Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2)

by Iain Cameron

  ‘Does he still hate the company and the people in it?’

  He hesitated. ‘It’s not my place to speak for him and I wouldn’t want to drop him in it. You’ll need to ask him yourself.’

  Henderson asked a few more questions but soon drew a halt as he’d probably got everything James Nash had to offer. He eased himself from the chair with some difficulty as it seemed to have moulded itself to his shape. ‘I've enjoyed talking to you, James. Here’s my card, if you think of anything else in the meantime, I’d appreciate a call.’

  He walked to the door and stepped out, but stopped and turned. James had turned to face the computer and was tapping away on the keyboard with all the finesse of a skilled typist.

  ‘Do you still keep in touch with Gary?’

  ‘Nah. I haven’t spoken to him for about six months, maybe more. Last I heard, at the start of this year he got a job in the IT department of some financial services company in Brighton. Boring as hell, he says but it pays the bills. Now he’s bought himself a boat and spends all his spare time down at the marina.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was a short drive from Burgess Hill to Haywards Heath but long enough for Henderson to mull over his conversation with James Nash. Two things stood out. It was Lawton, not Markham who was the subject of their ire, as at the time Sir Mathew was semi-retired and William Lawton would have been responsible for all day-to-day decisions.

  It was Lawton who pulled them up about their bad-boy behaviour and Lawton’s name that appeared on their termination letters. So if they were targeting the business, why did they kill Sir Mathew Markham and not William Lawton? Was he an easy target, an old man who rarely ventured out, or were they saving Lawton for last and making him sweat, much as Jamil suggested?

  Another question annoyed him, why did James Nash lie? When he asked him if he still kept in contact with Larner, he said he didn’t but what he actually said was, he knew Larner didn’t like the job and only did it to pay the bills, indicating that he had spoken to him since he started work. In another conversation he might have put it down to semantics or the inelegant phrasing of a young and inarticulate lad, but Nash wasn’t young and he wasn’t inarticulate.

  Haywards Heath was a much larger town than Burgess Hill with its own mainline station and in close proximity to the A23. Over the years, it had shed its ‘dormitory town’ tag and was now home to a number of insurance and financial services companies and with a good selection of night-time entertainment in the form of dozens of pubs and restaurants.

  A few minutes later, he turned into Bolnore Road, a leafy area of large and small individual detached houses in marked contrast to the regimented and standardised semi-detached estate he left behind in Burgess Hill. Amidst mock-Tudor mini-castles, five-bedroom ‘executive’ retreats and small houses, extended so many times they had forfeited the right to be called a ‘cottage’, stood Larner’s place.

  He parked across the street. The house was small in comparison to many of its neighbours and looked as though the exterior had not been improved in decades, with an abundance of old and paint-flaked sash windows, an original but bowed roof, and a driveway dotted with many clumps of grass and weeds that if left untended a while longer, would soon become incorporated into the untidy garden.

  He walked over to the driveway, his presence now shielded from neighbours by a rampant laurel hedge blocking out much of the light from nearby street lamps and giving the house a black, forlorn look.

  The windows were in darkness with the curtains open, suggesting there was no one at home, but he knocked on the door all the same. In his experience, IT people were a strange bunch and he wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Larner inside, tapping away on his keyboard in a darkened back room and wearing nothing but a old straw boater and flip-flops.

  He knocked again, louder this time, the sound reverberating around the empty hallway, but still came no reply. The house, the encroaching garden, the stillness of the night, reminded him of a poem he first learned in school by Walter De La Mare, called The Listeners. He could still recall his favourite stanza.

  ‘But no one descended to the Traveller

  No head from the leaf-fringed sill

  Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

  Where he stood perplexed and still.’

  The poem was a metaphor for a dying man knocking on death’s door and as the traveller received no reply to his knock, it meant his time on earth wasn't yet over. He liked the poem, but hoped its sudden appearance in his mind and its preoccupation with death was in no way prescient.

  He walked back to the driveway and after making sure he wasn’t being watched by a vigilante dog walker or the Neighbourhood Watch coordinator out for an evening patrol, as it wouldn’t do to try and explain his presence here to a couple of plods from Haywards Heath Station, he disappeared around the side of the house and into the shadows.

  When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see he was standing in front of a gate and over to the right, and blocking the way into the rear garden, the doors of a garage. The gate looked old and a good kick would most likely open it, but he was glad he didn’t because when he turned the handle, he found it wasn’t locked. He pushed it open and could see why. Either through settlement in the house or warping of the wood, the gate had shifted a couple of inches away from where the hasp met the corresponding staple on the gate post, and so it couldn’t be locked even if Larner wanted to.

  He carefully walked past the windows at the back of the house, but his caution was unnecessary as he couldn't detect the slightest chink of light inside, no ghostly flicker of a television, no tinny prattle from a portable radio, nothing to indicate the presence of anyone. The moon was casting light on the garden but it was Blackpool Illuminations next door, with a light blazing in every room, no doubt the refuge of a posse of teenagers, too lazy to switch anything off. The house was far enough away not to bother him and it was separated from Larner’s with another tall and untidy hedge.

  Before tackling the back door, he decided to take a look in the garage. In his experience, crooks often hid incriminating things inside sheds and garages, things they didn’t want the casual house visitor to spot, and it was often the place where tools were stored and where he might find something useful to open the back door or a window without causing too much damage.

  The side door to the garage looked as old and dilapidated as the gate, and this time the weakness lay in a rattling, loose-fitting lock. It was a disappointing discovery as he fancied a challenge, but instead he dug his fingers into the space between the door edge and its frame and eased the door closer to the hinges. It opened with an unoiled creak, a piece of cake for him or any neighbourhood lawnmower thief.

  He had investigated many old garden sheds and garages over the years, in search of drugs or guns, and knew to blunder inside without looking was a mistake of the naïve and foolhardy. Any number of calamities were lying in wait, such as a smack on the head from a low hanging plank, to bruising an ankle on a discarded spade, but more painful in his personal experience, was tripping over a rake and falling headlong into a bundle of barbed wire. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his battered and trusty Maglite, which repaid his faith yet again, when it switched on first time.

  In contrast to the neglect evident all around the house, the inside of the garage was tidy and all tools and implements had been put out of harm’s way on shelves and brackets leaving a broad open space for him to walk around in, either that or he didn't own much stuff. Not having tended a garden for many years, he wasn’t tempted to have a poke inside a small box containing seed packets or to take a look along the shelves at boxes of fertiliser or weed killer to see what he had been missing, because whenever he saw anyone mowing the lawn with a grumpy expression on their face, it simply re-affirmed his resolution to live in a flat.

  He looked around for a few minutes but finding nothing of interest, he turned to walk outside, when the torch illuminated a large cardboard box
in the corner, nestling under two rolls of netting. Propping the Maglite on a shelf, he carefully removed the rolls. They were large and bulky and looked heavy but when he tried to lift one, it weighed next to nothing.

  He opened the box expecting to find a stash of beer or well-thumbed porno magazines, a discovery which never failed to lighten up many a boring drugs search, but felt slightly cheated to find it contained only clothes. Slowly, as he didn’t want to be assailed by a squadron of moths or have his face covered in dust, he removed a black balaclava, fleece and trousers. He grabbed the torch and aimed it inside. There were three sets of each. His heart skipped a beat. There had been three men at Mathew Markham’s house and Suki described clothing similar to this.

  His mind began racing but like the waves at Brighton Beach, no sooner did the excitement rise, when seconds later it receded. The might well be the clothes of criminals but equally, they could be gardening clothes, building clothes, or the clothes Larner used when he cleaned his boat. They were simply clothes and unless a fragment found at Markham’s house could be matched to anything in this pile, it would prove nothing and even then, a clever lawyer would be able to pick holes bigger than any moth.

  The logical part of his brain said 'no,' this is nothing, but his intuition was screaming and demanding his attention, it was too big a coincidence to ignore. He spent a few more minutes searching the rest of the box but found nothing more and so he replaced the rolls of plastic sheeting back on top and walked over to the back door of the house, more convinced than ever that he was on the right track.

  The neighbours had settled down for the evening to watch television and the teenagers had gone out, as all the upstairs lights were off. If Larner’s house was as modern as those in Burgess Hill, the back door would be made from uPVC, be double-glazed, and fitted with a multiple locking system, nigh-on impossible to open without a hammer and an arrest warrant, but this one wasn’t.

  It was made of wood with a large window at the top and an inset panel at the bottom. This offered a few choices, none of which were unpalatable or difficult for a burglar or a curious copper. He could smash the window or less messy, kick in the bottom panel, which was in all likelihood made from something no thicker than plywood and crawl through the gap His personal favourite was to open the door with the key, which he could see through the window, hanging from a peg close to the door.

  He went back to the garage and removed a long screwdriver, used by handymen to work in those tight, inaccessible places where a hand and a smaller tool wouldn’t fit, but the rust on the blade suggested it hadn’t been out of the tool box for a while. In his other hand, he carried a wooden stepladder and a piece of wire.

  Balancing on the steps, he used the tip of the screwdriver to cut away a small section of wood from the bottom of the frame of the little window above the main kitchen window, and eased the screwdriver into the gap. After a bit of wriggling about, trying to get the angle right, he pushed it under the window handle. After checking to make sure the ladder was still on a sound footing, he gave the base of the screwdriver a sharp smack with his hand and he was pleased to see the handle jump from its rest.

  Holding the little window open with his shoulder, he leaned inside the kitchen and hooked the loop he made at the end of the wire over the handle of the main window and pulled it open. A few minutes later, he inserted the key into the lock and opened the door.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  DI Henderson walked slowly into Gary Larner’s house. If there had been an alarm, he would have been shocked, as he couldn’t see a tell-tale box outside and given the general state of disrepair and neglect all around, he would imagine an alarm would be way down low on Larner’s list of DIY priorities. Sure enough there wasn’t, and he stepped into the kitchen confident he wouldn’t be scurrying back out twenty-seconds later, trying to make it back to the car before the ear-splitting bell sounded.

  Kitchens were good places to hide things as storage jars and closed food containers looked innocent enough until opened, but he didn’t bother looking as he was certain what he was looking for, wouldn't be there. He didn’t know what it was, short of evidence to prove Larner's involvement in Sir Mathew’s murder, but he was sure if he came across something suspicious, he would recognise it.

  Larner’s study was adjacent to the living-room and at first glance, looked like it contained more kit than the Florida Space Centre as it was jam-packed with all manner of computer gear, including three huge screens, two keyboards, a powerful looking server, and on another table, printers, scanners and black boxes all twinkling, all powered-up. He wanted to take a look at one of the screens but worried that as soon as he touched it, the whole room would light up like a beacon, so he kept well away from anything which would hasten such an unfortunate event.

  Venetian blinds covered the window and when he looked closer, they were lined in a thick layer of dust, suggesting they hadn’t been opened for a while. He pulled the cord and allowed a little light from the streetlight outside to filter inside. Aside from the computer gear, he could see a bookcase, filing cabinet, cupboard, and pile of stuff in the corner, which would take a four-man SOCO team a week to look through.

  He closed the blinds and switched on the torch. He took a quick look inside the filing cabinet and the cupboard, but soon realised that to make any sense out of it, he would have to go through every file one by one. The normal course of action in such circumstances would be for him to obtain a search warrant, but after Harris's tirade earlier today, he would be reaching for his P45 faster than Wild Bill Hickok could draw his Colt Navy revolvers. He needed time to do this thoroughly but at this precise moment, time was one commodity in very short supply.

  He switched off the torch and went off in search of Larner’s bedroom. He reached the top of the stairs when heard the sound of a car stopping outside. He moved to the window at the end of the hall and peered out through grubby net curtains.

  Adjacent to Larner’s drive, a car was parked and he knew it hadn’t been there when he first arrived. The silence that followed was oppressive, as if the room was filled with thick, dense smoke and it was a relief when the driver’s door opened. It stayed open, swaying back and forth without anyone appearing until he realised the driver was either talking to someone inside the car, or trying to retrieve something from the glove box.

  A few seconds later, a man appeared. He had seen Larner’s mug shot in his personnel file but with no idea if he was large or small, fat or thin, and in any case, this guy was too far away and the light from the nearby street lamp too weak to tell if it was him or not.

  The guy stood there looking at Larner’s house. Henderson was sure he had closed the back door but did he leave the venetian blinds just as he found them? In legal terms, he was up the Red River Rapids without a paddle, canoe, or life jacket as breaking and entering into house without a warrant, not even with more watertight evidence than he had, would spell the end of his career and a possible criminal prosecution.

  A few seconds later, a woman exited the passenger door. She was irate and intent on carrying on with whatever conversation they had been having in the car. For a minute or so their movements were acted out in slow motion, as they seemed more focused on their argument than moving away from the car.

  The guy turned and locked the car and the couple walked towards Larner’s driveway. Henderson was about to leg it downstairs to the back door when they stopped, turned, and crossed the road. They passed under a street lamp and the realisation hit him. He carried a bottle of wine and she flowers, the invitees to someone’s dinner party but with a measure of doubt as to which house they were going to. He was glad he hadn’t been invited, as he wasn’t sure the warring couple would make such good company, and knowing his luck he would be seated right next to them.

  He waited a few minutes more, until he heard the slam of the door of the house opposite, before making his way downstairs and checking the blind in the study. The blind looked fine but as he emerged from the study, he
spotted a door underneath the staircase.

  If it was a cellar, it was a rarity as this valuable extra space had been phased out of UK house building over the years since the Second World War, due to cost constraints, but it was a great place to hide all manner of stuff. He turned the handle but the door was locked and instinctively he did what he used to do at his grandmother’s rambling old house in Inverness, he ran his hand across the top of the doorframe.

  The key was large, metal and ornate and looked more like an offensive weapon than a door entry device, but when he fitted it into the keyhole, it turned and pulled back the bolt with the same, sure snap of a modern, well-oiled mortice. He opened the door and peered inside. It was dark but he could see enough to know he was looking into a cellar and not a broom cupboard.

  If sheds, greenhouses, lofts, and garages held unknown calamities which could kill and maim the unwary, cellars were ten times more dangerous and one time he fell down a steep flight of steps as they started immediately on opening the door. He switched on the torch and after making sure of his footing, ventured inside and closed the door, but not before pocketing the key, as there was no way he wanted to be locked inside by accident or on purpose.

  Standing at the top of the stairs he panned the torch around the wall until he found a light switch and using the combination of the weak light spilling up from a bulb in the cellar and the torch, descended the stairs. Near the bottom, he ducked under low-lying rafters and looked inside.

  Expecting to find boxes, old books, and discarded household appliances and furniture, it took two takes to realise there was a fair amount of those but behind them, a woman was chained to one wall and a man to the other.

  They were hard to spot against the grey walls as their clothes and faces were as grimy as their surroundings. He ran over to the woman and knelt down to loosen the rope around her hands, while bombarding her with a volley of questions before realising she had something in her mouth, gagging her.