The ambulance arrived first. I gave Donald a slight nod, asking him to show the paramedics to Paul.
In the front of the shop, Faye wept quietly. Tamara simply watched me, showing little emotion. “Have you worked here long?” I asked her.
“Little over a year. It’s a part-time gig. I’m still at uni.”
She was close to thirty. Old for a university student, I thought, but she might have tried other endeavors first or had a gap year that stretched a good deal longer than a year. She was also a bit old for the goth makeup and clothes, but I read nothing into that. No accounting for taste.
“What are you studying?” Grant asked her.
“English lit.”
“This is a good place for you to work then,” he said.
“Not that I’d call anything they sell here literature,” she replied.
We stopped talking at the sound of more sirens pulling up. Two officers came into the shop dressed in the Metropolitan Police uniform of black trousers, yellow jacket worn over white shirt and stab vest, black-and-white checked band on their hats. I stepped silently into the shadows by the bookshelves.
“The medics are in the back with the deceased.” Grant pointed to the open door leading to the private space.
The female officer went where he indicated, while her partner watched us. “You lot have to stay here. The detectives are on their way, and they’ll want to talk to you.”
“I want to go home,” Faye said. “This is all just too much. My nerves aren’t good.”
Tamara rolled her eyes in my direction. Dismissed, Donald edged back into the main room.
“You can go once the detective’s spoken to you,” the officer said.
Outside, other officers were cordoning off the street to allow them vehicle access while the bored and the curious gathered to see what was going on.
The medics came into the room, carrying their equipment. “Nothing for us to do here,” one of them said.
“Thanks,” the cop said.
His partner followed them outside, and she began stringing blue crime scene tape around the store front.
Faye moaned again.
“If we have to wait,” Tamara said, “can I get my bag? I have some reading I need to do. It’s in the back room. I promise I won’t touch anything else.”
“No,” the cop said.
We didn’t have to wait long for the detectives to arrive. She was short and round, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, with chin-length thick black hair. Her partner was ginger-haired, chubby-cheeked, a thousand freckles dotted across his face. His days as a schoolboy must have been a nightmare.
“What have you got?” he asked the uniform as his partner glanced around the store and at us. Donald, Grant, Faye, Tamara. Me.
I saw something cross the detective’s face as she struggled to place me. Rather than wait it out, I stepped forward.
“DS Patel, we have met before. I’m Gemma Doyle. Henry Doyle’s daughter.”
She flipped rapidly through her memory banks and then she had it. “It’s DI Patel now, Ms. Doyle.” She did not smile at me.
“Congratulations.”
“Good afternoon,” Donald said. “Donald Morris. We also met on that other occasion. I also extend my congratulations on your promotion. Well deserved, I must say.”
She didn’t smile at Donald either. She looked at Grant next and shook her head. “I was hoping you’d all gone back to America.”
“We did,” Donald said. “We have returned. I for one can’t stay away for long from your beautiful city.”
“What’s this?” Faye said. “An old school reunion? Can we get on with it, please?”
“I want to have a look at the scene,” DI Patel said. “And then I’ll talk to you all in turn. You stay with these ladies and gentlemen,” she said to the uniformed officer. “Make sure they don’t talk amongst themselves.”
“Bit late for that,” Tamara said. “We’ve been chatting happily away all morning.”
Patel gave her a look indicating she was not amused. Tamara merely grinned in return. Faye had dragged a tattered tissue out of her skirt pocket and blew her nose lustily. Her eyes were red and wet, her makeup streaked with tears. Of the two store employees, only Faye seemed at all bothered by the death of her boss. It was too early to read much into the women’s reactions. Some people are more emotional and demonstrative than others. For some, grief comes later. If Paul was nothing but a largely absent boss, Tamara genuinely might not care what had happened to him.
“You’d better call for help,” Patel said to her partner. “We need more people outside. If those protesters head this way, they might take the crime scene tape as an invitation to get in our faces.”
He nodded and spoke into his radio.
“Is there a back entrance to this place?” she asked.
“Yes,” Tamara said.
“Door’s unlocked,” Donald said helpfully.
“How do you know that? Aren’t you only a customer here, sir?”
“I suppose you could say I’m a customer of sorts. I tagged along after Gemma and Grant. Always love visiting bookstores. As for the door, Gemma checked.”
“What else did Gemma do? Never mind that for now. Constable, tell forensics to come in via the alley. We’ll try not to create any more of a circus out of this than we have to. Who works here?”
“We do.” Tamara pointed to Faye and herself.
“And you three are simply passers-by?” Patel asked me.
“In a way,” I said.
“They went into the back. To the office. It was them who called the police,” Tamara said. “She, Gemma, said she was here to meet with Paul. She said he was expecting her.”
“Constable,” Patel said. “Arrange to have these three taken to the station. I’ll talk to them later.”
Grant, Donald, and I were stuffed into police cars and driven to the nearest police station, where we were separated. I’d been allowed to keep my phone, so once I was settled in an interview room and told to wait, I texted my parents first and then Ryan and Jayne to say we’d been delayed.
Jayne: Okay. Have fun!
Ryan: Delayed? What does that mean?
Never had four simple words carried so much suspicion. I didn’t know how to reply so I didn’t.
We wouldn’t be able to keep what had happened from the others for long. DI Patel would no doubt want to haul us back in for further questioning if this case dragged on. But I wasn’t going to try to explain the afternoon’s unexpected events over text.
I cooled my heels in a not-too-horrible interview room waiting for DI Patel. I’d asked for a cup of tea, and it had been delivered by an untalkative, unsmiling female officer. The tea was simply dreadful, but I drank it anyway, not sure when I’d get the chance to have something better. Grant had been visibly annoyed at being delayed, muttering about not a good look to be late for his first dinner with his new in-laws. Donald had been delighted at, once again, being involved in a Metropolitan Police case.
“You will offer them our, I mean your, full assistance in this matter, of course, Gemma,” he said to me as we were bundled out the back door to our waiting escorts, passing people wearing white boiler suits and booties coming in.
“I have the feeling that wouldn’t be welcomed,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said. “You are ‘not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies.’ ”
Donald could always be counted on to have a Holmes quote at the ready for any occasion. In this case, the quote was from “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.”
I was stuffed into the back of a police car and driven out of the alley. The sounds of the protest still came from Trafalgar Square, but the intensity seemed to be dying down. The people heading toward the square didn’t seem to be the sort who would turn on a police car in a sudden frenzied mob. I saw family groups, babies in slings and toddlers in push chairs, along with nicely dressed middle-aged and older people, women mostly.
“What’s the protest about?” I asked the driver.
“Who knows what they’re ever about? Some environment thing, I think.”
The car had to negotiate the maze of narrow streets and pedestrian-only walkways to reach the Strand.
I got a quick glimpse of someone I vaguely recognized, standing in the crowd at the corner of the Strand and Adam Street, waiting for a light to change. My distant cousin, Lawrence Denhaugh, who’d been at Pippa’s wedding with his father, the eighth Earl of Ramshaw. I was about to lift my hand to wave, and then I remembered I was in the back of a police car. If he saw me, he might take it the wrong way. I slunk further down in the seat instead.
I decided to be nothing but completely frank and honest with DI Patel. I had nothing to hide. Paul had died some time before we found him, so we couldn’t (reasonably) be considered suspects.
“You maintain you haven’t seen Mr. Erikson for seven years,” the detective asked me when she finally joined me in the interview room.
“I do.”
“And you had no other contact over that time?”
“Our lawyers dealt with the divorce and the dissolution of the business partnership. We had no contact.”
“Would it surprise you to know he had a picture of you on the start-up screen of his phone? At a guess I’d say the picture is about seven years old.”
I didn’t want to confess I’d checked his phone myself, so I put on my shocked face and said, “I would be surprised, yes.” That was no lie. I had been surprised. Extremely. “We separated because he was having an affair with another woman. He told me last night that hadn’t worked out. Perhaps he had his regrets.” I was being open and honest with the inspector, but I saw no need to tell her the finer details of what Paul said to me last night.
“You maintain you don’t know what this book is he wanted you to see?”
“I do not. Nor do I know why he wanted me specifically to see it. I don’t deal in rare books, and far more people are far more capable of evaluating them than I.”
“The shop clerks say they don’t know anything about any rare book. But they also say Paul didn’t involve them in any business decisions. They were strictly front-of-store sales staff. I have officers searching the premises for something potentially valuable, but considering they don’t know what they’re looking for …”
“Did Faye or Tamara say if something had been bothering Paul lately? Had he had any unusual visitors or unexpected absences from the shop?
“ ‘Mercurial’ was the word Tamara O’Riordan used to describe him. I gather she didn’t like him much, but I also gather she didn’t mind. It was just a student job.”
“And Faye?”
“Faye is more—” Patel blinked and pulled back. “I ask the questions here.”
“Simply attempting to draw a picture. Are there CCTV cameras watching the back entrance to the shop? I didn’t see any, but they might be hidden.”
“That’s confidential.”
“Not a problem. Everyone knows how heavily surveilled London is; anyone up to no good would know to hide their face and probably to smudge their footprints too. I trust your people noticed the dog prints still visible by the back door. I hope no one trod on them. If the dog sniffed at the door because it sensed something happening inside, you want to locate the owner, find out what time they passed. And then—”
DI Patel pushed her chair back and stood up. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Doyle. If you think of anything else that might be relevant, do give me a call. It might be necessary to speak to you and your friends again as the investigation progresses.”
I also stood up. I’d been getting bored with this conversation. The best way of getting out of a police interview, I’d discovered some time ago, was to start asking them questions they didn’t want to answer.
“Please give your father my regards.”
“I’ll do that.”
I found Grant waiting for me on a cheap plastic chair in the lobby. Donald was speaking to the duty sergeant at the front desk. “I’ve always thought you English got a step ahead of us in the policing business. Did you know the word ‘cop’ is derived from constable-on-patrol? ‘Bobbie’ is a reference to—”
“Yeah, I know, thanks,” the sergeant said.
“I’ll have to check my reference books to see if Holmes himself had reason to visit this particular station. Do you happen to know—?”
The sergeant threw me a pleading look. “You people can go now. Please.”
“Thank you,” I said cheerily. “Come along, Donald.”
On the way out, we passed a group of protesters being hurried up the steps. “Passive resistance!” a gray-haired woman dressed in a swirling multicolored dress shouted, to the cheers of onlookers.
“It’s almost half-five,” I said when at last we were standing on the sidewalk. “Total waste of a day. We might as well go straight to your place rather than back to Stanhope Gardens, Grant.”
Grant waved down a black cab and we piled in.
“Have you worked it out yet, Gemma?” Donald asked as the busy streets of central London slipped past.
“Worked what out?”
“What happened to Paul, of course. Did the detective inspector inadvertently reveal something allowing you to crack the case wide open?”
Donald’s opinion of my detective prowess is sometimes highly exaggerated. In this case, I didn’t have a clue. Paul appeared to be on the down-and-out. Sometimes those circumstances led to making unsavory financial arrangements with unsavory people, particularly for a man like Paul who didn’t like to put in the hard work necessary to return himself to a sound footing.
Grant pointed at the cabbie, skillfully maneuvering the taxi through the traffic. “Now’s not the best time.”
Donald nodded sagely and tightened his lips.
Pippa had been living in a small row house in Fulham when she met Grant. As a couple, they needed a home big enough for him to have an office where he could conduct his book-dealing trade, as well as a place to store the items as they as they came and departed. They spent a long time searching and eventually bought a flat in one of one of the best and newest buildings in the East End. On a Sunday, this part of town was relatively free of car traffic, although plenty of people were out enjoying the day, walking dogs, taking children to the park, biking or running. Kayaks and sculls, tour boats, and water taxis slipped soundlessly past on the smooth dark waters of the river.
It was late October. Londoners knew to enjoy good weather when they had it. They might not see the sun again until spring.
The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the curves of the river Thames, intersected by watery passageways. When London had been the most important city in the world and its ports the busiest, this had been a network of docks, warehouses, working-class housing, and grimy pubs. When the big ships no longer came here, the area fell into desolation and decay. It was now being reclaimed as a vibrant center of business offices, good hotels, nice restaurants, and luxury flats.
“That’s it,” Grant pointed out the window as we approached Canary Wharf. “Our place.”
“Goodness,” I said.
“It’s somewhat … unusual,” Donald said.
A tall circular building on the waterfront, narrowing as it stretched upward into the sky, balconies fitted together like Lego.
The cab pulled up to the main entrance. Donald stumbled as he got out, his mouth agape, staring up at the structure and around at the landscaped gardens, the sculptures, the riverside boardwalk. I might have stared myself. The building was so new, I’d never seen it.
Grant used his fob to open the interior door of the building. “Good afternoon, Mr. Thompson,” the uniformed man behind the concierge desk said. “Your guests have begun to arrive.”
“Thank you, Reg.” Grant couldn’t help glancing at me with a decided twinkle in his eyes.
The lobby was beautifully decorated with low, white chairs and sharp-edged wooden tables. The floor of sleek, dark wood was covered with a white and gray carpet. Colorful modern art hung on cream walls. Grant pressed a button for the lift; the doors opened soundlessly and immediately.
I didn’t bother to ask how much a flat here cost or how Grant and Pippa could afford it.
“Pippa,” Grant said, “wanted a place near the river if we’re going to live this far from the center of the city.”
“Good idea,” Donald said. “The view must be spectacular.”
Pippa, I suspected, didn’t care about the view. She needed to get to the “office” as fast as possible in case of an emergency, and traveling by water was always faster than through clogged city streets.
The lift stopped at one of the lower floors and the door swooshed soundlessly open. The door at the end of the hallway was unlocked, and Grant held it open for us.