by Kim Fleet
The corridor was painted in pale green and had a dark blue lino floor. A nurse squeaked towards them and they glanced up, anxious for news, deflated when she walked past without a glance in their direction.
‘What was he doing there?’ Eden said. ‘It was after nine o’clock, for God’s sake.’
Judy tucked her arm around her shoulders. ‘Try not to worry. He’ll be fine.’
‘You can’t tell with head injuries,’ she said. That was the trouble with the training she’d had, years ago: she knew too much. She’d known colleagues who’d arrested a suspect and thought they were fine to be interviewed, only to find they collapsed a few hours later from an injury that had been assumed to be minor. Death in custody, every officer’s nightmare.
‘The police will find who did it,’ Judy said.
Eden snorted. ‘That wretched relic.’ She huddled deeper in her jacket, though it was roasting in the hospital. Aidan, in a pool of blood on the floor. Thank God they’d seen the lights on in the office and gone to investigate, otherwise he could have lain there until Monday morning. A victim of the Holy Blood. So much for eternal life.
A doctor in a flapping white coat came towards them, and they rose from their seats. Anxiety coopered Eden’s chest. Please let him be OK.
‘Relatives of Aidan Fox?’ the doctor asked.
‘That’s us,’ Judy said. She tucked her hand into Eden’s and squeezed it.
‘He’s taken quite a bash on the head, but he’s conscious and there are no signs of intra-cranial bleeding. We want to keep him in for observation for a few days, just to make sure that the injury is stable, but there’s no reason for concern.’
‘Can we see him?’
The doctor pursed his lips. ‘For two minutes. And don’t upset him.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ Judy said, as he hurried away.
Aidan looked like a little boy in the hospital bed. His face was ashen, stark against his dark hair, and his eyes were huge and moated with purple. A bruise spread from his hairline down to his cheekbone. Dressed in the blue hospital gown, he was vulnerable and sick.
‘Aidan!’ Eden rushed towards him. ‘Oh God, look at you.’
‘All in one piece,’ he croaked. ‘Christ, my head hurts.’
She grasped his hand and massaged the knuckles. Shame washed over her at the thought of the last few days’ mistrust and bickering.
‘How you doing?’ Judy said. ‘You look awful.’
‘Thanks, Judy. I feel worse than I look. What were you two doing in my office?’
‘We saw the lights on,’ Eden said. ‘What were you doing there?’
‘I thought I’d forgotten to lock the safe. I went back to check.’
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. Someone had searched my office; all my stuff was moved about. I was checking it when I heard a noise.’
‘See anyone?’
He shook his head and winced. ‘I can’t remember. Where’s the Blood?’
She patted his hand. ‘Don’t worry about that now. Concentrate on getting better.’
He struggled to sit up and she pressed him back down against the pillows. ‘Stay there, buster.’
‘But the Blood; I can’t believe I’ve lost it again. God, what a mess.’
‘Leave it to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it back.’
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Saturday, 31 October 2015
09:14 hours
Eden slept badly and awoke with a headache pounding her skull to sand. She dragged herself out of bed and padded into her sitting room, drawing back the curtains and gazing out over the tops of the trees to the square. Another Christmas tree had sprouted on the balconies, its pink, yellow and green lights winking in the morning gloom. The sight was overwhelmingly depressing.
Her mobile rang while she was making breakfast. She froze at the first ring, her throat taut. What if it was Hammond, taunting her again. Her next thought was it was the hospital. Aidan. Fear churned inside her. When she finally answered, her voice cracked.
‘Eden Grey?’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Will Day. We met in the Imperial Hotel yesterday. I’d had some gloves stolen.’
Was that only yesterday? It seemed a lifetime ago. ‘Yes, I remember. How can I help you?’
‘I wondered if you were free for brunch today? I’d like to talk to you about the missing gloves.’
‘Sure, but can we make it a late-ish one?’ Aidan needed pyjamas and a washbag, and no doubt a pile of reading to keep him entertained while he was in hospital.
They fixed up a time and place to meet, and Eden hung up. She ate, showered and dressed quickly, then grabbed her car keys and went to Aidan’s flat. It was in an imposing Regency building in Lansdown, one of a crescent of stone houses that had been converted into flats. She let herself in and went up two flights to his flat, half afraid that she’d find the place turned over. Her breath came out in a whoosh when she opened the door and saw the calm, though eccentric, order that ruled Aidan’s home.
Everything was symmetrical: the arrangement of objects on the marble mantelpiece; the placing of easy chairs and coffee table; the ordering of pictures on the walls. His bookcases were set into the alcoves either side of the chimneybreast, and were arranged in size and colour order. A shelf of old orange Penguins, a line of black-spined classics, philosophy, poetry, mythology. Aidan had a magpie mind: his interests were eclectic and once he’d heard or read something, he never forgot it. He was a deadly weapon on pub quiz teams.
She took a pair of pyjamas out of the chest of drawers, and unhooked his dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door. In the bathroom, she gathered washing and shaving kit, adding a bottle of aftershave to cheer him up and combat the disinfectant stink of the hospital.
With a final check that she’d got everything, she locked up and drove to the hospital, parking in a side street nearby so she didn’t get stung by the car park charges, and walked to his ward.
Aidan’s black eyes had developed overnight and were spreading down his cheeks. Some of his hair had been shaved away and the stitches stuck out like false eyelashes. His eye sockets were hollow and she was alarmed by how poorly he looked.
‘How you doing?’ she asked, kissing his forehead.
‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what he hit me with, but it was heavy.’
‘He?’ She unpacked the bag into the bedside cabinet.
‘I’ve remembered I saw his shoes. Long, slim feet in leather brogues. Looked expensive.’
‘Remember anything else?’
He waggled his head. ‘No. I saw his feet go past and I blacked out.’
‘Did he say anything? Smell of anything?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘OK, don’t worry, just try to rest.’ She slid the books onto the bedside cabinet. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d want with a head injury, so I brought Dorothy L. Sayers, Celtic legends, and some Horace.’
‘Brilliant, thank you.’
She perched next to him on the bed and twined her fingers in his. ‘I’m sorry the Blood has gone again.’
‘Someone must really want it.’
‘Is it valuable?’
He shuffled himself higher on the pillows with a grunt. ‘As a medieval bottle made from a gemstone with a silver topper, it’s not worth that much,’ he said. ‘But if it is the Holy Blood, one of the most important religious relics in history, it’s priceless.’
‘But who would want it?’
‘People like Lewis, who think it’s got mysterious properties. Or people who just get off on thinking they own a bit of Christ. Makes them feel powerful.’
‘But you don’t know what was in that bottle yet,’ Eden said.
Aidan let go of a deep sigh. ‘That’s not the point. It might be real, so I guess for someone it’s worth taking the risk.’
‘Who would want it that badly?’
‘There are relic collectors out ther
e,’ Aidan said. ‘You can buy relics online.’
‘You can buy bits of dead saints online?’ Eden echoed.
‘It’s illegal to trade in the relics themselves,’ Aidan explained. ‘You can only sell the thing it’s held in, the reliquary, and the relic itself is passed off as a gift from the seller to the buyer.’
‘If you sell it openly,’ she said, catching his eye.
‘Yes, if it’s sold openly.’ He coughed and grimaced. ‘But there’s a black market in relics, too.’
She shouldn’t be surprised. There was a black market in all sorts of things, from exotic animals to weapons to Nazi memorabilia. Her time at Revenue and Customs had taught her that people would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain the objects they desired. Danger and suffering only added value to the item, to the wrong person.
‘How much would the Holy Blood cost?’ she asked.
‘How do you put a figure on something like that?’ Aidan said. He fingered the side of his bruised eye. ‘But we know he’s prepared to kill for it.’
The café was in the Suffolks area of Cheltenham – narrow streets of independent boutiques, a favourite haunt of arty types – and was full of men in three-quarter length wool coats and long stripey scarves, and women in green velvet skirts and clattery bangles. Will modelled his off-duty clothes of deep pink moleskins, pale blue polo neck and a navy blazer: the perfect image of a cavalry officer in civvies, and the favoured weekend look for a spy.
He’d bagged a leather sofa towards the back of the café, and stood and waved when Eden entered.
‘You’ve not gone back to London for the weekend?’ she asked him.
‘No, I’m here for a few days.’ Will leaned back in his seat and spread his arms out along the back of the sofa. ‘I’ve done a bit of asking around since we spoke yesterday.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘I checked with some of my colleagues, and a few of them also said they’d lost stuff when they stayed at the Imperial Hotel. Nothing worth making a fuss about. Some of them reported it to the hotel manager, but none of them wanted to take it further and involve the police.’
‘Too many awkward questions?’
‘And too much hassle, to be honest. It’s not worth having to make a statement and possibly come back to Cheltenham to give evidence, just for gloves and shoes and toiletries.’
‘No one’s thought to stay elsewhere?’
Will sniffed. ‘The bookings are done by our travel team, and until you cropped up no one realised there was a problem with the Imperial.’
‘So the bookings are made centrally?’
‘Yes.’
Eden mashed butter into her croissant while she thought. ‘Security there is pretty slack. They’ve had lots of little thefts, pilfering really, yet they’re careless about where they leave access keys for the rooms.’ She’d found a pass key in the pocket of an overall. Very handy both for nosy private investigators and minor thieves.
‘What are you doing at the Imperial?’ Will asked.
‘I was investigating some poison pen letters sent to a client, and when he turned up dead, I hung around. That’s how I know about the thefts.’
‘You think the death and the thefts are linked?’
‘Not sure, but my guess would be it’s more in your line of work.’ She caught his eye. ‘Any known foreign interest here?’
Will paused before he answered. ‘Russian and Chinese. We know that some of them have bought flats conveniently close to certain assets.’
‘You ever take a camera, phone or laptop when you stay there?’
Will slumped as he said, ‘Yes. Bugger!’
‘And you leave them behind in your room when you visit certain assets?’
‘But no one’s had a phone or laptop stolen.’
‘The thief doesn’t need to.’ She polished off the last of the croissant. ‘I’ll keep on digging and let you know if I find anything. But I have to tell you, Will, I wouldn’t stay at the Imperial any more if I was you. And I’d warn your colleagues to steer clear, too.’
‘Point taken.’
Her mobile rang as she finished her coffee and was debating whether to have another. ‘Aidan, what’s the matter?’ she said, when she heard his voice. She listened for a few moments, sighed, and hung up. ‘I’ve got to go, Will,’ she said. ‘That was my boyfriend. He’s discharged himself from hospital.’
The nurses weren’t at all happy about Aidan leaving, and told Eden repeatedly that he was not to be left alone and that if he became groggy or confused at any point, she was to bring him straight back to hospital.
‘I only saw you a couple of hours ago,’ she grumbled, as she helped him into her car. ‘All you had to do was lie in bed and be quiet.’
‘I can do that at home,’ he said. ‘I was bored. And the curtains had got swirly bits on that just wouldn’t line up and I couldn’t make the tiles fit any sort of pattern.’
She started the engine. ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘But you’re not going home, you’ll have to stay at my place.’
‘I promise I’ll behave myself.’
She snorted as she pulled away. ‘That’ll be the day.’
She settled him on the settee while she stripped the bed and remade it with fresh sheets. Aidan always loved the feel of crisp sheets: another thing that calmed his mind and stopped his thoughts from whirring. With the pillows plumped up, and the sheet yanked tight, she helped him undress, wincing at the bruises on his back, arms and neck, and eased him into the cold sheets. He sighed with relief when his head met the chill pillow.
‘No coffee for you,’ she said, drawing the duvet up to his shoulders, ‘but I’ve got plenty of green tea. And I bought you a present.’
She took a purple paper bag out of her drawer and handed it to him. Inside was a hardback copy of Victorian fairy tales.
Aidan swooped on the book with a cry of delight. ‘Brilliant! Thank you! Where did you find it?’
‘That bookshop in Suffolk Square. It was in the window. Thought it might cheer you up.’
‘Thanks, Eden.’ He was already turning the pages and sinking more comfortably into the pillows.
She lay down on top of the covers beside him. ‘I’ve got some work to do. Will you be OK here while I get on with something? I’ll only be in the next room if you want me.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, evidently not listening and already engrossed in the book.
She left him to it and went to her dining table where she spread a huge sheet of blank paper. In the middle she drew a circle and wrote Lewis Jordan’s name, then drew circles around him, labelled them with the people in his life, and drew connections between them. She added in the events of the case: the poison pen letters, the thefts from the hotel rooms, Lewis’ murder, the stolen Blood, and the attack on Aidan. Then she started to compile a timeline of everything that had happened, back to when she rescued the boy and discovered the skeleton and the Holy Blood of Hailes.
Aidan shuffled out of the bedroom a few hours later, bleary eyed and with his dark hair sticking up at the back. He pulled out a chair at the table and looked over the mind maps and timelines Eden had drawn up.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Everything I know about Lewis Jordan.’ She scrubbed her hands over her face. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Poison pen letters, large amounts of money paid into his account that immediately go out again, background checks on everyone, thefts from the hotel, oven cleaner put in his eye drops, Lewis killed, the Holy Blood stolen.’
‘You think it’s all linked?’
‘It can’t be. Too much going on. The trouble is, the key people seem to have alibis.’
‘Can you corroborate any of them?’
She snapped her fingers. ‘The CCTV. At least it will help to confirm the timeline.’
‘Want some help with it?’
‘You should be resting.’
‘I’m going a bit mad with all this resting. Come on, Sherlock, break out the CCTV.’
&nb
sp; She dug out the DVD she’d stolen from the hotel’s security office and slotted it into her DVD player. ‘May as well watch it on the big screen,’ she said.
‘Do we get popcorn?’ Aidan asked, making himself a nest of pillows on the settee.
‘Coming up.’ She scavenged a large bag of crisps and a block of fruit and nut chocolate from the kitchen. ‘Budge up.’
For two hours they skipped through the CCTV footage, noting the arrivals and departures of everyone who went through the revolving door. Aidan’s sharp eyes and photographic memory were a blessing with this chore: despite his head injury he could remember faces, no matter how blurry, and recall when he’d seen them coming and going before.
Eden paused the DVD. ‘That’s everyone. We’ve seen Lisa arriving and leaving, before Lewis was killed, and we’ve had the film crew staggering back, after he was killed.’
‘What was the time of death?’
‘The people in the room next to his heard a rumpus at ten. I think that was when he was attacked.’ Her words tailed away. ‘But we don’t know whether he died immediately. In fact, they said they also heard a scream at about midnight.’
‘Does it make a difference?’
‘Yes, because the rumpus could have been him lumbering around after he’d put in his eye drops.’ She sat for a moment, fiddling with her bracelet. ‘The corrosive in the drops didn’t kill him, but it must have been agonising. And there was no sign of that in his hotel room when I found him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There was no turned over furniture, no evidence he’d blundered about crashing into things while his eyes burned out. Only some bloody handprints on the carpet.’ She jumped up from the sofa. ‘He could have been killed later. We could be working on completely the wrong time of death.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I need to check his hotel room.’ She planted a kiss on the top of his head. ‘Won’t be long.’
She grabbed her jacket and bag, and hurried out of the flat.
The Imperial Hotel wasn’t far away, and soon she was pushing through the revolving doors and heading across the black and white marble floor to the staircase. Gabor was clearing tables in the bar and gave her a wave when she walked past.
