The Happier Dead (12 page)

Still, it was too much of a coincidence to have the company implicated, however loosely, in one brother’s disappearance, and for the other to turn up murdered on their property half a decade later. If Prudence Egwu really had kept paid men on his brother’s case, perhaps they could give him more information. They must have written reports, submitted expenses. Oates knew there wasn’t a front garden in the suburbs more meticulously kept than a private detective’s expense forms. He remembered the victim’s address from the file. He decided to drop round there to see if he could find any record of the investigations before the tech team arrived.

He took the Underground. When he sat down on the padded bench, he saw someone had scratched the letters ‘M.R.’ with a coin onto the carriage window. By Notting Hill Gate tube station the shops were still open, but the shopkeepers had taken their goods from the window displays. One store selling cephoscopes on the corner had nothing in the window but a handwritten sign saying
No stock or cash kept on premises
. The street where Prudence Egwu had lived swept down from Camden Hill, wide and tree-lined. The houses themselves stood back from the road, with gleaming black front doors beneath porticos at the tops of stairs. Despite the cold Oates grew warm as he toiled up. The house was near the brow of the hill, overlooked by nothing but sky. The door had a keycard lock, and he used his police pass to open it.

The entrance hall was flagged with black and white marble tiles. Oates opened the set of double doors on the left hand side and whistled. The dining room was thirty feet long. He flicked the lights. Down the length ran a long mahogany table, polished to the point where a ring of dim stars floated underneath the chandelier. The chairs were green leather buttoned in shining bronze, with wooden eagle claws for feet. On the walls there hung a picture composed of a couple of childish squares in oil. It was altogether the kind of room that seemed too expensive to be the property of any one man, but existed in Oates’s mind as a place which could be hired out by the rich for weddings and funerals.

The thing that affected him most deeply was not the opulence of the furnishings, but the space. Space was the rarest thing in London, and as the space for the body was curtailed, so the mind was similarly circumscribed. The physical barrier presented by the walls of his cubicle at the office and the be-suited bodies of tired men on the tube prevented his mind from wandering as effectively as if his thoughts had been creatures of flesh and blood. And what was that sound? Silence! No chatter of phones, no hard drive whirring, no traffic, no television, no neighbours moving in the walls, shattering the illusion of solitude. With this much quiet, a man could be dignified. The room made him uncomfortable in a way no blood spattered back street could ever have done.

He pulled one of the seats out from the table, but it looked so clean he hesitated to sit down. He set it back in its place, being careful to align the balls clutched in the carved talons with their corresponding dents in the thick carpet. He pictured the financier with no next of kin to hear of his death, sitting alone at the end of that long table, flanked by twenty empty chairs. Oates thought fondly of the clutter of his own home, and the toys on the carpet.

He went over to look at the modernist painting. He couldn’t see the point of it, and the very fact that someone like him thought it pointless would be part of its attraction. He knew instinctively that there were people in the world, rich people, who would think that this painting was worth more than him and a thousand like him. And in financial terms, they would no doubt be right. The working life of a DCI would not produce enough money to move the painting from a wall in this house to a wall in someone else’s. It was offensive for a thing like this to hoard millions between the four wooden planks of the frame, when the Met had not the manpower to protect the weak of the city.

He went over to the silver drinks tray standing fully crewed with cut crystal decanters on the sideboard beneath the painting. He wouldn’t normally of course, but his encounter with Minor had forced him to break the seal, and he needed to take the edge off his irritation. He liberated the whisky bottle from its silver collar, and poured himself a measure.

Oates left the room and wandered back down the hall to the study, and knew he had found what he was looking for. Above the desk there was a portrait of Prudence Egwu as he had been before the Treatment, an elderly black statesman in a suit and tie, standing with his hand resting on a globe. Oates raised the glass to him.

One side of the office had been converted into a strong wall. A safe-like box about a foot in depth was fitted with a panel over the surface, and a shutter of bonded steel a couple of inches thick that could descend over the entire recess. The shutter, which locked with another keypad at the wall, was raised. Out of curiosity Oates passed his police card over the keypad, and it bleeped red. Someone had gone to the trouble of disabling the factory settings; only the proper code or a warrant frequency would release the lock. Inside the alcove were hundreds of paper files in slings. Oates knew that men like Prudence Egwu trusted the physical security of their homes over the computer. When you kept important files on your computer, you never knew whose skinny fingers were reaching up the wires to rifle them.

A couple of the folders had been pulled from their moorings, and lay strewn on the carpet. Oates squatted to leaf through the pages, but without context they were meaningless. He found graphs, columns of numbers in a spreadsheet, photocopies, some with notes written in a tidy hand in the margin. The labels of the files still hanging in their slings were marked with letters and numbers, and gave no clue as to their contents. He looked up, and noticed the cameras hanging in the corners of the room.

The security panel was mounted on the wall of the study. Oates set down the glass on the desk blotter, and scrolled in fast rewind backwards through the hours since he had been woken by Grape’s call. The grainy screen showed 1:45am as a masked man approached the front door and entered the keycode. As the door opened the intruder looked back over his shoulder at the empty street, craning out from the portico with an almost comic furtiveness. Oates tracked him through the hall, where he switched the light on, stood for a few seconds, then thought better of it and switched it back off.

In the few seconds of illumination, Oates was surprised to see that the mask he was wearing was an ornate Venetian titillation, with tiny bells hanging from the colourful papier-mache crest. He used a lighter to see his way through the hall to the study. He entered another code into the panel of the strong wall, which lifted into the air. He did not need to pause to read the files, by the light of the flame he carried he removed two neatly from their slings and slipped them into a leather satchel. Then he pulled others from the shelf and spread them over the floor in a simulation of disorder. He went back out through the hall, and closed the door behind him. On the doorstep, blithely unaware of the external camera, he removed his mask to reveal the face of a handsome young man.

With the mask off, the expression made Oates want to protect him from whatever it was he had gotten himself involved with. He looked so proud standing there, and so relieved, already congratulating himself as a master criminal as he prepared to slip away into the night with his illicit bundle. Oates waved to him on the little screen.
I’ll be seeing you later
. He looked forward to finding out what was in those missing files.

The awareness that he was not alone in the house dawned slowly on Oates. It was an atmospheric phenomenon, brought to a sudden focus by the sound of a muffled shout from upstairs. Oates removed his gun from the mooring in his belt. He walked softly into the hall, risking a look up the stairs. He returned to the security panel and worked the keypad.
Number of occupants in house?
Three.
Location?
Study, one. Master bedroom, two
.
Would you like to signal the police? All our alarms are silent and confidential!
Oates lingered over the question for a few seconds, and pressed ‘Decline’.

He mounted the stairs, grateful for the deep pile of the carpet. The sounds were coming from a closed door on the second landing; as Oates drew nearer, they took on the unmistakable quality of a man or woman being beaten. There was the sharp sound of a slap, and then a muffled cry, the rumble of a low voice and the shrill quaver of a desperate response. He pressed his ear to the door to try to gauge their position in the room. He stood back, and kicked the door in.

In the first instant of apprehension, the thing on the bed in front of him was a monster. It seemed to be tearing itself apart, one half begging for release, the other half urging on the coupling. Like some horrible manifestation of his own conflicted instincts, the thing incited violence and begged for peace from two different mouths. After a few seconds the image of the demon dispersed, and Oates realised that it was a man raping a young woman whose arms were handcuffed to the posts of the wide headboard. The man was so intent on his work that he did not even hear the crash of the door behind him, but the woman, whose wild eyes stared over his shoulder, saw Oates and her screams intensified.

Oates holstered his gun. He grabbed the man’s shoulder and flung him backwards. He stumbled off the bed but managed to keep his footing, his erection bobbing in the air in front of him in an obsequious greeting. He was a young guy, late twenties and well built, a fact from which Oates took a momentary savour; no need to hold back with a guy built like that.

The man had the presence of mind to cast about him for a weapon, and his eyes alighted on an open backpack on the floor, from which protruded an effusion of metal and leather objects. He dipped for it and came up clutching some kind of sex toy, two vibrating balls attached to a length of silk. Just for a moment the two men paused, breathing heavily, and looked at the absurd device with which he had armed himself.

He swung one of the love eggs at Oates. It bounced with a harmless clatter against his shoulder pads, and Oates punched him in the face. As the blood began to flow from his nose he cried out, “No, no, no,” in the high-pitched, querulous tones of an old lady remonstrating with her Pekinese. He turned to run, but Oates grabbed him by the hair and hurled him through the door of the bathroom. He hit the marble wall of the tub. He scrabbled to right himself on the bathmat and had found his feet before Oates could get through the door. He went to slam it shut, but the floor of the bathroom was wet and his feet went from under him. He collapsed backwards into the tub, and Oates was on him. He grabbed him again by the hair, and all the time he kept saying, “No, no,” only now there was no more sense in it than a dog’s barking.

Oates noticed that the soap in the tray beside the bath still had its wrapper on, as if this was not someone’s house but a fancy hotel. He held the man’s head under the tap and turned it with his free hand. The flared spout erupted with a pressurised stream of freezing water, and Oates left it on. When he finally shut the water off the “nos” had stopped, as had the struggling, and the naked man turned on his side to glub and spit mouthfuls of water into the gold plughole. Oates took off his coat and hung it over the towel warmer. He dried his hands, took out his handcuffs, and yanked the man’s wrist over the edge of the tub to fix it to the pipe running underneath. Finally he picked up the pair of trousers that lay crumpled in the corner of the room, and husked the wallet.

“What do you want? I’ll give you anything you want, just please, don’t hurt me.”

This raised a giggle from the room next door.

“You fucking bitch!” the man shouted. “You set me up, you little fucking whore! When this is over I’m going to find you and I’m going to…”

Oates shut the door to the bathroom and walked back over to the taps. He pulled the porcelain handled lever that switched the flow from the taps to the shower, and then turned the hot tap instead of the cold. He allowed the scalding rain to fall on the writhing flanks of the man for a second, and a cloud of steam filled the air. Being clothed before the pink and naked figure in the tub made Oates think quite suddenly of Mike, who had finally stopped his dad from coming in the bathroom to hoik him out of the bath at the age of six. Oates liked to hold the towel for him, to wrap his warm body in white folds, but once they asked you not to, that was it. The man stopped screaming and began to whimper once the shower was shut off. Oates sat on the edge of the bath and looked through the wallet.

“Who are you?”

“Detective Chief Inspector Oates, Metropolitan Police.”

It frustrated Oates that this answer seemed to grant the man some comfort.

“Give me a towel.”

Oates peeled the sodden bath mat from the floor and dropped it on top of him. The man arranged it over his groin.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to answer my questions,” Oates said, “and then stay here quietly until I can get someone down to arrest you for sexual assault.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Hugo Travers-Brom. Seventy-five years of age, resident in Chelsea, London.”

Oates tossed the ID down so that it hit him on the top of the head and bounced into his naked lap.

“How do you know Prudence Egwu?”

“Prudence… what?”

“The man who owns this house.”

“I’ve got no fucking idea. The hotel I’d booked us into was double booked and I can’t take her home with me, and she said she had a friend’s place we could use.”

“I’m going to go back out there now and talk to that young girl, and if she tells me a different story, I’m going to find the biggest, spikiest dildo in that bag of tricks and I’m going to come in here and I’m going to stick it up your pompous arsehole whilst I read you your rights. Now do you want to tell me anything different?”

“No, no I swear, it was her idea!”

Oates shut the door on him and went back into the bedroom.

“A
RE YOU OKAY
?”