Chelsea Mansions (38 page)

‘That’s strange, isn’t it? I believe your aunt owned a hotel here in Chelsea Mansions, Colonel.’

He waved his hand. ‘Toby, please. Yes, my father’s aunt, Great-Aunt Daphne, next door at number seven.’

‘So it’s possible that these people were staying at her hotel. Certainly Nancy would have remembered being here with her parents. That’s presumably why she was so eager to stay here. And yet, having come all this way, she didn’t mention it to you?’

‘That does seem strange,’ Toby agreed.

‘Would you still have your great-aunt’s hotel records, visitors’ books, that sort of thing?’

‘I’m afraid not. John had a poke around in our attic, but I don’t think he came up with anything like that.’

‘Would you have been here at that time, Toby? April 1956?’

He frowned in thought. ‘Shouldn’t think so. I was in the army by then.’

‘There was a visit by the Soviet leaders to London that April.’

‘Oh, I do remember that—B and K, Bulganin and Krushchev. The papers were full of it. I remember the
Daily Express
ran articles instructing readers on how to say “Hello, how are you?” and “Did you have a nice trip?” in Russian, in case they bumped into any of the official party in the street. But no, I’m sure I wasn’t in London then. I would have been up at Catterick.’

Brock wasn’t altogether convinced by the way he dismissed the idea, but it was hard to read Toby’s expression, behind those dark lenses. ‘Pity. I was hoping you might have been the photographer.’

‘Sorry, no. But look, this is ancient history. What’s its relevance?’

He said it with a sudden vehemence, and Brock sensed an undercurrent of impatience, even anger in the man. Money troubles, perhaps. The place looked as if it was on its last legs.

‘Why are you wasting your time with this?’ Toby was going on, his voice hardening. ‘You and I both know what lies at the heart of it all. You had the answer in your hands. Money is what this is all about, the gangster Moszynski’s money, and the sickness and corruption that flows from that.’

‘You didn’t like him, did you? I believe he tried to cheat you.’

‘I detested him.’ Toby sat up straighter in his chair, sticking out his chin defiantly, and Brock had a glimpse of what he would have been like in the army, twenty years before.

‘He was one of those men who have no history, no tradition. They are opportunists who exist only in the present, preying upon those around them and using their money to spread corruption. And at the heart of that corruption squats that poisonous toad, Hadden-Vane. You had him, Brock! You had him in your grip, and he slipped away, thanks to corruption!’

He reached for a folded newspaper and slapped it down on the table in front of Brock, who saw the picture of Hadden-Vane, beaming smugly at the camera, and the caption,
MP cleared
. The short article stated that Scotland Yard had confirmed that Sir Nigel Hadden-Vane was not considered a person of interest in the murders of Nancy Haynes and Mikhail Moszynski. An unnamed source claimed that investigations on British soil had now been concluded and that a request to send detectives to continue inquiries in Moscow and St Petersburg had been rejected by the Russian government.

‘You’ve been duped.’ Toby sank back into his chair. ‘Outflanked and outmanoeuvred. The toad’s too wily for you.’

And perhaps it was true, Brock thought, as he walked back through Belgravia and Victoria. Or perhaps it was just the paranoia of an old soldier who had been defeated by the brutal realities of civilian life.

The officer at the reception desk at Queen Anne’s Gate had been told to expect him, and immediately showed him up to his old office, where Superintendent Chivers offered him a coffee and a seat. Chivers seemed unabashed to be in occupation of Brock’s old room. It was just an office after all, but still it seemed rather eerie, with the old clutter of books and papers swept away and someone else at Dot’s desk outside, as if Brock were dead and returning as a ghost to see how the world was coping without him. Extremely well, seemed to be the answer.

‘Yes, just putting the final touches to the report,’ Chivers said. ‘Then it’s up to the politicians if they want to pursue it, which I doubt.’

‘So it was the Russians all the time?’

‘Yes, a rerun of the Litvinenko case, except that they varied their method to hide the fact. No exotic poisons this time. They hired a local sub-contractor, Peebles, to do the dirty work.’

‘How did they get onto him?’

‘Through Danny Yilmaz’s cousin, Barbaros Kaya. We can’t prove it, but we’re sure he’s had drug dealings with Russian mafia from the Caucasus. That seems to be the link. We think they were used by an FSB faction that wants to ingratiate itself in the Kremlin by bringing Moszynski’s money back to Russia.’

Brock wondered if Sean Ardagh had inspired this idea. ‘And will they do that?’

‘That depends on which side of the fence Vadim Kuzmin chooses to jump. He holds the reins now. We’ve had the fraud boys working on the accountant, Freddie Clarke, but he’s giving nothing away.’

‘And Nancy Haynes?’

‘Peebles mistook her for Marta Moszynski. They wanted rid of her too—apparently she still has some influence with Putin because of her dead husband, Gennady Moszynski.’

‘The MI5 theory,’ Brock said.

‘Yes.’ Chivers scowled at Brock, irked by his lack of enthusiasm. ‘You have a problem with that, Brock?’

Brock took the 1956 photograph out of his pocket and showed it to him. ‘This turned up. It’s Chelsea Mansions, and that’s a teenage Nancy Haynes and her parents. The other man is probably Gennady.’

‘What?’ Chivers peered at it. ‘You sure?’

‘Reasonably. Not so as it would stand up in court.’

‘Where did you get this?’

‘Nancy’s companion, Emerson Merckle, had a packet of her old photographs.’

‘Well . . . what am I supposed to make of it?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Chivers stared at it for a while, then pushed it aside and gave Brock a grim smile and shook his head. ‘Brock, you bugger, you always do this.’

‘Do what, Dick?’

‘Try to complicate things. You’re never satisfied with the simple answer. You’ve always got to look for a more complicated explanation, a more
interesting
and original explanation. Well, you’re wrong. Remember Occam’s razor, Brock—the simplest of two theories is to be preferred.’

Brock hadn’t seen Chivers so worked up. He seemed to have touched a nerve.

‘My report is about to go to Sharpe,’ Chivers went on. ‘Don’t muddy the waters, please.’

‘Fair enough.’ Brock put the photograph back in his pocket and got to his feet. ‘Thanks for the update, Dick.’

Chivers showed him to the door. ‘Any time, Brock. You’re looking well, by the way. Still on sick leave?’

‘Another week, the doctor says.’

‘Best not to rush things. Not sure what they’re going to do with this place. Someone said they were thinking of selling it. Shame if they did. Close to HQ but conveniently out of sight. I’ve become quite attached to it.’

Feeling like a displaced person peddling a worthless trinket, Brock decided to give the photo one last try. He took the tube across the river to the Elephant and Castle and walked down to Amelia Street, where SERIS, the Specialist Evidence Recovery and Imaging Services unit, was based, and with them Morris Munns. Morris, whose myopic gaze through thick-lensed glasses seemed so at odds with his ability to conjure hidden information from crime scenes, grabbed him in a hug.

‘We thought we’d lost you,’ he cried. ‘The Marburg Pimpernel. The lads ran a book on your survival. I lost a packet.’

‘You betted against me?’ Brock said, shocked.

‘It’s called hedging,’ Morris chuckled. ‘Come on, you can buy me lunch while you tell me about this private job.’

Over a Thai chicken salad Brock showed Morris the photograph. He peered at it, turned it over, sniffed it.

‘Over fifty years old? So what am I meant to find?’

‘The reason why this picture killed two people. No, I honestly don’t know. Anything you can tell me about it. For instance there’s a distinctive lapel badge on that bloke at the back. We think he may be Russian, the other three American, the background Cunningham Place in Chelsea. We don’t know who took the picture. We believe the date is on or around the twenty-sixth of April, 1956.’

‘Okay. I suppose you’ll say this is urgent, only I’ve got a backlog of weeks.’

‘Your other customers don’t come back from the dead to buy you lunch, Morris.’

After they parted Brock rang Kathy. He told her about Chivers’ report and then, as he was about to ring off, she mentioned that John Greenslade was flying back from America that night, and could the three of them meet up for dinner the next evening? He wasn’t wildly enthusiastic, but he sensed her eagerness and agreed.

When he got home he felt edgy and unable to settle. Later, after grilling a fish fillet for his supper, he sat in the window bay that projected out over the lane, watching the trains pass by in the twilit shadows of the cutting down below. He had a novel on his knee, but was unable to concentrate on it. Too many characters, he thought, none of whom he cared about, and too clever by half. Which was what Chivers would say about him. Quick and clean, was Chivers. Get the job done. Occam’s razor.

THIRTY-THREE

M
orris had rung Brock in the middle of the following morning, arranging to meet him at a Latin American deli in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, the first covered shopping centre in Europe back in 1965, and subsequently voted London’s ugliest building, now awaiting demolition. It had a gloomy subterranean feel to it which depressed Brock’s spirits, but Morris seemed perversely cheerful, sitting with a large bag of groceries by his side. Brock ordered a coffee and joined him.

‘Can’t stop long,’ Morris said. ‘But I needed to stock up for our samba party tonight.’

Brock raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Morris took an envelope out of the carrier bag, extracted the photograph and laid it down on the table in front of them.

‘It’s printed on a Kodak Velox paper that was available from the mid-fifties into the sixties, consistent with your date. If the April twenty-six date is correct, the length and angle of shadows indicate the picture was taken at around four in the afternoon, this being Chelsea Mansions on the north side of Cunningham Place, right?’

Brock nodded, and Morris took some enlargements from the envelope.

‘The lapel badge you mentioned is a five-pointed star, approximately ten millimetres across, resembling the gold star which Heroes of the Soviet Union were entitled to wear. The man wearing it has an area of scar tissue on his left temple which appears to be caved in, as if from an industrial accident or war wound. You could get a pathologist’s opinion on that, and on some Soviet-era dental work he seems to be sporting.’ Morris pointed to a close-up of the man’s smiling mouth.

‘The other man, who you say is an American, appears to be rather well off and possibly involved in international travel and business. He’s wearing a Rolex GMT Master wristwatch, the first watch to show two time zones at once, first released in 1954.

‘The woman at his side is also well heeled, dressed in what looks to be a Dior A-line costume. But her taste in jewellery seems a little unconventional and artistic. The younger woman is carrying a posy of flowers—a mixture of what looks like roses and some other type, like Michaelmas daisies. She’s also holding something else in her left hand . . .’ He produced an enlargement. ‘Maybe a cigarette or spectacle case. She’s much more informally dressed than the others, who look as if they’ve been to some sort of function.’