One | London
Stella stared at the bloody lump of flesh and wondered what it meant. If you wanted a man to keep a secret, removing his tongue would do it. But why do it after he was dead?
Again, the answer presented itself. Because you wanted somebody else, maybe the whole world, or your part of it, to know he squealed when he shouldn’t have.
But what on earth could Tomas Brömly, an elderly Swedish ex-diplomat, say that would be worth killing for? Any political or business secrets he may once have possessed would surely be out of date now? And if he’d been an intelligence operative, the Swedes would have arrested and prosecuted him for breaching whatever their version of the Official Secrets Act was.
The former ambassador was seventy-nine. Stella didn’t write off the possibility of a jealous lover. Though the odds were against it.Stella stared at the bloody lump of flesh and wondered what it meant. If you wanted a man to keep a secret, removing his tongue would do it. But why do it after he was dead?
Again, the answer presented itself. Because you wanted somebody else, maybe the whole world, or your part of it, to know he squealed when he shouldn’t have.
But what on earth could Tomas Brömly, an elderly Swedish ex-diplomat, say that would be worth killing for? Any political or business secrets he may once have possessed would surely be out of date now? And if he’d been an intelligence operative, the Swedes would have arrested and prosecuted him for breaching whatever their version of the Official Secrets Act was.
The former ambassador was seventy-nine. Stella didn’t write off the possibility of a jealous lover. Though the odds were against it.
Would a woman scorned really procure and use a firearm? And what about the business with the tongue? If it had been a woman, Stella would have expected any post mortem mutilation to have taken place south of there.
The other possibility was a religious maniac. Stella puffed out her cheeks and tugged on her ponytail, running the thick hank of brown hair through her clenched fist until it hurt. Motive would have to wait. Facts were more important.
This felt like a targeted hit, rather than a random or chaotic killing. Brömly had been shot dead. Probably by a handgun. The killer would have needed planning, considerable forethought and the smarts to get hold of an illegal weapon.
She stared at the tongue. The tattered root, far from being neatly severed, had clearly been wrenched out. Blood had stained the open pages on which it rested.
Stella turned to the nearest CSI.
‘Any chance you could move the tongue?’ she asked. ‘I’d really like to take a look at the Bible.’
The CSI shook his head. ‘Sorry, Ma’am. The pathologist said to leave it. He had to go back to the mortuary. Said he’d be back by three.’
Stella checked her watch. Five to. She began a walk-through of the apartment.
She’d called her estate agent brother-in-law earlier to ask him what flats in Upper Brook Street went for. Jason told her two-bed apartments went for three or four million. The most expensive sale in the previous twelve months had been for eighteen.
The room she’d just entered was huge, at least thirty feet by forty. Standing in a corner on a deep-red Turkish carpet was a full-sized grand piano. A wall of large plate-glass windows gave onto Hyde Park: she saw trees waving in the wind outside.
She walked over to the piano. A Bechstein. A double-spread of sheet music lay open on the stand above the keyboard. Stella read the title: Piano Trio No. 4 in C Major by Franz Berwald. A Swedish-sounding name. Natural for an expat to feel nostalgic for his homeland, however happily settled he might be in his adopted country.
She surveyed the paintings and drawings on the walls. Art had never been her thing, but she could recognise quality when she saw it and these works were very definitely quality. Strike that. These were Quality.
At the window, she looked out across the park. A pair of mounted police officers trotted along one of the paths through the park, their chestnut horses steadfastly ignoring the waving tourists trying to distract them for selfies. She tried to bring this elderly Swede into sharper focus.
A cultured man. A wealthy man. A man who, though retired from the diplomatic service, had stayed in England. Had he enemies? Did senior diplomats live the sorts of lives where they pissed people off badly enough to want them dead?
Why not? Anyone could. Until you added in the wild card of the tongue.
Tongues had two main jobs, as far as Stella could see. Eating and talking. Maybe three, if you included their erotic potential. You could eat without a tongue, she supposed, if only soup and liquids. You could kiss, do all the things people got up to behind closed doors. But talking? No. That came to a stop.
She entered the master bedroom, another impressive space. The lower halves of the walls were clad in pale-wood panelling. Above that hung more exquisite works of art, including a fleshy female nude by Lucian Freud. A sleigh bed in a rich russet colour that suggested cherry wood to Stella took up half the floorspace.
She opened a door that led to a walk-in wardrobe the size of the spare bedroom in her own, far more modest flat. She saw a dozen or more expensive-looking suits in soft sober-coloured fabrics.
She checked the label in one of the jackets and recognised the name of a famous contemporary tailor based in Savile Row, where well-heeled English gentlemen, and their imitators, had bought their suits for centuries.
Dress shirts hung in a coordinated row from white through pale pink to pale and then darker blue. High-end shoes sat on the carpet in pairs. She stooped to check the makes. Crockett & Jones, Grenson, Tricker’s. All high-end English brands.
She had Brömly pegged. A member of that tribe of foreign settlers who fell in love with London and became more English than the English.
She turned to the nightstand and opened the drawers one by one. The top drawer held a slim leather-bound book that, when she flicked through it, contained contact details for hundreds of men and women, with a great many possessing British-sounding names.
A CSI poked their head round the bedroom door.
‘Ma’am? The pathologist’s here.’
Stella walked back to the room where Brömly’s cleaner had found his body. Fitted out with dark-wooden furniture and an old-fashioned writing desk, with framed vintage Grand Prix posters on the walls, the study was a very masculine space and larger than the living room in her own flat in Lisson Grove.
The man bending over the tongue with a magnifying glass was her favourite of the Home Office pathologists working out of Westminster Mortuary: Dr Roy Craven. He turned as she approached, pulled his face mask down and smiled.
She returned his smile and pointed at the tongue. ‘What can you tell me? Apart from the obvious.’
‘What would you consider obvious?’ he replied, eyes twinkling behind his glasses.
Realising she’d strayed into a trap, Stella refused to blunder forwards into its waiting jaws.
She pointed at the body. ‘I see a human male corpse missing its tongue.’ And at the grisly specimen on the desk. ‘I see a tongue, which appears to have been torn free of its moorings, on top of an open Swedish Bible.’
‘And?’
Craven cocked his head on one side like a heron eyeing a fish in a pond: eager to catch a mere police officer out in an assumption unsupported by evidence. He wanted her to put the two facts together and come up with a third. That the tongue belonged to the dead man. She wouldn’t give him the pleasure.
‘From which some people might conclude that the tongue belonged to the dead man,’ she said, locking eyes with him. ‘But can we really be sure? Perhaps the killer took the tongue away and left an animal tongue behind to confuse us.’
Craven nodded. ‘Perhaps.’
They’d played out this ritual before and both enjoyed it. It was their way of getting an initial feel for a case.
‘Though intact, the tongue appears to have been torn out, rather than cut free,’ Stella said.
Another nod.
‘Therefore, an inexperienced detective might decide the killer lacked knowledge of anatomy or surgical techniques.’
‘But you?’
‘But I consider that our killer could just as easily have been a consultant maxillo-facial surgeon disguising their knowledge.’
Craven offered an ironic clap of his gloved hands. ‘Bravo.’
‘Was it removed before or after death?’ she asked.
Craven shook his head again.
‘Surely you don’t expect me to offer an opinion before my investigation?’
‘Just thought it was worth a try. When’s the post mortem?’
‘Tomorrow. First on my list. You’ll be there?’
She nodded. ‘I’d really like to get that Bible.’
‘And so you shall. I’m done with it for now.’
And with that, the grand panjandrum of Westminster Public Mortuary’s Iain West Forensic Suite left her to it, trailing behind him a faint, fruity aroma of pipe tobacco.
Stella beckoned the closest CSI.
‘Could you secure that, please. Then get it to Westminster Mortuary.’
The CSI fetched a plastic box. When he lifted the obscene lump of tissue away from the Bible, the page beneath lifted.
‘It’s stuck. Hold on, I’ll have to remove the page as well.’
‘No! I want that. Try to free it without damaging the paper.’
The CSI nodded before disappearing to another room briefly and reappearing with a small scalpel in his hand.
Stella stretched out a hand and closed her gloved fingers on the tongue. The surface gave a little, making her wince. She raised it a couple of centimetres so the CSI could get the scalpel in.
With a series of gentle strokes, like a watercolourist applying paint, he managed to separate the tongue from the thin sheet of bloody paper without damaging either. It came free with a whisper and the page settled back.
The CSI placed the tongue in an evidence bag, sealed and labelled it, and placed the whole thing in the plastic box.
Shaking her head, Stella peered at the blood-soaked page. Through the staining she could make out the type but that was all. No, not all. She looked closer. One of the verses had been underlined. Important, then. But to whom? Brömly? Or his killer?
She pulled her phone out and took a picture.
Stella looked at the multicoloured strips poking out from between the pages. They were either yellow or green and bore greasy marks and furred, tattered corners. Except one. Pink. Fresh-looking, with crisp edges and sharp corners. She touched it. It had to be another important verse.
Stella turned the pages until the marked page fell open. A single verse had been underlined. She took another photograph.
She’d have to get them typed up and translated by a Home Office-approved interpreter or any evidential value would crumble. But for now she was happy to use an online translation tool for a quick reference. She made a mental note to do it as soon as she got back to Paddington Green.
Stella left the flat using the common approach path of yellow plastic tread plates and crossed Upper Brook Street to the designated motorcycle parking bays. Her metallic-blue Triumph Bonneville waited for her at the end of a row of mopeds. It looked comically oversized next to the spindly two-wheelers with budding taxi-drivers’ clipboards fixed to their handlebars.
Over the years, she’d had to endure a certain amount of good-natured piss-taking from her colleagues. They’d suggested, variously, that she should join Traffic, or possibly go undercover with the Hells Angels.
Truth was, Stella loved bikes. She’d always ridden them, even owning a Harley for a while. She’d ended up ditching the Fat Boy for something British and more suited to London’s narrow streets.
Throwing her right leg over the wide, comfortable saddle she settled herself then twisted the key in the ignition and thumbed the starter button. The big engine caught with a cough and a roar.
She toed the gear lever down for first and pulled away, heading back to Paddington Green police station. That meant turning left onto Park Lane and going all the way down to Hyde Park Corner, before swinging north again and heading up beside Hyde Park itself to Marble Arch.
As she rode the big Triumph back to the station, Stella was thinking about the lack of damage to the flat’s door. That could mean one of two things.
Either Brömly knew his attacker. True in ninety-five percent of murders. Or the attacker was a stranger with a plausible story that got him admitted.
Of the two hypotheses, she leaned towards the latter. People one knew well enough to admit to one’s home tended not to be psychopaths with a penchant for DIY oral surgery.
She thought back to the time she’d forced a High Court judge to remove one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers. Leonard Ramage was the one who’d killed Richard and Lola. The trigger man. Even though his weapon of choice was a Bentley. He’d deserved it. They all had. Especially her old boss, Adam Collier. Rounding Hyde Park Corner, she scowled at the memory.
Four thousand and twenty eight miles due west of her position, Collier was about to get a new lease of life. Or, at any rate, death.
Would a woman scorned really procure and use a firearm? And what about the business with the tongue? If it had been a woman, Stella would have expected any post mortem mutilation to have taken place south of there.
The other possibility was a religious maniac. Stella puffed out her cheeks and tugged on her ponytail, running the thick hank of brown hair through her clenched fist until it hurt. Motive would have to wait. Facts were more important.
This felt like a targeted hit, rather than a random or chaotic killing. Brömly had been shot dead. Probably by a handgun. The killer would have needed planning, considerable forethought and the smarts to get hold of an illegal weapon.
She stared at the tongue. The tattered root, far from being neatly severed, had clearly been wrenched out. Blood had stained the open pages on which it rested.
Stella turned to the nearest CSI.
‘Any chance you could move the tongue?’ she asked. ‘I’d really like to take a look at the Bible.’
The CSI shook his head. ‘Sorry, Ma’am. The pathologist said to leave it. He had to go back to the mortuary. Said he’d be back by three.’
Stella checked her watch. Five to. She began a walk-through of the apartment.
She’d called her estate agent brother-in-law earlier to ask him what flats in Upper Brook Street went for. Jason told her two-bed apartments went for three or four million. The most expensive sale in the previous twelve months had been for eighteen.
The room she’d just entered was huge, at least thirty feet by forty. Standing in a corner on a deep-red Turkish carpet was a full-sized grand piano. A wall of large plate-glass windows gave onto Hyde Park: she saw trees waving in the wind outside.
She walked over to the piano. A Bechstein. A double-spread of sheet music lay open on the stand above the keyboard. Stella read the title: Piano Trio No. 4 in C Major by Franz Berwald. A Swedish-sounding name. Natural for an expat to feel nostalgic for his homeland, however happily settled he might be in his adopted country.
She surveyed the paintings and drawings on the walls. Art had never been her thing, but she could recognise quality when she saw it and these works were very definitely quality. Strike that. These were Quality.
At the window, she looked out across the park. A pair of mounted police officers trotted along one of the paths through the park, their chestnut horses steadfastly ignoring the waving tourists trying to distract them for selfies. She tried to bring this elderly Swede into sharper focus.
A cultured man. A wealthy man. A man who, though retired from the diplomatic service, had stayed in England. Had he enemies? Did senior diplomats live the sorts of lives where they pissed people off badly enough to want them dead?
Why not? Anyone could. Until you added in the wild card of the tongue.
Tongues had two main jobs, as far as Stella could see. Eating and talking. Maybe three, if you included their erotic potential. You could eat without a tongue, she supposed, if only soup and liquids. You could kiss, do all the things people got up to behind closed doors. But talking? No. That came to a stop.
She entered the master bedroom, another impressive space. The lower halves of the walls were clad in pale-wood panelling. Above that hung more exquisite works of art, including a fleshy female nude by Lucian Freud. A sleigh bed in a rich russet colour that suggested cherry wood to Stella took up half the floorspace.
She opened a door that led to a walk-in wardrobe the size of the spare bedroom in her own, far more modest flat. She saw a dozen or more expensive-looking suits in soft sober-coloured fabrics.
She checked the label in one of the jackets and recognised the name of a famous contemporary tailor based in Savile Row, where well-heeled English gentlemen, and their imitators, had bought their suits for centuries.
Dress shirts hung in a coordinated row from white through pale pink to pale and then darker blue. High-end shoes sat on the carpet in pairs. She stooped to check the makes. Crockett & Jones, Grenson, Tricker’s. All high-end English brands.
She had Brömly pegged. A member of that tribe of foreign settlers who fell in love with London and became more English than the English.
She turned to the nightstand and opened the drawers one by one. The top drawer held a slim leather-bound book that, when she flicked through it, contained contact details for hundreds of men and women, with a great many possessing British-sounding names.
A CSI poked their head round the bedroom door.
‘Ma’am? The pathologist’s here.’
Stella walked back to the room where Brömly’s cleaner had found his body. Fitted out with dark-wooden furniture and an old-fashioned writing desk, with framed vintage Grand Prix posters on the walls, the study was a very masculine space and larger than the living room in her own flat in Lisson Grove.
The man bending over the tongue with a magnifying glass was her favourite of the Home Office pathologists working out of Westminster Mortuary: Dr Roy Craven. He turned as she approached, pulled his face mask down and smiled.
She returned his smile and pointed at the tongue. ‘What can you tell me? Apart from the obvious.’
‘What would you consider obvious?’ he replied, eyes twinkling behind his glasses.
Realising she’d strayed into a trap, Stella refused to blunder forwards into its waiting jaws.
She pointed at the body. ‘I see a human male corpse missing its tongue.’ And at the grisly specimen on the desk. ‘I see a tongue, which appears to have been torn free of its moorings, on top of an open Swedish Bible.’
‘And?’
Craven cocked his head on one side like a heron eyeing a fish in a pond: eager to catch a mere police officer out in an assumption unsupported by evidence. He wanted her to put the two facts together and come up with a third. That the tongue belonged to the dead man. She wouldn’t give him the pleasure.
‘From which some people might conclude that the tongue belonged to the dead man,’ she said, locking eyes with him. ‘But can we really be sure? Perhaps the killer took the tongue away and left an animal tongue behind to confuse us.’
Craven nodded. ‘Perhaps.’
They’d played out this ritual before and both enjoyed it. It was their way of getting an initial feel for a case.
‘Though intact, the tongue appears to have been torn out, rather than cut free,’ Stella said.
Another nod.
‘Therefore, an inexperienced detective might decide the killer lacked knowledge of anatomy or surgical techniques.’
‘But you?’
‘But I consider that our killer could just as easily have been a consultant maxillo-facial surgeon disguising their knowledge.’
Craven offered an ironic clap of his gloved hands. ‘Bravo.’
‘Was it removed before or after death?’ she asked.
Craven shook his head again.
‘Surely you don’t expect me to offer an opinion before my investigation?’
‘Just thought it was worth a try. When’s the post mortem?’
‘Tomorrow. First on my list. You’ll be there?’
She nodded. ‘I’d really like to get that Bible.’
‘And so you shall. I’m done with it for now.’
And with that, the grand panjandrum of Westminster Public Mortuary’s Iain West Forensic Suite left her to it, trailing behind him a faint, fruity aroma of pipe tobacco.
Stella beckoned the closest CSI.
‘Could you secure that, please. Then get it to Westminster Mortuary.’
The CSI fetched a plastic box. When he lifted the obscene lump of tissue away from the Bible, the page beneath lifted.
‘It’s stuck. Hold on, I’ll have to remove the page as well.’
‘No! I want that. Try to free it without damaging the paper.’
The CSI nodded before disappearing to another room briefly and reappearing with a small scalpel in his hand.
Stella stretched out a hand and closed her gloved fingers on the tongue. The surface gave a little, making her wince. She raised it a couple of centimetres so the CSI could get the scalpel in.
With a series of gentle strokes, like a watercolourist applying paint, he managed to separate the tongue from the thin sheet of bloody paper without damaging either. It came free with a whisper and the page settled back.
The CSI placed the tongue in an evidence bag, sealed and labelled it, and placed the whole thing in the plastic box.
Shaking her head, Stella peered at the blood-soaked page. Through the staining she could make out the type but that was all. No, not all. She looked closer. One of the verses had been underlined. Important, then. But to whom? Brömly? Or his killer?
She pulled her phone out and took a picture.
Stella looked at the multicoloured strips poking out from between the pages. They were either yellow or green and bore greasy marks and furred, tattered corners. Except one. Pink. Fresh-looking, with crisp edges and sharp corners. She touched it. It had to be another important verse.
Stella turned the pages until the marked page fell open. A single verse had been underlined. She took another photograph.
She’d have to get them typed up and translated by a Home Office-approved interpreter or any evidential value would crumble. But for now she was happy to use an online translation tool for a quick reference. She made a mental note to do it as soon as she got back to Paddington Green.
Stella left the flat using the common approach path of yellow plastic tread plates and crossed Upper Brook Street to the designated motorcycle parking bays. Her metallic-blue Triumph Bonneville waited for her at the end of a row of mopeds. It looked comically oversized next to the spindly two-wheelers with budding taxi-drivers’ clipboards fixed to their handlebars.
Over the years, she’d had to endure a certain amount of good-natured piss-taking from her colleagues. They’d suggested, variously, that she should join Traffic, or possibly go undercover with the Hells Angels.
Truth was, Stella loved bikes. She’d always ridden them, even owning a Harley for a while. She’d ended up ditching the Fat Boy for something British and more suited to London’s narrow streets.
Throwing her right leg over the wide, comfortable saddle she settled herself then twisted the key in the ignition and thumbed the starter button. The big engine caught with a cough and a roar.
She toed the gear lever down for first and pulled away, heading back to Paddington Green police station. That meant turning left onto Park Lane and going all the way down to Hyde Park Corner, before swinging north again and heading up beside Hyde Park itself to Marble Arch.
As she rode the big Triumph back to the station, Stella was thinking about the lack of damage to the flat’s door. That could mean one of two things.
Either Brömly knew his attacker. True in ninety-five percent of murders. Or the attacker was a stranger with a plausible story that got him admitted.
Of the two hypotheses, she leaned towards the latter. People one knew well enough to admit to one’s home tended not to be psychopaths with a penchant for DIY oral surgery.
She thought back to the time she’d forced a High Court judge to remove one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers. Leonard Ramage was the one who’d killed Richard and Lola. The trigger man. Even though his weapon of choice was a Bentley. He’d deserved it. They all had. Especially her old boss, Adam Collier. Rounding Hyde Park Corner, she scowled at the memory.
Four thousand and twenty eight miles due west of her position, Collier was about to get a new lease of life. Or, at any rate, death.
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