Zack didn’t like him, she could tell.
‘Why are you telling me this, Zack?’
‘Well, let’s say that I trusted your nose for sniffing out something rotten, and that Hadden-Vane is rotten, yeah? And he’s the one person we haven’t spoken to again.’
Hadden-Vane. When she put the phone down she pictured him again. And the dead-Nancy Haynes, Mikhail Moszynski, and Harry Peebles and Danny Yilmaz too-all dead, while he, improbably, rose above the carnage unscathed. She wondered if she was becoming obsessed.
The pub had a terrace overlooking the river, and they took a table by the wall looking directly over the water. It was a perfect June day, pale blue sky, sunlight sparkling on the dark Thames current across which a pair of two-man skiffs were skimming.
‘Thanks so much for sparing the time,’ John said.
‘I’ve got all the time in the world now.’ Kathy took a sip from her glass of wine.
‘You haven’t resigned, have you?’
‘I’m on leave, stood down, not involved.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I told you, John, you had nothing to do with it. What about you? Shouldn’t you be at your conference?’ Kathy was aware that her words sounded brittle, and tried to make herself relax and enjoy this. It was a damn sight better than being in Queen Anne’s Gate, she told herself, or moping about at home, but it just felt so unreal to be out and free during a working day.
‘It finished last Wednesday, but I didn’t want to go back home with this unresolved.’
‘Have you changed your mind about Moszynski’s letter?’
‘No, on the contrary. I studied those other documents you gave me and I’m more convinced than ever that he didn’t write the letter to The Times.’
‘Has the new team been in touch with you?’
‘No. Should I speak to someone?’
She shook her head. ‘Probably not. Send in your bill.’
‘How about your boss, Brock? Has there been any change?’
He seemed genuinely pleased when she told him, but then his frown returned. He noticed that her glass was empty, although he had barely touched his, and he poured her another.
‘I just couldn’t believe it when I saw that interview with Hadden-Vane on TV,’ he said.
‘People seem to think it was honest and courageous.’
‘For her, maybe, but not him. I was quite impressed with him at Moszynski’s funeral, but this was different. I thought it was the most devious and calculated performance I’d ever seen. Toby and Deb were outraged too. They’d come across him before, but it was the first time I’d really looked at him. You knew he was guilty, didn’t you?’
A river cruise ship was passing, its open top deck crowded with people wearing dark glasses and sun hats. Some of them were waving, and Kathy felt a little surge of well-being, the first she’d felt in a while.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that if he was prepared to admit that much, and put his wife in front of the cameras to back him up, that he must have had something much, much worse to hide.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I also think that he moved so fast that he must have had it in mind all the time, as a contingency plan, if we got too close.’ She shrugged and gave him a smile. ‘But it doesn’t matter what I think now.’
‘I like it much better when you’re smiling,’ he said. ‘And it does matter what you think, at least to me, and to Toby and Deb. They’re particularly upset that everyone seems to have forgotten about Nancy’s murder. They think that you’d probably have solved that if Moszynski’s death hadn’t got in the way.’
‘I’m sure it hasn’t been forgotten, John. Anyway, what are you doing with yourself, now the conference is over?’
‘This and that. I’m helping Toby and Deb upgrade their computer software. They send their best wishes, by the way. They said they’d love to see you if you wanted to drop in for tea or something.’
‘Unfortunately I’ve been forbidden from coming within a mile of Chelsea Mansions.’
John whistled. ‘That bad? Well, maybe I could keep my eyes open and tell you what’s going on in Cunningham Place, if anything interesting happens.’
It seemed that everyone wanted to keep her informed, while she didn’t want to know. But when she got home later that afternoon, after a surprisingly good lunch and promises to catch up again, she thought about what they’d said, about Brock’s questions about Peebles, and Toby and Deb’s fear that Nancy’s murder hadn’t been properly investigated, and she forced herself to open up her laptop and load the case files, and begin to look at them afresh.
TWENTY-SIX
T he following day she took the laptop into the hospital with her. Brock was sitting up in bed, showing signs of impatience.
‘I need to get out of here, Kathy, but they’re being difficult. They say there’s some residual infection and they have to keep me in for observation a bit longer. Really it’s just that they’ve never seen Marburg fever before and they want to hang on to me, and prod me and test me like a prize specimen. I’m going mad just sitting around here.’
‘Well, maybe I’ve got something for you to think about. You asked what if Nancy wasn’t mistaken for Marta Moszynski? The reason we’ve been assuming that is because we can’t see any connection between Nancy and Moszynski other than the fact that they were living in the same block. But there was the thing that the neighbour, Dr Stewart, said about seeing Nancy going up the front steps of the Moszynskis’ place one day. I didn’t put much weight on it, thinking he was mistaken, because no one else had seen her and there was no record of it on the camera mounted at Moszynski’s front door.
‘But I’ve been going over the log we made of all the people recorded coming and going on that camera, and there are gaps. It didn’t record Moszynski going out for his cigar the night he was killed, because he switched it off himself, according to the security staff. And there are two other times that week where there are gaps-for twenty-three minutes on Wednesday afternoon, and another for ninety-two minutes at lunchtime on Monday. We were told these were for maintenance. Those ninety-two minutes would have covered the period that Dr Stewart saw her.’
‘Why would she visit?’ Brock mused. ‘Did she know who lived there?’
Kathy shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Why would she go calling? To get Shaka’s autograph for her granddaughter? Because she was interested in Victorian architecture? Or might she have been there before, at some time in the past? Maybe she knew the previous owners.’
‘We just don’t know. We didn’t take it any further. And if she went inside, could she have seen or heard something she shouldn’t have?’
‘And was it just a coincidence,’ Brock said, becoming more intrigued, ‘that the camera was switched off when she called? Or could it have been done so that there was no record of her visit?’
‘Other people in the house would have seen her, the maid for instance, answering the front door.’ Kathy began to flick through the pages of the timetable they’d made of people’s movements. ‘But, there’s a thing…’ She showed Brock the screen. ‘The maid went out at twelve forty-five, with the cook and the office secretary. Looks like they all had a lunch break together. Mikhail’s driver and security guy was out too.’
‘What about family members?’
‘Mikhail was at home. That’s all.’
A nurse came in to give Brock some pills and Kathy left for a few minutes. When she came back he had more questions.
‘Wouldn’t Nancy have phoned first to make an appointment? That would have given Mikhail time to make sure the house was clear and the camera switched off. Could there be a record of such a call? Would she have used her mobile, or the hotel phone? Wouldn’t her friend Emerson have known something?’
‘No, there doesn’t seem to be a record of such a call on her phone or on Moszynski’s phones, and Emerson had no idea. What I’d like to do is speak to the people in the hotel again, just make quite sure they didn’t see or hear something.’