For Richer, For Poorer

by Kerry Wilkinson

‘I know that you do.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Jessica left it face-up on the table. ‘Before we get into things, when we were going around the shops in Cheetham Hill and everyone was so reluctant to talk to us – to me, you said something to them in their own language before you let me speak. Were you telling them not to talk to me?’

  Katerina smiled: ‘The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘Perhaps I was saying hello and the rest is all in your mind. Maybe they just don’t like you?’

  ‘But it wasn’t that, was it? You were telling them not to say anything to me.’

  Katerina smirked more widely. ‘You English and Americans; colonising the world and not even bothering to learn how to say hello. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so ignorant of everyone else’s culture. Maybe then you’d be able to understand what’s being said.’

  Jessica continued to stare at her but Katerina wasn’t going to give a definitive answer: perhaps the shop owners hadn’t liked Jessica and that was that.

  ‘How do you know Pavel Adamek?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘Through you.’

  ‘I know that’s a lie – you’re why he wasn’t in the pub car park even when it was him who’d received the text message about being there in the first place. I called Esther and Esther called you asking for help – except that it was so late in the day that you didn’t have time to tip him off properly to stop the whole thing. In the end, you only managed to text him, or call him quickly, something that stopped him being there with the rest of the men.’

  ‘Think what you want.’

  ‘Is it because Montenegro and Serbia are close? Or you lived in Serbia? Is that how you know him?’

  ‘You know nothing about the history of our countries.’

  ‘Tell me how you know him – did he come to you over here because he knew you were working for the police or was it something else?’

  ‘You seem to know a lot, you tell me.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  Katerina blinked and suddenly her eyes were locked to Jessica’s. ‘It’s not just Ana who has people she cares about.’

  DCI Topper sat up straighter as they finally got an answer other than flat denial but Jessica stayed where she was, speaking deliberately and trying to sound as open as she could. ‘If that’s the case, we can contact the police in Montenegro, or wherever your family are.’

  ‘The fact you don’t even know where my family live should tell you all you need to know about what I think of your protection offer. They could be living next door to you and you wouldn’t even know.’

  It was true: Katerina was Montenegrin but that didn’t mean that was where her family lived. No one had even bothered to find out, so it was no wonder she was hostile.

  ‘If you tell us what you know about Pavel, then—’

  ‘Pavel who?’

  Jessica stopped and pointed at the photograph. ‘How about this person?’

  Katerina glanced down but peered back up, smiling. ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘You do. You had Pavel’s half of the jewels and were taking them to the Ukraine. Someone would have either taken them from you there, or you’d have flown on to Serbia. Perhaps you were getting a cut? Perhaps you owed Pavel something? Perhaps he’s got your family? His people would deal with selling them on. If you don’t tell us, there’s nothing we can do.’

  Katerina shrugged. ‘Then there’s nothing you can do.’

  Jessica patted the photograph one more time. ‘All you have to do is say the name, then we’ll know for sure where the other half of the jewellery ended up.’

  Katerina shook her head.

  Jessica stood and picked up the photograph. ‘More fool you, then. This is Tania Teague and at half past nine last night, she took a flight to the Cayman Islands with one hundred and fifty grand’s worth of jewellery and who knows what else on her. While she’s sunning herself in the Caribbean, you’re going to be living in a cell. Congratulations. I’ve heard the food’s shite.’

  45

  Jessica sat in DCI Topper’s office with Assistant Chief Constable William Aylesbury at her side. He was stirring his tea, scraping the spoon along the bottom of the mug in an increasingly annoying way. If anything, Aylesbury was looking younger than when he’d been DCI. He was wearing a navy blue jumper with knitted cables that made him look thin, plus matching dark trousers. His hair had apparently stopped going grey without even having that dodgy dyed look about it. He seemed every inch the retired country gentleman – except he was part of Greater Manchester Police’s command team.

  ‘This is exceptional work,’ he said in between bites of a Battenberg slice. Somehow, whenever the superintendent or anyone else senior was in the station, someone found a packet of biscuits or a cake. Aylesbury was eating the marzipan from around the edge, leaving the cakey centre for last.

  Jessica was leaning back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. The bright white lights were making green shapes appear in her vision. She didn’t feel ‘exceptional’.

  ‘Tania played me completely,’ she said, still looking into the lights.

  Scrape, scrape, scrape. How much stirring did one cup of tea need? And how come they were constantly left with sludge from the machine, yet someone magicked up a proper mug if anyone important turned up?

  ‘Now, now,’ Aylesbury said, ‘anyone could have been taken in. We’ve got Pavel Adamek, who’s wanted for all sorts of things; we’ve got the gang of robbers, plus fingerprints on the stolen money; we’ve recovered half of the stolen jewellery. That’s a pretty good result.’

  ‘What am I going to say in the press conference when they ask about the mastermind?’

  ‘Feel free to leave the talking to those of us who are more . . . comfortable in front of the camera. I know it’s not your thing.’

  Jessica peered back down, blinking away the green and pink stars. Aylesbury was eating the cake square by square. ‘With respect, Sir, I’ve not written everything up yet, so you might struggle to give information if you don’t know it.’

  He popped more of the cake into his mouth and grinned. ‘So tell me.’

  Jessica sighed. Again. She was doing a lot of that recently. Saying it all out loud made her feel stupider for allowing Tania to run rings around her.

  ‘It was a daft thing, really.’ She nodded towards the canvas bag still under the whiteboard. ‘I saw the guv’s gym stuff and it jogged my mind. When I’d been out with Katerina around Cheetham Hill, she had a towel on the back seat of her car that had a gym logo on it. I was at Martin and Tania Teague’s house and she had a gym bag with the same logo. I don’t know who approached who first but I guess they were talking in the changing rooms or somewhere like that at some point, the way that people do.’

  Aylesbury interrupted: ‘The way that women do!’

  No one laughed, so Jessica continued: ‘Tania would have said that one of her husband’s friends – Rosemary – had come to them looking to borrow thousands of pounds. She might have joked about it but Katerina already knew Pavel was looking for someone to marry to try to stay here. I don’t know how they knew each other but I strongly suspect Pavel came to her. She told me that the dialects are similar and they come from adjacent countries. Perhaps he found out a few things about her first and threatened her family, or maybe that came later? Either way, Katerina began doing odds and ends for him. With her work for us around the local immigrant community, she’d have been very useful to him.’

  Aylesbury took another slice of Battenberg from the plate and began nibbling around the edges a little like a rabbit.

  ‘I should have seen it,’ Jessica continued. ‘It was never Martin who was money-obsessed. He was an idiot with it. He spent whatever he had whether it was nine quid or nine million. He didn’t care. When I was there, he had his feet up, a beer by his side, his mates around. That’s all he was ever bothered about. Tania was the one who liked the nice things in life �
� it was obvious with her choice of clothes, even the way she held herself, but I was so focused on him that I wasn’t even looking. When she had an inkling of what was going on in my head, she fed me the line: “It wasn’t me who spent all the money and it’s not me who’s missing it”. Martin didn’t react because he was trying not to argue with her but she’d said it for my benefit anyway. She’s the smart one, Martin’s the street kid who picked the right numbers.’

  Aylesbury was peeling away the marzipan again. ‘It wasn’t her who did the robberies though.’

  ‘Of course not. Perhaps by accident, Katerina introduced Tania to Pavel. Katerina thought it was because Pavel was after a wife but Tania was way too clever for that. She wanted to get her fortune back, so she was talking to Pavel about ways they could make money quickly. That’s when he told her about the scheme he eventually got caught for in Serbia. Because she and Martin had lived in a rich area with their lottery winnings, Tania knew exactly who to rob – not their immediate neighbours, the ones a little lower down the social ladder. All she had to do was rope in a few people. Her husband was out – he was stupid enough to blow almost ten million in the first place – but they were childhood sweethearts. He hired an island and flew her and all their friends there. Because they’d all grown up together, she knew his friends as well as she knew Martin. She’d have known how to press their buttons; perhaps flirt a bit, perhaps say what a perfect plan she had, promise them money, riches, whatever. They’d have all seen their mate spend ten million and wanted a bit for themselves. Suddenly she was offering them their own windfall. All they had to do was follow exactly what she said and keep their mouths shut. As for Pavel, to keep him quiet, he was getting a percentage.’

  Aylesbury frowned as a blob of jam dropped onto the floor. ‘Very clever.’

  ‘The first house might have been a surprise. They couldn’t take big items because that’s how you get caught. Cash, jewellery, anything shiny, in-out, don’t hang around. Tania might not have expected so many bracelets or necklaces but then they were left with a problem of how to get rid of it. Pavel had the answer because he has contacts at home from his old jobs. It’d be too risky to go abroad after every robbery, so once they had enough jewellery stockpiled, someone flies out of the country keeping it in plain sight, passes it over to Pavel’s men and then it’s converted back to money again. They didn’t know what to do with the cash in case it was marked but there wasn’t much there relatively speaking. I suppose it was Tania’s idea to give it away because it was all about the jewellery anyway. It made us look silly, took the attention away from what they were actually doing, and still left a few thousand hidden away. If it turned out the notes were marked, or there was something else traceable about them, we would have said when people started giving them away. We’d have fallen right into their hands and told people to check the serial numbers, that sort of thing. As it was, by doing nothing, we told Tania and her gang it was fine to spend.’

  ‘She even told you where the house was, I gather.’ Aylesbury hadn’t said it critically but Jessica took it that way.

  ‘I thought I was being smart by appealing to her conscience but she’d deliberately wound me up to get to that point. She didn’t care if her husband was implicated but knew we probably didn’t have enough on him otherwise, so she pointed us in the right direction. It wouldn’t surprise me if she engineered being at the gym on the night of the robberies, knowing she wouldn’t be able to give Martin a proper alibi. That way she could offer the pretence of being the supporting wife, all the while doing her best to make him look guilty.’

  Aylesbury was on a roll of clichés and casual sexism. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Sir, but perhaps if you ever win nine point eight million quid, you should put a million to one side for your wife to spend as she sees fit.’

  He brayed, not noticing DCI Topper’s withering stare. ‘Quite, quite. I’ll bear that in mind. She’d probably blow it in a week on shoes.’

  DCI Topper interrupted the laughter, talking directly to Jessica. ‘We know Tania got off the flight in the Cayman Islands last night but have no idea where she went after that. Her poor dog—’

  ‘Tinkerbell.’

  ‘Yes. We found her roaming their house by herself. We had to call the RSPCA in to take her.’

  He turned back to Aylesbury and passed him the photograph Jessica had shown to Katerina in the interview room. It was a CCTV image, showing Tania shortly after passing through airport security, reattaching a sparkling bracelet to her wrist.

  Aylesbury glanced at it and nodded. ‘The chief constable’s been talking to Interpol. We’ll catch her.’

  Jessica didn’t want to disagree but knew that Tania wasn’t stupid enough to get caught so late in the game. She would have kept her half of the loot somewhere close, bided her time, and then, when things had started to fall apart, her plans would have gone into action. Within an hour or so of getting off the plane, she’d have been on a boat somewhere. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds in jewellery wasn’t much in the long run but she was smart and probably had other amounts squirrelled away somewhere.

  Aylesbury grabbed one more slice of cake and got to his feet. ‘Come, they’ll be waiting for us downstairs. Leave it with me: I’ll play down the Tania thing as much as possible. This is a massive success. Everyone here deserves the highest praise.’

  DCI Topper caught Jessica’s eye behind Aylesbury’s back as the assistant chief constable turned to leave. He didn’t need to say it because the raise of an eyebrow was enough: ‘Don’t get involved.’

  He was right, except Jessica still had to find a few minutes to call Esther and tell her what Katerina had done. They were colleagues, after all.

  Jessica closed her mouth and followed Aylesbury down the stairs and through the corridors towards the Press Pad. In the passage ahead, runners and technicians were racing up and down checking cables and strength of reception. Given the Robin Hood element that had been reported by practically every media outlet in the country, the revelation that the case had been solved was going to attract massive attention. Topper kept a hand on the bottom of Jessica’s back as they moved along, pressing gently, not intimately. It felt like he could read her mind, knowing she wanted to do a runner. In the space of a few days, she’d gone from hating him to thinking he was one of the few people who understood how she worked.

  Aylesbury led them into a side office and it was only then that Jessica knew she couldn’t go through with it. Chief Constable Graham Pomeroy was sitting in a chair talking to someone on his phone, enormous rolls of fat bursting out through a shirt that was tucked into his trousers and hanging on literally by threads. His cheeks were overhanging his jaw, his chins blubbering into one. The last time she’d seen him in person was at a press conference and he was disgusting then. It wasn’t even his appearance, it was what she knew about him. What she thought he and his group of friends knew about the way her car had blown up with Adam inside.

  He acknowledged the three of them with a nod, said goodbye to whoever he was talking to and then hung up. When she’d last seen Pomeroy, he’d barely nodded at her, not really knowing who she was; now he had eyes only for Jessica, stretching out his piggy hand for her to shake.

  Jessica remained where she was, partially behind Topper. ‘I’ve not been feeling well,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want to pass on any germs.’

  Pomeroy stopped where he was, hand still outstretched. Topper saved her by reaching forward and shaking it vigorously. ‘I have no such problems, Sir. Thank you for coming.’

  Unable to ignore the chief inspector, Pomeroy turned to Topper, a disingenuous grin appearing on his face. ‘Quite, an excellent result – almost perfect. Interpol are very confident about wrapping things up.’

  Jessica took another half-step sideways so that Topper was almost completely blocking Pomeroy from even looking at her.

  ‘Much of the credit has to go to Inspe
ctor Daniel,’ Topper said.

  Pomeroy’s gaze flickered around the DCI until Jessica had no choice but to look at him. ‘Excellent, excellent. That inquisitive mind is such a praiseworthy thing . . .’ He let the words hang, the meaning clear to Jessica, even if it was lost on the other two. ‘And you’ll be joining us at the press conference? I’m sure there’ll be a lot of questions.’

  Jessica shook her head. ‘I should probably go home. I think I’ve eaten something a bit ropey.’

  Aylesbury cackled with laughter. ‘I suppose the canteen here hasn’t improved since I left.’

  No one else joined in.

  Jessica took two more sidesteps until she was next to the door. She had one hand on the knob when she heard Pomeroy’s voice behind her: ‘Oh, Inspector Daniel . . .’

  She didn’t turn, not wanting to look at him again. ‘What?’

  ‘Drive carefully.’

  46

  ‘Drive carefully . . .’

  Jessica’s eyelids flickered open slowly, her eyes searching through the darkness towards the square green digits of the clock in Archie’s bedroom: 02.41.

  Again.

  Was she dreaming? This had happened before, hadn’t it? The alcohol, Archie, the bed, 02.41?

  She slipped out of the covers, standing and letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. Archie was sleeping on his front again, naked except for one of his legs underneath the sheet. She ran her hand along the floor until she found her clothes and had reached the door by the time his voice filtered through the room. ‘Are you ever going to stay the night?’

  Jessica stopped, one hand on the cool metal of the handle. ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know why.’

  She could hear him moving into a sitting position. ‘You know the story about nicking things from the man with the corner shop at the end of my road – I’ve never told anyone that. If it hadn’t have been for you, I never would have done.’

  Jessica shivered, not because of the cold. ‘What do you want me to say?’