The Riverman lab-4

by Alex Gray

  The woman in the mirror stood up straighter and gave her dark hair a reassuring pat. She’d encountered dozens of difficult clients over the years, dealt with cases where grown men and women had shrieked abuse at her for simply telling them what the law required and how they must make reparation to their creditors. She’d taken a pride in being on the side of the angels all those years ago, so what had gone wrong? The face that looked back at her was older, hardened with lines that told of sleepless nights rather than laughter. What had she to laugh about now? Her familiar world was about to be broken into pieces unless …? Unless she told the story she had so carefully rehearsed. But could she carry it off? The dark woman staring at her lifted her chin a fraction as if in challenge. Yes, she could do it. She hadn’t come this far to let a few policemen spoil everything.

  ‘Miss Devoy’s in the interview room, sir,’ WPC Irvine told Lorimer.

  He raised his head, ‘Still no sign of Mr Adams?’

  ‘No, sir. Shall I try his office?’

  Remembering the London partner, Lorimer nodded briefly. Adams was probably still ensconced with his bosses. Still, it was bloody annoying. He’d had the instructions to be here at the same time as the Devoy woman.

  ‘Oh, and tell him I want him over here, will you?’ he added, rising from his seat with a sigh. He felt as if he’d been glued to that chair for the last hour listening to Mitchison warble on about Home Office procedures. If he’d just get on with it and stop trying to be so wrapped up in rules and regulations they might get somewhere. Graham West was winging Singapore and they were no nearer to finding a way to intercept him at his journey’s end. So far, not a lot had been found in either Forbes Macgregor’s offices or in the betting shop’s riverside headquarters: plenty of bags of shredded paper, though, which had raised not a few eyebrows. That old chap in Human Resources, Adrian Millhouse, had admitted that there was about a year’s worth of shreddings stacked in the machine room, and, no, the bulging plastic sacks hadn’t been there at the start of the week. DC Cameron had already taken statements from other members of staff who had confirmed this. As he strode along the corridor, Lorimer wondered what Miss Catherine Devoy would say when he asked her opinion about West’s sudden disappearance.

  Thinking back to his first visit to the offices by the river, Lorimer recalled Jennifer Hammond. He stopped outside the door of the room for a moment, conjuring up the leggy redhead’s flirtatious smile, the way they’d linked arms to cross the road. That such scintillating life should be snuffed out! He took a deep breath to bring the spurt of anger under control then turned the handle and entered the room.

  Inside, three pairs of eyes turned towards him but Lorimer ignored the psychologist and the duty officer, turning with a smile and outstretched hand to the slim woman sitting on the edge of her chair.

  ‘Miss Devoy, thank you so much for coming in today,’ he said and took a seat opposite her.

  Catherine looked up at the tall policeman with surprise. There was no trace of anything other than pleasant courtesy in his manner. He might have been one of her associates coming in to discuss the wording of a legal document. She sat back against the hard wood of the chair and clasped her fingers lightly together. This was going to be fine, just fine.

  ‘You are one of Forbes Macgregor’s associates?’ Lorimer began.

  Catherine inclined her head. ‘I’m one of the partners,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Ah,’ he replied and smiled at her. ‘Sorry.’ Then, just as she was beginning to relax, he added, ‘An equity partner, I suppose, not salaried?’

  Catherine frowned. ‘Of course!’ she snapped. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’

  Lorimer inclined his head a little. ‘Maybe nothing, but you would stand to lose a great deal if the firm were to collapse, wouldn’t you?’

  Catherine felt as if someone had pulled a plug inside her, draining away all her reserves of energy. She had to keep it together. She had to. Forcing a lightness into her tone, she heard herself reply, ‘Oh I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, Chief Inspector. We’re a well-respected firm, you know, with offices all over the globe.’

  ‘Really?’ Lorimer asked. ‘Even in places like Australia and Singapore?’

  Catherine frowned. What on earth was he getting at? ‘Well yes, since you ask. In fact,’ she lifted her handbag onto the table and opened it, searching for her diary, ‘you can see for yourself,’ and she handed it over to Lorimer who glanced at the Forbes Macgregor logo but did not make a move to take it from her. ‘See,’ she insisted, flicking over the pages till she came to the firm’s international directory, ‘we’ve got offices everywhere.’

  Lorimer took the diary, gave it a cursory glance, and handed it back without a word.

  ‘Do you have any idea where your partner Graham West has gone, Miss Devoy?’

  ‘None at all, Chief Inspector,’ she answered him, her eyes deliberately meeting his own.

  ‘So it would surprise you to know that he has left the country?’

  ‘What?’ Catherine Devoy sat up suddenly.

  Either she was genuinely surprised or she was a damn good actress, Lorimer thought, wondering obliquely what Solly was making of this.

  ‘Yes. We wondered if he had spoken of his intentions to you or to anyone else.’

  The woman shook her head slowly and deliberately. ‘No. He did not.’

  ‘So the first you knew of his disappearance was when he failed to turn up for work this morning?’ Lorimer almost hesitated. This morning seemed like the day before yesterday, so much had happened in the past few hours.

  ‘That’s correct,’ she replied, her gaze still concentrating on him.

  ‘Why d’you imagine he’s taken off like that, Miss Devoy?’ Lorimer leaned back and swung gently in his chair, his tone easy and conversational.

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Well, you’re his partner. Don’t you all have inside knowledge about one another?’

  Catherine Devoy shrugged, her eyes sliding away from his at last. ‘Not about personal things, no,’ she said.

  ‘But you do know about Mr West’s business affairs?’

  ‘Of course,’ she replied.

  ‘So you would know that he had been taking out large sums of money from his partnership account?’

  The woman’s open-mouthed silence told him all he needed.

  Lorimer nodded again. ‘Perhaps you didn’t know everything about Mr West after all?’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘Perhaps not,’ she whispered.

  Lorimer smacked his hands onto the edge of the desk suddenly, making her jump. ‘Miss Devoy, we have reason to suspect that Graham West is guilty of killing Duncan Forbes and Jennifer Hammond.’

  There was silence while they watched the woman’s reaction. For a long moment she did not move or make a sound, her expression frozen. In disbelief? Lorimer wondered.

  Then she swallowed hard. ‘Chief Inspector, why on earth would Graham do something as terrible as that?’ Catherine’s voice was low but steady, her gaze once more on the chief inspector’s face.

  ‘I thought perhaps you might be able to tell me,’ he countered lightly.

  ‘Well,’ she replied, her eyes suddenly hard, ‘you thought wrong.’

  ‘You don’t think he was capable of murder, then?’

  For a moment she looked away, thoughtful, then she gave a sigh. ‘Who can tell what a person is capable of, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Lorimer replied.

  ‘I think,’ Catherine Devoy began slowly, ‘that if Graham had been embezzling from the firm we would have known about it before now.’

  Lorimer regarded her with interest. There was something about her manner that told him she was thinking on her feet. Had she really been unaware of West’s massive withdrawals?

  ‘The sums involved were pretty large. We found that he had transferred them to an overseas account,’ he continued, blessing those of his team who had been quick to uncover
these financial details. They would know soon enough exactly where it was.

  ‘May I see these transactions, Chief Inspector?’ Catherine Devoy asked, reaching again for her handbag and drawing out a slim spectacle case as Lorimer opened the file and pushed the relevant papers across the desk.

  For a minute there was silence in the small room and Lorimer could hear the sound of traffic outside the building: cars turning from the main road and the rumble of a passing lorry. Then the woman drew off her rimless glasses and laid them on the table between them.

  ‘This has nothing to do with Forbes Macgregor,’ she began. ‘If Graham was making payments, then it was to a personal account.’

  ‘Maybe one he’d already set up?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s not against the law to transfer your own money from one account to another.’

  ‘How do you know it’s his own? The sums are huge,’ Lorimer protested.

  Catherine Devoy smiled sweetly at him. ‘But Graham West is a very wealthy young man, Chief Inspector. What’s wrong with that?’

  Lorimer sat back suddenly. He had no answer to that. Maybe she was right. Perhaps West had inherited money, invested it quite legally. After all, he was an accountant. A frown crossed his face as he changed tack.

  ‘Could you describe his relationship with Duncan Forbes?’

  The daylight was fading as Lorimer and Solly stood at the window, gazing down across the city rooftops. Catherine Devoy had left the building an hour before but this was Lorimer’s first chance to speak to the psychologist alone. They’d found out very little from the woman. West seemed to be a charmer, ‘Bit of a playboy’ was how she had put it, and he’d enjoyed good relations with everyone in the firm. No animosity had been shown between the late Duncan Forbes and his younger, high-flying partner. He’d been popular with all the staff, too, and big things had been expected of him in the future. But now? The woman seemed genuinely puzzled as to where he’d gone and why. Part of Lorimer wanted to believe her.

  ‘What d’you make of her, Solly? Think she’s telling us the truth?’

  The psychologist’s eyes twinkled behind his horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Well,’ he began in the non-committal manner that infuriated Lorimer, ‘I think,’ he stressed the word, ‘that Miss Devoy is hiding something.’ He paused before continuing, ‘I also had the distinct impression that she was ready to say something to you, but that your line of questioning took her by surprise.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was the way she came into the room, actually. She was ready, prepared. Her manner seemed quite relaxed and she held herself as though she were about to make some sort of pronouncement.’

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  Solly shook his head, ‘No. Pity, really. I’d have been interested to see what fabrications she was going to tell us.’ He raised his eyebrows at Lorimer as if to invite a response.

  The chief inspector merely sighed. ‘Well, maybe you’re right, but it hasn’t got us much further, has it?’

  ‘And Mr Adams hasn’t turned up yet either, has he?’ Solly looked towards the door, as if expecting their next interviewee to walk in at any minute.

  ‘No, think it’s about time we found out why, don’t you?’

  ‘Hello?’ Lesley Adams picked up the telephone and listened, her hand going to her mouth as the voice at the other end identified himself as an officer of Strathclyde Police.

  ‘Malcolm! What’s happened to him? He hasn’t come home!’

  ‘Mummy! Where’s my book?’

  ‘Not now, sweetheart, not just now.’ Lesley shushed the child, clinging onto her chubby fingers as if they were a lifeline.

  ‘But Mummy-’

  ‘Mummy’s on the telephone, darling. No. No, I told you he’s not here,’ Lesley returned to the voice asking for the whereabouts of her husband. ‘He should have been home hours ago.’

  Alec Barr gave a huge sigh of relief as he swept away from Glasgow airport. Hinshelwood was gone at last. He’d given a brave version of West’s disappearance, sticking to the depression theory. It was a reasonable card to play, after all. With three of his colleagues dead, how must Hinshelwood have felt? West had no parents or wife to go home to, he’d said. And, besides, these sorts of illnesses were hard to spot, weren’t they? If Peter Hinshelwood was convinced, he didn’t show it. But at least he’d tried to sell the idea to his London colleague, Barr told himself, revving into the outside lane as he left the slip road.

  He was about to head for the city when his mobile rang. A quick flick of the hands-free button told him who was on the other line.

  ‘Malcolm,’ he began, ‘how did it go?’ Barr’s voice was hearty, encouraging.

  ‘Alec, I need to see you.’

  ‘Sure, sometime tomorrow?’

  ‘Now! It has to be now, Alec,’ Adams raised his voice. There was no mistaking the tone of desperation.

  ‘But I’m on my way to police headquarters, Malcolm,’ Barr protested.

  ‘I need to see you now!’

  There was a pause as Barr thought hard.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll see you in our usual place. Fifteen minutes max. That do you?’

  There was no reply, just an audible intake of breath before the phone went dead.

  CHAPTER 47

  It was midnight. The curtains were still undrawn against the gathering darkness. Tomorrow would be the first of May. When she was little, her mum would laugh and say they should wash their faces in the dew and they’d be pretty for the rest of the year. It was a joke, really, that old wives’ tale, but Lesley had always wanted to creep out in the dawn light and wipe the moisture from the wet grass across her cheeks, just in case.

  Where was Malcolm? she thought desperately, for the hundredth time. This had never happened before. He wasn’t one of the drinking and carousing types that she read about in the Sunday papers, those men who seemed to live such unpleasant lives of clubs and pubs where sexual adventuring was the norm. Malcolm would never — she bit her lip to stop the tears coming again. Where was he? She’d wanted to phone Mum earlier, just as a comfort, but her older wiser self stopped her hand lifting the phone. It would be selfish to worry her mum. There was nothing to worry about, was there? Yet, a little voice suggested unkindly, turning her bowels to water.

  When the telephone rang, Lesley Adams jumped as if she’d been stung. Stumbling away from the window, she grasped the phone and pressed it to her ear.

  ‘Hello? Malcolm! Is that you?’

  The voice on the other end of the line was unfamiliar and Lesley sat heavily on the edge of the bed, expecting the worst, expecting this to be the police telling her that Malcolm was dead.

  But as she listened, Lesley Adams sat up straighter. The voice was telling her things that she could never have believed, things far, far worse than the sleazy goings-on outlined in any colour supplements. That Malcolm had been involved … She couldn’t imagine her gentle husband being mixed up …

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Lesley whispered at last, gripping the phone so tight that her fingers hurt.

  With a sigh, the voice at the other end told her.

  Lorimer lay awake staring into the darkness. Beside him Maggie moaned softly, dreaming about something she’d forget by morning. Unlike his wife, Lorimer always remembered his dreams but as yet he’d not even managed to fall asleep.

  Adams had never shown up. His wife had been hysterical, they’d said, and Lorimer had initiated a discreet search for the man. He thought of Adams, he’d been the quiet one of the four. A mere stick of a man, his fair hair thin against a cadaverous skull. But his face had softened with pity, Lorimer remembered, when he’d asked questions about Duncan Forbes and Jennifer Hammond. Pity and grief, he thought, striving to recall the details of that meeting in Carlton Place. Yes, that was it. He’d appeared quite stricken, in a silent sort of way.

  They knew little about Adams as yet. It seemed he was a family man whose wife cared enough to break dow
n and beg the police to find him for her, to bring him home. None of that day’s searching had turned up anything unsavoury about these Forbes Macgregor partners. They were as clean as the proverbial whistle, but the masses of shredded paperwork suggested that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make this so. Tomorrow he’d have the fingerprints off both sets of bags; those at the offices and the ones West had left outside his flat. If they matched, as Lorimer supposed they would, then their hunt for the fugitive would intensify.

  Alec Barr had been helpful in that respect. He’d seemed reluctant to part with the knowledge that West had been suffering from some kind of depression. It was an old-fashioned reaction, to speak about mental instability in such hushed tones, but that was exactly what Barr had done. The man had seemed weary, and Lorimer couldn’t blame him. Trying to hold on to the remnants of his world must be hard, yet Barr had maintained a dignity that the senior investigating officer admired. He’d looked grim, as if fearing the worst, and had answered all of Lorimer’s questions with a directness that he’d found refreshing after the clipped responses he usually had to listen to. When asked what he thought was going on, he’d sounded genuinely perplexed. It was a nightmare of someone else’s making, Lorimer thought. Barr would be losing sleep right now, just like the rest of them, trying to figure out what West had done, why he’d done it, and what would happen to his firm once all the facts were uncovered.

  And more would be, Lorimer thought with a yawn, when tomorrow finally came.

  She heard a baby’s cry, sharp and insistent, as she sat bolt upright in the bed. But as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, Liz Forbes was only aware of her own breathing. There was no baby in the house; Janey and the family had gone home. It must have been a dream, Liz decided, lying back against the pillows. The night air was cool in their bedroom and the linen curtains moved as a breeze blew in. Duncan had always liked an airy bedroom and she’d become accustomed to the night sounds over the years. There were always noises from the garden: trees soughing in the wind, their resident owl deep within the adjoining woods and, sometimes, the bark of a fox.