The Seagull

by Ann Cleeves

  The beer and the chocolate seemed to have given Vera a burst of energy and pulled her attention back to the case.

  ‘So what have you got for us, Joe? You must have come to some conclusions. You read through all this stuff in the Marshall house. I’d like a concrete idea of the way that Brace, Marshall and the Prof. were linked financially to Gus Sinclair. We know they mixed socially, but there must have been more to the relationship than that. I found out today that Sinclair has been insinuating himself into the landed-gentry set, so he might have been part of Brace’s scheme to hire out thugs to the minor aristocracy. No way of proving it, though.’

  Joe shifted uneasily in his seat. Holly wondered what that was about. Joe was Vera’s blue-eyed boy. He had nothing to fear from her.

  ‘There was a regular payment into Marshall’s account. There’s only a reference number on the statement, but the financial investigator has already tracked it down. It came from the business account of The Seagull.’

  ‘What do we think?’ Vera looked round at her team. ‘Were they business partners and Marshall was getting a return on his investment, a share of the profits?’

  Charlie was looking at a copy of the statement. ‘I don’t think The Seagull ever made that much of a profit.’

  ‘What, then?’ Vera’s voice was excited now. Almost girlish. In this mood, Holly thought she looked at least ten years younger than her real age. ‘Was this a retainer for services rendered?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Charlie said. He drank the last of his coffee. ‘But we know Marshall was a fixer. There would have been costs to making the Sinclair business empire run smoothly. Cops to pay. Councillors. Perhaps that was the service Marshall provided to Sinclair, and the money was a kind of slush fund for Marshall to pass on.’

  There was a moment of silence. They were all waiting for Vera’s reaction. ‘I can see that would work,’ she said at last. ‘I’m not sure how it would provide a motive for killing Robbie Marshall, though.’

  ‘Unless he was ripping Sinclair off.’ Holly wanted to show that she could make a contribution. ‘Keeping all the money for himself.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ But Vera sounded dubious. ‘I’m not sure that was the sort of man Marshall was, though. He enjoyed making things happen, keeping in with the power-players. I think that gave him more of a buzz than the cash. Like Charlie said, he was a fixer. That was his reputation.’ Another silence. ‘It would be good to track down some of those people Marshall was paying on Sinclair’s behalf. Test the theory. Any ideas, Charlie? Some ex-police who took the cash but might have a conscience after all these years?’

  He nodded. ‘You’d never get them to go on the record. Brace’s sentence frightened them all.’

  ‘It’s information I’m after at this point, man. Not justice.’

  Charlie nodded again.

  Vera went on. ‘I wonder if Sinclair’s working in the same way now. Using someone else to do his dirty work, to bribe the planners and the councillors to let him build his gleaming new Whitley Bay. According to my neighbour, he’s buying up half the town for rental properties. And that’s beside his development of the old Seagull site.’

  ‘You think he might have been using Gary Keane?’ Joe had been quiet all evening, listening but staring into the fire. Now he turned back to face them.

  ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Vera’s cheeks were red from the flames. ‘We’ve assumed that the Prof. was involved in his death, because he left a message on Keane’s voicemail arranging to meet. But would a killer – someone we know to be an intelligent man – really leave a message that he knew we’d find? Besides, what would his motive be? But if both Sinclair’s fixers have ended up dead, that would be some coincidence.’ She paused for a moment and Holly could tell that her mind was racing. ‘You talked to Keane’s neighbours, Hol. Any sense that he might be part of Sinclair’s world? His business empire or the nouveaux-riches hunting-and-shooting crowd?’

  ‘I didn’t get anything like that,’ Holly said. ‘He certainly had aspirations, but they were more urban. Nice food and good wine. He’d even joined a book group. And he was dating a younger woman. Someone called Felicity, the daughter of a bookseller.’ Holly thought of Patty’s house, the mess and the kids. ‘It was as if he was trying to reinvent himself.’

  ‘So perhaps he was ripping Sinclair off. Paying for his new lifestyle. I don’t see him as a natural fixer, like Marshall.’ Vera absent-mindedly took another biscuit. ‘That might be a motive.’

  ‘Where does John Brace fit into the theory?’ Holly looked at Vera’s face and hurried on. ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense, because it does. I just want to know if we can fit all the pieces together.’

  ‘Eh, pet, sometimes things just aren’t that tidy. But I bet John Brace was getting money from Sinclair when The Seagull was still in operation. Probably through Marshall. And I think he’s still got a load stashed away somewhere. Someone’s keeping Patty’s bairns in computer games and fancy phones. Can we find out if he’s still in business with Sinclair and his associates? He could be an investor or sleeping partner. And there might be other people involved. People who wouldn’t want their relationship with Sinclair, Brace or Keane made public. We know that Brace was put inside for sourcing muscle for country landowners. No one else was implicated at the time of the court case, but he could have pulled in colleagues. That’s another one for you, Charlie.’

  Vera heaved herself to her feet and went to the kitchen for more beer and coffee. In the gap that followed, Holly took out her phone to check for emails. No signal. She wasn’t even sure that Vera had Wi-Fi.

  Vera returned, took another couple of biscuits from the packet and continued talking as if she hadn’t been away.

  ‘Is there anything else we should talk about? Or is it time for you folk to piss off and let me get some beauty sleep?’

  ‘There is something else.’ That was Joe, talking quietly. ‘A regular payment by cheque to an individual.’ He pulled out the copy statement and underlined one of the transactions, pushed it across the table towards Vera.

  She looked up sharply. ‘Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you saw it?’

  He shifted in his seat again. A small boy caught out in a fib. ‘I didn’t hide it!’

  ‘So Marshall paid Hector five hundred quid. It could have been payment for a piece of taxidermy. His share of some raptor eggs.’ Now they could both have been children, fighting in the playground, for pride, to save face. Holly felt embarrassed. This was a conversation that shouldn’t be happening in front of an audience.

  ‘It wasn’t a one-off payment,’ Joe said. ‘I’ve gone back through the statements and each month there was a cheque for the same amount.’

  Another silence. The fire spat, and outside there was the faint rumble of a car moving down the track to the farm next door.

  ‘It probably means nothing,’ Joe said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I think it means Hector was a crook.’ Now Vera looked every month of her age. ‘I always knew he was, of course. The birds and the taxidermy. None of it legal. But this links him with Sinclair. Everything that went on at The Seagull. Sex workers like Mary-Frances.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking daft. It’s not your fault. Mine, for wanting to think well of him, despite everything.’ She stood up, very nimble on her feet despite her weight. ‘Now it’s time for you to go. I need my bed.’

  Outside it was dark and clear. More stars than you ever saw in the city. Joe and Charlie were travelling back together, but Holly had her own car. She stood for a moment and watched them drive away. The lights were still on in Vera’s house and the curtains hadn’t been drawn. Holly watched her boss sit back down at Hector’s table. She was tempted to go back, to offer Vera a chance to talk about her dad, but she knew that sort of approach wouldn’t be welcome.

  Vera began to sort through the papers that were lying in front of her. Then she pushed them away and got to her feet, took a wood
en box from the mantelpiece and opened it. Holly watched her pull out a pile of photographs and sort through them, one at a time. She must have found what she was looking for because she stopped and stared at it. Holly was too far away to see the image and she was anxious that Vera would catch her prying, so she didn’t move any closer to the window. At last Vera replaced all the pictures in the box. She reached out for a chocolate biscuit but the packet was empty, and she screwed the paper into a ball and threw it into the grate.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Vera got to the station early, feeling tired and hung-over, although she’d only had a couple of bottles of beer the night before. It was the complication of this case. All the tangle and mess, which had kept her up until the early hours fighting to find a single thread, one explanation to link the three victims. She longed for simplicity and order – clean lines like the sweeping curves of The Seagull of her memory. The big open-plan office was still busy with detectives working on the inquiry, but the members of her gang were out and she felt the loss of them. Now the chaos was all in her head. If she’d been able to talk to the others, she might get rid of some of it. And at the back of the confusion there was Hector, tied up with a pile of buried bones, and she had to consider that he might be a murderer. She started working through the phone calls and messages that had come in from the public overnight and tried to push all thoughts of Hector to the back of her mind.

  There was a knock on the door and Charlie poked his head round. It seemed he’d made an early start too.

  ‘Come in, man.’ She knew she sounded too enthusiastic, too desperate for distraction.

  ‘I’ve been talking to some of the people who were close to Brace. There’s someone I think you might want to chat to.’

  ‘Oh? Got a name for him?’

  ‘Not a him,’ Charlie said. ‘A her. Janice Gleeson.’

  Vera remembered Gleeson. Older than her and a bit of a heroine. She’d pushed open the door to promotion and then held it for Vera to come through. Not all women in the force worked that way. She’d ended up as assistant chief constable in a smaller county in the south, then moved back to Northumberland on retirement. ‘You’re not saying Brace corrupted her too?’

  ‘Not in that way. I think she admired him. Believed him too easily. Thought he was on the side of the angels, a bit rough around the edges but one of the good guys.’

  Vera nodded. Brace had affected a lot of officers in that way. ‘Will she speak to us?’

  ‘She’ll speak to you.’

  * * *

  Gleeson lived with her husband in a windswept house in an unfashionable part of the Northumberland coast. It had a view of the sea, but also pylons, an offshore wind-farm and the site of a redundant power-station. Vera liked that. The fact that Gleeson was keeping it real, not living in a cottage in a chocolate-box village that could have been in Surrey or Somerset. The house was made of old red brick and grey slate and backed by tall trees. The leaves had started to drop and, when Vera arrived, the woman was raking them up from an untidy lawn. She was tall, angular, striking in a Glenda Jackson sort of way.

  ‘It was good of you to see me.’ Vera struggled not to add ma’am.

  Gleeson straightened and leaned on the rake. ‘Shall we go in? Edward’s gone into Morpeth for shopping. We’ll have the place to ourselves.’

  Vera tried to remember something about Gleeson’s husband. Had he been a lawyer? An accountant? Something professional, at least. Gleeson was still talking. ‘I wasn’t sure he’d be much good at retirement, but he loves it. He’s taken to domesticity, cooking especially. We eat very well.’

  She led Vera into a kitchen that could have come out of a country-living magazine. Aga, scrubbed pine table, pots of herbs. There was even a cat on a rocking chair next to the stove. Gleeson pushed it to the floor and offered Vera the seat, then disappeared to take off the mac she’d been wearing for gardening. There was a rookery in the trees, and Vera could hear the birds calling through the open window.

  ‘Charlie says you want to talk about John Brace.’ They were drinking coffee, eating Edward Gleeson’s home-made biscuits.

  Vera thought this domestic bliss was all very well, but she’d go mad with boredom if this was her life. And perhaps that was why Gleeson had agreed to meet her. Because she was bored out of her tree too. ‘Did Charlie give you the background? Tell you about Brace putting us on to the bones buried at St Mary’s? We know one set belongs to Robbie Marshall and suspect the second is Mary-Frances Lascuola. Now another associate of Brace, Gary Keane, has been killed in his flat in Bebington.’

  Gleeson nodded. ‘I’m not sure how I can help, though.’

  ‘You were around at the time. A colleague of John Brace.’

  There was a silence. ‘I got sucked in,’ she said at last. ‘Brace could do that. Make you feel special. One of the gang. He was my boss, and I was the only woman in the team. He made sure there was no disrespect.’

  ‘The common link between Marshall and Keane was a club called The Seagull in Whitley Bay. It’s not there any more. Do you remember it?’

  Gleeson looked straight at Vera and seemed to come to a decision. ‘I went there regularly.’

  ‘As a punter? Not for work?’ Vera was surprised. She wouldn’t have had Janice Gleeson down as a clubbing type.

  ‘Edward was Gus Sinclair’s accountant.’

  Silence, while Vera tried to digest the relevance of the information.

  ‘I got caught up with the glamour of the place.’ Gleeson had turned away from Vera now and was staring out of the window at the swaying trees and the rooks. ‘Seduced, I suppose. By the celebrities and the music, the designer dresses. I’d never been anywhere like it. And I persuaded myself that I wasn’t there as a police officer, but as Edward’s wife. The free dinners and the bottles of champagne sent to our table were a gift to him and not to me. I told myself that I wasn’t being compromised in any way.’

  ‘But perhaps your husband was?’ Vera kept her voice quiet. There was no condemnation implied in the question. After all, what right had she to judge? Her father had been taking money from Marshall.

  ‘Edward’s a good man. Decent.’

  ‘But like you said, it would have been hard not to get sucked in.’

  Gleeson turned back into the room. ‘He was glad when Sinclair left the area and moved back to Glasgow. It gave Edward the excuse to give up the work and drop all contact.’

  ‘What was going on there, Janice? What can you tell me?’

  ‘There was nothing criminal. Nothing you could prove.’

  ‘I’m not asking for proof, pet. I’m asking you to point me in the right direction. We’ve got three deaths here. Three victims.’

  Gleeson took a while to answer. It seemed she was struggling to pull together the right words. Vera had once seen her giving evidence in a rape trial and she’d been the same then. Calm. Determined to describe clearly exactly what had taken place. ‘There was more money in the company account than the Whitley Bay business could possibly have generated.’

  ‘Where was it coming from?’

  ‘Edward asked at the time, of course. Sinclair claimed to have a number of rental properties and that might have been true, but the sums still didn’t stack up.’

  ‘So what are we talking here?’ Vera could sense a rising impatience and tried to keep it under control. ‘Money from trafficking? Drugs? Prostitution?’

  ‘That was my first thought.’

  ‘But?’ Because Vera could tell from Janice Gleeson’s voice that there would be a but.

  ‘Edward thought it was more likely to be money-laundering.’

  ‘From Sinclair Senior’s activities in Scotland?’ Suddenly the business model of The Seagull became clear. It had never been intended to make money. How could somewhere so sophisticated, so sleek, be successful in a tacky seaside town like Whitley Bay? It was there to soak up the Scottish ganglands’ profits and make them respectable. In that case, why had it been burned down?
r />   Gleeson nodded slowly.

  ‘Could anyone else have guessed what was going on?’ Because Vera thought at last they had a motive here, for Robbie Marshall’s murder at least. Perhaps Robbie had wanted part of the action. Perhaps he was tired of being Sinclair’s fixer and decided to become a player.

  ‘Gus’s father, Alec, started spending more time in Tyneside. To visit his son, he said, but someone might have realized that he had more interest in the business than in his family.’ Gleeson sounded tired now. Drained. ‘And I assume the women would have known.’

  ‘The women?’

  ‘Sinclair’s business partners – on paper at least. Elaine, who went on to become his wife, and Judith Brace.’

  Vera sat upright, so that the rocking chair creaked and the cat slid away from its place by the stove. ‘Judith Brace was Sinclair’s business partner?’ Judith, who’d pointed them in the direction of Elaine as a chum of Marshall’s? What was that about?

  ‘I’m not sure she’d actually invested any cash in the place. But she came from a respectable family and her father was a magistrate. That was more important to Sinclair than any financial consideration. It gave him a certain legitimacy.’ Gleeson turned to Vera with a twisted smile. ‘And of course it did no harm that she was married to a senior police officer.’

  There was another pause. Vera was thinking of her next meeting with Judith Brace. Relishing the prospect of the confrontation, demanding to know why Judith hadn’t passed on that little piece of information. Gleeson was still talking.