Dead of Night, page 17
part #7 of D.I. Tom Mariner Series
‘Those are big windows,’ said Mariner.
‘I’m sorry, it’s the best I can do.’
Mariner had already seen the two soiled cloths, spread out on a bench on the far side of the room. ‘Anything you can tell us about the cloth?’ asked Mariner.
‘Ah, our Turin shrouds.’ Croghan walked them over to the bench. ‘They look like your common or garden bed sheets,’ he said. ‘More or less identical, they’re made of heavy duty pure cotton, the kind that is commonly used where linen has to be frequently laundered.’
‘Like a hotel?’ asked Mariner.
‘That would be about right,’ said Croghan. ‘Most domestic stuff these days is much lighter, polycotton or percale. We’ll have more when it’s had a full analysis.’ Reaching over, he lifted the edge of one sheet where there was a clean rectangular step in the fabric. ‘You can see here that a chunk has also been cut out of it, as though there was originally some kind of laundry mark,’ he indicated. ‘It’s the same for both of them, and again it would fit the idea of a hotel.’ Before they left, Croghan came out to the viewing suite with a small plastic bag containing one of the necklaces. ‘Again, identical,’ he said. ‘You might want to keep this one back for tomorrow morning.’
‘What’s happening tomorrow morning?’ asked Jesson.
‘Councillor and Mrs Clifton are coming in to make a formal identification,’ said Mariner.
‘What about Rosa?’
‘If we can’t get hold of any of her family from London we’ll have to ask the teacher, Sam McBride, to come in.’
NINETEEN
Chelsey Skoyles herself came to the door of the house on Winchester Drive. She looked sleepy and her hair was tangled, as if she had just got out of bed, although Charlie could hear a TV playing nearby. Pudgy and slightly overweight with dyed blonde hair and a number of piercings, Chelsey wore too-tight tracksuit bottoms and a short T-shirt. Squinting at Glover, she absently scratched at the inch or so of white belly visible between the two.
Charlie identified himself. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions about what happened to you at the Belvedere last year,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The assault,’ said Charlie. ‘I want to talk to you about it. Can I come in?’
‘I suppose.’ The door open, she slouched back into the house, leaving Charlie to follow. He found her slumped back in front of the TV in an untidy living room, the air stale from unopened windows, watching what looked like a child’s cartoon show. Sitting down, Charlie found himself momentarily distracted by the garish colour and sounds. ‘Can we turn the TV off for a bit?’ he asked.
Without looking at him she picked up the remote and turned off the TV. ‘What did you want, then?’
‘I just wanted you to tell me about the night you were attacked,’ Charlie repeated, suspecting that Chelsey was what Helen would have called a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
‘I told that other bloke, ages ago,’ Chelsey said, puzzled.
‘I know, but it would help if you could tell me too,’ said Glover, as if he was addressing a five-year-old. ‘In case we missed something, or there’s anything new you’ve remembered.’
Chelsey sighed with the effort of it. ‘We was out on Broad Street, me and Laura and Stacey, and I’d had a skinful. Stace went off with this bloke and I don’t know what happened to Laura but I ended up on my own. I was starving so I went and got a McDonalds from the all-night one by the library, then I couldn’t get a taxi, so I went down to the station. There’s always loads there.’ She seemed to lose her thread.
‘So what happened?’ Charlie prompted.
‘I was taking a shortcut down this alleyway, and I got shoved in the back. This bloke just came out of nowhere. He’d got hold of my arms really tight and dragged me in by these big bins and pushed me against the fence. I banged my head.’ She touched her scalp. ‘He had his hands all over me and up my skirt, so I screamed. He told me to shut up, but he was trying to hold me down and get his trousers undone, so he couldn’t do much about it. Then this door opened right by us and these two men came out. He just let me go and legged it. One of the men went after him, but he couldn’t catch him. I was just sat on the floor, crying. I tried to get away too, because I was scared but one of the men said they’d called the police so I’d be all right.’
‘That was the American man, and the hotel porter?’
She nodded. ‘They took me in the hotel and got me a cup of tea and we waited ’til the police came. They were nice to me.’
‘You said this man who attacked you came out of nowhere and pushed you from behind. This is really important, Chelsey. Where do you think he came from?’
‘Dunno. All of a sudden he was just there.’
‘Do you think he could have come from the hotel?’
She thought about that for a while, before shrugging. ‘I suppose so.’
While they were talking, a door slammed, shaking the building, and a middle-aged woman appeared, weighed down with supermarket carrier bags. Seeing Charlie, her eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
He got up to show her his warrant card ‘I’m DS Cha—’
‘Police? What the fuck are you doing in my house?’
‘It’s all right, Mrs Skoyles,’ Charlie said, trying to placate her. ‘I just came to ask—’
‘Ask her what? What do you want with her?’
‘I was asking her about the attack last—’
‘It’s a bit late for that! You’ve got no fucking right barging in here like this.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Chelsey, get up to your room. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She gets upset. She’s only just getting over it. And your lot weren’t fucking interested. Not when it happened.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean get out of my house now. We don’t want you here. You should have done your job properly in the first place. Go on, get out. Now!’
Glover had no option but to retreat. But the episode left him feeling slightly mystified. Hostility towards the police was common enough, and Charlie had experienced it often, but here it seemed misplaced, to say the least. Chelsey hadn’t seemed the least bit upset to be talking to him, and he would have expected the family to welcome any further investigation of the incident. Perhaps when Mrs Skoyles had calmed down … Meanwhile there were other lines of enquiry he could follow so he started his car and returned to Granville Lane.
After the post-mortems, Jesson and Mariner stopped off at one of those ubiquitous American-style coffee shops in the hospital entrance to try and purge the smells that lingered in their nostrils. Sipping her cappuccino, Jesson smacked her lips and grimaced. ‘I can still taste those chemicals.’
‘Operant conditioning,’ said Mariner. He was watching, out of the window, the people coming and going. ‘So if P is our killer, the necklaces may have been only put on the women shortly before, or after, their deaths. Both women had contact with him, so he must have picked them up somewhere. The most obvious place is in or around the Belvedere. Rosa worked there and Grace probably walked past it on a regular basis. For all we know she may have been inside too.’
‘We should check with her friends,’ said Jesson. ‘And colleagues from Symphony Hall.’
‘So,’ said Mariner. ‘Our man picks them up, takes them somewhere where they are undressed and then washed clean. Each body is then wrapped in a sheet and transported out to Pepper Wood, where he carries them some distance before digging a shallow grave for each and burying them. The clothes are laundered and ironed, the shoes are polished, then they’re sent to us. So, this person has access to somewhere private where he can do whatever it is he does with them, strip and bathe them, launder their clothes, then wrap them and move them. Could you do all that in a hotel without being noticed?’
‘You might get away with it for a few hours, perhaps even overnight.’
‘But this is all pointing to the women being held for some time, possibly days.’
‘I suppose that might be possible if you were on the staff,’ said Jesson. ‘You’d have access to anywhere – bathrooms, laundry and linen store. And keys to the rooms. A strategically placed “do not disturb” or “closed for maintenance” sign would help.’
‘But only for a limited time and even then it would be a huge risk,’ Mariner pointed out. ‘And what about when you’re ready to move them?’
‘There must be a trade entrance to the hotel at the back. In the dead of night it may be possible to move around unnoticed, and, as we know, the right kind of vehicle can easily blend in.’
‘Like a dark-coloured van, you mean?’
They had finished their drinks and started making their way back to the car park. ‘We should look at the staff and guest lists for the hotel,’ Mariner said, as they walked. ‘You’d better call Charlie and let him know where we’re going. Where is he, anyway?’
But wherever Glover was, he wasn’t answering his phone, so Vicky left a message.
Having been ejected from the Skoyles home, Charlie was back at Granville Lane. According to the incident report, the Belvedere’s night porter didn’t speak very good English and as he had called the police first, he had only arrived on the scene after the assailant had run off. So Charlie was putting through a long-distance call to Larry and Gaynor Hausknecht at their home in Philadelphia. The five-hour time difference meant that in the US it was just coming up to 9 a.m. Larry Hausknecht, when he came on the line, was only too happy to try and help. ‘To be honest, we have been expecting that someone would have gotten in touch with us before now,’ he said. ‘I told the officer at the time that I’d be happy to help in any way I can, as soon as the guy was caught. Is that why you’re calling? You’ve got him?’
‘We’re not quite there yet,’ said Glover. ‘Mainly as there hasn’t been much to go on … I mean, I understand that it was dark and you didn’t get a good look at him—’
‘Sure, it was dark,’ Hausknecht interrupted. ‘But I got a pretty good look at the bastard. I can picture him right now. I gave a detailed description to the police officer who came to the hotel that night.’
Charlie looked at the notes in front of him: sole witness unable to provide adequate description due to conditions. ‘Would you mind just running through it again,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ said Hausknecht. ‘He was about my height, maybe five-nine or five-ten, lean, with short, dark hair and a real short beard, like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He was wearing a suit and tie. The tie was shiny, some sort of metallic effect. He was kind of dishevelled, I guess because of what he was trying to do, but apart from that he looked like a respectable type of guy. I ran after him, but he was gone pretty fast, so he must have been athletic, you know.’
Hausknecht was right. It was a pretty good description. Glover didn’t like to think about why it wasn’t recorded in the file.
‘Mr Hausknecht, if I can arrange a satellite link, would you be prepared to help us put together an e-fit of this man?’
‘Sure. And how is the girl, Chelsey? My wife and I were worried about her. She was pretty clearly intoxicated, and if I’m honest the officer who came out seemed more concerned with that than what had happened to her.’
‘She’s fine,’ said Charlie. ‘I spoke to her today and she’s …’ Charlie hesitated. ‘She’s being well supported by her family,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m glad to hear that.’
Leaving the car on double-yellow lines outside the Belvedere, Mariner dispatched Jesson to obtain guest lists for the nights that Grace and Rosa went missing and the night of the alleged attack. This time they would take a more assertive approach.
Meanwhile he walked back down the road and round to the back of the building to investigate the rear entrance. A narrow passageway ran along the back of the buildings and below the spidery fire escapes of the hotel was an open trade entrance, with waste skips lined up against one fence. Along the opposite side of the yard, a crude canopy had been erected over a shallow ramp that went up to the double door into the back of the hotel. As Mariner stood there, the nearest of the two doors opened and a young man in chef’s whites came out to deposit a bulging rubbish bag into one of the bins.
When he’d gone back inside, Mariner went up three concrete steps and tried the second door. It opened easily, taking him into a carpeted corridor, which he followed along past toilets marked pretentiously ‘Dames’ and ‘Hommes’ and found himself at the back of the hotel lobby. As he walked past the lifts, as if sensing his presence, one of them pinged and the doors slid open. It was empty, so Mariner stepped inside for a second and scanned the control panel to try and get a sense of the size of the hotel. Six floors up, but also something else he hadn’t thought of. He pressed a button, the doors closed and he felt a judder as the lift began to move. Seconds later it delivered Mariner into the sodium-lit cavern of the underground car park, with spaces clearly designated for the businesses occupying the surrounding office blocks. In the section marked out for the Belvedere Hotel, there was a single vehicle: a green Ford Escort van with a discreet logo on the driver’s door.
Back up in the hotel, Mariner found Vicky Jesson in a corner of the bar, sitting in a leather tub chair, and studying a sheet of A4.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Mariner.
‘I met no resistance, if that’s what you mean,’ said Jesson, looking up momentarily. ‘Given how things have turned out, I think they’ve been expecting us to come back. This is the staff list and she’s gone to print off the rosters and the guest lists for the dates that we’re interested in.’
‘Anything?’
‘I’ve found one thing.’ As Mariner pulled up a chair beside her Vicky held out the list, the tip of her forefinger pointing out one particular name. ‘Our friend, Ricardo,’ she said. ‘His full name is Ricardo Ponti, with a P.’
‘Well, well,’ said Mariner. ‘Anyone else?’
‘A Narinder Patel, but that’s about it,’ said Jesson.
At that moment the manager appeared. She greeted Mariner with a nod. ‘These are the staff and guest lists for the dates that you have requested,’ she said, handing him the sheaf of papers.
Mariner thanked her. ‘We’d like to speak to Ricardo too,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ the manager said. ‘It is Ricardo’s day off today.’ She leaned over Jesson. ‘But here is his address,’ she said pointing to the list.
‘Thank you,’ said Mariner, getting to his feet. ‘I’d also like to take one of your sheets with us.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘A sheet?’ Although the discovery of the bodies had been made public, details of the find had not.
‘Yes, for the beds? One will do fine.’
She must have been curious, but no questions were asked and several minutes later she returned with a sheet zipped into a protective polythene pouch.
‘We’ll return it as soon as we can,’ said Mariner. Through the transparent plastic covering he’d already noted the red print of a laundry mark along one border. ‘Do you have your own laundry here?’
‘No, we use a laundry service.’
‘There’s something we hadn’t thought of,’ said Mariner, as they left the hotel. ‘Our washerwoman might actually be a washerwoman.’ On their way to the car Mariner told Jesson what he’d found below ground level.
‘So at the right moment it would be pretty easy to get someone, or something, into a vehicle without being seen,’ she said.
‘Tailor made,’ said Mariner. ‘The bad news is that the hotel’s security arrangements at the back of the building are crap, so in practice anyone could get in or out.’
Ricardo lived not far from the city centre, so it made sense for Mariner and Jesson to go directly there; a terraced house in a seventies development just off Sherlock Street. Inside, the compact house was meticulously clean. They had apparently arrived when Ricardo was in the shower and he came to the door wrapped in a thick robe. ‘I’d like to get dressed,’ he said.
‘That might have been a bad move,’ said Mariner, as he disappeared upstairs. ‘Gives him time to work out a story.’
‘He’s very keen on cleanliness,’ observed Jesson. ‘Isn’t that meant to be next to godliness?’
‘Perhaps we should have brought Charlie,’ said Mariner.
Ricardo joined them moments later in a lounge that was an extravaganza of leather and animal print.
‘You know that we’ve found Rosa?’ Mariner said.
He looked genuinely upset. ‘I do,’ he said, crossing himself. ‘I keep thinking of that poor little girl without her mamma.’
‘So you’ll understand that we need to ask a few more questions. When you left work on Saturday night, did you come straight home?’ Mariner asked him.
‘Not right away,’ said Ricardo. ‘I was meeting a friend in the Piccolo bar on Hurst Street.’
So definitely not straight home then, thought Mariner. ‘Will your friend be able to corroborate that?’ he asked.
Ricardo flushed. ‘I don’t know. I think maybe he was going out of town for a few days.’
‘Do you have contact details for him?’
His colour deepened further. ‘I think I might have mislaid them. The staff in the Piccolo can tell you I was there. I go in there pretty often after work.’
‘Tell me a bit more about this incident a few weeks ago,’ said Mariner. ‘Can you remember anything at all about this man?’
‘He was not a nice man. That I remember.’
‘Can you describe him to me?’
‘He was pretty tall and big, yes, with very round face and a little beard.’ He brought his thumb and forefinger together under his chin.
‘You said it was a works group. Do you know where they were from?’
‘Yeah, was one of those betting shops.’
‘Do you remember which one? William Hill? Coral? Sceptre?’
‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Ricardo. ‘Sceptre.’
‘Do you remember anything else about him or the incident that you think could be important?’ But Ricardo couldn’t help.
