‘Really?’
‘Yes. He ordered a pizza delivery on his first night at Ferncroft Close, on the Wednesday, and again on the Thursday, but nothing after that.’
‘So what?’
‘Then I had a look at his record. His manslaughter charge was based on a vicious assault with a hammer. He battered the man to a pulp—literally—and claimed self-defence. The year before he’s believed to have thrown a teenager out of the tenth-floor window of a tenement block, but the sole witness disappeared and the police had to drop the case. And before that there was a string of assault incidents, all very violent and bloody.’
‘Yes?’ Kathy couldn’t see what he was getting at.
‘All his victims have been physically mangled, Kathy. He likes to crush them, like throwing Nancy under a bus.’
‘Okay.’
‘But there’s no record of him using a knife, and if he did I’m guessing he’d make a terrible mess with it. He has no finesse. Three precise, surgical stabs to the heart is not his style at all.’
‘Maybe he was told to do it that way, by someone who didn’t want Moszynski disfigured.’
‘Well, that’s a thought. Then there’s Peebles’ autopsy report. Sundeep is very wary of specifying the exact time of death, isn’t he? That’s when I collapsed, wasn’t it, when we were discussing that with him, and reading between the lines, I’d say he’s still not entirely happy with our later time, of Sunday night, after Moszynski’s murder.’
‘He doesn’t rule it out. The room temperature makes it difficult.’
‘I know, but still, I’ve always found Sundeep’s instincts to be worth paying attention to.’
Kathy sighed inwardly. What was he trying to do, take the whole investigation apart from the beginning again? The thought made her feel physically ill. She looked up and saw him regarding her with a faintly worried frown.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just mulling things over. You’re not still nursing that resignation letter, are you? Yes, you are, I can tell. Well, burn it. I forbid you to send it.’
She gave a snort of amusement.
‘I mean it.’ He picked up the pack of cards. ‘I wonder what Chivers is up to?’
Kathy said, ‘I could find out if you really want to know,’ and she told him about Zack.
So when she got home she rang Zack’s number at Queen Anne’s Gate. He sounded cautious, speaking so quietly she could hardly hear. ‘You calling on your own phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get yourself a prepaid and ring me tonight after seven. I’ll give you my private number.’
She did as he asked, and when they spoke that evening she said, ‘You’re being very careful, Zack.’
‘Got to be, Kathy. Chivers is very hot on security. We don’t want him going through the phone records and seeing your number on the list again.’
Then he brought her up to date. Everyone involved in the case was being reinterviewed, every camera re-examined, every phone record cross-matched. A fraud squad was working through Freddie Clarke’s records. Two officers had been sent out to the Bahamas to speak to Shaka and two more to Scotland to track down Peebles’ movements after he got out of prison.
‘Sounds thorough,’ Kathy said.
‘Oh, it is. The super is nothing if not thorough. He demands a perfect job.’
Zack didn’t like him, she could tell.
‘Why are you telling me this, Zack?’
‘Well, let’s say that I trusted your nose for sniffing out something rotten, and that Hadden-Vane is rotten, yeah? And he’s the one person we haven’t spoken to again.’
Hadden-Vane. When she put the phone down she pictured him again. And the dead—Nancy Haynes, Mikhail Moszynski, and Harry Peebles and Danny Yilmaz too—all dead, while he, improbably, rose above the carnage unscathed. She wondered if she was becoming obsessed.
The pub had a terrace overlooking the river, and they took a table by the wall looking directly over the water. It was a perfect June day, pale blue sky, sunlight sparkling on the dark Thames current across which a pair of two-man skiffs were skimming.
‘Thanks so much for sparing the time,’ John said.
‘I’ve got all the time in the world now.’ Kathy took a sip from her glass of wine.
‘You haven’t resigned, have you?’
‘I’m on leave, stood down, not involved.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I told you, John, you had nothing to do with it. What about you? Shouldn’t you be at your conference?’ Kathy was aware that her words sounded brittle, and tried to make herself relax and enjoy this. It was a damn sight better than being in Queen Anne’s Gate, she told herself, or moping about at home, but it just felt so unreal to be out and free during a working day.
‘It finished last Wednesday, but I didn’t want to go back home with this unresolved.’
‘Have you changed your mind about Moszynski’s letter?’
‘No, on the contrary. I studied those other documents you gave me and I’m more convinced than ever that he didn’t write the letter to The Times.’
‘Has the new team been in touch with you?’
‘No. Should I speak to someone?’
She shook her head. ‘Probably not. Send in your bill.’
‘How about your boss, Brock? Has there been any change?’
He seemed genuinely pleased when she told him, but then his frown returned. He noticed that her glass was empty, although he had barely touched his, and he poured her another.
‘I just couldn’t believe it when I saw that interview with Hadden-Vane on TV,’ he said.
‘People seem to think it was honest and courageous.’
‘For her, maybe, but not him. I was quite impressed with him at Moszynski’s funeral, but this was different. I thought it was the most devious and calculated performance I’d ever seen. Toby and Deb were outraged too. They’d come across him before, but it was the first time I’d really looked at him. You knew he was guilty, didn’t you?’
A river cruise ship was passing, its open top deck crowded with people wearing dark glasses and sun hats. Some of them were waving, and Kathy felt a little surge of well-being, the first she’d felt in a while.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that if he was prepared to admit that much, and put his wife in front of the cameras to back him up, that he must have had something much, much worse to hide.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I also think that he moved so fast that he must have had it in mind all the time, as a contingency plan, if we got too close.’ She shrugged and gave him a smile. ‘But it doesn’t matter what I think now.’
‘I like it much better when you’re smiling,’ he said. ‘And it does matter what you think, at least to me, and to Toby and Deb. They’re particularly upset that everyone seems to have forgotten about Nancy’s murder. They think that you’d probably have solved that if Moszynski’s death hadn’t got in the way.’
‘I’m sure it hasn’t been forgotten, John. Anyway, what are you doing with yourself, now the conference is over?’
‘This and that. I’m helping Toby and Deb upgrade their computer software. They send their best wishes, by the way. They said they’d love to see you if you wanted to drop in for tea or something.’
‘Unfortunately I’ve been forbidden from coming within a mile of Chelsea Mansions.’
John whistled. ‘That bad? Well, maybe I could keep my eyes open and tell you what’s going on in Cunningham Place, if anything interesting happens.’
It seemed that everyone wanted to keep her informed, while she didn’t want to know. But when she got home later that afternoon, after a surprisingly good lunch and promises to catch up again, she thought about what they’d said, about Brock’s questions about Peebles, and Toby and Deb’s fear that Nancy’s murder hadn’t been properly investigated, and she forced herself to open up her laptop and load the case files, and begin to look at them afresh.
TWENTY-SIX
The f
ollowing day she took the laptop into the hospital with her. Brock was sitting up in bed, showing signs of impatience.
‘I need to get out of here, Kathy, but they’re being difficult. They say there’s some residual infection and they have to keep me in for observation a bit longer. Really it’s just that they’ve never seen Marburg fever before and they want to hang on to me, and prod me and test me like a prize specimen. I’m going mad just sitting around here.’
‘Well, maybe I’ve got something for you to think about. You asked what if Nancy wasn’t mistaken for Marta Moszynski? The reason we’ve been assuming that is because we can’t see any connection between Nancy and Moszynski other than the fact that they were living in the same block. But there was the thing that the neighbour, Dr Stewart, said about seeing Nancy going up the front steps of the Moszynskis’ place one day. I didn’t put much weight on it, thinking he was mistaken, because no one else had seen her and there was no record of it on the camera mounted at Moszynski’s front door.
‘But I’ve been going over the log we made of all the people recorded coming and going on that camera, and there are gaps. It didn’t record Moszynski going out for his cigar the night he was killed, because he switched it off himself, according to the security staff. And there are two other times that week where there are gaps—for twenty-three minutes on Wednesday afternoon, and another for ninety-two minutes at lunchtime on Monday. We were told these were for maintenance. Those ninety-two minutes would have covered the period that Dr Stewart saw her.’
‘Why would she visit?’ Brock mused. ‘Did she know who lived there?’
Kathy shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Why would she go calling? To get Shaka’s autograph for her granddaughter? Because she was interested in Victorian architecture? Or might she have been there before, at some time in the past? Maybe she knew the previous owners.’
‘We just don’t know. We didn’t take it any further. And if she went inside, could she have seen or heard something she shouldn’t have?’
‘And was it just a coincidence,’ Brock said, becoming more intrigued, ‘that the camera was switched off when she called? Or could it have been done so that there was no record of her visit?’
‘Other people in the house would have seen her, the maid for instance, answering the front door.’ Kathy began to flick through the pages of the timetable they’d made of people’s movements. ‘But, there’s a thing . . .’ She showed Brock the screen. ‘The maid went out at twelve forty-five, with the cook and the office secretary. Looks like they all had a lunch break together. Mikhail’s driver and security guy was out too.’
‘What about family members?’
‘Mikhail was at home. That’s all.’
A nurse came in to give Brock some pills and Kathy left for a few minutes. When she came back he had more questions.
‘Wouldn’t Nancy have phoned first to make an appointment? That would have given Mikhail time to make sure the house was clear and the camera switched off. Could there be a record of such a call? Would she have used her mobile, or the hotel phone? Wouldn’t her friend Emerson have known something?’
‘No, there doesn’t seem to be a record of such a call on her phone or on Moszynski’s phones, and Emerson had no idea. What I’d like to do is speak to the people in the hotel again, just make quite sure they didn’t see or hear something.’
He sighed with frustration. ‘It’s all very well speculating, but we can’t ask the damn questions.’
‘Maybe I can,’ Kathy said, ‘through John Greenslade.’
‘The forensic linguist?’
‘Yes, he’s still at the hotel and offered to help. The people there are upset that Nancy has been forgotten. I’m sure they’d be keen to tell us what they can.’
‘And you trust Greenslade’s discretion?’
‘Oh, I think so.’ She got out her phone and tried his number. He responded immediately.
‘Kathy! How are you?’
‘Hello, John. I’m with my boss, DCI Brock, at the moment. We were just discussing Nancy’s murder, and we came up with a few questions that we thought Toby and Deb might be able to answer. Unfortunately, as you know, I can’t come to them. I wondered if you might be able to arrange for me to meet them for an hour somewhere away from the hotel?’
Ten minutes later he rang back. They would meet her at The Parlour, in Fortnum & Mason, at twelve. ‘Will Brock be there?’ he asked.
‘’Fraid not. He’s still stuck in hospital.’
‘That’s too bad.’
Brock was annoyed that he couldn’t go. ‘Haven’t been there for years,’ he said. ‘Not since . . .’ A memory seemed to trouble him for a moment, then his face cleared. ‘Enjoy yourself.’
They were already there when Kathy arrived at the first floor of the Piccadilly store, the three of them at a table overlooking the street, examining menus with great concentration. They welcomed her with enthusiasm.
‘This is such a treat,’ Deb said. ‘The hotel is like a gaol. We pretend that we can’t leave it and stay chained to the desk, when the truth is that Destiny can easily cope for a few hours.’
Toby ordered a knickerbocker glory and a bottle of wine, the others open sandwiches.
‘We were utterly disgusted by what happened to you, Kathy,’ Toby growled. ‘Your principals should be shot. If they can’t stand up to a bully like Hadden-Vane, God help us all.’
‘I think they had little choice under the circumstances, Toby, but thanks anyway. But stepping back has let me go over the ground again, and one grey area in particular that troubles me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘One of your neighbours told us that he’d seen Nancy calling at the Moszynskis’ front door on the Monday or Tuesday, a few days after she arrived. We weren’t sure how credible this was, but it raises the possibility that she might have had some connection with them that we don’t know about.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about a connection.’ Deb frowned. ‘She never mentioned anything like that to us.’
‘Which neighbour was this?’ Toby asked.
‘A Dr Stewart, on the east side of the square.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Toby chuckled. ‘Did he tell you he writes murder mysteries? Never had one published. Gave me one to read once. Agatha Christie on steroids. He’d be lapping up the attention you gave him.’
‘You don’t think he’s a credible witness?’
‘Let’s just say that he’s a lonely old man who would just love to be able to offer you a juicy clue. But can you seriously see him in a courtroom under cross-examination?’
Toby’s face lit up as their lunches arrived and the towering confection of his knickerbocker glory was placed in front of him. ‘Wonderful,’ he breathed. ‘I can remember the first and last time I had one of these. I hadn’t been in the army very long, and I’d been on some godawful training course and was home on leave, and Ma brought me here. I can still taste that first mouthful. Just before they sent me off to my first war. The end of innocence.’
‘Which war was that?’ John asked.
‘Suez. A shambles.’
‘You were there? I was reading a book about it recently. It was such an interesting time, 1956—the Cambridge spies, the Russian invasion of Hungary, Castro landing in Cuba . . .’
Toby cut in, ‘Ancient history, old chap, best forgotten. I prefer to remember the knickerbocker glories.’ He paused for a moment to taste and approve the wine, and they raised their glasses. ‘To justice,’ he murmured. ‘So, Kathy, anything else we can help you with?’
‘Let’s go back to the beginning. When did Nancy first contact you?’
‘That was last autumn, as I recall,’ Deb said. ‘She wrote this extremely enthusiastic email about how she very much wanted to stay with us and hoped we could oblige.’
‘Would you still have a copy?’
‘Should do, on file somewhere.’
‘Did she say why she picked Chelsea Mansions? Was it recommended by
someone?’
‘I don’t think she said, just that she was dead set on staying with us. We could hardly refuse, she sounded so keen.’
‘And when she arrived, did she say anything?’
Toby shook his head. ‘Don’t remember anything special.’ He spooned another dollop of ice-cream into his mouth.
‘I think she said something about loving that part of London,’ Deb said. ‘She said it made her feel at home.’
‘Do you think she might have been there before?’
Deb shrugged and took a bite of her smoked salmon sandwich. ‘No, I think it was just a general statement. I think the real reason was that we were handy for the flower show and not too expensive.’
‘How about the neighbours? Did she know about the Moszynskis?’
‘I think we did talk about them, didn’t we, Toby? Or was that with the Leeds people? Someone had read about Shaka’s wedding.’
‘That wouldn’t have made the American news, would it?’ Kathy said doubtfully.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ John said. ‘We got it in Canada. One of those juicy news bites, “Glamorous model weds Russian billionaire”, you know, like beauty and the beast.
‘But I was thinking,’ he went on, ‘Toby, you mentioned that your aunt ran a hotel next door to your house at Chelsea Mansions. Is it possible that Nancy, or her parents maybe, once stayed there, and met the people down the street, and maybe Nancy thought she might try to trace them?’
Toby looked at Deb and they both frowned. ‘She didn’t mention anything like that.’
‘Would it be worth seeing if you have any old records or photographs that might tell us something?’
‘We had boxes of old family papers, but they got damaged by damp, down in the shelter.’
‘The shelter?’ John asked.
‘Our cellar. Pa built a bomb shelter for us in the cellar in ’39, before he went off to France with the BEF. Damn stupid idea really—if the house had been hit we’d all have been buried alive. But it’s damp down there so we took what we could salvage up to the attic, next to your room, John. You’re welcome to have a look if you want.’
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