by Sabina Manea
MURDER ON THE HEATH
A suave murder mystery with a great twist
Sabina Manea
Published by
THE BOOK FOLKS
London, 2021
© Sabina Manea
Polite note to the reader
This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents is appropriate.
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‘Now, by my maidenhead, at twelve year old, I bade her come. What, lamb! what, ladybird! God forbid! Where’s this girl? What, Juliet!’
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene Three)
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
MURDER IN HAMPSTEAD
OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST
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Chapter 1
The damp, disconsolate November morning did no favours to the late Victorian frontage of Kentish Town Police Station. Soaked through, the incongruous palm tree at the entrance swayed pitifully in the unforgiving wind. Inside, the CID team was safely tucked away in a corner of the first floor, shut off from the chaos of the public area downstairs and the unwelcome distraction of the other departments. Under the harsh glare of the overhead neon lights, the evenly positioned desk spaces seethed with industriousness, or at least enforced staring at screens.
Lucia Steer, a former lawyer turned interior designer, and now a civilian investigator with Kentish Town CID, had thankfully been spared the indignity of the open plan arrangement. As far as she was concerned, it was a thinly veiled excuse to spy on your neighbour and get distracted by the constant toing and froing between the working area and the kitchen. She surveyed her desk, which faced that of Detective Chief Inspector David Carliss of the Metropolitan Police, and in doing so caught sight of her own reflection on the shiny metal surface of the coffee mug. It was comically distorted, as if wrung through a fisheye lens. Shoulder-length brown hair recently cut into a thick fringe framed slightly oversized features, of which the exaggerated effect dwelled largely on the expressive eyes. She granted herself a satisfied smile and returned to the lengthy report before her.
The two desks were mirror images of each other – practically empty, save for a computer and a phone on each. Lucia shared her boss’s disinclination to bring anything personal to work and treasured her privacy above all things. The inspector was the one who had put the idea in her head that she should join the police. They had met entirely by chance two years previously. DCI Carliss had led the investigation into the death of one of Lucia’s interior design clients, Professor Alla Kiseleva, a reclusive Soviet academic. Lucia’s sharp mind and uncanny ability to coax information out of the most unwilling participants had not gone unnoticed. When caught in the right mood, the detective would even go as far as to admit that, without her, the case would still be open.
Lucia was herself surprised how quickly she had accepted the job offer. One drastic career change should have been enough, and yet it was precisely the serenity and relative security of manual labour that had ended up driving her to boredom. Interior design had been her escape valve from her former life as a corporate lawyer, at the beck and call of all kinds of unsavoury characters. And yet it was precisely those dormant instincts and the sharply honed nose for foul play that soon lured her back to her old ways.
The Kentish Town CID team was a peculiar creation. It had been tasked with investigating unexplained deaths in unusual circumstances – a division of labour intended to supposedly spare the overstretched Camden headquarters at Holborn. Evident drug overdoses and stabbings, the bulk of the fatal cases that washed through Holborn CID, were considerably more straightforward propositions than mysterious scientists dropping dead at afternoon parties, and the borough budget was split accordingly. In the two years working with the police, Lucia had first cut her teeth on financial crime – but it was too much like her old career, and she soon found she hankered for more. Carliss had jumped at the prospect of having her on his team, and his instincts were proved right. She had a talent for ferreting out obscure facts and piecing together slivers of information that nobody else could make any sense of. Even the Super had noticed. She had gone as far as commending Carliss for ‘championing’ – as she put it in PR speak – the little understood role of civilian investigator, which was in reality partner and not just support to harried coppers.
Lucia’s arrival at Kentish Town had been greeted with a mixture of amusement and hostility. Most of the officers glared at her with mistrust as she wasn’t one of their own. The first day had been a merry-go-round of administrative form-filling followed by a tortuous walk of shame from desk to desk, under the guise of being ‘introduced’. Lucia was chronically unable to remember names, let alone match them to faces, and so the tour was a waste of time. It only served to identify her as the newbie that nobody wanted around. She knew they called her ‘the Guv’s lawyer bird’ – and not just behind her back – derogatory on so many levels that it made her skin crawl just thinking of it. That she and the DCI shared an office didn’t exactly help matters. It looked like preferential treatment, being sheltered from the rest of the herd, and if there was one thing that guaranteed being ostracised at the station, it was being set apart.
But, gradually, as the months went by, something began to shift. Lucia found she could pinpoint the precise moment when the tide started to turn – eleven o’clock on a Tuesday in early November, as she braved the perpetually squalid kitchen for a cup of caffeinated dishwater. Tina, the station veteran, and Lucia’s sworn enemy from the word go, squeezed a lopsided smile as she ambled in and took her place in the drinks queue.
‘Alright, Loosha?’
You can’t expect everything to fall into place straightaway, Lucia mused, and generously opted to overlook the deliberate mangling of her name. She had uttered it out loud often enough, so nobody could feign ignorance. Besides, the Italian pronunciation was hardly a tongue-twister. PC Tina Braydon was a stout woman in her mid-fifties, a menacing cross between an old-fashioned matron and a feral bull terrier. She was fiercely proud of her career stagnation and made it her business to look down on any of her colleagues unfortunate enough to be brandishing a university degree. The one notable exception had been the newly promoted DI, who, to Tina’s dismay, had left Kentish Town for the – literally – greener pastures of the south coast.
‘All good, Tina. And you?’
Lucia fully expected a single grunt as the retort. Surprisingly, from the mop of unevenly bleached hair came the tentative start of an unburdening.
Lucia offered one of her enigmatic but sympathetic smiles, the ones that were perfectly pitched to elicit further details without prying. She knew that her frank, kind eyes never failed to make people open up, even the hostile ones.
The effect was almost instantaneous.
‘I swear, it’s been one thing after another this morning. First my leg seizes up, and just as I’m stumbling out of the house my sister calls me. That layabout son of hers has been at it again, called in sick and now they’ve let him go. Told him not to bother coming back to the building site. Amazing it’s taken them this long, I said to her. He’s always down the pub, off his face every day of the week…’ Tina paused to catch her breath. It had been quite the outburst.
‘Sounds like a shitty morning. And you having to do all this supporting. It’s a lot of work.’ Lucia hoped against hope that the rant was at an end.
Tina’s coarsely made up face brightened with delight at her efforts being recognised.
‘Yes. It’s always me they call when they’re in trouble. It’s ’cause I’ve got a kind face, you see. One of them faces that’s just begging for a good old moan.’
Funny you should say that, thought Lucia. She wouldn’t have trusted Tina’s face with a coffee order, let alone personal information.
‘Well, see you around, Loosha.’
Tina scuttled back to her workstation downstairs, which was the polar opposite of Lucia’s – groaning with dog-eared reports that should have been archived a long time ago, reams of pages ripped out of notebooks and covered in indecipherable scribbles, mouldy biscuits and at least three empty mugs. The health and safety rules and the clean desk policy clearly didn’t apply there.
Lucia smiled to herself and wondered if she had become a fixture at last.
Chapter 2
Peering intently at his computer screen, DCI Carliss was doing his best to appear deep in thought, but he wasn’t fooling Lucia. She knew he was dreaming about a crafty fag down the alleyway next to the station. He had been trying to kick the habit for years and had got as far as allowing himself one or two when he was stressed. He always reasoned that, in his line of work, this was most of the time, and so consumption had slowly but reliably crept back up.
‘What’s in store today, boss?’
The policeman stretched himself out like a cat, his blue eyes fixed on his colleague.
‘Burglary up in Hampstead. One of the big houses up on Frognal.’
‘Anything juicy?’
‘Not sure yet. The Super seems particularly keen to get this one sorted. It’s not our usual remit, so I can only guess it’s someone she knows.’
‘I’m just finishing something up and then I’m all yours.’
The burglary sounded much more enticing, Lucia thought, and her current case was all but over – it would be all written up and delivered in less than a couple of hours if she put her mind to it. She couldn’t wait to make her way up the hill.
Frognal was a seemingly incongruous snippet of countryside just off the busy high street. Up close, the most impressive houses were set back from the road, shielding from prying eyes the selection of high-end vehicles comfortably accommodated on their drives. The specific area where the burglary had taken place was so exclusive it hadn’t even been featured on the street view map. The residents were, unsurprisingly, reclusive – not exactly the type to volunteer for the church flowers on a Sunday. Footballers, Eastern European magnates, even a Hollywood actor or two were rumoured to have bought their way into this forbidding enclave.
Carliss and Lucia spent the rest of the day sifting through the evidence on the burglary. They had been working together for nearly two years, and it hadn’t taken them long to fall into an easy partnership, part sparring, part collaboration. The DCI’s approach was methodical – he read the paperwork slowly, with a pen in his hand and his trusty notebook handy, taking his own comprehensive notes and drawing intricate diagrams as he went along. He left no stone unturned, no possible angle untouched. He was as prudent and thorough in his professional life as in his personal.
Lucia, on the other hand, treated the reams of dry reports and witness statements as indicative at best, distracting at worst. She skim-read the lot at breakneck speed and took incomprehensible notes – hieroglyphic scribbles that ran in all directions across the page and only made sense to the writer. She would make connections between the seemingly disjointed pieces of information and vividly picture the people speaking out loud the words so cruelly flattened on paper. It was like shooting a moving picture in her head, and when she tried to explain her method to the policeman, he looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. Nonetheless, she was adamant that her unorthodox system produced results.
‘Jim and Sally Rowlands. Premier League footballer and his wife. She’s some sort of fashion model. You’re probably more clued up on this sort of thing than an old codger like me.’
Carliss smirked disingenuously. He wasn’t that old, and he knew it. Fifty-three this coming Christmas Day, though he fancied he looked a little younger. He wasn’t the kind of man to put himself about, but his good features and intense blue eyes had served him well over the years. He had never abused this advantage, but nor had he used it to find a long-term companion. He was comfortably settled in his ways and, as he frequently reminded himself, perfectly happy on his own.
Lucia snorted with laughter. ‘Yes, being the archetypal trashy magazine reader, I’ve got all the gossip on Sally Rowlands.’
The name didn’t ring any bells, though she did occasionally have a peek on a certain well-known sidebar.
‘He’s properly famous, this boy, and only thirty-four. Mind you, that’s considered old in the sporting world,’ Carliss said. It was amusing how the detective liked to make himself out as a bit of a football fan, if only to keep up with the lads at the station.
Lucia ignored him. ‘She’s a lingerie model, actually. Quite a different kettle of fish from fashion, and a lot better paid. They do look very well matched to each other, I must say.’
She pulled up a few photos of the couple at what looked like a fellow celebrity wedding. Immaculately dressed and airbrushed, they looked like they had been printed out to order – sharp undercut and tattoo sleeves for him, lavishly long curled hair and theatrical make-up for her. They represented a very contemporary set of aspirations. Lucia knew better than to be prejudiced against the apparently shallow presentation. A couple of local kids from the roughest of the Kentish Town council estates couldn’t have got to the top of their respective professions without dogged hard work.
The detective ambled over to her desk and raised a disapproving eyebrow. ‘She looks a bit over the top, don’t you think?’
‘You’re such an old man sometimes, David. She’s one of the biggest earners in the industry, so why shouldn’t she spend the money on herself? Besides, she’s a walking advert for her job.’
‘I thought you of all people would be a staunch feminist, or whatever it is you’re allowed to call people these days,’ he retorted, feigning ignorance. ‘Hardly emancipated, is she?’
Lucia crossed her arms and shot him one of the withering headteacher looks she had perfected over the years, despite her relatively young age of thirty-nine.
‘And how is it your business to decide what she should look like? Isn’t it all about choice?’
Carliss raised his arms in a pacifying gesture.
‘Alright, alright, don’t bite my head off, we’re not in court now. Anyway, enough of the recreational snooping. I’ve drawn up a list of questions we need to ask Mr and Mrs Rowlands. The Super’s requested a follow-up visit, and only you and I will do. Apparently, uniform didn’t do a very good job, poor sods, or so she says. She’s bringing out the big guns,’ he grinned.
‘What, you and me?’ Lucia smiled with false modesty. ‘I thought Tina was supposed to have gone along.’
‘They were probably star-struck. It’s not every day that you meet the people you read about in the papers.’ Lucia raised a critical eyebrow as she surveyed the detective’s list. ‘I’ll take a red pen to your questions and send them back when I’m done.’
‘Go easy on me, please. I’m not as good with words as you are.’
DCI Carliss sat back at his desk and groaned at the number of emails that had come in during the few minutes he had been away from his desk. The policeman had only recently got used to Lucia’s red pen method. The first time he’d been subjected to it had been a baptism of fire. Never since his school days had his work come back with so many corrections, and violently colourful to add insult to injury. Lucia had been taken aback that he was so sensitive about it – in her former life as a lawyer, she had been on the receiving end for long enough to have become inured to this brutal approach. It wasn’t like she gave him a mark, like her supervising partner used to.
‘Don’t forget it’s drinks tonight. Don’t dress up for it, will you. Don’t want to give the poor PCs a heart attack, what with their having just recovered from interviewing Mrs Rowlands,’ teased Carliss, a tad inappropriately, though he knew Lucia wouldn’t take any note.
‘As you can see, I’m wearing my best clean jeans, thank you very much,’ replied Lucia with a grin. ‘Is that what you’re wearing then?’
The policeman looked down and realised his dubiously moth-eaten jumper sported a coffee stain that not even the murky green colour of the garment could hide. ‘Shit,’ he muttered.
‘Time for the chop, don’t you think? That rag’s seen better days.’
Lucia was dying to empty his wardrobe into a large bin-liner, if only he’d let her near it. His dress sense was atrocious most of the time, though when put on the spot he scrubbed up remarkably well. Take that night when they drank cocktails with her old friend Nina at The Savoy, to celebrate solving the unpleasant case of Professor Kiseleva. He had looked particularly dashing, and, after the second deliciously dry martini, she had briefly considered it. No, emotional commitment just wasn’t her cup of tea – too messy. She had always been disinclined to let anyone into her closely guarded life. There were occasional brief trysts, of course – she was only human and had physiological needs, like everyone else – but no lasting attachments.