by John Fairfax
‘Never.’
‘Did he mention who he thought might kill him?’
‘Yes. But he didn’t think, he knew. He said, “I’ve got on to the wrong side of a Chinese gang.” He said, “I know too much.” He said, “They’ve told me. It’ll look like I just went and vanished. Went missing. But I’ll be dead.” He said, “Roger, I don’t know what to do, I’m—’
‘Just calm down, Mr Grange. Have some water. Let’s take this a little more slowly.’
Grange drank a glass of water, holding it with both hands. Then Benson took him stage by stage, getting the events in the right order, starting with the death of his solicitor, Hugh Wellborn. How Bealing was convinced the fatal car accident had been a professional assassination. That he’d been killed because Bealing had asked him to find a way of voiding a haulage contract. That Bealing had been unable to extricate himself from a ruthless organisation whose goods he’d been distributing. Had he named the Chinese gang? No. But then Grange volunteered something he hadn’t told Tess and which was therefore not in his witness statement:
‘I said I’d look at ways of putting money in a safe place for Debbie and then at the door he said there was something else. He’d been having a fling with an employee and—’
‘Slow down again, Mr Grange.’ Benson had to check his own surprise. He moved on cautiously, sensing sunlight, sensing the fall of shadow upon Glencoyne’s mind. ‘Who was the employee?’
‘A Pole. Anna Wysocki.’
‘By fling, you mean—’
‘An affair. But it must have been pretty serious because he asked me to hold twenty grand in her name. Off the books.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of Debbie. He didn’t want her to know. Didn’t want anyone to know. Which was wishful thinking because everyone knew Andy dipped his whistle here and there—’
Mr Justice Oakshott was faster than Benson: ‘Modify your language please, Mr Grange. And we are not remotely interested in what everyone knew. We only want to hear what you know.’
‘I’m sorry. Well, I certainly knew of a couple. And Debbie must have known about Wysocki because she asked me once if Andrew was giving her one – that’s her words, not mine – and I said I hadn’t a clue. I didn’t want to get involved.’
‘And what were you to do with this twenty grand?’ asked Benson.
‘Andy said if anything happened to him, if he was “disappeared”, I was to give the money to this Wysocki. It was a way of putting her in his will without putting her in his will, if you see what I mean.’
‘I do. And did you give the twenty grand to Miss Wysocki?’
‘I did. But she wouldn’t take it.’
‘Where is it now?’
‘I added it to Debbie’s capital when we liquidated the different Hopton businesses. No one noticed given that the final figure was £11.6 million after tax.’
Benson then swiftly shut down the most obvious avenues of cross-examination open to Glencoyne. Why had he said nothing of this to the police? Because DCI Winter had only been interested in Sarah Collingstone, and he’d been terrified that he, Grange, might go the same way as Wellborn and Bealing. Why speak now? Because he was still terrified. But the defendant’s solicitor, Miss de Vere, had urged him to speak out as the best way to protect himself and his family. Yes, he’d taken a risk.
Benson left matters there and he sat down, wondering how Glencoyne would handle the witness who’d obviously told the truth; who’d obviously not been paid; who’d possibly wrecked her case. She couldn’t attack him for his silence without compounding DCI Winter’s failure to question him. She couldn’t attack what he’d actually said without rousing more fear and sharpening his credibility.
‘You have been very brave, Mr Grange,’ she said. ‘I only have two issues to explore with you. First, in relation to Mr Bealing’s financial planning. Can you confirm that he had no intention of giving any money at all to this defendant?’
‘Absolutely – at least insofar as I had anything to do with it.’
‘Well, in the event of his death, you alone were to handle official and unofficial disbursements, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, for Debbie, through a trust, and Anna Wysocki, under the table.’
‘Exactly. And this defendant was to get nothing. Under the table or over the table.’
‘That’ll do, Miss Glencoyne,’ said Mr Justice Oakshott.
‘Sorry, my lord. This defendant was excluded from all arrangements, both official and unofficial?’
‘So it seems.’
‘And finally, let’s revisit Mr Bealing’s fear of being killed. You quoted him as saying, “They’ve told me.” Did you get the impression he’d had direct contact with the person or persons who’d made the threat?’
‘I did, yes.’
‘And it was a very specific threat, wasn’t it? He would be “disappeared”? There would be no seeming accident?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘Thank you, Mr Grange.’
Benson felt the effect of this short cross-examination himself and he saw its effect on the jury. Within a matter of seconds Glencoyne had cut through Grange’s evidence as if it was a baroque irrelevance. She’d underlined a Gothic motive to kill and the brutal manner of the killing: there’d been no money for Collingstone and there’d been no mysterious disappearance. The two facts seemed linked. Bealing had upset someone far more dangerous than the Chinese. A woman scorned.
No longer quite so confident, Benson called Kingsley Obiora.
And Glencoyne used the same tactic. After listening to Obiora describe his discovery of sachets containing legal highs rather than green tea and after recounting Mr Bealing’s indifference, Glencoyne asked no questions at all. She hadn’t even made a note of his evidence. She’d watched, she’d listened and she let him go. It simply wasn’t important, she seemed to say. She looked at Benson expectantly, as if puzzled to learn what other distractions he might have procured.
‘My lord, I call Ralph Collingstone.’
51
And – when her turn came – Glencoyne played another card from the same hand of indifference.
Ralph Collingstone had been released from hospital after a couple of hours on Monday evening. He’d been advised to rest but he’d come to court insistent on giving evidence. And now, at last, it was his turn. Benson had some difficulty controlling him because his answers were long and involved, full of affection and concern for his daughter. Full of speeches he’d make if he were Benson, which Benson had to tailor down to specific answers to specific questions. Eventually his account took form.
Sarah had left Hounslow at around 5.15 p.m. to meet Andrew Bealing. She’d gone to discuss the paperwork demanded by Anna Wysocki. She returned at about 7 p.m. and made a tuna salad, cutting herself on the tin. After supper, the family listened to a story and Sarah went to bed at roughly 10.15 p.m. The next morning, Sarah said she expected to get hell from Anna Wysocki, so she wanted to get away. He suggested France.
Again, Glencoyne wrote nothing down. But she did ask a couple of questions:
‘You’d do anything to get your daughter out of this mess, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Including lie to this court as she has lied to you?’
‘No, that’s not fair, that’s . . .’
And Ralph went into a speech that Mr Justice Oakshott cut short, if only because Glencoyne had sat down. She’d got the answer she was looking for with her first question.
And that was it. Benson proposed to call no more evidence. The anomaly of ‘Alan Shaftoe’ simply meant that Bealing had been shifting money abroad. Connecting that fact to his murder was tenuous. Arguing that Bealing had intended to disappear in advance of any murder attempt was pure speculation. To air it would only cloud the simplicity of Benson’s argument that Bealing had been killed by the people who’d threatened to kill him. It couldn’t get any simpler than that; and, as Camberley had stressed more than once, juries like a simp
le explanation. Benson had everything he wanted for his speech, so when Ralph Collingstone limped from Court 1, Benson said, ‘My lord, that concludes the case for the defence.’
Glencoyne, however, hadn’t finished. She applied to call rebuttal evidence with respect to two issues that had taken the Crown by surprise.
First – and with Benson’s agreement – a statement by Luke Baker was read to the court. The accident investigator deposed what he’d said to Tess: that he’d scrutinised the circumstances surrounding the death of Hugh Wellborn at a notorious accident site shortly after the incident. In such a case he would routinely check for indications of foul play. There had been none.
Finally, Glencoyne called Cathy Turton, a pseudonym for a senior officer working in the Organised Crime Command of the National Crime Agency, which had replaced the Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2013 a group she had joined in 2006. Called at short notice, she had nonetheless studied a transcript of Roger Grange’s evidence which, in effect, was a record of what Andrew Bealing had said. Whether or not it was true, however, was a different matter altogether. Because according to Turton, there were no Chinese gangs known to be operating in south London. And she ought to know, because this was her specialism; and her sources of information weren’t limited to NCA operations, or previous SOCA operations, but shared intelligence from MI5, MI6, Interpol, Europol and other bodies whose remit brought them on to her patch.
‘The Chinese don’t work in this way,’ she said. ‘Haulage is too risky. For legal highs, they use the internet and the post. It’s cheaper and safer and faster.’
‘But we have heard evidence from the warehouse manager at Hopton’s Yard and he’d come across sachets of Spice in boxes labelled as tea.’
‘Sure, individual businesses might have an employee who smuggles the odd crate or two, but you were asking about organised crime and significant shipments of legal highs, and a criminal gang capable of killing a collaborator who seeks to renege on a distribution agreement . . . and this is not something I’ve come across in London. The internet is the preferred means of bulk trade.’
And no intelligence had ever landed on her desk regarding Andrew Bealing and Hopton’s Yard. She would have expected to come across his name if he’d been hand in glove with a known gang.
‘And an unknown gang?’ asked Benson, before Glencoyne had even sat down.
‘Well, if it was an unknown gang, I wouldn’t know about it, would I?’
‘Precisely, Miss Turton. Do you know everything that’s going on in south London?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, we’re broadly agreed, then, aren’t we?’
Benson’s cross-examination had been instinctive: his mind had been knocked elsewhere. A small and completely irrelevant detail of Turton’s evidence had struck him with the force of a headbutt. He’d been reeling, unable to work out the full implications of the blow. In something of a daze, he went through the motions of responding to what was now happening in court. Mr Justice Oakshott was asking Glencoyne if she wanted to recall Anna Wysocki and she said, ‘No, my lord’ (because things could only get worse if she did), and he then asked Benson if he wanted to cross-examine her again, and he said, ‘No, my lord’ (because as matters stood, things could hardly get much better). And so Glencoyne closed her case for the second time and Mr Justice Oakshott turned to the jury.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have now heard all the evidence in the case. Tomorrow you will hear speeches from counsel. And then, after I have summed up the case, it will be for you to decide if you are sure Sarah Collingstone killed Andrew Bealing. For now, please bear in mind my usual warnings . . .’
Benson’s mind had cleared somewhat by the time Mr Justice Oakshott left the bench. He was still shaken, but he was now fairly sure he knew exactly what had happened on the night of the 14th of February 2015. There were a number of points to tie down, but these were mere detail. All the evidence was tumbling in one direction, faster than he could make sense of it.
52
Tess had some difficulty understanding Benson’s behaviour. He’d listened to Ralph Collingstone’s complaints about Glencoyne’s upsetting cross-examination without comment, letting the poor man blow himself out, and then he’d said, ‘Well, it’s over now.’ Down in the holding cells with Ralph’s daughter, he’d asked if Daniel was okay, only to learn what he already knew – that she wouldn’t know because she’d been remanded into custody since the previous evening. As with her father, Tess had taken control, explaining exactly what would happen tomorrow, that they were to try and relax. Outside the Old Bailey, he’d been similarly distracted with Tess, not wanting her notes of evidence, finally heading off in the opposite direction to his chambers. The trial, it seemed, had taken its toll; and so had the disturbed night, and the handling of the late evidence. He looked drained.
Back at Coker & Dale, Tess found a message on her desk from Gordon: ‘ECHR judgment today on covert surveillance of legal and non-legal consultations in a police station. You were right in both your predictions. If you want to discuss any of this, do give me a call.’
Tess didn’t, on either score.
There was also a fax from Denis Stockwood. He’d sent on the employment history schedule of Paul Harbeton. She ran a finger down the list of employers, hoping to latch on to something but nothing obviously stood out. Then her eye caught on a place, rather than an employer. And—
The phone rang. It was Sally.
‘How about the Nightjar? Just for an hour? I’d like to gloat.’
The Nightjar was a 1920s Chicago hideaway on the City Road. No flash exterior just a bird sigil on a double wooden door. Inside, lush decor. Gold light. Glinting bottles at the bar. A jazz sax-man in the corner, eyes closed. A couple of machine guns propped against the wall and it would have been perfect.
‘Was I or was I not right?’ asked Sally.
‘About what?’
‘About who, darling. Your client. I said she was hiding a great deal, and she was. I said she was hiding guilt and shame, and she was. I said you couldn’t trust her and you couldn’t. Which means you’re paying. I’ll have a Happy Buddha.’
Tess checked the menu and went for a Name of the Samurai. The waitress slinked off.
‘If you want another prediction,’ said Sally, ‘I’d say her greatest secret guilt and shame is the only one she hasn’t admitted.’
‘Which is?’
‘She killed him, for God’s sake. You can forget about the Chinese gang. I’m right about Benson, too. You’ll see. He’s reinventing himself.’
‘I don’t think I know anyone who speaks drivel quite like you do. You sound like a quack. Hang on a minute . . . you are a quack. I forgot.’
‘Put your money where your mouth is.’
‘I’m not going to gamble on someone’s innocence.’
‘Bu you are doing already.’
That was true, thought Tess. ‘How much, then?’
‘Don’t be common. I was speaking figuratively.’
‘So what are the terms?’
‘If I’m right about Benson, you tell me why you really went to Strasbourg. If I’m wrong, I’ll pack in graphology.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to do that,’ said Tess. ‘I’d lose an awful lot of fun.’
‘I’m sure you would. But I want to know why you up and went without a word of warning.’
As so often happened with Sally, the joke had turned serious. Between them Tess’s move to Strasbourg had been passed off as a sudden whim, one of the surprise decisions to which she was prone. Something Irish. A caprice. But that was a Band-Aid. They both knew it. And out of reverence for friendship, Sally had never tried to strip it away. But it remained painful for both of them because this was the only secret to come between them. Upon Tess’s return to London, Sally had taken to pulling at the edge of the plaster, hinting if there’d been a cut it should have healed by now. But she was wrong.
‘Why hesitate?’ asked Sally, after the coc
ktails arrived. ‘You’ve already backed Benson in public. You might even lose your job at Coker and Dale. Why not risk everything?’
‘Agreed,’ said Tess, smiling woodenly, wishing she’d stayed at Ely Place, hoping with depth that Sally was wrong about William Benson. Her own secret was now tied to his . . . it was an intimacy she didn’t want. ‘May the best woman win.’
With those words the Samurai clinked into the Buddha.
When Tess got back to Ennismore Gardens she went straight upstairs to the drawing room where the Benson trial papers were laid out on a table. Still in her coat she found the pre-sentence report prepared by Geraldine Whitmore dated 21st July 1999, two days before Benson got life. There was one line in it that had come back to her when she’d skimmed over Paul Harbeton’s employment history. She read the line again, as if to make sure she wasn’t mistaken. She’d spotted a coincidence. Two in fact. And both of them were almost certainly insignificant but they couldn’t be left unexplored.
Paul Harbeton had worked exclusively in London except for a period of eight months when he was employed by a scaffolding company based in Norwich. That was between February and October of 1992, when he was twenty-seven years old. At that time Benson’s world was centred on Brancaster Staithe, where he lived with his parents and brother. However, when reviewing Benson’s character and family background, Geraldine Whitmore recorded that Benson – like Harbeton – had done a great deal of charitable work, and in 1995 (aged seventeen) he did a thirty-mile sponsored walk along the Peddars Way and Norfolk Coast Path, raising money for the Radwell Brain Trauma Clinic. Which was in Norwich.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. Paul Harbeton and William Benson both had a connection to Norwich, though it was separated by a period of three years. Charitable work featured in both their histories. Histories that were joined for ever on a Saturday night in November 1998 when they both went to the Bricklayers Arms on Gresse Street.
53
You wouldn’t know that Abasiama Agozino had lost her right leg on a land mine. You wouldn’t know she’d lost her leg. You wouldn’t know she’d lost anything. She was mysteriously complete. Benson marvelled at her appearance. She’d wrapped her hair in bands of coloured silk this time. Her fingers were heavy with rings, all of them cheap and possibly nasty, only they’d been transformed by her hands.
