A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  Chapter Five

  Kennedy was happy to leave the swimming pool building, especially before the body was bagged. Although the necessary procedure still seemed inhumane to Kennedy, he didn’t allow it to bother him any more. His mind was now totally focused on this particular mystery: the “how” and the “why,” and then, if there was malice involved, the “who.”

  “Okay,” Kennedy said as he and Irvine emerged to sunshine, “DS King and myself will question Jean Claude.”

  “D’accord,” Irvine replied.

  “Can you get someone to visit that row of houses at the foot of the garden? They’ve all got balconies. Maybe someone was sitting out there on Saturday reading the paper or listening to the football results on the radio and noticed something. Has anything useful been discovered in here yet?” he asked as they climbed the steps to the front door of the house.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Irvine started, but pulled himself up very quickly and added, “but I’ll go and check immediately.”

  “Good. Could you track down the house cleaner too and see what information she has. And maybe see where it would have been possible to buy men’s garters. I can’t imagine too many places having them in stock these days. We’re very nearly two days behind on this one, James; it’s vital we catch up as quickly as possible.”

  Irvine veered right and bounded up the stairs, while Kennedy turned left and headed toward the kitchen where he found DC Dot King.

  “Right,” Kennedy said, as he quickly looked around the brushed-chrome finished, ultra modern kitchen, “and who’s with Mylan’s man?”

  “He was here a few minutes ago, brewing up a coffee for everyone,” King replied.

  “Could you do me a favour and go and find him, please?”

  Head down, her mop of black curly hair obscuring her face and her thoughts from her boss, King speed-walked out of the kitchen.

  Kennedy walked over to the back part of the kitchen, which opened out through the original back wall of the house into a conservatory. The garden beyond was small and wasted to pathways and paving. Due to the high, dense foliage along the left hand perimeter of the garden, Kennedy had totally forgotten how close they were to the Regent’s Canal; it was just the other side of the overgrowth, in fact. From the conservatory, he could see the swimming pool building to his extreme left and, rising high above the trees, the magnificent St Mark’s Church. Kennedy had once, in the company of ann rea, been there to a reading and talk by local author, playwright, and all round national treasure Alan Bennett. Kennedy was amused that the last time he’d visited a church had been for a non-religious, fund-raising event.

  He wondered if he could see ann rea’s multi-coloured barge from the end of the deceased’s garden. Probably not. He considered whether or not her close proximity gave him a justifiable excuse to go and knock on her door and ask if she’d seen anything and then to ask, “Oh, and by the way, exactly why have you been ignoring me for the last few months?” Okay, maybe not. He found his mind drifted very, very quickly to Miss Chada and he was disappointed in himself for doing so.

  He sat down in the one and only high chair in the conservatory; Miss Chada had instructed him to avoid low soft chairs for the foreseeable future. He studied the house whose garden bordered Mylan’s tiny yard. The narrow balcony, with black iron railings and steep sloping roof supported with uprights from the railings, reminded him of some of the Brighton seafront houses. It would have been very easy for neighbours, maybe sunning themselves or reading the papers, to see directly into the conservatory where Kennedy now sat. He wondered how much Mylan used the room. He looked around the modern furnishings and spotted an uncomfortable looking grey ottoman, close to the garden-side glass wall. He noticed the distinctive pink hue of the Financial Times. He checked the date. It was the weekend edition, which meant that Patrick Mylan had been alive, well and reading at least on Saturday morning. Apart from the FT, the conservatory was incredibly tidy. He wondered if Banks had tidied the place up when he’d arrived. Then he had a flash: had the Frenchman also acted as though he were one of those concerned parents Taylor had been talking about, the ones who cleaned up any embarrassing literature from the scene of the crime?

  “He’s not in the building, sir,” the young and enthusiastic DC Dot King said breathlessly as she returned.

  Kennedy counted to seven under his breath. Instead of getting mad with his team, he forced himself to focus on Jean Claude Banks. Could he, in some way, be responsible for the death of his boss? Had he returned to the scene of the crime to tidy up and ring the police as a demonstration that he couldn’t possibly be the perpetrator and simply walked out of the house and away from the scene of the crime?

  Kennedy was ultimately responsible for securing the crime scene. He knew it was his head on the block and not King’s or Irvine’s. If he screwed up, his boss, Superintendent Thomas Castle, would think he’d brought him back to a major case too quickly. But Kennedy could use as mitigating circumstances the fact that he’d solved the case in, he looked at his watch, less than twenty minutes. Surely that must be a record for Camden Town Criminal Investigation Department, maybe even for the whole of Scotland Yard as well? The butler had done it, and Kennedy had allowed him to slip out from under his nose.

  But he was a Frenchman in London, for heavens sake; surely it couldn’t be too difficult to apprehend him. Just send a couple officers over to the new sexy, but very poor use of space, Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. But, Kennedy wondered, why might the butler have done it?

  “Do you think it was Banks and he’s scarpered?” King asked, with a bit of a quiver in her voice.

  Kennedy turned to face her, briefly glancing over her shoulder, back into the main part of the house.

  “I very much doubt it,” he said, leaving no room for debate.

  “How can you be so sure?” King replied.

  “Because he’s just walked back in through the front door,” Kennedy replied, barely above a whisper.

  “Excuse me, Inspector,” Banks apologised as he walked into the kitchen and put a brown paper bag down on the worktop closest to the coffee pot. “I just nipped up to Anthony’s in Primrose Hill to get some sweet breads to go with zee tea and coffee for your team.”

  Just as quickly as it had drained, the colour returned to DC Dot King’s cherubic face.

  Chapter Six

  Within ten minutes, Jean Claude had coffee and tea on the go, and even better, at least for Kennedy, the tea was amazing. Not too strong, not too weak, and the chocolate croissants went down as an absolute treat. King nodded approval to her cup of black coffee and then at Kennedy. She sat at the table in the conservatory, removed her notebook, and elaborately opened it at a new page.

  “How long have you worked for Mr Mylan, sir?” she started. The Frenchman looked to Kennedy as though disappointed it wasn’t the inspector who was questioning him.

  “I started to work for Patrick,” he said eventually, pronouncing the second syllable of his boss’s Christian name as though it was a description of a foul smell, “just after his fortieth birthday.”

  “That would make it twelve and a half years.”

  “Ah, nearly, Madame,” he agreed, lighting up his face with a smile.

  “Detective Constable will be fine,” she replied; “and all this time you worked in this house?”

  “Yes, Detective Constable, I arrived just after he had bought this house. He had just left Credit Suisse and needed a home with more space because he wanted to base his work here.”

  “What exactly did he do?” the young DC continued.

  “He was an investor.”

  “For other people?” she pushed. Kennedy was content to remain quiet and observe.

  “No, only for his own company, although sometimes he would give his friends, and myself, tips on where he felt would be a good place for them to put money.”

  “Were the tips always successful?”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘Were any of zee tips failu
res, big failures, the type of failures…’” Jean Claude paused in consideration. He did a funny thing with his jaw - he kept his mouth shut and moved the bottom half of his jaw from side to side a few times - before continuing, “‘…the type of failure which could threaten ones’ health?’”

  “Well, now you come to mention it.”

  “Ah, yes,” Jean Claude replied. He smiled again, looking very pleased with himself in an Inspector Poirot kind of way, “They say that gambling can damage your health. But all I can tell you is that Mr Mylan’s tips were slow burners, and if one troubled one’s self to get involved and one was prepared to take a long view on zee project, then I believe one did well.”

  “Did you ever lose money on any of Mr Mylan’s tips?” King asked, now sounding a wee bit impatient.

  “I’d have to consult my portfolio for you, but overall I believe I am up, and doing better than if I’d invested zee same money on deposit at the bank.”

  Kennedy caught King’s eye and gave her a brief nod encouraging her to move on.

  “These friends of Mr Mylan’s, could I please have their names and contact details please?”

  “It feels so… it feels like a betrayal,” Jean Claude started.

  “Mr Mylan is dead, sir,” Kennedy stated. “For the moment, the best we can say is that he died in mysterious circumstances, so all you are guilty of is helping us find out what actually happened; you are not being disloyal to him or any of his friends.”

  “Yes, Inspector Kennedy,” Jean Claude replied, visibly moving into another gear, “Okay, let’s see… his best friend - well, I suppose he had four very close friends really. They are all from zee Credit Suisse days. He was with Credit Suisse for a long time - over ten years I believe - and a lot of his acquaintances are from that time. Martin Friel and Tony Stevenson, then there was Roger Littlewood and his wife Maggie. Maggie was very fond of Patrick…”

  Jean Claude left the words hanging in the air.

  “Did they ever…” Kennedy started, needing this all spelt out. It was better getting the important facts right at the beginning, rather than amassing and chasing down misleading and potentially time-wasting leads.

  “No, no, no, not fond of him in that way,” Jean Claude replied, looking happy that Kennedy had taken the bait. “She cared about him. She was always checking to see if he was taking proper care of himself.”

  “We’ll come back to this later, but for now, could you continue with his close friends?” Kennedy asked, nodding in the direction of King’s notebook and her growing list of names.

  “D’accord. Let’s see, ah, Martin and Tony, Roger and Maggie, Nealey Dean…”

  “Nealey Dean, the actress?” King interrupted, quite literally spitting out the name in disbelief.

  “Yes, that’s her. They were all around here a couple of weeks ago for dinner. In fact, that really was his ideal get-together: Martin and Tony and their wives, Roger and Maggie Littlewood, Nealey Dean and Tom Dickens.”

  “Nealey Dean and Tom Dickens are dating?” King said in disbelief, immediately looking as if she regretted her involuntary reaction.

  “No, no,” Jean Claude replied, looking happy to have some inside information to share. “I believe most of zee people around the table had hoped Patrick’s attempts at matchmaking would stick, but neither the actress nor the singer seemed interested in each other in that kind of way, although they seemed to get on well, and they shared zee same sense of humour.”

  “And that’s all Mr Mylan’s friends?” Kennedy asked.

  “Well, yes. I mean, of course he had lots of other acquaintances, business contacts and what have you, but zee group at the dinner table on Friday past would have been his inner circle.”

  “What about his own family?”

  “He never shared the details with me, but I believe his mother died when he was young and he hadn’t spoken to his father in over thirty years. I could be wrong about that though. I don’t believe he has any brothers or sisters, but I don’t know for sure. I think Maggie Littlewood knows a little bit about his early life.”

  “Girlfriends?” King enquired and then added immediately, “Boyfriends?”

  Jean Claude Banks starred intently through the glass of the conservatory in the direction of the swimming pool building where Mylan’s body had been found.

  The Frenchman raised his eyebrows, moved his lower jaw from side to side, shook his head sadly for quite a few seconds before saying, “It seems he took no comfort from woman nor man.”

  “But did he have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?” King asked again, this time more directly.

  Jean Claude arched his shoulders as if to suggest he wouldn’t know.

  “What were your working hours?” Kennedy asked, deciding to move on but at the same time wondering what he was hiding.

  “I’d get here for eight o’clock and leave about seven in the evening on weekdays, unless he was entertaining. Sometimes on Saturday evenings, if he was entertaining, but Saturday during the day was always sacrosanct; that was zee time he wanted to be alone. I rarely worked for him on a Sunday, although I was always available when needed.”

  “And Saturday just past?” King asked.

  “No, he didn’t need me this weekend. He wasn’t entertaining on either day, so I didn’t see him at all.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Kennedy asked.

  “Friday, when he returned from lunch. We went through his emails, and he said that was it, he didn’t feel like doing anything that afternoon and he’d see me on Monday.”

  “How did he seem?” Kennedy continued.

  “He seemed very happy to have a free weekend for himself. He was, how you say, in good spirits.”

  “You’ve no idea how he spent his weekend then?”

  “No. He had a season ticket for Arsenal, but I don’t know if they were playing at home. He was a loyal supporter. He was always saying they were a few seasons away from being great, but he’d been saying that since I met him.”

  “I believe their season is over, sir,” King offered. “My Ashley is a supporter, and I think he was happy… well, happy that this particular season was behind them.”

  “Maybe we could trouble you to tell us what a typical day would have been for Mr Mylan?” Kennedy asked.

  “When he was here, he got up around six o’clock, worked out and swam until about seven. He’d come back to the house, spend an hour on his emails, still in his dressing gown from his post-swim shower, have breakfast and read his papers from eight o’clock until about nine, and then he dressed.”

  “Okay, let’s stop there for a moment,” Kennedy said, trying to figure out the best way to word his next question. “Did he dress from habit, or would he have a variety of clothes he wore?”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Ehm, did he have a look? You know: a set of clothes, style if you will, that he was happy with.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean. Well, since he left Credit Suisse, he never wore suits or, how do you say…blazers, he never wore a blazer. He wore a clean shirt every day, varying colours, mostly blue, pink, and dark striped. He never wore a cravat, no I didn’t mean a cravat, I mean...”

  “Oh, you mean a tie,” King offered helpfully.

  “Yes, a necktie. Sorry, it’s still zee simple words that elude me. He wore black, traditionally cut trousers, either a leather jacket or a windbreaker, and polished loafers. He never wore a jumper or a cardigan, but he would wear an overcoat over his jackets in the winter.”

  “And socks?”

  “Socks?”

  “Yes. Some people feel more comfortable in more sober-coloured socks, and some people like their socks to be bright exciting colours.”

  “Ah, I see. He liked to wear black, dark blue, and brown socks, so you would say he liked to wear more sober socks.”

  “Right,” Kennedy replied hesitantly. He still hadn’t reached the point of this line of question, and he didn’t want to accuse himself of lead
ing the witness to where he wanted to go. “Ah…”

  “One other thing,” Jean Claude offered, while appearing to be deep in thought.

  “Yes?” Kennedy and King asked in unison.

  “Those elastic suspenders Patrick was wearing at zee time of his death…” the Frenchman hesitated.

  “Yes?” Kennedy nudged gently.

  “They were not his; well, at least I’d never seen him wear them before.”

  “Okay.” Kennedy was pleased with himself but not showing it. “So we were up to nine o’clock when he got dressed - then what was his routine?”

  “Then he’d go to his office and work through until around eleven-thirty, eleven forty-five.”

  “Would you be in the office with him?”

  “Sometimes, not all of the times. It would depend on whether he needed me or not.”

  “For instance?” King asked simply.

  “Well, Patrick would be on the phone, ringing around his contacts, checking out things, monitoring what was happening in the market. He spent a lot of his time researching new stocks, and that is where I would help him. Someone would drop him a name of a new potential investment, and he would have me do as much research as possible on the company.”

  “Did he do well at it?” King asked. Kennedy subtly nodded his approval to her.

  “Well,” Jean Claude started, his eyes now leading them in an arc around the house, “I believe he did very well in zee good days. He had some land in Ireland, a property in California, and a large country style house in Nice. He and Tony and Martin had made quite a few robberies.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No, no, excuse me, of course I did not mean robberies, I mean… killings. That was how Mr Mylan used to describe them, he would do a killing.”

  “Make a killing?” Kennedy offered.

  “Yes, yes, make a killing, that’s how he would say it. They would buy into companies when zee shares were almonds… No?” he added when he saw how blankly the Camden Town CID officers were looking at him.