‘Why?’ The woman asked her.
‘We don’t know.’
Now wasn’t the time to tell her the police had been talking to her son in connection with a crime.
Mrs Gleason pressed her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes tight shut.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Janine asked her.
‘There’s a bottle of Bailey’s in the kitchen, second cupboard.’
Janine retrieved it and poured a generous measure into a glass. Mrs Gleason took it and drank half of it in one go. Janine could smell the sweet blend of liqueur and cream.
She looked at Janine; her face started to crumple. ‘What do I do now? I don’t know… what happens?’
Gently, Janine talked her through the immediate necessities. Was Jeremy married, had he any family of his own?
‘Divorced,’ his mother said, ‘that’s his lad.’ She tilted her glass at the photograph. ‘He hasn’t seen him for a while.’
Janine explained that there would be no need to start funeral arrangements as a post-mortem would have to be carried out and nothing could happen until the coroner released the body.
Mrs Gleason seemed to take most of it in. ‘Does Lee know?’ she said suddenly. ‘Lee Stone, he was living at Lee’s.’
‘Not yet. We haven’t been able to speak to Lee, he’s not at home. If he gets in touch with you will you please let us know? He’s wanted for questioning.’
Confusion and then distress flashed across her face. ‘Oh, God,’ she began as she realised the implication.
‘We don’t know what happened,’ Janine told her clearly. ‘We’ve no idea at the moment. But Lee was with Jeremy shortly before he was found – we really need to talk to him.’
There was a pause and Mrs Gleason took another drink from her glass.
‘Would you like me to arrange for someone to come and sit with you?’ Janine offered.
The woman shook her head. ‘Our Karen’s just down the road, I’ll go to hers.’
‘I’ll wait while you call her.’
As Janine watched her make the call she wondered about Rosa Milicz’s family – who had broken the news to them, how much had they been told? Rosa would probably have been sending money home to them; did they know she’d been an exotic dancer or had she pretended she was doing something more respectable? The wages she earned in the UK would have made life better for them all and then, out of nowhere, someone had strangled her, mutilated her and thrown her in the river. Why? Why Rosa? Why Gleason?
