Joyce Rindell’s hand shot up. Norman acknowledged her with a nod.
“Joyce Rindell from the Argus. I understand traces from a Class A drug were found on board Mr Devos’s yacht. Do you consider this to be a drug related crime?”
The question staggered both Norman and Ianthe, who recovered first.
“Not sure where you got this information, Joyce but we are currently following a few leads. Drugs are always a possibility in Brighton, that isn’t a big secret.”
“Is that why you are searching Mr Devos’s residence in Lewes right now, detective inspector?” Joyce fired her second bullet.
Ianthe saw Norman turning red in the face.
“It is not uncommon that a victim’s house is searched as part of an investigation,” Ianthe tried.
“You are interviewing Josephine Devos right now here at Sussex CID HQ. Are you treating her as a suspect?”
“Josephine Devos is helping the police with our inquiries, nothing more.”
*
They took a few more questions, then retired to the Detective Superintendent’s office. Sheila Parker, his Personal Assistant, came in and silently handed him this morning’s copy of the Argus. All over the front page the heading screamed at them: ‘DRUG MURDER?’ With an equally telling subtitle: ‘Local Lewes businessman murdered in drug deal?’
“What the HELL, Ianthe?” Norman yelled displeased. “How is this possible! Who has been leaking to the press!?”
“I have no idea where she got that information, boss,” she responded. “I’m as shocked as you are. Can’t believe someone from my team leaked it to her.”
“Well you better find out and put an immediate stop to it! Now tell me again at length what you found during the search of the Devos residence.”
Ianthe briefed him on the drugs they had found in Helen Devos’s room and what she had been told by the girl about the provenance of the drugs.
“Humm. You were walking a dangerous path interviewing a minor, I’m sure you know. But I think you handled it correctly. I guess you still have to break the news to Josephine Devos?”
“Indeed. I will do that straight after this. Then I am meeting my team at two. Next obvious action is to go and pick up Brandon Nicholson and search his home. I double checked and Brandon Nicholson is not a minor. His dad is the GM of Solstice Technologies here in Brighton. That is a pretty big company in the Internet of Things world. Which means his parents appear to be quite wealthy and influential. If he is smart, he will lawyer up as soon as we bring him in.”
“I agree. What is your view on the drug angle?”
Ianthe shrugged.
“It may be the right direction to look for a motive. But to be honest, right now we don’t have too many clues to be certain this is drugs related.”
“I better brief Olivia about this. In particular now that the press knows about it.”
Olivia West was the Assistant Chief Constable responsible for Major Crimes.
“And we will need to expand your team, Ianthe.”
She started to protest, but he waved it away.
“The ACC will insist on it anyway. We need someone with knowledge of the local drug scene. And an analyst.”
“Actually, boss, Ben seems to have the right contacts in that world. But I will be happy to accept your offer of an analyst.”
Norman the Pooh Bear seemed unconvinced.
“I guess you really don’t want Vik Gorti to work with you on this, Ianthe?”
She just rolled her eyes at him.
“All right. You’re the only one in my team who wants to keep her team as small as possible. Every other DI would jump at the opportunity to have more people in his team.”
“Let’s just say I am very budget conscious,” Ianthe replied sweetly.
“Humph. Sure you are. I will assign Anne Baker to your team. She may be the best analyst we have. What else?”
“Search warrant for the Nicholson home?”
“Right. I will take care of that for you. Come to see me after your team meeting. It shouldn’t be an issue.”
*
After her meeting with the Super Ianthe went to the interview rooms. She found DS Ajanta Ghani and DS John Ryan outside Room number One trying to get a decent coffee out of the machine.
“Any luck?”
“I’m afraid there is nothing much to tell you, Ianthe,” Ajanta said. “Either she is the world’s greatest liar, or she is as much in the dark as we still are.”
Ianthe quickly briefed Ajanta and John about what they had found in Lewes and the conversation she and Ben had had with Helen Devos. Then they went in and broke the news to Josephine Devos about the coke find at her house. Josephine Devos looked at her dumbfounded, then buried her face in her hands.
“This nightmare is getting worse and worse! How could she have done that?!”
“Right now, I am not planning to take this further, Josephine, given the circumstances and the fact that Helen cooperated with us. But I am counting on you to give her a very stern talking to and I am not excluding that if it appeared, she has kept anything back from us this will still have consequences for her. You can go home for now. I’m afraid the press has found out on the search we executed, and they may try to talk to you. I would insist that you try and avoid talking to reporters for now. It won’t do the case any good.”
Josephine nodded.
“DS Ajanta Ghani and DS John Ryan will take you back home now.”
Ianthe left the room and went in search of Anne Baker to brief her on the tasks at hand.
*
“It is now two pm and this is the Thursday briefing for Operation Blackbird,” Ianthe said, looking at her team around the table. Everyone had been present when she had entered the room half a minute earlier.
“We are joined by Anne Baker who will be our analyst.”
Anne raised her hand in a quick wave to everyone. She was a wiry woman with cropped blonde hair in her early thirties, immaculately dressed in a simple charcoal grey business suit. She had a pleasant face with a small nose and big blue eyes that were somewhat hidden by large round gold framed spectacles. She was wearing a modest pearl necklace.
“As you all know we have had some development in the case of the murder of Bert Devos. Geoff?”
“Right. During our search of the Devos residence at 6 Prince Edward’s Road in Lewes this morning we found a small bag with a white powder. On site testing using our NarcoCheck kit revealed the bag contained one point seventy-two grams of good quality cocaine or a derivative of that drug. We assume the bag originally will have held two grams of coke and about a quarter of a gram may have been used. This afternoon our lab will run gas chromatography with time-of-flight mass spectrometry tests to determine if this sample corresponds to the sample found on Bert Devos’s yacht earlier this week.”
“How does that actually work? With what degree of certainty will you be able to determine that, Geoff?” Ianthe wanted to know.
“Well, simply put we will first be using gas chromatography to establish the purity of each of the samples and separate them into their components. We inject a tiny bit from either sample in the gas chromatograph which is able to then tell us which components are present. Then we inject the samples in a mass spectrometer to identify the actual molecules. If the drugs found at the Devos residence are from the same batch as the coke found on Polaris, those tests will show them to be identical. But if the dealer selling it to his customers has decided to cut the drugs further down first to maximize profits it is a bit more tricky but we should still be able to establish whether the original cocaine is identical or at least very similar. Sometimes they buy let’s say ten grams from their supplier, then add some talcum powder to it to make eleven or twelve grams out of it. Meaning they have ten to twenty percent more merchandise to sell. Which in turn means they can make a bigger profit. But the underlying cocaine may still be the same and that will show in our test.”
“What sort of profit are we talking
about here?” Ajanta wanted to know.
“Street prices for cocaine vary a lot,” Anne Baker chipped in. “They are completely subject to the game of supply and demand. Studies show that even in the UK prices may vary geographically. I recently read a study of coke use at universities claiming that the price per gram was lowest in Liverpool at around forty-five pounds per gram and highest in Edinburgh at about eighty pounds per gram. As we all know, drug use has been quite a problem in Brighton and drugs are easy to come by here, so I would assume the current price per gram in Brighton would be approximately fifty pounds.”
“Fifty-four pounds actually,” Ben commented.
He saw Ianthe raise her left eyebrow, her particular expression of surprise, and quickly added: “I checked that before the meeting with my sources.”
“That means that Helen Devos spent about one hundred quid on coke,” Ianthe continued.
“In the conversation that Ben and I had with her she claimed she had obtained this from Brandon Nicholson, who is a twenty-two-year-old MBA student at Brighton University, a single child, who lives with his parents at 55 Roedean Way. His father is Mark Nicholson, General Manager of Solstice Technologies in Brighton, originally from Slough. His mother is a Rowena Nicholson, nee Rowena Stuart-Lane from Eastington, Gloucestershire, apparently without known profession, assumed to be a housewife.”
“Soon to be a ‘desperate’ housewife,” Ajanta quipped, causing some tittering around the table. Ianthe could not hide a smile either.
“Indeed,” she resumed. “I have briefed Pooh Bear in the meantime, and he is taking care of a search warrant for the Nicholson Residence. That should be available any moment now. Our next course of action is to execute that search still today, at five pm. Ajanta can you please liaise with uniform to have local support and a sniffer dog again?”
Ben nodded.
“Ajanta, you will be in charge of the search. Ben and I will pick up Brandon Nicholson and bring him here for questioning.”
“Will you be arresting him, guv?” Ajanta asked.
“That depends on the search. We will treat him as a potential suspect selling Class A drugs with the aggravating circumstances that he has been offering these drugs to minors. If your search can dig up items or information to substantiate that, I will indeed arrest him. As I suspect he will refuse to answer questions without a lawyer, you should have ample time to find something if there is anything in his house. We will also need further substance to the claim of Helen Devos, however. John, do you have connections in the student crowd at Brighton Uni?”
“I have several nieces studying there in fact.”
“Can you try to sort out with them if the name Brandon Nicholson rings any bells with them? If they wanted to get drugs, who they would go to, or where? I will need your report on that before we start questioning Brandon.”
John nodded and started to scribble furiously in his notebook.
“Ajanta, I guess you didn’t get the info from the banks yet about Bert Devos’s finances?”
“No boss, you know what the banks are like. Most likely it will come in some time later today and I will look at it as soon as I possibly can.”
“All right. You will be busy with the search anyway.”
Perhaps she had been too rash telling Pooh Bear she did not need any additional manpower on this, Ianthe thought.
Ben said: “I can check with my sources if they have heard of Brandon and where he is getting his supply from.”
Ianthe nodded gratefully.
“What about the link with the murder of Bert Devos, boss,” John wanted to know.
“Clearly, Brandon Nicholson is a person of interest in that case. He may have had various motives to kill Mr Devos. He knew Bert Devos and was Helen Devos’s boyfriend for a while. It is possible that Bert Devos was his supplier and they ran into a tiff. It is also possible that he argued with Mr Devos over his relationship with Helen. Perhaps Bert found out Brandon had been selling coke to Helen, who told us that her dad was vehemently opposed to drugs of any sort. But our case is a far cry from being strong enough to charge him with murder.”
“Anything else from anyone? No? Before we adjourn, unfortunately, I have an unpleasantness to share.”
That made everyone sit up in their chair.
“In our press conference this morning, it became clear that the reporter from the Argus, Joyce Rindell, had inside information about this operation. She knew we were making a connection with drug related crime. She was aware of the search we had been conducting in Lewes. That means someone must have leaked information to her, either by accident or on purpose. You all know that discussing an ongoing investigation with someone outside the force is an offence that will get you fired immediately without pension. There will be no mercy if I find out one of you did this on purpose. This is the one and only warning.”
She looked around the table.
“Let’s go about our business then and close this case.”
Ianthe rose and left the room to go to her workstation. John followed Ianthe and caught up with her at the door to the conference room.
“Can I have a quick word in private, boss?” he asked.
Her left eyebrow lifted.
“Sure. Let’s step inside.”
She opened the door to the conference room and they went in.
“What’s on your mind, John that you couldn’t say in front of the others?”
She noticed he coloured slightly and was looking at her in a distinctly uncomfortable way.
“It’s the leak, Ianthe. I’m afraid it may have started with me.”
Her eyebrow shot up again.
“Explain,” she added curtly.
“Yesterday when I was on my way out, I was accosted by DI Vik Gorti. You know he used to be my boss, right?”
And DS John Ryan went on to tell her what DI Gorti had been asking him about Operation Blackbird.
“I hope you understand, ma’am, he is part of the force after all and he used to be my governor until I joined your team.”
She sighed.
“Of course I understand,” she said, and he visibly relaxed at that.
“I would hope that DI Gorti would have been smart enough not to have leaked that information to the Argus. We will never know for sure, I guess. But I’m glad you trusted me enough to tell me. In particular after that stern speech I gave back there.”
“I thought it important the team was beyond your suspicion on this. We can’t work very well together if we think we need to look over our shoulder all the time, can we?”
“Quite right, John.”
“What will you do now with this, ma’am?”
Ianthe smiled while she opened the door again and stepped out in the corridor.
“There is a popular saying, John, to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
*
Ianthe went back to Norman Stokes room and knocked on the door. He waived her in and indicated she should sit down.
“I guess you are here about the search warrant. That is on its way. Ms Mirchandani is the duty magistrate and promised to sign it promptly when she has the time to read the material.”
“We want to do the search at five still this afternoon, sir. I know it might be better to do it in the early morning of tomorrow, but with the leak in the Argus and all I don’t want to take any more risks.”
“That should be fine. Get your search party over there and I will deliver it in person. Will you be supervising the search?”
“Probably not, sir. I am hoping we may be able to find Brandon at home as he does not have any classes today. If that is the case, I want to bring him in personally for questioning. If he is not at home, I will ask uniform to find him and bring him in. I have arranged for DS Ajanta Ghani to lead the search.”
“Isn’t she a bit inexperienced for that? We cannot afford to make mistakes on this one.”
“I think she will be fine, guv.”
“If you say so,” he sou
nded unconvinced. “I may stay to make sure everything is done as it ought to be.”
He looked straight at her, frowning.
“I also discussed the case with the ACC Olivia West, Ianthe. You are not going to like this. She insists your team is too small to deal with a major incident that may involve drug related crime. And she wants me to bring in DI Vik Gorti.”
He sat back and raised his hands in front of him when Ianthe tried to say something.
“Hold your horses, Ianthe. I actually agree with her on this. In fact, I had told you so already. Now, we both recognize you have been on this from the start and you have been doing an excellent job so far. And I know there has been some friction between you and Vik. The ACC and I have agreed we will temporarily promote you to Acting Detective Chief Inspector so that there can be no doubt who is in charge of Operation Blackbird. Can you work with that?”
Ianthe left his office hiding a smile. Not only had she intended to admit to Pooh Bear she would indeed need someone additional to explore the drug angle of the case, but she had also planned to ask for Vik Gorti so that she could keep an eye on him. And now she even got a promotion out of that. Temporary, yes, but such things tended to stick if she did well. That made her the youngest DCI in Sussex Police as far as she knew. She was quite happy with that thought.
*
DI Vikram Gorti knew he was a reasonably handsome guy of Telugu descent but born and bred in Eastbourne where his parents had run a twenty-four-hour supermarket. He was the only son in a family of six and the youngest sibling who had come into the world as a sort of afterthought. His oldest sister was Vik’s senior by fifteen years, and it was she and her husband, the endlessly irritating Sanjay Goel, who had taken over running the supermarket when their parents wanted to slow down a little. The store had made certain their lives had been wonderfully comfortable and Vik had been sent to attend the best schools. He had never been a great student though and had preferred to spend his days with his friends coming down to Brighton in the weekend to party, booze and chase girls. He had gotten a hold of himself just in time though to receive acceptable A-levels that secured entry into the faculty of law of the University of Warwick. He was the first in his family to go to College and his parents paid for it all the way. And he was bright enough not to flunk too many exams. He was not an honours student, but he managed to graduate with just a small delay. Going into the family business at that time was not an option as his sisters and their husbands were employed there and there was no way that he was going to play second violin to Sanjay. He wanted to join a law firm and eventually become a barrister, but in an England that was still very class-minded, he had quickly realized that would either not be possible or need far more effort than he wanted to put into it. At the same time his parents had made it obvious that they wanted to see him settle down with a nice Telugu girl. He had decided to join Sussex Police making use of the new scheme where it was not always a requirement anymore to be a beat-cop for two years when you already had an advanced degree. After some basic training he had been promoted to Detective Constable quickly. It had helped that Sussex Police was in need of some positive action as almost no Asians were part of CID. And his dad did play golf with Henry Morton, who was Chief Constable at the time. When he was twenty-seven, he was a Detective Sergeant and the matchmaker had found him an acceptable Telugu wife in Hanusha Naidu. But his good fortune had slowed down considerably after that. Family life had made a huge impact on his available time. When children had started to arrive two years later, Hanusha had expected him to be at home more often. If he was honest about it, he did not really mind that either. He was rather bored with the tediousness of some of the police work. There was a lot of waiting that needed to be done and plenty of reporting. He managed to move a lot of the more monotonous tasks to his unmarried colleagues. In his view, that was only right, as they simply had more time on their hands. But it did not make him popular. He knew that but he did not care much. He was good at writing reports and his law education had trained him to understand very well what the hierarchy wanted to read in them and how to make himself shine. Two years ago, his luck had returned. He had been part of Operation Bassoon, trying to solve the murder of a small-time drug dealer. The investigating officer in charge, DI Livingstone, had secured evidence implicating the son of the leader of the local council of Brighton and Hove. He had communicated this only to Vik when he had suffered a major heart attack and had passed away in his car in the parking lot of Sussex House. Vik had grabbed the opportunity to shine with both hands had acted as if he had personally found the evidence. By-passing his line managers, he had gone straight to the chief constable with the information and had been allowed to make the high-profile arrest. Shortly after that, just after his thirty-fourth birthday he had been promoted to Detective Inspector. That was about the same time that Ianthe Seymour had been promoted. But she was almost ten years younger than he was. He had always envied how lucky she had gone with her cases. She had brought in a serial rapist, a paedophile turned child-murderer and a snuff movie producer, to name just her highest profile cases. She was well regarded by the hierarchy, which he had always found bizarre as she never showed what he would call the proper respect for her superiors. And she was liked by her colleagues. Vikram Gorti excluded. He did not like her one bit.
Dead in the Water Page 11
