Murder on Page One (21 page)

Osborne, in earlier than usual, swept a pile of unfiled papers into a drawer of his desk and drew his sleeve over the surface. His feet crunching the sugar he had sprayed over the vinyl floor, he crossed the room and stood behind Baggo.

‘So, six victims now,’ he said. ‘What about the suspects? We can lose the kinky journo. The twisted bastard only came into Stanhope’s case. And for Christ’s sake scrub that stuff about Chapayev and the Russkies. Bloody Jumbo’ll have a fit if he sees that. We’re looking for one killer for all these cases.’

‘Have you heard much from Chapayev recently, gov?’ Baggo asked. There was something odd about Osborne’s attitude to the Russian angle, and Baggo could not put his finger on it.

‘He hasn’t phoned for a bit, thank God. I spoke to him last week and told him in no uncertain terms that his press rantings weren’t in the least bloody helpful. I said our inquiries are proceeding quietly but well.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘Lots of bluster and shouting, as you’d expect. I told him I was going to solve the case and I was more interested in catching the bleeding criminal than starting World War bloody Three.’

‘Ooh, gov. He would love that.’

‘Too right he didn’t. But I haven’t heard from him since. Bloody Eastern Europeans come here and think they can bring their bloody wars with them. Same as …’ He cast his eye over the board. ‘Why don’t we have photos of all the crap crime writers?’

‘Because Dalton, Francis and Lawson are not on Facebook, gov, and they do not have records. The pictures of Wallace and Cilla Pargiter are not very good, but we are spoilt for choice with Johnson.’

Osborne grimaced and lit a cigarette. ‘Well, make sure you put up all the stuff about alibis. The more we get on the board, the more Jumbo will like it.’

‘It is a pity about Johnson’s parole hearing. It gets him neatly out of the Swanson murder.’

‘Ah, there you’re wrong, Baggo. Danny found out yesterday that the hearing was at half past three. Ms Swanson was skewered just before one o’ clock and Johnny could have got from that ponsy store to a tube, then to Victoria. There’s a station five minutes’ walk from the jail. He could have been tucked up in his little cell, ready to see the do-gooders, by two thirty.’

‘That would take nerve, gov. If the trains let him down …’

‘Johnny’s got plenty of that. More’s the pity. He’s our number one suspect. You do realise that, Baggo?’ He snatched the pen and scrawled ‘COULD KILL L. S. AND STILL MAKE HEARING’ under Johnson’s name.

‘Yes, gov. Do I keep Candice Dalton and R. L. Lawson on the board?’

‘You bet. I want to let Jumbo see how busy we’ve been. Have you double-checked that credit card alibi?’

‘I was going to do that this morning, gov.’

‘It’ll keep for a bit. As soon as Fortune brings her pretty backside into work, I want the pair of you to visit Robertson’s office.’ He studied the board, sucking nicotine deep into his lungs and holding it there before grudgingly allowing thin wafts of smoke to drift from his lips. ‘So the long and the short of it is, we can’t eliminate anyone after last night?’

‘Francis was definitely out at the time of the murder, and he couldn’t say exactly where he was when questioned later; Dalton you know about; Johnson was definitely in his cell three hours after the killing, but …’

‘Like Swanson’s murder. Pity they didn’t send someone round sooner. He sets up these situations, Baggo. You mark my words.’

‘Lawson was checked too late to be helpful, though her alibi for the Swanson murder is rock-solid. Wallace was out on his own. He says he went for a drive to admire the Berkshire countryside and watched the sunset from a hill while the rush hour was on. We haven’t traced Cilla Pargiter yet, but she wasn’t at her friend Lesley Mortimer’s.’

‘It’s Johnny, Baggo. He’s our man as sure as whelks are whelks. But how the hell do we prove it?’ He scratched his crotch then spoke in a low voice. ‘That man is evil, Baggo. Plain evil. Forget what he went down for, it was what he didn’t go down for that sickened me. What these bloody fools with their rose-coloured spectacles thought they were doing letting him out, I don’t know. Tigers don’t go changing their stripes, do they, Baggo?’

‘No, gov, they do not. The Parole Board sits in an ivory tower and the members do not realise how difficult it is for us to keep the elephants from knocking it down.’ He paused, instinctively uneasy about discussing anything Indian, except curry, with Osborne. ‘In Mumbai we were privileged and protected, but it was impossible to ignore the unpleasant realities of life. We understood that if we wanted clean streets, we had to get our hands dirty sometimes.’

Osborne smiled. He placed a hand on Baggo’s shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Baggo,’ he said. ‘A real copper.’ He pinched the butt of his cigarette, put it in his jacket pocket and immediately lit another.

‘I didn’t get a chance to tell you last night, gov, but Mrs Smith, Lavinia …’

‘Thank you, Sergeant, for gracing us with your presence,’ Osborne bellowed as Flick arrived for work. ‘If your make-up is properly on, please take Detective Constable Chandavarkar to Mr Robertson’s office and make appropriate inquiries. Today would be good.’

Flick went straight up to Osborne, her face reddening. ‘This is the first time you’ve been in before me this year, you fat slob,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘And if you report me for calling you a fat slob, sir, I’ll report you, again, for sexist and inappropriate language and behaviour. Including smoking.’ Nodding to Baggo, she had a quick look at her tidy desk before striding out of the room. Baggo smiled and shrugged at Osborne before following her.

Glancing sideways in the car, Baggo saw a tear in Flick’s eye. She scowled at the road ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. He thought of a number of things he might say, but realised none of them would improve matters.

By the time they reached the elegant white buildings of Inverness Terrace, she had recovered her composure. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, forcing a smile.

There were two pristine, white pillars on the front step of Laurence Robertson’s office. The portico they supported and the solid, white door oozed style, tradition and wealth. Flick took a deep breath then rang the bell. A girl with a cut-glass accent answered. Almost imperceptibly, she curled her lip when Flick introduced herself, but led the officers upstairs to a spacious office in which every available surface was piled with books, mostly hardbacks. Above what looked like the original fireplace was a picture of a man holding a plaque. They could barely recognise the person they had seen on the car park floor; the photographer had captured eyes that twinkled and a twisted, quirky smile.

‘He was a good man,’ said a quiet voice behind them.

Amelia Renwick had been Robertson’s PA. Her skirt was short, her hair styled, but smudged make-up and false eyelashes springing loose from their moorings suggested that her concern for her employer had been more than skin deep. In a controlled way, she answered the officers’ questions; Robertson had dealt with fiction, including crime; he liked submissions by e-mail; he had at least a look at each one, sending a rejection to almost all of them; a few were invited to send their work in hard copy, but most of them were rejected also. She said she could provide a list of those who had sent manuscripts, but not those rejected at the e-mail stage.

‘There is one thing you should know,’ she added hesitantly. ‘Last year at the Harrogate Festival he said something about needing a new crime author like a hole in the head. Unfortunately, a journalist was listening and it got reported. I don’t know if that helps,’ she added, twisting her fingers in her lap.

She had no problem about the officers searching for information, and gave Flick the keys of the desk and Baggo the passwords for the laptop. While she was away for the list of manuscripts, they got to work.

At first there was nothing that surprised Baggo about the dead man’s computer. There were files containing business letters and files containing novels. He had e-mailed authors and publishers. There were a few to or from friends, arranging lunch or golf. His inbox contained one e-mail from ‘[email protected]’. It had been sent the previous year, on fifteenth November. Its title was ‘Here it is’, and it took up 693 KB. The paper clip beside it indicated there was an attachment. Baggo opened it. There was nothing in the e-mail but the attachment, marked ‘Buried’. He clicked on it, Norton Security passed it and he opened it. A page of script came up on the screen. As the rest of the book was loaded, Baggo read the opening: ‘Timeless sand ended the priest’s time on earth. As scorched grains snuffed out his life, one thought prepared him for his voyage on the boat of the dead: revenge.’

Baggo closed the window and returned to the inbox. For a moment he sat, deep in thought. As his eye scanned the room, he saw the photograph above the mantelpiece in a new light and the penny dropped. He glanced at Flick, who was examining papers she had taken from the filing cabinet. As Osborne gunned for Johnson, Flick suspected Cilla Pargiter; she had thought the cuttings about the murders very suspicious. But Baggo could not stop himself from dreaming about Cilla, from imagining himself with her after the inquiry was over. Thinking hard, he read some other, inconsequential, e-mails then said: ‘There’s a lot here, Sarge. I’ll need to take this laptop back to the station.’

‘Nothing here, though,’ she replied. ‘Once she comes back with the list, let’s go. Have you found anything interesting?’

‘No, Sarge,’ he said, too quickly, as the door opened and Amelia Renwick returned. She handed Flick three sheets of A4. Baggo noticed that both false eyelashes were now properly moored and grouting had been applied to the mascara. As he made out receipts for the list and the laptop, he asked, as casually as he could, if Robertson had been thinking of taking on any new authors at all.

‘I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. “There’s talent out there, but it’s a lousy time for it,” was something I heard him say a lot,’ she replied.

The officers thanked her for her time and left, reaching their car in time to stop a traffic warden summoning the removal truck.

It was just before midday when they got back to the CID room, but the meeting Osborne had been dreading was already underway. Cumberland glared at them as if they were late and Flick muttered ‘sorry’ without meaning it. In front of the whiteboard, Dr Dai Williams continued to describe the corpse he had just finished dissecting. Cumberland and Palfrey sat together on the scruffy chairs normally used by Flick and Baggo. Neither looked happy. Suddenly feeling guilty, Baggo put Robertson’s laptop in a drawer of his desk then perched on the surface as he paid attention to what Dai ‘the Death’ had to say.

‘… like Denzil Burke, shot twice from behind, this time with a nail gun. Now, to fire a nail gun, there has to be pressure on the tip of the barrel, because normally nails are driven innocently into wood. So the killer has sneaked up behind poor Mr Robertson, pressed the tip of the nail gun hard against the lower part of his back,’ he turned and used his right hand to indicate the spot, ‘and fired upward and leftward. Then another, just the same.’ He faced his audience and paused to let this sink in. ‘Fifty millimetre nails,’ he added.

‘The second nail passed through the lower right ventricle, stopping the heart, and causing death within a few seconds. Now it gets interesting. The killer has turned Mr Robertson on his back and desecrated the body.’ The Welsh lilt in the pathologist’s voice made this deed sound specially repellent. ‘He has fired the nail gun into the dead man’s forehead. But he doesn’t know, or he’s forgotten, his anatomy. The bone at the front of the skull is particularly dense and strong. It is one of the body’s most effective weapons. Glaswegians know this from their kissing. The nail goes part of the way in, but jams half in, half out of the barrel.’

‘A hole in the head,’ Baggo exclaimed. ‘Sorry, Doc.’

‘What’s that?’ Cumberland’s squeaky voice cut across Williams.

‘The dead man recently said that he needed a new crime author like a hole in the head, and was reported saying it, sir. We’ve just learned that from his PA.’

‘Interesting, Chu…’ He bent his head as Palfrey leaned over and whispered. ‘Chandavarkar. Well done. Carry on, Doctor.’

Pointing to a picture of the gun and the jammed nail, Williams continued: ‘Our killer pulls the jammed nail out of the skull then uses it to cut two letters on the skin of the forehead. The letters are N and U.’ He indicated the most revolting of the pictures he had added to the whiteboard.

‘New!’ Osborne exclaimed. ‘It has to be linked to that quote.’

‘That’s obvious, Inspector,’ Cumberland snapped. ‘This is clearly one of a series of murders, and again the killer has left no clue about his or her identity. I take it the killer could have been a woman, Doctor?’

‘Absolutely, Chief Superintendent.’ Williams nodded.

‘Well, what do we know about the latest one, Inspector?’

Williams moved to one side as Osborne stood in front of the board. His tie was straight and his clothes didn’t look as if he had slept in them. His left hand drifted towards his crotch, but he pulled it back and lodged it safely in his trouser pocket.

‘It seems he always parked in that multi-storey, and generally left his office at about five thirty. He lived in Notting Hill and Peters and I went there this morning to see the widow. She’s Isabel Robertson, aged thirty-six and pregnant with their first child. He’d not been previously married and had no children. She’s due in six weeks, is it?’