“The killer, sir? Or another victim?”
“That,” Collison said grimly, “is exactly what we need to find out, Timothy. Ah, here’s the Inspector. How are we doing with the incident room, Bob?”
“IT are making a start on it right now, guv. Should be ready to go sometime tomorrow morning, say about 11.”
“All right. Let’s start trying to get our thinking in order, shall we?”
Collison stood up and walked across to the flipchart where he liked to jot down things as they occurred to him. He had used it a lot during the preparation of his recent paper.
“Raj,” he said, scribbling the name as he did so. “We need to find him. If we find his body at the house then that obviously strongly suggests that they were both killed by the same person. If we don’t find his body, then we need to find him, and fast. He’s an obvious suspect and needs to be eliminated.”
“Our victim,” he continued, as he wrote ‘Conrad Taylor’, “was the only other occupant of the house so far as we are aware. How much do we actually know about him? Not very much, it seems to me, despite Priya’s excellent work with the neighbours. We need to dig a lot more deeply into his background. In particular, we need to find somebody who knows the truth about his relationship with Raj. Were they lovers? If not, what on earth was Raj doing there? And who is he, anyway? We need to find his full name ASAP.”
“Maybe we’ll find something in all those papers,” Willis suggested. “Some recent post, for example.”
“Yes, and I’m glad you mentioned that, Karen. It seems to me that this case may be similar to the one at Burgh House: you know, with lots of papers lying around which may or may not be relevant. I hate to do this to you, but you did such a good job on it last time, that I wonder if you’d take that on again? I suspect it may be pretty much a full-time job, but it’s important. The lead we’re looking for may well be stuck away in one of them somewhere.”
“Of course, guv. I’d be happy to.”
“What about the deceased’s family?” Metcalfe queried. “I know he was a recluse, but he must have some relatives stashed away somewhere.”
“Agreed, Bob. Priya, why don’t you take that on? You’ve been the one gathering the background so far, and you really know your way around the computer system.”
“Happy to do that, guv,” she replied, “but it’s only fair to warn you that I was here until late last night trying to do exactly that, and it’s not going to be easy. Taylor’s quite a common name and I wasn’t able to cross-reference anything conclusive. I couldn’t even come up with anything that might be the deceased’s birth certificate. I reckon he was about 60, don’t you? Well, I went back 80 years just to be sure and I couldn’t find anything at all for a Conrad Taylor.”
“Then maybe he was born abroad?” Willis asked. “Something else we need to find out about.”
There was a silence while they all gazed at the flipchart.
“That’s probably all we can do until we have a full team in place, and until we have the post-mortem and SOCO reports,” Collison commented. “I know that Brian Williams will do his best to get the former to us as quickly as possible, but I think SOCO will be some time. They have the whole house to examine, and all those papers to go through. Karen, I suggest you ask Tom Bellamy to let you have each batch of papers as they clear them and bag them, together with a note of where they were found.”
Willis nodded and made a note on her pad.
“There’s one other thing,” Collison said. “As soon as we have a better idea of what may have happened here, I’d like to get Peter Collins involved. Could you have a word with him this evening please, Karen, and see what his availability is likely to be?”
Willis smiled.
“If there’s a chance for him to get involved in another murder enquiry, guv, I think he’ll be very available indeed.”
CHAPTER 7
The incident room the next morning was in its usual state of induced chaos while IT set it up prior to handing it over to the investigative team. One terminal after another was plugged in and activated, its screen flickering into life; a technician would wait patiently for a login screen to appear before moving onto the next machine. Around the room, telephones rang in turn as their newly allocated numbers were noted and checked. With all this going on, Collison decided to defer the initial briefing meeting until 11 o’clock, by which time IT promised the room would be ready. In the interim, arriving team members sat down at a desk, logged in, and brought themselves up to speed on the background of the case. A few of the speedier ones then went for coffee or sat around aimlessly, waiting for order finally to reassert itself.
True to their word, IT handed the room over to Metcalfe just before 11, and he passed the word to Collison who duly arrived a few minutes later. The room fell silent as he walked in.
“Good morning, everybody. Good to see you all. I’ll ask DI Metcalfe to brief us in a minute, but first I just wanted to welcome you all. I think I’ve worked with most of you before, and I’m looking forward to getting to know the rest of you. Thank you, Bob. All yours.”
“Thank you, sir. OK, everybody, I think you all know who I am, but just in case I’m DI Bob Metcalfe. I will be in overall day-to-day command of the investigation, reporting to Mr Collison as SIO. DS Karen Willis – sitting over there – will be backing me up, although she will probably also have some specific responsibilities on this case, as you will hear in a minute.”
He walked over to the big whiteboard where Willis had already assembled notes, together with some preliminary photographs which SOCO had sent over by email.
“Yesterday afternoon, acting in response to concerns expressed by some members of the public for the welfare of a Mr Conrad Taylor of Wentworth House, Downshire Hill – just round the corner in fact – I visited the property with DS Willis and DC Desai. When we were unable to gain any response, I authorised uniform to break down the door. We subsequently found a corpse, believed to be Mr Taylor, in the front room on the right-hand side of the house as you look at it from the street. We immediately evacuated the house to await the arrival of the duty pathologist and SOCO.”
“It is the doctor’s opinion – preliminary, of course – that death almost certainly occurred as a result of head injuries which have an appearance consistent with having been inflicted by a blunt object. In short, we are now treating this as a murder enquiry. After discussion with SOCO, Mr Collison took the decision that the entire house should be subject to detailed forensic examination. This will obviously take some time. It’s quite a large house, and every room that we have seen so far appears to be littered with papers. That means that we’re going to be receiving information from SOCO piecemeal as our enquiries go forward. Not very satisfactory, I know, but there’s no way round it so we just have to live with it. Karen, why don’t you bring it up to speed on what we know so far?”
“The short answer to that is not very much, at least not at the moment,” she said, taking his place by the whiteboard.
“Our victim, Conrad Taylor, was a recluse. So much so that we don’t even have a photo of him – of him alive that is – to show you yet. DC Desai has spoken to the neighbours on both sides of Wentworth House. Both had been inside it, though briefly and infrequently. Taylor was almost never seen outside, his shopping apparently being done by a mystery figure known to the neighbours only as Raj who was apparently living with Mr Taylor. One of the things we obviously need to do is to try to define exactly what the nature of their relationship might have been. Raj is missing, by the way, so we don’t know at present whether to treat him as a potential suspect or a potential second victim. That’s one of the things we’ll be looking out for SOCO to discover: is there a second body at the house?”
“Excuse me, Sarge,” Desai called out, “but I’ve spoken to both neighbours again this morning. Neither of them had any idea what Raj’s full name might be, but Mr Rowbotham – he’s the one who’s been there the longest – says he thinks Taylor might
have mentioned to him that Raj is a Tamil.”
“Okay, well that’s something anyway I suppose. One thing we’ve asked SOCO to let us have as soon as possible is any post they may come across. Hopefully that will tell us what we want to know.”
“Thank you, Karen,” Metcalfe said. “Just a bit more background for you all. We believe Conrad Taylor had lived at the house for at least the last 20 years or so. Before that there seems to be some record of a family called Schneider, which we believed to have comprised two adults and two children: one boy, one girl. At the moment, they seem to have vanished without trace. But it simply can’t be possible for the trail to go completely cold like that. Somewhere, somebody knows what happened to them and where they are today. That’s one of the things I’d like to find out as quickly as possible.”
Collison walked into the middle of the room.
“As you can see, it’s early days and there’s a lot we don’t know. We need to change that. First, there’s the mysterious Raj. Who is he? On what basis was he living at the house? What does he do for a living? We understand from Mr Rowbotham that he works in IT, yet he seems to spend a lot of time hanging around at home. Where was he living before he pitched up at Wentworth House, and most important of all: where is he now? Is he alive, in which case he’s an obvious suspect, or is he dead like Conrad Taylor?”
He waited while Willis jotted these questions down on the whiteboard.
“Then there’s Conrad Taylor, whom we are assuming to be our deceased. We need to gather as much background on him as we can if we’re to understand who might have killed him. Bob, we need to apply for a court order to identify and access his bank accounts. Let’s also ask the Law Society to circulate his details. It would be good if we could find his lawyer. We also need to intensify our efforts to find his family. Even if he was living there alone – apart from Raj that is – he may have siblings, or even children. We need to find them.”
He looked around the room.
“Any other thoughts, anyone? No? Then let me give you my initial analysis.”
He thought deeply for a moment and then went on.
“First, there is always the possibility that he was killed by some random caller; a burglary gone wrong perhaps. What used to be called the passing tramp theory. Uniform haven’t had any reports of burglaries in the area recently, but that doesn’t mean we can rule the possibility out.”
“Second, there is the alternative possibility that he was killed not by a stranger but by someone he knew. Here the fact that he was a recluse should be an enormous help. After all, he simply didn’t know many people. So far, Raj is the only one we know about. There are the neighbours of course, but neither of them had any obvious motive, nor indeed any opportunity. So far as we know neither of them had a key to the property. We should check that though, Priya.”
“Yes, guv.”
“At the moment, all roads seem to lead to Raj. We need to find him, dead or alive, and we need to find out more about him. Well, I think that’s it for the moment. You’ll have the post-mortem report and ongoing information from SOCO as they become available. I’ll leave DI Metcalfe to allocate responsibilities.”
He nodded and left the room.
“Right, listen up,” Metcalfe called. “DS Willis will be taking point on any papers that are found at the property as soon as SOCO are finished with them. It’s quite possible this may turn out to be a huge task – I’ve seen the place and it’s knee deep in some places – in which case we’ll allocate more bodies to it in due course. The rest of you, come and take one of these task sheets and then get on with whatever you’ve been assigned. I think you’ve all done this before, so you know what to expect. We will meet in here every morning at 9 o’clock at which time you will bring the team up to speed on what progress you have made with your own particular responsibility. If you come across anything which you feel to be urgent, then you come and talk to me at once, or DS Willis in my absence. Clear? Good. Let’s get on with it then.”
He watched them all come forward and take a sheet off the pile. Then, with a quick smile to Willis, he left the room. He headed up the stairs, walked along the corridor, and knocked on the door to Collison’s office.
“Come in. Ah, it’s you, Bob. The troops all organised?”
“Yes, that’s all OK, but there’s something I wanted to ask you, guv.”
“Sit down then. What is it?”
“Well, I was thinking overnight, and it’s occurred to me again just now. We really need at least one more DS on this, particularly with Karen likely to have only limited time for day-to-day stuff.”
“Sounds very sensible. So why not get one?”
“Well, that’s a bit delicate. The ones I’d like are already allocated to other enquiries. A few are off on courses. That leaves only two, and to be honest I’ve worked with them both before and have no particular wish to again.”
“You don’t trust their abilities?”
“To be honest, no I don’t.”
There was a pause while Collison digested this. Then he gazed at Metcalfe..
“You wouldn’t be bringing me this, Bob, unless you had some solution to propose. What is it?”
“It’s Priya actually. What about making her acting DS just for this investigation? I think she’s ready for it and I’d certainly trust her more than those other two goons.”
“I think it’s an excellent idea. I’ve been meaning to recommend her for promotion anyway, so a spell of acting up will look good on her file. Anything else? No? Then why don’t you ask her to come up and see me and I’ll break the good news.”
A few moments later Desai, looking unusually nervous, tapped uncertainly on the door and found herself in her turn sitting before the Superintendent.
“Is something wrong?” she asked at once.
He smiled and shook his head.
“Not at all, Priya. The fact is that DI Metcalfe has asked for you as an acting DS on this enquiry. He thinks you’re ready for it, and I agree. If you’re happy to accept then I’ll do it with immediate effect.”
Desai gulped.
“Yes please, sir,” she said simply.
“Good. Well, congratulations. I’ll ask Bob to put out an email at once notifying the troops. I should warn you, by the way, that Karen is likely to have her time occupied mostly with all that documentation, so you’ll need to organise your own time very carefully. You will need to delegate a lot of your own stuff to others so that you will have the time available for people to come and talk to. DS is a very important position on a team like this. If you miss something, then it gets missed full stop.”
“That won’t happen, guv. You can rely on me.”
“I’m sure I can.”
CHAPTER 8
“Morning, Sarge,” Desai greeted Willis the next morning.
“Morning, Sarge, yourself,” she replied with a smile, gesturing towards her computer screen. “Congratulations. By the way, in the circumstances I think you’d better start calling me Karen, don’t you?”
“Oh, thank you, but are you sure it’s okay? After all, I’m only acting DS.”
“I shouldn’t worry about that. Provided you do okay on this one then I would have thought it’s almost automatic, isn’t it? They don’t normally ask someone to act up unless they’ve already pretty much made up their mind to promote them.”
“Well, let’s hope so. I’m pretty nervous I don’t mind telling you.”
“Well, I’m here to help. Anything you’re not sure about, just ask. Bob did the same thing for me. It’s great to know there’s someone watching out for you.”
“Thanks, Sarge – I mean Karen. That’s really kind of you.”
Looking at her, Willis realised it was the first time she had ever seen Desai exhibiting anything other than total self-confidence. Today there was a hint of insecurity, perhaps even vulnerability.
“Is everything okay otherwise, Priya? No trouble at home, or anything like that?”
The
question felt clumsy as soon she asked it. It was common knowledge that Desai was not in a relationship and still lived at home with her mother, her father having died recently. Perhaps it felt clumsy to her as well, for she gave Willis a sharp glance.
“Yes of course, why shouldn’t it be?”
“No reason, no reason at all. Sorry, I was just trying …”
Around in the room was filling up and Willis was able to fall silent without further embarrassment as Collison came through the door. The team was larger now, pretty much complete, and one or two new arrivals who had not worked with Collison before stared at him curiously. As Collison of the Yard, as some of the less weighty newspapers had dubbed him after a couple of high-profile successes, he had become the closest thing to a media celebrity that the Metropolitan Police possessed. He nodded to the room in general and went and sat at the back, as he often did.
“When you’re ready, Bob,” he called out as he sat down.
“Thank you, guv, and welcome to those of you who weren’t here yesterday. Before we start, as you’ll all have seen from Mr Collison’s email yesterday, Priya Desai has kindly agreed to act up as DS to fill a hole in the team, so thank you and congratulations to her. I anticipate that she will be playing a very full role in this enquiry as DS Willis already has some specific responsibilities which are likely to take up most of her time. So, from now on, if there is anything you need urgently and I’m not around, please speak to DS Desai. Okay?”
Everyone looked at Desai, who squirmed a little and tried not to meet anybody’s eye. It was the first time she had heard herself addressed by her new rank and it had given her a spontaneous little thrill of pleasure. Ridiculous, she thought angrily. Am I really that vain?
“Now to business,” Metcalfe continued. “We have a new development. Karen, why don’t you tell us about it?”
The House on Downshire Hill Page 5
