Murder in Hampstead by Sabina Manea (read this if txt) 📕

the end goal of the vandalism, and she was damned if she was going to succumb to it. First things first. She didn’t want to drive back to her place with the vehicle in that state. After taking a photo of the damage, she got out a pot of metal paint that matched the body most closely and swept over the writing. She knew it was unlikely the perpetrator would be caught, and she wasn’t planning to report the incident to the police. It would have been a waste of their time, and in any case, it would have only been summarily logged and relegated to the bottom of the pile. Now it was invisible, the effect of the threat was diminished. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be wise to forget that someone out there not only wished her ill but was prepared to make it happen. She had her strong suspicions about who that someone might be.

There was no question of moping around at home passing time. Despite her best efforts to shake it off, the incident had unnerved her. She was on her own, and whoever did this must have known that. She decided a walk on the Heath would help clear her mind. The early evening sun waved in and out of soft clouds, and once she got past the first couple of ponds the grassy expanse stretched out before her, far removed from the urban clutter of Belsize Park that she had just left behind.

In the first pond past South End Green, the swan nest was empty, and the parents were proudly parading their nearly grown offspring, now improbably large but still in possession of downy grey feathers staining the immaculate white. It had been a long and dry summer, and the grass was spattered with singed patches of yellow where the worst damage had been done. A flock of feral parakeets, a semi-mythical apparition that clashed with the Englishness of the hilltop village, had settled in a tall, gnarled oak tree, their shrieks competing with the dozens of mewling prams on their final outing of the day.

Lucia had her eyes on the prize – the viewing point at Parliament Hill, from where the city could be surveyed in all its disorderly, overbuilt glory. The most distinctive landmark was St Paul’s, a tiny sugary fancy of a building that somehow managed to hold its own in the midst of unforgiving glass towers. The walk had the desired palliative effect, even though she wasn’t predisposed to bouts of sentimentality. The meandering circuit back to her flat would take her up to Christ Church, where she could reminisce about the familiar school playground and time whiled away at the gate before sauntering home just around the corner. Paradise twice over, her mother used to call it – four solid walls in God’s own London village. That night, she couldn’t sleep.

The following day, DCI Carliss smoked a stealthy cigarette as he waited for Lucia outside Beatrice Hall. He stubbed out the offending item just as she pulled up.

‘What’s happened to your van?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Probably bored teenagers having a dare.’ As soon as she opened her mouth, she instantly knew the reply had been too quick, too dismissive to fool him.

‘Nonsense. What happened?’

There was little point in carrying on with the pretence, so she decided to come clean. ‘Someone – I’ve got a good idea who it is – wrote a nasty message in big red letters. Must have been while we were at the pub yesterday. Childish, really.’ She showed him what she had found and told him about Danny.

Carliss’s expression hardened. His eyes were ice-cold, his easy-going manner long gone. ‘This isn’t a joke, Lucia.’ He’d dropped the politeness, so she knew he wasn’t fooling around. ‘You could be in danger. This Danny bloke sounds like a nasty piece of work. Tell you what. I’ll get one of my boys to keep an eye on him, low-profile, from a distance. There’s little chance we can prove anything, but people like that aren’t smart enough to hide their behaviour for long. Who knows what else he’s been up to?’

‘Really, there’s no need. I’m not scared of the likes of him.’ That wasn’t entirely true, and she clearly wasn’t fooling the policeman.

‘No ifs, no buts. It’s no trouble, so it would be silly not to. I’ll call the station right now, before we get distracted by the big house circus.’ A short conversation ensued, with Carliss giving polite but firm instructions. ‘It’s all set up. We’ll hear back at the end of the day. He’s a sharp one, PC Harding – angling to move to CID – he won’t miss a thing.’

Lucia unloaded the tools and paints out of her van. She planned on devoting the morning to her work, after which her schedule would take an entirely different turn. They went through to the drawing room, which had unwittingly metamorphosed into their de facto command centre.

Uncharacteristically, DCI Carliss had brought along a rucksack, which Lucia now eyed up intently.

‘I’ve got a little present for you.’ He fished out the Baccarat coupe, neatly packaged up in what looked like a sandwich bag, albeit extensively labelled, and handed her a pair of surgical gloves. ‘What are we looking for?’

‘I don’t know. Something that’s hiding in plain sight.’

Lucia put on the gloves and held the delicate object up to the light. Its apparent simplicity belied the painstaking craftsmanship that had been expended on the piece. There was a small amount of dried-up sticky residue at the bottom, as expected, but nothing else out of place. She ran her finger along the rim and paused for a few seconds, weighing up a thought.

‘I’m fairly sure the champagne in this glass was poisoned,’ she said, ‘and the Professor drank it.’

Carliss was running out of patience, but Lucia rather liked seeing him squirm. She would enlighten him in