The Dillon Hotel occupied a stretch of large early Victorian terraced houses set back behind railings, close to Manchester Square, not far from Marylebone High Street. The area immediately outside had been cordoned off and Tartaglia and Minderedes were forced to park a little further down the street and walk back. As they checked in with a uniformed officer, a short, heavy-set man with thinning salt and pepper hair detached himself from a group standing by the main entrance. He was wearing a baggy grey suit that had seen better days and had the tired, puffy eyes of somebody who had been up all night. He greeted them, introducing himself as DI Johnson from Marylebone CID.
‘I hear it’s one of the guests, a woman. Is that right?’ Tartaglia asked, as they walked with Johnson up the wide stone steps and in through the open front door. He hoped there was no trace in his voice of the irrational anxiety he felt, again telling himself that it couldn’t be Jannicke.
‘Yes, the victim’s female,’ Johnson replied, leading them past the white, panelled reception area and down the main corridor, ‘but we’re not sure who she is, or if she was staying in the hotel. She was strangled up in one of the rooms on the second floor.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Let’s go in here and I’ll fill you in,’ Johnson said, looking around as though worried somebody might overhear, even though there was nobody within earshot. They followed him into a book-lined snug, with a small bar in one corner. Tartaglia hadn’t noticed it the previous evening, although the leafy courtyard where he had met Jannicke while having a smoke the night before was just beyond the tall pair of French doors. Johnson appeared to be using the room as a makeshift office. Two small tables had been pushed together, with a cordless phone, papers, and several half-drunk cups of black coffee spread out on the surface.
‘So what exactly happened?’ Tartaglia said, growing increasingly impatient.
Johnson shrugged. ‘Some sort of romantic tryst gone wrong, possibly, although she could easily be a pro. The room’s booked in a man’s name, Robert Herring. She was lying on the bed, not wearing much. The man called room service from the room and ordered a bottle of champagne and some food. When it was brought up, they found her.’
‘Yes, but what time?’
Johnson picked up a piece of paper and peered at some notes. ‘The call came from the room and was logged on the in-house dining system, as they call it, at twelve-fifty-one a.m. About half an hour later a waiter goes up to the room and knocks on the door.’
‘So, around one-twenty-five?’
‘Thereabouts.’
Tartaglia stared at him for a moment, hoping his relief was well hidden. At one-twenty-five he had still been in Jannicke’s room and she had certainly been alive, so it couldn’t be her. He had left Jannicke’s room a few minutes after two. He remembered looking at his watch.
‘There’s no answer so he lets himself in with a passkey,’ Johnson continued. ‘He sees her on the bed, but there’s no sign of the man. It’s clear something’s wrong so he calls the duty manager who comes up and takes a look and decides she’s dead. He then dials 999. The call came in at one-thirty-nine and we got here just after two.’
As Johnson spoke, it struck Tartaglia that he had actually been there, in the hotel, at the time of the murder. It was something that had never happened to him before in connection with his work and he felt a little shaken by it. Had the killer stayed around afterwards to watch the action, maybe waiting downstairs in the bar until the police came? It wouldn’t be the first time.
He thought back, picturing himself leaving Jannicke’s room – nobody in the corridor outside – then coming down the main stairs and turning into the hall. A few people were still milling around in the lobby and in the large sitting room beyond. Nothing particularly noteworthy about that and he didn’t remember seeing anybody on their own, let alone acting oddly. The bar had still been open and an Alex Clare song he particularly liked had been playing. He was half tempted to stay and listen, but had felt suddenly very tired. Leaving the building, he hadn’t been aware of anything out of the ordinary. Nobody hanging around outside or behaving suspiciously, no commotion, no sirens, no blue lights or obvious unmarked cars pulled up outside in the street. He must have left just before CID got there. It had been raining earlier and he recalled how pleasantly fresh the air had felt. He had paused to light a cigarette then walked on, eventually hailing a cab along George Street. As far as he was aware, he had witnessed nothing relevant to the investigation.
‘How long had Robert Herring been staying?’ he asked Johnson.
‘He arrived yesterday evening, just after seven p.m., and appeared to be on his own. He was given a large double on the second floor, but he only asked for one key. He gave a home address in Manchester, which we’re checking along with his other details. There’s also a mobile number, but the phone’s switched off. The credit card that was used to secure the room is in a different name. Nobody at reception remembers seeing the woman or anybody asking for Herring and according to the switchboard no calls were put through to that room all evening. As I said, she could be a pro, or a girlfriend – or a guest staying in one of the other rooms, but until we speak to everybody, we won’t know. A lot of the guests are still asleep.’
‘What about the hotel staff ?’
‘We’re taking statements from anyone still here who was on duty last night. I can give you the full list of names.’
Tartaglia looked at Minderedes. ‘You’d better start waking up the guests as soon as the rest of the team gets here.’
‘A few are already up,’ Johnson said, ‘but we told them to go back to their rooms. We’ve closed off the second floor entirely, so nobody can go in or out. We’ve left the main stairs open but we’ve stopped access to the lifts and the back stairs unless authorised. Do you want to take it any further than that?’
Tartaglia shook his head. ‘That’s fine for now. Just make sure nobody leaves the hotel until they’ve been spoken to and their IDs have been checked.’ Theoretically, he would have liked to lock down the entire hotel, but it wouldn’t be practical.
‘Have you got a map of this place?’ he asked.
Johnson handed him a sheet of paper. ‘This is the ground floor.’
‘What about cameras?’
‘There are a few dotted around, here and here,’ he said, marking the paper for Tartaglia. ‘It’s pretty minimal coverage, though. The manager gave me some spiel about guests needing their privacy. I suppose they get their fair share of celebs here, but luckily there’s a camera at reception, so we should be able to get a visual of Herring.’
‘Where’s Security?’ Minderedes asked.
‘In the basement, next to the gym,’ Johnson replied.
‘Start with that,’ Tartaglia said to Minderedes. ‘I’ll come and find you when I’m done with the crime scene.’
‘The CSM was looking for you,’ Johnson said to Tartaglia, as Minderedes disappeared out of the door. ‘She’s still up in the room. I can take you there now, if you’re ready. This place is like a rabbit warren.’
‘Carry on with what you were doing. I’ll find it myself.’ He wanted to be on his own for a minute. Try and clear his thoughts. The room where he had been with Jannicke had been on the first floor at the front of the building, not that he’d paid much attention to the location at the time. He remembered using the main stairs by reception and that was about it. He wondered whether she was already up and getting dressed, and if he would bump into her at some point. It would be a little awkward, but he felt no real embarrassment.
‘It’s number 212, at the back of the building,’ Johnson said, following him out of the snug. ‘There’s a lift that gets you out right by the room. Go through the bar, and you’ll come to it.’
Tartaglia glanced at the map. The hotel was a rectangle, with four wings built around a long central courtyard. He remembered reading in some blurb the previous night that the rear wing had once been a small theatre or cinema. The bar was empty and silent, apart from the distant sound of a hoover, and the strong smell of cleaning products hung in the air. Grey early-morning light filtered in through the row of tall windows and the room looked more austere and less welcoming than he remembered it. As he passed the table where he and Gianni had been sitting only a few hours before, he wondered what time Gianni had left and whether he had gone home on his own.
The lift was outside the entrance to the restaurant. He heard the clatter of plates and cutlery and saw staff through the glass panel of the door preparing for breakfast. He showed his ID to the uniformed PC guarding the lift, then took it up to the second floor. Breakfast TV blasted from one of the rooms nearby. It wouldn’t be long before people would be up and about and the usual complaints would start about being delayed and having to account for themselves, along with the inevitable, probing, ghoulish curiosity.
The section of corridor between the lift and room 212 had been taped off and a pathway marked out on the carpet leading to the door. Tartaglia helped himself to protective clothing from a box on the floor and was about to head towards the room when he saw Tracy Jamieson, the crime scene manager, emerging from the lift behind him.
‘There you are,’ she said cheerily. ‘I was wondering when you’d get here.’
‘Why are you so perky this morning?’
‘No reason. I tried calling you but some funny bloke answered your phone.’ Tall and athletic, she was fully suited and masked, but he could tell from her brown eyes that she was smiling.
‘I left it in a taxi last night.’
‘Ah . . . These things happen. I’m afraid I had to make a start without you.’
‘So where are we?’ he asked, grateful that she wasn’t going to make a song and dance about it.
‘As you can see, we’ve cleared a path so you can go into the room. It looked sexual, so I asked for a pathologist.’
‘Who’s on call?’
‘Arabella. She’s already been and gone. She’s pretty certain, from a quick visual, that cause of death is manual strangulation. There’s clear bruising to the neck and very obvious petechial haemorrhaging. She took some intimate swabs so we don’t lose anything, but said the rest could wait until later.’
‘Was the woman killed in the room?’
‘We think so. On the bed. Someone’s pummelled the right side of her face. She was still alive, judging by the swelling and bruising and the amount of blood on the sheets. I’ve examined the areas of exposed skin and she’s now ready to go. I want to get her out of here before the world wakes up, so they’ll be bringing a stretcher up any minute now.’
‘Do we have an ID?’
Jamieson shook her head. ‘She’s in her underwear but her clothes and personal things are gone, apart from an overcoat and a pair of heels in the cupboard.’
He wasn’t thinking clearly, but the most obvious solution was that the killer had taken her clothes and personal things for some reason. Why he had left the shoes and coat behind was another matter.
‘How far have you got with the room?’ he asked.
‘Nothing interesting so far. The photos and video are done. I can walk you through it all later, if you want. We’ll do light-sourcing and fingerprints but, given it’s a hotel, how far do you want to take it?’
‘That’s fine for now. I’ll just take a quick look at the room, then I’ll get back downstairs.’
Jamieson led the way to the door and clicked it open with a passkey, saying, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
Inside, a room-service trolley was parked up against a wall of the small internal lobby. An unopened bottle of champagne stood in a watery ice bucket beside two unused flutes. He pulled it out and looked at the label. Krug. No ordinary champagne, he noted, wondering how much a bottle would set you back in such a place. He lifted the metal covers off two plates. Half a dozen oysters beneath one; some sort of white fish under the other, with a gravy boat of what looked like congealed Hollandaise under a napkin on the side. So, the killer rings down to room service and orders food. Things must have been going well up to that point. Then something goes wrong and half an hour later, the woman’s dead. Was that what had happened? It didn’t quite stack up.
There was a small marble-clad bathroom to one side. The lights were on and he gave it a cursory look before pushing open the bedroom door. As he went in, he was hit by a blast of chill air. Someone had been sick on the floor just inside the room. The waiter, he assumed, or someone else from the hotel. The room was spacious and almost identical to Jannicke’s, with a modern black four-poster bed pushed up against one wall, a desk in one corner and a couple of armchairs grouped around a coffee table. The heavy red-striped curtains were still drawn, as they had been the previous night, and the lighting was very dim. Even so, he could see that the bed looked as though it had been hit by a typhoon, sheets and duvet half on the floor, pillows and cushions scattered around. The victim lay across the bed on her side, dark hair covering her face, her body partially hidden under a tangle of blood-stained sheets. He had never had a problem being alone with a body before, but he found it all suddenly oppressive and, in the shadowy light, felt strangely disorientated, almost intoxicated again. His vision blurred and for a moment he saw another woman lying before him, looking up at him, mouth slightly open, as if about to say something. It was as though no time had passed, he was in a room on the opposite side of the courtyard, it was still night outside, and he had never left the hotel. He blinked and shook his head. Maybe he was still drunk. He would get some strong black coffee as soon as he was done. He heard a noise and turned to find Jamieson in the doorway, holding a large, folded plastic sheet.
‘Was this how you found her?’ he asked a little abruptly, trying to recover himself.
‘More or less. Arabella didn’t need to shift her much to get what she wanted.’
He looked again at the scene in front of him, the chaos of the bed, the blood, the body lying untidily in the midst as though it had been violently discarded. He would study the photographs and video that had been taken but it looked as though there had been quite a struggle. Frenzy was the word that came to mind.
‘Were there any defence wounds?’
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
‘What about restraint marks?’
‘Again, nothing Arabella commented on.’
He frowned, surprised. He would call Arabella Browne later for more of an insight. Also, if the victim was drunk or had been drugged, it would show up on the toxicology report. Hopefully, the post mortem and forensic analysis would reveal more clues. He gazed around the room again. Apart from the area immediately around the bed, he was struck by how tidy it all was, nothing out of place. The air conditioning was making a racket above him and he suddenly felt very cold. He checked the thermostat on the wall. It was on the ‘Low’ setting, reading sixteen degrees, with the fan turned up to the maximum.
‘Did anybody change the thermostat?’
‘No. It’s been like this since I got here. Wish I’d put on my thermals.’
He frowned again, wondering why somebody might have deliberately turned down the thermostat when it was only a few degrees above zero outside. It was hardly conducive to a romantic atmosphere.
‘You say her clothes are gone. Did you find anything belonging to the man who booked the room?’
‘No.’
He made a mental note to ask if Herring had checked in with luggage and if anybody had taken it up to the room. Unless the victim had left her things in another room in the hotel, Herring would have needed something to carry them in, something that wouldn’t draw attention to him when he left the hotel in the early hours of the morning.
Jamieson unfolded the plastic sheeting and spread it out on the bed beside the body.
‘Can you give me a hand?’
Together they rolled the woman over onto her face and Jamieson started to untangle the bed sheet from the body’s legs. ‘Hang on. Take a look at this,’ she said, indicating the back of the woman’s thighs.
He peered over her shoulder. Faint, uneven red lines crisscrossed the woman’s skin in places.
‘We need some light,’ Jamieson said, unzipping the front of her suit. She pulled out a small torch, which was hanging on a cord around her neck, and shone it on the woman’s legs. The white beam illuminated what looked like a series of crudely formed capital letters. At first Tartaglia thought they had been tattooed on the victim’s skin, but looking closer he realised that they had been scored by something sharp, deep into her flesh. There was no bleeding, so the cuts had been made postmortem.
‘Did you find a knife or anything with a blade?’ he asked.
She shook her head, peering at the marks. ‘Whatever it is, the blade’s really fine and sharp. Like a Stanley knife.’
‘He may have taken it with him, but we should be looking at corridors, bins, stairwells, drains, anywhere close where he might have ditched it. I’ll get a search team onto it right away. Can you read what it says?’
‘ “E” something, then “O” something, then “S” something. The last bit looks like “Som”. She crouched down until her eyes were almost level with the top of the woman’s legs. ‘That’s better. I can read it now. “ERIS QUOD SUM.”’
He squinted, but still couldn’t see clearly. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I’m pretty sure.’
She passed him the torch and he crouched down beside her, angling the beam until he could make out the letters clearly. Eris Quod Sum. She was right. It was part of a familiar quote, although he couldn’t remember what it was from. Eram quod es. Eris quod sum. He looked up and met her gaze. ‘It’s Latin,’ he said. ‘You find it on gravestones. It’s the dead speaking to the living. “I once was what you are now. What I am, you will be.” Basically, we’re all going to die.’
‘How very ominous. I didn’t know you spoke ancient Italian.’
‘Benefits of a good Catholic education,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Did Arabella see this?’
‘No. She was in and out of here like greased lightning. Sounded like she had the flu.’
‘I’ll catch up with her later, then.’ It would have been useful to have Arabella Browne’s initial input right away, but it could wait.
‘Who’s the message for, do you think? It’s pretty ominous.’
He grimaced. His head ached and he had seen enough for now. ‘It’s probably a wind-up. CSI gives them all sorts of creative ideas. Let’s get her out of here ASAP. I need to get back downstairs.’
They rolled the woman onto her back and as Jamieson moved to bag up her feet and hands, Tartaglia glanced automatically towards the woman’s face. His mind was already sorting through a quick priority list of things to be done next, but something caught his attention, some sort of fleeting impression of familiarity that made him pause. He looked at the woman again, hoping that it was a trick of the dim, shadowy light or his own tiredness and state of mind. Her face was bloodied and disfigured on one side by the beating she had received. Death also had a way of robbing a person of their humanity and turning loved ones into strangers. Still unsure, he moved over to the other side of the bed and as he brushed back the remaining hair from her face, the breath caught in his throat. Unable to speak, he blinked, studying every detail and contour, hoping that somehow he was mistaken.
‘What’s up?’ Jamieson asked somewhere in the background.
He inhaled deeply, then exhaled, staring blindly down at the body before him, automatically noting the cuts to her face, the bruising and swelling and obvious signs of strangulation, wishing that she were someone else. But there was no doubt about it and it was pointless wasting any more time. The hideous consequences started to unfurl in his mind. What should be done, how to handle it, who to call first . . .
He pulled off his mask and rubbed his face with his hands. Even though the room was like a fridge, he was sweating. He felt suddenly feverish and claustrophobic.
‘Mark? Are you OK?’
He looked up at Jamieson and shook his head. ‘No. I’m not OK. I know her.’