“If there were any items of a dubious provenance, we weren’t aware of that.” Becky was evidently choosing her words with care. “We used an expert to verify them, but sometimes even a specialist can’t be entirely certain.”
“You’re telling me you had no idea that you and ‘Trowelboy’ were dealing in fakes?” Pru’s use of Howarth’s supposed online name brought a brief flicker of recognition from the witness. “You’re an intelligent woman, and given your record of spouting lies to us, I’m finding it hard to believe you.”
Becky slapped the table, making Pru flinch. “What do you want me to say?”
“The truth, the whole truth and nothing but.” Robin forced his body to relax, forced himself to put on a friendlier face. “It’ll be better for all of us, not least you. You can’t run forever.”
Somehow he’d found the right words to pierce the armour. The witness put her hand to her face. “Do you know,” she said in a tremulous voice, “I’m so tired of having to hide.”
“Take your time.” Robin rose, said what he was intending to do—for the benefit of that all-important recording—then walked to the door and called for the constable on duty to get them all a cup of tea.
“Thanks. This is going to be thirsty work.” Becky, who’d produced a hankie, dabbed her eyes before continuing. “I knew Charlie Howarth at uni. Not ‘knew’ in the biblical sense. He got back in contact best part of three years ago, saying he was in my neck of the woods and suggesting we meet up. It turned out he wanted to make a business proposition: selling legitimately sourced items online—everything from bits of Roman glass to World War II-era helmets. Part of my role would be to verify what was being sold, either directly or via one of my contacts. It was, as they say, ‘a nice little earner.’ We should have stuck with that.”
“So what happened?” Pru asked.
“One of Charlie’s ‘big ideas.’ He started getting enquiries about whether we could provide certain specialised items for certain collectors. When we couldn’t obtain them legally, he thought it could be an idea to provide a substitute. The way he sold the notion to me was that we would be making these clients happy.”
Pru gave a snort. “You fell for that?”
“Yeah, I did. I’m not proud of it, but I was at a low point. Mum had been diagnosed with cancer—she’s in remission now—and I wasn’t thinking straight.” The answer appeared to be an honest one, although it could simply be a convenient excuse to use; nobody would be heartless enough to question it. “And once you’re in these things, it’s hard to get free. You tell yourself you’ll do something about it, and then you chicken out. It goes on, getting worse and worse.”
Robin, mind never far from the Anderson situation, was beginning to appreciate how people ended up in that sort of a mess, almost impotent to deal with it. “We’ll need the details of what went on—names of anybody who bought a faked item, for a start—but those particulars can wait. You can either come into Abbotston to make a full statement or the duty officer here can take one. First, I need to know who was involved apart from you and Howarth.”
“There was a girl called Pippa Palmer. She was another friend of Howarth’s. I guess he inveigled her into working with us, just like he’d inveigled me.”
Robin had difficulty imagining Becky Bairstow being coerced into doing anything she didn’t want. “You’re saying that neither of you wanted to be involved in this business?”
“I’m saying that neither of us realised what we were getting into until it was too late. Anyway, Pippa provided the independent verification for artefacts. Only it wasn’t really independent, was it?”
When no more was forthcoming, Robin nudged the witness with, “You’d better tell us that.”
“It wasn’t entirely independent,” Becky conceded. “She didn’t make huge amounts out of it, though.”
“Enough to go travelling?” Pru cut in. “Like you did?”
“Hardly.” Becky gave the sergeant an old-fashioned look. “There wasn’t that much money in the business, although Howarth had plans to make a big coup. I suspect he was hoping for a ‘Hitler Diaries’ moment. He can whistle for that, now.”
“Were you threatened by any of the people you’d conned?” Robin wrested the questioning back.
“Eh?” Becky, clearly flustered, screwed her hankie into a ball.
“Please answer the question.” Pru tapped the table. “Were you threatened with prosecution for fraud?”
“Yes.” The answer came with a hint of relief; had Becky expected a different question? “Albeit the threats never amounted to anything. Not enough evidence for a prosecution, although I suppose our reputations could have been sullied. People will persist in believing there’s no smoke without fire.”
“But that wasn’t enough to make you want to do a runner, was it?” An inkling of an idea had formed in Robin’s mind. “Exactly what threats were made? Apart from seeing you in court.”
The witness hesitated again, evidently weighing her options once more.
“We know there’s more to it than that,” Robin said, keeping the pressure up.
“All right, all right. There was a relative of someone who bought an item from us. Several items, about two years ago, when we started on the faked stuff. A couple of months later he had an accident, but she seemed convinced it was suicide, brought on because he couldn’t believe he’d been scammed.” Words were tumbling out now, as Becky seemed to be getting her version of the story onto the record. “She started with saying she wanted to ruin us, but when we wouldn’t respond, the intimidation got worse. She made comments online, saying what she’d like to do to us.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “For the record, will you detail precisely what those comments were?”
Becky screwed her eyes shut, shuddering before proceeding. “She said she was going to strangle us with her bare hands, then smack us over the head with a real piece of stone from a Roman villa, before burying us alive with one of our own faked artefacts. It sounds really silly, and we didn’t take it seriously at first.”
It did sound like a ridiculously overworked threat, although it possessed a chilling edge. Had Pru—who was keeping a remarkable poker face—noticed what Robin had? “You said ‘at first.’ What changed?”
“Howarth counter-threatened. Said he’d report her to the police, given that physical threats were much worse than anything we were accused of doing, so she took the online comments down. Last year it started again. She’d managed to find a contact address for us—Howarth’s on LinkedIn, so it was easy enough for her to write to him via the council. She repeated the threats. Said she knew where we lived and was just biding her time. Fortunately, I won the lottery and got away before she had any opportunity to make those threats reality.”
A knock on the door heralded the arrival of the local bobby with steaming mugs of tea and an unexpected plate of biscuits. Robin pressed his stomach, constraining the rumbling, although once he’d got a biscuit inside him, he was straight back into the fray.
“Did the person who made the threats have a name?” Stupid question. Everybody had a name. “I mean, who was it?”
“I don’t have absolute proof, but I think it was Sian Wheatstone. Jerry’s ex. He had a hell of a shock when I told him my suspicions. That’s partly what threw us together.” Becky took another sip of tea. “He was sorry for me, and scared for himself. They’d not long been going out—only since she moved here, obviously—and he didn’t want to be hooked up with a psycho.”
Quite. At last some of the elements in the case were pulling together. Robin took a drink—not the best cuppa he’d ever had, but it was warm, wet, and welcome. “So why did you say earlier that you were having an affair with Howarth?”
“I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I don’t mind taking the rap myself, but it’s different dobbing in your colleagues. Especially when you’ve been asked to keep up the pretence.”
“Who asked you to keep up the pretence?”
“Charlie, of course. He rang me yesterday, saying that things were getting a bit hairy. He couldn’t work out how you’d got onto us.”
“A lot of hard graft.” And a bit of luck, with Sophie Baxter and her father, and the line of enquiry they had led to, although he wasn’t going to mention that. “Going back to that first interview you gave—”
“Which I came and gave voluntarily,” Becky clarified, no doubt for the benefit of the tape.
“Which you did,” Robin confirmed, “even if you weren’t entirely candid with us. Why did you tell us you were orphaned? And get your ‘ex’ to back up that part of the story?”
“Isn’t that painfully obvious?”
Pru sniffed. “Answer the question for the tape, please.”
“Because I was scared for my parents’ welfare. If we were being threatened, then they might have been at risk too. We were told it wasn’t just us in the firing line.”
That might be so, although the fact that “being orphaned” would have added credence to her disappearance story couldn’t have hurt, either. Still, Robin wasn’t convinced the story of these threats and her reaction to them hung together. Anybody that hell bent on revenge would surely have been able to track down any living relatives? “So why did you come back at all? Weren’t you safer staying away? Your parents must have known you weren’t the woman found at Culford.”
“Don’t you think I considered all that? But I’m tired of running and hiding. Okay, Jerry’s got the job in Stuttgart, but at some point we’ll want to move back here—now seemed the right moment to begin that process.”
That could also be the truth, given Becky’s apparent tendency to seize an opportunity and make the most of it, although there were several elements which continued to make little sense. Pru’s thoughts must have been on the same lines, given her next question. “If Sian was the one making the threats, why is she working at Culford? I’d have thought Howarth would want to keep her at arm’s length.”
“He didn’t know she was working there. The woman who manages the day-to-day stuff at the site—Cathy? Clare?—took her on as a volunteer.” Becky knocked back the last of her tea, then plonked the mug down decisively on the table. “Can you imagine the shock he got when he came across her?”
“I can, except that you and he were still operating your business out of Culford after she began volunteering there. Wasn’t that taking a huge risk?”
“It was, in retrospect, but—as I said—when we restarted, he didn’t know she was there. He’d planned to lie low, and then resume only the legitimate side of the business once we thought we were safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been keeping an eye on him all that time.”
It was certainly suspicious that Sian had come to Culford; maybe she still had an agenda to work through. Becky’s explanation that Howarth had been shocked to find Sian on-site might be the truth, depending on the exact timing and sequence of events. It would also further strengthen the rationale for Becky and Jerry having left the country, getting out of the way of somebody they regarded as unstable.
“Okay. We’ll talk to Howarth and might have to come back to you on that point.” Robin pretended to check his notes, letting the witness stew for a moment. “We know the dead woman was buried at Culford around the time you and Jerry left. Who do you think she is?” He glanced up and caught an uncomfortable flicker across Becky’s face.
She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Pru’s snort would sound loud and clear on the tape. “You’re an intelligent woman. Do you expect us to believe that you haven’t any suspicions?”
Becky closed her eyes, although whether to compose herself or get her story together, Robin couldn’t tell. “I did wonder if it could be Pippa Palmer,” she said at last. “She was a lynchpin to our business, on several fronts. Really good, actually, where genuine items were concerned. She came up with a lot of supporting evidence for each object’s veracity, examples of similar artefacts and the like. Pippa knew her stuff.”
Pru sniffed again; Becky appeared to produce the same reactions in her as Howarth did in Robin. “Was she equally convincing about fakes?”
Becky quickly suppressed a sly smile. “Pippa had a way with words. She could put together a document full of information which could be read two ways. On the surface of it the authenticity of the item was proven, but if you read through carefully, at no point was that veracity stated explicitly. That’s why we weren’t that worried about all that ‘being charged with fraud’ stuff.”
She was evidently still not worried about it, given how she’d provided chapter and verse on the business. Fraud prosecutions were notoriously difficult to secure a conviction with, and Robin knew that on such a small scale the Crown Prosecution Service might not bother. Sian Wheatstone—or any of the other victims—might have been able to take a case to the small-claims court, but people didn’t necessarily make the effort.
Robin pressed on. “And Sian Wheatstone was threatening Pippa too? Because she was the one who’d verified the objects?”
“Yes. Although part of me says she can’t be the dead woman. Like you pointed out, she took my approach to matters and got herself out of harm’s way. There was nothing suspicious at the time she went, and I’m sure I’ve had emails from her since then.”
“Did you keep them?”
“No. Why should I?” That belligerent edge had appeared again. “They didn’t contain anything important; they’ve been long deleted.”
Conveniently so, if they held information about the fakes. “Did the pair of you plan your respective escapes together?”
“Not quite. I mean, when we were first threatened, we made a bit of a joke about how we all needed to run away, but I certainly didn’t have any intention of doing so until things got nastier. Pippa went before I did.”
“Not perhaps in the way you’re implying,” Pru mumbled.
“Sorry?” Becky gave the sergeant a withering glance.
Pru, flushing, reverted to her normal “for the tape” voice. “So, do you think she’s dead or not?”
“I don’t see how she can be. Where did the emails come from? You’re surely not suggesting that somebody’s impersonating her?” Becky rolled her eyes. “That’s like something out of a film.”
“I don’t think we suggested anything.” Robin was tiring of faffing around. “You were the one who put Pippa’s name forwards, and then you started backtracking. Have you proof that she’s still alive, other than the emails? Have you met her?”
“No, I’ve not met Pippa since then, not that I know of.”
Not that I know of. An odd choice of words. “Can you explain what you mean by that?”
“Well, I never actually met her face-to-face in the first place. Everything was done online, and she hated posting photos of herself. I wouldn’t recognise her if she were in this room.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t know if she was dead or not?”
“I suppose so. It’s all a bit bewildering.” Becky didn’t exactly sound bewildered—more like she was choosing words carefully. So used to having to keep up a pretence and being in a constant state of watching her back that it had become habitual? Irrespective, it appeared there was little further to be gained at this point. Robin reminded the witness that they were expecting her to make a full statement about the faked artefacts, and that the police would want to talk to her again when they had new information. He made a bit of an act of getting his papers together, then glanced up. “One final question.”
“I thought you’d finished. You’ve stopped recording.”
“We have. This is more for our information than anything potentially to be used in evidence. Are you selling your story to the tabloids? Or one of the celebrity magazines?”
Becky, jaw dropping, couldn’t have feigned her degree of surprise. “How preposterous. Where did you get that idea from?”
“A reliable source.”
“Not that reliable, then, because that�
��s the last thing I’d do. And especially not given what I’ve said about being under threat. Selling stories to the media is the lowest of the low.”
“That’s what I suspected,” Robin assured her, “but I had to check.”
They delivered the witness into the local officer’s care, to give as full a statement as possible about the fakes business, then returned to the interview room to debrief.
“What was with the tabloids question, sir?” Pru asked.
“I don’t like things not adding up. If Becky was so scared that she’d gone to all these lengths trying to protect herself and her family, why would she risk that by selling her story? And if she isn’t selling her story, why are people saying she is?”
“Good point.” The sergeant paused, pen in hand. “There are a lot of points that don’t add up, though. I’m still not entirely convinced by her reasons for returning now.”
“Neither am I. Nor the story about her and Howarth restarting their business, although that’s timeline dependant, I guess. If they genuinely didn’t know that Sian had started volunteering at Culford, they might have taken the risk.” Robin took a deep breath then exhaled loudly. “Plenty about this case bugs me. Too much pretence. Too many lies. Where’s a good old domestic barney followed by hubby getting hit over the head with a rolling pin when you need it?”
“I never thought I’d be hankering for that sort of case, but it’s starting to look attractive.” Pru picked up her things and headed for the door. “Coming, sir?”
“In a minute. Just getting a few more ideas straight.”
“Ideas? Like wondering if Agnew or his wife might have lied to us about Hello?”
“I’ve been considering that, although maybe somebody else put the rumour around and Mrs. Agnew believed what she heard. You know what the internet’s like; one person says something and it spreads like wildfire. Misinformation seems to spread fastest of all.”
“One of their dupes who still bears a grudge?” Pru, standing by the door clutching her bag, clearly impatient to get away and back to familiar territory, asked, “You talked about Becky keeping a low profile, but the fact she’s alive is already in the public domain. Walking into our police station made it so. She can’t hide completely.”
Two Feet Under (Lindenshaw Mysteries Book 3) Page 17
