DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 2

by Phillip Strang

  ‘Good to see you, Mr Lawrence,’ Ian Grantly, the medical director at the drug rehabilitation centre, said. The sign outside made no mention of its function, or that it catered to the rich and famous. Caroline saw one of her favourite singers as she walked through the building with Michael and Grantly. At another time and place, she would have felt inclined to stop and talk to him, but as Grantly had said, ‘We’re all equal here.’

  ‘Leave me, Caroline,’ Michael said. ‘I’ll play the game.’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Caroline said. She had to admit that after so many years of not seeing her nephew, she had been surprised by his better than expected appearance. He was also polite, and he had inherited the charm that his father had in abundance.

  ‘Once an addict, always an addict,’ Grantly said as he escorted Caroline off the premises. ‘Visiting hours, Monday and Wednesday, 2 p.m.’

  ‘Can you get him off the drugs?’

  ‘We can control him in here, but outside, that’s when the problems start. He looks as though he’s had it rough.’

  ‘There’s not been a lot of guidance from his father, and as for his mother…’

  ‘Long gone?’

  ‘The mother, no idea where she is. His father is here, although he’s been absent for more years than I can remember.’

  ‘That’s the problem. Michael needs a support mechanism.’

  ‘I’ll try, but I’m not going to be a nursemaid.’

  ‘I’m informed that all costs will be borne by his grandfather’s estate.’

  ‘They will, although you’ll be submitting them to a Leonard Dundas. He’s as careful with money as my father was. I’d suggest that you don’t commit to any treatment out of the ordinary unless you’ve run it past Dundas.’

  ‘I read about your father,’ Grantly said.

  ‘No doubt you formed your own opinion.’

  ‘Your mother, that’s what I assume you’re referring to. Hardly the actions of a rational man, but I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘I don’t. Ralph, my brother, Michael’s father, is also not always easy to understand.’

  ‘It doesn’t make it easier when there’s eccentricity in the family.’

  ‘But you’ll try. I need Michael on my side,’ Caroline said.

  ‘And his father?’

  ‘If you have a centre for stupidity, he could do with a few weeks there.’

  ‘Bad decisions?’

  ‘In the past. I just hope he’s wiser now.’

  ‘Do you think he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ***

  For once, Ralph was welcomed into Caroline and Desmond Dickson’s house, but not because the two men liked each other. On the contrary, Ralph regarded Desmond as a pompous snob; Desmond considered his brother-in-law worthless.

  ‘The situation’s changed,’ Caroline said. She was holding a glass of red wine and leaning back on the dining room chair. She had to admit that she was slightly tipsy.

  ‘Not to me, it hasn’t,’ Ralph said. He had drunk as much as his sister, but he was a regular drinker, Caroline was not. ‘Dundas is still in control.’

  ‘But your son is attempting to reform.’

  ‘He’s a weak man, a major disappointment.’

  ‘The pot calling the kettle black,’ Desmond said in a moment of derision. For the last few hours he had been civil to Ralph, but now, when all three were winding down after a meal prepared by Caroline and three bottles of the best wine from the house’s cellar, the reluctance to speak their minds had dissipated.

  ‘Desmond, you may be married to my sister, but it doesn’t stop you being a pain in the rear end.’

  ‘Please,’ Caroline interceded, not very successfully as the effects of the alcohol were impairing her usually coherent speech. ‘We need to work together. The enemy is Leonard and Jill Dundas, not each other.’

  ‘Caroline is right,’ Desmond conceded. ‘I spoke in error. Ralph, please accept my apologies.’

  ‘There is no more to say. My son will assist or he won’t. It doesn’t stop the issue with Dundas and his scheming daughter, and what they have control of. Caroline, you’ve attended their meetings. Are you able to update us with any more than what you have already told us?’

  ‘Not really. We can assume there are more properties than we know of, more bank accounts, but unless Dundas tells us, we’re blind.’

  The three of them moved to another room. Caroline prepared coffee, black for everyone, and she made it strong.

  ‘I have a contact. I don’t trust him,’ Ralph said.

  ‘A criminal?’ Desmond said. He didn’t like where the conversation was heading. He did not need to walk on the dark side. He had a successful business, upstanding members of society as his customers. He had met the occasional villain, realised to what lengths they would go to maintain their importance or to achieve their aim.

  ‘We need to hack Dundas’s computers, check out the files in his office.’

  ‘We need someone on the inside, not a crook,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Anyone in mind?’ Ralph said. He was about to suggest bringing in Gary Frost, but he knew the man could not be trusted.

  ‘Someone in Dundas’s office must be willing to help if we pay enough.’

  ‘That’s the easiest way to get yourself evicted from the meetings.’

  ‘Your contact?’ Caroline said. She wanted the money from the sale of the shopping centre, but that was months away, even more time for the Dundases to put additional blockers in place.

  ‘What do we know?’ Desmond said.

  ‘We know of three bank accounts in the UK, two overseas.’

  ‘Passwords?’

  ‘Not to any of them.’

  ‘And how much in total?’

  ‘Seven million pounds approximately.’

  ‘So where is the rest? There must be more cash,’ Ralph said. He couldn’t see how they could progress further by talking about it. There was a time to bring in help, and that time was now.

  The three studied the figures that had been presented to Caroline by Leonard Dundas. According to what they had in front of them, there were twenty-five million pounds deposited in various bank accounts, the locations not specified, as well as a total of one hundred and eighty-three properties, the majority in the UK, others around the world. Nobody believed that what they were being shown was the true situation, purely what had been prepared for them to see, and an independent audit of Gilbert Lawrence’s assets would not reveal much more, cleverly concealed as they would be.

  ‘I don’t trust my person,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Then we need someone in Dundas’s office,’ Desmond said. For once he found his brother-in-law making sense. ‘Your son, Michael?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve not seen him yet. Caroline, what did you reckon?’

  ‘It may be time for you to reacquaint yourself with him. His return may be suspicious.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was, according to what I’ve gleaned from the police, involved with anarchists.’

  ‘Do we have them in this country?’

  ‘Apparently we do. They call themselves the Anarchist Revolutionaries of England. It’s run by Giles Helmsley, a disgraced academic.’

  ‘Him?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘We were at school together. Back then he wasn’t an anarchist, just odd.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He always saw himself as superior. Academically brilliant, always on about the ruling classes.’

  ‘But you went to an elitist school, even members of the aristocracy in your year.’

  ‘But Helmsley was different. He was working class, won himself a scholarship. Supposedly an attempt by the school to make itself out to be egalitarian.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Not at all, but I suppose there were brownie points to be gained for those in charge. Anyway, Helmsley was there and he was keen, keener than any of us. He al
ways sat up the front of the class, looking for an opportunity to show us how smart he was.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘He was. We were at the back of the class, only interested in playing up, getting a few drinks in, making plans to meet up with the local girls.’

  ‘Helmsley?’

  ‘Not him. We always thought he was gay, not that there was any proof, but it was unnatural. Teenage males are hot for anything in a skirt, but Helmsley, he’d be there, his face in a book.’

  ‘You’ve not changed,’ Desmond said.

  ‘Thankfully, I haven’t,’ Ralph said. ‘Anyway, Michael. What’s he up to?’

  ‘Are you suspicious?’

  ‘Of Michael? Like father, like son. If he’s willing to sort himself out, it can only be with someone at his back. I was always weak if temptation was there, but Michael, he was worse. If there was alcohol, he’d down the lot, and then he was into drugs, running with the crowd. Quite frankly, I assumed he’d OD at some stage.’

  ‘It didn’t concern you?’ Caroline said.

  ‘It did, but he’s an adult, and even if I was more responsible, I couldn’t take him on. I have enough trouble looking after myself.’

  ‘And his mother?’

  ‘The last I heard, she was swanning around the Caribbean. A beautiful woman in her day, probably still is, but she was never the maternal type.’

  ‘Not much of an upbringing for your son,’ Caroline said.

  ‘No worse than ours. The first thing that our parents did was to ship us off to boarding school, come home at long weekends, holidays, and even then, we were soon sent off on an activity somewhere.’

  ‘That was our mother and father, devoted to each other.’

  ‘Not normal, though.’

  ‘We survived.’

  ‘Who knows if what they did was right or wrong. And besides, it’s Michael that we’re talking about. The man is sorting himself out, a weak and feeble person susceptible to drugs. The condition of our father’s will was that he had to stay clean for a year, get himself a job. I can’t see him doing that.’

  ‘What if he’s cleaned up? What are the chances of getting him into Dundas’s office? Could we trust him? Would Dundas let him in, give him a job?’

  ‘If I agree to Dundas’s conditions, he might,’ Caroline said.

  ‘What conditions?’

  ‘If I agree to rubber stamp everything that charlatan and his daughter do, then maybe they’ll agree.’

  ‘Try it on,’ Desmond said, ‘and Ralph, go and see your son, make your peace.’

  ‘And Helmsley?’ Ralph said.

  ‘Let’s see what he does. If he becomes a nuisance, we’ll need to neutralise him.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘No, we never met Mr Lawrence,’ Kingsley Wilde, the senior psychoanalyst, said. He was broad-shouldered, with grey hair and a beard trimmed short.

  Isaac and Larry were in the offices of Wyvern Psychiatrists, one of the organisations that had declared Gilbert Lawrence sane and able to sign his will.

  ‘If you never met the man, how can you declare him to be of sound mind?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘It was an unusual request,’ Wilde said, as he sat upright, looking at the two police officers with a keen eye.

  ‘We’re not here for evaluation,’ Larry said. He found the man unnerving.

  ‘Apologies. I’m not conducting an analysis of you. No doubt you’re both subjected to vigorous checks of your physical and mental status by the police doctor.’

  ‘We are,’ Isaac said. ‘We’re concerned that for the last twelve years you have given Gilbert Lawrence a clean bill of health, when the man lived an unusual life and, as we now know, his dead wife was upstairs in the house.’

  ‘How a person lives does not decree whether he or she is mentally impaired. We had realised that he was eccentric, but our tests are not there to deal with what we would believe to be unusual. Our requirement was to ascertain whether the man was capable of signing his last will and testament, that is all.’

  ‘Are you saying that living in that house as a recluse does not indicate a person with severe mental issues?’ Isaac said, not sure if Wilde was on the defensive and trying to justify his position or whether he genuinely believed what he was saying.

  ‘We conducted standard tests in writing and via phone.’

  ‘No video?’ Larry said.

  ‘At the request of his solicitor, it was only audio.’

  ‘And how did the man sound?’

  ‘He sounded like a man of advanced years. He was coherent if a little slow in his responses. Apart from that, he was found to be in control of his faculties. And let me make this clear. If the man’s last will and testament is to be contested, it is up to those contesting it to prove that he did not have the required mental capacity or did not properly understand and approve the content of the will.’

  ‘Will you stand up in court and defend your position?’ Isaac said.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Cook, we are a reputable organisation. There is no need for us to defend what we have stated. The standard tests were conducted, the results were appropriate. As far as we are concerned, the man was sane.’

  ‘Even with his wife upstairs in her bed for thirty years.’

  ‘Even then, although we did not know of that. A murderer, a rapist, those who commit outrageous and disturbing abuses against other people or commit terrorist acts could all be sane. It may be that others will say they are not, but the tests are specific in so far as Mr Lawrence was concerned. His wife in her bed will no doubt sway the general public, but in law it will have little bearing. If others wish to dispute the will the man signed, then they can, but the law is not on their side in this matter. I realise that is not what people would expect, but the onus of proving mental incapacity is on those disputing.’

  Wilde, no doubt, had a list of clients impressed by the letters after his name. To be associated with a disputed will, with him having to argue in a court of law that a man who he had declared sane had in fact been living with the skeletal remains of his wife, was not going to be well regarded in the media.

  Isaac could only imagine the headlines in the press: ‘Billionaire sane even though his dead wife was propped up in their bed,’ says a prominent psychoanalyst. Other media outlets might not be so kind, running quizzes on how to determine your sanity: ‘Do you have your dead wife upstairs? If you do, then you’re sane’; ‘If she’s in the kitchen making you tea, then suspect borderline mad’. Facebook could well have a field day, with the amateur pundits providing comedy.

  ‘Mr Wilde,’ Larry said, ‘are you seriously expecting us or anybody else to believe that your tests, as detailed as they may have been and even if they were in line with agreed procedures, were not impacted by his dead wife being upstairs? And before you answer, remember that not only did he put her in the bed, he had previously buried her for some months and stripped her carcass, cutting chunks off her body, before putting her in with flesh-eating beetles. Can we be expected to believe that the man was sane, can any court of law, can you?’

  ‘I hold by what I said,’ Wilde said. He sat down, a dejected look on his face. ‘I know what you’re saying. There are some who still regard what we do as charlatanism, an opportunity for the criminally insane to get off serving a sentence in a normal prison, to be confined to a mental institution with three meals a day and daytime television, even after they’ve murdered or committed other ghastly crimes.’

  ‘We intend to contact two other psychoanalysts,’ Isaac said. ‘One in America, the other in Australia. Will they answer the same as you?’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘Any gain to yourself?’ Larry said.

  ‘We were paid for our services, that is all.’

  ‘A lot of money?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s to be expected. Any legal challenges to the man’s inheritance were expected to be rigorous. Anything other than total diligence on our part would have left us open.’

  ‘An
d Leonard Dundas?’ Isaac said.

  ‘I have no idea what Dundas’s arrangements were. All I know is that Gilbert Lawrence understood what he was signing and that he had the mental faculties to do so. Regardless of how your investigations turn out, we acted correctly.’

  ‘And if he murdered his wife?’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘We have no proof, but if he did?’

  ‘The tests were conducted according to accepted criteria.’

  ***

  A father and son meeting after so many years should under normal circumstances be a cause for celebration, Ralph Lawrence realised, although he could not see it that way. He had never been paternal, no more than the mother of the boy had been maternal. It had always been agreed between Ralph and the then Mrs Lawrence that no child should result from their union. However, when Ralph had been flush with money, and the alcohol had flowed, as well as ganja, in Negril, Jamaica, the one-time hippy resort that had become the playground of the rich and famous, Yolanda had become pregnant. Neither she nor Ralph had been excited at the time, each blaming the other, but nine months later the boy had been born on a rainy day in London.

  A cause of celebration it should have been, but Ralph had taken one look and decided fatherhood wasn’t for him. His wife had taken a look as well and felt maternal love for what she had produced. For the sake of the child, active and healthy with a fine pair of lungs as he went through teething, the reluctant parents had tried their best, even ensuring that their son was well looked after. By the time of his fifth birthday, the young Michael was sent off to school. With him out of the way for most of the day, Ralph reverted to type and started to stay out longer, Yolanda also finding herself another lover.