Deadly Intent

by Lynda La Plante

  “I haven’t seen him for a long time, I swear I haven’t.”

  “But why not? If, as you have taken pains to describe to me, you had a very special and very luxurious life together, what happened for you to marry someone else?”

  Anna tapped Cunningham’s arm and she leaned close; they whispered together, and then Anna took out her report of when Julia had broken down at her home when Anna had interviewed her very early in the investigation. Julia began to twist her ankle around again, then tapped her foot as Cunningham read Anna’s report.

  “I am waiting for you to answer, Mrs. Brandon. I need to know exactly when you last saw Mr. Collingwood.”

  “He had another woman.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, he had another woman. She’d moved into the house in St. John’s Wood.”

  Cunningham sighed and glanced to Anna. “When was this, Julia?”

  “Years ago, whilst I was living in the Mews. He told me he was abroad, but I think he had been living at the house all the time. I couldn’t tell you how long, but he had this woman, and I knew she had been living there.”

  “Did you find out who it was?”

  Julia was now leaning forward, wrapping her arms around herself. “I couldn’t believe it, but when I confronted him about it, he admitted it. We had this terrible argument.”

  “Was this before you conceived your children?”

  “Yes! I threatened to leave him and, to make up for betraying me, he said he had put a lot of money into my account. He said that he had been very stressed because of some business transactions, that he needed me even more to divert funds. He said the house in St. John’s Wood was mine, but I was very upset and angry. Then he said he wanted me to have children. I said before, that it was probably to keep me bound to him. I went along with it, but things were never the same between us. I was so hurt.”

  “Did he continue seeing this other woman?”

  Julia wouldn’t look up. “He disappeared again—said he had suffered huge losses. Some bank had collapsed.”

  “Would that be BCCI?”

  “I can’t remember. I had my hands full with the first baby. I suffered from terrible postnatal depression. And I was obviously suspicious of him.”

  “Because of this other woman?”

  “Yes!”

  “And you never discovered who she was?”

  Julia’s lips tightened, and she began rocking again. “I knew, I knew, but I wouldn’t face it.”

  “So you did know who she was?”

  “Yes! I’m not dumb, I put two and two together; it was a painting.”

  Cunningham leaned back in her chair as if this was going nowhere, but now Anna spoke up. “Was it a painting of a yacht?”

  Julia looked in surprise at Anna, but made no reply. There was a long pause and, at last, Fagan seemed to feel he should inteiject.

  “What painting are you referring to,Julia?”

  “I was feeling so wretched, you know, with a new baby, and I had never asked her for anything, ever. She’d got married and had moved with her husband to this farmhouse, so I packed a case and drove to Oxfordshire. The place was hideous, falling down, damp, and the spare bedroom was so small I couldn’t breathe. I hated it, and I was very

  obviously not welcome. I was no sooner there than I wanted to leave, and then I saw the painting.”

  “At the farmhouse,” Anna said quietly.

  “Yes. As soon as I saw it, I put two and two together, and I knew.”

  Anna continued. “So you discovered that the other woman, the woman who had been living at your house in St. John’s Wood, and in fact driven you away, was your sister?”

  Cunningham glanced at Anna; she hadn’t put it together.

  “Yes,“Julia hissed.

  “Did you confront her?”

  “No. I fucked her husband and left. I lied to you about the IVF. I only had it the once; my second baby is her husband’s. I didn’t even think I was pregnant. If I’d known about it earlier, I wouldn’t have had it, but it was too late for an abortion. I told Anthony that it was IVF again, and he accepted it.”

  “Did you ever tell your sister?”

  “No, I don’t speak to her. It was after I had the baby I decided that I had taken enough, all his lies, and that’s when I sold the house.” Julia sighed, really tired now. She had been interviewed for a long time, but it wasn’t over. She asked for some water, and was handed a beaker and a plastic water bottle; she unscrewed the cap and drank from the bottle.

  “I contacted David Rushton; it was luck, really. I had no idea who to turn to and it was my hairdresser who told me she’d had problems with tax, or something, and had this wonderful accountant. So I went to see him. He handled the sale of the house.”

  “For how much?”

  “Eight million. He arranged a deposit account, and then organized the Wimbledon property.”

  “And the other accounts?”

  “Well, when he knew I had access to so much, he started to say I had to really protect it—you know, start to make it earn more money for me. So he opened all these offshore accounts, and arranged various investments, making sure that I lived off an allowance. I needed a lot of money to refurbish the Wimbledon property and furnish it.”

  “Did Mr. Rushton have any indication that the money was not actually yours but Anthony Collingwood’s?”

  “No. I told him I had inherited some, and the rest had been given to me by my partner. I wanted him to make sure that no one could get their hands on it.”

  “Wasn’t he suspicious?”

  “No—well, if he was, he didn’t mention it. He was very, very clever, and always tried to explain everything to me, but to be honest, I was never really sure exactly what he was doing—-just that he had invested the bulk sums.”

  “Which were what?”

  “Around twelve or thirteen million, to begin with.”

  They were reaching the point where Julia moved into the house in Wimbledon with her children, and employed the Chinese au pair, and Frank Brandon. It was now that Fagan insisted that his client have a bathroom break. Anna needed one herself. Just as she was washing her hands, Julia walked out from one of the cubicles.

  “All right?” Anna asked pleasantly.

  “Yes, thank you, but I want to have a few words with my lawyer before I continue.”

  “I’ll arrange that,” Anna said, but knowing that Cunningham wouldn’t like it.

  Julia remained by the washbasins, until the remaining engaged cubicle was vacated by a uniformed female officer. As soon as the door closed, she went back into a cubicle and opened her powder compact. She lifted a gauze from the compact; pressed flat was the cocaine.

  She took out a small silver spoon and used two scoops, snorting the fine-cut coke. She then rubbed her gums, sniffed and, unlocking the door, went back to the washbasins. She checked her nostrils for any residue, reapplied her lipstick, and took a damp tissue to rub beneath her eyes, where her mascara had left black smudges from crying. She ran a comb through her hair and then shook her head so her hair fell in loose, silky strands onto her shoulders. She gave herself a look of approval, biting at her lip, as the cocaine had numbed her gums slightly; by the time she walked out, the coke had kicked in.

  Langton had already been into the incident room with his update on his interviews with Delroy and Silas, and the team were able to see how the jigsaw was slowly building, piece by piece. Phil turned to Anna, asking how it was going with Julia, and Anna pulled a face.

  Phil gave her a rueful look. “Well, we’re not getting much from her financial adviser’s murder. We have the CCTV footage and we have every indication that Alexander Fitzpatrick was the last man to see David Rushton alive. What we don’t have, obviously, is where in God’s name he is! We’ve also got more bloody paperwork; it’s been a real argy-bargy getting the Julia Brandon files from Rushton’s partners but, from what we’ve ascertained so far, there are about four files missing.”

>   “But you have some idea of what he was doing for her?”

  “Yeah, but it’s a maze of companies and investment banks and fucking hedge funds; we’ve got three guys on it. We might find out Rushton was feathering his own pockets big-time.”

  Phil sighed, and they both looked back at the board. They now knew that Delroy and Silas were blaming each other for the shooting of Frank, but Langton was certain it was Delroy who also shot, with the same gun, the garage owner Stanley Leymore.

  Phil called over to Gordon, who joined them. His desk was stacked with papers from the garage. They were still trying to unearth the date that Leymore received the Mitsubishi. They had the date and time it had been stolen in Brighton, but by whom they didn’t know. What they were trying to piece together was when the jeep was taken over by Frank Brandon, driven to the farm in Oxfordshire, and how Donny Petrozzo’s body came to be in the back of it. They still had no time frame for when it came into Julius D’Anton’s possession.

  Phil moved along the incident board. “The start date would be when whoever bought it from Leymore. Gordon here’s been checking over the garage’s farcical receipts and invoices.The turnover wasn’t bad, considering it was such a shithole.”

  Gordon pointed to the area on the board that he was writing up. “I’m going back two years, because I’ve found a Mercedes listed by Leymore: its reg plates were found in a stack at the back of the garage.

  They match a vehicle stolen from Kingston in Surrey. This Merc, a silver four-door saloon, was the one driven by Donny Petrozzo; we’ve got a match on the engine number. The car Petrozzo used for his wife and her niece to drive around was on Leymore’s legit books. I’ve also traced the BMW driven by our drug dealer from the squat back to Leymore’s garage; this was stolen almost a year ago. This could be the reason Leymore’s prints were found in the squat; they could have been left there before the murder went down: prints minus fingertip, right? I’ve got another vehicle Leymore also sold to—”

  “Enough already, Gordon! We’ll concentrate on the start date of whoever bought the stolen jeep from Leymore. You got anything on the Mitsubishi?” Phil asked.

  “Not yet. For the hot vehicles, he had a whole lot of legitimate documents for vehicles bought from car auctions; there’s a load of equipment for respraying, et cetera. I’ve also got a stash of receipts for paints and electrical spare parts. They were stuffed into a black bin liner.”

  “What about his personal bank account?”

  “We’ve got two accounts, a savings and a current; there is really not that much in either, but…” Anna and Phil waited expectantly … “he’s got a time-share on the Costa del Sol. I’m waiting for a bloke there to get back to me with more details, but Leymore has had it for years; he could plow his cash into the villa and carry it out in a suitcase.”

  “So when he wasn’t up to his elbows in grease, he was sunning himself in Spain?” Phil said, swearing under his breath.

  “Hang on, Gordon,” Anna said suddenly. “The Mitsubishi that was stolen: had it had a respray?”

  “No, but it’s only got thirty-five thousand miles on the clock.”

  “So whoever got it from Leymore might have done so almost as soon as it was stolen?”

  “Could be.”

  By now, both Anna and Phil were standing beside Gordon’s desk. The grubby papers were stacked in piles, dated, and clipped together; there were still hundreds more in black bin liners to sort through.

  “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” Anna said, smiling.

  “You can say that again!” Gordon held up his hands; some of the grease from the stained papers had rubbed off onto his fingers.

  Anna turned as Cunningham signaled for her to return to the interview room: Mrs. Brandon’s bathroom break was up.

  As they left the incident room, Gordon got the call in from the property company in Spain. They confirmed that Stanley Leymore had bought from them a time-share apartment on the Costa Del Sol for £150,000; with inflation, it was now valued at over £200,000. He had paid the previous owner in cash.

  As Gordon took down the details, he accidentally knocked over a stash of papers he had not yet checked. When he finished the call and picked them up, he noticed a receipt for a Mitsubishi taillight from the main dealers of the jeep. When Gordon checked with them, they were able to give him more details: the taillight was for a 2008 Mitsubishi jeep. The date was one week after the vehicle had been reported stolen in Brighton: March 15, 2008. It was highly probable that Stanley Leymore had the jeep in his garage by that time.

  Julia was sitting with her back pressed into the chair, her legs crossed. Fa-gan’s arms were folded, his leather-bound notebook closed on the table.

  “Can we now return to the date you say you moved into your home in Wimbledon?” Cunningham asked.

  Julia sighed. “It’d be early March. I owned the house before that, maybe five weeks before, but it needed furnishing and redecorating.”

  “You were with your children and their au pair?”

  “Yes, I’d got the girls into a local nursery. Mai Ling came from an agency; she had a place of her own, so she would just come in for the day and evening, then go home. She didn’t move in full-time until March.”

  Cunningham inteijected. “I would like to know the date that you first employed Frank Brandon.”

  Julia looked to the ceiling. “It’d be about a month after I’d moved in.” “You say you put an advert in the local paper?”

  “Yes. I needed someone for the garden, and someone to drive for me.”

  “A chauffeur?”

  “Call it what you like. Frank contacted me and came round, and we discussed wages.”

  “When I spoke to you originally, Mrs. Brandon, you said you actually wanted a bodyguard as well as a driver.”

  “Yes, well, you know I am a woman alone. I have some very valuable jewelry, so 1 thought it would be best to hire someone with experience.”

  “So you knew he had been a police officer?”

  “Yes, he told me. He said he could maintain my car, do whatever I wanted. Mostly, he was driving the children to school and back, because I was always scared, you know—in case someone found out I had money. I felt protected having him around, and he got on well with the children.”

  “So this was in late March?”

  “Yes.”

  “So when did the relationship become more personal?”

  Julia sniffed, and smiled. “Well, if having sex is personal, then it was a few days later.”

  “When did you ask him to move into the house?”

  “Maybe in May? I can’t really remember the exact date; it just happened.”

  “But Mr. Brandon was also working as a driver for someone else.”

  “Oh, that. Well, it wasn’t as if it was an everyday thing. This man would call him and ask him to do odd pickups when he was too busy.”

  “Did Frank work for Donny Petrozzo?”

  Julia shrugged. “I never knew his name, I never met him. He would call Frank on his mobile and Frank would say yes or no. Often he would drive to wherever and pick up a car to do the chauffeuring, mostly to the airports.”

  “Frank had his own car, a VW?”

  “Yes. Just like I said, he would go in his own car to wherever this

  man lived and then he would use a Merc, 1 think it was.” Julia sniffed and began tapping her foot against the leg of the table. She kept on glancing at Fagan as if he should say something. He remained silent.

  “So when did you see Mr. Brandon in possession of the black Mitsubishi jeep?”

  “I never saw it.”

  Cunningham slapped the table with the flat of her hand. “Stop lying, Mrs. Brandon! You knew that Frank Brandon drove this vehicle; you also knew where it was parked—you gave Detective Inspector Travis directions on how to get to the garage he used to park it in.”

  “Of course I knew about the garage—I paid the rent on it. I had my two cars, so we needed another garage.”<
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  Fagan leaned forward. “I think Mrs. Brandon has answered your question. She did not know Mr. Brandon had this jeep; she has clearly just said that she never saw it.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said curtly.

  “Let’s go to the date you were married.”

  “I am getting sick and tired of this. I have told you about the wedding.” She jerked her head toward Anna.

  “I just need to know when you and Mr. Brandon agreed to be married.”

  “Why? What business is it of yours?”

  “Please answer the question.” Cunningham was starting to sound irritated now.

  “It was sometime in May.”

  “He had worked for you for two months?”

  “My goodness, how clever of you, yes! After two months we realized we wanted to be married; we loved each other, and we went to the Isle of Man and got a special license and we got fucking married.”

  Fagan whipped around on her. “Julia, that was not necessary.”

  “Of course it is! They keep asking me these ridiculous questions that have nothing to do with anything.”

  “The life insurance policy your financial adviser arranged for Mr. Brandon?” Cunningham persisted.

  “Yes, you’ve bloody asked me about that. I was looking out for him, that is all.”

  “But it was payable only if he died.”

  “That is not the point! If he had a life insurance policy, he could get mortgages and things like that.”

  “Why would he want a mortgage when you owned your house outright?”

  “Maybe he wanted to show me he had a pair of balls rather than live off me!” she shouted. Fagan again warned her to be quiet and behave. She sniffed and then rubbed at her nose. “I just want to go home to my children,” she said, in a whine.

  “Were you afraid? Was someone threatening you?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me about the four million you took out recently?”

  “It’s my money. I have already told you, I paid for the house and I had a lot of things to buy.”