cubicle wall was Maddox Cavendish, and he was one of the project’s main architects, but Joseph had heard that he was Marianne Waters’s hatchet man, and that presumably meant he fired people, and that meant there were a lot of people who really hated him.
Which probably explained why Maddox Cavendish had no head.
‘Oh, God. Oh, Lord. Oh, Jesus.’ Raymond Land sat shaking his head in his hands as Arthur Bryant looked on with interest.
‘Isn’t it funny how the most atheistic people start summoning gods when they’re in a state of panic?’ he mused. ‘You could probably trace the birth of many religious cults to such moments of self-induced anxiety.’
‘Oh, shut up, Bryant. You’re no help at all. What are we going to do? The chief architect of the ADAPT Group’s expansion plans, rendered headless in an office with a secure entry system. Murdered within a few hundred yards of two other men, one a builder, the other an assistant manager of a sodding coffee shop! And you’re telling me our only suspect is the clueless young leader of a local protest group. It’s not going to stick. I can’t go back to Faraday and tell him this. I can’t contain it now. The story will be out and all over the networks by lunchtime. We can’t have people fearful of going to work. Can you imagine the chaos? They’ll be suing their employers. The publicity’s going to backfire on everyone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lied to Leslie Faraday this week. I keep telling him we’re getting close to an arrest but he doesn’t seem to believe me. He’s not getting information from anywhere else, is he?’
‘I can’t imagine why you did that, old fruit. You should have told the truth and said that there’s a mad killer roaming our streets and we have absolutely no clue about who he might be or what his motives are.’
‘That’s what you would have done, isn’t it? Because you don’t care what you say to your superiors; you never have. I remember the Brixton Prison breakout, when you called Faraday a time-wasting dung-beetle.’
‘If I remember correctly, which is fairly unlikely, I accused him of behaving like Cardinal Richelieu or a rabid weasel, depending on whether he preferred to take his comparisons from history or the animal kingdom.’
‘All very amusing, Bryant, but Faraday was a junior official then and he’s your boss now, and that’s exactly why we’re in this fix. If you’re mean to them on the way up, they’ll knife you once they reach the top. We’re all going to be thrown out on the streets any minute now.’
‘Drink your tea, Raymondo, you’ll feel better. It’s got whisky in it.’
‘It’s half past eleven in the morning. I can’t drink alcohol this early.’
‘I only added a drop to buck you up. We’re doing everything we can. Apparently the room was covered from every angle by cameras and very well lit, but the killer took the precaution of smashing up the CCTV’s hard drive. There was a separate system in operation outside which he couldn’t get at. April and Meera are going through the footage right now.’
‘What about everyone else?’
‘Renfield is with Kershaw at the morgue, John has gone with Janice and Dan Banbury to the ADAPT offices, Bimsley and DuCaine are getting interviews and I’m ploughing my lonely furrow here. In fact, you’re the only one not doing anything useful.’
‘Then tell me what I can do,’ Land pleaded.
‘Go over Faraday’s head. Talk to Oskar Kasavian and tell him the truth. If you don’t, I will.’
‘I don’t see what good it will do—’
‘I want him to understand one thing,’ said Bryant. ‘He must realise that whether he likes it or not, we’re his only hope. Tell him that we’ll clear up the case. We need everyone on our side for this. And I think we can do it.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Land asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Bryant. ‘But if I told you why, you’d probably have a heart attack.’
‘We know that he was here until nearly ten p.m. because he called home from work to check his messages,’ said John May. ‘Where have you gone, Dan?’
Banbury appeared from behind the desk units. ‘I’m trying to get the carpet tiles up,’ he explained. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood underneath them.’ The area surrounding Cavendish’s desk had been taped off and photographed, and the floor closed to all members of staff, who periodically peered in through the glass with impassive faces.