The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

by Nick Louth

  She kissed Singh on both cheeks too, before showing them both to a table in an adjacent low-ceilinged room, a cosy place with photographs hung on the wall, and a small Eastern Orthodox shrine in an alcove. Tatiana then brought in big bowls of delicious-smelling casserole.

  ‘Dead birds from the estate, shot and prepared by myself,’ she announced. ‘An old Ukrainian recipe. Enjoy!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Singh.

  ‘Have you discovered who killed Sasha?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not yet,’ Hoskins replied.

  ‘I think it was his bodyguard. Bryn Howell. Not a very nice man.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘Every time I bring in food for Sasha, he looked in the pot, or even tried a sample. He also searched my kitchen just before mealtimes, getting in the way.’

  ‘That’s probably part of his job,’ Singh said. ‘Looking for poison.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Tatiana said. ‘Food poisoning? I am a good cook! Besides, whoever heard of a Russian being poisoned?’

  The two detectives shared a glance.

  ‘The man was a nuisance and a racist,’ Tatiana continued. ‘Once, I found him in my room, going through my things.’

  ‘Again, that’s probably part of his job,’ Hoskins said.

  The cook wasn’t convinced. ‘He did bad things, not just to me. Last summer, when Anastasia was here, I overheard Sasha furious with him about something, shouting and swearing in Russian. When the bodyguard left the room, his face was red and he was very angry. I think Bryn had a reason to kill his boss.’ She tapped her nose and winked.

  ‘The shooting started before the bodyguard went in, you know,’ Singh said.

  Hoskins shook his head at his colleague. Don’t hand out that kind of detail.

  ‘So Tatiana,’ Hoskins called as he began to eat. ‘Did old Volkov treat you okay?’

  She walked back into the room wiping her hands on a tea towel. ‘Yes. He was a lovely, lovely man, it so, so sad.’ Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped them away with a sleeve. ‘He was away a lot, but he made a point of coming down to see us below-stairs-people when he came back. He was terribly lonely, you know.’

  ‘Really?’ Hoskins said.

  ‘This is delicious,’ Singh said. ‘Really tasty.’

  ‘Yes. He never wanted to leave Russia, but he was frightened. Always frightened. He had money, but money makes you lonely, makes you sad.’

  ‘Does it?’ Singh asked.

  ‘Of course. Money is a wall. It was the wall between Sasha and the world. Every woman he met, every new friend, he thought: “Does she like me, or does she just want the cash?” For me it is simple. I have no money, so my friends like me for me. I can trust them.’

  ‘Maybe they just like you for your cooking.’ Hoskins said, as he lifted another spoonful of stew to his mouth.

  Tatiana beamed, and pinched Hoskins’ cheek. ‘Ooh, you are a very naughty little boy,’ she said, attempting to ruffle the sparse stubble that inhabited Hoskins’s scalp. It was like trying to caress sandpaper. ‘You know, Sasha liked to eat his meals here, at the place you are sitting. He had grand luxury dining room upstairs. Magnificent! Beautiful!’ She gestured with her arms, her eyes mapping out a huge imagined space. ‘But often he would come here, sometimes in the middle of the night, and wake me up. Get out the vodka and tell me stories of his childhood until dawn. Then I would tell him my stories of a broken heart. He would always listen, even though I am just an ordinary person. Sometimes, with too much vodka, he would weep. Often he would say: “Tatiana, you are the only one I love. You and Mother Russia.” Then I would make him a big Russian breakfast, and he would go back to his room. It is so wrong he is gone, I am so sad.’ She began to sob. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Hoskins gave her a brief hug and stroked her hair. ‘Come on, you’ll get over it.’

  ‘No. It’s terrible, terrible. I will never get over it. All the staff loved him.’ She sniffed and took a deep breath. ‘One story, he would tell me. When they came for his father in dead of night.’

  ‘Who came?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘KGB, who else comes in the night, silly boy? It was the middle of the night, and he was only four years old. His father was taken away to the gulag for writing anti-Soviet leaflets. Sasha and his mother wept and pleaded and begged, but the big green van drove away through the snow, leaving only tyre tracks and heartbreak. You know, I don’t think Sasha ever recovered.’

  ‘How awful,’ Singh said.

  ‘When his father was eventually released, Sasha was in his twenties. The father they returned to him was a pale shadow of the man he had lost. An old man, a broken man. Thin, confused, and very soon confined to an asylum.’

  ‘Got any more of this lovely stew?’ Hoskins asked, scraping up the dregs with his spoon. As Tatiana rolled her eyes and headed back into the kitchen, Singh gave him a withering look.

  ‘What?’ Hoskins asked.

  ‘You know something, Carl? You’re the kind of bloke that farts in the middle of Swan Lake.’

  * * *

  Gillard had promised Sam that he would make it home sometime that evening. He was determined not to spend another night at Westgrave Hall. But something was bugging him. He sat in the Khazi, at a computer terminal on HOLMES, the Home Office complex enquiry system, flicking through the latest evidence reports and finding nothing of use. He picked up his phone and rang DC Shireen Corey-Williams, who had been working from home since midday.

  ‘Hi, Shireen,’ he said. ‘Any luck getting the plans of the library from the architects?’

  ‘Well, it is Christmas Day. But I have left a message.’

  ‘I think we need to try a bit harder than that. Otherwise they won’t get back to us until the new year.’

  ‘Aren’t there any plans at Westgrave Hall? Volkov would have had a copy?’

  Gillard sighed. ‘Wolf said there are physical copies in the safe, but we can’t get into that. Rob Townsend has got Volkov’s iPad, but again it’s quite secure.’

  ‘Why the hurry, sir?’

  ‘I think there might be a tunnel from the hall into the library. Wolf is adamant that there isn’t anything, but it seems to me the only possibility for how someone got in and out of the library without being seen. Can you see if there’s any resources like ground-penetrating radar we could have access to?’

  Corey-Williams said nothing for a moment. ‘I’ll have a look, but at Christmas—’

  ‘Will you stop reminding me what day it is, detective constable? This is urgent. Get onto it, will you?’ He hung up.

  Gillard tracked Wolf down in the control room. He was sitting at the master screen, giggling to himself and eating an entire family-sized Christmas pudding from a foil dish. ‘Only Fool and Horse Christmas Special 1991. Very funny,’ Wolf said, gesturing at the screen with his spoon.

  ‘You know you’re supposed to eat them warm,’ Gillard said, indicating the pudding.

  ‘Yes, Tatiana, she also say this. She call me inbred Georgian peasant for eating figgy pudding from fridge, so I bring here where no insult. Still nice when cold.’ Wolf raised a glass of some ruby-coloured liquid to his lips. ‘Tawny port. Very good year. I don’t think Mr Volkov miss it now,’ he said with a grin. ‘Wolf, he inbred peasant perhaps, but he know nice drink.’

  ‘About this underground passage, Wolf,’ Gillard asked.

  ‘From main panic room, yes. An old tunnel goes north to the woods, but not in good condition and very wet. But like I say, nowhere near library.’

  ‘Are there any plans of Westgrave Hall which show it?’

  Wolf blew a sigh and put his pudding aside. ‘No peace even at Christmas. Goodwill to all men, but Wolf still he works. Phew, Wolf, he must be plonker.’ He shook his head in exasperation and got up.

  He led Gillard upstairs to a storeroom which contained piles of documents. ‘This is all stuff from the Westgrave family,’ Wolf said. After a few minutes’ search, he found a series o
f aged A3-size documents and brought them out onto a table with more light. ‘No, this quite clear. The old tunnel just goes north. In any case, the main panic room has security doors which block off tunnel. Only if you are in panic room can you open door. Mr Volkov, he had idea to restore tunnel which is centuries old, but that work never priority.’

  Gillard couldn’t quite make sense of the plans, but accepted Wolf’s assurances.

  ‘I can take you down tunnel tonight if you want. See for yourself. Just let me finish Only Fool and Horse first.’

  The detective chief inspector looked at the time. It was already nearly eight o’clock. He dearly wanted to spend a few hours at home before going off to do a couple of witness interviews in London the following morning.

  ‘One more thing,’ Wolf said, pulling a data stick from his pocket. ‘Is this yours?’

  Gillard took the proffered object and examined it. ‘I don’t think so, where did you find it?’

  ‘In rear USB port on the master terminal here. A place not easy to see.’

  ‘Have you looked to see what’s on there?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Not yet. I thought: “Okay, Surrey Police has warrant and maybe copying evidence.” So I leave alone. I do notice that it has antenna, which means could be transmitting data by wireless.’

  ‘That’s all a bit sophisticated for Surrey Police.’

  Wolf shrugged extravagantly. ‘It wasn’t there yesterday, and the only people who have been in here apart from me and my assistant are Surrey Police. So that’s you, Mr Hoskins, and those guys with the suits who came in this morning.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, big man from Special Branch and the quiet fellow in the bad suit. They asked me to let them see the place at seven a.m.’

  ‘I knew nothing about this,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Ah, so these people is not police?’ Wolf’s face tightened.

  ‘Corrigan is from the police, yes.’

  ‘But they did not tell you? Left hand not know who right hand what doing?’

  Gillard apologised. ‘I have to look into this, would you excuse me?’

  Chapter Ten

  Boxing Day morning

  Gillard had agreed to drive in to meet Lord Fein at nine a.m. at his London office, which turned out to be in one of the 1980s tower blocks on Leadenhall Street in the almost-deserted City. Shown up into the financier’s twenty-third storey office, Gillard was soon looking out with his interviewee over the changing streets. ‘When I first took the lease, the outlook here was tremendous,’ Fein said. ‘But first came the Gherkin at St Mary’s Axe, then a whole load of other glass monstrosities. For half the day in the summer, we’re in shade thanks to this.’ He stabbed his finger out towards a tall but rather unimaginative glassy block on the other side of the street.

  ‘What’s that one called?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s got a name,’ Fein replied with a sigh. ‘Just the address, number one. Russian money in there, too.’

  Gillard cleared his throat. He’d agreed to come in because Fein had to catch a flight to New York at lunchtime and would be unavailable for face-to-face interview for two weeks afterwards.

  ‘Thank you very much for your flexibility, Craig. Hope I’ve not interrupted the festivities too much.’

  ‘Happy to oblige,’ Gillard said, knowing that the noble lord was probably wholly uninterested in the wreckage of his home life. ‘At least on Boxing Day the traffic is light.’

  ‘A silver lining, Craig, I suppose.’ Fein had a habit of referring to everyone by their first name, even when, as in this case, he had never met them before. When he was trade minister, some years earlier, he had been interviewed by the combative John Humphrys on the Today programme on Radio 4. Finding himself in a corner over the issue of his expenses, Fein had tried to silkily ease his way out by using the interviewer’s name as if they were old pals. It hadn’t worked then, and it wasn’t working now. Gillard found it patronising.

  ‘I’ve got just over an hour before I need to leave. Americans are such uncivilised people, don’t you think, Craig? Wall Street is open on Boxing Day, for goodness’ sake, and I have a meeting there this afternoon. I have to be over there from time to time, and I often spend Hanukkah in New York, but I could never live there.’ He gave a brief shudder.

  David Fein was a great political fixer, slipping almost effortlessly between the two main British political parties. His flexible ideology was considered suspicious by many party stalwarts on both sides, but few could doubt his contacts among the press barons, his skills as a negotiator – particularly in trade and the EU – or his apparent background role in the Good Friday Agreement to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

  For a man in his late fifties, Fein exuded youthfulness. Dapper and well-dressed, he had an astonishingly bouffant head of silver hair, with the thickness and luxuriance that one would normally associate with a Hollywood A-lister. Though he would often play with it, running his hands through it in TV interviews, it never seemed dishevelled. When he was being doorstepped by the press during the Parliamentary expenses scandal, Fein was never caught by the cameras taking out the rubbish in his dressing gown, as a few of his colleagues had been. He would emerge from his tastefully decorated home in Virginia Water, fully dressed in suit and silk tie before eight o’clock in the morning, smooth and unflappable. On several occasions he and his glamorous wife Natasha had dispensed mugs of tea and coffee, and a large tray of bacon and tomato sandwiches on his home-made sourdough bread, for the gentlemen of the press, as he called them. Fein had also been known to offer interviews while on his morning run, for any journalist who could keep up with him.

  ‘Lord Fein,’ Gillard began. ‘We already have a brief statement from you on what you actually saw last night. But I want to ask you about the wider context, and your connections with Mr Volkov.’

  ‘That’s absolutely fine. Look, I’ve known Sasha for over twenty years, and Maxim for, oh, eight years, so I’d regard them as good, close friends. Both astute businessmen, absolutely. Of course I’m shocked by what happened yesterday. An awful occurrence.’

  ‘Did they get on, in recent years?’

  ‘Well. I wouldn’t exactly say that. What I would say is that differences had been buried, as a matter of expediency.’

  ‘Expediency?’

  ‘Yes. There was a big contract in the offing, between the two of them, and the final settlement of the divorce deal with Yelena was being undertaken simultaneously. It was all to be tied up over Christmas.’

  ‘What kind of deal?’

  ‘I’m not really at liberty to say, but I’m not giving away much when I say that minerals were at the heart of it. Sasha had them and Maxim needed them. It was confidential, obviously, and there are other parties to consider. Speak to Sasha’s lawyer, Belshin. He might be able to shed some light.’

  ‘And linked to a final settlement to the divorce?’

  He held up his hands. ‘Now there, Craig, I really can’t disclose anything.’

  ‘Were you assisting them in those negotiations?’

  Fein’s mouth adopted a slight moue of satisfaction. ‘Well, my role was more facilitator than anything. I was definitely in the background.’

  ‘You were at the Christmas party, so presumably you could say whether either or both of these apparently linked deals were signed by the time of the shooting?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t, actually.’

  ‘It could be that someone wanted them not to sign this deal, that’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘Well, that would seem a little far-fetched.’ Fein ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘You seem to be skirting the issue, if I may say so.’

  ‘My hands are tied,’ Fein said, with an expressive shrug which proved that in literal terms they were not.

  Gillard tried another tack. ‘All right, a yes-or-no question: do you think one might have tried to kill the other?’

  Fein’s eyes narrowed and
he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Well, there was a time, of course. But I’m absolutely convinced they would have seen the bigger picture by now.’

  ‘You dealt with them both in business, and sometimes together, is that true?’

  ‘Well, individually many times. Together…’ He sucked his teeth ruminatively. ‘Craig, I’ll be honest with you. I’m not sure there were more than two or three times when I was right there in the same room with them both. Excluding big social gatherings, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Gillard said, feeling he was lost in a swamp of nuance. ‘Did you ever witness arguments between them?’

  Fein searched the ceiling as if the answer might have been written there. ‘I can’t say I did, to be perfectly frank.’ He smiled. ‘But what I would say is that the ingredients for conflict were certainly in place. Now, Craig. Perhaps I could ask you a question? My sources tell me that you don’t possess the murder weapon. Is that really true?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Two can play at that game, mate. ‘Lord Fein, you would best help this inquiry by answering my questions. A bit of history, perhaps. Tell me a bit more about when that enmity began. Beyond the issue with Yelena Yalinsky.’

  Fein permitted himself a small laugh, which showed a perfect arc of small white teeth. ‘Well, I think we have to go back to Hookergate, as it became known. Do you know about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. Well, in Russia there is a great tradition of digging up kompromat, compromising material which allows an individual to be blackmailed. It was always the cornerstone of the KGB’s recruitment attempts. It makes for very loyal spies. But of course it has other uses. Now in 2013, Sasha lost several billion in a Zimbabwean platinum deal, for which he blamed Talin. It’s all very complicated and clever, but it basically revolved around the fact that Sasha had got too many debts and, because of the impending divorce, struggled to service them. Anyway,’ he dismissed the complexities with a wave of his hand. ‘A year-or-so later, Talin happened to be in Sochi, you know, the Black Sea resort, and decided to have a party in his room involving two ladies of the night.’ He rolled his eyes as if such shenanigans were beneath contempt.