The Art of Murder (35 page)

At the insistence of Dr Braithwaite, Sonia had stayed away until now. She received formal letters each week, detailing her husband’s progress, or lack thereof, and she had done as the doctor advised. Then, upon the prompting of an Oxford Professor of Medicine who had been a close friend of her father’s, she had written to Braithwaite telling him that she would be visiting Archibald in two days’ time. The doctor could do little other than comply with her wishes.

‘I’ll leave you alone together, Mrs Thomson,’ he said, and turned towards the door. ‘A nurse will be
outside should you require anything. Please come and talk to me before you leave.’

Sonia heard the door close behind him. She glanced at her husband. He stared back at her, unseeing. She gathered her thoughts. The friend of the family who had advised her to visit her husband had said she should simply talk to him as though nothing had changed. But at that moment, staring at Archibald’s marble-still face, she realised that it was no easy thing to do.

‘I thought you would like to know that everyone at the paper is thinking of you, my darling,’ she began, swallowing back tears. ‘They have been very kind. And …’ She could no longer stem the tears and started to weep into her hands. Archibald did not react. After a moment, Sonia was able to pull herself together. She cleared her throat and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Then she removed a bundle of letters from her bag.

‘I received some letters today, darling. The strangest letters from a man called William Sandler.’ She looked into her husband’s eyes to see if the name produced a reaction in him. ‘I think you knew him as Harry … Harry Tumbril. Does that mean anything to you?’

Archibald stared at her. Silent.

Sonia felt a stab of fury. ‘Archibald? Husband? Does this letter mean nothing at all to you?’ She waved it in front of his face. He did not react.

She stood up and leaned over her husband. Grabbing him by the shoulders, she shook him hard.
‘Archibald!’ she shouted, and threw the letters on to the bed beside him. ‘Archie … Archie.’ She fell to her knees in front of him and started to sob again. Looking up, tears running down her cheeks, she grasped his chin in one hand and started to shake his head. ‘ARCHIE!’

She heard a sound behind her. The door to the corridor had opened. A nurse was standing there.

‘Is everything … ?’

Sonia ignored him and slapped her husband’s face hard. His head rocked from the blow, but he simply stared straight ahead.

‘Mrs Thomson!’

The nurse ran over and grabbed Sonia’s arm just as she was about to hit Archibald again. ‘Please, Mrs Thomson!’

Another male nurse appeared in the doorway, then strode in. Between them they turned Sonia away from her husband’s blank stare, helping her to leave the room. They had almost reached the door when they heard a sound from behind.

‘Tumbril.’

Sonia froze and the men tightened their grip.

‘No. Please!’ she cried. ‘Please stop! My husband spoke to me.’

The nurses looked at each other.

‘Please? He said something.’ Sonia pulled away, turning back towards Archibald.

‘Tumbril,’ he said quietly. His lips moved, but his face remained frozen, staring straight ahead. The nurses took Sonia’s arms again, lightly now. They
too seemed to be transfixed by the sight of the patient speaking.

‘Tumbril,’ Archibald repeated, his face a blank mask. ‘TUMBRIL!’ The sound reverberated about the walls of the room, a deafening roar now. The three onlookers stared, petrified and powerless, as Archibald fell forward on to the tiled floor, his forehead hitting the hard surface with a dull thud.

Dr Braithwaite was yelling something incoherent as he ran into the room, a warder a step behind him. ‘Out of the way!’ he shouted, pushing them aside. He crouched down beside Archibald and, with the help of the warder, slowly turned him over on to his back. Sonia made a strange sound in her throat as though she were choking. The two nurses had let her go and taken a step back.

Dr Braithwaite checked Archibald’s pulse and pulled up one eyelid. He let out a heavy sigh and his body seemed to sag. Standing, he walked over to Sonia. ‘I’m afraid your husband is dead.’

‘NO!’ she cried. ‘No!

That’s not … NO!’ She threw herself to the floor huddled next to her husband’s body. Then she leaned back, pulling his bloodied head towards her breast and cradling it, sobbing and rocking. The others stood by in silence until Braithwaite crouched down, helped the widow gently to her feet and guided her from the room.

Brick Lane, Stepney, Thursday 29 January, 2.05 p.m.

Pendragon sat in the swivel chair at the back of the darkened Media Room, the monitor casting a pallid blue haze all around. Apart from a scattering of red power lights, this was the only illumination. He sat back, resting his head against the back of the leather chair, and for a few moments ran through in his mind the first section of
The Inner Mounting Flame
, one of his favourite pieces of music.

An incongruous thought came to him. He was transported back twenty-six years into his rented flat in Oxford. He had graduated that summer. Now it was late autumn and he still had not decided what he was going to do with his life, but he had just suffered the greatest trauma he had yet known. He had discovered that Cheryl, his girlfriend of two years, had been sleeping with his best friend at college, Gareth.

It was 7 a.m. when Cheryl turned up at the flat they had shared. He had been up half the night waiting for her. He had opened the front door, saying nothing. When she tried to speak, he put a finger to his lips and pointed to a chair
in the living-room. Then, with his mind in a numb, nowhere land, he had paced over to the record player, put on
The Inner Mounting Flame
, sat in another chair directly facing Cheryl, and insisted they both stay and sit and listen to the whole side of the LP. The moment the last notes died away, he had stood up, put the record in its sleeve and ignored Cheryl when she called his name. Still silent, he had walked into the bedroom, placed the record in his case of albums and picked up his two bags. Reappearing in the lounge with the sum of his possessions, he walked past her, through the door and out on to the pavement.

Now he sat up, lifted his head and saw the light from the blue monitor dominating the room. A single word had popped into his head – Eberswalde. Eberswalde … the town a few miles from Berlin. He had heard that name years ago. Yes, it was all coming back. Eberswalde … His uncle Sid had been a corporal in the 1st Armoured Division. He had been stationed in Germany in the late 1950s. Uncle Sid was always regaling Jack with stories from his halcyon days in the army. One of his favourites had been about the time he almost went AWOL because of a debauched weekend spent in the town of Eberswalde. There was
never
an army base in Eberswalde.

A cold chill ran down Pendragon’s spine. He jumped up from the chair, yanked open the door of the Media Room and dashed into the hall. He strode towards his office. He could see it was empty and ran on to the Briefing Room. That too was empty. Retracing his steps, he went over to the main desk where Rosalind Mackleby was on duty. ‘Sergeant, have you seen Turner?’

‘Here, sir.’

Pendragon spun round to see Jez walking towards him munching a ham sandwich. ‘Spot of late lunch,’ he added, holding up the other half still in the packet.

‘Turner … the film from the party at Berrick and Price? Can you get it – right now?’

‘Sure. But …’

‘Now!’

Pendragon was in one of the two chairs in front of the monitors in the Media Room staring anxiously at the machines when Turner came in with the DVD in his hand, his mouth crammed with bread and meat. He sat down and slid the disk into a slot in the front of one of the machines, on a rack perpendicular with the control desk. ‘Give us a sec,’ he said, and tapped at a couple of buttons. ‘So, what’s this about then, guv?’ he asked, swivelling round to face the monitors.

‘Take it to about ten minutes in,’ Pendragon replied, grim-faced.

Turner touched the ‘Fast-forward’ button and the images on the monitor became a blur. He pushed ‘Stop’ then ‘Play’, and on the screen they could both see the gathering at the gallery over a week earlier, just before the first murder. The camera moved around the room.

‘Go forward about sixty seconds.’

The sergeant depressed the control and the film rolled on, slower than the first time. When he pressed ‘Stop’ the picture froze, showing a small group of people talking. There were Kingsley Berrick and Noel Thursk, side-on to the camera. Between them, with her back to the camera, was Gemma Locke in her low-cut, black cocktail dress.

‘Okay,’ Pendragon said. ‘Can you zoom in?’

‘Yeah. Which bit of the picture?’

‘Gemma Locke.’

Turner nudged a control and the image on the screen slowly expanded. He moved a toggle and the image shifted to the left as it grew bigger.

‘Stop!’ Pendragon said.

The entire screen was now taken up with the head and shoulders of Gemma Locke.

‘Okay, Turner, nudge the film forward. She’s starting to look to her left.’ The film moved on a few frames at a time.

‘Stop! Can you enhance that image?’

‘Yes.’

A horizontal line shimmied down the screen and in its wake left a picture that was twice as clear as the original. Pendragon moved his face close to the monitor. He could just about see a dark mark on Gemma Locke’s neck. ‘Close in there,’ he said, pointing to a spot on the screen. ‘And can you make it any clearer?’

‘I’ll try.’

The picture shifted once more. The horizontal line again moved down the screen, leaving an enhanced still image of Gemma Locke’s neck. In the centre of the image was a faint scar approximating a circle and a narrow vertical line of scar tissue leading downward. It was clearly the faint remnants of a tattoo removed by laser.

‘That’s the best I can …’ Turner froze and then slowly looked round at Pendragon. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said.

‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Superintendent Hughes asked, staring at the monitor in the Media Room.

‘One hundred and ten per cent,’ Pendragon replied, and told her about how Gemma Locke had lied to him about Eberswalde.

Hughes still looked doubtful for a second. She stared at the floor, concentrating, then suddenly snapped into action mode. ‘Right. I’ll get an armed squad mobilised immediately.’

Pendragon was nodding. ‘As back-up, ma’am. Let me go in first. She knows me. And she won’t be expecting us.’

‘Inspector! The woman is insane and extremely dangerous.’

‘I know. Turner and I will go together … armed. You can have the SWAT team ten seconds away.’

‘Why, Jack?’

‘I honestly couldn’t tell you,’ he replied, holding the Super’s steady gaze.

‘Very well. And you know where she is?’

‘Oh yes,’ Pendragon replied, recalling the Bermondsey address Sammy Samson had dug up. He suddenly had a clear image of Gemma Locke standing in her apartment
the previous day, her face straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, an image tarnished only by the thick swathe of bandage around her head. ‘I have a studio in Bermondsey,’ she had said.

Freezing rain was hammering against the road, coming down so heavily it was almost impossible to see the buildings only a few yards beyond the windscreen. Twenty-two units had been fabricated out of a vast complex of Victorian grain stores that backed on to the river near Tate Modern. Gemma Locke’s stood at the end of a row, number eleven. It was a two-storey cube with at least two hundred square metres of floor space.

All the occupants of the other offices and units had been surreptitiously moved to safety. Pendragon and Turner donned Kevlar jackets and duty belts, each with a holster for the standard police issue Glock 17 pistol, a baton and a small tear-gas canister. They crossed from the car towards the rear of the units as nine highly trained officers from the Specialist Firearms Command, known as CO19, dressed in full body armour and armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 machine-guns as well as Glock pistols, took up position around unit number eleven.

Pendragon went ahead. Crouching low, he traversed the tarmac and pulled up against the back wall. The brickwork was sodden and had turned a dozen shades darker than normal. A gutter overhead had slipped from its bracket and freezing water in a sheet a metre wide cascaded down from the roof. As Turner reached the wall, Pendragon moved off towards the rear door. He tried the handle. It was unlocked and opened inwards.

Out of the rain it was suddenly eerily quiet with just the steady beating of water on the roof to dispel the stillness. Pendragon looked around. They were in a small lobby about eight feet square. A door in the far wall stood ajar. A strong smell, a blend of chemical cleaner, paint and linseed oil, pervaded the place. Jack leaned against the doorframe and pushed the door slowly inwards.

It opened on to a large space, considerably bigger then the ground floor of most suburban houses. The walls had been painted a creamy white, and the floor was of highly polished dark oak parquet. Two large windows set in one wall had been blacked out so there was no natural light coming into the room. Around the three other walls ran a balconied mezzanine level. A large chandelier holding dozens of lit candles hung from the centre of the vaulted ceiling and cast a surprisingly strong light over the room. But it was a strangely hollow light, a sickly orange hue. The chemical smell was stronger in here.

It took a moment for the two police officers to see the figure seated in the chair at the far end of the room. Pendragon walked carefully across the wooden floor, crouching and turning as he had been trained to do. He had the Glock gripped in both hands and was scanning the shadows in the far corners of the room, expecting the unexpected. Turner was a couple of paces behind him.

Dr Geoff Hickle was strapped to the chair, unconscious. He was dressed in a heavy green coat and a Russian-style fur hat. Pendragon had seen that hat before. His body was strapped so he was sitting back in the chair, but his head was slumped forward. His splendid teeth had been smashed and a pipe stuck into his ruined mouth. His right
ear had been removed and placed in his lap. The wound had been wrapped in a bloodstained bandage pressed against the side of his head with a strip of adhesive gauze.