Chelsea Mansions

by Barry Maitland

  ‘So you witnessed the murder.’

  ‘Murder?’

  Kathy leaned across the table. ‘Not a hundred yards from where you were waiting, your mystery client grabbed a woman and threw her under a bus. That murder.’

  Danny looked shocked. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘And then he ran up to you and jumped on the back of your bike and you drove him away from the scene, making yourself an accessory to murder. That murder, Danny, the murder that’s going to put you inside for twenty years.’

  Danny’s jaw dropped, he shook his head. ‘Swear to God . . . I had my helmet on, didn’t hear or see nothing.’

  The CID man gave a snort of disgust and half turned away, as if he couldn’t stand much more of this.

  Kathy said, ‘Who’s the man in your flat?’

  Danny shrugged. ‘Dunno. Friend of mine asked me to let him sleep on my floor for a couple of days, till he gets a lift up north.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘Nothing. He doesn’t say much. I reckon he’s African, the way he talks.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have any papers.’

  Danny rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know nothing about that.’

  ‘Give me the name and address of this friend.’

  He wrote it down and Kathy took this and his phone out to Brock. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘He’s giving us a highly edited version. He’s scared, don’t you think? More scared of his client than of us. Keep at him, Kathy. Charge him as an accessory to murder, that should focus his mind. And meanwhile, let’s hope we can lift some of his client’s DNA from his bike.’

  On their way back to the interview room the CID man told Kathy about Danny’s cousin Barbaros Kaya, a more serious villain with a web of local connections. ‘I reckon he’s got to be involved.’

  They charged Danny under the Accessories and Abettors Act and explained that, under the terms of the act, an accessory is liable to the same penalty as the perpetrator.

  ‘Murder, Danny, that’s what you’re up for.’

  Danny demanded a brief.

  The solicitor came quickly, almost as if he’d been waiting for the call. He had a short conversation with his client and they resumed the interview, going back over the ground, point by point, detail by detail.

  ‘You said the man on the phone was arranging this for a friend coming to London,’ Kathy said. ‘Coming from where?’

  ‘Dunno, he didn’t say.’

  ‘What were his exact words?’

  He couldn’t remember, not really. The money? In used twenties, gone now to pay off some debts. The bag they were in? Who knows.

  Four weary hours later Kathy brought the interview to an end. Danny had made only one slip, when Kathy pressed him about his passenger’s exact words. Hard to say, Danny said, they were hard to make out, what with the helmet and his accent. He blinked as the word came out, realising his mistake. What accent? Kathy pressed. British? Foreign? Danny shook his head but she detected a flicker on the second option. Foreign then, she insisted, and saw him go a little paler. What kind of foreign? But he blustered. He really couldn’t say, it might have been Irish, Welsh, Pakistani, he had no idea.

  He had given them nothing more of substance. The client’s number on his phone proved to be unlisted and inoperative. Peter Namono was unknown to UK databases and there was no record of him entering the country. The local detectives were trying to trace the man who had arranged his stay with Danny Yilmaz and promised to talk to Danny’s known friends and associates. Phone records for Danny and for Barbaros Kaya would be obtained. A team was checking CCTV cameras on all the stations of the Northern underground line serving Camden Town station.

  Later, towards eight, back at Queen Anne’s Gate, Brock put his head around the door of Kathy’s office.

  ‘Time to go home,’ he said. ‘Fancy a drink?’ The fact was that he couldn’t get rid of the taste of that man’s blood. He’d brushed his teeth and swallowed numerous cups of strong coffee, but it was still there, a faint noxious taint. Maybe Scotch would clear it.

  The Two Chairmen at the end of the street was quiet when they arrived, a couple of women on stools at the bar and a lone drinker in the far corner. Kathy sat at a table while Brock went to order, returning with a Scotch for himself and a glass of white wine for Kathy.

  ‘Cheers.’ He felt the cleansing spirit burn down his throat and sank back into his chair with a sigh.

  She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  ‘Wine no good?’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine, just what I needed. But I should have nailed Captain Marvel.’

  ‘Whoever he’s protecting is a lot more scary than you or me, Kathy.’

  ‘It’s frustrating.’ She looked up and noticed the single drinker in the far corner get to his feet and head towards the rear door. She had a brief glimpse of his face before he was gone and she frowned. He looked very like the Canadian from the hotel.

  Brock, seeing her expression, said, ‘Had an idea?’

  ‘No, I just . . . No, it’s nothing.’

  Later, when she got home, still troubled by the thought of the man in the pub, she phoned the duty officer at headquarters and asked for a check on the Police National Computer and the Interpol databases. He rang back as she was reheating a Thai takeaway in her microwave. John Greenslade was not a name known to either system. She asked him to check the Home Office UK Border Agency. This time she did get a result. John Greenslade, a Canadian citizen with a Montreal address, had entered the country through Heathrow ten days previously as a visitor. His occupation was given as ‘university professor’.

  Restless now, she played with her meal without really tasting it and turned on her laptop. There was only one email of interest, from Guy, a short message that looked as if it had been written in a hurry.

  Hi Kathy,

  Hope all goes well with you. I’m okay, but the job has gone pear-shaped. Work has stopped, and they’re moving me on, to Shanghai would you believe, where we’ve got a big project on the go. Sorry about the trip. Maybe we can meet up on the Bund. I think of you a lot. Stay safe.

  Love,

  Guy

  She looked up at the envelope that had been sitting on her mantelpiece for quite a while now, containing a first-class air ticket to Dubai, and felt sad, thinking of lost opportunities and roads not taken. Then she roused herself and got up to take a shower. It would never have worked out with Guy anyway.

  FIVE

  On Saturday morning John Greenslade made his way down to breakfast in the dining room at the back of the hotel, overlooking a courtyard garden. He had learned from Deb that there were only seven guest rooms in the hotel, and three of those were occupied by semi-permanent residents: a young Australian woman lawyer, an elderly English woman who had been there since the hotel opened in 1996 and who was now rarely seen outside of her room, and a retired man originally from Nepal. Apart from Emerson Merckle and himself, the short-stay guests were two couples from Leeds, who came every year at this time for the flower show. They were in the dining room now, and gave him a cheery greeting. Once they picked up his accent they told him they’d done Canada, and described their trip there at some considerable length.

  After breakfast he went back up to his room and worked on his laptop for a while. The BBC had a clip of the police press conference on Thursday night, and he downloaded this. After a while he got up and stood by the window overlooking the square. The Maybach had gone, its place taken by a red sports car. He peered down at it, trying to figure out what it was. A Ferrari Spider, perhaps.

  Across the road he saw a figure sitting beneath the trees in the central gardens, and recognised Emerson’s thatch of grey hair. He closed his laptop, picked up his keys and went out. At the front desk he asked Deb about the gardens and she explained that they were available for the use of guests by means of a key for the gate that the hotel could provide.

  ‘Emerson’s got it at the moment, John,’ she said. />
  ‘Oh, fine. I might go and say hello. It looks pretty nice over there.’

  As he went down the front steps he took a close look at the sports car. He was right, an F430 Spider, a beauty. He looked back up at the windows of the property next door, and saw an old woman glowering down at him from behind a curtain. John turned, crossed the street and pushed open the gate in the cast-iron railings.

  Emerson didn’t appear to have moved, hunched over something on his knees. As he got closer John saw that it was a pouch of photographs.

  ‘Hi, Emerson,’ he called out, and the other man looked up, blinking to focus. ‘Am I interrupting?’

  ‘What? Oh, no, John. Hello.’

  ‘It looked so pleasant in here. Private and secluded.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Are you sure I’m not intruding?’

  ‘Not at all. Come and sit down.’

  John nodded at the photographs. ‘Nancy’s?’

  ‘Yes. She brought these with her. I was just . . . well, you know. I guess I’ll have to give these back to her family, but I wanted to remember them.’

  ‘Is that her? She was an attractive woman, Emerson.’

  ‘Very.’ He said it with some feeling. ‘When she was younger she turned a few heads, I can tell you.’

  ‘Including yours, eh?’

  Emerson smiled. ‘Well, we were both married then, to other people. But yes, I did admire her. And she was talented, very artistic. She painted in watercolours—New England landscapes mainly. They were much sought after. She sold them through a local gallery. Look.’

  He showed John a photo of people at a fancy-dress party. ‘That’s Nancy as a bird of paradise. She made the costume herself, and the mask. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘Oh yes. And that’s you as the pirate chief, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Emerson gave another wistful smile. ‘She made the parrot on my shoulder. We had a good laugh about that. She had a great sense of humour.’ He frowned suddenly.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not at all, it’s important to remember. She got her artistic talent from her mother. There’s one of them together . . . here.’

  He drew out one of the older black and white pictures.

  ‘Her mother was a professional sculptor, using her maiden name, Maisy McKellar. Nancy had been hoping to make contact with the McKellars in Scotland on this trip. Before Maisy married Nancy’s father, Ronald, she worked with William Gordon Huff in California. Have you heard of him?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘He’s mainly known for his statues of characters from the Old West—Indians and pioneers, that kind of stuff. There’s a picture of Maisy somewhere . . . here.’

  A couple, their hair and clothes obviously in the style of the 1930s, stood arm in arm in front of a long reflecting pool, with a monumental arch in the background.

  ‘Art Deco,’ John said. ‘It looks very Hollywood, don’t you think? And that’s Maisy with Huff?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I guess it could be.’

  ‘They look a glamorous couple.’ John pointed to another photo. ‘And those are Nancy’s grandchildren?’

  ‘Yes, seven at the last count. I wonder what their parents have told them. Your grandmother was thrown under a bus. It’s obscene, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘The police have no idea why he did it. I suppose he was doped up on ice or some damn thing.’ He shook his head sadly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘This is upsetting you.’

  ‘Well, maybe it helps me to talk about it. Apart from the police, the only people I know in this city are in that hotel. They’re trying very hard to help, but they do seem kind of odd.’

  ‘Yes.’ John chuckled. ‘They are, aren’t they?’

  ‘You’ve heard about the memorial service idea?’

  ‘Yes, Toby told me. I’ll be there.’

  ‘That’s kind of you. It’ll help to see a friendly face.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get moving. See you then.’

  Not much more than a mile away to the east, Kathy was working in her office. She’d started the morning with a brisk swim in the baths in Pimlico, looking forward to an active day and, hopefully, a breakthrough. But on her desk she found a heap of accumulated paperwork awaiting her urgent attention, and reluctantly she sat down and started working through it.

  A response had come in from the FBI during the night. They had spoken to Nancy’s solicitor and confirmed that her two sons were her principal beneficiaries. They had also determined that neither had a police record and a preliminary search of both men’s business and financial affairs had revealed nothing unusual.

  But something had been fatally special about Nancy Haynes. If Danny Yilmaz was to be believed, someone had begun to arrange her murder within a couple of days of her arrival in London. Nancy must have been observed during that time, her movements tracked.

  Kathy sent a reply to America, asking for a check on Emerson Merckle and information on Nancy’s financial records, then turned to the forensic reports on Nancy’s body and clothing and Danny’s Kawasaki. There had been dozens of fibres, fingerprints and DNA traces, all painstakingly listed, but so far no matches to anyone apart from Nancy, Emerson and Danny.

  After a couple of hours scanning incoming reports, Kathy rubbed her eyes and got to her feet. She went out to see how the CCTV team was getting on, searching for sightings of the killer on the underground, and picked up a mood of resignation.

  ‘There are fifty stations on the Northern Line,’ Zack said with a sigh. ‘Not to mention connections to the Victoria Line, the Piccadilly, Circle, Central, District . . .’

  ‘I get the picture. How about his ticket? Could he have bought an Oyster card with a credit card?’

  Zack nodded, thinking. ‘We could get the numbers of all the Oyster cards that went through the Camden Town ticket machines at that time on Thursday . . . Leave it with me.’

  Kathy moved on, checking progress, feeling impatient, then returned to her desk. Mickey Schaeffer was at Tottenham, Brock at headquarters, and she wanted to be out of the office. One of the reports in the pile in front of her was by an officer who had spoken to organisers at the Chelsea Flower Show, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered. How had that worked, exactly? If the man that Emerson had photographed at the show was really the killer, waiting for his moment, had he planned to kill Nancy there among the crowds, and then changed his mind when he realised that they’d noticed him? The more Kathy thought about it, the more odd it seemed, a strange combination of planning and improvisation. Where had the man come from? Would a native Londoner have done it like that? Would they have relied on someone like Danny Yilmaz to make an escape? And how had he got into the flower show?

  This was the final day of the show, she remembered; she could go and see for herself. She pulled on her jacket and headed out.

  The street in front of the entrance gates was jammed with visitors carrying sun hats, backpacks and handfuls of maps and tickets, queuing to get in. As they approached the gates she saw them stare at the police notices posted nearby, appealing for witnesses with pictures of Nancy and the unidentified man, and whisper among themselves.

  Among them were a few army veterans resident at the Royal Chelsea Hospital, in whose grounds the flower show was held, wearing the scarlet coats and black caps of the Chelsea Pensioners. She spoke to one who gave her directions to the organisers’ office. Inside, a brisk woman finished a phone call and showed Kathy to a table in a corner of the tent.

  ‘Yes, I spoke to a detective yesterday, Inspector,’ she said. ‘He wanted a printout of the names of all the people who bought tickets for Thursday, but he baulked a bit when I told him there were forty thousand of them. And I doubt it would help anyway. Thursday’s tickets were sold out two months ago, so he probably didn’t pre-book.’

  ‘Then how did he get a ticket?’

  ‘Probably from a scalper at the gate. I’m told the going ra
te is as much as two hundred and fifty pounds at the moment. The detective did try to speak to one of them, but I don’t know how much success he had.’

  There had been no mention of that in the officer’s report. ‘Are there cameras at the gate?’

  The woman shook her head. They discussed the security at the show and the information on volunteers held in the computer, until Kathy decided there was no more she could find out. She thanked the woman and left. Outside she stood for a while at the entrance, watching the visitors streaming through. She saw no one trying to sell tickets, and after a while she returned to Queen Anne’s Gate.

  A number of messages had come in while she was away. A situation report had arrived from Tottenham Green profiling known associates of Danny Yilmaz and other possible criminals in the area. There were quite a few of them, but so far no connections to Thursday’s events had been established. Peter Namono was not known to the police in Uganda, and appeared to be an unauthorised migrant. Apparently he had been in touch with a refugee advisory service in South London.

  The Home Office had forwarded a request from the American Embassy for an update on the case, with a cover note demanding urgent attention. And a preliminary report from the coroner’s office had been delivered. The autopsy had been completed and blood and tissue tests carried out in record time. Nothing new had been revealed and it was proposed to release the body to the family for return to the United States on Monday. Kathy sensed an all-round official desire to move on, to see a rapid and tidy end to an embarrassing and incomprehensible affair.

  SIX

  Tucked away in one corner of Cunningham Place was a small, rather plain brick church. Built eighty years before the square was laid out, its modest spire had once stood out among the fields and hedgerows of the western edge of London, but was now overshadowed by its neighbouring housing blocks. On most Sundays its congregation amounted to barely a dozen elderly people, but today they emerged through the porch to find a small crowd assembling outside in the sunshine.

  As the vicar shook the hand of the last parishioner, Toby Beaumont mounted the steps with his two employees, Garry the silent concierge and Jacko the limping bellboy, all dressed in suits and ties, and introduced them to the priest as the ushers for the memorial service. Garry was carrying a poster-sized photograph of Nancy’s smiling face, enlarged from a snapshot Emerson had provided, and received permission to tie it to one of the porch columns. Deb, Julie the cook and Destiny the maid followed, carrying huge bunches of flowers, and disappeared inside.