DCI Isaac Cook Box Set 2

by Phillip Strang

  Forensics had checked the bottle of wine at the crime scene, examined the cans and boxes of food in the cupboard and a plastic bag. The date of the wine’s purchase had been confirmed at a local off-licence.

  ‘It was on special,’ the licensee said. ‘Good value for the price, although it could have done with a couple of more years’ cellaring.’

  The identification of the dead man wasn’t a problem either. Marcus Matthews had a criminal record: fraud, robbery when he was younger, fencing stolen goods when he got older, and then there was his known association with Hamish McIntyre.

  ***

  A murder had been committed, but Isaac Cook did not feel comfortable with the reports he was receiving. There was no violence, and clear signs of two people sharing a bottle of wine: one of the two a murderer, the other a victim. It was as if two friends had sat down and decided on a course of action that resulted in the death of one of them.

  Murder was not conducted in such a manner, Isaac knew that. The man who had died had remained in his seat. It couldn’t be an assassination: that required surprise, and usually a crowd to hide the assailant while he got close enough to take the shot, and then pandemonium for him to make good his escape. In that room, there had only been two people. The idea of an arranged killing had been considered, the victim dying of a terminal ailment, the pain such that the man had preferred death to life, but Marcus Matthews was found to be in good health, and his bank account had shown no financial difficulties. And the background checks had not revealed a man with a depressive outlook on life.

  On the contrary, he had been a cheerful man, in spite of being a crook who had had more than his fair share of brushes with the law, even spending time in prison on two occasions as a young adult.

  Larry Hill sat still, saying little. It was early, not yet seven in the morning, and as the team had expected, a new murder case meant that early-morning meetings were again the norm, and working long days and weekends was to be expected. Larry, a man who enjoyed a greasy breakfast at a café on Portobello Road in Notting Hill when he could, and one too many pints of beer of a night time, sat quietly as Isaac went over the case so far.

  ‘It’s murder, no matter the reason,’ Isaac said. He was standing up, looking out of the window of his small office, his carefully honed team watching him. Sergeant Wendy Gladstone, closing in on retirement but not there yet, did not like the rigidity of the office, certainly not the reporting, and computers to her were anathema. Bridget Halloran, a great friend of Wendy, was the office supremo and computer expert: if you needed information from the internet or from the various police databases, she was the best person for the job.

  Larry Hill wasn’t too fond of computers either, but he could struggle by with them. He, like Wendy, preferred to be out on the street, and working his contacts, more often than not the local rogues and villains; drinking with them of a night at one or another pub was par for the course. Isaac understood that, so did Larry’s wife, a woman who looked for better in her life than a detective inspector’s salary could give her and who continued to remonstrate with him to be more ambitious, to improve his qualifications, to become a detective chief inspector, a commander. Not that she was going anywhere else, as regardless of her remonstrations, and Larry’s apathy, they were a couple still in love, still able to show affection for one another – but not on the nights when Larry came home having had a few too many beers.

  Isaac was tall, dark because of his Jamaican heritage, and fit. He’d exercised every day before a recent trip to Jamaica with Jenny to visit his relations. He had proposed to her there – she had accepted as he knew she would – and now they were married, the blonde-haired wife with the porcelain complexion and the black man. Jenny ensured that he continued to exercise regularly.

  ***

  Isaac’s penchant for the early-morning meetings did not sit easily with Larry; he was a late-to-rise, late-night person. The meetings did not suit Wendy Gladstone either; she still struggled with her arthritis, and the cold, damp mornings exacerbated the problem, not that she’d complain openly as ill health would be the quickest way to early retirement. Bridget Halloran had no such issue with the early starts, and the chance to be in front of her computer screen filled her with joy, not dread.

  As was the custom, the meetings were an opportunity for all present to put forward suggestions, no matter how foolish and obscure they were. This time what they appeared to have was a murder by agreement. It baffled all of them, and one thing that Isaac did not like was uncertainty.

  ‘Marcus Matthews was married to Hamish McIntyre’s daughter,’ Larry said. ‘The word on the street is that McIntyre’s not involved.’

  ‘A name to strike fear into anyone who knows him,’ Isaac said. ‘You’ve seen him around?’

  ‘Once or twice, but he moves in elevated circles now. He’s not the sort of person to get down the local pub of a night for a pint with his cohorts. Strictly upmarket is McIntyre, a box at Ascot during the season, seats at the opera, the best of everything.’

  ‘When I was younger, he was a rough man who swore profusely, maimed anyone who got in his way.’

  ‘He still is,’ Bridget said. ‘I’ve compiled a report. The relationship with his daughter is tortuous, and it’s believed they’ve not spoken for several years.’

  ‘Wendy, any more to add?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘I’ll check out where McIntyre goes, get a feel for the man. You’ll be off to meet with Matthews’ widow?’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Hamish McIntyre didn’t kill Marcus Matthews,’ Bridget said, looking up from the folder in her hand.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Larry said.

  ‘If the date of death is confirmed as 13 September 2013, then McIntyre was not in the country.’

  ‘Where was he?’ Isaac said.

  ‘Majorca,’ Bridget said, smug because she had the facts. ‘I’ve checked, and he exited England on the twenty-fifth of August, returned on 14 October 2013.’

  ‘Long enough to establish an alibi,’ Larry said.

  ‘Hamish McIntyre had a broken leg. He’d been in a car accident, and the hospital records haven’t been falsified. He couldn’t have climbed those stairs with his leg in a cast.’

  ‘Where is McIntyre now?’

  ‘He rarely comes into London, preferring to stay at his house in Kent.’

  ‘If he wants to pretend to be the country squire, it doesn’t alter the fact that the man’s a criminal.’

  ‘No one’s been able to prove that conclusively for a long time. His last conviction was in 1996, served two years for robbery, a building society in Croydon,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Two years? That’s not a long time,’ Larry said. He had seen it all before, a smart lawyer, a villain with money, the ability to intimidate witnesses, to pay them off if necessary, and murder became a minor and unfortunate affray.

  ‘One of the other gang members was sentenced for seriously wounding one of the building society’s employees with a baseball bat,’ Bridget said. ‘Everyone in the place, employees and customers, gave statements at the scene that the man had spoken with a Scottish accent, whereas the man who was convicted was from London, full-on Cockney.’

  ‘A travesty of justice?’

  ‘No one would stand up in court and repeat what they had said at the crime scene, and the gang members had all been masked.’

  ‘Two years, why not an acquittal?’ Wendy asked.

  ‘A police car had been passing by. They saw McIntyre pull away from the scene, two others in the car. There was no denying he was involved. He stuck to his story that he had been outside in the car, and yes, he admitted to his part in it.’

  ‘He couldn’t get out of it totally,’ Larry said.

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t often that houses stayed unoccupied in Kensington. For one thing, their values were so high that whoever owned them rented them out, renovated them or sold them.

  136 Bedford Gardens, a detached Victorian house,
was an exception. There was nothing to mark it out from the other homes in the street, apart from its advanced state of decay.

  Charles Stanford, the owner, had been traced to an address in Brighton, a seaside resort in East Sussex.

  It was the second day of March, and as Isaac and Larry drove along the seafront in Brighton, saw the waves and felt the blast of the cold wind coming off the English Channel, they were not in the mood for ice cream or candy floss.

  Isaac had brought Larry Hill into Homicide after they had met on a previous case. Larry had impressed him, not only with his professionalism but also with his astuteness in seeing through the evidence presented and drawing alternative conclusions; conclusions which had turned out to be right. It wasn’t a burglar or a predator who had killed a woman in her apartment, her naked body untouched apart from her head being thrust into a bath filled with water. It was her older lover, a man who never saw justice, becoming the victim of an ordered assassination.

  Isaac knew Larry to be an asset, but the man came with baggage, not known initially. Detective Inspector Larry Hill was an alcoholic. It could be controlled by Isaac reading him the riot act and his wife withholding favours in the bedroom, making him sleep on the sofa downstairs.

  ‘Stanford’s a man who lives off the grid. A place in Kensington worth millions, yet he appears to live a reclusive existence. That’s according to what I could find out from his local police station,’ Isaac said. His words proved to be accurate; Stanford had an upmarket address to the north of the city, in Preston Village, named after the manor house that had existed since the thirteenth century and had been rebuilt in 1738 in the Palladian Style. The manor house, reputed to be one of the most haunted buildings in Britain, did not interest the police officers; although a dingy and rundown house three streets away did.

  Isaac and Larry could not believe the aberration. Amongst the elegant houses in that area was an unpainted and unloved building. At the side of the house, a driveway with an old wooden garage at the end of it, the doors falling off their hinges. In the front garden, the detritus of years.

  Isaac, a fastidious man, did not want to go any further, but he had no option.

  Larry raised the large brass knocker on the front door and slammed it down hard. After what seemed an eternity, a voice came from inside the house. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Cook, Detective Inspector Hill,’ Isaac said. ‘We have a few questions for you.’

  ‘I’ve broken no laws. Go away!’

  ‘Are you the owner of a house in Bedford Gardens, Kensington?’

  ‘I own a lot of houses.’

  ‘Your name is Charles Stanford?’

  ‘I mind my own business; I suggest you do as well.’

  Outside the house, on the pavement, an old woman stood. She was dressed for the chilly weather, in a warm coat and a woollen hat.

  ‘He doesn’t come out often,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen around the place. You’re from the council, another order to clean up, is that it? Not that you’ll have any more luck than the others. The only way is if you come here with a gang of men and do it yourself.’

  ‘We’re here to see Mr Stanford,’ Larry said. ‘We’re not from the council; we’re police officers.’

  ‘If it’s as bad in there as it is out here, then the best of luck,’ the woman said as she continued walking down the street.

  Isaac knocked on the door, this time with more gusto than Larry had.

  ‘I’m coming,’ an exasperated voice shouted. ‘Can’t a person be left alone?’

  The door eventually opened. ‘Now, what do you want?’

  ‘136 Bedford Gardens, Kensington. Are you Mr Stanford, the owner of that property?’

  ‘’It’s one of mine,’ Stanford said. A dishevelled man, he looked destitute and without a penny to his name. But Bridget Halloran, the department’s internet aficionado, had found out that the man owned at least twelve such properties.

  ‘It’s been empty for a long time.’

  ‘More years than I care to remember.’

  ‘May we come in?’ Isaac asked.

  Outside on the street, another woman and her dog had appeared.

  ‘Don’t let that mutt defecate on my pavement,’ Stanford shouted.

  Not that it would have made any difference from what Isaac and Larry could see.

  Inside the front room – entry had been granted – the curtains hung in shreds. At the rear of the room, magnificent in its heyday with its decorative ceiling, stood a bookcase full of books, some neat and in rows, some thrown on top of each other. An open fireplace held centre stage in the room; in the past, a log fire would have burnt there, but not today. The room was freezing cold, and Isaac and Larry both hunched their shoulders and buttoned up their jackets. Stanford made no reference to the cold, dressed as he was in tracksuit bottoms, a tee-shirt that had possibly been white once and a dressing gown.

  ‘What is it with Bedford Gardens?’ Stanford asked. He had sat on one of the sofas in the room; a cat, previously asleep on a window sill, taking what heat it could from the weak sun shining through the window, came up close to him, wanting to be allowed to get on his lap. ‘Get away,’ Stanford said as he pushed the animal roughly to the ground.

  ‘How long has it been empty?’ Larry said. It wasn’t the first house of a recluse he had been in; it was the worst, though. The smell of the flea-infested cat was overpowering. Cobwebs hung from a chandelier in the centre of the ceiling.

  ‘Ten, maybe twelve years,’ Stanford said. He kept his head low, avoiding eye contact. He had not proffered a hand when the police officers entered, and no cup of tea was likely to be forthcoming.

  ‘Do you live on your own?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘I don’t like people. State your business and leave.’

  ‘Marcus Matthews. Does the name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not to me.’

  ‘We found him on the top floor of your house in Bedford Gardens, or what remains of him. He’s been dead for six years, and you’re the only one with a key to the place.’

  ‘It’s the land I want, not the house.’

  ‘You could have demolished it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How else could you get the land?’

  ‘Buy cheap and wait my time.’

  ‘Twelve years?’

  ‘I’m in no hurry, and if you’d checked, you would have found out that 136 Bedford Gardens has structural problems.’

  ‘Why land? Why not fix the house?’ Larry asked.

  ‘I don’t see why I’m telling you this, but you’re here now. Planning permission won’t allow me to knock it down, too many rules and regulations, preserving England’s heritage and whatever else. Nonsense if you ask me, but then again, I suppose you’re not interested. Why should I spend money fixing the place up when it’s easier to sell the land unencumbered?’

  ‘The question remains,’ Isaac said, ‘as to why you’re not concerned that Marcus Matthews is dead on the top floor of the house?’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person.’

  ‘Who would be the right person?’

  ‘I’d find myself a smart police detective and ask him. Why don’t you just do that and leave me alone?’

  ‘A smart police officer would ask the owner, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Then you’ve had a wasted trip. I don’t know how he got there, and as to why, I don’t care.’

  Chapter 4

  A visit to Stanford’s local police station and a conversation with Inspector Wally Vincent, a smartly-dressed man in his early forties, had revealed the following about Charles Stanford. He was eccentric, he only left the house every ten to fourteen days, he was the bane of the local council and his neighbours.

  ‘He’s not a murderer,’ Vincent said. Isaac instinctively liked the man, a professional; Larry did not. Although what Larry didn’t like, which Isaac could see, was that Larry Hill and Wally Vincent were, in terms of experience and age, very simil
ar, but one was lean and fit, the other was suffering the effects of alcoholism.

  To Larry, Vincent represented a threat.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Isaac asked. The three of them were sitting at Vincent’s desk in the police station. The top of the desk, as the man, was neat, not a thing out of place. The impression that it gave was that this was a man on top of his game.

  ‘We keep an eye on him. Not me particularly, but there’s a file as long as your arm, the times a neighbour made a complaint, the times he has. There’s not much we can do, and as long as he’s not violent, there’s not much that can be done. And if he wanted to get some barking dogs, then the neighbours can complain all they like. We’re paper tigers to him, and he knows it.’

  ‘You know that the man’s wealthy?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘We found a body in one of his houses,’ Larry said. ‘We believe there must be a connection between the dead man and Stanford. We need him to open up.’

  ‘What you need and what you get are two vastly different things,’ Vincent said. ‘I apologise for my flippancy in this matter, but there’s one thing that separates Stanford from the other eccentrics and troublemakers we’ve all dealt with.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The man has been a barrister, a QC, a judge. He’s highly educated, knows the law better than we do. Fifteen years ago, he started causing trouble. Up until then, we didn’t know anything about him. The man has never committed a crime apart from local violations, arguing with his neighbours. How he got to be that way is not our concern.’

  ‘You’re just dealing with the consequences, not the cause.’