Chapter 13
Now, there’s a bit coming up where I do a generic Eastern European accent.
I’m not proud of it, but I’m just letting you know in case you’re worried it’s cultural appropriation or something.
I justify it because I know that if I get it wrong, this man will kill me and Jonny with his bare hands.
He could probably do us both simultaneously.
So that kind of takes priority. I’m not going to patronise you by saying lots of my best friends are from Eastern Europe, because as you’ve been reading for the last however many pages, I don’t have many friends of any nationality.
Back to the room. This man is tall. Jonny’s about six three, and this guy has a couple of inches even on him. He also lacks Jonny’s expression of gentle benevolence.
He opens the batting. ‘Who are you?’ English, I think, slightly middle class but that doesn’t do any good. Even if he spoke like the Duke of Westminster, there’s no mistaking the violence in his face.
‘We cleaners,’ I say. ‘We clean.’ (I told you I wasn’t proud.)
‘What about you?’
Jonny decides not to pretend to be from downtown Bucharest, and slips into multicultural London English. ‘We’re just cleaning, man. Why, you own the place? This your flat? You want us to get out?’
Bowling Ball looks at us for a second, takes another step into the room.
‘You’re not cleaners.’
Suddenly I’m glad I kept my mask and Marigolds on. I gesture at our cart, baffled but cheerful. ‘Yes,’ I say, loudly, as if I’m used to dealing with the rich and deaf every day. ‘We clean.’ Is my accent slipping?
‘You.’ He points at me. ‘Take your mask off.’
‘You want mask?’ I reach into my pocket. ‘We have extra mask.’
‘No. I said, take your mask off.’
He takes another step towards us. If we ran … it wouldn’t do any good. He’s quite clearly the most athletic person in the apartment.
‘Me … mask?’ I gesture to my face. Has he seen me before?
Think, Al. Think. Has he got you on CCTV?
The cameras at the Bridling village pub didn’t show our faces.
Has he found out what we look like? Did he discover my camera before the police did?
Does he already know exactly who I am? Oh Christ. I’m starting to panic. And he’s just stepped towards me again.
‘Take. Your. Mask. Off.’ He accompanies it with a mime. Quite hard to pretend I don’t understand that one. I’m going to have to go along with it. I raise my hands, loop one finger around my ear, and—
‘What the fuck is going on here?’
All three of us look around. Standing there, framed by the doorway and looking like a pissed-off Boadicea, is Em. I have never been happier to see her. Nobody replies for a second, and she follows up: ‘Hello? Does anyone in this room speak English?’ The fury in her voice could scour a pan.
I pipe up. ‘We cleaners.’
‘I get that, dope. My question is, who are you?’ This is to Bowling Ball.
‘I’m the owner.’ He doesn’t sound terribly sure.
‘Fuck off you’re the owner. My boyfriend owns this place. And you’re not him.’ She gives a little wobble, just the kind you might show if you were the unacknowledged kept woman of a senior estate agent who had been murdered and now your very livelihood was under threat. That sort of wobble.
‘Listen, madam, I’m with the authorities, and—’
‘Authorities? Get to shit. You haven’t got a warrant, that much is clear.
Are you a fucking journalist or something?
’ To be clear, this guy would make the least convincing newspaper journalist since Clark Kent.
He looks like his sole reading matter is the manuals of small, expensive German firearms, or niche CIA magazines with titles like Enhanced Interrogation Quarterly.
But Em has evidently decided that’s the most palatable interpretation she could make to get this guy out of the room, so she goes on.
‘You are, aren’t you? You’re a bloody tabloid rat.
Well you can just get out. First my boyfriend is murdered and now you worms have to come in and snoop around …
Just get out, all of you. Get out. You too, cleaners. Go on. Out. Out!’
This last word is thrown at us in a key and register I didn’t know Em had in her. She’s unstoppable. And before we know what’s going on, the three of us are standing in the corridor, and she’s slamming the door behind us, her face streaked with tears.
There’s a pause, as we all recalibrate in the light of what’s just happened. I’m the first one to speak.
‘We clean next place now.’
And I drag Jonny away to the neighbouring flat, where he busies himself fiddling with the entry keypad while I rearrange our cart.
Bowling Ball looks at us for a few seconds, and then decides we’re not worth the effort.
Either that, or he’s too embarrassed about what just happened to attempt a second questioning.
Whatever the reason, after a final baleful look he stalks away down the corridor towards the posh lifts, and I breathe freely for the first time in about three minutes.
‘Jeeeesus.’
Jonny gestures back along the corridor. ‘Shall we go and see Em?’
‘No. She’ll join us when she can. Let’s just get out.’
As we’re walking back to the service lift, another thought strikes me.
‘Jonny. What happened to the ledger? The one I gave you in there with the addresses in?’
‘I dropped it.’
‘What? Where?’
He grins, and reaches into his bin bag.
About five hours later, we’re back in Balfour Villas, finishing an unbelievable stir-fry courtesy of Jonny.
I didn’t think people actually made stir-fry except the stuff the supermarkets sell pre-prepared.
I should learn to cook, I think, before dismissing the thought as ridiculous.
Interlopers don’t cook. Why not? I turn my attention back to our two finds from the afternoon.
‘A laptop and a ledger,’ I say.
‘Hope they’re worth it,’ says Em. ‘That thug has seen my face now.’
Em joined us an hour or so ago, having skulked in Davy’s flat all afternoon.
She managed to get in by informing the receptionist that she was the PA of the resident in flat 227 and she had been notified of a breach in security by his internal security systems. God knows how convincing she would have had to be to get through on that lie, but the receptionist bought it and it worked.
As for why she did it … she was waiting outside the building and saw Mr Bowling Ball heading in.
I’ve been too embarrassed to thank her properly so far, because what can you say to someone who’s just saved you from an agonising death?
‘Seriously,’ says Elle, ‘can’t we just report this guy to the police?’
‘And say what? “Yes, this man is following us, we recognise him because he’s been chasing us since the morning after the murder. What’s that, officer?
Why’s he after us in particular? Well, we were in the building when Mr Harcourt was shot, you see.
No, we didn’t have anything to do with it, we were just … Hey, why are you handcuffing me?”’
Em gives me an annoyed look, but she doesn’t disagree. ‘Let’s look at the properties on the list.’
‘They’re all classy, as far as I can tell. Barely a double-digit postcode among them. Must have been sales Davy made.’
‘Al, did you say something about the register?’
‘Registry. The Land Registry will show who owns all these places. Let’s have a look.’
Jonny opens up his laptop, gets us secure access, and starting from the top, we look up the list of properties. By the fifth one down, a pattern emerges.
Arthurian Capital
Sid Wayne MNP
Kidd Orpington Ltd
J. Besley
T. Grantham
About half these properties are owned by companies – none of which I’ve ever heard of, although that’s hardly surprising.
Looking at the ones that aren’t, the dates of sale don’t match the handwritten dates in Davy’s ledger.
But the properties that do come up on the Registry as being company-owned correspond exactly with the dates Davy wrote.
‘These ones’ – Em points to the properties that don’t match Davy’s dates – ‘must have been resold. But these company ones are the sales he was responsible for.’
‘Does his laptop have any more information, Jonny?’
Jonny sucks some sauce off a finger. ‘Dunno. It’s locked, properly. Going to take a few days to get into that one. First difficult job I’ve had for months.’
‘Suspicious?’
He shrugs. ‘Maybe just careful. Lot of money sliding around here, clearly.’
‘So what are we saying?’ says Elle. ‘Davy represented companies that were buying property?’
‘Looks like it. Nothing automatically dodgy there. Might have been his speciality.’
‘All right. I guess the next step is to look at the companies.’
‘Yeah.’ Em frowns. ‘Maybe we ask that friend of yours at the firm, Al.’
‘Mrs P.’
‘Exactly. Try your superficial charm on her.’
‘Thank you.’ I look at the lists Elle wrote in the pub at lunch. ‘What about these appointments from the diary you nicked off his desk?’
I’m worried about these. The first engagement, 215 Feathers, is in thirty-six hours.
2.15 is clearly the time, but as for the location, we’re nowhere.
Before supper we spent an hour looking up feather merchants, pubs called the Feathers, chicken farmers …
but none of it seemed to have any connection to Davy.
We even did some cold-calling of everywhere in London with ‘feathers’ in the name, and various places in the Bridling area.
Nobody had even heard the name David Harcourt.
‘Still nada,’ says Jonny. ‘I’m up to a five-mile radius around the three known locations we have for Mr Harcourt.’
‘Damn.’
‘Yes. Finding out what this meeting is – assuming it’s meaningful – would be by far the easiest way of working out Davy’s business interests, but at the moment there’s no indication whatsoever where it would have taken place.
’ Jonny has a knack for delivering the worst possible news in the poshest possible way.
‘How about the wife? What was her name again?
‘Ex-wife. Charli. And nothing doing,’ says Elle. ‘I’ve been on her Instagram account all afternoon trying to map where she might be. There’s no pattern. Seems like she lives in the UK – somewhere in west London, I think, but she’s private about that. No job, as far as I can tell.’
‘And right now she could be halfway around the world. Where do rich people go in April?’
‘I’m not sure there’s a particular place. Maybe there’s a horse race or something? It’s too early for tennis.’
‘Coachella’s on,’ says Elle.
I look over her shoulder at Charli Harcourt’s Instagram feed.
Not many followers, but it’s full of the stuff influencers like posting.
A few shots of her holding a doughnut or a steak near her mouth, beaches, heavily filtered close-ups.
It looks silly enough when teenagers post this stuff.
‘She’s a bit old for Coachella, surely?’
Elle shrugs. ‘Looks like she’s been everywhere else.’
In my pocket, my phone buzzes. I ignore it, and a few seconds later, it buzzes again. That’s odd. I don’t normally message anyone from this phone, and the photographic agency I work for never texts me, let alone after hours. I look at my watch: it’s almost 10 p.m.
Out in the corridor, I look down at the screen: two new messages.
The first one reads:
Hello Al. You are still going by ‘Al’, I’m guessing? Sweet. But I know who you really are.
The second:
I don’t know exactly where you are, Al, but it doesn’t matter. Because wherever you are, you’re in deep, deep shit.