The sun peeked over the gently rolling hills to the east of Opocapopopoulos House, spreading creamy golden light over the orangery, the three swimming pools (one shaped like a giant dollar sign, one like a pound sign and one which had been a deutschmark but had been remodelled to look like a big O for Opocapopopoulos since the introduction of the euro, which Bartholomew hadn’t been too keen on), the cherry orchard, the cement garden and the Caucasian chalk circle which Bartholomew had had installed after reading about them in Wallpaper magazine. It dappled the gently rotting tomatoes in the greenhouse, the moat with its creeping carpet of algae, and the glass dome covering the mansion’s central atrium, a four-storey courtyard with an oak tree growing in the middle of it. The observatory on the east roof had a hole in from where it had been hit by a small meteorite; while Bartholomew had been alive it would have been repaired as soon as it had happened, but now it was letting in the rain. The house, which from space looked like a big O and was pretty much big enough to be viewable from space if you had a big enough telescope and weren’t too far away, stood silently, slumbering, as if waiting for its master to return before it awoke.
Inside, forensics teams dotted the place, brushing every marble sculpture, giant plasma TV and gold tap for clues. They were all dressed in white, with breathing masks and white gloves on, and looked like a jumbled, uncoordinated dance troupe. Occasionally one of them would stop what they were doing for a while – you couldn’t easily tell, with all their gear on, whether they were each male or female – and look at something long and hard for a few seconds, thinking they’d found something. In almost every case, though, they hadn’t, and resumed dusting or brushing or scanning things with high-tech bleepy devices. The head forensic expert, Meredith, stood at the top of the twin sweeping marble staircases in the grand entrance hall and surveyed the scene with the eye of someone who’s been there before, who’s seen it all, but who for some reason is still intrigued by it. Something didn’t make sense to her, and although she wasn’t sure what it was – she knew it was only a hunch, and in her business you don’t work on hunches, you work on hard evidence backed up by DNA – she felt certain that sooner or later they had to uncover some piece of evidence that would prove her right. This was the third day they’d been there; they’d been called in after reading the piece in the Eastwestchester Windsock about Opocapopopoulos’s gardener, which had sounded fishy to them. Since Opocapopopoulos had been a rich man, they were also hopeful they might find a few bin bags stuffed with money somewhere, which might help patch up the leaky roof at the office. Meredith frowned, although if you’d been standing in front of her so you could see her do that you wouldn’t have been able to anyway due to her breathing mask, which covered her face entirely and made her look like a beekeeper who’d mislaid all her bees. What was she missing? she wondered.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was her husband, who was a forensic pathologist. They’d met while they were both chemistry students in Manchester; he was in the year above, and had introduced her to a cocktail consisting of vodka, lemonade, blue curaçao and something which he’d “cooked up in the lab”. Three days later, she’d come to in the university hospital, and sworn never again to touch another drop of alcohol. He had been charged with three counts of trying to get girls into bed by rendering them chemically unconscious, and had been about to be convicted when she’d stepped in, entranced by the steely beauty of his eyes and the way he managed to wear spats without looking like a pretentious eejit. A year later, and once she’d let him romance her almost to the point of exhaustion, they’d been married in a simple ceremony on the Isle of Wight, where his parents were from, and they’d both decided to do postgraduate forensics courses: his was to do with chopping up dead people and hers seemed, at least at the moment, to be something to do with watching thirty-five people in white boilersuits stare at tiny parts of wall for hours on end. She sighed.
“Patrick.”
“Hi, Dith.” That was another thing about him that she’d kind of liked at the time: the fact that he shortened everything, as if there just wasn’t enough time in the day. “Meredith” was too long, at three syllables, so it had become “Merry”, “Dith”, “Red” and then metamorphosed into “Dithuthed” which then became “Dithuthed EarthWorkth”. It was the kind of thing that made her want to hit him with a plastic spade, now, but most of the time she couldn’t be bothered to go and find one.
“Is this urgent, I –“
“Survey going fine? Right. Found something. Might be useful. Got to get back to the slab in a few mins but briefly. Opocap had only one employee, right?”
“Yes, his gardener –“
“Wrong. Had three. Gardener, we know about. But also PA and chef. Got this from chap here who played golf with him sometimes. Says he ‘members Opocap mentioning this, few months ago.”
“Oh. Thanks,” said Meredith, not sure what she should do with this. “We’re only really trying to find fingerprints.”
“True. But where are PA and chef? Had cars, too? How about driver? Lived on his own but had had girlfriends too, I heard.”
That was true. For many years Opocapopopoulos’s private life had been the main subject of the local paper’s gossip column; since the town it covered wasn’t really all that large, the rest of the gossip consisted of what might be termed – well – non-gossip, concerning local flower shows, charity events and the occasional launch of a new swanky bar. Opocapopopoulos provided its weary editor, Crankum McGultz, with the only ray of hope they had that they might one day be able to bundle a red-top magazine called something like Top Starz in with its Sunday edition. When he’d moved into Opocapopopoulos House he had been involved with a beautiful but expensive Russian called Olga Dolmaiacheva, who had come very close to marrying him before deciding that even the inevitably huge eventual divorce settlement wasn’t worth having to spend time in the company of someone so repellent, and had purposefully driven one of his Ferraris into a tree before trying to set the garage containing the rest of them on fire. Since then, he had had flings with the daughter of a Las Vegas casino owner, who had eventually threatened Bartholomew with suicide (Bartholomew’s) if he didn’t leave her alone; a French heiress called Françoise, whom he had somehow managed to bankrupt (the Eastwestchester Windsock speculated that she might have been too nice for her own good), and latterly, the beautiful but utterly vacant daughter of one of Austria’s wealthiest wood-pulping mill owners. She had lasted well, until she started demanding that her highly-trained team of interchangeable chiahuahuas be allowed to roam freely throughout the house. Bartholomew had flown her, then and there, to the nearest airport by helicopter, forwarding on twenty-nine large trunks full of her stuff the following day.
“Isn’t that a police matter, though, if they’re missing?”
“Yes. But if were me, would be looking for proof they might have done it. Sorry. Got to get back.”
Meredith crossed the corridor overlooking the hallway to a decorator’s table on which had been set up a makeshift operations centre. There was a computer, lots of printouts, and a complete set of diagrams of the house which they’d managed to extract from the architects who had built it. By all appearances, they had been only too happy to wash their hands of the whole project, which (the Eastwestchester Windsock had sorrowfully reported at the time) had ended up running £15 million over budget, which Opocapopopoulos had refused to pay and had then counter-sued them when they sued him for it. They’d eventually settled out of court for “an undisclosed sum”, which to the Windsock had meant that Opocapopopoulos had probably ended up paying them more than that. The plans they’d sent her detailed five floors of the mansion and as much of the ornate landscaped gardens as they’d been involved with; Opocapopopoulos was never satisfied and had kept changing his mind, firing whoever was working on the gardens and taking on someone else only to fire them. There was a big sheet of paper for each level: she could see the ground floor, with the oak tree in the middle of the courtyard and the grand entrance hall she was standing overlooking, and on the next sheet was the first floor. She mentally marked out a small flashing blob marked You Are Here, and traced a path going clockwise around the O, passing bedroom suites, bathrooms, staircases and rooms which didn’t seem to serve much purpose other than to further inflate the clearly already monstrous ego of a monomaniac materialist. Her path climbed the stairs going over the bridge which Opocapopopoulos had modelled on the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, but due to not listening to the tour guide when he’d been in Venice had called it the Bridge of Size, and passed Opocapopopoulos’s five-chamber master bedroom suite before coming around the corner to her right and bumping into the flashing blob again. The next floor was pretty much the same, and it was possible to trace the same closed loop; the third and fourth floors stopped either side of the bridge, however, forming more of a U shape. How come she didn’t have the plans for a basement? she wondered. And in a house this size, how come nobody had ever questioned the apparent fact that Opocapopopoulos had only ever had one member of staff? A place this size, which had – she counted – fourteen bedrooms, a ballroom, a dining-room, a catering-grade kitchen complex, eight bathrooms, three studies, two drawing “slash” living-rooms and numerous smaller rooms, not to mention the outhouses, would surely need more than just one gardener. Did Opocapopopoulos do all the cooking in a kitchen the size of a squash court, heating up a microwave meal for one every night? She doubted it. But who might know the truth?
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