Fifth Member

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Wanna bet?’ she said. ‘Politics are politics the world over. Some places are more honest than others, but I don’t for a moment suppose you’re not as subject to corruption here as anywhere else. But fair enough’ – she raised both hands, for it was clear he was settling down to argue – ‘we’ll say no more about it. But I tell you, this affair is a hunt not for a madman but for a highly motivated plotter who has good reasons to do what he’s doing and that politics may or may not be part of it. You register that, and when the whole thing’s over and done with, we’ll see who’s right. And if I am …’

  ‘OK, it’s a deal. I say it’s got damn all to do with what we’d consider real motives; that we’ve got a common-or-garden serial crazy here. What do you bet?’ She considered. ‘I’ll take a rain-check,’ she said after a moment. ‘Wait till it’s over and if I win I’ll demand whatever I want from you and you’ll have to give it to me. And vice versa.’

  He put a hand out. ‘We’ll shake on that. And start saving, sweetheart. On account of this is going to cost you. Now, how about that chicken dinner, eh? I’m famished.’

  By unspoken consensus they said no more about the case during their meal, which Gus pretended to be amazed by, making outrageous comments about her usual cooking skills, and afterwards they settled to watching TV, a typical trashy Saturday-night film that they could jeer at. As Gus said when he switched off and they went trailing up to bed: ‘It’s more fun to watch a lousy flick than a good one. I love picking holes.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Listen, Gus, tomorrow, are we home?’

  He hesitated. ‘Not me, ducks. I’m sorry, but I have to put in an appearance. Everyone else is working overtime, so I must too. I got tonight to myself so Roop can go off tomorrow. He’s got some special event at his local Church. He’s a pillar of the place.’

  ‘Really,’ George said a touch waspishly. ‘I just wish he’d show a bit more goodwill and loving kindness towards women as a result. Then I’d be more impressed.’

  ‘One of these days you two might be friends,’ Gus said and yawned again. ‘When pigs fly to the moon to get their cheese rations.’

  ‘Well, I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘May I?’

  He shook his head, ‘It’ll be boring. Really. We truly are just plodding. I’ve got men out all weekend hunting down as many people as they can from that office building in Creechurch Lane – they’ll get the ones they miss on Monday – and a lot of the others are prowling around picking up stuff on the whereabouts of our victims and the people around them. Once we have all the evidence in, and it’s time to analyse what we’ve got, then I’ll be glad to have you along. But till then you might as well –’

  ‘I know. Make curtains. OK, I’ll make curtains. Come on. I’m bushed.’

  Curtain-making vanished from her schedule at three a.m., when the phone rang. Gus emerged from sleep to grab the handset and growl into it, listen, and then, as George reared up to blink at him anxiously, hang up and say to her with real amazement: ‘Would you believe it? The bugger’s done it again! How the hell does he manage it? Another one … its bloody impossible, but he’s done it.’

  17

  She was still in a dazed state when she arrived at Old East to do the post-mortem. During the journey to Spitalfields Market and the trek through the maze of little shops and boutiques which now occupied the area to reach the storeroom in which the body had been found she had experienced a state of déjà vu, the longest-lasting one she had ever known. She seemed to have been so often to places where she had expected to find a mutilated corpse that it felt like a habit now. And the effect of repetition was underlined even more when she saw the body. The likeness was so vivid; and it wasn’t just the slit throat and belly and the transposition to the shoulder of the genitalia. It was the face. She looked at it and then closed her eyes and shook her head.

  Gus said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I am. If you mean, do I feel ill,’ she snapped. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I know him.’

  ‘You do?’ He peered at the body again, tilting his head to avoid the dazzle of the torchlight that was being thrown on it by two or three of the uniformed men who were standing there. ‘How can you – Ye Gods!’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘If you mean, is it Lord Durleigh, you’re right.’ It was Dudley, who had come up to stand behind them. He had been part of the knot of police at the entrance to the Market when they arrived and had followed them inside. ‘I never got to meet him, but one of the others did, and anyway he’s had his mug in the papers a good deal since his brother was killed.’ He looked down at the body and shook his head. ‘Question is, is this just another of the series, and the relationship with an earlier victim coincidental, or …’ He left the question dangling.

  ‘If it is Durleigh it certainly shifts the emphasis,’ Gus said. ‘Before they were all linked just by being Parliamentarians, but when relatives start being clobbered, well, it makes you wonder. After all, most murders are –’

  ‘Committed by close relatives of the victims. Yes,’ George said. ‘But in this case, it can hardly be regarded as one of “most murders” can it? I mean, the whole point of this is that it’s one of a series. The link is Parliamentary, surely, more than the relationship? After all, there aren’t many close relatives who are Members of Parliament.’

  ‘Yes, there are,’ Dudley said, pleased to be able to contradict her. ‘There’s that father and daughter pair in the Lords and a husband and wife in the Commons, and –’

  Gus interrupted adroitly. ‘Who found him? And when? Have there been any reasons why this wasn’t prevented? We’ve had more uniforms around her than flies on a pork chop, and yet here he is.’

  Dudley was defensive now. ‘My blokes have been pulling out every stop. This is – Well, if the murderer turned out to have been equipped with wings and flew here with his victim, I wouldn’t be surprised. There hasn’t been a single thing missed out as far as security is concerned. It’s very difficult during the day, of course, when the place is heaving with shopkeepers and customers and strollers and Gawd knows who, but once the day was over and we could police the entrances properly, and seal the premises to make sure they were empty, there was no way anyone could get past us.’

  ‘But someone did,’ Gus said.

  Dudley’s face mottled with an angry red. ‘I’m well aware of that, Guv, and don’t think I haven’t been goin’ spare over it. I tell you, I’ve talked to every man on the job, had the day people on the phone and several of ’em called back here, to check on what happened. This place was searched with toothcombs. There was no way anyone would have got in. Or out. I’d have sworn it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Gus, forbearing to point out the obvious yet again, and looked around him. ‘Who found him then?’

  Dudley’s colour was still high. ‘It was a tip-off,’ he muttered.

  George lifted her head, suddenly alerted. ‘What sort of tip-off?’

  He looked at her, then at Gus and, thinking better of arguing with her, pulled from his pocket a transparent plastic envelope. Inside it was a sheet of flimsy fax paper. He gave it to Gus, and George came closer and peered over his shoulder.

  It showed a drawing of the Market. It was a neat plan, drawn in thin lines, and over one section there was a big cross. That was all. No words had been written, no indication of directions given, just the series of squares and oblongs with a big cross.

  ‘It arrived at Ratcliffe Street,’ Dudley said. ‘The duty clerk gave it to me and I saw at once it was a plan of this place. I know the layout by bloody heart, I’ve been over it so often. So, I came here, got the nearest gate open’ – he jabbed his finger at the map – ‘and headed for the storeroom. It was partly open.’ He took a deep breath in through his nose. ‘The bastard. That door had been shut with a padlock that was rusted in, it had been locked for so long. You can still see it. No one had a key for it when we searched, but two or three of my men took a close
look at it, saw it hadn’t been opened since the year dot and let it go.’ He looked at Gus, his eyes filled with misery and rage and a sort of fear. ‘I have to take responsibility for that. I’ve always told my people not to go damaging property unnecessarily and it was obvious to them that no one had been in here or had tried to get in. It never occurred to anybody that someone had been buggering about with the bloody hinges. So they let it go.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gus sounded resigned rather than angry. ‘So that was it, was it?’ He turned to look at the door, squeezing out through the gap to do so. In the light of the torches he could see clearly how the door had been breached: the hinges were the old-fashioned flat sort, attached to the jamb and the door itself on the outside. All the killer had to do was unscrew the flap on the door side, and ease the door outwards. Even though the padlock and the latch and lock on the usual side were rusted firmly in place, there was just enough movement on the rather flimsy door to open a space on the hinged side, enough for a slim person to get through, albeit with difficulty. Once the door was pushed back into place and the hinges refastened with a few turns of a screwdriver, it looked totally undisturbed from the outside.

  ‘Well, it’s good he wasn’t a fat man,’ Gus said, coming back inside and looking down on the body. ‘He could never have squeezed in here if he had been. But why should he have done? Why should an intelligent man in possession of his senses agree to go into a storeroom by squeezing through the wrong side of a door?’

  ‘He trusted the person who was with him,’ George said. ‘Someone had to be with him, obviously. And he gave him a believable reason.’

  ‘The killer,’ Gus said a little abstractedly, still looking at the hinges. ‘Another thin man.’

  ‘Another thin man,’ she had agreed. And now, as she changed into her greens and tied a cap over her head before plodding in her heavy theatre boots into the mortuary where Danny had the body ready on the central slab for her attentions, she tried yet again to visualize what had happened. The Ripper – No, she corrected herself, I mustn’t slide into thinking of him that way. The killer had persuaded his victim to go with him willingly with a tale that made it perfectly logical that they should go into a storeroom by a highly illicit method. And that didn’t frighten him. She stared sightlessly at the opposite wall. If I were an MP, knowing of the horrible death of my colleagues, would I go to some hidden place of my own free will? Surely I’d think about the risks if such a suggestion were made to me? She shivered a little. Whoever the killer was, he clearly had a great gift for reassuring his victims they were safe in his hands. And he must have done the same with all of them. Or had he?

  She stood there, slowly pulling on a pair of gloves and smoothing the latex over her fingers as she remembered. The first one. Sam Diamond. Why had he gone to that hidden square off Durward Street? Had he too been invited there by someone he knew and trusted? And what about CWG, who had died so near to the same place as his brother? How had he been persuaded to come to Spitalfields? One of Gus’s jobs clearly would be to investigate links between the brothers and that part of London – but then she reminded herself: he would have done that already for CWG and had found nothing. If he had he would have told her, of that she could be certain.

  She picked up her knife and looked at it, thinking of the job that had been the most disagreeable: the Scroop post-mortem. How had he been lured to that shed on the waste ground beside Henriques Street? Or had he been strangled first and taken there afterwards?

  She sighed. She had a job of work to do on this victim; it was no time to be trying to work out the whys and wherefores of all of them. She pulled the big magnifier round on its ceiling fixing so that she could investigate the throat of the man on the slab. Had he too been strangled first? And she bent her head to her task as Danny, yawning beside her, tried to do the mental arithmetic that would tell him what he could expect in his overtime-padded pay packet at the end of the week.

  The message she found waiting for her when she had finished was terse. ‘Meeting incident room. Ratcliffe Street ten a.m.’ read the fax. ‘See you there.’ It was in Gus’s familiar scribble, and she was a little amused, weary though she was as the effect of a broken night’s sleep caught up with her. It was more private to send a fax than to use the phone these days, especially when others were likely to listen in to your calls. This way she could turn up and no one would know she’d been invited, so no one could get uppity over her presence; or if they did they’d aim their irritation at her, rather than at Gus. And for that ‘one’, she told herself as she went to the shower, read Dudley. Not that he’ll be quite as full of himself as he has been, now he’s been so thoroughly caught out failing in the protection of the Spitalfields Market site. For a very brief moment she had it in her to feel sorry for the man.

  The incident room, when she arrived there, smelling richly of Badedas and with her hair still curling damply over her ears, was still empty. It was barely half past eight, she realized, and shook her head at herself. It was very difficult to keep track of time intelligently, feeling as weary as she did. But not sleepy, she assured herself as she settled on the sofa in Gus’s office to wait for him. Not sleepy at all.

  She woke with a start an hour and a half later as Gus slammed the door behind him. ‘Hi,’ he said absently, as though she had been there all night and he hadn’t noticed her before, and headed for the phone on his desk.

  ‘Griffin?’ he barked when at last he got an answer to his irritated thumbing of the keypad. ‘Where the hell are those reports? … What? Of course I know it’s Sunday, but what’s that got to do with the price of eggs? I need ’em now! I’ve got five bloody murders here to handle and I can’t do it without the data I ask for when I ask for it … Eh? Well tell ’em it’s a matter of life and bloody death – yours probably – and get ’em out of their stinkin’ beds. Sunday or no Sunday. I never heard they were that religious in Brussels anyway. So move it.’

  He slammed down the phone and glared at her. ‘Five hours and still nothing! You’d think they’d have found something by this time.’

  ‘Who haven’t found what?’ she said, yawning hugely. ‘You’re not making a lot of sense.’

  ‘Interpol,’ Gus growled. ‘According to his housekeeper he’s in Brussels, and I want to know where and with whom. It’s not enough just to have someone say it.’

  ‘Who’s in Brussels?’ George managed to hold on to her patience.

  ‘The brother, for Pete’s sake! Who else? Edward CWG. We tried to find him, to get him to do the necessary ID rather than his housekeeper – would you want to show a woman her boss looking like that? But the housekeeper said –’

  ‘I’ve got it now. He’s in Brussels, Gus. It’s the middle of Saturday night. Or it was five hours ago. You can’t expect everyone everywhere to run around getting stuff for you at that sort of time.’

  ‘Of course I can. This is a massive case we’ve got here. We need all the information we can get and we need it fast. I’m convinced I’ve got to talk to the brother. Check his movements and so forth.’

  ‘I bet you wouldn’t turn out in the small hours of a Sunday morning for Brussels police,’ she said. ‘And why get so agitated over the brother? I grant you that in most murders it’s someone close to the victim who did the nasty but in this case we’re looking at a serial murderer.’

  ‘But you said this wasn’t just a serial murder,’ he said and suddenly yawned too. ‘The other day –’

  ‘Much good staying up all night has done you,’ she said. ‘And yes, I know I said that, but I meant that I believe there’s some sort of political motive here. As well as an element of serial behaviour. One thing I’m sure it ain’t is a nice cosy domestic.’

  ‘Two brothers dead? It could be.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘You saw the two of them together. They seemed on comfortable-enough terms, didn’t they? You’re talking like a policeman instead of –’

  ‘Of course I am. I am a policeman. And thinking like one is what
gets cases solved, ducky, not some airy-fairy flights of fancy.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that’s all I offer? Because if you are –’

  He put up both hands. ‘We mustn’t argue. We’re both dead on our feet and it’s making us as ratty as a pub cellar. I don’t suppose it’s helping much, either. So let’s not talk about anything but work, OK.’

  She stared at him and bit back the angry retort that had slipped into her mouth. He was right, of course. It was her fatigue that was making her irritable.

  ‘OK. So, what’s next? What’s this meeting you’ve called me to?’

  ‘Just routine. I want us to collate all we’ve got, and that includes your findings on this case. Durleigh, I mean. I don’t want to be kept waiting for your report. Bad enough I have bloody Brussels to contend with. With you here, at least I can get a verbal on the PM. Come on.’

  He led the way out into the incident room which now was alive with people. Someone had brought in hot bagels and cream cheese to go with the coffee that was as usual bubbling on the table at the side, and everywhere there were champing jaws. Gus and George joined in and felt a good deal better when they’d finished. Hunger makes a dangerous mix with sleep deprivation, George thought. Gus is right. We really mustn’t get personal over this investigation. It’s too complex and important to allow such indulgences.