Chelsea Mansions

by Barry Maitland

  ‘What is this, family history time?’

  ‘In a way, yes, it is.’ Brock reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph. He handed it to Kuzmin, who, just for a brief moment, gave a look of recognition, Brock thought.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘That’s Gennady standing there behind the girl, isn’t it?’

  Kuzmin’s eyes darted to Brock’s face, then back to the picture. ‘Maybe.’ He said the word carefully.

  ‘The girl is Nancy Haynes, the other two people are her parents, the building in the background is this building, and the date is the twenty-sixth of April 1956.’

  ‘Before my time,’ Kuzmin said dismissively and handed the picture back.

  ‘You’re not curious? Or do you already know what it means?’

  ‘What are you talking about? What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that, contrary to what everyone has been telling us, Nancy Haynes had been here before, she knew Mikhail’s father and would surely have approached Mikhail.’

  ‘And you think this has something to do with their deaths? That’s crazy.’

  ‘Gennady had met Nancy’s mother before, in San Francisco in 1939. They became lovers. Gennady was Nancy’s father, Mikhail was her half-brother.’

  Brock watched the man’s impassive face. ‘You knew this?’ Brock persisted. ‘Mikhail told you?’

  Kuzmin shrugged.

  ‘Nancy had recently lost the money she needed for the lifestyle she was used to. Did she ask for money from Mikhail to keep quiet about this family scandal?’

  Kuzmin shook his head indifferently. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Marta? How would she feel? Her revered husband, Hero of the Soviet Union, the father of an American woman. Would she have wanted rid of her, before she sold her story to the newspapers?’

  That seemed to register with Kuzmin. ‘That old witch,’ he growled. ‘Who knows what she would have done? But what about Mikhail? Why kill Mikhail?’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Brock said. ‘Why kill Mikhail?’

  Brock left Kuzmin and went out to see how the search through the Russians’ palace was going. They were looking for documents, letters, electronic records, anything that might throw light on the relationship between Hadden-Vane and the Moszynski family.

  Eventually he made his way down to the basement security control centre where Zack was working at the control panels, and took a seat alongside him.

  ‘So what is all this stuff?’ he said.

  Zack looked up. ‘High-quality gear but nothing extraordinary. That’s the controls for the motion sensors set up around the house, and this is for the window and door alarms. Then there’s the CCTV stuff—the screen there linked to that DVR . . .’

  ‘DVR?’

  ‘Digital video recorder, which in turn is linked to that HDD—hard disk drive—which stores the images.’

  ‘Can we find out why the CCTV was switched off at exactly the times that we really needed it—like when Mikhail Moszynski went out for a cigar on the Sunday night he died?’

  ‘The Shere Security people explained that, didn’t they?’ Zack said. ‘They said that Mikhail must have switched the recording off himself.’

  ‘The trouble is, Zack, that we may not be able to trust Shere Security—Wayne Everett in particular. How can we check this?’

  ‘Well, either the system, or some key part of it, like the HDD, was switched off for that period, either deliberately or as a result of a tech glitch, or . . .’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or the system did record for those periods and was erased afterwards.’

  ‘Can we test that?’

  ‘Yes. Not here or at Queen Anne’s Gate, but I can take the HDD over to technical support to take a look.’

  ‘Yes, do that.’

  Brock’s phone sounded. Bren had something for them at Queen Anne’s Gate. Brock contacted Kathy and got up to go. As he made his way out he passed an open door leading into the warren of unused cellars in which he’d seen evidence of digging. The walls in there were whitewashed brickwork, similar to what could be seen in the background on Freddie Clarke’s video. He called Zack and reminded him to take a look.

  As he stepped out into the square Brock saw a taxi waiting outside the hotel, the driver loading a suitcase into the boot. The hotel door opened, and he saw Deb, a coat over her arm, come trotting down the steps. When she reached the cab she turned and, seeing him, gave a wave, then she got in and the taxi moved off.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘I reckon we’ve got him,’ Bren said, nodding with satisfaction. He described what he’d established about Wayne Everett’s earlier history with Hadden-Vane and the Tottenham youth club.

  ‘He was Hadden-Vane’s enforcer, and he made sure the club officers were kept sweet as he used the charity to divert his share of the money coming in from Moszynski. He knew Danny Yilmaz, and also Kenny Watson, who used to come to the club before he went up to Glasgow.’

  ‘He told you all this?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Yes. It took a while, but he finally agreed to let us have his prints and DNA. They’re processing them now.’

  ‘Good. Does he show up on the CCTV records at Hackney?’

  ‘We’re still looking.’

  As Brock and Bren sat down together to go through the interview record in detail, Kathy at the next desk checked her phone again. Nothing from John. She tried ringing his number, but it was still switched off. She hesitated for a moment, then finally called the number of the Chelsea Mansions Hotel. It rang for a long time before it was answered with a tentative, ‘Hello?’ She recognised Toby’s voice.

  ‘Toby, hello, it’s Kathy Kolla.’

  ‘Ah . . . Hello, Kathy. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m trying to get in touch with John. Is he in the hotel?’

  ‘John? John Greenslade?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s not here. I haven’t seen him since yesterday.’

  Kathy frowned. ‘I was with him yesterday evening, and he said he was going back to the hotel. He should have got there about ten-thirty, eleven.’

  ‘No, he didn’t come home last night—we presumed he was with you.’

  ‘Would you mind getting someone to check his room, Toby? See if he slept there?’

  ‘It’s a little awkward at the moment. I’m rather short-handed. I’ll ring his room, shall I? Hold on.’

  After a minute he came back on the line. ‘No reply, I’m afraid. He’s not here.’

  Kathy rang off, feeling worried.

  ‘Okay, Kathy?’ Brock was looking at her.

  ‘Not sure,’ she said, and told him.

  ‘Probably nothing to worry about. But why don’t you check the crime reports?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ She went to her computer and logged in. She worked through the accident and crime incidents from the previous night in the districts he would have walked through on his way back to the hotel, but none of the victims resembled him, and his name didn’t crop up anywhere. Then, feeling a little foolish, she requested a check on passenger flights to North America. That too drew a blank. Well, she thought, of course he wouldn’t have gone home without contacting her. She rang the caretaker of her block to see if he’d called in there, but again there was nothing. Then she decided she was being overanxious and got back to work on a pile of the documents they’d taken from Mikhail’s office at Chelsea Mansions.

  Brock came over to her side and said, ‘Did we find out any more about Toby Beaumont?’

  ‘Yes, a little, about his father.’ She searched through the papers on her desk and found what she was looking for. ‘Well, not much. His name was Miles, so presumably he wrote that note on the back of the photo.’

  ‘And probably took the picture too,’ Brock said.

  ‘Yes. Born 1910, Eton, Oxford, the army. He was sent over to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 and evacuated from Dunkirk the following June. In September 1941 he joined the Special Oper
ations Executive which had just been formed to carry out raids in occupied Europe. In 1942 he was parachuted into Greece as part of Operation Harling, which blew up the railway viaduct at Gorgopotamos and cut the railway line from Thessaloniki to Athens and Piraeus which was being used by the Germans to supply their army in North Africa. He subsequently returned to England, took part in D-Day and was awarded the Military Medal.’

  ‘A distinguished record, then.’

  ‘Very. Toby must have idolised him.’

  ‘So what did Miles do next?’

  ‘Nothing. At least nothing we can discover. There are no records of him after he quit the army in 1946 as a full colonel, until he committed suicide ten years later, in November 1956.’

  ‘The time of Suez,’ Brock said. ‘The end of innocence—wasn’t that what Toby called it? He was at Suez, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They said nothing for a moment, Brock deep in thought. ‘So what was he up to?’ he said finally. ‘This hero of wartime special ops who vanishes from the record, and then plays host to an American diplomat and a senior Soviet party member at his home in London. What kind of larks was he up to?’ Brock shook his head and got to his feet. ‘I think we’ve been mesmerised, Kathy, by the Russians. Let’s go and have another chat to Toby.’

  As they made for the door they were called back by Zack, who had returned from taking the surveillance hard drives to the SERIS unit in South London.

  ‘We’ve looked at that gap on the night of Sunday May the thirtieth,’ Zack said, ‘when Moszynski was killed. The system was checked at eighteen minutes past midnight, and it was discovered to have been switched off at nine-fifty-two p.m., just before Moszynski left the house.’

  ‘That’s what the security people said.’

  ‘Yes, and that’s what the copy that we took from the hard drive showed. But we’ve now had a closer look at the hard drive, and it seems that the system was actually switched off at six minutes past eleven. The previous hour and fourteen minutes had been recorded, but then erased.’

  ‘Aha.’ Brock leaned forward. ‘Wayne Everett. But is it possible to retrieve the missing time?’

  ‘If you go to the computer suite I’ll show you what we’ve got so far,’ Zack said.

  They hurried there, where Zack typed on a keyboard and the screen in front of them buzzed into life, a crackle of white static at first, clearing to show the front steps of the Moszynski house and the street beyond. A car drove past, then a figure came out from beneath the camera and stood for a while at the top of the steps, the man’s head and shoulders bathed in the porch light: Mikhail Moszynski. He looked to left and right up the street, then walked down the steps and across to the gate in the fence to the gardens on the far side, where the lower half of his body was visible as he fiddled with the lock, swung the gate open and disappeared off the top of the screen.

  ‘Nothing happens for a couple of minutes,’ Zack said, and there was a buzz of static as the recording was fast-forwarded. ‘Now . . .’

  The lower half of a figure emerged in the top left of the screen. It was wearing dark trousers, and against the background of dark foliage it was difficult to make out any detail. It walked quite slowly to the gate and went into the gardens.

  ‘Another five minutes where nothing happens,’ Zack fast-forwarded the film. ‘Here we go.’

  The dark trousers had reappeared at the gate, and retraced their route out of view.

  ‘There’s nothing more for another twenty minutes,’ Zack said, ‘until Wayne Everett comes out and goes across the road, just as he said. There’s no sign of him carrying a knife.’

  Brock was getting to his feet. ‘Come on, Kathy.’

  ‘You know who it is?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, so do you. Didn’t you see the stick?’

  There was a car standing at the kerb outside the hotel when they arrived, its engine running. As they went up the steps the front door opened and Toby emerged, one hand clutching his stick and a briefcase.

  ‘Hello, Toby,’ Brock said. ‘I’m glad we’ve caught you in.’

  ‘Oh.’ He glanced from Brock to Kathy and back. ‘I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a rush, Chief Inspector. Let’s make it another time.’

  ‘Sorry, this won’t wait.’ Brock advanced on him so that he had to back through the door. Looking over her shoulder Kathy noticed the driver get out of the waiting car. It was the concierge, she saw, Garry, the silent one.

  They moved into the hotel office. Filing cabinet drawers were open, papers strewn across the table, as if there had been a hurried search for something, and Toby’s photographs were missing from the wall.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ Brock asked.

  ‘Can you tell me what this is all about?’ Toby said, a touch of annoyance in his voice. ‘I really am in rather a hurry.’

  ‘Sit down, Toby,’ Brock said, and drew out a chair for himself.

  They heard the front door slam shut and Garry came in and stood behind them in the office doorway.

  ‘We’ve managed to decipher the CCTV footage shot by the camera on Mikhail Moszynski’s porch on the night he died,’ Brock said. ‘It shows him going into the gardens, closely followed by yourself.’

  Toby stood there and stared, inscrutable behind the tinted glasses. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You stayed with Moszynski for about five minutes and then left. You were the only one in the gardens with him until the security guard went in there twenty minutes later and raised the alarm. Care to explain?’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Very well. Toby Beaumont, I am arresting you on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Mikhail Moszynski. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  Toby listened in silence to the caution, immobile as if on parade. Then he glanced at Garry and slowly sat down, facing Brock across the table.

  ‘Very well. You want the truth, do you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mikhail Moszynski made my life hell. For some reason that I could never fathom, he was obsessed with this building, with Chelsea Mansions, and was determined to own it all. One by one he bought out the other owners until there was just us left. When I refused to sell he resorted to subterfuge. I needed money to carry out a much-needed modernisation of the hotel, and one day a guest, a very plausible sort of chap, got talking to me about it. How much would I need? he asked. More than the bank was prepared to lend, I told him. It turned out he worked for a private investment company that specialised in loans for property developments of various kinds. We discussed the ideas I had in mind, and why the bank thought them too ambitious while I was convinced they would work. He thought so too, and a few days later he presented me with a proposal. It was exactly what I needed. I scanned the terms and noticed a couple of clauses that looked a little strict, but he assured me that his company was very experienced in this sort of project and understood the need for flexibility. I took him at his word and signed up, and the money was in my bank account the next day.

  ‘Then the problems began. There were endless delays with the council over approval for alterations to the interior of a heritage building, by putting in a lift and so on. Good grief! I pointed out that the bloody Russians next door had gutted their heritage building and turned it into something from Las Vegas, but it made no difference. I discovered later that the poison toad, Hadden-Vane, had gone behind the scenes and used his influence and Moszynski’s cash to fix the building inspector. Then there were extraordinary problems getting a builder. They would promise to tender, then back out at the last minute. Everyone we approached seemed to suddenly find themselves unexpectedly tied up elsewhere.

  ‘The end result was that when the time came to start repaying the loan, we were hopelessly embroiled, the place a mess, no guests and no income. I failed to meet the first deadline for a repayment and when I asked for flexibility
I was told that the letter of the contract would apply. Within a week we were rushed to court, where, surprise, surprise, Moszynski appeared as the owner of the loan company, backed up by a phalanx of barristers and solicitors. He didn’t just want the first repayment. We were in default, he said, and so the surety on the loan, the building itself, was now his. He also demanded that I cover all his legal costs, amounting to a quarter of a million so far. When the judge mildly pointed out that this would ruin me, Moszynski nodded and said, “So be it.”

  ‘In the end the judge saved us. He didn’t like the way Moszynski was using the law like an assault weapon. He gave me another week in which to fulfil the terms of the contract, and made Moszynski carry his own costs. Somehow we scrambled together enough money to settle the first account, and later arranged a loan from another lender and paid off Moszynski’s debt in full. The hotel, as you see, was left unimproved.

  ‘I tell you this, not by way of mitigation, but so that you understand the nature of this man, Mikhail Moszynski. If there was something he wanted, he was utterly ruthless and relentless until he had it.

  ‘Well now, on Sunday the thirtieth of May we held a memorial service for Nancy Haynes. You were there, Inspector Kolla, and so, to my surprise, was Moszynski. I was even more surprised when he spoke to me and asked to meet with me in the gardens at ten o’clock that evening for a private conversation. I was inclined to tell him to go to hell, but I had learned to be cautious where Mikhail Moszynski was concerned.

  ‘It was dark, and the others were concerned about my going. Deb wanted me to take Garry here with me, but Moszynski had insisted I come alone and I decided to comply. I am somewhat incapacitated of course, but not entirely helpless. I made my way to the gate and took a pace into the gardens, then stopped. I could see nothing. But then I smelled his cigar, and he called out to me, and I followed the gravel path to the bench where he was sitting.

  ‘He seemed in a good mood, cheerful about something. Apart from the cigar I could smell brandy, and his voice was slurred. He said he had an interesting proposition to put to me.