The second bedroom was slightly bigger, with a single bed and Chelsea Football Club wallpaper, quilt cover and pillowcase. An old computer desk stood by the window, the curtains above it a sun-damaged blue.
‘This must be Josh’s old room,’ Mike said, and opened the fitted wardrobe, which had nothing in it other than mothballs and some dirty shoeboxes. Barbara noticed an old black-and-white picture on the computer desk, of a uniformed army officer standing next to a British World War Two tank. The butt of his service revolver protruded from its holster.
‘I’d say this chap could be the original owner of the Enfield revolver,’ Barbara said as she put the picture into a property bag.
‘God, this place is so old-fashioned it’s hideous. I doubt Josh Reynolds would bring a woman back here for sex,’ Dewar sneered as Pete Jenkins walked into the room.
‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Come and have a look at the boudoir next door.’
They all squeezed through into the main bedroom. This had been painted white and had thick cream curtains edged with dark red bands and draped back with matching rope ties. The bed was king-sized, with a cream duvet and white Egyptian cotton pillowcases. There was a pine chest of drawers and a fitted wardrobe. A zebra skin rug was positioned along the foot of the bed; there was no carpet, but the floorboards had been painted white.
‘My, my, maybe this was where the liaison took place: up the stairs, lights out and into bed,’ Dewar said, opening the chest of drawers, which was empty.
Mike eased the wardrobe open but only hangers were left on the rail.
‘I can take the bed sheets and pillowcases back to the lab for DNA,’ Pete suggested as he put down his large forensic case and proceeded to pull back the quilt.
As she started to cross the room Barbara stepped onto the zebra skin rug which promptly slid from under her feet, causing her to topple backwards. Mike managed to grab her before she fell.
‘Bloody thing hasn’t got any slip grips on it,’ Barbara muttered, embarrassed at her near mishap, and she bent down and repositioned the rug.
‘Wait a minute, the zebra skin, pull it back,’ Dewar exclaimed excitedly.
Barbara pulled the rug away and Dewar stepped slowly onto the floorboard, making it creak. She pressed her hand flat against it, and then straightened to use the heel of her foot. The floorboard was loose.
‘I wonder what’s hidden under here?’ Dewar smiled.
Pete Jenkins got down on his hands and knees and discovered that the nails were missing from this particular board. He tried to ease it up, but soon realized he would need a screwdriver to prise it open. Dewar waited impatiently for Mike Lewis to retrieve an implement from downstairs; she was starting to doubt they would find anything. The odd thing was that unlike the other boards, which were all flush, the loose board had been sawn slightly shorter. Mike returned with a kitchen knife and handed it to Pete, who slid it into the narrow gap and slowly lifted the twelve-inch piece of loose floorboard away.
‘Anything?’ Dewar asked, bending down over Pete as he blindly felt around with his hand.
‘Nope, nothing,’ he replied and then lay flat on the floor so he could get his hand further along the space underneath. ‘Hang on, there’s something here, feels like cloth of some sort.’
He asked Barbara to get a large paper exhibits bag from his forensic kit and lay it out on the floor beside him. He then eased his body back and slowly withdrew a cloth money bag.
Dewar was now kneeling beside him, eager to see what it contained. With his gloved hands Pete eased the bag open and removed wads of fifty-pound notes, tied with elastic bands. He flicked through a bundle.
‘There’s a grand in each of these. There may be more down there, this one was stuffed so far back,’ he said, dusting himself off as Dewar started counting the bundles of cash.
‘I can do fingerprint examinations on the top and bottom notes of each bundle to start with, but as they’re used notes and untraceable, any Tom, Dick or Harry could have left their prints,’ Pete said.
‘There’s just short of a hundred and sixty thousand here,’ Dewar breathed, causing Mike to give a long, low whistle of surprise.
Barbara gestured to Mike. ‘Guv, it doesn’t make sense that Josh Reynolds would hide the money under floorboards when he had a safe.’
‘Well we know from the neighbour’s description that Donna had keys for this place. She may have taken the money from the safe after she murdered Josh,’ Dewar suggested.
‘You might be right, Jessie. There’s plenty for you and Barolli to put to her in interview now,’ Mike said.
Finally, the engineer arrived and reconnected the electricity while a carpenter put new locks on the door. Meanwhile, Pete Jenkins bagged up the money, the bed sheets and the decorator’s paint tins, hoping they might yield some DNA or fingerprints. Mike Lewis asked the neighbour about garages that were owned by the residents. The man said that there was a row of twenty round the back of the flats but he had no idea as to who owned which one, except of course his own.
Mike Lewis, Dewar and Barbara went over the premises with a fine-tooth comb, checking for more hidden cash or anything else that might prove useful to the inquiry. However, they found no keys or paperwork related to a garage. Mike knew that he could not force open all the garages, nor did he have the time to knock on every resident’s door asking which garage they owned. He would just have to wait and hope that the arrest of Donna would result in the recovery of the keys and the discovery of the garage and maybe Josh’s car. The last thing he did was to take the Chubb and Yale locks that had originally been in the front door as they made their way out.
On the journey to Marisha Peters’ flat, at 51 Clarendon House, Radley Street, Brixton, Anna hardly spoke a word. Barolli, who was driving, tried to engage her in conversation about Quantico and the FBI course but her replies extended to nothing more than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Barolli attempted to reassure her. ‘If you’re worried about Dewar, don’t be – I can keep her in check while you are away.’
‘You think so, do you?’ Anna remarked glibly as she stared out of her passenger window.
Barolli couldn’t let that go without comment. ‘You’re like a pair of squabbling schoolgirls pulling pigtails and it looks bad in front of the team. What was it you said about earning respect?’
Anna turned and looked at Paul, saying nothing, but the look on her face told him he had hit a nerve.
It was another ten minutes of silence before they reached their destination of Clarendon House, a 1950s concrete tower block of council flats. The estate looked as if it suffered from the anti-social behaviour of bored kids, and signs of drug use and graffiti were rife, mostly tags from the local gangs.
Barolli pressed the lift button and the door opened, whereupon the strong smell of urine hit them as they noticed the wet floor.
‘You’d think the council would clean up the place,’ Anna said, disgusted.
‘They probably do, but it’s a lost cause,’ Barolli sighed. ‘This is one of the most notorious blocks, lot of gangs around, and at night it’s shut the door, close the curtains and put your telly on at full volume.’
Anna said she would rather walk up the fire escape stairwell, Barolli agreed, and together they trudged up the ten flights of stairs, which didn’t smell much better. The long stone corridor on floor ten was covered in graffiti. Barolli knocked at the door of flat 51 and waited.
‘Who’s there, mon?’ a female voice asked in a strong Jamaican accent.