Kathy had watched Brock’s expression freeze. He turned his eyes to her and she bit her lip and nodded. ‘It’s true,’ she said softly.
‘Ah, so you knew,’ Toby said to her. ‘Well, to the point. You, Brock, are in the position that I was in, though with rather more certainty about the outcome. You can go ahead and do what you believe to be your duty and arrest me, but if you do so you will know with absolute certainty, as I did not, that you will lose your son.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kathy made to get up but felt Garry’s hand on her shoulder, pressing her down. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘When he returned here last night, John became rather too inquisitive. He found something he shouldn’t, and I was obliged to take him into my custody. He’s still alive, I should think, but he probably won’t survive another night, which would be a shame. You have no chance of finding him without my help, which I will give you, by phone, two hours after Garry and I drive away from here, and provided you don’t raise the alarm in the meantime. You can trust me on that. I give you my word. What do you say?’
‘You can go to hell,’ Brock said.
‘Brock, I think we should talk about this,’ Kathy broke in.
‘Sensible woman,’ Toby said. ‘Listen to her, Brock. Just two hours. Garry and I will retire to the inner office there to let you discuss this in private, eh? You have three minutes to decide.’ He got to his feet and marched stiffly to the door which Garry held open for him.
Brock was staring at Kathy. ‘Is it really true?’
‘Yes, John told me. I had to let him speak to you first. He was hesitant, uncertain how you’d take it, but we agreed that he’d tell you over dinner last night. Only it didn’t work out for some reason.’
Brock swore softly under his breath. ‘I think that was my fault. Dear God, Kathy! I had no idea.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. So what are we going to do?’
‘We can’t agree to this. The man’s just admitted to murder. There was no evidence of a struggle, was there? He’s a killer.’
‘And ruthless enough to let John die. We can’t allow that, can we?’
‘He’s bluffing.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Brock put both hands to his face.
‘Forget he’s your son,’ Kathy said. ‘He’s a member of the public whose safety depends on our giving a self-confessed killer a head start. We have no choice.’
Brock took a deep breath and sat upright. He was about to speak when they heard the sound of a car starting outside in the street. Kathy ran to the window and saw Toby ease himself into the passenger seat and pull the door shut behind him. The car drew away from the kerb. She turned back to Brock.
‘They must have gone out the back way. What do we do?’
Brock nodded. ‘You’re right, we have no choice.’ He seemed momentarily defeated.
‘We could have them followed, but I think it’s too risky. I’ll get Zack to track them with cameras, shall I?’
She used her mobile to ring Queen Anne’s Gate, speaking urgently down the line, giving them a description of the car and its number, then listened while they got to work.
‘They’ve got them crossing the river on Chelsea Bridge,’ she said at last. ‘The roads are clear to the south. What do you think, Gatwick?’
Then, a minute later, ‘They’re turning west on Battersea Park Road.’
‘The heliport?’ Brock roused himself. ‘Come on, we’ve got to find John before they get away.’
‘How can we? They could have taken him anywhere.’
‘What could he have discovered that forced their hand?’
Kathy thought. ‘He’d been looking through their old records stored in the attic by his room on the top floor.’
They hurried out to the front desk, where Kathy grabbed keys from the pigeonholes and they ran to the stairs. When they reached the top floor they opened the door to John’s room. His bag was still there, the bed unmade.
‘So he went to bed last night. Then maybe he got up and started searching the attic again.’
They found the door nearby on the landing, opening into a narrow staircase that doglegged up into a cramped loft laced with rafters and beams. In the pale gloaming from a dusty roof light they made out boxes, piles of old books and several metal-bound trunks. They searched rapidly, peering into the dim recesses, accompanied by the muffled cooing of pigeons on the roof outside, but found no sign of John.
‘I wonder,’ Kathy said, trying to suppress a rising feeling of panic, ‘if they made that tape of Freddie Clarke’s confession? Perhaps John found some evidence of it.’
Her phone interrupted her, and she whipped it out and listened. Toby Beaumont and Garry had abandoned their car outside the London Heliport terminal on Lombard Road and were boarding a waiting helicopter.
‘An AgustaWestland AW109,’ Zack said. ‘The registered owner is Mikhail Moszynski’s company, RKF.’
Brock was thinking about what Kathy had said, the video of Clarke’s confession, the glimpses of old whitewashed brickwork in the background, like the cellar next door. ‘Perhaps they brought Clarke here. We should check the cellar.’
As they ran downstairs Kathy received another message. The helicopter’s reported route was to Biggin Hill airfield in Kent, a fifteen-minute flight away.
They found the door to the cellar beneath the stairs in the ground-floor hallway, switched on the light and saw the flight of stone flags leading down. ‘John!’ Kathy called. ‘Are you there?’ There was only a dead silence.
At the foot of the steps they paused and looked around-a bench, some steel shelving, a box of tools, a bucket, pickaxe and spade. Nothing seemed out of place. Through an arched opening another room was bare, smelling of raw damp. They looked into a third room and a fourth, all empty.
‘Nothing,’ Kathy said, feeling panicky.
‘Beaumont was enjoying that, upstairs,’ Brock panted, feeling the chill of the place. ‘He was excited, hyped up, alive. He was back in Riyadh, in the war room- gung-ho, as he put it.’
‘Let’s hope we can trust him. There’s no sign of John anywhere.’
‘Someone’s been down here recently,’ Brock said, pointing to footprints on the dusty floor.
Another call came in. ‘The helicopter is landing at Biggin Hill. There’s only one plane preparing for take-off at present, a Cessna Citation Sovereign jet, fuelled up, waiting on the tarmac for its final passengers. It’s privately owned. RKF again.’ She listened some more. ‘It has a range of five thousand kilometres. Flight plan to Lagos, Nigeria. Zack is asking if we want flight control to hold it up.’
Brock frowned. ‘We have no extradition treaty with Nigeria.’ He shook his head and kicked at the shovel in frustration, sending it skidding across the floor. Then he crouched down. Kathy saw that his kick had dislodged a lump of clay from the back of the shovel’s blade. He felt it, damp and sticky.
He straightened and said, ‘No. Tell them to stop the plane. Put a vehicle on the runway. Don’t let it take off.’
Kathy stared at him in surprise. ‘Are you sure?’
‘They’ve been digging,’ he said, ‘like in the cellars next door. But there’s no sign of disturbance in here. So where were they digging?’
Together they paced rapidly around the other rooms again, scanning the floors and walls, examining the brickwork, but could see nothing. When they returned Kathy took another call from Biggin Hill; the pilot of the Cessna was asking what was going on and the control tower wanted to know what to tell them.
Brock groaned. ‘Tell them…’ he began slowly, and at that moment Kathy’s eyes focused on the steel shelving in front of her. ‘Wait,’ she said. She stepped forward and heaved at the shelving, sending it crashing to the floor. As Brock looked at her in astonishment she pointed to the white wall behind the shelving, which wasn’t brickwork but a panel of white board. Together they pulled the board away to reveal a metal door with a steel handle and two heavy b
olts. Kathy reached for them, then abruptly stopped, noticing the wires that led from the bolts to a large flat cardboard box which had been taped to the centre of the door.
‘They’ve booby-trapped it,’ she said, taking a careful step back. ‘What is he planning to do, blow the whole building up?’
Brock said, ‘Call the bomb squad, Kathy.’ As she made the call she watched him walk away, looking back to the stair and round again at the wall with the sealed door, scratching his beard. When she hung up he said rapidly, ‘This is the side of the house facing the Moszynskis, right? And Toby told us that he had found a way through to their basement. So we may be able to get into this room from the other side, from the Moszynskis’.’
They ran up the stairs, along the hall and out into the street, Kathy on her phone again, shouting for back-up. When they arrived, panting, at the Moszynskis’ front porch there was no answer to their urgent pounding on the door.
‘The place is empty,’ Brock gasped. ‘They’ve all left.’
As they waited for help there was another call from the airfield. A Colonel Beaumont had asked for a message to be relayed. Chief Inspector Brock was running out of time, he’d said. The plane must be allowed to take off immediately, or he would not answer for the consequences. Kathy looked at Brock for a response, but he said nothing, staring fixedly down the street from where the sounds of police sirens could be heard.
Brock shouted at the crew of the first car as they jumped out, and they brought up a ram and began slamming it at the edge of the door. The door was very solidly built, and it seemed to take an age before it finally splintered and burst inward.
‘Kathy,’ Brock said, ‘one of us will have to stay at the hotel and take the bomb squad down. I’ll do that. You go with these lads. There’s a door behind the glass lift on the other side of the hall that gives access to a stair to the basement. You’ll find tools down there you may need, pickaxes and sledgehammers. Let me have the Biggin Hill number and I’ll stay in touch with them.’
Kathy gave it to him and then led the uniforms, joined now by a second squad, across the hallway. She followed Brock’s directions, running through the cellars, leaping over excavations and piles of debris until they came up against a solid brick wall with no openings. ‘Okay,’ she panted, ‘we need to work our way along this wall, left and right, into the rooms next door, until we come to some sign of a way through.’
It wasn’t long before they found it, a panel, encrusted with layers of old whitewash. They ripped the panel apart with a crowbar to reveal a heavy steel door beneath, like the one next door, but without a handle. ‘Handle must be on the other side,’ Kathy said.
A few blows with sledgehammers convinced them that they would never penetrate it that way. ‘We’ll have to go through the wall,’ one of the men said. ‘Stand back!’ and two of them began an assault on the brickwork to one side of the door, sending splinters of brick flying.
As they worked, Kathy imagined the bomb, just a few yards away from them now, steadily ticking towards whatever deadline Toby Beaumont had set. She turned away from the noise of the sledgehammers and called Brock. The bomb squad had arrived, he said; he was with them now, examining the box with some kind of equipment they’d brought; they could hear the pounding of the hammers, ringing through the brickwork. She turned at the sound of a shout as a blow finally punched a small hole through the wall. ‘Shouldn’t be long now,’ she yelled into her phone.
They steadily worked at the hole, smashing it larger and larger until it was wide enough for a man to slide through. Then they stopped and looked at Kathy. She called for a torch and stuck her head and shoulders through and turned it on. The beam flashed around the chamber, picking up a mound of soil and bricks, a shovel, but no human figure. Her heart sank. They would be too late now. They would never find him. ‘This isn’t it. He’s not here,’ she cried, and then thought she heard an answering sound, a distant moan. She twisted her head, straining, and called out, ‘Hello!’‚ and there it was again, not much more than a whisper. She pushed her head further in and turned the beam down at the floor, and saw a figure directly beneath her, bound in tape and covered in broken bricks and dust, a mop of dark hair she thought she recognised. ‘Hell!’ she said. ‘We could have killed him.’ She clambered through the hole, swept the debris off him, and began to rip away the tape. At the same moment a door on the other side of the chamber swung open and Brock stood there and the room was flooded with light.
THIRTY-SEVEN
T hey stood on the hotel steps and watched the stretcher with John, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket, face covered with an oxygen mask, being wheeled to the ambulance.
‘Are you sure it’s true, Kathy?’ Brock said. ‘He wasn’t just shooting you a line, was he?’
‘About being your son? No, it’s true all right. I’d bet Moszynski’s millions on it.’
And it was only then, in the strange aftermath of frenzied action, that the impact of Toby Beaumont’s revelation fully struck him. John Greenslade was his son. It had always been there, in the back of his mind, wondering if this day would come, and how it might happen, but he could hardly have imagined this.
His mind went back to a nightmarish day in April 1981, the day his wife Alice left him and the day Brixton, down the road, exploded in flaming anarchy. Neither event had really surprised him. It was almost a month after that before he discovered that Alice had gone to Canada to stay with her sister Tess, although even then Tess had been reluctant to admit it. ‘She just wants to be left alone, David,’ Tess had said. ‘She’s terrified.’ But that was absurd, just histrionics, he’d told himself. It was many years before he discovered that Spider Roach had been threatening her. She had left without a word, and he’d had no inkling she was pregnant. It wasn’t until after he had signed the divorce papers Tess passed on to him three years later that she finally let him know that Alice had had a baby boy.
And now what?
He reached for the phone and dialled Suzanne’s number. She was astonished, then delighted by his news, and wanted to jump in her car and drive straight up to London to be with him, but there was so much to do now, and he needed time to think, and they agreed in the end that they would get together at the weekend.
When they finally let them in to see John, he was sitting up in bed, his head bandaged and a drip in his arm, but his expression was alert.
‘John, how are you?’ Brock said, going to the side of the bed, and something in his manner must have alerted John because he shot Kathy a quick, uncertain glance, and Brock said, ‘Yes, Kathy told me. You really are Alice’s son?’
‘Yes, and yours I believe.’
Brock was lost for words for a moment, then he growled, ‘Hell of a way to find out.’
There was an awkward silence, and then they both began to laugh.
‘We’ll have time to talk later, but right now you’d better tell us what happened to you.’
So John told them the story. ‘I really did think I was going to die down there,’ he said finally. ‘It was the skull that really freaked me out. I thought, someone else died here, and now it’s my turn.’
‘There’s no skull down there, John. We both had a good look around the cellar before we left, and the sloping plank you mention, that you thought might be for waterboarding, that was there, but no skull and no bones.’
John looked at Kathy, who nodded in agreement.
‘There was a smooth lump of stone among the debris,’ Brock said. ‘Perhaps that’s what you felt.’
‘No! Look, I saw it, when they returned and there was light. It was a grinning skull, with eye sockets and a row of rotten teeth.’
Brock shrugged. ‘Well, the main thing is that you’re alive and reasonably okay. I’d have hated to have to tell your mother that I’d got you killed on our first encounter.’
John smiled. ‘She’d have said it was only to be expected. But there was a skull, Brock… Kathy, don’t you believe me?’
She shrugged. �
��We’ll get a thorough forensic search made. If there was anything there we’ll find traces.’
On the way out Brock said, ‘It’s amazing what the human mind comes up with under extreme stress.’
They decided to wait until the next day to interview Beaumont and his team. There had been four of them on the plane-Toby and Deb, and the two men, Garry and Jacko. There was no sign of the two other women members of their staff, Julie the cook and Destiny the maid, and Brock ordered a search for them. From the bomb squad they learned that the cardboard box had contained nails and a lump of clay, the ‘bomb’ no more than a dummy, presumably intended to delay any possible searchers.
Brock arranged for the luggage on the plane to be taken to Queen Anne’s Gate and a room cleared for the contents to be laid out and thoroughly searched. Apart from clothes and toiletries, they found a number of those things that people might take with them when leaving for an uncertain future from which they don’t expect to be coming back any time soon. They all had photographs of family and friends; Deb had an embroidered sampler that looked quite old, a locket of what looked like baby’s hair, a collection of letters‚ and a can of mace; Garry and Jacko had both taken pistols and ammunition, and Toby his swordstick. They were all carrying a great assortment of medications.
Of more pressing interest was a pouch in Toby’s luggage containing fifteen pages of typed notes with bank account details, access codes and balances, together with two copies of a DVD of Freddie Clarke’s interrogation, uncut and almost three hours long.
And in the middle of Toby’s suitcase, packed between the neatly folded tropical suit, shirts and regimental tie, was a striped plastic beach bag containing one human skull, the bones of two hands and pieces of perished black fabric.
Chelsea Mansions bak-11 Page 30