‘The Koh-i-noor.’ He grinned. ‘All you can trough for a tenner a head.’
At the door he found DC Webster lurking in the corridor.
‘You after Mr Faraday, son?’
‘You, skip. Though the boss might be interested, too.’
‘What’s that?’ Faraday looked up from the number he was trying to dial.
‘It’s about Pelly. I got a call from the bloke we talked to at Cheetah Marine. Heard a rumour he thought he ought to pass on. Turns out it’s true.’
‘And?’
‘Pelly’s had enough. I talked to the estate agent. He’s trying to sell up.’
Cosham police station lies on the mainland, barely a mile north of the muddy creek that serves as Pompey’s moat. From Cosham, a fair-sized army of uniforms keeps a wary eye on the estates that sprawl over the lower slopes of Portsdown Hill. It was nearly five by the time Winter and Suttle made it to the front desk.
‘Sergeant Brothers at home?’ Suttle flipped his warrant card.
The clerk disappeared to check. Seconds later, he was back.
‘Over the courtyard.’ He nodded at the door. ‘He’ll meet you on the steps.’
Ivan Brothers was a sergeant in Cosham’s Traffic department, a towering, rather intense ex-motorcycle cop with a reputation for plain speaking. According to Suttle, he’d been cagey on the phone, refusing to discuss details of the case on anything but a face-to-face basis. When Winter had enquired further, demanding to know the name and circumstances that made a visit to Cosham nick so pressing, Suttle had once again told him to be patient. He didn’t want this thing to go off at half-cock. Rabbit from the hat, thought Winter, following Brothers and Suttle into the DI’s vacant office.
Brothers stamped his authority on the meeting at once. He was due home to take his wife shopping at six. This time of night, he’d be leaving at half five. Suttle therefore had thirty minutes to make his case. He plainly hated CID.
‘Victor Lakemfa.’ Suttle was reading the name from his pocketbook. ‘October twenty-first last year.’
‘That’s right. Hit and run. File is still open.’
‘We’re talking that little road on the back of Portsdown Hill. Yeah?’
‘Correct. Crooked Walk Lane.’
‘You put out a press appeal the following day. Witnesses. Anyone who might have been in the area around half eight, nine. The News carried a report. Lakemfa was a Commander in the Nigerian navy, over here on a course at Dryad.’ Suttle folded his pocketbook shut and laid it on the conference table. ‘That’s pretty much all I know.’
Winter eyed the pocketbook. Mention of the Nigerian navy had aroused his interest. HMS Dryad was a naval shore establishment tucked away beside the village of Southwick. The command and control courses it offered attracted officers from countries all over the world. Wishart, Winter thought. And all those visits to Lagos.
Brothers was being difficult. Road deaths sparked an exhaustive investigation, a procedure as complex and painstaking as anything CID could muster. As lead officer on this particular job, it had been Brothers’s responsibility to drive the inquiry forward. To date, unusually, they’d made virtually no progress. Divulging details of the case required clearance from the Traffic Inspector, who was acting as SIO.
‘Where is he?’ It was Winter.
‘On leave. In Florida.’
‘And when’s he back?’
‘Week after next.’
‘What about his deputy?’
‘Flu. Probably back Monday.’
‘Can’t wait that long, skip. Not with the ACC breathing down our necks.’
‘That would be Mr … ?’
‘Alcott. DC Suttle mention Plover at all? How your lad Lakemfa might tie in? Only Mr Alcott’s giving Plover top priority.’
Brothers stole a look at his watch, then asked Winter to shut the office door.
‘So what’s Plover?’
Winter was back at the table, shedding his car coat, savouring this small moment of triumph.
‘Can’t say, I’m afraid. Not without the say-so from my guvnor.’ He beamed at Brothers. ‘You want to tell us about Lakemfa? Only time’s moving on.’
Brothers conceded the point with a weary sigh. Lakemfa, he said, was a thirty-four-year-old commander in the Nigerian navy. He’d already spent six months on one Dryad course and had returned last year for another. He lived in a rented flat in Port Solent and travelled to Dryad most days by bike, returning in the evening. The route he favoured took him to a narrow country lane that wound up the rear face of Portsdown Hill. Traffic was normally limited to the odd tractor or locals taking the short cut back to Southwick. On the night of 21 October a woman returning home found a body sprawled beside a bike near the top of the lane. There was blood still seeping from his nose and ears.
‘Lakemfa?’ Suttle was making notes.
‘Correct. He was wearing proper riding kit, Lycra stuff, high-vis vest, helmet, the lot. We found ID in his day sack, temporary Dryad gate pass.’
Damage to the rear wheel of the bike suggested a hit and run but there were no skid marks on the road, and no witnesses. Forensic tests on the bike recovered microscopic flakes of black paint which may or may not have been evidentially material but exhaustive inquiries in the area failed to flush out a vehicle.
‘I take it Lakemfa was dead.’
‘Very. The PM showed skull fractures, probably from impact with the road.’
‘Even wearing a helmet?’
‘Sure. It happens.’
‘But you’re saying he wasn’t run over?’
‘No. We set up an incident room down the corridor there, ran a paper-based inquiry, blitzed it for a week or so, team of five. The guy’s nationality was a bit of a drama because it turned out he was quite highly placed back home. Had the ear of the President. Tipped for stardom.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘We went through the intel boys, put it in the hands of ILET.’
Winter nodded. The International Liaison Enquiry Team were stabled at the force intelligence HQ, a featureless office block on an industrial estate off the M27. They had a direct feed to Special Branch and links into all the major embassies. On a case like this their involvement made perfect sense.
‘So what happened?’
‘Very little. The media appeals produced virtually nothing. Witness boards on surrounding roads, crap response. Incidents like these, we often get the driver in over the next day or two, once the booze has worn off, but no bugger put his hand up. On fatals we run a seventy-two-hour review. Turned out to be one of the shortest meetings on record. We had zilch. Most unusual.’
The following week, he said, they kept plugging away, but the investigation was hamstrung by the sheer absence of leads. The divisional source handling unit tasked a number of informants to keep their ears to the ground. Word was passed to the fire service to be especially vigilant for burning cars. Finally, with the Nigerians pressing for return of Lakemfa’s remains, a second PM was commissioned in the event of defence lawyers one day demanding an independent report. Then, towards the end of November, Lakemfa’s body was flown to Lagos.
‘End of story?’ Winter couldn’t keep the smile off his face.
‘I sincerely hope not. The Coroner has yet to set a time limit on the investigation. As far as we’re concerned, the file remains open.’
Mention of the Coroner prompted Winter to ask about jurisdiction. Crooked Walk Lane, it turned out, was the Winchester Coroner’s turf. Hence the blank they’d drawn earlier with the Pompey deaths.
‘What else did you recover from Mr Lakemfa?’
‘We left his apartment to the MOD police. They sorted out his possessions.’
‘I meant the day sack.’
‘Ah …’ Brothers looked up at the ceiling a moment, ordering his thoughts. ‘Address book, mobile, assorted paperwork.’
‘You still have them?’
‘No. But we do have the billing on the phone. Standard procedure. If t
he guy’s on the phone when he gets himself killed it gives us a starting point.’
‘You still have the billing?’
‘Of course.’ He hesitated. ‘You want to see it?’
Brothers left the room. Several minutes later he returned with a big plastic box full of files. In one of them, amongst the PM reports, press cuttings and policy logs, Brothers finally located the call billings on Lakemfa’s mobile. Winter asked for a photocopy.
‘The lot,’ he added. ‘Please.’
Brothers left the room again. From the office next door came the whirr of a photocopier. Three sheets of paper, still warm.
‘Is that it?’ Brothers hadn’t sat down.
Winter was scanning the numbers. The records went back to early July. Finally he looked up.
‘Good work, skip.’ He pocketed the billings. ‘You’ll be the first to know once we’ve cracked it.’
Fifteen
Friday, 27 February 2004
The first of the Congress squad meetings was over by half past six. Dave Michaels had finally mustered a full house – all thirteen DCs plus support staff – and Faraday had spent a brisk ten minutes tracing the operation back to the moment when a birder had spotted a body wallowing amongst the rocks beneath Tennyson Down. Putting Chris Unwin’s name to the headless corpse was still, he emphasised, a supposition, but the sheer weight of circumstantial evidence was beginning to make the link all but irresistible.
No one had seen Unwin since early October. At about the same time Pelly’s old boat – the Tidemaster – had also disappeared. After failing to come up with the money to fund the build for a replacement, Pelly had suddenly produced a cheque for £23K, money it might be possible to link back to Unwin. Most significant of all, there was first-person evidence that the two men, Unwin and Pelly, had been involved in some kind of row.
Whether this was connected to their shared business interests wasn’t clear. There may also have been a dispute about the treatment of Unwin’s cherished nan, Mary. Either way, Pelly had a reputation for escalating petty slights and routine disagreements into something far more violent, as one local informant had found to his cost. Homicide, all the same, remained a large step for any man to take. At this, one or two of the older DCs exchanged glances. A couple of decades in the job taught you that the price of a life could be absurdly cheap. These days, especially, kids of eighteen were pulling knives and using them on the slightest provocation. A spilled drink? An unwise glance at someone else’s woman? Better to do the bastard than bother with conversation.
Before winding the meeting up, Faraday summarised the thrust of tomorrow’s actions. DS Pete Baker would be tasking the bulk of the Outside Team with house-to-house enquiries around the margins of Bembridge Harbour. Because it was Saturday, there’d also be an opportunity to talk to anglers, birdwatchers, walkers, and maybe even the more intrepid dinghy sailors – anyone, in short, who regularly used this stretch of water. Pelly himself had already told one witness that he’d sold his Tidemaster to a French buyer who’d trailered the boat and driven it away. A Tidemaster was a sizeable craft. DS Baker had a stack of photocopies to show around. Had anyone seen a boat like this being winched onto a trailer? Could anyone remember when this might have happened?
With the harbour flooded with detectives, Faraday also intended to put a handful of DCs into Pelly’s nursing home. There were eighteen registered residents, all of them women. Some of them were gaga. One or two were terminally ill. All of them were seriously old. Few of these ladies would cut the mustard in the witness box – indeed, most of their testimony might well be inadmissible – but patience and a listening ear could conceivably offer ammunition for the moment when Faraday decided to pull Pelly in for interview. That moment had yet to come, but when it did Faraday wanted as many court cards in his hand as possible. Pelly fancied himself as a poker player. So far, in Faraday’s judgement, he’d been bluffing.
Returning to his office, Faraday found Willard sitting at his desk, paging slowly through the Policy Book. He’d just stepped off the Hovercraft in the middle of a cloudburst and was trying to dry out.
‘How’s it going?’
Faraday summarised progress to date. Willard didn’t look up. The Policy Book served as an ongoing record of Faraday’s stewardship of the inquiry. He carefully logged every decision he made, together with an explanation to which he might have to return months later.
Willard’s finger was anchored on one of this afternoon’s entries.
‘Why the HSU?’
The Hampshire Surveillance Unit was based at Totton, the other side of Southampton. Specialist detectives were available for tasking, should an inquiry warrant their help.
‘We need to keep obs on Pelly. When we turn up at the home he’s never there. Be nice to know where he gets to.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking he’s got a lot of bases to cover. The big one is the boat he used to have. We’ve yet to talk to him but I’m betting a sale to some mystery French buyer is bullshit. The man needs to cover his arse.’
‘I’m not with you.’ Willard had abandoned the Policy Book.
Faraday perched himself on the edge of the desk. Down the corridor, he could hear a cackle of laughter from Dave Michaels.
‘Pelly has definitely moved the boat from the harbour. That we know. He may have taken it somewhere else. Or he may have sunk it.’
‘Because it’s a crime scene.’
‘Exactly. He’s got a body to dispose of. If he’s taken the head off on board, then he’s up to his knees in DNA. Whoever did that body, assuming foul play, was forensically aware. Answer? Scuttle the boat.’
‘So how does he get back?’
‘My question exactly. A decent way out to sea, he’d need another boat. And someone on board to drive it. That someone becomes a material witness. As Pelly will obviously know. Pelly being Pelly, he’s bound to pay him a visit.’
Willard nodded, glancing at the Policy Book again.
‘And the HSU?’
‘The guys are coming over tonight. They’ll rotate with a back-up team for a couple of days. With luck we may have cracked it by then.’
‘You think so?’
‘Why not?’ Faraday smiled. ‘If Nick Hayder can get his name in the papers, it can’t be that hard.’
A tap on the door brought DS Dave Michaels into the office. The Crime Scene Manager had failed to make it to the squad meet and had phoned in to apologise.
‘How are they doing?’
‘Nothing so far. Place is clean as a whistle. But they’ve seized a load of Pelly’s paperwork – financial records, personal stuff – and they’ve taken his computer as well. What do you think?’
Faraday directed the question to Willard. The force computer crime department was currently swamped with work. The waiting list for hard disk analysis now stretched to seven months. Not until May could they begin to recover deleted emails and other files. The alternative was to outsource the job to a private firm, a decision that carried a £2,500 price tag. Minimum.
Willard dismissed the cost implications. He was looking at Faraday.
‘You think it’s worth it?’
‘I think it might be. This is a guy who covers his tracks.’
‘Then do it.’ Willard had noticed another entry in the Policy Book. ‘What about the second PM?’
‘Pembury phoned through this morning. He’s prepared the neck bone for electron microscopy. Should have a result by tomorrow. The tox is back from the first post-mortem, though.’
‘And?’
‘The guy was pissed, whoever he was. Twenty-nine millilitres of alcohol, still there in his liver,’ said Faraday.
‘That’s the best part of a bottle of Scotch.’ Michaels was laughing again. ‘At least he died happy.’
‘Anything else on the tox? Drugs?’
‘Traces of paracetamol. Pembury’s seen the results, too. The guy might have been on medication for anything, but flu could be
a runner.’ Faraday paused, remembering Webster’s earlier news. ‘There’s something else you ought to know about Pelly. He’s trying to sell up. Dave?’
Michaels nodded. DS Baker had dispatched two DCs to check out the estate agency and they’d returned with the full story. Pelly had first approached them in November last year. He’d said he’d had enough of tucking old ladies up at night and wanted out. The property market was still buoyant. There’d never be a lack of demand for a decently run home. Anyone fancying a new life on the Isle of Wight, plus a lifetime’s supply of incontinence pads, no problem.
‘Has he found a buyer?’
‘One or two nibbles but nothing firmed up. He started at £550,000 but he’s dropped twice since then so he must be keen to get shot of the place.’
‘Any clue where he might be off to?’
‘I asked that. It was the lad Webster again. Said the estate agent hadn’t a clue, except it wouldn’t be anywhere English. Apparently Pelly gave him a volley. Told him the country was shit. Anyone with half a brain should be queuing for the ferry.’
‘No bloody wonder. If you’ve just killed someone.’
‘Exactly.’
Another figure, slighter, had appeared in the corridor behind Dave Michaels. DS Brian Imber. Faraday gestured for him to come in. He needed a bigger office.
Imber found a space beside the wall board, pushing the door closed with his foot. Willard looked up at him, expectant. Imber rarely bothered with impromptu meetings like this unless he had something worth sharing.
‘Well?’
‘I’ve been taking a look through Pelly’s bank statements. The seized material includes his business account plus a private account he runs through NatWest. Remind me about October the third.’ Imber was looking at Faraday.
‘That’s the day the Tidemaster had definitely gone.’
‘You can evidence that?’ Willard wanted to know.
‘Yes, sir.’ Faraday nodded. ‘We’ve found an old boy who keeps an eye on the moorings, knows all the boats by heart. October the third was his wife’s birthday. Pelly’s boat had gone. He thought it was odd because Pelly never went to sea on Fridays. Something to do with wages day at the home. The old boy ran into Pelly soon afterwards, at Tesco. That’s when Pelly told him about the French guy.’
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