by GJ Minett
For most of that time, he’d had Linda for company. It had been an established part of their daily routine – have lunch, load the dishwasher, quick cup of tea and maybe a brief nap, just to recharge the batteries. Then Nelson – or Pixie before him – would pick up his lead and come pottering into the lounge, nudging at their feet until they got the message.
For the past five years, it had been just him and Nelson. He didn’t consider himself a particularly sentimental man and would have laughed at the suggestion that he was sticking to the same route every day as some sort of memorial to Linda, but the plain and simple truth was that he couldn’t quite bring himself to walk anywhere else. He felt closer to her now on sunny afternoons, with the sun dipping behind the trees and the shadows stretching across the road, than he’d ever felt while she was actually there in person. She’d always been a compulsive chatterbox. He would have been quite happy to stroll along the country lanes and exchange no more than a few words the whole way, just soaking up the scenery, but she was uncomfortable with any sort of silence and could talk the hind legs off a donkey. Now he had all the peace and quiet he could wish for and no one with whom to share it. The silence stretched out ahead of him like Honer Lane itself.
He sighed and used the ball launcher to send Nelson scurrying along the road. The retriever skidded to a halt, sweeping the ball up into his mouth in one flawless movement before trotting back towards his master. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he stopped dead, pricked up his ears and shot off through the entrance and into the field.
Rabbits, thought Peter, stepping off the road in pursuit of his dog.
PART TWO
8
EARLIER: THURSDAY, 11TH SEPTEMBER
DANNY
If he was going to go through with it, he told himself, it was going to have to be today. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Monday the loan would have to be repaid to the Bellamys which left him with just three working days to pull it off. He’d managed to snatch a few moments at the end of work yesterday to do a quick search through cash sales over the last few weeks – just in case, he’d told himself. If there’s nothing in there that fits the bill, forget it. Knowing all the time there would be.
He’d picked out a transaction for an item he knew they had in stock, which was in the right price range. Then he’d made a note of the customer’s details and spent most of Sunday batting the whole thing back and forth, even though he was pretty sure deep down he was going to do it. He had to come up with the money somehow. Had to.
And today was the day. D-Day. Decision Day. Danny Day ha ha. The reason was simple. Yvonne, his manager, was on her way to Croydon for a training seminar and it was Jenny who would be acting manager for the day. Yvonne was as sharp as a tack, great to have in charge as long as you were doing all the right things but a nightmare if you were trying to slide something past her. The thought of those few seconds while he waited for her countersignature was so daunting, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to go ahead if she was there.
Jenny, on the other hand, had fallen out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. Whenever she’d stood in for Yvonne in the past, the difference between the two of them had been appreciable. She was a compulsive worrier who started to come apart at the seams whenever the pressure was on. Normally they all dreaded it when she was in charge because she had such a way of adding to the stress of the day, you could almost comb it out of your hair by the time you got home. Now however it seemed for all the world as if the gods had given their blessing: go ahead, son. Do it.
As soon as he arrived at Estelle Roberts, he checked again to make sure the necklace was still in stock. It was priced at £474.99, which was just about perfect. In the event of refunds for anything in excess of £500, it was company policy that the manager would try to persuade the customer to exchange it for an alternative item around the same value. Under that figure, it was left to whoever happened to be serving to process the refund and simply get the manager to sign off on it. For such a relatively small sum they preferred not to place any more obstacles than necessary in the customers’ way, so as to encourage them to return in future.
He already had £490 of the £650 he’d been expecting to pay back, which meant he’d have £964.99 by the end of the day if his nerve held. The other £35 or so wasn’t even worth worrying about. He’d get that from somewhere, even if it meant tapping up his parents. And with Jenny in charge for the day, his chances of success had improved immeasurably. It was just a matter of picking the right moment.
For the first couple of hours business was maddeningly slow. Then, shortly after eleven o’clock, as he was about to sneak out the back and scream at the gods for toying with him, things picked up significantly. Not only were there several people inside the store, there was even the added bonus of a particularly awkward woman who was insisting that another customer had been served ahead of her out of turn. Jenny was called over to appease her and was starting to look flustered. He knew that if there was going to be an opportunity, this was it.
He was in the process of serving an elderly couple at the time. While they were looking at a selection of rings in the display case, he asked if they’d excuse him for a moment – he’d be right back. Then he walked over to the window, removed the necklace and brought it over to the till. He quickly tapped in his four-digit operator number, trying not to think too much about what he was doing in case it made him change his mind at the last minute. He tapped in 1 plus the stock number, remembering to look up and smile at the elderly couple as he did so.
The till recognised his entry and came up with 1 necklace at £474.99. He pressed Total and when asked for the customer details he pulled the slip of paper from his pocket and entered the name, postcode and house number of the original purchaser whose order he’d pre-selected on Saturday evening. Then he hit the address button.
While the returns form was printing, he counted out the notes in fifties and twenties, casting a nervous glance across to the elderly couple who, to his intense relief, were still undecided. Then he picked up the printed form and jotted down Faulty clasp as the reason for returning the item, scrawled an utterly illegible signature and took it over to Jenny as soon as he was ready, trying desperately not to remind himself that there was still time to back out if he wished. He might well be wading in it up to his thighs but the river hadn’t been crossed just yet.
He hovered just out of Jenny’s eyeline, taking huge encouragement from the anxious look on her face as she tried to appease two customers at once, each equally unwilling to back down. At an appropriate moment he slipped a pen into her hand, smiled apologetically and placed the form in front of her, asking her to sign for a refund. Barely taking in what was happening, Jenny checked the total, scribbled a quick signature and turned back to the customers. Danny walked away, his heart pounding like a marching band at Mardi Gras, and replaced the necklace in the window.
‘Now then,’ he said, returning to the elderly couple, the ultimate professional. ‘Have we seen anything we like?’
He patted his trouser pocket to reassure himself that the money he’d taken from the till was still there. The worst, he knew, was over. At the end of the day, the tills would be checked against the refund forms and everything would match up. Jenny would countersign all the forms and they’d be filed away, never to see the light of day until the auditors decided it was time for a visit, which could be months away. They would discover then that they were a necklace short but it wouldn’t be the only thing missing – there was always a stock deficit of some sort and any items unaccounted for were assumed to be the result of shoplifting. As long as losses weren’t significant, they’d not lose any sleep over it. Natural wastage was how they viewed it.
He knew this had to be a one-off. Others had tried similar schemes in the past and had come unstuck because they’d been too greedy, going to the trough too many times. If this was going to work it would be because he’d tried it just the once, left no trail for them
to follow. A one-off, in and out quickly, was always in with a chance. And he felt good about this, as if somehow by taking such affirmative action when it was needed, he’d managed to turn around his fortunes.
Suddenly the sun was shining and anything seemed possible.
HOLLOWAY
‘You’d think they’d let me have my own parking space here by now, wouldn’t you?’
‘Boss?’
‘Special customer privileges? I was working it out on the way here. This is the sixth time this year. You don’t think that ought to qualify me for a little “Reserved” plaque of my own?’
He backed up to allow the first group of mourners from the previous ceremony to pass through on their way to the car park. One down, plenty more to go. The place really was like a conveyor belt.
Tired of squinting into a refulgent sun which seemed unwilling to acknowledge that it was now September, Horgan removed his sunglasses from his top pocket and put them on.
‘Goes with the territory, I suppose.’
‘And what territory would that be?’ he asked. ‘The job or my age?’
Horgan smiled.
‘Wish it was just down to the job,’ Holloway sighed. ‘Two of them have been family. Two others were friends. I’ve got to that stage in life where you start looking over your shoulder.’ He thrust the tip of his tongue at the hole in the Polo mint he’d been sucking since they got out of the car. ‘By the way, son,’ he continued. ‘You can leap in any time you like and tell me I’m not that old.’
‘You’re not that old, boss.’
‘He said with conviction.’
More and more people were now using the footpath in either direction. They exchanged sympathetic nods with each other as they passed, total strangers united for a moment in time by shared misfortune. He glanced at his watch and decided they might as well move along and join the others who had been waiting for the past fifteen minutes or so for the funeral cortege to arrive. Until now he and Horgan had made a point of maintaining a respectful distance. It was important to be there in order to reinforce the message that they were all in this together. At the same time Holloway never lost sight of the fact that this was an intensely personal moment for the family. A little distance was needed to allow privacy and show respect.
‘Did you and Phil Green ever work together?’ Horgan asked, jiggling the keys in his trouser pocket.
‘A bit . . . back in the day. Started more or less the same time as each other. We were at Littlehampton back then. I mean, we’re talking more than thirty years ago now. Haven’t really kept in touch since then . . . not like we should have.’
‘He OK?’
‘Phil? Yeah. One of the good guys. Steady Eddie, you know? Never showed any interest in CID or promotions or anything like that as far as I’m aware. Not one of your glory hunters. Quite happy to plod along doing the same job year in, year out.’
‘He got out early though, didn’t he?’
‘Family reasons. Don’t think his wife was ever very happy about him being in uniform. You know she died not that long ago. Couple of years, maybe?’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah. First his wife, now his boy.’
‘Has he got any other children?’
‘Nope.’ They stood in silence for a few moments, each lost in his own thoughts. Holloway himself was divorced and almost totally estranged from his ex-wife. If they spoke at all, they maintained an appropriate degree of civility but there was always an edge to it, as if recriminations were lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce. As for his two children, they had lives of their own now. They did their best not to take sides but he suspected any sympathies they had would be with their mother if it came to it. Irrelevant anyway – they’d both moved far enough away to make visits difficult to co-ordinate and contrived when they did take place. Even so, he wouldn’t trade places with Phil Green for anything. No one should have to do what he’d be doing today.
As he and Horgan approached, some of the mourners started to make a move from the waiting room into the chapel, prompting others, who had been guiltily enjoying the sunshine, to do the same. Holloway watched as they shuffled forward, collecting an order-of-service programme from a woman just inside the doorway and leaving the front row vacant as they took their seats. He’d already interviewed many of them during the first few days of the investigation; the others he’d be seeing in due course. Logic and experience told him that someone in there was harbouring a piece of information, however inadvertently, that might give them the impetus needed to drive the case forward and as far as he was concerned, that couldn’t come soon enough.
The facts of the case were easy enough to establish. Callum Green had been battered to death with a large wooden implement (presumed to be his own baseball bat which was missing from the boot of his car) on the evening of Monday, 25th August. It was his wife – widow – who’d told them about the bat. She’d always been unhappy about it being there but he’d insisted on having it to hand – because you never know.
He’d been found in his BMW convertible in a dip that was hidden from view unless one walked into the field itself. A half-hearted attempt had been made to delay its discovery even further by dragging loose branches across it, but whoever was responsible had clearly given this up as a bad job, either because there were too few branches available or for fear of being disturbed.
The elderly man who discovered the body the following afternoon had walked back towards Manor Lane before eventually flagging down a passing car. Unfortunately (the ultimate in Sod’s law as far as Holloway was concerned), there had been the mother of all rainstorms on the Monday evening which had turned the field into a quagmire, all of which meant that by the time the occupants of the car had also waded across the field and had a good look, any physical evidence had been either washed out or sufficiently compromised for it to count as useless.
An approximate time of death at least had been quickly established. The scene-of-crime guesstimate of sometime between 7 and 10 p.m. on the Monday evening was borne out by the autopsy and was narrowed down still further by the phone call, logged at 7.28 p.m., from Green himself to his wife to say he’d be leaving for Bournemouth in due course. It wasn’t immediately clear what his car was doing in South Mundham if he was meant to be driving in the opposite direction but the calendar app in his mobile revealed that he had a dinner reservation for Friday evening at the Walnut Tree. A quick follow-up call established that he’d been there sometime between quarter to eight and eight o’clock to make the booking in person. And the reason why he might have driven ten miles in the wrong direction rather than just phone it through became clearer when they checked his text messages and voicemail. A woman who lived in Honer Lane had been expecting him sometime around eight. He’d been found no more than 400 yards short of Hannah Reid’s cottage.
So they were clear about the when. The who, on the other hand, looked like being a different proposition altogether. Green, it seemed, had been the antithesis of his father. It didn’t take long for a picture to emerge of an arrogant, confrontational, opinionated young man with more money than sense and an inability to look beyond his own interests that strayed into the pathological.
He’d already come to the attention of the authorities on two separate occasions. In April 2007, at the age of nineteen, he’d been questioned about an affray at 2 a.m. outside Liquid in Portsmouth in which two Polish youths, having been subjected to a series of racist taunts, had then been assaulted by half a dozen lads who’d followed them out of the nightclub. Three years later his name had surfaced in an investigation into a revenge attack at a party in Barnham which Green and a handful of friends had gatecrashed and subsequently been asked to leave. Even though neither incident had resulted in criminal charges being brought, his name was out there and it told a story.
Professionally, at a superficial glance at any rate, he’d been bounding from one roaring success to the next. Although relatively young, he’d already made a
name for himself in network marketing and had been headhunted by a large American corporation with offices in London and several other European capitals. Employers and colleagues alike had been fulsome in their praise, describing him as energetic, enterprising, sharp as a razor. Gift of the gab, by all accounts. He was a man who was going places – no one was in any doubt about that.
The moment Holloway’s team started to look more deeply into his financial dealings however, it was like stepping out onto Spaghetti Junction wearing blinkers. Or, as Horgan put it, like tugging at a nest of cable wires. Just as you thought you’d managed to isolate one of them, it dragged a host of others out with it and tracking back through the various knots to the junction box was a nightmare.
There were donations, loans, down payments, multiple transactions involving transfers of large sums of money, both into his various accounts and back out again via intermediaries to financial institutions in a number of different countries. Complex didn’t come near. It was going to take quite a while to unravel it all sufficiently to get a better idea of what he’d been up to but one thing was clear: there was an awful lot more money passing through than could possibly be accounted for by his income from ACI, substantial though that was. Callum Green’s hands were looking distinctly grubby and, judging by some of the names that were already starting to emerge, he hadn’t been too fussy about where he’d been putting them. Wading through a directory of that calibre was going to present a host of problems.
Holloway was jolted out of his reverie by a gentle nudge to the ribs from Horgan. Away to his left he could see the funeral cars as they made their sedate, respectful way through the shade thrown by a row of trees and neatly trimmed hedges, before drawing to a halt in front of the chapel. They were preceded by a tall man in full mourning regalia, complete with black top hat and gloves, wing-collar shirt and Ascot tie, Oxford shoes polished to within an inch of their life.
