Chapter 12 #2
Personally, I’m a fan of poor doors. For one thing, they offer a much more convenient route into a block of flats – far fewer cameras and gatekeepers.
And there is always a way of getting from the normal bit of the building to the absurdly nice bit.
Might be an unadvertised staircase, might be a fire escape, but there’ll be something.
For example: the developers usually build to the assumption that the eventual management company will be contracting all its cleaning out to one firm.
Granted, the cleaners might be paid to spend more time polishing the swanky bits, but the same people will be scrubbing the floors.
They’ll be on exactly the same crummy subcontracted wage wherever they are.
And that means I simply have to get in through the PD, work out where the cleaners’ special tunnels are, then wriggle through to the bit with the expensive, generally empty homes.
Usually you won’t be noticed, and even if you are, you’ll have your hi-vis on.
And once you’re in the nice bit of the building, it’s just a matter of getting through a flat’s front door.
Plus, once you’re in, you can whip off your hi-vis, walk out past the reception at the luxury door, and deliberately greet the receptionist, who will automatically fill in the blanks and assume you’re a new resident.
Do that a few times and then, once you’ve nicked a pass, you can start walking in through the marble entrance, and that feels great.
This is the Al Method of Interloping Central London Prime Apartments.
It’s never failed me yet. The only downside is that most flats have just one door.
It’s easy to panic if you hear a key in the lock and realise you have no time whatsoever to pack up your stuff, nor a good escape method.
Most windows in these places don’t open; even if they did, you could reach the ground floor in three seconds flat but you wouldn’t be in great shape to walk away.
One solution is to open the hatch to the stopcock or gas meter or whatever when you’re inside a home.
It’s the barest fig leaf of an excuse, but if you’re in your hi-vis, you might get away with telling the owner you’re here from the power company to adjust the polyphase doodah because there have been warnings from central office of a dangerous leak of gas, or electricity, or whatever.
The owner will be alarmed for at least thirty seconds – you’ve put them in a hot state, just like I did with Mr Lethbridge when I introduced myself as the police – and you can use that time to clear up and clear off.
Final thing on poor doors: a few years back, the bloody developers started reading the Guardian and realising they were copping some reputational damage, so now they’ve replaced them with poor floors.
They work almost the same way: everyone comes into the building via the same hall, but the people in the really nice flats are on separate floors of the building, accessed by separate lifts.
These have made my job harder, and as such I can confirm they are highly regressive and actively harmful to my radical pro-equality agenda.
Back to Dead Man Davy’s flat. Jonny’s with me this time.
As before, I’ll blag; Jonny will get us into the flat itself.
He’s found photos of the inside of the building on Instagram, and while I don’t recognise the keypad system on the doors, Jonny has dismissed it as almost embarrassingly off-the-shelf.
He disappeared into the Tottenham Court Road electrical supply swamp for two hours, and came back with a big thumbs-up, so at least one of us is confident.
I’m nervous, but there again there’s that feeling of … what is it? Intrigue? Oh, God, I’m clearly losing it. Focus, Al. There is nothing to be interested in here except saving your own skin. The thought of staying out of prison for a murder I didn’t commit helps me concentrate.
We found the cleaning station OK, run by a harassed woman in her mid-forties who couldn’t find any record of us being booked for the afternoon shift (unsurprising), but who was so short-staffed and so used to chaotic management from above her that she was willing to hand us our kit with no questions asked.
Rule 13: Play dumb. Most people are so used to dealing with idiots that if you pretend to be one, they’ll probably do everything for you out of the desire for a quiet life.
Our new boss gave us detailed instructions about which corridor to clean first, in the ‘poor’ bit of the building.
My job now is to get us to the fancy half.
We’re currently in the corridors, pushing our cart aimlessly and nodding like idiots at any other maintenance people we see.
The other advantage is: we’re in cleaning gear, masked and gloved, so no fingerprints and no CCTV footage.
Jonny’s in a chatty mood. ‘Who’s your money on so far?’
‘What?’
‘Davy. Out of all the possibilities, who do you think did it?’
‘Jesus, Jonny, I don’t know. Probably Mr Bowling Ball, who’s apparently convinced that we’re involved somehow and is trying to track us down and murder us so we don’t blab.’
‘I suspect you’re right.’ Jonny nods, solemn. ‘But it’s too premature to judge.’
‘Then why did you … Never mind.’
‘The question, of course, is why Mr Harcourt didn’t fire, if he was going to his door holding a gun. You wouldn’t open the door at all unless it was someone you trusted.’
‘That’s true.’
‘And the other question is who knew Mr Harcourt wasn’t actually out of the country, as his flight booking suggested. Once you find that out, you’ve presumably got who killed him. Or who allowed him to be killed.’
‘Food for thought, Jonny.’
‘Yeah.’
We’ve come to another lift, halfway across the building. Before us is the side looking out onto the riverfront; the side the posher apartments will be on. ‘This will be it.’
The thing about these new apartment buildings is that they’re designed to be as impersonally wipe-clean as a beautiful hotel.
The designers try their utmost to showcase the nice parts and hide the shabby ones, including me and Jonny in our fluorescent tabards.
It’s not unlike those country houses with secret passages between the walls to conceal the staff.
Anyway, as we step out of the lift onto Davy’s floor, I look back, and sure enough, the service lift has been carefully designed almost out of existence.
It’s concealed round a fold in the wall, a subtle partition that any resident here would subconsciously know not to look behind, in case they tripped over someone on minimum wage.
Jonny and I have moved from the grubby side – cracked concrete, ill-smelling air, a kind of aroma of poverty – to the thickly carpeted corridors Davy would have walked.
It’s so plush underfoot the sound is deadened, and the lights are gentle enough to make you think you’ve died and are being gently cradled on the journey from this world to the next.
You know, it’s thoughts like the above that make me conclude that in another life I’d have written a cracking update of Down and Out in Paris and London.
Although on reflection, that’s a bit gritty for my taste, and my own provisional title, Fucking Lovely Homes I’ve Sneaked Into, doesn’t quite have the same moral force.
My point is, this building is so luxurious it’s hard to imagine any residents ever having a bad day, or a breakdown, or a divorce. Or being murdered, a little voice murmurs, and I look over my shoulder.
Outside Davy’s door, Jonny reaches into our cart’s bin bag and pulls out a credit-card machine with a dozen leads dangling off it.
He plugs one into the keypad, and after about thirty seconds (which I spend doing the most obviously fake dusting you’ve ever seen), there’s a bzzz-click. The door swings open.
‘Take the cart in?’
‘Definitely.’ If the supervisor has already seen on the building CCTV where we’ve ended up, it’s too late; but if not, there’s no sense in leaving a big THIEVES AT WORK sign in the corridor. We push it through, into Davy’s London flat, and gasp.
It’s breathtaking. I thought a river view was something nice to have; I realise in this moment that I want nothing else in the world.
The apartment’s entire front wall is sheet glass, so clear you feel like you could step out onto the glittering water.
A few boats are bobbing at anchor, or chugging between the sparkling wavelets.
It looks like one of those paintings of Venice by that guy … Cornetto? That can’t be it.
It’s open-plan. The bedroom is separated from the rest of the room only by a black Crittall window.
The bed consists of a huge mattress–headboard combo on a wide podium, making it faintly sacrificial.
The decor is impersonal, though. You couldn’t tell from this place whether Davy had liked collecting Victoria Crosses and visiting Flanders war graves, whether he was a wine buff, whether he was a punk as a teenager.
There’s almost no character here. I find it hard to picture that big chaotic man living in a flat like this.
The kitchen is ultra-stylish – not a cupboard handle in sight, and the stripped-back cupboards contain some spotless grey Le Creusets.
The tap is one of those boiling-water ones where you can scald yourself while making tea – far more convenient than scalding yourself with a kettle – and the fridge door is about fifteen feet square.
The countertop also contains one unusual built-in feature – one of those grill devices you get in Japanese restaurants. Davy fancied himself a chef.
Maybe not all the time, though. The only bum note is a half-eaten supermarket lasagne, still in the foil, sitting on the counter with unwashed cutlery beside it. It’s clearly been there a few days. There aren’t enough bacteria in this place to have rotted it yet, but it smells of cold grease.
Jonny nods at the lasagne. ‘Left in a hurry.’
I’ve just had the same thought, although I was considerate enough to keep it to myself. ‘Mm.’
‘Probably worried he was going to get murdered.’
‘Let’s look around, shall we?’
The river wall does have a desk on it, which I gravitate towards. It’s one of those standing ones. Maybe Davy was trying to get in shape, get his life together. I stand at it, grasp the adjustable handles on the sides and—
‘What’s this?’ Jonny has approached from the other side, and reaches into the desk’s innards.
This is an old MacBook, which was sitting in a recessed pocket on the desk.
‘Could be useful?’ he asks.
‘Very.’
‘Should we steal it?’
‘Remove. Remove for further study. Yes, Jonny. Good idea.’ Into the base of our cart it goes.
Next to the desk is a bookcase. Finally, a bit of Davy’s personality.
I look through it: a lot of historical novels (Patrick O’Brien and Sharpe both strongly represented), plenty of horror, some popular science, an entire shelf of dull-looking property books.
The cookbooks are here, too, and are almost exclusively Japanese: Hibachi at Home, Further Journeys in Okonomiyaki, Make Your Own Shirako.
I pull titles off and start flipping through, looking for notes, for lists.
TEN MORTAL ENEMIES WHO WISH ME DEAD. That sort of thing.
None of the books contains any notes. I keep looking. ‘Who were you?’ I murmur. ‘Why were you so scared?’
And then it pops out at me: a brown leather case, at the end of the property shelf. I pull it out, open it up, and see the same expansive, confident handwriting that was in Davy’s diary.
10 Leinster Avenue
14 Manfred Court
27 Jupiter Gardens
… and so on. It’s a sort of ledger, and all the addresses have a date next to them.
The dates are ancient – the first entries in the book are ten years old.
I flip until the pages go blank – there must be several hundred properties here, although oddly there have been no new entries in the last three years. But it’s something.
‘Hey, Jonny? Take a look at this.’
But as I’m in the process of handing it over, there’s a bzzz-click behind us. We turn around. Somehow, the hairs on the back of my neck have already informed me the news is bad.
Standing in the doorway – let’s not forget, the only way out of the room – is an extremely tall man, with a shiny dome of a head. If you were feeling whimsical, you might say he looks a bit like a bowling ball.