'Sorry, I don't…'
'His mood, I mean. Was he chatty, friendly, glad to be back?'
Nayim shook his head. 'At first, he hardly say a word. I go, hey Steve, good you're back, but he just grunt and go straight up to the roof, start work.'
'You didn't happen to notice if he had anything with him? Out of the usual, I mean?' Karen hoping against hope.
But Nayim was shaking his head. 'Just his bag of tools. Like always.'
Karen stood and brushed the seat of her trousers. 'If we wanted to take a look up there, where he was working – would that be difficult, do you think?'
Nayim looked up at her, uneasy without knowing why. 'Easy enough, I think. You can get into the roof space through the top-floor flat if you wish. If owner give permission.'
Karen nodded, smiled. 'Thanks for your time.'
As she turned, something quick and greyish brown scuttled through the leaves that had gathered between path and pond; either a squirrel which had emerged early from hibernation or a rat. On balance, Karen thought, a rat.
The leaseholder was away and not answering his mobile. Karen wasted the best part of an hour being shunted between the landlord and the management company, much of it either being asked to choose from the following options or being left on hold listening to Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'. Finally, out of frustration, she slammed down the phone, jumped in her car and drove the few miles to the company's offices in Edgware. Once there, dark suit, stacked heels, taller than all of the women and most of the men, she got the attention she needed. The right permissions, the right keys. No more delay.
Forty minutes later, she and Ramsden, Furness and Denison in attendance, were passing the reservoir on Dartmouth Park Hill, turning right across the traffic and looking for a place to park.
The entrance hall and stairs had recently been recarpeted; the usual plethora of unsolicited mail and restaurant flyers sat neatly piled on a small table just inside the front door. Someone in the first-floor flat was practising the violin. On the floor above, the washing machine lurched into its spin cycle as they passed. A bicycle, presumably belonging to the owner of the upper flat, was on the landing outside his door.
Karen exchanged a quick glance with Ramsden before turning the key in the lock.
The entrance to the roof space was easy to find, through a drop-down door set into the ceiling between kitchen and bathroom.
'Mike?' Karen said, looking at Ramsden.
'Paul,' Ramsden said, 'up you go.'
Furness fetched a chair and held it steady. Denison pushed at the wood and slid it aside, hauling himself up and out of sight.
'What's it like up there?' Ramsden called.
'Dark.'
Furness handed him up a torch.
'You know what you're looking for?' Karen called.
'I think so.'
Not so many minutes later, he'd found it, taped to the side of one of the beams, snug against the angle and the roof itself. Thick dark tape and, Denison guessed, plastic or paper underneath.
It was both.
He passed it down and, using gloves, Karen prised away the tape, folded back the plastic and then unwound several pages from the late night edition of the Standard, dated 26 November 2003.
It was a butcher's knife with a twenty-centimetre stainless-steel blade firmly bolted all the way down the handle. Black haft, shiny blade, the tip not broken but bent very slightly to one side, as if it had been driven against something hard, like bone.
'Let's get this off to Forensics, first thing,' Karen said. 'Almost certainly he'll have wiped away any prints, but we need to check. Then compare it to the photographs of the wounds to Maddy Birch's body.'
Ramsden grinned a wolfish grin. 'That'll be sharpish, then.'
53
Under as high security as he could muster, Framlingham had set the technicians to work on the video tape: after enhancing the picture as much as they could, they had transferred it on to disk. From this they printed off a number of digital images, and it was these that Elder carried with him as he walked across Blackheath. Past six and the sky had already taken on that luminous orange glow; there were stars faintly visible above, though compared to Cornwall, precious few. One of them, he remembered reading somewhere, was some kind of satellite station and not a star at all.
Anton's T-shirt was white today instead of black, otherwise he looked exactly the same. The same sardonic, slightly camp look in his eye.
'She's in what we laughingly call the breakfast room, watching the snooker. Can't be doing with it myself. All that hushed commentary, as if they were in church. He's just kissed the ball up against the baulk pocket. Well…'
If Lynette Drury were indeed watching the snooker, she was doing so with her good eye closed.
The room smelt fetid and warm.
'Don't tire her,' Anton said.
Elder brought over another chair and sat at an angle between the wheelchair and the screen. He sat there silently while one of the players made a break of forty-seven.
'I didn't think you'd be back so soon,' Lynette said.
'Even after you sent the video?'
'What video's that?'
'Singin' in the Rain.'
'I never took to Gene Kelly much. More of a Fred Astaire fan, myself. Lighter on his feet I always thought. More debonair.'
'Something missing in the credits,' Elder said. 'My copy, at least. Nothing about the locations. The party scene in particular.'
Lynette watched as a balding man with a cummerbund barely holding in his beer gut skewed the cue ball in off the black and looked heavenwards for forbearance. 'Manningtree,' she said, still staring at the screen. 'Ben had a place out there. Not just him. Him and a few others. Country club, that's what they liked to call it. Gone now.'
'Gone?'
'Sold to some foundation. Don't know what they're called.'
'How long ago was that?'
'Three or four years, must be. Around the time Ben bought the place in Kyrenia.'
Elder took the photographs from the envelope and spread them across her lap. The pace of her breathing quickened and then slowed. They showed, in bare bones, the story of what had happened in the bedroom. It didn't take any great imagination to fill the gaps.
'I assume,' Elder said, 'there was a camera hidden in the room.'
'In every room. Whenever there was a party, Ben had them on all the time. Some years he'd make a Christmas tape, you know, highlights. Send 'em round to his friends.'
'Not this particular year,' Elder said, indicating the photographs.
'No, not that year.' Then, 'Watch what you're bloody doin'!' as the bald man's opponent clipped the yellow while attempting to pot the green.
'The two girls,' Elder said. 'Do you know what happened to them?'
