Murder on the Commons (A Davies & West Mystery Book 4)

by Will North

“What, then, was the problem…from your point of view?” Penwarren mumbled, shaking his drooping head as if already exhausted.

  “Well, the problem, you see,” Winterbourne said smiling and resting his hands in his lap, “was that he kept losing.”

  “On penalties. We know that, too,” Penwarren said, glancing at Waggoner and lifting both eyebrows to signal his impatience. Waggoner shrugged.

  “But even that was not what brought him to our attention…not exactly anyway.”

  Another pause. Penwarren looked at the ceiling.

  “What exactly did, Winterbourne?” Bates asked, deliberately neglecting to address him by his rank.

  Winterbourne blinked, registering the affront, and finally continued. “It was the betting pattern. Those who bet against him made a lot of money each time he was disqualified. And he was disqualified a lot.”

  “Which is to say he threw fights?” Bates pressed.

  Penwarren was enjoying this exchange. Extra points for Terry.

  “Precisely.”

  “Isn’t that a matter for BAMMA? Why should it concern you lot?”

  “A very good question, young lady.”

  She wanted to throttle him, but merely put her fingers to her forehead as if she had a headache.

  Winterbourne smiled his private smile again and took time to turn a few pages in the file before him.

  “Rodney, please,” Waggoner murmured.

  Winterbourne looked up, surprised by the interruption, but took the message.

  “Well, it concerns us, because our friends in the Irish Garda, with whom we’ve shared what little we know, suspect his backers may be associated with the IRA, or rather some splinter group of zealots who rejected the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement and are active, apparently, in various worrying pursuits.”

  “Such as?” Bates pressed.

  “Illegal firearm sales, drugs, murder…that sort of thing.”

  “That sort of thing,” Penwarren repeated. “What else did your ‘friends’ in Ireland say?”

  Winterbourne shrugged his shoulders: “Not a lot, as it happens. Apparently, several consortia commonly bet heavily against your Mr. Lugg. In every match where he is eventually disqualified, especially the televised ones, they make a substantial fortune.”

  “Can’t you track those winnings? Penwarren asked.

  “Only just so far. These bettors don’t show up for the fights to collect their winnings, for one. Too smart for that, they are. The bets are placed through well-established betting companies, some of them international, but the funds are transferred from, and to, e-wallet accounts.”

  “What accounts?” Bates asked.

  “e-wallet.”

  Penwarren looked at Waggoner.

  “Perhaps you might explain, Rodney,” Waggoner said.

  Winterbourne sighed, as if answering were a burden.

  “The Irish are famous gamblers, of course. Irish Sweepstakes and all that,” he said. “Over the years several laws have been passed in the Republic to manage this national proclivity. A recent one made it possible for certain companies to act as financial intermediaries, which is to say that if you are a bettor, you deposit your stake with what’s known as an e-wallet company and they, in turn, place the bet with one of the big betting companies—say Ladbrokes, to choose but one.”

  “Why not place the bet with Ladbrokes, or whomever, directly?” Bates asked. “What’s the advantage of using an intermediary?”

  Winterbourne folded his hands on the table and smiled, as if humoring a child.

  “Anonymity. The financial exchange cannot be traced.”

  “If that’s so, then why suspect that the IRA are involved?” Bates demanded. “Where’s the connection?”

  “The connection, such as it is, is that the Garda have been unwilling to tell us much about the exchanges, the bank or, if they even know it, the account or accounts to which the funds are eventually deposited.”

  “Do they know the bank?”

  “They believe they do, yes.”

  “And that bank is?” Bates pressed.

  “They say they cannot reveal that information, as a separate investigation of the same bank is allegedly underway.”

  “And you can’t force them?”

  “No, we have no jurisdiction.”

  “Interpol?”

  “Interpol are concerned principally with international crime. Betting is not a crime.”

  “And the Garda’s silence tells you something?” Penwarren interrupted.

  “Yes. It seems something they do not wish to reveal. That tells me something.”

  “And that’s all you can tell us?”

  “At this point, yes.”

  Penwarren pushed his seat back and rose. He looked at Waggoner. “This could have been handled through a secure email. We have wasted our time here.”

  “There is one other thing worth mentioning,” Winterbourne said, holding up an index finger and peering now at another page in his file. “We picked up a few cell phone intercepts, untraceable of course, in which your Mr. Lugg was mentioned. He was threatened, or rather his elderly mother was. Lived with and supported her not far from here.”

  “Upper Pitt Street,” Bates said.

  Winterbourne lifted an eyebrow. “Correct. Until she was taken into a care home.”

  “And the threat?” Penwarren asked. He remained standing.

  “That if Lugg were to reveal anything about his Irish backers to anyone, his mother would no longer need a care home.”

  “Jesus,” Bates said, “his mother?!”

  “Another reason to suspect the IRA. They are not particularly sentimental.”

  Penwarren pushed his chair under the conference table and picked up his small briefcase, which he had never opened. “Thank you, Winterbourne; I think we are done here.” He nodded to Terry and she, too, rose. Almost apologetically, Waggoner showed them to the lift but added nothing, only wishing them a safe journey home.

  Outside, as they walked up the Strand toward the ibis Hotel, Terry fairly shouted to the sky: “Jesus, what a passive-aggressive berk! If that’s their intel guy, Liverpool’s in trouble!”

  But Penwarren, loping slowly beside her, was apparently elsewhere. He said nothing. Then, a block from the hotel, he stopped.

  “They know something. And they’re holding out.”

  “The Garda?”

  “No, Liverpool.”

  “And you think that because…?”

  “Call it instinct, Terry. Or experience. I’ve seen it before. They’re stonewalling.”

  “Why? It’s our case.”

  “Because there’s something about Lugg’s murder that threatens them and that’s more important to them than us.” Then he smiled and began walking again. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a pint after that torture. Meet you in the hotel bar?”

  “No.”

  Penwarren stopped.

  “How do you feel about doing a bit of doorstepping?” she said. “Or is that below your pay level?”

  Penwarren leaned his head back and laughed. “What did you have in mind, Detective?”

  “Lugg’s old neighborhood. Upper Pitt Street. Where he lived with his mother. It’s only a few blocks away.”

  “I like it,” Penwarren said. “Lead on.”

  Seventeen

  MORGAN DAVIES AND Adam Novak had spent all of Monday morning in front of computer screens trying to learn something—anything—about Celtic Property Development Ltd., but at each turn they’d hit dead ends. Irish and international business records said the company no longer existed. And yet it was leasing a posh car. In Cornwall.

  “We should follow the money,” Adam said finally.

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s leased, yeah? Who makes the monthly payments?”

  Morgan got on her phone and put the squeeze on the decidedly reticent sales manager at the Saltash Rover dealership.

  “I don’t know if I can release that information,” sa
id Charlie Penrose.

  “Look, Mr. Penrose, let’s say for the sake of argument you might want to uphold the reputation of your dealership in your community and with the Devon and Cornwall Police who, after all, are here to protect your business from criminal activity…”

  “Well, of course we would.”

  Morgan paused. “Especially in the case of a murder investigation,” she added.

  “What? Murder?!”

  “Got it right the first time, you did Charlie! Well done! And this murder may involve a client who leases a Range Rover from your dealership: Celtic Property Development, Ltd. Are you following me? All I can say at this point in the investigation is that we believe there may be some connection.”

  Morgan knew she was way out on a limb but pushing the boundaries of procedure was familiar territory. Apart from the car seen near Poldue the night the body had been found, if it was the same one, she had nothing.

  “What we need to know is very simple, Mr. Penrose. Who makes the monthly payments on this car?”

  “I would suppose the lessee, but I wouldn’t know. That would be the purview of our business office, you see. I’m principally in charge of sales, and the business office people are at lunch. I’d have to check with them.”

  “Right then, you go ahead and do that. I’ll stay on the line while you do.”

  “But…”

  “Murder, Charlie. I’ll be waiting right here.”

  Morgan had to admit that she took some pleasure in throwing her weight around, especially when it came to male business managers too full of themselves. It wasn’t ego, really; it was her certainty about the superiority of the force’s needs over those from whom they needed to gain information, whoever they were. She had a crime to solve—they didn’t.

  But the answer she finally got just led them down another rabbit hole. The lease payment was wired to the dealer’s leasing department from a private account at a bank in Ireland, KVF Bank, specifically a branch in Cork.

  “What we need is a friend in the banking world,” Morgan said to Adam when she rang off. “And I may have one.”

  “RODERICK?”

  “Morgan! How lovely to hear from you again, even if it has been almost a year. How am I supposed to carry on a flirtation with a brilliant and beautiful detective when she just vanishes?”

  “Control yourself, Roderick. You’re on speaker phone here in the Bodmin Police Hub.”

  Roderick Nelson, manager of the St. Ives branch of Lloyds Bank, chuckled. A year earlier, he’d been instrumental in unraveling the accounts of a couple whose wife was ultimately charged with murder.

  “You’re still there in St. Ives, then, Rod?”

  “You reached me here, so I must be.”

  “You’re a banker, not a comedian, Rod, but I should have thought you’d have been pushed upstairs by now.”

  “Was that a compliment? Okay, so I turned down a promotion to Plymouth. I realized I love St. Ives and the sense that I am helping a small community of good souls here.”

  “Well, I need your good soul again.”

  “Just my soul?”

  “Speaker phone, Roderick!” She moved her mobile to the middle of the desk. “Let me introduce my colleague, Detective Constable Adam Novak.”

  “Adam, hello! You were our police constable here and were involved in that incident last year, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve been promoted!”

  “Correct, sir,” Adam said.

  “And, for his sins, must work with me, Rod. Now then…”

  “Yes, I should have guessed this wasn’t a social call. What do you need this time? Will it jeopardize my career again?”

  “Just information, Rod. Your banking world knowledge. Do you know anything about KVF Bank? They may have something to do with a case we are investigating.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “They have branches in Ireland.”

  “Never heard of them, but then I wouldn’t. Another murder, Morgan?”

  “Yes, if you must know—or at least, possibly. I’m just guessing that you have access to banking databases we lowly police do not.”

  “There goes my career again.”

  “Come on Roderick. I’m just looking for who they actually are, not their financial secrets!”

  “Okay, okay. May I get back to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me guess, yesterday?”

  “If not earlier, Rod.” She laughed and rang off.

  Fingers hammering his computer keyboard, Adam worked out that KVF bank had an office in London, but then there wasn’t a bank in the world that didn’t, although the national vote supporting Brexit was looking likely to put a kink in London’s supremacy as an international finance center. Though no agreement had been negotiated with the EU yet, financial companies with headquarters in London were already beginning to seek friendlier locations elsewhere in Europe. KVF bank had no branches in the UK, and yet it had several in the Republic of Ireland. Why?

  The Lugg case had already gone so cold that there was no one else in the incident room pursuing it this Monday. And it was lunchtime anyway. Most of the brass would be up the road in Bodmin at The Hole in the Wall, a pub located in a former 18th century debtors’ prison that still retained iron bars at its entrance. A favorite local brew was “Jail Ale.”

  A voice behind them suddenly said, “Having fun, are we?”

  Morgan had been so focused she jumped and spun her chair.

  “Jesus, Calum, don’t do that! I have plenty of adrenaline going on inside me without you popping up out of nowhere.”

  West smiled. “I haven’t been nowhere, I’ve been elsewhere.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Calum nodded to Novak and shook his hand. He was delighted to see the new detective constable at Morgan’s side.

  “Pursuing my own investigations,” Calum finally answered.

  “I repeat, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Been back up on Rough Tor this morning. Still trying to work something out about that scene.”

  “Idiot! Your heart!”

  “No, I felt fine. Light exercise. Doctor’s orders: resume normal activities and get my strength back.”

  “Until you orphan your two daughters!”

  “Morgan. Is it not obvious that, as I am here, I therefore survived?”

  “You’re still nuts.”

  “I believe you’ve pointed that out before.”

  Novak, always the quiet one, interrupted their game. “Did you learn anything new, Calum?”

  “Yes. And no. What I learned simply doesn’t make sense. That body should not have been there. How it even got there is dumbfounding. I poked around the margins of the mire. There’s no way to get even close to the water where Lugg was found without going under yourself.”

  “Your SOCO people got him out with ropes. Maybe he was dragged in the same way,” Adam suggested.

  “And the killer pulled himself out using the same ropes? Technically possible, perhaps, but there’s a problem. No ground disturbance or footprints anywhere around the edges.”

  “Hoof prints,” Adam ventured.

  “True, but from wild moorland ponies. Not a very cooperative bunch. So that’s out.” West shook his head as if to shake off the impossible. “It’s like Lugg was catapulted from the tor.”

  “Also unlikely,” Morgan said.

  “I agree. It’s maddening.”

  He leaned over and looked at the computer screen. “What are you studying, you two?”

  “International banking,” Adam answered.

  “Nothing better to do?”

  Morgan shot him a blistering look. Adam explained.

  “The night we went to interview the Cuthbertson daughter about the body, a top-of-the-line Range Rover exited their drive and sped off north just as we were turning in. When asked, the daughter said it must have been her parents on their way to a Bodmin Moor Landowners’ Association meeting. Three pro
blems with that explanation: first, the meeting, which the father chaired, would already have been underway in St. Breward; second, St. Breward is south, not north of Poldue; and third, the Cuthbertsons don’t own a Range Rover.”

  “Maybe a neighbor her parents called to look in on her that night?”

  “Sure, Calum,” Adam said, “but why lie about it?”

  “Adam did some digging,” Morgan added, “and found that a Range Rover of that description is leased from a dealer in Saltash to a company in Ireland called Celtic Property Development Ltd.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “Except that the company shut down almost a decade ago.”

  West frowned. “So who’s making the payments?”

  “That’s the strange part. They’re made by way of private wire transfers from a bank in Ireland called KVF.”

  “Who are they?”

  Morgan’s mobile danced on the desktop. She looked at the caller’s ID. “Excellent question, Calum, and this may be part of an answer. Hang on.”

  “Roderick! That was speedy indeed! You trying to get on my good side?”

  “All your sides are good, my dear lady.”

  “We’re still on speaker, Rod, and Calum West is here, too. Do all bank managers flirt with their customers? I’m not even a customer!”

  “Which reminds me, who do you bank with Ms. Davies?”

  “None of your business! Have you got anything for me or is this a social call?”

  She heard the banker sigh.

  “KVF are based in Belgium and have several branches in Ireland, as you said, but none here. You may wonder why.”

  “And you’re going to tell me?”

  “I wondered, too. Mind you, I did this research on my lunch hour, so there may be more, but I do have some interesting bits of background.”

  “Which you intend to share with me before I reach retirement?”

  Another sigh and perhaps, she thought, a stifled chuckle.

  “Okay, KVF’s predecessor was the Catholic Volksbank, founded in 1886 in the Flemish part of Belgium. Today, one of its principal shareholders is the Flemish Farmers Association, which is also predominantly Catholic. Just recently they sold their entire corporate loan portfolio, rumored to be worth almost half a billion Euros, to The Bank of Ireland.”