Femme Fatale

by Dominic Piper

  I type in the name of the club and take a look at who’s on. Véronique D’Erotique is headlining and she’s supported by Kitty Bourbon, Strawberry Sapphire and ‘special guests’. Doors open at eight pm, show starts at nine-fifteen until late. I’m going to have to go. She’ll be expecting Rikki and it’s unlikely he’ll be turning up. Maybe she’ll have some useful information. Maybe I just want to go and see her.

  I decide to take a wander around the flat and check out the rooms I’ve missed. I step out into the hall. It’s a relief to get away from the smell of the lilies. I don’t usually mind them, but they can get a little overpowering when you’re sitting two feet away. There’s a corridor that leads to a bathroom. I can see a window in there that’s a little open, but when you’re on the fifth floor in a place like this, the risk of burglary must be minimal.

  Before you get to the bathroom, there are two rooms which must be the bedrooms. I can only imagine the level of luxury I’m going to find in these. The first door I come to is slightly ajar. I’m about to give it a shove when the smell hits me. I didn’t notice it before because of the scent from all of the flowers.

  There’s a dead body in there.

  11

  THE GIRL IN THE FLAT

  I breathe through my mouth so I’m not tempted to throw up. It’s a girl. She’s lying on the bed. She’s naked. Her eyes are open. Her throat has been slit from ear to ear. Her stomach is bloated. She’s starting to get discoloration of the skin. There are noticeable areas of green and purple appearing over her death-pale torso and on her face. I bite the bullet and start breathing normally. In two minutes, my brain will stop registering the awful smell. That’s the theory, anyway. I can hear my brain objecting to this theory and asking me to go to the bathroom and puke.

  There are flies everywhere and maggots crawling around in her eyes and in the open wound in her throat. For a moment, I can’t work out how the flies got in, then I remember the open bathroom window. With the help of the central heating and the seasonal warmth, she’d be giving off a stench that a ravenous fly and his pals could smell from four or five miles away. They haven’t had a chance to have a real go at her yet, but it won’t be long.

  Under normal circumstances, I’d say that she’s been dead for a week, but these are not normal circumstances. Someone has turned the heating on fully to speed up the process. It occurs to me that this doesn’t make sense. I have central heating in my flat. It doesn’t stay on all the time. When it gets too hot, the thermostat cuts it out. I’ll take a good look at her in a moment, but first I have to do four things.

  I put my latex gloves on once more, go to the front door and pull the latch down on the Yale. I don’t want anyone coming in, even if they’ve got a key. I close my eyes and make a mental sweep of the flat, remembering every single thing I’ve touched from the moment I came in. Luckily, it’s not much; it’s second nature to me not to touch anything unnecessarily when I’m working and I used the gloves to take the electrics down. I find some clean cotton tea towels and wipe down what needs to be wiped: a book, some DVDs, the office desk, computer and all of the coffee stuff. Takes five minutes to do it all to a level that’ll fox forensics, even if my fingerprints could be traced, which they can’t.

  Still holding one of the tea towels, I open windows in the office, the kitchen and the dining room. This is not to freshen up the flat for important visitors, but to dissipate the smell a little. It isn’t actually that pervasive at the moment, apart from in the bedroom, but someone wanted the odour from that corpse to be noticed, if not today, then in a few days’ time.

  Then I look for the thermostat. It turns out to be in the kitchen to the left of the Liotard print. I’ll have to take it apart before I can work out what’s happened. I carefully remove the plastic casing. I don’t know precisely what they did, but there’s a small yellow power interface inside which has a green wire hanging off it. That doesn’t look right. Next to that, there’s a ‘system off’ switch, which has just been removed and set down at the base of the casing. I push the green wire back into the power interface and click the ‘system off’ switch back into place.

  Immediately, the barely perceptible hiss of the central heating stops and I can hear the radiators ticking with relief. Well, that’s that out of the way. Now for the girl. I’m going to keep the latex gloves on, but I’m not going to touch her. For all I know, she might have been booby-trapped. It has been known.

  She could be anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five. She’s slim, quite pretty (apart from the insect larvae), maybe five foot six, has longish brown hair and, from what I can make out, blue eyes. There’s a tattoo of a single rose surrounded by multi-coloured musical notes on her right forearm.

  The upper part of the bed she’s lying on is drenched with the brown staining caused by most of her blood leaking/spurting out from her jugular veins and carotid arteries. There’s a fair amount of blood on the floor, too. Presumably it didn’t leak through into the flat below.

  She’s lying on her back with her arms by her side, palms facing upwards, as if she’d just decided to have a lie down. The cut in her throat is deep – right down to the vertebrae – and pretty neat; not the sort of precise, effective work you could do if someone was clawing at your face and loudly objecting to the whole process.

  As it’s certain that her throat was cut in the flat, there seems to have been no struggle, so presumably she was unconscious; possibly drugged. I go over to the wall and turn the lights on with my elbow. I take a good look at her arms, looking for puncture marks. As I’m not going to push her around, I’ll have to make do with what I can see.

  After a few minutes I’m about to give up, then I spot a tiny hole about an inch away from the curve of her left jaw and a couple of millimetres away from the slash. I can’t say for sure that this was the result of some sort of injection to keep her subdued while whoever it was murdered her, but I’m betting that it was; possibly caused by something small like an insulin syringe needle or a dental needle. The whole area around her jaw has suffered such a catastrophic injury that you might be expected to miss a tiny detail like that. Or perhaps it wouldn’t really matter if you noticed it. Perhaps you were meant to notice it.

  Was she a junkie? If so, that’s a pretty dangerous/stupid/difficult place to inject yourself, so I’m betting someone else did it. This is all conjecture, of course. I’m not going to perform a toxicology assay on her any time soon and how she was subdued before she died is hardly the point, though it would be nice to know.

  So who did this and why? I’m pretty certain it wasn’t Rikki. A number of reasons: first of all, people in his line of business don’t usually bring their work home. Secondly, she’s not Chinese. I know the Triads have been expanding their business to involve dealing with the gweilo, but considering Rikki’s position in the firm, it’s unlikely that this is someone he’d inflict his many talents on. I could be wrong, of course. It could be that he’s also a psychopath outside working hours. A man has to have a hobby.

  Thirdly: Rikki has gone to a lot of trouble to make this a great place to live, a little designer palace where he can entertain his new friends. Brutally and messily murdering a young girl in one of his sumptuous bedrooms would absolutely fuck everything up beyond repair and I can’t imagine that he’d just leave her there and make himself scarce even if he had done it.

  Another explanation. Caroline mentioned that the rival lodge who felt the sharp end of Rikki’s cleaver were involved in human trafficking. Could this girl somehow be a part of that? Girls on the game (if that’s what she was) would just be so much dispensable meat to criminals like that. Perhaps killing one of them in Rikki’s pad would be just a light-hearted warning or subtle admonition.

  They turn the heating up, break the thermostat, the neighbours eventually complain about the smell, the police arrive and Rikki’s in deep shit. Could there be some inter-lodge trouble going on and this is part of it? Could this be why Mr Sheng is so keen to find Rikki?

/>   It’s a possibility, but both Mr Sheng and Caroline Chow thought that Rikki’s vanishing trick somehow lay with his gweilo-loving lifestyle and even after what Lee Ch’iu said about Rikki having ‘hassle’ with whomever the hell it was, I’m basically at a loss. Anyone could have done this, but my gut feeling is that it wasn’t Rikki and it was done to get Rikki in some sort of trouble.

  OK. Let’s say that the people behind this girl’s murder did a bit of meticulous planning first. They’d have to select the girl, decide that it was fine to kill her, get her and themselves into Rikki’s flat without anyone noticing, slash her throat open with the minimum fuss and noise and then disappear into the night. Or day.

  That is one fucking big thing to do. That’s a major, fearless operation. It was a hassle for me to get in here and I had a key and no particular criminal intent. I had to create a harmless and effective diversion and I didn’t have a half-cut, protesting girl to drag in with me. And another thing – where are her clothes? I haven’t done a comprehensive search of this flat, but I’ll bet you anything they’re not here. Why would the perpetrator get rid of them? DNA traces? Other identifiers? Anyone’s guess, really.

  Whatever’s going on, this girl has to be removed from here before the smell gets too bad and someone calls the cops. I’m aware that doing this will mess up someone’s plans, and if they get wind of it, they’ll know someone’s been snooping around, but it still has to be done. Not doing it will mess up my investigation and I doubt whether the perpetrators will be coming back. I remember what Caroline said when I asked her what would have happened if Lee Ch’iu had killed me. About getting rid of my body. She said ‘no problem’ and ‘there are ways’. I could do it myself, but I think it’s her department. Reluctantly, I decide to give her another call. I wonder if she’s still in bed and naked.

  ‘Is she Chinese?’

  ‘No. White Caucasian. I can’t tell her age accurately. Teens or twenties. I haven’t turned her over, so I can’t give her a full physical. There’s a minute puncture mark on her neck, pretty close to the wound. I think she’d been drugged before they killed her. Everything’s too neat. No signs of a struggle.’

  ‘And she was definitely killed there?’

  ‘No doubt about it. Unless that’s someone else’s blood all over the bed and the floor. It’s rapidly becoming a fly hotel in the bedroom. Someone left a window open, maybe intentionally. Listen, Caroline. Is there any chance at all that Rikki would have done this?’

  ‘No way. First of all, he would never kill a woman or a girl or whatever she is. And even if he did, he assuredly wouldn’t bring her back to his flat to do it. That would be insane. That goes against all of the stuff we do. He’d be finished. He’d be an unreliable loose cannon. It would be untidy, dumb and unprofessional. Conspicuous. Inviting trouble. None of it bears his mark. He’s slit throats, but he’s not an aficionado, and the idea that he’d dope somebody out before killing them – ridiculous. Who the hell would do that?’

  ‘Could this be the work of a rival lodge? I remembered you telling me about Rikki’s altercation. Maybe they’re getting their own back.’

  ‘Very, very unlikely. We’d have known about any trouble brewing in that respect and there’s nothing going on at the moment as far as I know.’

  ‘Whoever did it managed to march her past reception and up here without being seen. It would not have been easy. Then they got out again. Also, there’s no sign of a break-in here. It would seem they had a key or were professional burglars. Or were using the services of a professional burglar. A professional burglar who had no objection to being party to a particularly sickening murder. Unless…’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless they had help here. It’s unlikely, but it’s another possibility. It was partially an inside job. Whoever was on reception when they got here turned a blind eye to the girl and whoever was with her. Someone managed to get the right person on the reception desk at the right time. I could check it, but I’d have to know which day the perpetrators got here and that’s impossible to tell. That theory might also explain why they didn’t have to break in. If they had staff help, then they may have had access to a master key.’

  There’s silence on the other end of the phone. ‘What’s the sort of clean-up that would be needed?’

  ‘You’ll need to get rid of the body and the bed. The bedroom will need a major spring clean. Even with that done, there’s a possibility that her fingerprints may be all over the place. Try and imagine a scenario where they somehow coerced her into coming up here for a drink or something. Even if she’s been removed, she could be reported missing and a person or persons unknown might conveniently lead the police here. I think it’s best to be over-cautious. The intent was for the people in neighbouring flats to complain about the smell and get the police in here. That’s not going to happen now, but you’ll have to act fast.’

  ‘I know what to do. I’ll need the keys. Can we meet up in about an hour? I’m staying in The Soho Hotel in Richmond Mews. You know it? I’ll see you in the bar. We can have lunch! I’ve been thinking about you all morning.’

  I go back in the bedroom and look at the girl again. I decide that I don’t like this. Whatever the motivation, whoever did this, I don’t think they should get off lightly and I’m going to make it my business to track them down and ensure they’re punished, whatever the outcome of this case.

  I sit down in one of the bedroom chairs and try and put myself in the position of whoever brought the girl in here. Could she have been a call girl? Could someone have let themselves into Rikki’s flat (how?) and called her up? Would reception have noticed her walking into the reception area, getting in the lift and not said anything, not stopped her? Or was it someone the perpetrator knew and she was just visiting him, thinking it was his flat and not realising it was her last day on earth.

  It would be useful to go down and speak to someone, but I’m not in the best position to do that at the moment and don’t want to link myself to her in any way. I take a look at her fingers. Call girls are usually pretty well groomed and this girl’s fingernails have no signs of an expensive manicure. There are no traces of makeup on her face, either, apart from a little kohl around the eyes. Her mouth is partly open and I can see a small but noticeable chip on her upper left canine. Looks like it’s been there for a while. No. She just doesn’t give off a call girl vibe.

  As she presumably didn’t lie on the bed and cut her own throat, there has to be at least one other person involved. That person would have had to come in here unnoticed, either with or without this girl. If you were going to commit a cold-blooded murder of this type, you wouldn’t want to risk being spotted by reception under any circumstances. That leaves two options, as far as I can see. Either the person who did this was very stupid and uncommonly lucky, or someone involved with the reception staff is bent.

  I go back to the office, sit down in front of the computer and get Google Chrome up again. I type in ‘Frampton House Ebury Street’. There’s a telephone number for the concierge and a load of flattering stuff about the whole site, which they refer to as a ‘village’. Then I find what I’m looking for: the people who own this whole thing. It turns out it’s an insurance company called Asset Properties and they’re based in Millbank. I look at their site. There’s another place they own called Bracklesham House in Tower Hamlets. That’ll do. I call the concierge.

  ‘Hello. Frampton House day concierge. How can I help you?’

  I recognise the voice. It’s the hot-looking middle-aged black woman I saw come out of the office behind the reception area. I use a bright, appealing vocal tone.

  ‘Hi. My name’s Leo Marsh. I’m calling about the vacancy for front reception. Harriet North at Asset Properties said I should call you. They told me that you and Bracklesham House had been looking for people for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Marsh. You’re speaking to the wrong person. You need to speak to the Day Manager, Mr Gallagher, but I�
�m afraid he’s on his lunch break at the moment.’

  ‘Is there someone above Mr Gallagher I can speak to? Miss North said there was someone there who was in charge of all reception staff. I can’t remember his name, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That would be Mr Wade, but he won’t be in until two today.’

  ‘OK. I’ll try and call later. Thanks very much for your help. Oh – could you give me Mr Marsh and Mr Wade’s first names? It’ll make a better impression if they think I know who they are.’ I allow a slight laugh to enter my voice.

  ‘Of course. It’s Mr Oliver Gallagher, and Mr Thomas Wade is the Reception Supervisor. I think it’s probably him you’ll want to speak to. Good luck!’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  I click off. Oliver Gallagher. Thomas Wade. This may be of no use whatsoever, but I’ll file those names away, anyway. I switch the computer off, take a final look at the flat and the girl, open the door and leave.

  12

  SOHO HOTEL

  As I walk up Dean Street towards The Soho Hotel, I try to mull over the last twenty-four hours. All things considered, it hasn’t been too bad. A pleasantly fucked-up morning with Annalise, a box of homemade Chinese candies, a thousand pounds in cash, a hot date on the horizon with Anastasija Novik from Zhodzina, a stimulating evening with Caroline Chow (whoever or whatever she might be), an attempt upon my life by an overweight, knife-wielding 49er, a naked selfie from a cryptographic consultant and a naked, dead, maggot-eaten girl in a luxury flat in Belgravia. Beats having an office job any day.