Moon Over Soho (25 page)

Which made me look at the three remote controls casually left on the coffee table.

I squatted down by the TV stand. It was your typical gray laminated chipboard cheap piece of rubbish and quite difficult, because of the tangle of wires at the back, to clean the dust off effectively.

“Give me a hand over here, would you?” I asked Trollope and explained what I wanted him to do. Carefully, so as not to disrupt any forensic evidence, we both took a side of the DVD player and lifted it up. Underneath, there was a clear rectangle of light gray where something had protected the laminated surface from years of dust, something with a smaller footprint than the DVD player. I nodded and we gingerly put the player back down.

“What?” asked Trollope.

“He had a VHS player,” I said and pointed at the remotes on the coffee table. One for the TV, one for the DVD, and …

“Bugger,” said Trollope.

“You need to tell your scene of crime guys that somebody’s stripped this house of VHS tapes,” I said.

“Why did he still have VHS?” asked Trollope. “Do you know anyone who still has a VHS?”

“It has to be something he couldn’t risk getting digitized,” I said.

“These days?” said Trollope. “It would have to be something really disgusting or illegal. Child porn, or snuff movies, or, I don’t know, kitten strangling.”

“The wife will have to be interviewed,” I said. “Maybe she knows something.”

“Maybe that’s why she left,” said Trollope. “Reckon there’s a trip to Australia in it?”

“Not for us,” I said. “They never send DCs abroad. It’s always ‘experienced officers’ who get the free trips.” We shared a moment of gloomy solidarity. “If you had a bunch of stuff that you were desperate to keep hidden,” I said, “where would you stash it?”

“Garden shed,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“That’s where my dad kept his grass,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“Grow your own is a long tradition in these parts.”

“You ever been tempted to bust him for possession?”

“Only at Christmas,” he said.

Ideally we would have trooped out and had a look in the
shed ourselves, but you don’t do that on a modern crime scene without checking with forensics first and they said we couldn’t go out until they’d checked the lawn for footprints. And they couldn’t do that until morning. Fair enough. So we went and reported unto Stephanopoulis who was mightily pleased with both of us and bestowed her munificence in the form of sandwiches and coffee. Which we had to go and eat out in the road so as not to get crumbs on the crime scene. It was surprisingly cold but the Norfolk Constabulary had parked a couple of Transit vans outside so we sheltered in one of them. Even this close to Norwich, the sky was amazingly wide and full of stars. Stephanopoulis noticed me noticing. “City boy,” she said.

I suggested that Johnson’s ex-wife be interviewed in Australia and she agreed although she felt the Victoria police were more than capable of handling that without the need to send a British officer over, senior or otherwise. Trollope snorted.

“Something funny, Constable?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“No ma’am,” he said.

The sandwiches were the kind that get stocked by the twenty-four-hour shops attached to petrol stations, which managed the trick of being both soggy and stale. I think mine was ham salad but I barely tasted it. Stephanopoulis put hers down after the first bite.

“We need to know what it was Johnson told Dunlop,” she said.

“I’ll bet it had to do with the Obscene Publication Squad,” I said. “What else would he have to talk about?”

“There’s more to people than the job,” said Stephanopoulis.

“Not this man,” I said. “If he had any special interests they were on the stolen tapes. I think he may have been killed, in part, in order to recover them.”

“I see it,” said Stephanopoulis. “OPS plus videotapes, plus story to a journalist, some juicy scandal from the 1960s? Maybe somebody wanted to shut him up. If we find out what the story was we’ll find out who has a motive.”

I told her about Alexander Smith’s presence in one of the photos on the mantelpiece.

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” she asked.

“Nightclub impresario,” I said. “Goes all the way back to the 1960s, had an extended vacation abroad in the ’70s and ’80s.”

“Is he a gangster?” asked Trollope.

“He’s dodgy, is what he is,” I said.

“How did he come to your attention?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“During the course of another inquiry,” I said and glanced at Trollope. I wasn’t sure how much Stephanopoulis would want me to say outside the Met.

“Do you think they’re related?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s definitely a place to start.”

Stephanopoulis nodded and pointed at me. “You get some sleep. I want you nice and fresh tomorrow,” she said and then looked at Trollope. “You—your boss has given you to me as my plaything so I need you to run some errands for me—all right?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Trollope.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” I asked.

“We’re going to have a nice long chat with one Alexander Smith,” she said.

I
FOUND
it surprisingly easy to sleep across the backseat of the Transit but I woke up to a clear and freezing morning and was really glad when DC Trollope turned up in an unmarked Mondeo to ferry me and Stephanopoulis to the train station. I swapped mobile numbers with Trollope because it never hurts to network and headed inside in search of coffee. Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead. Stephanopoulis didn’t approve.

“The chicken in that is embalmed, dried and pressed very flat, and then sprinkled with extra chemicals,” she said.

“Too hungry to care,” I said.

We caught the express to Liverpool Street and Stephanopoulis got us a warrant card upgrade to first class, which on a short route like that meant slightly bigger seats and slightly fewer plebs. This suited Stephanopoulis because she was asleep before the train left the station.

There was no WiFi on the train so I booted up a PDF of
Latin for Dummies
on my laptop and spent an hour and a half getting to grips with third-declension adjectives. We were twenty minutes out of Liverpool Street and the suburbs were a comforting rainy smear when Trollope called me.

“They let me into the shed,” he said. “I was right. The door was forced.” The entry method had everyone puzzled because the lock and small circle of the surrounding wood had been popped right out. “Nobody can work out how it was done,” he said.

I knew. It was a spell. In fact it was one I’d seen Nightingale use on a garden gate in Purley when we were dealing with the vampire nest. Either our black magician was getting careless, didn’t know that there was anyone capable of hunting him, or just didn’t care that we might be alerted to his presence.

According to Trollope, the shed had been the usual mess, gardening tools, flowerpots, hose, and bits of bicycle.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to find out if something was nicked or not,” he said. Forensics were dusting for fingerprints all the same. The details of that, the lock, along with the report on the two possible footprints found in the lawn, were being attached to the relevant nominal on HOLMES. I thanked Trollope and promised to let him know if anything exciting happened.

Stephanopoulis woke up with a snort just as we were pulling into the station and gave me the briefest look of confusion before she got oriented. I filled her in on the lock in the shed and she nodded.

“Should we get your governor in?” she asked.

Dr. Walid had been firm. “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see if I
can’t get confirmation from Alexander Smith first, before we get him out of bed.”

“Oh yes, Smith,” said Stephanopoulis as the train came to a stop. “A villain of the old school. This should be a treat.”

Stephanopoulis decided to use West End Central for the interview. Built in the 1930s on Savile Row, it’s a big square office block that’s been clad in expensive Portland stone in the hope that it will disguise its essential dullness. Just across Regent Street from Soho proper, it’s the main base of operations for Clubs and Vice, and Stephanopoulis persuaded an old friend of hers who worked there to pick up Alexander Smith for us. The idea was to promote in his head that he was just a small fry caught in a great big impersonal grinding machine. We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are. We let him marinate in the interview room for an hour and a bit while me and Stephanopoulis sat in the canteen drinking the bloody awful coffee and sketching out our strategy for the coming interrogation. Well actually, Stephanopoulis did the sketching while I sat there and filed it all away under best practice.

Alexander Smith had been abroad in the 1970s and 1980s all right—living near Marbella in southern Spain on the notorious Costa del Crime along with a lot of tough middle-aged men who sounded like Ray Winstone and had all the moral fiber of damp tissue paper. He was a villain of the old school, but a smart one because he never got caught or prosecuted. He’d owned a club but his main income had been from acting as a middleman between bent coppers and the porn barons of Soho. He literally knew where the bodies were buried and would be expecting us to want to focus on that.

“But he’s scared,” said Stephanopoulis. “He hasn’t asked for a brief or even a phone call—he actually
wants
to be banged up.”

“Why not just ask for protection?”

“Villains like that don’t ask for protection,” said Stephanopoulis. “They don’t talk to the police at all unless
they’re looking to buy you. But he’s scared of something and we need to find out what it is. When we do, we jam in the knife, give it a twist, and he’ll open up like a winkle.”

“Not an oyster then?” I asked.

“You follow my lead,” said Stephanopoulis.

“What if we start getting into my area of expertise?” I asked.

Stephanopoulis snorted. “In the event of us charting that small corner of a foreign field you get to ask the questions you need to ask,” she said. “But be sensible and be careful because I don’t like to kick people under the table—it’s unprofessional.”

We finished off our bloody awful coffee and had a brief discussion about stack size. It’s not unknown for police officers going into an interview to pad out their files with a few reams of fake paperwork, the better to convey the notion that we, the police, know everything already so you might as well just save time and tell us what
you
know. But Stephanopoulis felt that an old lag like Smith wasn’t going to fall for that. And besides we wanted to convey the idea that we weren’t that bothered.

“He wants something from us,” said Stephanopoulis. “He wants to be talked into giving it up. The more he thinks we don’t care, the keener he’ll be to talk.”

Smith was back in his blue blazer but the carefully matching button-down shirt was open at the collar and his face was gray and unshaven. We made a big production of putting the tapes in the machine, introducing ourselves, and advising him of his rights.

“You understand that you’re not under arrest and that you may terminate this interview at any point you wish.”

“No, really?” asked Smith.

“You’re also entitled to a lawyer or some other representative of your choice.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Smith. “Can we just get on with it.”

“So you don’t want a brief?” I asked.

“No I do not want a sodding brief,” said Smith.

“You seem in a hurry. You’ve got somewhere to go?”
asked Stephanopoulis. “Somebody waiting for you perhaps?”

“What is it you want?” asked Smith.

“The thing is, we want to clarify your involvement in a number of crimes,” said Stephanopoulis.

“What crimes?” asked Smith. “I was a respectable businessman back then, I owned a club, that was it.”

“Back when?” I asked.

“The old days,” said Smith. “Isn’t that what you’re asking about? Because I was a respectable businessman.”

“But Smithy,” said Stephanopoulis. “I don’t believe in respectable businessmen. I’ve been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn’t think you’re respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat.”

That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was “Power to the people.”

Smith was staring at us as if we were both mad.

“So,” I said. “You were involved in a lot of crime back then, Smithy?”

“I wasn’t an angel,” he said. “And I’ll put my hand up to having to deal with some less-than-salubrious elements in my day. That’s one of the reasons I moved abroad—to get away from all that.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

“I got a yen for dear old Blighty,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “You told me that England was a shit hole.”

“Well, at least it’s an English-speaking shit hole,” said Smith.

“He ran out of money,” said Stephanopoulis. “Didn’t you, Smithy?”

“Do me a favor,” he said. “I could buy you and all the senior officers in this station and still have enough left over for a flat in Mayfair.”

“Make me an offer,” said Stephanopoulis. “I could get a new chicken run. And her indoors is always asking for an extension to the conservatory.”

Smith, who wasn’t about to say anything that could be misconstrued or digitally edited into an admission of guilt, gave us a suitably ironic smile.

“If it wasn’t the money,” I said, “why’d you come back?”

“I went to Marbella because I’d made my wedge,” he said. “I’d retired. Got myself a nice villa for me and the wife and I ain’t going to kid you life was sweet, away from the rain and all the shit. Everything was good until the fucking ’80s when the Russians started turning up. Once their snouts were in the trough there was shootings and kneecappings and a man wasn’t safe in his own home. I thought, if I’m going to put up with this bollocks I might as well do it back in London.”