by Tim Ellis
‘Again?’
‘That’s what I said. Where are you?’
‘At the . . . Never mind where I am. Do you want me to come home?’
‘That means I’ll have to wait for you.’
‘Just a minute.’ The phone went dead. ‘Josh said he’ll drive me.’
‘Okay.’ He told her where to meet him and Ray.
‘We’ll see you there.’
He kissed Angie, turned the football on for Digby to watch, and left.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Name?’ Kowalski said.
‘Willie Tomasic. I am Mr Voss’ building supervisor for Butterfield Spire.’
Kowalski, Parish and Richards were standing in the marble lobby. Sergeant Maurice Lydiard and Constable Sarah Schofield had been waiting outside, and had accompanied them into the high-rise.
‘And where is Mr Voss?’ Kowalski continued.
‘He is out of the country, I believe. Where? I do not know. He does not keep me informed of his whereabouts.’
‘You had a meeting with my wife – Jerry Kowalski – at two o’clock this afternoon?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Nobody’s seen her since she came here.’
His brow furrowed. ‘I do not know what to say. Your wife left at about twenty-past two. She wanted Mr Voss to allow her to bring in an independent expert, because one of the residents had complained of a smell in their apartment – he agreed to her request. I told her so, and then she left. She was not here very long at all.’
‘I only have your word for that, Mr Tomasic.’
‘No. I have the recording of her leaving.’
‘Show me.’
Tomasic took them into his tidy, but drab apartment on the ground floor, sat in front of a computer screen and found the relevant black and white recording. ‘Here – she is arriving.’ He pointed to the date-time stamp ‘You see, today at three minutes past two.’ He put the recording on fast-forward. ‘And here, she is leaving – nineteen minutes past two.’
‘What about her car?’ Richards asked the Chief.
He shook his head. ‘It was the first thing I looked for when I arrived.’
‘Were those the clothes she was wearing today?’
Kowalski stared at Jerry on the screen. She had on a light-coloured jacket and skirt. ‘I don’t know. She leaves after me, and gets home before me. I don’t know what she wears. If the recording was in colour, maybe . . .’
‘You don’t think . . . ?’ Parish said. He wondered whether Rose Needle had come back to finish the job she’d started.
Ray looked at him. ‘What?’
‘No – nothing. What now, Ray?’
His face was a terminus for lines, and he clenched his fists. ‘I don’t know.’
‘She obviously isn’t here.’
They moved out of the apartment and back into the lobby.
‘Have you finished here?’ Sergeant Lydiard asked.
‘Yes,’ Richards said. She turned to the building supervisor. ‘Thank you, Mr Tomasic.’
‘It was no problem. I hope you find her.’
Kowalski turned back to him. ‘Are you sure my wife left?’
‘I am sure.’
‘She didn’t say where she was going?’
He shook his head. ‘Not to me.’
Once they were outside Richards said, ‘Jerry’s still here.’
Kowalski turned on her. What . . . ?’
‘I saw his lip move.’
‘That’s what people’s lips do,’ Parish said.
‘No. He thought we weren’t looking at him. His head was down, and I saw his lip move as if he was trying to hide a smile.’
Kowalski began to barge his way back towards the lobby. ‘There’s one way to find out,’ he said.
Parish stepped in front of him. ‘And if Richards is wrong?’
‘Before you bash his head in,’ Richards said. ‘I have some other ideas.’ She turned to Sergeant Lydiard. ‘We need to find out what happened to Mrs Kowalski’s car and whether she was driving it . . .’
Lydiard nodded. He was close to retirement, overweight with a ginger-grey beard and thick glasses that seemed too small for his face. ‘We have a pretty good traffic section and CCTV coverage in the area. Let me see what I can do.’ He wrote down the details of Jerry’s car in his notebook as Kowalski gave them to him, and then moved away to make the phone call.
‘Didn’t Tomasic say that Jerry came here yesterday as well?’
‘Yes,’ the Chief agreed.
‘Well, we saw Jerry arriving and leaving today on that recording, but what if it wasn’t today?’
‘You’re getting too smart for your own good, Richards,’ Parish said. ‘Are you suggesting that Tomasic altered the recording?’
‘I don’t know, but if she’s still here then he – or somebody else – must have done.’
‘Where’s Josh?’
‘I sent him home.’
‘That wasn’t very bright.’
‘I didn’t know we’d need him.’
‘Well now you do, so you’d better call him and get him back here.’
‘Okay.’ She made the call.
Constable Sarah Schofield cleared her throat. ‘I don’t mean to pour cold water on your plans, but don’t you need a warrant for what you’re suggesting?’ Schofield was older than Richards by a couple of years, but just as pretty. She had short blonde hair cut in a choppy pageboy style with unblemished skin and bright-blue eyes.
Parish looked at the Chief.
Kowalski shrugged. ‘We don’t have any evidence to support a warrant application.’
‘If we were to arrest Mr Tomasic, then we could search the premises under Section 18 of PACE,’ Constable Schofield said.
‘You’re a genius, Schofield,’ Kowalski said.
Richards pulled a face. ‘Arrest him for what?’ We have no evidence that he’s done anything wrong.’
‘We have reasonable grounds for suspecting he’s guilty of an offence under Section 24A,’ Kowalski said.
‘With what justification, Sir?’ Richards pressed him.
‘To allow the prompt and effective investigation of the offence.’
Sergeant Lydiard came back into the discussion. ‘That’s done,’ he said. ‘Someone is looking at the footage and they’ll call me if they find anything.’
‘Thanks,’ Parish said. ‘We can’t search the building without a warrant unless we arrest Mr Tomasic, so that’s what we’re going to do.’
‘I see. On what grounds?’
Parish told him what they’d come up with.
‘It probably won’t stand up in court, but if you tell me to arrest him, Sir – I will.’
‘We have no choice,’ Kowalski added. ‘Go and arrest him, Sergeant. Handcuff him to something sturdy in the kitchen, and Constable Schofield can guard him until we’ve finished searching the building.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Lydiard and Schofield returned to the building.
Parish craned his neck upwards. ‘How many floors do you reckon there are, Richards?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Is that a guess, or do you know for sure?’
‘A guess.’
‘Okay. There are twenty floors and only four of us – that’s five floors each. It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Sleeping is overrated anyway,’ Kowalski said.
‘We don’t have to search people’s apartments,’ Richards said.
‘That’s true,‘ Parish said. ‘We just search the storerooms on each floor. What’s happening about Marmite?’
‘He’s on his way back. He said about twenty minutes, and that was ten minutes ago.’
‘Right, you wait in the lobby for lover-boy . . .’
‘Is there something I should know?’ the Chief said.
Richards screwed up her face. ‘No there is not.’
‘. . . And when he arrives you tell him to interrogate Tomasic’s computer, especially the sec
urity recording from this afternoon. The Chief and I will begin the search. We’ll start in the basement first. After that, I’ll take floors 1 to 5, you take 6 – 10, Sergeant Lydiard can take 11 to 15, and the Chief can take 16 – 20.’
‘Okay.’ She turned to the Chief. ‘Do you have Charlie Baxter’s phone number?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only, I was thinking about what Jerry was wearing today. Charlie Baxter might know, or some of the people she works with.’
‘I knew there was a reason I asked you to come along.’ Parish said.
‘Very kind. If you give me the number, Chief, I’ll phone Charlie and he can find out what she was wearing and ring me back.’
‘Thanks, Richards. My head isn’t working right at the moment.’
‘That’s understandable, Sir.’
Parish and Kowalski walked back into the building while Richards called Charlie Baxter.
Sergeant Lydiard met them in the lobby and said, ‘Tomasic is handcuffed to the radiator in the kitchen, and he’s saying that Mr Voss will have our jobs and sue the Metropolitan Police for everything they’ve got.’
Parish laughed. ‘He won’t get rich doing that.’
Lydiard didn’t laugh. ‘You’re not worried, Sir?’
‘There’s plenty of time to worry, Sergeant. Let’s see what we can find first.’ He told Lydiard what they’d decided and which floors he was responsible for searching.
‘Keys, Sir,’ Lydiard said. ‘There’s a board in the kitchen with keys belonging to each floor on it.’
‘Good idea.’
They went into the kitchen, found the keys clearly labelled for each floor and handed them out.
‘Once you’ve finished searching your allocated floors,’ Parish said. ‘We meet back here in the lobby.’
Everyone nodded.
‘Anything I’ve forgotten?’
‘Phone numbers, Sir?’ Lydiard suggested.
They made sure everyone – including Constable Schofield – had everyone else’s mobile number.
‘Right, let’s all do the cellar first,’ Parish said. ‘Richards can join us when Marmite arrives.’
***
The basement was divided into rooms around a central area. The largest room to the rear of the building was taken up by the electrical and mechanical services, which included plumbing; air conditioning; heating; water; gas; telephone and fibre-optic cabling and so on. The lift came down to the basement, but the service room was located on the roof, as were the vents for the air-conditioning. Another room was for waste disposal, and there were seven other rooms that contained various supplies used by Willie Tomasic.
Kowalski and Parish went into the electrical and mechanical services room, and Lydiard started searching the other rooms. Richards appeared within twenty minutes and helped Lydiard until she received a phone call.
‘Who was it?’ Parish called.
‘Charlie.’
‘And?’
‘She was wearing a dark blue trouser suit today.’
Kowalski stopped what he was doing. ‘Right, I’m going to rip his arms off one by one until he tells me where she is.’
‘Confessions obtained by torture don’t mean anything, Ray,’ Parish said.
‘I’m not interested in a confession, I just want to find Jerry.’
‘We all want to find her.’
Richards ducked under a thick painted-green pipe. ‘We have justification for arresting and holding him now, and we also know she’s here somewhere.’
‘No, we don’t,’ Parish said.
‘Yes, we do.’
‘Let’s say he was the one who moved Jerry’s car . . .’
‘Oh God! You’re right. He could have taken her somewhere else.’
‘Why have you stopped searching?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Get back to work. If you can’t talk and work at the same time – don’t talk.’
‘Humph!’
It took them two hours to find no trace of Jerry, or any secret doors, panels, walls and so forth.
Lydiard was the next one to receive a phone call. ‘They’ve found your wife’s car, Sir,’ he said, when he ended the call. ‘They found it parked under a bridge in Wanstead not far from the tube station.’
‘What about the CCTV.’
‘Nothing yet, but it gives traffic an idea where to look now. Also, they’re examining the CCTV at Wanstead and Hainault tube stations.’
‘Good.’
‘It looks as though we’ve got him, doesn’t it?’ Richards said.
‘We haven’t got anything yet,’ Parish replied. ‘It’s all circumstantial. Right, let’s start searching the other floors, shall we?’
They made their way back up to the lobby.
Kowalski wanted to go into Tomasic’s apartment and torture him until he told them where Jerry was, but Parish stopped him.
‘Go in and find out whether Marmite has made any progress, Richards.’
‘All right.’ She made her way into the apartment and then heard her shout. ‘Sir! You’d better get in here.’
***
Friday, August 8
‘What’s going on . . . ?’ Parish began, but then stopped.
Richards was standing over the body of Josh Marmite. He was slumped face down on the work surface in front of the computer screen with a knife protruding from his neck.
‘I take it he’s dead?’ Kowalski said.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Are you all right, Richards?’ Parish asked her.
She nodded. ‘I’m okay. It’s not as if we were lovers, or anything like that. I hardly knew him.’
One end of Sergeant Lydiard’s handcuffs were still dangling from the downpipe of the radiator. The other end – that had secured Tomasic’s right wrist – was lying open.
Lydiard looked around the room. ‘Tomasic must have taken Constable Schofield as a hostage’
‘Taken her where though?’ Parish wondered aloud. He moved Marmite’s body, so that he could access the computer keyboard and mouse, found the current recording of the lobby, reversed it until her saw Tomasic leave his apartment with a knife against Schofield’s neck and watched the two of them enter the lift. He found the recording for the interior of the lift, but the screen was black. He reversed the recording until he saw Tomasic reach up and disable the camera. ‘Well, we know he went into the lift, but we don’t know which floor he went to.’
Richards shuffled forward. ‘Go back to the other recording, Sir.’
Parish did as she asked.
‘Slow the speed down.’
He did that. ‘I hope this is going somewhere, Richards?’
‘There. He takes something out of his pocket, and I bet it’s the lift key.’
‘So?’
‘You need the lift key to access the penthouse suite.’
Kowalski joined in: ‘You also use the lift key to override all other commands. So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he went to the penthouse suite.’
‘I’m going to phone for back-up, Sir,’ Sergeant Lydiard said. ‘Not only is your wife missing and in danger, but now a civilian has been murdered and a police officer has been taken hostage.’
Kowalski nodded. ‘You’re quite correct, Sergeant. We need forensics, and a search team here. We also don’t know whether Tomasic has any weapons, so you’d better call in CO19 as well. While you’re doing that, we’ll go up to the penthouse suite and begin the search.’
‘Okay, Sir.’
Richards found a copy of the lift key on the board holding all the keys.
The lift was sitting on the sixteenth floor when Parish pressed the button.
‘Do you think . . . ?’ Richards said.
‘Let’s stick to our original plan. If we start second-guessing everything we’ll never get anywhere.’
Richards put the key in the keyhole and pressed the “P”. The doors closed and they began to ascend.
‘I had the idea that Jerry was okay while we
had Tomasic,’ Kowalski said. ‘But now . . .’
Parish put a hand on the Chief’s shoulder, but he didn’t say anything. Words – he felt – would have been useless under the circumstances.
The lift doors opened onto the penthouse suit and they stepped inside.
***
She watched as Willie Tomasic metamorphosed into Israel Voss. The shoulder-length black hair became a short steel-grey; the dark eyes changed to cerulean blue; the goatee-beard was pulled off; the protruding Adam’s apple almost disappeared; and the East European accent changed into perfect English. The wig, the contact lenses, the beard and the prosthetic Adam’s apple were dropped onto the floor and Voss set the small pile alight with a match.
‘You’ll never get away with this,’ Jerry said.
Voss laughed. ‘Stop being so naive. Of course I’ll get away with it. The police are looking for Willie Tomasic who – as you have just witnessed – has disappeared without a trace. Israel Voss is out of the country, and knows nothing about his building supervisor’s little hobby.’
‘I’ll . . .’
‘You won’t be in any position to do anything, my dear. Both you and the beautiful young constable here will be dead – two more victims of the sick individual everybody knows as Willie Tomasic.’
‘My husband will find me . . .’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but nobody will ever find you. As I’ve already said – this place does not exist. And because it does not exist, no one can ever find it. Soon, it will be time for Israel Voss to leave the country for a while. My plane is being prepared for take-off as we speak. But first, if you have no objections, I plan to have a little fun before I bid you farewell?’ Voss took a step towards her.
Jerry began struggling and screaming.
‘No, it is not your turn just yet, my dear.’ He smiled as he manhandled the saltire cross round to her left.
She could now see a young naked blonde-haired woman tied to a frame. There were other devices as well: A large wooden wheel balanced on an A-frame with metal spikes underneath; a pillory with holes cut out for the victim’s neck and hands; an iron maiden with horrific-looking spikes inside; a hoop of iron with a hinge in the middle and a screw on top . . . It was like a museum of medieval torture devices.
