The lane ran on past a big old farmhouse, and ended at a new building perched on the end of the village. Church Vista Apartments. Its design was pure Californian-Italian, completely out of place in the heart of rural England. Five luxury apartments sharing a single long building with a stable block and multi-port garage forming a courtyard at the rear. Climbing roses planted along the walls hadn't grown halfway up their trellises yet.
There was a tall security gate in the courtyard wall. Amanda held her police identity card up to the key, and it swung open for her. A police car and the cleaning agency van were parked on the cobbles beyond. Amanda drew up next to them. The rain was easing off.
They moved briskly over the cobbles to the door of apartment three. One of the uniforms was standing just inside, holding the heavy glass-and-wood door open. She didn't have to flash her card at him, as Rutland's police force was small enough for them all to know each other.
“Morning, Rex,” she said as she hurried into the small hallway. He nodded politely as she shook the water from her jacket. “What have we got?”
“Definitely a corpse.”
Alison slipped in and immediately blew her cheeks out. Her breath materialized in the air in front of her. “God, it's bloody freezing in here.”
“Air-conditioning's on full,” Rex said. “I left it that way, I'm afraid. Scene-of-crime, and all that.”
“Good,” Amanda muttered, not meaning it. The chill air was blowing over her wet clothes, giving her goosebumps.
Rex led them into the apartment. It was open-plan downstairs, a single space with white walls and terra-cotta tile flooring, Mexican blackwood cabinets and shelving were lined up around the edges. There were pictures hanging on every wall; prints, chalk and charcoal sketches, oils, watercolors, silver-patina photographs. Most of them featured young female nudes. Three big plump cream-colored leather settees formed a conversation area in the middle, surrounding a Persian rug. A woman in the cleaning agency's mauve tunic sat on one of the settees, looking shaken.
The front of the room was twice the height of the back. Wide wrought-iron stairs curved up to a balcony which ran the entire width, giving access to all the upstairs rooms. A sheer window wall in front of the balcony flooded the whole area with light.
The corpse lay at the foot of the stairs. A man in his mid-to-late twenties, wearing a pale gray dressing gown, his legs akimbo on the tiles, head twisted at a nasty angle. Some blood had dribbed from his nose. It was dry and flaking now.
There were three air-conditioning grilles set in the edge of the balcony. One of them was right above the corpse, blowing a stream of the frosty air directly over him.
“He fell down the stairs?” Alison asked.
“Looks like it,” Rex said.
“So was it a fall, or a push?” Amanda wondered out loud.
“I had a quick look around upstairs,” Rex said. “No sign of any struggle. The main bed's been used, but everything seems to be in place as far as I can tell.”
Amanda wrinkled her nose up. There was a faint smell in the air, unpleasant and familiar. “How long's he been here?”
“Possibly a day,” Rex said.
Alison gestured at the window wall. “And nobody saw him?”
“One-way glass,” Amanda said. It had that slight give away gray tint. She stared through it, understanding why the apartments had been built here. The last of the rain clouds had drifted away, allowing the hot sun to shine down. It was a magnificent view out over the junction of two broad rolling grassland valleys. In the distance she could see an antique windmill, its wooden sail painted white. A long communal garden stretched out ahead of her, a paddock beyond that. There was a circular swimming pool twenty meters away, surrounded by a flagstone patio. Wooden-slat sun loungers were clustered around stripy parasols.
“All right,” she said wearily. “Let's do the preliminary assessment.”
Alison opened her cybofax. “When was the body discovered?”
“Approximately 8:45 this morning,” Rex nodded toward the cleaning woman. “Helen?”
“That's right,” the woman stammered. “I saw him—Mr. Tyler—as soon as I came in. I called the police right away.”
Amanda pursed her lips and knelt down beside the body. The handsome face had quite a few resonances for her. Byrne Tyler. She remembered him mainly from Marina Days, a soap set amid Peterborough's yachting fraternity—though 90 percent of it was shot in the studio with the all-action boating sequences cooked on a graphics mainframe. That had been five or six years ago; Byrne played a teenage hunk crewman. But he had left and gone onto star in action-thriller dramas and interactives. Pretty bad ones if she remembered her tabloid gossip right. There would be media attention with this one.
She stood up. “Helen, was the door locked when you arrived?”
“Yes. And the alarm was on. I have the code, and my palm is one of the keys. Mr. Tyler was happy with that. He was a nice man. He always gave me a Christmas bonus.”
“I'm sure he was lovely. Did you do all his cleaning?”
“Yes. Twice a week. Tuesday and Friday.”
“Which means he could have been here since Tuesday. She rubbed her arms, trying to generate some warmth. “Rex, go see if the air-conditioning was set like this or it's glitched. Alison, look around for empty bottles, or anything else,” she said pointedly. It could so easily be an accident. Drunk, stoned, or even sober, a fall could happen. And God knows what a showbiz type like Tyler would take for amusement in the privacy of his secluded secure home.
Amanda went upstairs to check the main bedroom. The door was open, revealing a huge circular waterbed with a black silk sheet over the mattress: there was no top sheet. An equally large mirror was fixed to the ceiling above it. She shook her head in bemusement at the stereotyping. Exactly the kind of seduction chamber a list celebrity sex symbol was expected to have. She remembered most of his scenes in Marina Days involved him being stripped to the waist, or wearing tight T-shirts.
Apart from the offensive decor, there was nothing overtly suspicious. A slower look and she realized the sheet was rumpled, pillows were scattered about. She stared. One person wouldn't mess up a bed that much, surely? On the bedside cabinet was a champagne bottle turned upside down in a silver ice bucket, a single cut-crystal flute beside it.
When she went back downstairs, Rex told her the air-conditioning was set at maximum. Alison was wearing plastic gloves; she held up a clear zip bag with a silver-plated infuser in it.
“Damn,” Amanda grunted. “Okay, call the scene-of-crime team, and forensic. Let's find out exactly what happened here. And tell the uniform division we'll need help to cordon off the area.”
Forty minutes later, Denzil Osborne drove up in the forensic team's white van. Alone. Amanda always found Denzil immensely reassuring. It was probably the phlegmatic way the forensic officer treated crime scenes when he arrived. Nothing ever fazed him.
“Where's the scene-of-crime team?” she asked as soon as he eased his huge frame out of the van.
“Vernon says he wants hard evidence there's been a crime before he'll authorize that kind of expense.”
Amanda felt her cheeks reddening. All those orders she'd snapped out in front of Alison were making her look stupid now, empty wishes showing where the true authority in the police force lay. England's police had got rid of the PSP political officers observing their cases for ideological soundness, only for the New Conservatives to replace them all with accountants. She wasn't sure which was worse.
“And the uniform division?”
He winked broadly. “You've got Rex, haven't you?”
“Sod it,” she snarled. “Come on, this way.”
Denzil took one look at Byrne Tyler's sprawled body and said: “Ah yes, I see why you wanted forensic now. Of course, I'm no expert, but I think he may have fallen down the stairs.”