Where Memories Lie

CHAPTER 14

But [Tim] Llewellyn’s main point, to which he returned several times, was that Sotheby’s was not a police force. “We have a right to protect the anonymity of our clients. We avoid breaking the laws in the countries where we operate. Our clients seek anonymity for a variety of reasons, but it is not our job to police our clients.”

—Peter Watson, Sotheby’s: Inside Story

Gemma’s first impulse, when she had dropped the boys at their respective schools, was to confront Erika about her husband’s murder.

But then, Gemma considered a little more calmly, maybe Erika had not thought it relevant, and perhaps David Rosenthal’s death had no connection at all with Kristin Cahill’s.

But Gemma wouldn’t know until she had the facts, and so decided she should start with the case itself, and talk to Erika when she knew enough to ask useful questions.

Kit had said that David Rosenthal had been murdered in a garden near the Albert Bridge. It would have been Chelsea’s patch, then. So for the second time that week, Gemma found herself heading for Lucan Place, and an interview with Detective Inspector Kerry Boatman.

“Dominic Scott knew Harry Pevensey and Kristin Cahill. And it was Kristin who took the brooch in for sale,” Cullen said as they got back into the car, sounding exultant. “And he had rows with both of them on the days they were murdered. That puts him square in the frame, alibi or no alibi, if you ask me.”

Kincaid didn’t like it when things seemed too pat, nor could he dismiss alibis so easily. And it didn’t tell them where Harry had got the brooch, or why Amir Khan had had a row with Kristin, or why he had been so reluctant at first to cooperate with the police.

“Let’s talk to Dom Scott again before we start jumping to conclusions. Does he have a job, do you think, or will we find him at home?”

“Melody said something about him being on the board of his grandfather’s company,” Cullen said a bit grudgingly.

“Having met him, I can’t quite see him turning up for work on the dot every day in some City office. And Andy Monahan said he was sure Dom Scott was using drugs. That fits in with what the barmaid told you about his dodgy friends, but how does that fit in with Harry Pevensey, who liked his gin? And what on earth brought the two of them together?”

Kristin Cahill, and now Harry Pevensey, dead on his watch, two people perhaps not blameless, but certainly not deserving of ruthless and brutal murder. He would find out who had done this, but not by jumping the gun. When he got there, he would make sure it would stick.

Dominic Scott answered the door. This morning, however, he wore a slightly less ratty version of jeans and T-shirt than Andy Monahan, and looked infinitely more exhausted. He stared at them, recognition of Kincaid only slowly dawning in his eyes.

“You came about Kristin,” he said. “Is there—have you—”

“No, we haven’t any news about Kristin. We wanted to talk to you about something else. Can we come in?” Kincaid sensed Cullen’s impatience, but he didn’t want a repeat of yesterday’s rather bizarre fainting spell, and he meant to take on Dom Scott at his own pace.

“Oh, right.” Dom Scott held the door for them, then hesitated in the hall. “We can talk upstairs,” he said, with a grimace at his mother’s living room. “Not exactly my idea of comfort, the barrage of great art in the arctic space.” He turned instead towards the stairs, and they followed, Kincaid looking round with interest.

In the stairwell, Ellen Scott-Miller had abandoned the snowy expanse and gone for a dark, cool green, against which small landscape oils glowed like little jewels.

They climbed all the way to the top floor, Dom Scott taking a surprisingly quick lead considering the lassitude with which he’d greeted them.

A door stood ajar on the top landing, and when Dom pushed it wide, Kincaid saw that it was not a room, but a flat with a small kitchen and separate bedroom and, he assumed, a bath.

There was no evidence of Dom’s mother’s hand in the decorating. The furniture seemed to be odds and ends collected from other parts of the house; the gray walls displayed framed posters featuring current bands and comedy acts, a few from the Edinburgh festival.

Clothes were strewn across sofa and floor, the coffee table was littered with glasses and mugs, and the room had a slightly unwashed aroma.

“Didn’t seem much point in tidying,” said Dom, with a shrug of apology, but he swept the sofa clean and tossed the bundle of clothing in the direction of the bedroom. He motioned them to the sofa and sat on the edge of a scuffed leather Morris chair, seemingly unaware of the crushed suit jacket beneath him. “So what did you want to talk about?” he asked, and Kincaid saw that his eyes were more focused than the previous day.

“Harry Pevensey.”

“Harry?” Dom looked at them blankly, but his hands twitched. “What about him?”

“How do you know Harry, Dom?”

“He’s just a bloke I met in a bar.” Dom’s fingers moved to his T-shirt, began to pick at the fabric. “What does Harry have to do with anything?”

“Why did you go to see Harry yesterday?” Kincaid asked, his voice still casual.

“What? But I—How could you—” Visibly rattled now, Dom clutched at his shirt with one hand and rubbed at his nose with the other.

“What do you know about a diamond brooch that Harry Pevensey put up for auction through your girlfriend, Kristin Cahill?”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, come on, Dom.” Kincaid leaned forward, holding Dom’s gaze, and said quietly, “I don’t believe you. Were you Harry Pevensey’s connection with Kristin?”

Dom let go of his shirt and seemed to make an effort to pull himself together. “So what if I was? Look, I told you. I met Harry one night in a bar, the French House, in Soho, when I went with some friends. It’s an actors’ bar. Harry liked to hang out there. We talked, and sometimes I’d pop in when I was in the West End. It was…comfortable…you know. Not like most of the places I go. And no one knew me.

“Harry was always hard up. I’d buy him a drink, but he never asked anything of me.” There was a plaintive sort of innocence in the words, as if Dom Scott didn’t have many interactions with people who didn’t want something from him.

“Until a couple of weeks ago,” Dom went on, his voice going flat. “He rang me. He said he had this brooch. He said he’d found it in an estate sale, but he thought it might be really valuable. So I introduced him to Kristin. I thought that if it was true, it might be a good thing for her, too, to bring in something.

“But then the police came round asking questions about it, and Kristin got into trouble with her boss. So yesterday I went round to ask Harry to take it out of the sale. I told him that the bloody thing was jeopardizing Kristin’s job, and that was never part of the agreement. But he said he wouldn’t do it, and I couldn’t change his mind, so I left.

“And then—then you came, and said Kristin was dead.” He sagged into the chair, his eyes dull again.

Kincaid didn’t mean to let him off so easily. “Dom,” he said sharply. “Did Kristin tell you why Mr. Khan was angry about the brooch?”

He frowned, as if thinking were an effort. “She said there was some woman claiming it was stolen from her during the war. It was that part that pissed him off. Mr. Khan said they would take items of unknown provenance, but they didn’t want the kind of investigation that would ensue from claims that might involve war looting. Like it was Kristin’s fault.”

“And that’s why you had a row with Harry?”

“That’s what Harry told you? I wouldn’t exactly call it a row, but Harry likes his bit of drama—What?” He had caught some telltale flicker in their faces. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Harry’s dead, Dom,” answered Kincaid. “Just like Kristin. Where were you last night between midnight and two?”

Kerry Boatman greeted Gemma with a warm smile as she ushered her into her office. “I didn’t expect to see you back so soon. Is it the Cahill case?”

“It’s actually not about that at all,” admitted Gemma, taking a seat. “Or only in a very odd and roundabout way. My friend who claims the brooch Kristin Cahill put into the sale at Harrowby’s…well, I’ve just learned from another source that her husband was murdered here in Chelsea, after the war. I don’t see any obvious connection, but I thought I should know more before I spoke to my friend. Don’t want to put my foot in it.” She smiled, feeling an idiot. “I wondered if I might look through your files. His name was David Rosenthal.”

“And the year?”

“I don’t exactly know. Say within ten years after the war?”

Boatman raised both brows and peered at Gemma over the tops of the reading glasses she’d perched on her nose. “Good God, Inspector, have you any idea of the state of our records?”

“Well, if they’re anything like ours…” Gemma looked down at the pretty skirt and top she’d put on that morning, and shrugged.

Boatman grinned. “You’ll find them in the basement. Enjoy.”

“So what did you think?” Kincaid asked Cullen when they were back in the car.

Cullen gave a snort of disgust. “Total bollocks.”

Dom had not repeated his dramatic faint, but he had gone white as a Victorian damsel and said he refused to believe Harry was dead. When Kincaid had told him that the police didn’t usually lie about things like that, Dom had just shaken his head like an obstinate child.

“I’m afraid it’s true, and I am sorry,” Kincaid had said. “And we still need to know where you were last night.”

“I was here. What would I be doing, with Kristin dead?”

“Did you drive your mother’s car?”

Dom looked as horrified as when they’d told him Harry was dead. “Are you out of your mind? And even if I were that daft, her car’s been in the garage for two weeks, waiting on a part from Germany.”

Cullen had got the name of the garage. Now he said, “Want me to check out the car, guv?”

“Yes, and see if you can find any mobile records for Harry Pevensey. There was no mobile phone on his body and we didn’t see one in the flat.” To Kincaid’s astonishment, the phone in Pevensey’s flat had been rotary dial. No wonder Cullen hadn’t reached an answering machine.

“What about Amir Khan?” asked Cullen. “I talked to my mate in Fraud. He said the salesroom has skirted the law a number of times, falsifying imports, documentation, and so on. What if Khan knew more about the brooch than he let on? Could he have recognized it as stolen and allowed it in the sale anyway? I could have sworn he looked worried this morning.”

“I’m not sure Erika ever reported it as stolen.” Kincaid glanced at his watch. “I need to check with Gemma, and before we tackle Mr. Khan again, I’d like to know a little more about Harry Pevensey. I think I’d like to check out the bar where Dom Scott said they met, the French House.”

By the time Gemma found David Rosenthal’s case file, her back hurt, her fingers were grimy, and the smell of old dust seemed permanently embedded in her nostrils.

“Why the hell couldn’t the Met pay some low-grade clerk to sit in the dungeon all day and transfer the bloody things to computer?” she’d groused when she first began searching the boxed files.

But when she had taken the box to the table, sat down in the utilitarian chair provided, and finally held David Rosenthal’s file in her hands, she changed her mind. Slowly she shuffled through the pages. Typed reports, with the occasional uncorrected error. Handwritten notes by the senior detective in charge of the case, an inspector named Gavin Hoxley. It all felt suddenly, undeniably, real.

David Rosenthal, she read, had been found lying on the ground beside a bench in Cheyne Gardens, on a Saturday night in May 1952. He had apparently been robbed of all his belongings, so that he had not been identified until his wife reported him missing.

His wife. Erika. Good God.

He had been stabbed multiple times with a double-edged blade, the reports went on, and was thought by the pathologist to have died instantly. There had been no defensive wounds.

He had lived in Notting Hill, and the address was the same as Erika’s house in Arundel Gardens. He had worked in North Hampstead, and had spent any free time at the British Museum. There was no known reason for him to have been in Chelsea on that Saturday evening.

And then Gemma came to the photos. This—this had been Erika’s husband. Even in monochrome, the crime scene photos were brutal, the blood on his shirt front starkly black against the white of the fabric and his blanched face. But even in death she could see that David Rosenthal had been striking, handsome in a fine-boned, careworn sort of way.

Why had she never seen a photo of him in Erika’s flat? Not even a wedding portrait. And Gemma, doing a quick calculation, guessed that Erika had been only in her thirties when her husband had been killed. Why had she never remarried? Had David Rosenthal been the great love of her life, never to be replaced?

And why had she, Gemma, never thought to ask?

Pushing back her chair, Gemma separated Gavin Hoxley’s notes from the other papers. He had made jottings to himself, just as she kept running commentary in her own notebooks, and his handwriting was well formed, with a bold downstroke. It made her think he had been a careful man, but determined, perhaps even obstinate, and she smiled at her amateur analysis.

She had just begun to read when her phone beeped, telling her she had a text message waiting, and she realized that she had been without a signal until she moved her chair. Her first thought was that she had missed some news about her mum, but the message was from Kincaid, asking if she could meet him at an address in Dean Street.

Kincaid leaned against the lamppost in front of the French House, looking up at the cheerful blue awnings above the bar. The windows of the upstairs dining room were thrown wide to let in the air, but the French flags flying over the first floor gave only a desultory flutter in the warm air.

He had taken off his jacket, and glanced with some dismay at the crush of customers spilling from the doorway of the bar and into the street. If it was warm outside, it would be warmer still within, and any thoughts he’d had of a cool drink and something to eat while they chatted with the staff were probably doomed to logistical failure.

Still, he was not, like Cullen, on his way back to a stuffy office in the Yard to subpoena phone records. The thought made him grin. Cullen had wanted to be in on this interview, and hadn’t hesitated to protest.

But Cullen was good at detail—as Kincaid had reminded him—and ferreting out facts was an important part of a sergeant’s job.

And the rebellion augured well for future promotion, but in the meantime Cullen had a ways to go in developing patience, and in Kincaid’s opinion, empathy. He was quick to judge, and lacked Gemma’s intuitive desire to understand what made people tick.

But then Kincaid knew that he would probably always, and perhaps unfairly, use Gemma as a benchmark for a partner’s performance, and he realized how readily he had jumped on an excuse to pull Gemma in on this case. Perhaps he couldn’t blame Cullen for being touchy.

As if he had conjured her, he glanced down Dean Street and saw Gemma walking towards him. The sun glinted off her copper hair, and even in a skirt, she moved with the long, swingy stride that always made his heart lift. She saw him and smiled, and he suddenly felt distinctly unprofessional.

When she reached him, he leaned over and brushed his lips against her cheek, then pulled away, studying her. “You’ve got a mucky streak across your forehead,” he said, rubbing at it with his thumb. “What have you been doing, excavating a tomb?”

“Nearer than you’d think,” said Gemma. Pushing his hand away, she fished in her bag for a tissue and wiped at the smudge. “Did I get it?”

“All better. Now, what were you doing at Lucan Place?”

“Digging through file crates in the basement. I’ll tell you later. What are we doing here? I could do with some lunch.” She gestured at the pub.

“You should be so lucky.” He told her what they had learned from the Harrowby’s warrant, and that they had then discovered that the seller of the brooch had been killed the night before. “His neighbor, the poor bloke who found the body, identified Dom Scott from Cullen’s photo. Said he visited the victim yesterday, and that they had a row. When we asked Dom, he said he wanted Pevensey to take the brooch out of the sale, as it was causing Kristin trouble, and Pevensey refused.”

“So Dominic Scott knew the guy who put the brooch up for sale, this Pevensey, as well as Kristin?” Gemma frowned. “But what has that to do with this place? If we’re not having lunch,” she added, and he grinned.

“You’re fixated on food. Dom Scott says that this is where he met Pevensey, that they were only casual bar acquaintances, and that when Pevensey told him he had jewelry to sell, he put him on to Kristin as a favor to them both. He seemed quite shocked to hear that Pevensey was dead.”

“He was quite shocked to hear that Kristin was dead, too,” said Gemma. “Either he’s a very good actor or he’s having very bad luck.”

“All a bit much of a coincidence for my liking,” Kincaid agreed. “I thought we should see if any of the staff here knows either of them.”

“Along with lunch and a drink?” Gemma asked, with a determination that would have done Cullen proud.

Their hopes of sustenance were quickly dashed. The late-lunch crowd was thinning by the time they muscled their way to the bar, but the bartender still looked harried. When queried, he said briskly, “We don’t do food. You’ll have to go upstairs for that. And we only do beer by the half. Now, what can I get you?”

“Information, actually.” Kincaid took out his identification. Even though he had spoken quietly, he had the sudden sense of attention in the room. There was no music, and he had noticed the other patrons glancing at them as they crossed the room. The bar was small, with a clubby feel, and for the most part the clientele seemed to lean towards the flamboyant side of eccentric.

The bartender slotted a wineglass into the rack with a clink and eyed them warily. “What sort of information?”

“I see you have Breton cider,” Kincaid said, waiting for the murmur of voices to rise again. He didn’t want the barman influenced by an audience. Catching Gemma’s affirmative nod, he added, “Give us two bottles, why don’t you?” although inwardly he winced at the price. This one was definitely going on the Yard’s tab.

When the barman had filled their glasses and Kincaid didn’t feel quite so many eyes boring into his back, he said, “Do you know a bloke by the name of Harry Pevensey?” He’d taken one of the smaller photos on Pevensey’s wall out of its frame and now showed it to the barman.

“Harry?” The barman broke into an unexpected grin. “That’s Harry, all right,” he said, handing the photo back. “What’s our Harry supposed to have done? Held up a director for a part?” He wiped and slotted another glass. “Of course I know Harry. I’ve been here for donkey’s years, and Harry’s been coming in longer than that. He’s a harmless sod.”

Kincaid sipped his cider, then centered his glass on the beer mat, suddenly reluctant to impart bad news to someone who had obviously liked Harry Pevensey. “Unfortunately, it’s not what Harry’s done, but what someone has done to him. He was killed last night, in front of his flat.”

The bartender stared at him, all the good-natured teasing wiped from his face. “You’re taking the piss.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“But that’s not possible,” he protested. “He was here, until closing, and he was in rare form.”

“Rare form?” asked Gemma. “In a good humor, was he?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Harry so full of himself.” The bartender frowned. “Jubilant, I suppose I’d call it. And flush. Had a proper dinner in the restaurant, and bought rounds for everyone in here.” Thoughtfully, he added, “But he was a bit secretive about it. Said his ship had come in, that sort of thing. We all thought he’d got a part in some big production, although it didn’t seem very likely. Harry was…well, Harry was all right, but it just wasn’t going to happen, know what I mean?”

Kincaid thought of Harry’s flat, of the photos on the wall, the yellowing invitations, and nodded. “Did Harry have any special friends here?”

“Special? Not really. He knew all the regulars, and vice versa, but I doubt he ever saw anyone outside the bar. He was chatting up some woman last night, but she left not long after he came down to the bar, so I suppose he didn’t quite have the pull.” His brow creased as he added, “Harry was a bit of a loner, really. I don’t think anything ever quite lived up to the good old days—or at least what he imagined were the good old days.”

“‘The good old days’?” Gemma repeated, leaning forward with such interest that the bartender reached up and smoothed what was left of his hair.

“The seventies. Harry ran with a posh crowd then, at least according to him. Partied with the Stones, invited to all the best clubs in the West End and Chelsea.” He shook his head. “No one ever quite believed him, but maybe it was true. He was quite a looker in his day, or so he was always happy to tell you. And I wasn’t too bad, myself,” he added, with a smile at Gemma.

“The seventies? Really?” said Gemma, as if that were the Dark Ages, and the bartender sighed, deflated.

“Told you I’d been here for yonks.”

“What about this bloke?” Kincaid asked, taking Dom Scott’s photo from his pocket and handing it across the bar. “You recognize him?”

The bartender wiped his fingers on his apron, then took the photo, holding it at arm’s length in the classic posture of middle-aged nearsightedness. “This guy? Yeah, I’ve seen him in here with Harry a few times. I remember him particularly because I had to tell him to turn off his mobile—we don’t allow them in here.”

“So the two of them met here?”

“If by that you mean making an acquaintance, no, I don’t think so. The first time this guy came in, oh, say a month ago, he and Harry were huddled in the corner, and Harry looked none too pleased. If you want my opinion, I’d say they knew each other very well.”