As usual Reuben had filled Bex in on the intricacies of London real estate. “Good location, close to restaurants, shops and other amenities. Could be in the vicinity of two or three mill for a two-bedroom flat. And more than that for a three or four bedroom,” he told her, inspecting the quiet residential street, before they knocked on the imposing wooden door.
“That’s a lot of money for a twenty-two year old to come up with. Maybe he’s just renting?”
Reuben shrugged. “Rents in this area are going to run above fifteen hundred pounds a week. I’m not sure how much money dental graduates have to spare, but it’s certainly outside my current pay scale.”
“Point taken, Reuben. The Galliers’ aren’t shy about throwing money around.” Bex made a note in her phone to check into the Galliers’ finances.
“Would you like a drink, detectives?” With his neatly combed hair, overpriced buttoned down shirt, and arrogantly tilted chin, Phillip was exactly what she expected of Penelope and Charles’ offspring.
They both declined his offer, although Bex felt her stomach gurgle, protesting its emptiness. She hadn’t filled it since breakfast on the flight over, thirteen hours ago.
Their refusal didn’t deter Phillip. As he moved to the sideboard to pour himself a finger of scotch whiskey, Bex’s eyes swept over her surroundings.
Although it didn’t quite have the grandeur of his parents’ home, there was no doubt the twenty-foot long room with its cathedral-high ceilings, was impressive. The hard wood floor was covered with muted scatter rugs that Bex hazarded a guess were Persian or some other expensive oriental variety. Double doors opposite the bay window gave a glimpse through to a modern, blue-tiled kitchen.
Over the fireplace in front of them hung an enormous monochrome painting in shades of red and gray that dominated the room. Beside the fireplace were two display cabinets, LED lights highlighting a number of crystal and ceramic knickknacks. Bex assumed these were rare and expensive collectibles.
The furnishings were tastefully bland, but looked slightly worn as if they were perhaps castoffs from his parents’ Mayfair home. The subdued lighting from a number of lamps scattered around made Bex feel like they should be conversing in hushed tones.
Reuben’s elbow nudged her. When she turned her attention his way, he nodded his head towards the coffee table and her glance fell to a framed photo: Phillip and Bon laughing into the camera lens, their arms slung casually over each other’s shoulders. It looked like a moment of genuine affection and carefree informality. She recalled Charles’ words, “Bon idolized Phil.”
“That’s a lovely photo of you and your brother,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She knew the words sounded like rote, but her emotions were too fragile to release any sort of sympathy.
Phillip remained standing. He nursed his glass, leaning against the sideboard. “It’s such a weird feeling to know that I’ll never speak to him again. I keep trying to make myself believe it, but I can’t.” His voice sounded pitchy, as though he was speaking over a lump in his throat. Like a thick fog, his emanating grief enveloped Bex. Her body shook and she squeezed her fingers tightly together between her knees to keep control.
“When was the last time you saw your brother?” Rueben’s voice cut through the misery in the room, like a superhero immune to their mutual kryptonite.
Phillip sucked in a deep breath. “I guess it would have been last Wednesday. He came by late. He was upset about the break up with his girlfriend. He wanted to vent.”
“He was angry?” With Bex unable to make her tongue move, Reuben took the lead.
“Yes. Some of his mates at Harrow had been ragging him about Clara’s new girlfriend. He’d called Clara that afternoon but she wouldn’t talk to him, so he went around to her place to confront her.” Phillip paused to take a deep breath and Bex had the impression he was holding back information. “Clara was there with her new girlfriend. They told him to go away or they’d call the police. He was beside himself. He couldn’t talk to his mates, they thought it was a huge joke. So he came here.”
“Did you say girlfriend?”
“Yes. I don’t remember her name, but apparently it was someone Clara had known for awhile. Bon just assumed they were friends. But it seems Clara was two-timing him with this other girl.” Phillip’s voice was a bitter snarl.
“How well did you know Clara Butterworth?” Bex finally pulled her thoughts back under control.
“Not that well. She came to a few family dinners and I spoke to her at Bon’s birthday in March. To be honest, I don’t know what Bon saw in her.” He shook his head, gulping down the last of his whiskey. Bex wondered how many he’d already had to drink. Whiskey, it was a great numbing agent.
“If truth be told, I never thought she cared much for Bon, and I sometimes wondered if that was her attraction for him. He was used to girls swooning at his feet. Clara was different. Or should I say, indifferent, to Bon’s charms. He tried so hard with her.”
“Was he obsessed with her?”
Phillip hesitated, pulling himself up short before he answered. His expression hardened, like ice forming over a pond. “Sorry, detectives, what did you say you were here for? Police don’t normally come around for car accidents, do they?”
“It’s just an informal chat. We’re asking a few questions to see if we can piece together Bon’s state of mind before the accident. Actually, I wonder, Mr Galliers, if I could get an aspirin for my headache?” Bex knew her red-rimmed eyes lent credence to her request.
“Ah, sure, I think there’s some in the bathroom.” Confusion at her change of tack clouded his eyes.
Bex stood up and Phillip led her through the single door, back to the foyer and through an archway into another vestibule near the entry. Three doors faced them. One lead to the guest bathroom and one to Phillip’s private bathroom with an adjacent door into his bedroom. As he moved to direct her into the public bathroom, she waved him away.
“Thanks, I can manage. I’ll be right back,” she promised, closing the door in his face.
Knowing he would linger for a minute, she counted in her head slowly to thirty. The bathroom she was in was coated with slick, black tiles so shiny she could see her own reflection. The heavy chrome fittings for the toilet and basins made her feel she was in a public washroom, but she presumed they had cost a fortune.
She cracked open the door. Good. Phillip had returned to the drawing room. She slid out of the room and through the half-open door into Phillip’s personal bathroom. They had no search warrant, but sometimes snooping around could shed unexpected light.
A free standing bath like an oversized shoehorn stood in one corner against a feature stonework wall. The brushed metal towel rack beside it looked like a refugee from an industrial site. The basin was exposed above the top of a cherry wood cupboard. Standing beside it was an automatic soap dispenser so fancy it looked like a coffee pot. Plugged in on top of the marble counter were his electric toothbrush and blow dryer, while a Bluetooth speaker was suction-cupped to the wall beside the mirror.
Wasting no time, she quickly pulled open the cupboard doors to reveal neat rolls of towels and stacks of toilet paper. Next, her attention turned to the drawers. The top drawer was a messy jumble of toiletries, expensive bottles of aftershave and cologne, razors and cocoa butter shaving cream, a small tub of anti-wrinkle moisturizer for men, deodorant, and toothpaste.
The middle drawer looked like a medicine cabinet, filled with both over the counter and prescription medication. She took note of a bottle of Xanax, the label indicating the prescription had been filled today.
She yanked open the bottom drawer, riffling through a rectangular, leather case filled with gleaming dental tools, a plaque staining kit complete with dozens of red tablets in a heavy-duty, zipped clear plastic bag, a fancy copper tongue scraper and two one-liter sized bottles of green mouthwash.
She paused on the verge of shutting the drawer. Once more her
eyes ran over the objects. The leather case was good quality, with tooled gold monogramming. The U-shaped tongue scraper had gold-plated handles. These objects screamed money. Beside them, the two unopened plastic bottles of green mouthwash looked cheap and out of place. Wouldn’t someone like Phillip Galliers keep his mouthwash in a special bottle, like a monogrammed hip flask? Come to think of it, hadn’t Bon had the exact same brand of mouthwash in his bathroom? Perhaps Dunreath Orthodontics got a special deal on the stuff?
She closed the drawer, but her hand lingered on the handle. Something about the articles nagged at her instincts. She tugged the drawer open again. Grabbing a handful of toilet paper, she gingerly lifted out a bottle of mouthwash. It was unsealed as though it had already been opened, but the fluid was full to the top. Using another wad of paper and a finger and thumb, she unscrewed the cap. Holding the bottle to her nose she expected to be assaulted by the astringent, minty, medicinal smell of mouthwash. But there was no odor. She inhaled more deeply. Still nothing. Quickly, she unscrewed the second bottle with the same results.
Hastily she returned the bottles and flushed the paper down the toilet. She was running out of time and needed to return to the drawing room before Phillip came looking for her. But she had been right to have misgivings. Whatever those bottles contained it certainly wasn’t mouthwash.
Chapter 14
Wednesday 5 July
Bex was almost too exhausted to appreciate the Parkwood’s plush interior with its sprinkling of antiques that bestowed an old world charm, when Reuben dropped her back at her room. It was just what she expected of a quaint London hotel that was boutique rather than franchised, but she was far more interested in laying claim to a hot shower and a hot meal.
Reuben had offered to share his “takeaway” chicken tikka masala but Bex had passed. Ordering room service, she ate a steak burger while scanning her phone for messages from home.
Your dad says the best way to avoid jetlag is to orient yourself in your new time zone and not go to bed until it’s night time in London. What did you do for your first day? Love you. XX
She knew her parents feared for her safety. It was only natural given that she’d barely emerged alive from a near fatal car crash, given she was a homicide detective, given that she had moved to a city facing a shocking spate of terrorist attacks. But they locked their objections firmly behind silent acceptance.
She sent her mother a photo from the Tower of London earlier that day.
Doing some sightseeing. Hotel is great. Weather hot. All good, so stop worrying. Won’t go to bed till nine. XX
No chance of going to bed earlier, she thought, with all the background notes Dresden had left for her to read through. Sighing, she slipped the phone into the pocket of the hotel robe she had wrapped around herself and, sucking back a caffeine-laced soda, she scanned each of her team’s individual reports.
Bex skimmed over Reuben’s details because there wasn’t much to his file. The twenty-eight year old had graduated last week with just eighteen weeks of training under his belt. This was his first probationary assignment.
Elijah Morgan, who preferred to be called Eli, was the veteran of the team at forty-five and with more than twenty years of policing, including fifteen in the detective ranks. His resumé showed him working initially at Dorset Police before moving onto the Fraud Squad, Drugs Squad and spending the last three years with the Haringey CID before shifting to the Youth Crimes Team. With his thorough grounding in detective work, she wondered why he’d never risen higher than Sergeant.
Idris Carson and Quinn Standing’s resumés bore a number of similarities. Both were thirty-one years old and had joined the service in the same year, serving as uniformed officers for four years before transferring to the Criminal Investigation Department. During those years, Quinn had been trained as an Authorized Firearms Officer, spending two years with the Specialist Firearms Command, while Idris had stayed with general duties.
They had also both been stationed at Hackney CID. Idris had transferred to the Youth Crimes Team straight from Hackney. Quinn had left Hackney twelve months ago to join the Serious Organized Crime Agency. He had transferred from that unit to hers. And from what she had overheard in Dresden’s office, the transfer had neither been initiated nor welcomed by him.
By comparison her detective experience with the NYPD had been intense, but brief. After eighteen months in uniform, her commanding officer had recommended her to their precinct’s detective unit. Almost immediately she and her partner, Walt, had cracked a long-standing serial murder, which put her on the radar of her new commanding officer. After wrapping up her third successful prosecution, this time for a child murderer, she was offered a spot on the Criminal Investigation Course.
“Zane, watch out for your wife. She’s a speeding bullet on her way to lieutenancy,” Walt had joked when the three of them had gone out for Chinese on a rare evening off work. Bex had secretly agreed with her partner. She wanted to be one of the youngest lieutenants in the precinct. But then the car crash happened.
Instead of making progress with her career she had thrown her energy into establishing a place where young offenders could go after their release. Knowing they would reoffend within minutes if placed back in their old environments, her intention was to keep the boys out of temptation’s way and give them a second chance to finish their schooling. Her psych informed her it was a healthy way to deal with her guilt over surviving the crash.
Bex’s eyelids drooped, feeling almost too heavy to blink, weighed down by sleepiness and sorrow. Guilt and sleepless nights now made up the fabric of her life. The folder of notes slipped from her lap as she drifted into a semi-trance.
* * *
Sweating, shaking and stiff from falling asleep in the armchair, Bex roused from a nightmare filled with splintering glass, screeching metal, blinding lights and her own screaming voice. With an effort she straightened her body, wincing at the pain from a crick in her neck. She glanced across at the digital clock on the bedside table. Its blinking digits said 2:05 a.m.
It had been several weeks since she’d had a nightmare that ripped apart her mind as badly as this. But Clara Butterworth’s case rattled her. It was painfully ironic that, after traveling thousands of miles to escape any reminders of the car crash that killed her husband, the first case she had to deal with was a crash victim.
The hotel room felt stifling. She rose from the armchair, shrugging off the sweaty robe and padding barefooted to the thermostat. She jiggled it, hoping to kick up the air conditioning a notch or two. Damn thing! She almost believed the thermostat was a fake, simply stuck on the wall by the hotel to fool foreign visitors into believing England had proper climate control.
Pulling on one of Zane’s T-shirts that clung to the tops of her thighs, she slipped under the bed sheets. They felt cool against her skin.
Tomorrow she and Reuben were due to interview Clara’s mother, Evelyn. The thought left her tossing under the sheets until they were tangled around her legs. Maybe she would be kind to herself and assign Quinn and Eli to the interview. Quinn would take it as a victory, but perhaps it would sweeten his antagonism. That would leave her with the option of visiting Bon’s rooms at Harrow and talking with his teachers and fellow students.
A yawn dragged her mouth open while her eyelids flickered wearily. She threw off the tangled sheet. The air in the room was still heavy with humidity and her body was fighting off sleep, afraid of more nightmares. It was going to be another long night.
Chapter 15
Thursday 6 July
Reuben picked Bex up in front of her hotel and drove them back to Victoria Embankment, after the shrill ring of her wake up call had launched her out of bed after too few hours of sleep. She had booked her team in for a 7:00 a.m. briefing and she hoped she wasn’t going to be late, but the morning traffic was a slow-moving conga line.
She forced herself to take three deep breaths to dissipate her rising tension as her psy
chiatrist had recommended. Relax and enjoy being chauffeur-driven, she scolded herself. At least this morning she was more appropriately dressed. The hotel staff had pressed her classic-styled plaid stretch wool pantsuit and she had teamed it with a crisp white button-down shirt. She felt a hundred per cent more pulled together than yesterday. Even if she’d still been unable to notch up eight hours sleep.
Bringing out her phone, she checked for texts. Walt had sent her a copy of the bill for the new hot water system that made her eyes widen. Damn, I’m in the wrong profession! How was it that fixing pipes earned more money than keeping people safe?
There were two messages from her mom. One from her former lieutenant wishing her good luck with the job she was supposed to start next week. She hadn’t wanted to worry anyone back home with the details of her current investigation. They would be on edge if they knew she had to deal with a crash.
As she was putting the phone away, it vibrated noisily in her hand and she fielded a call from Dresden.
“Where are you up to in the investigation, Wynter?”
“We have a team debrief this morning and some more interviews planned. I’ll report to you directly after that.”
“Make sure you do. I’ve got Super Titus breathing down my neck because apparently Galliers is breathing down his neck. Plus I’m expected to do a press conference this afternoon.”
“Will do, ma’am.” Bex knew this was her chance to make an impression on her commanding officer and she could only hope her team would come up with something concrete she could present.
While Reuben parked the car, Bex took the elevator to the third floor. There was a quiet buzz of conversation in the open plan office space as people geared up for their workday. She found Eli and Idris sipping hot beverages at their computers. The slick sharpness of Idris, dressed in a dark gray button down shirt with matching silk tie, contrasted with Eli’s creased wrinkles and damp underarm patches. A weather-worn suit jacket sagged over the back of his chair, looking like a relic from a thrift store.
Driven to Death Page 8