The Borgia Ring (3 page)

Chief Inspector Jack Pendragon grabbed for the receiver, missed and knocked the phone to the floor along with a glass of water and his alarm clock. He could faintly hear the voice at the other end of the line as he scrambled in the dark to locate the receiver.

‘Pendragon,’ he said, trying to sound as together as possible.

‘Inspector Grant. I’m sorry to call you so early, sir. Something’s come up.’

Pendragon rubbed his right eye and switched the phone to his free hand as he inched back up the bed. He glanced at the clock on the floor. The red letters told him it was 3.05 a.m.

‘What’s up?’

‘Best see for yourself, guv. I’m …’ there was a pause ‘… four minutes from the crime scene.’

‘Can you be a bit more precise?’

‘A body in a club. Don’t know much else.’

‘Where?’

‘Mile End Road. Some sort of bunker behind a jewellery shop called Jangles.’

‘Okay. I’ll find it.’

He ran the shower and waited for the water to warm up. He had only arrived at Brick Lane Police Station the previous evening. His commanding officer, Superintendent Jill Hughes, had shown him around and then gone through the
team’s files with him. He had two inspectors under his command: Rob Grant, twenty-six, hard-working, hard-nosed and tough, a high-flier; and Kenneth Towers, thirty-one, not terribly ambitious, a bit of a plodder. Then there was Jez Turner, one of three sergeants under him and the one assigned as his ‘principal sergeant’. Jez was twenty-two, keen, a bit of a lad, but a promising young cop who would, in theory at least, follow him round like a loyal puppy. But, like all the staff at the station, Sergeant Turner had in fact greeted Pendragon’s arrival with a blend of outward respect and barely disguised scepticism. He knew the score when it came to new arrivals without promotion. They were seen as having failed in their last posting and consequently had to prove themselves in a new one. Pendragon also came with baggage, personal issues that had probably been discussed and dissected before he arrived to fill the role of number two at the station, answerable directly to the Super.

And that brought Jill Hughes back to mind: a career cop, confident, almost androgynous except for the softness of her face and the shapely figure her uniform could not disguise. Her large brown eyes were attractive but betrayed no hint of sensuality. Superintendent Hughes was, Pendragon knew, a very tough, very strong-willed woman and an exceptional officer. At thirty-two, she was perhaps the youngest Super in the country, but she had little practical experience. Like himself twenty years earlier, she had been a top graduate from Sulhampstead Police College. Her team at Brick Lane had grown to respect her razor-sharp mind; but there was no denying the fact, Jack reflected, that she would be relying on him and on the case experience he could offer.

He gargled some mouthwash as he did up his tie and rubbed his hand over the just-acceptable stubble on his chin. At forty-six, allowing for a slight paunch, he had kept his
athletic build, and although his hair was now more white than black, the flesh on his face was still taut. In a good light, he could just about pass for early-forties.

He had been looking forward to a weekend spent revisiting his old stamping ground. Pendragon had been born within half a mile of the station and had lived in the heart of the East End of London for the first eighteen years of his life. There had been a few trips back after going up to Magdalen, Oxford, but when his parents died in the late-80s he’d felt no further inclination to return. Until, that is … He picked up his keys and made for the stairs.

The front desk was unmanned as Pendragon crossed the hotel foyer and exited on to the street. The hotel was close to Moorgate tube station in the City, a five-minute drive from Mile End Road at this time of day. The streets were aglow with reflected neon. Pendragon followed his nose. He knew his way around London by simple instinct. The roads and the buildings might, on the surface, have changed during the decades since he had left, but the inner structure was immutable, the underlying topography intact. He could follow these roads as though they were leylines. London was ingrained into the very fabric of his being.

And some things had not been tarmacked over or given a radical facelift. Most of the shops were now owned by Indian and Bangladeshi tradespeople, but some of the long-established family businesses remained. And although most of the old pubs had taken on new, trendy names and been made over, the landmarks of his youth still jumped out at him. Passing the Grave Maurice public house and the Blind Beggar, he remembered that they had once been favourite haunts of the Kray twins. The gangsters had been more powerful than God in this area when he was a boy.

As he approached Jangles, an ambulance pulled away from the kerb and sped past him towards the London Hospital a few hundred yards down the road. Pendragon could see two police cars parked outside the shop, their blue lights splashing brightness across the drab brick and discoloured concrete surroundings. The shop window had been emptied before closing, anything precious safely locked away. The glass was masked with inch-thick steel bars. A scratched and scuffed blue-painted door set to the side of the shop stood ajar. Sergeant Jez Turner emerged from it and approached Pendragon’s car as he pulled up at the kerb.

Turner was slim and rangy, his hair gelled back retro matinée-idol style. He had large dark eyes and a long narrow nose. His suit, a Hugo Boss he had found in a designer discount sale on Kensington High Street, was too good for the job. He knew it and the thought pleased him.

‘What’s the story?’ Pendragon asked, coming round the back of the car.

Turner went ahead of him along a narrow corridor. It took them through the building and into a small courtyard. A short staircase led on to the flat roof of a concrete extension taking up most of the back garden of the property. Another door from the passage opened on to a short staircase leading downward.

‘Packed dance-floor, lots of E, I expect,’ Turner said. ‘Then … a body drops from the ceiling.
SPLAT
!’ He turned to Pendragon with a mischievous grin and started to sing. ‘“I believe I can fly …”’

Pendragon ignored him and Turner ushered the Chief Inspector down into the large semi-basement. It stank of sweat and was unbearably hot. Two men stood in the centre of the room: a middle-aged constable and a morbidly obese man dressed in an orange boiler suit. Close by, a pathologist
in green plastic forensic gear over his civvies was crouching beside the body of a man who lay twisted to one side, his neck clearly snapped. The victim was a man of colour, perhaps Indian, but his face was now dark and discoloured from internal bleeding. His black hair was matted with blood and grey matter. He was wearing a light-coloured short-sleeved shirt. Just visible were the words
Bridgeport Construction
printed on the fabric.

Pendragon crouched down to take a closer look. ‘Time of death?’ he asked the pathologist. The man stared blankly at him and then at Turner before realising who Pendragon was.

‘Sometime between one-thirty and two-thirty a.m. And it’s Dr Neil Jones.’

‘Thanks, Dr Jones.’ Pendragon straightened up, turned to the constable and nodded at the figure in the orange boiler suit. ‘Who’s this?’

The constable glanced at his pad. ‘Nigel Turnbull, sir. Aka MC … er, Jumbo.’ He intoned the words with some distaste. ‘A second-year student at Queen Mary College. He made the call.’

Pendragon eyed the youth. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

Turnbull was calm and concise. He recounted events from just before the body appeared, the panic that then ensued and how he had called for an ambulance and notified the police. He omitted to mention first texting a friend to get over
ASAP
to take care of two hundred tabs of E.

‘And the time?’

‘Just before two-thirty. I remember looking at my watch a few minutes before … before this happened.’ He waved towards the corpse.

‘A miracle only one person was injured. I suppose there’s no point asking you for names.’

Jumbo looked at him blankly. ‘I know a few of the regulars, but we don’t use membership cards.’

‘Well, Nigel, perhaps a trip to the station will help jog your memory.’

Turnbull’s face dropped. ‘Look, I’m only a DJ here. I have no probs with giving you a few names, but they’re just students, same as me.’

‘Excellent. Sergeant Turner here has a sharpened pencil at the ready.’

Pendragon turned back to the constable. ‘Where’s Inspector Grant?’

‘Upstairs, sir. He’s talking to the owner of the building.’

Dr Jones stepped forward and caught Pendragon’s eye. The pathologist was a short, solidly built man, with a thick greying beard and a shock of curls; an over-sized Tolkien dwarf. ‘I’d like to get the body to the lab, if it’s all the same to you,’ he said. ‘Forensics will go over every inch of this place.’

‘Fine. And … you’re sure of the time of death?’

‘You know I can’t give you the minute and second, but as I said – definitely between one-thirty and two-thirty.’

Jez Turner placed a cup of vending-machine coffee on the desk beside Pendragon’s elbow.

‘Thanks,’ said the Chief Inspector, and took a sip. ‘Bloody hell!’

Turner held his hands up. ‘Don’t blame me.’

‘But this is …’

‘… perfectly adequate.’ It was Superintendent Jill Hughes at the door to his office. Jack made to get up, but at a signal from Hughes sat back again.

‘You’re perfectly welcome to bring in your own blend if you prefer, Chief Inspector.’

‘Don’t worry, I will,’ he said, and handed the cup back to Turner. ‘Dispose of this … please.’

Hughes smiled and perched on the corner of his desk. ‘So, what’ve we got?’

‘The man could have been killed just before he gate-crashed the rave, ma’am, and certainly no earlier than one-thirty according to Jones.’

‘But how on earth did he end up there?’

‘Sheer fluke. Inspector Grant interviewed the owner of The Love Shack. He’s being very co-operative, of course. A couple of my boys have been all over the house and the outbuilding. The club, if you want to call it that, was originally an air-raid shelter. It was extended in the seventies and used as a storeroom. A couple of years back, the owner was talked into converting it into a music venue. Got in some cowboys by the look of it … an old chimney has been widened and connected up as two air-vents. Whoever pushed the body into the opening on the roof probably thought it was a disposal chute. They could never have dreamt the corpse would end up in the middle of a packed dance-floor.’

‘So …’

‘So I’m heading over to Pathology, to see what Dr Jones has come up with.’ Pendragon was pulling on his jacket and following Hughes to the door. At the end of the corridor they could see Turner with two constables. The sergeant was doing a passable impersonation of Pendragon refusing the machine coffee. They were all wearing big grins. Turner glanced around, saw Pendragon and Hughes and immediately straightened up. The uniforms slipped away. Superintendent Hughes turned to Pendragon with a barely discernible smile. ‘Not a bad mimic really, is he?’

By 9.15 the streets were aglow with orange light. It was obvious the day was going to be another hot one. The thermometer hadn’t moved below 25 degrees all night and now it felt like a summer morning in the south of France. Even the usually grey surroundings of Mile End Road sparkled today. Amazing what a bit of sunshine could do, Pendragon thought as they pulled out of the station and turned on to the main road.

Turner drove and they sat in silence. Pendragon watched the sun-bleached shop fronts and the stained, graffiti-covered walls, metal garage shutters and broken guttering flash by. He thought how odd it all looked; as if London had suddenly been shifted a couple of thousand miles south. The strains of ‘Summertime’ played in his head. Traffic was light. Within a few minutes they were passing through a narrow entrance into a car park. A rectangular sign on the wall of a squat brick building read ‘Milward Street Pathology Unit’ under the Metropolitan Police crest, blue on white.

They found Dr Jones outside the front entrance. He was drawing hungrily on a cigarette, the ash falling into his fulsome beard. He barely reached Pendragon’s shoulder.

‘Banned from my own building,’ he said as the two policemen strode up to the doorway.

‘Quite right too,’ Pendragon responded. ‘Funny. I would
have thought opening up corpses all day would have put you off the fags.’

Jones gave a dry laugh then coughed. ‘Fuck, Pendragon! It’s precisely because I cut open dead people that I don’t give a toss. You end up in a place like this either way. Come on, I’ve been here since before dawn with this one.’ He squashed the cigarette underfoot and shouldered open the door.

The pathology lab was like any other, anywhere. There were two rooms. The smaller one was the morgue. It was lined with steel drawers from floor to shoulder-height. The other had blinds at the windows, workbenches arranged in an L-shape along two walls, racks of test tubes and sundry pieces of chemical equipment. Two stainless-steel dissection tables with drain-off trenches and power hoses stood along the back wall. Between the tables were two trolleys. On top of these, a set of shiny steel dishes. Overhead, a stark fluorescent strip. The concrete floor was a scrubbed gun-metal grey. The whole place stank of cleaning agent and viscera.

Dr Neil Jones was pulling on latex gloves as he approached one of the dissection tables. The dead man lay on the table with his torso cut open. His head was raised slightly on a stabilising block. Pendragon noticed a card tied to the big toe of the victim’s left foot. The card was covered in spindly black writing. In one of the steel dishes beside the table lay a liver. In the other, the contents of the man’s stomach. Turner, notebook in hand, seemed fascinated by it all.

‘So, do you have anything for us?’ Pendragon asked, and kicked his sergeant lightly on the shin.

‘No ID. Male. Late-thirties. Indian, or perhaps Bangladeshi. Five-five and overweight. A heavy smoker by the look of his lungs.’ He nudged a mass of grey tissue with a scalpel. Pendragon looked away for a moment; he could
never get used to the clinical dismissiveness of people like Jones.

‘Oh, please! Don’t tell me you’re squeamish, Chief Inspector?’ Jones chortled.

Pendragon ignored him and glared at Turner who had stopped scribbling. ‘Go on.’

‘You’ll notice extensive bruising … here and here … on the upper arms. Also, his jaw is fractured and his windpipe has been shattered.’ He pointed to the side of the man’s face and under his chin. The flesh was black and broken, split like torn leather. ‘He suffered two particularly vicious blows to the head. Either one would have killed him.’ Jones rolled the victim’s head to one side and they could see a large occlusion on the back of his skull. ‘Blunt-force trauma. Hit by a heavy object, here and under the chin – the blow that smashed his windpipe. I’ve measured the opening in the skull and would guess the weapon was cylindrical – a metal pipe or tubing; heavy-duty torch perhaps. There’s no blood under the fingernails, no hair or skin traces. But from the fractures and bruising, I would imagine there was definitely a struggle.’

Jones turned to another table close by and lifted up a boot. ‘Workboots, size seven, caked in mud. Shirt with a company name –
Bridgeport Construction
. Our man was obviously a labourer or at least working on a building site. Should help.’

Pendragon was about to reply when Turner’s phone rang. ‘Yep,’ he replied chirpily. ‘Yep, cool …
ciao
.’

Pendragon gave a heavy sigh and raised his eyebrows.

‘The station, sir. The murdered man is Amal Karim. Indian. Worked for Bridgeport Construction, who just happen to have a building site down the street from Jangles, on Frimley Way.’

‘Great.’

‘There’s more. Forensics have something they want you to see. Wouldn’t elaborate.’

The locus – the immediate vicinity in which the body was found – in The Love Shack – was abuzz with figures in green plastic suits, scene-of-crime officers from local forensics. Yellow police crime-scene tape had been stretched across the door leading down into the club from the short passageway alongside the shop, and as Pendragon pulled himself under it two SOCOs turned to see who had invaded their space. Neither of them knew Pendragon, but one of the investigators nodded to Turner as he followed the DCI under the tape.

A woman approached them. She was dressed in a regulation plastic suit over a shirt and jeans. ‘DCI Pendragon, I presume,’ she said. ‘Dr Colette Newman, Head of Forensics.’ Her voice was clipped, a hint of BBC circa 1960. Not something you heard much any more.

Pendragon started to put out his hand then withdrew it. Dr Newman smiled. She looked to be about thirty-five, he guessed: fine features, high cheekbones, huge blue eyes. She had to keep tucking strands of blonde fringe behind her right ear.

‘You have something for me?’ he said.

‘Yes. If you’d like to follow me.’

Dr Newman took them back out into the small enclosed concrete courtyard. Some stairs to one side led up to the roof of the club. It was flat and featureless with two metal flues rising about three feet above roof level. The cover of one of the flues had been removed. It lay on the floor a few metres away, a SOCO dusting the metal edge with a large floppy brush. Pendragon could see blood smeared across the bright metal.

‘We’ve found plenty to go on up here.’ She pointed to a large pool of congealed blood. It had dried at the edges and some had seeped into the concrete. A trail of mud and blood ended at the flue and all around were flecks of red. ‘From a first look at the blood-spray pattern, I’d say the victim was hit at least twice.’

Pendragon nodded. ‘The pathologist said the same thing.’

‘I think the attacker came on to the roof from the stairs.’ She led the way to the edge of the roof and they looked down on to the courtyard they had just crossed. From here they could see into the neighbouring properties. To the right, three shops fronted the main road, each with flats above and small gardens behind. To the left stood a high wall. Just visible behind that stood a single, derelict property taking up the corner with Globe Road. Immediately behind Jangles, on the corner of Frimley Way, was a construction site.

‘So the murder took place up here?’ Turner said.

‘Definitely. Follow me.’

She took them back down the stairs, across the yard and through a gate. The alleyway beyond had been cordoned off. They could see a row of green council refuse bins, a dry mud path, brambles and weeds. A random line of red flags snaked its way through an opening ahead. The flags were numbered and had been stuck into the parched soil. In some of these locations they could see smears of blood, black against the mud. The opening led on to a narrow lane. At the end of this stood a tall mesh fence with barbed wire running along the top. A gate opened on to the construction site. It was unlocked, the chain and padlock hanging limp.

‘As you can see, we’ve found traces all along this path. Plenty of blood, hair, flakes of skin. But as it’s a building site, you’d expect at least the last two of these. No footprints,
though, the ground is too hard. We’re still looking for fingerprints, but nothing so far.’

She picked a route across the hardened mud avoiding the flags and the ground close to them. A few steps on, they had reached the edge of a vast, roughly hewn pit criss-crossed with dirty planks supported by a framework of scaffolding. More red flags could be seen where the ground fell away. They followed her down a slope into the pit and along three planks, sidestepping more flags, until they reached the edge of a trench cut into the bottom of the pit. Piles of freshly turned earth lay all around. A cluster of flags had been stuck into the ground here.

Two SOCOs were hard at work. One was photographing the bottom of the trench; the other was on his knees, poking at the soil with a small trowel. The officer with the camera stopped work as they approached and Dr Newman stepped into his place, waving over Pendragon and Turner to see something.

The crouching figure straightened up and stepped aside as the Head of Forensics squatted down.

‘This is the beginning of the trail, DCI Pendragon. There are several signs of a struggle – crumbled soil and scrapes.’ She pointed to one side of the trench. ‘And then there’s this.’ Turning, she pointed to the ground.

They could see a small white object. Pendragon crouched down to take a closer look.

‘It’s a metatarsal, a finger bone, from the fourth or fifth on the right hand, I believe.’