The Body in the Snow

by The Body in the Snow (retail) (epub)

  Gillard said nothing.

  ‘It’s not just an alibi, Craig, it’s cast iron. We know when he went out, we know when he came back. When Mrs Roy was killed, he just wasn’t here.’

  Now doubting himself, Gillard apologised to Claire for disturbing her, then cut the line. His theory still made so much sense. It provided a motive, finally. For the murder, and in a traditional Indian family, the imperative of protecting the secrecy over Harry’s real orientation.

  He wanted to go home to Sam, for a home-cooked meal, to sit down and relax. But overshadowing that was the meeting with the chief constable at nine a.m. tomorrow morning. Alison Rigby was going to order the release of Jason Waddington. If he didn’t have a plausible new suspect to replace Waddington, she had threatened to call a press conference at which he would have to explain why the investigation had run into the sand.

  The detective was disturbed by the whirr and rumble of the lift, summoned to a higher floor. He watched the indicator light. The eleventh, Harry’s floor. He hid himself behind reception, crouching under a desk where he couldn’t be seen.

  The lift doors opened and he heard Morag Fairburn’s glorious Scottish lilt. ‘They must know Deepak is the killer to have arrested him. I never liked him, but…’

  ‘Poor Prish must be horrified,’ Kiara said. ‘And Indigo, poor kid, what about her?’

  They were both silent for a moment.

  ‘So how long have you known about Zayan?’ Morag asked.

  ‘Not long really. I suspected Harry was gay years ago when he went to college, but then he denied it, and then of course your relationship – all that hand-holding in public, the little stolen kisses, well – it made me doubt myself.’

  ‘It was all deliberate,’ Morag said. ‘He was always petrified of being discovered, and he probably didn’t completely trust his little sister to keep a secret. It got almost obsessive because the stakes were so high.’

  ‘I can see why. My father had so poured his hopes and dreams into Harry. If he’d even got the slightest idea who Harry really was, he would have cut him off completely. I mean in Dr Roy’s philosophy there was only one thing lower than a woman, and that was a homosexual.’

  ‘So you never mentioned your suspicion to Prisha?’ Morag asked.

  ‘God, no. We’re not that close and Prish was obsessed with this race between you and her to produce the first Hindu son.’ They both laughed uproariously. ‘Now that turned out to be a pointless race. No winners, and now not even a prize!’

  ‘I was never even in that race,’ Morag said. ‘Did you know, Prisha even gave James a lift home from school, and asked him a load of questions. I think she was trying to find out if he was being brought up a Hindu.’ They both laughed again. ‘Oh, I’ve got to tell you,’ she giggled again. ‘There was one time, it was absolutely hilarious. I think I told you, I used to regularly drive around to Harry’s house, with Zayan lying down on the back seat under a blanket. These private detectives that Prisha had hired would sit opposite, taking photographs for your sister. They were so easy to spot; two fat blokes sitting in a car reading newspapers.’ She laughed again. ‘So they watched me reversing my company BMW into the garage which adjoined Harry’s house. Then I’d walk out and go to the front door, and ring the bell, so the snoopers could see me kissing Harry hello before going into the house. But what they didn’t know was that there was an internal door from the garage, so that Zayan could come in unseen. You might also remember that there was a rear alleyway?’

  ‘Yes, I remember that.’

  ‘Well, I had my other car, the old Toyota, parked around the back in a cul-de-sac off another road. So I’d arrive, go straight through and out of the back via the alleyway to where the Toyota was, and drive it home. Then, at seven o’clock the next morning, I’d drive the Toyota back, go back in to the rear of the house, leave at the front, giving Harry a lingering French kiss on the front doorstep, walk to the garage, then drive my company car to the office, with Zayan already secreted in the back.’

  ‘Very clever.’

  ‘Well I mean, those private detectives were useless. Prisha had given them her suspicions, and they simply earned a lot of money confirming them. Why would they bother to use their initiative? Still, after that Harry, being his sensible self, thought it logistically safer to move house, and bring Zayan into the same block of flats.’

  Kiara laughed, jingling her own car keys. ‘Look, it’s been great to catch up. I take it Harry has looked after you, for the arduous decade pretending to be his girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. Still, it’s not over yet, is it? The marriage may not last very long, once Sonali finds out that Harry’s not interested, but a £27 million dowry is not to be sniffed at. It should keep the banks from the door for a while. We might have to sell and lease back the Slough factory, but it should be manageable.’

  The two women said their goodbyes as they headed off to their respective parked cars.

  Gillard waited until they had left, then eased himself out from behind the desk. It was nearly ten p.m. when he pulled into the Mount Browne car park, still with work to do.

  * * *

  The open-plan office from which CID operated was generally tidy, and at this time of night rarely populated with more than one or two officers. The chief constable, who possessed a well-ordered mind, emphasised that the crime scenes remained outside the building, with documents filed, evidence logged, data backed up, and desk drawers locked before anyone finished their shift.

  The advice wasn’t always followed.

  Any night-time intruder wanting to find where DCs Colin Hodges and Carl Hoskins worked from would have had about as much difficulty as finding the path of a tornado through an Indiana cornfield. Their end of the room was the upended trailer park of criminal investigation. Stacks of box files, discarded coffee cups, burger wrappers, and screens so smeary they were often blurred. There were two reasons why CID, despite insufficient space for all officers, had desperately resisted Rigby’s plans for hot-desking. Those reasons were easily summarised: a) Hodges b) Hoskins. Nobody wanted to play rubbish roulette with their own personal space.

  Gillard spent five minutes going through Hoskins’ inbox and outbox, not finding what he was looking for. He knew from long experience that the details of Zayan Lal’s travel would not yet have found their way onto the Surrey Police computer system. Hoskins’ drawers were locked (good boy), but the key was Sellotaped to the underside of his keyboard (bad boy). In the top drawer he found a printouts of Lal’s travel documents, and the Border Force’s e-gate record, which did indeed prove his arrival at Heathrow on the stated day.

  The detective turned on a desk lamp and flicked through the grubby papers, looking for more. Giving up, he rang Hoskins’ mobile, and found him at the Red Lion with a bunch of mates.

  ‘Are you sober, Carl?’

  ‘More or less, guv.’ Laughter could be heard in the background. ‘Not called for my take on that last Spurs goal, then?’

  ‘This travel documentation for Lal is incomplete,’

  ‘Blimey, hold on. I’m going out into the car park where I can hear you.’

  When the background noise had gone, Gillard repeated his statement. ‘This is only the last leg, from Dubai to Heathrow.’

  ‘That’s all that was forwarded from Epsom. I think we got the complete outbound,’ Hoskins said. ‘Can I deal with it in the morning, sir?’

  ‘No, Carl, because I have to deal with it now. Okay, get back to the footie, I’ll do it.’

  Gillard hung up, returned to his own office, looked up then rang the duty security officer at Air India in London. He got passed from pillar to post, having to verify his security credentials three times at a call centre somewhere in the subcontinent, before he received a promise of a call back with the information he required. While waiting, he spent forty minutes online checking which UK airports received flights from Dubai. There were a lot, and he was only halfway through cataloguing them when, at 12.27 a.m., he got the I
ndia callback. It confirmed his suspicions.

  Zayan Lal had only boarded the Air India flight back to Heathrow from Dubai. Gillard checked Surrey CID’s security contact details, to find they did not have one for immigration in Dubai. It was 2.45 a.m. when the duty officer at the Met police called him back with the information he wanted.

  Only then did Gillard check his own phone to find that his long-suffering wife, Sam, had texted him twice in the last two hours to ask if he was coming home or not. It was now too late to ring her back without waking her.

  He was dizzy with tiredness by the time he finally got the information he wanted. Lal had returned to Britain not once but twice in the last month. He had taken the Mumbai to Heathrow flight on the Friday before Mrs Roy’s murder, but left the flight at Dubai. He had then caught an Emirates flight from Dubai to Gatwick, arriving on Saturday. On Sunday night, the day of her death, he had departed again from Gatwick to Dubai, hung around for a day or two, then returned to Heathrow on an Air India flight arriving on Wednesday.

  The upshot of these complicated shenanigans was that Lal could provide partial documents which appeared to prove he was out of the country on the day Mrs Roy was murdered. But he had doubled back, and was actually in the UK from Saturday morning until Sunday evening. He would have had ample time to kill her and cover his tracks.

  Finally Gillard had some circumstantial evidence for Lal. Now all he had to do was arrest him.

  With a renewed burst of energy he logged on to the online warrant service, a national out-of-hours service which allows a duty magistrate somewhere in the country to examine and approve requests for arrests and searches. It certainly beat the old system where they had to wake up a local magistrate, almost always male, and often travel to his home to convince him face-to-face that a warrant was required.

  * * *

  A miserable, rainswept Thursday morning, 5.45 a.m., found Gillard sitting in his Vauxhall, once again outside the block of flats where Harry Roy and Zayan Lal lived. If this was luxury living they could stuff it. Eleven floors, three columns of steel balconies on each side, except for the penthouse floor where Harry lived, which had a single, somewhat wider terrace over the middle column. He was drinking the last dregs of a coffee he bought at an all-night petrol station and munching a cereal bar while he waited for the two carloads of uniforms with door rams to arrive and tackle the two targeted flats. Simultaneously, another carload would go in to Morag Fairburn’s house. The detective was almost delirious with lack of sleep, and the magistrate who had questioned him over the phone had remarked that he sounded tired. But he had, in the end, granted search and arrest warrants that covered all three individuals, and the information held on their phones, computers and other devices. Additionally he had been granted a search warrant for all premises of Empire of Spice Plc, just in case.

  He yawned extravagantly, and felt a wave of sleep wash over him. He reckoned he had about another hour or two of energy left in him before he passed out, and was willing the plods to hurry up.

  The sound of the phone awoke him. He hadn’t realised he had dozed off. Control was notifying him of the arrival of the uniforms, and sure enough an unmarked people carrier and a bloody riot van of all things hoved into view. Gillard levered himself out of the car, and the Transit slewed noisily to a halt. The driver leaned out of the window and explained: ‘It’s all we had available.’

  A dozen largely beefy officers with stab vests and police-issue baseball caps piled out of the vehicles, looking like a particularly disreputable rugby team. The detective briefed them about the location of the flats, and emphasised that this was not some drugs raid, they should not expect violence, and the men they were there to arrest would probably not put up much resistance.

  ‘When we get up there, we’ll start by ringing the doorbell,’ he said to smirks of amusement. The officer carrying the ram, a huge, bearded fellow called Tunnicliffe, looked crestfallen. Gillard led his army down the carefully landscaped footpath, past the pretty shrubs and towards the glass doors at reception, unstaffed at this hour.

  ‘Which one of you is the locksmith?’ he asked the men behind him. No one replied.

  The sergeant in charge, a thickset, bullet-headed officer called Platt, said: ‘No one told us we needed one.’ Gillard could hear chuckling in the ranks. Tunnicliffe elbowed his way forward, with the ram on his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ Gillard said, and pressed four bells for second-floor flats. Leaning his head in to the intercom, he waited for someone to answer. A woman did, and he apologised for waking her. ‘It’s the police, would you kindly buzz us in?’

  ‘Is it about the dog fouling?’ she asked.

  ‘No, madam. Please, just press the button.’ She did.

  The entourage clomped in, and gathered around the two lift entrances. When the lifts arrived, Gillard went with the crew to tackle Harry Roy on the eleventh floor, while Platt headed to the tenth, under instructions not to ram the door without asking him first. ‘That occupant is likely to be in the higher flat. So wait for my say-so.’

  Outside Harry Roy’s door, the detective rang the bell, while ten-ton Tony Tunnicliffe, as he was known, hammered on the door with his fist, bellowing, ‘Police, open up.’ They waited five seconds, and Tunnicliffe began again, making a huge racket. The door opened as far as the chain allowed, and Gillard saw Harry Roy’s shocked face, with a toothbrush sticking out of it, and a silk dressing gown below.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’ he said, foamy toothpaste down his chin.

  ‘Open it NOW,’ Tunnicliffe yelled, blocking out Gillard’s attempt to make himself heard.

  ‘Harry, I have a search warrant,’ the detective repeated, showing him the document. ‘Is Zayan Lal in there with you?’

  ‘Open it NOW,’ Tunnicliffe repeated. ‘Or I’ll smash it down.’

  Gillard lifted a restraining arm in front of Tunnicliffe, leaving Harry time to close the door and unchain it. The officers barged in immediately, and fanned out across the luxury flat.

  ‘Where is Zayan?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘He’s not here,’ Harry said, with just enough of a hesitation to show he was lying. The detective saw movement, a hem of curtain billowing. Gillard raced past Harry, threw the drape back and discovered the sliding door to the balcony was partially open. He went through into a lash of rain and wind, and saw to his left Zayan Lal, crouched on top of the left-hand edge of the terrace handrail, perfectly balanced, just one hand reaching down steadying himself. The pose was familiar somehow. Gillard remembered, from a film poster. Spiderman, poised to jump.

  ‘Don’t!’ Gillard said. ‘We just want to talk to you.’

  Zayan glanced at the detective and then below at the drop behind him. It was a long, long way down. Eleven stories to a concrete path, formal gardens, then, thirty yards further out, the river. The lazy Thames, winding its way towards London, with a long history of ferrying the dead and dying.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ Gillard edged closer, the rain lashing his face.

  ‘Then stay away.’ Zayan was wearing tracksuit bottoms, a white T-shirt, and training shoes. His muscled forearm readjusted its grip on the stainless steel rail, fingers moving as if fidgety for flight. Gillard had never before noticed his athletic poise. He turned back to the detective.

  ‘Leave Harry out of it, Gillard. He doesn’t use.’

  ‘I’m here about murder, not drugs.’

  ‘Then you’re wasting your time.’ Zayan glanced behind him, again considering the drop.

  ‘Why did you kill her, Zayan?’

  ‘I didn’t. It wasn’t me.’

  Behind Gillard, the glass door slid further open, and Tunnicliffe’s bulk muscled out. The stainless steel terrace, for all its generous proportions, seem to flex. Out here, two was company, three definitely a crowd. ‘I’ll get him,’ the big cop said and, before Gillard could stop him, he lunged.

  Zayan fired himself backwards from the balustr
ade, as if spring-loaded. He twisted away from Tunnicliffe’s grasping paws, and then fell, disappearing in a moment. The big cop banged into the rail, half over the edge of the rail himself, and it took all Gillard’s strength to stop him from tipping over the edge. By the time the detective peered over, Zayan was gone. There was no body on the grass, no corpse on the concrete. The Thames, impassive as ever, seemed undisturbed.

  ‘Where the fuck has he gone?’ he whispered.

  Tunnicliffe, on his knees and winded, croaked out something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘On the other balcony. He landed—’ the rest was lost in a coughing fit.

  Gillard stared over the edge. But Zayan wasn’t on the terrace on the floor below. It was at least twenty feet down, and there was a fifteen-foot void to cross to get there. He turned back to Tunnicliffe. ‘He’s not there.’ Then he looked again. There were all-weather cushions on the other balcony, and in the middle of one, a series of dirty, newly-wet footprints.

  ‘Fuck, that’s his own flat.’ Gillard grabbed the big cop’s radio, and called the rest of the team. ‘Get into the tenth floor flat, I want someone on the ground floor too. Don’t let him get away.’

  There was a crackle of static, then an acknowledgement.

  Before Gillard had finished, Harry Roy burst out onto the balcony. ‘Zayan?’ He was still in a dressing gown, still with toothpaste smeared down his chin.

  ‘He jumped,’ said Tunnicliffe, inclining his head towards the parapet.

  Harry let out an anguished shriek and rushed to the guardrail. Gillard grabbed him by the shoulders and said: ‘It’s all right, he landed on his own balcony. He’s inside his own flat.’ He wished he knew that for a fact.

  There was a noise across and below from the other balcony, and a cop in a stab vest burst out, looking confused.