The Body in the Snow

by The Body in the Snow (retail) (epub)

  ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘Well, maybe. The fact it was the CFO might indicate that they were discussing the details of a deal. That’s speculation on my part. We don’t know what was said, although it was a long lunch according to my sources. But anyway, I just thought I would toss that bit of cardamom into the biryani, so to speak.’ He laughed. ‘Of course the other person you must speak to is Johnny Lam of Hong Kong & International Cuisine. He’s got 15 per cent of EoS, and would dearly love to buy the rest.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Lam is the consummate opportunist. He’s been after this company for probably two decades. He is a pretty safe pair of hands.’

  ‘Does he always get what he wants?’

  Cathcart laughed. ‘Pretty much, yes. He’s very single-minded. Brutal, even. I bet you a pound to a penny he’ll be in contact with the Roy family with an offer for the firm.’

  Gillard thanked him and they exchanged contact details before ending the call.

  ‘Useful?’ Christina asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ Gillard said. ‘It adds weight to the idea of a motive within the family. If there were strategic differences about what to do with the company.’ He returned her phone and pulled out his own. ‘I’m going to get onto my own financial detective expert, DS Shireen Corey-Williams. She’s going to love sinking her teeth into this.’

  * * *

  It was after ten p.m. by the time Gillard got back home. Sam was watching TV and shushed him when he started to speak. ‘I’m sure you want to see this. It’s a special, all about Mrs Roy and the Empire of Spice.’

  He sighed and sat down with her. ‘I suppose I’d better watch it.’ He caressed her tummy. ‘How’s everything?’ Sam was nine weeks pregnant, and had been troubled by nausea and morning sickness. She’d miscarried on a previous occasion at ten weeks a year ago, and was understandably anxious about a repetition.

  ‘Fine.’ She pressed a finger to her husband’s lips, as she looked at the screen.

  ‘The murder of Mrs Tanvi Roy on Sunday morning has shocked the nation,’ the presenter said, anoraked against the sleet and standing in front of a floodlit crime scene. Beyond the blue fluttering tape, figures in Tyvek suits were busy coming and going to a large plastic marquee which trembled in the wind. ‘She was the matriarch of one of Britain’s best-known ethnic food companies, a frequent TV chef and celebrity, and was held in great esteem by hundreds of thousands of viewers who tuned in not only to BBC’s Celebrity Cook Off, but also saw her fronting advertisements for the bestselling products from her family company, Empire of Spice.’

  Gillard watched as three of the most famous advertisements were shown in brief, and then a snippet from a cookery show, which showed a bustling but stylish woman, her dark hair cut in a neat bob, rapidly folding pieces of precisely cut pastry, adding a few dabs of filling, then skilfully folding them into a triangle. ‘And there you are, spicy mini samosas, ready for baking and perfect to add a bit of zing to any dinner,’ she said to camera, then gestured to a small bowl. ‘And here of course is the perfect creamy mint-infused dip, to balance out the heat with the cool.’

  The next image was a black and white photo of an Indian family. The presenter, in voice-over, said, ‘So how did this successful business begin? Well, the roots were, perhaps surprisingly, in Africa. The young Tanvi, her three brothers and sisters and her parents fled in 1972 from Idi Amin’s Uganda with just five pounds to the family name. They settled in Leicester with an aunt, where they all worked in the family sub-post office. Within two years, and using savings borrowed from the wider family, they set up a small shop in the centre of the East Midlands city. The young Tanvi was wooed by an old acquaintance of the family and in 1976, aged eighteen, she was married to a forty-eight-year-old academic, Dr L. K. Roy, and moved down to Slough, where he had inherited a long-established spice import/export business. Her flair for numbers and a capacity for hard work soon made her husband realise that she would be an asset beyond the family home. It was she who suggested to him that her family’s recipes for pickles and chutneys might find favour in the rapidly expanding British taste for ethnic foods. They started slowly, but the business grew rapidly. By the start of the 1980s, the company already had its own manufacturing facilities and dozens of employees, and the brand Empire of Spice was becoming well known.’

  The programme cut back to the crime scene and a voice-over. ‘Police are, so far, baffled about why anyone should want to kill this woman who had charmed a nation. Sources say that the murder weapon is thought to be a hammer, and a cyclist was spotted racing past through the early morning snow.’

  The programme then descended into a speculative conversation between the studio presenter and the reporter at the scene, who ran through various theories about why anyone should have killed Mrs Roy. Eventually the reporter handed back to the studio.

  ‘Now I have with me retired Detective Chief Superintendent Norman Champion,’ the studio presenter said, turning to a guest, a craggy-faced, bald-headed man.

  ‘Christ, not him,’ Gillard muttered.

  ‘…who was one of Britain’s most successful detectives and…’

  Sam turned to her husband in bemusement.

  ‘This bloody desk jockey,’ he said gesturing at the screen. ‘Couldn’t catch herpes in a brothel.’

  ‘…captured one of Britain’s most notorious murderers, James Patrick Hill,’ the presenter continued.

  Gillard turned to her. ‘I’ll tell you how he actually caught him.’

  ‘Shush, Craig, I can’t hear what he’s saying,’ she said, waving her hand at him.

  Champion was now speaking. ‘…of course the Surrey force is quite inexperienced at this type of crime. The Met is really the only force with the depth of skill and knowledge required.’

  ‘Patronising bastard,’ Gillard muttered.

  ‘Craig, please.’ Sam rolled her eyes, and whacked up the sound volume on the remote.

  Gillard, clearly incensed, raised his voice to compete with the retired detective on the screen. ‘It was about half past midnight one Saturday in 1997. Champion was drunk, and driving through Epping Forest, when he pulled into a lay-by for a slash…’

  Sam gave up, and muted the TV. ‘Okay, you win. Tell me your story.’

  ‘He collided with an unlit stolen vehicle in the back of which Hill was sleeping. Champion didn’t immediately recognise Hill, despite the fact that his mugshot had been all over the TV for months, but Hill knew him for a cop, and ran for it across the road, only to get knocked down by a stretch limo full of women on a hen do. It was them that recognised Hill as he was lying there with a broken leg and they who called the police. Finally old Norman staggered up and took credit.’

  ‘Was he ever breathalysed?’

  ‘Nah, not by Barking Police. They know one of their own. But I saw the witness statements from those in the taxi. According to them, Champion was absolutely legless. Of course, by his own account, he’d been chasing Hill, that was why he could hardly stand.’

  ‘We’ve missed what he was saying now,’ Sam said, turning the sound back on.

  ‘You’ll have missed nothing,’ Gillard responded ‘Except a lot of hot air and conjecture.’

  At that moment his phone rang. It was DI Claire Mulholland.

  ‘Yes,’ Gillard said. ‘I’m watching it now. Yes, I did see that useless bloody idiot.’

  Sam watched her husband, and she could tell that he had been told something interesting.

  Two minutes later he hung up.

  ‘Progress?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Possibly,’ Gillard replied. ‘They found an abandoned bicycle in a culvert under the A243, not too far from Ashtead Common. It’s being sent off for forensics. If the tyres match, we’re in business.’

  Sam looked at her husband. ‘Did you ever work under Norman Champion? I can’t think of any other reason why you be so unpleasant about him.’

  ‘Ha! You’ve got a good nose, Sam. Yes, in my first three m
onths in the Met, when I was based in East London, he gave a lot of recruits a very hard time. One of my female colleagues, a nice girl called Jill, was subjected to one of his initiation ceremonies. She was found at seven a.m. handcuffed to a roundabout in a playground, gagged and wearing only the top half of her uniform. It was January. The poor girl was half dead from exposure.’

  ‘Didn’t she report him?’

  Gillard gave a cynical laugh. ‘You didn’t grass up your elders and betters, that was the code. This was thirty years before “Me Too”. It was considered to be part of the toughening-up process. Of course when Jill resigned, a lot of them just said: “Well, that’s the trouble with women, can’t take a joke.”’

  ‘Women’s lot has improved since then,’ she said. ‘Though we still get interrupted by bad-tempered men when watching TV.’

  Gillard held up his hands in surrender. ‘Touché.’

  * * *

  Gillard had convened a mobile incident room meeting for eight a.m. on the Monday morning. He had two reasons for doing so early, despite the grumbling from attendees. One, it was well before they expected to run into any reporters, and two, it fitted well around a renewed search for a murder weapon and Mrs Roy’s missing purse. Over a hundred volunteers and twenty officers had been scouring the common from first light – 6.30 a.m.

  The Khazi was freezing cold, and condensation was already beginning to run across the ceiling. With Gillard were DCs Hodges and Hoskins, financial specialist DS Shireen Corey-Williams and DI Claire Mulholland. Gabby Underwood was not invited, because he didn’t want her to know too much of the detail about the investigation. He had a feeling that this powerful family might well be as good at extracting information from the family liaison officer as vice versa.

  ‘All right, let’s get going,’ he said. ‘Number one priority today is to find the murder weapon or at least be sure it’s not been tossed somewhere nearby. Carl, what’s the word on the bike?’

  ‘Too early to say, sir.’ Hoskins put some photographs on the whiteboard and secured them with magnetic holders. ‘As you can see, it is a black and silver Trax TFS 10 mountain bike, which was well hidden under the culvert. It didn’t get there by accident.’

  ‘Was it rusty?’

  ‘Not the kind of rust that indicates it was there for long.’ He pointed to a close-up tyre picture, putting it side-by-side with one of the pictures taken by Kirsty Mockett. ‘On the face of it very similar tyres, but hopefully we will get confirmation later on. I’ve already emailed pictures of the bike to Ms Mockett, but she’s not able to say if it’s the one she saw.’

  ‘Any sign of the purse?’

  ‘No sir,’ Hoskins said, pinning up another photo. ‘According to her PA, Mrs Roy’s purse was a Bottega Veneta designer job, in light blue calf leather. Worth a few hundred quid on its own. We’ve notified the twelve banks whose credit or cash cards she owned, but it’s too early for detail on whether any have been used.’

  ‘I’ll get Shireen to take over that side, Carl,’ Gillard said. ‘Claire, how’s the appeal for witnesses going?’

  Claire Mulholland went to a flipchart where she’d already listed a number of names. ‘We had half a dozen cyclists come forward, none of whom claim to have been on the common that early on the Sunday. Three were on the A243 at roughly 7.30 a.m., their normal run out of Epsom, but claimed not to have seen anybody cycling in either direction at that time. We’ve got two dozen lots of dashcam footage from cars on the same road, which is currently being examined. That may take a day or two.’

  ‘What about the CCTV from Ashtead Station?’

  ‘Nothing. Of course there were two other routes in from the south.’ She flipped over the first page of notes. ‘Our observant CSI trainee witness has already helped us greatly on vehicles parked to the south of the common. A green Jeep Cherokee she saw turns out to be Mrs Roy’s own vehicle. Of course it may be that any relevant vehicle for the assailant was parked much further away, along either of these residential roads,’ she said, pointing to the large map of the area now pinned to the wall.

  Gillard thanked her, and then began his own contribution, describing his visit to Mrs Roy’s home, and encounters with her three children. ‘They’d already got their own version of events before Gabby managed to contact them. Mrs Roy’s phone had been ringing almost continuously at the scene, and one of the uniforms answered it. The bad news got passed on in rather an uncontrolled fashion.’

  Gillard was interrupted by a uniformed constable coming into the Khazi. ‘We found the murder weapon, sir.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a gym hand weight. With two screw-on weights attached at one end. Quite nasty if you ask me. It had been lobbed into a patch of nettles about 150 yards from the location of the body.’

  The DCI left the meeting to go and inspect. A police photographer was busy at the scene of the find. The silvery weight was 10 inches long and should have been easy to spot. There was a gory black mess caked all over the business end of the weapon. It was twenty-four hours after the murder and this patch of woods had been gone over three times. ‘All right,’ Gillard told the assembled officers. ‘Let’s not disclose details of the murder weapon. If we get false confessions, it should allow us to sift them out.’

  Chapter 4

  Gillard headed off to Kensington in West London to get an early interview with Kiara Roy, the youngest of the family at thirty-one, and seemingly the last to see her mother alive. While he was on the train he had looked up the Kiara Fashions website. He had to admit he hadn’t the first idea about fashion, and some of the dress designs confirmed just that. He couldn’t for the life of him see why any woman would wear what seemed to be a pair of diaphanous curtains slung with chainmail, but there on a Milan catwalk was a model wearing just that.

  The detective found the studio in a cobbled mews behind a very swanky set of Regency frontages. The business was one of half a dozen sharing a very small terraced house in what had originally been stables. Looking at the value of the properties, something he had also done on his journey up, seemed to show that a hefty wodge of family money must have been involved from the outset.

  Buzzed in, Gillard clambered up four flights of rickety wooden stairs passing through numerous millennial-filled businesses promising a new edge in social media, online marketing and design, each light and airy and staffed by young enthusiastic and attractive people of all races. He ended up in an open-plan, shared kitchen area. Kiara called down to him from the final staircase, a rickety open cast iron spiral. He climbed into a lengthy loft space which resembled nothing so much as an art gallery. It was gloriously lit through a very large skylight, and Kiara’s creations were mounted on life-size, chicken-wire mannequins. There was some quite challenging erotic art on the walls too, intimate photographs that for all the subtle lighting left nothing to the imagination.

  ‘Detective, welcome to my humble place of work.’ Kiara was wearing a pleated, gauzy mini-skirt and a loose white open-weave woollen, which hung off the shoulder at one side. Her mahogany skin showed clearly through both garments, along with a skimpy pink petticoat that matched her gloves. She looked even more delicious than the first time he had seen her. Her short white hair played off her exquisite bone structure and her long slender neck.

  ‘Nice place,’ Gillard said, trying to tear his eyes away from her. ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Well, we’re just getting going, to be honest. I’ve had some very interesting commissions, and there is plenty of publicity, much of it I’m glad to say before this week’s events. I’ve just got this one creation to finish up for a show on Saturday and then I’m going to take a few days off, to try to get my head round what has happened.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. I hope you have been able to ask all the questions you need of Gabby Underwood? Her job is to be a point of contact.’

  Kiara shrugged. ‘I haven’t thought about what I need to ask yet, but I’m sure I’ll get there.’

  ‘As I ment
ioned to you on the phone, my reason for being here today is that you had mentioned you saw your mother on Saturday, the day before—’

  ‘You don’t need to remind me what day it was before, Mr Gillard.’ She offered him coffee and he accepted. After she had been down to the kitchenette and brought up two mugs, she pointed him towards the only place to sit, a large, low and very battered leather sofa. It was rather more intimate than he was used to for this kind of interview. She tucked her legs beneath her as she nestled in the corner, and patted the seat beside her. As he lowered his considerable weight, the settee wheezed and settled, lifting her up by an inch or two.

  ‘I’ll never get up out of this,’ he said.

  ‘I use it for customers. They can never escape me,’ she said opening her dark brown eyes wide.

  ‘So, back to Saturday,’ Gillard said. ‘Tell me about what happened.’

  ‘Well, there’s not really much to say. My mother was always busy, and she was shooting backwards and forwards in the house doing things when I arrived—’

  ‘Just to be clear, that was at the house in Richmond, was it?’

  ‘Yes. I still have a bedroom there, though I’m often elsewhere overnight.’

  Gillard looked up, with a questioning look on his face.

  ‘I don’t think my personal life is relevant at this moment, is it?’ She took a large gulp of coffee, and held the detective’s stare.

  ‘I’m hoping that almost nothing you tell me will be relevant to the crime, Ms Roy, but that doesn’t mean to say it should be withheld.’

  ‘I’m not withholding it. Look, you don’t understand what it’s like being a daughter in a family like this. My parents tried to arrange a marriage for me when I was very young. I fought like crazy to get out of that, but I also asserted my right not to be supervised or judged. Of course, that makes me toxic within the traditional Hindu community. A woman who demands to be treated as equal to a man. My gosh, no one would want her, would they?’