Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (6 page)

‘Yes, yes. I take it she’s dead,’ said Bryant impatiently.

‘Very.’

‘That doesn’t explain why we have to drive somewhere godforsaken.’

‘It’s not godforsaken, just a bit windswept. The body’s been left
in situ
.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s something very unusual about the circumstances. Yes, look at the smile on your podgy little face now; you’re suddenly interested, aren’t you?’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ Bryant knotted his scarf more tightly than ever and climbed into the passenger seat of Victor, his rusting yellow Mini.

‘Have you got around to insuring this thing yet?’ asked May, crunching the gears.

‘It’s on my bucket list, along with climbing Machu Picchu, visiting the Hungarian Museum of Telephones and learning the ocarina. Where
are
we going?’

‘We need to climb Primrose Hill.’

Bryant perked up. ‘Greenberry Hill.’

‘Greenberry?’

‘That’s what it was once called. After the executions of Messrs Green, Berry and Hill, who were wanted for the murder of one Edmund Godfrey in 1679. Although nobody really knows for sure if the legend is true.’

‘Incredible,’ May muttered, swinging out into Euston Road. ‘All this from a man who can’t remember how to open his email.’

The night before it had snowed heavily again. Now the afternoon air was crisp and frosty, and the rimes of snow that formed tidemarks around King’s Cross Station had turned black with traffic pollution. The Mini slushed its way past the grim bookies and pound stores of lower Camden Town, up and over the bridge still garlanded with Christmas lights, and into the wealthier environs of those who paid highly for living a few more feet above sea level. It finally came to a stop at the foot of the fenced-off park, a great white mound surrounded by the expansive, expensive Edwardian town houses of Primrose Hill.

‘Local officers have sealed the area,’ said May, ‘but the council wants the body removed before nightfall. The hill is a focal point for well-heeled families, and as the shops in Queen’s Crescent are all staying open late over Christmas they’re worried about the negative impact on local spending.’

Bryant wiped his glasses with the end of his scarf and peered across the bleached expanse, its edges blurred by a lowering silver sky. Halfway up, a green nylon box had been erected. ‘You can tell them they’ll get it cleared when we’re good and ready to do so,’ he said, setting off towards the body.

‘Wait, you can’t do that, Mr Bryant.’ Dan Banbury, the PCU’s crime scene manager, was sliding through the pavement slush towards them.

‘Can’t do what?’

‘Just go off like that. I’ve established an approach path.’ He pointed to a corridor of orange plastic sticks leading up the hill. ‘You have to head in that way.’

‘I’m a copper, not a plane,’ said Bryant, waving him aside.

‘There are already enough tracks out there. I don’t want to have to eliminate any more.’

Making a sound like a displeased tapir, Bryant diverted to the narrow trodden channel, and the detectives made their way up the snow-covered slope to the tent, with Banbury anxiously darting ahead. ‘She was found just after six twenty a.m. by a man out walking his dog,’ he told them.

‘Why did it take so long to get to us?’ asked May. ‘It’s after two.’

‘There was a bit of a dispute about jurisdiction. They were going to handle it locally but all fatal incidents in Central North get flagged, and we put in a claim that was challenged.’

‘Meanwhile the victim’s been lying there like an ice lolly,’ said Bryant. ‘So much for the dignity of death. Show me what you’ve got.’

They reached the tent and Banbury went in ahead of them. The woman lay on her back on the frozen ground, her beige overcoat dusted with snow. From the alabaster sheen of her skin she might have been a marble church effigy reclining on a bier. A single battery lamp illuminated the wound on her upper throat. Blood had coagulated around the parted flesh and had formed a hard black puddle beneath her left shoulder. Her eyes were still open but had lost their lustre as they froze.

‘You’ve moved her,’ said Bryant, noting the snow on the front of her clothes.

‘That was the dog-walker,’ said Banbury. ‘All he could see as he got closer was a woman’s body lying in the middle of the common. There was a bit of a mist earlier. He thought maybe she had collapsed until he turned her over and saw she’d been stabbed.’

‘Looks like a very sharp kitchen knife or a cut-throat razor,’ said May. ‘The wound’s very clean, straight across the carotid artery. A real vicious sweep.’ He checked her palms and fingers and found them crimson. ‘No defence marks. Maybe she raised her hands to the wound and tried to stem the bleeding. Any other cuts to the body?’

‘Not that I can see, but bodies aren’t my field of expertise,’ Banbury admitted. ‘I’m more interested in where she fell.’

‘Why?’ May asked.

‘She’s in the exact centre of the common, for one thing, about a hundred and fifty metres in every direction. The dog-walker was met by a DS from Hampstead who called in his team. We took a full statement from him. I picked up the initial report and established the corridor to the site.’

‘Why did you do that before anything else?’

‘Because there are no footprints,’ Bryant cut in, waving his gloved hand across the virgin expanse of the hill.

‘That’s right, Mr Bryant. We’ve got hers, out to the middle but not back, the dog and his owner’s, also there and back, and the DS’s. Nothing else at all. Six is a bit early for the Primrose Hill crowd. Victim was last seen around eleven p.m. last night by one of her tenants. She was coming out of a restaurant. No more snow fell after about five a.m. According to the dog-walker, there were just her footprints leading out to the middle of the hillslope and nothing else. Not a mark in any direction that he could see.’

‘He must have been mistaken.’

Banbury blew on his hands. ‘Nope – he’s adamant, reckons he’s got twenty-twenty vision and there were no other prints at all.’

‘Then it’s simple – she must have taken her own life.’

‘What with? There’s no weapon.’

‘You haven’t had her clothes off yet; you can’t be sure of that,’ Bryant said. ‘Can we take the body or do we have to use the local resource?’

‘They’re happy for her to go to St Pancras if you sign it off.’

Bryant didn’t answer. He was peering at the victim, trying to conjure her last moments.

‘Could someone have swept away their footprints?’ asked May.

Bryant pulled a sour face. ‘Look at this snow – it’s crusted solid. Besides, why would anybody try to do such a thing? This is an urban neighbourhood, not Miss Marple country. There has to be a more obvious explanation. Got her mobile, have you?’

‘She received a call from a nearby phone box just after six this morning.’

‘A
phone box
,’ said May.

‘Yes, you might want to check last night’s – No!’ Banbury snatched the plastic bag back from Bryant, who had begun to open it. ‘Can you not take it out until I’ve finished with it?’

‘Just send us the call list, then.’ May was always keen to keep the peace. His partner was like a baby, reaching out to grab the things he wanted without thinking. Except that he was always thinking. ‘Come on, Arthur,’ he said, ‘we’ve enough to be getting on with.’

‘Where did she live?’ Bryant asked as he was being led away. Below him the skyline of London formed an elaborate ice sculpture that shone pink and silver in the gelid afternoon air.

‘Canonbury, I believe,’ Banbury said.

‘What was she doing over here so early on a Tuesday morning? Get those lads on it.’ He indicated the members of the Hampstead constabulary who were standing around in the car park. ‘She might have stayed somewhere nearby; maybe she has family here. Have them check taxis running from Canonbury to Chalk Farm early this morning.’

‘Why Chalk Farm?’ asked May.

‘To get here from there you either have to drop off your fare by the footbridge near Chalk Farm station or go all the way around,’ Bryant explained. ‘This place is a peninsula that’s a pain in the arse to reach because of the railway lines. That’s why the rich love it. They don’t have to rub shoulders with us plebs. Get someone to walk all the way around the perimeter, check for any kind of break in the snow. There must be
something
.’

After a brief stop at the PCU, the pair headed across to the gaudy offices of North One Developments Ltd, the property company Marsha Kastopolis had owned with her husband. Bypassing the confused staffers at their computer terminals, they found Phantasos Kastopolis in the building’s basement, sweating on an exercycle. The beetroot-faced property tycoon was leaking from the top of his dyed combover to the bulging waistband of his electric-blue nylon tracksuit. He grabbed a towel and mopped at his chain-festooned chest, annoyed at having his journey towards a coronary thrombosis interrupted.

‘If this is about burst pipes, there’s nothing I can do,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody freezing, innit, and them students haven’t paid their rent this month so they got no bloody complaining to do.’

‘It’s about your wife,’ said May, and he proceeded to explain the circumstances of Mrs Kastopolis’s death while Bryant wandered around examining the Californian gym equipment with ill-disguised distaste.

‘What was she doing out at that time?’ Kastopolis asked after he had demonstrably absorbed the news, a process that involved a fair amount of ranting but not much grief. ‘She never goes for a bloody walk.’

‘We were hoping you could tell us. Does she know anyone in Primrose Hill?’

‘I don’t know where her bloody friends live.’

‘Do you know if she had any enemies?’

‘She had enemies because I have enemies!’ Kastopolis exploded, throwing his towel on the floor. ‘They all got it in for us, ’cause they don’t like Cypriots owning their streets.’

‘I thought your wife was English.’

‘Yeah but she was married to me. I came here with nothing but the clothes I stood up in and bought the shops one by one. My father was a farmer, his fingers in the dirt, and look at me now. Thirty years of bloody hard work.’ He raised his spatulate fingers before them in an attempt to prove the point. ‘Of course I have enemies. They’re jealous of me. They try to ruin me. But I tell you what, my friend, I do a lot of good in this community.’

‘You infringe a lot of building regulations, too,’ said Bryant, unimpressed. He pulled a plastic folder from his overcoat. ‘Fire hazards, illegally blocked-off hallways, substandard materials, contractor lawsuits, environmental-health injunctions, it’s all here.’

‘Listen, if I waited for council approval before starting to build, I’d never get anything done.’

‘Let’s get back to your wife,’ said May. ‘You think someone was trying to get at you through her?’ He thought:
If that was the plan, they didn’t succeed. He’s not upset or even surprised.

‘Why else would anyone bother with her?’ Kastopolis pushed past them and began slicking down his hair before an elaborate gilt mirror. ‘She didn’t know nobody important.’

‘But she worked for you.’

‘Secretary stuff – posting the mail, making coffee, that sort of thing. I made her come to work just to keep her out of the shops, spending my bloody money. And to stop her eating. She was getting as fat as a pig.’

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘When she left the office yesterday evening. She was going out with her mates to some cocktail bar maybe. I don’t know what she does no more.’

‘She didn’t come home?’

‘We got a lot of places, and she’s got keys to them all. She stays in different ones when she’s had a few drinks.’

‘Alone?’

‘Of course alone! She belongs to me! What are you bloody saying?’

‘And you, do you stay in these flats without her?’

‘That’s got nothing to bloody do with it.’

‘It has if you can’t vouch for your whereabouts between last night and today.’

Kastopolis nearly ruptured a vein. ‘Ask my boys upstairs where I was. They was with me all evening. We left here at eight and went to the Rajasthan Palace until midnight. They was all with me again from six o’clock this morning. We work long hours here. Why you think we make so much money? Are you sure she’s dead?’

‘Very sure. She was stabbed.’

‘Primrose Hill, eh? No blacks around there – don’t know how she got stabbed. I can’t bloody believe this! I gave her everything. She didn’t have nothing when she met me, came down from Liverpool without a penny to her name. She owed me big time, and this is how I get paid for my kindness.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Stands to reason, innit? She was seeing someone behind my back.’ Kastopolis checked his hair in the mirror and turned to them. ‘Where do I pick up her body?’

‘What a revolting man,’ said Bryant as they headed back along the Caledonian Road. ‘All that grey chest hair poking out between his chains, it made me feel quite ill. Surely no one would speak about his wife like that if he’d killed her.’

‘Obviously it’s a long time since he cared anything for her,’ said May. ‘It sounds to me as if the arrangement of staying in empty apartments was more for his benefit than hers.’

‘I think we should talk to someone she counted as a friend,’ Bryant replied, ‘rather than a husband.’

They found Kaylie Neville seated alone in the Lion & Unicorn. The dishevelled forty-year-old was nursing an extremely large gin and tonic. Judging by her swollen red eyes and the number of lemon wedges in her drink, she had already been informed of her friend’s death. The pub was so still and quiet that the detectives stirred the dust motes in the late-afternoon sunlight as they sat down beside her at the copper-topped table.

‘Phantasos called me and just started having a go, yelling and carrying on like I’m to blame,’ she said, anxiously searching their faces. ‘You mustn’t believe anything he says about her. Nothing true or kind has ever come out of his mouth. He cheats, he steals, he has affairs. There’s not a decent bone in him. The things he gets up to in those flats, you don’t want to know.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Bryant, ‘but if Mr Kastopolis is such a terrible man, why did Marsha marry him?’