Shot Through the Heart: DI Grace Fisher 2

by Isabelle Grey

  Which left whoever had shot the bastard as the possible sender of the anonymous email. Had the executioner been clever enough to stir up a quick hate campaign and simultaneously ensure that instead of only a handful of people with any idea of Church’s movements there was now a crowd of tabloid readers among whom his killer could hide?

  The conference room was already lively, and Ivo hailed a few familiar faces as he jockeyed for a seat where his line of sight wouldn’t be messed up by some beefed-up camera crew and their fucking sound booms. Recognizing the kind of snarling bad mood that a few years back would have had him heading for the nearest bar, he shook himself down, hoping that Hilary Burnett’s promise of a newsworthy development would provide sufficient distraction.

  As he waited to see whether Grace would be part of the line-up, he finally allowed himself to examine his reluctance to be here. Since his return from the Algarve earlier in the week, he’d been busy researching the overlapping networks of property development companies that had invested in the sandy coastline of Portugal, trying to establish where their funding originated and who ultimately held the deeds to the white stucco villas with the sea views. He’d got a few names, but you had to know how to make sense of all this company structure and finance stuff, and that wasn’t really his bag. So then he’d gone after Jerry Coghlan, looking back into his time on the Flying Squad, and digging deep into the oozing mud that had persuaded Coghlan to quit the job and piss off to Portugal. Not that his sins appeared all that black: money appeared to be his only motivation, and apart from a talent for losing paperwork in return for cash and a conspicuous failure to track down – officially, at least – the ill-gotten proceeds of various high-value robberies, he appeared to be a reasonably proficient thief-taker.

  If Ivo were honest, he’d only gone to Portugal in the hope of impressing DI Fisher, to ride to her rescue in some way. He hadn’t entirely failed, but all he’d really accomplished was to put a few names to faces and make a couple of interesting connections that still led nowhere.

  Yet his researches had obviously made someone unhappy. First off, one of the associate editors had dropped by his desk to remind him that the Courier had some very lucrative advertisers with interests in the Algarve, so best all round if Ivo just canned this Madeleine McCann stuff, or whatever story it was he’d been chasing out there. And then, the morning of the Gordon Church shooting, he’d arrived in the newsroom to find that all his personal files had been wiped from the company system. Computer glitch, he was told, simple bad luck that he was the only one affected.

  Given how careful Ivo was about never using his work computer for anything remotely sensitive, he’d decided to take it as a compliment that he’d managed to provoke one of his unseen lords and masters into showing that they cared. What rattled him was why? Clearly he’d yanked someone’s chain, but whose? His real fear was that he’d blundered into something that would backfire on the very people he was trying to help. Maybe he should stick to simple muckraking and leave the knight-in-shining-armour stuff to people who knew what they were doing. Except that there was young Davey too. A kid in the power of adults who wouldn’t let him speak about what was really going on around him. It didn’t stand thinking about.

  Ivo had dedicated years of drinking to the obliteration of the wounds that this cluster-fuck combination of Grace and Davey now threatened to scrape open. Self-medicating, the trick-cyclist had called it, though the chap had never been wily enough to trap him into telling tales. Nor had either of his two wives, nor even his daughter, wherever she was now. But Grace Fisher’s grey eyes, sometimes they made him want to drop to his knees and sob.

  Roused by the commotion as Hilary led the way to the long table set up in front of a huge image of the red, white and blue Essex Police crest, Ivo watched the door through which she’d entered for DI Fisher, but she did not appear. Instead, the communications director was followed by Colin Pitman and two men Ivo hadn’t seen before, whom she introduced as Detective Chief Inspector Tony Bullen from Lincolnshire and Detective Inspector Sajiv Gupta from Cambridgeshire. More disappointed than he liked to admit at Grace’s absence, Ivo settled down to hear the details of the newsworthy development.

  And, he had to admit, the story Colin presented was a neat package. Not only had a similar weapon, ammunition and MO featured in all three murders, but a similar-looking silvery-grey van had also been spotted in the vicinity of each shooting. In Ely someone had noted the registration plate of a van speeding from the scene. The plates turned out to have been stolen from a metallic-grey Renault Kangoo. A roadside camera, picking up the same stolen number plate, supplied what the police thought was an image of the man they were seeking: the driver wore a hat, sunglasses and a scarf over his mouth, which while of little use to the police – at least until a suspect was detained – would make the perfect moody shot for tomorrow’s front page. The photo combined with some cynical ambivalence over whether the shooter was a loose cannon or a twisted hero was going to make great copy.

  Meanwhile the three murder inquiries from Ely, Grantham and Colchester would be brought together under the leadership of Detective Superintendent Pitman, who would be looking for any common elements that had led the gunman to target these three individuals over a four-month period. Hilary then wrapped up by asking the media to remember that some of the victims had grieving families and, whatever their alleged crimes and convictions, they had a right to the full protection of the law. Among his fellow cowboys, her appeal not to inflame opinion and so risk inciting copycat incidents would have about as much effect as a cattle rustler’s entreaty to a lynch mob.

  Ivo hung about in case Grace came looking for him. He was in no hurry to file his copy – the story was already written in his head, and he could access any images he needed from the Essex Police media portal – and he wanted the chance to tell her that he’d hit a dead end. The room emptied, and he slowly followed the rest of the pack to the front entrance, where he lingered outside, pretending to check his phone. She came out soon afterwards, passing him without a glance.

  Ivo trailed her all the way to a dark and deserted park surrounding what looked like a Norman castle, but the gates were already locked. She shook her head in frustration and led the way instead to a nearby bus shelter. A bus had just departed, taking with it any waiting passengers, and they perched together on the slanted plastic bench while he told her the little he’d been able to find out about the beneficiaries of the Panama-registered shell company that held the titles to numerous Algarve villas. When he mentioned one name, her eyes grew bigger and rounder than he’d ever thought possible.

  ‘Leonard Ingold?’ she asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. He effectively owns the villa where both Adam Kirkby and your friend DS Cooper stayed. Why? Is he already on your radar?’

  ‘Yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s a local registered firearms dealer. And if I’m right about him, he’s also a major supplier of illicit guns and ammunition to half the criminals in England.’

  Ivo whistled through his teeth. ‘And he’s clever enough to implicate a steady stream of police officers eager to take advantage of free or heavily subsidized holidays in a sunshine villa paid for by the laundered proceeds of crime. Nice one!’

  Grace placed a hand over her mouth. ‘I just sent Lance to talk to his daughter.’

  46

  Grace was relieved to find Lance waiting for her when she returned to police HQ. She had spent the walk back debating with herself how much she ought to tell him, how much he’d be able to deal with. Her instinct was to offer as little as possible; on the other hand, if he’d managed to establish a rapport with Robyn – as she’d seen him do with young women before – then it was now more vital than ever to find grounds to arrest Leonard Ingold and search his premises.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Lance asked as she walked in. He was waiting by his desk, tightly coiled with impatience. Grace didn’t like the look of him.

  ‘Someone I had to see,’ s
he said. It was late and most people had gone home, but she drew him along with her into the relative privacy of her cubicle and pulled the spare chair up close to hers. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked. ‘Did Robyn speak to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s just a kid, Grace.’

  ‘A bright kid.’

  ‘Yes, but can you imagine what she’s going through?’

  ‘She’s trying to make sense of her life,’ said Grace.

  ‘And this is helping her do that?’

  ‘She’s had time to think this over.’ However much Grace might privately applaud Lance’s scruples, she couldn’t downplay her suspicions any longer: the tenuous net of connections, with Leonard right at the heart of them all, was being pulled too tight. If Lance had access to the girl, then Grace had to carry him with her. ‘Robyn chose to contact us a second time,’ she reminded him. ‘I didn’t pursue it.’

  He shook his head with a faint grimace of distaste.

  ‘Look, Lance, she needs to be sure she’s right about her father. Surely you understand that?’ she asked, checking over his shoulder that there was no one in earshot. ‘You wanted the truth, didn’t you? So does she. Why is it terrible to withhold it from you but not from her?’

  ‘Because she’d be sending her own father to prison.’

  ‘So she did tell you something?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘There must be some other way we can get to him.’

  ‘Oh, come on! Robyn’s father may very well have supplied the bullet that killed her friend. What are we supposed to do? Tell her there’s nothing we can do and we’re simply going to let him get on with it?’

  Grace wanted to give Lance time to come to his own decision, but as he stared moodily out at the leafless branches of winter trees thrown into witch-like relief by the streetlights below she made up her own mind: she had no choice but to press him, hard.

  ‘I’ve just found out something else,’ she said. ‘It may make you think differently. Do you want to know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The villa you stayed in. The same villa Adam Kirkby was staying in when that photograph of Peter, Adam and Coghlan was taken.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Want to know who owns it?’ Grace deliberately let her pause lengthen. ‘It’s Robyn’s dad. Leonard Ingold.’

  Watching the process of deduction play so plainly across Lance’s face – a face that had become dear to her – Grace watched him arrive at the same conclusions she’d reached during her meeting with Ivo.

  ‘So Peter wasn’t just investigating money-laundering,’ he said slowly. ‘He could have been after Leonard Ingold.’

  ‘We don’t know anything for sure.’ Picturing the dark gravel and brick of the alley where Peter had died, she despised herself for manipulating Lance in this way. But what choice did she have? She had a duty to too many other people.

  ‘But if Peter had been getting uncomfortably close to Ingold, it could’ve been Ingold who had him killed,’ said Lance. ‘Or even killed him himself?’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ she said as Lance rose to his feet. There wasn’t enough room in her cubicle for him to pace up and down, and Grace watched him anxiously, suddenly afraid of what she might have unleashed by opening up the possibility that Ingold could be responsible for Peter’s death. ‘That’s jumping way too far ahead,’ she pleaded. ‘You know what Colin would say: clear the ground beneath your feet. First we need to secure the evidence that Ingold is a criminal. Get the building-blocks in place one at a time.’

  ‘But Ingold must be friendly with John Kirkby and his sons.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Grace. ‘Again, we don’t know for certain. Could be that Jerry Coghlan acts as the lettings agent, so Adam Kirkby had no idea who the villa really belongs to, any more than you did.’

  Lance’s frown revealed the direction of his thoughts. ‘Except that Ingold befriended Duncan at the wildfowling club, and it holds open days and stuff for Police Federation members,’ he said. ‘John Kirkby’s a former local Federation chair, isn’t he? And it was the Federation who organized my trip for me.’

  ‘Still doesn’t mean John Kirkby knows Ingold as anything more than a friendly and obliging local registered firearms dealer who is entirely legit.’

  ‘Except Kirkby’s not exactly squeaky clean, is he?’ said Lance. ‘He must know that Coghlan was corrupt back in the day.’

  ‘Adam Kirkby’s a piece of work too,’ she agreed.

  ‘And it would certainly explain how Mark Kirkby came into possession of a Heckler & Koch G3.’

  ‘Yes, it would,’ she said. ‘But we really do need to go softly softly on this until we know more. We need to put Leonard Ingold in a position where he has to start talking to us.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That’s why, if Robyn gave you something, we need to use it.’

  Lance nodded, his mouth twisting oddly as he came to a decision. ‘She said her father has dumped at least two lots of stuff in the creek out beyond their garden.’ His voice was emotionless. ‘I pulled up a map on my phone and she showed me precisely where. We’d probably need a dredger to get them up.’

  Grace wasn’t quite sure what she felt: she’d have to think about that later. ‘When I went to his workshop,’ she said, ‘everything was pristine. He said he’d been having a long-overdue clear-out. If we find a repriming tool down there, then we’ve got him.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lance. ‘Do you think he’ll talk?’

  ‘Who knows? He’ll have plenty to say if he does. Given that he’ll be facing a long sentence, a letter to the judge saying he cooperated certainly wouldn’t do him any harm.’

  ‘Unless he goes down for murder.’ Lance’s mouth was now set in a hard line, and Grace didn’t much like the unnerving look in his eyes. She fervently hoped that she hadn’t somehow placed a bomb in his hands. She asked herself how it was possible, in five short weeks, for the relaxed and joyful friend who’d played Scrabble with her on Christmas Day to become someone she feared she might not really know at all.

  47

  Robyn hadn’t expected anything to happen quite so fast, especially not anything as noisy and large and physically present as the red dredging machine that was brought over from Tollesbury on a Saturday morning. At breakfast she and her parents had become aware of a distant and incessant engine noise, and, finishing off his mug of tea, her father had set off down the field with the dogs to find out what was going on.

  Robyn hadn’t accompanied him because it never occurred to her that it could be the police acting upon what she had told the young detective with the sad brown eyes. Leonard had returned, whistling to himself, and informed Robyn and Nicola that it was a dredger clearing silt. It was only after he’d disappeared into his workshop that Robyn suddenly perceived the significance of his statement. She had quickly made a clumsy excuse to her mother and taken herself off to confirm her fears.

  She stopped at a safe distance at the edge of the field beyond the poplar trees that marked the end of their land. From here she could see how the big tank treads of the dredger covered the entire width of the sea wall as the operator directed the bucket out across the muddy islets to scoop deep into the sucking mud of the main creek, in the exact spot she had described to DS Cooper. She was also near enough to make out the slim figure of Grace Fisher. The detective stood to one side of the public footpath that ran along the top of the sea wall. A couple of men Robyn didn’t recognize stood nearby. She looked closely, but DS Cooper definitely wasn’t with them. Grace Fisher barely moved as she watched the machine do its work. Fully exposed to the icy sting of the damp wind coming in off the water, she was well wrapped up in jeans, wellington boots and a warm padded jacket, and clearly prepared to brave the elements for as long as it took. Robyn felt sick, overwhelmed by the physical reality of what she had done.

  There was no way her dad hadn’t also seen the police presence, yet when he’d returned to the house he had said nothing to Nicola and
shown no sign of concern or fear – nor of the anger she dreaded. His incredible skill at masking his true feelings felt more terrifying than the rage he must surely feel inside.

  Grace Fisher turned briefly in Robyn’s direction but made no sign of recognition. Robyn knew that they were going to find the sack she had seen her father throw into the deep mud of the creek, and maybe more besides. She assumed now that the other bags she’d watched him carry down there must contain items he did not want found: why else would he have lied to her about his actions? She was suddenly desperate to know what would happen next. Would they arrest him? And, if so, would it all happen fast, so fast she would never have to face him, never have to look at him? Have no time even to say goodbye. If not, then it would be her turn to conceal her most desperate thoughts and feelings, to hide from him what she had done, and she could not imagine how she could possibly do that for a single minute, let alone whole days.

  For he must already have realized that this monstrous machine was here, its long arm stretching out to gouge deep into the mud, because of her. There was no one else who could have known to tell the police to search in this exact spot. So how had he managed to walk so calmly back into the house and tell her and her mother that there was nothing to worry about?

  Robyn could never have dreamed that her father would possess the capacity to act so convincingly that, even when she could imagine all too vividly what they must be, she could not guess his true emotions. The only other possible – impossible – explanation was that he did not suspect her at all, that he found the idea of her betrayal so unimaginable that it had never even occurred to him. That thought was almost worse.

  She had always loved her father more than anyone else in the world, and had always believed her love to be returned in full. But clearly neither of them had the remotest inkling of what secrets the other possessed. Unless the deeper truth was that he simply had no feelings to conceal. Or not for her, anyway. Which was perhaps as it should be. After what she had done, she did not deserve his love.