Her Nightly Embrace Page 18

  “There’s tea, coffee, snacks. Takeout menus. If you need anything, Ken or Clive can pick it up for you.”

  “Looks all right,” Sandra said as she looked around the living room and the open-plan kitchen. “Don’t I get a keycard?”

  “You don’t need one. Either Ken or Clive will be with you all the time.”

  She seemed spaced-out.

  “What did Darren want from you when he was banging on your door?”

  “Sorry?”

  “He was shouting ‘give it back.’ ”

  “Was he?”

  “What was it he wanted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sandra, I can’t help you if you lie to me. You hired us, remember?”

  She hesitated, weighing whether she should tell.

  “Darren copied the details of the transactions onto a thumb drive. I told him to do it, and I took it.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have it, please?”

  Like pulling teeth.

  This was moving faster than she had thought. She was flying by the seat of her pants and trying to find an angle. Here’s the thing: all clients lie. They tell the story that benefits them best. It’s about controlling the narrative before someone else does. It’s about picking the theme and the message that puts them in the best light. And they hire us to help write it for them. Sandra had a mind to write it by herself, which was never a good idea. She was keeping things from us because she didn’t trust anyone. I just hoped that wasn’t going to bite us in the arse later on.

  Sandra fished a SanDisk thumb drive out of her purse and handed it over.

  “Oh, Darren encrypted it. I don’t know the password.”

  “Ah.”

  “That was why we broke up. He started getting cold feet about grabbing those files. He must have known I would take it, so he put in a password out of spite.”

  “Leave it with me. We’ll take care of it.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, there’s just one thing you could get for me?”

  “Go on, love,” Ken said.

  “I could really do with some coke. I can give you the number of my dealer.”

  I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes.

  “Yeah, I’ll pick it up for ya,” Clive said.

  Great. Just what we needed. Borderline personality disorder and gak. That combination always went well.

  NINE

  I dropped the thumb drive off with Olivia back at the office. She didn’t look happy about the password situation, but I was already late for Ken and Clive’s contact at the police station.

  I met the desk sergeant at the back of the station, away from the eyes of his colleagues. I handed him the hundred quid in ten-pound notes in an envelope, and he gave me Jack Higglesworth’s file. It wasn’t very thick, didn’t take long to read through at all. No history of mental illness, no unusual behavior the day he jumped off the roof of Holloway-Browner and turned a parked Volvo into a J. G. Ballard sculpture ten floors below. The other bankers didn’t report anything strange. No mention of interviewing Higglesworth’s family.

  “You finished?” Sergeant Riley asked. “I need to get that back on the DCI’s desk before he notices it’s missing.”

  I handed it back. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Private investigators carried a certain stink around coppers, even the ones who took our cash whenever we needed a favor, never mind that many of them become one of us when they stop being coppers.

  I’m glad I was never a copper.

  So I continued to do my due diligence. Time to interview Jack Higglesworth’s widow. I drove back to Central London, found the narrow terraced house in an upscale street. She worked as an interior decorator. I imagined the two of them split the mortgage on the house. She was glad to have someone other than the cops to talk to, someone who would actually listen to her.

  “They told me it was suicide. Are you saying it wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just want to hear what you think.”

  “I told them he just wasn’t the type. But they’d already made up their minds. He was terrified of heights. I couldn’t get him up on the roof to make repairs after the last storm, let alone go to the top of his office. Why would he jump off the roof of his office?”

  She was still numb from grief and shock. I glanced at their son sitting next to her on the sofa. Thirteen years old, hoodie, expensive sneakers, totally zoned out on his smartphone, texting his friends.

  “How are you holding up, mate?” I asked.

  “Whatevs.” He shrugged.

  The gods were swirling behind me. They were well into this.

  TEN

  Next morning: Sandra’s ex-boss. I doubted he was going to talk to a private investigator, so I posed as an insurance investigator to ask about Jack Higglesworth’s death. Got the business card ready. The number was one of Golden Sentinels’ alternate phones where Cheryl would answer to confirm I was legitimate. Basic social engineering again. They didn’t generally call, but it was best to be safe.

  I’d phoned and made an appointment beforehand. As I walked past the traders at their computers, I saw none other than Darren Cowley at his desk, chatting away on his phone. We locked eyes for an instance. Shock in his. Then he quickly turned away and pretended to look at his computer.

  I didn’t have to wait long for Powys before he saw me in his office. Clearly, they didn’t want me hanging around in the office long.

  “I just have a few questions regarding Mr. Higglesworth’s life insurance policy.”

  “Poor Jack. I feel sorry for his wife. Anything I can do to help.”

  Stuart Powys. Head of corporate finance. Red suspenders, expensive tie, and an even more expensive haircut. Slight paunch, slightly reddish face indicating a fondness for steaks and booze. Facing his early fifties with some reluctance. A man accustomed to his lifestyle. His handshake was firm, squeezed slightly too hard. An attempt to assert alpha male rules. Fine, I would give that to him.

  I sat and took out a notepad. Best to look as innocuously officious as ever, not a threat. Bean counter. I even put on glasses for the show.

  “Now, how many years did Mr. Higglesworth work for you?”

  “Just under seven.”

  “I see. And during that time, did he exhibit any aberrant behavior that might have been a cause for concern?”

  “No, not at all. His volumes were down. He wasn’t making the numbers like the others on the team.”

  I remembered the videos of his hazing on Sandra’s computer. . . .

  “I suppose that might have caused a great deal of stress, but surely not suicide.”

  I looked at Powys evenly. There. A slight twitchiness. An impatience. He couldn’t be shot of me soon enough.

  “Do you have any idea why he might have been driven to take his life?”

  “None whatsoever. It was a complete shock. I’d just had a talk with him about bucking up, doing better, then he walked out. The next thing we knew, he’d gone up on the roof and jumped off.”

  “You don’t think he might have stumbled upon something he wasn’t supposed to know.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “What?”

  “That was rather quick. What are you denying?”

  “Nothing.”

  Again, the answer that came too quickly.

  How to tell when someone’s lying: when they give rehearsed answers to questions before you’d finished asking them. Hand involuntarily going up to cover their mouth to conceal a falsehood, like he was doing now.

  He was also flickering in and out of focus like a bad photograph. As if lying made him not quite real. I had to blink a few times, as the vision was getting annoying.

  He took his hand off his mouth, rather self-consciously. Under the glass top of his desk, he shuffled his feet.

  “Let me finish my question, Mr. Powys. Do you
think Mr. Higglesworth might have stumbled across something that would make someone kill him and make it look like a suicide?”

  Powys’s face grew redder than ever.

  “You don’t think his death might have something to do with, I don’t know, a deal he was working on, an account he was looking after?”

  “What are you suggesting?” He was almost spluttering. “Are those questions an insurance investigator asks?” “I never—”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said evenly.

  I put on the most neutral, professional smile I could muster, just the right side of shit-eating.

  “Just covering the bases, sir.”

  ELEVEN

  I asked to go up on the roof of the building to see where Jack Higglesworth had fallen from. Twenty floors up, with a full view of the City of London. Powys got a security guard to accompany me. It was the kind of rooftop where you could hold presentations and cocktail parties, so of course there were safety railings. It also was the type of rooftop where a suicidal man could easily climb over the railings and jump off.

  Or be bodily lifted, struggling and wailing, by a couple of guys and thrown off. Up in the air, the vultures continued to circle. No one saw them but me, and I wasn’t going to bring them up. I looked at the railings again and saw two Rakshakas, eyes red and bloodshot, their demon skins rippling with muscle, snarling and sneering as they grabbed Jack Higglesworth and threw him screaming off the roof.

  Was this my mind seeing his killers as demons? Is this how unhinged I’d become? Was I just speculating, or was this the gods telling me that Jack Higglesworth was indeed murdered and I might be in over my head again?

  “You all right there, sir?” the security guard asked.

  “Yeah, just making a note,” I said.

  I left the Holloway-Browner building before they got tired of me and got into the car. Dialed Darren’s mobile.

  “Who’s this?” he answered quickly.

  “Darren. We hadn’t been formally introduced. We met at Sandra’s.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” His voice hushed; he didn’t want anyone at the office hearing. “She got you doing her dirty work now?”

  “We should talk.”

  “About what?”

  “The thumb drive. Is that what Jack died over?”

  “I can’t talk here.”

  “If you’re both in danger, it’s what’s going to save you. We need the password.”

  “What do I get in return, eh? She’s already landed me in the shit.”

  “Then we really have to talk.”

  “All right, all right. Meet me at my flat after work.”

  TWELVE

  I returned to Golden Sentinels to log my notes.

  “Think it’s a murder case?” Marcie asked.

  “Leaning that way, but nothing concrete yet.”

  Everyone was huddled around Sandra’s laptop.

  “Ms. Rodriguez is a very prolific videographer,” Olivia said.

  On the computer: video of an orgy between the bankers. Mass of sweaty bodies rubbing against each other. Glimpses of Jack Higglesworth and Darren Cowley among them.

  “Oo-er!” Benjamin was very interested.

  “Ehh.” Marcie shrugged. “I’ve seen better.”

  “Are we going to find you in here, David?” Olivia asked.

  “Please! I would have better lighting and editing.”

  Another video: Darren, Gavin, and the bankers on the street at night, taunting a homeless man with wads of cash. And not for the first time on video, either.

  “Bastards like abusing the homeless way too much,” Benjamin said.

  “All about asserting power,” Marcie said.

  “Is there anything tasty we could use beyond showing us these bankers are dickheads?” David asked.

  Olivia opened some other files on the computer.

  “Emails. This should be interesting to sort through.”

  “Again, might be considered property of the bank,” David said. “We want to tread carefully here.”

  “If what she says is true, Sandra Rodriguez could become very famous for all the wrong reasons,” Marcie said.

  “That might be what she wants,” I said. “And not good for us.”

  THIRTEEN

  Darren Cowley’s flat was one of those new modern units in Canary Wharf. He was on the tenth floor with a view of the city that was presumably one of the justifications for the amount of rent they charged. I arrived at six p.m. as we arranged and pushed the buzzer.

  No answer.

  I pushed it a few more times. Didn’t hear any sound on the intercom to suggest anyone came to their front door. I dialed Darren’s mobile but only got the answerphone.

  I waited for more than half an hour. Nobody came in or out of the building. I tried him on his phone again to no avail, same with his buzzer.

  It was coming to an hour when my phone rang. On screen was a photo of a tattoo of the goddess Kali on a woman’s arm.

  “Remember me?” Ariel Morganstern asked.

  Ariel, whom I had met earlier in the year on a flight from New York. With whom I had a perfectly enjoyable Sunday in the period before the gods came back to hassle me.

  “How could I forget you, Kali Girl?”

  FOURTEEN

  Ariel had just come into town from India. We had dinner at a Thai restaurant near her hotel in Covent Garden. It felt like we were back in that weekend we first met months ago and no time had passed. God, it felt good to laugh again, pretend I wasn’t dealing with a murder case, that I didn’t have to worry about my dad, that I wasn’t heartbroken and thinking about Julia. The gods weren’t there in the restaurant. Actually, Kali was there, watching, in the form of Ariel’s tattoo. I could never totally escape the gods, especially not Kali.

  “Still having your existential crisis?” she asked.

  “Worse than ever.”

  I told her about the case with that ugly porcelain clown.

  “So you ended up polishing a clown?”

  “I hope that hasn’t become a metaphor for what my life has become.”

  “Hey, sometimes an ass-clown is just an ass-clown.”

  “So what are you doing back in London?”

  “Just passing through again. I actually went back to the States for a little job, you know, shore up the bank account, then it’s back to India again.”

  “Again? You’re not done?”

  “Come on, you know better than anyone a spiritual quest is gonna take more than a couple of months trekking through India visiting ashrams. I didn’t get to be there long last time before work needed me back. No, this time I’m gonna be there longer, go deeper.”

  “Go deeper? How?”

  “Oh, you know, study more, meditate more, find some guidance, check out more ashrams.”

  “You haven’t bathed in the Ganges, have you?”

  “Nope. You told me not to on the plane, remember?”

  “I do. I really don’t recommend it. A lot of Westerners think it’s the done thing and terribly spiritual, but the water’s toxic. It’d be a great way to get hepatitis.”

  “Good to know.”

  Then she looked up at me with what we were both waiting for.

  “Want to get out of here?” she asked.

  Before I could say yes, my phone rang.

  “I’m in Darren Cowley’s flat,” Benjamin said. “You’ll want to get down here.”

  FIFTEEN

  I called Ariel a cab to take her back to her hotel.

  “Sorry about this.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Work emergency. I get it.”

  I tapped my phone and buzzed hers. She opened my message.

  “Voucher for a full treatment at the Thai House Spa in Covent Garden,” I said. “Near your hotel. Help with your jet lag.”

  “And you just happened to have it stored on your phone?” She laughed.

  “Perks of the job. We helped them out once.”

  �
��Are you bribing me?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Is it working?”

  “Ask me tomorrow night.” She smiled and winked.

  I shut the door and sent her off, then ran to the BMW and drove out to Darren Cowley’s flat.

  Benjamin buzzed me in.

  There are a few things I would happily go to the end of my life not seeing, and a half-naked dead man hanging from the ceiling with a full erection is very close to the top of my list.

  “Fuck.”

  When I had clocked off four hours ago to go on my date with Ariel, Benjamin had volunteered to watch Darren Cowley’s flat in my place, since he had nothing better to do: Olivia was going out drinking with her girlfriends from college and his online friends were too busy with babies and family stuff to play Call of Duty with him.

  After the first hour, Darren was still a no-show. Benjamin got bored and, being Benjamin, decided to come inside to take a look. He managed to bypass the buzzers in the building’s front door, and picking the lock to Darren’s flat was even easier for him. That was when he found what was left of Darren Cowley.

  “I think they’ll call it autoerotic asphyxiation,” Benjamin declared as he handed me a pair of rubber surgical gloves so we wouldn’t leave any of our prints around the place.

  “He must have already been dead when I got here,” I said.

  “See the booze and the drugs on the coffee table? The sliced oranges, the peels? No suicide note. This will read, ‘Got high, got randy, decided to extreme-wank, went wrong.’ ”

  “Hell of a coincidence,” I said.

  “What, he got so stressed out he would accidentally top himself?”

  I looked at Darren, much as I didn’t want to. There was a slice of orange in his mouth, apparently for biting down so the sour taste would jolt him from blacking out while the noose was tightening. There was the kicked-over chair near Darren’s legs. His wrists were tied in front of his chest, seemingly part of the ritual to feel “helpless.”