The Tower Hill Terror Read online

  The

  Tower Hill Terror

  Leipfold Mysteries • Book 2

  Dane Cobain

  Encircle Publications, LLC

  Farmington, Maine U.S.A.

  The Tower Hill Terror Copyright © 2020 Dane Cobain

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-64599-052-9

  E-book ISBN 13: 978-1-64599-053-6

  Kindle ISBN 13: 978-1-64599-054-3

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher, Encircle Publications, Farmington, ME.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual places or businesses, is entirely coincidental.

  Editor: Cynthia Brackett-Vincent

  Book design: Eddie Vincent

  Cover design by Christoper Wait

  Cover images © Getty Images

  Published by: Encircle Publications, LLC

  PO Box 187

  Farmington, ME 04938

  Visit: http://encirclepub.com

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  A Note on the Text

  MAILE AND LEIPFOLD live in a London that’s similar to, but not identical to, our own. It’s a London where the villains are straight from the pages of a comic book, where the heroes are unusual (but normal) people, struggling to do the best they can in the knowledge that life doesn’t always turn out like it does in the storybooks.

  Because of that, not all of the city’s geography is one hundred percent accurate. If you walk along Balcombe Street, you won’t be able to follow it down an alleyway, up the stairs and into Leipfold’s office. You won’t be able to visit Cholmondeley at the Old Vic, either.

  Likewise, all of the characters are creatures of the imagination. Any similarities with real people—living or dead, fictional or otherwise—are purely coincidental.

  The Tower Hill Terror originally had a different name, which we can’t actually print here because it includes a registered trademark. Still, kudos if you’ve been reading my books and following my journey for long enough to know what that other title was!

  If you ever find yourself falling through a rabbit hole and resurfacing in Leipfold’s London, be sure to buy him a lemonade from me. And if he’s riding Camilla, give her a pat on the handlebars.

  Chapter One:

  Murder at the

  Grosvenor House Hotel

  MAILE O’HARA’S first official task at Leipfold Investigations was to carry out surveillance on Jayne Lipton, a suspect in the case she’d helped to crack as an unpaid intern. At first, when Leipfold told her what he wanted her to do, she was confused.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why? I thought we were finished with the case.”

  “We are,” Leipfold replied. “But I like to cover all the bases. Besides, I have a bad feeling about her.”

  As the owner, founder and one-half of the brains behind Leipfold Investigations, James Leipfold had a bad feeling about a lot of things, but Maile was used to it by now. It was his job to have bad feelings and to figure out what was causing them.

  “About who, boss?” Maile asked. “Jayne Lipton?”

  Leipfold nodded and scribbled down the answer to another one of the clues in The Tribune’s daily crossword. He barely even noticed he was doing it.

  “Last time we saw her, I thought she wanted to tell me something,” Leipfold said. He shrugged. “It might be nothing, but then again it might not. I’d like to find out.”

  Maile stared woodenly across the gap between their desks at the top of his ginger head while his eyes roamed across the newspaper. She waited for a moment, expecting him to say something more, but all she could hear was the scratching of his pencil as he answered the clues.

  “Can I help?” Maile asked.

  “That depends,” Leipfold replied. “Can you find out where she’s staying?”

  “She’s staying at the Grosvenor House Hotel,” Maile said. “Remember it?”

  “How could I forget? We went there for the Thompson case. But how do you know where she is?”

  Maile smiled at him and held up her smartphone. “GPS,” she said. “Well, that and geolocation. I got it from her Twitter feed. I already checked it out.”

  Leipfold laughed and scribbled down the final answer, then tossed his pencil onto the desk and turned to look at her.

  “Have you got the room number?” he asked.

  “No dice,” Maile said. “Soz.”

  “All right.”

  Leipfold stood up suddenly and grabbed his phone before patting his pockets for his keys. Maile watched him as he rushed across to the coat stand beside the door and pulled his leather jacket on. Then he grabbed his helmet and tucked it under his arm.

  “Man the phones while I’m gone,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

  “Where are you going?” Maile asked. But she thought she already knew the answer and Leipfold didn’t bother to tell her. He stalked silently out of the office and left her alone with her thoughts.

  * * *

  The hotel lobby was huge, intimidating. The closest Leipfold had come to the opulence of the place was when he stayed in a Newport Travelodge on one of his rare spells away from the city. It had been nice enough, but it had nothing on Grosvenor House with its wide-open spaces, marble busts and mahogany furniture.

  Leipfold felt keenly out of place as he walked up to the reception desk, but he’d felt out of place for most of his life. He looked shiftily around and then rang the little bell on the reception desk. It was answered by a long-legged Italian man in an expensive suit with a thinning thatch of hair and a well-groomed beard. When Leipfold introduced himself as a private investigator, the receptionist looked sceptical, but he asked politely how he could help.

  “I need to speak to one of your guests,” Leipfold replied. “A pretty girl in her early twenties with long brown hair. Mid-twenties. About five-six, maybe five-seven. Brown eyes and decent clothes. Her name’s Jayne Lipton, but I have reason to believe she booked under a pseudonym.”

  The receptionist frowned. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “A man like you doesn’t have friends who stay in a place like this. Besides, I can’t give a guest’s details to just anyone.”

  “I could slip you a tenner.”

  “I could call security.”

  “Please,” Leipfold said. “Just do me a favour. I’m worried. Just send someone to see if she’s okay.”

  The receptionist sighed and mumbled something into a walkie-talkie. Leipfold watched him apprehensively, trying to figure out what was happening. It seemed like a whole heap of nothing until the Italian man was joined by one of his colleagues, a woman whose badge identified her as the shift manager. She shot Leipfold a withering look and sent the Italian to check on the room.

  Then she led Leipfold outside and told him to stay there. The two of them were still arguing about it when the walkie-talkie crackled and the Italian’s voice filtered through. It sounded different, distressed. The calm authority had disappeared and been replaced by an awestruck terror.

  “Karen!” he shouted, as Leipfold’s eye wandered towards the woman’s right breast where a high-end badge confirmed her name. “Karen! Call the police, okay? Call the police!”

  The shift manager blanc
hed and tightened her grip on the walkie-talkie, holding it more like the handle of a hammer than a thick chunk of plastic and computer chips.

  “Carlo?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a body up here,” he replied. “A body and blood. Merda! Non puo’ essere vero!”

  The shift manager dropped the walkie talkie to the floor, thinking only of her phone and the triple digits of the emergency services. She panicked, like the people in plane crashes who burn to death after forgetting how to undo their seatbelts. She patted her pockets in desperation and then lowered her head and started rooting through her designer handbag.

  Leipfold saw his chance, and he took it.

  * * *

  Leipfold heard Karen calling after him, but if anything, it made him run a little faster. Adrenaline was coursing through him, his legs and his arms were pumping, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt ready to take on the world. A suited security guard made a grab at him, but Leipfold, unencumbered in jeans, a leather jacket and a pair of trainers, dodged aside and skidded across the glossy tiles towards the elevator. He veered right at the last second and then raced up a short flight of stairs.

  Leipfold had the advantage of surprise, but neither of them knew where he was going. He hit corners at random and went in out and out of Personnel Only doors in a mixed attempt to find the Italian and to lose the flat-footed klutz who was trying to stop him. It didn’t take long to accomplish the latter, and he found the Italian shortly afterwards. He just had to follow the man’s panic-stricken voice. As Leipfold slowed to a stop on a third-floor corridor, he heard the man still swearing softly on the other side of a half-open door.

  Leipfold approached it slowly and looked inside.

  His first impression was of blood and viscera, the sort of scene that played across his mind on the darkest nights but that he hadn’t actually seen since he last saw action. This was worse. It was more unexpected, out of place in a high-class hotel. A quick visual on the corpse’s face told Leipfold that it was Jayne Lipton, but he couldn’t be sure without a closer look and that was the last thing he wanted to do. But it was a woman all right. That much was clear, even though the face had been battered so badly it was almost unrecognisable.

  At a glance, Leipfold thought that if the trauma to the face hadn’t killed the girl, it must have happened after her death. No one could survive that. She also showed signs of sexual assault, at least if her clothes were anything to go by. Her bare skin shone a pallid, deathly grey under the hotel lighting, and there was more of it on show than Leipfold cared to look at. At that moment, he was focusing on something else.

  Carlo, the Italian receptionist, was on his hands and knees at the foot of the bed, breathing heavily and dribbling saliva onto the carpet. Leipfold sympathised with him. It was one of several common reactions to seeing a body for the first time, and this one was in particularly bad shape. Leipfold himself felt a little queasy, but his mind was working on autopilot.

  “You bloody fool!” he shouted, launching himself into the room towards the receptionist. “You’re contaminating the crime scene.”

  Leipfold was gagging on the coppery smell of congealing blood and dragging the insensible Italian out of the room when the security guy with the bad hat caught up with him.

  He’d brought reinforcements.

  Chapter Two:

  The Old Vic

  GARY MOGFORD was about to knock off when the call came in. It was a Friday evening and he was ready for the weekend. He was on call, but he knew from experience that the crime rate would drop because it was cold, wet and rainy. But someone—some bastard—had screwed it all up by reporting a corpse in a hotel room.

  And then a helpful young lady called Karen had led him up to the third floor of the Grosvenor House Hotel, where a guilty-looking James Leipfold was dragging a concierge, spitting, cursing and still spewing, out into the hallway.

  “James Leipfold,” Mogford said, as Constable Jenny Groves grimaced and fingered her handcuffs beside him. “Fancy seeing you here. We’re going to need you to make a statement.”

  * * *

  Back at the Old Vic, the nineteenth century police station that still housed two-fifths of the city’s woefully underfunded coppers, Mogford checked in with his boss. He found Cholmondeley in the empty canteen. The guvnor was hiding out with a stack of paperwork, trying to make a dent in it without being disturbed every ten minutes by a knock on the door.

  “Ah,” Cholmondeley said, marking his place with a finger at the end of a paragraph. “Mogford. How can I help you?”

  “Bad news, boss,” Mogford replied. “A body’s been found at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Your old pal James Leipfold was at the scene. I thought you might want to have a word with him.”

  “What happened?” he asked. “Who was killed?”

  “Looks like Jayne Lipton, guv. Remember her? We’ve got men on the ground to secure the scene, and the body’s on its way to the coroner. Leipfold was there when I arrived, boss. Dragging their receptionist away from the crime scene.”

  “Is there any chance that the receptionist was behind it?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Mogford said. “He needed a change of underwear, if you catch my drift. Doesn’t seem the type to kill a fly.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s a possibility.”

  Mogford said nothing, and Cholmondeley sighed and looked shrewdly across at his second-in-command.

  “Okay,” Cholmondeley said. “You speak to the hotel staff and see what you can figure out. I’ll have a chat with James Leipfold. But you know what he’s like. He’s always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  * * *

  It was the following day, a Saturday afternoon, and Leipfold had just escaped a stressful meeting with a new client. He unlocked his mobile phone and dialled the office.

  “Are you busy?” Leipfold asked when Maile answered the call.

  Maile laughed. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. You’d better be paying me time and a half.”

  “Can you meet me at the Rose & Crown?”

  “Sure thing. Just give me a couple of minutes to power down. What’s up?”

  “I’m not convinced that the Thompson case is over,” Leipfold replied. “And besides, I could murder a lemonade.”

  Leipfold arrived first, and he went up to the bar and ordered a lemonade, a gin and tonic and a pint of lager before selecting a discreet booth in the corner. Leipfold sat with his back to the wall, an old habit that allowed him to keep an eye on the doors. It was a useful surveillance trick, but it also came in handy if he had to make a quick getaway.

  Maile arrived ten minutes later, dressed all in black but still showing a slight lick of colour that Leipfold struggled to place until he realised she’d had her fringe done. He wondered how she’d found the time. She spotted Leipfold at his table and made a beeline for the booth.

  “Hey,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside him. “What’s new?”

  “This is for you,” Leipfold said, sliding the G&T across to her. He kept the other two drinks for himself. Maile stared at him as he took a slow sip from the lemonade before picking up the lager, sniffing it, swirling it delicately and putting it back down on the table.

  “And that one’s for you?” she asked.

  “I don’t drink,” Leipfold reminded her. “Not anymore. But sometimes, when I feel like I’ve earned one, I buy something to remind me what I’m missing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maile said. “Because that’s totally sane. You’re not missing much.”

  “Perhaps not,” Leipfold murmured, staring moodily at the drink. He took another sip of his lemonade and said, “It looks like we’ve got another murder on our hands.”

  “Yuh-huh,” Maile said. “Jayne Lipton. Who do you think killed her? Is it connected to the Thompson case?”


  “I don’t know,” Leipfold admitted. “It could be. But something tells me it’s unrelated. The ferocity of the attack, for one thing. The modus operandi for another.”

  Leipfold took another sip from his lemonade while Maile slurped away at her G&T. Then he stared morosoley into the pint of lager.

  “So what’s next?” Maile asked, breaking the moody silence with an upbeat smile.

  “The same as always,” Leipfold replied. “We investigate, and if we can make some money while we’re at it, even better.”

  “Doesn’t look like we’ll be short of work for a while.”

  Leipfold nodded and said nothing.

  Maile grinned again and leaned towards him. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said.

  She sat back and downed the rest of her G&T. Then she pointed at the pint of lager that Leipfold was still brooding over. “You going to drink that?” she asked.

  Chapter Three:

  Operation Aftershock

  MAILE O’HARA LOVED HER JOB. After all, where else would she get paid for poking her nose into other people’s business? But she had to admit that it had its downsides. Right now, she was worried about her workload. She needed an afternoon off and she wasn’t sure how Leipfold would take it. Luckily, she’d grown used to his moods and knew when to talk and when not to.

  At twenty-four-years-old, unattached and covered with more tattoos than a Maori tribesman, she cut an imposing figure, despite her diminutive height and her refusal to wear high heels. But she was also a humanoid chameleon, a gifted amateur at the subtle art of fancy dress and deception. That, combined with her ability to shift code and study data, multiplied by her skills at digital research and her analytical mind and driven personality, made her a valuable employee.

  Not that her boss, private detective James Leipfold, had hired anyone else. When Maile had joined him six weeks earlier, she’d signed on as an unpaid intern because Leipfold had no money in the bank and Maile had nothing better to do with herself. The two of them had taken on the case of a young woman called Donna Thompson who’d been killed in a hit and run. Leipfold had solved it with Maile’s help, and the ensuing publicity meant that business was on the up. Leipfold and Maile had taken on half a dozen new clients in the weeks that had passed.