Chelsea Mansions (30 page)

‘Terrible. I’m feeling very guilty.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It was all my fault, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t cast doubt on the letter to
The Times
, you wouldn’t have turned your attention to the MP, and none of this would have happened.’

‘There was a lot more to it than that, John.’

‘All the same . . . I’d feel happier if I could talk it through with you, face to face. Would you do that? For an ex- consultant?’

She laughed. ‘From an ex-detective.’

‘They haven’t kicked you out, have they?’

‘Not yet. The resignation letter’s in my bag.’

‘You mustn’t do that, Kathy! Please, let’s talk it through.’

So in the end she agreed to meet him one day for lunch. But not yet. She wasn’t ready for it yet.

She also met with Brock each day. Suzanne had now been away from her business for almost a month, and was having to spend time in Battle, commuting back up to London each evening to visit him in hospital. Kathy usually called in each morning, and after discussing whatever had come up of interest in the papers they might play a few hands of gin rummy, or a game of chess. But Kathy had brought him his laptop and copied her flash drive case records onto it, and inevitably his attention would stray back to the larger and more interesting puzzle of the murders in Chelsea.

One day he seemed particularly preoccupied, and finally said, ‘The whole investigation relies on one premise: that Peebles mistook Nancy Haynes for Marta Moszynski. But if that’s not true, nothing else makes sense, does it?’

‘No.’ Kathy felt a familiar reluctance to go over it all again, and picked up the pack of cards and began shuffling.

‘How did you feel about that idea, when it was first suggested?’

‘I didn’t like it. I’d seen photographs of Nancy and I’d met Marta, and I didn’t see much resemblance.’

‘Me neither.’

‘But we never met Nancy in the flesh. Maybe the photographs were flattering. Maybe she was more stooped in her everyday posture, when she wasn’t posing for the camera.’

‘There must be some way to pin that down. Computer simulations? A reconstruction?’

‘Well, it’s not our problem now, is it?’

Brock looked at the cards she’d dealt him and played out the hand, then scratched his chin. ‘I’ve been thinking about Harry Peebles.’

‘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

T
he following 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?’