He held the door open for me, stood back. “You’ll see. It’s been a fun morning all round. You really did a number on our boy’s face, didn’t you?”
He was right. John Naylor was sitting at an interview-room table with his arms folded, wearing the same colorless sweater and old jeans, and he wasn’t good-looking any more. He had two black eyes; one cheek was lopsided, purple and swollen; there was a dark split in his bottom lip; the bridge of his nose had a horrible squashy look. I tried to remember his fingers going for my eyes, his knee in my stomach, but I couldn’t square those with this battered guy rocking his chair on its back legs and humming “The Rising of the Moon” to himself. The sight of him, what we had done to him, made my throat close up.
Sam was in the observation room, leaning against the one-way glass with his hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets, watching Naylor. “Cassie,” he said, blinking. He looked exhausted. “Hi.”
“Jesus,” I said, nodding at Naylor.
“You’re telling me. He’s saying he came off his bike, face first into a wall. And that’s about all he’s saying.”
“I was just telling Cassie,” Frank said, “we’ve got a bit of a situation on our hands.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, like he was trying to wake up. “A situation, yeah. We pulled Naylor in around, what, eight o’clock? We’ve been going at him ever since, but he’s giving us nothing; just stares at the wall and sings to himself. Rebel songs, mostly.”
“He made an exception for me,” said Frank. “Stopped the concert long enough to call me a dirty Dub bastard who should be ashamed of myself for licking West Brit arse. I think he fancies me. Here’s the thing, though: we managed to get a warrant to search his place, and the Bureau just brought in what they found. Obviously we were hoping for a bloody knife or bloody clothing or what-have-you, but no such luck. Instead… surprise, surprise.”
He picked up a handful of evidence bags from the table in the corner and waved them at me. “Check these out.”
There was a set of ivory dice, a tortoiseshell-backed hand mirror, a small lousy watercolor of a country lane, and a silver sugar bowl. Even before I turned the bowl around and saw the monogram-a delicate, flourished M-I knew where these had come from. Only one place I knew of had this kind of tat variety: Uncle Simon’s hoard.
“They were under Naylor’s bed,” Frank said, “prettily packed away in a shoebox. I guarantee if you have a good look around Whitethorn House you’ll find a cream pitcher to match. Which leaves us with the question: how did this lot end up in Naylor’s bedroom?”
“He broke in,” Sam said. He had gone back to staring at Naylor, who was slouched in his chair gazing at the ceiling. “Four times.”
“Without taking anything.”
“We don’t know that. That’s according to Simon March, who lived like a pig and spent most of his time legless drunk. Naylor could’ve filled up a suitcase with anything he fancied, and March would never have known the difference.”
“Or,” Frank said, “he could have bought it off Lexie.”
“Sure,” Sam said, “or off Daniel or Abby or what’s-their-names, or off old Simon, come to that. Except that there’s not one single speck of evidence to say he did.”
“None of them ended up stabbed and searched half a mile from Naylor’s home.”
They had obviously been having this fight for a while; their voices had that heavy, well-practiced rhythm. I put the evidence bags back on the table, leaned against the wall and stayed well out of it. “Naylor’s working for just over minimum wage and supporting two sick parents,” Sam said. “Where the hell is he going to get the money to buy antique bits and bobs? And why the hell would he want to?”
“He’d want to,” Frank said, “because he hates the March family’s guts and he’d jump at the chance to screw them over-and because, just like you said, he’s skint. He may not have the money himself, but there are plenty of people out there who do.”
It took me that long to realize what they were fighting about, why the whole room was tight with that hard, bitten-down tension. Art and Antiques may sound like the nerd squad, a bunch of tweedy professors with badges, but what they do is no joke. The black market spreads worldwide, and it gets tangled up with a whole bunch of other kinds of organized crime along the way. People get hurt, in a swap network where the currencies range from Picassos to Kalashnikovs to heroin; people get killed.
Sam made a furious, frustrated noise, shook his head and slumped back against the glass. “All I want,” he said, “is to find out whether this fella’s a killer, and arrest him if he is. I don’t give a damn what else he’s been doing in his spare time. He could have fenced the Mona Lisa and I wouldn’t care. If you seriously think he’s been passing antiques, we can hand him over to A and A once we’re done with him, but for now, he’s a murder suspect. Nothing else.”
