Already Dead

by Stephen Booth

  ‘We’ll need the name of this woman who wrote to you,’ said Fry.

  ‘Will you? Isn’t that a confidential detail?’

  ‘Not in a murder inquiry, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah, well. I suppose there might still be some collateral damage to our reputation, then.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Fry. ‘It depends if we can get anyone in court, and how they plead.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Well, a not guilty plea means a full trial has to take place – witnesses, cross-questioning, all that. Every relevant detail will be explored, and it can go on for weeks. A plea of guilty avoids a lot of that, and the hearing is over more quickly.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So it’s in all of our interests to get as much evidence together as possible and create a nice watertight case from the start. Then the defence has no room for manoeuvre and is more likely to go with a guilty plea to get a lesser sentence for the accused.’

  Hart smiled. ‘You’ve convinced me, Sergeant. You’ll have full co-operation from this office. Let’s get the bastard who did this thing.’

  Chapter Thirty: Monday

  Sean Gibson was gaunt and bony, with yellow skin that barely covered the network of veins and arteries in his body underneath.

  When Fry saw him on Monday morning, she was reminded of Juliana van Doon’s description of a waste product in the blood, bilirubin. It caused the yellow colour in bruises, and it was also what turned the skin yellow if there was too much for the liver to get rid of. But Sean Gibson wasn’t suffering from jaundice. The colour of his skin was the result of age, and a body abused by alcohol and drugs, not to mention a bad diet.

  Sometimes, Fry wondered if the human race was evolving in reverse, gradually regressing to stunted troglodytes with primitive language skills and shorter lifespans. Sean Gibson was well along that evolutionary path.

  DCI Mackenzie’s team had Gibson in an interview room, sweating it out as he made a world record attempt for the number of times he could say ‘no comment’.

  ‘We’ve pulled his brother in too,’ said Mackenzie. ‘He had a trail bike hidden in a shed at his address. The tread on the tyres matches the tracks made in the wood.’

  The DCI had called in to see Fry while a DS from his team took over the interviewing. He was a big man, over six feet tall and wide across the shoulders, and he had the air of a rich uncle visiting distant cousins. Fry recalled the first time she’d worked with him. He was the only person who could ever have thought she was a farm girl. Everything was relative.

  ‘The theory we’re working on is that the Gibson brothers were aware that the Nokia mobile phone had been left behind at the crime scene and were making an attempt to retrieve it when they thought it would be quiet. Lucky your local farmer Mr Maskrey spotted him. Though obviously we can’t condone the use of a shotgun.’

  He gave each of the local CID officers a shrewd stare, weighing them up in that way an experienced officer did, even with colleagues. His gaze dwelled briefly on Gavin Murfin, then moved on to the younger DCs, who seemed to meet with approval.

  ‘They would have had to watch the forensic teams working at the scene,’ said Mackenzie, ‘to be able to tell when the water level had fallen sufficiently and there was no one around. I don’t know how they did that.’

  ‘From the rocks above,’ said Fry automatically.

  ‘Oh? Well, you’re probably right, DS Fry. Local knowledge and all that. But we were lucky that your vagrant identified Ryan Gibson.’

  ‘My vagrant? Do you mean the man who calls himself Spikey Clarke?’

  Mackenzie looked at her with his head tilted on one side. She’d seen that mannerism in him before, and she’d come to dislike it.

  ‘Didn’t you know that Mr Clarke witnessed the incident with the farmer and got a good look at the biker?’ he said.

  Fry shook her head. Mackenzie reached out a hand, and for a moment she thought he was going to pat her on the arm consolingly.

  ‘Well, don’t worry, Diane. It’s all dealt with now. And we’re getting some useful results from the analysis of Mr Turner’s computer too. That’s a bonus.’

  As soon as his back was turned, Fry cursed under her breath. This wasn’t supposed to be the way it went.

  ‘I’m very glad we were able to raise the priority of this inquiry and move against some known suspects,’ said DCI Mackenzie before he left. ‘Thanks to good intelligence.’

  Irvine looked at Fry when he’d gone. ‘What intelligence, Diane?’

  Fry threw her hands in the air. She didn’t know. But she was afraid she might be able to have a good guess.

  Later that day, it struck Fry that Nathan Baird was almost as thin and gaunt as Sean Gibson, though perhaps for a different reason. But only perhaps. His sharp cheekbones were a design feature, like the oak finish desk in his office at Prospectus Assurance.

  ‘Insurance fraud?’ he said. ‘Yes, everyone regards it as a victimless crime. But the fact is, fraudulent claims add about fifty pounds a year to the insurance bill of every honest customer. Undetected claims fraud costs the industry more than two billion pounds a year. And it’s rising every year.’

  ‘What type of fraud?’ asked Fry.

  Baird gestured at her eagerly. ‘Home insurance frauds are the most common, though the highest-value claims are in the motor insurance sector – that costs nearly six hundred million pounds a year. We’re talking big numbers either way, Sergeant.’

  Fry had heard of some common types of fraud. In the more traditional scams, a criminal set himself up as an apparently genuine insurance adviser, complete with a shopfront and a variety of products, though motor insurance was favoured. Unsuspecting customers paid a premium and were provided with false documents giving the impression their car had been insured. In one variation, the illegal adviser simply advertised their services through a newspaper or on the internet, often targeting specific vulnerable communities. In London, the Metropolitan Police had arrested a man on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering offences. He was alleged to have made thirty to forty thousand pounds a year by trading as an illegal insurance adviser, targeting members of the Chinese community and students.

  Increasingly common were whiplash claims after car accidents, where the extent of injury was difficult for doctors to diagnose. Organised gangs operated ‘cash for crash’ schemes, staging collisions in which some unsuspecting motorist crashed into the rear of a vehicle that stopped suddenly with its brake lights disabled. Just like the cannabis gardeners, those at the bottom of the food chain in those schemes were often poor and ignorant immigrants, who were paid a few hundred pounds to put themselves physically in harm’s way. Any genuine injuries they sustained were collateral damage as far as the gang leaders were concerned.

  ‘Are we talking hard or soft?’ asked Baird.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Basically, hard fraud is when someone deliberately invents a loss covered by their insurance policy. Criminal gangs get involved in hard fraud schemes, because they can obtain large amounts of money. Soft fraud is far more common. It’s more opportunistic. Policyholders exaggerate an otherwise legitimate claim. Almost anyone can be involved in that type of fraud. It’s so tempting just to overstate the amount of damage or the value of items lost. And of course, most small frauds go undetected, so it’s known as an easy crime to get away with.’

  Fry shook her head. ‘Not soft fraud. There must be large amounts of money involved.’

  He bit his lip. ‘I see.’

  ‘Those gangs who stage collisions to collect insurance money. The set-up sometimes involves insurance claims adjusters, doesn’t it? They create phoney police reports to process claims.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Baird slowly.

  It was an evasive, noncommittal reply, if ever she’d heard one. Fry waited in silence for him to say more.

  ‘The sheer number of claims submitted each day makes it far too expensive for companies like
ours to have employees checking each claim for signs of fraud,’ he said. ‘So we use computer systems and statistical analysis to identify suspicious claims for investigation. There are drawbacks.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The system can only be used to detect types of fraud that have been identified before. Claims adjusters can be trained to identify “red flags” or symptoms that in the past have often been associated with fraudulent claims. Statistical detection doesn’t prove that claims are fraudulent. It merely identifies claims that need to be investigated further.

  ‘If a red flag is triggered on a claim, it’s passed on to a specialist loss adjuster to investigate. They’ll interview the policyholder, carry out background checks. Often the result of our fraud checks and an investigation is that the claim process becomes a bit long-drawn-out. Then some claimants simply withdraw their claim, and we never hear from them again. That’s a result too.’

  ‘An unscrupulous staff member could take advantage of that system,’ said Fry. ‘Meeting claimants and doing background checks – it puts someone in a position of power. Some individuals can’t resist abusing that sort of power.’

  ‘We participate in the Insurance Fraud Bureau scheme,’ said Baird. ‘Any legitimate insurance company would be mad not to. The IFB have recorded tens of thousands of staged collisions and false insurance claims across the UK. In one year, their use of data mining led to seventy-four arrests of individuals involved in insurance fraud networks.’

  ‘Data mining. Would that be in the job description of a fraud analyst?’

  ‘Like Ralph Edge?’

  ‘Yes, that’s who I’m thinking of.’

  Baird looked suddenly alarmed. He stared out of the window as a defeated-looking Ralph Edge was led past his office by two men, each with a hand on an elbow. Fry jumped up and went to the door to watch them disappear down the corridor.

  ‘Who were they?’ asked Baird.

  ‘Those,’ said Fry, ‘were two of my colleagues from the Major Crime Unit. They appear to have arrested Mr Edge.’

  ‘You’re not going arrest me too, are you?’ said Baird. ‘Please tell me you’re not. It was just a bit of fun.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The paintballing.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with that, sir.’

  ‘Thank goodness.’

  Baird wiped his hands on a tissue from a box on his desk.

  ‘Ralph?’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Really?’

  ‘He didn’t take advantage of your open door to talk to you about it?’ asked Fry.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No doubt they’ll be taking away his files and computer,’ said Fry. ‘Of course, Mr Edge isn’t the type to do the dirty work himself.’

  Baird waved his bony hand nervously That imaginary irritating fly in his office had become an entire swarm of wasps.

  ‘How am I going to explain this to my managing director?’ he said plaintively.

  ‘Perhaps you could send a boy with a message,’ said Fry.

  Fry knew Ben Cooper had his phone switched on now, so she called him first to make sure he’d be in. She would have spent the rest of the day trying to track him down if necessary, but he answered straight away and agreed to see her.

  She parked right outside number eight Welbeck Street this time, just behind Cooper’s Toyota. Inside his flat, he offered her a coffee, which she accepted reluctantly, feeling obliged to maintain a veneer of sociability when her instincts urged her to do quite the opposite.

  Fry sat on his settee with her mug, exchanged glares with the cat, which stalked out of the room, and decided not to beat about the bush any more.

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me everything you’d worked out?’ she said. ‘You could have given me the whole damn case.’

  ‘Would you have appreciated it?’ asked Cooper.

  Fry hesitated, realised there was no point now in telling anything but the truth.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘I never really understood this obsession of yours,’ said Fry.

  ‘Obsession?’

  ‘All those cuttings on your kitchen wall. I call that the sign of an obsession.’

  ‘How did you know about those?’ asked Cooper quietly.

  ‘I…’

  ‘You’ve been in here somehow? Oh, wait a minute – Mrs Shelley mentioned that friends of mine had called looking for me. That would have been you, I suppose? So you made sure I was out of the way, then you talked your way into my flat.’

  ‘It might sound that way.’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Let me explain, Ben. We’re all—’

  He turned away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m finished listening to your explanations, Diane. Just leave me alone, why don’t you? Everyone else does.’

  ‘No, wait. That wasn’t what I came here for.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I want you to explain it to me, Ben.’

  He put down his coffee on a low table. ‘I suppose you haven’t been following the news stories the way I have over these last few months, Diane. Did you actually look at my cuttings?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘I mean, did you look properly? The way you would look if you were presented with them as evidence and you were trying to put the clues together, to make connections? Or did you just take one glance and jump to a conclusion?’

  Fry didn’t answer. Well, she couldn’t respond to that without admitting a failure. So she said nothing. It didn’t matter. Cooper knew the answer to his own question anyway.

  ‘Some of them aren’t really what you’d call cuttings,’ he said. ‘They’re printouts from the internet. Specialist news sites, mostly. You’d be amazed what you can turn up just by creating a few Google alerts. That’s how I know about Prospectus Assurance. It was a buyout, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I had a feeling when I went there that it used to be called something different.’

  Cooper nodded. ‘It used to be owned by a firm called Diamond Finance. They were also the parent company for Diamond Hybrid Securities, based in London. But the insurance division has different owners now. They became Prospectus a few months ago. I read all about the takeover and the rebranding. The details are right there on my wall.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Before Prospectus Assurance was bought out it was called Derbyshire Reliance Insurance. I know that, because they provided the insurance cover for the Light House pub.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Sitting opposite Diane Fry in his own flat, Ben Cooper began to feel that familiar sensation of unreality. The moment he mentioned the Light House, his head swam and he felt the stirrings of that tremor in his hand, the ache in the back of his throat. But they were fainter now, as if they were fighting a losing battle for control of his body. His mind felt clearer than it had for a long time. Though that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  ‘Well, despite the takeover,’ he said, ‘many of the staff are still there in some departments. Call handlers come and go, but experienced people tend to stay on. They’re better paid, and they might find it more difficult to get the same level of salary elsewhere. Ralph Edge was working in the side of the business providing financial advice. He’s a fraud analyst. He knows what methods of fraud work, and which bring in the largest amount of money with the least risk. In fact, he was in a position to cover up fraud, if he wanted to. A gamekeeper turned poacher.’

  ‘How did he get away with that?’ asked Fry.

  Cooper smiled. ‘How did people get away with losing billions of pounds for the banks? Well, they get put into positions of trust, where they’re left to handle huge amounts of other people’s money every day. As long as everything seems to be going okay, no one asks any questions. It’s only when it all goes wrong that people start saying there ought to be more regulation. And by then it’s too late.’

  ‘And poor old Glen Turner? Turner was pretty weird. He lived a strange life.
But he was getting money from somewhere.’

  ‘Yes. From Ralph Edge,’ said Cooper. ‘Turner had been roped into his fraudulent money making schemes somehow.’

  Fry nodded. ‘He was probably very willing at first. God knows, Turner had little enough excitement in his life. I can just imagine him hugging that secret to himself, knowing he’d broken away from his mother’s expectations of him. Then he bought her the greenhouse with the money.’

  ‘He sounds a sly beggar on the quiet.’

  ‘But still weird,’ said Fry.

  ‘And then I suppose he must have begun to feel he still wasn’t appreciated. He was still getting pushed around and disrespected at work. I bet he resented that even more when he’d just begun to feel he was a cool, edgy sort of guy underneath.’

  ‘After the incident at the paintballing session that Sunday, it all changed, though.’

  ‘That incident would have been the last straw for Mr Turner,’ said Cooper. ‘The final humiliation. Not only was he the butt of the joke yet again, but his humiliation was orchestrated by Ralph Edge, who he thought was his friend. Perhaps his only friend. But everybody has a limit. Even Glen Turner could only be pushed so far. I think he told Edge exactly that on Tuesday.’

  ‘He stood up for himself,’ said Fry. ‘Finally, the worm turned. He probably felt in a stronger position after he’d been to the solicitor, and believed he could sue Edge and Baird, even get them prosecuted for assault. I bet Mr Turner came away from that consultation with Mr Chadburn feeling happier and more confident than he had for a while.’

  ‘And he went straight off to confront Edge the next day.’

  ‘No,’ said Fry. ‘First he went and bought himself a fossil.’

  Cooper hadn’t known that. ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said. ‘Some people would have gone a for a drink, or a slap-up meal, or bought themselves a box of chocolates, or whatever.’

  ‘Are we saying that it was feeling better about himself suddenly that got Glen Turner killed. Is that it?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Cooper. ‘Yes, pretty much. I imagine he went to see Mr Edge on Tuesday and told him he was going to pull the plug on the insurance fraud scheme.’