The Art of Murder (33 page)

‘I take it you were robbed too?’

‘Oh yes. Phone, cards, a bit of cash.’

‘Well, sorry to be predictable but I’ll have to be the first to say you should have caught a cab.’

‘Oh, you’re way too slow. The doctor has already said it.’

‘So you’re free to go now?’

‘I am.’

‘Well, the least I can do is to put you in a cab.’

‘All right,’ she responded. ‘But only on condition you let me make you a coffee at my place.’

Pendragon looked at his watch. ‘Ah …’

‘No deal then.’

Gemma Locke’s fourteenth-floor apartment was in an exclusive new block in Wapping. It was very modern, but softened by a female eye for comfort as well as practicality. Where many a successful thirty-something single man would have furnished the place with black leather and chrome, Gemma had gone for a more subtle, feminine palette of burnt umber, ivory and unpainted plaster. It worked well with the urban view through a massive window opening on to Docklands. Canary Wharf was just visible, and beyond that the long twisting coils of the grey Thames. Great black clouds hung low over the scene, threatening more snow.

‘I’m guessing you don’t work here,’ Pendragon said, surveying the beautiful space.

‘Er … no!’ Gemma replied. ‘I have a studio in Bermondsey. I like to keep home and work completely separate. Or else I’d always be working.’

Pendragon insisted he made the coffee while she lay on one of the large sofas in the main space. He found everything where he expected it and brought over a tray, placing it on a mother-of-pearl inlaid Indian coffee table. Gemma pulled herself up, bringing one hand to her bandaged head.

‘Hurting?’

‘Not as such,’ she replied. ‘They gave me something the doctor said would make a mugged elephant feel better. I’m not sure I appreciated the allusion.’

Pendragon laughed.

‘Do all coppers have such a good sense of humour?’ she asked with a faint upturning of the lips.

‘Some of them believe they do. My sergeant thinks he’s very funny.’

She nodded and took a sip of coffee. ‘Mmm … good.’

‘So, now that you have my full attention,’ Pendragon said. ‘Perhaps you’ll let me know some more about yourself. I Googled you.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘And you have an impressive website.’

‘Pretty much
de rigueur
these days.’

‘I imagine so. But they only scratch the surface.’

‘What do you want to know? Am I being questioned?’

Pendragon shook his head and smiled. ‘Strictly personal research,’ he said, and drank some coffee.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Gemma teased, eyeing him over her cup. ‘Oh, the interesting stuff is all on the website actually. My life only really started when I got to London as a twenty-one-year-old, fresh out of art college.’

‘You studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, I saw.’

‘Yes. Dad was a colonel in the British Army. We moved around a lot – Cyprus, Gibraltar, even a less than glamorous spell in Belfast. I was about fifteen when we moved to Germany. Dad’s regiment was stationed at Eberswalde, about thirty miles from Berlin. When I was seventeen, my father was offered a desk job and the family moved to Brussels. I stayed on in Berlin because I had just been given a place at BUA.’ Gemma looked serious. ‘Dad died a year ago, almost to the day.’

‘I’m sorry …’

‘No need to be. We were close when I was young, but we drifted apart. I’d hardly seen him during the two or three years before … maybe that makes it worse. Anyway …’ She drained her coffee cup and placed it on the tray.

‘So, your big break? That was …’

‘
Freeways and Blood
.’

‘I have to confess, I didn’t really … well, get it. But it was undoubtedly clever,’ Pendragon replied. In truth, he had not understood the piece at all. It was a rectangular box about two metres tall and a metre wide, divided laterally in two. On one side a video loop showed an aerial night-time view of a ten-lane freeway somewhere in America, the headlights of hundreds of cars running in ordered streams. Down the length of the right half of the box ran another continuous video loop of a magnified image of blood, showing the individual corpuscles bobbing against each other in a seemingly random flow.

‘Oh, dear! Damned by faint praise.’

Pendragon held his hands up. ‘No, not at all. I’m afraid
any shortcoming is mine. My tastes are a bit old-fashioned, I suppose.’

‘Oh, please! Don’t say the word “Monet”.’

Pendragon frowned. ‘Give me some credit!’

Gemma produced a small laugh, and winced.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said, standing up. ‘What am I doing, grilling you on art just after you get out of A and E?’

‘It’s okay …’ Gemma began, and then yawned. ‘Oops!’ She started to get up, reached halfway and swayed. Pendragon caught her and helped her back to the sofa.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, and let her eyes close. ‘Guess the doc was right about the elephant …’

‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said.

Pendragon was walking through the lobby of Gemma Locke’s apartment block when the call came through from Turner. The traffic was gridlocked on Commercial Road, which meant it took over half an hour for him to reach the hospital. At reception, the same woman Pendragon had seen earlier that day directed him to the Critical Care Wing on the third floor. Turner met him at the swing doors into the ward.

The hospital administrators had gone into overdrive. The other four patients in Intensive Care had been moved to another building, and a dozen others in neighbouring rooms had been shifted to any available space beyond the doors into the ward. This included two elderly men who were forced to share a tiny room usually reserved for doctors needing a quick nap between shifts.

‘Who else is here?’ Pendragon asked, noticing Sergeant Thatcher and Inspector Towers. The two policemen were questioning a small group of hospital staff huddled in the corridor close to a workstation.

‘Dr Jones has been delayed. But Colette Newman and an assistant are in the ICU.’

‘And what’s that smell?

‘I dunno, sir. I noticed it as soon as we got here. It’s like burned rubber.’

‘Yes, and something else … I can’t think what. Anyway, where’s the ICU?’

‘There.’ Turner pointed to a door on the left towards the far end of the corridor.

The single bed containing Gary Townsend’s body looked out of place alone in the room. Wires and leads hung from the wall at the other three bays. The machines still attached to Townsend stood mute. The monitor that had once recorded his shallow heartbeat now displayed a flat line. A plastic-suited forensics officer Pendragon did not recognise was dusting for prints along the rails and around the tubes on the far side of the bed. Dr Newman was crouching beside the bed, a test tube in one latex-gloved hand, a pair of tweezers in the other. She was wearing protective lab glasses and a paper mask over her mouth. Turning, she saw the two policemen approach, placed a stopper on the test tube, stood it in a rack inside a metal case on the floor beside the bed, and pulled the mask down to her chin.

‘Well, Inspector, the bodies are piling up.’

Pendragon looked at the scientist with a pained expression then took a couple of steps to the side of the bed and peered down at Townsend’s disfigured face. He let out a heavy sigh and turned back to Dr Newman. ‘Any preliminary findings?’

‘We’ve only been here ten minutes, but it looks like there’re a lot of prints around the place … some hair … skin flakes. But then, you’d expect all those, wouldn’t you?’

‘How quickly can you analyse everything? I’m sorry to seem so damn pushy, Doctor, it’s just …’

‘No need to apologise. It will be our top priority … don’t worry. Now, perhaps if you could …’

‘Right,’ Pendragon said awkwardly. He tapped Turner on the shoulder and pointed to the door.

Outside in the corridor, Towers was still talking to one of the nurses. The others had gone. Pendragon beckoned him over. ‘What have you got?’

‘Well, no one saw anything. Whoever got into the ICU set up a decoy.’

‘What?’

‘A homemade bomb. Feeble and crude, but enough to produce a bit of smoke and get people running around.’

‘That explains the stink,’ Turner said.

‘The ICU sister, Agnes Daniels, insists she and her deputy were only away from the room for a couple of minutes. She got back and heard the buzzer on Gary Townsend’s monitor going off. His heart had stopped. She immediately called a doc, but they couldn’t revive him. Pronounced dead at nine-twenty-four this morning. She only realised over an hour later that someone had tampered with the computer at her workstation. They’d turned off the personal bleeper that warns her remotely of any patient distress if she’s out of this room. She put two and two together, and immediately alerted Security. The call came through to the station about thirty-five minutes ago,’ he concluded, looking at his notebook.

Pendragon strode over to Towers. The nurse he had been interviewing was walking away. ‘Anything?’

‘She was out here in the corridor. Heard a small bang from over there,’ Towers pointed to a door a dozen feet away. It was ajar. Pendragon and Turner could just see inside. A forensics officer in a plastic suit was crouching down and prodding at something on the floor.

‘They panicked a bit,’ Towers went on. ‘You know, what with terrorists here, there and everywhere. But then, when they realised it was a toy bomb, they decided it was probably some bloody idiot kids who’d got into the hospital. Security here dealt with it. Didn’t bother reporting it to us.’

Pendragon was shaking his head. ‘Understandable, I suppose. No one wanted the paperwork. So who else was here at the time of the explosion?’

Towers quickly scanned his notes. ‘The Intensive Care sister, Agnes Daniels, and her deputy, Ungani Metubu, were in ICU. Two other nurses, Consuela Manito and … er … Ari Hullano, were out here at this desk.’ He pointed to the now empty workstation along the corridor. A junior doctor was passing through on his way to J Ward. A Dr Imhrim Atullah. And there was a specialist due in at nine. But they didn’t show.’

‘Did they turn up later?’

‘Not sure, sir.’

‘Well, check then, Inspector!’ Pendragon snapped, waving him away. ‘Get the ICU sister … Agnes Davies … now!’

‘It’s Daniels, guv,’ Turner said, and regretted it when Pendragon spun round on him.

‘Sir, may I make a suggestion?’ Sergeant Thatcher said, quickly defusing the situation. ‘How about I talk to the
staff in the main reception area downstairs? See if they spotted anything unusual this morning around nine.’

‘Yes, it’s worth a try, Sergeant. And while you’re about it, talk to any of the patients who were up and about or at least
compos mentis
around here this morning, to see if any of them saw anything out of the ordinary. And, you, Turner …’ Pendragon went on ‘… can get all the CCTV tapes from the hospital. There must be cameras in some of the corridors, and there’ll be plenty of them outside the building. Get the recordings back to the station and go through them, second by second, between nine and ten this morning.’

Pendragon turned and saw Towers approaching them. Beside him walked a tall, slender woman in dark blue uniform. Resting in the crook of her left arm was a clipboard. She could have been anywhere between forty and fifty-five, Pendragon decided. She had dark eyes, slightly sunken. She looked ill or else extremely tired.

‘Sister Daniels,’ Inspector Towers said.

The woman nodded brusquely to Pendragon. ‘I understand you wanted to know about the specialist.’ She had a deep, almost masculine voice and it sounded as tired as she looked.

‘Yes, please.’

‘He was due here at nine. Still hasn’t appeared,’ she said, a hint of contempt in her voice.

‘I see. Do you have a name?’

She glanced at the clipboard. ‘Yes, Dr Hickle. He was Gary Townsend’s specialist. But I imagine it’s pretty academic now anyway.’

Whitechapel, 6 October 1888

‘This bleedin’ sack just gets ’eavier and ’eavier,’ Eddie Morestone moaned. ‘And stop fucking wrigglin’ around, ya bastards!’ he snapped, hoisting the sack a few inches above the slurry running along the floor. At thirty-two, Eddie was already an old man. The life of a tosher was a hard one, but he had come from a desperate family. His father and two uncles had been mudlarks whose work had involved finding anything of value they could in the sewage-filled banks of the Thames. At times their job had required them to pull a bloated dead body on to a barge or the sand banks, and to strip the poor soul of anything the waters had not aleady claimed: gold teeth, rings, crucifixes … anything that would fetch a profit. Eddie had worked on the river for two years but he hated the water and when a friend had suggested they go into partnership together as toshers, trawling through the East End sewers for rats that could be sold for baiting dogs in the gambling dens, he’d jumped at the chance.

The friend, Jimmy Grafter, had died five years
ago, a victim of cholera – ‘the downside to the job’ Eddie would joke darkly to anyone who would talk to him; anyone that is who could bear his stink. After Jimmy was taken, Eddie got himself a new partner, Quick Tom, a kid of twelve at the time who still deserved his nickname. He was already carrying the partnership, and Eddie’s days down the sewers were numbered; they both knew it.

‘Tom, slow down a sec, will ya?’ he called into the darkness ahead.

‘I wanna get ’ome,’ the boy snapped back, keeping up the pace. He had his own sack of restless rodents to drag along. Then, out of pity, he stopped to let Eddie catch up. Sighing, he waited for the older man to slosh his way level, panting as he advanced. Tom was holding their only source of illumination, a small lamp poised just in front of his nose. It cast sinister shadows across his pox-scarred face.

‘Cheers, son,’ Eddie wheezed.

It was then that they heard the scraping sound.

‘’Ello,’ Tom said, a grin appearing through the filth coating his face. ‘Sounds like a big’un.’

‘It’s comin’ from over there.’ Eddie gave a brief nod towards a point further along the tunnel to their left.