by Jack Gatland
‘Did he have any other friends?’ Jess asked. ‘I was at least hoping to speak to people who knew him.’
’Try the college,’ the receptionist suggested. ‘Or if not there, the Regal Picturehouse on Boroma Way. There’s a downstairs cafe that they all liked to meet up at.’
Jess thanked the receptionist and made her way down Bell Street, towards the Picturehouse while she considered what she’d learned. Nathanial Wing was a debtor. Could someone have cashed in their chit? Demanded payment and, when he failed to do this, killed him? It certainly made better sense now why Nathan Wing was classed as a suicide. And a son hideously in debt was one of the worst insults that parents who were incredibly traditional could endure. It was probably why they wouldn’t speak about it, too.
The Red Reaper had chosen wisely. If it hadn’t been for her dad stepping in, this would have gone as unsolved as the others.
Just like the ones involving her grandparents.
Jess shook away the thought as she turned down Boroma Way, and entered the cafe on the ground floor of the Regal Picturehouse. It was a warm, open space, with a pale, wooden hard floor, under brightly painted yellow chairs around small tables, the white walls and windows contrasting against the emerald green wallpaper behind the counter. There was a young woman at the counter, a barista currently pouring an espresso for a customer, and the cafe was quiet apart from a small group of four teenagers sitting in the cafe's corner, huddled together. Two boys and two girls, they seemed deep in some kind of debate, so Jess decided to start with the barista first. Walking up to the counter, she tried the same smile she’d attempted at the Web Design company. The barista smiled back.
‘What can I get you?’ she asked.
‘Lemonade, please,’ Jess looked around the cafe again, breathing in, taking in the smells of coffee and fresh cakes. It was glorious and calmed her instantly while giving her a conundrum.
How could a teenager who hung around such a place kill himself? How had nobody considered foul play?
The barista placed a glass of lemonade in front of Jess, and she passed across a couple of pound coins. ‘Hey, did you know Nathanial Wing?’ she asked conversationally. The barista paused, watching Jess carefully.
‘He owe you money?’ she replied. Jess shrugged.
‘I think he owed everyone money,’ she said, as if this was a well-known situation. The barista nodded at this.
‘You should join the club,’ she pointed at the four teenagers in the corner. ‘They have badges and everything.’
Thanking the barista, Jess took her lemonade and walked over to the table. The four teenagers were all around the same age; mid teens, maybe sixteen, seventeen at a push. The two girls were both Asian; one was slim and stunningly beautiful, her makeup on point and her clothing obviously expensive, while the other was larger and more relaxed in her look, wearing a denim hooded jacket and jeans over a band tee shirt. Opposite her were two boys, one Caucasian and blond, as equally manicured and dressed as the first girl, while the other one was Mediterranean in looks, olive skinned, his long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, his piercing green eyes looking up at her as she approached.
‘Hi,’ she said nervously. ‘The barista said you were all friends of Nathanial Wing?’
‘How much did he owe you?’ the boy with the piercing eyes muttered.
‘That obvious?’ Jess tried to smile as the blond boy reached across to another table, pulling a fifth yellow chair to the table.
‘Please, sit,’ he said. ‘I’m Leon, that’s Bino, the princess is Meena, and the lesbian is Prisha.’ He ducked a half eaten muffin as Prisha threw it with surprising force at him.
‘I’m Jess.’
‘So, go on then, how much?’ Meena asked, pointing at Bino. ‘So far Bino’s in the lead with three grand.’ Jess’s surprise at this was obvious, because Prisha started laughing.
‘See, boy?’ she said to Bino. ‘Nobody’s as stupid as you.’
‘I loaned him a couple of hundred,’ Jess lied. ‘I didn’t know—‘
‘That he was a serial debtor?’ Leon interrupted. ‘Yeah, that was his modus operandi. We all took the same class as him, and none of us knew that anyone else had loaned him money.’
‘You think that’s why he killed himself?’ Jess enquired carefully, hoping that she wasn’t overstepping. Leon shrugged.
‘If he did.’
He leaned into the group, lowering his voice.
‘I heard he was offed by a loan shark. Owed him ten grand.’
‘I heard you were full of shit,’ Meena responded. ‘Loan sharks don’t kill the debtor. They’d take all of his stuff first.’
‘You can’t retrieve a debt from a dead man,’ Prisha agreed.
‘What kind of loan shark?’ Jess asked. Leon shrugged.
‘I dunno,’ he admitted. ‘But I was with Nate when he took a call, yeah? Scared the crap out of him. Seems he’d run out on someone, and they were telling him that if he didn’t fulfil his end of the bargain, the debt would pass to his parents.’
‘He told you this?’
‘I could hear it,’ Leon shrugged. ‘The phone was close by. Nate grabbed his stuff and ran shortly after. Next thing I hear, he’s dead.’
‘Yeah, but that just sounds like he had nowhere to run and took the coward’s way out,’ Bino replied. ‘If some gangster called me up telling me I’d screwed up like that, I’d be on the phone to my parents immediately. His mum and dad could easily cover a ten grand loss.’
’Just saying what I heard,’ Leon held up his hands. ‘The German seemed pissed, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘German?’ Jess looked to Leon, who nodded sagely at his one believer.
‘Voice on the phone had a strong accent. Couldn’t miss it.’
‘So Nate was owing German loan sharks money and ended up being offed on a golf course,’ Prisha chuckled. ‘You get many German loan sharks around here?’
Leon leaned back, sulking, aware that his great revelation was being mocked.
‘I just didn’t think he was the sort of guy to kill himself,’ Jess muttered, as if surprised.
‘He didn’t,’ Leon insisted. ‘I said what happened.’
‘Leon’s bullshit aside, I agree,’ Meena spoke up now. ‘Nate wasn’t a quitter. Christ, he kept trying to get out of the hole he’d gotten himself into.’
‘By borrowing more money,’ Prisha added.
‘Sure, but he was trying,’ Meena replied.
‘What did he need all the money for?’ Jess asked the group. ‘He never told me.’
Leon laughed at this. ’Nothing,’ he replied. ‘He was sticking it into crypto, trying to make the big pot, you know? Screwing around on Uniswap and DeFi groups, talking it big about the next solid moonshot coin.’ He looked to his cup of coffee, sighing.
‘Prick never had a clue how it all worked. Listened to the wrong people, screwed over a lot more online, shilling coins that had no value, rugging a lot of investors by default and walking away with sod all.’
Jess nodded at this. It was a common scam in crypto to create a coin that was similar to a big selling name coin and then, once it had made a ton of money to sell everything, grabbing a great profit but dumping the price at the same time, pulling the rug out from under the investors’ feet.
Rugging.
The problem was, it also gained people who shilled it, people like Nathanial Wing, desperate investors who needed the coin to rocket in price, telling people how great it was, not knowing that the coin was soon to disappear. And, having done the developers own work for them, they would lose their own money, and their reputations, when it died.
Rising, Jess thanked the four teenagers for taking the time to speak with her and, placing the empty glass on the counter, she left the cafe and started back towards Hurley.
She didn’t like being undercover. They were good people, and she’d lied to them.
She needed to get back to her dad’s house and take a shower.
Declan had pulled over at the side of the road, allowing Doctor Marcos and Monroe to emerge on the passenger side while he opened the door carefully, ensuring no speeding maniacs were going to take it off as he exited the Audi. Honey Lane was a narrow country road, one lane in width that ran south from Henley Road, a mile north from them, down to the T junction that Declan and his team now stood at where Honey Lane continued to the east, while a lane equally narrow and no more than a bridleway to the west led to the Dew Drop Inn, a pub that claimed a heritage that not only went back to the 1600s but also a connection to noted Highwayman Dick Turpin.
Declan chuckled to himself. What with Epping Forest and Ambresbury Banks also being linked to him, Declan and Turpin seemed to spend a lot of time together. The man was as busy as Charles Dickens for the amount of pubs that claimed he’d visited.
As you drove down Honey Lane to the junction, directly ahead of you was a public footpath that led into dense woodlands, part of the Berkshire Loop of the Chiltern Way; but before that, and on either side were more trees and a ditch on the left-hand side, a ditch that followed around to the left, and the route east.
‘So let me get this right,’ Doctor Marcos was already pacing the scene. ‘Where was your father’s car found?’
Declan pointed to the ditch. ‘Down there,’ he said. ‘I got hold of a set of copies of the case notes from a friend in the pathology office.’ He walked to the ditch where even now, a couple of months later, you could still see small glints of broken glass in it from the windscreen and side windows. The car was long gone. ‘It claimed that dad apparently died when his car, caught in terrible weather and en route to Maidenhead spun out of control at the corner, flipping over as it clipped the edge of the road, and coming to a rest, on its roof around here.’ He took a deep breath as he remembered the report.
‘Dad, smashing his head against the steering wheel with enough force to shatter his nose apparently died instantly as his heart gave way.’
’And you think it was murder.’
‘I know it was murder,’ Declan snapped. ‘People said he had the heart attack first. Maybe the road was wet and slippy. But look. We’re going uphill. How does that even happen?’
Monroe was walking west, towards the bridleway. ‘Why was he driving down here anyway?’ he asked. Declan considered the last conversation that he’d had with his dad. It had been while he was investigating the Bernard Lau case, at the moment when Declan had learned that DCI Ford had lied when she had told him that Patrick Walsh had asked her to bring him onto the case.
‘Look, I’ve got an event to go to in Maidenhead right now. Let me make some calls and I’ll come back to you.’
It was the last thing that his dad had ever said to him. An hour or so later, while in Victoria Park, Declan had been given the news of the accident.
‘He had an event that he was going to,’ he whispered. Monroe shook his head.
‘I don’t mean that, laddie. I don’t live here and I’ve only visited a few times, but even I know that this isn’t the best way to Maidenhead from Hurley. The Henley Road is way better and much safer. These country lanes are dangerous at the best of times, let alone in a bloody storm.’
Declan had wondered the same thing over the last few weeks. Patrick had worked in Maidenhead as a Chief Superintendent for years before he retired. He knew these roads like the back of his hand, but he’d still go the quickest route. And this wasn’t the quickest route.
‘Impossible,’ Doctor Marcos looked up from the impact site. ‘Physically impossible to come from there, turn here and end up there.’
‘Are you saying that he was struck?’ Declan asked. Doctor Marcos was looking to the west, and the sign that showed the Dew Drop Inn.
‘What car was he driving that night?’ she enquired as she crouched down beside one tree at the side of the road.
‘A Mondeo or a Peugeot, I think.’
‘Colour?’
‘Metallic blue.’
Doctor Marcos nodded to herself.
‘Then I’m saying your father didn’t come that way,’ she replied. ‘There’s damage to the tree on the left up here. Metallic blue scrapes, around a foot, maybe eighteen inches high, and coming from the west. It looks like a car swerved, clipped itself on the passenger side. That could have spun the car, causing it to roll…’ she followed the road, as if imagining the rolling car passing her. ‘And then ended up in that ditch.’
‘What are you implying?’ Declan followed her gaze. ‘That dad wasn’t going to Maidenhead?’
‘Oh, I think he was definitely going to Maidenhead,’ Doctor Marcos replied. ‘But he wasn’t coming from Hurley when he crashed. He was coming from that direction.’ She pointed at the Dew Drop Inn sign.
‘Maybe he met someone at the pub before he carried on,’ she said. ‘Someone who maybe caused him to crash and placed a Red Reaper card in his car at the same time.’
Declan looked up the bridleway. If Doctor Marcos was right, then Patrick Walsh had stopped off at a pub in the middle of nowhere for a clandestine meeting in the middle of a thunderstorm, moments before he died in a fatal car accident.
The question was, though, with who?
12
Adding Up
Declan returned with Monroe and Doctor Marcos to The Olde Bell just after one in the afternoon, and pretty much as the lunchtime rush was starting. Anjli and De’Geer were in the Library, both eating pub-bought lunches on the table; Anjli was eating some kind of curry of the week with basmati rice and a naan to the side, while De’Geer was polishing off a roast beef baguette, dripping with horseradish sauce.
‘I hope you saved some for us,’ Monroe muttered. Anjli slid a bar menu across the table to him.
‘Order at the bar,’ she said through mouthfuls. ‘Vegan is VG, vegetarian is V.’
As Monroe picked up the menu and examined it, Declan looked around. ‘Anyone seen Jess?’
‘She’s just popped to the bar to order herself a black bean burger,’ De’Geer replied. ‘Says she has some information on Wing.’
‘And Billy?’
‘He’s on a lunch date,’ Anjli grinned. ‘Seems that after we all left, that German guy, Rolfe turned up at the door, flashing his own badge and demanding to see all the crime stuff we had in here, as if we were all beneath his remit or something. Anyway, Billy plays dumb, says he’s just the tech guy, brought in from Marlow and can’t let anyone in or it’s his job. Rolfe stomps off, but an hour later Ilse turns up, all smiles, and invites him to lunch.’
‘So they want to gain intel from our weak link?’ Declan almost chuckled. ‘By the end of the first course he’ll have everything on them instead.’
‘Or they’ll be dating,’ De’Geer muttered.
‘Not likely,’ Anjli replied, looking across to him. ‘She’s not his type. Plumbing’s all wrong.’
De’Geer’s eyes widened slightly at this revelation, but then returned to his baguette. Monroe threw the sheet back to the table.
‘Sod this, I’m having a small and a large plate,’ he said. ‘And maybe a dessert. I didn’t eat before I travelled here today. Salt and pepper squid, and a sausage and mash.’
‘Because they’ll go so well together,’ Doctor Marcos wrinkled her nose at this.
‘Well luckily, you won’t be eating any of it,’ Monroe sniffed.
‘You sure about that?’ Doctor Marcos smiled and almost winked at Monroe, and for a moment Declan almost wondered if the two of them had finally revealed to each other how they actually felt. But then the moment passed, and Declan realised it was nothing more than accidental flirting. He pulled out a twenty-pound note and passed it to Monroe.
‘If you’re going to the bar, get me a pint of coke and a chicken and bacon salad, yeah?’ he asked.
‘When did I become your bloody servant?’ Monroe protested.
‘When you told me to stop deferring to you and take charge,’ Declan smiled. ‘And make sure it has the honey mustard dressing on it, too.’
/> Monroe huffed irritably, but with the hint of a smile he turned to leave the Library as the door opened and Billy and Jess walked in, Billy beaming with pride as he did so.
‘You know, I thought I’d had enough of being undercover, but it’s actually quite invigorating,’ he said. ‘I’m Billy Myers, IT Support.’
‘It’s not quite Bond, James Bond, but it suits you, laddie,’ Monroe replied. ‘I take it you got some tea for us?’
‘Oh, I hadn’t ordered—‘ Billy’s face fell.
‘He means gossip, news for us,’ Doctor Marcos interrupted. ‘As in spill the tea. He’s been watching a lot of reality TV of late.’
‘Well, in that case I have an entire pot of it,’ Billy said as he walked to the table.
‘Hold on it until we’ve ordered,’ Declan suggested. ‘If we miss the lunchtime cut off, the Guv will be miserable as sin all day.’
Monroe left for the bar to order a round of drinks and food, and Declan looked to Jess.
‘You did okay?’ he asked. Jess nodded.
‘I have information on Wing,’ she replied. ‘But it can wait until after food.’
And wait they did for the food to arrive. During that time, with Anjli and De’Geer now finished eating, they spent the minutes finally catching up, the matters of the case placed on hold until after lunch was consumed. Anjli brought them up to date on the state of her mother’s cancer, pointing out that it was now effectively in remission, while Monroe talked about some television show he’d been binging about very rich Asians in Beverley Hills. After ten minutes PC Joanna Davey finally arrived, having finished up in Maidenhead and was surprised at the boos and annoyance her arrival brought, until it was pointed out that this was because she wasn’t bearing their food, which turned up five minutes after her arrival.
Eventually lunch arrived, and they ate heartily, possibly the most relaxed that the Last Chance Saloon had ever been. And, once they’d all finished, Jess and De’Geer were sent to take back the dirty plates, purely because of their time on the team.
