Vanishing Point

by J G Alva

  “It’s the whole investigation on the death of Liam Casey.”

  “From Detective Bocksham?”

  “The very same.”

  Fin put the paper on the table and began flicking through it.

  After a moment, he looked up at Sutton and said, “this is a big file.”

  “Yes.”

  “It could take some time to go through it.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want me to go through it, that is.”

  “Yes.”

  “So…are we going to look into it?”

  “Maybe.”

  Fin stared at him.

  He then picked up his empty mug and waved it in Sutton’s general direction.

  “Coffee?” Sutton guessed, and when Fin nodded, he got up to make it for him.

  ◆◆◆

  “What did you find out about the Zabijak?” Sutton asked.

  Fin continued to flick through the report on Liam Casey while he spoke.

  “Not much,” he admitted. “It has the flavour of another urban legend. Like The Rumbler.”

  “He turned out to be real.”

  “Yeah. So I suppose the Zabijak is. I got a couple of hits online, but only passing references to other cases. I talked to a friend of mine in the police. He knew the name. Some Polish guys who were prostituting out some Eastern European teens mentioned the Zabijak. But that was literally all they would say. Zabijak, Zabijak, Zabijak. Nothing else.”

  “So he is real.”

  “But I don’t know how you’d go about finding him,” Fin said. “Except maybe the way we found The Rumbler.”

  “By accident, you mean.”

  “We weren’t looking for him, remember. We were just trying to find out if Chris Masters was murdered. We already had The Rumbler…we just didn’t know it.”

  “I’d have to start with what I know,” Sutton said thoughtfully. “Is there a list of Liam Casey’s friends and associates in the file?”

  “Yep.” Fin took a moment to find the page, and to read it. “So. We’ve got a Kyle Weaks, a Paul Sombret, and a Wayne Clapp. All heavily into drugs apparently. Paul and Wayne have been convicted of both possession and dealing. Kyle Weaks has been in and out of about half a dozen different rehabs.”

  “So maybe I can talk to Weaks. If he’s trying to kick the habit.”

  Fin nodded.

  “He might be the more reliable of the three.”

  “Is there an address in there for him?”

  “Bedminster. Hebron Road.”

  “Alright. What about the sister? How thoroughly did they look into her?”

  “There’s a couple of pages of the typed interview in here,” Fin said, tapping the paperwork. “And of course they confirmed her whereabouts at the time of the murder.”

  “And?”

  “Solid.” Fin went back and found the relevant sheet. “She works part time at a stationers. So she worked from eight until three. Four people confirmed she was there. She had a forty minute lunch break, where she said she went to a café which nobody can confirm…but forty minutes isn’t enough time to do much of anything. At least, not what they did to the brother. I mean, he must have really fucked someone over to get that kind of attention. It was like he was attacked by a battalion of people. You’ve got chainsaw marks, drill holes, cuts, broken bones…fuck. It’s like he walked into an industrial blender.”

  “And after she left the stationers?”

  “Uh…” He flicked some pages. “Here we are. After she left the stationers, she spent two hours at a place called Airhop with her niece.”

  “What is Airhop?”

  “Oh, it’s like this massive warehouse that they’ve filled up with trampolines and stuff. It’s out by the Mall.”

  “Sounds hideous.”

  “Obviously the sister-in-law and the niece confirmed she was with them.”

  “And then?”

  “She left there and went back to the sister-in-law’s house for another hour. She had dinner there. Didn’t leave until seven.”

  “There’s an hour missing somewhere.”

  “Um…” Fin scanned the page. “It says here that she went to a local Sainsbury’s to buy some food and drink for the sister-in-law beforehand. The sister-in-law confirmed she brought the purchases out of the car into the house. See what I mean? Solid.”

  “And Liam’s estimated time of death was four in the afternoon?”

  “That’s what the medical examiner said. But he wasn’t killed where he was found. No exsanguination at the crime scene. So he was killed somewhere else and dumped there.”

  “And where was that?”

  “In a field just outside of Tetbury.”

  Odd.

  Fin continued, “he was found at six the next morning by the farmer that owns the field.”

  “And he didn’t see who dumped the body?”

  “Nope. But he owns a good ten acres, apparently. His house is on the far side, so if someone had been in that field dumping a body, he wouldn’t have seen them anyway.”

  Did that indicate local knowledge? Someone who knew that the man who owned the land wouldn’t be able to see them dumping the body?

  “Any suspicions about the farmer?”

  “No. Not according to the report. His name is Frederick Stables. Married for twenty four years. Three children. No criminal record.”

  Sutton thought about it for a moment, while Fin continued to read. His final diagnosis was: hopeless. All the evidence pointed to a semi-professional outfit, a drug war casualty, and getting involved in that would be a difficult and unpleasant task. There were people he could call, who might point him in the right direction…but he could be potentially putting them in danger, if the rumours about this Zabijak were anything to go by.

  The best thing he could do would be to refuse the girl’s request. He could admit to it being beyond his remit. It would be dangerous. And he didn’t need the money, not now. He didn’t like having to tell someone that he couldn’t help them, but there were occasions where he had to do that very thing. Occasions like this. It made no sense to pursue it further; not to give her false hope, not when he knew there was little chance of solving it; and not to put himself in harm’s way with very little chance of success.

  “She’s rich,” Fin remarked, typing on his laptop.

  It took Sutton a moment to come back to the conversation.

  “What?”

  Fin finished typing, and then scanned whatever was on the screen.

  “Yep. She’s married to Lewis Helmsley-Weigh. He’s worth about ten million quid.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He owns a string of manufacturing companies,” Fin said, reading from his laptop. “Helmsley-Weigh Engineering. LHW Manufacturing. LHW Design. All pretty big companies, each one valued at a couple of million quid. They’ve got a nice big house in Tetbury. And one in the south of France. And one in the Costa del Sol.”

  Something wasn’t right.

  Sutton thought back, to when the woman had been in his flat…

  He couldn’t remember seeing a wedding ring.

  Getting old, he thought. Missing something like that.

  “Are you sure?” Sutton asked.

  “That’s what it says here, it says…” Fin stopped, his eyes scanning the screen. “Okay. Right. It looks like they’re actually getting divorced. I’ve just gone to this gossip column on the Bristol Post website, and there’s rumours that the marriage is over, that old Lewis Helmsley-Weigh is ‘stepping out’ with a twenty two year old model. Dirty old fucker. He’s fifty four.”

  “Interesting,” Sutton said. So maybe she hadn’t been wearing a ring after all. Maybe he wasn’t that infirm.

  “You think?”

  “If Liam Casey was hurting for money, he might have decided to call on his brother-in-law.”

  “Maybe that’s why they’re getting divorced.”

  “Hm. Maybe.”

  “What about Diane? Do we tell her what’s
going on?”

  “I told Detective Leeman to update her. Unless you want to talk to her?”

  “I’ll call her up,” Fin said. He shrugged. “It seems like the right thing to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you want me to do with all the stuff we got off Masters’ USB stick?”

  “What?”

  “You know. The audio files. The bank account stuff. Shall we get rid of it?”

  “The bank account info. Did you ever find out who it belonged to?”

  Fin shook his head.

  “There’s no way. They’re all cross referenced to some kind of index, and I have no idea where the index is. Without it, I don’t know which account belongs to who.”

  “Are there sort codes?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I think you should get rid of it. All of it. It’s too dangerous. But before you do, try and see if you can’t match sort codes to a branch near William Mackenzie’s address.”

  “Okay. That shouldn’t be hard. Why?”

  “We’re looking for a charity that he might have set up.” This was the sudden revelation he had had in the Elemental warehouse. The money was somewhere…and this seemed the most likely place. “But an unofficial one. One that he set up as a front for all the money that Chris directed to him. The Dunbar Group can’t find it. But I’m wondering if we can.”

  “You think it’s still there?”

  Sutton nodded.

  “I think so. I think he was in a rush to leave, but when the Dunbar Group picked him up there was nothing on him to indicate a bank account or anything. If there had been, Dunbar and Steadman wouldn’t have been working so hard to get the location of the money out of him. I think he put it somewhere where he could access it from outside of the UK. Maybe it was some kind of international charity, something that it would make sense to tie to a foreign bank.”

  Fin made a note on the pad beside the laptop.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” he said.

  ◆◆◆

  CHAPTER 22

  Tuesday, 7th June

  The place where Liam Casey’s body had been found was actually outside of Tetbury, in Long Furlong.

  Sutton didn’t know why he decided to take a trip up there. He had pretty much convinced himself that he would have to turn the sister down. And yet, almost against his will, he had made the decision to drive up to where the body had been discarded. He wasn’t saying yes…he just wanted to get a feel for the place. Where was the harm in that?

  Tetbury itself was an unremarkable place. Forty minutes north of Bristol, it was a town built on an old hill fort, with a population of around six thousand souls. The town centre consisted of buildings that had been erected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it had even won the Best Small Town award for three years running in 2008, 2009 and 2010. It was surrounded by farmland, and Sutton couldn’t imagine it changing much, except perhaps for the addition of more modern suburban homes on its outer edges. Still, it had a pleasant rural feel to it, and seemed an unlikely place for a murder.

  Liam Casey had been found in a field bracketing Hookshouse Lane, hidden from the road by a long thick hedge. Sutton discovered that part of the lane that had been widened and so parked his car on it and walked back to a break in the hedge. There was a small thin trickle of water hidden under tall grass, and he jumped over it. In front of him was a roughly ploughed field, maybe a couple of acres; he couldn’t see the owner’s house, but hadn’t expected to: Mr Stables wouldn’t be anyone’s first suspect. Sutton guessed that the well-trodden area directly behind the hedge must be where they’d found the brother, although all evidence of the crime had been removed or obliterated. There was a small circle of earth that showed wear by human traffic. That was all. He could hear birdsong, and somewhere in the next field a tractor was grinding through its gears. Sutton didn’t know what he had expected to find, but still…it was unsatisfactory. Why here? Where were they coming from, to stop here of all places, to dump the body? It was isolated, sure, but had they known about the break in the hedge? Did that mean they were local? Or was it an act of opportunity? The body hidden in the boot, burning in their minds, they had to get rid of it, and then here, coming up in their vision, a break in the hedge, as good a place as any…

  He didn’t know.

  He returned to the car, the sun warm on the back of his neck.

  Hookshouse Lane wasn’t a wide affair, but it was long, with a broken line of trees hugging one side of it, and a more uniform hedge on the other. Sutton turned the car in the road and went north, and had been driving for only a minute when it met the A4135. He stopped the car at the intersection. To his left, more fields, stretching away into the distance. To his right, a copse of trees, nestled in front of which was a sign for the Market Downe Industrial Estate. He drove toward it…and then on impulse turned on to the road leading to the estate. It was not much more than a dirt track, with dust and stones crunching under his tyres. An arch of trees blotted out the sun, and then he was through them, and faced one long yard of fabricated sheds and buildings, surrounded by a battered and bent chain-link fence. The park had been concreted, but a long time ago, and was pitted and cracked; grass and weeds had made the cracks wider. The buildings all looked abandoned until, passing the longest of the structures, he came across men at work on the farthest building from the entrance. It looked as if they were engaged in taking the machinery from the building and loading it into vans.

  They stopped as he came closer, curious faces turned toward him.

  Two young men, sweating in the hot sun and wearing rough gloves, were doing the bulk of the heavy lifting. The third man was older; presumably the one in charge. He wore a flat cap and a khaki T-shirt over worn jeans. He had brown work boots on. His face was unshaven, and the stubble was grey. His skin was ruddy, as if he had worked outside all his life.

  “Can I help you?” He asked, as Sutton got out of the car.

  No use beating around the bush with this guy, Sutton thought. He would probably be able to smell a lie.

  “I don’t know,” Sutton admitted. “I’m looking into the murder of Liam Casey.”

  No change of expression.

  But the eyes watched him.

  “I just came from where they found the body.”

  The old man nodded.

  He turned to wave at the two younger men and, at his signal, they continued with their work.

  “You police?”

  “Not really. I said I’d look into it for the sister. You know. As a favour for a friend.”

  The old man stared hard at him, but then seemed to come to a decision.

  “First murder we’ve had in this area for seventy four years,” he said, squinting in the sun. He indicated the fields, but probably meant Tetbury.

  “Did you know him?” Sutton asked.

  The old man shook his head.

  “No.”

  “I understand he originally came from Tetbury.”

  “I knew his father, but I didn’t know him. A right royal cunt, in my opinion – forgive the expression. The father, I mean. And then he died. This was fifteen years ago now. Surprise seemed to be the general consensus at the time. Who could have known the mean old shit had a heart to begin with?”

  “Did you know the mother as well?”

  “No. She hardly came out of the house. He wouldn’t let her. She was from Cheltenham, I think. Rob was working over there, met her, married her, and then brought her back with him.” He shrugged, as if this wasn’t an uncommon thing.

  “You still live in Tetbury?”

  The man smiled.

  “For my sins.”

  “Was Liam back? Did you see him around?”

  “No. Never saw him. I don’t think he was back, not to stay anyway. I would have heard.” And then by way of an explanation, he added, “the wife. She foists gossip on me whether I want it or not.”

  Sutton smiled.

  “Okay. What’s going on here?”
He asked, indicating the young men at work. Some large metal box was being carefully escorted to the back of the nearest van. It looked heavy; the men were straining to keep it off the ground.

  “Owner wants all the machines out of the Bleak Factory moved to a new place in Swindon,” the old man said.

  Something in his voice made Sutton ask, “you used to work here?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Long time ago now. Three years? It was a good job.”

  “So why the move?”

  “Fuck knows. Far be it from me to ascertain the thoughts and feelings of those that breathe more rarefied air than I. I’m just down here in the mud, doing all the work, getting my hands dirty.”

  “Your sons?” Sutton asked, indicating the two younger men.

  Reluctantly, the old man nodded.

  “Both a waste of space.”

  “They’re doing alright.”

  “Only because I agreed to pay them double. There was a break-in – couple of weeks ago. Lots of broken glass everywhere. They refused to go in unless they were ‘adequately compensated’. Honestly, this new generation…they chill the blood. I don’t know how the hell they’re going to survive without me.”

  At that moment, the old man caught one of them resting against the back of the van. The guy looked to be catching his breath.

  “What are you doing!” He shouted at them. “Get on with it! I don’t want to be bloody here all day!”

  An unintelligible reply, but the young man got back to work.

  “I’ll let you carry on,” Sutton said, moving back to his car and opening the door. “Good luck with the move.”

  “My wife might know a little more, if you can stand to hear it,” the old man said. “She used to teach at the school, right about the time both the Casey kids were there. You got a phone?”

  The old man gave Sutton the number. Sutton programmed it into his phone.

  “Call her up,” he said. “She’d be more than happy to talk to you about it. I’ll let her know about you, tell her it’s okay. But I better warn you: if you let her carry on she’ll wear out your phone. That woman could talk all four legs off a donkey.”