by Iain Cameron
‘Mathew has three children,’ Lawton said. ‘Suki, who is twenty-nine and someone you might have read about in the papers,’ he said with a slight sneer. ‘She’s a part-time model, an it-girl if you will, and a darling of the tabloids, and if any of that constitutes a career, please let me know. However, she’s a charming girl, utterly delightful but she can’t seem to settle down and do something worthwhile. ’
‘I’ve read about her,’ Hobbs said. ‘Wasn’t she in rehab for alcohol and drug problems?’
If Lawton heard him, he didn’t acknowledge. ‘The youngest member of the family is Jackson who is twenty-four. He’s a software engineer and works upstairs in this building, and in case you think his job is a sinecure, I assure you it’s not. He’s a bright lad, went to Cambridge University and worked for a couple of electronic companies in the town, before coming here. We’re lucky to have him as he is a very talented designer and even if he wasn’t the chairman’s son, we would still have employed him.’
He stopped to take a drink from a glass of water.
‘And finally there’s Hamish. He’s thirty-two and also works in the business, but in our Burgess Hill warehouse operation as a packer, and now if you think his appointment smacks a little of nepotism, you’d be dead right. He is the veritable black sheep of the family.’
‘How so?’ Henderson asked.
‘Where do I start? He was the first-born son, so Mathew had high hopes that he would eventually take over the running of the business. He was a lovely child and grew into an intelligent adolescent, but at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he got into a bad crowd at boarding school and without warning, dropped out and backpacked to India where he spent three years taking drugs and getting high. A bout of malaria followed and Mathew brought him home to recuperate but the spark had gone. He works here packing boxes and goes home at night to his television or now and again, over to the Amex Stadium to watch the Albion. It’s a pity as he had so much promise.’
‘Are there any long-running disputes between any of the children?’ Hobbs said.
‘God no. They all loved Sir Mathew and get on well together, but don’t only take my word for it, ask anyone and they’ll tell you the same. No, to find Sir Mathew’s killer, you need look no further than this gang of odious car thieves that I read about in the newspaper. According to some reports, their violence has been escalating over the last few weeks, making it inevitable someone would soon be killed. I wouldn’t want this to happen to anyone else, but it’s such a shame it had to be someone like Sir Mathew.’
‘We’re exploring every angle,’ Henderson said.
When he visited the murder scene at first light yesterday morning, he noticed straight away how the gang had taken a different approach this time, aside from the presence of a corpse. The door had been smashed in by what looked like sledgehammers, so far so good, but the telephone line hadn’t been cut nor mobile phones destroyed, as happened on every one of the previous 14 robberies.
In addition, Suki reported hearing a discussion between the killers and Sir Mathew, that escalated into an argument but it seemed to go on much longer than the time it took to demand a set of car keys. This was also unusual as the gang were without exception, taciturn and rarely heard uttering more than a couple of one-word commands. The final difference was Sir Mathew's body was found in the kitchen, but in the past, the gang only strayed from the hall to rouse the owner or retrieve the car keys from the kitchen or study, but most of them and the owner stayed in the hall.
To the media, Sussex Police top brass, and many of the detectives in his team, the raid bore all the hallmarks of a scale-up, the gang moving into a new, more violent level of activity. However, if the discrepancies were viewed separately, and in conjunction with perhaps the less significant fact that only three robbers were present when in the past they always used four, it made him feel uneasy.
‘How well do you know Suki, Mr Lawton? At the moment, she is our only witness,’ Hobbs said.
‘You’ve spoken to her?’
‘Yes, we have. She is too upset to give us much more than a brief statement, but we’ll try again today or tomorrow when her thoughts may be a little clearer.’
Lawton took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes before replacing them. ‘Yes, Suki,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve known her most of her life. She’s a beautiful, beautiful girl and one with so much vitality but she fritters her time away setting up art galleries that don’t make any money, modelling shoots that never get published, and associating with men who use her for what they can get.’
‘Putting this to one side,’ he continued, ‘you should also know she has always been the light of Mathew’s life and even though she was thrown out of school for smoking dope and thinks a mobile’s about as expensive as a newspaper, and isn’t too bothered if she leaves it on an underground train, she is likely to inherit all this,’ he said spreading his arms wide.
This surprised Henderson, as he assumed the company would have many large shareholders or the son who was working in the business would be the chief beneficiary.
‘What about wives or ex-wives,’ asked Hobbs, a keen student of inter-marital strife as he had been there before. So had Henderson, but his divorce had been a walk in the park compared to Hobbs.
‘It’s a good question, sergeant. There have been two, first Lucinda and then Olivia. Olivia will dig for all she’s worth and might even contest the will if she doesn’t receive as much as she thinks she deserves. Mathew was very angry when she ran off with a much younger man, her hairdresser if you can believe it, and threatened several times to cut her out. His first wife, Lucinda is made of less volatile material, shall we say, and I’m sure Mathew would have left her a sizeable sum but whatever it is, she won’t cause any trouble, I’m sure.’
‘So it could all get a bit complicated?’ Henderson said.
‘It could do, so watch this space. When do you think the coroner will release Sir Mathew’s body? It can be a lengthy process in circumstances like this, so I understand.’
‘I don’t think there will be a problem in this case, sir,’ Henderson said. ‘There are no complications I can foresee. Will you be making the funeral arrangements yourself or will Sir Mathew’s family be doing it?’
‘Oh, it’ll be me making them, as I’ve got the experience and in any case, they’re not the sort of family who can do things for themselves; they’ve always had people to do things for them. In a sad way, I’m getting rather good at it, as I recently arranged one for someone else.’
‘Did you?' Henderson said. 'Was it someone close to you?’
‘Not close, but a valued working colleague. He was divorced and didn’t have many friends or family in the area.’ He took off his glasses and wiped them. ‘He was our Finance Director, David Young. He was killed in a motorbike accident a couple of weeks back and his body lay undiscovered for over two weeks before anyone found him, the poor sod.’
TWENTY-ONE
DS Hobbs and DI Henderson drove back to Sussex House after their meeting with William Lawton, in the Hobbs family people carrier. It was a boxy, ugly grunt of a machine exuding aromas of soiled nappies and blackcurrant juice, and the seats and the floor were littered with papers and various bits of junk. If Hobbs told him it had been borrowed by four teenagers to take them away for a drunken weekend at a pop festival, he would've believed him.
It hadn’t been their intention to cheer William Lawton up but if so, they both would have received a D- for effort, as they had left the poor bugger as miserable as sin. Hobbs reckoned it was the vision of a coke-snorting Suki using his office for drug-fuelled parties, nude photo-shoots, and shag-fests with a host of her London luvvy friends that did it.
‘The thought of that girl,’ Hobbs continued, ‘who’s never out of the gossip pages of my wife’s Daily Mail and hanging from the arm of some air-head male model, being in charge of one of Britain’s leading electronic companies, would make me feel pretty depressed as well.’
‘You’re just je
alous it’s not your arm she’s hanging from.’
‘I wish. I mean, a lingerie business, party planning, or at a push, an event management outfit, but Markham Microprocessors is a tough call for anybody, never mind someone with no business experience.’
Hobbs went quiet for a minute or two as he negotiated the junction with Dyke Road. At least in the grunt machine, the seats were set high so they could see over the roofs of parked cars, preventing them from pulling out into on-coming traffic.
‘What do you make of Lawton’s story about their Financial Director, David Young?’ Hobbs said when the manoeuvre was completed.
‘To lose one senior manager was unlucky, especially in the middle of a poorly disguised takeover, but to lose another so soon afterwards is nothing short of reckless, and if I didn’t know any different, I would think someone’s got it in for them.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I didn’t hear anything about Young’s accident on the wire.’
‘Same here, but why would we?’ Henderson said. ‘On the face of it, it’s just another tragic road accident. In fact, if I did see it on the system or in a newspaper, I wouldn’t have made a connection as I’d never heard of the Markham business before.’
‘Me neither, but then I never read the business news, I always get waylaid by the television or the sports pages first.’
They arrived back at Sussex House and Henderson had only an hour to spare before his next meeting, a team briefing at six. He ignored a couple of phone messages and fifty-odd unread emails and started researching two issues raised during the meeting with William Lawton.
He began with David Young’s accident, first looking on the police reporting system and then on a number of news sites on the web. He assumed it would be difficult to find and merit no more than a footnote in most stories, another traffic accident to add to the many occurring in Sussex every week, but to his surprise several national newspapers were carrying long and detailed articles, on the basis that Young was an important figure in the business community.
Having now read the story a couple of times, Henderson suspected another reason for its prominence might have been because the poor man had lain undiscovered in a field of nettles, brambles and weeds for weeks, only to be found by an attractive woman out walking her dog, so it had enough of the macabre and a touch of glamour to garner the interest of even the most casual of readers.
One article went on to say how he lived alone in a large house in Hove, he had been divorced for twelve years, he liked motorbikes and golf, but socialised with few people outside work. This dash of the banal, atoned for the ghoulish nature of some of the narrative but it made him wonder, and not for the first time, what sort of people worked in newsrooms and enjoyed scaring and sickening the general public. Perhaps Rachel would know.
The other topic he wanted to examine was the proposed sale of Markham Microprocessors. It was a task made more difficult than the one before, as even though he was skilled in the minutiae of dead bodies, road traffic accidents, and to a lesser extent, motor bikes, the very mention of share prices, yields, dividends, or any other sets of numbers for that matter, left him cold.
At fourteen, he was a keen but challenged schoolboy, and forever lambasted by his teachers at the Lochaber High School in Fort William for failing to understand the rudiments of times tables, algebra, and the gobbledygook they called trigonometry. His failure to grasp the subject almost stopped him joining the police force, but following a fortuitous and amorous relationship with a young schoolteacher from Strontian, he started to master what he needed to know and ignored the rest as best he could.
He found an article on the BBC website summarising the reaction of the business community to the sale in layman’s language, and section by section, waded through the technical jargon, writing down unfamiliar terms to look up later. At the bottom, it included a link to another article dealing with the effect on Markham’s share price and he found to his amazement, the company’s value fell by ten per cent following the death of Young, and had now fallen a further twenty per cent after the demise of its founding father. In a takeover situation someone would save hundreds of millions of pounds. Now wasn’t that enough motivation to get rid of the chairman?
He’d done all he could do and needed someone with a financial brain to interpret this stuff for him, but he would have to leave it for now, as the briefing meeting he was supposed to be chairing, started five minutes ago.
‘Apologies everyone,’ he said as he entered the Murder Suite and walked towards the sectioned off area reserved for his team. They had moved out of the small meeting room as this was now a murder enquiry, and moving into the suite helped focus minds away from the travails and tribulations of the day-to-day and in any case, the meeting room was too small for this lot.
It was not a surprise to find that nobody wanted to talk about the car thefts, as the murder was at the top of everyone’s agenda and without much preamble, he asked DI Hobbs to deliver his initial report.
‘DS Harry Wallop and I attended the post-mortem of Sir Mathew Markham at Brighton Mortuary this morning. It should come as no surprise to anyone in this room when I tell you he died from multiple stab wounds from a large bladed knife, such as a hunting knife. What may come as a surprise, as we know many of the other car owners were beaten up, there wasn't any additional bruising on Sir Mathew.’
‘Interesting,’ Henderson said as he made a note and added it to his ‘differences’ list.
‘I thought so too,’ Hobbs said. ‘He had high levels of alcohol in his system, which is consistent with the brief statement given to DI Henderson and myself by his daughter, Suki Markham, and may explain why neither of them had the sense to call us when they first heard the front door being sledgehammered. The forensics team are still at Stavely House and door-to-door enquiries will continue. I hope to interview Ms Markham more fully soon and from this discussion, we should have a better idea where our priority targets lie. That’s it for the moment.’
‘Thanks Gerry. Pat if I can move on to you. How’s it going at Stavely House?’
DS Pat Davidson, the Crime Scene Manager was aged early forties and unfazed at speaking to a large group such as this. He put down the can of Red Bull he cradled, this week’s ‘fad,’ before addressing them.
‘Yet again, the gang wore balaclavas and gloves and left nothing but a few navy fibres. We haven’t been able to locate the murder weapon as yet but I can say without contradiction, he received all his stab wounds in the kitchen and died in the kitchen.’
‘Why there?’ Henderson said. ‘It’s different from all the other robberies. The car owner always remained in the hall.’
‘I think it makes sense when you look at the layout of the house,’ Walters said. ‘He was most likely accosted in the hall, perhaps he went there to investigate the noise at the door, and backed away into the kitchen.’
Many in the room agreed with this theory. 'Could be,' Henderson said, 'but it still doesn’t tell us why the gang changed their MO.'
‘They wore gloves,’ Pat Davidson said, ‘so we haven’t picked up any fingerprints or DNA from the door or the kitchen, but we’ll continue to look.’
‘Thanks Pat,’ Henderson said. ‘Let me say,’ he said addressing the room, ‘I’m a bit bothered by this one. In none of the previous cases, and I’m appalled to say the number of stolen cars now stands at fourteen, although their activity seems to have tailed off since we nabbed their customer, have the gang changed their MO. The gang stay in the hall while one guy goes upstairs to find the car owner and another into the kitchen to pick up the keys if they’ve been left there.’
‘Maybe they’re throwing caution to the wind,’ DS Wallop said.
Again, many agreed with this hypothesis, leaving Henderson sounding like a lone voice and so he let it go for the moment.
‘Carol, do we have anything on CCTV?’
‘There's nothing much in the way of cameras in the village, as you can imagine, and little in surro
unding areas since it’s quite rural, so no, we didn’t pick them up. Also, when you talked about closing down their customer, we didn’t find a white chilled foods van heading north either.’
The meeting ended at seven-fifteen and he returned to his office, despondent at the lack of progress and irritated by his inability to pull together all the disparate strands swimming around his head, and not being able articulate something to the team which would have helped to build consensus.
He would now go home and kick the cat, if he had one, or punch the wall but knowing his luck he would find it was plasterboard and cause hundreds of pounds worth of damage. He decided to do neither and instead settle down for a quiet night in, with a take-away from Izzi’s, as he didn't feel like cooking, accompanied by a glass of the good stuff if his local off-licence had any left on their shelves, as his whisky cupboard was bare.
He woke up his computer, intending to shut it down without looking at anything. A large number of emails had arrived in his inbox since the last time he looked, and he resolved to look at them in the morning when he would be in a more positive mood, as the way he felt now, he could delete the lot.
Reaching for the mouse, he noticed one from DI Wallis of the Met Police. He double-clicked to open it.
‘DI Henderson,
I hope you are well and your jaw has recovered. We’ve interviewed the five suspects nicked at the Hackney garage as part of Operation Poseidon.
Dwain Harrison – a car electronics expert
Brian Lockhart – in charge of paperwork and the one you apprehended in the office at the rear
Barry Phillips – a car mechanic
Thomas Holt – a guy we found upstairs and a mechanic
Haden Jamieson – the other guy we found upstairs and probably the tea boy.
