uniforms had responded to a semi-hysterical call from a cleaning agency operative, and confirmed the existence of a body with associated suspicious circumstances.
The unseasonal rain beat down heavily as she drove over from Oakham, turning the road into a dangerous skid-rink. Then she had almost missed the turning off the A47. As it happened, that was the least of her navigational worries.
“Call him again,” she told Alison Weston. The probationary detective was sitting in the passenger seat beside her, squinting through the fogged-up wind screen trying to locate some landmark.
“No way. Uniform will crap themselves laughing at us if I ask for directions,” Alison complained. “It’s got to be here somewhere. There can’t be more than five buildings in the whole godforsaken village.”
Amanda let it go. Hailstones were falling with the rain now, their impacts making clacking sounds on the car’s bodywork. She braked at yet another T-junction.
Bisbrooke was woven together by a lace work of roads barely wide enough for a single vehicle. They all curved sharply, making her nervous about oncoming cars, and they were all sunk into earthen gullies topped with hedges of thick bamboo that had been planted to replace the long-dead privet and hawthorn of the previous century. With the rain and hail pummeling the wind screen, it was perilously close to driving blind. The only clue they were even in the village was the occasional glimpse of ancient stone cottages and brick bungalows huddled at the end of gravelled drives.
“You must be able to see the church,” she said. The address they had been given was in Church Lane.
Alison scanned the swaying tops of the bamboo shoots. “No.” She gave her cybofax an instruction, and it produced a satnav map with their location given as a small pink dot. “Okay, try that one, down there on the left.”
Amanda edged the car cautiously along the short stretch of road where Alison was pointing. The tarmac was reduced to a pair of tire tracks separated by a rich swathe of emerald moss.
“Finally!” The junction ahead had a small street sign for Church Lane; a white-painted iron rectangle almost overgrown by a flamboyant purple clematis. This road was even narrower. It led them past the village church, a squat building made from rust-colored stone that had long since been converted into accommodation units for refugee families.
The lane ran on past a big old farmhouse, and ended at a new building perched on the end of the village.
Church Vista Apartments. Its design was pure Californian-Italian, completely out of place in the heart of rural England. Five luxury apartments sharing a single long building with a stable block and multi-port garage forming a courtyard at the rear. Climbing roses planted along the walls hadn’t grown halfway up their trellises yet.
There was a tall security gate in the courtyard wall. Amanda held her police identity card up to the key, and it swung open for her. A police car and the cleaning agency van were parked on the cobbles beyond. Amanda drew up next to them. The rain was easing off.
They moved briskly over the cobbles to the door of apartment three. One of the uniforms was standing just inside, holding the heavy glass-and-wood door open. She didn’t have to flash her card at him, as Rutland’s police force was small enough for them all to know each other.
“Morning, Rex,” she said as she hurried into the small hallway. He nodded politely as she shook the water from her jacket. “What have we got?”
“Definitely a corpse.”
Alison slipped in and immediately blew her cheeks out. Her breath materialized in the air in front of her.
“God, it’s bloody freezing in here.”
“Air-conditioning’s on full,” Rex said. “I left it that way, I’m afraid. Scene-of-crime, and all that.”
“Good,” Amanda muttered, not meaning it. The chill air was blowing over her wet clothes, giving her goosebumps.
Rex led them into the apartment. It was open-plan downstairs, a single space with white walls and terra-cotta tile flooring, Mexican blackwood cabinets and shelving were lined up around the edges. There were pictures hanging on every wall; prints, chalk and charcoal sketches, oils, watercolors, silver-patina photographs. Most of them featured young female nudes. Three big plump cream-colored leather settees formed a conversation area in the middle, surrounding a Persian rug. A woman in the cleaning agency’s mauve tunic sat on one of the settees, looking shaken.
The front of the room was twice the height of the back. Wide wrought-iron stairs curved up to a balcony which ran the entire width, giving access to all the upstairs rooms. A sheer window wall in front of the balcony flooded the whole area with light.
The corpse lay at the foot of the stairs. A man in his mid-to-late twenties, wearing a pale gray dressing gown, his legs akimbo on the tiles, head twisted at a nasty angle. Some blood had dribbed from his nose.
It was dry and flaking now.
There were three air-conditioning grilles set in the edge of the balcony. One of them was right above the corpse, blowing a stream of the frosty air directly over him.
“He fell down the stairs?” Alison asked.
“Looks like it,” Rex said.
“So was it a fall, or a push?” Amanda wondered out loud.
“I had a quick look around upstairs,” Rex said. “No sign of any struggle. The main bed’s been used, but everything seems to be in place as far as I can tell.”
Amanda wrinkled her nose up. There was a faint smell in the air, unpleasant and familiar. “How long’s he been here?”
“Possibly a day,” Rex said.
Alison gestured at the window wall. “And nobody saw him?”
“One-way glass,” Amanda said. It had that slight give away gray tint. She stared through it, understanding why the apartments had been built here. The last of the rain clouds had drifted away, allowing the hot sun to shine down. It was a magnificent view out over the junction of two broad rolling grassland valleys. In the distance she could see an antique windmill, its wooden sail painted white. A long communal garden stretched out ahead of her, a paddock beyond that. There was a circular swimming pool twenty meters away, surrounded by a flagstone patio. Wooden-slat sun loungers were clustered around stripy parasols.
“All right,” she said wearily. “Let’s do the preliminary assessment.”
Alison opened her cybofax. “When was the body discovered?”
“Approximately 8:45 this morning,” Rex nodded toward the cleaning woman. “Helen?”
“That’s right,” the woman stammered. “I saw him-Mr. Tyler-as soon as I came in. I called the police right away.”
Amanda pursed her lips and knelt down beside the body. The handsome face had quite a few resonances for her. Byrne Tyler. She remembered him mainly fromMarina Days, a soap set amid Peterborough’s yachting fraternity-though 90 percent of it was shot in the studio with the all-action boating sequences cooked on a graphics mainframe. That had been five or six years ago; Byrne played a teenage hunk crewman. But he had left and gone onto star in action-thriller dramas and interactives.
Pretty bad ones if she remembered her tabloid gossip right. There would be media attention with this one.
She stood up. “Helen, was the door locked when you arrived?”
“Yes. And the alarm was on. I have the code, and my palm is one of the keys. Mr. Tyler was happy with that. He was a nice man. He always gave me a Christmas bonus.
“I’m sure he was lovely. Did you do all his cleaning?”
“Yes. Twice a week. Tuesday and Friday.”
“Which means he could have been here since Tuesday. She rubbed her arms, trying to generate some warmth. “Rex, go see if the air-conditioning was set like this or it’s glitched. Alison, look around for empty bottles, or anything else,” she said pointedly. It could so easily be an accident. Drunk, stoned, or even sober, a fall could happen. And God knows what a showbiz type like Tyler would take for amusement in the privacy of his secluded secure home.
Amanda went upstairs to check the main bedroom. The door was open, revealing a huge circular waterbed with a black silk sheet over the mattress: there was no top sheet. An equally large mirror was fixed to the ceiling above it. She shook her head in bemusement at the stereotyping. Exactly the kind of seduction chamber a list celebrity sex symbol was expected to have. She remembered most of his scenes inMarina Days involved him being stripped to
