The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

by Nick Louth

  ‘She’s under a legal obligation to assist us—’

  ‘One that has practical jurisdiction limitations, I think you’ll agree. As she says, she is happy to help.’

  Gillard got the message loud and clear: get tough with her and she’ll vanish to a place the British legal system cannot reach.

  * * *

  Back in the Khazi, DI Claire Mulholland and DCs Rainy Macintosh and Michelle Tsu were crowded round a terminal, flicking through hundreds of photographs of bloody footprints taken on the balcony. They were trying as best they could to separate out the movements of the protagonists in the gunfight from the later contamination from the rescuers. A simple idea, but practically impossible to do.

  ‘Och, this is like a Dulux nightmare,’ Rainy exclaimed, as they carefully flicked through the images. ‘Having hurriedly decorated the wall, we’re now trying to extract the undercoat.’

  While they had labelled the images within each photograph with the shoe types, it was still confusing. Maxim Talin seemed to have moved very little, at least once he had stepped in his own blood, but the larger tread from Alexander Volkov, who only had blood on the right shoe, showed that he had raced from the middle of the balcony to the end where the panic room was. There, he made several steps in different directions, as if dithering, before falling over and producing a large pool of his own blood.

  ‘Talin stood and fought, which matches the fact he had a gun,’ Michelle said.

  ‘Whereas Volkov looked to be running for safety,’ Claire said, pointing a pencil at the widely spaced bloodstains from the oligarch’s right shoe. ‘That’s a three-foot gap at least.’

  ‘If he had blood on the sole of his other foot, we’ve lost it in the mayhem of the subsequent contamination.’ They had labels in place for Wolf’s boots and Sophie Cawkwell’s fashionable Manolo Blahniks. Hers were easy to trace for the most part – firstly because the roughly triangular sole of the high heel shoes was so different from the male footwear, and secondly because hers were the last prints. Helpfully, there was a tiny paper label stuck on her right sole which acted as an absorbent stencil, stamping out her path in blood across the balcony and the landing by the panic room.

  They finished the first slideshow of 178 pictures taken by PC Zoe Butterfield and moved on to the even larger number taken by CSI. ‘We could be here until the wee hours and still make no sense of it,’ Rainy said.

  The plywood door of the Khazi squealed and crime scene technician Kirsty Mockett walked in, shaking the rain off her overcoat. ‘Ah, good to see you Kirsty,’ said Claire.

  ‘A late entrant to the girls-who-missed-Christmas club,’ said Rainy. Her son Ewan was being looked after by Claire’s plasterer husband Barry, who had incorporated him into an impromptu family Christmas at the Mulholland home in Staines. From Christmas morning onwards, Claire had fielded calls from Baz about cooking turkey, making bread sauce, thickening gravy and even the procedure for preparing instant stuffing mix. Two of her boys were there too, but despite her best attempts, none of the male members of the household could cook.

  ‘I’ve got something here which may help on the footprints,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘Well we could certainly do with that,’ said Claire. ‘We’ve got Raj’s map on a roll of wallpaper and loads of confusing photographs. That’s about it.’

  ‘Ah well, this is some imaging software from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands,’ Kirsty said. ‘It allows you to specify footprints, and then visually remove them from the photograph. In theory it should show you what was underneath but masked. Of course, what it really does is to replicate the specified print, but it should give a better idea of an individual’s path.’

  The four officers took the next hour to set up the software, until they were able to strip away the contaminating footprints applied after the shooting had finished. The first to be removed were Wolf’s big outdoor boots, and then Sophie’s shoes. They then passed each of Zoe’s images through the filter to see what else they could glean.

  ‘Yes, it’s clear Volkov was running, but instead of jumping into the panic room after Yelena, he seemed to turn round,’ said Michelle.

  ‘That accords with the ballistics evidence,’ said Claire. ‘There were exit wounds both in his back and his chest, so he was shot from both sides.’

  ‘So it was right here that he was shot,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘And then sat or fell down, against the panic room door, poor wee bugger,’ Rainy said.

  ‘Not so wee,’ said Kirsty. ‘It took four of us to shift his body into the hoist.’

  Michelle had moved the screen on to CSI’s own images of the bloodstains, which were close-ups, each covering a smaller area. ‘What’s this?’ she said. She was pointing to a small triangular print surrounded by a large U-shaped pool of smeared blood.

  Kirsty looked at the number and referenced the index sheet. ‘I think that’s where Volkov had been sitting. It’s right next to the panic room door.’

  ‘You think Sophie Cawkwell managed to move him?’ Michelle asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. He was a big guy,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘Then how come she got her feet underneath where he was sitting?’ Michelle asked. ‘They must have tried to lift him.’

  ‘Just to be clear,’ Claire asked Kirsty. ‘When Volkov’s body was removed, there was no one around but CSI, right?’

  ‘Correct. Certainly no one wearing high heels.’

  ‘So if Sophie couldn’t have moved Volkov, and there was no blood for her to step in when she was previously in the library, how did this footprint come to be here?’ Claire shifted the focus to look more closely at the images. ‘Here’s another odd thing.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘The little label isn’t visible in this one.’ Claire looked up at the puzzled faces of the women around her. ‘Sophie Cawkwell had a little label on her right sole.’

  ‘Let’s get the shoes in here,’ Rainy said. She headed off to Raj’s carefully organised evidence van, which was parked outside, and came back a few minutes later with a large paper evidence bag. ‘Right, let’s have a wee look.’ While the women all donned evidence gloves, she undid the seal strip, and pulled out two kingfisher blue Manolo Blahniks.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ breathed Kirsty.

  ‘No change out of seven hundred quid,’ Rainy said. ‘And they’ll still bugger your toes and ankles eventually, and that’s even if you don’t fall off them while pissed.’

  ‘Rainy, you are such a little ray of sunshine,’ Michelle said.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, hen, I’d still love to own a pair.’

  ‘Amazing workmanship,’ said Claire, turning over the right shoe. The instep carried the continental size and the stencil ‘handmade in Italy’. There was no tread on the sole, just flat leather and a small label, originally white but now dark brown. The remains of the bloodstains looked like a little map of Ireland on the sole.

  Michelle looked at the image on the screen and the sole of the shoe. ‘It doesn’t match this stain. Nor does this,’ she said picking up the other shoe. ‘It isn’t just the absence of the label, but the shape of the bloodstain.’ She pointed to the image. ‘If the footprint doesn’t belong to Sophie, it must belong to Yelena Yalinsky.’

  ‘Well, that makes sense, because she was on her way into the panic room,’ Claire said. ‘That print is literally one foot away from the door.’

  Michelle shook her head. ‘She claimed that she headed in the moment the shooting started. Would there have been any blood to step in at that time?’

  ‘No,’ said Claire. ‘Trouble is, we don’t have any footprints for her to check against.’

  ‘And we don’t have the shoes either,’ Rainy added.

  The women all looked at each other. ‘What time is it in Geneva?’ Michelle asked.

  Claire checked her phone. ‘It’s an hour ahead, so it’s just coming up to ten.’

  ‘What time is Gillard seeing Yalinsky?’ Rainy
asked.

  ‘Nine, so with any luck he might still be there.’ Claire punched out her boss’s number.

  He answered immediately.

  ‘Craig, it’s Claire. Are you still with her?’ The other women looked up expectantly. They saw her face contract and the excitement leach out of it. After a minute-or-so she hung up.

  ‘He’s in a taxi on his way back to the airport. The interview’s over. He’s going to try to ring her, but she’s been pretty evasive so far.’ There were a few groans of disappointment among the assembled officers. ‘He’s got one other suggestion. To prove it is Yalinsky, we should look for bloodstains inside the panic room.’

  ‘We did that,’ Kirsty Mockett said.

  ‘With Bluestar?’ Claire asked.

  ‘No, we only did the main room with Bluestar,’ she conceded.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and take the panic room apart,’ Claire said.

  * * *

  The four officers changed into Tyvek coveralls and booties, filled rucksacks with the tools they expected to need, and trooped out of the Khazi. They made their way through the Boxing Day darkness, past the shadowed portals of Westgrave Hall, and the flagpoles flying at half-mast, the flags of Russia, the UK and the US. They trudged across the alabaster bridge to the library. A uniformed officer, his face red with cold, greeted them and undid the enormous police-issue padlock which secured the doors. They stepped inside, flicked on all the lights and shuffled their way along the ground floor under the enormous bulk of the great primaeval rock, until they reached the scissor lift. Claire operated the lifting console. At the top, she turned to the lighting console rigged up on the edge of the scaffolding and flipped on the arc lights. The bloodstains, partially covered by CSI duckboards, were still shocking to look at. The profusion of yellow and white markers indicated the location of bullet holes and cartridge cases respectively. Above her, the skylight had been closed to prevent rain getting in.

  Carefully, Claire led her team from the platform over the balcony rail and onto the duckboards. She braced and gradually pulled open the heavy panic room door by its stainless steel handle. She flipped on the lights and stared at the top step of the metal staircase. No blood was visible on any of the steps. The four women made their way down gradually. At the bottom she allocated tasks.

  ‘Kirsty, could you Bluestar the panic room staircase? Michelle, I want you to search again for ballistic residues. Rainy, I want you to take the bathroom apart. I want that gun found.’

  ‘Aye, I always get the shitty jobs,’ Rainy muttered to herself as she wandered into the luxury bathroom. A huge gold framed mirror threw back her Tyveked reflection, like some kind of bespectacled jelly baby. There was a neat pile of monogrammed linen hand towels, just like she’d seen at the poshest hotels, and a choice of different liquid soaps. The two large cubicles had no visible cisterns, so she began by using a screwdriver to pry off the brass caps on top of the screws which held in the ceramic panels. It took five minutes to reach each cistern, and she was able to verify that there was no weapon hidden within either. She then took a hacksaw to the plastic soil pipe and cut out a melon-shaped slice. She hoped that in such a new building that the fittings would be pristine and there wouldn’t be any nasty residue inside the pipe.

  She was right.

  From her rucksack she took out a reel of cable with a small device on the end. This was the inspection camera, which she intended to use to find out what was in the cesspit. She fed out the cable gradually for about forty feet and then connected her mobile phone to a terminal at the reel end and activated the camera and light.

  Opening the app, she saw a chamber about a yard across that was a foot deep in water. Floating half on the edge of this was what looked like a piece of towelling, and just a few soggy lumps of toilet paper. The water was relatively clear and when she dipped the camera in, it showed that there was no weapon.

  After twenty minutes Claire called them back in. Kirsty was already there. ‘Bluestar shows there’s been an attempt to clean blood off the staircase,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing in the bedroom, no obvious storage places located,’ Michelle said. ‘I didn’t pick up any ballistics residues.’

  ‘The cludgie was a damn sight cleaner than my local municipal swimming baths,’ Rainy said. ‘Not a single piece of shite. But I think I found the hand towels that may have been used to clean blood off the stairs. The canny wee bugger must have flushed them away. Expensive towels as well.’

  ‘That’s very good, team,’ Claire said. ‘Shame there was no gun.’

  ‘Are we now thinking that Ms Yalinsky is the murderer?’ Michelle asked.

  ‘It’s got to be a possibility,’ Claire said. ‘She was out there long enough to get blood on her shoes. She clearly didn’t want that to be known, otherwise why would she clean the stairs and flush away the towels?’

  ‘But how did she manage to get Volkov to trap her in here?’ Rainy asked.

  ‘It’s a good question,’ Claire replied. ‘Carl Hoskins is on the night shift. I think it’s time we borrowed him.’

  * * *

  By the time they got back to the Khazi it was nearly eleven, and the light filtering from the Portakabin almost made it look welcoming. Carl Hoskins was already there, making his way through an enormous pile of turkey leftovers from an aluminium foil parcel.

  ‘Do they not feed you at home?’ Rainy asked.

  Hoskins nodded, and licked his fingers. ‘This lot has just been delivered by a nice lady at the Westgrave Hall kitchen. Got some leftovers from the party too, in that parcel,’ he said, pointing to another turkey-sized aluminium clad parcel.

  ‘Leave that for now,’ Claire said. ‘Come with me everyone. Carl, you’ll need to suit up.’

  A few minutes later the entire entourage trooped back again, under the fossil and via the lifting platform back to where they had been an hour previously. ‘Michelle, you’re about as petite as Yelena Yalinsky. I’d like you to move into the panic room and wait at the top of the spiral stairs.’

  Michelle heaved open the heavy steel door and stepped inside.

  ‘We’re going to shut you in. In exactly one minute I want you to try to push the door open.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now, Carl, shut her in, and sit down against the door.’ He gradually eased the door closed and sat back against it. ‘Sorry to ask a personal question, Carl, but how much do you weigh?’ Claire asked.

  ‘About seventeen stone, give or take. The original two-hundred-pound gorilla.’

  ‘He’s a wee black hole of Christmas pud, and I cannae escape his gravity,’ Rainy said, leaning towards him as if helpless.

  ‘You’re a fine one to talk,’ said Hoskins.

  ‘Och, that’s no way to speak to a lady.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be.’ He chuckled.

  ‘Quiet everyone,’ Claire asked. ‘Okay, Michelle, push!’ she shouted. Everyone looked at the door for signs of movement. Nothing.

  ‘I can feel a pressure on my back, but nothing that would shift me,’ Hoskins said. Soon afterwards they could hear tapping.

  ‘Okay, let her out.’

  Hoskins stood up and pulled the heavy steel door open. Michelle Tsu emerged. ‘I couldn’t make any progress. It was impossible.’

  Hoskins gave a guilty shrug. ‘Too many chips for too many years.’

  ‘Volkov, being a few inches taller, probably weighed even more than Carl. I think we can conclude that it would have been pretty difficult for Yelena to shoot him fatally, and then get inside the panic room,’ Claire concluded.

  ‘But not impossible,’ Michelle said. ‘If he didn’t collapse for a few seconds afterwards.’

  ‘There could be some other possibilities,’ Hoskins said. ‘If she fired the gun first, then passed it to her boyfriend—’

  ‘But we don’t have the gun!’ Rainy exclaimed. ‘None of this gets us anywhere. Somewhere in this place there must be another gun.’

  ‘It could have been chucked out thro
ugh the skylight,’ Michelle said.

  Hoskins peered up. ‘That would be a hell of a throw, and even if it was hard enough to reach there, you’d probably just hit the glass the first half dozen times. I didn’t find nothing when I was up there yesterday. I searched all the gutters.’

  ‘It looks a bit unlikely,’ Claire said. ‘Okay, team, well done for today, we’ll meet up tomorrow morning, when Gillard gets back. I’m getting a tour round the ossuary first. Carl, are you staying in the Khazi?’

  ‘Yeah. Might catch up with some reading first,’ he said, indicating the array of books in the library.

  ‘Shireen has sent through what we know about Volkov’s will. You might want to start with that.’

  ‘All right.’ The one unvoiced thought in Hoskins’ head was the promise of a big fry-up for tomorrow’s breakfast. One benefit from having chatted up Tatiana, the chef, a Ukrainian woman with a golden tooth and ample bosom.

  A few hours earlier

  PC Simon Woodbridge was relaxing at his one-bedroom flat in Reigate, just outside London’s orbital M25 motorway. It was Boxing Day evening, he had a couple of cans in and there was a Bond film on the TV. He’d just got off the phone with his girlfriend, Sally, and had arranged to meet her at her parents’ house in Bracknell for lunch on Saturday. Sally’s eager questioning of him about the juicy murder at Westgrave Hall made him feel guilty about what had happened to him there, and he told her he wasn’t allowed to say anything. That hadn’t stopped him giving his mates Steve and Geoff a blow-by-blow account of his entanglement with Anastasia. In fact, it was almost the first thing he had done when coming off duty that morning.

  The call on his mobile took him by surprise. It was a withheld number.

  ‘Hello simple Simon,’ came the husky voice. ‘It’s Anastasia.’

  ‘Oh hi, how are you?’ He was shocked. He didn’t think he’d given her his number.

  ‘I’m taking you to dinner,’ she announced. ‘Unless you have already eaten.’