32
THE COLLECTOR
The dawn brought heavier rain. The sky was gutter-grey. The downpour seemed to be carrying soot from the sky. Inside the warehouse at 231 Caledonian Road, the staff of the PCU were discovering how badly the roof leaked.
‘Rufus has come up with five names,’ reported April, looking across her desk at Meera. ‘Five major cases that went as far as the courts.’ She moved the papers to avoid getting them soaked, and shifted a plastic bucket into place with a casual flick of her foot.
‘Not bad, considering how many people the ADAPT Group have employed over the years.’ The two women had been going through the details of hundreds of staff members considered an employment risk by the company, but the young hacker had cracked their problem in minutes. It appeared that ADAPT had made plenty of enemies over the years.
‘They’ve usually managed to settle out of court.’
‘See anyone familiar?’
April smiled. ‘Oh, yes. Just one.’ She turned the screen of her laptop to face Meera. ‘Xander Toth. Employed at ADAPT’s corporate headquarters as a researcher four and a half years ago, fired for misappropriation of funds, threatened with court, case dropped, no reason given. Scrubby beard and a body like a pipe cleaner. The picture’s quite old, before he started working out.’
‘Fired four and a half years ago? Long time to nurse a grudge. We have to get into his apartment.’
‘It can wait for the moment,’ said John May, coming in with Banbury. ‘Giles just called. He’s got a new ID on the other body. He’s done his best work. I need everyone on this.’
‘So who is he?’ asked Meera.
‘Adrian Jesson, thirty-four years of age. Giles found an operation scar over his left lung, and checked with the Royal Free Hospital’s chest surgeons. They sent over nearly seventy pre-op photographs, and he matched one up.’
‘Smart man.’
‘Jesson’s an Old Etonian. He has no police record, no driving convictions, no bad debts, no prints on record, clean as a whistle. He was living alone in a run-down flat on Copenhagen Street, working at a Starbucks in Islington, ran a branch of Café Nero before that. No girlfriends to speak of, no friends at all. His family business was declared bankrupt and his father moved to Majorca seven years ago, leaving the family behind. Jesson worked in an Oxfam shop at the weekends and collected for Help the Aged, ran an Alpha Course at the church up the road. No-one has much to say about him, just that he was very shy, got on with his life and minded his own business, always visited his mother in Ealing every Sunday until she died of bowel cancer last year, collected tokens for the local special-needs school, and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Someone has to go to his current place of employment and interview his boss.’
Longbright slapped a coin onto her wrist. ‘Call it.’
‘Heads gets Starbucks, tails gets his flat,’ said Meera.
Longbright checked the coin. ‘Damn.’
The Starbucks on Upper Street near Highbury Corner was a cluttered chaos of dirty crockery and baby buggies. Long-bright located the harassed manager, and took her to the quiet office at the back of the shop.
The manager sat nervously jiggling her knees and playing with her braids as Longbright asked questions. Her name was Shirelle Marrero, and she had been running the branch for two years. Yes, Adrian Jesson had worked with her for the past year, but there was little she could add to the information about him that Longbright already had. With the unenlightening interview coming to a close, Shirelle rose to leave when a sliver of memory returned to her. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ she said carefully, ‘but you know he was a bit OCD?’
‘In what way?’
‘One of the baristas told me Adrian had been in trouble for stalking a girl; she tried to stick a restraining order on him. He was a collector.’
‘What sort of collector?’ In a John Fowles sort of way? Long-bright caught herself wondering.
‘Well, he went to those fairs where you get autographs of TV stars, pop memorabilia, rare comic books, lonely-guy stuff like that. He said some of the things he owned were so valuable he had to keep them locked away. Adrian had this thing where he had to get the set of everything he collected, an OCD thing. His stuff was probably just valuable to him, like Batman toys and old records. He was always reading comics, talking to the customers about which was better, Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, stuff like that.’
Meera had already phoned in from the flat, and had not reported seeing any collectable items. If they were really valuable, thought Longbright, Jesson might have kept them off-site for insurance purposes.
‘He always came in with bags from Forbidden Planet,’ said Shirelle, ‘and that other shop on the Holloway Road. Rocket-ship.’
Drizzle continued to fall in the morning’s half-light as Long-bright searched the down-at-heel storefronts on the Holloway Road. Sandwiched between the junk shops and takeaways was the Rocketship bookshop. A less appropriate name would have been hard to imagine. The rain-stained plastic sign above the door was missing half its letters. The outlet specialised in collectable toys and science fiction books, but it looked shut. Long-bright was surprised to find the door open when she leaned on it. The lights were off, half the shelves were empty and the old man behind the chipped wooden desk at the back of the shop seemed to be fast asleep. An overpowering smell of damp paper rose from the Dells, Pans, Arrows, Bantams and other yellowed paperbacks that lay in uncatalogued piles around the floor.
Longbright introduced herself. The bookseller looked as spine-broken and dog-eared as the novels that surrounded him. He blinked at her ID card, unimpressed, but recognised the photograph of Jesson that May had provided for her.
‘Oh, him. He’s always in here. A real nuisance. Never buys much.’
‘Well, he won’t be in anymore—he’s dead. How come you remember him?’
‘He was always at the fan conventions. One of the really boring ones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he took it all a bit too seriously. People like him get too cliquey, make a lot of enemies.’
‘You think he had enemies?’
‘I know it. I saw them arguing publicly at events. Everyone did.’
‘Who exactly are we talking about?’
‘Jesson’s been having some kind of long-running feud with a guy called Richard Standover for years.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘A very big memorabilia collector. One of the biggest. He’s got a Web site he buys and sells from.’
‘What were they arguing about?’
‘I imagine they were both going after the same memorabilia, but Standover also lives with Jesson’s sister.’
‘Did Jesson ever talk to you about his collection?’
‘He hardly ever talked about anything else,’ said the old man wearily. ‘He has a storage unit in King’s Cross right next to St Pancras station where he keeps everything.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘He owns the first hundred issues of Spider-Man in mint condition, every single Bob Dylan track ever released, stuff like that. He specialises in original artwork from album sleeves, but he lives in a really run-down council flat. No furniture, nothing. I had to deliver some books to him once.’
Longbright wondered why Jesson had chosen to live in squalor when his collection was worth good money.
The man behind the desk seemed to read her mind. ‘Blokes like him never sell their treasures,’ he explained. ‘They’re not interested in investment value. They’d rather live like starving students, because they can never let go. It’s the mark of a true collector. It becomes an unhealthy obsession.’
There were only a handful of storage places left in the King’s Cross area, and it did not take long to track down the one used by Adrian Jesson. Longbright arrived to find rain sluicing from the brick arches of the undercroft beneath St Pancras station. The vaults had been constructed for storing beer, and were tailored precisely to fit the barrels. Once the area had been defined by these Victorian tunnels, which were eventually converted into everything from car washes to showrooms for antiques. One of the last surviving businesses was behind a pair of curved wooden doors marked Rental Space Available At Cheap Rates.
The manager was just about to leave for the day. Longbright explained why she needed him to open Jesson’s storage unit. For the next hour she dug through boxes filled with sealed and dated plastic bags of comics, albums, paperbacks and merchandising ephemera from old movies, including screening tickets, invitations, drink coasters and VIP party tags. Without an expert, it was impossible to tell how much the collection was worth or which parts of it were valuable.
‘When was the last time you saw him?’ she asked the manager.
‘About a week ago. He’s got his own keys and can come by whenever he wants, but I happened to be on-site. He complained that the arch had a leak and was damaging his boxes. I said I’d try to get it fixed, and he told me he was going to come by the next morning to move his stuff out of the way, but he never showed up.’
‘You remember the exact day?’
‘It must have been Thursday.’
‘Are you absolutely sure?’
‘Positive. I only do a half-day on Thursday, and when he didn’t show by lunchtime, I went home.’
‘Did he ever come here with anyone else?’
‘You’re joking. He was far too scared of getting robbed.’
‘Is this stuff valuable?’
‘You could sell it piecemeal on eBay, but it’s worth more in sets.’
Longbright called the unit and spoke to May. ‘Jesson definitely died after Delaney. He was last seen alive on the Wednesday, two days after Delaney was killed.’
‘We mustn’t get misled by the timing of the deaths, Janice, that’s just muddying the waters. Jesson was a collector. Delaney had a habit of helping strangers. I can’t help wondering if they had something valuable in their possession that had to be taken from them whether they were dead or alive.’
‘What could they have had in common, John? They seem to have been complete opposites. Different backgrounds, different classes, different interests. The only thing they share—’
‘—is the same location.’ May completed her thought. ‘What if Arthur is right and it’s not who they were but where they lived?’
The arguments went back and forth, but nothing further was achieved that night. The rain continued to fall, the skies darkened, and King’s Cross once more became a place of transience, somewhere to hurry through before reaching safe shelter.
The lights in the PCU’s warehouse shone long after the bars had closed down and the streets had cleared. At night, the edges of the smart gentrified area frayed to reveal older incarnations; flyers for call girls and sex clubs filled the wet gutters, drunks and the homeless reappeared in the shadows. All would vanish with the coming of another dawn, but the central mystery refused to be dissolved.