Strange Tide (12 page)

Cooper searched the ceiling for an answer. ‘Just under a year.'

‘Living together, that right?' asked Longbright, checking her pad.

‘Yeah, she moved in about six months ago.'

‘Where was she before that?'

‘I don't know. Hanging out with the rest of the Botox set, I imagine.'

‘Is that all you know?' asked Longbright, looking at her notes again.

‘There's not much else to say,' said Cooper.

‘Try telling us about her.'

Cooper wiped his nose, looking vaguely bored. ‘Posh bird, privately educated; I met her at the bar of the Hoxton Hotel with all her frozen-faced pals looking down their noses at me. She thought a bit of rough would make a nice change.'

You're not that rough
, thought Longbright,
not with an original Burne-Jones on the wall.
‘The street accent,' she said. ‘Have we got some Received Pronunciation under that? You went to Westminster, didn't you?' She had already done some checking.

‘Well, yeah—'

‘Which university did you drop out of?'

Cooper shrugged. ‘Oxford, Worcester College.'

‘So, Frederick, Posh Freddie, what's the history here? You came to town, banged through your trust fund while squatting in one of your old man's Primrose Hill properties, then invested in an up-and-coming area like this, or has the money already run out? You met Dalladay and thought you'd sponge off her for a while?'

‘You should watch how you talk to me, I'm not the villain here, I'm a successful businessman,' Cooper warned, a short fuse lit.

‘So who is the villain?' Longbright asked.

‘I don't know. Dalladay was damaged goods, a real mess. Women like her can drag you down with them. She said she was trying to “find herself”. She found plenty of others on the way. Spent a year bumming around Goa and Kerala, ashrams, tantric sex, lots of drugs. Used her connections to get a few media jobs but always got fired.'

‘Why?'

‘Because that's what happens when you can't concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes at a time. She went to Thailand, joined a religious group, discovered her inner goddess, came back to London and cleaned up her act, so she told me.'

‘And then she met you,' said Longbright, eyeing the table with the badly wiped-up coke-line, the suspicious inlaid wooden box next to it.

‘Yeah, I tried to keep her straight.'

‘Sure you did.'

May withdrew his smart new PCU-issue tablet and ran down its history. ‘You've got two convictions for possession of a controlled drug and intent to supply. So she was a free spirit or, as we call them, a “Person at Risk”, and she teamed up with someone who, historically speaking, is a bit of—'

‘—an entrepreneur.'

‘—a scumbag. Not that it's my job to judge. How was that going to straighten her out?'

‘I told you, I'm a businessman,' said Cooper. ‘Like a few million others in this city. We were both on the same road back from a bad place. I thought I could help her.'

‘So what went wrong?' May asked.

Cooper made an attempt to look hurt. ‘Who said anything went wrong?'

‘Do you share this place with anyone else?' May nodded at the table. ‘Class As, that's up to seven years. You don't care about that?'

‘Come on, man.' Cooper waved the idea aside. ‘You've got bigger things to think about than a bit of blow. I had a few mates around from the office.'

‘So you weren't exactly missing her,' said Longbright.

‘What, that's a crime now? She was the one who lost interest in me.'

‘How did that show itself?'

‘Let me see. That would be when she started disappearing for several days at a time.'

‘You mean she was using again.' May had seen Giles's report and knew this not to be the case.

‘No, I don't think so. But she must have been seeing someone.'

‘You don't know where she went?' May asked. ‘It says here she was working at the Cossack Club in Dalston. That doesn't sound very Henley.'

‘I have no idea what happened to her, and that's the God's honest truth,' said Cooper, taking pains to look as if he might be telling the truth. ‘She stayed away more and more, wouldn't tell me where she was going or where she'd been, and certainly couldn't remember enough to lie properly. Finally she moved out.'

‘Or did you throw her out?' asked May.

‘No, it was her decision to go.'

‘When was this?'

‘About two weeks ago. And before you say it, yeah, I knew she was pregnant, but I also knew it wasn't mine.'

‘How did you find out?' asked Longbright. ‘She called you?'

‘No, someone else, I don't remember who. I meet a lot of people, hear a lot of rumours.'

‘Something like that, I'd have thought you'd remember. Did somebody pop a postcard through?'

‘We've got some shared friends who talk too much, OK?'

‘Was she happy about it?'

Cooper all but exploded. ‘How the hell would I know? Are you even listening to me? She wasn't saying and she sure as hell wasn't sleeping with me.'

‘But you must have had
some
idea of where she was going and who she was going with,' Longbright persisted. ‘Did you never hear a phone ring or see any texts?'

‘No, she had this old phone that barely worked, and nobody rings the house phone except my foreman, usually to tell me that something's gone wrong at work, or my mother, who can't figure out how to call my mobile number.'

‘Did Dalladay have a laptop?'

‘You're joking. I bought her an iPad a few months back. It's still in its box.'

‘So a fortnight ago she just announced she was leaving.'

‘She didn't announce anything, just packed a bag and walked out.'

‘Did you have a fight?'

‘You can't have a fight with someone who makes no sense.'

‘And she left no forwarding address.'

‘She washed her hands of me, man. Like all the little rich girls who clean up their acts. She got
bored
. I bored her. She was bipolar and scary and she was driving me nuts.'

‘So you got tired of her too.'

‘That's an understatement. She wore me down. After she walked out it was like a weight had lifted. I opened a bottle of champagne.'

‘Anything else we need to know before we find out?' Longbright asked, looking around the room.

‘There's nothing I can tell you about her that would surprise you.' Cooper shrugged, as if the matter was closed. ‘I felt sorry for her, but she was just another high-maintenance princess with an exaggerated sense of entitlement who went ballistic when people stopped paying attention to her.'

‘When she took off, you didn't try to find her?'

‘I didn't look too hard, if that's what you mean. Can't you track her movements over the last couple of weeks?'

‘Tell me about the Cossack Club,' said May.

Cooper raised his hands. ‘It's just an after-hours place people go. You're going to look into it and find out some bad stuff, but I swear that has nothing to do with me, or this.'

‘What kind of bad stuff?' asked Longbright.

‘If you're going to ask me anything else, I want a lawyer.'

‘Tell you what, we'll take a swab and a blood sample for now,' said May, rising. ‘Just to – you know.'

‘And you can show us where you keep your shoes,' said Longbright, also rising.

‘What, you think I was involved in her death?' Cooper asked as he chased behind them.

Longbright deadpanned. ‘Were you?'

‘I'm not the most honest bloke in the world, but if I wanted to deal with a problem I wouldn't take it down to the river and drown it like a cat.'

‘No, I imagine not,' said the detective sergeant. ‘At the moment we have no reason to assume that you killed her. By the way, did she wear any jewellery?'

‘Not much,' said Cooper. ‘Some rings, cheap things.'

‘Nothing around her neck?'

‘Like what?'

‘A silver chain with a crescent moon and a lock.'

‘No, I never saw anything like that.'

They headed upstairs to the main bedroom, which had a freestanding white marble bath at one end. May opened the antique wardrobe and emptied out Cooper's boots and trainers. He was careful not to touch the outsides, knowing that Banbury would be able to tell if any pair had been specially cleaned. He took some shots of the wardrobe's layout. ‘Don't touch anything; we'll send someone along,' he said. ‘Where's Dalladay's stuff?'

‘She never left anything here.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘She always dragged a bag around with her.'

‘Where were you on Sunday night around midnight?'

‘I was here, at home, alone in front of the telly, like I always am. I start work at six a.m. on Mondays.'

‘What's your business?'

‘I run a road-haulage company. So I am a suspect?'

‘Only if you keep asking me.'

As they left, Longbright stopped May in the gloomy hallway. ‘Do you want to bust him?'

‘For recreationals? A bit of work-hard-play-hard? No. He knows we could whenever we wanted. He'd have cleared it away if he was dealing. If we turn a blind eye now he may be useful to us in the future.'

‘You know what the Met Drugs Directorate would have to say about that.'

‘We're PCU; they have no influence over us.'

As they reached the car it was starting to rain finely, glossing the pavements. ‘So, what do you reckon?' Longbright asked.

‘About Cooper? He thinks he's smooth. He's just another Flash Harry,' said May. ‘But I suppose there could be something. Let's dig a little deeper.'

‘Dalladay sounds like she was a pain in the arse.'

‘She's not able to give an account of herself,' May reminded Longbright. ‘Someone robbed her of that right. I want you to go and see where she worked. We need someone who spoke to her in the last couple of weeks. She couldn't just have vanished.'

‘Maybe she went back to Henley.'

‘Not to her parents.'

‘You've spoken to them?'

‘I got somebody local to do the knock. You heard Cooper. She left with an overnight bag.' May dug out his keys. ‘Can I give you a lift up to Dalston?'

‘It's not far, I'll walk,' said Longbright. ‘Where are you going?'

May checked his watch. ‘We've been gone a while. I have to keep an eye on Arthur. I think each day's going to be a surprise from now on.'

‘Of course, there are only a handful of real motives for murder,' said Raymond Land, concluding his argument with all the authority of someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. ‘It's always sex or money, stands to reason.'

As everyone else was out working on the case, Land found himself answering phones, making weak tea, reorganizing paperwork in such a way that no one would be able to find anything and babysitting his befuddled detective. It was unfortunate that in this case the baby was a faintly unsanitary pipe-smoking senior with oversized false teeth, a whistling hearing aid and a lethal walking stick.

‘I must disagree with you there,' said Bryant, who looked forward to disagreeing with anyone, especially his unit chief. ‘There are many more motives.' He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Revenge and power and anger and damage control and cruelty, warnings to others, the hiding of evidence – and plain, simple insanity. Meanwhile you've got the Met spending their days chucking quasi-military teams into every postcode with a gang problem when London needs more community workers, not goons inviting themselves into council flats with battering rams. We need to spot the symptoms instead of dishing out cures.'

Beyond the office windows a sudden squall of rain increased its strength, causing the other side of the road mercifully to disappear. Land blinked back at his charge. He found it hard to believe that this was the same man who'd been reported lost in a department store just a few hours earlier. Bryant never ceased to wrongfoot him.

‘Do you know what's happened to the murder rate in London, Raymondo? It's dropped by 30 per cent in five years and is still falling.' Bryant poked at his pipe bowl with a meat skewer, disrespectfully emptying its reeking contents on to Land's desk. ‘Great Britain now has one of the lowest murder rates in the world. It's lower than Norway's, for heaven's sake. Have you ever met a Norwegian? If they were any gentler they'd be hamsters. Do you know who has the highest murder rate? Honduras. Now before you tell me it's down to hot-blooded Latins, let me point out that it can't be related to temperature because the place with the lowest murder rate in the world is Polynesia. I suppose you can't hide a gun in a grass skirt.'

‘Wait, wait,' said Land, feeling as if he was once more stepping into the wobbly funhouse corridor of Bryant's mind. ‘You have no way of knowing how each country classifies its cases. In the UK you can't count homicides unless there's a conviction. There's no international standard. Knife crimes are up.'