Chelsea Mansions

TWENTY-FIVE

O ver the following days Kathy withdrew. She occupied herself with swimming, cleaning and repainting her flat, taking long walks and going to the movies. She wanted to avoid analysing what had happened, but the world outside kept intruding, forcing her to confront it. For a start there were the newspapers, and radio and TV coverage, which she could hardly avoid, especially the Sunday papers which were full of the story. There was general respect for the Hadden-Vanes’ confession, which was seen as brave and a welcome change from the hypocrisy that usually surrounded MP sex scandals in the UK. There was also much rehashing of the Russian question, and of the police investigation. There were even a few photographs of Kathy herself.

Then there was her friend Nicole Palmer, who worked in police records for the National Identification Service and whose partner was an MPS detective, and who told her of the rumours and opinions that were circulating within the force. There was general agreement that the higher echelons had failed to support Kathy as they should, and that breaking up the team was a disgrace. Kathy would have taken more comfort from this if she hadn’t felt that Sharpe and his bosses were justified in the way they’d reacted.

Kathy also had calls from several team members-Dot, Pip and Bren-all anxious to know how she was coping, and letting her know where they had been posted. Most surprising was a call from Zack, who told her that they’d decided to keep him on at Queen Anne’s Gate to manage the new computers. He offered to keep her informed of developments.

John Greenslade also called, several times, before she finally rang him back.

‘Kathy! I’m so glad you’ve rung. I’ve been worried about you. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, John, thanks. How are you?’

‘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.