by Peter James
‘Gimme.’
Lubbings tapped a couple of keys, then wrote down a number off the computer screen onto a scrap of paper and handed it to Michael.
Michael recognised the number instantly. It was Terence Goel’s Orange mobile number. He instantly dialled it on his own mobile, and once more got Goel’s recorded voice. He killed the call. ‘Jesus Christ.’ His eyes drifted around the room. Squalid. Coffee mugs unwashed since yesterday. One wall lined with wooden pigeon-holes, some empty, some containing correspondence. A solitary golf club with most of the grip peeled away. Lubbings wasn’t hiding anything any more: he could see from his face how concerned he was. Concerned for his own skin. Concerned not to have police rummaging through his books. He was going to co-operate.
‘Mr Lubbings, please think really hard. What else do you know about this man?’
Lubbings shook his head pensively. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘Do you know what he does? Where he works? Does he work for GCHQ?’
Lubbings hesitated. ‘I – ah – have a chum there. I can find that out for you.’
‘Can you do it now?’
Lubbings made a call, clearly to some old forces friend from the way he spoke. After a couple of minutes, he replaced the receiver. ‘Definitely not. No one there by the name of Goel.’
‘How long has he been using you?’
‘Two or three weeks.’ He tapped another key. ‘Friday, July the eleventh. Three weeks, exactly.’
Michael sat down on a plastic chair. The phone was ringing again. Lubbings tapped his keyboard then looked at his screen to check the caller. ‘It’s not Dr Goel.’
Michael nodded. The phone stopped ringing and the voice-mail took the call. ‘Please think really hard, Mr Lubbings,’ he said, more calmly now. ‘Are there any details you can remember? Anything at all that struck you about Dr Goel?’
Lubbings scratched the end of his nose with a grubby finger. ‘I can describe him, if that helps.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Very tall, about six foot six –’
Michael interrupted him. ‘Good-looking? Striking-looking?’
‘Yes – actually he reminds me of a film actor, the one who played Schindler in Schindler’s List.’
‘Liam Neeson?’
‘That’s him.’
Michael nodded. ‘Anything else?’
Lubbings rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a packet of King Edward cigars. ‘Do you mind if –?’
‘Go ahead.’
Lubbings lit a stubby cigar with a book match, then waved away the smoke. ‘One minor detail, if it’s any help. The first time Dr Goel came to see me, he was wearing a black tie.’
‘A dinner jacket?’
‘No, not a bow-tie, an ordinary tie. He was wearing a dark lounge suit and a black tie. You know, as if he was in mourning.’
Michael stared back at him. ‘Mourning?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ask him anything about that?’
‘I’m discreet with all my – ah – clients, Mr – ah –’ He glanced down at the letter. ‘Dr Tennent. I make a point of not asking questions. You get my drift? Run a tight ship here.’
Three weeks. Dr Goel in mourning. Michael’s mind was churning over this information. Three weeks. Mourning.
Mourning whom?
He gave Lubbings his own numbers, pocketed one of the man’s business cards and left.
Outside, in his car, he dialled DC Roebuck’s direct line at Hampstead police station. He was told that the detective hadn’t yet come in. Then he dialled Roebuck’s mobile number and got Roebuck’s voice-mail. He left a message, asking him to call him back, urgently, and also to contact the Orange phone company and see if he could find out anything about a Dr Terence Goel from the man’s cellphone registration details.
Then he sat and thought hard for some minutes. Mourning. Fallout shelter. For some reason, these two things connected together in his mind. For whom had Dr Goel been in mourning three weeks ago?
He powered up his Mac, went to his addresses section, and entered the name of an old friend, Richard Franklin, who headed a large architectural practice in the City. Then he dialled the number. Franklin’s secretary told Michael he was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. Michael told her it was urgent. After a couple of minutes’ wait, the architect was on the line.
He hadn’t spoken to his friend for several months, but dispensed with pleasantries and went straight in. ‘Richard, listen, I’m sorry to disturb you but I’m desperate. Is there a database anywhere that lists nuclear fallout shelters in England? Say, within Greater London?’
‘The Cold War’s over, Michael. I’d be more worried about germ –’
‘Richard, please, forget my reasons. Just tell me if there would be any kind of database?’
‘Do you mean military? Civil service? Private?’
‘All of them.’
There was a silence. ‘I’m sorry, Mike, you’ll have to give me a moment to get my head round this one. You could try looking at planning permissions, but there wouldn’t be any kind of database for them. There are specialist firms for this kind of construction. It’s civil-engineering work. Structural engineers would be involved. I wouldn’t think there is any one central database. You’d have to do a trawl through all the specialist firms and the structural engineers.’ There was a brief silence. ‘Even then, I would think a lot of these were built secretly. I think you’d have a problem getting a comprehensive list.’
‘Who’d have a better chance of getting this list quickly? Me, you as an architect, or the police?’
‘The police, I should think. Listen, how are you? Long time no hear.’
‘I’ll call you at the weekend, we’ll talk, OK?’
‘Sounds good.’
Michael ended the call. He leaned back in his seat, staring at the dial of his phone as if somehow, among its numbered keys, was the answer he searched for.
Three weeks ago, Dr Terence Goel was in mourning.
Three weeks ago, Dr Terence Goel went to a lot of trouble to get himself referred to him.
Who the hell was Dr Terence Goel mourning three weeks ago?
Who had died? Who? Who?
He dropped the phone as the thought hit him. Gloria Lamark had died just over three weeks ago.
Gloria Lamark?
Was there some connection between Dr Terence Goel and Gloria Lamark?
It was an absurd long shot, but right now he had no other ideas. Anything was worth a try. He dialled Richard Franklin’s number again. The architect sounded less pleased to hear from him this time.
‘Richard,’ he said, ‘one more question. If I wanted to find out whether one specific house has a nuclear fallout shelter beneath it, how would I go about that?’
Chapter Ninety-four
Cora Gertrude Burstridge. 15 August 1933 – 22 July 1997.
Someone, maybe Cora Burstridge or maybe her daughter, had chosen ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ as the psalm. Glenn Branson approved of that. And 1 Corinthians 13:12 for the first reading. ‘Through a glass darkly’. He liked that passage in the Bible. ‘Jerusalem’ was the last hymn. ‘And did those feet, in ancient times, Walk upon England’s pastures green . . .’
Stirring, emotional stuff. A grand funeral for a grand lady.
He sat in his unmarked car with the order of service sheet in his lap, listening to the sound of the hymn playing now, the blast of the organ, the voices of two or three hundred people carrying out through the open church doors into the blazing mid-morning heat. He thought back to last Thursday. To Cora Burstridge’s face inside the plastic bag.
He shuddered.
The narrow street, more like a lane, which climbed up past the lychgate was clogged with cars, vans, photographers, news cameras, sound booms, the press and the public jostling for position. Cora Burstridge’s public, mostly middle-aged and elderly, had come either to pay their respects to an actress who was much loved, or to gawp at the celebrities.<
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The church was full of them. Actors and actresses, directors, producers, singers. It was rumoured that Vanessa Redgrave was in there, and Alan Rickman. Someone said Elton John had come, but Glenn hadn’t seen him, although he thought he had caught a glimpse of Sir Cliff Richard.
Glenn wasn’t here to pay his last respects, although he would like to have done; he wished he could have been in that church just so Cora would know he was close by, that he hadn’t forgotten her, that he wasn’t going to forget her. That he wasn’t going to let go of her death until he was certain of the truth.
He was here, outside the church, to watch the crowd. To find a face, just one, that did not fit. But it was impossible in this extravaganza. Broad black hats, veils, black chiffon scarves, black silk dresses shimmering like water, this was a fashion event, a summer season photocall to rival Ascot. He thought he had parked sufficiently far back, but still people teemed around his car, blocking his view.
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Only one more verse after this. He started the engine. After the church service there was a private cremation, family only. He backed the car carefully through the crowd. They lined the street, as if they were waiting for royalty, all the way down to the bottom of the hill.
The gardens of the crematorium were orderly; too well laid out, too well tended, they felt like Toytown grounds.
Sprinklers tossed spray over impossibly green turf. Absurdly colourful blooms rose from dark chocolate soil. A Toytown waterfall tumbled down stepped rocks into a Toytown pond.
Glenn drove down the winding drive towards the bland red-brick crematorium. A hearse was parked outside the doors, and two black Daimler limousines. On the opposite side were several cars. A service was in progress. These places were like factories. They ran to strict timetables. Cora Burstridge was next on the list to be processed.
Glenn scanned the cars, driving slowly towards a space on the far side. Eight cars. Seven were parked front-in. One, a blue Ford Mondeo, was parked tail-in, giving the man sitting in the driving seat a clear view of the crematorium entrance.
Its engine was running, and the lightly tinted windows were shut making it hard to see the occupant clearly. Glenn wondered who he was, and why he wasn’t inside the building. Someone’s driver? Possibly. A member of Cora Burstridge’s family, who had arrived early for the cremation? Also possible, but unlikely – he’d have gone to the church. A bereaved person just come to be near his loved one’s remains?
Glenn parked nose-in, facing the garden of remembrance, where two rows of flowers and wreaths were laid out, not wanting to look obvious, and angled his interior mirror to give him a view of the Mondeo. He was in the full heat of the sun and there were no shaded places to park.
The service was over. People were coming out of the side door. A group congregated in front of the entrance. Two tearful women in black, one holding a small child, walked through to the garden of remembrance and began looking at the floral tributes.
The man in the Mondeo stayed where he was, in the cool of his air-conditioned car.
More people came into the garden of remembrance. They peered closely at some of the bouquets, kneeling, reading the tags, commenting to each other, then dispersing.
The limousines were leaving now. They moved a short distance down the drive then stopped, to allow other mourners to form a convoy, presumably to the wake. Some of the cars were starting to roll. Soon all of them, except the Mondeo, were moving.
The convoy snaked slowly off up the drive. Mondeo man sat tight. Two men in grey suits and another in dungarees were hastily gathering up the floral tributes. Glenn switched the volume of his personal radio right down, not wanting the crackle of static or the burble of voices to give away his identity, and climbed out of his car. Flashing a surreptitious glance at the Mondeo’s number-plate, he walked over to the garden of remembrance, then sat on a bench shaded by a rose trellis, his back to a brick wall engraved with names and dates.
From here he had a clear view of the area. He jotted the Mondeo’s number down in his notebook, then waited. After about ten minutes a hearse, followed by a black Daimler limousine, came down the drive and halted outside the entrance to the building.
An elderly man came out of the limousine first. Then two boys in their teens, followed by a good-looking middle-aged couple. Then a glamorous-looking woman, whom Glenn guessed was Cora Burstridge’s daughter.
They filed inside, while the pallbearers struggled with the coffin. The men in grey suits reappeared, took flowers out of the hearse and carried them through to the garden of remembrance.
The man remained in the Mondeo. Glenn took a stroll around the gardens. The service was brief. Ten minutes, and Cora Burstridge’s close relatives were coming out. They spent just a short while looking at the flowers, then went back to the limousine. Glenn could see that the daughter was crying.
The limousine drove off. When it had cleared the crematorium gates, the Mondeo reversed out of its parking space and headed off down the drive.
Glenn returned to his own car, gave his call sign into his radio and asked for the vehicle police national computer. When an operator answered he gave his warrant number, followed by the Mondeo’s registration number. Within seconds the operator came back to him.
‘Are you looking at a blue Ford Mondeo?’
‘Correct,’ Glenn replied.
‘Registered owner from Cheltenham. Dr T – tango Terence G – golf Goel. Ninety-seven – nine-seven – Royal Court Walk, Cheltenham. No trace lost or stolen, no markers.’
Glenn wrote down the details as she spoke and thanked her. Then he drummed his fingers on the wheel. Dr Terence Goel, what is your interest in Cora Burstridge? What kind of a doctor are you? Why did you drive all the way from Cheltenham to Cora Burstridge’s cremation but not get out of your car? Why didn’t you go to the church?
You’re not making much sense to me, Dr Goel.
In fact, you’re really bothering me.
He picked up his radio mouthpiece and asked the operator to put him through to the Divisional Intelligence room at Cheltenham police station.
A harassed sounding detective answered. Glenn asked him if he had any details at all about a Dr Terence Goel of 97 Royal Court Walk.’
‘How urgent? We’re up to our necks.’
‘It’s urgent,’ Glenn said.
‘Will an hour do?’
‘An hour would be fine.’
He put the mouthpiece back on the rest and yawned. He’d got to bed after two this morning. Officially it should have been his day off today.
Closing his eyes, he allowed himself a five-minute catnap.
Chapter Ninety-five
At twelve fifty-five Michael sat in a tiny, stuffy, windowless microfiche booth in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Planning Department offices, ending a call on his mobile phone.
Shocked, he put the phone down on the wooden work surface, scarcely able to believe the words of the detective at Hampstead police station, who had just given him the news that DC Roebuck had died earlier this morning, at the wheel of his car, from an apparent heart attack.
Bleakly, he stared at the pattern of holes in the pegboard wall in front of him. Roebuck had been his anchor, the man who cared, the man who had been trying his hardest for him.
The phone was hot and the right side of his head felt as if it was on fire. He’d had to call his architect friend Richard Franklin out of yet another meeting to pull strings to circumvent the three working days the clerk at the Planning Department had told him were required to retrieve a file from the archives.
So far the clerk had taken half an hour. He picked up the phone again, and rang Lubbings in Cheltenham to see if he had heard from Dr Goel. Lubbings, deeply deferential, assured Michael he hadn’t. After Lubbings, he rang Thelma and blew out his afternoon appointments, then he rang Lulu. He’d already spoken to her earlier, on his way up to London and given her his
findings about Lubbings and Dr Goel, but he called her again now because he preferred to keep busy, and told her the latest, about Roebuck.
‘Do you think it’s suspicious, Michael?’ was her immediate response.
‘I don’t know. He was only in his thirties, but he was overweight, he’d been working around the clock, and this heat isn’t clever for anyone with a heart condition. I don’t have enough details. He came home late last night, left early this morning, and he apparently had a heart attack in his car in traffic this morning.’
‘It doesn’t strike you as odd?’
Her voice irritated him, as if she was accusing him of some deficiency. ‘Lulu, I don’t have enough information, OK? I don’t know what’s odd and what isn’t odd any more. Everything’s bloody odd.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently. ‘We’re all stressed. Is there anything I can do to help you?’
A shadow fell over the desk. Michael looked up and saw the clerk standing right behind him, holding a microfiche film.
‘I’ll call you back in a while,’ he said to her.
‘Michael,’ she said. ‘I know you’re doing your very best. I appreciate it, I really do. We all do.’
‘I wish I was doing my best,’ he replied. ‘I feel I’m running around like a headless sodding chicken.’
He thanked the clerk, loaded the microfiche, which contained all the planning applications for the whole of Holland Park Avenue since the first Planning Act of 1953, and began to scroll through it.
He found Gloria Lamark’s house. An application, in 1957, to build a double garage at the rear. Granted. An application in 1961 to widen the roof to create larger servants’ quarters. This had been turned down. There was an appeal. All the objection letters were listed. The appeal was rejected on the grounds of it being out of character with the neighbourhood.
Then he found an application dated 7 October 1966.
APPLICATION TO EXTEND CELLAR FOR FINE WINE STORAGE PURPOSES.
Permission had been granted, but with strict provisos on structural work to shore up the foundations of the house, and elaborate drainage instructions.
