Brownlow switched on a tape recorder, declaring the date and time and the names of those present before beginning questioning. ‘Right, Mr Gold. I’m sure your solicitor told you the details of the charges against you, and the nature of the latest crime.’
‘Yes, he did,’ Gold replied sombrely. ‘You found Som strangled in a flat in Woodside Park. Appalling.’
Meadows leaned forward. ‘When we came to arrest you, you asked us if we’d found a flight attendant’s uniform and a champagne bottle in Niratpattanasai’s flat, which we had. Do you deny that?’
‘You don’t have to answer that, Levy,’ said Harcourt-Boles.
‘I have nothing to hide,’ Gold replied. The solicitor made an aggrieved noise deep in his throat, but did not speak. ‘No, I don’t deny it.’ Brownlow wrote down a note.
Meadows’ expression became predatory. ‘And how did you know that Niratpattanasai was staying in a flat and not at a hotel?’
‘Because he told me, of course,’ stated Gold, as if it were perfectly obvious. ‘I’ll use the masculine pronoun in this case, as he was in male mode at the time. But I was correct in my assumption that Som was kathoey, wasn’t I?’
‘It looks that way,’ said Brownlow. ‘The victim was wearing makeup and women’s clothing. And like you said earlier, looked very convincingly feminine.’
‘Sans moustache, then?’ The policeman nodded. ‘Fake, as I thought. But to continue, after our luggage was searched, I asked if he might be interested in joining me for a drink. He politely declined, saying that he was going to meet the friend with whom he was staying in Woodside Park.’
‘And you didn’t see him again after that?’
‘No. I actually met up with Mali and Tola soon afterwards, and spent the rest of the day with them. And indeed the night. I’m sure they’ll confirm that.’
‘Actually,’ said Meadows, with the air of a chess player watching an adversary step into a trap, ‘we’ve also arrested Mali Kanthachai in connection with the murder.’
Gold was shocked. ‘What? What on earth for? You can’t possibly think she has any connection to this!’
‘Let’s discuss your connection to this first,’ said Brownlow. ‘You deny any further contact with the victim after leaving the airport?’
‘Absolutely I deny it!’
‘So can you account for your movements for the rest of the day?’
‘Certainly. I went with Mali and Tola to their hotel, the Heathrow Holiday Inn Express — Air Thailand don’t treat their cabin crew to the same level of luxury as their first class passengers, sadly. But once they’d dropped off their luggage and got changed, I took them as my guests for lunch at the Groucho, where we stayed until around three. After that I took them on a walking tour of Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus, then we took a cab for a spot of sightseeing — Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Westminster and so on. Following that, we had an excellent dinner at Hix around six-thirty, had a few more drinks in the club downstairs, then went back to my flat at nine or so. Where we stayed until you arrived in the morning.’
‘And you can prove all this?’ demanded Meadows.
‘I always keep all my restaurant and taxi receipts,’ Gold replied, almost cheerily. ‘One never knows if something worthy of an anecdote may happen — in which case it counts as part of my work, and I can claim the cost back against my taxes. Feel free to check the times of payment with my credit card company. Oh,’ he added, ‘and if you like, I can provide you with a quite lengthy list of famous friends with whom I chatted at both venues. I’m sure they’ll corroborate my story.’
Brownlow mulled that over. ‘And what about after midnight?’
‘After midnight?’
‘You told us this morning that your guests went to sleep around midnight, but that you stayed awake. That would give you plenty of time to get to Woodside Park, kill Mr Niratpattanasai, and get back before morning. Is there anyone who can confirm your whereabouts then?’
‘Levy,’ said Harcourt-Boles in a warning tone.
Gold waved him down. ‘Other than Mali and Tola? I would say no. However,’ he added on Meadows’ look of triumph, ‘I’m sure that if you call my building’s management company, they’ll provide you with the CCTV footage from the security cameras covering the front and rear exits, and the garage. And the lift. And the stairwell. Now, unless you’re suggesting that I used a rope ladder to climb down from my fifth-floor window, I think you’ll find there’s no way I could have left the building unseen.’
‘We’ll do that,’ said Meadows. ‘We can have a warrant before the end of the afternoon.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Harcourt-Boles, levering himself to his feet, ‘but unless you have any actual evidence against my client, I insist that he be released at once. This whole thing is quite preposterous. Leviticus Gold is one of the most well-known personalities in the country, and a man who has legal ways of dealing with the depredations of the tabloid press, rather than resorting to murder. To suggest that he is involved in a double homicide is absolutely ridiculous.’
‘I’ll present our case, then,’ Brownlow said. ‘Firstly, motive. Despite what your client told us, that he wasn’t bothered by what Perch’s newspaper printed about him, he issued several libel suits against it.’
The solicitor made an impatient sound. ‘I’m well aware of that, Detective Inspector. I was the one who issued them on his behalf! Do get to the point.’
‘We also ran a Lexis search,’ Meadows added: the media database. ‘In the past year alone, the paper ran a hundred and twenty-six stories mentioning Leviticus Gold — almost all of them negative in tone. I think it’s fair to say that Desmond Perch really disliked you, Mr Gold. You might even call it a campaign against you.’
‘There are limits to what a person can take,’ said Brownlow. ‘So you decided that enough was enough, and arranged to kill him.’
‘If I were emotionally affected by what the press said about me,’ Gold scoffed, ‘I would probably have killed myself by now. It’s unfortunately the price of fame in this country. Tabloid journalists are a dreary, embittered lot, and think anyone who dares to raise their head above the mire of mediocrity deserves to be cut down to size for the baying amusement of their readers. The best way to fight them is to keep on doing that which angers them so much, without fear or shame. Rather than devise an outrageous method of murder — one that you wouldn’t even have discovered if I hadn’t worked it out for you, I might add!’
Meadows shook her head. ‘You couldn’t resist telling us. It was so clever, maybe even too clever, you couldn’t stand the idea that nobody would ever know about it. Your ego couldn’t take being ignored.’
‘Ah, so you’re saying that having devised the perfect crime, I then tried to throw suspicion off myself by telling the police exactly how I did it? Really! That’s logic worthy of a Batman villain.’
‘You arranged to kill Perch,’ Brownlow pressed on, ‘by using Som Niratpattanasai as your accomplice. You seduced him in Thailand, maybe promising a civil partnership so that he could get UK citizenship, and convinced him to commit the actual murder so that you’d have an alibi. The statements from the cabin crew and the other passengers said that Niratpattanasai was very nervous at the start of the flight, but almost numbed at the end. We found a blister pack of diazepam — Valium — in his luggage at the flat, with one pill missing. He took it right after the murder to cover his shock. But that wasn’t enough for you to be sure that he wouldn’t talk, so you then asphyxiated him — her, at that stage — to make certain.’