When he got home he felt edgy and unable to settle. Later, after grilling a fish fillet for his supper, he sat in the window bay that projected out over the lane, watching the trains pass by in the twilit shadows of the cutting down below. He had a novel on his knee, but was unable to concentrate on it. Too many characters, he thought, none of whom he cared about, and too clever by half. Which was what Chivers would say about him. Quick and clean, was Chivers. Get the job done. Occam’s razor.
THIRTY-THREE
M orris had rung Brock in the middle of the following morning, arranging to meet him at a Latin American deli in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, the first covered shopping centre in Europe back in 1965, and subsequently voted London’s ugliest building, now awaiting demolition. It had a gloomy subterranean feel to it which depressed Brock’s spirits, but Morris seemed perversely cheerful, sitting with a large bag of groceries by his side. Brock ordered a coffee and joined him.
‘Can’t stop long,’ Morris said. ‘But I needed to stock up for our samba party tonight.’
Brock raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Morris took an envelope out of the carrier bag, extracted the photograph and laid it down on the table in front of them.
‘It’s printed on a Kodak Velox paper that was available from the mid-fifties into the sixties, consistent with your date. If the April twenty-six date is correct, the length and angle of shadows indicate the picture was taken at around four in the afternoon, this being Chelsea Mansions on the north side of Cunningham Place, right?’
Brock nodded, and Morris took some enlargements from the envelope.
‘The lapel badge you mentioned is a five-pointed star, approximately ten millimetres across, resembling the gold star which Heroes of the Soviet Union were entitled to wear. The man wearing it has an area of scar tissue on his left temple which appears to be caved in, as if from an industrial accident or war wound. You could get a pathologist’s opinion on that, and on some Soviet-era dental work he seems to be sporting.’ Morris pointed to a close-up of the man’s smiling mouth.
‘The other man, who you say is an American, appears to be rather well off and possibly involved in international travel and business. He’s wearing a Rolex GMT Master wristwatch, the first watch to show two time zones at once, first released in 1954.
‘The woman at his side is also well heeled, dressed in what looks to be a Dior A-line costume. But her taste in jewellery seems a little unconventional and artistic. The younger woman is carrying a posy of flowers-a mixture of what looks like roses and some other type, like Michaelmas daisies. She’s also holding something else in her left hand…’ He produced an enlargement. ‘Maybe a cigarette or spectacle case. She’s much more informally dressed than the others, who look as if they’ve been to some sort of function.’
‘There was a banquet lunch for visiting Russians that day,’ Brock said.
‘There you go then.’ Morris turned the photo over to look at the back. ‘Notice the faint brown smudge. It’s a vegetable glue, as if there was once an accompanying note or card stuck to the back of the photo, so we did an ESDA electrostatic scan.’
Morris flicked through the contents of his envelope to a grey photograph across which black lettering was visible. ‘ESDA picks up the faintest compression marks, in this case caused by something being written on another piece of paper with the photo underneath.’
Brock read the message: Dear Ronnie and Maisy, What larks! Love, Miles
‘You’re a magician, Morris.’
Morris gathered the material up, put it back in the envelope and handed it to Brock. ‘Happy hunting, mate.’
After he’d gone Brock remained at the table going over the contents of the envelope while he finished his coffee. Ronnie and Maisy were Nancy’s parents, he remembered, but who was Miles? He examined the enhanced enlargements that Morris had made of the faces of the four people in the photograph, and he thought of Kathy’s theory about Gennady as he studied them. The two American adults were long-skulls, tall and of slender build, whereas the Russian was a round-skull Slav, short and stocky. Brock looked at the girl’s bone structure, the cheeks, the chin, and pondered. Finally he checked his notebook for the number of someone he knew well in forensic services. He got out his phone and made the call, asking for a special favour.
As Brock turned into Cunningham Place he saw two men emerge from the Moszynski entrance porch. One was the security guard, Wayne Everett, who hurried ahead to open the rear door of a Maybach Zeppelin for the other man, Vadim Kuzmin, who appeared angry and impatient. The limousine eased out of its parking spot and surged away at speed.
Brock continued towards the porch, climbing the steps and pressing the button on the entry phone. A female voice responded and he said, ‘Detective Chief Inspector David Brock, Metropolitan Police, to see Mrs Marta Moszynski.’
‘One moment, please.’
It took considerably more than that for the voice to come back. It sounded anxious, and hesitant in its use of English. ‘I’m sorry. Mrs Moszynski is not well enough to see you, sir.’
‘Tell Mrs Moszynski I have information concerning her husband.’
A hesitation, then, ‘Mr Moszynski was her son, sir, not her husband.’
‘I’m talking about Mr Gennady Moszynski, not Mr Mikhail Moszynski.’
‘Wait, please.’
Eventually there was a click and the door opened and the maid indicated for him to come in. As he entered the hall he was struck again by the scale of the internal transformation that had been worked on the original buildings. The whole of the middle house had been gutted to create a central atrium with stairs, lift and galleries rising through five storeys to a glass lantern, with a multi-tiered lighting feature suspended within it. When he’d seen it before, at night, with the glitter of hundreds of tiny lights, it had seemed flashy but rather dazzling, like the foyer of an exotic gaming club. But now, with the lights turned off and no one around, it seemed merely overblown and pretentious.
He followed the maid across to the glass lift which rose with a faint hum to the third floor, where they walked around the gallery to overscaled double doors which the maid tapped, then opened. This was Marta Moszynski’s private apartment, with a generous sitting room from which doors led off to other rooms. The old woman was sitting in an armchair by the windows overlooking the square, surrounded by a blue haze of cigarette smoke. She turned and regarded Brock’s approach with a stubborn scowl that might have been modelled on Krushchev.
Brock took the seat facing her and said, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Moszynski. How are you today?’
She tapped her cigarette slowly on the heavy glass ashtray at her side. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’d like you to tell me why Mikhail chose this building to live in when he came to London.’
The question seemed to throw her, and she shook her head.
‘Did his father tell him about it? Because Gennady was here, wasn’t he?’
‘You’re crazy!’ Marta growled, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘Go away.’
Brock took a copy of the photograph out of his pocket and offered it to her. Reluctantly she reached out a knobbly hand and took it, then made a great play of picking up her spectacles from the small table at her elbow and putting them on.
‘That’s Gennady at the back, see?’ Brock said.
She frowned and peered closer. ‘No.’
‘Yes. Here’s a larger picture of his face. It was the twenty-sixth of April, 1956, and they were standing in front of this building.’
‘No,’ Marta repeated, and her head was shaking again, with movements so jerky and violent that Brock wondered for a moment if she might be having some kind of fit.