Chelsea Mansions Part 12

'Oh.' He frowned down at his beer. 'This was a mistake, wasn't it? I'm imposing on you when you're so busy.'

She looked over and felt a little sorry for him, aware of the brusqueness in her manner. 'Why don't you tell me about Chelsea Mansions? Is it a dump?'

'Well, it isn't the Savoy, that's for sure. I've no idea how it stays solvent with so few guests. But I like the people, Toby, Deb and the others. They're real characters and would do anything for you. They met in Saudi during the first Gulf War, he was in the army and she in the Foreign Office.'

'Yes, they told me.'

'And did they tell you that's where he lost his son?'

'No.'

'Toby doesn't talk about it, but Deb told me today. Apparently he was with special forces. He disappeared somewhere out in the Iraqi desert. What made it especially tragic was that Toby was on the team at headquarters that planned the operation. He was keen for his son to go, to have a chance to see action.'

'Oh dear.'

'Yes. Deb thinks that's why he gave me a room. I'm the same age as his son was apparently, twenty-eight, and Deb says I look a bit like him.'

'He has to like you to give you a room at his hotel?'

'Absolutely!' John laughed. 'And what he charges depends on how much he likes you. My room's ridiculously cheap. That's what I mean about wondering how they stay in business. And that's why he feels so guilty about Nancy Haynes. He thinks that if he'd turned her down and she'd gone somewhere else she might still be alive. But according to Deb she wrote him this really charming letter about how she didn't want to stay anywhere else in London, and he said okay.'

'Do you know why she wanted to stay there?'

'Good location for the Chelsea Flower Show, I imagine. So tell me, how did you come to be a detective?'

'Oh . . .' She didn't feel like going into it, but made an effort. 'One day I was having a cup of coffee in a cafe. Across the street was a police station. I watched the people come and go through the doors-uniformed men, shirt-sleeved for the summer, chatting in pairs as they returned from their beat; people in civilian clothes looking like any other office workers, running down the steps to catch their buses; and, most of all, the uniformed women. I watched the way they moved through the evening crowds, and the way they spoke to each other. When I finished my coffee I crossed the street, followed three women constables up the steps, and asked the desk sergeant for information on joining up.'

'Just like that? No regrets?'

'No. I felt like I'd come home.'

He gave a puzzled smile. 'I guess I'd have to know the back story to understand that.'

But Kathy didn't want to say any more about herself. 'You'd make a pretty good detective. You seem to be good at getting information.'

'Oh, don't say that. My mother would kill me. She told me I could be anything I wanted, except a cop.'

'How come?'

'She was married to one once-my dad.'

'Ah.'

'Yeah. So I became an academic, but still, I've always been curious about the police. I guess it must be the sense of comradeship that made you feel at home, the people you work closely with.'

She laughed. 'Not all of them.'

'No, but, well there's that guy you were on TV with. Brock? Was that his name?'

'Yes, I've been on his team for a long time now. He's the best.'

'Right. You must get pretty close, emotionally.'

She stared at him, eyebrows going up, and he blushed. 'Sorry, didn't mean to pry.'

'Yes you did. Brock and I are colleagues.'

'Right, right.'

'So what would your Lieutenant Ledoux have told me if I'd got around to ringing him?'

'Ah, well, I've done some work for him.'

'What, tutoring his kids, fixing his car?'

'No, no. Police work.'

Kathy gave him a sceptical look and he hurried on. 'My academic field is linguistics, studying texts, mainly from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of things I've specialised in is establishing authorship of unattributed fragments of writing. A couple of years ago they did an article about it in the Montreal Gazette and Paul Ledoux contacted me. He was working on a suicide that he suspected might be a murder, and wondered if I could tell if the suicide note left on the guy's computer was genuine. Looking at other things he'd done, I decided he hadn't written this, and appeared as an expert witness in court. It turned out I was right. Since then I've given advice in over a dozen cases in Canada.'

'Forensic linguistics,' Kathy said.

'Right. There aren't many of us about. The thing is, I heard about the Russian's letter to The Times this morning, and it occurred to me that you might need to authenticate it.'

'We've done that.'

'Oh.' His face dropped.

'The notepaper, the signature appear to be genuine. It was typed on his computer.'

'That's not what I look at. People can steal a piece of notepaper and copy a signature, but they can't impersonate another person's form of words, not perfectly. That's what I study: the text, its construction, vocabulary, use of idiom and so on.'

'Yes, I understand that, but-'

'It just seemed to me a good idea-no, vital, that you check that too. After all, if Moszynski didn't write that letter it changes everything, doesn't it?'

Kathy considered his bright, intelligent eyes. There was something quite disarming about his enthusiasm, like an eager border collie that knows exactly what needs to be done. She could have used a few more border collies on the job today. 'It certainly does.'

'And you don't really think the FSB is behind this, do you?'

'Don't I? Why do you say that?'

'Because Brock's in Scotland, isn't he?'

She blinked. 'What?'

'On your phone in the hotel. Sorry, I couldn't help overhearing. You were talking about someone being in Scotland. It's Brock, isn't it, following up a completely different line of investigation? I had exactly the same idea myself.'

'You did?'

'Yes. Emerson told me about Nancy's plans to contact long-lost relatives up there, and I wondered if there might be something in her past that led to her death. I guess it's my work that makes me think like that. I need to place the texts I deal with in the context of their past, because everything about them-language, ideas, themes-is shaped by that. You have to understand the past in order to interpret the present, like why you became a cop and I didn't. So anyway, what do you think? Will Brock agree?'

'Agree to what?'

'To me taking a look at Moszynski's letter. Or maybe he doesn't have to, if he's away in Scotland. You could commission me. I'm not expensive.'

Kathy laughed.

'And it would look good on my CV. What we would need is similar samples-ideally other letters to newspapers. Do you know if he was in the habit of writing to the papers?'

A good question. 'We can find out.'

She felt weary by the time she got to Brock's place. Apprehensive, too-she had never seen Brock ill before, and it had been like a sudden revelation of his mortality. It had shaken her more than she'd realised, and as she raised the key to his front door she hesitated, remembering that first glimpse of him in bed the day before, and wondering how she would react if she went in and really did find him dead. Part of her would die too, she was sure of that.

'That you, Kathy?' The voice was hoa.r.s.e.

She grinned, said, 'Yep, it's me,' and ran up the stairs.

He was sitting on the sofa in the living room, looking somewhat diminished in his old tartan dressing-gown, but with a little colour in his cheeks.

'How are you feeling?'

'Bit better. Come in, sit down.'

'What are those?' Kathy pointed to the files and crime scene photographs scattered around him.

'I got Dot to courier them over.' He nodded towards the whisky bottle on the side table. 'Pour us a snifter, will you?'

'How about food?'

'Had some soup. Now, tell me what's been going on.'

'Everyone's desperate for you to come back from Scotland.'

'I'm planning on flying back tonight.'

'Really? Are you up to it?'

'Sadly the bracing Scottish weather didn't agree with me, and I shall have a bit of a cold and look somewhat the worse for wear. But you've been covering for me long enough, Kathy. Tell me about today.'

So she did, everything except her drink with John Greenslade.

'Zack's right,' Brock said. 'Soon we won't need to leave our screens to do our job. We'll be able to see what's going on inside every room and every car. But we still won't be able to see what's going on inside people's heads. And you're worried about what's going on inside Vadim Kuzmin's head, am I right?'

Kathy nodded. 'He's a hard case, doesn't give much away.'

'And Five can't give us any leads to Russian visitors we should be talking to?'

'Apparently not. We're running our own checks through the Border Agency, but so far nothing promising.'

'So we're thinking of a domestic killer hired by someone like Vadim to do the dirty work while he's out of the country.'

'Something like that.'

'What about Captain Marvel?'

'Danny Yilmaz? We haven't got any further with him. The CPS are worried about going for the aid and abet charge on the basis of what we have so far, and the court granted him bail.'

'And yet he's pretty much all we've got.' Brock scratched his beard thoughtfully. 'Tottenham have been looking into that cousin of his, Barbaros Kaya, but they haven't come up with anything.'

'Yes.'

'I think we should speak to Danny again. And Vadim, a formal interview. Let's work on both ends to find out who's in the middle.'

THIRTEEN.

Everyone seemed immensely pleased to see Brock back, Dot especially so. Brock shrugged off her solicitations with a grunt and a request for strong coffee. The truth was that he still felt half dead, and the effort involved in pretending to be normal seemed to sap what little energy he had. He sat alone for a while in his office, gathering his strength for the team meeting, then took a deep breath and put a call through to Commander Sharpe's office. He too was delighted to hear from Brock.

'You sound a bit ropey, Brock. Catch a bug on the plane? So how was the castle?'

Brock blinked, wondering what he was talking about. 'Could still bear fruit, sir. But not as productive as I'd hoped. We're becoming quite interested in Vadim Kuzmin.'

'The son-in-law, yes of course. The FSB connection. Is there a problem?'

'I wonder if a high-level request could be made for Five and Six to open their files on the man.'

'We can but try. Leave it with me. There's been a h.e.l.l of a lot of speculation while you've been away-TV, papers, blogs, questions in the House. Well, you'll know of course. Marilyn says we need to give them something. Maybe something on the Scottish angle? What do you think?'

'Not yet, sir. Could prejudice our inquiries.'

Sharpe gave a growl like a pit bull with toothache. 'Twenty-four hours, Brock. Give me something.'

The enthusiastic mood in the team meeting quickly went flat as Brock's unhappiness with progress became apparent. He listened with a frown to the reports from each of the groups and finally pointed at Emerson Merckle's photograph of the man at the Chelsea Flower Show, enlarged and enhanced until the pale scar down the left cheek of his brooding face was apparent.

'What happened to this man after he got off the motorbike at Camden Town tube station? We'll have to go over it all again, every station on the Northern Line, every camera, every eyewitness. Where does a man go after he commits a murder? Church, brothel, pub, betting shop, Turkish bath? There's got to be a trace of him somewhere. Kathy, I want you to take charge of this. Bren, you and I will go up to Tottenham and interview Danny Yilmaz again. Come on everyone, twenty-four hours. Give me something.'

He felt bad afterwards, repeating Sharpe's demand without any clear hope of a result, and he felt worse when they finally had Danny Yilmaz sitting hunched in front of them in an interview room, waiting for his brief to arrive. There was something about the glare of the fluorescent lights, the indefinable smell in the stale air, the sc.r.a.pe of metal chairs on plastic floor tiles, that seemed deliberately calculated to make him feel nauseous.

'Danny,' he said softly, 'the tape's not running yet, nothing's going on the record, but before we begin I want to do you a good turn.'

'Oh yeah, sure.'

'We know you were lying to us. And we know why. It was a favour for your cousin Barbaros, wasn't it? And we know that it was Barbaros that you picked up on your bike after he killed that woman in Sloane Street.'