Her Beautiful Monster Read online

  “So property isn’t the only thing that’s the Harkingdale family business,” Roger said, impressed. “There’s also murder.”

  “We reckon it’s poisoning.” I said. “After all, no one conducted toxicology tests or autopsies in those days. Faking Mayakovsky’s suicide wouldn’t have been difficult. They could have slipped something in his wine before he got in the bath. It knocks him out, and Cecily comes in when he loses consciousness to just gently push him under the water and keep him there.”

  “Which brings us to Irina and Sacha Mayakovsky,” Julia continued. “In the months before he died, Mayakovsky began to visit them quite regularly after only seeing Sacha just once every few months since the divorce ten years ago. He spent time with Sacha to keep in touch and help bring him up, but he and Irina avoided each other if they could help it. Then in the last year of his life, he started seeing her even when Sacha was away at school. I don’t think he wanted to get back together with her.”

  “We think he knew something was up with the Harkingdales,” I said, “And Irina was the only one in his life who would understand if he talked about it.”

  “He must have told her about his new will,” said Julia. “If he was expecting the Harkingdales to bump him off, he might have decided not to give them his assets, so he would have another will drawn up leaving it all to Irina and Sacha.”

  “So he felt trapped,” Cheryl said. “He saw his whole life crumbling around him. He was depressed. He saw no way out. Cecily wasn’t going to give him a divorce because he was the Harkingdales’ meal ticket.”

  “What I don’t get,” Roger said, “is why he continued to live with her, with her relatives coming and going in their house. He could have legged it, moved out and into one of his penthouses in London with extra bodyguards restricting access to him.”

  “Oh, Roger,” Cheryl sighed. “You’ve never understood the mind of a fatalist. The poor sod was depressed and losing the will to live. He might have thought this was his fate, his punishment for his hubris and arrogance, for abandoning his first wife and son, the simpler life with purer love, for an illusion of glamour and status, and this was where it got him. He was probably at the end of his rope.”

  “Bloody stroll on!” Roger rolled his eyes. “If I ever get that way, Cheryl love, you have my permission to shoot me. Just blow my head off and get it over with.”

  “Might be too late for you by then,” Cheryl said.

  “I mean it!”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Back to the case at hand,” Roger said, suddenly rubbing his hands. “This could call for a nice earner for us. Lots of ways to play it. Lovely-jubbly!”

  “So now our priority is to find Irina and Sacha before the Harkingdales do,” I said.

  “Too right! We are their new best friends,” Roger said. “No, even better. We’re their fucking guardian angels. Their very expensive guardian angels!”

  Of course, this was all still circumstantial evidence and pure speculation. We didn’t have any real evidence to support this. You might think we were awfully quick to jump to the worst conclusion about human nature here, but the way things went in this world, by the time Golden Sentinels was brought into the picture, there was already an expectation that awful shit was afoot. In the time I’d been at the firm, that usually turned out to be true. Murder cases were still not the norm, however. We usually referred such clients to the police, and if we were called to solve a murder case, we had to be extra careful. To be implicated as an accessory, to hide or tamper with evidence, to be accused of obstruction or perverting the course of justice were not charges the firm could shrug off. That was why Roger, Cheryl, Ken, and Clive took great pains to drum into us the old saying “Do what thou must, but for God’s sake, don’t get caught!” Words to live by.

  I glanced at the sofa in Roger’s office. Kali was dancing up a storm on the cushions, whirling like a dervish, tongue wagging, bouncing up and down in rapture, reveling at the coming madness. Bagalamukhi stood by, goading her on, anticipating the drama to come.

  Great. Just bloody great.

  SIX

  We went up on the roof to have our usual communal spliff. Mark had a new strain he wanted to try out, one with less sting, more smoothness.

  “What’s landed gentry in the twenty-first century anyway?” Mark asked. “An outmoded form of aristocracy still leeching off the resources of the nation. And now we find out this family is evil? The Harkingdales have form as poisoners? That’s just too rich!”

  “Well, they got away with it for over a hundred years,” I said.

  “It’s like something out of a Brontë novel,” Julia said, taking a puff off the spliff.

  “Charlotte, Anne, or Emily?” Olivia asked.

  “Emily. More full-on death and melodrama,” Julia said.

  “This is kind of an interesting irony,” Marcie smiled. “Mayakovsky was a KGB badass for twenty years before he got out with his billions, hoping for his happy ending livin’ large in London, only to end up poisoned by a family of English aristocratic assholes for his money. My buddies at the US Embassy are gonna love this.”

  Marcie was such a gossip I could tell she couldn’t wait to tell her mates in the CIA. And this would then spread throughout the entire intelligence community. Spies relied on information, and gossip was no less valid as intel. If knowledge was power, Marcie must have been getting a lot of street cred amongst her fellow spooks, justifying her staying here at Golden Sentinels to run us as a network of assets, and juicy morsels of potential leverage.

  “I want to use drones,” Benjamin said when the spliff was passed to him.

  We all looked at him as if he was mad.

  “For surveillance!” he said. “To get dirt we need on the Harkingdales! Roger won’t get me access to weaponized drones!”

  We all relaxed.

  “Bloody hell! Do you think I actually want to kill people?”

  “Sometimes we wonder about you, Benjamin,” I said.

  “I can’t believe your opinion of me is that low!” He sulked. “Where’s the lulz in killing people? Honestly.”

  “What’s this about killing people?” David asked, arriving late.

  We told him what Julia and I had turned up.

  “Fucking hell!” David cried. “Another murder case?!”

  I could sense the panic bubbling up from his stomach. The normal human reaction that the rest of us often sidestepped.

  “David throwing a wobbly again,” muttered Benjamin.

  “I hate murder cases!”

  “Me, too, David,” I said. “Deep breath now.”

  David was the first person I’d ever met who had a genuine phobia of murder cases. I suppose it was a middle-class fear, that fear of chaos and the breaking of reason and the social contract, and of becoming tainted by that darkness.

  “This was supposed to be a simple case of due diligence!” he cried.

  “David, you know as well as I do that when it comes to fuck-off amounts of money, things will always get complicated.”

  “Fucking hell!”

  I caught Ken and Clive glancing at David’s panic attack when we went back down to our desks. Ken shrugged. Clive rolled his eyes. I could tell he thought David was such a wimp. Not everyone could be hardboiled like Ken and Clive. Actually, no, Ken and Clive were not hardboiled. They were concrete.

  “Do they know we suspect?” David asked.

  “The Harkingdales? No. They don’t have any reason to, but once we find Irina and Sacha Mayakovsky, they might kick off.”

  “Like how?”

  “I don’t know. Off the top of my head, they might try to have them killed, which might mean coming after us first.”

  “So we might end up collateral damage!” David was losing it again.

  “I’m glad you’ve had your weekly dose of medicinal libation, children,” Roger declared, stepping out of his office. “Now I think the task is clear. Anyone with a spare moment, help Ravi find Irina and Sacha
Mayakovsky before the Harkingdales do. I want everyone rested and fresh in the morning to talk strategy.”

  SEVEN

  As Julia and I left the office, my dad phoned. I didn’t need gods to forewarn me that this was coming.

  “Come and pick up your washing,” Dad said. “And please talk to your mother.”

  “About what?”

  “She’s been receiving stolen goods from that Dhewan gangster woman!”

  “What?!”

  The skies cracked open and thunder and lightning raged above us as I sped towards my parents’ house. Julia didn’t see any of it—Lord Ganesha raising his scepter above the clouds and goading Arjuna on as he led his troops forth in the great Kurukshetra War.

  “I might be mixing up my stories, since Ganesha wasn’t there,” I said, my foot on the accelerator.

  “Ravi, calm down,” Julia said.

  “I am perfectly calm. It’s just the bloody Mahabharata is being reenacted above me as my parents go round the bend again!”

  “What does a war have to do with your parents and Mrs. Dhewan?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t bloody know. My mother committing a crime and a gang war erupting?”

  “That’s ridiculous, Ravi. You know that won’t happen. Mrs. Dhewan would never get your mother involved in one of her ventures. Your mum is too much of a loose cannon for her to take the risk.”

  “Julia, I appreciate you trying to calm me down. Really, I do, but I’m seeing a fucking big mythical battle going on up in the night sky as we drive to West London.”

  “Maybe it’s telling you about something else, not your parents.”

  “What, then?”

  “This case. You said the gods send you signs and portents, yes? Think about how big this thing we’re on could blow up into. Tens of millions of pounds at stake, a murderous family, a mother and son on the run and facing a fight for survival.”

  “We really don’t need to think about that now. We just need to find two missing people. And I just need to sort out my parents.”

  “You don’t always need to be so stoical, love.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Singh means ‘lion.’ You can’t help but live up to your name. You just need to protect everyone because you feel guilty. Even when you don’t have to.”

  Julia’s literary perspective made her a unique investigator. Roger must have spotted that when he interviewed her. He didn’t see her as just another pretty face as I had first thought he did. She and I complemented each other, and to my surprise, she was the only person in my life who could actually calm me down. We seemed to have that effect on each other, as if we were a complete person, but my worry was that we also enabled each other to do the outrageous things this job demanded, with no remorse and even a certain amount of glee. It was the perfect contrast to reading literary criticism and writing papers. Julia enjoyed this job much more than I did, as addicts chased dangerous situations to feel alive, and that worried me.

  “Stop thinking you’re responsible,” she would say. “It’s not about you, Ravi.”

  Meanwhile, my parents’ living room looked like a food warehouse.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  Boxes upon boxes of canned foods, pasta, sugar, jars of sauces, soups, biscuits, toiletries, and basic household cleaning products were stacked against the wall. Dad sat in his armchair, seething.

  “I’m just holding them for Mrs. Dhewan,” Mum said. “Her nephews are collecting them first thing in the morning to take to the food bank.”

  “It’s not even an official food bank!” Dad grumbled. “These must be stolen! Or past their sell-by date! They might be poison!”

  “They’ve been giving these away to the poor for months,” Mum retorted. “Nobody’s died. Why do you leap to the worst conclusions about everything! You’ve done nothing but complain!”

  “Leave me alone, woman!”

  “I have been leaving you alone! I should ask the same of you!”

  “Listen to you two!” I said. “What are you? Children?”

  “At least I’m doing something to help with the community,” Mum said. “Instead of sitting around sulking all day.”

  I decided to leave Julia to look after my folks while I went over to see Mrs. Dhewan, whose house was only two streets down. I phoned ahead and asked to visit, a necessary formality, and she granted permission. Mrs. Dhewan may have looked like a Hindu housewife with airs, but she was really the local gangster and loan shark, with her son and nephews keeping the peace as her enforcers. I grew up with them, after all, under the veneer of respectable middle-class courtesy, since we never got mixed up in her business. That came later, after I became a private investigator, which brought my world uncomfortably close to hers.

  “I understand work has been very busy, Ravi,” she said as she received me in her living room. “How nice of you to come by to see Auntie.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Her living room was piled with even more boxes than my mother’s. She formed a surreal juxtaposition against them, in her expensive gold-and-red sari and jewelry.

  “A temporary situation.” Mrs. Dhewan waved her hand away. “All these goods are donations from local businesses for the food bank.”

  “So they’re actual donations? They didn’t fall off the back of a bunch of lorries off the M4?”

  “Of course not. Do you think we could get away with having this much in full view of everyone? They’re a tax write-off for those warehouses and businesses. Did you think I would jeopardize your mother by telling her to hold on to stolen goods? She’s a civilian, dear. You know as well as I do that we do not mix civilians with our business. They’re woefully unsuited to cope.”

  “Well, as long as everything’s kosher, but that doesn’t explain why you and my mother are storing them at home instead of the food bank.”

  “Oh, you’re such a good son, Ravi. Your mother is holding those goods precisely because they’re not stolen.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We’ve been having a spot of bother with thieves stealing from the stores in the back of the food bank itself. Since we’re catering to the community, we had to hide the goods away from the shop and bring them in the next day so people will get their food.”

  “Here’s the thing: I’m a bit concerned that my mother agreed to store them at home. In the past she would have kicked up a fuss about it cluttering up the house.”

  “Blame it on the tensions between her and your father.”

  “Oh God, don’t tell me she told you about that, too.”

  “Women commiserate, Ravi, otherwise we would all go mad. If your father was performing his marital duties as a husband, she would be much more relaxed and happy.”

  “I’m not comfortable discussing this with you, Auntie.”

  “You’re an adult now, dear. You and I both know your mother is prone to being highly strung at the best of times. She might even be bipolar if you want to get psychological. That might explain why she was so eager to accept so many boxes, but it wasn’t my place to comment. I can only say that this situation between your parents needs to be dealt with sooner or later.”

  “I never thought of you as a marriage counselor, Mrs. Dhewan.”

  “I am whatever the community needs me to be.” She shrugged. “Just like you in your day job.”

  “Do you need any help with the thieves? Like a line in finding out who they are?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. I have my boys on the lookout, but they’re hardly detectives. Be a dear, won’t you? I would be ever so grateful.”

  EIGHT

  I sent Benjamin over to Mrs. Dhewan’s food bank warehouse in the morning to hide some extra surveillance cameras in the storeroom and RFID chips in the dozen boxes I got her boys to put there to attract the thieves. Benjamin never seemed to sleep. He was always happy for a chance to play with his toys. I could tell Roger I was “cultivating local relationships
that might prove useful.”

  Then back to Golden Sentinels for the strategy meeting. Julia was off in class, since she was still part-time, but I would fill her in later.

  “The Harkingdales are chomping at the bit to find Irina and Sacha Mayakovsky,” David said. “Since as long as they’re in the wind, the estate is in limbo. They can’t execute the will, the Harkingdales can’t touch the properties. They have millions in debt, so they want to sell them as soon as possible.”

  There we were, doing what we did. Open-plan office, everyone gathered around for a strategy meeting. Roger’s Bright Young Things, us, acting like we were a trendy start-up when we were in fact dealing with literal life and death.

  “If this was a murder inquiry,” Ken said, “we’d be lookin’ at the ex-wife and son leggin’ it so soon after he snuffed it as highly suspicious.”

  “If we were still coppers,” Clive added, “we’d be on the telly askin’ the public for help and appealin’ for Mrs. Mayakovsky and Junior to come forward.”

  “Highly unlikely for them to be suspects,” Mark said. “Since they didn’t have access to Mayakovsky. And we know the Harkingdales have form with poisoning and access to him.”

  “They’re not the ones who’ve done a runner,” Ken said. “That still makes ’em suspect.”

  “You think the kid might have killed his dad, then grabbed his mum with the intent to get rid of her, too?” Marcie said.