Free Death of an Elgin Marble by David Dickinson Page B

in front of Great Russell Street as if their lives were in danger. One or two of the more punctilious curators were able to tell him that they had been left standing about for at least forty minutes. The Inspector decided it was time for another fire alarm. This time he and a couple of his men would be left hiding inside the museum to see how easy it would be to move things about or to replace one object with another. He would talk to Deputy Director Ragg that afternoon about arranging a date. He thought his children would probably approve of fire alarms with their promise of fire engines and ambulances rushing to the rescue with their sirens at full blast.
    ‘I’m the bringer of bad news this evening, very bad.’ Detective Inspector Kingsley had refused the customary cup of tea on his evening arrival in Markham Square and was sipping slowly at a glass of brandy. Powerscourt thought he looked very pale.
    ‘It’s Kostas,’ he went on, ‘one of the Greek porters at the museum. He’s been killed, I’m afraid.’
    ‘How?’ asked Powerscourt.
    ‘Well,’ said Christopher Kingsley, ‘the official story is, and will continue to be, that he was killed by a tube train. The usual story, too many people trying to get on in the rush hour, somebody slipped and then there was a body on the line waiting to be run over by God knows how many tons of Piccadilly Line train. There was an off-duty police sergeant several carriages down and he managed to keep all the passengers at the front of the train back until he spoke to them. The driver was weeping uncontrollably in the stationmaster’s office. He’d only been in the job for two weeks and nobody had prepared him for anything like this. He kept saying that it was all his fault. The point is, the sergeant told his superiors that one of the passengers, a middle-aged woman in a fur coat, said she thought somebody was pushing the victim towards the front of the train, but she couldn’t be sure. She’s going to speak to us again in the morning when she’s calmed down. You know how confusing and chaotic these situations can be, my lord. Very hard to make a sensible narrative of what’s been happening.’
    ‘What do we know of the dead man, Inspector?’
    ‘Very little so far. Name of Kostas Manitakis, employed as a porter in the British Museum. Age, thirty-four, resident in a Greek boarding house, apparently, near their cathedral in Moscow Road in Notting Hill.’
    ‘I wonder if Johnny Fitzgerald has come across him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Maybe he drank in the basement of that pub down there with the ouzo and the unspeakable Greek wines.’
    ‘I have made an appointment to go to his lodgings in the morning, my lord. I should be very happy if you would come with me. In the meantime, as a precaution, I have ordered his room to be sealed off and guarded and a watch kept on the house. All the other lodgers will be kept at home until they have spoken to us before they go off to work. The landlady is going to miss her normal cleaning duties in the cathedral.’
    ‘It sounds as if you expect foul play, Inspector.’
    ‘I do, and I don’t. I happen to have worked before with the sergeant who was on the train and organized the passengers for questioning. He’s a most reliable fellow. He wouldn’t have told us about the pushing if he didn’t think there was something funny going on.’
    Powerscourt looked closely at the Inspector and remembered what Christopher Kingsley had said about his dislike of murders. Now it looked as though he might have been plunged right into the middle of another one.
    Number six Moscow Road was a three-storey terraced house with steps up to the front door, guarded by a large cat with fierce black eyes and half a tail. The landlady, Mrs Olga Henderson, was of Greek extraction but married to a man from Yorkshire. She greeted them nervously at the door, as Kingsley introduced his sergeant and Powerscourt.
    ‘Come in, sir, my lord Powerscourt, Sergeant.