by Tim Sullivan
The gym proved fruitless in their search for Alex's drugs. They had held out the hope that maybe there were members' lockers where they kept their kit. But there weren't. The lockers were used on a daily basis for members to put their belongings while they trained. The gym was on an industrial estate, occupying one of the medium-sized units there. It was the gym of a famous local boxer called Johnny Hazel, who was working his way through the amateur super flyweight category, nationally. The main room was dominated by a large boxing ring. There were boxing bags, racks of gloves and head guards littered all over the place. It was what you might describe as "hardcore". It was deliberately basic. No fancy machines and juice bars here. Old fashioned. If you looked closely you'd see that this was a very much curated appearance. Everything was deliberate. From the black and white pictures of old boxing fights on the walls, to the antique lockers and wooden benches in the changing room, and the clean towels on wire racks. If you came here, this place said you came to train, nothing else. This was serious, no-frills training. The smell of Deep Heat mixed with sweat, hung in the air.
At one end of the large room, the pictures on the walls changed from portraits of boxers and action shots from fights to bodybuilders competing. Standing in grotesque poses, flexing their absurdly large muscles, with more oil on them than a well-dressed salad. Weights were being pumped by some outrageously large, muscled individuals – men and women alike. It would surely not be too much of a stretch to imagine that you could tap a supply of steroids or whatever you had a taste for, thought Ottey. They met with Danny. As Patel had said, it was indeed quite hard to avoid him. An amateur bodybuilder, his biceps were twice the size of Cross' thighs. They were given use of the office to talk. Danny squeezed himself into one of the chairs opposite the two detectives.
'I heard Alex had passed. But murder? That doesn't make any sense,' he said.
'How well did you know him?' asked Ottey.
'Um, well, just inside of the gym really. I helped him with some muscle-toning in his legs. Not that he needed it.'
'What do you mean?' Cross asked.
'Well, he was a cyclist. Have you seen the thighs on some of them? Like tree trunks. Totally out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. But we worked on some stuff,' he said.
'That's quite the physique you have there,' Ottey remarked.
'Thanks. I'm coming up to a competition so I'm getting fully toned,' he said.
'I'm not in the least interested in the legality of how you obtained that impressive range of axial muscles, but I am curious as to whether you utilise some sort of additional chemical help to achieve it,' Cross said.
'No more than the usual supplements. Nothing illegal,' he replied.
'As I said, I have no interest in that. The reason we're here is that traces of various drugs were found in Alex's body. Performance-enhancing drugs,' Cross explained.
'Okay,' said Danny, giving nothing away.
'Would you know anything about that?' asked Ottey.
'About drugs or Alex using?' he asked.
'The latter,' she replied.
'No.'
'Do you expect us to believe that?' she asked.
'I don't give a shit what you believe, to be honest. I'm a member of the UKDFBA and I compete regularly,' he said.
'And that is?' she asked.
'The United Kingdom Drug Free Bodybuilding Association,' volunteered Cross.
'So you've heard of it?'
'No, it’s just a fairly obvious acronym,’ Cross replied.
'So I'm clean. Have to be,' he said.
'Did Alex ask you about getting hold of any drugs?' Ottey asked.
'Are you kidding?' he scoffed.
'She is quite obviously being serious,' said Cross. 'I think that must be quite apparent even to someone who doesn't know her.'
'We need to know who people go to, to score this stuff,' Ottey continued.
'Well that's easy. People here tend to go to the same guy. Best supply, best stuff apparently and easy to do business with,' he said.
'And that is...?' she asked, happy to play his game. People often did this when talking to the police, out of either a sense of drama or self-importance. Detectives had to indulge them and play along to get the information they needed. This was one such occasion.
'Alex Paphides.'
The detectives sat there for a moment, taking this in. It didn't surprise them so much as change the narrative, possibly. Cross, like so many other policemen, had come to the conclusion that nothing could surprise him in this line of work any more. He was intelligent enough to know he hadn't "seen it all" and he most likely wouldn't have when he retired.
'So, with him being dead, it wouldn't surprise me if it had something to do with that. Wherever he got the drugs from. Not nice people to deal with, and the other thought I had was – did he step on anyone's toes?'
At this point a heavily built man came to the office and knocked on the door.
'You good?' he asked Danny.
'Hey Tony, we don't have a session today.'
'I think you'll find we do,’ Tony replied. Danny checked his phone and looked up.
'No, it's definitely tomorrow,' he said.
'I have it in for today,' came the response with the obvious implication that he hadn’t made the mistake. Danny was about to say something further then changed his mind.
'You know what, it's fine. Let me finish up here and we'll do it.'
'I only have an hour,' Tony said, and left. Danny's attitude made Cross think that Tony wasn't someone you messed with. He also had a feeling he'd seen him somewhere before.
'Regular client?' Ottey asked.
'Yeah. Are we done here?' Danny replied.
'Sure.'
'I hope you find the guy, I really do. Anything else you need to know, I'll be here.'
They left and walked to the car, 'Did you recognise Danny's client?' Cross asked.
'Tony? No. But he looked like a piece of work. Danny certainly seemed a little nervous, didn't you think?' she said.
'I've definitely seen him before. Recently.'
Ottey started the ignition and then asked what had been bugging her all morning. 'Trypanophobia, spill.'
He looked at her, puzzled. 'What does it mean?' she explained reluctantly.
'Oh, I see. Fear of needles.'
‘Ah.’
Back at the MCU, Cross summoned Alice to his office. It always felt like a summons to her, such was his tone. Not a request. An order. One she had learnt, over time, it was easier to follow at the earliest opportunity rather than prevaricate over. He gestured to a chair and she sat. He went through his notepad till he came to his action orders. Here he noted all the actions he had laid out to the team and the time and day in which they'd been ordered. They were ticked as soon as they had been fulfilled. It also had a time noted for him to follow up. This was what he was doing with Mackenzie now. He found her assigned task and looked up.
'Laptop,' he said.
'Yes. Nothing much, just usual social stuff. Loads and loads about cycling. How many pictures can you have of yourself and your mates on a bike, I ask myself?' He didn't furnish her with an answer. 'Pictures of bikes themselves, gears, brakes – it's all a bit anal.'
'Nothing about any business plans in London?' he asked.
'Nope,' she replied.
'No emails about it?'
'None.'
He thought for a minute. 'That seems unlikely,' he said.
'That’s what I thought. I went through his trash. Everything. So it has to be elsewhere,' she said.
'My thoughts exactly,' he replied.
'So the question is, where? I wondered whether he might have another laptop, but you haven't found one, have you?' she asked.
'No I haven't, but then again I haven't specifically been looking for one,' he replied.
'By "you" I meant us.'
'That, in itself, is fairly confusing.'
'"Us" in the generic sense.'
'I see.
Thank you for clarifying.'
'So I started doing random searches on the laptop we have around "restaurants", "London", "business plan"...'
'And did you find anything?' he interrupted impatiently.
'No, but I did find a couple of documents that couldn't be opened because they couldn't be found.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means they were saved elsewhere. On a drive, from what I could see. So we need to find that drive,' she said, quite pleased with herself, as she considered this to be right up there, legit, detective work. Cross sat silently for a few seconds then looked at his watch. It was just before ten. This was pertinent, because he knew it was when Ottey visited the ladies' room, prior to making her morning coffee. Like everyone, she was a creature of habit. As with everyone and everything, it was something that Cross had noted and would use as an opportunity to sneak out of the office when he needed to. Now was such a necessity and opportunity. He looked over to her desk and she was, indeed, not there. So he stood up, grabbed his bicycle gear and started to leave.
'Where are you going?' Mackenzie asked, immediately regretting the way it had come out.
'I beg your pardon?' said Cross.
'I was wondering where you were going, that's all,' she replied nervously.
'And why is that?'
She thought for a moment and remembered that being blunt and honest with Cross was often remarkably effective. 'DS Ottey asked to me to. If she wasn't around to ask you herself. She finds it annoying when you leave without telling her where you're going.'
'Yes she does,' he said, and left. She found herself smiling. The better you got to know him, the more charming his manner became at times – unintentionally, of course.
As he attached his bicycle clips outside, Cross was thinking how refreshing their exchange had been. If only more people just told the truth instead of hiding behind badly concocted, feeble excuses. Everything would be so much more straightforward.
He left the office on occasions like this not because he didn't want Ottey to be with him. It was just that there were occasions where he didn't want to have to deal with social interactions and be on his best behaviour. Just a simple conversation in the car with Ottey was an effort for him to process and interact with appropriately. It took energy that at times he felt he just didn't have – or could've been used more effectively somewhere else.
On this occasion, as Ottey knew only too well when Mackenzie told her he'd left the office, it was definitely more to do with the fact that he didn't want to have to talk about his Thursday night conundrum with his dad. She thought this was because he was coming round to the view that she had a point and he didn't want to admit it. There was definitely an element of truth in this as Cross, cycling on his way to see Kostas, was secretly congratulating himself on avoiding exactly that.
Chapter 14
'What are you looking for?' Kostas asked him as he handed Cross the keys to his brother's flat.
'I'm looking for an external hard drive for his computer,' Cross replied.
'He has one here in the office.'
'I think it's unlikely...' Cross stopped himself. 'Yes, that would be helpful.'
Cross was then installed in the back office with a coffee and left alone. The office was all you would expect from a family-run business but, Cross noted, it was very orderly. Receipts, invoices and paperwork were all clipped together and hanging off hooks in the wall. There was a whiteboard with weekly tasks and orders on one side. But the most affecting thing about it were the dozens and dozens of family photographs. Mostly taken in the restaurant with the two boys helping their mother and father. It struck Cross how much Alex resembled his father when his father was younger. There were pictures of the boys, aged no more than six or seven, Cross calculated, dressed as waiters in waistcoats and bow ties, serving tables. Their beaming smiles matched by the customers looking on fondly. Alex had an amazing ability to carry four plates of food at one time when he was only five. There was a picture of Kostas with a huge circular tray above his head, dwarfing him, laden with meze. Alex standing on a chair to carve the doner, which was at least twice his size, as his father looked on proudly. The two boys, either side of their dad, cooking in the charcoal pit aged about eleven or twelve. Cross thought it was a little strange that there were no pictures of Helena, their mother. Then he realised the answer. It was so obvious – she was the one taking them.
There was nothing on the hard drive about London, which didn't surprise him. If Alex was keeping the dream of it alive, he wasn't going to let his brother find out on a shared computer. Cross had a chat with Kostas on the way out. He made a point of doing this with people involved in a case. If you had a legitimate reason for visiting them, in this case to get the key to the flat, you should never waste it. People acted very differently when you went to see them with specific questions or lines of enquiry than when you were there for a seemingly altogether different reason and you dropped the questions in tangentially. They were more relaxed at times like this, off their guard even. These occasions were often more productive than visits that were made specifically to question them. This was also in part because, if a detective made the visit specifically, it endowed the questions with way more importance than they probably warranted. So the answers became more considered and guarded.
'The bike in Alex's flat. It has to be worth around eleven thousand pounds,' said Cross.
'That doesn't surprise me. He'd been splashing the cash a lot recently,' Kostas replied. 'Mind you, how many bikes does a guy need?'
'Oh, I don't think it was for him. It's the exact make and specification as Matthew's. The one he destroyed. I think he was planning to replace it.'
'So, what? Do you think I have to give it to him?'
'I don't think anything. I'm just saying why I think he bought it.'
'Well, I don't need it.'
'Even so, it's brand new. I'm sure you could return it in the circumstances. It is worth a lot of money.'
'That's true. I'll think about it. I mean it feels like the right thing to do. If he'd not died he would've done it, so maybe...' Kostas' voice trailed off. It was a moment where the pain and reality of his loss hit home. Grief so often struck people out of the blue like this, unexpectedly.
'What did you mean by "he'd been splashing the cash a lot" recently?' Cross said. He noticed a minimal flinch in Kostas' cheek. He'd regretted saying anything, which was a cue for Cross to push. 'Had he changed his spending habits?'
'Yeah,' said Kostas quietly.
'Mr Paphides, we have nothing at the moment. Nothing to go on. We will have. But it takes time. Your brother has been murdered. That much we have determined, and we will do our very best to bring the perpetrator to justice. But at this stage in any investigation, it can be the smallest of things, things that seem innocuous to you, that could lead to significant leads and findings for us. Unless your brother had done anything illegal. In point of fact had he done something illegal, it’s immaterial: he’s dead. He can't get into trouble. Unless of course it was something you were also involved with.'
'No! No, I wasn't involved. What I mean is he wasn't doing anything illegal. I would've known, wouldn't I?' he said. Cross didn't answer. He wanted him to go on. 'Just recently, in the last year, he was definitely spending like it was going out of fashion. I thought he must've been maxing his credit cards, but I looked. I know all his passwords. He knew mine, and everything was fine,' said Kostas.
'Like the cars?'
'Yeah. He bought them both. On finance, obviously, but he arranged it and paid for it all himself – the deposits and repayments and that. I knew nothing about it until he showed up with them one morning. I couldn't believe it. But he wouldn't take no for an answer. Said it was good for the business, like I told you. Truth is we could have afforded it together, if we'd spoken about it, but it was the way he went off on his own and just did it.'
'What about London?' Cross asked.
'What about it?'
'Nothing,' Cross replied. But something about the speed of his answer made Cross think that possibly Kostas was aware of the fact that Alex hadn't given up on the idea of opening in London. He'd come back to it another time.
'You had an argument a few days before Alex was killed,' said Cross.
'Maybe. Like my dad said, we argued all the time,' he replied.
'But this one was particularly heated,' Cross went on.
'Maybe; I don't remember,' he said.
'Okay.'
His instinct that Kostas was hiding something was borne out by the fact that he seemed distinctly relieved when Cross announced he was leaving.
The first thing he did when he got to Alex's flat was get a glass, wash it, fill it from the tap and drink it. He took off his coat. He was looking for something hidden. So he checked all the normal places – the freezer, back of the wardrobe, under tables, drawers, air vents. He found nothing. He sat down, then his father rang.
'Cross,' he said.
'You know it's me. Why d'you answer the phone like that?' Raymond said.
'It's how I always answer the phone.'
'That's how you answer the phone at work.'
'I am at work,' Cross replied.
'Don't be deliberately obtuse. You know what I mean,' said Raymond, uncharacteristically terse. Cross knew that something had annoyed his father. He could tell from his tone. He assumed it was also why Raymond was calling him. He never called his son at work unless it was important.
'What is it?'
'This Thursday has been postponed for a week. We can have dinner as usual.'
'And the following week?' Cross asked.
'The following week I can't do. Nor any weeks after that for the foreseeable future,' said Raymond.
'Understood.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means we'll have to find another night to have dinner. I was thinking Wednesday might be the optimum solution,' Cross went on.
'I thought you had organ practice on Wednesday.'
'I do, but as it doesn't involve anyone else and as I've determined that the church is also free on Thursday evening it's just a matter of swapping the two,' he said, as if this was the obvious thing to do and he was surprised his father was hadn't thought of it.