Suddenly at Home

by Graham Ison

‘There’s a very upmarket safe in the study, Harry,’ Linda announced.

  ‘I presume Downs left it open.’ I suggested whimsically.

  Linda just laughed. ‘There wouldn’t be much point in shelling out five or six grand for a state-of-the-art safe and then leaving it unlocked.’

  ‘Locksmith, then?’

  ‘I doubt if the bloke we usually employ could open it. You’d probably need someone from the makers.’ Linda chuckled. ‘Or a good peterman. But they’re probably all doing time, and they’d only blow it up anyway.’

  ‘Did you come across any computers in your examination of the scene, Linda?’ asked Kate.

  ‘No, I didn’t. If Downs had a laptop, it’s probably in the aforementioned safe. Incidentally, Harry, there aren’t too many fingerprints about the house, so the results shouldn’t take too long. Either Downs was careful who he invited in or he had a fastidious cleaner.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling that might have been Ram Mookjai, the manservant,’ I said. ‘He struck me as being a highly efficient sort of general factotum.’

  ‘Except when it came to access control,’ said Dave cynically. ‘But as you said earlier, guv, it looks very much as though Downs knew his killer. If the scenario of our visit here on Wednesday was repeated, Ram would’ve told the visitor to wait in the hall while he went and alerted the boss.’

  ‘But he only made it to the point halfway up the stairs where his body is,’ said Kate.

  ‘And that tells me something else,’ said Dave. ‘The killer must’ve used a weapon fitted with a suppressor. Otherwise Downs would’ve heard it.’

  ‘Unless he was as deaf as a post,’ volunteered Kate.

  ‘He wasn’t, ma’am.’ Dave called Kate ‘ma’am’ in much the same way as he occasionally called me ‘sir’: when either of us had made a stupid comment. ‘His hearing was normal when we saw him, and he wasn’t wearing a hearing aid. What’s next, guv?’ he asked, turning to me.

  ‘We’ll start with the master bedroom,’ I said. ‘Kate, perhaps you’d make a start on the rooms down here.’

  Victor Downs’s body had been removed to Henry Mortlock’s carvery, along with that of the manservant Ram Mookjai. The evidence recovery team had removed Downs’s bedclothes for scientific examination, just in case they revealed a DNA sample that wasn’t Downs’s and we were lucky enough to be able to match it in the database.

  ‘It looks as though he was expecting female company, guv,’ said Dave, ‘though whether it was a female who killed him remains to be seen. But he’d obviously got his kit off in anticipation, and put it all on that chair.’ He pointed to a neat pile of clothing that consisted of a white shirt and a pair of slacks. Nearby, on the floor, was a pair of sneakers with socks carefully rolled and placed inside. ‘He had a liking for the fancy gear, I’ll say that for him,’ he added, pointing at a pair of men’s mauve briefs that had been tossed across the room.

  ‘You can be very old-fashioned at times, Dave,’ I said. ‘He could as easily have been expecting a man.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ Dave went through the pockets of the trousers and took out a leather key case. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, ‘I do believe our Victor Downs has left us with the wherewithal to open his safe.’ He held up two keys that were similar in pattern but not identical.

  The study was on the ground floor, at the back of the house. Richly carpeted and wood-panelled, it was dominated by a desk old enough and large enough to have belonged to someone historically important. The distinctive aroma of cigars pervaded the air, and there were two cigar butts in a pewter ashtray on the desk.

  Dave inserted the two keys in their respective locks, twisted the lever and the door of the safe silently swung open. ‘Thank you, Uncle Victor,’ he said. ‘And lo and behold, here is a laptop. We can’t be lucky this often, can we, guv?’ he asked, as he removed the computer.

  ‘What d’you reckon that is, Dave?’ I pointed at a piece of tape stuck to the inside of the safe door.

  Dave glanced at it and read it aloud. ‘Tristram 1713.’

  ‘Any idea what it means?’ I asked.

  ‘Laurence Sterne, an English clergyman and author, was born in 1713, and wrote Tristram Shandy among other works.’

  ‘How the hell d’you know that, Dave?’

  ‘I read Tristram Shandy at university. Well, I tried to. It was a bit heavy-going, but fortunately it didn’t come up in any of the finals papers.’

  ‘But why has he stuck it on the inside of his safe door?’ I asked a little tersely. ‘To remind him to return a library book?’ I didn’t really want a dissertation from my English-graduate sergeant on someone I’d never heard of or the book he’d written.

  ‘It tells me two things, guv: despite his rough-diamond exterior, Victor Downs appeared to have had a liking for English literature, and he had a bad memory. If I’m right, that is the password for his laptop.’

  ‘Surely it can’t be that easy,’ I said. ‘Why on earth did he leave it there? Doesn’t seem a very clever thing to do.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Dave. ‘The safe was always locked, the keys were always in his pocket or nearby, and finally he didn’t expect to get topped … sir.’

  ‘All right, smart-arse. See if you can get into it.’

  Dave seated himself at Downs’s ornate desk and began playing with the laptop. Within seconds, he looked up and chuckled. ‘We’re in, guv’nor.’

  I moved a spare chair so that I could sit alongside him. ‘Anything interesting, Dave?’

  ‘Yes, a link with the Cuyper murder.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Just have a look at this, guv.’ Dave twisted the laptop sideways so that I could read some of the information on the screen. There was a list of names starting with Dirk Cuyper, Pim de Jonker and Anna Veeltkamp. Those three names had been bracketed together and marked with the single word ‘Opposition’. ‘But there are a lot more, all of which are Flemish or French.’

  ‘It looks as though the picture is beginning to clear,’ I commented. ‘I think it’s safe to say that there are two opposing gangs here: Downs’s lot and the Flemish lot, although we don’t know who the leader of that lot is yet. And if what Dennis Jones told us about Cuyper being scared out of his wits by some woman, it could be any one of the names on his computer who topped him.’

  ‘Or it might be someone whose name hasn’t yet surfaced,’ said Dave. ‘It’s jolly good fun, this murder investigation business, isn’t it, guv?’

  ‘Chantal Flaubert’s name was on Cuyper’s laptop and it sounds French, Dave. I wonder if she could be the woman Lydia Maxwell saw a couple of times letting herself into Cuyper’s flat, who she suggested was French.’

  ‘I suppose it’s possible,’ said Dave doubtfully, ‘and it’s an odds-on chance that the other names on here are Flemish or Dutch. More likely to be Flemish perhaps, as Cuyper was a Belgian. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff on here. It’ll take some time to go through it all.’

  ‘We’ll take it back to the office and I’ll get one of the team to spend a few hours analyzing it.’

  Kate joined us in Downs’s study. ‘There’s not much in the way of evidence on this floor, guv. Unless you think that collecting things because they are valuable rather than useful or beautiful is an indictable offence.’

  ‘I said the man had no taste,’ muttered Dave.

  I glanced at my watch and was amazed to find that it had gone eleven o’clock. It had been a long day.

  ‘You can stand your team down, Kate,’ I said. ‘But perhaps you’d leave a couple of them here overnight. We’ve got uniforms outside, mainly because the front door was broken down to obtain entry, but I don’t want any of our light-fingered brethren doing a sightseeing tour of the property in our absence.’ Regrettably it was not unknown for policemen to help themselves to small items of property as souvenirs of a murder, or to take photographs that they anticipated might have a market in one of the tabloids.

  ‘That’ll do for tonight, Dave,’ I
said. ‘I’ll stand the team down and you and I will meet at the incident room tomorrow morning and make our way to the post-mortem. Let’s say at about nine.’

  It was gone midnight by the time I got home to my flat in Surbiton. It seemed rather empty now that Gail Sutton had walked out of my life. I missed her not being there, scantily attired and holding a bottle of champagne, or finding her underwear scattered about my bedroom. Being Saturday my precious cleaning lady, Mrs Gladys Gurney, had not put in an appearance. Gladys was an absolute treasure. She would make my bed, iron my shirts, and generally care for me as if I were an errant son. And she would wash and carefully wrap the aforementioned items of Gail’s underwear in tissue paper, and leave them on the kitchen worktop with one of her charming little notes.

  Perhaps I should get married. But I’d tried it once. When I was a uniformed PC, I was involved in a fracas with a group of youths I was attempting to arrest in Whitehall and dislocated my shoulder. I attended Westminster Hospital, where a delightful young physiotherapist pummelled me into shape. Her name was Helga Büchner, an attractive twenty-one-year-old German girl from Cologne. I took her out dancing the same evening, and we were married two months later. The wiseacres at the nick said such a whirlwind romance wouldn’t last. They were right, of course, although it did take sixteen years before we finally divorced. It was the death of our son, Robert, that started the rot. Helga had left him with a friend while she went to work, much against my wishes, and he fell into the neighbour’s pond and drowned.

  That tragedy spelled the beginning of the end of our marriage. During its death throes there were extra-marital affairs on both sides, and finally Helga announced that she intended to marry a doctor with whom she’d been having a torrid affair for six months. The only benefit, as far as I was concerned, was that I learned to speak German fluently. On balance, it might have been cheaper to go to night school.

  FOURTEEN

  I called in at the office on Sunday morning in case any information had come in, either from enquiries made by my team or from other agencies. Alas, there was nothing. Dave was already there, and we were about to leave for the post-mortem when I received a telephone call from Linda Mitchell.

  ‘I thought I’d let you know straight away, Harry, that one of the prints we lifted from Downs’s bedroom and banister rail was identical to one we found in Dirk Cuyper’s apartment.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘Where was it in Cuyper’s place?’

  ‘All over the place,’ said Linda. ‘The sitting room, the kitchenette area and the bedroom, but we also found an identical print on the safe. If you remember, Harry, the safe was behind a panel in the bedroom wardrobe. What’s more, this particular print was on the inside of the safe door.’ She paused to give weight to her next revelation. ‘We also found the same print on Cuyper’s laptop. Fortunately I examined it before Lee Jarvis put his own dabs all over it.’

  That was indeed fortunate. Jarvis, our tame IT geek, was always so keen to get at any sort of computer we found that he tended to overlook the importance of it first being examined by forensic-science experts.

  ‘I suppose there’s no trace of these prints in the national database, Linda?’ I posed the question tongue in cheek.

  ‘You suppose correctly, Harry. It’s fairly safe to assume, based on my experience, that someone who’s careless about leaving their prints all over the place doesn’t have a record and intends to keep it that way.’

  ‘I think, Linda,’ I began thoughtfully, ‘that it might be a good idea to enlist the help of our colleagues in Europol. As Cuyper was a Belgian, it’s possible that those prints belong to a Belgian citizen. If I remember correctly, there is some arrangement whereby we can fast-track this.’

  ‘That’s absolutely right, Harry, and we’ve done it before. What’s more I know a shortcut whereby we bypass Europol and send the prints straight to the Directorate of International Police Co-operation in Brussels. It’s called the “old boy net”, or in my case, the old girl net. I’ll get on to it immediately. In fact, while I’m about it, I might as well send all the prints that we lifted from both scenes, apart from the only one we’ve already identified.’

  ‘Good idea, Linda. Nothing like casting your bread on the waters.’

  ‘Actually I was thinking of sending them by secure email,’ said Linda drily. ‘One set of prints I mentioned just now were found in both Cuyper’s apartment and in Downs’s house, and we did identify them as belonging to a convicted prostitute by the name of Irene Higgins. She has no convictions for any other type of offence.’

  On the way to the mortuary to meet Henry Mortlock, I told Dave the full details of this latest development. ‘I think we might be getting somewhere at last,’ I was unwise enough to suggest.

  ‘Not until we know who left those dabs there, guv. I think Linda Mitchell was right: whoever spread their dabs all over the place knew damned well that we wouldn’t find a match in our database. Or probably in any database.’ As usual Dave managed to pour cold water on what I’d firmly believed to be a breakthrough.

  ‘One thing is certain, Dave. The prints on the inside of Cuyper’s safe door weren’t Dennis Jones’s. The CID at Richmond took his prints after we arrested him, and Linda’s eliminated them from the enquiry.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Dave, ‘that’s another quick fix gone down the drain.’

  We arrived at Mortlock’s chop shop, and further discussion about the fingerprints had to be deferred until later.

  Surprisingly, Mortlock had only just finished sewing up Downs’s innards as we walked through the door. ‘I don’t know why anyone bothered to murder this man, Harry.’ He stripped off his protective gloves and tossed them into a medical waste bin. ‘His liver was on its last legs and he had lungs that look like pickled walnuts. He’d have been dead within months, if not weeks, and that’s the result of too much drinking and too much smoking. Be warned, Harry.’ And that was hilarious coming from a man who drank champagne to excess and smoked cigars.

  ‘Thank you for that advice, Henry, for which you will doubtless send me a bill. But what actually killed Downs?’

  ‘These did.’ Mortlock handed me a kidney-shaped stainless-steel bowl containing two rounds of ammunition. He followed this up by handing me a second similar bowl containing two more rounds. ‘And those killed Downs’s manservant. Sign these bits of paper, Sergeant Poole, and you may take them away with you.’

  ‘You are overwhelmingly generous, Doctor,’ said Dave, taking out his pen and scribbling his signature on the form that maintained the chain of evidence.

  ‘I think your killer was an expert shot, Harry,’ Mortlock continued. ‘Or a damned lucky one, three times over. The two rounds that killed Downs went straight into his heart, and the two with which Ram Mookjai met his end also went into the heart. Via his back, of course. And Cuyper was killed by two rounds straight into the heart. I’ll write my report after I’ve finished my round of golf.’ He glanced at the clock over the door and tutted.

  ‘So the same murderer killed Cuyper, Downs and Mookjai, then?’ I ventured to suggest.

  ‘Oh, come on, Harry,’ said Mortlock despairingly. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that it’s within my field of expertise to know if the same killer did for all three victims. I’m only the poor bloody pathologist. It’s your job – you and the ballistics experts – to sort that out. All I can say with certainty is that in the three victims I’ve examined the cause of death was two rounds straight into the heart. But don’t quote me until I’ve put it all on paper. By the way, Downs had had a vasectomy, which might explain why there weren’t any condoms at the crime scene.’ He took off his apron and donned his jacket. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and fill some cavities at Richmond. If I’m not too bloody late.’ Leaving us to find our own way out, Mortlock departed, whistling an air from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. At least, that’s what Dave said it was.

  Back at the factory, Dave and I dropped into the small office that Nicola C
hance had commandeered so she could have some peace and quiet while analysing the contents of the laptop we’d found in Downs’s safe.

  ‘How’s it going, Nicola?’

  ‘Slowly, sir, but I’m getting there.’ Chance was in her early thirties and spoke fluent Spanish, a qualification that had come in handy on more than one occasion. She was not what you’d describe as a classical beauty, but good-looking and attractive she most definitely was. Her short blonde hair was never untidy, and she always wore a skirt. In fact, I don’t recall having ever seen her in trousers or jeans.

  On duty, she always wore flat shoes. Just in case she had to run, she said. And run she certainly can. I recall one occasion when we’d attempted to arrest a wanted man on the concourse of Heathrow Airport, but he suddenly broke away and made a dash for it. Nicola Chance took off and chased him for about fifty yards before bringing him to the ground with a rugby tackle that would have brought her a standing ovation at Twickenham. Despite having an air of modesty, Nicola is capable of occasionally shocking everyone with an uncharacteristically risqué comment or even swearing quite obscenely. The aforementioned chase was one of those occasions.

  ‘To summarize, sir, this man Downs was up to his neck in the sex business.’ Nicola leaned back in her chair, stretched and took off her glasses. ‘According to the details on his laptop, he appears to have controlled a tidy empire of brothels, prostitutes and upmarket call girls, and the minders that go with that particular sort of business. There are lists of women together with their nationality, dates of birth, where they originated from and where they are now.’ She looked up and laughed. ‘Against each name are details of their special talents and a tariff. All in all, he’s got a record system on here that would do credit to the human resources department of a big company.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether to be pleased or horrified, Nicola.’

  ‘Why, sir?’ Chance looked disappointed, as though she’d done something wrong.

  ‘I think the guv’nor sees an unending vista of report-writing, Nicola,’ said Dave. ‘And that actually means you and I doing the writing.’