Ten Guilty Men (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 3) (9 page)

‘I do. The night she died we had an argument. It wasn’t a big argument. It was one of those small arguments that every couple has. We’d had a few to drink, and ended up arguing over nothing at all. One insult led to another and before I knew it, we’d dragged up every problem we’ve ever had. She gave me the rollicking of a lifetime, and went to her bedroom to sulk. I wish she hadn’t. I never saw her again.’

‘Do you think things might have turned out differently if you’d stayed?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I never will. Maybe whoever broke in would have left if they’d seen me first.’

‘I’m sure they would have!’ Meredith said. ‘You’re what, six foot three?’

‘Six four actually.’

‘You think it was a burglary gone wrong then?’ Meredith asked.

‘It wasn’t a burglary!’ Brianna cried out in a shrill voice. ‘Nobody broke in that night. When I left, she was alive – and he was still there!’ Brianna jabbed a finger towards Kal.

‘It wasn’t me. I left not long after you.’

‘Who was there then?’

‘Eli. Paddy. Gabby... And Lord Culloden,’ Kal spat.

‘
Him
? He’s not even really a Lord! The police said so,’ Brianna said.

Meredith looked gobsmacked. First the argument. Now an even more juicy rumour. Her ratings would be through the roof.

‘Who are we talking about?’ she asked.

‘Some friend of Eli’s who was at the party. He calls himself Lord Culloden, but apparently he’s been using a fake name all along.’

Behind camera number four, Simon Keller was waving furiously. The conversation was skirting the bounds of defamation, and the producer knew he couldn’t get away with cutting to pre-recorded trailers again so soon. Meredith spotted his frantic attempts to curtail things and took control quickly.

‘There we go, ladies and gentleman. A famous face that fell from grace. An argument with a lover, and an allegation of fraud. Let’s take a look back at the life and work of Ellis DeLange in this video montage of her greatest work.’

The camera cut away, and a video showing Eli’s photography began to play.

Chapter 13: Sources

Morton hit pause. They’d watched the
Wake Up Britain!
video three times in quick succession. He was in the Incident Room with his laptop hooked up to a projector so that the rest of his team could watch. Bleary-eyed officers sat around a large table drinking enough coffee to wake someone from a coma.

‘She’s got to be the one leaking details to the press,’ Ayala said. ‘She could certainly use the money.’

‘Unfortunately, our wonderful courts have seen fit to protect journalistic sources. I don’t think mere curiosity counts as an overriding public interest, so
The Impartial
will never admit it and it doesn’t prove anything other than she’s got fewer scruples than the Prime Minister,’ Morton said.

Ayala slouched in his seat. Shot down again.

Morton saw his disappointment, and decided that team morale was worth letting Ayala waste an hour or two. ‘But see if her bank will release her statements. They’ll probably say no, and we don’t have enough for Kieran to force them to comply, but it won’t hurt to ask.’ Morton referred to his pet prosecutor, Kieran O’Connor.

Ayala regained his enthusiasm almost instantly. ‘Will do! And what about this fight? He tells us it’s about money, then tells the world he can’t remember. What’s up with that?’

‘Not everything is a conspiracy. Perhaps he simply wanted to avoid tarring her memory. The dead cannot rebut accusations, so the living should refrain from making them. If he loved her, it doesn’t matter whether or not she spent his money.’

‘You’re buying the money bullshit? We found ten large in the safe!’

‘Which we have no reason to believe he had any knowledge of. Let’s assume he was telling the truth, just for a moment. He leaves when Culloden and Gabby burst into the kitchen where he’s drinking with Paddy Malone. At this point, our victim is upstairs fuming at her boyfriend. Again assuming no one else entered the house, what happens next?’

‘In that case, two options. Either Gabby and Malone leave together, and Culloden kills Ellis, or Culloden leaves and Ellis is murdered by both Gabby and Malone,’ Ayala ventured.

‘We’re assuming that they did stay together.’

‘CCTV proves it. At 02:17, they approached Richmond Station. On the tape it looked like they saw the shutters down over the ticket office and turned around. They then flagged a taxi down right in front of the station.’

Morton stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘They actually approached the ticket office? When did it shut?’

Ayala fell silent, and avoided eye contact. The other junior officers around the table did likewise, as if they collectively found a sudden interest in studying their nails.

After about a minute, Stuart Purcell, who was hovering near an evidence board near the back of the room and helping himself to the detectives’ coffee, spoke up: ‘Half past nine.’

Morton glanced up. ‘How’d you know that?’

Purcell held up his smartphone. ‘Google.’ He grinned.

‘Well then,’ Morton said. ‘If Detective McGoogle is correct then they’d have had no reason to approach the ticket office at all. It had been closed for hours.’

‘They could have been drunk. It certainly looks like she’s leaning on him on the tape,’ Ayala said.

‘They could have been pretending to be drunk. The CCTV camera is right above the ticket office plain as day.’

‘You think it was an attempt to set up their alibis?’

‘It seems awfully convenient that they flagged down a taxi right in front of a camera.’

‘Boss, you’re being paranoid. There are cameras all over the place.’

‘If there are cameras everywhere, then find me one which shows what happened to our papier-mâché peer, because if Paddy and Gabby are innocent then our prime suspect is a nobody who has disappeared into the wind without a trace.’

Mayberry stood and raised his hand.

‘Yes, Detective Sergeant?’

‘Did our v-victim re-join the, the, the, dancy-music?’

‘The party?’

‘Yes.’

Morton paused. None of their witnesses had actually seen Ellis return to the party.

‘You think she was already dead before the end of the night, and that she was dumped in the pool later?’

‘Y-yes sir.’

‘That means any of the guests could have done it,’ Ayala said.

‘That seems unlikely. We had no sign of a struggle upstairs. Presumably someone checked on the birthday girl during the night. She had friends there, and she’d just argued with Kal. Do we really think he killed her, came down to play poker and then left without anyone noticing him doing clean-up in the room? I’m not buying it. One of our five is the killer. Unless someone here can prove otherwise?’

Purcell cleared his throat. Everyone turned expectantly, expecting another insight from Detective McGoogle. ‘The thermostat–’

‘Not the thermostat again. I’d rather you told me you had made it into her laptop.’

‘Yes, the thermostat. And no, I haven’t made it into the laptop. It’s a smart thermostat. To save energy, it turns off radiators when people have left the house. There isn’t much point heating empty rooms. This is a crude system. The more expensive ones control homes on a room-by-room or zone-by-zone basis. This one just turns the heating off when everyone leaves.’

‘So we calculate the drop in temperature between the time the party ended and when we got there?’ Ayala asked.

‘Don’t be daft, Detective. It would have hit ambient temperature fairly quickly, and we’d be basically guessing. We also know someone entered Edgecombe Lodge before we did.’

‘Who?’ Ayala demanded.

‘Whoever called you lot in. Someone found the body and unlocked the house.’

Presumably the same person that called in the anonymous tip.
‘So how does this thermostat help us, Stuart?’ Morton asked.

‘Simple. It logs when the system turns itself on or off. On the hour, every hour, it checks with a set of heat sensors to see if anything in the house is within two degrees either side of thirty-seven Celsius.’

Ayala looked on blankly.

‘People,’ Purcell explained flatly. ‘People have a body temp of around thirty-seven. If the sensors don’t detect heat signatures belonging to people, the system assumes the house is empty and turns off all the radiators.’

‘You said sensors plural. Does that mean we can track where in the house people were on each hour by where the heat signatures were?’ Morton asked.

‘Sadly, no. That data isn’t recorded. It’s a binary set-up. Either people are there or they’re not. It isn’t a surveillance system.’

‘It should be!’ Ayala said. ‘It would double up nicely. So when did the system turn off the heating?’

‘Two o’clock in the morning.’

‘Which means the house was empty by two,’ Morton said. ‘The station isn’t far from Edgecombe Lodge, so it’s consistent with when they left.’

‘Which doesn’t help at all, boss. Either it confirms they left just before two and were the last people in the house and thus have to be the killers, or it confirms someone else came in between them leaving and two o’clock.’

‘Or that someone else never left. What it does confirm is that by two o’clock in the morning, Ellis DeLange was dead.’

Chapter 14: Pied-à-Terre

Morton and Ayala’s next port of call was the final suspect that they had an address for. Gabriella Curzon lived in the centre of Fitzrovia. Her one-bedroom apartment was three floors above a flower shop in a pretty old redbrick building.

‘Nice building,’ Ayala commented as the pair ascended towards Gabriella’s front door. ‘Shame about the noise though.’

A constant hum of traffic went by below which hadn’t subsided by the time they reached the top floor. The door of Number One Eastcastle Place was open by the time they reached it. Morton knocked on the door anyway. They entered a small hallway with another open door at the end of it. Through the doorway, Morton could see a sofa upon which a woman was sitting. She beckoned them in with a slender finger. They followed the hallway into a huge living area lit with floor-to-ceiling windows through which bright sunlight beamed.

‘Miss Curzon, I presume.’

Gabriella, like Ellis, sported dyed-blonde hair. But unlike Ellis, she bore no tattoos. Where Ellis looked every bit of her thirty years and then some, Gabriella appeared to be almost effortlessly youthful with high cheekbones and a warm complexion. She had a smartphone in her hand and was busy tapping away at the screen.

‘Gentlemen,’ she greeted them without rising from the sofa. ‘Welcome to my home. Do have a seat. Would you care for tea? The pot on the table is camomile, but if you would like something else then I shall fetch it for you.’

Morton sat down, glad to have the harsh sunlight behind him rather than blinding him. He shifted until comfortable then produced his notebook and a pen. Ayala did likewise.

‘No thank you, Miss Curzon. Tell me about your relationship with Ellis DeLange.’

Without so much as putting down her mobile, Gabriella answered without looking up: ‘She was my best friend. We’ve known each other forever. I became a model when I was seventeen–’

‘How old are you now?’

‘A lady never tells. Just kidding, I’m twenty-four. As I was saying, I had a scholarship to a boarding school when I was sixteen. Back then, Eli was the ‘it-girl’ of the fashion world and I was lucky enough that she came to speak to our six-form about the challenges of fame. I was picked to be photographed as part of a demonstration she did. We were all amazed at how good a photograph from a digital camera could be, but Ellis was such a sweetie. The moment she saw how my picture came out, she positively squealed with delight. She passed it on to a magazine. They didn’t want the photo, but they loved me. A few weeks later I dropped out of formal schooling, came down to London to crash on Eli’s sofa and never looked back.’

‘What sort of modelling did you do?’

‘I modelled clothes mostly. I did a few artsy shoots including a few with Ellis but everything I ever did was tasteful. Some of the girls I knew back then ended up doing less-than-savoury work. It was very competitive, and none of us ever made very much.’

‘And what do you do now?’

‘I still model, mostly catalogue shoots.’ She hit a few buttons on her phone and brought up an image of her dressed to the nines in a studio shoot. She flashed the phone at the detectives so they could see for themselves. ‘But I’m also studying. I won’t be pretty forever.’

‘Did you ever work with Lord Culloden?’

She recoiled slightly at the mention of Lord Culloden. ‘Oh yes. He’s a manager for a catalogue company. Alex often hires both Eli and me. Well, he did anyway.’

‘Alex? Is that his name?’

‘Alex Culloden. That was what he told me to call him in private.’

Something about her familiarity made Morton suspicious. None of their other suspects seemed to be on first-name terms with the mystery man.

‘How would shoots with him work?’

‘Oh, he almost never comes to the shoots, silly. I only ever see him socially. But he’d usually have someone call, and fly me out to wherever the shoot was. I go wherever designers need me: Paris, Milan, Sao Paulo, Berlin, wherever.’

‘New York?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘With Eli?’

She nodded. ‘It wasn’t always Eli. She’s been doing more for him lately than she used to. It’s funny how it goes. She used to be too busy for mere catalogue photos. Now I am.’

‘What are you studying?’

‘Law. At Birkbeck.’

‘That’s got to be convenient.’ Ayala said. It wasn’t untrue. Birkbeck’s campus was less than ten minutes away.

For the first time in the conversation she turned her attention away from her mobile and became animated. ‘Very! I never have to go too far for the library, I’ve got boutique shops and nightclubs within a hundred yards and–’

‘Tell me about the night of the party,’ Morton said in an attempt to wrangle the conversation back towards the investigation.

‘I got there at, like, eight. Eli was a great host. She passed out glasses of champagne, and we made the most of the garden as it was unseasonably warm. A few of us went in the pool.’