Autumn Maze (34 page)

“Do you think the police will solve the murder?”

Aldwych toyed with his smoked salmon. The Gold Room was a hangover from the boom years of the Eighties, when extravagance had been mistaken for a virtue, when designers thought they had been
let
loose in Byzantium. The crystal was gold-rimmed, the plate gold-patterned: the smoked salmon was spread on a gold grid. “Eventually they will. The man in charge is one of the best, Inspector Malone. He won't give up. Did you know young Rob?”

“Yes, I knew him. I couldn't stand him, though he was always charming to me. But he wanted to go to bed with every woman he met.”

“Including you?”

“No, I was just out of his age group. But he didn't mind a middle-aged woman, so long as she wasn't sagging in the wrong places.”

“Like the Bruna sisters?”

She looked at him above her gold-rimmed soup spoon. “You don't miss much, do you?”

“Are you saying he went to bed with them? All of them?”

“Not with your daughter-in-law.” She had suddenly recognized that in certain things he was strait-laced; under the criminal was a Methodist struggling to get out. She was not a good liar, but she managed to convince him: “No, not Juliet. Nor Rosalind, I'd say, though I'm not sure. But Ophelia . . .”

“Why her?”

“Jack, what do you know about women?”

He grinned, not afraid to be honest with this woman. “Not much. You never learn much from hookers, not unless you're their pimp. I ran a string of brothels, but I never thought of myself as their pimp. I was the managing director.”

Roland, her husband, would never believe this conversation if he were alive and she could tell him; Roland had been a senior executive with a trustee company, handling trusts for old ladies who, if they knew anything at all about brothels, believed they were women's cooperatives. Pimps were girls who had told tales on them in school. Roland had not been as innocent as the old ladies, but he had been a sweet gentle man who looked for the best in everyone. Since his death she had been out with and into bed with crooked politicians, crooked lawyers, crooked bankers; but none of them had been killers or run brothels. She had to treat Jack Aldwych differently from all the others.

“
Ophelia thinks the world is her oyster. She would never miss an opportunity, no matter what the opportunity was. Cormac is an old man . . . Are you offended at me saying that?”

“Emily, I
am
old. Why should I be offended?”

“Male vanity.”

“I'm not gunna put the hard word on you, love. I'm too old for that, so if you had your hopes up—Did you?” He smiled, enjoying her almost as much as if making love to her. “I wouldn't wanna die on top of a woman. We had that politician of ours who did—”

She nodded, “I know the lady in question. It was a nightmare for her.”

“I won't ask who she was. There was an ex-governor in the States, too, you would of read about him. That must of been funny. The woman in that case, she called his minders and they went rushing to his place. He was naked and they tried to put his clothes back on before they called the ambulance. But they couldn't get his shoes on—Did you know it's almost impossible to put shoes on a dead man? It's got something to do with the way the bones of the foot set. There's a moral there. Over a certain age a man should always make love with his shoes on, just in case . . . I wanna die with dignity. Some men think it'd be a wonderful way to go, while making love.” He shook his big head. “Not me. I think it'd be the most undignified way to go.”

“It wouldn't be very dignified for the woman, either,” she said and they both laughed. “How'd we get into this conversation?”

“You were telling me about Ophelia. And Cormac.”

“He's too old for her, he couldn't keep up with her. Not in bed.”

He waited till the waiter had put their main courses in front of them, rack of lamb for her and fish for him. “You're full up tonight?” He had looked around the suddenly crowded dining room.

“Yes, sir,” said the waiter. “It's a change. There's an international bankers' convention. Mint sauce,
madame
?”

When the waiter had gone, Aldwych said, “How do you know what goes on in their bedroom?”

“Ophelia can't help boasting. Not directly, she doesn't exactly come out and tell you what she's
done.
But another woman can tell. She's had half a dozen lovers since she married Cormac. I'll bet Rob was one of them.”

“Are you saying she might have had a hand in killing the young bastard?” He asked the question as casually as he might have asked her if she was liking her lamb.

She was shocked at how she had let the conversation run away with her. Because he was an old criminal, must they talk of things criminal? But then the businessmen she had gone to dinner with had talked business, the horse trainer had talked horses. “No. I wouldn't accuse anyone of murder unless I actually saw them do it.”

“That's always a dangerous thing, seeing someone commit murder.” The ocean trout was over-cooked, but he wouldn't embarrass her by sending it back. Shirl wouldn't have let him. “If ever you see a murder, turn your back and walk away.”

You couldn't ask for anyone better than he to give that sort of advice; but she didn't say that. He went on: “She didn't kill him, it was a professional job. Unless she paid to have it done.”

She felt a mixture of queasiness and excitement; the rack of lamb was under-cooked, she could see blood. “We shouldn't be talking about a friend like this—”

“She's no friend of mine. But I like Cormac—I'd hate to see him mixed up in anything as dirty as murder.”

“He was almost killed himself.”

“A rich man's risk.”

“Did you only rob the rich?”

“What's the point in robbing the poor? Like the Bible says, the poor are always with us. But they're bloody useless if you're trying to make a living.” He was a reactionary, the only sensible stance for a professional criminal. He had no time for the welfare state; it only encouraged bludgers. Socialism bred its own crims, members of the ruling clique; there was no place for outsiders; he was amused when he read that the only successes in the old Soviet Union, now that socialism was dead, were the Russian Mafia. “Cormac copped it because he advertised he was rich.”

“
No, Jack, he's always been discreet about how much he is worth.”

“That was before he married Ophelia. Jack Junior told me about him. He never had a private jet, he didn't own a string of polo ponies, he didn't let the world know when he bought a valuable painting. He had a yacht, I think, but Jack tells me he was only part-owner of that. Then Ophelia comes along and next thing they've got that penthouse in The Wharf and a new place in the country and the Bentley . . . I dunno what he thought of it all, he'd be too conservative to tell you anyway, but Ophelia made sure of the advertising. Muggers like those kids who tried to burn him, they go by appearances. He
looked
rich, so they did him.”

She looked around the dining room, now full. “You look like a rich man. Aren't you afraid the muggers might—
do
you? Or do they all know who you are and they wouldn't dare?”

“Today's muggers and street kids wouldn't know me from Ned Kelly. I was before their time. I take my chances, like everyone else. There's gunna be more and more muggers, the world's going to the dogs. History repeats itself—I read that. The only difference now is you got muggers and hookers out in the suburbs. It wasn't like that in my day.”

Then they got off mugging and murders and crime in general; the subject bored him after a while. But Ophelia Casement stayed in a corner of his mind, suddenly a suspect. It shocked him that he was thinking in terms of justice, like a policeman.

He paid the bill with cash, as he always did; credit cards were like fingerprints. He left no tip, which would have upset Shirl; he hadn't liked the condescension of the waiters, which Shirl would have counteracted by over-tipping. As he and Emily walked out of the dining room several diners turned to look after them. Like a true male chauvinist he was all at once immensely proud of the beautiful woman he was escorting; he saw her through the eyes of the men staring at them, not through those of the women. Some of the latter, recognizing Emily from the Sunday social pages, marvelled at how she carried her age. None of them, men or women, recognized Aldwych. His minders had always smashed the cameras of anyone who tried to take photos of him. Photos of him had appeared in the newspapers, but he had always been walking away from the camera.

As
they waited outside the lobby of the hotel for their hire car, another hire car, a stretch limousine, drew into the kerb. Aldwych glanced at it, wondering why anyone would want to ride in anything so conspicuous. He grinned at Emily. “Would you have come out with me if I'd called for you in that battleship?”

Then three men, all Japanese, came out of the hotel lobby, down the steps and into the car. Two of them were middle-aged; the third was the young Japanese who had abducted him. They got into the limousine, disappearing behind its dark windows and the long car drew out of the driveway and into the street. But not before Aldwych had noted its number; he took out a small notebook and biro and wrote it down. Then he was aware of Emily looking hard at him.

“Do you often do that? Take down a car's registration?”

He smiled. “It's a hobby, like train-watching. Here's our car.”

“Have you got
its
number?”

His smile broadened. He knew now that if he had met Emily twenty years ago he would have been unfaithful to Shirl. The thought hurt him, so that the smile was more a grimace.

IV

This late in the evening the morgue was deserted, at least of the living. Malone walked down the long main room towards the murder room, past the stainless steel tables now washed clean of the blood and tissue of the day. Insect-killers hung from the ceiling like blue honeycomb and on one wall a row of white rubber aprons were draped like corpses that had been gutted. The air reeked of death, disguised as disinfectant.

Romy Keller and Clements were in the murder room with the body of Kim Weetbix. It lay on a stainless steel table under the bright light of a green-domed lamp. Face down, arms by her side, Kim looked much thinner than she had in life.

“I haven't touched her yet.” Romy, in a white coat but with no rubber apron, blew a kiss to Malone across the corpse. “I'm waiting on the HIV or hepatitis test. I don't think it matters—the autopsy, I
mean.
She was killed the same way as Mr. Sweden and Mr. Kornsey.”

She lifted the short hair on the girl's neck and Malone saw the small wound. “Who found her, Russ? Mrs. Kornsey?”

“She came back to the house, she'd been to pick up her niece, and there was this girl on her doorstep. Just dumped there on the mat. She's hysterical, Mrs. Kornsey, so the local D's said. I didn't go out to see her—”

“Leave her, her family will look after her. Why'd the buggers do this to her? Is it some sort of warning?”

“I'd say so. Telling her to lay off, not try for the twenty-five million.”

Romy had been listening to this without comment, but now she whistled softly. “Twenty-five
million
? This girl was mixed up in something as big as that? I thought she was supposed to be a street-kid?”

“She was. If she knew anything about the money we're talking about, it was by accident. Maybe whoever killed her thought she knew more than she did.”

“She'd been tortured. There are burns, they look like cigarette marks, on her breasts. And there are bruises on her arms—she'd been pretty heavily handled.”

Malone leaned with his back against the wall looking at the thin pitiful body; it looked more yellow than white, as if her mother was asserting herself. He knew nothing of the girl's background, but he guessed it had been neither happy nor promising. But she had not deserved to finish up, tortured and dead, on this table in this pitiless room. “I don't suppose there'll be anyone to claim the body for the burial?”

Clements shrugged. “Who? Some street-kid?”

“Do you expect to find anything, Romy, when you do the autopsy?”

“Not really. All that'll help you is what you see there.”

“Anything in her clothes?”

“I've got the PE guys on that,” said Clements. “Fibres, dirt, anything. But I don't think we're gunna come up with anything that'll help. There was nothing in her pockets, not even a handkerchief.”

Malone
heaved himself off the wall. He could feel the weight of these cases building up; he was an unwilling weightlifter as the kilos were added to the bar. “We'd better mount security on Mrs. Kornsey, we don't want her finishing up in here.”

Romy was attaching a label to one of Kim's big toes. “I'll park her in the body room till morning.”

“And let's hope nobody comes trying to steal her,” said Clements.

Romy pushed the wheeled table out of the murder room and down the long main room. She looked back as the men followed her. “Has Russ told you we're being married in July?”

Malone waited for the corpse to roll over and sit up. “No. When did you decide that?”

“While we were waiting for you back there.” She jerked her head back towards the murder room. “We want you to be the best man and Lisa matron of honour and the girls to be our bridesmaids.”

They had reached the door to the body room. She unlocked it, pushed the table ahead of her and the three of them went into the chilled room. “Will you?” She gestured for the men to help her move the body on to one of the shelves. “I'll talk to Lisa later.”