Booked for Murder - V. McDermid L.

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Lindsay found herself talking to dead air. She hailed the first cab that passed and asked him to wait outside the warehouse in Camden occupied by Watergaw Films while she picked up the keys. They stopped at Meredith’s to collect Lindsay’s luggage, then carried on to Helen’s terraced house in Fulham. As the black taxi juddered through the early afternoon traffic, Lindsay pondered her next move. Collecting keys and luggage had reminded her that she needed to check out the flat where Penny had been living.

      Dredging her memory for details of a half-forgotten dinner conversation with Penny and Meredith, Lindsay recalled that Penny had swapped her house for a flat in Islington belonging to a friend of Sophie. An academic, Lindsay recalled. A philosopher? A psychologist? A philologist? Something like that. The Rubik’s cube of memory clicked another turn and the pieces fell into place. A palaeontologist attached to the Natural History Museum. Called … She pinched the bridge of her nose in an attempt to awaken her protesting brain as the taxi rattled along Fulham Road. They turned into a side street wide enough for cars to double park without obstructing the road, then rounded the corner into a street of three-storey terraced villas, their stucco in varying states of repair that reflected whether they were single residences or split into rented flats. As the taxi squealed to a halt, Lindsay suddenly realised she didn’t really need to remember his name. He was the man living in Penny’s house, at the end of a phone whose number she knew almost as well as her own.

      Feeling triumphant, she paid off the taxi and staggered wearily up Helen’s short path with a bag that felt heavier with each step. She unlocked the three mortises that fastened the front door of the sparklingly painted house and keyed the last four digits of the phone number into the alarm pad to silence the high-pitched squeal of the warning klaxon. Then she stumbled into a living room that could have been sold to the Tate Gallery under the title of Installation: Millennium Chaos. There were piles of newspapers and magazines in a haphazard array by the chairs and the sofa. The coffee table was invisible under an anarchy of used crockery. A spread of CDs was strewn in front of the stereo and tapes were tossed randomly on the shelves to either side of it. Books teetered in tall pillars against the wall. The only remotely ordered area in the room was a cabinet of videos that seemed to be arranged according to some system, though there were gaps in the rows and half a dozen unboxed tapes were piled on top of the TV. A tabby cat sprawled on one of the two video recorders, barely registering Lindsay’s arrival with a flicker of one eyelid.

      Lindsay closed her eyes briefly. She’d had her moments in the untidiness rankings, but she’d never come close to this. Helen had been right. Sophie would go absolutely nutso. Grinning, she gripped her suitcase and staggered upstairs. The spare room was considerably clearer than downstairs. On the floor next to the ironing board was the biggest pile of clean but crumpled clothes Lindsay had ever seen, but that apart, the room could have been almost anyone’s guest room. What marked it out as belonging to Helen were the framed TV and film stills featuring actors she’d placed in her previous career as a casting director. Though she’d progressed to producer/director in her own independent production company, it was clear she hadn’t forgotten how she’d started in the business.

      Lindsay dumped her case on the floor, not even bothering to open it, and headed back downstairs. There had to be a phone somewhere. She tracked it by the flashing light on the answering machine. A glance at her watch told her it would be just after eight in the morning in San Francisco. She didn’t even have to feel guilty about calling too early. On the third ring, a voice said, ‘Hello?’

      Foiled in her hope that he’d identify himself, Lindsay blundered on regardless. ‘Hi,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s Lindsay here. Sophie’s partner?’

      ‘Oh, hello,’ said the precise voice she remembered from phone calls she’d answered previously. ‘How are you?’

      ‘I’m fine. And you? Settling in okay?’

      ‘Well … Everything was going splendidly and then I had some rather terrible news about … well, about our flat and the woman we swapped with.’

      ‘I heard about that,’ Lindsay said sympathetically. ‘That’s actually why I was ringing, Brian.’ Brian! It had suddenly come to her in mid-sentence. Brian Steinberg, married to an anthropologist called Miriam. Grinning with relief, Lindsay said, ‘I know this probably sounds a bit weird, Brian, but did you happen to leave a spare set of keys with anybody when you left?’

      ‘Keys?’ he echoed.

      ‘Yeah, for the flat.’ When in doubt, gabble. It was a lesson Lindsay had learned from Helen years ago, and she’d just had the refresher course. ‘The thing is, Penny’s girlfriend, Meredith, is in a bit of a state, as you can imagine, and I’m over here in England with her trying to get things sorted out. You know what it’s like, all the bureaucracy. Anyway, I’m just trying to sort out the practical stuff, and Penny’s agent is desperate to get hold of the manuscript of Penny’s last book, and it’s stuck on the hard disk of her computer, which of course is in the flat, and the police are being really difficult about letting anyone in, so I thought if I could get the keys and just nip in and out … I mean, you know me, you know I wouldn’t be doing anything I shouldn’t be doing …’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he said hesitantly. ‘If the police don’t want you to go in …’

      ‘There’s no reason for us not to go into the flat. It’s not as if the police have any objections, it’s just that they’re being really awkward about fixing up a time when we can go and sort it out. I don’t have to tell you about bureaucracy, you’re dealing with American academia.’

      ‘Yeah,’ he said, with feeling. ‘Oh, I suppose it’ll be okay. I can’t see any real problem, and the police have had days now to do whatever it is they have to do. I left a spare set with Miriam’s sister. She lives up in Hampstead.’ Brian gave Lindsay the address and promised to phone his sister-in-law right away to warn her Lindsay was on her way.

      What felt like a lifetime later, Lindsay emerged from the rancid stuffiness of the tube into sunlight at Highbury Corner. Even though it was laden with traffic fumes, the air was still fresh enough to rouse her from the virtually catatonic state she’d reached underground thanks to the combination of heat, jet lag, lack of oxygen and lack of proper sleep. She hoped her exhaustion wouldn’t make her miss anything in the flat. Probably it could have waited till the following day, but Lindsay had never liked leaving till tomorrow what could be thrashed out today. Besides, this was a good time to make an unauthorised entry. At the end of the working day, all sorts of people were going in and out of buildings where they didn’t necessarily live.

      To guard against her potential for carelessness, she stopped at a chain-store chemist for a pack of disposable latex gloves. A few minutes later, she turned into the street where Brian and Miriam occupied the middle flat in a converted Georgian terraced house. Even though she was pretty certain the police would have finished by now with the scene of crime, that was no reason to take chances. She walked right to the end of the street, then kept turning right till she’d done a circuit of the block and was back where she’d started. She’d seen no sign of any police officers, nor did there seem to be any twitching curtains or faces at windows as she strolled down the street for the second time.

      Deciding it was clear, she turned nonchalantly into the entrance of Brian and Miriam’s house. She climbed the four steps up to the front door and hastily sorted through the bunch of keys until she found the ones that fitted the two locks on the heavy street door. Inside, she closed the door smartly behind her. Ahead lay a dim carpeted hallway, a flight of stairs at the far end. Cautiously, Lindsay made for it and climbed to the first landing. There was a sturdy door facing her, crisscrossed with yellow plastic tape that proclaimed Police. Keep out. The flat was still officially a crime scene.

      Pulling a face, Lindsay pulled on the gloves, then fumbled with the locks until the door swung free. Then, with a quick look round the corner to check the stairs above were still clear, she ducked under the tapes and into the flat. This long after the killing, she couldn’t believe she was going to affect any crucial forensic evidence.

      She found herself in a corridor which opened out into a large, high-ceilinged room whose walls were hung with

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