Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2)

by Iain Cameron

  We’ve interviewed each of them three times and their story hasn’t changed - they admit nothing and deny nothing. You’re welcome to have a go, but I think it would be a wasted journey.

  They will be charged with resisting arrest, police assault, and reset of stolen vehicles and with a bit of luck, conspiracy as well, once we’ve analysed their paperwork. I’m afraid I can’t help you with the names of the car nicking gang or for that matter, the name of the person behind it.

  Sorry not to be the bearer of better news.

  Gary Wallis (DI)

  TWENTY-TWO

  She parked the car outside the newsagents and locked it. A week ago, she would have left it with the engine running while she nipped inside to buy a newspaper and some milk, as it wasn’t far from her flat and the engine hadn’t yet warmed up. However, there had been a spate of car thefts in this part of Queens Park from owners leaving their engines on while they were in a shop or sitting at home finishing a cup of tea, waiting for the car to generate some heat and demist the windows, and she decided not to risk it.

  DS Carol Walters could never claim her old VW Golf was worth much or it was the love of her life, despite it being part of the booty in a hard-won divorce settlement. It was the car which moved her from A to B without too much drama, but it would be a bugger to live without.

  She arrived in the office early and soon got stuck into a batch of reports about the theft of Sir Mathew Markham’s Bentley. Half an hour later, DI Henderson approached.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, sir?’ she said. ‘I thought you said you had your bad tooth seen to.’

  ‘I did…ach you cheeky mare. I don’t look so miserable, do I?’

  ‘I beg to differ.’

  ‘If I do, it’s because of this bloody case. One step forward and two steps back doesn’t cover it.’

  ‘Let's not forget we did bring down the selling side of their operation.’

  ‘I know, I know or at least we caught some of the workers, but it’s obvious with the Markham attack it hasn’t stopped them. It looks like they’ve set the whole thing back up again.’

  ‘I don’t know. It was quite a sophisticated set-up. It would take time to piece something as good as that together again.’

  ‘What annoys me is, I was hopeful that if we caught either the thieving gang or the selling gang, one lot would rat on the other, but I got an email from DI Wallis last night and he says the people we nabbed at the garage in Hackney are saying not a peep.’

  ‘Bloody hell, not another dead end.’

  ‘Yes, but no sooner does one door close and other one opens.'

  ‘Is this another one of your cryptic clues or have you got something else to tell me?’

  ‘When we met William Lawton yesterday, he told us about his Finance Director, David Young. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in March but his body wasn’t discovered for another two weeks by a woman out walking her dog.’

  ‘Sounds gruesome, I’d hate to be the person who found him. First the chairman and now the Finance Director, either somebody doesn’t like them or the company is cursed.’

  ‘There’s something strange going on at that place for sure. What I want you to do is go over to David Young’s house and take a look around and see if you can find anything linking his death with Sir Mathew’s. Young lived alone so there aren’t any friends or relatives we can ask.’

  ‘Why, do you think there’s a link between them?’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I know it seems too much of a coincidence for two senior people of one company to be killed within a couple of months of one another, but Young died in a bike accident and Markham was killed by the car thieving gang. It's hard to see how they could be connected.'

  ‘Nevertheless, go to Young’s house and see if you can find evidence of, I don't know, death threats, gambling debts, drug usage. Anything you think looks suspicious.’

  He handed over report and a set of keys.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘A report done by uniform in March, when they were treating Young’s disappearance as a missing persons enquiry. They entered his house but didn’t examine it in any detail, just making sure he wasn’t lying on the bathroom floor with bottle of pills in his hand, or in the garage swinging from the rafters.’

  ‘That’s a relief. So, you want me to go and do what? Go over there and have a root around?’

  ‘Use your womanly wiles to uncover what's hidden, more like.’

  She gave him a quizzical look. ‘When?’

  ‘Now would be a good time.’

  ‘I suppose it gets me out of the office for a while.’

  *

  David Young lived in a large four-bedroom property in Shirley Drive, Hove, which in her estimation was worth about eight hundred thousand pounds and even though she knew Young hadn’t died in the house, somehow the empty rooms felt desolate and creepy.

  DC Phil Bentley checked upstairs while she, after taking a look in all the rooms downstairs, sat in David Young’s study, as recommended by budding detective, PC Tommy Rogerson in his comprehensive report. She would make a start with his papers and afterwards, take a look at the laptop.

  An hour later and tucked away in an anonymous blue binder, she found a small pile of bank statements. She thought this odd, as she had seen a pile already, neatly filed in a blue Barclays Bank folder, and decided to take a closer look. They bore the logo of UBS, a bank in Switzerland and into it had been posted several large deposits, but the account wasn’t in Young’s name as the Barclays account was, but in the name of a company called Branso Manufacturing Ltd.

  Before getting too excited at the large amounts, she first confirmed the currency was Swiss francs and used her phone to find out the current conversion rate, as she would feel a right wally blurting out to Henderson about finding massive amounts of money salted away in a secret bank account, only to discover it was four thousand francs to the pound and this lot were worth a few hundred quid.

  She jotted down the amounts, one point two million pounds, seven hundred and seventy five thousand pounds, three hundred thousand pounds, and on it went. In total, it came to a whopping eight point three million pounds.

  She knew Young had been a well-paid executive in a successful company and no doubt he was in line for large bonuses, but the timing of the UBS payments were irregular and looked larger, in her opinion, than would be payable to a senior employee in a medium sized company; but hey, what did she know?

  She called Markham Microprocessors and a nice lady in the Human Resources Department confirmed the company did indeed operate a profit-related bonus scheme and payments were made to all eligible staff, including David Young once a year. Share options were calculated after the annual results were announced and only redeemable if the recipient held them for five years.

  None of the deposits in the Swiss bank account matched the steady drumbeat of salaries, bonuses, or share options, either in their frequency or payment dates. It came as no surprise when the HR woman refused to tell her the amounts paid to David Young but when Walters told her the amounts she was investigating, she confirmed they did not match the payments made to Mr Young and she couldn’t suggest what they might be.

  Walters switched on his laptop and as expected, it demanded a password but she was confident of gaining entry, as her search had also uncovered Mr Young’s little black book of web site passwords and usernames. A password used throughout the book was ‘Daniel,’ which she now knew was the name of his sixteen-year son living in Dorset. It did the trick and Windows started to boot up.

  She was savvy with computers as she spent a fair amount of her leisure time on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and often late at night she could be found updating a blog she was writing about the life and experiences of a female detective. This was a secret kept back from her colleagues, as some of them were mentioned in the cases she was writing about, and unflattering nicknames were used for the Assistant Chief Constable and
Chief Constable, and it wouldn’t do her career prospects any good if any of this leaked out.

  With the laptop booted-up and armed with the suspicious bank statements, she was tempted to use a search term such as ‘Swiss’ or ‘deposits,’ or even the date of the deposits to search the machine for all references, but it would be boring watching the little egg timer spinning round and round only to return a long list of irrelevant rubbish.

  Instead, she decided to take a more methodical approach and interrogate the machine, program by program. She double-clicked Outlook. In a matter of seconds it became clear that this particular machine was David Young’s personal laptop, as none of the emails related to Markham and the single email address he used was a personal one. This made sense as his rucksack had been recovered at the accident scene and inside they found another laptop. It bore a sticker, ‘Property of Markham Microprocessors’.

  For the next hour, she read through a succession of emails from the secretary at the West Hove golf club, his partner at the bridge club, several terse money-related ones from a stroppy woman she assumed to be his ex-wife, and a series of mushy ones from his son wishing him much fun on his new bike.

  In the email ‘filing cabinet’ she found a flurry of emails between him and the place where he bought the bike, a large Ducati dealership in Croydon but far from identifying a fault that might have resulted in the crash, he was complimenting them for their quality of service, booking the bike in for some modification work, and enquiring whether a particular accessory was back in stock.

  The spreadsheet and word processing programmes made her feel sad as she could tell by the date and time stamps that he often worked late into the night and at weekends, but while there were spreadsheets on bridge and football, and documents relating to the personal projects he was working on, she found nothing about UBS or the large deposits.

  She closed every program and sat staring at the screen. A few minutes later, DC Bentley arrived at her shoulder. He reported finding nothing odd upstairs, outside or in any of the outbuildings.

  ‘What are you doing, sarg?’ he asked.

  ‘I found these large deposits,’ she said pointing at the UBS statements, ‘but I can’t find any reference to them on his pc. I’ve looked at Outlook, Word, Excel and the rest of his programs, but I’ve found nothing.’ She blew a puff of frustrated air. ‘I'm out of ideas.’

  ‘They are large,’ he said bending over to take a look. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a piece.’ He looked up and pointed at the screen. ‘If you can’t find anything about them in his normal email program, it might be because he also uses a web-based email account.’

  ‘Bloody hell, I hadn’t thought of looking there.’ She picked up Young’s black book and after flicking through every page, found it on the last one, listed under Google.

  ‘Well done, you,’ she said as she fired up the web, loaded Google and clicked on ‘GMail’. ‘Daniel’ didn’t work this time and she went back to the little black book where ‘899pan’ did the trick, a truncated version of the name of his Ducati motorbike, a Panigale 899.

  The emails in this account were all from Branso Manufacturing and tied up with the name on the UBS statements. Attached to every email were invoices for a variety of goods and services, many described in the woolliest of terms such as, ‘Marketing Services’ or ‘Consultancy.’ Adding them up and converting them to Swiss Francs, tied back more or less to the timing and amounts of the deposits in the UBS account.

  She sat back, feeling tired and brain dead after her intensive two-hour workout.

  ‘What are you thinking sarg?’

  ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ she said turning to face Bentley, who looked equally tired from watching her, ‘our late Mr Young was involved in a massive fraud.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  William Lawton shifted in the chair. The floor was his. In the cosy and comfortable surroundings of Sir Stephen Pendleton’s house in Westerham, Surrey he didn’t feel the least bit nervous at being in this august company. He had spoken at many conferences, supplier meetings, and press briefings and had been involved in multi-million pound negotiations many times before, but for the first time in his career, he was unsure what he was going to say.

  He called this meeting of the partners in his newly formed consortium, as many had expressed concern at having thrown their hats into the ring with him, it was beginning to look like a fixed horse race. Following the recent death of Sir Mathew Markham, press speculation was rife about Suki taking over the running of the business and to add a little zest to the tale, some suggested she had already agreed to sell her stake to a major Japanese electronics corporation.

  He called them up one by one and told them in no uncertain terms, anything they read in the newspapers was nothing but speculation, as no decisions had been made yet and it wasn’t even a done-deal that Suki would inherit the business. Despite the reassuring phone call, he decided to have the meeting as he wanted every member of the consortium to understand, the ball was still in play as far as he was concerned and he still required and wanted their full support.

  On his left, and seated on the sofa was their host, Sir Stephen Pendleton. He created the UK’s largest electrical conglomerate by buying the last remaining UK video machine, radio, and television manufacturers for a song and turned them into a well-run outfit, making electrical components for the defence industries, badging up consumer electronics for many big retailers, and manufacturing control systems for industry.

  Before he retired, the group was sold to a French conglomerate for over a billion pounds and as Sir Stephen was the company’s largest individual shareholder, he now had a thirty million-pound investment pot. It would be hard to tell all this from looking at the house, as it could only be described as modest, but then he also owned a two-hundred-acre cattle ranch in Montana and a chalet in Verbier.

  Beside him sat Fred Hallam, a car nut who had taken his large but unknown motor tuning business in Northampton into the Finnish-dominated world of car rallying, and in a matter of a few years, notched up three World Championships. Their achievements soon came to the notice of German carmaker Volkswagen who now produced a Hallam-tuned version of many of their cars and turned the lightening-quick VW Hallam Castra hatchback, into the must-have choice for hardened rally fans.

  Still only forty five, he was number two-hundred in the recent Sunday Times Rich List and interested in Markham as he believed the future of faster and more fuel-efficient cars lay not only in expertly tuned engines, quick-change gearboxes, and lean burn fuels, but in their electronics and he was confident Markham could be at the forefront of this new and exciting development.

  Next to him, sat the long, slim frame of Dominic Green, looking around the room with the piercing green eyes of a hawk hovering above a cornfield and searching for its prey. Earlier, Lawton asked him if he knew anything about Sir Mathew’s death, as he was well aware of his reputation, and knew his nose was buried in some murky troughs and he moved around in some dark places. Rather than appear horrified, as he would be if someone asked him the same question, he shrugged his shoulders and asked him what he was whinging about as in his view, the killers had done him a big favour.

  Next along, and looking uncomfortable on the Queen Anne chair, was the considerable bulk of Barry King. Green had introduced him into the consortium as a long-standing friend, and if Lawton believed everything he had read about Green, the same could be said for King. He started out as an East-End gangster and cut his teeth importing alcohol, running brothels, and peddling drugs, but to the world at large, he was now a respectable businessman and responsible for some of the largest developments in London, including a new fifty-story office block in Moorgate and one of the sports stadia for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

  The final member was Jacques Trudeau, Managing Director of France’s biggest defence contractor and a friend of Sir Stephen, ever since the Frenchman purchased his company. Like Hallam, he wanted to be involved with Markham, not so much for what t
hey were doing now, but for the expertise they could channel into his current area of focus, defence.

  His vision of the future included a Star Wars military capability consisting of pilotless planes, robotic armies, and sophisticated missiles, all controlled from a well-protected offshore aircraft carrier. In his opinion, Markham, with all its skills at shrinking electronics and making them perform complex tasks while generating low levels of heat, were perfectly suited to this market.

  Lawton had been impressed by many of their pitches, but he could see a problem if they succeeded in putting in a winning bid, and that was how to satisfy all their conflicting demands. The business had a full order book from mobile phone companies with existing chips and they were, at the moment, in discussions with the same phone companies about the introduction a new family of chips which would provide a range of novel services. It wasn’t the sort of business which could be easily up-scaled without expensive development work and tooling, however, he was a positive person and in his mind, it was a good problem to have.

  If, for any reason, the sale did not go ahead, it was likely he would still be in charge of Markham and if so, he would be interested in talking to Hallam and Trudeau about trying to grow the company organically into their business areas. He and Mathew never considered going into the car industry, but they had been trying to crack defence for years and even Sir Mathew, with all his legendary selling and negotiating skills, couldn’t get so much as a sniff.

  Lawton stood up and the murmur ceased. ‘Thank you all for coming. For those of you unaware of the current situation, please let me clarify.’ He went on to explain the circumstances surrounding the death of Mathew Markham, the progress of the police investigation, and the reaction of the press, and the effect of all these events on the Markham business.

  ‘With the death of Sir Mathew, the papers are speculating that the sale will not go ahead until the contents of his will are known and everyone discovers what the inheritors of his shares intend to do, and in this case, I think the papers are more or less right.’