Deadly Intent (Anna Travis Mysteries)

by Lynda La Plante

  “Get the wrecked car checked over and put the pressure on,” Langton told him. “The surveillance guys said that she was driving that fast down the slip road, and onto the motorway, like someone hell-bent on suicide.” Phil, who also was tired out, having worked from eight that morning, nevertheless went off to arrange it.

  Cunningham looked at her watch, then at Langton. “Maybe you should take a break.”

  “Was she going to her sister’s?” he muttered, ignoring her suggestion.

  “That’s what we all thought.”

  “Not Gatwick, not Heathrow, and not Southampton, so that excludes boats and planes. Do we have anything from her landline?”

  “No calls,” Cunningham said, trying to hide a yawn.

  Langton removed from his pocket the crushed mobile, still wrapped in his handkerchief. “Get this checked over; see if we can find out who called. She had to have made contact with someone to do a runner, right?” He frowned. “Unless it was already planned.”

  Cunningham said nothing, but looked at her watch again, eager to get home. “When are you going to pick up the sister and her husband?”

  “When I’m ready. As long as we know they are holed up at that farm, they can stay there. One move out of it that looks suspicious, we pick them both up and bring them in, but I’m not quite ready for them.”

  Again, Cunningham said nothing; nor did she remark that it now appeared, to all intents and purposes, that James Langton had taken over the case.

  Anna hadn’t realized how tired she was until she got home. It had been strange to work alongside Langton. He never showed her the slightest familiarity—in fact, quite the reverse—but it was not as difficult to work beside him as she had thought.

  Like Cunningham, she knew that he had taken over the case. She had to admit that, with him at the helm, they were regrouping, as if he had picked them all up and shaken them. She also wondered, just like Cunningham, why he had not yet brought in Honour and Damien; she was as certain as everyone else of their involvement. Her eyes started to droop as she lay back on her pillow; the last image before she fell asleep was the dead Julia’s face, and the glinting diamond earrings.

  20

  Laid out on a trestle table covered in white paper were the items removed from Julia Brandon’s handbag. The shards of glass had been swept to one side in a small heap. The wallet contained three hundred pounds in crisp new notes. There were sunglasses, now with a twisted frame, and two photographs of the children in a small leather case. There were some dry-cleaning receipts and old car parking tickets, paid for at a machine. A silver powder compact was open, with the lid caved in as if someone had stamped on it. Everything had a strong smell of Julia’s perfume, from the broken bottle of Chanel No. 5. The diamond earrings were in a small plastic bag, with a Rolex watch, a gold chain with a large dewdrop diamond, and a small daisy-chain diamond bracelet.

  Anna stood, staring down at the items—then jumped with fright as someone came up behind her.

  “Long time no see.”

  “Pete!” She turned. She couldn’t resist telling him that she had dropped by his house after her drinks with Langton. “But just as I was drawing up,” she concluded, “I saw your friend Daniella paying a taxi, so I headed home.”

  “Oh, right—yeah, she did come by. You should have joined us.”

  Anna laughed. “I’m sure.”

  “You two seemed very familiar.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You and Langton.”

  “Well, we’ve worked together a few times,” Anna said defensively.

  Pete said casually, “I suppose you must have got a shock, seeing me there.”

  “No—it is your local, isn’t it?” Anna was surprised at how readily the lie came. “I was concerned you might feel I’d said one thing to you and then done another.” She apologized for not calling him and explained that they had been run ragged with the case.

  “So I hear. In fact, I was beginning to wonder when you lot would bring in another body!”

  “Well, you’ve got one—or her possessions, at least.”

  “Yeah, I hear she was pretty mashed.” Pete looked over the table. “Okay…most interesting—and please do not ask me how I can be so certain—is the powder compact.”

  “Yes?”

  “Pure, very high-quality cocaine.”

  They walked farther along the table to the overnight bag and its contents, which were laid out, item by item: a satin nightdress with matching dressing gown; a small pair of silk slippers; a lace brassiere and matching panties; two new packs of seven-denier stockings and a suspender belt; some makeup in a velvet bag. There were also two cashmere sweaters, a pair of Yves Saint-Laurent black trousers, and a pair of soft leather, high-heeled boots.

  Anna could smell Julia’s perfume; to touch the luxurious and very expensive clothes made her skin crawl.

  “She must have been a very sexy woman,” Pete said, folding his arms; then he said there was one other item that had been locked up—the dead woman’s jewelry case. “We didn’t put the other jewelry in, as it has traces of blood on, so will need to be tested.” He unlocked a small safe, signed a book by the side of it, and took out a square black leather jewel bag. It unfolded like a large envelope; if Anna had been impressed by the size of Julia’s diamond earrings, she now looked on in amazement.

  “Don’t quote me, because I don’t really know, but the emeralds look magnificent. Each item is, in my estimation, exceptional quality. What do you think?”

  Anna agreed. As she had never owned an emerald, she wouldn’t know, but the color of the stones in the large necklace was beautiful. Among the items were rings and spectacular drop earrings of ruby and pearl; the pearls were large, and glowed on the black velvet lining.

  “Nice booty; maybe why she couldn’t stand to be broke,” Langton said, making both Anna and Pete turn.

  “Not broke if you sell this lot,” Pete replied.

  “Ah, but she reckoned she’d earned these. You know what they say about a woman scorned? She wasn’t going to sell this lot; she wanted it all. Like she said, ‘What have I done?’ Well, what she did was get very greedy, and underestimate what Lover Boy would do.”

  “Have you seen the items taken from her handbag?” Pete asked.

  Langton walked back along the trestle table as Pete returned the jewels to the safe. He paused for a moment by the silk nightdress, and then gently lifted a part of the hem to smell it. “Nice. Some women know what’s a turn-on in the bedroom, and I’d say this lady was hot to trot. No wonder he kept her for all those years.”

  “You can tell all that from her nightdress, can you?” Anna wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “Pete said there’s cocaine in the powder compact,” she added quickly.

  “And old Pete would know!” Langton said softly. His mobile rang, and he moved off slightly to take the call.

  Pete returned. “Shall we meet up tonight?”

  “Why not? It’ll be down to what time we’re through. I didn’t get back until after eleven last night.”

  “Well, call me. I can come to you, or you can come to me, or we can go Italian or Indian.”

  “Travis!” Langton was already banging through the door into the corridor. As Anna scurried after him down the stone stairs, he told her they had come up with something in the mechanical forensic section in the yard.

  They left the building and headed into a cordoned-off yard with large hangars. Inside, a team of four forensic experts were checking over the appalling wreckage of Julia Brandon’s Mercedes. It was cut into sections so as to prize apart the crushed metal. Langton went up to the men and conferred with them; then they walked him around to show him sections laid out on a big workbench. Anna felt like a spare part as she moved around the wreckage, standing back as a metal cutter was used on a section of dashboard.

  The engine had shifted into the front seats and a section of the bonnet had already been cut away. Now cleared, the mangled dashboard was visible an
d they could get access to the buckled glove compartment. They used a crowbar to prize it open. The contents—like those of Julia’s handbag, which must have been on the front seat—were flattened and soaking wet, as there had been a bottle of water inside. They slowly began to withdraw, with large steel tweezers, the crushed plastic bottle, then a leather-covered road map, an AA book, and the Mercedes manual. Each item removed was placed into plastic evidence bags.

  Langton joined Anna. He watched for a few moments, and then said quietly that Julia hadn’t stood a hope in hell of getting out of the car alive; what surprised him was that it hadn’t happened sooner. “The brakes were tampered with, virtually severed in two.” He then took off, shouting out his thanks to the workers, and headed back toward the car park. “Fucking surveillance.”

  Anna chased after him. “If the car was parked in her garage, there were the two so-called bodyguards inside the house, plus the children, plus the so-called au pair! There’s a connecting door from the kitchen into the garage; they would have had plenty of time to cut her brakes without being seen.”

  Langton glared. “Somebody, either the two beefed-up bodyguards, or some unknown bastard, took her kids and drove fucking out, right under our noses.”

  “Their routine was to be taken to nursery school.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Anna persisted: after the surveillance team saw the children go into the school, they returned to the property.

  “Letting them just walk out of the school!”

  “The officers were told to return to the house, as Julia was by then in a patrol car, with me, heading back there!”

  “Fine, fine. Make excuses for total incompetence!” He got into the front passenger seat beside the driver and slammed the car door so hard it rocked.

  Anna refused to rise to the bait. She got into the back of the patrol car and sat, tight-lipped.

  He calmed down as they drove out of the yard. “Unless that is exactly what she intended to happen: lead them off, then come into the station and have a screaming fit.”

  “I think she was a liar, and a very good one, but I honestly don’t think she had any prior knowledge that the children were going to be taken.”

  “Well, thank you for that insight, Travis,” Langton muttered. He turned to face her, leaning his arm along the back of the seat. “What if she did have? You said you thought it strange the way she went from hysteria into giving you a eulogy; even admitting that Collingwood had been to the house.”

  Anna shrugged, not believing it. “What she didn’t know was that her brakes would be liable to give way.”

  He turned back to face the front as they continued the journey across London toward Chalk Farm and the station. “The clothes, the overnight bag; that doesn’t look like someone who didn’t know where she was going. The suitcase should have sent alarm bells ringing, albeit to two dozy fuckers on surveillance.”

  “They were on her tail the moment she left the house.”

  “Yeah, I know, but where was she going? M40 to Oxford? Unless she was doing a drive-around to lose the tail? They said she was doing over ninety most of the time—so was she leading them on a runaround? Or was she heading for the farmhouse and her sister?”

  “Well, it’s going to be hard to question her!”

  “Very adroit, Travis.”

  She asked why he had delayed on bringing in Honour and Damien Nolan.

  “I’m not positive I’ve done the right thing, if the surveillance team on them is as fucking useless as the one on Julia Brandon.”

  “But surely they’re both implicated?” They knew the Mitsubishi had been there; they knew Damien probably wrote the directions too.

  Langton slapped the seat with the flat of his hand. “You presume! We can’t presume anything!” He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly as if to control his temper. “They are involved in this up to their necks but, until we have something to really pull the carpet from under their feet, we stay off them. We watch and we wait.”

  “For what?”

  Langton remained silent, then murmured, almost to himself, “He is going to surface.”

  “You presume,” Anna said, equally softly.

  He suddenly laughed, tilting his head back. “Touché.”

  They continued in silence, getting into heavy traffic in the West End. Langton stared out of the window, sighing. He then instructed the driver to put the flashing lights on and move. “Not that we’ve anything to hurry back for,” he muttered. After a while he leaned forward, rubbing his head. “You know, if anything had happened to Tommy…”

  “Your stepson?” Anna asked.

  He gave a soft laugh. “My son. If anyone had taken him—harmed him in any way—I wouldn’t have sat there, giving you a lengthy rundown of who did what to whom.”

  “She didn’t have much option.”

  “But wouldn’t she have been screaming to go and find her kids, get a search going or something—like a caring mother would? Unless she knew who had taken them and, like I said, possibly even set it up.” Langton paused for a moment. “Didn’t she tell you that the father of her second daughter, Kathy, was Damien Nolan?”

  “If the children were taken to Honey Farm, we’d know.”

  “Maybe they weren’t taken there, but somewhere that Julia Brandon knew about—which could mean that the couple might be getting ready to do a runner. We’ve assumed that, because she was heading for the M40, that’s where she was going. Maybe, for once, we’re right.” Langton clicked on his mobile and gave instructions to the team to get more surveillance standing by, and bring in the local Oxfordshire police, to make sure the Nolans were surrounded at the farmhouse and unable to make a move without a trace on them. Anna then saw him physically tense, listening. He swore and said that he would be there in ten minutes. As he cut off the call, he punched at the dashboard with his fist.

  “What’s happened?”

  She didn’t get an answer as they drove into the Chalk Farm Station car park. Langton was out before the patrol car had stopped and, bad knee or not, he ran into the station. Tapping in the code at the back door, he was already halfway down the corridor as Anna entered the station after him.

  The incident room was busy, phones ringing, as Phil hurried to join Langton. “He’s in with Cunningham. She’s giving him all the information we’ve got so far.”

  Langton had thrown his coat off and was heading toward Cunningham’s office.

  Anna still had no idea what was going down. “What’s happening, Phil?”

  “Fraud Squad. DCI John Marlow is in with her.”

  “Travis!” Langton bellowed, waving one arm for her to follow him.

  Langton opened Cunningham’s office door, Anna on his heels. She froze on seeing the man who stood up to greet Langton.

  The face blocking the CCTV security camera in David Rushton’s office was printed indelibly on her mind. They had unsuccessfully attempted to match it with the old photographs of Alexander Fitzpatrick taken from the Internet: it was blurred, with only three-quarters of his face showing due to the baseball cap. It was this image that had been used to confirm whether or not he had been a guest at the top London hotels. They had got nowhere, and this was obviously why: the man on the CCTV footage was DCI John Marlow.

  The small office felt claustrophobic. Marlow was a big man, at least six feet three, with broad shoulders. He had dark brown collar-length hair combed back; it looked as if it was gelled, as it was so stiff. Both Anna and Langton drew up chairs as Marlow gave them details of a fraud his team had been investigating for two years. A client of David Rushton’s had got in touch with them, about missing funds. They had begun an undercover investigation, quietly contacting other clients as the fraud began to unravel. Rushton had been misappropriating clients’ money in a complicated paper trail of fictional companies while moving millions into his own offshore accounts. They had not, as yet, begun to delve into the accounts of Julia Brandon, but were about to start.

  Marlo
w said that he had already approached Rushton, acting as a potential client. He had a deep resonant voice, and calmly continued. “I had an appointment with Rushton in his office at around six-thirty. I had implied that the funds I had to be taken care of were proceeds from something illegal. He wasn’t fazed, quite the reverse. He said he would not ask questions, but what he could do was outline the options for securing a safe way of moving the money out of the UK without any problems from the Inland Revenue.”

  Langton leaned forward, rubbing at his knee. Anna could hardly breathe, she was so taken aback. In the flesh, Marlow was rather handsome with very good, white teeth. Why she was even thinking about his teeth, she could not imagine, but she found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying.

  “I was there for no more than a few minutes. When his phone rang, he apologized and said that he had to rearrange our meeting as he had a client desperate to see him.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I believe he may have sussed what was going down—he may even have been tipped off by the caller—but he couldn’t wait to get me out. To make a show of my possible criminal activities, I got up and remarked about the security camera; he said it wasn’t turned on, but he was very nervous, really agitated, which again led me to believe he was onto me. I turned the camera to face the wall and said I didn’t like being messed around. He said we could meet in a few days, but it was necessary he saw this client immediately. We made another appointment and I left.”

  “Did you get to see this client?”

  “No, but whoever it was must have come in directly after I left.”

  Cunningham showed him a photograph of Julia Brandon. Marlow didn’t recognize her. He had not left via the main reception, as Rushton had told him that the main door would be locked, but used a service exit at the rear of the building, the same way he had entered, which was why he had not been caught on the reception CCTV camera. Cunningham had already given him details of what they had so far been able to uncover about Rushton, but had only just passed him Julia Brandon’s documents. Marlow spent some time glancing over them, and asked if he could retain a copy for his file.