were you last here?’ Ben asked.
‘I know the exact number of days,’ Raul said. ‘Too many. It was last autumn. Our birthday, November third. I stayed here for a week.’ He thought for a few moments then added in an undertone, ‘In fact I hardly saw much of her. She was so busy with her work, some new thing she was working on that she was terribly excited about. I didn’t even ask her what it was.’
Raul’s voice trailed off as he lost himself in memories of the last time he’d seen his sister alive. In one corner, a gleaming classical guitar rested on a stand. He went over to it, gazed at the instrument for a moment and then softly drew his fingers across its six strings. Its sound was deep and sonorous. ‘Catalina’s guitar,’ he murmured.
Feeling he should say something, Ben was about to ask, ‘Did she play well?’ Too much past tense, he decided. Against his instincts, and to avoid hurting Raul, he said instead, ‘Does she play well?’
Raul smiled sadly. ‘I suppose so. She took it up years ago. But I never heard her play. She always kept it to herself.’
Too much past tense. Raul had snagged the emotional tripwire that Ben had managed to avoid. He began to droop as if his limbs and his head weighed nine hundred pounds, and lowered himself into the nearest armchair with his elbows on his knees, forehead cupped in both hands and his eyes screwed tight.
Ben walked slowly around the room. It was an elegant blend of modern and old that spoke of good taste and a fine eye. He paused at a heavy sideboard, brushed his fingertips along wood that felt like oiled silk, and snicked open one of its doors. His guess had been right: drinks cabinet. Catalina’s good taste extended to single malt scotch, nothing less than a fifteen-year-old Glenfiddich. He grabbed the bottle and two cut-crystal glasses, set them on the top and glugged out two generous measures. One for him, after the long drive. One for Raul, to take the raw edge off what he was feeling. Sooner or later they’d have to think about food, having eaten nothing since their sandwich before Rügen Island. Scotch would substitute fine for the moment.
Ben held out Raul’s drink. Raul opened one eye, then the other, reached out for the glass and downed most of its contents as if he could happily chug through the whole bottle that night. Ben didn’t intend to let him, not after what had happened last time.
‘Mind if I look around?’ he asked.
Raul just waved a hand at him. Ben thought he could trust him alone with the bottle for a few minutes while he had a quick reconnaissance of the apartment, sipping his whisky as he went from room to room. The kitchen was large and modern, spotless and gleaming and equipped with all the right accessories for someone who probably ate out most of the time but liked her kitchen to look the part. Ben checked the fridge and found two bottles of chilled 2011 vintage Chablis nestling on a rack inside. A couple of thin-crust pepperoni and anchovy pizzas were stacked in the freezer compartment above. Dinner was sorted, at least.
From the kitchen, he wandered down another passage to what looked like a home office, although it had to be the neatest and least-used home office in the world, entirely clutter-free and a few neat rows of abstruse-looking astrophysics and cosmology titles arrayed on the shelves. One wall displayed a blown-up framed still of Catalina pictured against the backdrop of an astonishingly resplendent Milky Way. Her face was aglow with enthusiasm, those big brown eyes as incandescent as the heavens. Ben presumed it must be an image from her TV astronomy series. Looking at it, it wasn’t hard to see what her public had loved in her. He gazed at it for a moment, then went on examining the room.
According to the police report, Catalina’s personal computer had been checked for suspicious emails or anything that could provide leads to contradict the suicide motive. Nothing having been found, the computer had been replaced, unplugged from the monitor on the desk. Ben was confident that the contents of drawers, her address book, phone records and general paperwork would have all been routinely examined, too, but he had a riffle through the desk just in case anything jumped out at him. It didn’t, although he wasn’t particularly sure what he was looking for. Sometimes you just had to go by instinct. And so far, his instincts weren’t feeding much back to him.
Of the three bedrooms in the big apartment, the first he looked into was a guest room with a huge empty wardrobe and a timber-framed bed piled high with silk cushions. The second was stripped bare and in the middle of being redecorated, a stepladder against one wall, paint pots, plastic sheeting on the floor. He found that potentially interesting. Suicidal people didn’t tend to care much about the state of their home decor. Then again, it wasn’t much to base a theory on.
The third bedroom was Catalina’s, the largest of the three with Gustav Klimt on the walls and a broad expanse of glass overlooking Glockenbach district. Her bed was an antique Louis XI kind of affair the size of a Cadillac Fleetwood. Old and modern side by side, the same elegant blending of styles. Ben did a five-minute search of her wardrobe and drawers, feeling as if he was prying. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he walked into the ensuite.
Despite his experience of domestic life with his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel, a woman’s bathroom nonetheless remained a world of mystery to someone of Ben’s ingrained spartan ways. Automatic halogen spotlights caught him by surprise as he entered, and he could see about twenty of himself reflected from all angles in the blaze of mirrors covering every vertical surface. A thick sheepskin rug stretched over the floor near the walk-in shower. Fluffy towels draped thickly over a chrome rail. The biggest vanity unit he’d ever seen held a collection of cosmetics and perfumes and creams and lotions and feminine paraphernalia that could have stocked a small pharmacy. Tools of her trade, he guessed. He had no doubt that being the world’s sexiest scientist must be hard graft.
A walk-in wardrobe led off the ensuite, a whole other room in itself. Ben stepped into it, gazing around him for clues the police might have missed, like a pair of bathroom scissors lying in a red pool on the floor, or a cryptic message daubed in blood by the kidnapper.
What he found instead, he stared at for ten long seconds and then hurried back through the apartment with to show Raul.
Raul hadn’t moved from his position on the armchair, and barely glanced up as Ben walked into the room.
‘What’s this?’ Ben said, striding up to him.
‘What’s what?’
‘This.’ Ben tossed it in Raul’s lap. Raul picked it up and gazed at it.
‘It’s fluoxetine,’ Ben said. ‘Any ideas why I might have found a whole stash of it sitting on a shelf in your sister’s walk-in wardrobe?’ He was trying to keep the anger out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy. His discovery had left him feeling betrayed and made a fool of.
Raul slowly examined the small amber bottle of pills, then turned a blank expression on Ben and shrugged. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘They’re antidepressants,’ Ben said. ‘And they’ve got your sister’s name on the label. And I want to know why.’
‘Anyone can take medicine.’ A flare of defensiveness lit up in Raul’s eyes as he said it.
‘Fine. If her doctor put her on pills for migraine headaches or a dust allergy, that would be one thing, wouldn’t it? But this is something else.’
Raul said nothing. He stared at the bottle in his hand as if he could will it to change into something else.
‘You
