat and ashen pale, and gave his eyes a disturbed gleam.
Fros drew back. The man was not a killer. And that left only one possible explanation for his confession.
“The murderer’s paid him off,” she declared and slapped a file on Tom’s desk. “I asked around the bookie community and Stewart Martin, while a prominent figure among them, does not have any outstanding debts. He paid everything he owed a month ago. Odd, right? Also, Martin really stank of fear.”
Tom opened the file and scanned the transcript of the interview from the previous day.
“Well?” Fros prompted, almost tapping her foot on the floor. A flash of worry tried to shake her when her brain unkindly reminded her that neither Jules nor Tal had called since the previous afternoon but she dismissed the reminder. This here was more important right now. Also, Tal and Jules were smart and wouldn’t let themselves get drunk dry by a vampire. Of course they wouldn’t.
“So, someone cleared Martin’s debts and made him take the fall for the murder,” Tom said. “Sounds plausible. And you know your nose best, so I can’t argue with that.”
“The money alone wouldn’t be enough,” Fros said. She’d had time to think since her meeting with Martin. “He stank of fear because whoever paid his debts and/or made him confess to the murders also threatened him. Carrot and stick.”
“And that would be our actual murderer,” Tom said. His features flickered into a mask of doubt for a moment.
“What is it?” Fros asked.
“It’s risky,” Tom said slowly and looked up from the desk. “Martin is not a random lowlife you can pay off with a couple of thousand quid and send him to jail for life. He’s smart and he knows the law.” He paused, frowning. “And if he still agreed to take the fall, the one issuing the threat must be good at it.”
Fros nodded.
“True. Also, Martin doesn’t necessarily risk a life sentence. I think he can get off on insanity. He knows the law, as you said. They’ll put him in hospital for a while, where he wouldn’t be able to gamble, then he’ll walk out in a few years all healed and no longer a threat to society. Case closed.”
Tom closed the file.
“I’ll send someone to look into Martin’s contacts,” he said. “Whoever it was must have left a trace somewhere.”
“Yeah, if we’re lucky,” Fros murmured. This case was turning into a major headache. But it was taking up time she would have otherwise spent worrying so at least it was doing some good. Unlike her.
“Do you think the girl’s still alive?” she asked Tom and didn’t even hide the hopeful note from her voice. Children were off limits. Children were where her understanding of others’ different needs and quirks ended, although admittedly she didn’t have vast amounts of such understanding to begin with.
Tom sighed. His smell answered for him. He didn’t think she was still alive.
“But she could be,” Fros insisted.
“She could be,” Tom agreed. “If the murderer is as weird as it seems, she could very well be alive. Or someone saved her and doesn’t want to come forward because…” Tom shook his head. “I don’t know, this doesn’t make sense.”
Fros suddenly stilled. A small explosion had taken place in her head at the mention of the word saved. The explosion had been caused by the appearance of an image – the image of a roll of biodegradable garbage bags tucked neatly in a drawer in the Damanis’ kitchen.
“You just had an idea, didn’t you?” Tom said with a spark in his eye. “What is it?”
“What if,” Fros began slowly, as though afraid if she spoke fast her idea would break down into a heap of nonsense. “What if the murderer killed Alok and Vinita to save the girl? What if he actually is insane?”
Tom was watching her through narrowed eyes.
“You mean someone thought Alok and Vinita were bad parents and found a novel way of enforcing child protection?” he said, crossing his arms.
“Yes.” It sounded deranged but people had killed for much more deranged reasons. “We couldn’t find a motive that would stick. The police couldn’t find a motive that would stick. They had to get a convenient confession to say they’ve made progress. We found no one with a grudge towards either of them. But if Meena was the motive it all begins to make sense. Someone wants to save the girl from her parents for whatever reason and punish them at the same time, so he or she kills them and takes away the girl.”
Or Fros had herself become deranged with the tonne of things she had to worry about.
“We didn’t find any suggestion of bad parenting anywhere. I talked to the girl’s kindergarten teacher myself and she was genuinely shocked. Not a hint of any misgivings about the Damanis’ parenting.” Tom shifted in his chair. The chair creaked. “I don’t know, Fros, it makes sense theoretically but practically…”
Fros was busy experiencing a second, a bit smaller, explosion. For a precious moment that explosion wiped out all her worries replacing them with brilliant light.
“Climate,” she said, looking up. “Someone worried about climate change. Did you know there’s now something called eco-anxiety? Therapists are treating it. There’s even a scale to measure it. And the other day I saw a news report about a guy who killed himself because he’d lost hope we could stop global warming. Someone actually killed himself over this.”
All she got from Tom was a blank look and the syrupy smell of confusion.
“I’m not crazy,” Fros promised and took a second to breathe in. “But there are people who do literally lose their minds over climate change. Some kill themselves. And if you could kill yourself over that, how far-fetched would it be to kill someone else over it? The Damanis were not very climate friendly or whatever it’s called. There was a roll of biodegradable garbage bags in their kitchen and it was the only one that wasn’t unsealed. And they happen to have a close relative who cares a lot about the climate.”
She frowned. “What’s with the fixation on the climate, by the way? It used to be about the environment. Anyway.” A load off her shoulders, she leaned back and put her feet on her desk. “So there, we even have a suspect.”
Tom was already dialling a number on his phone.
“Joe, hi. I have a job for you and I need you immediately. Are you in the office? Great. I’ll meet you in the common room.” He stood and put the phone in his pocket. “Joe’s on it. I’ll take over for the night.”
“Thank you, Tom,” Fros said, a little light-headed with relief.
Tom turned to go but hesitated.
“There’s just one thing I can’t understand,” he said. “You said Shankar didn’t smell like a killer.”
Fros took her feet off the desk.
“I did,” she said. “But then I remembered I knew someone else who didn’t smell like a killer but had killed. For a good cause.”
Tom gave her a long look, which ended with a nod of acknowledgment and understanding. Fros nodded back.
“You’ll have a report by tomorrow morning,” Tom said and left.
The first time she had come to this house Fros hadn’t exactly had time to look around and appreciate things like design and decoration. Now she saw that Jasper Collins, for all of his questionable qualities, either had a good taste in interior design or had hired someone who did.
The living room and the kitchen were a common space, separated by a partial wall that gave the sense of separation and unity at the same time. The kitchen was as big as the living room, with a large, simple wooden table that had been set for two. The exposed beams on the ceiling didn’t look like something that would fit Jasper but somehow they did. He looked different here. He felt different, too, but Fros was not going to dwell on that.
“That’s interesting,” she said and stepped closer to the arrangement on the wall opposite the stove. It was as simple as decorations could go: a plain rectangular wooden frame with slots in it and four knives hanging blade down in the slots. The wooden handles were scratched and worn, and darkened by time, and the blades had the dull gleam of a weapon that had lived a long and productive life. Oddly, they also smelled faintly of acrylic paint.
As Fros leaned in to look at them closely a distant whiff of something familiar wafted to her nose but before she could sniff more deeply she felt Jasper’s breath on her neck.
“That’s my hobby,” he said. “Artificial aging.”
That’s where the acrylic paint smell was from. And from up close the deception was obvious. She touched the blade of the second knife from the left, which looked like an ordinary chef’s knife when you got past the black blade. It was sharp.
“I keep them sharp,” Jasper said. “Just because they are for decorative purposes doesn’t mean they can let themselves go,” he added. The chuckle was implied rather than uttered.
Fros turned.
“How did you get into it? Artificial aging?” With one last glance at the knife range she moved away and towards the table. “I wouldn’t think people in marketing had time for hobbies.”
This time Jasper did chuckle.
“I do have free time, you know. Wine?” He raised the bottle of Pinot Noir. “Or beer?”
Fros couldn’t help a slight smile-like twitch of the lips.
“Beer, please.”
With a smirk, Jasper put the wine on the counter and opened the fridge to take out two bottles of yellow-label Tuborg. He opened them both and passed her one.
“Cheers,” he said, still standing by the fridge.
“Cheers.” The beer had a rich smell – and a higher alcoholic content than her beverage of choice. A sip confirmed it and so did the follow-up glance at the label. “You’re not trying to get me drunk, are you?”
Jasper smiled and shook his head.
“I just thought you’re the kind of woman who would like stronger beer. Not vodka or whiskey, or stuff like that, but strong beer,” he said. Once again, he was sizing her up, assessing her, with perfect openness and complete absence of shame.
Fros didn’t drink spirits these days. They dulled the senses, which had been welcome in the past, before circumstances forced her to learn to control those senses. It was either that or chronic alcoholism if she was to avoid accidentally breathing a venomous breath on random people and killing them. It had happened before. Fros took great care to make sure it didn’t happen again. So she drank beer instead of vodka.
“You’re a good people reader, then,” she said and took another sip. As she did, something dawned on her and she stole a glance at the stove. “Didn’t you say you were cooking?”
Jasper painted embarrassment over his features.
“I may have exaggerated a little,” he said and strolled over to her. “The day was longer than I planned it to be, so I had to order. We’re having Italian, if you don’t mind.”
Fros didn’t mind. In fact, Fros couldn’t care less what they were having. That vaguely familiar smell she’d caught near the knives was gnawing at her. It was really familiar and yet she couldn’t put her finger on it. But that didn’t stop her from trying while Jasper served dinner.
Like the name of an actor that one’s known for years but has suddenly slipped out of memory’s grasp, the smell kept avoiding identification. She was probably just tired and the couple of vibration alerts from her phone didn’t help matters because now, in addition to everything else, she was also thinking about who had messaged her and why.
“Tell me something about yourself.”
Fros looked up from her salad and her thoughts about betrayal, giving in to temptation at your own risk, and getting what you want and paying for it.
“What do you want to know?”
Jasper shrugged.
“Anything you could spare,” he said. “So far we’ve only talked about me. Since we met, I mean.”
“Well,” Fros said, shaking off the grim thoughts. Grim thoughts could piss off. Everyone deserved a break occasionally. Otherwise there would be a breakdown waiting to happen. “I’m an only child, my parents are both dead and I was a food photographer before I got into private investigations.”
The moment the words were out Fros almost reached out to catch them and take them back but it was too late. They were out and there was nothing she could do about it. Now the questions would begin, she would have to mention Peter, and that meant thinking about Peter, and lying through her teeth about how totally normal it was for a food photographer to re-qualify as a detective in a couple of months with no help from any supernatural sense whatsoever.
“I know how it sounds,” she added with a shrug and took a bite of fettuccine.
“It sounds intriguing,” Jasper said, his eyes on her like he was recording her every move and every gesture. And possibly every thought. He was moving the food around his plate but little of it had so far travelled to his mouth.
“You’re not hungry,” Fros observed. “Why is that?”
Jasper took his eyes off her for a moment to check if what she was saying was true. Indeed, there was still a lot of fettuccine on his plate.
“I finished my salad,” he pointed out with a half-hearted smile. “I wasn’t that hungry, I guess. For food, at least.”
The unveiled suggestion hung heavy in the air, his eyes back on her.
“I thought this was going to be something like a reverse date,” Fros said, nonchalance still within reach despite the fact she was getting warmer and the much more annoying fact that the grim thoughts were back, alive and in perfect health.
“Is it?”
Fros swallowed the last bite of her meal, which was delicious even if it had a slight smell of indifference.
“We’ve only ever talked professionally, if you think about it,” she said. Or they didn’t talk at all but she wasn’t about to mention this.
“We talked tonight,” Jasper countered and took a sip of beer. “We covered current events pretty comprehensively.”
They’d talked about the Prime Minister’s latest verbal blunder to find they both found him more hilarious than anyone before him. There’d been mention of electricity bills but it hadn’t managed to gain traction as a conversation topic.
“That’s true,” Fros agreed. “We did that.”
“Yeah, we did.” Jasper eyed her with sharpened focus. “What’s bothering you?”
“Me? Nothing. Why?”
Jasper inclined his head to the side, his eyes, soft until a moment ago, now turned into twin probes.
“Something’s bothering you, I can see it. Is it me? Am I still a suspect?”
“Were you ever?” Fros said and pushed her plate away. “This was delicious, by the way. Thank you.”
“I thought I was, when you started asking all these questions about Vinita and Asha. And something tells me you’re not buying the police version of the desperate gambler.”
In a blink, the grim thoughts ran for cover, freeing up space for others, such as the notable fact that Fros had smelled a killer the first time she’d met Jasper and the no less notable fact that many murderers desperately wanted to be caught and found various interesting ways to ensure it happened. Provoking a private detective to look harder in a new direction could easily count as one such way.
“Well, did you kill them?” Fros asked, almost crossing her arms but resisting. She focused on her nose instead of her unease. There was no change in his smell – beer and the hot dry earth scent of amusement.
“No,” he said. The amusement was genuine but there was something underneath it – something dusty and old, something sad. A memory the conversation had called forth. “But I killed my brother.”
The words were not meant to cause chills in the listener but chills was what Fros felt for a moment before ignoring them to focus on what the man opposite her at the thick wooden table in this cosy kitchen was saying.
“You said your brother had hanged himself,” Fros pointed out carefully.
“He did,” Jasper confirmed. Now his gaze was not fixed on her but his half full glass. He took it and drank. “But I helped drive him to it.”
The smell of grief intensified and with it the smell killers had – heavy and sharp. Jasper’s usual scent of desire for everything life could offer, became no more than a weak note in a mostly single-smell bouquet.
“How?” Fros asked when Jasper did not volunteer any more information although it was obvious he wanted to talk.
“I didn’t care about his concerns,” he said and his mouth twisted into a smile of resignation. “He used to talk about the planet and how we were killing it, and I just brushed it all off. You know, we’re a dominant species, that’s what dominant species do, what do you want us to do, kill ourselves?” He sighed. “I didn’t know he’d take it literally,” he added after a heavy pause and drank again, emptying the glass.
“Your brother must have had bigger problems than his concern for the planet,” Fros said. “Mental problems. It’s not your fault.”
Jasper looked up. The intense, laser-like shine in his eyes had dulled.
“You know, I keep telling myself this and sometimes it works. Most of the time it works. But sometimes… Sometimes it doesn’t.”
Conflicting signals from her brain tore Fros. Jasper was currently the embodiment of vulnerability and something urged her to go and comfort him, make him feel better, help him stop being sad. Meanwhile, however, the grim gang was back, making her question her decision to even come here in the first place, and continue to be here now, when there was a clear, imminent risk of what was happening between her and this man turning into a relationship. Fros emptied her own glass in two gulps.
“Let’s clear out the table,” she said and set an example by taking her plate. “Mundane tasks always help me feel more human.”
Jasper raised his head.
“What do you mean more human?”
Biting herself inside, Fros went around the table to get his plate.
“You know, when I’m so desperate or sad about something that it doesn’t feel like I’m even human? When it’s all too much? That’s when mundane tasks help.”
Jasper apparently thought it was worth a try because he joined her with the salad bowl and the glasses.
“No,” he said when Fros planted herself in front of the sink. “I’ll wash and you dry. There are towels in the third drawer.”
Fros pulled said drawer and it hit her – a familiar smell still fresh in her memory. It was coming from the deep end of the drawer. Fros pulled it a little wider and there it was – the biggest coincidence in the known universe. The sight of that coincidence pulled a memory trigger in Fros’s mind and it suddenly, though with a considerable delay, delivered the answer to the question that had been gnawing at her all evening.
“Blood,” she said nowhere near quietly enough.