Murder in Kentish Town: an elegant mystery set in Bohemian London Read online

  MURDER IN KENTISH TOWN

  An elegant mystery set in Bohemian London

  Sabina Manea

  Published by

  THE BOOK FOLKS

  London, 2021

  © Sabina Manea

  Polite note to the reader

  This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents is appropriate.

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  We hope you enjoy the book.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  List of Characters

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  Chapter 1

  In her scrupulously minimalist flat up on Hampstead High Street, just across the road from the underground station, Lucia Steer stood before the tall mirror in her bedroom and gently smoothed the folds of her burgundy dress. The heavy silk wound around her fingers, reassuringly soft and familiar to the touch. It was a much-loved outfit that she had worn many times before, a luxury made possible by the generous bonus that had rewarded the end of her legal career in the City all those years ago. She pushed back her thick brown hair, surveyed the result of her efforts, and smiled. She was ready.

  The clock on the bedside table read six forty-five. Fifteen minutes remained until the doorbell would ring promisingly. Engrossed as she had been in preparations, Lucia hadn’t noticed the creeping darkness outside. She wound down the Roman blinds; the blackness of the windows always made her feel a little on edge, a bit too exposed. She went back to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of fizz from the half bottle she had opened earlier and parked in the fridge door. A bit of Dutch courage wouldn’t go amiss, though it was hardly an unprecedented event that loomed before her. She had in her possession two tickets for Blithe Spirit at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London’s West End, and one of them was for somebody who was her boss and had steadily graduated to becoming her friend: Detective Chief Inspector David Carliss of the Metropolitan Police. Their growing amity had crept up on her and had, quite frankly, taken her by surprise. She had never been platonically close to a man before. In fact, she could probably count her genuine friends on the fingers of one hand, and even then, there would be some spare digits left.

  Lucia had always been intensely private, a trait she shared with DCI Carliss, which was one of the reasons they got on so well. An ex-corporate lawyer, interior designer and now civilian investigator with the Unusual Deaths Team at Kentish Town police station, Lucia had shed more skins than most. At last, she felt at ease with the one she was currently inhabiting, with no desire for significant change. Just over two years working with the Met had whetted her appetite for adrenaline and foul play. So far, she had been lucky enough, if that wasn’t too ghoulish a way of putting it, to get plenty of both.

  As anticipated, the doorbell rang at seven o’clock sharp. DCI Carliss was a punctual man, as careful with his timekeeping as he was with his professional and personal lives. These he endeavoured to keep as separate as possible, save for his closeness to Lucia. She had somehow managed to weave herself into every aspect of his existence.

  ‘Looking good.’ His intensely blue eyes lingered admiringly as he looked her up and down. She didn’t mind at all. As it happened, she often wished he would do more than look. But, in the two and a half years they had known each other, it never seemed to progress any further. There was a reticence on both sides, perhaps out of fear of jeopardising a harmonious professional relationship, perhaps out of fear of something else: commitment and the start of an irreversible road to entanglement. And entanglement was messy. Neither of them liked messy.

  ‘Thanks. You’ve scrubbed up pretty well yourself,’ she replied.

  He had made a commendable effort, from the sharp jacket and impeccably pressed shirt, down to the smart brogues. DCI Carliss was a good-looking man, not that he ever made a fuss about it. Fifty-three years old to Lucia’s thirty-nine, he wasn’t exactly a stickler for tidiness or fashion in his appearance, but he tended to deliver when an extra push was required, and an evening engagement with an attractive woman was such an occasion.

  ‘Shall we?’ Lucia led the way to the taxi that was waiting patiently outside.

  As the car glided down the steep end of the high street and then the gentler slopes of Rosslyn Hill, they watched the changing cityscape. Smart Victorian frontages gradually gave way to grubby, higgledy-piggledy slums with hastily added shopfronts, an unkind but sadly accurate way of describing Mornington Crescent. Winding around Regent’s Park, the regimented emptiness of the Outer Circle was soon softened by the animation of Regent Street and the promising lights of the West End. This was a city they both loved at its ultimate best – dirty, noisy, glamorous and untamed all at once. Soho was supposed to have changed irreversibly since the demise of Raymond’s Revue Bar and other establishments of the same ilk that crowded expectantly around it, but Lucia wasn’t so sure. Some things never changed, and the fabric of the place was immutable. There would always be pleasures to be bought and sold, and money exchanging hands for a wide spectrum of thrills. It was human nature, then, now, and always. No amount of moralising or prudishness could change that; these particular attributes were passing fads, while addiction and desire were not.

  Lucia and Carliss got out at Cambridge Circus. They preferred to walk the rest of the way rather than be deposited straight in front of the theatre. Despite a couple of decades of gentrification, there were plenty of secretive doors down dark alleyways if you had the patience to look beyond the sanitised, elegantly branded shop windows. Veteran neon signs jostled for attention alongside seemingly neglected entrances that promised things that even in this permissible age the law deemed questionable, if not downright depraved. Admittedly, the bulk of the sex trade had long migrated out of the centre, but some of the old Soho had clung on, refusing to entirely succumb to media companies and swanky flats. The stench of urine and spilled booze attested to it, even though the evening was still young.

  The play was good, as good as could be expected of a light comedy of manners which had aged well and had been given a new lease of life by a reasonably famous cast of TV personalities. At the end, the audience spilled out eagerly, as if the cultural box had been ticked and now the real fun could begin. There was a slight chill in the air, not the winter smell of damp brick, but a slight warming of the tarmac, signalling that hibernation was over. Lucia shivered as she tightened the belt of her elegant black cashmere coat, th
e one that made her look like a Sicilian widow. An image flashed before her eyes, no more than a split second of darkness, but enough to take the edge off the pleasure of the evening. No matter how many deaths and broken lives they came across in their line of work, it never got any easier. They left marks, deeper ones than Lucia would have liked, and she couldn’t forget. A theatrically Victorian cemetery, a crowd of mourners whose faces faded in her mind with every day that passed, and a dead man whom nobody really missed. Lucia ran a hand across her forehead, as if to erase the uninvited memory of a past case that kept lingering. It was just work, and tonight she and the inspector weren’t there for work.

  DCI Carliss looked like he was weighing up whether to offer some comfort from the cold, but nothing happened, so he had evidently thought better of it. He rustled in his pocket for his trusty cigarettes – lately he seemed to have given up giving up – and lit a slim Sobranie. At least he had upgraded his choice of poison, not that the effects would be much different. Lucia inhaled the smoke as it coiled around their heads. She liked it, though smoking wasn’t a vice that she particularly had any time for. There were better things to get into, ones that the policeman would have disapproved of.

  ‘So, what’s this place you’re taking me to? You know I don’t like surprises,’ she asked.

  ‘I know, I know. But I figured this time you’d forgive me, at least when you taste a mouthful of the wine. It’s got the best white Burgundy in London.’

  ‘Very impressive. I see you’re pulling out all the stops tonight.’

  Carliss smiled as he affected a comical air of mysteriousness. He was clearly enjoying having the advantage for once. They strolled into Covent Garden and headed towards Seven Dials. As they arrived outside a red-fronted restaurant, he gently placed a hand on the small of her back and ushered her in.

  ‘Nice choice. Old-school but never fails to disappoint.’ Lucia breathed in the warm smell of classic French cooking as she looked around her approvingly. The DCI had done exceedingly well. The table was perfect, ensconced in a corner of the room that had changed little since the restaurant had first opened in the 1940s. The French waiter sat them down with a flourish, winking conspiratorially at Carliss as if to congratulate him on his choice of companion for the evening. The policeman grinned back. He didn’t look like he minded the assumption that was being made.

  Carliss had been right; the white Burgundy was nothing short of spectacular. Despite being friends outside work, spending evenings together like this wasn’t something they did very often. There were plenty of occasions down the pub, team drinks, casual drinks for just the two of them, but not usually in this vein: a cosy, intimate tête-à-tête which the restaurant staff had understandably categorized as a romantic encounter.

  DCI Carliss raised his glass as he perused the food menu. ‘Cheers. To an evening well spent. We should do this more often, you know. I don’t know about you, but it must be years since I’ve been to the theatre. Got plenty of catching up to do. Good idea to get those tickets.’

  ‘Cheers. Well, I fancied something different. And going to see a play on my own is not a lot of fun.’

  ‘You could have invited Walter and Nina.’

  ‘I could have done, but they’re up at Lexington Hall.’

  DCI Carliss put on the best mock-offended face he could muster. ‘So, I was second choice then?’

  Lucia smiled. She didn’t do coquettish, but this was the closest to it that she would allow herself to get. ‘Well, a girl’s got to make do with what’s available.’

  She was secretly pleased that her friends hadn’t been around. Plus, she had bought the two tickets with the express intention of inviting Carliss and nobody else. Lucia and Nina Chanler, née Lexington, had been inseparable since university. Lucia counted Nina and her American-born husband Walter as her best friends, in all honesty the only two fingers on the hand that were taken up by that designation. DCI David Carliss, well, he was in a slightly different category.

  The restaurant was an easy-going sort of place, which translated into a conscious laxity in enforcing closing time. As a result, the two companions were able to avail themselves of plenty of after-dinner chat and drinks, until they were eventually politely shown out just after midnight.

  Carliss squinted at the streetlight, which was brighter than the low-lit room where they had sat for so long. ‘One last drink for the road?’

  ‘We probably shouldn’t. We’ve still got tomorrow to get through at the station.’ The protest on her part was rather feeble.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. We shouldn’t.’

  He held her gaze for what seemed like interminable minutes. The yellow haze of the streetlight bounced eerily off his face, as if he were shining a torch under his chin in a childish attempt at a scare. Lucia put out her hand and stroked his cheek.

  Chapter 2

  The next day, Kentish Town police station was buzzing with a distinct TGIF exhilaration. On the first floor, home to the Unusual Deaths Team, DS Cam Trinh was scribbling furiously on a Post-it Note, one of many that littered her usually tidy desk, while DC George Harding pretended to busy himself with a lengthy email that had just landed in his inbox. It was the second morning of uninterrupted sunshine, and it was nigh on impossible to get any serious work done.

  DS Cam Trinh sniffed the stale air like a disdainful greyhound faced with a bowl of unappetising slop and marched determinedly to the window. On the outside, the police station was a staid, perfectly serviceable Victorian affair, but on the inside, it had been mercilessly gutted out and fitted with the regulation package of grim false ceilings, aggressively bright lights and floors that squeaked menacingly under foot. The window had been broken for years, without anyone troubling themselves to do anything about it, and as a result it could only be cracked open a couple of inches. Still, any fresh air was better than none.

  ‘Morning, Lucia,’ Trinh said.

  Lucia, who had just popped out of the office that she and DCI Carliss shared across the corridor, was on the hunt for what seemed like the hundredth coffee of the day. The offering in the kitchen was so watery that it couldn’t be properly categorized as a caffeinated drink, and so it didn’t really count. She had been planning to sneak out for the real deal from the cafe around the corner, but a backlog of emails that had poured in first thing had put a stop to any hope of escape.

  ‘Morning, Cam. Lovely day, isn’t it?’

  Trinh looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her big, brown eyes, and her fine features were washed over. She had two small children at home and worked ungodly hours, in fact, any hours that she could get her hands on. There was a tacit, mutual appreciation between the two women. They were cut from the same cloth – relatively young, ambitious and disarmingly outspoken, which always made an impression in a male-dominated environment. Not always a good impression, it had to be said, but then neither of them was out to flatter unnecessarily. Trinh had once confessed to Lucia that the year-long maternity leave she had recently taken had been an ‘indulgence’, implying that reparations had to be made. These were in the shape of self-punishment, working like crazy to make up for lost time.

  ‘It’s sunny, that’s for sure. One of those days when the light’s just too bright, you know.’ Trinh blinked, as if temporarily robbed of her sight. ‘Sorry, I sound like a right killjoy. It’s just that Tilly woke up on the hour, every hour last night. I feel like I’ve got no idea what time it is any more. Fancy a proper coffee in a minute? This stuff isn’t really doing the job, is it?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  Trinh and Lucia walked out and breathed in the familiar smell of petrol fumes and unattended bins. The birds were chirping merrily, despite getting drowned out by the squeals emanating from the primary school across the road. Thankfully there was no queue at the cafe, and it wasn’t long before the two women were clutching the much-awaited paper cups.

  ‘How old’s Tilly now? I’ve lost track of time,’ asked Lucia. Children ha
d always been a peculiar species to her, something she had absolutely no interest in.

  ‘Nearly eighteen months. Terrible sleeper though. I seem to have drawn the short straw. Joe was the same – didn’t make it through the night till he was nearly three. Did my head in, those two. They still are.’ Trinh sighed wistfully, and her attractive face lit up. ‘Little blighters.’

  ‘Does your mum still help out a bit?’

  ‘Yeah, she does, more than I could ever expect.’

  They sat down on a bench and sipped the hot, appetising milky coffees. It was lovely to bask in the sunshine in silence for a few minutes. Lucia could tell there was something on her colleague’s mind, something she wanted to get off her chest.

  Trinh spoke before being prompted. ‘She’s a bit off-colour these days, my mum. It’s not like her. She’s never been one for moping or feeling sorry for herself. She’s of the generation where you just grin and bear it.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it might be?’ asked Lucia.

  Trinh flicked back her smooth, dark brown ponytail and frowned. ‘Don’t know. She’s been on the phone a lot lately. I’m pretty sure she’s talking to her friend from her old work – you know, Trish’s Nails, just up the road from here on Kentish Town Road? Trish runs the gaff, and she and Mum have been thick as thieves for years. But, beyond that, it’s a mystery. Maybe I should just go ahead and ask Mum straight up.’

  ‘She’ll probably tell you not to be silly, that you’re imagining it.’ Lucia laughed. ‘She won’t want to worry you.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. It’ll probably pass anyway. Shall we head back? I’ve got this monster report sitting on my desk, begging me to give it some proper attention. I’ve been avoiding it like the plague all morning, but if I don’t make a start, the boss is going to give me a right telling off. What’s up with him, anyway?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ The question came out a bit more defensively than Lucia had intended.