MONOLITH (20 page)

Detective Inspector Robert Johnson murmured something under his breath, shaking his head and looking down from the window.

He looked down at the tarpaulin that covered the ground below him. Huge sheets of material hid the pavement and tarmac in all directions for a full fifty yards and were now surrounded by blue and white strips of tape that carried the legend; POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. Johnson had considered closing the whole of Hill Street but had decided against it considering how busy the thoroughfare became during the course of the day and besides, forensics had advised him that they had a good enough area to work in and that initial examination of the scene outside meant that no evidence was thought to be scattered beyond the fifty yard exclusion area anyway. As he looked more closely he could see several dark stains where the blood beneath had soaked through the material and he made a mental note to get some less absorbent covering put over the site until it was cleaned up. Any passers by might see the traces of destruction and it wasn’t pleasant. The aftermath of a murder never was.

Inside Adrian Murray’s office, where Johnson now stood, other men in overalls were moving about, examining objects, taking samples, bagging specimens. The usual circus that resulted from events of this kind, Johnson thought glancing around the room.

He himself had arrived at the scene an hour or more ago alerted to what had happened by a phone call.

The D.I had already been over the office and its approaches, allowing just his expert eye to take in details of the scene. He’d taken a more cursory look at the debris below then returned to the fourth floor where he now continued to gaze out of the window for a moment longer, seemingly oblivious to the sounds and movement around him.

When he turned back and glanced around the room he looked more closely at what lay before him.

The place was a ruin. There was no other word to describe it. The destruction that had been wrought inside was quite breathtaking. Furniture had been obliterated not just smashed.

It appeared that the damage had been systematic and that everything in the room had been destroyed with relish. Much of the carpet was spattered with blood and these pools and puddles had already been examined by the team of forensics men and verified as belonging to Adrian Murray, the man who had been killed the night before. Johnson had met him a couple of times before and wondered who he could have offended or crossed to incur this kind of fury. He was still pondering that fact when he glanced up and saw Detective Sergeant Powell making his way into the room. The DS paused and motioned to Johnson to join him out in the corridor and Johnson nodded and did as he was asked, weaving his way between the forensics men who were still busy collecting specimens.

‘The initial signs are that Murray was the only one in the building when he was attacked,’ Powell began as the two men walked slowly along the corridor towards the stairs that would take them down to street level. ‘There are no other prints in his office other than his and those of people who worked here, prints you’d expect to find.’

‘Nothing from the killer?’ Johnson murmured.

‘Not that we can find so far. Just this.’ Powell held up a small evidence bag which contained several large particles of a grey matter Johnson couldn’t identify at first. He took the bag from Powell and held it up to the light.

‘What is it?’ the D.I wanted to know.

‘Clay residue,’ Powell told him. ‘Same as we found at Brian Dunham’s house. There’s more of it in the lift and on the carpet leading to Murray’s office.’

‘Clay,’ Johnson murmured.

‘The same residue is all over the body too,’ Powell went on. ‘Well, what’s left of the body.’

The two men continued down the stairs and through the foyer of the building, finally emerging into the street where they turned a corner and headed towards the tarpaulin that had been spread out across the ground.

‘Let’s have another look,’ Johnson said and his companion lifted some of the tarpaulin to reveal a shape nestled beneath a piece of plastic sheeting.

He lifted that too and Johnson looked down at the body of Adrian Murray.

‘Fucking hell,’ he murmured, his eyes surveying the incredible damage that had been done to the body. ‘Whoever did this made sure, didn’t they?’

The two men stood gazing down at the corpse for a moment longer, each regarding it with a professional eye but also forced to suppress what was their own growing revulsion to what lay before them.

‘Forensics say that the head was almost pulled right off before he was pushed from his window,’ Powell said. ‘There’s only a couple of vertebrae and some muscle keeping it attached. And it was pulled off bodily. No sign of weapons. No knives, no axe. Nothing.’

‘So all the injuries he sustained were inflicted up there,’ Johnson said, glancing up at the office window four floors above. ‘Then he was thrown out into the street.’

Powell nodded.

‘If a body falls from a window, it drops straight down, like a stone, right?’ the DS went on. ‘Murray’s body is more than fifteen feet from the side of the building. Whoever killed him, picked him up and threw him from that window. What do you reckon he weighed, twelve, thirteen stone?’

‘About that?’ Powell concurred.

‘How strong does someone have to be to throw a thirteen stone man fifteen feet after physically almost pulling his head from his shoulders?’

The words hung on the air like a bad smell.

LONDON; 1933

A passer-by had seen the bodies and approached a policeman on the beat down by the Embankment.

Instructing the passer-by to remain on the steps leading down to the shore, the constable made his way slowly down towards the mud below, his heart beating a little quicker. If he was honest with himself he was hoping this was some kind of false alarm, he was due to finish his shift in less than an hour and the last thing he wanted was to be embroiled in something when he was meant to be heading home. The night shift was usually quiet and he was thankful for that. It had been again the previous night. All he’d had to deal with had been a couple of drunks and a family argument between a man and his wife which had been resolved purely by the use of common sense he thought, congratulating himself. Now the constable moved wearily towards the bottom of the stone steps hoping that his workload was not to be increased but also increasingly worried that it might be.

In the dull light that comes just before the dawn it was difficult to make out shapes at first but as the constable moved nearer, trying to avoid sinking up to his ankles in the sucking mud of the shore, he could see that there was indeed something just ahead of him that resembled a human body.

Or had done once.

As he moved closer, instructing the accompanying member of the public to keep back, he began to see more details as he squinted through the gloom and those details, he decided would have been better hidden by the night.

The constable felt his stomach contract and for a second he feared he might lose control completely and vomit such was the sight that met his horrified eyes. And he was a man well used to the destruction that could be wrought on a human body. He’d been in the Finchley Rifles during the last two years of the War, fifteen years earlier and during that time he thought he’d seen horrors he would never witness again.

What he saw before him now made him question that assumption.

The body consisted of a torso and legs. Both arms had been severed at the shoulder and the head also appeared to have been cut off. Only as the constable reached for his notebook with one shaking hand, peering closer to the destruction, did he realise that the head wasn’t missing. It had been pulverised to such an extent that all that remained atop the shoulders were portions of skull and tendrils of flesh. It looked as if something heavy had been used repeatedly not just to fracture and destroy the skull but actually to drive it downwards into the torso itself. He saw too that the arms, which he’d initially thought had been cut off, had actually been removed clumsily and not with an edged weapon as he’d assumed.

The tendrils of flesh, portions of muscles and sinews at the shoulders seemed to indicate that the arms had been torn off not cut off.

The constable blew out his cheeks, aware that he was sinking into the muddy shore not merely because it was wet with the water of the great river before him but also because blood had spread out around the corpse and was helping to make the terrain soggy. He could smell the coppery odour in the morning air. A smell he also recognised from his days in the army. He pushed his notebook back into his jacket, deciding that no amount of notes was going to help.

As he prepared to straighten up he realised that there was another dark shape lying two or three yards away, closer to the river’s edge.

Even without approaching it he knew that it was the remains of another body.

Close by was an arm, torn off at the elbow.

The third body had been eviscerated and the constable saw that thick coils of intestine were protruding through a rent in the torso that had been opened from groin to sternum. He could also see portions of shattered ribcage gleaming whitely within the gory mess.

The constable was sure of only one thing now. He needed help. He needed support.

With his teeth clamped firmly together he staggered backwards, intent only on reaching the nearest phone and calling for help.

He heard the passer-by shouting something to him but he merely blundered past and up the stairs, his head spinning and his stomach somersaulting.

As he reached the top of the stairs he saw another uniformed man approaching him and he stumbled towards the other constable, preparing to tell him too what he’d saw. As it was, he merely doubled up and retched until there was nothing left in his stomach.

‘If he finds out about this there will be trouble.’

The voice echoed around the inside of the hallway of the Penthouse suite of the Crystal Tower, the accent was East European, some of the words spoken falteringly but with a note of fear.

‘How could it happen?’

The other voice, also Eastern European, was deeper, befitting the size of the man who spoke the words.

‘How it happened isn’t important,’ the first voice said. ‘What matters is that no one ever finds out about it.’

The woman who spoke the words paced agitatedly back and forth, the sound of her high heels clicking on the marble floor.

‘Where the hell were you and your men?’ she snapped. ‘How did someone just walk into this place without being seen?’

‘You cannot blame us.’

‘Why not? You’re supposed to be in charge of Security here. Who else should I blame? Who do you think
he
would blame?’

The tall man pulled at his tie as if it were suddenly tightening around his neck. He swallowed and looked at the woman who was now standing facing him, hands planted on her hips.

‘We have a record of every person who came in and out of the building today,’ the tall man said. ‘We’ll find out who it was.’

‘For now we have to check the whole apartment,’ she said. ‘Find out if whoever got in went in any of the other rooms.’

‘And how will we know?’

‘Just check the other rooms, you fucking idiot,’ the woman snapped. ‘We’ll know.’

‘Don’t call me a fucking idiot,’ the man rasped. He took a menacing step towards her. ‘You said there was no need for
him
to know that anyone had ever been in here. You and I are the only ones who know. If we’re sensible it will stay like that.’

‘It had better stay like that,’ she intoned.

‘When does he arrive?’ the tall man asked.

‘Tonight at eleven, he changed his plans at the last minute.’

‘Why wasn’t I told?’

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘The car will pick him up from Heathrow and bring him straight here. It’s all been arranged.’

‘And who arranged it?’

‘I did.’

The tall man nodded slowly.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We have more than six hours before he arrives.’

‘We’d better start. We’re going to need that time.’

The towel was stained with blood.

Jess splashed her face with water once again and looked down at the material as she prepared to wipe more of the congealed fluid from her skin. It looked like rust on the towel, not the vivid bright red of fresh blood but an old and faded colour. Like a memory someone tries to retain but can’t. She shook her head, dismissive of her own clumsy metaphorical thinking, folded the towel and walked out of the small bathroom carrying it.

She found Hadley in the kitchen making tea.

‘I didn’t know where to put this,’ she said, holding up the towel.

‘Just chuck it on the side,’ he told her, nodding towards the nearest worktop.

‘This is a nice place, Alex,’ she said, glancing around. ‘I don’t know why you were moaning about it.’

‘It’s a fucking shoebox,’ he told her. ‘More than two people in here and it’s crowded. Not that there’s ever more than two people in here.’ He dropped a tea bag into the sink. ‘The people upstairs had a party the other week. Thirty fucking people in a place this size.’

‘That must have been fun for you.’

‘They told me they were having it. I went out that night so the noise didn’t disturb me. They were all right, a decent couple in their late thirties. Trouble is they moved out a few weeks ago and two young girls moved in. I don’t know what they do up there but the banging on the floor sometimes drives me fucking crazy. It’s the bastards
downstairs
who really piss me off though. Poles or something. Noisy bastards. It’s like they can’t just close doors they have to fucking slam them all the time and they’re at it all times of the day and night. Bastards. You hear everything through these walls and ceilings, they’re like cardboard.’ He took a teabag from his own mug and tossed it into the sink with the other.

‘You could ask them to watch the noise couldn’t you?’ Jess offered.

‘They just pull the “no speak English” shit when that happens,’ Hadley snapped.

‘Why don’t you move out?’ Jess asked, sipping her tea.

‘To where?’ he grunted. ‘I can hardly afford to live here.’

‘Is it as bad as that?’

‘It’s every bit as bad as that,’ he said, flatly.

Jess studied him for a moment and saw the look in his eyes. It was a mixture of sadness and anger. They were emotions Hadley knew only too well these days.

‘Anyway,’ he said wearily. ‘Talking about it isn’t going to make it better. Let’s do what we came back here to do shall we?’

She followed him into the second bedroom where he sat down at a computer. Jess perched on the corner of the small desk beside him and looked at the screen that was already flickering.

‘There isn’t going to be anything more on there about Voronov, the Crystal Tower or any other part of his life than we already know,’ Jess said, sipping her tea.

‘What about his background?’ Hadley asked.

‘What are you going to do? Look on Wikipedia?’ She chuckled.

‘What exactly do you know about him?’ Hadley wanted to know.

‘What I’ve told you before. About as much as everyone else knows about him.’

‘His family lived here in the 1930s, as you know. Here, in London.’

Jess looked at Hadley and then at the computer screen as he tapped one of the keys.

‘His grandfather moved here from Germany when the Jew baiting started,’ Jess said.

‘He lived in Prague before that,’ Hadley added. ‘His family were there for years.’

‘But I thought Voronov was Russian.’

‘Russian by Nationality. Jewish by Religion.’ He glanced at the screen that was also now displaying a couple of photos and a map. ‘His grandfather moved here in 1931 but he only stayed for two years.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He left again. No one knows where he went. If he went back to Europe chances are he ended up in a fucking concentration camp eventually.’

‘What did he do while he was here?’

‘He had his own business. He was a watchmaker. He lived over the top of the shop from what I can gather. He seemed to be doing ok.’

‘So why did he leave?’

‘His shop was burned down,’ Hadley told her flatly. ‘Someone tried to kill him.’