Deadly Pretty Strangers: US Edition

by Max Thorn

  From the front door I could see police tape arranged like the guide rails to an exhibition inside. Tall, freestanding lamps shone a fierce bright light, making the interior brighter than the gray day outside. All the curtains remained closed. Figures in hooded white coveralls moved back and forth from the other rooms. The flash of a camera momentarily made the white light even brighter. A quiet murmuring of many voices continued. The clean, sanitized smell reminded me that I should do some housework.

  I went back upstairs.

  Thirty minutes later, a broad-shouldered detective knocked at my door. He wore a light-gray suit, white shirt with stiff collars, and a blue and black tie. A uniformed officer stood behind him.

  I invited them in. With a practiced smile, Detective Sergeant Cattermole gave me a business card with his name, rank, phone number and email. He asked me questions about how long I’d lived in my apartment, whether I was alone, what I did for a living and whether I’d mind giving a statement.

  “So what happened to your head?”

  “Someone knocked me out with a fridge early this morning, just as I came in the main door downstairs.”

  “What time was this?”

  “A little after three o’clock. I called the police but I didn’t see who did it. Nothing was stolen, so no one came round.”

  “What do you mean when you say you were knocked out with a fridge?”

  “The manufacturer’s logo is imprinted on my forehead.”

  “Can we see?”

  I took the dressing off.

  Cattermole said to the uniformed officer, “Get the photographer to come up here.”

  He asked if we could use the dining table as a place to sit and write the statement. He had the kind of affected politeness that people use when they know that there’ll be a time soon when they won’t feel like being polite anymore. I guessed that for the moment, if Aleksy’s death turned out to be suspicious, I might be a suspect. I wondered when we were going to get onto the dead body discussion.

  The photographer came in. He blinded me with the flash. Then he realized he’d get a better picture of the logo on my face if he used the natural light from the window. He took shots from several angles and left.

  The detective took a pad of pre-printed paper from his briefcase. He told me that he was going to ask me for details about myself and how I know Patryk, and then an account of what had happened over the last twenty-four hours.

  So I told him that I was a freelance equity researcher, working in financial investment and that I’d lived here on the top floor for about five years.

  I’d met Patryk about eighteen months ago when he first moved in and had shown him around the estate and introduced him to the residents’ association. We’d had a drink socially on about six occasions in the local pub and talked sometimes out on the stairs or in the square outside. I’d only been in his apartment twice before and had only seen the living room and the kitchen.

  I hadn’t seen anyone entering or leaving Patryk’s apartment during the night and I hadn’t heard any sounds. But I had spent a while lying on the cold floor of the lobby after being knocked unconscious by, as the detective had put it, persons unknown.

  Cattermole asked me a dozen questions about the blow to see if I’d noticed anything at all about the assailant. Hair color, any item of clothing, a fist, a sound or a smell. I had nothing and he huffed with dissatisfaction.

  We began a new statement concerning the later events of that morning. He seemed excessively interested in the curtains.

  “What was your reason for opening them?”

  “It was dark. I wanted some light to see the body. And I thought it might wake him up. I didn’t know he was dead when I walked in.”

  “Were the curtains completely closed?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why did you close them again?”

  “I thought I should leave everything as I’d found it.”

  “Have you met the deceased before?”

  “No. I don’t know him.”

  “Why did you check the body?”

  “I wanted to make sure we weren’t wasting everyone’s time by calling the police if he was just unconscious through drink or something.”

  “What does ‘or something’ mean?”

  “I’ve no reason to think that he or anyone else around here used drugs or was involved with people who handled drugs.”

  “When you say ‘anyone else’, do you mean your friend Patryk?”

  “That’s right.”

  He thought about this for a moment and then moved on to the body. I described what I’d seen.

  “Where did you touch the body?”

  “Here,” I positioned two fingers under my own jaw at my neck.

  “Did you touch anything else?”

  “No, nothing. We came up here to call an ambulance and the police and avoid disturbing anything else.”

  The detective gave me the handwritten pages so that I could read what he’d recorded and put my signature to it. Every other sentence seemed to start with the words “then I” which gave my description the tone of a twelve-year-old describing what he’d done on a day during the school holidays. The day he’d found a dead body.

  Cattermole left, the excessive politeness dropping off rapidly. A brusque contempt was just discernible in his now stern demeanor as he said, “Give me a call if anything else comes to mind.”

  I went out to get dinner. When I came back the dead-friend exhibition was still on. Less murmuring now, but still the lights blazed and the tape was up. A different uniformed officer guarded the door. There was no sign of Patryk.

  Two days later the door to Patryk’s apartment was closed. No light came from the gaps in his curtains and the voices had all left.

  I knocked in the evening.

  Patryk opened the door. He’d been staying in a hotel while the police investigation had continued at his apartment.

  The tape and bright lights were gone. Fingerprint powder was on doorframes, closet doors, windows and furniture. The apartment still smelt of bleach though not nearly as strongly as it had before. From the living room I could see a new mattress wrapped in polythene, stood against the wall, just inside the bedroom.

  Patryk followed my gaze to the mattress. “The police took the old one,” he explained.

  He had company. Aleksy’s mother and one of her other sons, Sebastian, had arrived from Rybnik in Poland. They’d already been to the mortuary to identify the body.

  She wore a heavy woolen outdoor coat and a plain scarf over her wiry, gray-white hair. Her brow was deeply furrowed and her heavy-lidded dark eyes were red and wet, bounded at the side by a fan of creases. Her aged lips had faded into a thin line separating a large chin from an almost equally large nose.

  “Mrs Naumowicz, this is my friend Zav. He lives upstairs.”

  “Did you know my son?” she asked quietly.

  “No. I only met him after…” I shrugged.

  She nodded.

  “I’m sorry he has died.”

  “We want to take him home but they don’t release his body.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are still investigating.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Poison.”

  “I don’t understand. How?”

  “Injected. He has puncture marks. In the neck.”

  “The spider?”

  “No. A different poison.”

  Sebastian was around my age, tall, fair-haired, wearing a casual jacket. He spoke in faultless English. “They don’t recognize the poison. It seems to be venom. But not from the spider. We don’t understand either.”

  We sat awkwardly, the mother murmuring to her son, and him asking questions of Patryk in Polish and me in English.

  Eventually, I told them again that I was sorry about their loss and if they needed me for anything, I was on the top floor. I didn’t expect to see them again.

  THREE

  After detectives and uniformed
officers had swept through the area conducting house-to-house enquiries and the public appeals for information had subsided, the police investigation became a long, very quiet, invisible process. Patryk got occasional updates from Mrs Naumowicz, but for the most part these were about the investigation into Aleksy’s background, the people he knew and the places he went to.

  About four months later we went for a drink in the local pub and Patryk told me that he was going back to Poland.

  It was an accumulation of problems and setbacks. The firm he worked for wasn’t doing as well as last year and his bonus had been cut. His rent had gone up. He’d met a girl, become infatuated, and then broken up with her. He felt foolish and when he didn’t feel foolish, he felt sad. He had very little money. Even the weather was against him. It had rained every day for the previous three weeks and when it wasn’t raining, it was cold and gray and looked like it might rain.

  A new couple with a very noisy small child had moved into the second-floor apartment between us. The child used few words but was an Olympic champion at screaming. The parents were nice people. No shouting or yelling from them, no matter how loud their child became or how often he banged closet doors or smashed crockery.

  So, what with the weather, money issues, failed relationship, neighbor problems and the shadow of his dead friend hanging over his bed, Patryk finally gave up trying to make it work in London.

  “I’ll be back in a year or two,” he said.

  But I guessed instead that I’d always have a friend in Rybnik if I wanted to visit Poland.

  * * *

  Two months after Patryk moved out, there was a polite knock at my door. It was mid-afternoon. Mrs Naumowicz and her son Sebastian stood in the bright sunlight.

  They’d stayed at the Strand Hotel the previous night and had walked a mile and a half because the taxi was too expensive. She wore her dark woolen overcoat with a black beret. Sebastian wore a raincoat with a jacket underneath. They glowed from being dressed a little too warmly for a balmy spring day and a long walk.

  I invited them in, encouraged them to take their coats off, seated them at the dining table and got them water with ice. I sat opposite. Their clothes carried the faint scent of a foreign cuisine.

  “How’s the investigation going? Do the police know who’s responsible for your son’s…death?” Her limited English made me speak bluntly.

  “No,” she said. “That’s why we come to see you.”

  I looked at them questioningly.

  “We wonder if you can help. The police are at a…” she looked pleadingly to her son.

  “Dead end,” he finished.

  “That’s disappointing. But I’m not sure what I can do to help. I’m not a detective or anything. What’s on your mind?”

  Sebastian said, “We’re not asking you to investigate. But we live a long way away. My mother calls the police—the family liaison officer—every week. But now that they’ve got all the information from us that we can give, they have nothing to say. She feels like a nuisance. They just keep saying that they’re pursuing multiple lines of inquiry. But their ideas on this have come to nothing. They have no one in custody. We don’t think they’re anywhere near making an arrest. We thought you might be able to help us press them. Keep them aware that people care. To get a result.”

  “I don’t think that’s something I’d be any good at.” I sat back looking at their tired ashen faces.

  Mrs Naumowicz leaned forward and reached for her black, battered handbag on the table.

  “I mean, I don’t see that my involvement would make any difference. Murder is the crime which the police are most successful at solving. They won’t give up, even if it takes years.”

  The old lady said, “I don’t have years.”

  Her son added, “If they could hear another voice, someone in the neighborhood, it would make us feel better. We’ve given them a petition from our town. Fifteen thousand signatures. Our mayor has signed it and sent it to your New Scotland Yard.”

  “Well that’s a powerful message. But my voice added to that? I don’t think they’d even talk to me. I’m not family.”

  “But you know this city,” he said, “and you’re smart. You find out things about companies that other people don’t know. When a dog smells a bone, he digs. That’s what Patryk says about you.”

  “That’s an exaggeration. I can only find out things that others do know. And researching companies from my own desk is completely different to a murder inquiry.”

  “But perhaps you could look at things they’ve ignored.”

  “They don’t ignore anything.” I calmed the exasperated tone in my voice. “There’s an army of police specialists working on every aspect, day-in, day-out. They have tremendous resources. Access to everything like phone records, email servers, video surveillance cameras. They have detectives who are good at getting the truth, taking statements from witnesses. I have no experience and a computer. That’s it. And some people say I don’t even use my computer very well. What exactly do you think I could do?”

  Sebastian said, “If you don’t want to get involved directly, perhaps you could find us a private detective to look into it. Someone reputable and efficient. Someone honest.”

  Mrs Naumowicz took a white envelope from her bag, and with an unsteady hand, pulled out two wads of ten-pound notes, each with a blue one-thousand pound band.

  I looked at the cash and said, “Why don’t you save your money and let the police do their job? It’s what they’re paid to do.”

  The old lady looked pained. She said slowly, “But we don’t know what they do. Let me tell you this. In my country there are some murders. Mothers and fathers waiting years for justice. And then later we hear a police chief is in the pocket of gangsters. Many parents die never knowing what happened to their children. No one made to pay for the crimes.”

  “That’s not the way things are done in London. The police will find the person who did this. And besides, I’m guessing the money you’ve got there would barely buy three days’ work from a private detective. It’s probably not even work that a private detective would do.”

  Sebastian said, “We know this. I’ve said it to my mother.” He looked at her with affection. “But we just want to make sure that Aleksy’s case is not sitting at the bottom of a busy detective’s caseload, forgotten because we’re a thousand miles away. Will you take this money and either ask the police what’s happening, on our behalf, or get an outside agency to spend a day on it?”

  I rested my chin on my hand and tried to think of something that I could do to help but nothing sprang to mind. I hadn’t known Aleksy and though it had been a shock finding him, I was pretty well over it. And I was beginning to feel ashamed because I knew that I mostly wanted the Naumowiczs to take their troubles elsewhere.

  Mrs Naumowicz’s eyes were wet. Her son wore a look of resignation. I think he’d always known they were making a long and pointless journey.

  She said, “If you died and your mother offered someone two thousand pounds to help find out what happened, while you look down from heaven, you want that person to help, yes?”

  “Yes. But if I was dead and my mother had two thousand pounds in cash, she’d spend it on a nice coat to wear at the funeral. Maybe a hat as well.”

  “I’m not that sort of mother. Help me find out who killed my son. Please.”

  Mrs Naumowicz was the kind of mother I wanted. I wondered if her dead son had known that her love for him extended beyond the physical world of money, possessions and practicalities.

  We brooded silently for a minute.

  “Okay, since I know nothing about this kind of thing, I’ll do what you’ve proposed. I’ll find an experienced detective. They can tell us whether there’s anything else that could be done to help find Aleksy’s killer. I’m guessing it will be a short consultation telling us what we already know. Or maybe half a day’s work to come up with some new ideas.”

  Mother and son relaxed. She smiled at
me.

  “Thank you. That is a good start,” she said, pushing the notes toward me.

  I gave them a card with my contact details and promised to stay in touch.

  It so happened that I had no other work in front of me anyway. I wasn’t worried. I needed a break. After a busy few months, I had cash in my accounts plus money due on invoices I’d sent out.

  I decided to start working—in an informal kind of way—for Mrs Naumowicz in the morning.

  FOUR

  The New Light Detective Agency had a simple five-page website that had probably been created by one of the detective’s school-age children. Its logo was a flashlight shining onto a puzzled-looking man, caught in the circle of the beam. It’s possible that the artist had intended a guilty look. The expression was hard to make out. But he had stubble and a badly-fitting sweater, so I’m pretty sure that made him a villain in the world of detective agency logos.

  The few pages on the agency’s services mostly described finding people who didn’t want to be found, or taking pictures of people in places where they didn’t want to be seen. There were no details on the detectives themselves, apart from claiming they were all former Metropolitan Police detectives with over twenty-five years’ service in the force.

  Companies House tax filings for the agency showed three men registered as the business’s directors; Savage, Slaughter and Meakin. They were all in their late-forties. A news-listing search showed reports from their time with the police tackling murders and violent crime. Details in the press tended to be scant; largely they focused on the detective’s appeal for witnesses to come forward. Sometimes they just asked the criminals to do the decent thing; give up and hand themselves in. There was nothing to tell me why, after more than twenty years of police work, they’d decided that the private sector was more suited to their ambitions.