The Borgia Ring (5 page)

Stepney, Saturday 4 June, 10.00 a.m.

Pendragon and Turner had reached ground level and were picking their way between rusty girders and piles of sand when an old Toyota Camry pulled on to the site and stopped a few metres away. A short, heavily built man, the dome of his huge head covered in grey stubble, stepped out of the driver’s seat. He carried a yellow hard hat in one hand.

‘I came as soon as I heard,’ he told them, extending his free hand.

‘Mr Ketteridge?’

‘Tony.’

‘DCI Pendragon. Sergeant Turner. You’re the site manager here, is that correct?’

Beads of sweat had appeared on the man’s forehead. He had dark rings under his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘What exactly have you been told?’

‘About Amal? He’s dead. Dreadful. Do you know anything more?’

‘It seems clear the man was attacked and killed in a neighbouring property.’

‘Christ!’ Ketteridge looked skyward.

‘Had Mr Karim been a security guard here for long?’

‘Well, he wasn’t really a guard as such, just one of the
construction team. Volunteered for a bit of overtime.’ Ketteridge wiped away the sweat that was now trickling down his cheeks. ‘We usually just rely on the security cameras, but it was the skeleton …’

‘Skeleton?’ Pendragon snapped.

‘You haven’t been down there yet then?’

‘Yes, we have, but there was no skeleton.’ Pendragon turned to Turner who simply shrugged his shoulders.

Ketteridge donned his hard hat and stepped between the two policemen, taking the sloping path down into the pit. From several metres away it seemed he could tell something was wrong and began to pick up pace. By the time Pendragon and Turner had reached him, he was crouching down close to the cluster of flags.

‘This is crazy!’ he said, standing up and turning to face Pendragon.

‘I think you’d better start at the beginning,’ the DCI told him.

They were in the site hut, a Portakabin fifty metres or so from the pit. Inside, the walls were covered with charts and plans and a calendar featuring an improbably endowed model resplendent in hard hat and nothing else. Ketteridge’s desk was strewn with papers, a calculator, empty mugs and chocolate wrappers. A computer surrounded by more papers stood on a separate desk close by. Beside it stood a printer and an A3 flatbed scanner.

Pendragon paced around the room looking at the charts before going behind the desk and surveying the muddle on top of it. Ketteridge looked uncomfortable, standing with hands in pockets.

‘Okay, talk us through it,’ Pendragon ordered, and tapped at the keyboard of the computer to snap it out of sleep mode.
Wallpaper of a tropical paradise appeared, speckled with at least fifty file names.

‘We were getting ready to close down for the day – must have been getting on for five – when one of the men called me over. He’d cleared some soil away at the bottom of the excavation and there were hip and thigh bones protruding from the mud. We dug away carefully and there it was – a full skeleton. It was very old.’

Pendragon came back round the desk and began to pace again, then stopped a few feet away from Ketteridge. ‘And you didn’t report it?’

The site manager looked sheepish. ‘Believe me, I was going to. I called my boss straight away. He was in a meeting.’

‘Who was with you?’ Pendragon asked, pulling a box file from a shelf and walking towards the desk with it. He perched on the edge and flicked through the file.

‘There’re sixteen men on the job. Only three were with me in the pit at the time. Oh, and Tim Middleton.’

‘Who is?’

‘Partner in the architect’s firm responsible for the design.’

Turner was taking all this down.

‘We’ll need a full list of names and addresses,’ Pendragon said. ‘Go on.’

‘I wasn’t sure what to do, and it was getting on. The guys were all exhausted … bastard of a week it’s been. Stifling. So I thought, well, the skeleton wasn’t going anywhere. Karim volunteered to do one shift guarding it, and one of the others said he would take over in the early-morning.’

‘I see.’ Pendragon closed the file and appraised the man before him.

‘There’s one other thing … there was a ring.’

‘A ring?’

‘On the skeleton’s right hand.’

Pendragon stared at the man in disbelief. ‘And you just left it there? With one security guard to cover the whole site?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do. I needed to talk to my boss. Besides, we have CCTV.’

‘Oh, jolly good.’

‘I thought …’

‘No, Mr Ketteridge. You didn’t
think
at all.’

There was a brief silence, the only sound the buzzing of a fly banging against the window.

Ketteridge went behind his desk and opened a drawer. ‘You may find these useful,’ he said, and handed Pendragon a set of half a dozen photographs. ‘Tim Middleton took some snaps of the skeleton and e-mailed them over as soon as he got back to his office. I printed them out before I left the site last night. Then I checked on Amal Karim to see if he was still okay about pulling the night shift. He seemed fine … poor sod. I dunno, I got the feeling he was doing it out of a sense of duty, respect for the dead or something.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘I must admit, we were all a bit freaked out by it.’

Pendragon studied the pictures. They were postcard-sized and taken from several different angles. The earth above the skeleton had been carefully removed and the area around it cut away, exposing the remains. The skeleton looked forlorn against the mud, a remnant from a different time, alien to this world. In one of the pictures a large gold ring topped with a green stone could clearly be seen on the little finger of the right hand.

‘Okay,’ Pendragon said, and shuffled the photographs together to take with him. Turning to Turner, he said. ‘Get the CCTV recordings and meet me at the car. And, Mr Ketteridge, keep your mobile charged. We’ll be in touch again … very soon.’

The wall clock read 11.30 a.m. as Pendragon stepped up to a whiteboard at the open end of a horseshoe arrangement of desks. The briefing room was small and hot; an electric fan on a spindly stand whirred away in the far corner, but it was almost completely ineffectual. The entire team had gathered in the room. Sergeants Rosalind Mackleby, Jimmy Thatcher and Terry Vickers sat to one side, Inspectors Rob Grant and Ken Towers to the other. Directly in front of Pendragon, Jez Turner was perched on a desk. At the back of the room, close to the door, stood Superintendent Jill Hughes, arms folded across her chest.

‘Okay, a quick summary,’ Pendragon began, surveying the room. He showed no signs of the anxiety he felt inside. ‘You all know about the body found in the club. Identified as Amal Karim, an Indian labourer who was employed by Bridgeport Construction.’ He tapped a photograph of the man, a passport picture from a few years back, copied and enlarged. Next to this were photographs of the crime scene, the body sprawled on a concrete floor, one side of the face a mass of black and red. ‘Karim was struck twice, once to the throat and then to the skull. Both blows came from a heavy, blunt object, probably a piece of metal pipe.’ He indicated the injuries on the photograph as he spoke. ‘His body was dumped in a ventilation duct. Time of death between one-thirty and two-thirty this morning.

‘Sergeant Turner and I have just returned from the crime scene. Karim was involved in a struggle on a building site a short distance from the club. He was killed on the roof there, his body dumped in the duct. He’d been on night duty as a security guard at the site.’

Inspector Grant’s hand went up. ‘Any idea of motive, guv? Anything valuable taken from the site?’

‘I was just coming to that. Dr Newman’s team have found a human bone close to where they think Karim was originally attacked.’

‘A bone?’

‘A finger bone, apparently. Very old.’

‘But that could be a coincidence, couldn’t it?’ Sergeant Mackleby asked. She was taller than half the men in the room, thin, with long auburn hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her pencil skirt and crisp white blouse accentuated her slender figure and also gave an impression of severity.

‘Fair question,’ Pendragon replied. ‘There’s a massive hole there, at least ten metres deep. Never know what might get dug up when you go that far down, but it’s nothing so simple in this case. We had a word with the site manager, Tony Ketteridge. Turns out they unearthed a skeleton there last night. That’s why Karim was keeping watch.’

There was a stunned silence. Superintendent Hughes walked round the desks to where Pendragon was standing. ‘And all that’s left of it is this finger bone?’ She gave him an incredulous stare.

‘It would seem so,’ Pendragon replied, and handed her the photos Ketteridge had given him. ‘When the skeleton was dug up, one of the architects for the project was there, a …’ he glanced at a notebook in his hand ‘… Tim Middleton of Rainer and Partner. He took these pictures with his phone.’

She studied them without a word, turning them round in
her hands before passing them on to Jimmy Thatcher who was closest to her. ‘And they didn’t report it?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘So you think this guy Karim was killed because of the skeleton?’ It was Jimmy Thatcher who was talking. He had just passed the photos on to Mackleby. Terry Vickers was leaning over her shoulder to get a look.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Pendragon retorted. ‘Far too early to jump to conclusions.’

‘But it’s an odd coincidence,’ Hughes said, walking over to take a close look at the photograph of the security guard’s body. ‘Did this Tony Ketteridge give a valid reason for not reporting the find immediately? Does he realise he’s broken the law?’

Pendragon shrugged. ‘Said he’d tried and failed to contact his boss. Thought it best to sleep on it first.’

‘Terrific!’

‘He kept reiterating the point that the skeleton was really old, ma’am,’ Turner interjected.

‘Oh, so that excuses him,’ Hughes said, rather louder than she had intended. Jimmy Thatcher straightened involuntarily. Grant coughed and crossed his arms over his chest.

‘Well, whatever his reasons, it was a bloody silly thing to do. Puts him right in the frame,’ she added.

‘Yes, but there’s no evidence. We can bring him in on a technicality, but I think the man would be more useful to us if we let his oversight go; played it softly with him. At least at first,’ said Pendragon.

‘And what’s this?’ Mackleby had the pictures again and was pointing at the ring on the skeleton’s hand.

‘It’s what it looks like. A ring,’ the DCI replied.

‘So, a motive then?’ Terry Vickers said.

‘Possibly.’

Outside the briefing room, Pendragon told Turner to take a good look at the CCTV disks he had brought back from the construction site. Turning to Thatcher and Vickers he instructed them to lead a search team to sweep the area within a two-hundred-metre radius of the site.

Superintendent Hughes tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Got a minute?’ She ushered him into her office and closed the door. ‘Quite a first morning.’

‘Nothing like going in at the deep end,’ he agreed and sat facing her across a remarkably neat desk. There was a Mac to one side; a silver-framed picture of a younger Superintendent Hughes in black gown and mortarboard sandwiched between beaming parents.

‘Any initial thoughts you’d like to share?’ she asked.

He was silent for a moment as he glanced around the room. It was almost obsessively neat, not a scrap of paper or mote of dust visible; even the waste bin was empty and pristine.

‘I think Amal Karim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he said.

‘And this skeleton business?’

‘Is the key, as far as I can tell.’

‘So what now?’

‘I’ve got Sergeant Turner on to the surveillance recordings and I’m going to see if Dr Jones has anything on the finger bone. Then I’ll interview the construction team, maybe the vic’s family.’

Hughes was nodding. ‘You going to bring Ketteridge in?’

‘Later. Thought I’d let him stew a bit. If he’s involved, the more he mulls it over, the worse he’ll feel.’

Superintendent Hughes put her fingers to her chin thoughtfully. ‘Fine. Well, you know my door is always open, Jack.’

Back in his own office, Pendragon spent some time familiarising himself with his new surroundings, especially the computer system he was networked to. It was obvious from the off this was going to be a complex case; they had both a fresh corpse and a missing skeleton on their hands, and it was only day one.

An hour flew by as he wrote up a report of what he had done so far, which he saved in a newly created file named
KARIM
. Then he dropped in on Turner.

‘Disks aren’t working properly,’ the sergeant said despondently. He had a cup of murky grey liquid in his hand.

‘Looks nice,’ Pendragon deadpanned, nodding towards the cup.

Turner smiled. ‘Sorry about earlier, guv.’

Pendragon waved it away. ‘So what’s up with the disks?’

‘One of the tech guys is on to it. Data drop-outs or something, he reckons. Might be the heat. He says he can transfer the images to a DVD, but it’ll take a few hours.’

‘Okay. I’m going to see Jones. While I’m out, get on to a local historian. There might be someone at Queen Mary. Or else King’s on the Strand have a great history department, I seem to remember. Oh, and do your own bit on Google. I’ve made copies of Ketteridge’s pictures. They’re on my desk. I want to know everything there is to know about that ring.’

He took a car from the pool. It had been parked facing the sun and was boiling hot. Police cars didn’t come with air conditioning as standard, so he wound down the windows. The novelty of this heatwave was wearing off. A big part of him wished the aquamarine sky would cloud over.

As he emerged into Saturday afternoon traffic on Whitechapel Road, he glanced at the photos of the skeleton where they lay on the passenger seat. At a red light, he had a moment to flick through them for a couple of seconds. This
whole thing smelt bad, he thought. Ketteridge was caught in the middle, by the look of it. They were probably all under pressure: the construction firm, the architects, the investors. Everyone always was, especially in high-stakes games like property development. The land alone was worth millions, and every day lost meant more money wasted on plant hire, labour, interest payments. It was easy to see why the site manager hadn’t reported anything. But then, who was to say he hadn’t planned to once he’d got the all-clear from his higher-ups?

There were two cars parked close to the doors to the path lab, both jalopies, a rusty Nissan and an ancient Ford Capri with leopardskin seat covers and furry dice dangling from the rear-view mirror.

‘Classy,’ Pendragon murmured to himself as he strode towards the entrance.

It was refreshingly cool inside, but the stink of the place was all-pervading. He was about to enter the suite of rooms that constituted Jones’s domain when a door swung towards him. It was held open by the pathologist. There was a group of half a dozen people coming along the passageway. Amal Karim’s family here to identify the body, Pendragon guessed. An elderly woman and a young man led the way followed by younger visitors, siblings or close relatives of the dead man, perhaps. The old woman was wearing a dark silk sari; her face was moist with tears. A young man in a cheap brown suit was supporting her with one arm around her shoulders. His own eyes were filled to brimming. Pendragon watched the group leave the building.

Jones tapped him on the shoulder and nodded towards his lab. ‘Always the worst part of the job,’ he said. ‘The dead are dead, but the relatives … Anyway, I suppose you’ve come about the bone.’

‘Bit optimistic, I know.’

‘Too bloody right … What do you expect?’

‘Anything. Hunches?’

‘DCI Pendragon, I’ve had a corpse to deal with, and the corpse’s family … and it’s still only frigging …’ he looked at his watch ‘… twelve-forty and I’m starving!’ He looked down at the ground sheepishly then at Pendragon. ‘It’s old – extremely old. The very lovely Dr Newman is right, it’s a metatarsal, fifth finger of the right hand, the little finger. You can tell by the size and curvature of the bone. It’s been freshly separated from the other bones of the same finger. You can see that from patches of discoloration to either end of the bone.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘How so?’

‘A few hours before this bone was found, an entire human skeleton lay in the same spot at the bottom of a dirty great hole on a construction site. The skeleton went walkies sometime last night. But whoever performed the disappearing act was obviously a little careless.’

Back at the station, the afternoon was allocated to a succession of interviews. First on the list was Terry Disher, the man who had unearthed the skeleton the previous afternoon.

‘Am I a suspect?’ he asked as soon as he sat down opposite Pendragon. They were at a steel table in Interview Room 2. He had declined the offer of tea. Pendragon had a cup in front of him, and took a sip before responding.

‘Just routine, Mr Disher. This is a murder inquiry.’

‘Do I need a solicitor?’

‘No. But if you feel …’

The builder was shaking his head. He was a big man, at least six foot four and two hundred and fifty pounds. Not
much fat on him. He had whitish-blond hair and intense blue eyes. Pendragon had read the report on him. Disher was twenty-six. Went to school in Bromley. Worked abroad on construction sites in Germany for a few years then came back to London. Married a year ago, one son. He lived on the local estate.

‘All right. Fire away,’ he said. ‘Dunno if I can help, but I’d like to see the bastard who did it put behind bars.’

‘You were a friend of Mr Karim’s?’

He reflected for a moment. ‘Yes and no. As much as anyone could be, I guess. He kept himself to himself. That lot all do.’

‘“That lot” meaning the Indian workmen?’

‘All the ethnics. The East Europeans, the black guys. There’s not a lot of … what do they call it now? … multi-culturalism in the building trade.’

Pendragon produced a half-smile. ‘No, I don’t imagine there is.’ He took another sip of tea. ‘Do you know if Mr Karim had any enemies? Did anyone in the company dislike the man?’