Corpse in Waiting (24 page)

‘Will it cause friction between us if I ask you if Alexandra has contacted you again?'

‘No, and she hasn't,' Patrick answered shortly.

I changed the subject.

FIFTEEN

F
or some reason I recovered from my writer's block, or whatever it had been, and reacquired the ability to concentrate. This coincided with my imagination giving up on producing nightmares, instead obediently producing up to around a thousand words a day and I made good progress with the novel. Regrettably, I deliberately pushed the horrible demise of Imelda Burnside to the back of my mind and it was James Carrick who first made contact in connection with his murder investigation.

‘Sorry if you're working but I thought you'd like to know about the truncheon,' he began. ‘Forensics has finished with it. It's been cleaned up and has a Queen Victoria crown and the letters CP stamped on it, which stands for the City of London Police. It's of a type that was used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and although there's no divisional stamp – they only used those after 1910 – there is a badge number. The truncheon was issued to one Constable Jack Davison and a lot of poking around later I've established that he was Miss Hilda Bennett's great-grandfather.'

‘Oh, well done! David Bennett's great-great-grandfather then.'

‘And the knife
had
been used to sever the murder victim's head. There was quite a bit in the report about traces of neck glands but you're probably having your morning coffee so I won't go into details. Ironically, putting the items in the plastic bag had helped preserve the blood and fragments of bone and other stuff trapped in the serrated edge of the blade so extracting DNA was no problem.'

‘What about the human blood in the soil sample?'

‘That too contains the victim's DNA.'

‘It does rather point towards these things being handy in the house and Bennett having killed her there, doesn't it?'

‘Yes, I'm about to have him brought in again and lean on him heavily.'

Ten minutes later my mobile rang.

‘Please forgive my bothering you,' said the celestial tones of Alan Kilmartin. ‘But I'm in a real quandary.'

‘I do tend to be a quandary wrangler,' I said with a laugh.

‘I hope you're fully recovered from your accident – only it wasn't, was it?'

‘No, but I have, thank you.'

‘Which makes what I'm about to say even more awkward and I shall understand perfectly if you put the phone down on me.'

‘I won't,' I promised. Ye gods, what was he about to propose? A fortnight in Mustique?

‘It's about Alex.'

‘Go on.'

‘She rang me last night, late, saying that my number was the only one she could remember. She sounded very distressed and then the call was cut short.'

‘People have numbers in their phone's memories though surely.'

‘She wasn't on her own phone. I got the impression she didn't have it with her.'

‘Was she sober?'

‘I don't
think
so. Her voice was slurred anyway. But I've never heard Alex like this before. If what she said is correct she's in some kind of trouble.'

‘What did she want you to do?'

‘We didn't have a chance to talk because, as I've just said, the call was cut short.'

‘Can you remember exactly what she said?'

There was a short silence while he tried to remember. ‘She said, “Is that you Alan?” and I told her it was. Then she said, “You must help me.” Then she cried a bit. I urged her to tell me what was wrong and she said, “I've found a phone that works in this bloody place and your number's the only one I can remember. If I—” That was all. Someone might have grabbed the phone – or hit her because there was a thump before the line went dead.'

‘I wonder what she was going to say before she was interrupted.'

‘I've been asking myself that. Perhaps she knew the number of it and was going to ask me to tell her where she was – find her even. I don't know. I don't know what to think.'

‘Have you contacted the police?'

‘That's part of the quandary. I've no evidence to give them that she's really in trouble. And it's exactly the kind of stagy thing she'd do to get even with people.'

Like pretending to be Carrie with the flu so I dashed off home in order to get rid of me, for example, not to mention what happened afterwards.

‘Sorry to present you with a bit of a problem,' Kilmartin went on when I remained silent. ‘But when you said your husband worked for SOCA . . . I just felt I ought to do
something.
'

‘I'll give Patrick a ring,' I told him. ‘Don't do anything until I phone you back. It might not be for a while if I can't get hold of him.'

I put the mobile back on my desk and muttered a few Patrick-style expressions. The woman kept coming back like bad drains. It went without saying that every last atom of my being wanted to consign her to whichever hell she had got herself into, which was most likely a surfeit of alcohol or even drugs. But Alan Kilmartin was a very nice guy, was worried and I am not the kind of person to do nothing and lie by telling him that moves were being put in place to find her when they were not.

‘Barnsley Sand and Gravel,' Patrick said when I rang him.

‘It might not have been me,' I pointed out.

‘I knew it was you. I've downloaded some new ringtones that are different, and suitable, for everyone in the phone's memory.'

‘So what's mine?'

‘A moo.'

I heard Michael Greenway chuckle in the background.

‘You obviously have loads of time on your hands so here's something for you to think about.' I told him the story.

‘I suppose the call could be traced,' he remarked when I had finished. ‘Please ring Kilmartin back and ask him to let me know the number of the phone that he received the call on.'

This I did and then went back to work. I heard nothing more about it until the evening, when, as it was Friday, I collected Patrick from the station.

‘The call came from a semi-derelict building, an old Inland Revenue office block eventually to be demolished in Woolwich,' he said in response to my query. ‘With Mike's permission I had a search made of the place but nothing was found. But there were signs of the building having been inhabited quite recently by squatters, or whoever, and, significantly, abandoned women's clothing. There were no phones around but it's a big building with rubbish everywhere so one might have been overlooked at some stage. These findings were referred to the people working on the vice gangs cases and I understand they're going to conduct a search of their own and possibly get forensics involved.'

‘But even if Alexandra was playing tricks on Alan she wouldn't normally be in a derelict building in Woolwich surely. And if she was there in connection with a sex trade business she has she would hardly draw attention to it. Alan did say though that he thought she'd been drinking. Or is she really that stupid?'

‘I wouldn't have thought so. That particular phone line's dead now too – as it should have been in the first place.'

‘So what on earth's going on?'

‘You tell me. Do your oracle thing.'

‘I'm too biased to give you an honest answer,' I muttered, concentrating on Bath's horrendous traffic.

‘Bias is of no use to SOCA.'

‘Don't be so bloody pompous!' I yelled at him.

‘OK, Alex is shallow, ignorant, spiteful, silly, jealous, on occasions crass, and vastly insecure. She's also fun to be with, larger than life with a great sense of humour, but, above all else, vulnerable. It doesn't balance out, does it? – so everything nasty that happens to her she deserves.
That's
bias.'

‘I meant that I was too personally and emotionally involved, that's all,' I snapped back.

‘Look, I really do need you to think this through. It's important.'

I turned into a residential road and, against all the odds, found somewhere to park. Then I said, ‘It's most unfair to expect me to do that when I'm
driving.
'

‘We can't risk having a blazing row at home.'

There was a tense silence.

‘I know now why you want that house,' Patrick sighed, opening his window for some fresh air and lapsing into silence.

‘It's called privacy,' I said. ‘All right, this horrible old bat the oracle speaks. Given the circumstances of the call there are several possibilities and I don't have money on any of them. One is that because Alex was drunk, or, at least, under the influence of something and was in the building in connection with her illegal business, she just thought she'd wind Alan up, being too sloshed to care or realize the risks of what she was doing. The phone packed up.
Or
, she was in the building ditto, and because of being even more sloshed or under the influence was scared stiff having genuinely forgotten almost everything about herself except Alan and his phone number. But she dropped the phone and then accidentally trod on it.
Or
, her business has got out of hand, she got a bit drunk and panicked, wanting Alan to make everything all right again as he's good at that. But she then suddenly changed her mind and slammed the phone down.
Or
, a perfectly legitimate little agency was infiltrated by vicious nasties who brainwashed her into thinking there was a lot more money to be made in running brothels using the girls she got from abroad. It all went swimmingly for a while until she realized exactly the kind of nightmare she'd got herself into. She wanted to bale out and planned to move to Bath, might have even tried to go to the police, but was forced to carry on and is now, having made herself a thorough nuisance to various someones, a prisoner. She was drugged but tried to ring Alan only for the phone to be snatched from her, yanked out of its fitting and chucked out of the nearest window. You could get someone to have a look for the phone as there might be some useful fingerprints on it.'

Patrick was by no means gaping but his face was wearing an expression that this oracle found immensely gratifying. Then he reached for his mobile.

Amazingly, this last theory paid off, at least with regard to the finding of a smashed old-fashioned-style telephone on the top of dumped rubbish on the ground outside the building. Unfortunately, subsequent tests would establish that half of London's fingerprints plus a generous amount of tom-cat pee were on it. At the time though the discovery narrowed down the areas those doing the detective work ought to search first, that is, rooms on the side of the building that faced west. Someone immediately remembered that a group of broken windows with blinds hanging out of them had been in rooms where women's clothing had been found and they all traipsed back to the seventh floor – the lifts were not working – and began their search, which was still ongoing.

One did not have to be very clever to know that Patrick was all ready to go and look for the woman but did not like to broach the subject with me. He would be aware that he would not be able just to set off without being given some kind of mandate by Greenway. In the
carte blanche
days of MI5 when he had virtually been his own boss matters had been different but to a resourceful man this merely meant that a different approach was now needed. And pray that his wife wouldn't mind too much?

‘The quandary file is getting fatter,' I commented later that evening, Patrick in a world of his own, preoccupied with tactics.

‘What? Oh . . . yes.'

‘You want to go and find Alex.'

‘Not just her, the others as well. It somehow makes it worse when you know someone who's involved.'

‘I'm sure there are people working overtime to put plans in place to find out where they're being held. There are probably several groups of women.'

He grimaced. ‘Yes, but with all due risk assessments completed and health and safety clauses taken into consideration, plus a reminder to personnel to take a woolly and a clean hankie.'

‘You're doing your ex-special services soldier knows best thing again.'

He smiled in a distracted way. ‘I can't help it.'

‘Then give Greenway a stunning plan of action that he simply can't turn down.'

Patrick got to his feet and restlessly paced the room. ‘Ingrid, you should know by now that I don't do stunning plans of action. Like your books, it's mostly made up as I go along. All I know is that I want to go undercover, and with the deepest malice aforethought, find these bastards and stop what they're doing.'

‘Start with Fred at Boyles House. Terrorize information out of him – I'm sure he knew a lot more than he told me.'

Patrick paced some more. ‘It's Greenway though. And you're right: plus everyone else who's working on this. If I go off-piste it's a slap in the face for them.'

‘You could ask. Mike might be reluctant to order you in because you've been ill.'

This Patrick did, phoning the commander there and then, at home. He was briskly told to be patient: as he was already well aware, a painstaking search of the building was being carried out and forensic people were involved. As he also should know this took time and any results of tests even longer. There was no point in rushing off without the benefit of knowledge as this might hazard the safety of the women even more. Greenway finished by saying that he hoped to see him first thing on Monday morning when the first outline results should be ready and then went on to remind him that he was an adviser to SOCA, not 007, expletives deleted.