by Keith Dixon
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I SPENT THE NIGHT in a cheap bed-and-breakfast where the bed was too short and the breakfast consisted of stale bread brutalised into toast and cornflakes that were as soft as confetti left in the road.
By 7:30 I was outside the younger Evans’ house again, yawning into the back of my hand and chewing gum to get the taste of stale bread out of my mouth. Fifteen minutes later Derek Evans and a younger man I presumed was his son came out of the house and climbed briskly into their own cars. Derek Evans drove off and Brian reversed his old Rover on to the road and followed. I waited a few seconds and then pulled out behind them.
The weather had turned wet, and it was difficult to follow their greasy tail-lights as they drove further north, away from the suburbs and into hillier and wilder country. Rain slanted down into my windscreen and turned the whole world outside into a grey mess that seemed to get no lighter even as daylight proper began to break over the hedgerows. We drove for twenty minutes with me wondering what the hell I was going to do when we arrived at our destination, wherever that turned out to be.
The tail-lights ahead burned brighter momentarily as they braked, then both cars turned left. When I reached their turning point I slowed down and saw that they’d turned into a gravelled courtyard surrounded on three sides by low grey buildings capped by tin roofs and entered through wooden doors. I drove past, found a gated field opening a hundred yards further on, turned, and came back. I waited five minutes, then drove through the entrance and pulled up next to the two cars that stood together and were still ticking like grandfather clocks as they cooled down. They were parked outside the central one of the three buildings, which had a wooden sign nailed over its door that read, ‘Floordamp Ltd.’ I climbed out of my car and looked more closely at the other two structures. They were warehouses, each with large double doors at one end serviced by loading ramps. This was a working day, but there were no other people around and no cars except those belonging to the three of us parked on the gravel. The smell of freshly-cut timber and wood-smoke floated towards me from another industrial unit behind this one, then the sudden whir and grind of a sawmill erupted into the air.
The door of the middle building opened and Brian Evans came out. He was probably in his mid-twenties. He was as slim as a racing dog and almost vibrated with pent-up tension, like a shaken soda bottle. His Adam’s apple protruded above the collar of his shirt and his wrists, too, showed knobbly bones where they emerged from his suit jacket. His face was pinched tight and ruddy, as though he’d been engaged in a shouting match, but I think this might have been the result of him creating an internal pressure so that he could deal with me.
‘We’re not open,’ he said. ‘Please leave the property.’
I took a step towards him and he visibly flinched.
‘I’m here to talk to your dad, Brian,’ I said. ‘He knows me.’
‘He’s not here ...’ he began, but couldn’t help his eyes sliding sideways to the Audi squatting five yards from him like an open rebuttal to his words.
This was getting me nowhere. I walked past him as though he wasn’t there and went into the building, which was as grey and dismal inside as it appeared from the outside. It was one large space that had been subdivided into three office cubicles by hip-height screens along the far wall, the rest of the space seeming to act as a dustbin for torn cardboard boxes, fat rolls of bubble-wrap, sheets of corrugated cardboard and boxes of those plastic filling shells that look like marshmallows and cling to static electricity. Derek Evans was standing to attention by a chair in the central cubicle, staring at me as though I’d dropped in to put him through a formal inspection—which, in a way, I had.
‘I thought I’d fired you, Dyke,’ he said, his voice sounding forced and unconvincing. He looked tired, his eyes showing pink rims and with dark half-moons emerging on his pale cheeks. Those eyes now flicked over my shoulder at Brian, who had come in behind me and shut the door.
I ignored his comment. ‘So what’s going on here, then, Mr Evans?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You know as well as I do. You’ve gone AWOL from Brands and then turned up here as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. I’m sure the police team investigating Rory Brand’s murder would find this all very interesting, not to say enlightening.’
‘What’s he saying, Dad?’ asked Brian.
I turned to him. ‘Left you out of the picture, has he? What is it? Running a dummy company for him, but you haven’t a clue what’s happening? Listen, Brian. Get out while you can. Walk away.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that, whoever you are.’
I looked around the room. Despite the temporary feel to the buildings the floor was concrete, and in the far corner a rug had been rolled back and a thick metal door about a foot square had been opened out of the floor. Next to it lay a small tan briefcase, its lid open but turned away from me.
Evans saw me looking. I realised that his upright stance when I entered had been an attempt to distract my attention away from the safe, like a child moving away from the scene of an accident in order to show his innocence. He really was living on the edge of his competence.
‘You take the cake,’ I said to him. ‘How long has it been going on?’
‘What?
‘Okay, if that’s the way you want it I’ll go phone Inspector Howard now.’
I heard a sudden shuffle of feet behind me and on instinct moved to my left. Something heavy glanced off my shoulder and I turned to see Brian standing with a square marble ashtray in his hands, his eyes wide open, a fleck of spittle on his bottom lip. He began to raise the ashtray again so I stepped forward and popped him with a medium strength punch on the point of his jaw. He staggered and fell backwards awkwardly into a metre-high roll of bubble wrap, which unfurled a tongue beneath him and exploded with a thousand little exhalations as he fell to the floor. He dropped the ashtray and raised a hand to his jaw.
‘Ow! You bastard, I’ll get you for that.’
‘Sit still, Brian,’ I said.
I turned back to Derek. He had collapsed and was sitting on a plastic office chair. The rain outside came harder and drummed on the tin roof like an overture for his confession.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘Do we have to carry on with this nonsense?’
‘All right. If you’re going to be a bully about it. Where do you want me to start?’
‘You and Rory Brand.’
He sighed and looked away from me. ‘Rory knew nothing about money,’ he said. ‘It was almost criminal to see the waste after we got the venture capital. New cars, new equipment, staff we didn’t know what to do with or even what their job descriptions were.’
‘So you thought you’d get in on the action.’
Brian spoke up from the floor, his voice nasal. ‘This is a legitimate business.’
‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘All your workforce on holiday today? Go on, Derek.’
‘Brian already had this company registered. It never really got off the ground. So I got him to send invoices to Brands periodically and I made sure they were paid.’
‘Damp-proofing? How much damp-proofing did Brands need?’
‘I bought a ready-made company name,’ Brian said. ‘Floordamp Limited. It was cheaper. Actually, we supply IT services and consultancy.’
I looked around at the cardboard boxes and wrapping paper. I remembered the hardware stacked in boxes in Brands’ offices and had a sudden realisation. ‘So let me guess—you buy PCs and computer gear cheap off the net, then re-package it and re-sell it to Brands at an inflated price. Together with maintenance contracts and a help-desk service. Didn’t your IT buyer smell a rat?’
‘I made sure we recruited a junior who bought what we told him to.’
I walked over to the tan briefcase and turned it towards me. It was half-full with bundles of high-denomination notes; there were more in the floor-safe. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How much?’
‘Two hundre
d grand, thank you very much. Perhaps we can come to an arrangement ...’
‘The police will be here in a few hours, if they’re doing their job. Won’t do me any good to be caught with my hand in the cookie jar, will it?’
Derek and Brian looked at each other. ‘So what’s next?’ Brian said. I felt sorry for him. I guessed he thought his dad was helping him out, not getting him deeper into the mire. I wondered if he’d known how much his dad was creaming off the top. Derek was the accountant, after all. And we all believe what our accountants tell us. I ignored Brian’s question and turned to his dad.
‘So why did you kill Rory? Did he find out about your little money-laundering scheme?’
His eyes widened. ‘I did no such thing!’
‘Then why the runner?’
‘I thought ... I thought with Rory gone and Tara missing, the company wouldn’t last much longer. I wanted to just get away, go away from it all, I mean.’
‘You didn’t think it would look suspicious?’
‘I had no motive and I’m not that kind of man.’
‘And of course the police knew this and would therefore leave you out of their investigations. You really are a dolt, aren’t you? This kind of malarkey is exactly what would bring them hot on your heels.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about them.’
‘So do you know anything about Rory’s murder or Tara’s disappearance?’
He sighed deeply. His ruddy cheeks were regaining some of their colour and he rubbed his hands through his mutton-chop whiskers as if pushing life back into them. ‘Absolutely nothing, I swear,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really like Rory, if you must know. He could be a brutal man.’
‘In what way?’
‘You’re an investigator. Find out.’
I closed the briefcase and lowered the lid on the safe. ‘I don’t think you’re in a bargaining position,’ I said. ‘You have a couple of options, though.’
Brian was standing now and watching us from the other side of the room. ‘What options? Aren’t you just going to snitch on us?’
‘You’re not on the radar,’ I said. ‘I’m after whoever’s got Tara. Not interested in this lot. That is, so long as I get some cooperation.’
Derek Evans stood up, running his sweaty palms down his overcoat—the one he’d worn to Rory’s funeral. ‘I’ve told you, I don’t know anything about Rory’s death. As far as I was concerned, it was just the last in a long line of bad decisions. As for Tara, I’m worried about her, but I know nothing about her disappearance. You can tell the police about us or not, but I can’t help you.’
I looked from father to son, the sad gang of white-collar thieves who could barely stand up without an instruction manual.
‘You said Rory was brutal. What did you mean?’
‘He took no account of people’s feelings.’
‘And being a Financial Director, you did?’
‘Talk to Andy Braithwaite. Talk to Eddie Hampshire.’
‘Who’s Andy Braithwaite?’
‘The computer man Rory stole Compsoft from.’
‘I’ve met Eddie Hampshire. Why should I talk to him?’
‘Didn’t you know, Mr Clever-Dick private eye? Rory fired him two weeks ago. He’s working out his notice.’
No, I didn’t know that, I thought.
