The Hireling's Tale Read online

  Shapiro breathed heavily and hung on to his patience. Shock took people different ways: you couldn’t hold them responsible for the first thing they thought of in its aftermath. ‘Mr Kendall, your sales figures are not my prime concern. I have a dead girl to worry about. I have to find out why she died and who was involved. Until I get something concrete to go on, the only way I can do that is by speaking to everyone who could conceivably have been involved and start eliminating those who probably weren’t. I’m sorry if that’s going to knock the bottom out of the grommets market for a while, but I expect your cooperation.’

  Philip Kendall was getting control of himself already. He sucked in a deep breath and nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Of course we’ll cooperate any way we can. But I feel I should warn you, you may have trouble contacting some of the people who were here. It’s an international business, we have clients all around the world. Some of them have a rather - casual - attitude to their own law enforcement agencies, I’m not sure how quickly they’ll respond to enquiries from ours.’

  Shapiro knew what he was saying. He knew what it meant. He just felt he had to have Kendall say it before he could believe his bad luck. ‘You mean, they’ve already left the country?’

  ‘Not all of them,’ said Kendall hastily. ‘But yes, a lot. Some of them left after breakfast this morning; some of them left to catch flights last night.’ He brightened a little. ‘There are a few people left in the hotel. Would you like to talk to them?’

  ‘Yes: thank you.’ But if Shapiro was sure of nothing else, he was confident that whoever was responsible for this had fled the scene soon afterwards. ‘And could I ask you to separate the ones who’ve gone into two lists - those who went last night and those who had breakfast here this morning?’

  While Kendall and Coren were working out who left when, Shapiro addressed the stragglers in a small room off the lobby. There were less than a dozen of them. Three were catching later trains back to London, one was waiting for a train to Manchester. Four were British nationals and were making a leisurely start before driving home. One had slept in and missed his flight - Shapiro mentally ruled him out there and then - and two more wanted to round off their visit to Castlemere with a bit of sightseeing. Try as he might, Shapiro couldn’t imagine what they thought there was to see.

  ‘Some of you may already have heard,’ he said, ‘but for those who haven’t these are the facts. There was an incident here last night, in the hotel or one of the adjoining buildings, and a girl fell from the roof.’ He passed round the photograph, watching faces as he did. ‘Did anyone see her, either in the lobby or upstairs in the corridors? Did anyone hear a disturbance?’

  A small man with a Zapata moustache gave a Latin shrug. ‘There was a great deal of disturbance here last night, Superintendent,’ he said, half apologetic, half amused. ‘Unfortunately, we were responsible for most of it. I think you could have fired a cannon upstairs and no one would have heard.’

  ‘I see. Mr—?’

  ‘Eduardo da Costa,’ the man introduced himself with a small bow. ‘I am here representing the government of Brazil.’

  ‘Mr da Costa. So there was a bit of a party down here?’

  The Brazilian nodded. ‘Tb put it mildly.’

  ‘And I assume that meant girls? Girls, I mean, rather than female delegates?’

  He shrugged again. ‘I was dancing with women who seemed to know very little about engineering.’

  ‘What about this girl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A woman who knew a great deal about engineering raised her voice. ‘Grace Atwood, Superintendent. Are you going to want us to stay here indefinitely? I’d like to phone home, tell them not to expect me if you do.’

  The vague mental picture which Shapiro had of the culprit in this case matched in no particular the squat, middle-aged woman with the round intelligent face who addressed him. But bitter experience had taught him to assume very little. ‘Where is home, Mrs Atwood?’

  ‘Ipswich. I’m not saying it’ll be difficult for me to stay, Superintendent, just that I don’t want my husband worrying where I’ve got to.’

  Shapiro nodded. ‘I’d like a brief statement from each of you at this point. Those of you who live in Britain will then be free to return home. Those from overseas, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to stay a little longer. Hopefully we’ll have this sorted out in a day or two.’ And indeed that was what he hoped, even if he didn’t expect it. ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but you’ll appreciate this is a murder investigation: while there’s any chance you may have seen something that could help I need you to be available.’

  There was a certain amount of muttering, a few startled looks, but nobody raised any objection. Da Costa said, ‘In that case I’ll go back to my room and unpack again.’

  ‘I appreciate your cooperation,’ said Shapiro, almost without irony.

  He knew, of course, that these eleven people were the least likely of the entire conference to be involved. If one of Bespoke Engineering’s customers had thrown a girl off the roof, it was a pound to a penny that he checked out immediately afterwards and was on the first flight going anywhere without an extradition treaty. That was why he didn’t take too much trouble hiding the body. He just needed two or three hours to escape the jurisdiction of British courts. He couldn’t leave her in his room: as soon as he checked out a maid would go in to change the linen. Dropping her in the canal would serve his purpose: even if she was spotted right away it would have taken time to establish where she’d come from and prevent anyone from leaving. That she went undiscovered for fourteen hours was a bonus.

  He went back to the manager’s office. ‘How’s that list of names and addresses coming? Mr Coren, I’ll need you to match them up with room numbers. Then I’ll get my people to check all the rooms that were occupied last night - not just for the conference, any others as well. If we’re lucky there’ll be bloodstains or clothing left behind to tell us who she was visiting.’

  ‘The maids have already cleared the rooms booked by Mr Kendall,’ said the manager. ‘They didn’t report anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘But they didn’t know then what we know now,’ said Shapiro grimly. ‘Believe me; you beat someone the way that girl was beaten, it takes more than a quick tidy-up to remove all the evidence.’

  He used Mr Coren’s phone to call Superintendent Giles. ‘You heard about the girl on the boat?’ Castlemere’s senior police officer had. There was, in fact, very little that escaped his notice. ‘I’ve got forty hotel rooms, and after that maybe twenty flats, to search and right now there’s five of us to do it. Any chance of a bit of help?’

  Chapter Four

  Late Monday afternoon, just when Shapiro was convinced that whatever evidence there was would be found in the room vacated by the Korean delegate Kim Il Muk - so that even sending him a postcard asking ‘Did you murder someone in Castlemere? Tick box A for Yes, box B for No’ would strain Queen’s Street’s budget - signs of a bloody struggle were found in the unlikeliest of places.

  The major breakthrough in police detection of the twentieth century was the discovery of how much physical evidence was created by an act of violence, and how much of it could survive a rigorous clean-up and still be read if you turned the microscope up high enough. A spot of blood in the crevice between the wall and the skirting board would elude all but the most professional search but could contain enough information to jail someone for life.

  The maid who cleaned the room had noticed nothing amiss. But Detective Constable Dick Morgan saw what both she and the departing occupant had missed: that one of the roses on the wallpaper behind the headboard was a deeper, richer red than the others. He called the Scenes of Crime Officer, and when Sergeant Tripp looked closely he saw more spots of rusty pigment in places where they were even less obvious - on the underside of the window ledge, in the hinge of the bedside cabinet. When he look
ed very closely there were also traces of blood in the grain of the wallpaper around the bed. A damp rag had removed the surface spotting but left a residue in the tiny canyons of the texturing.

  ‘There must have been enough of it,’ said Tripp; and two things all Queen’s Street knew about SOCO, that he knew his blood and that he never exaggerated. He looked round the room. ‘She was probably on the bed when he was hitting her. No knife wounds on the body? - so he did the damage with his fists. Her nose or maybe her lip was pouring blood, and she was turning her head to try and avoid him. Going off what’s left, this whole wall must have been spattered.’

  Morgan shook his head in a kind of brooding wonder. Like Tripp he was a Fenman born and bred, not given to emotional outbursts. Inside he was seething. Someone had pinned this girl to the bed and pounded her face until it ran with blood. Why? - because that was how he got his kicks? Because he only enjoyed sex with women he’d first beaten senseless? Toms made their living fulfilling some pretty odd male fantasies, but they didn’t sign up for something like this. Which was why when he’d finished with her he killed her. By the time she knew what he was capable of, he had to.

  Morgan pulled himself together and called Superintendent Shapiro, and Shapiro opined that the discovery would probably earn Morgan a promotion. Since DC Morgan had spent the last ten years avoiding promotions - a canny, intelligent man who already had all the responsibility he sought - this was not what he wanted to hear.

  But Dick Morgan’s discomfort was soon forgotten when Mr Coren’s list put a name to the last occupant of room 411.

  ‘Can’t be,’ said Morgan with certainty.

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought so,’ agreed Donovan.

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ observed SOCO gravely.

  Room 411 had been occupied by Mrs Grace Atwood.

  A straw poll of everyone who knew her would have voted Mrs Atwood the last person in England to be involved in a suspicious death. Shapiro remembered her from his meeting with the remaining delegates: a sturdy, shrewd woman of about fifty with a regrettable penchant for floral chiffon. She’d left Castlemere after giving her statement, but she hadn’t gone far. Ipswich, wasn’t it?

  Philip Kendall confirmed that. He’d known her for years, they’d worked for the same firm once. Until this weekend he hadn’t seen her for a while, but he’d be astonished to learn she was involved in a murder. She surprised people quite enough by hiding behind that plain apple-cheeked face one of the keenest brains in the machine tool business. Surely to God she wasn’t also concealing a fondness for beating and murdering young prostitutes?

  But Shapiro had spent over thirty years learning to take nothing on trust. Not long after Mrs Atwood arrived back in Ipswich, Liz set off to follow her. It was clearly necessary to talk to her again; but she didn’t expect to return with the murder solved and the murderer in handcuffs.

  Mrs Atwood had hardly finished telling her husband and the two of her four children who were at home about the appalling events in the hotel in Castlemere when a Detective Inspector arrived on her doorstep with more, and yet more disturbing, news. They talked in the kitchen, alone.

  ‘We think we’ve established where the initial assault on the girl took place. Room 411.’

  Mrs Atwood blinked. That sounded familiar, but it took her several seconds to realize why. When she did her jaw dropped. ‘But - that isn’t possible.’

  ‘We have forensic evidence,’ Liz said quietly. ‘Laboratory analysis will give us positive confirmation, but I can’t think of any other reason why there would be traces of blood on your walls. Can you?’

  Innocent or guilty, Mrs Atwood wasn’t the type to babble. When she got her voice back she said, quite firmly, ‘Nothing happened during my occupancy of room 411 that would leave traces of blood anywhere.’

  ‘Nevertheless, that’s what we found.’

  ‘Could it pre-date the conference?’

  Liz was impressed. Not many people could think that clearly in a state of shock. ‘That’s something we’ll check, of course. But it would be the hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?’

  Grace Atwood thought so too. But she was no closer to understanding. ‘So what are you saying? That someone let himself into my room in order to meet a prostitute there? That they used my bed?’ She shook that thought out of her head, but not before it had left its impression in her eyes. ‘And then he killed her?’

  ‘Probably not in the room,’ said Liz. She thought that might matter to Mrs Atwood. ‘But he certainly gave her a bloody nose there - he cleaned up afterwards but we found traces that he missed. They must have been there half an hour or more, probably between nine and eleven. I take it you weren’t in the room at that time?’

  Mrs Atwood shook her head. ‘I don’t believe I’d have missed all that going on. No, we had drinks in the bar about eight-thirty, then I went for a bite of supper with’ - the pause as she thought through her next words was brief but significant - ‘one of the other delegates. I got back to the room a little before midnight. There was nothing obviously wrong at that point - it never occurred to me that someone had been there.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to know,’ said Liz. ‘He tried very hard to leave it as he found it. Who was it you had supper with?’

  There was a sharp, machine-tool-specialist glint in her eye. ‘It was only supper with an old friend. But I’d just as soon my husband didn’t know, and I imagine my companion would feel the same way about his wife.’

  Liz had no problem with that. ‘There’s no reason they should know. But you’re one another’s alibis: it’s important that we know who you were with during the relevant period.’

  After another moment’s thought Mrs Atwood nodded. ‘Of course. As I say, it was perfectly innocent. But we were catching up on one another’s gossip, and it got late, and … Well. It was Philip Kendall, the sales director at Bespoke. He organized the conference. We used to work together, we had a lot of news to swap, and it was so noisy in the bar he suggested we go out for some supper. And there was no reason not to, except that I try not to do things I’ll have difficulty explaining to my husband afterwards. I work in a man’s world, Inspector Graham, there are myriad opportunities for misunderstandings. I usually try to avoid them.’

  ‘I know about that,’ Liz assured her. ‘It’s no different in police work. As I say, this should be the end of it. I now know where both you and Mr Kendall were at the critical time. That narrows the list of suspects down’ - to a mere sixty or so; assuming it was someone staying in the hotel and not just hijacking the room for an hour. ‘Thank you for your help. Unless the timing becomes an issue, I don’t expect I’ll need to trouble you again. The best thing you can do is forget about it.’

  ‘Forget that I slept last night in a bed where a prostitute entertained a client and he beat her so badly that he needed to clean the blood up afterwards?’ Mrs Atwood’s voice soared incredulously.

  Liz gave a rueful shrug. ‘I said it would be the best thing. I didn’t say it would be easy.’

  *

  At close of play on the first day Shapiro still didn’t know who the dead girl was. He knew roughly when she died, but he didn’t know when she entered The Barbican Hotel or who she went there to meet. He accepted Liz’s judgement that the registered occupant of the room knew nothing about the incident, but if she wasn’t involved then the field was wide open again. A hotel room is not like a bank vault, it doesn’t take much in the way of specialist skills to get inside. Despite the best efforts of Mr Coren’s staff to run a safe and efficient establishment, anyone with a little nerve and ingenuity could have walked in off the street, found an empty room and called a prostitute to meet him there.

  Except that she wasn’t a local prostitute, and if he’d picked a room at random - even if he’d assumed the conference group would be in the bar until late - he couldn’t waste time waiting for her to travel here. She must have been nearby. Maybe they arrived together. But if they’d been staying here someo
ne would have seen her, and no one did. Maybe no one saw him either. The invisible woman had been drugged, beaten and then murdered by the invisible man, and CID had somehow to bring in a prosecution. Thanks a bunch. Shapiro took his coat off the stand and went home.

  Chapter Five

  As soon as Tuesday’s sun was up Donovan took his dog for a walk. Even before he had the dog he’d enjoyed walking at quiet times of the day, late at night or soon after dawn. He wasn’t a sociable man, preferred his own company to that of people he cared nothing about, whose only topics of conversation were the weather and the government. He had a few close friends, almost no casual ones.

  Dawn and dusk suited Brian Boru as well. He was no more into small talk than Donovan was. Also, although he definitely wasn’t a pit bull terrier, he wasn’t the sort of dog you could walk in the park in the middle of the day. The ducks, and indeed the poodles, were just too damned tempting.

  They set off along the towpath and went as far as Cornmarket before heading back along Brick Lane. It was a clear morning, full of promise for the day, the pale early sunshine glinting off the water and illuminating a faint haze over the distant fields of The Levels.

  Halfway along Brick Lane someone fell into step behind them.

  Donovan broke his stride and looked back. It was a woman; more than that, it was someone he knew. The red satin blouson, the short skirt, lighter streaks running through the dark mass of hair: subtlety isn’t much use to a streetwalker. ‘Zara?’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t want people to know I’m talking to you.’

  He blinked. Being accosted by a prostitute wasn’t something he’d boast about either. ‘So … ?’