Embrace Me (4 page)

Computer literate, he was able to use that together with his agile, enquiring mind and impressive range of contacts. Sixsmith and Sullivan had never met anyone quite like Harry Graves-Jones and they used him as an inspiration to rise that little bit higher in their work. They respected him as a man and loved him as a master detective.

‘Anything I should know?’ he asked his assistants now.

‘No further developments,’ said Joe Sixsmith.

‘Jenny, I want more men on the house to house. Extend the search to Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Chelsea now. If our lady’s still in London she’ll have sought refuge in one of those areas. A hundred men on the streets – see to it. Each hour that goes by is to her advantage. Any sightings, I want to know about them immediately. I’m going to lunch at my club – Joe, you can drive me.

‘Jenny, I want you to try the Bond Street shops. Enquire about her and anyone who habitually accompanied her. Find out who her friends are, anything they might know about her. Joe, you can try the restaurants she’d have frequented. Here’s a list. Start with San Lorenzo and Harry’s Bar.’

Harry’s club was Brooks, which had been his father’s, his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s. A bequest from his Uncle Raymond took care of any bills run up there and the annual membership for Harry’s lifetime. Upon Harry’s death, the bequest was to pass to his sons if there were any. Uncle Raymond had been Harry’s father’s brother, a bachelor who’d loved his freedom and detested the very idea of marriage. He’d been reclusive yet strangely social when it suited him, a well-respected High Court judge. Uncle Raymond had adored his nephew and had been a second father to Harry whose own had been as generous as he could afford to be but indifferent as a parent. They had always had a slightly formal relationship. His mother had died soon after Harry had been born. She had been the great love of his father’s life, and with her death love and emotion were buried in the same grave.

Another bequest Uncle Raymond had left Harry was a set of
rooms at Albany, a large and elegant Edwardian building set back off the street by iron gates, with a circular drive before the front doors where an impeccably uniformed doorman presided. Albany was famed for its A-list residents. When Harry learned that Olivia Cinders had also lived there he was not encouraged. He had had no intimation of it before the case broke as this was a building famed for privacy, the discreet behaviour of its tenants and the silence of its staff.

On enquiring all he gained, besides entrance to her set of rooms, was the information that she’d rarely used them. That she was more apt to spend a few hours there during the daytime, and was never there at the weekend. That she was adored by the staff, who said they knew nothing about her life except what they read in the papers and did not believe for a minute that she was capable of killing anyone. Harry had known the doormen most of his life. They knew all the liaisons that took place in Albany, and would keep strict silence. Scandal was not Albany’s style. Harry knew he had already gathered as much as he was going to from the staff and the board that ran the building. He’d been clever enough not to be so intrusive as to annoy them but knew he’d get no further.

At Brooks he dined alone, watching and listening to the club members. One of their own in such a scandal was bad publicity for the upper classes. It was sure to be a topic of general conversation for at least a few minutes. Harry was just attacking his jam roly-poly when he received his first piece of concrete information.

‘A lovely girl, damned attractive,’ he overheard. ‘The Buchanans of Sefton Park, were inseparable with her, the girls especially, will be shattered by any scandal. If Olivia made it to them, she’ll be all right, they’ll take care of her. She’s always run with the best and they won’t let a star like her down, no matter what she did or didn’t do. It was foolish of her to run away, though. Should have stood her ground no matter what had happened to the prince. A bit cowardly that. The running away, I mean.’

‘Do you think she did it, Archie?’

‘Early days, Bumpy. If she did it will have been self-defence, of course. A sordid affair, though, whichever way you look at it.’

Harry finished his pudding and took his coffee in the main room. He drank it slowly with beautiful Lady Olivia in the forefront of his mind, afterwards feeling compelled to return to her rooms at Albany.

Chapter 4

It had been easy to trace the owner of the car found abandoned in Sefton Under Edge. The vehicle was London-registered to a Mrs Caroline Wasborough of 28 Hay’s Mews, Mayfair. When an officer from the Oxford police department called to verify ownership of the car she claimed she had not even known it was missing. When told by the officer the circumstances in which her car had been found, Mrs Wasborough professed disbelief.

All arrogant, cool detachment she asked, ‘Are you telling me that my car has been involved in a crime? What a nuisance! I do hope it’s drivable and you can get it back to me some time today?’

‘I don’t know about that, ma’am. I shouldn’t think so. I’d have to ask my chief.’

‘Well, put me through to him then,’ she demanded.

Chief Inspector Fred Pike took the call and asked far more questions than Mrs Wasborough felt was necessary. She considered his behaviour intrusive and told him so in no uncertain terms.

‘My husband will be home at four. I suggest you deal with him if you have anything more to ask. This is too inconvenient! Just get that bloody car back to me
today
!’ And she slammed down the telephone.

‘Snotty upper-class bitch!’ was Fred Pike’s verdict.

Forensic had not as yet even arrived in Sefton Under Edge where they would go over the car then have it towed to the police garage in Oxford for a further once over. Fred Pike smiled to himself because he knew Mrs Wasborough would not have her car back for a very long time if they found anything untoward.
When he thought how angry that would make her, he was delighted.

The Chief Inspector’s first sight of the car confirmed his gut instinct that this case was trouble. He radioed in to his office and summoned twenty men at once to comb the wood. Forensic arrived while he was still on the telephone. If the search of the woods revealed nothing untoward, nor the questioning of the villagers and the Buchanans, he would put it down as just another stolen car snatched by joyriders.

Several days passed and forensic had done its work which included analysis of the bloody fingerprints on the window. It was a woman’s thumb and forefinger, type B. As a matter of course they ran the prints through the system to see if they belonged to any known criminal and came up with nothing. A search of the woods and interviews of the residents in the area revealed nothing that might help to find the culprits who had stolen the car. Several days had passed. The Chief Inspector pulled all his men off the case but left the file open.

Fred Pike was a good detective, and instinct told him that there was more, much more, to this abandoned car than stealing for a joyride and somehow the Wasboroughs were more involved than they appeared to be. Fred Pike daily expected a call from either Mr or Mrs Wasborough, demanding their car. He found it strange that after his one conversation with Mrs Wasborough, he never heard from them again.

At odd moments through the day Pike would be reminded of that conversation. It still niggled him that she should have been so deliberately rude to him, that she should not have been at all interested in the fact of her car’s being stolen, all she had wanted was to have it returned. It suddenly occurred to Fred that Mrs Wasborough was for some reason acting out a role. She had been deliberately rude to him for a reason.

The newspapers, radio and TV were full of the search for Lady Olivia Cinders who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. It was all the talk everywhere. Had she committed suicide? Had she got away abroad? The tabloids were dredging up every scrap of smut they could find about Lady Olivia and her prince.

Fred Pike had the habit of breakfasting at a small cafe a few streets from his office. It was the best fry-up for the money that could be found in Oxford. Sally Ann’s Cafe was frequented by many officers from Pike’s division. He preferred breakfast with them to the chaos of the first meal of the day with his wife and four children whom he adored, but not first thing in the morning.

He, like every officer in the country, was following the Cinders case with a professional eye. Every one of them had their own theory about what had happened on the night of the murder; whether she’d done it or she hadn’t. Where she might be in hiding. Whether she was dead or alive. Talk of Olivia Cinders was all around him while he devoured his breakfast. Waiting for his second cup of coffee, Fred Pike shook out his rolled up newspaper. There was yet another photograph of Lady Olivia. In this one, taken at Royal Ascot, she was flanked to one side by Caroline Wasborough, to the other by her husband Giles. The dead prince was standing at the end, or so the caption told him.

‘Holy shit!’ exclaimed Fred Pike.

‘What’s up, sir?’ asked one of his men.

‘Nothing much. Except we’ve had the hottest clue to the Cinders case sitting right in front of us for several days and never even saw it! Let’s go. Got to get this worked out before I call New Scotland Yard and this Graves-Jones who’s running this case. Lucky bastard.’

Harry Graves-Jones was too baby-faced to take seriously, too handsome, too well-dressed and too eccentric. Far too affable to be a detective chief inspector and wield authority. Or so the uninitiated believed. Harry used his looks and manner, his public school and Cambridge education, to catch people off guard. ‘Harry Graves-Jones always gets his man’ was what they said about him at New Scotland Yard. And he did.

Harry greeted the plain-clothes man on duty at Lady Olivia’s front door. The officer let Harry in to her rooms after he’d told his superior that there was nothing to report. It had become a habit, Harry visiting Olivia’s rooms before he retired to his own on the floor above at the opposite end of the building. There was
a marked difference between the two apartments.

He walked through Olivia’s drawing-room, switching on lamps, imagining that that was what she would have been doing on returning home. The room instantly sprang to life. It was her drawing-room, it could not have been anyone else’s. Painted a creamy white, the large double cube room, with marble columns and a high ceiling, was furnished in sumptuous fabrics: damasks and brocades, leather and suede, all in many shades of white. There was a concert grand: a white Bechstein. The only touches of colour in the room came from the oriental carpets on the polished wood floors and the painting on the wall: a massive Poussin. The tables were of ivory, as was the odd occasional chair. On every surface stood a seemingly endless collection of silver-framed photographs and several black and white portraits by world-famous photographers: Eve Arnold, Terry O’Neill, Norman Parkinson, Bailey, Donovan.

He preferred the Terry O’Neill portraits which captured Olivia’s sensuality. She seemed to shimmer. The photographer had managed to grasp her vitality, her hunger for life in all its many forms. She was an enchantress in the same way as Princess Grace of Monaco had been. Her cool, blonde beauty did it all for her.

After interviewing several of Olivia’s friends Harry knew he had a fight on his hands. Word was out among the upper echelons of English high society: ‘Close ranks.’ He rather admired them for their code of honour – ‘We take care of our own’ – even when it hindered his work.

There was a faint scent of lily of the valley in the rooms. He walked through them all, as he did every evening. And as always he discovered something new about his quarry that served to render him even more infatuated with her, made him understand why she had run away. He had no doubt that she had killed the prince; felt that it had been a murder born of passion, of both love and hate, not coldly premeditated. That she must have been driven over the edge by the intensity of erotic love gone wrong. The clues were all there at the scene. The prince had still been tied to the headboard of his bed, a blindfold over his eyes, a long silken cord round his neck. Mere sexual games. But not so the
chiffon scarf stuffed in his mouth nor the dagger that had slit his wrists.

Harry was not releasing these facts or any others pertaining to the sex life of the prince which he had learned from the prince’s brother. He had also grasped that Lady Olivia Cinders was driven by a passion for all things sexual and lived her erotic life openly, indulging in it as if it were a toy or a delightful game.

Harry sat on the end of her bed. How he would like to meet a woman such as Olivia! One with the courage of her sexual convictions. He was convinced she had not run away because she had murdered her prince but because she could not and would not face the scandal of her sex life being made public knowledge. It was not in her to see her other lovers’ private lives dragged through the press, innocent people being exposed for their dalliance with her.

For all the interviews he and his force had conducted there had not been a bad word said about Lady Olivia. It seemed her kindness and joie de vivre had always been uplifting. Everyone either loved her or wanted to love her. And he could understand that since he had become infatuated with her himself, this woman he had not even seen in the flesh.

After turning off the lights Harry stood for several minutes in the dark. He thought about a ravishing young woman living in such a setting with a three-million-pound family painting hanging on the wall. That life was now in shreds, Olivia a murderess on the run whom he must hunt down. Where could she go? And how would she manage for money? All her bank accounts were frozen while every country in the world was looking to arrest her. Two weeks and still no sign of her, no real clues to go on. Harry knew he had to consider that she might no longer be alive. He could hardly bear to think about that. Olivia was not one to take her own life. If she had been she would not have run away. To be free was everything to her.

When Harry entered his own set of rooms and switched on the lights, he was struck by the differences between them and Olivia’s. He had never touched them, had moved into the rooms just as his Uncle Raymond had left them. From childhood he had adored his uncle’s set at Albany. Every time he entered them
now he never ceased to be amazed that they belonged to him; that Uncle Raymond had left them and their contents to him.

The contrast between Olivia’s rooms and his was marked. Harry’s were choc-a-bloc with treasures from his uncle’s lifetime of travelling: Egyptian artefacts, mostly sculptures, Greek bronzes and black and terracotta vases decorated with Minotaurs and young boys trying to wrestle the beast to the ground, Roman amphoras, a collection of Roman glass iridescent with age, a library of rare books, oriental carpets on the floors, Edwardian leather sofas soft and mottled from wear. Eighteenth-century mahogany reading tables and the massive head of a Greek kouros. Draperies of cream silk moray embroidered in tiny silk flowers, festooned and with giant tassels, that had once been in Marie-Antoinette’s sitting-room at Versailles, hung in ribbons where the sunshine of centuries had scorched the folds. The bedroom looked much the same, offering a handsome four-poster bed draped in faded yellow silk damask.

Harry enjoyed his home enormously, had spent much of his youth here visiting his uncle. Harry was no cook and dined out mostly or invited one of his lady friends to come and cook him a meal. Otherwise he sent out for Chinese takeaway, his favourite food.

The aroma of roasting lamb and the sounds of Pink Floyd were apparent from the kitchen. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them on the floor as he went through to the small room. Naked, he walked as silently as possible up to Sambella and wrapped himself around her.

She was only one of the many women Harry had in his life. Nineteen years old and a stunning long-legged beauty, she was one of the top mannequins on the Paris runways. The fashion world adored her for her ebony skin, her long slender body, legs that seemed to go on forever, almond-shaped eyes, high cheek bones, and magnificent symmetrical features.

Harry rarely saw her because she was based in Paris and travelled the world for her work. When in London she always stayed with him. They were good friends and magnificent lovers, who knew there was no future for them, only now. He was too old for her but he had been her first sexual partner and
periodically she returned to him.

She slipped around in his arms to face him and they kissed. He picked her up and carried her to the bedroom. She wore a transparent white shift and as he placed her on the floor he slid it up over her head. She began to say something. Harry silenced her with another kiss, then told her, ‘Shush! Not a word. Sex first.’

Sambella smiled and, taking him by the hand, led him to the bed. Before they lay down together she ran her hands over his body, kissed his chest, sucked on his nipples. With her hands locked around his neck, she raised herself, crawled up his body and impaled herself upon him in one swift, deep thrust. She called out in intense pleasure. With her hands on his hips, legs twined round his waist, she raised and lowered herself on his ample erection. Slowly, deliberately, they fucked for their greatest pleasure. Olivia and everything but sexual ecstasy was forgotten.

When Harry awoke in the morning she was gone. All that remained of her was her scent, jasmine and lemon, a note and her key to his rooms on the pillow. He read it and smiled. A farewell fuck, the best way she knew to say goodbye. It had been a memorable night of lust, a marvellous ending. He smiled, feeling a sense of love and admiration for the young and astonishingly beautiful girl who, it seemed, had now fallen deeply in love with a Sudanese diplomat.

He walked through the rooms looking for a trace of her but she had left nothing, not even the dirty dishes from the night before. Only the scent of her lingered, that and a sense of gratitude that he had had her and they had been so good together. The piercing ring of the telephone broke his moment of sentimentality and Sambella was gone from his mind.

‘Chief, I think we’ve got a break at last. A call from a Chief Inspector in Oxford. He’s been working on an abandoned car and thinks there might be a connection between it and the Cinders case,’ said an excited Sixsmith.

‘Give me twenty minutes and pick me up at the Vigo Street entrance.’