Barry Maitland: Chelsea Mansions

O n Saturday morning John Greenslade made his way down to breakfast in the dining room at the back of the hotel, overlooking a courtyard garden. He had learned from Deb that there were only seven guest rooms in the hotel, and three of those were occupied by semi-permanent residents: a young Australian woman lawyer, an elderly English woman who had been there since the hotel opened in 1996 and who was now rarely seen outside of her room, and a retired man originally from Nepal. Apart from Emerson Merckle and himself, the short-stay guests were two couples from Leeds, who came every year at this time for the flower show. They were in the dining room now, and gave him a cheery greeting. Once they picked up his accent they told him they’d done Canada, and described their trip there at some considerable length.

After breakfast he went back up to his room and worked on his laptop for a while. The BBC had a clip of the police press conference on Thursday night, and he downloaded this. After a while he got up and stood by the window overlooking the square. The Maybach had gone, its place taken by a red sports car. He peered down at it, trying to figure out what it was. A Ferrari Spider, perhaps.

Across the road he saw a figure sitting beneath the trees in the central gardens, and recognised Emerson’s thatch of grey hair. He closed his laptop, picked up his keys and went out. At the front desk he asked Deb about the gardens and she explained that they were available for the use of guests by means of a key for the gate that the hotel could provide.

‘Emerson’s got it at the moment, John,’ she said.

‘Oh, fine. I might go and say hello. It looks pretty nice over there.’

As he went down the front steps he took a close look at the sports car. He was right, an F430 Spider, a beauty. He looked back up at the windows of the property next door, and saw an old woman glowering down at him from behind a curtain. John turned, crossed the street and pushed open the gate in the cast-iron railings.

Emerson didn’t appear to have moved, hunched over something on his knees. As he got closer John saw that it was a pouch of photographs.

‘Hi, Emerson,’ he called out, and the other man looked up, blinking to focus. ‘Am I interrupting?’

‘What? Oh, no, John. Hello.’

‘It looked so pleasant in here. Private and secluded.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Are you sure I’m not intruding?’

‘Not at all. Come and sit down.’

John nodded at the photographs. ‘Nancy’s?’

‘Yes. She brought these with her. I was just… well, you know. I guess I’ll have to give these back to her family, but I wanted to remember them.’

‘Is that her? She was an attractive woman, Emerson.’

‘Very.’ He said it with some feeling. ‘When she was younger she turned a few heads, I can tell you.’

‘Including yours, eh?’

Emerson smiled. ‘Well, we were both married then, to other people. But yes, I did admire her. And she was talented, very artistic. She painted in watercolours-New England landscapes mainly. They were much sought after. She sold them through a local gallery. Look.’

He showed John a photo of people at a fancy-dress party. ‘That’s Nancy as a bird of paradise. She made the costume herself, and the mask. Isn’t it beautiful?’

‘Oh yes. And that’s you as the pirate chief, eh?’

‘That’s right.’ Emerson gave another wistful smile. ‘She made the parrot on my shoulder. We had a good laugh about that. She had a great sense of humour.’ He frowned suddenly.

‘Sorry.’

‘Not at all, it’s important to remember. She got her artistic talent from her mother. There’s one of them together… here.’

He drew out one of the older black and white pictures.

‘Her mother was a professional sculptor, using her maiden name, Maisy McKellar. Nancy had been hoping to make contact with the McKellars in Scotland on this trip. Before Maisy married Nancy’s father, Ronald, she worked with William Gordon Huff in California. Have you heard of him?’

John shook his head.

‘He’s mainly known for his statues of characters from the Old West-Indians and pioneers, that kind of stuff. There’s a picture of Maisy somewhere… here.’

A couple, their hair and clothes obviously in the style of the 1930s, stood arm in arm in front of a long reflecting pool, with a monumental arch in the background.

‘Art Deco,’ John said. ‘It looks very Hollywood, don’t you think? And that’s Maisy with Huff?’

‘I’m not sure. I guess it could be.’

‘They look a glamorous couple.’ John pointed to another photo. ‘And those are Nancy’s grandchildren?’

‘Yes, seven at the last count. I wonder what their parents have told them. Your grandmother was thrown under a bus. It’s obscene, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

‘The police have no idea why he did it. I suppose he was doped up on ice or some damn thing.’ He shook his head sadly.

‘I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘This is upsetting you.’

‘Well, maybe it helps me to talk about it. Apart from the police, the only people I know in this city are in that hotel. They’re trying very hard to help, but they do seem kind of odd.’

‘Yes.’ John chuckled. ‘They are, aren’t they?’

‘You’ve heard about the memorial service idea?’

‘Yes, Toby told me. I’ll be there.’

‘That’s kind of you. It’ll help to see a friendly face.’

‘Well, I’ll get moving. See you then.’

Not much more than a mile away to the east, Kathy was working in her office. She’d started the morning with a brisk swim in the baths in Pimlico, looking forward to an active day and, hopefully, a breakthrough. But on her desk she found a heap of accumulated paperwork awaiting her urgent attention, and reluctantly she sat down and started working through it.

A response had come in from the FBI during the night. They had spoken to Nancy’s solicitor and confirmed that her two sons were her principal beneficiaries. They had also determined that neither had a police record and a preliminary search of both men’s business and financial affairs had revealed nothing unusual.

But something had been fatally special about Nancy Haynes. If Danny Yilmaz was to be believed, someone had begun to arrange her murder within a couple of days of her arrival in London. Nancy must have been observed during that time, her movements tracked.

Kathy sent a reply to America, asking for a check on Emerson Merckle and information on Nancy’s financial records, then turned to the forensic reports on Nancy’s body and clothing and Danny’s Kawasaki. There had been dozens of fibres, fingerprints and DNA traces, all painstakingly listed, but so far no matches to anyone apart from Nancy, Emerson and Danny.

After a couple of hours scanning incoming reports, Kathy rubbed her eyes and got to her feet. She went out to see how the CCTV team was getting on, searching for sightings of the killer on the underground, and picked up a mood of resignation.

‘There are fifty stations on the Northern Line,’ Zack said with a sigh. ‘Not to mention connections to the Victoria Line, the Piccadilly, Circle, Central, District…’

‘I get the picture. How about his ticket? Could he have bought an Oyster card with a credit card?’

Zack nodded, thinking. ‘We could get the numbers of all the Oyster cards that went through the Camden Town ticket machines at that time on Thursday… Leave it with me.’

Kathy moved on, checking progress, feeling impatient, then returned to her desk. Mickey Schaeffer was at Tottenham, Brock at headquarters, and she wanted to be out of the office. One of the reports in the pile in front of her was by an officer who had spoken to organisers at the Chelsea Flower Show, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered. How had that worked, exactly? If the man that Emerson had photographed at the show was really the killer, waiting for his moment, had he planned to kill Nancy there among the crowds, and then changed his mind when he realised that they’d noticed him? The more Kathy thought about it, the more odd it seemed, a strange combination of planning and improvisation. Where had the man come from? Would a native Londoner have done it like that? Would they have relied on someone like Danny Yilmaz to make an escape? And how had he got into the flower show?