‘That’s the hotel, right?’ I asked, knowing full well it probably wasn’t.
‘Grosvenor Square,’ said Kittredge wearily – meaning the American Embassy.
I thanked him and hung up. CTC was responsible for guarding the embassy, including any secret back doors it might have. If Kittredge said Reynolds was inside then that’s probably where she was.
‘Sitting in front of a laptop watching us drive around,’ said Lesley.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I leave the tracker with you, then she’ll never suspect.’
Finding the senator was easy enough. I just called Guleed – knowing where the relatives are is part and parcel of the family liaison role. It comes in useful if they make that unfortunate, but all too common, transition from victim to suspect.
‘We’re at the house in Ladbroke Grove,’ said Guleed.
I left Lesley to baby-sit Kevin and call in the cavalry, and made the short drive in under ten minutes.
The senator was an ordinary-looking man in an expensive suit. He sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Jameson’s and a plastic half-pint glass in front of him.
‘Senator?’ I asked. ‘May I have a quick word?’
He looked up at me and gave me a grimace – I figured it was the closest he could get to a polite smile. There was whiskey on his breath.
‘Please, Detective, have a seat,’ he said.
I sat down opposite – he offered me a drink but I declined. He had a long face with a curious lack of expression, although I could see pain in the tension around his eyes. His brown hair was neatly cut into a conservative side parting, his teeth were white and even and his nails were neatly manicured. He looked
‘How can I help you?’ he asked.
I asked whether he, or anyone he knew, had purchased a kiln and associated equipment.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Is it important?’
‘I can’t say yet, sir,’ I said. ‘Did your son have access to an independent source of income – a trust fund perhaps?’
‘Yes,’ said the senator. ‘Several, in fact. But they’ve all been checked and nothing has been taken. Jimmy was always very self-sufficient.’
‘Did you have a lot of contact?’ I asked.
The senator poured a measure of whiskey into his plastic cup.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘The FBI seemed concerned that he might prove embarrassing – politically?’
‘Do you know what I like about the English?’ asked the senator.
‘The sense of humour?’ I asked.
He gave me a bleak smile to make sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.
‘You’re not a constituency,’ he said. ‘There’s no community leaders or lobbying group ready to crawl up my ass because somebody somewhere takes exception to a joke or just a slip of the tongue. If I was to, hypothetically speaking, call you a limey or a nigger – which one would cause you the most offence?’
‘Was he an embarrassment?’ I asked.
‘Do you know why you evaded that question?’ asked the senator.
Because I’m a professional, I thought. Because I spent a couple of years talking to morose drunks and belligerent shoplifters and people who just wanted someone to shout at because the world was unfair. And the trick of it is simply to keep asking the questions you need the answers for, until finally the sad little sods wind down.
Occasionally, you have to wrestle them to the floor and sit on them until they’re coherent, but I thought that was an unlikely contingency given who I was talking to.
‘In what way would he have been embarrassing?’ I asked.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he said.
‘I’ll tell you what, Senator,’ I said. ‘You tell me about your son and I’ll answer.’
‘I asked first,’ he said. ‘You answer my question and I’ll tell you about my son.’
‘If you call me a nigger you just sound like a racist American,’ I said. ‘And limey is a joke insult. You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly.’
The senator squinted at me for a long time and I wondered if I might have been too clever by half, but then he sighed and picked up his plastic cup.
‘He wasn’t an embarrassment – not to me,’ he said. ‘Although I think maybe he thought he was.’ He sipped his whiskey, I noticed, savouring it on his tongue before he swallowed. He put the glass down – rationing himself – I recognised the behaviour from my dad. ‘He liked being here in London, I can tell you that. He said that the city went on for ever. “All the way down” he said.’
His eyes unfocused, just for a moment, and I realised that the senator was phenomenally drunk.
‘So he was in contact with you?’
‘I’d arrange a phone call once a week,’ said the senator. ‘He’d call me every other month or so. Once your kids are out of high school that’s pretty much the best you can hope for.’
‘When did you last speak to him?’
‘Last week,’ said the senator. His hand twitched towards the whiskey but he stopped himself. ‘I wanted to know if he was coming back for the holidays.’
‘And was he?’
‘Nope,’ said the senator. ‘He said he’d found something, he was excited and the next time he saw me he was going to blow my mind.’
The older coppers always make it very clear that it’s just not good practice to get too involved with your victims. A murder inquiry can last weeks, months or even years and ultimately the victims don’t want you to be sympathetic. They want you to be competent – that’s what you owe them.
But still someone had stabbed James in the back and left his father flailing around in grief and incomprehension. I decided that I didn’t approve of that at all.
I asked some more questions relating to his son’s art work, but it was clear that the senator had been indulgent rather than interested. Guleed, who’d been watching me from the other side of the kitchen, managed to convey, by expression alone, the fact that she’d already asked all the routine questions and unless I had anything new I should shut up now and leave the poor bastard alone.
I was walking back to the car when Lesley phoned me.
‘You know that house?’ she asked.
‘Which house?’
‘The one that Kevin Nolan delivered his greenery to.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘The one where he picked up all the crockery,’ said Lesley. ‘The very crockery that we have just found several metric tons of?’
‘The house off the Moscow Road,’ I said.
‘That house doesn’t exist,’ she said.
15
Bayswater
The British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across the Atlantic were busy blowing each other to pieces in a Civil War they embarked on the construction of the Metropolitan Line knowing only one thing for certain – there was no way they were going to be able to run steam trains through it.
Experience with the established long tunnels of the mainline railways had proven that, unless you liked
