The Button Man: A Hugo Marston Novel

by Pryor, Mark

  On the other side of the body from Hugo lay the only piece of visible evidence, a gun. A .22 by the looks of it, but other than that, nothing. Confident he wasn’t trampling on evidence, Hugo knelt by the body and placed his fingertips on an upturned wrist. It was a routine gesture, not a realistic hope for life, the first people to find him would have made sure of that.

  Hugo reached into his pocket and pulled out a pen. Careful not to disturb the man’s position, he slowly raised the front of the silk hood that hid his face. This, too, was a formality in large part. He and Upton had guessed, and up close Hugo knew before looking. But the visual identification of a body was a time-honored tradition and a ritual to be observed, no matter what.

  Hugo knelt beside the man he had sworn to protect and looked into the eyes that had made him a star, that had captured the hearts of a million women, that in life had twinkled and danced across a thousand movie screens, but that in death held the cold charm of two children’s marbles, unseeing, unfeeling, and soon to fade from memory, lost to the passage of time.

  Hugo let the cloth fall back over Dayton Harper’s face so the photographer could capture him as he was found, but he stayed on one knee for a few seconds before looking back at DCI Upton.

  There merest of nods, a shared moment of sadness between two men who faced it daily but never quite got used to it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hugo and DCI Upton returned to the church as the crime-scene team went to work filming and collecting evidence. It was the same pair as the night before, and they’d apologized for being late but also looked at Hugo and Upton quizzically, as if wondering about the American grim reaper who’d twice pulled them away from their usual crop of robberies and burglaries.

  They got no explanations, because they didn’t need them to do their job and because there were none—not good ones, anyway.

  Hugo and Upton sank onto rough wooden benches in the porch outside the main door of the church, away from the other officers, silent for a moment as they processed as best they could. Finally Upton spoke, one word.

  “Shot.”

  “I didn’t see any other trauma,” Hugo said. “Looked like one shot to the heart.”

  “Suicide?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It fits. The love of his life is dead, he’s wracked with guilt at killing young Quincy Drinker, and he’s shot and killed the father for some damn reason. His acting career is over, he’s looking at a long time in prison . . .” Upton shrugged. “Seems to fit.”

  “Yes,” Hugo nodded. “It seems to fit.” And yet it didn’t. If Harper had shot Old Man Drinker it might. But he hadn’t, and in Hugo’s mind it made the rest of the puzzle fall apart.

  “We’ll know more soon. They’ll swab his hands for gunshot residue—that’ll tell us something.”

  “Not much,” Hugo said. “Assuming your guys do it within about four hours of his death and they find something, it’ll tell us he was in the presence of a gun that was discharged. Which we kinda know already.”

  “I’ve not had much experience with that particular science,” Upton said sheepishly. “Shot plenty of weapons, but we don’t get to enjoy the delights of GSR much in Hertfordshire. Thank God.”

  “Like all police work,” Hugo said, “it ain’t like on TV. As you know, I’m sure. We see it a lot at home, too much, where someone is shot and ends up with lead in their chest and gunshot residue on their skin. Had a case where a guy fired an AK-47 from the back seat of a minivan and killed two people. His buddies in front of the van also tested positive for GSR, setting up a nice defense for the shooter.”

  “Great,” Upton said. “We’ll see if we can trace the gun—that might get us somewhere. Where the hell would a Hollywood star get a gun in the middle of the English countryside?”

  Hugo thought about that. “Well, given he’s a movie star, he’d probably just have to ask. Who’s going to say no? But he’d need to find someone who has a gun first.”

  “Those movie weapons,” Upton said. “Are they real? If they are and just fire blanks, it seems like getting a few bullets might be easier than the gun itself.”

  “No idea,” said Hugo. “Though I’m sure we can find out.”

  “Any problem with this getting out to the media?” Upton asked. “Even if these young coppers haven’t figured out who he is, they will pretty soon, and it only takes one of them to talk.”

  Hugo shook his head, but in disappointment not disagreement. He’d been involved in his share of high-profile cases in the past, profiling and catching several serial killers, and helping unravel a plot to assassinate the Russian ambassador in Washington. But nothing like this. Politics and violence commanded headlines, he knew, but not like celebrities. And this story would have it all: sex, tragedy, love, and murder. Some of which he could have prevented. Should have prevented.

  He rose. “I need to call Ambassador Cooper, let him know what’s happened.”

  “Sounds like a fun call,” Upton said.

  “If you like being posted to Bangladesh, sure,” Hugo smiled grimly. “Me, I’m getting used to the rain.”

  “Don’t worry, they have rain there, too. Want me to talk to him?”

  “I got it.” He pulled out his phone but stopped when he saw two people striding toward them. Constable Agarwal was almost trotting to keep up with the figure ahead of him, making a beeline for Hugo and Upton.

  “I told him she wasn’t invited,” Upton said, standing and moving into the path. “Agarwal, I told you—”

  “It’s OK,” Hugo said. “No harm done.”

  Merlyn reached them, out of breath and seething. “What the hell’s going on? If it wasn’t for me, you’d be chasing your fucking tails still.” She noticed the activity at the far end of the graveyard. “What’s that about?”

  Hugo took her by the elbow and steered her into the porch, pulling her down to sit next to him. He told her slowly and gently, taking her hand when her face paled, waiting quietly for a moment, holding her hands as she sobbed. After a moment, he stood and moved over to where Upton and Agarwal were deep in discussion.

  “Pendrith taking a leak in the trees or something?” Hugo asked.

  Upton turned and looked at him, no trace of a smile on his face. “He wasn’t at the pub.”

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t there, sir,” Agarwal confirmed. “The landlord hadn’t seen him, nor had the young lady. No one’s seen him since last night.”

  “You checked his room?”

  “Yes, sir. Cleaned up and cleaned out, nothing there at all. He even made the bed before he left.”

  The landlord told Hugo and DCI Upton the same thing he’d told the constable, adding for Hugo’s benefit the observation that just because a guest had walked off into the sunset, or sunrise, as the case may be, and just because the cops were all worried, didn’t mean those rooms didn’t need to be paid for.

  Hugo dug out his wallet and handed the man cash, then dialed Pendrith’s phone for the third time in ten minutes. When it went to voicemail, Hugo climbed the stairs with Upton and stood at the entrance to Pendrith’s small room. The landlord assured them that the rooms hadn’t been touched, what with his wife being sick, which was the first good news Hugo had heard in hours. The bed had been made, as Agarwal had said, and a cursory search also confirmed what was obvious from the outset: no indication of where Pendrith had gone or why he’d left.

  “No signs of a struggle,” Upton said. “That’s something.”

  “I guess.” Hugo stood at the end of the bed and ran his hand over the blanket. He looked down at it. “Did you go to boarding school, Clive?”

  “Boarding school? No, why?”

  “How about the military?”

  “Nope. Local grammar school, local university, local police. My life in a nutshell. Why?”

  “Look at the bed, the way it’s made.”

  “Like a maid did it,” Upton shrugged. “A nicely made bed, your point being that he wasn’t in a hur
ry?”

  “My point being that perhaps he didn’t make it.”

  “Explain.”

  “The FBI is famous for its training and application of the behavioral sciences, right?”

  “Profiling, you mean. Yes, that’s right.”

  “But you Brits are pretty good at it, too. I came over here a few years ago and took a course with a guy from Scotland Yard. Anyway, profiling courses and training are naturally full of examples, real-life examples, that show a little about the unsub.”

  “Unsub?”

  “Unknown subject, sorry,” Hugo smiled. “Anyway, one example this Scotland Yard guy gave us really stuck in my head. There had been a few murders in a town called Colchester, women raped and strangled in their beds. The locals didn’t have any idea who did it or why, so these guys from Scotland Yard came and looked at pictures of the crime scenes. This detective saw what the local police had seen, that the unsub killed these women and then left them in their beds but remade them, tucked them in almost. But what this Yard detective saw was the way the beds were made. The corners had been tucked a certain way, I think he called them hospital corners.”

  “Hospital corners, right. So . . . ?”

  “So we know that people are creatures of habit, especially when carrying out an action they can do without thinking, an action they’ve done thousands of times before. Pendrith went to boarding school and was in the military. For years the guy made his own bed, and every time the same way, which means that he’d make his bed with hospital corners no matter how much of a hurry he was in because it’d be easier and quicker for him. He’d probably not even think about it.”

  “And these are not hospital corners.”

  “Correct.”

  “Meaning someone else made his bed for him.” The men looked at each other, and Upton raised an eyebrow. “You think he was kidnapped?”

  “I think he had company of some sort. Let’s not jump to conclusions about kidnapping, though.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  Hugo stroked his chin. “Well, first we should make doubly sure he’s not around here somewhere.”

  “OK, I’ll have my men search the pub grounds right away.”

  “Good.” Hugo frowned. “And have them canvas the houses around here. Pendrith didn’t have a car, so maybe someone saw him walking along the main road, down one of the public paths, or maybe even gave him a ride.”

  Upton nodded and started down the stairs, leaving Hugo to stare into Pendrith’s room. As always, when he failed to come up with a definitive, helpful clue, he knew he was missing something. And while the hospital corners were definitive in his mind, he didn’t see them as a helpful clue, simply because a clue should answer part of the riddle, not make it more complicated. Who would have wanted to kidnap Pendrith? More to the point, who would have been able to? The old boy would not have gone quietly, Hugo assumed, nor would he have fallen for some trick. He was too wily for that.

  He turned in the doorway and walked across the sitting area to Walton’s room. The reporter had not been seen since the previous day, and Hugo couldn’t think of a single reason in the world why he’d want to take Pendrith. And how the hell would such a scrawny little weasel manage it? A gun?

  Possibly. All things were possible when you were at the right end of a gun, Hugo had seen that time and again.

  He walked slowly into Walton’s room, lifting the pillows from the bed, then the top blankets and sheet. They had been pulled up rather than made, as if straightened by the occupant rather than made by the landlord or his wife. No hospital corners here either, Hugo smiled to himself. He opened the dresser drawers and saw nothing, even looked into the two wastepaper baskets. Empty. Had he disappeared into the same vortex that had swallowed Pendrith? Had they gone together willingly or was one of them the coercer? Or someone else . . . ?

  Hugo walked back out to an armchair and sank into it, wrinkling his nose at the musty odor that enveloped him when he sat. He pulled out his cell phone and called his office, asking to be put through to the agent who’d been at the pub watching over Cooper, Bart Denum.

  “Bart, it’s Hugo. Busy?”

  “Nope, all quiet on the London front. I hear you’ve been a little preoccupied, though.”

  “You could say that. I need your help with something. Lickety-split, if you can.”

  “Sure, whatever you need.”

  “Pen and paper ready?”

  “Always.”

  “Good.” Hugo read off Pendrith’s phone number. “I need you to start pinging towers to see if we can locate the owner. I also need you to dig up as much as you can on a reporter called Harry Walton. He’s about sixty years old, a freelancer. Can’t give you anything more than that, I’m afraid.”

  “No problem. OK to use one of the other guys here, or you need this to stay hush-hush?”

  “Use whoever you can of our people, sure. Speed is the key here.”

  “Will do. And boss?”

  “What is it, Bart?”

  “Been online lately?”

  “No.”

  “Our wandering minstrel is all over the news sites—the story is out.”

  Hugo grimaced. “It was bound to happen. Thanks Bart. Call me when you get anything on that number, or anything interesting on Walton.”

  “Will do. Oh, Ambassador Cooper asked me to tell you about the Ferro autopsy.”

  “Good, what have you got?”

  “That’s the thing,” Denum said. “Nothing. Seems like there’s a bit of a jurisdictional battle here. Brits want to do it as she died on their turf and, I gather, was once a British citizen. We want to do it because she’s now a US citizen and because we don’t trust anyone who’s not American to get it right.”

  Hugo heard the smile in his voice but knew he was only half-joking. Nevertheless, this kind of bureaucracy was precisely why Hugo got nervous every time he was promoted. And in the State Department he’d seen even more red tape than he had in the FBI, which he’d never thought possible.

  “In the meantime,” Hugo said, “she’s on ice and the investigation goes nowhere. That’s absurd, Bart.”

  “Yeah, I agree. But I don’t think it’s Cooper making the call, to be fair.”

  Hugo was pleased to hear that, at least. “OK, let me know if anything changes.” He closed his phone, then looked up as DCI Upton crested the stairs. “Any luck?” Hugo asked.

  “I’m afraid not. No word from or about Pendrith at all.”

  “And no sign of Harry Walton?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Upton sank into the empty armchair and looked at Hugo. “What the hell is going on?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hugo held the car door for Merlyn, looking over her shoulder to see DCI Upton saluting a tall and powerfully built woman in police uniform bearing the crown on her epaulet. The chief constable, Upton’s boss, who’d come running when Dayton Harper’s name hit the headlines. He’d been dead a matter of hours and everyone knew that this crime, if that’s what it was, had to be solved immediately.

  Inside the car, he turned to Merlyn. “You doing OK?”

  “Fuck no, what do you think?”

  “That’s what I thought.” He started the engine. “I also think we need to talk.”

  “OK.”

  “I need to fill in some gaps, make some connections . . .” He waved a hand. “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the church.” He felt her stiffen beside him. “It’s OK, they took him away an hour ago. I just do my best thinking at crime scenes.”

  “That’s weird, Hugo.” The vague hint of a smile in her voice.

  He looked over and winked. “From you, missy, that’s a compliment.”

  They drove in silence for the five minutes it took to get to the church. A police constable stood guard at the entrance but recognized Hugo and let him through with a polite “Good morning, sir.”

  Merlyn shivered and wrapped her arms
around herself as they started up the path to the church. For the first time in days Hugo looked up and saw blue sky, but the cloudless night had brought with it a frost that painted the grass in the churchyard a silvery white, dusting also the gravel beneath their feet. Hugo looked ahead to the high stone wall against which Dayton Harper had either propped himself or been left by another. The sturdy branches of the oak tree held still, but at their tips the bare and brittle twigs bobbed up and down, rubbing against each other as if for warmth. They stopped by the entrance to the church, and Hugo turned to Merlyn.

  “I need to ask you something,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said with a glance.

  “Did either Pendrith or Harry Walton ever go to Braxton Hall?”

  “You mean as guests? Or breaking and entering, like you did?”

  “As guests.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Are you sure? I know you need to protect the place, but this is bigger now; whatever secrets you have I can try to keep, but people are dead, Merlyn, and it may not be over. Walton and Pendrith are both missing, and I don’t know why.”

  “And you think Braxton Hall has something to do with it?”

  “I have no idea. I’m just trying to find connections between everyone and everything. Braxton Hall may be that connection.”

  “I don’t know everyone who goes there, Hugo. How could I? And I know this is important, more important than anything.” She shrugged. “I’ll help as best I can, but I don’t know the answer to your question. All I can say is, I’ve never seen them there.”

  “Does the guy who runs it keep records?”

  “His name is Nicholas Braxton. And yes. Actually, he asked me to work for him once, as kind of hostess-cum-secretary. I declined because I didn’t want to leave London. Plus he’s a little creepy. Anyway, he showed me the office, and I know he keeps records because whenever you first go there you have to give your real name and show some sort of identification, which he copies and locks away. He also makes everyone sign confidentiality agreements and a legal waiver.”