by Graham Ison
‘Oh, really? How interesting. I’ll leave you to it, then, Guy.’ Helen Wilson finally looked up from the magazine she was reading, appraised Dave and me scathingly, but said nothing to us. Clearly a double murder virtually on her doorstep was not something that excited her. ‘Anyway, I’ve some telephone calls to make.’ The ice maiden rose from her chair, ignored Dave and me, and tossed her magazine on to the seat before leaving the room without a backward glance. She appeared to be quite a few years younger than Wilson, but first impressions were that she shared his arrogant attitude. She certainly didn’t seem to enjoy having two common policemen sullying her elegant sitting room.
Wilson crossed to an oak cabinet, unlocked a safe that was secreted inside and took out a book in a plastic bag. ‘This is the sort of investment I make, Chief Inspector. It’s a first edition of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. It retailed in nineteen fifteen for a shilling.’ He paused. ‘That’s five pence in today’s currency, but now it’s worth somewhere in the region of twelve thousand pounds.’
Good for him, I thought, but Guy Wilson was not the sort of man who would admit to having been swindled, even if he had. It wouldn’t be good for his image.
‘How fascinating,’ I said, but failed to see why anyone would want to pay that much for a book. If I really wanted to read The Thirty-Nine Steps, I could probably pick up a paperback edition for a few pounds in a bookshop or even less at a charity shop. But perhaps I’m an iconoclast.
‘I could download that on to my Kindle for a few quid,’ commented Dave, playing the dim copper, something he’s very skilled at doing when the mood takes him. ‘It might even be free.’
‘Really?’ said Wilson scathingly. The mere mention of a Kindle seemed to offend him.
‘This silver car you saw on the night of the fire . . .’ Dave walked to the window and stared out at the site of the camper-van fire. ‘Had you ever seen it before, perhaps during the days leading up to the fire?’
Wilson answered immediately. ‘No. At least, not as far as I can recall. I did see a sports car that stopped there about a week ago. But I think the driver was just using his mobile.’
‘Did you happen to hear any shots just before the fire?’
‘No, I didn’t. But he’d’ve used a silencer wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, I never thought of that, sir,’ said Dave, turning from the window, but his sarcasm escaped Wilson.
‘Have you anything to add to what you told Inspector Ebdon, Mr Wilson?’ I asked.
‘No, I told her all I know. That I saw a small silver car leaving just before I saw the van go up in flames.’
‘Just now you mentioned seeing a sports car,’ I said. ‘Any idea of its make, colour, anything like that?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Do you own a car yourself?’ asked Dave casually.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve got a Lamborghini and before that I had a Porsche. But I’m thinking of trading in the Lamborghini for a Ferrari later this year. Unfortunately, and to my chagrin, I just missed laying hands on a 1920 Haxe-Doulton. It was made by an American firm in Detroit that went bust the following year. A good investment if I’d’ve been able to get it.’
‘Really, sir?’ Dave sounded enthusiastically impressed. ‘You’re obviously well up on sports cars, then.’
Wilson preened slightly. ‘I think I can safely say that I know my way around them, yes.’
‘But you couldn’t identify the sports car you saw outside your house a week ago.’ Dave shut his pocketbook and tapped it with his pen.
‘All I can say is that it was one of the cheaper models,’ said Wilson, irritated that Dave had so easily made him appear foolish. ‘I’m not awfully familiar with the lower end of the market.’
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Wilson,’ I said, as Dave and I made to leave.
‘What d’you think, guv?’ asked Dave, as we drove away from Wilson’s house.
‘I don’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would set up a job like the murders of Eberhardt and Schmidt bang opposite his own house, Dave. Mind you, I don’t think he’s the brightest star in the firmament, despite his airs and graces and his bluster about clever investments. Nevertheless, it seems an odd coincidence that his was the address that the sender of those emails singled out for the killing ground.’
‘D’you think he’s clever enough to try a double bluff, guv?’ asked Dave. ‘Pretends to be an airy-fairy pseudo-intellectual, but is smart enough to cover his tracks.’
‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but we’d need more evidence of his involvement. Much more.’
‘I wonder if there’s anything in his sighting of this sports car,’ said Dave.
‘I shouldn’t think so, but we’ll bear it in mind.’
‘D’you think he had anything to do with Samson Adekunle’s murder, guv?’
‘I don’t see our Mr Wilson as a torturer, Dave. He’s much too squeamish and the sort of barbarism that was done to Adekunle would more than likely make him throw up.’
‘Shouldn’t we have asked him where he was when Adekunle was murdered, guv?’
‘When was he murdered, Sergeant?’ I said, employing Dave’s little ploy of formal address. It wasn’t often I was able to turn the tables on him.
‘Ah!’ said Dave.
NINE
I was on the point of leaving the office when I received a telephone call from the detective inspector at Brighton.
‘It’s about your man William Rivers, guv. The post-mortem showed that he was in the advanced stages of pancreatic cancer. The pathologist reckoned he had only a matter of days to live.’
And that presumably explained his suicide. But it didn’t solve the question of whether he’d told a former colleague about being swindled. And if he had, whether that colleague had acted upon the information.
On Friday morning, the first of the scientific reports about Samson Adekunle’s murder came in.
When Linda Mitchell arrived in the office she was looking stunningly attractive, something that hadn’t really registered with me before. Wearing her day clothes rather than the unflattering protective coveralls in which we saw her at a crime scene, she was attired in a smart grey trouser suit and wore her long black hair loose.
‘You’re obviously giving evidence in court this morning, Linda?’ suggested Dave casually.
‘What makes you think that, Dave?’
‘Because you’re wearing your Old Bailey outfit,’ said Dave.
‘But I always dress scruffily to go to court, Dave. Like you do,’ said Linda, and turned to me. ‘We found fingermarks all over the Clancy Street address, Mr Brock. We’ve identified one set as belonging to Adekunle, but there’s no trace of any of the others in records. It’s possible, I suppose, that some of them belong to a cleaning woman. Assuming, of course, that he allowed anyone to come in to clean up. Although in view of what he was involved in, I think that that’s unlikely. The other possibility is that most of them belong to previous tenants or visitors. The only prints in Adekunle’s car were his own.’
‘I doubt that any of them belonged to our murderer,’ I said. ‘He seems to have been very careful.’
‘There were no weapons anywhere in the house either,’ continued Linda. ‘I understand from Doctor Mortlock that the victim was tortured in a variety of ways. But we didn’t find a whip, although there was that piece of bloodstained rope we found near the body.’
‘Any joy with tracing the rope, Linda?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid not. It was fairly standard stuff, the sort you could buy at almost any hardware store or DIY supermarket, and the blood on it was Adekunle’s. The killer might’ve brought it with him or found it in the house somewhere, although we didn’t find any similar rope. We examined the rack of kitchen knives and one of them was missing. But the one that was found near the body seemed to match the kitchen set and that, of course bore traces of the victim’s blood. There were no cigarette ends anywhere in the house, either.’ Lind
a laughed. ‘But we did find a bit of cannabis secreted in the toilet cistern. How original is that?’
‘You can forget about the cannabis, Linda. I’ve got enough on my plate without worrying about that sort of nonsense. But if anything else crops up, you will let me know, won’t you?’
‘Of course, but there are a couple of other things, Mr Brock. We got our tame locksmith to open the safe. Inside was a bundle of banknotes, ten thousand pounds in used fifty-pound notes to be precise. If they’d been new, we might’ve been able to find out when and where they were issued.’
‘I doubt that that would’ve helped much,’ I said.
‘And then there were these.’ Linda displayed a sheaf of bank statements. ‘They relate to an account in the name of Trudi Schmidt, one of the camper-van victims. The account is at something called Sparkasse with an address in Essen. Would that be the name of the bank?’
‘Not specifically, Linda. Sparkasse is German for savings bank. But that’s all very interesting. Why, I wonder, should Adekunle have been holding Trudi Schmidt’s bank statements?’
‘Perhaps he was the banker for the whole scam, or at least the United Kingdom branch,’ said Dave.
‘We’ll see if Horst Fischer can shed some light on it. Thanks very much, Linda,’ I said. ‘It gives us something else to work on. By the way, where’s the cash now?’
‘At the moment, it’s in the safe in the property store at Paddington police station. Sergeant Wright took charge of it.’
‘Thanks, Linda. I’ll have a word with him.’ ‘Shiner’ Wright was the laboratory liaison officer whose task, among others, was to preserve continuity of evidence. ‘You said there were two things.’
‘I thought I’d save the best bit until last. This was also in the safe.’ Linda produced a dark green document and handed it to me. ‘Adekunle’s Nigerian passport.’
‘I wonder when he arrived in the UK,’ I said, flicking through the pages of the passport.
‘Officially, it appears that he’s not here, Mr Brock. There’s no entry stamp.’
‘So, he was probably an illegal immigrant. Well, there’s a surprise. But at least we know how old he is and that he was born in somewhere called Calabar, for what good that’ll do us. I’ll get checks run with the Border Agency and the Nigerian High Commission.’
‘Good luck,’ said Dave quietly.
Ten minutes later, Kate Ebdon appeared in the incident room, but unlike Linda, Kate was wearing her usual working outfit: jeans and a man’s white shirt.
‘After a great deal of messing about with the local authority, the land registry and God knows who else, I’ve managed to trace the owner of the Clancy Street property, guv.’ Kate referred to her pocketbook. ‘After a few false starts I eventually tracked down the local estate agency that’s responsible for renting out the property and spoke to the manager. The property’s owned by a Lucien Carter and apparently he resides abroad. Very much the absentee landlord by all accounts. But the agent has never seen Carter and hasn’t got a clue where he lives.’
‘None at all?’ I asked.
‘The best he could suggest was that he thought he might be in France, but he’d got nothing to back it up with. All he could tell me was that Adekunle rented the property on a two-year lease about a year ago. I seized a reference that Adekunle gave the manager when he signed the agreement, but it’s almost bound to be duff. It’s on expensive notepaper purporting to come from a New York letting agency in East 92nd Street and stated in glowing terms that Adekunle was the sort of tenant anyone would be delighted to have living in their house.’
‘Lucien Carter won’t think so now that there’s blood all over his expensive carpet,’ said Dave, and paused. ‘Unless it was Carter who put it there.’
‘That letter’s bound to be a fake, but I’ll have a word with Joe Daly,’ I said, taking the plastic-shrouded document from Kate. Daly is the resident FBI agent in London whose official title is legal attaché at the United States Embassy. ‘Any luck with house-to-house enquiries?’
‘No, guv. The nearest neighbours reckoned they’d never set eyes on Adekunle, and certainly never saw anyone entering or leaving the house. Must’ve been a night bird.’ Kate paused to laugh. ‘I interviewed one old biddy who lived opposite and who said she definitely thought there was something funny about the house, but as evidence goes, it’s crook. I think she just enjoyed a yabber.’
‘Perhaps you’d translate that for me, Kate.’ I was gradually getting to grips with Australian slang, but some of Kate’s more obscure words still eluded me.
‘“Crook” means that in terms of evidence it’s no good and “yabber” means she just enjoyed having a chat, sir,’ said Kate, with a cheeky smile. It seemed that she’d caught the ‘sir’ habit from Dave.
‘I’m glad we’ve got that cleared up. Now perhaps you’d do what you can with this, Kate.’ I handed her Adekunle’s Nigerian passport. ‘See if the Border Agency’s got anything on this guy. It looks as though he’s in the country illegally. And the Nigerian High Commission might help, but I doubt it.’
‘Pity he didn’t get deported at some stage,’ said Kate. ‘It would’ve saved us a lot of trouble.’
‘Couldn’t’ve deported him, guv,’ said Dave. ‘It might’ve infringed his human rights.’
Kate scoffed. ‘Give me ten minutes with him in a dark cell and I’d’ve infringed his human rights for him,’ she muttered.
‘Well, somebody did, that’s for sure,’ said Dave. ‘And he was in no position to appeal to an immigration tribunal.’
The matter of Adekunle’s passport being out of the way for the time being, I telephoned Kriminalhauptkommissar Fischer to tell him about the bank statements that Linda had found in Adekunle’s safe.
‘What address was there for Trudi Schmidt on the statements, Harry?’ Fischer asked.
‘Glockestrasse 59, Kettwig. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘That’s very useful, Harry, because she no longer lived at the address we had for her in our records. The present occupants of her old apartment hadn’t heard of her, and the letting agent certainly didn’t know where she’d gone. I’ll arrange to have the Glockestrasse address searched and I’ll tell you what we find. That’s if we find anything that might help the investigation.’
I gave the bank statements to Charlie Flynn. ‘See what you can do with those, Charlie. They’re in German, but they’re much the same in layout as those issued by UK banks and shouldn’t be too difficult to read. If you have a problem with the language, come and see me.’
Next up was Tom Challis. It was turning out to be one of those busy mornings when people wanted me to make decisions.
‘I’ve got the details of the subscribers to the telephone numbers in William Rivers’s address book, guv.’
‘How many, Tom?’
‘Twelve, but of those only three were in the Metropolitan Police District.’
‘Any near neighbours of Rivers?’
‘No, guv, none at all, but there were three in the Aldershot area, one in Bordon and one in Odiham.’ Challis gave me a meaningful glance. ‘Living in that area could mean they’re ex-army, I suppose.’
‘Could be,’ I said, ‘although Odiham is a Royal Air Force station, so I think we can rule that one out. Let me have the addresses and Dave and I will take a trip to the home of the British Army. I just hope we won’t be wasting our time.’
‘I’ve also done that search on the Rivers family you asked for, sir.’
‘Turned up anything useful, Tom?’ I asked, glancing at my watch.
‘It’s complicated, guv, but it won’t take a minute to explain. William Rivers’s sister Gladys was married to a guy called Edward Deacon, both now deceased. Their only son is Charles Deacon and he’s married to Mary née Webster. They also have an only son whose name is George Deacon, aged twenty-five.’
‘Do me a chart, Tom, and then track them down. I suppose we’d better have a word. If George Deacon knew about his great uncle
being swindled, he might’ve decided to do something about it. Any evidence that he is or was in the army?’
‘No, sir. Not yet.’
Before going to Aldershot, I decided to make time to call on Joe Daly.
One of the great benefits of visiting the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square is the quality of its coffee. And the fact that it always seems to be available. If you’re lucky enough to be invited to lunch, you can look forward to a T-bone steak that overlaps the plate. And in the centre of the round table there is a Lazy Susan holding every condiment you could possibly want. And a few you’ve never heard of.
‘Great to see ya, Harry.’ Joe Daly swept across his huge office and seized my hand with a vice-like grip. He’d once told me that he’d been a useful baseball player in his youth and the strength of his hand confirmed it. ‘Dave, how ya doing?’ Dave Poole was subjected to a similar bone-crushing grasp.
‘So, Harry, what can I do for my favourite Limey cops today?’ Daly waved his hand in an expansive gesture that Dave and I took as an invitation to sit in his deep armchairs. Right on cue Darlene, his secretary, appeared with the coffee. Darlene is pure Hollywood, a svelte American redhead who looked as though she’d stepped straight off the set of an episode of Sex and the City. Given that most of the support staff at the embassy was British, I presumed that Joe Daly’s secretary being American had something to do with the need for security. Ever since 9/11 the Americans have been justifiably concerned about security. I just hope that one day we might be too, but we won’t if the Border Agency has anything to do with it.
‘I’m dealing with a triple murder, Joe,’ I began.
‘Would that be the fire out at Richmond that I read about in the paper, Harry?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘But there were only two bodies in that camper, weren’t there? But now you’re treating it as a homicide.’
Clearly Daly kept his finger on the pulse. I explained the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Eberhardt and Schmidt and went on to tell him about the murder of Samson Adekunle. Finally, I produced the letter of reference that Kate Ebdon had seized from the estate agent who’d rented out the house where we’d found the body of the Nigerian fraudster.
