Death in Leamington (22 page)

*

By now, it was late on Sunday afternoon; Eddie had taken Carrie to the Dell to play on the swings while Alice returned to the hospital to assist at Winnie’s autopsy. The temperature had continued to rise during the day and the air was beginning to feel oppressively close. There were several other families in the park enjoying the last of the sun in the dog days of summer. They bumped into Izzie walking with her new friend.

‘Izzie!’ shouted Carrie.

‘Hello, my little darling, it’s so good to see you,’ replied the Irish nurse a little sheepishly. She was hand in hand with her new actor friend. After their trip to the coffee shop, they had spent a quiet Sunday morning in Izzie’s bedsit, most of which had been passed in bed. They had only just emerged, somewhat guiltily, to catch the last of the day’s sun.

‘Carrie, this is my new friend Penn. I know it’s a funny name, but he’s an actor, although I’m afraid not a very funny one despite that name.’ Penn dug her in the ribs so that she burst out in giggles.

‘I’d love to be an actress,’ said Carrie.

‘Well, my princess, sometimes a little fantasy is a very good thing you know.’

‘Do you want to join our play?’ asked Carrie, her expression studied and completely serious.

‘What play would that be?’

Eddie pulled him aside and whispered to him. Penn smiled and shook Eddie’s hand, nodding.

‘Of course, that sounds a lot of fun. I hear you’ve been hunting Snarks, would you like to hear about the Jabberwocky then?’ asked Penn and proceeded to quote her the opening lines.

Lewis Carroll,
Jabberwocky

They walked back towards the town together. As they came to the junction of Beauchamp Hill and Clarendon Place, they saw Pearl standing on the opposite corner outside Mr Baxter’s house, as if she was searching for something. She saw Eddie and beckoned urgently for him to cross the road.

‘Stay here a second with Izzie, Carrie, I just need to go and talk to that lady for a moment.’ Eddie crossed the road, wondering what had happened.

‘Hello Miss Taylor, what are you doing in our neck of the woods?’ he asked. She seemed somewhat energised about something.

‘Ah Eddie, I was really hoping to find you. I knew you lived around hereabouts because of the newspaper reports of the murder. There’s a really big favour I would like you to do for me.’

‘Of course, what is it, Miss Taylor, how can I help?’

‘I’m afraid I might have given your friend Inspector Hunter a little bit of a run around for my own amusement this morning. I have to leave this evening and I’m afraid he is not going to be very pleased with me when he finds out about something I did earlier. There’s no real harm done, nothing permanent anyway, just a wounded woman’s practical joke on a rather nasty man I know. But I wonder if you could give him this letter tomorrow all the same, so he’s got the real story, but not before tomorrow. I’m flying this evening, I’ll be back in a month’s time and I’ll make my peace with him then. And when I return, perhaps you would all join me in London for a performance I’m giving.’

‘Of course I’ll give him this, but it all sounds very mysterious. As for the concert we’d love to do that, Alice was so disappointed she missed your singing last night,’ said Eddie. ‘But I wonder in that case if you might also be around on October the 9
^th
, there is a big favour you could do for me as well.’

‘Yes I’ll be back in England for a couple of weeks with the concert program,’ she said, checking her calendar on her Blackberry. ‘And yes, remarkably I’m free that evening at the moment, although I have a matinee in London that afternoon.’

While they had been talking the sky had grown ominously dark. The storm that had been threatening all day had arrived. There was a sudden clap of thunder. Carrie called to Eddie in a concerned voice from across the road. Almost immediately the skies opened and there was a torrential downpour. Eddie grabbed Pearl and led her quickly across the road. Izzie, Penn and Carrie were already running towards the entrance door to Sherridge House. Within a few seconds they were soaked, but quickly reached the entrance to the nursing home. They all gathered in the hall while Izzie went off to find some towels. When she returned she handed them out and then said to Pearl, ‘Miss Taylor, I’m told you are a singer?’

‘Yes I am indeed, my dear.’

‘I wonder if you could sing a couple of songs for our old ladies while you are sheltering, I am sure we can offer you a cup of tea and a scone in return. They would so love that.’

‘Of course, I’d be very glad to,’ Pearl said but then looked at her watch. ‘Although I must be gone by 5pm, I have a plane to catch and the taxi will be waiting for me at my hotel at 6pm.’

‘That’s fine; just a few minutes will be more than enough.’

‘And I’ll need to get you home too, Carrie,’ added Eddie. ‘It’s school tomorrow, and you need to pack your bags and get a good night’s sleep.’

*

Later on that afternoon, after the storm had subsided, the assassin passed from the garden onto the back veranda of Hawthorne House. Someone had made this all too easy for him. The doors to the garden were unlocked and he passed easily through the heavy curtains into the living room. He removed his shoes to avoid leaving prints on the carpet. The room was in relative darkness, but he could see the reclined form of his intended victim stretched out on a chaise longue. There was no movement and he assumed that the man was fast asleep after a heavy Sunday lunch. He did not hesitate to grab this ready-made opportunity. The Browning was not exactly a silent weapon, but it did the job. He then placed it carefully in the dead man’s hands. As he did so, he noticed and inspected a scrap of paper lying under the day bed. There were strange characters written all over it. He screwed it up and put it in the victim’s pocket.

‘Whatever Nariman told you will remain between you and me now, Mr Troyte,’ he said coldly. He called the number that had been dialling him persistently all afternoon on his cell phone.

‘Thank God you called,’ Sir William said, ‘Apparently Rohit has got a gun, what if he comes after me?’

‘Correction, Sir William. He had a gun and now that gun is the primary evidence in the passing of our mysterious and now quiet American friend, Mr Arthur Troyte.’

‘The American’s dead?’

‘There’s a nice elegance to that don’t you think, Sir William?’

‘My God! Another one? What about Rohit, he can still make trouble for us, surely.’

‘I don’t think we need to worry too much about Rohit again,’ replied Khand as he moved to press ‘end call’ on the phone. ‘He’ll have quite a bit of explaining of his own to do.’

*

The housekeeper, when she got the call from Hugh was in two minds whether she should leave her family and go straight round to the villa. The weather had turned nasty, and she was cooking Sunday dinner. The reaction of her husband when she said she would have to go out and leave them to make their own dinner was enough to make her change her mind. ‘OK. He’s got my number, I’m sure it can wait till morning,’ she said. ‘It serves him right if he had a hard time this morning, the old letch.’

*

At home at last on Sunday evening, Hunter put on one of his favourite CDs – of course, given all that was on his mind, it was natural for him to play Pearl Taylor’s latest release. He had been re-running in his mind all the evidence they had gathered so far, but he knew there was something missing, something that didn’t quite fit. Maybe Troyte would provide the clue they needed in the morning. He wondered whether he should go round himself that evening but it was likely to be his one night off for a while and he didn’t want to undermine Penny’s decision. He had been looking at the coded messages again, trying to see if he could make anything fit. Pearl Taylor had been enigmatic but the one link to her in the word ‘Toposcope’ had been too tenuous to take any further action that afternoon. Somehow he felt she had the upper hand with him on this. She was certainly a very smart lady. He poured himself a glass of brandy and put his feet up on the ottoman. His bachelor pad was spartan but tidy, his books, his music, a few choice pieces of furniture, chosen for their design integrity rather than comfort. ‘Form follows function’ was his mantra, although he would also agree with the sentiment of William Morris when he said,
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful
.

Hunter had begun to doze off when he suddenly woke with a start. He looked at the photograph on the CD of Pearl in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House.

‘Of course, Pearl Harbor,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before? Seven digits, it works exactly.’ He looked up at the nineteenth century engraving of the British Camp on the Malvern Hills on the wall and had another brainwave. He rang Penny immediately.

*

‘Read me that header to the message we got at lunchtime again,’ he asked.

‘WSW. Don’t take clues from Toposcope hounds, blessings and Glory to God!’ I replied.

‘God, I’m stupid, I thought WSW was an initial of some sort. Have you got that iPad of yours? From the beacon, which towns would you hit if you went west southwest would you say, Penny?’ he asked. It took me a minute to look up the map function.

‘Alcester, Worcester, Malvern…’ I replied.

‘Yes of course you do, Malvern, how stupid I am. “Nimrod confused”’, oh how stupid of me, yes that’s clever, so very clever. I think we may need a little bit more work on this, Penny. Think back to when we met Miss Taylor in the hotel, did you happen to write down exactly that cryptic clue about Nimrod she gave us?’

On the other end of the line, I opened my notepad again and read: ‘Don’t be confused, my mighty Nimrod, it’s in G-minor after all.’

Hunter groaned. ‘Which of course also refers to me given my name is Hunter – Nimrod the mighty hunter –
confused
. OK so “confused” in a cryptic clue would normally signify an anagram. What’s Nimrod an anagram of?’ he asked. I started to scribble on my pad.

‘Mindor, Romind, D-minor?’ I answered.

‘She said “G-minor after all”. Think. What does she mean?’ he replied. I could imagine him beating his brow with his hand. ‘What else did she say?’

‘But as a rule you should always keep the major key in sight.’

He gave out a gasp of discovery. ‘Yes, if I remember right, Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ variation is in the key of G-minor not D-minor, so that works. But she also made a little joke about your name didn’t she – bright Penny? And if I take that first, the letter ‘d’ is the old money symbol for a penny and D-major would therefore be the major key. What’s the significance of D-major to Elgar?’

‘The key of one of his famous pieces?’ I guessed.

‘Maybe, but I have another idea, what would you see on an old penny?’

‘The Queen’s head?’

‘And on the tails side?’

‘I don’t know, a portcullis isn’t it?’

‘No, I mean on an old penny.’

‘Britannia?’

‘Yes, Britannia, that’s right.’

‘Britannia or ‘Rule Britannia’?’ I added in triumph.

‘Yes but that’s by Thomas Arne not Elgar. Oh but of course, well done Penny. Beethoven’s ‘Variations on Rule Britannia’ are in D-major. Many people believe that’s the secret theme that runs through Elgar’s Variations. So we’ve got ‘Nimrod’ in G-minor and ‘Rule Britannia’ in D-major. What happens if you write out the scale of G-minor from ‘Nimrod’ and the scale of D-major from ‘Rule Britannia’ side by side?’

‘That would be G A Bb C D Eb F and D E F# G A B C#,’ I said. Scales were one thing I’d had lots of practice at over the years. I wrote out the two scales alongside each other.

‘Bravo, so if you transpose all the G-minor notes that appear in your transcription with the corresponding D-major notes in the scale in the emails, what happens?’ We were beginning to see how Pearl’s mind worked. I worked away at the paper for a minute or two and then shouted out in triumph.

‘‘LIAR THIEF COWARD ADULTERER’.’

‘Bullseye!’ he replied in triumph. ‘Now we’re in business, but what on earth is she up to? We’d better go and talk to her again.’

‘But she’s already left.’

‘What?’

‘She was leaving for London this evening, don’t you remember?’

‘Damn, OK first thing in the morning we need to get on to her.’

Based on Wikipedia,
Randolph Turpin

When the housekeeper found Arthur Troyte sprawled dead on the daybed early on Monday morning, the blood that had dribbled from the bullet wound in his head had already dried into a sticky brown patch like a halo around his brow. An old-fashioned Browning pistol lay on the floor just out of reach of his fingers.

*

When we arrived at the scene twenty minutes later, we noticed at once the gold ring with similar markings to the one that Nariman had been wearing. The forensics team arrived shortly afterwards and their preliminary examination revealed no other signs of a wound than the gunshot to the head.

Hunter turned to the shocked housekeeper and asked, ‘When precisely did you last see Mr Troyte alive?’

‘I left him with his lunch on Saturday – he was very tired after the journey,’ she replied. ‘I had fully stocked the larder for him for the weekend but he said that he would probably be dining out that evening and away on Sunday at the convention. He was due to be speaking yesterday and he said he would see me bright and early this morning.’ Her voice was nervous and still trembling from the shock of her unpleasant find. I knew she was clearly hiding something.

‘And what happened last night?’ I asked.

‘How do you mean?’

‘You were supposed to go round and check up on him last night; you got a call from Hugh Powell?’ I said to the housekeeper, who looked at me guiltily, knowing that I had caught her out.

‘I had something I had to take care of at home, he had my number, and he only needed to call,’ she replied defensively.

‘Looks like that might have been difficult in the circumstances,’ I chided with my most ironic voice. Of course what she didn’t know was that I was feeling even worse than her about this given that I had not insisted on seeing Troyte the previous afternoon.

‘OK Penny, that’s enough. We all make mistakes, don’t we? What do you make of the bullet wound, Alice?’ asked Hunter.

‘Point blank range, I’d be very surprised if this isn’t the weapon, but forensics will test it as soon as they can,’ she said.

‘Seems like a classic suicide, even though there’s no note,’ Sergeant Jones chipped in.

‘Indeed, sergeant, but we also know from Mr Baxter that a Browning like this was stolen by Rohit Dhawan on Saturday evening, so we certainly can’t discount foul play. Let me see the victim’s hand a second,’ said Hunter.

With Jones’s help, Alice turned him on his back.

‘No sign of any damage to the web,’ Hunter said, inspecting the skin between Troyte’s forefinger and thumb. ‘That’s not conclusive but this pistol has a tendency to ‘bite’ the web of the shooter’s hand, between the thumb and forefinger. You’d expect to see a mark if it was a suicide.’

‘But if it’s not a suicide then it must be murder and Rohit’s in the frame?’ I asked, trying to get back into the action.

‘Or an accident, we do have to keep an open mind, Penny. But equally, if you were planning to kill yourself, would you really choose a gun with such a poor reputation for reliability? I suppose it could be a coincidence but this single-action Browning Hi-Power is a very unusual handgun in the UK. On the other hand, it’s unlikely to be a hit; a criminal gang would tend to prefer semi-automatics for a hit.’

‘I’ve just found this screwed up in his pocket,’ said Alice. She gave him a glove and then passed him a ball of white paper marked with the now familiar dancing men.

‘Wow,’ said Hunter. ‘I didn’t expect that. Let’s see what this one says; why don’t you have a go, Penny?’ At last I was useful again.

He spread out the piece of paper and I brought out the earlier copy that we had made of the longer message with the quotation inscribed on the Toposcope. I got out my pencil and began to transcribe the letters corresponding to the dancing figures into my notebook.

‘It’s meaningless again, Sir. But then again this code is different to the other one, look: they are all holding flags, not just the men at the end of each word.’

‘Of course, that’s very well spotted. Maybe for this one we just need to use some simple semaphore then.’

I got out my iPad again and substituted the letters for semaphore characters read off the screen. My work quickly revealed a new but altogether more chilling message.

‘TROYTE PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD.’

‘I think suicide is beginning to look much less likely, don’t you?’ asked Hunter.

‘And it certainly doesn’t look like an accident now,’ I replied.

‘Yes, it looks as though we have another murder on our hands. But the nature of the message and the code is perplexing – we need to get Rohit in and track down Pearl.’

‘Inspector, one more thing,’ Alice said as we turned to go. ‘We haven’t finished our report yet, but the victim from Saturday – Mr Nariman – the indication is that he was dying already of mercury poisoning.’

‘Really, could it have been something in his diet, fish, sushi, maybe?’ asked the inspector.

‘Unlikely. The concentrations were far too high for that unless he ate nothing else. Evidence so far suggests he was being poisoned.’

*

In the control room at the Woodbine Studio, Eddie was in the middle of mixing a track for a local indie band on the Audient Asp8024. Absentmindedly, he reached down into his sports bag for his lunch and instead pulled out a brown paper package. It was the envelope that Pearl had given him the night before to give to DI Hunter. He had forgotten to drop it off at the police station as Pearl had requested. He opened it slightly and pulled out a sheet of paper.

He called Hunter immediately on his mobile to tell him about the letter.

*

Filming had resumed and the square had recovered its theatrical ‘normality’ after the disturbing events of the weekend. Jack was talking to Penn who was dressed in a towelling gown. They had been debating how Penn should leap so as to fake the fall from the balcony of the second floor window. They would need to cut to the stunt man for the real shot, but Penn needed to give them the start of the scene.

Across the square, Izzie was watching somewhat anxiously but proudly from the windows of the top floor of Sherridge House. The other nurses were looking on as well, all eagerly waiting for the action to begin as Penn removed his robe.

*

When we reached the Holly Hotel, we found that our female American friend, who had occupied Room 23 that weekend, had indeed checked out the previous evening, but she hadn’t left any forwarding address as she had promised to. We hurried up the stairs with the concierge in tow. He was complaining loudly about the intrusion and the lack of a warrant. I snapped at him to be quiet.

‘Get this door open quickly!’ ordered Hunter when we reached the room. He seemed genuinely angry, a tone in his voice that I had not heard before. We knew we had both made mistakes here in not following up with Mr Troyte the previous evening. The concierge unlocked the door as quickly as he could, steeled by the directive tone of Hunter’s commands.

We entered the room and Hunter ran straight over to the closet safe that he had seen Pearl put the package away in on his previous visit to the room.

I studied the keypad. ‘It’s locked with a combination,’ I said, and then turned to the concierge who shrugged his shoulders.

‘We’d have to get the locksmith in – we don’t have codes to open the safes ourselves, it’s company policy.’

Hunter studied the safe for a few seconds more and then said out of nowhere, ‘Try 12, 7, 19, 41,’ I tried this combination and was surprised to hear the electronic beep as the safe door opened.

The small question of how he knew the combination was left hanging as I opened the door and removed a collection of papers from the safe and a larger package. There was a signed copy of Pearl Taylor’s promotional photograph with the message,
My dearest Gus, xxx
, there was also an airline ticket stub to Sydney, New South Wales and a flyer for a concert the next month in London at the Elgar Room,
An evening with Pearl Taylor, please join me, P xxx
, which I handed to Hunter with a wry smile.

I opened the larger package. There were a number of flash drives and computer disks as well as papers and photographs inside. At first, I had to turn my eyes away in disgust as I inspected the images that I pulled out one by one from the package but then quickly realised that I recognised both Troyte and the other man in the printed photographs.
Isn’t this Bas?
I thought,
Eddie’s friend? How could that be?

I was soon back working my magic machine. ‘Flight BA15 left on time at 21.15pm last night, do you want me to check with the airline that she got on, Sir?’

‘Yes, but I suspect Miss Taylor is well on her way to Sydney by now. Can you just summarise the timeline for me, Penny?’ Before I did so Hunter dismissed the concierge and warned him not to say anything about what he had just seen to anybody. I checked my notes.

‘Well we saw her here at around 2pm,’ I began. ‘She’d been somewhere that morning and returned just after lunch. The curator at Compton Verney says Troyte arrived around 10am to give his lecture but did not leave there until around 4pm, as he was feeling unwell. Hugh was there visiting Claudia Baxter and dropped him off back in Leamington about 4.30pm. So that’s still enough time for Pearl to meet him when he got back, kill him here and then get to Heathrow to catch a 9.15pm plane.’

‘That’s true, but Eddie told me earlier that she was also with him and Carrie singing at the nursing home from 4 till 5pm and that she was due to catch a taxi to London at 6pm.’ I frowned, I was a little annoyed that Eddie had chosen to tell this to Hunter and not me.

‘But it’s still just about enough time.’

‘All the same, I’m pretty sure that Miss Taylor is not our murderer. Given all the clues she’s left for us and your account of what the curator said went on at the conference yesterday, I rather suspect that she has already had her revenge for whatever Troyte did to her.’

‘What about the photos? Maybe she was planning to blackmail him.’

‘A good idea but even that’s not a very likely scenario for murder, unless something went wrong. I can’t imagine she needs the money either.’

‘Well, whatever happened, she has certainly been wasting our time during a very serious investigation.’

‘True, but I don’t think we can drag her back to the UK just for that.’

‘Ok, Sir, what do you want me to do next?’ I said in frustration. I knew my boss was a fan of Miss Taylor’s but this had begun to feel like he was getting dangerously close to protecting her for personal reasons. Hunter must have noticed this tone in my voice as his next statement was clearly designed to get me back on side.

‘I’m sorry; forgive my funny little ways. The thing that’s confusing me is that I can’t see any connection between the Troyte and Nariman murders, have you got any thoughts on that from your research to date?’

‘Well obviously they knew each other from the past.’

‘Yes there could be something significant there, but again, it hardly gives us a motive for murder. What else, Penny, what’s the connection, what are we missing? Might it be about something that happened, not about the man himself?’

‘Well, as you said yesterday, the phone lines were cut and the sniper shot that killed Nariman made that killing look like a hit or professional assassination, but Troyte’s death is completely different. It looks more like a domestic than a professional job.’

‘I agree, they could be completely separate incidents but we also need to consider who would have wanted them both killed. Nariman I could understand, given his business interests, we just need to work out who wanted to kill him enough, but this guy is just a mildly successful Midwest architect on a personal trip to Europe as far as we know. I just don’t get any possible motivation yet for the Troyte murder.’

‘Maybe someone thought he knew something about Nariman’s death, something that they needed to shut him up about.’

‘Possible, but it seems unlikely given that he had hadn’t even arrived in Leamington when Nariman was killed.’

‘Perhaps he knew something about why Nariman was going to be assassinated.’

‘Yes I think that’s more promising. We do really need to find out exactly what Nariman knew or did that would have caused someone to want to get rid of him.’

‘OK, I’ll get on to it again straight away, but I’m still confused about Miss Taylor. Do you want me to get the Sydney police to question her or not?’

‘No, we know where she is, and an international artist like her has fixed appointments for months to come. She hasn’t exactly been covering her tracks. For now, it looks to me like we should just work out what our next steps should be here. Although I’m intrigued to know how she knew that Troyte would be here this weekend, but let’s think about that more before we create an international incident.’

‘OK and I’m sure you know I’m dying to ask you this. How on earth did you know the combination to the safe?’ I asked, stroking his ego a little more. He laughed, but looked distinctly pleased to be asked.

‘Let’s say it was an informed guess – ‘a day that will live in infamy’. That’s the expression Miss Taylor used with me when I asked about the origin of her name, and it was on the note she left Eddie – it was originally said by Roosevelt to describe Pearl Harbor.’

‘Pearl Harbor?’

‘It was attacked by surprise by the Japanese fleet on December 7, Nineteen-Forty-One.’

‘So, 12, 7, 19, 41, that’s very clever.’ I said, realising that he had even got the American date system the right way round. He was truly a genius. I reminded myself that that was why I still wanted to work for him, despite all his foibles and predilection for unsuitable women.

*

In the autopsy room, Alice removed Troyte’s clothes and then rolled the body on to its side. She noticed and then pointed to a freshly tattooed scar that had been carved into the perineum below Troyte’ buttocks – three Greek letters –
ΑΖΩ
. She got on to the phone straight away to Hunter, who put the call on his speakerphone.