Killer Lies (Reissue)

by Chris Collett

  ‘Did you work very closely with Mr Ryland?’ Mariner asked in a split-second pause that presented itself.

  ‘Oh, all the time,’ Sandie waved a dismissive hand. ‘I mean, we have our routine tasks that we do for all the members; answering the phone, filing and photocopying, that kind of thing. I used to do some of that for Mr Ryland. He spent a lot of time here so I got to know him quite well and how he liked things done — would you like to see his office, it’s just down here?’

  ‘That would be helpful,’ said Mariner, exercising enormous restraint.

  A little further along the corridor Sandie turned the knob of an oak-panelled door and Mariner stepped into a high-ceilinged room, dominated by a monster of a solid walnut desk and surrounded on three sides by shelves of leather-bound books. This was the place where his father had spent the last years of his life, sitting at that desk, enjoying the view from the high sash windows that made up the fourth wall of the room. It was the air he had breathed.

  This was the closest Mariner would ever get to the man and he’d been unprepared for the emotional impact, which left him momentarily speechless. Glancing down he saw that Sandie’s eyes were wide, staring unblinkingly at the chair behind the desk.

  ‘It’s funny. I still expect to see him sitting there,’ she said, uncharacteristically subdued.

  ‘Do you mind if I—?’ recovering his voice, Mariner nodded towards the chair.

  ‘No, help yourself,’ said Sandie.

  Mariner seated himself in the soft leather, hyper-conscious of the upholstery under him. His only minor disappointment was that, aside from a blotter and an elaborate desk tidy, the room had been completely cleared of any personal belongings. But why wouldn’t it have been? ‘What did you think of Mr Ryland?’ he asked Sandie, who had unconsciously, it seemed, dropped into the chair opposite him.

  ‘He was a lovely man,’ she said, immediately, ‘always kind and considerate. He always said please and thank you, no matter how rushed he was, and had time to ask how Dominic and me were getting on with the flat. We bought a one-bedroom basement last year and we’ve been doing it up, it was in a right old state.’ Seeing Mariner’s face she meandered back to the subject in hand. ‘Mr Ryland always made sure we got paid extra for any late working or for anything that he classed as “above and beyond” as he called it.’

  ‘Such as what?’ Mariner sat back, anticipating another list of routine admin tasks.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Sandie, enigmatically, and for a horrible moment Mariner thought she was implying sexual favours. ‘Mr Ryland liked a flutter on the horses. In his position he didn’t like to broadcast it, so we had this little arrangement.’

  Thank God for that. ‘What kind of arrangement?’

  ‘I’d take an envelope of cash to this drop-off point, with the name of the horse written on the back, and the bookie’s runner would collect it and place the bet for him.’

  It wasn’t quite what Mariner had expected. ‘What kind of drop-off point?’

  ‘It was a left luggage locker at Euston Station.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oh. I’ve still got the key. I should take it back, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Might be an idea.’ Mariner was still trying to get to grips with the logic of this activity. ‘And did you collect his winnings too?’

  Sandie chuckled. ‘To be truthful, I think he hardly ever won. It was a little joke between us. And when he did the bookies must have paid the money straight into his bank.’

  ‘How often did Mr Ryland place these bets?’

  ‘Not very often, only once a month.’

  ‘Exactly once a month?’

  ‘Yes. Always on the last Wednesday. He used to say it was his end of the month treat to himself. It was what helped him get through the rest of it.’ She giggled. ‘Mr Ryland had that kind of sense of humour where you never knew if he was joking or not. I mean, you couldn’t tell from his face at all. He would say these things and I’d think, that’s awful, and then he’d just get this twinkle in his eye—. Deadpan, Dom called it. He said—’

  ‘Did you ever see how much Mr Ryland placed?’ asked Mariner.

  She looked shocked. ‘Oh no. The envelopes were stuck down and I would never have looked inside.’

  ‘So it could have just been a tenner, or a twenty?’

  ‘Oh, I think it was more than that. The envelope always felt as if there was quite a lot in it.’ She measured a quarter inch with her finger and thumb. ‘It was about that thick.’

  The flaws in the system were glaringly obvious, but had not apparently occurred to Sandie.

  ‘How long have you been working at the Commission?’ Mariner asked.

  ‘Four years this May,’ she said, proudly.

  ‘And has Mr Ryland always placed these bets?’

  ‘I expect so. But he only asked me to start helping with them about, let me see, eighteen months ago.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about it?’

  ‘Oh no! Mr Ryland’s wife didn’t like him gambling, and I know Miss James wouldn’t approve. That’s why Mr Ryland asked me to do it on the quiet. I’ll get into terrible trouble for it. And it can’t have had anything to do with . . . you know . . . what happened. You won’t tell anyone, will you?’

  Mariner didn’t necessarily think Helena was ignorant of the scam. He was pretty sure now that it was why he’d been introduced to Sandie in the first place. Ryland had taken advantage of Sandie’s loyal innocence and now Helena was doing the same. But betting on horses was a perfectly legal and harmless activity. The Queen Mother had indulged for God’s sake, so why develop such an elaborate, covert strategy and why the secrecy? If Ryland wanted to conceal it from his wife, he could easily have slipped out during the working day to place the bets himself, without her ever knowing. And if that wasn’t convenient there were other, discreet mechanisms. Most white-collar gamblers picked up the phone and arranged the transactions electronically.

  None of it made sense, unless Ryland had got a buzz from the intrigue, the thrill of doing something illicit. No, it had to be something more than that. Either Ryland was telling an outright lie and the packages had nothing to do with horse racing, or it was possible that he was bending the truth and was more deeply involved in something closer to the boundaries of the law. If horse racing was at the root of it then it could be that he belonged to the kind of gambling syndicate that had become increasingly common in recent years.

  A group of men, usually businessmen, bought shares in a racehorse, contributed regularly, usually monthly, to the animal’s upkeep, and then took a proportion of any winnings. Unless there was race fixing, belonging to such a syndicate was far from illegal, but there were certain seedy connections and it probably wasn’t the sort of thing a high-level government official would want to be visibly linked to. Added to which, there was little doubt that heavy involvement in such a venture would not have gone down well with his wife. If she didn’t approve of betting she wouldn’t have wanted him embroiled in anything shadier. ‘I doubt that it would bother anyone now, Sandie,’ Mariner said. ‘So don’t worry.’

  ‘It was going to stop anyway,’ she said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘On the last Wednesday in November Mr Ryland went to place the last bet himself.’

  ‘The last bet?’

  ‘Yes. He said he’d made up his mind that he wasn’t going to do it anymore.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  Sandie shrugged. ‘Perhaps he was losing too much money.’

  ‘Was he sad do you think, that it was the final flutter?’

  ‘No. He seemed sort of . . . pleased with himself. “The last one, Sandie,” he said. “And then we can get on with the real work.”’

  ‘Were you surprised?’

  ‘Only because he had to cancel a meeting so that he could go and do it. Mr Ryland hated cancelling meetings. He didn’t like to let people down.’ She wrinkled her nose, ‘Then when he got back he seemed sort of. . . deflated. He’d gone out
all pleased with himself but when he came back he seemed really down.’

  ‘As if he knew the fun was over?’

  ‘It was more than that. He’d brought a bottle of scotch with him because he said it was a cause for celebration.’

  ‘I didn’t think he drank.’ Maggie said Ryland had taken the pledge when he met Diana.

  ‘That’s the thing. He didn’t. And he was making out like we were celebrating but all the time he looked as if he was heading for the gallows. Something had really shaken him up. I thought maybe he’d gone for broke and made the last bet a really big one, and that he’d lost a lot of money.’

  ‘Did you ask him?’

  ‘Oh no, I never asked about the money. None of my business, was it? I just had a drink with him and played along.’

  ‘And this was the last Wednesday in November.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Which would make it only a couple of weeks before he was killed. So why did it fit into that slot in the timeline? Was it just coincidence? Eleanor had said she thought her son was planning to contact Mariner. Was it because he knew his son was a senior police officer and he needed help? Or was it because he knew something terrible was going to happen to him and it would be his last chance?

  ‘Which betting shop did Mr Ryland use?’ Mariner asked. But Sandie didn’t know.

  If Ryland was involved in some kind of syndicate it could be as Sandie had described, and that on that final payment day Ryland was planning to pull out. But he’d somehow been thwarted, meaning that other syndicate members may have refused and perhaps even threatened to reveal his secret vice? Or maybe they set a ridiculously high buy-out price that left Ryland significantly out of pocket.

  But it was hard to see how either of those scenarios would lead to Ryland’s assassination just a couple of weeks later, and even less the murders of his wife and his driver. Mariner had reached the end of speculation alley. Sandie’s instinct could be right. The horse racing scam, whatever its exact nature, was probably completely unrelated to the shooting. He should get back to the task he’d come here to tackle: finding out more about Joseph O’Connor.

  Mariner tapped on the pile of files Sandie had deposited on Ryland’s desk. ‘I’m keeping you from your work. Do you need to do something with these?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on properly. I’ve got to take them down to the archives. Do you want to wait in—?’

  ‘No, I’ll come with you. Could do with stretching my legs, if that’s all right?’

  ‘It’s not very exciting.’

  ‘Who wants excitement?’

  On the walk down two flights of stairs and along another corridor, past the staff toilets, Sandie was back in full spate, this time concerning the general lack of space for anything and how they were being squeezed out by all the files. The storage area had originally been used as a conference room, but they’d had to put in shelves even though it couldn’t be secured, and now there was hardly space to swing a cat, was there? She led the way into a vast warehouse of a room with rows of shelves stretching up to the ceiling, packed with alphabetically labelled archive boxes. It took her mere seconds to locate the required row, extract the relevant boxes and replace each file, chattering all the time.

  ‘Copies of all the files are kept here?’ Mariner tried to get his head round the implications of that in relation to the statistics Helena James had quoted earlier. The amount of storage space needed would be phenomenal.

  But Sandie shook her head. ‘Oh no. We hold them electronically, too, and then once a case is closed the hard copy goes to a special government storage facility.’

  ‘I don’t understand. So what are we bringing down here?’

  ‘Sometimes individual members of the Commission ask us to hold a further copy of files they consider significant,’ she told him. ‘Mr Ryland did it all the time.’

  ‘Significant how?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘Sometimes there’s a pattern, say the same trial judge, or the same police force.’ Or, thought Mariner, the fact that a suspect had been coerced into making a confession; Ryland’s witch-hunt against the police.

  So somewhere in this mass of paperwork there could be a copy of Joseph O’Connor’s file. Mariner knew that asking outright would be a step too far. Helena’s introduction had been carefully worded and so far Sandie had quite openly accepted his questioning, assuming that he was here on some sort of official business. Getting too specific would no doubt involve consultation with her seniors, and there was a simpler way of doing this, if not completely above-board. It made him uneasy, but taking the broader view, what he was doing was in the name of justice and if he did uncover something that had been missed by Special Branch it would all come right in the end, wouldn’t it? If Dave had been more open and honest with him there wouldn’t be any need for all this cloak and dagger stuff.

  ‘I could do with a pee,’ he said as they passed the gents toilets on their way back from the archive. ‘Shall I catch you up?’

  ‘Oh there’s a much nicer one on the ground floor,’ Sandie said. ‘These aren’t really used anymore.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not fussy,’ said Mariner. ‘And all those stairs,’ he joked. ‘I’m not sure if I’ll make it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Now Sandie was concerned, probably thinking that the old fella had prostate problems. ‘Okay then. You’ll be able to find your way upstairs?’

  ‘If I’m not back in an hour send out a search party.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was clear from her face that Sandie couldn’t tell if he was serious or not, but she continued on her way, leaving Mariner with full access to the archive and feeling like Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. He hoped to God that the filing system was logical.

  Though his watch counted only minutes, it seemed to Mariner that it took him hours to locate Joseph O’Connor’s file. Contained in the card folder were notes on the interview that followed O’Connor’s arrest. They looked unobjectionable, but interviews weren’t routinely taped until the late eighties, so the accuracy was questionable. On the front page, the names of the arresting officers were outlined several times with pink highlighter. Were they the significant aspect of the case? Mariner noted their names in his pocketbook: Detectives George Hollis and Stephen Jaeger. O’Connor’s confession had been bullied out of him, so the chances were that this wasn’t the first or last time these two had indulged in a bit of malpractice.

  Now another possibility entered the equation; that O’Connor was helping Ryland to build a case against Jaeger and Hollis. Sharon O’Connor had denied that her husband was offering any additional help and talked categorically about her husband wanting out, but would she necessarily have known? She’d intimated Ryland’s promise that he would ‘get the men’ who’d put Joseph in prison the first time and Mariner had taken that as meaning the men who’d set him up; Brady and his crew. But she could have equally been referring to the police officers who’d secured the wrongful conviction. If that was what she’d meant then it was a whole new ball game.

  If Ryland was planning to initiate disciplinary proceedings against Hollis and Jaeger, citing O’Connor’s case in evidence, then the detectives would be keen to keep both men quiet. Offering O’Connor a job could have been Ryland’s unsuccessful strategy for trying to protect him. The timing was a puzzle, though. O’Connor had been released years ago. If the officers were taking their revenge, why wait until now? Had it taken this long for Ryland to build the case against them, or had something triggered a decision to act on his findings? Or maybe the policemen in his sights had been tipped off about what was going on.

  Knowing what he now knew, it was becoming increasingly difficult to understand why Ryland was being overlooked as the target of the shooting. Potentially there were all kinds of people who were unhappy about what he was up to. The trouble was that none of these revelations would be palatable to the public, especially with a general election coming up and a government that claimed to be tough
on crime. It was also exactly the kind of thing the Met would be keen to cover up, preferring instead to divert attention towards O’Connor’s so-called previous drugs activity.

  Flicking through the other paperwork in the file, Mariner found a large envelope. He pulled out the contents, a series of eight-by-six black and white surveillance photographs. Two men in conversation beside a car, neither of them Joseph O’Connor; bright sunlight, sunglasses, one of them in a Hawaiian shirt, the other wearing a polo shirt. Casual, holiday clothes and somewhere warm. Other photographs were almost identical, but with slightly modified poses, so that Mariner could see they’d been taken in close succession. He could almost hear the shutter clunk and whirr as he sifted through the images.

  Another shot was of the same two men with a third sitting at what looked like a pavement café. Same brilliant sunlight and sharp shadows. The pub landlord had talked about Terry Brady having a villa in Spain, so one of the men could be him.

  Mariner realised he’d been standing here too long. Sandie would be wondering where he’d got to. He should have dropped stronger hints about his prostate. It would have bought him a little more time. Committing as much detail to memory as possible, including the partial index on the car, he slid the photographs back into the envelope. But they caught on something; a yellow Post It note that had become detached from the pictures. It bore a scribbled message: Well, what do you know? M.B.

  Sadly, M.B., whoever he was, had chosen not to share any further detail about what information he was party to. His note provided no clue as to the identity of the men or what they might have been doing. His frustration mounting, Mariner returned the photos to their envelope and replaced O’Connor’s file.