The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

by Nick Louth

  Chapter Twenty

  Former police constable Simon Woodbridge had never been on a private jet before. He couldn’t believe there was so much space. Just him and her, sitting side-by-side on fat white leather seats looking out of the large porthole as the Hampshire countryside receded beneath them. Once the flight had levelled out, a steward served them chilled champagne and caviar. Anastasia’s dogs lay together on a sofa, yawning as if this was how they always travelled.

  She had rung him before ten that morning and asked that he come to pick her up in a village a few miles up the road from Steeple Risby. She had parked the VW there, and asked Simon to drive her to Farnborough in his car.

  ‘Why are you leaving in such a hurry?’ he had asked when they were on the road.

  ‘Things are about to get heavy at Westgrave Hall. I need time away. I’ll tell you later. Have you thought about the job? I really need an answer now.’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to take it. I’ve brought my passport, as you suggested.’ He’d started by calling in sick for his noon shift, and even as he was getting an ear-bashing from the sergeant for such late notice, his decision to resign had crystallised. It was in the end an easy choice. Even if he got to chief inspector, he’d never earn even a tenth of the salary Anastasia had offered him.

  Now to consider that exciting future. As her head of security, he’d have lots to learn, foreign languages for a start, and he’d have to get properly fit. She’d explained that he was to be based in Liechtenstein, a place he’d barely heard of, but he’d get a free flat, medical insurance, time off, one-to-one language tuition, all sorts of benefits. Basic income tax there was 1.2 per cent. Brilliant!

  The thing he was least sure about was his status with her. Was he Anastasia’s boyfriend, or simply an employee? She hadn’t clarified that.

  As they climbed to a cruising altitude, Simon turned and looked at Anastasia’s expressionless face, pressed close to the window. In some lights she did look hauntingly beautiful, but he found her pallor and sullen countenance hard to warm to. Could he learn to love her? He thought so. He obviously adored the hour-long treats she had bestowed upon him, four times now, always with him bound tightly to the bed frame, her in utter control. The hints and suggestions dropped into the conversation about when the next one might be kept him in a permanent state of excitement. He just wondered how long it would be before she agreed to actually make love with him, so he could give something back to her. When he had tried to touch her in the hotel, to give her pleasure, she had shied away. The most troubling aspect was the way she looked at him. No smile, no shine in her eyes.

  Nothing. Almost a void.

  Perhaps it was the trauma that she had suffered. The bullying and the abuse by Jason. Simon hoped that, with his affection and adoration, she would gradually thaw and they could enjoy a life together, away from all the murder and mayhem. He’d been amazed as she’d told him the choice of homes she’d be able to use: the huge apartments in Moscow and Nur-Sultan, the dacha near St Petersburg, the ski chalet in Switzerland, the castle in Italy, the hunting lodge in Botswana and the private estate near Bordeaux. Given what had happened, the three Volkov homes in Britain and the flats in San Francisco and New York would probably be off limits, at least until things cooled down a bit.

  If it worked out, it was going to be fantastic.

  If not, there was always the money. He would squirrel away every penny, just in case.

  On Simon Woodbridge’s face there was just the semblance of a smirk.

  * * *

  Several hours later, when they were somewhere above Northern Europe, Simon reached for Anastasia’s hand. ‘I want to ask you a question,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ she replied, continuing to flick through a magazine.

  ‘Now that Jason’s gone, are we more than just employer and employee?’

  ‘What has Jason got to do with it?’ She was clearly amused.

  ‘He abused you, and your statement says that he raped you, because he knew about you and Bryn Howell.’ Simon had struggled with the apparent complexity of this young woman’s love life, if love wasn’t a redundant word.

  ‘I lied, Simon.’ She flicked the page of the magazine.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Lots of things. I needed to make it seem like Jason forced me to get you involved in digging up the details about Daniel Levin. In fact it was my idea.’

  ‘So he didn’t rape you?’

  ‘Simon, Jason was gay.’ She was smirking now. ‘He never even kissed me. We were friends. I helped him, and he helped me. After he’d got Levin, the plan was to go our own separate ways.’

  ‘Gay? I don’t understand. And what about the blackmail? The video that he had. I’ve seen it, with both of us on it.’

  ‘Yes, but he never had that video. It was me that made it, me that sent it to you. I sent the threatening texts from a burner phone, signing myself off as Jason.’ She reached for her Hermès bag, pulled out a phone, and showed him the texts she’d sent. ‘See? The last of them I sent when I was in the bathroom at the Dorchester. Jason then spoke to you on my phone, just to give it added authenticity. The video was all my own work, and has now been deleted. I needed it to force you to help him, just as he helped me.’

  ‘You’ve been deliberately manipulating me!’

  ‘Oh, poor simple Simon, of course I have. Men are so easy.’ She looked him up and down. ‘You are like the little toy soldiers we used to have in Russia, put a kopek in the slot, and they march to your tune.’

  ‘What did he do for you, in exchange for the details about Daniel Levin?’

  She chuckled. ‘A little bit of a break-in in Switzerland.’

  ‘Burglary?’

  ‘No, he never took anything, except perhaps some twisted dreams. He simply turned off the electricity to a couple of machines. He’d never have been caught. His Kremlin nickname is Ghost. He’s extremely meticulous.’

  Simon’s frown was getting deeper and deeper, his lips more twisted as he tried to understand.

  ‘What about all the bruises you showed me?’

  She looked at him with an expression bordering on pity. ‘Simon, I made them. I squeezed my own arms and neck, tied a rope around my own neck.’

  He looked at her incredulously.

  ‘Simon, I needed you to be scared of him. I needed everyone to think I was the victim of blackmail, just in case you opened your mouth to the clever Mr Gillard.’

  Simon shook his head. ‘Right, that’s it. I’ve changed my mind about the job.’

  ‘Think of all the money you won’t earn.’ She slid the magazine back in a rack, and stared out through the window, over the snowy trees of Scandinavia.

  ‘Ah, but if there’s no video, you can’t blackmail me anymore.’

  ‘Simon, you are not thinking clearly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can I ask you, Simon, as you know all about the British police, what would happen to an officer who illegally used police resources to supply the information that allowed a man to be murdered?’

  Simon knew the answer – a lengthy term of imprisonment – but didn’t dare say the words. ‘Yes, obviously, but no one knows about what I did,’ he muttered.

  She giggled and tapped her chest. ‘I know about it. Jason obviously knew about it, and I’m pretty sure that his bosses in the Kremlin got to hear about it. In fact, if the clever Mr Gillard knows his stuff, he will already have checked who it was that typed Daniel Levin’s car number plate into the police database, and who it was who searched for the location of his phone. It will come back to you, won’t it?’

  ‘I was blackmailed into it!’

  ‘Really? Where’s the evidence?’ she said, in mock bewilderment. ‘Oh, it’s been deleted. Silly me.’

  She was absolutely right. ‘So now you are definitely blackmailing me.’

  ‘No, Simon, don’t look at it like that. You work for me, and I need to know that you will be loyal, because I have testing times ahead.’


  He stared at her with fresh eyes. ‘Did you kill them in the library?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re lying!’

  ‘Simon, you know I wasn’t there. It’s impossible.’

  She was obviously lying, but he didn’t know what to do. She’d outwitted him at every turn.

  ‘So, Simon, as you’ve seen my phone, I need to see yours.’ He hesitated, until she clicked her fingers and said: ‘It’s a condition of your employment, actually.’

  He passed it over then watched helplessly as she, pretending to be him, dumped his girlfriend Sally by text and then blocked her number. She went on to delete the numbers of all his friends, one after another.

  ‘I am your future. You have no past,’ Anastasia said.

  Simon stared out of the window. Below, through gaps in the cloud, he could see an endless white wilderness, dotted with trees. A tundra of bleak, friendless isolation, where he was utterly dependent on a woman who thought nothing of murder.

  His future.

  * * *

  Anastasia had cleared her bedroom at Westgrave Hall of almost everything incriminating. When Gillard and the other detectives broke down the locked door that evening, they found no phones, laptops or computers. No purse or credit cards. Even the dogs’ bowls and grooming kit were missing. What she had left behind were wardrobes full of clothes, enough jewellery for a branch of Tiffany and bins full of rubbish.

  Breaking remotely into Anastasia’s absent phone took another day but produced some interesting results. Townsend did manage to track down and restore a copy of a video from a server on the service provider’s site, one that had been deleted on the phone itself.

  Seeing how it began, he called Gillard over to look at it.

  A camera apparently concealed in the top of Anastasia’s canopy bed caught her performing oral sex on someone bound naked to the bed frame. They had both expected the recipient to be Bryn Howell, the kompromat video Anastasia had mentioned that Lefsky was using to blackmail her.

  ‘Can’t see the face, but he’s clearly having a great time,’ Townsend said.

  ‘He’s too pale to be Howell,’ Gillard said. ‘It’s probably Simon Woodbridge.’

  ‘So Lefsky was blackmailing him too,’ Townsend said.

  Gillard shook his head. He’d been going through some of the recovered texts between Anastasia and a burner phone which seemed to be owned by Jason Lefsky. ‘I think this was more like a joint operation. She compromised Simon, so he would dig up the details on Daniel Levin’s location.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Townsend said.

  ‘Why else would he flee the country with her?’

  ‘A daily blow job might be part of the answer,’ Townsend muttered.

  Gillard grinned at the younger officer’s envy. ‘Maybe. And her billions, of course. We’ve got it confirmed from the ANPR database that it was Woodbridge who checked for Levin’s camper van registration. I’m sure he was the cop who rang Vodafone for Levin’s cell tower trace that evening too, though he used a false name. These are quite incriminating too.’ Gillard showed Townsend his own computer screen, where he’d been trawling through the texts exchanged between Anastasia and Lefsky.

  ‘This last one, late on Boxing Day evening, from Lefsky to her, is the clincher,’ Gillard said, pointing to the translation of the Russian.

  Он получит информацию сегодня вечером. Я бы не задержался слишком долго после этого. Увидимся в Москве. Спасибо за все хх.

  He’s going to get the info tonite. I wouldn’t hang around too long after. Tks for everything. J. xx.

  ‘A conspiracy,’ Townsend said.

  ‘He was working for Moscow, but her? I’m still not sure.’

  ‘What a nice girl,’ Townsend said.

  ‘Damaged, is the nicest thing we can say. Unloved, certainly.’

  ‘Doesn’t excuse what she did,’ Townsend said.

  ‘No, you’re right, but her upbringing was the perfect one to create a psychopath.’

  ‘We will be able to trace her in Moscow, Russia is a member of Interpol,’ Townsend said.

  Gillard smiled at the naïveté of his younger colleague. ‘Good luck with that, Rob. She is connected to some very powerful people and will inherit some critically valuable mineral companies. And if you think she is a transactional person, then she is nothing compared to the powers that be at the Kremlin. Everything with them is a negotiation, a bargain to be made.’

  * * *

  Anastasia disappeared off the radar, as Gillard expected. But some things could be traced. On Sunday, with the help of Sophie Cawkwell, research intelligence officer Rob Townsend managed to retrieve every flight plan and video recording that had been produced on all of the drones that Sophie’s TV company owned. Townsend wasn’t interested in any of the dozens that were in the main database. He went straight to those that were marked deleted, recovering them using a police software tool developed to retrieve deleted images of abuse from paedophiles’ computers. The video he showed to the assembled detectives in the Khazi turned out to be every bit as shocking.

  ‘This, ladies and gentleman, is a drone’s eye view of the crime in action,’ Gillard announced, as Townsend began a big screen projection.

  The screen began in black, framed by the gyroscope bearings and a clock along the bottom, which showed it was recorded from the first minute of Christmas morning. After a few seconds there began the sounds of fireworks and coloured light reflected into a dark room. The drone’s light came on, showing it was under a table in a dimly lit room lined with bookshelves.

  ‘That looks like one of the library meeting rooms,’ Michelle Tsu said.

  The characteristic buzz of the rotors could now be heard. The viewpoint rose slowly by a foot, and pivoted slightly, until an open door could be seen. In the distance was loud echoing conversation, several voices and laughter.

  ‘This is amazing,’ said Rainy. ‘We are seeing and hearing from the murderer’s perspective.’

  The drone crept forward beyond the last of the table legs, and then gradually began to rise further. It headed for the door, which led out to the ground floor of the library. The lens went to wide-angle, which showed the great dark bulk of the fossil rock above.

  The talking in Russian continued nearby and was then interrupted.

  ‘This must be when they heard the noise,’ Gillard said. ‘They stopped talking because they’d heard the drone.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t have been alarmed,’ Rainy said. ‘Talin and Yelena would have thought it was all part of the show. They knew Sophie was making a documentary about the fossil.’

  With a loud buzz, the drone rose rapidly. It soared above the fossil and continued climbing, giving the wide-angle lens a panoramic view below of the sixty-yard balcony, halfway along which three figures could be seen, close to each other, leaning on the rail and looking up towards the drone. Talin was on the left, Yelena in the middle and Volkov on the right.

  ‘They seem friendly enough,’ Rainy said. ‘A bunch of pals leaning at the bar.’

  ‘It certainly kiboshes the idea they were having an argument,’ Hoskins said.

  On the screen, Talin pointed right up at the drone, and whatever he shouted caused both Yelena and Volkov to step back from the balustrade.

  ‘Aye, he spotted the wee gun,’ Rainy said.

  On their screen the lens switched to telephoto, and closed in. Red crosshairs appeared, jerking around as the drone was manoeuvred. The first shot, seemingly aimed at Yelena, came as a loud shock, and the screen jerked wildly.

  Once the screen had stabilised Gillard pressed pause. ‘I couldnae see where that went,’ Rainy said.

  ‘I suspect the operator had the same problem,’ he replied. ‘It does explain the wild shooting.’ He resumed the video, and there were three more shots in quick succession. Talin could now be seen with his own gun in his hand. Volkov was ushering Yelena to t
he right, towards the end of the atrium where the panic room was, but she was shouting back, gripping the handrail and refusing to move. They were still all within five yards of each other.

  Rainy had her hand over her mouth. ‘Och, the poor wee hen doesnae want to leave her beloved Maxim.’

  The drone’s next shot was clearly a bull’s-eye, because Talin staggered, and when the screen stabilised a huge red flower of blood bloomed in the centre of his dress shirt. He still managed to get off a couple of shots.

  ‘Missed us,’ Rainy said.

  ‘Us?’ Gillard queried, pausing the video.

  ‘Sorry, sir. I’m getting a bit too involved.’

  The next bit they watched in slow motion, Yelena had escaped Volkov’s grip, and had squeezed past to reach Talin. He had staggered back, gun still pointing, but was gripping a bookcase behind for stability. Another flurry of shots from the drone emphasised a target they had already seen: the crosshairs were again on Yelena. The first one missed because she knelt down to attend to Talin, who had collapsed; the second hit Volkov, who had interposed himself between her and the balcony rail.

  ‘Definitely trying to kill her,’ Hoskins said.

  ‘But not Volkov, seemingly,’ Gillard observed.

  The next moment, Volkov grabbed Yelena, plucking her from the ground even as she was holding out her arms and screaming for her beloved Maxim.

  ‘Och, it breaks your heart,’ Rainy whispered.

  With bullets flying thick and fast, Volkov then ran as best he could, with Yelena in his arms, towards the panic room.

  Gillard suddenly exclaimed: ‘Ah, that’s why there are none of her footprints in the blood on the balcony. Volkov carried her for a good thirty yards. It all makes sense now.’

  ‘Anastasia’s still trying to get her,’ Michelle said, noting the crosshairs that jerkily followed Volkov’s progress.

  ‘Oh!’ a collective gasp went up from the detectives as a shot aimed at Yelena’s head hit Volkov and caused him to topple sideways into the bookcase. He managed to steady himself and stagger the last five yards towards the panic room. It was with seemingly superhuman strength that after taking another bullet, this time in the leg, he pulled open the door with his free hand. He placed his ex-wife delicately on the floor right by the open door.