Chelsea Mansions (42 page)

Then John heard a sound from the cellar outside. As he turned to look, the light in the chamber was abruptly switched off. He heard the scrape of steel on stone and gave a shout as the rectangle of light from the doorway began to narrow. The heavy door slammed shut, plunging the room into absolute darkness.

‘Hey!’ He scrambled towards the door, tripping blindly over the bricks, and heard the bolts, one and then the other, being rammed home. When he tried the handle there was no movement. He beat his fists against the steel and yelled, and the sounds seemed to sink, deadened, into the mass of the material in which he was now entombed.

After a minute of shouting, kicking and banging on the door, he subsided with a groan. This was ridiculous. Who had locked him in? Not Toby or Deb, surely, nor Jacko with the artificial leg, or Julie or Destiny. Garry then, the silent one. But had he realised that anyone was inside the room? John thought back. Yes, he had definitely called out before the door closed. Was Garry deaf?

John shivered, suddenly very cold. He felt in his pockets and realised he’d left his mobile phone upstairs in his room. He swore out loud. What if Garry hadn’t heard him? He’d probably been doing his rounds, locking up for the night, never imagining that there was someone down here. How long would it be before they wanted to get into this room again? A day? A month? He felt a skitter of panic in his chest. There was a spade and pickaxe, he remembered. Could he dig his way out? What else might be hidden in the corners of the room? A flashlight? Matches? He turned to blindly feel his way around and promptly stumbled onto the pile of rubble beside the pit. He reached out his hand and felt something smooth and hard and rounded, like an old copper cistern ballcock, perhaps. An old copper cistern ballcock with two holes, like eye sockets. And a row of ragged teeth. He dropped it, swore and fell backwards, cutting his hand on something sharp and hard. Broken bones. ‘Dear God,’ he groaned. ‘What’s going on here?’

An hour or so later, John, hunched against a wall and shivering with cold, heard a faint sound from the direction of the door. He strained his ears and then heard another noise, a more substantial clunk, and then a heavy creak and a thin line of bright light appeared.

‘Thank goodness!’ he cried, and tried to scramble to his feet, but his knees had locked with cramp and he staggered, momentarily blinded by the sudden dazzle as the door was flung open. He made out the black silhouette of a figure against the light and began gabbling, ‘I thought I was here for good!’ He laughed, seeing the figure’s arm swing up towards him, as if to catch him. ‘It’s all right, I can stand,’ he cried, and was felled by a shattering blow to the side of his head.

His face was pressed into the mud and someone was on his back, wrenching his arms behind him, binding them with tape. Then he was being turned roughly over and he felt a searing jolt of pain as if they’d dislocated his shoulder. He gave a scream that was abruptly cut off as tape was stretched across his mouth and wrapped several times around his head, his eyes. Fingers pinched his nostrils closed and he couldn’t breathe. He began to struggle wildly, lashing out with his legs, and the hand released his nose. Now his ankles were being gripped, taped together, and he was being dragged across the floor and dumped awkwardly in a corner. Through the singing in his ears and the muffle of the tape he heard people talking. It seemed to go on for a while until he heard the bang of the steel door closing, and total silence. He tried to move his lips under the tape, but this had the effect of easing the tape up across his nostrils as well as his mouth. He froze, terrified he was going to suffocate.

THIRTY-FIVE

B
rock had worked through the night on the files, preparing his plan of attack. By five he was satisfied and had taken an hour’s nap before waking to the sound of Dot in the outer office.

‘Wanted to see what sort of mess they’d left the place in,’ she said when he put his head around the door, as if she were talking about squatters who’d invaded her home.

Brock yawned. The clean shirt and toiletries that he used to keep in the desk drawer were no longer there, and he’d just have to make do with a quick splash in the toilet basin. A lick and a promise, his mother would have said.

The team assembled quickly, talking together excitedly about the developments. Chivers’ action manager was present too, to answer queries about the ground his team had covered, and his detectives were available if required.

Brock began with a brief summary of the facts surrounding Hadden-Vane’s suicide, and then they sat in silence, watching the recording of Freddie Clarke’s revelations. At the end of it, Brock asked Zack if he had any observations to make on the tape itself.

‘Well, it’s been edited,’ Zack said. ‘Nothing sophisticated, just a couple of places where there’s a slight jump, as if a few seconds have been cut out.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It could be that someone spoke, asked him a question maybe, and that’s been deleted.’

They replayed the tape to the places Zack indicated. ‘See?’ he said. ‘His eyes have shifted as if responding to someone to the left, behind the camera.’

Kathy said, ‘There is something different about his manner from when I saw him. He’s very tense, keyed up. His eyes are staring and he hardly blinks.’

‘Drugs?’ someone suggested. ‘Or fear?’

‘What about the background?’ Brock asked Zack. ‘Could you enhance it, get some idea where he is?’

Zack shook his head doubtfully. ‘Maybe if we had the original recording, but the quality of this is poor. I’ll have a go.’

Brock moved on to describe the lines of inquiry he wanted pursued. ‘We have to finish the job we were doing when we were taken off the case. We’d made connections between Hadden-Vane and the Haringey youth club and the house in Hackney, but we hadn’t established how it was done. How did Hadden-Vane brief Harry Peebles? How did he pay him? The missing link may be the security guard, Wayne Everett. Kathy noticed him in the background of that newspaper photo you found, Bren. Could he have been Hadden-Vane’s agent in all this? We need to go through all the CCTV footage again, and all the forensic evidence from Ferncroft Close, to look for his traces.

‘Then there’s Freddie Clarke. We need to find him, or at least discover the circumstances under which this confession was made. Is he to be trusted? What were his motives?

‘We also haven’t explored the possibility that Nancy Haynes may have presented some kind of direct threat to Hadden-Vane. It’s hard to see how, but we ought to check that she didn’t try to get in touch with him, speak to the people in his parliamentary and constituency offices, his wife.’

Brock checked through the list in his hand. ‘One other thing. I went to see the people in the hotel yesterday, and I had the impression they were hiding something about their dealings with Nancy Haynes. They said she’d never mentioned staying in Chelsea Mansions as a girl, or shown them the photograph she had with her, which seems improbable to me. They admitted detesting the Russians next door, and I wonder if they might be trying to hide something else she’d told them, perhaps to protect her reputation? We’ll need to talk to them again, but first I’d like a bit more background on them and their dealings with Moszynski.’

He looked around the room. They were all fired up, debating options, throwing ideas around—all except Kathy, he noticed, who seemed preoccupied.

Bren Gurney’s first task was to speak to Wayne Everett. He bustled into the interview room with a file of papers under his arm and shook hands with the security man.

‘Sorry to take up your time, Wayne,’ he said affably. ‘We need to speak to as many people as possible who knew Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane. I take it you’ve heard about his suicide?’

Everett nodded cautiously.

‘How about the video of Freddie Clarke on the web, accusing him of fraud? Have you seen it?’

‘Yeah. Jeez, what a shocker, eh?’

‘You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?’

‘What? No, of course not.’

Bren chuckled. ‘Don’t worry, had to ask. So what exactly was your relationship with Sir Nigel?’

‘Relationship? Well, that’s too strong a word. I knew him because I worked for Mr Moszynski, and Sir Nigel was a friend of his and often came to the house. Sometimes Mr Moszynski got me to drive Sir Nigel home after a heavy evening, that sort of thing.’

‘How long have you been working for Mr Moszynski?’

‘Six months.’

Bren paused and opened his file. With his heavy build and Cornish burr, Bren sometimes appeared slow and deliberate, and Everett waited, shifting in his seat as the silence dragged on. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘since December.’

‘As I said,’ Bren spoke at last, ‘we’re anxious to talk to people who’ve had recent contact with Sir Nigel, and we came across this.’ He selected an enlarged photograph from his file and showed it to Everett. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? And that’s Sir Nigel, yes?’

Everett looked puzzled. ‘Um . . . yeah. Could be. Where did you get this?’

‘It was in the local paper, couple of years ago. Sir Nigel handing out prizes at the Haringey Sport and Social Club in Tottenham Green. Remember that?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Everett gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Yes, I had met him before I went to work for Shere Security. In fact he got me the job there—it’s a company that he part-owned.’

‘So Sir Nigel got to know you well enough to get you a job?’

Everett shrugged, not quite as nonchalantly as he might have intended. ‘Around then his chauffeur died, and I did a bit of driving for him, casual like. Then later, when I was looking for a regular job, he got me the interview with Mr Shere.’

‘I see. Sir Nigel was a sort of patron of the club, wasn’t he? We’re wondering who else he knew there. Anyone else in the picture you recognise?’

Everett took another look. ‘Don’t think so.’

‘What about this bloke?’ Bren pointed to Danny Yilmaz.

‘Face doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘You sure? He’s been in the news lately, name of Danny Yilmaz, died last week of something called Marburg fever.’

‘Oh, that bloke. Yes, I did read about it.’

‘So have you had any contact with him in, say, the last six months?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘That’s his cousin behind him, Barbaros Kaya. Do you know him?’

‘More by reputation. Bit of a tough guy, I’ve heard. But I haven’t had any personal dealings with him.’

Bren nodded. ‘Did you know Sir Nigel’s previous driver then, the one who died?’

‘I’d seen him around, yeah. I think his name was Bernie.’

‘That’s right, Bernie. And he had a son and daughter called Kenny and Angela. Remember them?’

‘I believe I do. Kenny went up to Scotland, I seem to remember.’

‘He did. Did you keep in contact with him?’

‘No.’

‘What about Angela? She inherited Bernie’s house. Have you visited her there?’

‘No. I wouldn’t have a clue where it is.’

‘Hackney, 13 Ferncroft Close. You quite sure you’ve never been there?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘You didn’t maybe take Sir Nigel there?’

‘Not to Hackney, no, never.’ Everett was looking disconcerted now. ‘I don’t get it. What’s this all about?’

‘The thing is, Wayne, with two recent homicides associated with Chelsea Mansions, we need to make quite sure that Sir Nigel’s suicide wasn’t, shall we say, assisted in any way. And we’re also interested to trace Freddie Clarke and make sure his video was above board. You can appreciate that.’