by Iain Cameron
‘Not for me,’ Henderson said, although he would welcome a coffee, as it had been an early start, but he didn’t want anything from this guy.
‘Same,’ Walters said.
‘It’s a pity, the coffee’s good around here. I insist on it as I can’t do with all that vending machine crap.’
‘The reason we’re here,’ Henderson said, ‘is we’re investigating the death of a man by the name of Chris Fletcher. His body washed up on the shore near Newhaven in Sussex, about three weeks back after falling from a cross-Channel ferry.’
‘Shit happens,’ Perry said in a cold voice.
‘You own a vineyard in France called Château Osanne?’
He nodded.
‘The victim, Chris Fletcher used to work there.’
‘There are over two hundred and fifty people in my organisation. You don’t expect me to know every one, do you?’
‘Come, come Mr Perry. It’s not every day one of your employees is killed, is it?’
Perry crossed his arms and said nothing.
‘Is this the only vineyard you own?’
‘I have another in Tuscany.’
‘Is this a business venture or a hobby?’
He smiled and leaned forward. ‘You don’t know me, detective but if you did, you’d know I only do something if it can turn a profit.’
‘Same with the vineyards?’
‘Yep, same with them.’
‘If we can focus on Château Osanne for a moment, as this is where Chris Fletcher worked, how long have you owned it?’
‘About four years. Why are the police taking an interest in my vineyards? Didn’t you say this guy drowned when he fell from a ferry?’
‘He was murdered, Mr Perry, didn’t I say?’
Perry’s face went ashen and his mouth dropped open, either in shock that an employee of his had come to such a shocking end, or, as Dennis Fletcher believed, annoyed that a planned accident had gone wrong.
‘Are you all right Mr Perry?’ he asked. ‘You look pale.’ It was as if he’d seen a ghost; the ghost of Chris Fletcher, maybe.
‘I’m fine. I’m just shocked to hear that someone who used to work for me was bloody murdered. Chris Fletcher you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think I remember now hearing something about it.’
‘At first, we thought he’d accidentally fallen overboard, or even committed suicide, but recent developments forced us to alter this view.’
‘What recent developments?’
‘I’m not at liberty to reveal this information at present, as you can no doubt appreciate sir, but I’m sure it will come to light once the killer or killers are apprehended.’
‘Do you know who did it? Do you have any leads?’
‘I can’t say at the moment, but can you think of anyone who would want to kill him?’
He shrugged. ‘I had trouble remembering the guy in the first place. How would I know if someone wanted to kill him?’
‘Perhaps you can pursue the question yourself by asking your vineyard manager and his staff if they know anything.’
‘I spoke to the manager earlier this week,’ Walters said, ‘and he was less than helpful. You might have more luck.’
‘He’ll talk to me all right, don’t you worry.’
‘While you’re at it, Mr Perry,’ Henderson said, ‘I’d like a list of all the employees working there.’
‘In France? Don’t make me laugh. You’ve got no jurisdiction there.’
‘I’m aware of that, but if you don’t, I could charge you with obstructing a murder investigation.’
‘Maybe I’ll just call my lawyer and ask his advice.’
‘Be my guest, mate but you’d be wasting your money. You don’t know me Mr Perry, but I don’t make threats I can’t keep.’
They eyeballed one another for a few seconds before Perry shrugged. ‘Not worth the candle. I’ll see what I can do,’ he grumbled.
‘Were you aware that Chris Fletcher was travelling back to England because he’d been sacked?’
‘I didn’t know, but you’ve got to understand something about wine making. It’s not all about sniffing the aroma and spitting into buckets.’
‘No?’
‘Wine making is about farming; a lot of people forget that. The vine is a plant and needs to be pruned, sprayed, the grapes picked and all the rest, and this sort of work is seasonal. We hire people to come in and pick the grapes and then we let them go at the end of the season. People come and go at a vineyard all the time.’
‘How often do you visit Château Osanne, Mr Perry?’ Walters asked.
‘A couple of times a year. I don’t need to be there so much as it more or less runs itself.’
‘Would you know if anything untoward was going on there, such as bullying or a high stakes poker school, for example?’
‘David Frankland, my Operations Director, goes over there more often than I do and he’d tell me if something wasn’t right.’
The name clicked with Henderson but he couldn’t remember why. ‘Where can we find Mr Frankland?’
Perry wrote down a number and handed a piece of paper to Henderson. ‘He’s not an easy man to track down as he’s away a lot. Usually working for me, but sometimes on his own stuff.’
‘Thank you. I don’t have any more questions.’ Henderson turned to Walters. ‘You?’
‘No, I’m done.’
They both stood and shook hands with a still-seated Daniel Perry.
‘Thanks for seeing us, Mr Perry, we’ll show ourselves out.’
‘The pleasure’s all mine,’ he said but his cold, hard eyes did not reflect the sentiments of the statement.
Henderson reached for the door handle but stopped and turned. ‘One more thing.’
‘You people with your questions. What is it this time?’
‘An investigator I know has uncovered what he believes to be a wine fraud going on in your corner of France.’
It was fleeting but Henderson saw it; a wave of alarm swept across Perry’s face.
‘Really? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘What, you don’t know anything about wine fraud in general, or you don’t know if wine fraud’s been going on in your part of France?’
‘Fraud goes on in every business. Wine’s no different. We’ve had the owners wine storage facilities selling wines that didn’t belong to them and Italians passing off cheap plonk as Barolo, but nothing like that is going on in my vineyards, I can assure you.’
‘I thought not, but it’s something we’re keeping our eyes on. I just thought I should mention it. Goodbye Mr Perry.’
Liar, liar, liar. Perry was no card shark and how he succeeded in business negotiations with such an easy to read face, Henderson would never know. He had lied to them earlier and he was lying to him now.
TWELVE
After staring at both whiteboards for half a minute, Henderson drew a line from Daniel Perry to Chris Fletcher.
‘I think Perry’s involved in whatever has been going on at that vineyard,’ he said looking around at the faces of the murder team.
‘He claims to know what goes on in his businesses,’ he went on. ‘This is borne out by newspaper reports that say he’s a control freak and money grabber who negotiates for discounts when he’s buying clothes and boasts he never pays over the odds for anything.’
‘Why does he do that, sir?’ DC Deepak Sunderam asked. ‘He’s a rich guy, owns a stream of businesses and properties and lives in a big house behind big gates with a young wife.’
‘Maybe he can’t get enough,’ DC Sally Graham said.
‘Maybe the wine-faking business is paying for the big house,’ DS Walters said.
‘Could be any of these things, but if Chris Fletcher’s death is connected to Château Osanne and there’s wine fraud going on there, Perry would know about it, and in all likelihood, he would be behind it.’
‘When you mentioned wine-faking to him,’ Walters said, ‘h
e practically peed himself, or whatever the male equivalent is.’
‘Sally why don’t you bring us up to date with the passenger and crew interviews you did with Deepak at Newhaven.’
She blushed slightly as she began to speak. She was a confident officer in interviews and dealing with victims, but ask her to talk in public and her self-assurance went out of the window.
‘We talked to the captain, but he didn’t know much and seemed more interested in his forthcoming voyage than talking about one dead passenger. We found a barman who thought he’d seen Chris go out on deck. He remembered two men following him out shortly after but it could be something or nothing. He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary after that.’
‘He didn’t see Chris come back in?’ Walters asked.
‘No, he didn’t, so as I guess he went overboard soon after.’
‘Did he notice the time?’
‘No.’
‘Did you check the ship’s CCTV? Do we have sight of these two men?’
‘Sorry sarg. We checked but there aren’t any cameras in that part of the deck.’
Graham paused, anticipating another question from Walters, but nothing came.
‘Go on, Sally,’ Henderson said.
‘Yes sir. Where was I? Erm, the captain gave us the name of a guy who had been drinking with Chris earlier, someone called Darren Land. He was the first person to notice Chris missing and reported it to the crew.’
‘How did you get on meeting him?’ Henderson said. ‘He sounds a good lead.’
‘He is, sir, as he gave us some idea of Chris’s state of mind.’
‘Which was?’ Walters asked.
‘A bit melancholy and down; understandable as he’d just been sacked from his dream job but not depressive, such that he would want to kill himself.’
‘Perry became evasive on the same point,’ Henderson said, ‘and gave us some spiel about the seasons and letting casual labour go.’
‘It was his way of avoiding getting into the reasons why they fired him,’ Walters said, ‘or as the busy chief executive of various businesses, he didn’t bloody well know.’
‘I think the former,’ Henderson said. ‘What else did Darren Land tell you?’
‘He talked a lot about the search of the ship which was irrelevant as we know they didn’t find Chris. I reckon he’d been drinking for most of the crossing as his memories were a bit patchy.’
‘I got the same impression, sir,’ Sunderam said.
‘Do we know if Land’s one of the men who followed Chris outside; perhaps the result of an argument earlier?’
‘No, he wasn’t one of the men. The description the barman gave of one well-built bloke and his tall, skinny companion doesn’t work with Mr Land, who’s small and fat. He told us he spent the entire voyage in the bar and only moved away to have something to eat or go to the toilet.’
Henderson sighed. ‘He looks like a dead end. Anything else?’
‘We haven’t tracked down Chris’s suitcase, but we recovered his backpack,’ Phil Bentley said.
‘Excellent. What have you done with it?’
‘We went through the contents, logged them and sent his laptop up to HTCU.’
‘You found his laptop? Good. Give HTCU a couple of days and if you don’t get it back by then, head up to Haywards Heath and badger them. Ok?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Did the contents of the backpack include Chris’s phone?’
‘Nope.’
‘It’s likely he took it with him when he went out on deck, mind you, a phone wasn’t included in the items we got back from the mortuary. Sally, could you check with the mortuary again? It’s unlike them to miss it, but they may have forgotten to give it to us.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Phil, what sort of laptop did Chris have?’
‘An Apple. Mac Air, I think.’
‘Ah that’s good as they keep records of phone messages. I’m interested in them and emails, social media and the websites he’s visited; anything that might give us a clue what he was involved in and why he died.’
DC Bentley nodded.
‘Have we covered everything?’ Henderson said, looked around at the faces but no one was offering anything new. He turned to Carol Walters.
‘DS Walters, enlighten us about how you got on with your calls to France.’
‘The Bordeaux Police were helpful but useless. They aren’t interested in Chris Fletcher’s death as they believe, not unreasonably, that it’s a UK issue. When I mentioned Château Osanne and asked if anything strange had been reported there, they stonewalled me. How can you sully the good name of a fine French wine producer without evidence blah, blah, blah?’
‘What about your calls to the vineyard?’
‘The manager of Château Osanne, when I finally got through to him, is a charming bloke called Rene Fournier, but he said more or less the same thing. Chris died on a cross-Channel ferry when it was close to England, and as Chris no longer worked at his vineyard, it wasn’t his responsibility.’
‘No sympathy for the dead?’ Phil Bentley asked.
‘Nope. He’s wiped his hands of him.’
‘This just leaves us one more item to consider: the victim,’ Henderson said. ‘You’ve all seen the profile I wrote after talking to Chris Fletcher’s father. Chris had troubled teenage years after his mother died and it led him into drink and drugs. I put a call into our colleagues at Guildford to find out if there was a history of violence among drug dealers and users in the Camberley area around that time.’
‘I’ll follow that up for you sir, if you like,’ Sunderam offered. ‘I know quite a few officers in the drugs squad.’
‘I was just about to ask. You do that. The guy I spoke to was DS Ken Haines.’
Sunderam nodded. ‘I know him.’
‘Dennis Fletcher said Chris had sorted himself out and didn’t detect any problems the last time his son came home on leave about three months ago.’
‘It depends on how well his father knew him,’ Phil Bentley said. ‘We’ve all heard of drug addicts and dealers that parents knew nothing about.’
‘I agree, and it serves to remind us to keep an open mind,’ Henderson said. ‘There may be wine faking going on at the château and we know Chris is dead, but we don’t know yet if or how the two are related. At the moment, we’ve only got Dennis Fletcher and Harvey Miller’s suspicions and theories to support the connection.’
**
After the team meeting, Henderson returned to his office. It was a brighter room than the old one at Sussex House, with views over nearby woods, and better quality furniture, but the more space he had, the more people were tempted to dump boxes in it.
He didn’t say so at the team meeting, but they were running out of places to look for a motive that could explain Chris Fletcher’s death. If the château was based in the UK, he could put them under surveillance and find out what they were doing, or obtain a warrant and raid the place. In France, as Daniel Perry so rightly said, he had no such jurisdiction. He’d considered keeping a watch on the Uckfield warehouse that Harvey Miller mentioned, but the DI could see nothing there but a dead-end, and if Miller wanted to stake it out for a few fruitless days, he was welcome to it.
If he believed Dennis Fletcher, and he had no reason to doubt him, Chris didn’t die as a result of some criminal activity on his part. It was caused either by an accident aboard the ship, not likely based on what he’d heard so far, or he was killed by someone on-board. Perhaps by the two men seen heading out on deck shortly after Chris, or other persons not identified yet. The only lead they had left was Daniel Perry’s head of operations, David Frankland. Henderson could try and put more pressure on Daniel Perry, as the owner of the vineyard he had to know what was going on; but with what evidence?
He picked up his jacket and headed downstairs. He went outside and made his way across the courtyard to the staff restaurant. They didn’t have this level of eating luxury at Sussex House, b
ut because so many admin and operating services were based in Lewes, the likes of 999 and 101 services, finance, HR, website specialists and all the usual functions of a large and complex business employing around five thousand people, it was a necessity.
The one disadvantage of such a place, besides adding the occasional inch or two to his girth, was that most of the top brass appeared there at some point in the day. To be fair, many of them didn’t get out much on investigations and operations due to the administrative rigours of the job, and so they tried to collar people like him to try and catch up with all the news. As if reading his mind, CI Lisa Edwards spotted him and waved him over.
He put his tuna and sweetcorn baguette and coffee down on the table and took a seat opposite.
‘Afternoon, ma’am. I didn’t expect to find you in here at this late hour of the afternoon.’
‘The ACC decided to hold one of his regular working lunches in here,’ she said as she sipped a cup of coffee. ‘I prefer to do it within the confines of his office with food brought in, as there are too many distractions in a place like this. Plus it’s hard to talk confidential stuff with all the professional ear-wiggers about.’
‘First whiff of a decent story and it’s all over the Airwave sets.’
‘It’s the internet I worry about,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware Angus, but many officers and detectives are secret bloggers.’
‘I knew a few were doing it.’
‘There’s loads doing it now. You’ve got ‘My Life as a Bobby,’ ‘The Bored CID Detective,’ ‘Death from Forensics’; there’s no secrets, even here. That’s enough tub-thumping from me, how are you getting on with the Chris Fletcher case?’
He gave her a synopsis of the work completed and what they had discussed at the last murder team meeting. She nodded, no doubt mentally ticking off all the things that she would do if it was her case.
‘Where did you leave it with the private investigator, Miller?’
‘He says he knows where the vans from the château go; the ones he saw the night he was beaten up. Somewhere in Uckfield apparently, and he’s going over there to take a look. At first, I thought it was a job for us, but after some thought, I decided no, it’s probably a wine delivery depot. ’
