‘Who owns the place, then?’ I asked.
‘Some tax dodging shell company out of Jersey,’ said Seawoll, running his fingers along the bottom of the desk top – looking for secret drawers, I guessed. ‘We won’t be able to trace that until the lads at Proactive Money Laundering can drag one of their experts out of bed.’ He gave up on the idea of secret drawer and jabbed a finger at Guleed.
‘Sahra,’ he said. ‘Get on the phone and give them a kicking.’
‘Gladly,’ said Guleed, and left.
‘Her brother’s an accountant,’ said Seawoll, watching her go. ‘So. What the fuck are you doing here?’
I considered lying for all of about two nanoseconds, but I don’t have a death wish – not even a figurative one. Of course, philosophically speaking, truth is a slippery concept and one should always be alive to nuance.
‘I got a tip off from a source that there might be some tangential Falcon involvement,’ I said. And because I saw Seawoll begin to draw himself up, ‘Lady Cecelia Tyburn-Thames believes her daughter may have been here when the incident occurred.’
‘And she wants you to put the fix in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what the “incident” is?’
‘Accidental drug overdose,’ I said.
Seawoll nodded.
‘So I bet you’re wondering what the fuck I’m doing here?’ he asked.
I felt a trickle of sweat work its way down my back.
‘You wanted a peek into the lifestyles of the rich and shameless?’ I said.
‘Because nobody was supposed to have access to this flat,’ he said. ‘Did you see the DPG cars downstairs?’
The Diplomatic Protection Group do bodyguard work for Royals and those people HM Government would rather were not done-in while resident in the UK. They’re routinely armed and drive around in red liveried vehicles – red to indicate that they are not there to break up fights, find your toddler or tell you the bloody time.
‘No, sir,’ I said.
‘Really?’ said Seawoll. ‘The lazy buggers must have sloped off for refs.’
He explained that, what with the screened entrance, bulletproof quality glass on the lower levels and the kind of semi-professional security that would gladden the heart of a putative generalissimo, this was the sort of place that the DPG knew they could park their high value targets.
‘Qatari Royal Family amongst them,’ said Seawoll.
And then not have to worry about them until they ventured forth to shop at Harvey Nicks or go to the opera or impoverish a small nation – or whatever else it was the very, very rich did when they had time on their hands.
‘So when a bunch of fucking kids waltz into the building, the DPG wants to know how. And I get woken up in the middle of the fucking night,’ said Seawoll. ‘And told to find out on pain of getting a bollocking. Me?’ he said in outrage. ‘Getting a bollocking? And just when I thought things couldn’t descend further into the brown stuff– here you are.’
With a grunt he levered himself to his feet, causing the chair to bang against the bookcase behind him and set the various objet d’bollocks rattling.
‘See,’ he said, once he was up. ‘Not even room enough to lean back and get yourself a bit of light relief. Mind you, there’s a media room next door that would do very nicely for a private viewing room.’ He must have seen that I’d lost the thread of his conversation.
‘Like they used to have in porn shops when there were proper porn shops?’ he said slowly, and then shook his head. ‘I suppose you lot get your mucky pictures uploaded to your phones.’
I wondered if he talked like this to Guleed. I doubted it, somehow.
He led me through to the media room, which was a cool grey-green and lined with sound absorbing material. There was a vast television, wider than some of the screens I’ve seen in retrofitted multiplexes, and an elegant curving sofa that actually suited the room it was in. It had also, if I’m any judge, been shagged upon in the last few hours. There was a V-shaped stain in the middle and the throw cushions, in amethyst and teal covers, had been pushed onto the floor. There was an island of wine bottles in the centre of the coffee table and a pair of wine glasses on the shelf by the Blu-ray player – both were white with fingerprint dust.
‘Behold,’ said Seawoll. ‘The wank palace itself.’
‘I don’t think they were wanking, sir,’ I said, and Seawoll sighed.
‘You’ve always got to push it, haven’t you Peter?’ he said, and outlined the details of the case.
At twelve thirty a 999 call had been made by a young man from a mobile phone asking for an ambulance and claiming that his friend ‘Chrissy’ was having an overdose and needed help. He was . . .
‘. . . hysterical, desperate and,’ said Seawoll, ‘obviously out of his box.’
But when the ambulance arrived, security wouldn’t let them into the building, claiming that the flat was unoccupied. The ambulance crew reported it to CCC who sent an instant response vehicle around, which ran straight into a pair of DPG officers responding because the building alarm was set up to inform them directly. Everyone piled up in the lifts, security opened the flat door and, voila, they found Christina Chorley, aged seventeen, lying in the entrance hall in the midst of a seizure.
She’d been dragged there by her boyfriend James Murray, also seventeen. James told the paramedics and everybody else in the immediate vicinity that ‘It was just E’s, it was just E’s.’ Had he taken them? Yes, he had. Who else was in the flat? It was just them. Oh god, it was just E’s.
Off in the ambulance went the pair of them while both sets of police kicked their problem upstairs until it bounced off DCI Seawoll’s bedroom window.
‘Metaphorically speaking,’ said Seawoll.
The ‘entrance hall’ was the wide, wedge-shaped, low ceilinged room with an unparalleled view over Hyde Park. I was getting used to the sheer amount of money wasted on the furniture, which was spread out like something designed for The Sims. In amongst the money there were signs that people had been having a good time — more bottles, wine glasses, empty cellophane packets, a flat pool of oatmeal coloured vomit on the carefully chosen hand-woven cream wool rug. Definitely more than two people. At least six or seven, I thought. Maybe more, if they were particularly tidy teens.
Not so tidy that they didn’t leave their pills behind when they scrambled to get out.
‘We think they left as soon as James Murray made his 999 call,’ said Seawoll. Both the police and the paramedics entered a description of the pills into the TICTAC database and got a name – Magic Babars – and the worrying information that this particular brand tended to be heavy on the PMA, otherwise known as paramethoxyamphetamine, or Dr Death. Not MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, otherwise known as the drug that allows you to listen to really dull music without your brain imploding from boredom. Seriously. PMA is a lot more toxic than MDMA and kicks in slower, so users have been known to swallow another couple of pills thinking the first were duds, and then suffer what Dr Walid would describe as ‘deleterious effects’.
Given that Christina Chorley had died on the way to hospital, it was important to find out who else had taken the Magic Babars in case they needed treatment – and to find out quickly. Before James Murray keeled over himself.
At first James had tried to claim that he and Christina had been alone in the flat, but five minutes with DI Stephanopoulos, who, having been pulled untimely from her wife’s embrace, was particularly pissed off that morning, saw him coughing names as fast as they could be written down.
‘Amongst them was the name Olivia Jane McAllister-Thames,’ said Seawoll. ‘Now, I’ve got a few questions that need answering. Like, how did they get in? Where did the drugs comes from? And can I get a result before this case turns into a great big fucking media shit storm?’