Where Memories Lie (12 page)

“Mo, sit.” Giles Oliver dragged the dog into a sitting position away from the door, giving them room to step inside, although Kincaid noticed Gemma stayed a pace behind him. “You want to talk to me about Kris—Kristin?” Oliver’s voice broke on the name. The dog stopped straining towards the visitors and leaned against his master’s leg, looking up at him with a furrowed canine brow.

“If you don’t mind. I’m Duncan Kincaid and this is Gemma James.” The young man’s face, Kincaid saw, was almost as puffy with weeping as Wanda Cahill’s, and he suspected that, for the moment, sympathy would be more persuasive than rank.

Oliver gestured towards a small sofa. “Here, sit down. I’ll just give it a brush—”

“We’ll be fine,” Kincaid said, preferring the risk of dog hair on trousers to the possibility of being bowled over if Oliver let go of the dog.

“He’s a mastiff, isn’t he?” asked Gemma, apparently unfazed by the dog’s size. “He’s lovely.” While Kincaid gingerly took a seat, she dropped into a crouch and added, “Can I stroke him?”

Giles Oliver’s rather weak-chinned face lit in a smile. “You don’t mind? Most people would rather not. Just let me bring him to you so he won’t knock you down.”

Kincaid imagined Gemma saying a prayer for her newest Per Una skirt and layered cardigan, but she weathered the onslaught heroically, even to the slurp across her cheek with the longest pink tongue Kincaid had ever seen. Then she gave the dog a last scratch behind
his floppy ears and joined Kincaid on the sofa, arranging her skirt demurely over her knees and obviously making an effort not to brush at the wet streaks.

Her exercise in canine bonding had given Kincaid a chance to examine the flat. Although small—the back of the sofa served as a divider between the living and sleeping areas—it didn’t share the dilapidated state of the rest of the building. The place was clean and freshly painted—although there was a definite odor of dog—and the few pieces of furniture were of good quality, as was the rich-hued oriental carpet. But the studio’s outstanding feature was a solid wall of shelving filled with vinyl LPs. To one side stood a double turntable and mixing station. It was apparent that Giles Oliver had at least one passion other than his dog, and he wondered where Kristin Cahill had figured in the equation.

“I know you,” Giles said to Gemma as he settled into a squat, using an arm over the dog’s shoulders as a prop. “You came into the salesroom, to talk to Kris. That’s why she got a bollocking from Mr. Khan,” he added, his tone becoming less friendly.

“I didn’t mean to get her into trouble,” answered Gemma. “Was he very cross?”

“More than usual. Although he’s always harder on Kris than on anyone else. Was.” His chin wobbled, giving him a fleeting resemblance to his dog. “
Was
harder on her.”

“Have you any idea why?”

“No. I asked her, as a matter of fact, and she said she’d no idea. I wondered, though, if he, you know…fancied her. And if she’d turned him down…”

“Does Mr. Khan have a reputation for chatting up the female assistants?” asked Kincaid, interested.

“Well, no. But Kristin—I mean how could he
not
want…” His arm went a bit tighter round the dog, who groaned and slid down into a fawn-and-black mound on the carpet. The poor kid really had been besotted with Kristin Cahill, Kincaid thought with a flash of
sympathy, and would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell. But that made him all the more viable as a suspect.

Oliver righted himself, left the dog, and perched on the edge of a chair with smooth, curving, burnished wooden arms. Furniture design was not Kincaid’s forte, but he guessed the chair was expensive, and original. “He’ll be all right now,” Oliver said, with a look at the dog. “Once he’s out, he’s out.” As if in answer, Mo began to snore, and his owner looked at Gemma and frowned. “I don’t understand. What were you doing at the salesroom yesterday, and why do you want to talk to me about Kristin?”

“Giles,” said Gemma, “are you sure it was after I was there that Mr. Khan was upset with her?”

His face darkened. “Well, before…all this…I thought it might have been because of the roses. They came just after you left.”

“Mrs. March said someone sent her roses. It wasn’t you?”

“Are you kidding?” His laugh was bitter. “I just barely manage to pay the rent on this dump. There’s no way I could afford flowers like that.”

Priorities, Kincaid thought—Oliver apparently managed fine furniture and collector’s vinyl on his pittance quite well.

“Do you know who did send the flowers?” asked Gemma.

Giles shook his head, tight lipped. “No.”

Kincaid picked up the questioning, changing tack. “Did Kristin talk to you about the brooch?”

“What brooch?” Giles looked from Kincaid to Gemma.

“The Jakob Goldshtein diamond brooch,” Gemma answered.

“Oh, that. She helped Mr. Khan catalog it. That’s her job.” Giles merely looked puzzled.

“She didn’t tell you she was getting a bringing-in fee?”

“Kristin? Where would Kristin come across something like that?”

“We thought you might be able to tell us. That Kristin might have talked to you about it.” Gemma leaned forward, inviting him to confide in her.

He colored, an ugly flush that brought out splotches on his neck. “No. She never said anything.”

“What about when you called her last night?” asked Kincaid, taking the opportunity to play bad cop. At the sharpness in his voice, the dog raised his head and gave a low rumble, and Kincaid suddenly remembered reading that mastiffs were very protective of their owners.

But Giles Oliver seemed unaware of his dog’s distress. “What?” he said, staring at them, but the blotches deepened in color.

“We talked to her mum,” said Gemma. “What was it that you wanted Kristin to do?”

“I—I just wanted—I thought she might want someone to talk to about Khan giving her such a hard time.”

“You asked her out?”

“No, not out, exactly. I thought she might want to come over. Listen to some records. You know, chill a bit. But—” He looked round the flat, as if seeing it through their eyes. “I should have known, shouldn’t I?”

“That she’d say no?”

“She said she was going out,” he retorted, as if trying to recover a shred of pride. “Meeting someone. At the Gate. That’s why she couldn’t come over.”

“The Gate in Notting Hill?” Kincaid asked, frowning. The Gate was the nightclub in the basement of the cinema of the same name, a Notting Hill landmark.

“Yeah. I guess. I don’t go places like that. Can’t afford the drinks, and I’d rather make my own music.” He gestured at the records and turntable.

“Did she say who she was meeting?”

“No. Maybe the same guy who sent her the roses. She was on her mobile with someone, after she argued with Mr. Khan.”

“Or maybe you’re making it all up,” Kincaid said slowly. “Maybe when she turned you down, let you know you were a stupid git to
even think she would consider going out with you, you decided to get even. You drove over and waited for her to come home, then gunned the car at her. Maybe you just thought you’d teach her a lesson.”

“What?” Giles stood, and the dog rose onto his massive haunches, growling. “Are you saying someone ran Kristin down on purpose?”

“You had good reason.”

“Me? Why would I do that? I loved her!” He began to laugh, with a hint of hysteria. “And I don’t have a bloody fucking car.”

“Well, that was a great success,” Kincaid said as he eased the Rover back into traffic. He’d rung Cullen as soon as they were back in the car, learning that Giles Oliver not only had no car registered in his name, he had no driving license.

“Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” Gemma replied mildly. “And it wasn’t a waste of time. We know where Kristin went—”

“Or at least where she told Giles she was going.”

She glanced at him—his lips were set in a straight line. He didn’t
like feeling a fool. “You’re determined to be difficult,” she told him. “We at least have a place to start. And we know that there was a bloke in her life who probably sent her roses. Was that what made Khan angry, or was it me asking her about the brooch? And is Giles right? Did she meet the rose sender when she went out?”

“Or maybe Giles borrowed a neighbor’s car, license or not.”

“Do you really see Giles Oliver running someone down?”

“Vehicular homicide doesn’t require getting up close and personal. Although I have to admit I can’t see him asking for someone’s keys, much less hot-wiring the neighbor’s Volvo.” His mouth relaxed, quirking into a smile. “Now if it had been accidental assault by dog…”

“I can’t blame Kristin for resisting the dog and DJ combo,” Gemma said, but the thought made Kristin seem very real. Sobering, Gemma wondered what would have happened if Kristin had accepted Giles’s invitation. Would Giles and Mo have seen her home and kept her safe, at least for that night? “We’ll have to check with his neighbors. Someone might have seen something, however unlikely.”

“Where do you want to go, love?” Kincaid asked as they reached the King’s Road again. “We seem to be at a momentary standstill. I can drop you at the Yard, if you want to get the tube to the hospital.”

Gemma realized that for the last hour she’d hardly given her mum a thought, and with the prick of guilt all her worries came rushing back, both for her mum and for Erika. Glancing at her watch, she saw that Kit would just be getting home from school. An idea struck her and she said, “Let me make a quick call.”

She caught Kit just as he was coming into the house, spoke to him, and was ringing off when Melody beeped in, her voice filled with cat-in-the-cream satisfaction.

“You’ll never guess what I found out, boss.”

Kit felt rather pleased. He liked Gemma’s thinking that he could be helpful, and he wanted to talk to Erika again. He was curious about what had happened to her family, but felt he had put his foot in it a bit yesterday. He would have to bring it up more tactfully. Nor was he quite sure how to talk to Erika about the girl Gemma said had been killed, but he supposed he would think of something.

And, unlike yesterday, this time he had the opportunity to get out of his school clothes. Today was even warmer, so he swapped blazer and tie for jeans and T-shirt, let the dogs out into the garden for a quick pee and gave them biscuits, then set off down Lansdowne Road. When a gaggle of uniformed schoolgirls passed him and gave him the eye, giggling, he grinned at them with an unaccustomed sense of power and quickened his step.

When he rang the bell in Arundel Gardens, Erika answered immediately, and she didn’t seem at all surprised to see him.

“I’ve made lemonade,” she said. “Real lemonade, the way we used to make it in the summers in Germany when I was a child, not the fizzy stuff from a bottle.”

“Did Gemma ring you?” he asked, following her into the flat.

“She’s fussing over me. And sending you to fuss by proxy,” Erika answered, but she didn’t sound displeased. “Anyone would think I was an old biddy, although I’ve never been sure just what a biddy is. It sounds rather unpleasant.

“It’s cooler inside today than out,” she added as they reached the kitchen.

She had put two tall glasses on a tray, along with a clear glass jug in which floated a few ice cubes and slices of lemon. When she poured Kit a glass he drank it down thirstily, finding he liked the tartness. He slid into a seat at the small table, and at Erika’s nod, poured himself another glass.

Erika sat across from him, but barely touched her own drink. He saw now that in spite of her chatter, she looked tired, and bright spots of color burned in her cheeks.

“I’m sorry about the girl who was killed,” he said, finding it suddenly easy. “And I’m sorry for what I said about your father yesterday. It wasn’t fair of me.”

“No.” She shrugged aside his apology. “It was what happened that wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair then, but you were right, you know. We should never have let my father talk us into letting him stay behind. But he was a stubborn man, and he convinced himself that if he carried on as usual and pretended we had gone to visit relatives in Tilsit, then there was less likely to be an alert for us.

“Not that the Nazis were averse to letting Jews out of the country at that point, mind you, but David was a troublemaker, and they might have thought he would stir up antagonism against the regime if he reached a country where he could speak freely.”

“But once you got out—couldn’t your dad—”

Shaking her head, Erika said, “It was 1939. By the time we were settled in London, Germany invaded Poland. After that, we lost all communication, although we tried, everyone tried. But even the news broadcasts were censored by the Nazis, and we could only guess, and listen to the tales told by those who came after us. It was only after the war, when records began to become available, that I learned my father lost his business not long after we left, and then our home. He was taken to a work camp—that was what they called them, then.”

“Sachsenhausen?”

“Yes. As far as I was able to discover, he died in Camp Z.”

Kit couldn’t imagine the not knowing, the imagining that could not have comprehended the horrors her father must have endured. At least he knew what had happened to his mum, what she had suffered, and that her death had been quick.

And what had it been like for Erika, a stranger in London, marked out by her accent as an alien, and worse, as a German? But at least she hadn’t been alone.

“Your husband. When you came to London, did he do what the
Nazis thought he would do? Did he tell people what had happened?”

Erika looked out into the garden. The fig tree outside the kitchen window made moving green shapes of the sunlight, like liquid puzzle pieces, and Kit caught the scent of hyacinths through the open window. He was sweating, and drops of condensation trickled down the outside of the lemonade jug. She was quiet for so long that, once again, he had begun to wish he hadn’t asked, when she turned back to him. She studied him for a moment, her dark eyes intent, until he felt he was being measured, or tested.

Then she said, “Let’s go for a walk, shall we? In the sun. And I’ll tell you about my husband.”

The CID room stank. There were too many bodies in a small space, wearing clothes rancid with sweat from the heat. Too many fag ends put out in desktop ashtrays, too many grease-stained chip wrappers, all mixed with the pervasive odor of burnt coffee.

Gavin put down the phone for what seemed the hundredth time and rubbed at his ear, damp from contact with the heavy earpiece. His head ached and his stomach burned from too much of the same coffee whose smell permeated the air. He wondered why he had ever wished for it to be spring, and why he refused to give up on a case that was going nowhere.

Last night he had stayed late at the station, compiling every report on David Rosenthal—the detailed postmortem, the house-to-house reports from the area near the murder, his own carefully typed interviews with Erika Rosenthal and David Rosenthal’s colleagues—and he had come up with nothing.

When he had gone home at last, Linda had been awake, her hair in papers, reading a magazine in bed. She had studied him, her nose wrinkled in distaste, and he’d wondered if he still smelled of death from the mortuary, or if he somehow carried the mark of his desire for another woman. Guilt had made him brusque, and he had been
careful not to touch her as he climbed into bed. He suddenly found the thought of intimacy with his own wife unimaginable, and he drifted into sleep facing away from her, clutching his pillow like a drowning man clinging to a spar.

He had awakened early and had spent the morning making phone calls to contacts at newspapers and to the few underlings in government offices he could count as reliable sources, but no one would admit to knowing anything concrete.

Yes, there were rumors—one assistant to an undersecretary at the Home Office had even said he’d heard whispers that the Haganah, the Jewish terrorist organization, had offshoots in London. But these figures seemed mythical, shadowy, as hard to pin down as wolves flitting in and out of the edge of a forest.

Nor could he see any reason why, if David Rosenthal had supported such people, they would have had reason to kill him. Unless…Unless David had fallen out with their ideals, and had threatened to expose them.

Frustrated with the endless loop of questions, Gavin pushed back from his desk. David Rosenthal had kept more than one part of his life hidden from his wife and his colleagues. It was past time he paid a visit to the British Museum.

Having appropriated Gemma’s desk, Melody leaned back in the chair and prepared to enjoy her disclosures. Although Kristin Cahill had apparently thrown away the card that came with the flowers, Mrs. March had remembered the name on the florist’s delivery van.

It was indeed an upmarket floral design shop in Knightsbridge, and Melody had put on her best posh voice when she made the phone call, the accent she tried her best to rub out of her daily existence. When she explained her mission, the salesclerk, sounding decidedly frosty, informed her that they were not in the habit of giving out their customers’ private information.

Melody explained, very politely, that they could of course get a warrant, but that would entail disrupting the business considerably, and that the presence of the police would certainly be of interest to the shop’s clientele. And besides, she added, who was to say that the recipient of the bouquet in question hadn’t told a friend or coworker who had sent them?

Having been assured of discretion, the florist hesitated. “How do I know you are who you say you are?” she asked. “You could be some journalist prying into our clients’ private lives.”

The thought made Melody smile, but she schooled her expression back into earnest sincerity and asked the woman to ring her back at the station number. That done, the florist reluctantly gave her the name.

Melody stared at the name she had scribbled, her eyes wide, then began checking references on the Internet. When she was satisfied and had printed a photo, she rang Gemma.

“His name,” she said, “is Dominic Scott. His grandfather was Joss Miller, a financier who made his fortune rebuilding London after the Blitz, often using less than respectable methods.

“Kristin Cahill was definitely dabbling outside of her sphere—or stratosphere might be more accurate. Dominic Scott’s mother, Ellen, who goes by the awkward hyphenate of Miller-Scott, has devoted herself to turning her father into a saint through philanthropy and arts patronage, especially now that she no longer has to reckon with the old man himself. He died two years ago from liver cancer.”

“So what about the grandson?” asked Gemma.

“Dominic, on the other hand, has a bit of a rep as a bad boy. A few run-ins on minor charges—public intoxication, creating a disturbance, that sort of thing. But it doesn’t seem to amount to more than spoiled rich-boy antics.”

“And this was Kristin’s mysterious boyfriend?” asked Gemma, sounding suitably impressed.

“Unless Dominic Scott was sending flowers to a stranger.”

Gavin took the bus to Bloomsbury, not being able to bear the thought of sweltering on the tube. He sat on the top deck by an open window, watching the spring green of Hyde Park, then the bustle of Oxford Street, and by the time he alighted at Tottenham Court Road, his head had cleared. A breeze picked up as he walked the last few streets to the museum, drying his damp hair and collar.

The Reading Room itself was dark and cool, an oasis from the unrelenting glare of the sun. This was an unfamiliar world to Gavin, and as he looked round the curving vault, its walls lined with a bulwark of books, the lamps in the cubicles illuminating heads bent over books and papers, a wave of inadequacy swept over him. David Rosenthal had been like these men, educated, a scholar. How could he, Gavin, have entertained, even for a moment, the fantasy that Erika Rosenthal could fancy him, a plodding policeman?

But plod he was, and he had a job to do. Although the librarian agreed to show him the cubicle that David Rosenthal had used, he assured him that he would find nothing personal of interest.

“The cubicles are used by more than one reader,” the librarian explained, “and David was always careful to take his materials with him.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like to see it,” Gavin had insisted.

But the librarian had been right. Having been led halfway round the room, then left on his own, Gavin contemplated the empty chair, the scarred but clean surface of the desk, the darkened lamp. There was nothing here, no hiding places, no secret messages, no trace of the man who had spent his precious free time here instead of with his wife.

Gavin turned his attention to the man working in the next cubicle, his dark head bent over a rat’s nest of papers illuminated by his green-shaded lamp.

“Excuse me,” said Gavin, stepping nearer. The man pulled his at
tention from his work with obvious reluctance, then his gaze sharpened as he looked Gavin over. He was younger than Gavin had realized. With his curly dark hair and rather delicate, pointed face, he made Gavin think of a faun.

“Can I help you?” he asked in perfect, unaccented English, and Gavin realized he had unconsciously assumed the man was foreign.

Introducing himself, Gavin asked, “I was wondering if you knew David Rosenthal? Do you work often in this particular cubicle?”