In return, Freddie – to use a phrase which had been a favourite of Vogel’s first sergeant – had begun singing like a bird.
‘My father knew that Fairbrother International was close to collapse, and that because of his irregular business practices he would probably end up in jail, possibly, at his age, for the rest of his life,’ Freddie began. ‘He had attracted the attention of fraud investigators more than once over the years, but nothing had ever been proven. If he failed to keep Fairbrother’s afloat, and he knew that he was about to fail, there would be an investigation on a whole new level. He feared that not only was he going to lose the bank, but his reputation, and that of the family, would be ruined for ever. Which to him was of massive importance, overshadowing even the probability of a jail sentence.’
‘And so, in your own words, Mr Fairbrother, will you please tell me the details of this plan your father concocted which was supposed to save the bank and keep his reputation intact?’ asked Vogel.
‘Well, I don’t know it all …’
‘Just everything you do know, Mr Fairbrother.’
‘Well, as you would be aware, Mr Vogel, the bank is a family affair, a family business, and it has survived many centuries of trading. One of the reasons for this is that continuity has always been maintained, largely by a unique system of trust funds, and other investments, which can only be released back into the bank following the death of the incumbent chairman, which is an appointment for life, you understand. Like being a monarch.’
Freddie managed a small smile. ‘A despot monarch, usually, and certainly in my father’s case,’ he continued. ‘The chairman traditionally retires from active participation at a certain age, if he lives that long, and appoints a chief executive to actually run the company, but he remains chairman until his death. These moneys are then realised when the next chair, always another Fairbrother, takes office, ensuring a fresh influx of funds with every generation, and more or less copper bottoming the future of the bank even if the previous chair has left it with problems. My father, I suppose, wanted to have his cake and eat it, as they say.
‘By faking his own death he could maintain his reputation, and at the same time ensure the future of the bank. That’s what he thought anyway. He also thought he could carry on running things from behind the scenes. The bank, in particular, had always been his toy after all. Crazy really. Now you come to think of it.’
Yes, thought Vogel. Beyond crazy.
Aloud he said, ‘Your father actually found someone to, in effect, die in his place. Do you know how he managed to do that? Why would anybody agree to that?’
Fairbrother shrugged. ‘Well, Pa didn’t actually seek someone out to do that. It happened by chance. He told me he was coming out of a restaurant in Covent Garden, with friends, when he damned near fell over this homeless guy lying on the pavement. The two of them just stared at each other. Pa said the man was his double, a slightly smaller, weaker, version of himself – even the same thick white hair – and about the same age. He could also see that this man was ill. The idea came to him that night, and he went back to Covent Garden the next day to try to find the man, which he did quite easily, and learned that he had Parkinson’s and a very limited life expectancy. So, basically, Pa offered him care for the rest of his days, a luxurious home, all the medical attention he needed and so on, if he would take Father’s place. The man wouldn’t have to do anything, he would be protected from difficult contact with outsiders, anything he wanted would be provided for him without question, and so on.’
Vogel tried not to show too much astonishment. He supposed he shouldn’t be that amazed. Sir John Fairbrother had clearly thought he was near immortal and could get away with anything. He also, equally clearly, had immense powers of persuasion.
‘And the homeless man agreed to all of this, just like that?’
Fairbrother shrugged. ‘You’re living rough, out in the cold, drinking meths and cider. Somebody offers you warmth and comfort, champagne and fine brandy. Bit of a no brainer, some might say.’
Vogel supposed Freddie Fairbrother had a point.
‘When did your father tell you all this?’ he asked.
‘He came to see me about seven or eight months ago. Just turned up in Brisbane, complete with beard and bald head. A simple but excellent disguise. I almost didn’t recognise him at first. But, of course, I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years.
‘The substitute Sir John was already installed at Blackdown. Bella knew all about it from the beginning. She and my father had staged their fall-out, you’ve probably guessed that, and she quit the board of Fairbrother’s so that she would be able to disassociate herself from the mess the company was in. Pa told me he wanted me back in the fold because he was afraid the board still wouldn’t accept Bella without the presence of a male Fairbrother. I was going to be the prodigal son. The thing is, Mr Vogel, I found that I rather wanted my birthright back. I really did. And it seemed like the perfect plan, in which everyone would be a winner.
‘The bank would be saved. As far as the world was concerned my father would die with his blessed reputation still intact, but actually he would be living on this exotic island he secretly owned in the Middle East, under the protection of his chum Sheik Abdul whose family fortune has been greatly enhanced by many years of involvement in Pa’s dubious international financial dealings. Pa was totally confident he would never be found there, and that he would be able to continue pulling the strings at Fairbrother International. Bella and I would each get exactly what we wanted, the top job at Fairbrother’s, or more or less, for her; all the trappings that come with being head of the Fairbrother clan for me, without doing the work, and the homeless man got a standard of living and a level of care he could never have dreamed of.’
‘But then it all went wrong. What happened, Freddie?’
‘Well, Pa’s poor sap responded rather too well to the care he was receiving. Pa had told me in Brisbane that he would be dead in weeks. Eight months later he was still going strong. Or reasonably strong. Meanwhile the affairs of the bank were becoming more desperate, critical in fact. My father realised something had to be done, things had to be speeded up or the whole plan would fail.’
‘And your father told you that, did he? That he had decided to speed up his impersonator’s death?’
Fairbrother looked furtive, as if realising he may have inadvertently revealed rather too much about his own involvement. ‘Uh no, he didn’t tell me anything like that,’ he said quickly. ‘I thought the fire was an accident. I still thought that when I arrived in the UK. I knew it was being investigated, but I was confident that no evidence of arson would be found.’
I’ll bet you were, thought Vogel, who already realised that Freddie’s capacity for self-deception was probably greater than his capacity for deceiving others. Unlike his father.
‘Do you know who this man was, the man who, in effect, died in your father’s place?’
‘No idea,’ said Freddie casually.
‘Do you not even know his name?’
‘No, why would I? He was just some homeless jerk. Pa used to refer to him as Johnny Two.’
Freddie laughed humourlessly.
‘I see,’ said Vogel, who was fighting an almost overwhelming urge to slap Freddie Fairbrother across the face. Instead he stood up, keeping his hands loose at his sides, and asked Freddie to do the same.
‘Frederick John Fairbrother, I am charging you with conspiracy to murder your sister, Christabella Ann Fairbrother, and also conspiracy to fraud. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence …’
Freddie did not seem to hear the caution. He stood with his mouth slightly open and an expression of disbelief on his face. He’d heard the first bit all right.
‘You’re charging me?’ he asked ingenuously. ‘But you told me you weren’t going to. You told me I could go home. Home to Australia …’ His voice tailed away.
‘I have absolutely no recollection of that,’ responded Vog
el deadpan.
‘But I’ve only been in the country for forty-eight hours,’ Freddie continued.
‘Yes, and look what you’ve achieved,’ said Vogel, equally deadpan.
‘And you said yourself, I’m barely involved, never have been, not with any of it,’ Freddie continued. ‘These charges are nonsense. No court will convict me.’
‘Mr Fairbrother, I feel confident we shall be able to prove that you phoned your father yesterday morning, straight after Bella had undoubtedly told you she had arranged to meet me at her home. You knowingly sent your sister to her death. Oh, and you have just confessed that you were fully aware of your father’s fraudulent attempt to fake his own death for both personal and professional gain. I am quite confident that we will gain convictions against you.’
‘You’ve tricked me, you bastard,’ said Freddie.
‘Not at all, Mr Fairbrother,’ said Vogel.
A small satisfied smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
EPILOGUE
Sir John Fairbrother was made of stronger stuff. He pleaded that he had been suffering from amnesia and could remember next to nothing since disappearing from his home. He knew nothing of the imposter who had taken his place at Blackdown Manor. He knew nothing of the catastrophic fire at the manor. He knew nothing about the death of George Grey, nor of his dear daughter, Bella. Jack Kivel was clearly responsible for all of it, and Sir John had no idea why.
His solicitor Peter Prentis arrived from London and, although not entirely able to hide his shock at the events which had been brought to his attention, went through the motions of taking control of the situation. His client, he said, would answer no more questions, and would be pleading not guilty to all charges.
A second search of the grounds of Blackdown Manor and the immediate area, following the break-in at The Gatehouse, revealed signs of recent habitation in an old keeper’s cottage, on Fairbrother land, which had previously been dismissed as derelict. A camp bed, tinned food supplies, and a small portable generator were found in an upstairs room with boarded-up windows.
It seemed incredible that Fairbrother would have chosen as a hiding place somewhere actually on his own property, but he was clearly a man conditioned to thinking outside the box. A man not only without morals, scruples, conscience or almost any normal human emotions, but also without a great deal of fear. Vogel reckoned that is exactly what he had done, that he had vacated his barge in Brentford and high-tailed it there right after killing George Grey. The one murder Fairbrother had surely committed himself, whether or not that could ever be proven. It therefore appeared likely that it had been Sir John himself, with or without the assistance of Jack Kivel, who had broken into The Gatehouse, presumably with the intention of silencing Janice Grey. He had, after all, almost certainly been more or less on the spot, camping out in the old keeper’s cottage less than a mile away. And he had once been an elite soldier – of an age, but doubtless still more than capable of dealing with a small frightened woman.
Vogel was determined that Fairbrother would pay for his truly horrific series of crimes. He considered the man to be every bit as much of an evil monster as any violent criminal he had encountered in his career, and there had been a few of those.
There was considerable evidence against Sir John, albeit much of it circumstantial. But Vogel was aware that the key to it all might be the evidence of his own son.
Vogel had thoroughly enjoyed charging Freddie Fairbrother and watching the man’s somewhat smug and confident demeanour change to one of shocked and fearful disbelief. However, a little plea bargaining might eventually be called for, because it was imperative that Freddie should be prepared to give evidence against his father in court.
Martha Kivel claimed to have been totally ignorant of all her husband’s nefarious activities, in spite of a number of items of value from Blackdown Manor, including, somewhat incredibly, the Gainsborough worth millions, being found in Jack’s shed in the Kivels’ back garden. Vogel found it difficult to believe that Martha hadn’t had at least an inkling over the years of the lengths to which Jack was prepared to go on behalf of his employer and boyhood and army friend. However, he had little choice but to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Further inquiries into the military careers of both Kivel and Fairbrother revealed that, whilst stationed in Germany, Kivel had been suspected of killing a taxi driver during an argument over the fare following a drunken night out. Fairbrother had given Kivel an alibi, which the military police had been obliged to accept even though they’d believed it to be false. Fairbrother had saved Kivel’s life, in a way, but only in facilitating him to continue to live in freedom. And, as Vogel had half guessed following the brief exchange between the two men which he had witnessed at Bristol airport, it seemed that Fairbrother’s hold over Kivel might have been down as much to a kind of blackmail as comradely love and loyalty.
The response of airport police and the apparent lack of communication at Bristol Airport on the night Kivel took his own life there and the two Fairbrother’s were arrested, was the subject of a Civil Aviation Authority Inquiry.
Janice Grey was charged with conspiracy to commit arson. She steadfastly maintained that, whilst she now realised that her husband must have been hired by the real Sir John and been fully aware of the whole intrigue, she’d had no idea that the man she had cared for to the best of her ability had been an imposter. And that whilst she had been aware of the plan for George to set fire to Blackdown Manor, she’d believed, as she thought George had too, that this was merely in order to obtain insurance money, and that there had been no intention to harm anyone. Except, of course, George! Vogel thought the woman was probably telling the truth, also that George had been ultimately little more than a scapegoat, and that it had almost certainly been Jack Kivel who had tampered with the gas tank and caused the explosion at the manor. But this was now unlikely ever to be known for sure.
Nobby Clarke pulled all the strings she could in the Met and at the Palace of Westminster in order to bring some sort of retribution against Sheik Abdul. It was of course a lost cause. The sheik’s lawyers asserted that his private jet had been made ready at Bristol Airport to transport a very important passenger who could not be named for diplomatic reasons. When this VIP had failed to turn up it had returned empty to the Middle East.
Sophia Santos’ remains were flown back to her distraught family in the Philippines, where she would be buried with due Catholic honours. Vogel hated it when foreign nationals died violent deaths on British soil. He always considered that the British forces of law and order, if not the whole country, had let them down.
Another innocent victim of the whole debacle was Bella Fairbrother’s fourteen-year-old daughter Kim. Victim support and social services were involved in assisting the understandably devastated girl. But it transpired that Kim had for a couple of years, and unbeknown to her mother, been seeing the father who had played no part in her upbringing. Sean Reardon had been her mother’s fitness instructor when he and Bella had had a brief affair. It seemed there’d been no question of Bella wanting him in either her or her daughter’s lives. But Reardon had been delighted to later have the chance to get to know Kim, and upon learning of her mother’s death and all the horrors surrounding it, had promptly offered the girl a home.
Vogel asked Nobby to launch a major inquiry in London to try to discover the identity of the man Sir John Fairbrother had so cynically plucked from the streets of the city in order to take his place. Johnny Two was eventually identified as Roland North, originally from Chelmsford, Essex, who had ended up on the streets following a series of broken relationships and an inability to hold down any sort of employment, possibly due to a drink problem. It turned out that he had a son, Wayne, who spoke with rather a distinctive accent which Vogel believed was known as estuary English, a blend of Cockney and Essex. It seemed likely that Wayne’s father had probably had much the same accent, and been advised to talk as little as possible, blaming the ravage
s of Parkinson’s for his poor speech. Wayne had apparently over the years made a number of attempts, albeit ineffectual, to find his errant father, and at least wanted to give Roland North, or what remained of him, a proper funeral. This was duly arranged in Sampford Arundel Church, not far from the manor house which had been home to Roland for the last months of his life. The only home he’d had in years.
Janice Grey, on bail, asked if she could attend. Vogel, Nobby, Ted Dawson and Saslow also attended. Tom Withey, not totally able to fight back a tear or two, and Bob Parsons were there, representing Wellington Fire Service. A small wake was held at the Blue Ball. Fiona, the landlady, provided some complimentary food. Nobby bought the first round of drinks.
Vogel offered to join in. Nobby glanced scathingly at his ginger ale, the DI’s favourite tipple.
‘Never, ever, will I let you near a bar,’ she said. ‘We could all end up drinking that stuff.’
‘It might do you good, boss,’ said Vogel.
‘When I want you to tell me what will do me good, Vogel, I’ll let you know,’ said Nobby, downing her usual double malt in one.
Vogel grinned.
‘Decent of you to come, boss,’ he said quietly.
‘Poor sod,’ commented Nobby Clarke. ‘He had a bloody awful life and a bloody awful death.’
‘Yes, well, at least we’ve got that bastard Fairbrother banged up where he belongs.’
‘On remand, Vogel. He’s not been convicted yet.’
‘If this one walks, I shall personally burn down the court he stands trial in,’ said Vogel.
‘Fighting talk, DI Vogel.’
Vogel grunted.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll provide the petrol,’ said Nobby.
Wheel of Fire Page 28
