The Bodies at Westgrave Hall

by Nick Louth

‘The next thing from Netflix: Return of the Romanovs,’ Michelle said.

  ‘Tsar Turn,’ Rainy suggested.

  Hoskins laughed. ‘Celebrity Snow Island, perhaps?’

  Gillard shushed them for the tail end of the fireworks. It was quite hard to disentangle the start of the gunfire on the video from the final aerial explosions, but once the shooting really got going it was unmistakeable. They listened to it right through three times.

  ‘I make it forty-six shots,’ Claire Mulholland said.

  ‘Forty-three, by my reckoning,’ said Hoskins.

  ‘That cannae be right, Carl, since we have recovered forty-six cartridge cases,’ Rainy said.

  Vikram Singh peered at the screen. ‘I calculate it was shot twenty-eight which frosted the window facing us. And we got up to thirty-nine at the point when we saw the bodyguard go in.’

  ‘That’s all useful information,’ Gillard said. ‘It’s fantastic to have a timeline backed by incontrovertible video evidence. By my reckoning, the entire incident from first shot to last took ninety-three seconds. The personal protection officer was inside at eighty-five seconds.’

  ‘When the poor bugger had only eight seconds left to live,’ Shireen said.

  ‘The question that gets me is why he was outside at all,’ Claire said. ‘His job is to be with his boss, protecting him.’

  ‘It could only be because Volkov felt completely safe in the company of Talin,’ said Michelle.

  ‘Oh, do me a favour,’ Hoskins said. ‘Yelena Yalinsky was in there too! What bloke ever feels safe in a confined space with his ex? Especially when they have been fighting for years about billions in a divorce settlement.’

  ‘I’m with you on that,’ Shireen said.

  Hoskins warmed to his theme. ‘I mean my ex would have scratched me eyes out in a heartbeat, and we were only fighting over a second-hand Ford Mondeo, a DFS leather settee with a rip down one side and her Barry Manilow CDs, which I lobbed in the skip.’ The chuckles in the room were particularly marked amongst those officers who had known Hoskins a decade ago when his divorce was going through.

  ‘Don’t forget the china pug,’ Claire said. ‘I took an irate phone call from her about that.’

  ‘Yeah, that bloody thing,’ Hoskins muttered. The ornament had ended up in the skip too.

  Gillard held his hands up. ‘For whatever reason, Bryn Howell was not in the library, and it appears he laid down his life in an attempt to get back in. Motivations at this point are beyond us. Like I said, stick to the facts for now, and when we get the full range of witness interviews we might be able to shed some more light on the “why”.’

  ‘You know we’ve got an Appeal Court judge on our witness list?’ Claire said, looking at a list of attendees ‘Richard Gibbon is Lord Justice Gibbon.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t think the circumstantial side of evidence is going to be a problem,’ Gillard said. ‘The biggest conundrum will be what actually happened in that library in the ninety-three seconds of the shooting. That is where I hope that Neville Tufton will be able to help.’

  Chapter Eight

  The arrival of National Ballistics Intelligence Service expert Neville Tufton moved the debate to a higher level. Gaunt, grey-haired and resembling a superannuated geography teacher, Tufton had been the Met’s lead on ballistics before being transferred to the Birmingham-based NBIS. He and Gillard greeted each other like long-lost friends. As Tufton set up his slides, he told Gillard not to expect too much.

  ‘All but five of the bullets I examined were fired from the same weapon,’ Tufton said. ‘But that weapon is not in our possession, and it’s not on the national database either. As far as we know it’s never been used in any crime.’

  ‘What can you tell me about it?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘It’s a .38, exhibiting the most common barrel configuration with six broad grooves, narrow lands and a left-hand twist. Judging by the number of rounds we have recovered, the assailant must either have had a larger-than-normal magazine or stopped to reload a couple of times. The profusion of cartridge cases widely spread about indicates it wasn’t a revolver, which retains them within the casing until a manual reload. Given more time, I may be able to narrow down the exact manufacturer and model, but the only way to be really sure is to have a candidate gun in your possession and test fire a bullet from it to compare to the others.’

  ‘I have nae idea about guns, but it sounds a bit wild to me. Like amateurs, spraying bullets everywhere,’ Rainy said.

  Tufton nodded. ‘Good point, well done.’ He really was like a schoolteacher. ‘That was my first impression on seeing the impact map. This is a world away from a professional hit job. Bullets in the ceiling, embedded in the hardwood floor on the ground level and in the bookcases. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that professionals were not involved. If a weapon jams, and an assassin is unable to get off his first shot, a surgical operation could easily deteriorate into mayhem.’

  Gillard interrupted. ‘We do know that Bryn Howell, the personal protection officer, had considerable firearms experience and training, because of his military background. I don’t know whether that was true of either Volkov or Talin.’

  ‘What can you tell us about the two guns we do have?’ Claire asked.

  ‘The Browning found near the body of the personal protection officer I believe to be his, an unlicensed weapon. Only one bullet was missing from the magazine and we have found a matching bullet in the ceiling and cartridge case on the ground floor.’

  ‘Witnesses do say that Howell only entered the building during the very last moments of the shooting,’ Gillard said.

  Tufton nodded. ‘The other weapon is a Glock 9mm found in the possession of Maxim Talin, again not on the database.’

  ‘Another illegal weapon,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Yes. Four shots were missing from the magazine, and we found three around the room. One lodged in a window frame, one embedded in a wall and another on the ground floor. That leaves one to find, assuming the magazine was full to begin with and he didn’t have a chance to reload.’

  ‘I wonder if any of Talin’s bullets are in Volkov?’ Shireen asked.

  Tufton smiled. ‘That’s a critical question, and one I can’t answer yet. I will be looking forward to examining them when they are retrieved.’ He turned to Gillard. ‘When is the post-mortem, Craig?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Aye, the usual way to spend Boxing Day,’ Rainy Macintosh said. ‘Dr Delahaye carving up the leftovers, followed by a wee few tins of lager and nodding off in front of The Sound of Music.’ This generated some chuckles amongst the assembled detectives.

  She continued. ‘I may be a wee bit slow, but it seems to me the killer has got away. If we havenae got the weapon, it must have left with the killer, right?’

  ‘I’m not really able to say, I just look at the ballistic evidence,’ Tufton replied, looking to Gillard.

  The detective chief inspector turned to Rainy and asked: ‘How did he get out? There is no emergency exit from the library, so the only way in and out is through the main door.’

  ‘What about the skylight?’ she replied. ‘It was open about a foot and a half, enough for a man to squeeze through.’

  ‘Yes, and I haven’t so far found anyone who admitted to opening it,’ Gillard replied. ‘It must have been opened after the snow blowers finished, which was six p.m. Otherwise there would be melted snow on the floor underneath.’ He gave a sceptical shrug. ‘For all that, it’s a thirty-foot climb from the mezzanine floor to the skylight. All right, you can manage the first six feet clambering on a bookcase, but you’d need Spiderman to do the rest, and it only gets you out onto the roof. Less than two hours after the killing I saw myself that there were no footprints in the snow on that pitched roof, and I think if a helicopter was involved everybody would have seen and heard it.’

  Rainy was not deterred. ‘Sir, maybe our cunning wee assassin could have hidden in the library, in one of the teaching
rooms, and only exited through the skylight after you had done your inspection of the snow.’ She held up a photographic enlargement of the three-foot by four-foot skylight.

  ‘How is it controlled?’

  ‘There’s a wee button on the wall outside the panic room. It’s alternate open and close. Nothing clever.’

  Gillard pursed his lips. ‘CSI was already in the place, but I suppose it’s possible. I still would have expected to see some footwear marks on the wall just below the skylight, even assuming he’s a skilled climber. I’ve done a bit of free climbing, but there’s no way I could do that. Besides, it still leaves the question of how he got in.’

  ‘Way earlier, before or during the party perhaps,’ Rainy said. Claire Mulholland nodded in agreement, as did a couple of the other cops.

  ‘Ah, do me a favour,’ Hoskins laughed, slapping the table. ‘So our Superman is invisible, or at least not noticeable, on his way in. Leaves no footprints at the crime scene that we know of. Climbs like a cat burglar on his way out, without using his feet on the wall. Flings himself off the roof somewhere without leaving a footprint on the roof or the surrounding snow. Given all those skills, why did it take him forty-odd bullets to finish off two pissed, overweight billionaires?’

  There was some laughter at this. ‘What made you think they were drunk?’ Michelle Tsu asked.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Hoskins rolled his eyes. ‘It’s a Christmas party, the booze is free, they’re male and they’re Russian.’

  Michelle, who had often been on the wrong end of Carl’s racial stereotyping, said: ‘Maxim Talin has been teetotal for five years, and vegan for ten, according to last year’s Sunday Times profile.’

  ‘Nah, teetotal Russians are rarer than unicorn poo.’

  Keeping incident room meetings on the point was always difficult. Craig Gillard always wanted his team to explore the possibilities, and to bounce ideas off each other, but when time was pressing, as it usually was, he needed to bring them back on track to examine the evidence before their eyes. Now seemed to be a good time to teach them about their two principal victims.

  Gillard started running some slides. ‘Alexander Vasiliyovich Volkov, fifty-five, born in Perm in Siberia. His father was in a Siberian gulag for twenty years. His mother was a hydraulic engineer. I’ve not covered the details of his education, and early working life because none of that is significant until—’

  ‘Until he laid hands on all the lolly,’ Hoskins said.

  ‘Exactly. Volkov is valued by Forbes magazine’s rich list at $6 billion, making him the seventeenth richest person in the UK. He has a controlling interest in Kazakh Minerals, which is basically all about copper. Fell out with the Kremlin about a decade ago over the lack of tax paid on his profits but is seemingly in their good books now.’

  ‘Or not, as the case may be,’ DS Singh said.

  ‘I’m just going by Wikipedia,’ Gillard said apologetically. ‘Haven’t had chance to do much more as yet.’ He turned back to the whiteboard. ‘He’s got two kids by Yelena Yalinsky: Oleg, twenty-one, a self-styled influencer and playboy, and Anastasia, seventeen, a student. Both were at the party.’ He glanced around the room. ‘I’ve interviewed her already. Spoiled brat, unsurprisingly. Plenty of emotional baggage.’

  Carl Hoskins laughed. ‘Maybe PC Woodbridge should have left her in the lake.’

  ‘The second victim was Maxim Talin, a Soviet émigré and scientist who’d built his fortune in recent years on a new generation of rechargeable batteries. Talin works in Silicon Valley, and has built a $100 million home modelled on the Versailles Palace in Trousdale. He commutes by helicopter. Forbes puts his fortune at $9 billion. Talin went to university with Volkov, and as Carl has pointed out, Yalinsky was originally Talin’s girlfriend at that time. Following the divorce from Volkov, she became Talin’s partner once again.’ Gillard capped the marker pen he been using and turned to the audience. ‘You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see endless motives here. Not only are both men extremely wealthy, but they have had an overlapping love life. For most of the last twenty years they have reportedly been enemies.’

  ‘Then of course there is the Kremlin,’ DS Singh said.

  Gillard nodded. ‘As I said earlier, let’s concentrate on the evidence and leave the motivations for later. Finally, let’s not forget about the personal protection officer, Bryn Howell. We’re awaiting his full military record and security clearances which should be here this afternoon. However, on the face of it, his death looks like collateral damage.’

  ‘I hope no one is going to say that to his wife,’ Michelle Tsu said.

  ‘Obviously not,’ Gillard replied. ‘Family liaison officer Gabby Underwood has been asked to make the approach.’ He looked at his watch. ‘All right, that’s all for now. Shireen, I’d like you to dig up everything about the background of these oligarchs that you can. Michelle, chase up all the witnesses and go through the statements, but your first priority is to see if we can get hold of Yelena Yalinsky before she leaves the country.’ He collected his papers and put them into a folder. ‘Carl, you and I are going to have to take a good look inside that panic room.’

  * * *

  When they re-emerged from the Khazi, it was raining. They made their way across to the library where the CSI tent was still in place, and one CSI van remained. Greeting the female uniform who was guarding the entrance, Gillard then peered inside the marquee structure, and recognised investigator Kirsty Mockett, even though she was in a hooded Tyvek suit and staring down at a laptop.

  ‘Will you be much longer?’ he asked the young woman. ‘Or should we suit up?’

  ‘Booties would still be appreciated so you don’t drop any grot, sir. The staircases are still being examined, so if you want to inspect the balcony, please use the ground floor access and go via the aerial platform. We’ve got quite a few latent prints away from the bloodstained areas, thanks to the fact it was snowy outside. I’m trying to match them up to the footwear evidence. I’ll be a while yet on that.’

  ‘We need to go to the panic room.’ Gillard pulled out his phone and rang Wolf, Volkov’s head of security. He’d need to be here too.

  ‘That’s fine, there’s duckboards just there above the bloodstains.’

  ‘Okay.’ Gillard was impressed by the progress made by Ms Mockett in the year since her qualification. She had undergone something of an ordeal by fire by stumbling across a crime scene, another snowy one, oddly enough, on the day before she was due to start at Surrey Police. She had acquitted herself well. Now the girlfriend of his research intelligence officer, Rob Townsend, she seemed like a fixture of every good CSI investigation.

  Once Wolf arrived, Gillard briefed him and they all slipped on plastic overshoes and gloves then went through the tent into the building. The staircases, the first where Bryn Howell died and the second at the other end, were still sealed off with crime tape, so the group made their way along the ground floor underneath the fossil rock until they came to the wheeled platform, big enough for three. They climbed the rattly ladder three feet onto the platform, then Gillard operated the lifting console which controlled a hydraulic scissor-lift to bring them up onto the balcony twelve feet above.

  ‘Where exactly is this panic room?’ Gillard asked Wolf.

  ‘Is concealed door there,’ the Georgian said, pointing to a section of stone-clad wall. Gingerly, they made their way out of the cage, over the balcony rail and across the plastic duckboards until they were in front of the door. ‘I left unlocked,’ Wolf said. He pressed a finger into a cavity in the stonework at waist height, and a small metal ring handle popped out. ‘We have to move plastic,’ Wolf said of the duckboard immediately in front of the door. ‘Otherwise door will jam.’

  Hoskins unclipped the plastic tile and moved it away. Wolf pulled the door, which slid silently open. It was four-inch-thick steel.

  ‘This is like something from The Matrix,’ Hoskins said. The door gave onto a small landing and a spiral metal staircase desce
nding.

  The panic room was more like a home, with a lounge, shower and bathroom, and a bedroom bigger than Gillard’s own, all tastefully decorated in grazed steel and glass. Picture windows gave the illusion of being in a Swiss meadow. There was even a small separate wine cellar.

  ‘Very comfy,’ Hoskins said. ‘All mod cons.’

  ‘Of course, what would you expect?’ Wolf gave the detective constable a withering look. The centrepiece was an office with a safe, numerous screens and some pretty sophisticated-looking electronic gear. It seemed the kind of set-up that some stock market trader might have.

  Gillard scrutinised the various controls and saw a row of rocker switches labelled in Cyrillic. ‘Ah, this controls the lighting. That must have been how Ms Yalinsky was signalling she was trapped. When CSI finally removed the body of Mr Volkov and was able to open the door, she told Yaz Quoroshi that she been trying to get out for more than an hour.’

  Wolf skilfully worked some switches on the control panel, and a monitor screen crackled into life. He rewound until he reached the last footage. ‘See, nothing after four p.m.’

  ‘Can you show me the other cameras?’ Gillard asked.

  Wolf’s finger skated lightly over the keyboard until the screen divided into a three-by-three grid of CCTV images into the library. ‘That is the current picture.’

  ‘Can you go back?’

  ‘I can, but earlier was switched off.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Because I was in main control room in house when Mr Volkov asked me. Most security systems here in library can be overridden from the main panic room.’

  ‘The main panic room?’ Hoskins asked incredulously. ‘So he’s got two?’

  ‘Of course. There is a five-bedroom, three-bathroom flat in basement of Westgrave Hall, with own oxygen and water supply and a secret escape tunnel.’

  ‘We’ll need to see it,’ Gillard said.

  Hoskins shook his head in amazement. ‘He must have been terrified to have all this. What was he so scared of?’