I walked out via the side gate, past Beverley’s Kia Picanto to where the Orange Asbo was parked. Once inside I checked my evidence bag was in the back and that the Airwave charger was plugged in, started her up and headed for Knightsbridge.
One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and a document scanner. Now, I have – as Beverley says – views about architecture. But there’s modern stuff I like. The Gherkin, the Lloyd’s building, even the Shard – despite the nagging feeling I get that Nazgûl should be roosting at the top. But the truth is that in the case of One Hyde Park my boy Sir Roger was definitely just putting in the hours for the pay check. It’s not ugly as such . . . it’s just not anything in particular. It is famously the most expensive block of flats in Britain, which just goes to show that property really is all about location, location, location.
The actual building is comprised of four towers that the brochures call ‘pavilions’ running between the Oriental Mandarin Hotel on the east side and the Edinburgh Gate into Hyde Park on the west. The north and south aspects are wedge-shaped to maximise natural daylight. As a result, if you look at a floor plan it looks like two Star Destroyers have backed into each other during manoeuvres. As I approached up the A4 I saw that all the lights were out on every floor, except for one flat half-way up the second tower from the end – so no trouble finding the crime scene, then.
Parking was a different matter, but the secret to avoiding a ticket when you’re police is to snuggle your reasonably priced unmarked motor in amongst the Battenberg checked IRVs and sprinter vans that accumulate at any crime scene. These I found crowded under the strange concrete canopy that stretches over the Edinburgh Gate. I noticed they also blocked the driveway to where the car lifts waited to whisk the money-mobiles of the rich down to the underground car park.
I’d read that the facilities below ground included a private gym, swimming pool, squash court and wine cellars – I really hoped that I didn’t have to go down there. It’s not that I’m claustrophobic, only that I’ve had practical experience of just how much the sodding earth can weigh and the taste despair can leave in your mouth.
Guleed was waiting by the cylindrical glass entrance to the lobby. Having worked with me on numerous occasions, she fell on me with cries of glee.
‘I don’t suppose you’d just consider fucking off?’ she said.
I was shocked.
‘Language,’ I said.
‘Don’t you start,’ she said.
I noticed she was wearing a rather fine purple silk hijab with a fringe design picked out in silver thread, a matching jacket and an elegant long black skirt. I did not think she’d planned to be out policing tonight.
‘Did you have a date?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Birthday party.’
‘I thought you were in the HAT car this week.’
‘I swapped,’ she said. ‘So I could go to the birthday party.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Is this going to be like the thing with the BMWs?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just got here.’
Guleed nodded to the PCSO guarding the entrance.
‘Put him on the list,’ she said and then to me: ‘You’re going to love this place.’
She led me through the transparent cylindrical airlock style door onto a mezzanine balcony and down a set of stairs into a double height reception area with leather chairs and the sort of meaningless sculpture that’s bought by the ton by particularly greedy banks. Through transparent walls, rumoured to be bulletproof, I could see a small faux garden and – through another layer of security glass – the dim and dangerous streets of downtown Knightsbridge.
Beside the reception desk stood a fit looking man with brown skin, black hair and a good quality off-the-peg suit. Possibly Indonesian, I thought. He also managed the trick of looking both alert and bored out of his skull at the same time – ex-Job, ex-military, ex-intelligence – something like that.
The level of security struck me as a bit paranoid but, as my dad says, the more they have the more they worry about it being taken away.
The security man gave me and Guleed a sour look as we passed and I responded with a friendly smile and a cheery ‘Good morning’. Because I am an officer of the law and, providing I’m not nobbled by political considerations and/or influence peddling, my arm doth reach into all places, yea even unto the citadels of the mighty.
This particular citadel of the mighty was reached by a glass-sided lift which ran up a completely transparent service core that allowed one – and one assumes that here one refers to one as one – to appreciate the view over Hyde Park which, after all, is what one has paid upwards of ten million to enjoy.
The glass elevator led out into a cross passage where we did the dance of the noddy suit whereby the grave dignity of the law is mitigated by the need to hop on one foot while you try and get the stupid paper leg over the other. Guleed, it turned out, was wearing leggings under her skirt – which she left, along with her scarf, in the clear plastic bag provided. Once we were safely zipped up in our hygienic forensically-neutral paper suits Guleed led me to the left, where a pair of mahogany doors had been propped open with a portable light stand. Beyond was a short hallway with a curved far wall and a lot of abstract art on the walls.
In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn’t get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums. An elegantly proportioned room can have whitewashed walls and a bare wooden floor. But if it’s an awkward shape, then all the piano-finish rosewood occasional tables riches can provide aren’t going to do anything more than annoy the cleaners. One Hyde Park, I saw, had all the basic architectural charm of a brutalist council flat – except on a larger scale. The rooms were much wider, of course. But pressure to maximise the number of flats meant that the ceilings were disproportionately low.
We found Seawoll just around the corner in what the plans listed as a ‘study’. The architects had laid out each wing to maximise the light, with a long central corridor and side rooms branching off like the veins in a leaf. This meant they all had walls on the diagonal, severely restricting the decorator’s choice about where furniture could be placed. If you didn’t want to block the doors, the access or blot out the windows then the beds, cupboards, shelves and all the other stuff that turns a concrete box into a home had to go where the architect thought they should go. In the study, this meant a desk that could neither face the window for the view nor face away to take advantage of the light. Instead, the black mirror-finish desk with the stainless steel legs stood in front of matching glass fronted bookcases that, as far as I could tell, contained a number of lumpy glass and chrome objects and a couple of soft porn albums cunningly disguised as cutting edge nude photography. Still in their shrink wrap, I noticed.
Seawoll sat in the executive leather operator’s chair behind the desk wearing a dangerously stretched noddy suit that made him look like the Michelin Man’s slightly deflated older brother.
‘You’ll notice that you can’t swivel all the way round,’ he said. ‘What fucking use is a swivel chair if you can’t fucking swivel on it?’ He spotted me trying to read the titles on the books.
‘Don’t bother, they’re just window dressing,’ he said. ‘As far as we can tell nobody lives here.’
I looked at a framed photograph of a young white woman with a dog.