Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Okay, carry on.”

  “The elder brother, Barford, died in 1990—”

  “Died? How?” Fergal interrupted.

  “I was just about to tell you. He drowned in a surfing accident in Cornwall; he was twenty-two years old. His death meant that Warwick inherited his father’s millions, or billions I should say, when Stratford died in 1995.”

  “Was there no Mrs Stratford Eden?”

  “There was. Mrs Della Eden, née Lloyd, was born in 1932. She and Stratford were married in 1960, in Birmingham, and divorced in 1975. She got custody of the two boys but Stratford took over the responsibility when she disappeared to South America with some gigolo chappie, according to the gossip columns, that is, in 1977.”

  “A colourful family. Anyway, Warwick is now, what? A twenty-four or twenty-five-year-old free agent with untold wealth and his father’s business?”

  Skye nodded. “And he made the most of it. He sold FP Transactions to an American bank and pocketed further billions which he proceeded to use to fund a pretty hedonistic lifestyle. You know, houses in Cannes, Monte Carlo, Florida Keys, New York, Channel Islands, amongst others, along with the odd yacht permanently festooned with lithesome and scantily clad hopeful starlets. Like his father he dabbled in film production, probably as a means to attract the girls as pictures show he wasn’t exactly an Adonis. Flabby and pasty faced are the words that spring to mind.”

  “You seem to have found out quite a bit.”

  “The more scurrilous papers and celebrity websites couldn’t get enough of him.”

  “And then for some reason he decided to go into politics?”

  “It seems he gave a lot of money to a few politicians in the more right-wing parties of America and Europe, including our own England Force, but fell out with the people he was funding. He said he could do a better job than all of them put together and stood in the General Election of 2015. He lost by quite a margin, but he always claimed he was robbed. There was a by-election later in the year, which he won, just, and then he swanned off on his yacht to ‘prepare for the referendum’, he said. If he did do any real work I couldn’t see it. He seemed to spend most of the time wining and dining various awful people on his yacht in various fashionable places in the sun. Since the referendum he’s been in the public eye far too much. Mostly gloating. That’s it really.”

  “Well done.” Fergal reached out and took his wife’s hand

  “It seems like there could be a goodly number of people who might wish him harm, though I’m not sure about hating him enough to kill him. Now, tell me, what have you found out about how he died that the newspapers either don’t know or can’t say?”

  “More of the can’t say, I think. It seems he had been dead a couple of days when he was found. They haven’t confirmed the time of death though it is likely to have been late on Thursday evening, give or take a couple of hours.”

  “Any idea how he died?”

  “One gunshot from close quarters to the back of the head did for him. But interestingly enough there was another shot fired post-mortem. His right hand had been formed into a fist after he was dead but before rigor mortis set in, and then that hand was shot.”

  “The fist! Ferrum Pugnus. That must mean something.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So are they thinking someone who lost out to his dad, or who lost out when he sold the business, was getting their revenge?”

  “It’s a possibility but it seems odd to wait twenty-odd years. I think it’s more likely that that was done to make it look like it was someone who lost out from FP Transactions.”

  “A deliberate red herring?”

  Fergal nodded. “Anyway, it seems he was killed somewhere else and then the body hidden under the upturned dinghy, to be found two days later.”

  “He wasn’t a small man, was he? So whoever moved him had to be quite strong.”

  “Or have help.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He had no ID on him and since his face was a bit of a mess, it took a bit of time to identify him. In fact, no formal identification has been made yet. They’ve only released the name because the dog walker recognised his suit and put it all out on social media.”

  “A recognisable suit?” Skye asked doubtfully.

  “It was a garish check tweed, apparently, completely unsuitable for the weather. The dog walker remembered it from having seen Warwick glad-handing admirers in the Market on the Thursday morning.”

  “He had admirers?” Skye scoffed. “And they’re keeping the details from the press?” she continued.

  “For as long as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “To give them breathing room.”

  “Them?”

  “He was an important man; however much we disagree with what he said he did have a following. The police, and no doubt others in the Home Office, need space to get a little ahead of the game. It’s pretty high profile, they don’t want it to be ages before they announce progress has been made.”

  “Does anyone suspect terrorism?”

  “Not that I’ve found, though he was pretty outspoken about asylum seekers and refugees. No one has linked his death to any particular radical religion.”

  “So how are they keeping a lid on it?”

  “I suspect, and I have no reason other than a deep suspicion of the man, Gordon’s hand in this.”

  “Gordon? You’ve never liked him, have you? Ever since we first met him and he flirted with me.”

  Fergal immediately denied jealousy. “The first reason I didn’t trust him was that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Anyway, that’s beside the point, I don’t trust him because he gets us down here on the flimsy pretext that Diane has gone missing. He hints there was an ulterior motive. A prominent and dangerous politician is murdered. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I do know that he isn’t being entirely honest with us.”

  Skye didn’t think that this was a good time to say that she rather liked Gordon and she thought he was very clever and that whatever he had in mind would probably work out well in the end so she changed the subject.

  “I can’t see any link between Diane’s disappearance and Warwick’s murder apart from the fact that they occurred at about the same time in the same town.”

  “Do we know why Warwick was in Dartmouth in the first place? There’s no election planned here, is there?”

  “No, no election,” Skye confirmed.

  “You said he had a yacht? Is there any chance he was here for the Regatta?”

  “Not that sort of yacht, silly! His is one of those superyachts with uniformed lackeys doling out massive alcoholic cocktails to nubile young would-be actresses.”

  Fergal ignored her cynicism. “Whatever he uses it for, what’s his yacht called? Can we check whether it was here? If so, why did it disappear without him because it’s not here now.”

  Skye looked back at her notes. “He’s got four. New Waters, Herdewyke, Beausale and Tinker’s Whorl.”

  She did not understand why Fergal was laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Fergal looked down at his screen and enlarged the map of Warwickshire. “New Waters is the name of a lake in Warwick, it was created by Capability Brown. Temple Herdewyke used to be a village between Banbury and Warwick before it was absorbed into a Ministry of Defence Establishment, Beausale is another place in Warwickshire and Tinker’s Whorl is almost an anagram of Kenilworth.”

  “I think that’s stretching the Warwickshire link a bit far”

  Fergal ignored her. “I wonder what the family’s obsession with Warwickshire is. It probably doesn’t matter. Anyway, let me check where the yachts are now.”

  “You can do that?” Skye asked.

  “Any yacht that travels in international waters and carries passengers would be fitted with a tran
sponder,” Fergal explained. “Warwick’s yachts would be fitted with an AIS—”

  “AIS?”

  “Automatic Identification System. These yachts will have one so we can track where they are, where they’re going, on what course and at what speed. They help avoid collisions in crowded waters.”

  “The breadth of your knowledge never ceases to amaze me,” Skye said smiling, knowing that he would have been interrogating an online encyclopaedia at the first mention of yachts. “So, where are they?”

  “Give me a chance!”

  Skye watched the back of Fergal’s head as he turned back to his screen and, not for the first time, thought how lucky she was to have found him.

  She used the ten minutes it took him to track the yachts to find out how Stratford Eden had died; she was suspicious that his death had been so soon after his elder son’s. It all seemed to suit Warwick too well. She was disappointed to find that, although only sixty-five years old, he died of natural causes, after a long illness. “Well?” she asked when Fergal sat back from his computer.

  “Well. That was interesting. The transponders of New Waters, Herdewyke and Tinker’s Whorl are all turned off and have been for a few weeks. They were all last seen in English Harbour, Antigua. They must still be there because they couldn’t cross the Atlantic or bum around the Caribbean without their transponders being turned on.”

  “That leaves Beausale.”

  “Indeed, that leaves Beausale.”

  “Oh come on! Stop mucking about. Where is she?”

  “Beausale is currently heading for Poole.”

  “You say that as if there is more.”

  “There is. Up until last Saturday evening she was here, in Dartmouth, anchored in the middle of the river. She arrived on Wednesday and stayed all day Thursday and Friday and left the day before yesterday. And there’s more.”

  “More?”

  “It seemed Mr Eden wanted to be in Dartmouth very badly because Beausale was here on Sunday two weeks ago but had to leave because of Regatta Week. She left, went to Jersey and came back again.”

  “So hang on a minute. Warwick Eden presumably arrives on his yacht and is sent away. Comes back again ten days or so later and soon after arriving, Thursday, he’s murdered and his body hidden. His yacht then hangs around for another couple of days but leaves before his body is found? It’s all rather odd.”

  “And at some time, while that yacht is in the river here, Diane goes missing.”

  “So…”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to believe there has to be a connection between Diane’s disappearance and Warwick Eden’s murder.”

  “So?”

  “We have to go back to Diane’s house tomorrow morning. We’ve missed something.”

  “Any idea what?”

  “No idea whatsoever, but there has to be something we’ve missed and that something has to be important. I’m beginning to think that Diane might, after all, not have left of her own free will.”

  Chapter 11: Skye and Fergal Make Progress

  Despite Fergal’s fears that Diane’s house may have been disturbed when they arrived the next morning they found it as they had left it.

  “What are we looking for now?” Skye asked. Fergal had not shared the reasons for his concerns with her.

  “Anything that links Diane with Warwick Eden.”

  “Anything to do with anything would be good,” Skye retorted as she stared out of the window at the bustling river. “Just out of interest, where would Warwick’s yacht have been moored? Would Diane have been able to see it from here?”

  Fergal joined her at the window. “Difficult to say really, but I would have thought it was highly likely.”

  “And her binoculars are here, to hand, on the table.”

  “Weren’t they always?”

  “I can’t remember. Maybe.” Skye picked them up and scanned the traffic on the river. “If it was parked—”

  “Moored.”

  “If it was moored there, in that space in the middle, she would have had a very good view of it.”

  “She. Boats are female.”

  “She. It. Whatever.”

  “It’s a very tenuous link but there might be something. I’ll have a look at her computer again.”

  “You looked at it yesterday.”

  “But I didn’t know what I was looking for then, did I?”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’ll look a little deeper into her search history.”

  Skye watched the activity on the river, trying to gauge how a yacht the size of Beausale could be moored there without causing a great deal of disruption. She imagined herself in Diane’s place, looking down at the ostentatious yacht arriving in the river. She had no idea what Beausale looked like but she imagined it sleek, shiny and white with blacked-out windows and perhaps a helipad at the back. Diane would have been able to watch the comings and goings of the large yacht’s tender. Perhaps she had seen something suspicious, something that might be connected to Warwick’s murder. Skye knew Diane was inquisitive. She would have gone down to look, she would have asked questions and maybe, Skye thought, she might have asked too many of the wrong people.

  Skye shook her head to clear it of fanciful thoughts. Despite Diane’s links with Gordon, and her history of running a house of safety, the truth was likely to be far less exciting. Diane had probably just got tired of the crowds and gone somewhere for a break.

  “Find anything?” she asked, realising that Fergal had been quiet for some time.

  “Mmm.”

  “Come on. That’s no answer.”

  “A couple of Sundays ago she searched for Beausale.”

  “That was when it, sorry she, first arrived in the river, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, the Sunday before Regatta Week.”

  “Then she followed a link on the website to Warwick Eden.”

  Skye kept her voice under calm, replying with what she thought was admirable control. “So there is a connection.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She visited sites that referred to both Stratford and Barford Eden.”

  “That makes sense, the father and the brother.”

  “And also someone else, not through a link but through a separate search.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone called Brian Cliffe with an e.”

  “Who on earth is Brian Cliffe with an e?”

  “I haven’t a clue. But she obviously wasn’t satisfied with the results because she then added Warwickshire to the search string.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t follow any of the links.”

  “That’s a shame. Still, at least we can now link Diane to Beausale.”

  “Certainly she was interested in the yacht, and in Warwick Eden.”

  “Idle curiosity?”

  “Can you imagine Diane wasting her time with anything idle?”

  “No, not really,” Skye had to agree.

  “We need to go back to the hotel. While you find out what you can about Beausale I’ll get hold of crew lists and find out what I can about anyone who might have been around Warwick in his last days.”

  For the rest of that morning they concentrated their investigation on Warwick Eden’s yacht.

  “Beausale is not as super as some superyachts. Certainly smaller than some of his others.” Skye began to read from her screen. “She was built in 2000 in The Netherlands, refitted in New Zealand in 2013. She is just under forty metres long and can cruise at twelve knots with a top speed of sixteen. She has five double guest cabins and although she can operate with a skeleton crew of three the normal complement when crossing an ocean with the owner on board would be seven. She has a jacuzzi, an inboard motor tender, various towables, whatever
they are, and state-of-the-art fishing gear. What else do you want to know?”

  “When we last saw her she was heading for Poole. Do we know when she got there?” Fergal asked.

  Skye checked the marine tracking website. “She hasn’t got there yet. A few minutes ago she was just passing Sandbanks into Poole Harbour.”

  Fergal frowned. “So where has she been in between here and there? We know she left here Saturday night, so why has it taken her the best part of three days to get to Poole? She should have got there overnight surely?”

  “I didn’t pick up on that.”

  “So where has she been?”

  Skye returned to the marine tracking website and checked Beausale’s back track. “It looks like she turned her transponder off. She seems to have flown from just off Berry Head, that’s just east of the Dart Estuary, to Portland Bill.”

  “So there’s a couple of missing days to explain.”

  “We’ve no way of knowing where she’s been, have we?”

  “I can’t think of one.” Fergal did not like having to admit defeat.

  “Anyway, how have you got on with the people?” Skye asked cheerily.

  “I’ve found a crew list but it’s not completely current. There’s captain, chef, sous chef, chief steward, three stewardesses, first officer, four deckhands and two engineers.”

  “Any names that ring bells?”

  “Actually, one does.”

  “Well?”

  “When I was following Diane’s searches remember she had searched for Brian Cliffe—”

  “With an e.”

  Fergal ignored the interruption. “—for Brian Cliffe and Warwickshire. I’ve been checking, just out of interest, to see if there could be a connection.”

  “There was in Diane’s mind obviously.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And is there?”

  Fergal nodded. “Most of the search results were for Guy’s Cliffe. Apparently it’s a village near Warwick, and there’s a Guy’s Cliffe Avenue and a Guy’s Cliff House.”

  “But no Brian?”

  Fergal did not answer Skye’s question directly. “No Brian, no. But—”

  “Oh come on! Stop hanging this out. You’ve obviously got something really good to tell me so tell me!”