‘Get him to phone me, will you? If you can—’ The line went dead.
Kathy was not assigned to the group seeking out stamp collectors. Instead she accompanied McLarren and Hewitt to their interview with Sammy Starling. She didn’t understand why she had been so favoured, until she saw Starling’s reaction to her presence, which was to ask immediately where Brock was.
‘DCI Brock has been taken off this case, Mr Starling,’ McLarren said carelessly, turning over the pages of the file in front of him.
‘Taken off? What do you mean, taken off?’ Starling insisted, in a tone of contained panic.
‘I mean exactly what I say, Mr Starling. You will not be seeing him again.’
‘What?’ Starling yelped. ‘But I—I insist on seeing—’
McLarren looked slowly up from his papers and fixed him with a withering look that killed his demand in mid-sentence.
‘You and DCI Brock go back a long way, I understand, Mr Starling,’ he said, in a soft, dangerous tone. ‘How would you describe your relationship?’
‘What?’ Starling bit his lip anxiously, his eyes disappeared into the narrowest of creases and his round face took on an aspect of doll-like innocence.
‘Friendship, would you say?’
‘Oh,’ Starling said cautiously, after a pause. ‘I wouldn’t presume to say that, Mr . . . Mr . . . ?’
‘Did money ever change hands between you, Mr Starling?’
Now it was Kathy who bit her lip, to stifle the objection that she almost shouted at McLarren.
‘Money?’
‘Money, yes.’
‘I think that’s a matter between Mr Brock and me.’
‘I take that to mean yes.’ McLarren’s voice became almost a purr. ‘What did you give him money for, Mr Starling?’
‘Eh?’ The folds of flesh around Starling’s eyes parted until his eyes appeared about to pop out of his head. ‘No, no. You’ve got it wrong! In the beginning, when I was starting out, I sometimes gave him a bit of information, like, in exchange for cash. He gave me cash.’
‘Yes? And the reciprocal, Mr Starling, the reciprocal ?’
‘What? I don’t follow.’
‘You also gave him cash in exchange for information, am I not right?’
‘No! Absolutely not. No way!’
‘Stamps, then? You gave him valuable stamps?’
‘What? No, no! You’ve got this all wrong. What’s this all about?’
‘He’s interested in stamps, isn’t he?’
‘He never told me if he is. We never talked about stamps, until this thing with Eva happened.’
McLarren glared with deep displeasure. ‘You are not being helpful, Mr Starling. If you want our unstinting assistance you must give us yours. Reciprocity is what this is all about. A token of good faith.’
‘I want to help you, of course I do, but I can’t tell you what isn’t so, can I?’
‘I wonder if you would be so loyal to DCI Brock if you realised . . .’ McLarren left the sentence dangling, then shook his head and muttered, ‘No matter.’
‘What? If I realised what?’
McLarren sighed. ‘It’s hard to deal with you, Mr Starling, hard to help you, when you’re so uncooperative.’
‘Please,’ Starling said desperately. ‘What should I realise? Maybe this is all some terrible misunderstanding. If you’d just tell me—’
‘A misunderstanding!’ McLarren turned to Hewitt at his side with a look of incredulity. The other man snorted. ‘A very tragic misunderstanding, if that’s what it was, Mr Starling. Very tragic. Let me put it to you then, very simply.’
He watched Starling carefully as he continued. ‘The stamp which you gave to the kidnappers by way of the ransom was not the authentic stamp which you had bought and they had demanded. It was a copy, which they detected, and naturally were exceedingly unhappy about. So unhappy, in fact, that they killed your wife and cut off her head to teach you a lesson.’
Starling might himself have been dead, so immobile had he become as he listened to this. Finally, his lips parted enough to whisper, ‘No.’
‘Oh, yes. And it wasn’t just any copy that you gave them. Our laboratory has confirmed that it was the copy they had made the night before the auction, which DCI Brock instructed them to make.’ He held up a sheaf of official order forms. ‘These are his requisition sheets . . . in order to substitute for the real stamp, but which in the end it was decided not to use. You remember?’
Another long, immobile pause before a whispered ‘Yes.’
‘Yes. And now the intriguing question. After your refusal, DCI Brock put the copy into his jacket pocket, do you remember that? Never mind—several witnesses confirm it, including DS Kolla here. So the question is, how? How was it possible that the copy in DCI Brock’s pocket, and the real stamp which came up from the auction, became, shall we say, confused? Have you got an answer to that?’
Starling gazed at McLarren for a long while, his eyes screwed up so tight that Kathy thought he might be about to cry. Then he said, ‘Who are you?’
‘I told you my name at the beginning, Mr Starling,’ McLarren said, with laboured patience. ‘Jock McLarren— Superintendent Jock McLarren.’
‘Yes, but who are you? I mean, who are you with?’
‘Fraud Squad, Mr Starling. You’ve had dealings with us before, I believe, ten years or so ago.’
Starling whispered some oath or prayer, and the last of the colour faded from his cheeks. ‘Why?’ he croaked. ‘This is a murder inquiry. My wife has been murdered.’
‘Yes, yes.’ McLarren said dismissively, as if that were the least of his concerns. ‘Now, in the light of what I’ve just told you, is there anything you would like to tell me about your relationship with DCI Brock, eh? Come along, man, we haven’t got all day.’
Starling’s pale moon face remained deadly still, eyes invisible. Then the three police officers saw a glistening drop of water form in the outer corner of each crease, and tumble simultaneously down each cheek, followed by another, and another, though Starling remained perfectly still and silent as he wept.
McLarren turned away with a look of disgust on his face. ‘I am interrupting this interview for a five-minute break for Mr Starling to compose himself,’ he said fiercely towards the tape-recorder, got to his feet and strode out of the room.
Hewitt followed him out, leaving Kathy to supervise Starling’s recovery. After a while he wiped his face with a handkerchief, and sipped at a plastic cup of water, but otherwise said and did nothing to give Kathy any clue as to what was going on inside his head. She had felt her stomach knot with alarm after listening to McLarren’s accusations against Brock, and wondered what had made him so convinced and confident that he could spell them out to Starling. She wanted to tell Starling that she was sure there was some other explanation for what had happened, but she was acutely aware of the video camera and the one-way mirror, on the other side of which McLarren and Hewitt were probably watching her.
After ten minutes of silence, the door opened and the other two detectives returned. McLarren was talking intently to his assistant, and Kathy picked up the last words of his sentence, ‘. . . by the balls, Tony.’
Hewitt nodded and took the central seat facing Starling, who showed no sign of having heard McLarren’s words.
‘Let’s talk about fraud, Mr Starling,’ Hewitt began coldly. ‘On Saturday you handed over a substantial collection of postage stamps to the dealers Cabot’s in exchange for credit towards the purchase price of an item bought that day at auction.’
Starling blinked uncertainly, then nodded.
‘A number of those stamps have now been shown to be forgeries.’
Kathy recognised Starling’s now familiar reaction to shock: his features switched off and went into a state of immobility. To Hewitt, this reaction appeared simply obstructive.
‘That’s fraud, Mr Starling,’ he said harshly, his voice louder. ‘Passing forgeries off as the genuine article. You’ve
been guilty of serious fraud.’
‘No,’ Starling muttered.
‘Well, what’s your explanation?’
‘I didn’t know . . . Are you sure?’
‘How could you not know? You’re an expert, aren’t you? You get advice from experts. Of course you would know.’
‘No. It’s impossible.’
‘That’s right, it’s impossible you couldn’t have known. That’s the view the court will take, before they put you away.’
Starling stiffened at this, and McLarren broke in, speaking almost caressingly after Hewitt’s harshness. ‘Aye, Mr Starling, fraud on this scale can only lead to prison.’
‘Scale? How—how many stamps?’
‘Oh dear, oh dear, our lab people’ll be busy for weeks before we know the full extent of it. And the longer you keep us in the dark, Mr Starling, and the more you make us work it out for ourselves, the harder will be the penalty of the court, believe you me. But, then, you know how hard the court can be with cases of serious fraud, don’t you? Not that your earlier assistance to the court in providing damning evidence against some of our former colleagues will help you now.’
Hewitt seemed to lose patience. Out of a folder he snatched the enlarged photographs of the three Tasmanian stamps and threw them down in front of Starling. ‘Recognise these?’
Starling focused on them, then nodded slowly. ‘The ransom notes. The stamps . . . probably came from my collection.’
‘Forged!’ Hewitt barked angrily. ‘How did you acquire them?’
‘I—I don’t know. From Cabot’s . . .’
Hewitt shook his head. ‘Their records show not.’
‘Well, Gibbons, perhaps, or Christie’s . . . I don’t know. You say these ones are forged?’
‘You must keep a record of your purchases, don’t you?’
Starling stammered, ‘I’m afraid not.’
Hewitt threw back his head in disbelief. ‘Oh, spare us!’
‘Truly.’
‘When did you buy them?’
The silence stretched longer this time, before Starling said, ‘I have no idea. I can’t remember.’
Hewitt glared at him. ‘Mr Starling,’ he said, voice full of menace, ‘you know where these forgeries come from—you must.’
‘No.’
‘It’s sometimes claimed,’ McLarren said, musing, ‘that the courts are harder on crimes against property than those against the person. Your case should provide an interesting test of that, Mr Starling. It’ll be fascinating to see whether your sentence for fraud is longer or shorter than that for obstructing the course of a murder inquiry.’
‘You think the forger murdered Eva?’ Starling whispered, brow wrinkled in concentration.
McLarren pointed a bony finger at him. ‘And you know who he is, don’t you, Mr Starling?’
Starling looked from McLarren to Hewitt and back again, as if just now realising what they were saying. ‘I want a lawyer,’ he said. ‘I won’t say any more without a lawyer.’
They broke for lunch and to give Starling time to call his lawyer. When the detectives were alone, McLarren said, ‘A pathetic figure.’
‘A bloody irritating one,’ Hewitt said angrily. ‘You can’t tell what’s going on inside that balloon of a bloody head. Can’t see his eyes.’
‘He’s a starling,’ McLarren said. ‘A greedy wee scavenger. But he’s been hit by a real predator, a hawk. When he’s had time to absorb that, I’m sure he’ll understand that he has no choice but to lead us to him. But I’d like something to convince him that he should be more frightened of us than of Raphael. I have no doubt that his lawyer will advise him that we would need a great deal more incriminating evidence than we presently have to charge him with intent to defraud Cabot’s.’
‘The idea of prison seemed to put the wind up him,’ Hewitt offered.
‘Aye, that’s true.’ McLarren nodded thoughtfully. ‘Kathy, that information you had about his wife’s drug habit, were his properties thoroughly searched for drugs?’
‘We didn’t know about the drugs when the searches were done, sir.’
‘Well, why don’t you organise another, more thorough search? You know what to look for now.’
‘Sir, if I may say . . .’
‘Aye, lassie. Go on.’
‘Sir, you’re wrong about Brock and Starling. I’m quite sure DCI Brock wouldn’t have done anything wrong.’
McLarren smiled at her. ‘Very loyal, Kathy. I like that. But, in any event, it’s others that’ll be pursuing that one— I was only shaking the tree to see what might drop out, and sowing one or two seeds of doubt, to mix my metaphors. Oh, and there’s something else apart from drugs that you should be looking for—the records of his stamp purchases. I have little doubt that he did keep records of some kind, and he would have had no reason to destroy them up until now. Paperwork is the thing, you see, Kathy, that trips most of us up in the end. That’s why you should be very wary of the kind of methods that DCI Brock no doubt insisted upon.’
‘Sir?’
‘Aye, the focus, I mean, on understanding the subtleties of human nature and motivation, and so on. Was that not his way of it? Well, in my experience, human nature is depressingly predictable and uniform, Kathy. What is amazingly various are the means we find to disguise it. And it’s usually the paperwork that exposes our fraud. You should concentrate on that. Get a degree—statistics, something like that, or information science. That’s the way of the future for policing.’
13
The Yellow Bikini
There was some relief from the heat of the city up on the North Downs, where a light breeze stirred the heavy foliage along the woodland lanes as the two cars made their way towards the house. Another car was already there in the forecourt, empty, but as they came to a stop Leon Desai appeared at the far corner of the house and walked towards them. Kathy had the key, and as the others unpacked their gear, she opened the front door. The interior was still and airless, the silence heavy as if the place had been brooding on its owners’ fate. Another vehicle arrived in the driveway, and a dog-handler got out with a beagle on a lead. They moved to the front of the group, the dog perky, wagging its tail happily.
‘We’ll start at the top and work down,’ Desai said, and the team of SOCOs, dressed up in their nylon overalls, shuffled forward to the stairs.
‘This is the bit I don’t like,’ Kathy said, hanging back.
‘How do you mean?’ Desai was pulling on his latex gloves with a look of purposeful detachment.
‘I don’t mind so much searching a place with the owners there,’ she said. ‘It’s in the open, everyone knows what’s going on. But coming into an empty house I feel like a thief, or a spy, prying. I don’t like it.’
‘That’s a bit of a fine distinction for someone in our line of work, isn’t it?’ he said.
His calmness, his indifference to the atmosphere in the house, niggled her. ‘Don’t you know what I mean? Don’t you feel anything?’
‘Shame? Is that what you mean? No, of course not. I’m doing my job, Kathy. So are you.’
‘I just sat in on McLarren interviewing Sammy Starling. He told him everything that you told us last night, about the forged Canada Cover. He seemed so confident that Brock is guilty.’
Desai nodded but said nothing.
‘We’ve got to do something, Leon. They’ve really got the knives out for Brock.’
‘I think it may be too late for that, Kathy,’ he said quietly. ‘My advice is to look out for yourself.’
She froze as he reached forward and took hold of her arm.
‘Really,’ he said softly, his mouth coming closer to her ear. ‘I mean it, Kathy. Let it go. Start again.’
She met his eyes, trying to read what was going on in his mind. He turned away and went up the stairs, two at a time.
They began in the roof space, beneath the clay tiles baking in the afternoon sun. It was hot, slow and uncomfortable work, checking the hidden corners around r
afters and trusses with flashlights, wearing face masks as they groped through the fibreglass insulation quilts laid between the joists. By the time they clambered down the loft ladder and pulled off their masks they were red-faced and soaking in sweat inside their overalls. The overalls themselves were filthy with dust and debris from the roof space, and they peeled them off and put on fresh ones. Then they spread out through the upper rooms. The only disconcerting find was something that Desai pointed out to Kathy in the dressing-room attached to the Starlings’ bedroom. He opened a wardrobe door and pointed to a steel cabinet inside. Its door was open, several umbrellas inside.
Did you notice this before?’ he asked her.
‘No. What about it?’
‘I’ve just realised what it is.’
Kathy still didn’t get it. ‘What?’
‘It’s a security cabinet. For guns.’
He swung the door closed, showing her the heavy lock.
‘Sammy has a gun?’
‘If he does it isn’t there now.’
After a fruitless search of the first floor they moved on downstairs, gradually, imperceptibly, becoming resigned to failure as their search yielded nothing. The final straw was the safe that they discovered set into the floor beneath a corner of the carpet in the room Sammy Starling used as an office and den. Its door was unlocked and wedged open with a fold of paper, as if to tell them that they needn’t waste time damaging the door trying to open it. There was nothing inside.
When they had finished in the cellar, they spent a further hour in a search of the outbuildings and grounds. Then Desai told the SOCO team and dog-handler to go home.
Kathy found him standing by the side of the swimming-pool, between the house and the tennis court, screened by hedges and shrubbery. It was just after six, the western sun still hot, its light glittering on the motionless surface of the blue water. He looked defeated, and she realised how much he’d wanted to get a result.
‘Eva probably kept it all in London,’ she said. ‘That’s what the flat was for, wasn’t it?’
‘She was here for weeks at a time. She would have needed to keep some here too.’
‘Well,’ Kathy said, ‘Sammy must have taken it. He must have known.’
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