Chelsea Mansions Part 30

'Where did you get this?'

'Nancy's companion, Emerson Merckle, had a packet of her old photographs.'

'Well . . . what am I supposed to make of it?'

'I'm not sure.'

Chivers stared at it for a while, then pushed it aside and gave Brock a grim smile and shook his head. 'Brock, you b.u.g.g.e.r, you always do this.'

'Do what, d.i.c.k?'

'Try to complicate things. You're never satisfied with the simple answer. You've always got to look for a more complicated explanation, a more interesting and original explanation. Well, you're wrong. Remember Occam's razor, Brock-the simplest of two theories is to be preferred.'

Brock hadn't seen Chivers so worked up. He seemed to have touched a nerve.

'My report is about to go to Sharpe,' Chivers went on. 'Don't muddy the waters, please.'

'Fair enough.' Brock put the photograph back in his pocket and got to his feet. 'Thanks for the update, d.i.c.k.'

Chivers showed him to the door. 'Any time, Brock. You're looking well, by the way. Still on sick leave?'

'Another week, the doctor says.'

'Best not to rush things. Not sure what they're going to do with this place. Someone said they were thinking of selling it. Shame if they did. Close to HQ but conveniently out of sight. I've become quite attached to it.'

Feeling like a displaced person peddling a worthless trinket, Brock decided to give the photo one last try. He took the tube across the river to the Elephant and Castle and walked down to Amelia Street, where SERIS, the Specialist Evidence Recovery and Imaging Services unit, was based, and with them Morris Munns. Morris, whose myopic gaze through thick-lensed gla.s.ses seemed so at odds with his ability to conjure hidden information from crime scenes, grabbed him in a hug.

'We thought we'd lost you,' he cried. 'The Marburg Pimpernel. The lads ran a book on your survival. I lost a packet.'

'You betted against me?' Brock said, shocked.

'It's called hedging,' Morris chuckled. 'Come on, you can buy me lunch while you tell me about this private job.'

Over a Thai chicken salad Brock showed Morris the photograph. He peered at it, turned it over, sniffed it.

'Over fifty years old? So what am I meant to find?'

'The reason why this picture killed two people. No, I honestly don't know. Anything you can tell me about it. For instance there's a distinctive lapel badge on that bloke at the back. We think he may be Russian, the other three American, the background Cunningham Place in Chelsea. We don't know who took the picture. We believe the date is on or around the twenty-sixth of April, 1956.'

'Okay. I suppose you'll say this is urgent, only I've got a backlog of weeks.'

'Your other customers don't come back from the dead to buy you lunch, Morris.'

After they parted Brock rang Kathy. He told her about Chivers' report and then, as he was about to ring off, she mentioned that John Greenslade was flying back from America that night, and could the three of them meet up for dinner the next evening? He wasn't wildly enthusiastic, but he sensed her eagerness and agreed.

When he got home he felt edgy and unable to settle. Later, after grilling a fish fillet for his supper, he sat in the window bay that projected out over the lane, watching the trains pa.s.s by in the twilit shadows of the cutting down below. He had a novel on his knee, but was unable to concentrate on it. Too many characters, he thought, none of whom he cared about, and too clever by half. Which was what Chivers would say about him. Quick and clean, was Chivers. Get the job done. Occam's razor.

THIRTY-THREE.

Morris had rung Brock in the middle of the following morning, arranging to meet him at a Latin American deli in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, the first covered shopping centre in Europe back in 1965, and subsequently voted London's ugliest building, now awaiting demolition. It had a gloomy subterranean feel to it which depressed Brock's spirits, but Morris seemed perversely cheerful, sitting with a large bag of groceries by his side. Brock ordered a coffee and joined him.

'Can't stop long,' Morris said. 'But I needed to stock up for our samba party tonight.'

Brock raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Morris took an envelope out of the carrier bag, extracted the photograph and laid it down on the table in front of them.

'It's printed on a Kodak Velox paper that was available from the mid-fifties into the sixties, consistent with your date. If the April twenty-six date is correct, the length and angle of shadows indicate the picture was taken at around four in the afternoon, this being Chelsea Mansions on the north side of Cunningham Place, right?'

Brock nodded, and Morris took some enlargements from the envelope.

'The lapel badge you mentioned is a five-pointed star, approximately ten millimetres across, resembling the gold star which Heroes of the Soviet Union were ent.i.tled to wear. The man wearing it has an area of scar tissue on his left temple which appears to be caved in, as if from an industrial accident or war wound. You could get a pathologist's opinion on that, and on some Soviet-era dental work he seems to be sporting.' Morris pointed to a close-up of the man's smiling mouth.

'The other man, who you say is an American, appears to be rather well off and possibly involved in international travel and business. He's wearing a Rolex GMT Master wrist.w.a.tch, the first watch to show two time zones at once, first released in 1954.

'The woman at his side is also well heeled, dressed in what looks to be a Dior A-line costume. But her taste in jewellery seems a little unconventional and artistic. The younger woman is carrying a posy of flowers-a mixture of what looks like roses and some other type, like Michaelmas daisies. She's also holding something else in her left hand . . .' He produced an enlargement. 'Maybe a cigarette or spectacle case. She's much more informally dressed than the others, who look as if they've been to some sort of function.'

'There was a banquet lunch for visiting Russians that day,' Brock said.

'There you go then.' Morris turned the photo over to look at the back. 'Notice the faint brown smudge. It's a vegetable glue, as if there was once an accompanying note or card stuck to the back of the photo, so we did an ESDA electrostatic scan.'

Morris flicked through the contents of his envelope to a grey photograph across which black lettering was visible. 'ESDA picks up the faintest compression marks, in this case caused by something being written on another piece of paper with the photo underneath.'

Brock read the message: Dear Ronnie and Maisy, What larks!

Love, Miles 'You're a magician, Morris.'

Morris gathered the material up, put it back in the envelope and handed it to Brock. 'Happy hunting, mate.'

After he'd gone Brock remained at the table going over the contents of the envelope while he finished his coffee. Ronnie and Maisy were Nancy's parents, he remembered, but who was Miles? He examined the enhanced enlargements that Morris had made of the faces of the four people in the photograph, and he thought of Kathy's theory about Gennady as he studied them. The two American adults were long-skulls, tall and of slender build, whereas the Russian was a round-skull Slav, short and stocky. Brock looked at the girl's bone structure, the cheeks, the chin, and pondered. Finally he checked his notebook for the number of someone he knew well in forensic services. He got out his phone and made the call, asking for a special favour.

As Brock turned into Cunningham Place he saw two men emerge from the Moszynski entrance porch. One was the security guard, Wayne Everett, who hurried ahead to open the rear door of a Maybach Zeppelin for the other man, Vadim Kuzmin, who appeared angry and impatient. The limousine eased out of its parking spot and surged away at speed.

Brock continued towards the porch, climbing the steps and pressing the b.u.t.ton on the entry phone. A female voice responded and he said, 'Detective Chief Inspector David Brock, Metropolitan Police, to see Mrs Marta Moszynski.'

'One moment, please.'

It took considerably more than that for the voice to come back. It sounded anxious, and hesitant in its use of English. 'I'm sorry. Mrs Moszynski is not well enough to see you, sir.'

'Tell Mrs Moszynski I have information concerning her husband.'

A hesitation, then, 'Mr Moszynski was her son, sir, not her husband.'

'I'm talking about Mr Gennady Moszynski, not Mr Mikhail Moszynski.'

'Wait, please.'

Eventually there was a click and the door opened and the maid indicated for him to come in. As he entered the hall he was struck again by the scale of the internal transformation that had been worked on the original buildings. The whole of the middle house had been gutted to create a central atrium with stairs, lift and galleries rising through five storeys to a gla.s.s lantern, with a multi-tiered lighting feature suspended within it. When he'd seen it before, at night, with the glitter of hundreds of tiny lights, it had seemed flashy but rather dazzling, like the foyer of an exotic gaming club. But now, with the lights turned off and no one around, it seemed merely overblown and pretentious.

He followed the maid across to the gla.s.s lift which rose with a faint hum to the third floor, where they walked around the gallery to overscaled double doors which the maid tapped, then opened. This was Marta Moszynski's private apartment, with a generous sitting room from which doors led off to other rooms. The old woman was sitting in an armchair by the windows overlooking the square, surrounded by a blue haze of cigarette smoke. She turned and regarded Brock's approach with a stubborn scowl that might have been modelled on Krushchev.

Brock took the seat facing her and said, 'Good afternoon, Mrs Moszynski. How are you today?'

She tapped her cigarette slowly on the heavy gla.s.s ashtray at her side. 'What do you want?'

'I'd like you to tell me why Mikhail chose this building to live in when he came to London.'

The question seemed to throw her, and she shook her head.

'Did his father tell him about it? Because Gennady was here, wasn't he?'

'You're crazy!' Marta growled, stubbing out her cigarette. 'Go away.'

Brock took a copy of the photograph out of his pocket and offered it to her. Reluctantly she reached out a k.n.o.bbly hand and took it, then made a great play of picking up her spectacles from the small table at her elbow and putting them on.

'That's Gennady at the back, see?' Brock said.

She frowned and peered closer. 'No.'

'Yes. Here's a larger picture of his face. It was the twenty-sixth of April, 1956, and they were standing in front of this building.'

'No,' Marta repeated, and her head was shaking again, with movements so jerky and violent that Brock wondered for a moment if she might be having some kind of fit.

'And that's Nancy, the woman who was murdered just before your son. How do you explain that, Marta?'

'No . . . no, no.'

'Could it be that Nancy-'

But Marta had lurched into movement, ripping the photographs into tiny pieces while she spat and cursed in Russian. She threw the sc.r.a.ps at him, screaming abuse, then turned and took hold of the ashtray at her side and hurled it too, with surprising force, straight at his head. He just had time to dodge and lift an arm, and he winced as the gla.s.s block hit his wrist. They were both on their feet now, Marta casting around for another weapon, when the maid burst in and ran to her. Abruptly the old woman's manner changed, and she began sobbing and gasping. The maid gathered her in her arms and eased her back down into the chair.

'You must go.' The maid looked back over her shoulder accusingly at Brock. 'She is not well.'

'Do you need a doctor?'

'No. I will take care of her. Please leave now.'

Brock hesitated, then nodded and turned to go. As he reached the door Marta hurled a parting curse at his back.

He waited for the lift, nursing his wrist. He was still jolted by the suddenness of her fury and its physical force. Now the silence in the deserted atrium made the whole episode seem surreal. The lift sighed to a halt at the ground floor and he stepped out, his heels squeaking on the polished marble floor. He took a few paces towards the front door, then stopped and looked around. In each of the flanking walls stood large doorways framed with cla.s.sical pilasters and entablatures. He went over and opened a door to reveal a mirrored dining room in which a long table had been laid with porcelain and cutlery as if for an elaborate banquet. Another door opened into a huge sitting room whose walls were hung with contemporary art-Hockney, Freud, Hirst-and, bizarrely, hanging over the ma.s.sive fireplace, a portrait of Mikhail Moszynski himself, dressed in the ruff and slashed doublet of a Tudor grandee, with a hedgehog at his feet.

On the far side of this room was another door, opening into a corridor. Brock was about to turn back when he heard the m.u.f.fled whine of machinery from one of the closed doors up ahead. He went towards it and hesitated, his hand on the doork.n.o.b, listening. The whine became shriller for a while, then subsided again. It was a sound he'd heard before, but it took him a moment to remember it coming from Dot's office-a paper shredder. He opened the door.

The woman turned from the machine and stared at him. There were tears running down her cheeks, and for a moment they stood staring at each other in surprise.

'I'm sorry to startle you,' Brock said, and showed her his police ID. 'Are you all right?'

Embarra.s.sed, she wiped her hand quickly across her face. 'Oh, not really. I've just been sacked. It's only to be expected really, but it was just so . . . abrupt. I'm sorry. I'm Ellen Fitzwilliam, Mr Moszynski's secretary-former secretary.'

'Tidying up?' Brock asked.

'Yes. I was sorting things out for Mr Kuzmin, who's trying to make sense of it all for the solicitors, only he's decided . . . Well, anyway, he's just left, gone to speak to Mr Clarke, if you wanted him.'

'I imagine it must all be very complicated.'

'Oh yes. And Freddie-Mr Clarke-isn't easy to pin down. Was there something I can help you with?'

'I know you've been asked this before, but I'm just trying to tie up one or two details. I'm interested in Mr Moszynski's state of mind in the days before he was killed. Were you working with him then?'

'Not on the Sunday when he died, but I did come in to work on the Sat.u.r.day morning, and all through the previous week. I can't say I noticed anything terribly different about his manner. He seemed his usual self-brisk, businesslike.'

'He went to the memorial service for the American woman here in the square on the Sunday morning. Was he upset by her death, do you remember?'

'Ah, yes, he did seem to be bothered by that-I told your inspector. He certainly read all the news reports about Mrs Haynes' death, and got me to keep cuttings.'

'He seemed personally affected?'

'Yes, I suppose so. He was certainly concerned about sending flowers for her memorial service.'

'Was he?'

'Yes, he got me to order them on the Sat.u.r.day, to be delivered to the church. He was quite particular about them.'

'In what way particular?'

'About the type of flowers. I'll have the details in the file. Do you want to see?'

'Please.'

She took a pouch of invoices and orders marked May from a filing cabinet and flicked through it. 'Here we are.'

Brock read the note. One hundred pounds worth of roses and camomile daisies. 'Camomile daisies?' Brock murmured.

'Yes, he was particular about the daisies. It seemed an odd choice to me, but he explained that camomile is the national flower of Russia. Very thoughtful, don't you think?'

'Very.' He looked through an open door on the far side of the room to what looked like a board room table, on which a couple of trays of sandwiches lay beneath plastic film, untouched. 'Mr Kuzmin miss his lunch?'

'Oh, yes. He and Mr Clarke were supposed to have a lunchtime meeting to discuss the financial matters, but Mr Clarke didn't show up. He wasn't answering his mobile phone, and when I tried to contact him at his office his secretary said that she hadn't seen him today at all. In fact, she hadn't seen him since he went out for a walk in Hyde Park yesterday lunchtime. But that's not unusual for Mr Clarke. He gets bored and suddenly disappears without telling anyone, and then after a few days we get an email from Tokyo or Las Vegas or somewhere. Mr Moszynski used to put up with it with a smile-he said Mr Clarke was an eccentric genius. But Mr Kuzmin isn't so tolerant. He started shouting down the phone at Mr Clarke's secretary to see if his pa.s.sport was still in his safe, and she checked and it had gone. Then Mr Kuzmin got in a rage and told me there was nothing for me to do here and I was fired.'

Brock shook his head in commiseration. 'Bit fiery is he, Mr Kuzmin? How does he get on with Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane?'

'Oh, pretty well. He tried to get hold of him, too, but the secretary at his parliamentary office said that he was in a committee meeting and would be tied up all afternoon.'

Brock said he would find his own way out, and left the secretary to her shredding. He returned along the corridor and came to what looked like one of the original house staircases. He decided to follow it down into the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the security control room was located, and as he descended he was aware of a change in the air, becoming cooler and tinged with the slightly acrid smell of fresh cement and plaster. Sure enough, the lower floor looked as if it had been recently abandoned by builders, with a heap of sand and a cement mixer blocking the way. Ahead of him a doorway had been roughly knocked through a party wall into what had once been the bas.e.m.e.nt of the next house, and as he stepped through Brock found himself in a dusty, dark room that looked as if it hadn't been touched in a hundred years. He stopped, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, and then saw that the floor in front of him had been dug up, with the old stone slabs tilted up on end against the wall and the ground beneath excavated. He made out the dim line of an old earthenware sewer pipe. Planks had been laid across the earthworks to a doorway on the far side of the room, and he crossed and found himself in another cellar, the floor of which looked as if it had been similarly excavated and then filled in again. There was a closed door on the other side of this s.p.a.ce, and when he tried the handle it opened into a carpeted corridor lit by fluorescent lights. A door to one side was open and he saw the equipment of the security monitoring unit inside. The room was deserted, a mug of coffee-Wayne Everett's perhaps-still warm on the table. The whole building had the air of an abandoned palace, half high-tech redoubt, half ruined excavation. He watched the screen for a moment as it flicked automatically from one empty room to another, before he continued along the corridor to a stair that took him up to the entrance hallway again. He opened the front door and, with a sense of relief, stepped into the sunshine.