Chelsea Mansions

TWENTY-NINE

K athy woke with a start, taking a moment to remember where she was. Reaching up to pull the curtain aside, she saw the sky lit by a pearly pink glow of dawn. Cars driving along Memorial Drive on the far side of the river still had their headlights on, and when she opened the window a cool freshness flooded in, along with the chirping of birds.

She pulled on a T-shirt, track pants and trainers and went quietly down the stairs to the front door. The street was deserted, its lamps forming a chain of glowing points beneath the trees away into the distance. She turned east towards the rising sun and jogged briskly along Beacon Street until it emerged onto the broad green slope of Boston Common, where other runners could be seen among the trees. She passed the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House and continued into the grid of narrow historic streets of Beacon Hill, then down between the towers of the financial district until she reached the wharves of the waterfront. She stopped there for a while at the water’s edge, watching the early morning flights coming into Logan far across the water, before turning and heading back.

When she opened the front door she was met by a delicious smell of cooking from the dining room. Looking inside she was hailed by Peter, the taller and more extroverted of the two owners, who invited her to sit down for breakfast. This morning his partner Tom, busy in the kitchen, was offering banana maple porridge with buttered apples, followed by sweet corn fritters with roast tomato and bacon. Kathy said that sounded wonderful.

It seemed like a propitious start to the day, made more so when she opened her laptop and found an email from London with several old photographs that John had discovered among Toby’s documents. Some showed various of his relatives posing with other people Toby hadn’t been able to identify, while a couple of others were of unknown groups standing outside Chelsea Mansions. Kathy put the computer into her backpack with her little Sony IC Recorder and a notebook, and got changed to meet Emerson.

It was Saturday, and they weren’t the only ones with the idea of driving down to Cape Cod, but Emerson, at the wheel of his Lincoln Zephyr, was unperturbed by the traffic and Kathy felt pleasantly cocooned as they drove sedately southward, past Plymouth and on towards the Cape. After they crossed the Sagamore Bridge onto Cape Cod much of the traffic turned towards the warmer beaches of the south shores of the island, facing Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound, while Emerson took the old road along the north side, through a succession of small historic towns overlooking sandy bays and pretty boat harbours.

‘Janice was married to a marine biologist based at the Atlantic Research Center up ahead at North Truro,’ Emerson explained. ‘He was drowned in a bad storm back in 2002, and Janice has stayed on in their house in Provincetown. It suits her out here. She loves the place, the white sand dunes and salt marshes, the beech forests, and she’s a great hiker. She hates the city, not at all like her sister.’

‘You said they didn’t get on?’

‘They tolerated each other, I’d say. Janice is much younger-Nancy would have been eleven or twelve when Janice was born. Their father retired a few years later and he more or less reared the new toddler single-handed. The two were very close, whereas Nancy saw less of her father when she was growing up. There was the war, and then he was working for the State Department and away a lot. She was always more attached to her mother.’

‘The artist.’

‘Yes, Maisy was really a very fine sculptor. There are several of her pieces in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her husband was a diplomat. He died some time ago, but Maisy lasted until just last year. She was quite a character. I got to know her well.’

They came at last to Provincetown, at the end of the road around the long curving reach of the island. They were too early to meet Janice, and Emerson took Kathy on a tour of the town, ending at a seafood restaurant overlooking the beach where they sat down for lunch.

As they were waiting for their order, Emerson, looking out to the boats in the harbour, pointed to a couple of swimmers with snorkels. ‘Well now, there’s another funny thing. It’s strange how your memory brings things up. When we were flying over to England Nancy asked me if I’d ever gone scuba diving. I thought it was an odd question, out of the blue. I told her no, and she said it would frighten her, diving deep under the water.’

He shook his head as if to clear the memory. ‘Anyway, Janice lives just a couple of blocks away,’ he said. ‘Not far from where Norman Mailer used to live. Apparently they got on quite well. He probably recognised a fellow grump.’

‘This is going to be difficult, is it?’

‘Well, don’t be too disappointed if you get nothing. I’d buy her some flowers except that she’d know I was trying to butter her up and she’d take offence.’

When Janice opened her front door Kathy saw that he hadn’t been exaggerating. She was dressed in old jeans and a faded T-shirt, and her grey hair was cropped severely short. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of them and her lips pursed tight.

‘Emerson,’ she acknowledged grudgingly.

‘Janice!’ His joviality sounded unconvincing, and Janice flinched as he made to kiss her cheek. ‘Let me introduce the person I spoke about. Detective Inspector Kathy Kolla has been investigating Nancy’s death.’

They shook hands, Janice unsmiling as she scrutinised her visitor. She kept them waiting on the threshold just a fraction too long before inviting them in.

It was a timber house, its plain furnishings set off by clusters of natural objects-pebbles, sea-bleached flotsam, skulls of small animals-and also by framed photographs of blossoms, sea and dunescapes, birds.

‘Beautiful photographs,’ Kathy said.

‘Janice is a very accomplished nature photographer,’ Emerson said. ‘I expect she gets her artistic talent from her mother, eh Janice?’

She ignored him and indicated seats around a scrubbed pine table.

‘You’d better show me your ID,’ she said to Kathy.

‘Oh, I can vouch for Kathy, Janice,’ Emerson protested. ‘I met her in London, and-’

‘All the same.’ Janice examined Kathy’s Metropolitan Police pass and the business card she gave her. ‘I would have thought you’d have been accompanied by an officer of the state or federal police. I suppose they do know you’re here questioning people, do they?’

‘I’m just here in an informal capacity, Mrs Connolly, clearing up a few loose ends so that our coroner can close the case. I’m relying entirely on your cooperation. You don’t have to answer any of my questions if you don’t want to.’

‘I won’t,’ the other woman said decisively, and sat back with arms folded.

‘We want to clear up the possibility that Nancy, or some other member of your family, may have had some previous connection to the place where she was staying in London, or the people who are living there now.’

‘What possible relevance could that have to her death? I understood it was a simple case of street violence.’

‘We’re concerned by the coincidence that another person living in Cunningham Place, where Nancy and Emerson were staying…’ Kathy noticed Janice’s hostile glance in Emerson’s direction, ‘… was murdered just a few days later. We need to rule out the possibility that there was any connection between the two crimes.’

‘Who was this other person?’

‘His name was Mikhail Moszynski, a wealthy Russian businessman.’

‘Oh yes, you told me, Emerson, didn’t you? I was upset at the funeral, and I don’t think it registered. Well, what of it?’

‘Are you aware of any connection?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I have some photographs here on my laptop that I’d like to show you.’

Kathy pulled out her computer and quickly opened up the file and began to show the pictures to Janice, beginning with individual shots of the Moszynski household, including Vadim Kuzmin, Nigel Hadden-Vane and Freddie Clarke.

‘No, I know none of these people.’

‘Nancy took some family photographs with her to London. Perhaps you could just identify the people for me.’ They opened the pouch and went through the pictures, Kathy taking notes of the names of cousins, uncles, grandparents.

‘I really don’t see the point of this. Most of these are ancient. How can they possibly be relevant?’

‘Nearly finished, Mrs Connolly. Just a few more.’

‘Hang on,’ Emerson said, peering over Kathy’s shoulder at one of the photos. ‘Isn’t that Maisy?’

It was a picture of three adults and a teenage girl grouped together on the steps of a building, their eyes half closed against the bright sunlight on their smiling faces. Emerson was pointing at the woman who was standing between two men.

‘I’m sure that’s your mother, Janice.’

Janice gave it another reluctant glance. ‘Maybe.’

‘And isn’t that your father with her? And the girl-could it be Nancy?’

Janice gave a sigh of annoyance. ‘Very likely. So what?’

‘Well, that looks a lot like Chelsea Mansions in the background, where we stayed.’

Kathy looked more closely at the background, tall sash windows in dark brickwork, a black doorway with white painted surround. It might be Chelsea Mansions, she thought, or a thousand other similar places in London, or Boston come to that. ‘What about the other man?’ Kathy asked. ‘Do you recognise him?’

‘Obviously someone they met somewhere. I’ve never seen him before. And I’m not convinced that’s Nancy. It’s probably the other man’s daughter… oh.’

Something had struck Janice. She stared again at the photo. ‘That dress, it was Nancy’s. I remember now, Pop and Mom took Nancy to London for her sixteenth birthday. I was only five. They left me behind with Grandma.’

‘When would that have been?’ Kathy asked, but Janice waved her hand dismissively.

‘This is nonsense,’ she said impatiently. ‘This has no relevance to you.’

Kathy didn’t press the point. She asked Janice to recall later trips made by Nancy to the UK. There had been two that she remembered, both with her husband, staying at the Hilton.

‘And now I must ask you to leave,’ she said. ‘I have another appointment.’

At the front door she added, ‘Your police must have a lot more time and money to spare than ours, if they can afford to send an inspector across the Atlantic just to check a few trivial details like this.’

‘Many thanks for your time,’ Kathy said evenly. ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted your afternoon.’

‘Dadgummed bitch,’ Emerson breathed when they got back into the car. It was such an uncharacteristic outburst from the gentlemanly Emerson, and said with such feeling, that Kathy had to laugh.

‘But that was Nancy and her parents,’ he protested, ‘and they were standing outside Chelsea Mansions. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘It’s possible. I could get someone in London to check.’

‘If Janice was right and this was Nancy’s sixteenth birthday, that would make it the twenty-sixth of April, 1956.’

He slowly turned the car and began the long drive back to Boston. On the way Kathy sent a text message to John with the date and asked him to check the background to the photograph, then sat back to admire the well-maintained clapboard houses they passed in picturesque villages or set back among the trees of private acreages.

‘You know what I find so upsetting?’ Emerson said after a long silence. ‘The idea that Nancy might have kept it a secret from me. How could she have gone through that whole charade, choosing the hotel and all, and not told me the real purpose of the trip for her?’ Then he added, ‘Unless it was something shameful. Do you think that could be it? Might she have wanted to revisit the scene of something bad, something embarrassing? Might she have been abused there, perhaps? Was she revisiting the scene of a trauma she couldn’t confess to me?’

‘It needn’t be anything like that, Emerson. She may just have been a bit reticent about telling you that she wanted to revisit a happy memory from her past. Especially when she discovered that Chelsea Mansions wasn’t the splendid hotel she remembered.’

He gave a rueful smile. ‘I guess you’re right. And if she was there in her teens it could have nothing to do with her murder, after all. Those other people in the old pictures are all dead and gone.’

When they got back to Beacon Street he said, ‘Will you be leaving now?’

‘I suppose so, yes. I’ll have to check available flights.’

‘It seems a shame to have come so far and seen so little. Let me at least take you out to dinner at one of Nancy’s favourite haunts. Nothing fancy, just a very friendly little Italian place down in the North End where we often went on a Saturday night. What do you say?’

‘You’ve given me so much of your time already, Emerson, I’d feel guilty about taking more.’

‘Nonsense, it’d cheer me up no end. I’ll phone Maria. I’m sure she’ll squeeze us in when I explain. Shall we say eight o’clock?’

So she agreed, and spent an enjoyable evening with him, talking about all the places she should have seen, and would have to return to one day.