Death Comes First

by Hilary Bonner

  Henry interrupted this time. Loudly. Calling out desperately through his tears.

  ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘No. It can’t be. It can’t.’

  Nobby Clarke didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. She had to tell them everything straight away.

  ‘We therefore have reason to believe the boy is probably your grandson.’

  Felicity still couldn’t take it in.

  ‘But Joyce is always such a careful driver,’ she said.

  She knew as soon as she heard herself make the remark that it was silly. It was the first thing that had come into her head. Joyce was a careful driver.

  ‘How could something like this have happened?’ Felicity continued. ‘How could she go off the road like that?’

  ‘Mrs Tanner, we do not believe that your daughter was driving the vehicle when it went into the Floating Harbour,’ said Vogel. ‘We believe a man was driving.’

  Felicity was bewildered. ‘A man? What man?’

  ‘We believe that the driver was your son-in-law, Charles, Charlie, Mildmay.’

  Felicity could barely believe her ears. She was incapable at first of comprehending. She was aware of Henry, trying to pull himself, as much as he were able to, into an upright sitting position. She couldn’t read the expression on his tear-stained face. He was shocked and distraught, yes. But there was something else.

  Suddenly she felt that she understood. That she was aware of what his expression meant.

  ‘You knew, Henry, you bastard,’ she said. ‘You knew Charlie was alive.’

  Twenty-seven

  After her outburst there was a brief silence in the room. Henry remained sitting upright, but closed his eyes again, screwing the lids tightly shut, as if in so doing he might make the world, to which he had been so cruelly reintroduced, disappear.

  Vogel had to feel sympathy for him, as well as for his wife. These were two broken people. A man and a woman reeling from the shock of having been told that they’d lost two grandchildren, and whose entire family life now lay in total ruin.

  It was DCI Clarke who broke the silence first.

  ‘I am so terribly sorry to be bringing you this terrible news,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone you would like us to call, anyone you would like to be here with you?’

  Eventually Felicity found her voice again. ‘Th-there’s our eldest grandson.’ She stopped, realizing what she had said. What the events of that day meant. ‘Mark, our only grandson,’ she continued quietly. ‘He was here earlier. He went looking for his mother and his sister. I don’t know where he is. But I can call him. Oh my God, he doesn’t know. I must call him. I wouldn’t want anyone else to tell him.’

  ‘All right,’ responded Clarke. ‘Look, Mr and Mrs Tanner, we have a lot more questions for you which may help us piece together what has happened here. Most of it can wait, but there are a couple that can’t.

  ‘As DI Vogel has said, we believe the Range Rover was being driven by Charlie Mildmay, your daughter’s husband. Your daughter told us that. Now, he was registered as missing, presumed dead in January, was he not? And I understand an inquest scheduled for later this year was expected to declare him officially dead?’

  Felicity was staring at her husband, who looked every bit as shocked and surprised as his wife did. Vogel wondered if Henry’s reaction was entirely genuine. He suspected that the older man might be a good actor.

  As if reading the DI’s thoughts, Felicity turned on her husband: ‘Henry, what do you know about this? Did you know Charlie was alive? I’ll bet everything I’ve got left in this world that you know something. You always bloody do. So why don’t you just tell it? All of it. Now. Or so help me, God, I promise you our marriage will end this minute.’

  Felicity’s voice had grown in volume. She seemed to have little control over it. And she didn’t look as if she cared one jot.

  Henry reached out to her again. Again she pulled away from him.

  ‘Darling, I promise you, I had no idea Charlie was alive,’ Henry said. ‘If he is. Or I mean, if he was until today.’

  He turned his head slightly to focus on Nobby Clarke.

  ‘That’s the truth, Detective Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘In fact I had reason to believe Charlie had killed himself . . .’

  ‘You bastard, Henry,’ Felicity interrupted. ‘You always said, when we all wondered how Charlie, such an expert sailor, could have died in that sort of accident, that you had no reason to suspect he would have committed suicide. Why would he? That’s what you said. Why would a man with everything to live for want to end his life?’

  ‘I was trying to protect you, Felicity,’ said Henry. ‘Like I always do. There were things it was better you didn’t know about. There still are.’

  ‘How can you say that, Henry?’ she demanded. ‘How the hell can you say that right now? Half your family has been wiped out.’

  Felicity turned to face Nobby Clarke.

  ‘The man you think is Charlie – is he dead now? Or has he survived this . . . this terrible accident, or whatever it was?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. He has also been brought to this hospital.’

  ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘I am afraid I have no details of his medical condition,’ Clarke replied.

  ‘My God, he has some explaining to do,’ muttered Felicity, turning back to Henry.

  ‘As do you, Henry,’ she continued. ‘And why don’t you start by explaining why you thought Charlie was a likely candidate for suicide? Come on, Henry, break the habit of a lifetime. Try being honest.’

  Neither Clarke nor Vogel said anything. They were both happy for the moment to let Felicity do the questioning. They just stood at the foot of the bed looking at Henry.

  The older man sighed and then, as if resigned to his fate, began with the same question he had asked on their previous visit:

  ‘DCI Clarke, you and DI Vogel know all about the, uh, covert activities of Tanner-Max, do you not?’

  ‘More or less,’ replied the DCI.

  Vogel grunted. Rather more less than more, he thought, but he supposed he knew enough. He’d grasped the gist of it.

  Felicity frowned. ‘I bloody don’t,’ she snapped.

  ‘You must have picked up some idea over the years,’ said Henry.

  ‘Not enough to think that it might lead my son-in-law to want to kill himself. Or to come up with some elaborate scam which has led us to believe all these months that he is dead. Not enough to think that it might end with two of my grandchildren dying so horrifically. Two of my grandchildren being murdered, Henry. My daughter lying in a hospital bed still fighting for a life she isn’t going to want now. And what about William? Maybe his death wasn’t an accident, either. Oh, Henry, Henry. What have you done?’

  Felicity shouted the words then seemed to collapse. She sat slouched forward, holding her head in her hands. Her shoulders began to heave. Vogel could no longer see her face. He didn’t need to in order to realize the state she was in.

  ‘It wasn’t the business, it wasn’t anything we did at Tanner-Max that made me think Charlie had killed himself,’ said Henry quietly, addressing no one in particular. ‘I found out that Charlie had gone independent. It seems that what the family and our business provided for him was not enough. He was doing deals with gangsters, for God’s sake. I discovered that he had diverted stock from a number of the international deals we brokered and he’d been selling weapons destined for our overseas clients to a London gang. He was involved in organized crime—’

  ‘Henry, are you saying you are an arms dealer?’ Felicity cried. ‘You deal in arms? I always knew there was something going on at Tanner-Max, something more than sending whisky all over the world. But not this. Is it true?’

  Henry inclined his head slightly.

  ‘In the service of the British government,’ he said rather pompously. ‘And we are brokers, not dealers.’

  ‘You are monsters,’ responded Felicity, horrified.

  ‘Would you go on, please, Mr Tanner,’
interjected Clarke. ‘You were telling us about the criminal activities you believed your son-in-law to be involved in.

  ‘Yes.’

  Henry glanced anxiously at his wife before continuing. She was not looking at him.

  ‘I found out about it the day after he disappeared off his boat. I think he was afraid of the people he was dealing with. I still think that, even if he staged his death rather than killing himself. Maybe he knew he hadn’t covered his tracks well enough. He would certainly have known that I would be furious. But I don’t think for one moment he was afraid of me. No, he was out of his depth. He was afraid of the criminals he’d got himself mixed up with. It seems he had good reason to be. After he was gone, they started to put pressure on me. I believe they were behind the shooting. Who else would send a gunman to kill me?’

  ‘You said yourself that the work that you have done over the years could have made you a target,’ responded DCI Clarke. ‘Is it not possible that you were shot by members of some terrorist organization, for example?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Mr Smith has been looking into that side of things since Fred disappeared. He and his people hadn’t come up with any evidence to suggest—’

  Felicity interrupted again.

  ‘Who the heck is Mr Smith?’ she asked.

  Henry made no attempt to reply.

  Vogel too stared at the older man. A rooftop sniper was likely to be a professional, that was for sure. But Henry was only wounded, shot in the right shoulder, away from the heart. A professional with a sniper’s rifle did not often mess up. If the intention had been to kill Henry, then Vogel would not expect him to be still alive. So maybe that hadn’t been the intention.

  Tanner continued to ignore his wife.

  ‘Here, take a look at my email,’ he said suddenly.

  Henry reached for his iPhone on the bedside table and tossed it across the room towards the two police officers.

  Nobby Clarke’s physical reactions were better and quicker than Vogel’s. But then so were almost anybody’s. She caught the phone with one hand and brought up Henry Tanner’s email account.

  Vogel studied the screen over her shoulder.

  Third on the list was an email from an innocent enough hotmail address, Marlon8920@hotmail.com.

  Vogel was a crossword freak. There was something about that email address that was crying out to him. But, for the moment at any rate, he couldn’t quite get it.

  The message was simple and to the point: You have been warned. Please reinstate our order.

  ‘So what do you believe this to mean, Mr Tanner?’ enquired Clarke.

  Henry leaned back in the pillows. Again he seemed to be willing the whole scenario to disappear.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, will you answer their bloody questions before we have any more deaths?’ barked Felicity.

  Henry did so.

  ‘When I found out what Charlie had been doing I put a stop to it at once. I let the people he was dealing with know they would receive no more arms from us. They didn’t take it well. They were in the middle of a transaction with Charlie and there was money outstanding. Not a fortune – about £10,000. I offered straight away to repay it. But that wasn’t good enough.

  ‘They said a deal had been done. They didn’t want the money, they wanted the goods. As arranged. They kept insisting, and I kept saying no. I suppose I was calling their bluff. I mean, I couldn’t believe they would do anything. Then when Fred disappeared . . .’

  Felicity screamed. She actually screamed. Once. At the top of her voice. Stopping Henry in his tracks. It was a shrill, sharp sound cutting through the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hospital room.

  Yet when she spoke her voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet.

  ‘Are you saying that when Fred disappeared you thought he had been taken by these people, these evil, dangerous people, that you thought they would use him to threaten you?’ she asked. ‘And yet you told nobody about any of this. Not the police or your family. Henry, you are despicable.’

  Henry flinched. ‘Look, I asked them if they had taken Fred,’ he said. ‘They replied that they weren’t child molesters. That’s all. They weren’t child molesters.’

  ‘Mr Tanner,’ said Vogel. ‘How did you find out that Charlie had been dealing with criminals?’

  ‘From his email. After he disappeared from his boat it seemed a good idea to check out his email account. At first we didn’t have any idea what might have happened to him. We thought his email might give us some sort of clue. And it did. As soon as we read all this stuff it seemed obvious that Charlie had reason to kill himself. I knew he lived on a knife’s edge. I knew he relied far too much on prescription drugs. Of course I knew. But as long as he held himself together I wasn’t going to do anything about it. When I came to believe that he’d ended his own life, naturally I wished I had.’

  ‘You didn’t consider that he could have staged his own disappearance?’

  ‘Actually no, it didn’t occur to me. That’s the stuff of fiction, isn’t it?’

  Vogel persevered. ‘Who exactly is this “we” you keep referring to?’

  ‘Me and Stephen Hardcastle,’ said Henry.

  ‘So Stephen also knew about the illicit arms dealing?’

  ‘Yes. He was as shocked as I was. Charlie was Stephen’s closest friend, but he hadn’t confided any of it to him.’

  ‘I see. And how did you break into Charlie’s email?’

  ‘He’d left a laptop locked in his safe in the office. He had a brand-new one, which he must’ve taken with him, but when we looked in the safe we found the old one.’

  ‘His personal safe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you and Stephen Hardcastle had access to it.’

  ‘Janet kept a spare key.’

  Vogel nodded. He glanced at Nobby Clarke. She seemed content to let him lead the questioning.

  ‘Wasn’t it password protected?’ he asked. ‘His email would have been, surely?’

  ‘Yes. But we have a chap who does IT for us, sets up our accounts. I contacted him. Charlie had never bothered to change the passwords this chap used to set the whole thing up for him in the beginning.’

  ‘Didn’t you think that was sloppy for a man involved in illicit arms deals? I mean, wouldn’t you have expected him to destroy an old laptop? He doesn’t even ensure that he has a password nobody else knew about, and he leaves a laptop containing incriminating information in a safe to which other people have access. Didn’t you think that was unbelievably sloppy?’

  Henry shrugged. ‘It wasn’t out of character, given the way Charlie had been behaving. Besides, if he was planning to kill himself, what would it matter? Even if he were planning to stage his own disappearance and create a new life for himself, as you now seem to think might have been the case, it wouldn’t have had any impact on his plans. Besides, Charlie was hopeless at computer stuff. One way or another, it didn’t strike us as odd that he had left his old laptop in a safe.’

  ‘And you used the email addresses Charlie had on his machine to contact these people and cancel all arms deals, is that correct?’

  Henry agreed that it was.

  Vogel was still looking at the screen on Henry’s iPhone. He did some quick mental arithmetic, using the fingers of both hands. Suddenly he got it.

  ‘Mr Tanner, didn’t you think that the Marlon email address was a little . . . prosaic?’

  Henry looked blank.

  ‘Marlon, as in Marlon Brando, The Godfather,’ said Vogel. ‘Numbers 8, 9 and 20. They represent the letters of the alphabet: H, I and T. HIT. As in hitman, perhaps?’

  Henry still looked blank.

  ‘Maybe, but what difference does it make?’

  ‘It could be an implied threat,’ said Vogel. ‘You were maybe supposed to work out that the email address was telling you it was from a hitman of some sort.’

  ‘I didn’t even come close,’ said Tanner. ‘I can’t see how you worked it out
so quickly, either.’

  ‘He has that sort of mind,’ remarked Clarke.

  She didn’t make it sound as if she was paying Vogel a compliment.

  Vogel paid her no attention.

  ‘Mr Tanner, did you at any stage have dealings with “Marlon” or any of these people through any other means than email?’ Vogel asked.

  Henry said that he hadn’t.

  ‘So you’ve never met any of these people, you’ve never spoken to them on the telephone?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry. ‘I tried to when Fred went missing. I gave them my phone number. I told them to phone me any time day or night. I told them I was prepared to do anything, give them anything, even the arms they wanted so much, anything to get my grandson back. I wasn’t entirely convinced, you see, by their denials. I still reckoned it was possible they were holding him to ransom. I kept thinking they would call sooner or later. I kept waiting for them to call. Nobody called.’

  Vogel had more questions but was interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed constable, PC Mick Perkins, who had been instructed to keep a watching brief on Joyce Mildmay.

  ‘They told me you were here, ma’am,’ he said, addressing DCI Clarke. ‘And they wouldn’t let me use my phone in intensive care. There’s something I thought you should know straight away.’

  He leaned closer to Nobby Clarke, speaking into her ear in little more than a whisper. Vogel could not hear what the PC was saying. He looked at Clarke questioningly.

  Henry Tanner took the opportunity to reach out again to his sobbing wife. A glutton for punishment, thought Vogel. He had rarely seen anyone as angry as Felicity Tanner. Again she leaned away, rejecting him. And tough, strong Henry looked about to break down himself.

  Clarke touched Vogel on the arm.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said.

  Turning back to the bed, she addressed Henry and Felicity: ‘Mr and Mrs Tanner, we’re going to leave you now. Although I am afraid we will need to speak to you again later. Meanwhile, I would like to say again how sorry we are for your loss.’

  The Tanners, both overwhelmed now by their own misery, seemed not to hear her.