A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  “I think you mean peanuts,” Kennedy offered.

  “Maybe,” Jean Claude said, looking very confused and sounding very French. “They would buy bulk shares very cheaply, and then as the shares rose, Mr Mylan would take out only his initial investment and leave the rest of his shares to mature. That’s why he studied what was happening on the market so closely each morning, so that he would know when to sell. But he was happy to be cautious in these troubled times.”

  “Did he invest in currencies?” Kennedy asked.

  “Never,” Jean Claude said firmly. “I know he had euro, sterling, and dollar accounts to cover himself, but speculating on currency was not something that interested him.”

  “Okay, so we’re up to midday?” Kennedy said.

  “Yes. Mr Mylan would generally leave the house just before twelve…”

  “For lunch?” King suggested.

  “No, no. He was very, very keen on playing tennis. He tried to play every day during zee week, indoor or out depending on the season. This time of the year he would head over to the courts in Regent’s Park, meet up with a partner or his coach and play a few games before lunch.”

  “Who would he play tennis with?” King asked.

  “Mostly his friends - the ones I mentioned from the dinner party. Or his coach, or people he’d met over the years at the courts. He and Tony Stevenson played together a lot. Mr Mylan would frequently say Tony was superb at tennis. Mr Mylan was very, very serious about his tennis. Then he’d have a late lunch.”

  “With his tennis partner?” King again.

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes by himself. I’d pick him up at the courts around two o’clock.”

  “Ah, so you were also his driver?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yes, in recent times. I mean, I was at the beginning, but then because I didn’t know London all that well, we hired a dedicated driver, but Mr Mylan wanted me to do it again. He said he didn’t like anyone other than me being with him all the time.”

  “Did he have a regular place he went to for lunch?” Kennedy continued.

  “Regular?”

  This conversation was starting to remind Kennedy how he’d felt when he first came over from his native Portrush in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, all those years ago. Until that point, he hadn’t realised he had an accent, let alone how strong it was. People would just stare at him blankly when he said something that, as far as his own ears were concerned, was perfect Queen’s English. He quickly learned to have a list of alternates or wee trick phrases for the troublesome words. For instance, Wimbledon became “the place where they played the tennis,” and “films” were “movies.” The numbers three and eight were very difficult to understand in his strong Ulster accent, so he’d say, “One, two, three,” and “You know, the number between seven and nine.”

  “You know: common, frequent, favourite,” he offered.

  “Ah, favourite,” Jean Claude replied, looking relieved. “For lunch, he would generally go to his club, Two Brydges, in the West End.”

  “And then in the afternoon?” Kennedy asked, as King seemed content to scribble in her book.

  “He’d get back here about three-thirty and do another three hours of emails, and then he’d check in with people to see what was going on. Most days I’d go home around seven, and he would have zee evening to himself. If he was entertaining, he would generally request me to stay around.”

  “And if he needed to go out?” King asked.

  “He was happy taking occasional taxis; he said taxi drivers were the best people to learn from what was happening in the country.”

  “Do you know what he did when he was alone here in the evenings?” King asked, unable to avoid a quick glance in the direction of the swimming pool building.

  “Do you mean did he entertain girlfriends?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “I know not of that side of his life.”

  Kennedy found this hard to believe, while at the same time admiring the Frenchman’s loyalty.

  “Were you aware,” King started off confidently enough and then faltered, “you know, when you found him this morning… were you surprised?”

  “Surprised that he was dead?” Jean Claude gasped in shock. “Why, of course.”

  “No, I mean, surprised at what he appeared to be doing at the time of his death?”

  “And what was he meant to be doing?” Jean Claude asked, now very agitated.

  “Autoerotic asphyxiation,” King replied.

  “Ah, mais oui, this is no-thing for a lady to discuss,” Jean Claude protested. “But I know nothing of such things, it is enough.”

  “What is enough?” King asked.

  “It is enough of this conversation, please,” Jean Claude said, and then turned to address Kennedy. “Please?”

  “Okay,” Kennedy said to the Frenchman’s visible relief. “One final question: can you tell us what you were doing between the hours of four and eight o’clock on Saturday afternoon, early evening?”

  “Let’s see. I lunched rather late, maybe as late as three o’clock, so I’d have been in the house until four-fifteen. Then I went shopping in Camden Market. I had a coffee and a maple Danish pastry at a stall near Camden Lock about five o’clock. I did some more walking around my favourite stores and second-hand bookshops until about twenty to seven, when I went to Baroque, had a few drinks, and then dined at Belgo at around a quarter to eight.”

  Chapter Seven

  Well,” Kennedy whispered to Dot King when they were alone again in the conservatory, “we’re making progress. Now we have one alibi to check and the names of seven people who can furnish us with information about Mr Patrick Mylan.”

  “He seems to me to have been a bit of a loner. I doubt if any of the seven will know a lot about his life, but if you put all their information together, we might…”

  Kennedy just looked at her, not in an unkind way; more like a proud parent the second before their child encounters a slight trip-up.

  “I know, I know,” King offered immediately in her own defence. “I regretted the sentence the second I started it. Of course it’s much too early to be making assumptions.”

  “Tell you what, while we’re waiting for Mrs Cynthia Cox, I’d like to visit Mr Mylan’s bedroom and study, see what we can uncover there.”

  Jean Claude was loitering around the entrance hall, which was tiled in checked black and white marble. He appeared to be willing everyone to avoid dirtying the hall or breaking any of the valuable-looking vases on the two dark oak baroque sideboards. Above both were large military style paintings. One depicted a battlefield in the heat and fire of conflict and benefited immensely from an inconsistent red hue. The other picture, of a similar size, was a straight on, full-length portrait of a soldier, perhaps even one of the soldiers from the battle scene, now fully decked out in his parade best.

  Kennedy thought Jean Claude’s movements were rather amusing: appearing to be shadow-boxing in silence, he was trying desperately to mentally will the members of Camden Town CID to be careful, very careful, in his boss’ palace.

  Jean Claude froze mid pose when he saw Kennedy approach him.

  “Could you direct me to Mr Mylan’s bedroom and office or study, please.”

  “Of course. Let me show you there.”

  “No, it’s okay, just tell us where it is.”

  “I will have to open both the doors for you.”

  “Even the bedroom door is locked?” King asked, looking very surprised.

  “I thought it was respectful to secure his private spaces.”

  When they reached the first floor landing, they discovered SOCO officers busy in two of the three rooms. The room at the front was a sitting room, with a good view of the Feng Shang restaurant boat across the road, sitting, as opposed to floating, in Regent’s Canal. Also in view, just a matter of yards beyond the boat, was a magnificent bank of tall trees. The room had an extremely high ceiling with floor-to-ceiling windows elaborately
draped with fawn material, puffed up here, there, and absolutely everywhere. Set up around the fireplace were a large coffee table and three chunky, uncomfortable-looking, fawn-coloured sofas. Opposite the fireplace was an antique console table, guarded on each side by a pale blue-striped Regency chair, and supporting a large vase of multicoloured flowers. The five large paintings in the room were abstract and perhaps all by the same artist. They looked to Kennedy like a paintings-by-numbers approach, where someone had mixed up all the numbers; the over all effect was a bit more Stallone than Picasso. Kennedy reckoned this might be a dangerous room to enter when you’d had a few too many, with more than a slight chance that the deep-pile cream carpet might enjoy a psychedelic transformation. All in all, Kennedy figured, apart from the obvious vile smell, such an organic change would be infinitely preferable to the works of art on the wall.

  Kennedy felt there was no soul to the room. Except for the lack of magazines, it looked more like the waiting room of a very expensive doctor or dentist. It told Kennedy absolutely nothing about Mylan.

  The back room was similar in décor, a lot smaller, but equally forgettable.

  The third door off the landing, the middle one, was unlocked discretely by Jean Claude, and Kennedy and King entered it hesitantly, putting their latex gloves back on, careful not to disturb anything until the SOCO team had used their fine-toothed comb on it. If Kennedy had ever seen a tidier office, he couldn’t remember when. The windowless walls were white and graced by a lone Shepard Fairey Obama Hope poster.

  The matte-black desk, resting on two sets of grey “A” frame legs, was centred against the middle of the wall opposite the door. On the desk was a modern Apple computer. Two sets of grey shelves were built into the wall, either side of the desk. The files were marked either by years, various research items or various brand names, the most frequent of which seemed to be Airtricity and Nighthawk Energy. To the left of the desk was a smaller worktop of a similar style, accommodating a fax machine, a printer, and a hi-tech phone unit. There were two drawer units beneath, but not supporting, this top.

  King continued diligently writing away in her notebook.

  Kennedy sat in the Aeron chair by the desk and wheeled himself across the grey-painted pine floor to the drawers and started to check them, careful about bending his back. This line of thought led him again to Miss Chada, and he wondered if he would need to wait for his next appointment with her before he would see her again.

  The first drawer, the top one of the left-hand unit, contained office supplies, pens, pencils, erasers, paper, envelopes, and elastic bands, all laid out as though on display in a shop. Next was a drawer full of telephone directories, and then a drawer of odds and sods, including a Tim Dickens Best of CD. As yet, however, Kennedy hadn’t spotted a CD player. The bottom drawer was completely empty except for about a dozen bars of Green & Black’s butterscotch chocolate.

  Kennedy shifted his attention to the unit to his right. He pulled on the top-drawer handle. The front section, consisting of a pretty board with all four drawer-fronts, came away in his hand, exposing a shelf- less, empty unit. On closer examination, Kennedy discover a keyhole between the second and third drawer front, a broken lock, and catch and hinges ripped out with screws still intact from the right hand side of the unit.

  “Get the SOCO to dust this one down,” Kennedy said, stopping to sniff inside the vacant space to see if he could detect what might recently have been there. He got a whiff of something strong, but his memory bank wouldn’t recall for him what the scent was.

  “Slim pickings here,” King muttered as she and Kennedy exited Mylan’s office.

  “Right,” Kennedy announced to the waiting Jean Claude, who was still twitching nervously about what may be going on down below, “we’re ready to see his bedroom.”

  The Frenchman walked them up to the next floor, where the ceiling was still high but not anywhere near as high as on the first two or ground floors.

  There were four doors off the second-floor landing. From the back room, Kennedy could see an incredible panoramic view of the ever-buzzy Camden Town. The room, painted in off-white, had a double bed covered in a matching off-white eiderdown. There was a bedside table and wall-mounted reading light on one side only, the right. The bedside table and the thick pile carpet were in the same off-white, and on the bedside was a copy of Vanity Fair magazine and three books: The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Zhusui Li, The First of the True Believers by Theodore Hennessey and Reporting America: The Life of a Nation 1946 - 2004 by Alistair Cooke. There were no drawers in the bedside table, no shelves on the walls, nor any photos, posters, or paintings upon the walls.

  The next door was opened to reveal two members of the SOCO in their transparent-blue, head-to-toe suits, busy going through what appeared to be a bed-less room. Jean Claude walked past the third door and on to the fourth, dismissing the third with, “This one doesn’t open from the outside,” and unlocked the remaining door. Like the back room, the windows were smaller than downstairs, but enjoyed, in at least forty shades of green, magnificent views of the Zoo and Regent’s Park through the tops of the trees. Kennedy noted that the inside of the locked door in the hallway had been rendered into the rest of the way giving him the sense of extra wall space in the bedroom. This room was dark, very dark, with a Japanese-patterned wallpaper with a base of woad blue. The floor was covered with a dark blue carpet, the pile so thick Kennedy felt as if he were walking through fluffy snow. The only thing absent was the sound of the crunch beneath him.

  This room was in the shape of an inverted L with, in the toe, the door they’d entered by, a sitting room arrangement of smoked glass coffee table; two matching chairs, one of which was extended into a near horizontal position not unlike an airline’s club class seat; a small bookcase just over half full of original Penguin Classics; and a small black box, about eighteen inches wide by two feet tall and two feet deep, which was plugged into the wall. Eventually Kennedy worked out that the entrance to the box was via the top. Inside the cooler/fridge he discovered several bottles of white wine, Champagne, still and fizzy mineral water, two large wine glasses, and two unopened large tubs of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. The gigantic bed was in the other section of the L and covered by matching black silk sheets and pillowcases. Kennedy wondered why there were no blankets. On the wall opposite the bed was a large, flat-screen Sony television, and on either side of that was what looked like two matching prints of the same concubine pleasuring two different men in two different locations. The prints looked very expensive and better from a distance.

  On the other side of the bed, opposite the windows and sitting room area, was a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, mirror. On close inspection, this mirror was made of several mirrors of varying sizes. Jean Claude demonstrated that each section was push-latch activated and, when opened, revealed rows and rows of neatly hung clothes and drawers filled with socks, perfectly folded shirts, T-shirts, and shorts, all neatly stored in their own compartments. One section, the size of a small wardrobe, was generously racked with various ladies clothes, which were, as far as Kennedy’s eye could tell, probably still store new. The final mirror, the one closest to the television wall, was in fact a full-size door and the entrance door to the bathroom.

  The generously sized bathroom betrayed nothing of its owner. Part mirrored and part white tiled, it looked - and was certainly decked out - like a bathroom in a high-class hotel. Kennedy noticed what looked like straight lines cut in the large mirror just about eye height above the two Edward Johns and Co matching sinks. He pushed the mirror gently at the intersection of one corner of these lines, and part of the mirror sprang open, revealing a stainless steel cabinet with four shelves, all neatly packed.

  The bottom shelf had Nivea shaving products, two hairbrushes, a Gilette G9 super dooper shaver with three spare cartridges of blades. There was also a black canvas bag which King, safe in her evidence gloves, unfolded to reveal a set of silver toenail clippers, fingerna
il clippers, small and large tweezers, two combs, a smallish pair of scissors with curved blades, and a larger pair of scissors which looked like they might have been a barber’s.

  Next shelf up was a glass containing three purple toothbrushes with different textured bristles, Mentadent P toothpaste, mint mouthwash and a bottle of stronger-looking Corsodyl mouthwash. Third shelf up had neat rows of male creams and three tubes of Aloe Vera Gel. The top shelf contained what Kennedy was really keen to see - Mylan’s medication - which was a real disappointment. There was nothing stronger than a couple of packets of soothing Strepsils throat lozenges; several packets of Durex; a bottle of Night Nurse, with the matching Day Nurse; vitamins; a bottle of Ginseng capsules; a couple of packets of amoxicillin; a bottle of liquid echinacea; and a couple of dispensers of very expensive looking Royal Jelly capsules.

  Kennedy could find nothing in the bedroom or bathroom to detain him further, so he handed it over to the SOCO team to see what they might unearth.

  “From the outside, I was expecting the house to be a lot bigger,” Kennedy said as he, King, and Jean Claude made their way back down the stairs.

  “Yes, I agree, it is deceptive,” the Frenchman declared. “There is some loft space if you’d like to view that,” he continued with all the enthusiasm of a deflated estate agent.

  “Of course,” King replied immediately.

  Jean Claude led them back up the stairs again and then along the landing towards the back of the house and there, just before the door to the back bedroom, was a full-length mirror. Jean Claude’s delicate touch activated another push-latch, and the mirror gently swung towards them, revealing a steep, narrow, unpainted wooden staircase.

  The Frenchman remained at the foot of the stairs as Kennedy and King ascended into the roof space.

  King obviously thought they were on the verge of some great discovery because she physically sank on reaching the top step. The space was entirely empty. The floorboards were newly laid pine, perhaps a first step in an unfulfilled refurbishment plan of Mylan’s. The loft was incredibly lacking in dust, as was not the case with most loft spaces. Kennedy walked over to the bay window cut into the roof and briefly took in more magnificent views of Regent’s Park.