Deadly Pretty Strangers: US Edition

by Max Thorn

  The agency website offered a free consultation, presumably to get people through the door so that the detectives could pitch their services. Most important of all, their office address was only a ten-minute walk from my apartment.

  I found the New Light offices above an electronics shop on a quiet backstreet within the maze of narrow roads behind Regent Street. The steel front door beside the shop front was freshly painted cobalt-blue. A pair of long dents not completely masked by the paint suggested someone had tried to get in with a very large key shaped like an axe. A black plaque showed the name of the agency in yellow capital lettering.

  I pressed the buzzer beside the door and looked directly at the camera lens above the buzzer so that they could see that I wasn’t anyone they might be trying to avoid.

  A female voice said, “Hello.”

  “I’d like to see a detective.”

  “Come up.”

  The door unlocked with a heavy clunk and I pushed it open slowly, like a bank vault door. Stone steps led up a windowless stairwell to a semi-opaque glass door. I entered a modern reception area furnished with straight-backed chairs against a wall, a watercooler, wooden high-fronted receptionist’s desk, and a cobalt-blue carpet. A philodendron that had outgrown the office environment and needed to be set free in a jungle somewhere, lurked beside the door.

  A sharp-featured woman with black hair tied-back in a small bun, sat behind the desk. No one was waiting.

  I said to her, “I need to talk to a detective about a murder.”

  She spoke quietly into her phone, got up and led me to the furthest of the consulting rooms. The faux etched-glass partitions showed shadowy figures seated in the first two rooms. As I walked into the third, a burly man in a light-blue suit got up from a thickly upholstered leather chair behind a desk and put out his paw.

  “Dave Slaughter,” he said warmly.

  I introduced myself. We shook hands politely and my hand got lost in his big dry palm. I wondered how he typed.

  His suit looked new, unrumpled by physical effort. Under the smooth jacket he wore a white shirt with precise collars, top button fastened, single-cuffs, and a blue tie. I guessed his wife fastened the top button in the morning and it probably stayed that way until she unfastened it in the evening.

  “What can I do for you?”

  We sat and I told him the whole story about Aleksy and what his mother wanted to happen.

  “You’re right. It’s not our thing at all. We let the police handle murders. They’ve got the resources. We mostly just find people. Occasionally a bit of surveillance on errant husbands or wives or business partners. Nothing like what you’re asking.”

  “So what should Mrs Naumowicz do?”

  “Be patient. It might take months or even years, but they’ll solve it eventually. Murderers rarely get away.”

  “She’s a suspicious type. Doesn’t feel they’re on it. The police won’t tell her anything.”

  “Well, as a bereaved mother obviously she wants fast answers. But unless she knows something that she hasn’t already told the police, there’s nothing she can do. Let the murder investigation team do their job.”

  “Do you have contacts there, with your former colleagues?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Could you take a look at the files on this case?”

  “No way. I wouldn’t interfere in a murder inquiry.”

  “I’m thinking that if she could see how far they’ve got, she’ll be reassured, stop pestering them and not pester me either. She gave me this.” I put the wads of brown notes on his desk. “They’ve asked me to be their…well, liaison I suppose, in London. If you could get a full story and maybe talk to her directly, that would be great.”

  Dave glanced at the money. “That looks like what, two grand?”

  “Yes.”

  “For an update? A conversation?”

  “With some solid facts behind it.”

  He thought for a moment. “No, I don’t want any part of that. Apart from anything else, you’re almost certainly on the suspect list.”

  “What?”

  “Living almost next door, single male, had some kind of argument within yards of the scene on the night, been in the apartment before, knows the resident. Like it or not, you’re involved at some level.”

  “Okay, I understand.” I reached forward to the money and was about to ask if he could recommend someone else, when he shifted in his chair and seemed to have second thoughts.

  He said slowly, “But if part of the case file came into your possession somehow, completely unconnected to me, I’d walk you through the contents. Give you some insight. I’d want a grand for that.”

  “Okay,” I hesitated. “But how do I get the file?”

  “No idea,” he said flatly. “You’d have to be lucky. The other grand might be enough to buy something. See what turns up. Come back if you get lucky. And turn your phone off before you come back.”

  I went home wondering which would be luckier, nothing turning up or something turning up that would cost two thousand pounds. I kept one of the thousand-pound wads in my pocket, just to be ready, and put the other in my desk.

  Then I got back to my between-jobs hobby, researching food manufacturers. I’d noticed that a global realignment of trade was going to affect the profitability of the major food producers, so I was getting interested in that sector of the stock market. High-fructose corn-syrup was beginning to look exciting. I started digging through company accounts.

  It was twilight. The streetlights shone yellow through my windows. A knock on my front door got me up from my desk. A clean-shaven man wearing an open-face crash helmet and weatherproof clothing stood on the landing. A large square bag hung against his side, the strap over his shoulder. In gloved hands he held the contents of the bag, a large, flat pizza box, horizontally at chest height.

  “Xavier Fox?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pizza for you.”

  “I didn’t order pizza.”

  “You sure? Take a look and see if you want it anyway.”

  I opened the lid, hinging it up toward the delivery boy’s chest. The odor of pepperoni pizza and hot photocopier printing wafted out. Inside was a large padded envelope, almost the size of the box. It was packed tightly with printed paper. There was no pizza.

  “That’s a thousand,” he said quickly.

  I pulled out the flat wad of notes from my jeans and put them in his gloved hand.

  He stuffed the cash into his waist pocket without counting. “Don’t open it here. You don’t know who’s looking.”

  I took the box and he was gone in a moment. Less than a minute later, a scooter in the street below buzzed away in a long uninterrupted acceleration.

  I wondered if I’d bought a ream of paper garbage for half of Mrs Naumowicz’s cash. The delivery boy’s comment on surveillance made me pause. As a precaution, I sat on the living room floor instead of at my desk, and took the contents of the thick envelope out under the dining table. There were photocopies of dozens of printed forms and reports, photographs of Aleksy dead, pictures of Patryk’s apartment, maps of the area and witness statements. I didn’t have enough room to look at it all properly, so I put it back in the envelope and put the envelope inside my best hiding place.

  Years before, I’d found a loose plank in my study floor. I’d made a box for the space below the plank, fixing it to the floor joists. Then I’d drilled screw holes through the natural knots in the plank and after screwing it down, I put tiny brown plastic plugs over the screw heads, making them invisible. The box contained my emergency cash, passport, driving license, a credit card, spare front door keys and a backed-up drive for my computer. Things I didn’t want burglars to conveniently pick up from my desk. I unscrewed the plank and squeezed the copied police files into the box.

  The following morning I was back in Dave Slaughter’s office with a thousand pounds and the heavily stuffed envelope containing the case files.

 
FIVE

  The private detective took the papers out and organized them into separate piles on his desk.

  I said, “I thought I’d get a memory stick.”

  “Nope. Can’t download to portable drives. Easier to print. Apparently.”

  Dave pulled sheets from the various piles, taking me through Aleksy’s journey as the police saw it. He was a truck driver. The export business that had hired him was genuine. Enquiries in Poland showed that the business owners made a moderate living. No sign of dealing in drugs or weapons. Aleksy had just been delivering furniture. A consignment of machinery was scheduled for the return leg.

  “The boy himself was no angel though.” He brought together several individually stapled reports and flicked back and forth looking at details on each one. “He was charged with rape in his home town of Rybnik three years ago. The case collapsed when the girl involved withdrew her testimony. My guess is she was either intimidated or paid off. Then the following year he’s accused of assault on another woman. Same outcome. The black sheep of an otherwise respectable, hard-working family. That’s what I’m seeing here.”

  “Not, innocent until proven guilty then?”

  “I prefer no smoke without fire. But you might be biased since you’re here on the mother’s behalf, right?”

  “I’m new to this. And I’ve only heard people saying positive things about him.”

  “Well just bear in mind, he might’ve been a lot less pleasant alive than dead. But leaving that to one side, let’s look at what he was getting up to on the night of his demise.”

  A map showed Aleksy’s phone-tracked movements in the hours before he died. A purple line meandered around central London to numbered points on the map.

  He said, “So after touring around the West End looking for girls, probably…”

  I looked at him enquiringly.

  “Just a guess. Young men away from home in a big city don’t look for much else. So, after wandering around for a bit, he stops here for an hour,” he pointed at a spot on the map on St Martin’s Lane. “I’m guessing he would’ve been in the bars here, popular with kids. Then he leaves and crosses over to Chinatown, stopping here for another hour.” The detective tapped on his keyboard and turned his computer monitor screen to show me a street view of a restaurant’s yellow and red frontage. “Most probably the Sun Ya Chinese restaurant on the corner of the main drag.”

  Taking papers from a different pile he spread out large, dark monotone pictures on the desk. “These four images are still-shots from the restaurant’s CCTV, and look. There’s your man, sitting at the window table with a girl. Look familiar?”

  “Him I’ve only seen dead. I don’t recognize the girl. I can’t see her face.”

  “Yeah. Strange thing. Not one full-face image or even a half-face according to this.” He waved a narrative report on the video. “She enters wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat, keeps her head down, points to the window seat and then sits with just her shoulder visible to the camera. Apparently they only have one camera viewing the diners. The others are all positioned to catch the staff stealing; one at the till, one in the kitchen and one at the backdoor. This shot shows the side of her face and chin. That’s the only facial detail they’ve got apparently.”

  He picked up another sheet of paper. “The restaurant manager puts her age at somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. Blonde hair. Attractive he says. Height is five-foot six inches, assessed from the video. Sure you don’t know her?” He looked at me casually.

  “No, but if I did, I think I’d take her to the Italian around the corner.”

  He returned to the map. “So they have a quick dinner and then his phone goes back to your friend’s apartment for the main event.”

  “What about her phone?”

  “Either it was flat, switched off, left somewhere else, or—a remote possibility—she doesn’t have one. Aleksy’s track is unaccompanied. So he arrives at the apartment at eleven o’clock and his phone doesn’t move after that. The signal goes dark about six hours later. I’m guessing the battery ran out, since that was how it was found. So in all probability, there’s your killer. Twenty to twenty-five year-old blonde sort, slim, five-foot six.”

  “Really? She killed him?”

  “Well it looks like she was the last person to see him alive and ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s the person responsible.”

  “How did he die?”

  His hand hovered over the piles of paper before pulling several sheets stapled together from the middle of a pile. “Poison. A neuro-toxin to be precise. Acts on the nervous system causing paralysis, which results in death from asphyxiation. The diaphragm stops working. Victim can’t draw breath.”

  “From the spider?”

  Dave looked at me puzzled.

  “I saw a spider in a plastic box beside the bed, when we found the body.”

  He read for a minute. “So the toxin is, according to the pathologist, a homologue of delta atracotoxin characteristic of the funnel-web spider, with traces of peptides similar to those found in platypus venom. Mean anything to you?”

  “A mixture of funnel-web spider and platypus? Not something I’ve heard of.”

  He read on. “They’re not sure if it’s manufactured or organic. But the amount they found in the body couldn’t have come from one spider, according to this. They’re estimating it at about ninety milligrams.”

  “You’d need the venom from the spiders in every western European zoo to come up with that amount.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I used to keep a spider as a pet when I was a kid.”

  “Maybe that’s not a big surprise,” he smiled while he judged me. “So, the killer would’ve needed a zoo-load of spiders.”

  “Or an animal fifty times bigger than a palm-sized spider, crossed with a platypus.”

  “Yeah, of course. The killer is either a fur-covered eight-legged creature the size of a small car or—and I’ll let you judge the balance of probability here—a blonde girl who likes Chinese food and floppy hats. I don’t think you’ll need two guesses to work out which one the police are looking for.”

  “Just using my imagination,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Somehow she gets the venom. It’s introduced subcutaneously to his neck. A pair of puncture marks. They seem to be at the same place as a human bite mark.” He laid a picture on the desk showing a close-up image of Aleksy’s neck. Two livid points were joined by a faint pink crescent. “The toxin probably paralyzed him in seconds and killed him in minutes. Unusual way of killing. Most murder victims in this town are stabbed. Some are shot. This feels like one of those weird political assassinations. Honey trap and then exotic poisoning. Are you sure this lad was just a truck driver?”

  “I’d no idea what he did for a living. I never met him. At least not alive.”

  “Well it seems he was hit with enough toxin to kill a horse. An entire stable of horses in fact. The clear-up after this crime is unusual too. Did you notice anything about the bed?”

  It took me a few seconds to remember. “No bed-linen.”

  “All in the washing machine, on the hottest wash program, with bleach on top of the detergent.”

  “The apartment smelt of bleach. I remember it. Why’s that significant?”

  “No DNA off the sheets. The bleach killed it. Also the floors had been washed. Bleach again. Same with the door handles, door frames and furniture. The apartment seems to have been vacuumed. But no sign of a vacuum cleaner. Owner said it was missing. Also the mop and plastic bucket are missing.”

  “What brand was the vacuum cleaner?”

  Dave consulted a typed report. “Scanlux.”

  “I think I met it on the way out. Someone knocked me out cold with something heavy. I got a deep cut and a corporate logo imprinted on my head.” I pointed to the faint red line above my eyebrow. “I would’ve preferred the plastic bucket.”

  “Maybe not. The bucket might not have kno
cked you out. If you’d seen them, they might have killed you too. Sounds like you had a lucky escape. Didn’t your friend Patryk tell you about the missing vacuum?”

  “It never came up. We hardly talked about the death. Aleksy was his school friend, so I didn’t like to remind him about it. I just asked him occasionally whether anyone had been caught.” I rubbed the scar, remembering the numbing pain from the blow.

  “Well the missing items haven’t turned up. Disposed of in a dumpster somewhere perhaps. That’s the killer making sure no hair or skin is found. Nothing on the crockery or glasses. Every contact leaves a trace, except when this cute girl’s your guest.”

  He rocked back on his chair, looked across the papers and picked out more reports. “And then this, strangest of all; the body. Washed, nails scrubbed, mouth washed out with bleach, genitals washed. Who does that? There’s a unique level of thoroughness here, especially from a younger person. Usually young killers are running away from the scene within seconds, spraying texts and pictures to everyone who knows them, making desperate calls for help or bragging about their evil crimes. This girl must’ve been in that apartment for hours.”

  He leafed through a pile and put two graphs in front of me. “These timelines from the utility companies show the electricity and gas being used until three in the morning.”

  “What are these charts?” I leaned closer to look.

  “The utility companies have most homes in London hooked up to real-time wireless data. Remember how they got rid of all the meter readers? Now they can tell exactly what you’re doing every minute of the day if it uses gas or electricity. Here’s the usage for that night, minute by minute. You can see the spike when the washing machine went on. And the vacuuming.”

  I looked at the graphs. A wavy line for over two hours showed the energy used by a heavy appliance. An arrow pointing to the line had been drawn from the words “washing machine” scrawled in the margin.

  “But even though she was there for hours, she must’ve had help. She’s not big. Lifting an uncooperative hundred and ninety pound body into the shower would have been exhausting for her, limbs flopping everywhere, body folding and sliding out of her grasp. Not to mention a grim task. She’s just had dinner with him. Now she’s carrying his lifeless body to the shower, cleaning him intimately and remembering to fill the drain trap with bleach afterward. Which is where you come in.”