Jack Morgan 02 - Private London (19 page)

‘How are Chloe and Laura?’ she asked, her voice even more tremulous.

‘Laura suffered a cut to her arm but she’s okay.’

‘And Chloe?’

‘Is still in hospital, Hannah. But she’s going to be fine.’

I figured that if I said it confidently enough it might make it so. People were still pouring out of the train, heading for the eastbound platform of the Jubilee Line. A guard was waiting for them to clear so he could whistle the train on. I went up to him and told him that I had seen an unattended bag on one of the storage racks over the seats.

It held up the train long enough for me to have a word with the driver. He had stopped in the tunnel due to signalling. It was a common enough occurrence when a train was waiting for traffic to clear ahead. There would be trains doing the very same thing now because we had backed up the system.

Fifteen minutes later and we were outside in one of Private’s mobile offices. A large black van with blacked-out windows and a state-of-the-art communications system inside.

We had put a transmitting device on Harlan Shapiro, strong enough to track from above the tunnel. That section wasn’t very deep, after all: it was classified as subsurface, not really underground at all. The device was disguised as a tie clip and the signal it was broadcasting translated as a flashing dot on our computer monitor displaying a map of central London. I called up the schematic of the London Underground system and superimposed it. Sure enough, the flashing light corresponded with where the train had stopped in the tunnel. The dot wasn’t moving.

‘He can’t still be down there,’ said Sam who was standing beside me with Del Rio.

Hannah Shapiro was sitting huddled on one of the bench seats along the left side of the van, holding a cup of tea but not really drinking it. I guessed she was lost in dark memories and darker imaginings about what might be happening to her father. Personally, I was kicking myself. Harlan Shapiro had been the target all along. Never mind the golden egg, they had wanted the golden goddamned goose.

I moved the remote-control mouse and clicked it, this time synchronising Google Street View with the flashing symbol.

‘Son of a bitch,’ I said out loud.

‘What is it?’ asked Del Rio.

It was unlikely he would know what it was. Not a lot of people in London did, either.

We were looking at a bricked-up building. A series of arches all filled in with the same dark grey brick as the rest of it. It looked like a church or a Victorian orangery, maybe, if the arches had been filled with glass. Up until a few years ago, the building had housed a Chinese restaurant but now it was standing empty, waiting to become part of the infrastructure again as a substation. It had been built in 1868 and closed in 1939 when England was at war with Germany and the USA was still watching from the sidelines.

‘It’s Marlborough Road,’ I said.

‘Which is?’

‘Marlborough Road Tube Station,’ I explained. ‘One of many old Tube stations hidden throughout the Underground network. The platform for it isn’t even underground – they walked up and out and could be anywhere by now.’

‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Del Rio.

I looked over at Hannah Shapiro looking into her mug of hot tea as if the answers might be found within it. Somehow I doubted it.

‘It leaves us with a job to do,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I know just where to start.’

Chapter 75

DI KIRSTY WEBB was feeling the kind of excitement she got when the ‘tide’ of a case changed.

She’d considered taking the information to her superiors but she would have had to explain where and how she had got the identification.

She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!

Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.

A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.

Chapter 76

BACK IN THE office I had assembled the troops.

The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.

We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.

Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything the Met had on the case over to me. Maybe there was something in all the data that had been missed.

Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.

I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.

Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.

On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.

He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.

I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.

Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.

I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.

Chapter 77

ADRIAN TUTTLE IGNORED me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.

The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.

He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.

He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’

I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’

Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’

‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.

‘I don’t know.’

Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even more blurred.

‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.

‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.

He typed on his keyboard and bounced the image across to Sci in the Los Angeles headquarters.

Within minutes, a message pinged back across the Atlantic and Adrian opened the attachment. Our American associate had run the image through a powerful image-enhancement system. The kind of technology that analyses space-telescope imagery of landscapes on Mars.

What we had was the corner and a fold or two of a blanket. Dark brown and red, in a chequered or tartan pattern. One edge of the blanket was folded across but there was part of a label visible, with the letters Q and U on it.

‘Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, Dan,’ said Adrian apologetically.

See, Adrian was good with the detail. He hadn’t even taken the photograph and yet he remembered the smallest discrepancy between the two images. But me? I knew a goddamned clue when I saw one!

Chapter 78

‘SHIT!’

DI Kirsty Webb kicked the tyre of her car. But it did little to ease her frustration.

She had thought she’d made a breakthrough in the case but now that she had arrived in Chesham it seemed extremely probable that she was looking at another dead end.

Literally.

The house she had come to had had a sizeable chunk blown out of it. Debris strewn all around. The windows smashed in the small station across the road from it.

She checked the address on the open page of her notebook as she walked up to the Police – Do Not Cross line. No mistake about it. It was the last known address of Adriana Kisslinger.

She ducked under the tape and flashed a quick, humourless smile to the young uniformed officer who approached her. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, flashing her warrant card. ‘DI Webb. So, what have we got?’

‘There’s been an accident.’

He would have said more but DI James appeared in the doorway. ‘Inspector Webb,’ she said, a little puzzled to see her.

‘Natalie.’

‘Have there been some developments? On the Colin Harris case? Is that why you’re here?’

‘It looks that way,’ said Kirsty.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Whatever this was … I’m guessing it wasn’t an accident,’ Kirsty gestured at the house.

‘We were working on the assumption that it was.’

DI Natalie James led Kirsty through the house into a kitchen, the far wall of which was missing. A third of the ceiling was gone, with beams and plaster hanging down and debris strewn across the floor.

Kirsty looked up a little suspiciously. ‘Is it safe?’

The Buckinghamshire DI smiled reassuringly. ‘Come through.’

Kirsty followed her through what would have been a back door to the garden patio off the kitchen. A brick wall had been blown into the next-door neighbour’s garden, with metal wreckage strewn around both. A number of white-suited SOCO officers were working the garden.

‘They’re mainly looking for the rest of his body,’ she explained.

‘Who was it?’

‘Local optician. Peter Chappel. Wasn’t he who you were here to see?’ she asked, puzzled.

Kirsty shook her head. ‘This was the last address I could find for my Jane Doe discovered on Friday night.’

‘With the finger missing?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And you know who she is now?’

‘A tip-off from a collar. Information to barter. Vice Squad alerted us. Her name is Adriana Kisslinger. Romanian. Busted back home for prostitution.’

‘And here?’

‘Working as a contract nurse. Dropped off the radar some months back. She was working at Stoke Mandeville.’

‘So Serious Crimes aren’t going away any time soon.’

‘They won’t when they find this out, no.’

‘You haven’t told them?’

‘I didn’t know, did I? Anonymous tips have to be checked out. I was just following up an old address on a possible ident. You know how it works. So what happened here, exactly?’

‘Peter Chappel had a barbecue planned for this afternoon. Came home from his shop after sorting out some paperwork. Put the wine to chill in the fridge and came out here to get the grill going.’

‘It was a gas barbecue?’

‘Range-style, three-burner. Propane gas cylinder in the metal oven. He turned the dial, pushed the ignite button. And … Boom!’

‘There was a leak?’

‘Looks that way. Like I said, we thought it was accidental.’

‘Think again,’ said Kirsty Webb.

Chapter 79

CHLOE, LAURA AND Hannah all shared a three-bed apartment in a student-accommodation block.

I nodded at the security guard we’d had placed at the entrance to the building. She wasn’t in uniform and I was discreet about it. The authorities still didn’t know that we had Hannah back safe and we wanted to keep it that way. Time enough for explanations and recriminations later.

Priority one was getting Harlan Shapiro back. His daughter’s rooms were on the ground floor. I keyed in the entrance code at the door and walked into a brightly lit warm corridor with rugs on the floor, flowers on a side table and modern artwork on either wall between the doors to the student apartments. To the right as I walked in was the students’ kitchen. Far fancier than the one I remembered from my student days.

Sitting at the table was Suzy, drinking a cup of tea, and Sam Riddel doing likewise. Herbal for him, no doubt.

I threw Suzy a slightly critical look. ‘I thought I said to stay with Hannah?’

‘She had a visitor.’

‘Laura?’

‘No.’

I knew they hadn’t let Chloe out. I had the hospital on speed-dial. With Chloe things were going well. They were talking of moving her out of intensive care. Which was good. But no way were they letting her home yet. Which was bad.

I snapped back to the present. ‘So who?’

‘Her tutor. Professor Kidman.’

I smiled, briefly. Not like Suzy to be jealous. But then I realised she wasn’t being jealous. It was a good call – the professor did look like the actress.