‘I need to take a look,’ Kathy said.
The man stepped back and Kathy moved to the doorway of the bedroom. The sheet had been pulled back and a photographer was taking pictures of the body.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the same. The hammer.’
‘Yep, it’s lying there beside the bed.’
‘Really? It’s here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that money on the floor?’
‘About ten thousand in fifty-pound notes. Now everyone apart from CSI personnel should leave the building so we can do our job.’
‘Okay. You’ve checked the other rooms up here?’
‘Two other bedrooms and a bathroom. No immediate signs of disturbance.’
‘Priority,’ Kathy said. ‘This is top priority.’
She went back downstairs, took a swift look at the other ground-floor rooms, and went to the sitting room, where a uniform was sitting with a woman, maybe late twenties, stocky build, alert intelligent eyes.
‘Ms Gruszka? Is that right?’
‘Yes.’ She seemed quite calm.
‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Kathy Kolla. I’d like to talk with you if you feel up to it.’
‘Of course. There is a body in the bed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it Mr Pettigrew?’
‘No. It’s a young woman, maybe Indian or Pakistani. Have you any idea who she might be?’
‘No. Mr Pettigrew doesn’t have any lady friends that I know of. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘There was a woman here last night, I think. There were two wineglasses in the kitchen, and one had lipstick on it. That is most unusual. What happened to her?’
‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. First of all, do you have identification, please?’
The woman unzipped a pouch on her waist and produced a Polish EU passport. Kathy opened it to the name, Nadia Gruszka. ‘Where are you from, Nadia?’
‘Katowice in Poland.’
‘How long have you been in London?’
‘Almost four years.’ She gave an address in Holloway.
‘How did you come to be working for Mr Pettigrew?’
‘The recruitment agency.’ She gave the name of the company, also in Holloway. ‘I have been coming here for one year and a half.’
‘Okay, now tell me what you did this morning.’
‘I arrived here at eight o’clock, as I always do, and started on the downstairs rooms—this room, the dining room, the study, the kitchen, the bathroom—vacuuming and cleaning.’
‘Was there anything unusual?’
‘Only the two wineglasses. I put them in the dishwasher, along with Mr Pettigrew’s breakfast things.’
‘So he had breakfast here? Just him?’
‘Yes, same as always—toast, marmalade and tea for one.’
‘And did you start the dishwasher?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘So there was nothing else unusual downstairs? No breakages, things out of place?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘I went upstairs to Mr Pettigrew’s bedroom, stripped the bed and put the linen in the washing machine.’
‘Could you tell how many people had slept in the bed?’
‘Only the one. Mr Pettigrew always sleeps on the left side. There was no sign anyone else had been in there. Oh …’ She frowned.
‘Yes?’
‘I just remembered something: a bloodstain on his shirt in the laundry basket. I sprayed it with stain remover before I put it with all the other stuff in the washing machine.’
‘You’ve washed everything?’
‘Everything I could find, yes.’
‘You didn’t strip the other beds?’
‘No, he would have left me a note if he wanted the sheets changed. I started vacuuming upstairs, and that was when I opened the door to the back bedroom and saw the mess, the blood. I didn’t want to touch it. I tried to ring Mr Pettigrew at his office, but his secretary said he was out at a meeting and his phone was turned off. So then I called the police.’
‘That bedroom door was closed—you’re quite sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about the house windows?’
‘All closed and locked, as usual, and the back door was locked—I had to unlock it to take the rubbish out to the bin.’
‘How do you get into the house?’
‘Mr Pettigrew leaves a key tied behind the front door. I get it through the letterbox, and I untie it and drop it inside when I leave.’
‘Show me.’
They went to the front door and Nadia demonstrated.
‘Okay. What about the back door?’
‘It’s a Yale lock. I don’t have the key.’
‘How about the alarm? Do you know the combination?’
‘No. Mr Pettigrew doesn’t switch it on when he leaves on Tuesday morning, and when I leave I press the activate switch.’
This all seemed very odd. If Pettigrew knew there was a body in the bedroom, why didn’t he cancel the cleaner?
Nadia said, ‘Please, can I go now?’
‘I’m afraid not. We’ll need you to go with an officer to a police station to give samples of your fingerprints and DNA and to make a statement.’
‘But I’ve told you everything. I just want to go to my next job.’
‘Sorry, Nadia. I’ll tell them to be as quick as possible.’
The driver took Kathy into Central London, through Oxford Circus and down Regent Street, navigating the narrow lanes of Soho and arriving at Golden Square, an ambitious seventeenth-century speculation laid out by Christopher Wren when this part of the city was largely hovels and fields. Kathy got out at one of the four- and five-storey brick office buildings lining the west side of the square and looked at the names of the occupants—an advertising company, an independent filmmaker, publicity agents—and rang the bell beside the brass plate for Golden Press. The door buzzed and she went inside, climbed to the first floor and opened the door to the publisher’s offices. She asked the receptionist behind the front desk if Mr Pettigrew was in.
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘It’s a police matter,’ Kathy said, and showed her ID. ‘Rather urgent. Is he here?’
The woman looked startled. ‘Oh, um, no. He went out for a meeting a couple of hours ago. But he’s due back any minute.’
‘What about his phone?’
‘He’s turned it off. He does that often.’ She smiled apologetically.
‘Give me the number anyway, will you?’
The woman wrote it down and handed it to Kathy. ‘Can I get you a coffee or something?’
‘No, thanks.’
Kathy looked around, taking in the worn flooring, the old office furniture, the outdated equipment. It didn’t look as if Golden Press was a flourishing business.
There was a sound of footsteps in the corridor outside and the door opened. A man appeared and glanced at Kathy, smiled, then said, ‘Any messages, Penny?’
‘This police officer is here to see you, Mr Pettigrew.’
‘Really?’ Pettigrew looked puzzled. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Do you have somewhere private we can talk, Mr Pettigrew?’
He led the way to his office, closed the door and invited her to sit down on one of a pair of ancient tubular steel chairs in front of his desk. He didn’t seem in the least alarmed by her visit. ‘So, how can I help, Inspector?’
‘Would you mind telling me your movements this morning, from when you woke up?’
‘Why? What’s this about?’
‘It concerns an incident in your street.’
‘Ah, I see. Another robbery, is it? Well, I’m afraid I didn’t see anything suspicious. My alarm went off as usual at six. I got up, had a shower, dressed, made my usual breakfast and left the house at seven forty, walked up to Hampstead tube station and came in to work. Didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’
&nb
sp; ‘How about yesterday evening?’
‘Um …’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing really. Got home about six thirty. Uneventful evening, bit of TV, heard nothing unusual outside.’
‘You were on your own all yesterday evening?’
‘Yes … oh, hang on.’ He frowned. ‘No, that’s right. I did have a visitor.’
‘Who was that?’
‘A young woman called in, about eight.’
‘Can you tell me about her?’
‘Is it relevant?’
‘I think it may be, yes.’
‘Well, her name was … let me see, I have trouble remembering.’ He reached into his pocket for his glasses and took out a small notebook. ‘I’m antiquated, you see. I use a paper diary. Where are we …? Yes, Shari Mitra. Do you want me to spell it?’
‘Please.’ Kathy wrote in her notepad. ‘Indian?’
‘Yes, from West Bengal, Calcutta—Kolkata, I should say.’
‘Do you have her contact details?’
‘No, ’fraid not. I’ve no idea where she lives.’
‘A phone number?’
‘Oh yes, I do have that.’ He thumbed through his diary and read the number to Kathy. ‘Do you want to contact her?’
‘Why did she come to your house?’
‘Business. She wanted to see if we would be interested in publishing a manuscript she had.’
‘Why didn’t she come here, to your office?’
‘She was rather secretive. It’s an unusual manuscript and she didn’t want anyone else to know about it.’
‘Had you met her before yesterday?’
‘Once, yes.’
‘In your house?’
‘No, on Hampstead Heath, on the Saturday morning before last. That’s—’ he consulted his diary ‘—the seventeenth. We had a chat then and I told her I needed more information. She phoned me last Friday to say she had it and we arranged for her to call in last night.’
‘Would you say she was an attractive woman?’
‘I must say I’m puzzled by all these questions, Inspector … May I see your credentials again?’
Kathy showed him her ID and gave him a card. She couldn’t make him out. His speech was articulate, yet his manner seemed distracted, as if his mind was far away. He studied her card closely, then shut his eyes and rubbed his temple.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Just a headache. Don’t know why—I never get headaches.’
‘I have to get some background here, Mr Pettigrew. So she came to your house about eight, and then what?’
‘We talked, she showed me more material she’d brought … then she left.’
‘What time?’
Pettigrew opened his mouth, closed it again, wrinkled his brow. ‘Not sure exactly. Um, actually, I did open a bottle of wine and we had a glass or two. I suppose she left around nine? Nine thirty?’
‘You distinctly remember showing her to the door?’
‘Well … not really, no, to be honest, but I must have done, mustn’t I? I went to bed and got up this morning as usual—with a bit of a hangover, if the truth be told. Why? Has something happened to her?’
‘Her body was found in your spare bedroom this morning by your cleaner. She’d been murdered.’
He rocked back as if he’d been punched. ‘What? No! That’s not possible.’
‘Mr Pettigrew, I’m not satisfied with your account. I’m going to caution you now and ask you to accompany me to a police station to answer further questions. There’s a police car waiting outside.’
As she got to her feet Kathy noticed a dog’s basket with a blanket in the corner of the room behind the desk. ‘You have a dog, Mr Pettigrew?’
‘Eh?’ He blinked in confusion, then saw where she was looking. ‘Oh … yes, I had a dog I used to bring to work. She died a couple of months ago.’
They took him to Kentish Town police station, where he was examined by a doctor and had blood, DNA and fingerprints taken. His clothes were exchanged for a pair of overalls and he was led to an interview room, given a cup of tea and told his solicitor was on his way.
Kathy meanwhile spoke to the doctor, who said, ‘He sounds quite confused. It’ll be interesting to see what the blood tests tell us. He says his GP’s been treating him for depression and acute insomnia with Temazepam. He says he can’t remember when he last took it or how much he took. Admits to being a “fairly” heavy drinker, which would exaggerate the effects of the drug, so his claims of gaps in his memory of last night may well be genuine.’
Pettigrew’s solicitor had now arrived, and Kathy decided to conduct the formal interview immediately, before Pettigrew had any more time to gather his thoughts. For the next hour she listened while he went through it all again, trying with little success to flesh out the details. Regarding Shari Mitra, Kathy was able to establish only that she was aged about thirty and appeared well educated, said her home was in Kolkata and that she had arrived in England a few weeks before and was in possession of some kind of manuscript she wanted published. Pettigrew said he had no idea where she was staying in London.
Kathy then asked him what he was doing during the late afternoon of the previous Saturday, 24 October.
‘Last Saturday?’ He thought. ‘Nothing much. I was at home, trying to catch up on some reading.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see anyone, or speak to anyone on the phone, say between five and six thirty?’
He thought about it, then shook his head. ‘Don’t think so, no. Why?’
‘How about the morning of the Tuesday before that, the twentieth?’
Pettigrew shrugged. ‘The usual—work, the office. Like this morning, I would have left home by seven thirty and been in the office by around eight thirty, I suppose.’
Kathy finished the interview, explaining that they would have to ask him to remain at the station until further inquiries had been made.
When she returned to her car, she checked new information that had come in. A trace of Shari’s phone showed that it had been used to make calls to only two numbers: Pettigrew’s and that of a Steven Weiner, listed as a literary agent. Kathy tried the number. It went to voicemail and she left a message asking him to contact her urgently.
Then she phoned Pettigrew’s office and got through to Penny.
‘Oh, I’m glad you’ve called.’ The secretary sounded flustered. ‘Can you tell me what’s going on? We’ve had reporters here from two different papers, asking questions about Charlie—Mr Pettigrew. Is he all right?’
‘He’s helping us with our inquiries about a case, Penny. I’d suggest you close the office if the press are being a nuisance, or direct them to us. I wanted to check something with you. Do you have an office diary there? Could you tell me if Mr Pettigrew had any appointments on the morning of last Tuesday, the twentieth?’
‘Tuesday? Um … he had one, with a rep from one of the distributors at ten. Oh yes, I remember now, he was late getting in and the rep had to wait. I made him coffee.’
‘How late?’
‘Um, about half an hour.’
‘So Mr Pettigrew got in about ten thirty?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did that happen often?’
‘Yes, quite often.’
Kathy thanked her and rang off. Plenty of time then to clean himself up and settle down after murdering Andrea Giannopoulos at around seven am. Meaning Pettigrew had no alibi for either of the previous murder times.
One of her team, DS Alfarsi, rang in with an update on the search of 14 Parliament Hill Close. At the back of a drawer in Pettigrew’s bedroom a woman’s necklace with a damaged clasp had been found, closely resembling the one ripped from Caroline Jarvis’s throat.
Kathy took a deep breath, finally allowing the swell of excitement to burst inside her. This is it, she thought. He’s the one.
At noon the following day Kathy stepped out of the conference room in New Scotland Yard filled with an enormous fee
ling of release. The mood had been positive—no, damn it, the mood had been bloody euphoric. The people from the Crown prosecutor’s office could hardly contain themselves, saying they’d never seen such a watertight case. Sally Cameron was about as enthusiastic as anyone had ever seen her and Torrens looked like a man reprieved from the gallows. Kathy was surprised in a way—she’d thought that she was the only one on trial over the Hampstead murders, but it seemed everyone had been. There were cheers when Sally read out a note received from the office of the Home Secretary via the commissioner’s office, expressing his congratulations on a brilliant piece of police work.
It hadn’t been that, of course. It had been pure luck. Pettigrew had blown a gasket and ended his brief campaign of horror in a confused mental blur. If anyone deserved credit it was Nadia Gruszka, the cleaning lady, but no one was going to admit that. No one except Kathy. Beneath her great relief she felt an itch of dissatisfaction. She’d passed her first big test with flying colours, but it had been pure luck. She knew it and she thought of Brock and knew that he would know it too.
And there was the inconvenient fact that they didn’t know who the third victim was. According to the UK Border Agency there was no record of anyone by the name of Shari Mitra entering the country within the past twelve months. Her fingerprints and DNA produced no matches, and information was being urgently sought from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation.
Kathy had also tracked down the other person the victim was known to have made contact with in the UK, the literary agent Steve Weiner. He had an eye-catching website with links to his social media pages and email and phone contacts, but no physical address. There were also a large number of web references to him, and in particular to a spectacular bidding war he had conducted between publishers in 2012 for a novel by one of his authors. When Kathy phoned him, he had already seen the news item on Pettigrew’s arrest and the police appeal for information on Shari Mitra. He explained that Shari had phoned him out of the blue on the morning of the previous Thursday, but hadn’t got around to explaining what it was about.
‘She was on the phone to you for eight minutes,’ Kathy objected.
‘Um, yeah,’ Weiner said, sounding a little surprised that she knew. ‘But she was kind of incoherent and I couldn’t understand what she was saying. You know, the accent? And I was in the middle of a meeting at the time and I asked her to hold on, but when I got back to her she’d rung off.’
The Promised Land Page 5
