For myself, I spent most of my time sorting through every single credit card purchase Jenny Lin had made over the past year. If I could find something out of the ordinary, maybe that could get us on the right track. But unfortunately for me, there were only purchases from luxury boutiques, a bit of online shopping, and a whole bunch of money spent at clubs, and cafés near the London School of Economics. She also spent way more money than I could have possibly imagined at JustEat, a local London food delivery service.
I was getting frustrated when Violet suddenly let out an exclamation of pleasure.
“Ah mais oui! That must be it. Cassie, do you believe in coincidence?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“If I told you that every painting that was stolen was insured by the same company, would you think that was a coincidence?”
“I definitely wouldn’t,” I replied. “There were seven paintings. That’s more than a coincidence.”
“Exactement,” Violet replied. “I think it is as well. Atkinson Insurance is the company that has insured all of the products.”
“Hm, that’s funny,” I said. “The third victim in the explosion worked for an insurance company. I don’t know which one though.”
“What did you just say?” Violet said, practically pouncing on me.
“Um, the third victim… what was his name… Green-something. He worked for an insurance company.”
“Merde! I have been an imbécile!” Violet paced around the room, her hands behind her back.
She turned to me suddenly. “How did you know about the insurance man?”
“Ummm, I spoke to Brianne, my friend who works at the hospital. She was there that night when he got brought in and spoke to his wife.”
“Call her, now. Tell her to come here. I need to speak with her. I need to know everything she knows.”
I took out my phone and texted Brianne.
Hey, you wanted to meet Violet? She needs to meet you too. Needs to know everything you know about Andrew Greenhouse. I got a reply back a moment later.
Ooooh, is it about the murder?
It is, yeah.
I’m working right now. I can be over there in three hours?
I relayed Brianne’s message back to Violet. “Tell her that if she arrives here in twenty minutes I’ll give her one thousand pounds,” Violet replied.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I texted Brianne and got a message back a second later.
Seriously?
Yup, I replied, sending her the address.
That’s definitely a deal then! See you soon!
Fifteen minutes later Brianne was knocking on the front door. I went to let her in and gave her a quick hug when I saw her.
“Hey,” Brianne said, looking past me into Violet’s home. “I managed to convince Lenny to cover the rest of my shift for me. Worst case scenario I was totally going to quit, a grand is like, two months’ worth of working at Chipotle,” she told me.
“Yeah, good call,” I replied, leading her into the study, where Violet came forward and shook her hand.
“Hello,” she said. “It is nice to meet you. I have been told you have spoken with Andrew Greenhouse.”
“I did, yeah,” Brianne told her. “Well, I only spoke with him briefly, yesterday, and the night of the accident. I did speak with his wife for a little while on the night of the explosion though, and a couple of times since.”
“Tell me everything the wife told you, and everything Greenhouse himself told you. Please. It’s very important,” Violet said, motioning toward the couch. “And please, sit. You must be tired, having been at the hospital all day before going straight to work.”
Brianne looked at me, confused. “I didn’t tell you about the shift at the hospital.”
“Yeah, she does that,” I told Brianne. “It’s basically magic.”
“It is not magic, it is simply that I observe. Brianne mentioned that she was at her job, yet there is a faint aroma of hospital grade cleaning fluid coming off her. And as a doctor in training, she would be used to being on her feet, yet she looked at the couch as one looks at a lover one hasn’t seen in a long time.”
I was worried Brianne would be insulted, but instead she just burst out laughing.
“My God! Cassie was not joking when she said you were magic. Sorry about the smell. And for your information, yes, I would absolutely make love to this couch right now, as long as it did all the work. But as I’m not an exhibitionist, and you’re both here, I’ll have to take a rain check,” she said, stroking the leather seductively. I laughed as Brianne continued. “I spoke with Andrew Greenhouse for a little while yesterday. He was very badly out of sorts, I must say. They’re keeping him heavily sedated, and nothing he said made any sense. He kept mumbling about how it was too early. They’ve been reducing the amount of sedative they’re giving him though. He should be awake now.”
“Too early?” I asked, and Brianne shrugged.
“I don’t know what he meant by that at all.”
“And he said nothing else?” Violet asked.
“Nothing coherent,” came Brianne’s reply. “The night of the accident he asked me if anyone had been killed in the explosion and I told him about the two Lin children. He seemed quite sad about it.”
“What about his wife?”
“I saw Andrew Greenhouse’s wife the night he came in, and a few times since then. She was fraught with worry. She said they lived on Cadogan Lane, and that he was walking home from work and got caught in the explosion. He had texted her before he left, telling her he was picking up dinner from Shakespeare’s Head, a nearby pub that he often brought food back home from.”
“And he works for Atkinson Insurance?” Violet asked.
“His wife didn’t say, but she mentioned that the office he worked at was in Holborn, if that helps?”
Violet’s eyes lit up suddenly.
“Oh yes, that does help. You say they lived on Cadogan Lane?”
“Yes. That’s the address listed on his chart, and his wife’s emergency contact as well.”
“And you are one hundred percent certain that he worked in Holborn? She definitely didn’t say Hammersmith, or something else?”
“Just because I’m Australian doesn’t automatically make me a moron,” Brianne told Violet, causing me to smile. “I know the difference between Holborn and Hammersmith. I am one hundred percent sure she said Holborn. Why?”
Violet got up and began to pace around. “Because Andrew Greenhouse is a double murderer, and an art thief. Was there anything else the wife told you?”
“Umm… yeah, a few days later she told me her husband had been working on a big deal at work, which was why he was working late. She said he was really looking forward to that deal, but that it was high risk. She also said that he was a good man, and that they were planning on having kids next year. Why do you think he’s a murderer?”
“Anything else?”
“No, that’s all I can think of.”
“That is all right. Already you have given me the proof I needed. Andrew Greenhouse killed both Lin children. The question is, where is the painting?”
“What painting?” Brianne asked, looking at me, confused.
“The Milkmaid, by Vermeer,” I replied. “Turns out the Lin kids were smuggling paintings, and Violet thinks that whoever killed them took the painting.”
“Wait, that painting that’s been in the news? The super expensive one?” Brianne asked, but Violet had moved on.
“He must have taken the painting,” Violet said. “It is the only explanation that makes any sense at all!”
“How do you know he did it? What about Holborn tipped you over the edge on that?” I asked Violet. I was as curious about that as Brianne.
“The trains!” Violet exclaimed. “The trains, they do not make sense!”
“He took the tube from work? What’s wrong with that? It was before one am, they were all still running.
”
“Yes, but he took the wrong train,” Violet said, moving to her desk and unfolding a large map of the London Underground. Because of course she had one just lying around.
“See here? He lived on Cadogan Lane, halfway between the Sloane Street and Knightsbridge stations. But he worked in Holborn. The Piccadilly line goes directly from the Holborn Underground station to Knightsbridge Station. If he had done that, he would have got home without going as far as Bourne Street, and he never would have been near the explosion zone. To get to Sloane Street, he would have had to take the Piccadilly Line to Gloucester Station, then transferred to either the Circle or District line to get to Sloane Street. But in doing that, he would have had to pass Knightsbridge station, so he would have made his commute longer. There was no reason for him to be at Sloane Street station whatsoever.”
“So him telling his wife he was at work and coming home was a lie,” I reasoned.
“Yes. And if he had food from the pub local to his work, then he definitely did come from there.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I’m not sure if you can convict someone for murder based on them taking a less sensible train route home.”
“It is enough! It is enough that I know. Now that I know who to look at, I will find the proof to convict him. I will find the painting. Thank you, Brianne. You have been instrumental in solving a murder. Let me get you the cash I promised you.”
Violet made her way to the bookcase, grabbed a random book, opened it and pulled out a handful of twenty pound notes.
“This should be one thousand,” Violet said. “Thank you again for your help.”
Brianne thanked Violet for the cash and stood up. “Well, I can’t say I understood everything that happened here tonight, but I’m going to go home and sleep, then Cassie what do you say we go for a drink and you can explain to me what just happened.”
“Deal,” I said with a grin.
“By the way,” Violet called out, “You should call your sister. She worries about you.”
Brianne stared at Violet for a second, then shook her head. “It really is magic,” she said. “Text me if you need a hand with anything,” she told me.
“Thanks,” I told Brianne, giving her another quick hug before closing the door after her. When I turned back around, Violet was practically giddy.
“We know who our murderer is now. We are in the end stages of this investigation. Come! This is when things get interesting.”
If everything that had happened so far was Violet’s definition of boring, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what she considered interesting.
Chapter 18
I left Violet soon afterwards as she wanted to think her way through the case.
“There is only one problem,” I said. “Where is the painting?”
“Ah yes, that is a problem indeed. If we can find the painting, we will have all of the proof we will need. I must figure out where the painting is hidden. I will text you when I have a plan.”
So that was how I found myself that afternoon, playing with Biscuit for a while, trying to find something to distract my brain that didn’t have anything to do with murder. Eventually I took out my iPad and began to browse birth record websites.
I wasn’t expecting much. After my total failure at e-stalking Aaron Stone’s social media accounts, I had more or less resigned myself to never finding any answers for Linda, despite the pep talk Violet had given me. Still, there was a part of me that wanted to give it a shot. After all, Violet recommended this option, and she knew what she was doing, right?
I found an engine to search birth records in the UK, and started off by typing in the surname ‘Stone’ and nothing else. Unfortunately, that got me hundreds of thousands of results. That certainly wasn’t going to help. When I narrowed it down to ‘Aaron Stone’ I was left with only around one thousand results. That was more manageable. Looking at dates of birth, I was able to narrow down the list to about two hundred people in the right age group.
I stared at the list, wondering how to narrow it down further, when suddenly I remembered something. I opened up Aaron Stone’s Facebook page again and scrolled down. There was one public post, made a few months earlier, on February 18th, from one of his friends, wishing him a happy birthday.
I grinned at my own ingenuity. Maybe I wasn’t so terrible at this as I thought. I scrolled through my list and found one Aaron Stone, born February 18th, 1982. That would make him thirty-four years old, which seemed about right. That had to be the correct Aaron Stone. His place of birth was listed as Ipswich.
I did another search, this time looking for anyone else with the last name Stone who was born at Ipswich hospital.
Unfortunately, there were only two of them. One was six months old, and the other nearly ninety.
“Damn it,” I said, angrily tossing my iPad aside; Biscuit taking advantage of the free spot on my legs to stretch across me and beg for belly rubs. I could feel the negative thoughts sneaking back into my brain. Of course I wasn’t good enough to do this. This was what Violet did, not me. I was never going to find an answer for Linda. How stupid of me to even try.
I started to burrow myself under the blankets again. I could feel the energy seeping out of me. Maybe I could sleep for a while. Biscuit wasn’t going to need his dinner for another few hours, at least. Violet would eventually call about the painting, I could get out of bed then.
No, I eventually thought. You can’t keep doing this. You can find a way to solve this. You have a fricking medical degree, finding out if someone has siblings should be a thousand times easier than figuring out where the nuclei of each individual cranial nerve is located after you’ve been awake for thirty straight hours.
I groaned as my brain forced me to get up once more. I knew it was good for me; I’d spent way too much of the past few months lying in bed feeling as though I didn’t even have the energy to be awake.
But how was I going to do it? Suddenly, I had an idea. It was a terrible, terrible idea, with a good chance of backfiring. But something Violet told me a few months earlier had stuck in my brain. She had told me I should practice lying when it didn’t matter, because no one would know, and if they did realize, they wouldn’t care.
That was how Brianne and I had become friends; I had used her as my first test subject, and it went, well, pretty badly. But Violet was right. If you lied to people you didn’t know, it didn’t matter if they caught you.
I grabbed my iPad and opened up Aaron Stone’s Facebook page again. I had been going about this all wrong. I didn’t need to know what Aaron’s life was all about, I needed to find one of his friends.
The friend who had wished Aaron a happy birthday was named Stephen Shaw. I clicked on his profile, much of which was private, but I did notice that he worked at a book store in Bloomsbury, London’s best known shopping district. I looked at the clock; it would still be open for another two hours. I had plenty of time to make my way to the shop before it closed and see if Stephen was working there.
As I took the underground toward the shop, I hashed out the details of my plan in my brain. It wasn’t just so that I wouldn’t screw it up; I also knew if I wasn’t thinking about exactly what to do I was absolutely going to wuss out of going through with this plan. I had always been a good girl. I was the girl in elementary school who told the teacher when she added up my test results wrong in my favor. I definitely wasn’t the girl who went into central London pretending to be somebody else to find out the truth about an acquaintance’s hunch that someone was lying to them. And yet, here I was.
When I got to Bloomsbury I realized I was actually right next to Holborn, where Andrew Greenhouse worked. I put the thought out of my head as I made my way down Bury Place and found the London Review Bookshop.
I stopped as I passed a corner store on the way there and noticed the headlines:
Vermeer Masterpiece Stolen
The Milkmaid Disappears in England
The Art Theft of the Century
Netherlands Angry: Art Theft
It looked as though the news of the Vermeer being stolen had finally hit the news. It was funny to read the headlines, knowing I was actually involved in the case to get the paintings back, and that I knew so much more than the newspapers did. I had never been in that situation before. Still, I wasn’t here to think about the gas explosion in Belgravia, I was here for my own answers. I continued down Bury place until I found the right place.
The London Review Bookshop looked incredibly classy from the outside; the wooden green façade was trimmed with gold, and plain gold lettering at the top advertised the name of the business. The display books in the window advertised older editions of classic books and hidden treasures, rather than the latest airport thrillers. I made a mental note to come back here another time; this seemed like the sort of place where people really knew books.
I entered the store and found myself greeted by a man who was obviously Stephen Shaw; he looked exactly like the profile picture on his Facebook page.
“Hello there,” he greeted me. “Can I help you find anything today?”
“Hi,” I said, flashing him a smile. “Sorry, I’m just wondering if you’re Stephen Shaw,” I asked.
He looked a bit confused, but nodded. “I am, yes. Is anything wrong?”
“No no, not at all,” I answered. “It’s just that I moved to America a number of years ago and lost touch with an old friend. I was looking for her, and someone mentioned that they knew you, that you worked here and that you were friends with her brother, Aaron?”
Stephen’s face suddenly fell. “Yes. Yes, of course. Aaron’s sister.” My heart swelled. I had figured it out! I was totally there! “I’m afraid Fiona went through some bad times. She’s in prison, actually. Holloway, I believe. Until they close that prison, anyway.”
“Oh,” was all I could reply. I was stunned. That explained everything, didn’t it? Aaron telling Linda he didn’t have any siblings, but being evasive about it. I imagined he’d rather pretend his sister didn’t exist.
Bombing in Belgravia (A Cozy Mystery) (Cassie Coburn Mysteries Book 2) Page 11