Cold Relations (Honey Laird Book 1)

by Gerald Hammond

  ‘When you saw him on Friday evening, he was his normal self? Not depressed or worried about anything?’

  ‘He was just as usual.’

  ‘Are any of his clothes missing?’

  ‘No, Inspector. Ay have looked. As far as Ay can see, he is away with what he stood up in, his shooting breeks and a tweed jacket, green stockings, warm underwear, leather boots, shirt, tie and his coat and hat. Nothing else, not even a toothbrush.’

  ‘And if he had met a lady . . .?’

  ‘You can put that thought out of your maynd, Inspector. Ay have known Mr Colebrook for upwards of ten years and he is past that sort of thing.’

  It was Honey’s opinion that no man was ever so far past ‘that sort of thing’ that the sleeping monster could not be woken again. She wondered whether Maggie’s certainty might not derive from the fact that she was already providing for Mr Colebrook’s needs, but she was saved from commenting by the entry of Ewan Picton. He had circled the house and outbuildings with Dancer and Pippa. The only recent scent of Mr Colebrook was where it was to be expected, between the front door of the house, the adjacent garage and the place on the gravel where he usually parked his Audi.

  Honey set the two men to a scan of Mr Colebrook’s papers and a preliminary search of the house while she continued to interrogate Maggie McLaghan under the guise of a girl-to-girl chat. Mr Colebrook had sold his supermarkets and had invested the money with care, mostly in a spread of annuities. He took the Financial Times regularly and seemed pleased with what it told him more often or not. All accounts were settled promptly. A starting assumption therefore was that there could be no shortage of money.

  Unless his sons were a drain on his resources? But no. Mrs McLaghan was firm on the point. Mr Colebrook, when the sale of his own businesses was completed, had made a substantial gift to each of his sons and his sons had then set up their own business in the agricultural buildings across the road. On occasions he had let down his hair in speaking with the housekeeper. The business belonged to the sons, this was quite clear, but the father still owned the buildings, was a director of the company and was always available for help and advice although he seldom if ever visited the premises. He made it clear that he wished his sons to stand on their own feet. That was the limit of her knowledge.

  The sergeant and the constable were still busily engaged. She left her mobile with them, asked the sergeant to join her as soon as he reached a suitable point for breaking off and then walked across the road. On closer inspection, the agricultural buildings were cleaner and tidier than the usual and the front had been given a major facelift. A sign that had not been visible from the farm track stated simply that this was the home of Colebrook Products, adding telephone and fax numbers and an Internet address. Several cars, none of them cheap, were parked outside the entrance and three vans had gathered at an open loading bay. There was no visitors’ entrance as such but a door close to the loading bays bore an inconspicuous sign that read ‘Reception.’ Evidently casual visits by the public were not to be welcomed.

  The interior more than lived up to the outside. The buildings had been lined and they were air-conditioned to a point of perfect comfort, but they were streamlined and functional rather than welcoming. There were no windows, only universal fluorescent lighting. She crossed a shining floor and knocked on a glass partition behind which three ladies were marking copy invoices. One, a dusky blonde with a slight twitch, came to the sliding hatch. They embarked on another conversation of which Honey had endured a dozen duplicates in the past. She asked for Mr Colebrook Junior. Which one? Which one was in? Mr Leo was in at the moment. Then she would see Mr Leo. What was it about? Resisting the temptation to say ‘None of your damn business,’ she produced her warrant card. Evidently word of the disappearance of Mr Colebrook père had reached the business. Within a minute she was ushered into an office so sleek and modern that it hardly seemed to belong in a converted barn at all.

  Leo Colebrook got up to shake hands. He was slightly younger than his brother and he bore less resemblance to their father. His hair was sandy rather than red and his nose lacked the Roman bridge. His expression was wary.

  ‘I met your father at the Tinnisbeck Castle shoot on Saturday,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re the young lady,’ he began. His voice was pitched a little higher than those of his father and his older brother. He paused, embarrassed, and began again. ‘I had never met the Carpenters, so of course I wasn’t invited. Dad stopped on the way home and phoned me from the car. We talked business for a minute – nothing of the least importance, I assure you – and he said how much he’d enjoyed his day out, what a good company they’d been and he was rather complimentary about a young lady – a member of the police, he was given to understand – who he said was not only an excellent shot and a good dog-handler.’ He stopped. The remark seemed incomplete. Not only, she thought, was usually followed by also. But also what?

  But this was mere curiosity and female vanity. She moved on. ‘Did he say how far along the road he was when he phoned?’

  Leo frowned while he tried to remember. ‘No,’ he said, ‘or if he did it didn’t register with me.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. I had somebody with me at the time and my mind wasn’t on it. The staff were showing impatience, so it might have been around five-thirty.’

  ‘Well, what did he say?’

  Leo hesitated, seeming slightly disconcerted. ‘Only to confirm that he’d enjoyed himself, like I said. And he asked me to let him have a spare set of accounts because he’d been working on them while under a misapprehension about something we’d already agreed and his copies were all scribbled over. I told him to chuck his copies away and I’d have a clean set ready for him.’

  ‘Tell me what you know of your father’s history.’

  Leo looked into the distance, beyond the solid walls. ‘I think he’s fifty-eight. He was born in Surrey. He inherited two corner shops in the south of England when he was young and he spent his working life building up his little empire. He was very successful. He had the knack of management and of handling staff. I must say that I learned a lot just from watching him. He always planned to retire at around fifty and that’s exactly what he did. He had always been fond of Scotland – our mother came from hereabouts – and he arrived at a deal with Mr Fulson, who wanted to enlarge his land. Mr Fulson took over the land and Dad acquired the house and farm buildings. He sold up and helped us, his three sons, to set up a business of our own where we reckoned there was a huge gap in the market. I’m the one who takes after him in business management, so I run things here. Vernon, my elder brother, is the country lover. He shoots and fishes so he does the buying. He can talk to keepers, farm managers and game dealers in their own language. Daniel’s the sociable one, very hail-fellow-well-met, so he’s the salesman. He’s always out and about, lunching with hotel and supermarket managers. He should be as fat as a pig but he never seems to put on an ounce. And he and Harriet do a lot of entertaining, not my cup of tea at all – that’s another way I take after Dad, in liking a quiet life. But we’re all interchangeable and we muck in together. The arrangement works very well and there’s rarely any friction.’

  ‘And what exactly do you do as a business?’

  ‘Didn’t I say? And, of course, the signboard doesn’t tell you much. We’re on the game.’ Leo laughed although the joke seemed to have been worn threadbare. ‘You know that eighty per cent – that’s four-fifths – of the pheasants shot in this country and sold to the game dealer for pennies go abroad, still at stupid prices? Those that remain on the market locally turn up in the butcher’s shop, still in the feather, at a fiver or so. The British housewife has never learned to think of the pheasant as food although it’s tastier and cleaner than chicken and it’s been treated more humanely – well, if you were a chick, would you rather be fattened and then killed as soon as you were of edible size, or turned out into the wild to grow on and tak
e your chance over the guns, with a better than fifty-fifty chance of surviving? We buy up some of that surplus and reckon to get it into the shops, oven-ready, for well under a fiver a brace. It’s catching on.’

  ‘I bet.’ Honey was interested in spite of herself. ‘What do you do for the rest of the year?’

  ‘Venison. Meat, pies and sausages.’

  ‘I thought something was ringing a bell. You’re Colebros, right?’

  ‘Absolutely right. Would you like to see the plant?’

  ‘Very much. Your venison pies are good. I’d like to see where they come from.’

  They were interrupted before the tour could begin. DS Bryant arrived, was admitted and handed Honey a note. She scanned it and said to Leo, ‘Your father’s car has been found, parked outside the Bellbridge Hotel. As far as is known, he hadn’t been inside, they don’t remember serving him a meal and there are no signs of him.’

  Leo got to his feet. ‘I’d better go.’

  Honey sat where she was. ‘You’d be wasting time and petrol,’ she said. ‘His car is, or will be, in the hands of the laboratory technicians. I don’t want to upset you, but you can see for yourself that they’ll be looking for signs of foul play or illness or accident or intent to commit suicide or take flight. I’m advised that two detectives have been sent to make enquiries locally, to find out whether the car was seen arriving there. There’s nothing useful you could do and you wouldn’t be allowed near the car anyway. You’ll be notified when you can collect it.’

  ‘Of course.’ Leo sank back into his chair and lowered his head. ‘I should have realised. It gets worse and worse.’

  She decided to be brisk. ‘I don’t see it that way. You were short of your father and of a nearly new top-of-the-range Audi. Now we’ve recovered the car and we know a little more about your father’s movements. That isn’t all that you wanted but it can’t all be bad. Perhaps you could leave it to your office staff to let your brothers know. Then we could do that tour. Sergeant Bryant might be interested.’

  After a moment of thought, Leo agreed.

  The buildings stretched further than Honey had imagined, all meticulously organised. There were storage rooms for newly delivered birds or beasts. In one large room, pheasants were being put through the whirling rubber fingers of a plucking machine. Dressing, cleaning and packaging followed and the processing lines finished at the cold stores. Damaged birds were diverted to where three large ovens prepared the game and venison pies, stews and other products. Cold stores ensured that goods could be delivered, frozen or fresh, to the customers. Honey was relieved. She had recognised several products that she had used and that June continued to buy; but all was clean and hygienic. Tiles and stainless steel dominated the scene and there were wash basins and notices about hygiene at every corner.

  The only person to remain unimpressed was the sergeant. To him, in common with many urban dwellers, pheasant was a dirty, or at least a foreign, word. As they left the plucking room he said, ‘I suppose you pay the girls extra for working in there.’

  ‘In point of fact,’ Leo said, ‘they queue up for a place there. They’re given gloves but they never use them. Working every day with their hands coated in pheasant grease, their hands become beautifully soft. Their husbands and boyfriends appreciate it. Have a look at a book of old wives’ medicines some time. You’ll be surprised how many of them feature goose grease.’

  The feather particles floating on the plucking room air had induced in the sergeant an enormous sneeze, in coping with which his handkerchief had removed the concealing makeup. His nose was again shining like a beacon, to the amusement of the staff, but Honey was becoming tired of his manner and pretended not to notice. The sergeant took the smiles that greeted him at every doorway as being of admiration or friendship and responded to each with a condescending wave. The continuous background noise prevented him from hearing the giggles that followed on behind.

  Chapter Eight

  Although she did not know it, Detective Inspector Honoria Laird was approaching the most frustrating days of her police service. As it became ever clearer that Henry Colebrook was not going to reappear, her small team grew by the addition of another detective constable and a retired sergeant to collate the probably negative information that kept rolling in. They pried into the lives and movements of the missing man, his sons and business contacts. Telephone accounts were demanded and eventually received. In desperation, Honey requested authority for DNA tests to be made of the debris vacuumed from the missing man’s car and from the clothes in his cupboards, but the investigation was still only a missing person enquiry and in view of the high cost of each individual test her request was turned down.

  Their enquiries embraced also the missing spaniels and included the assumption that the two cases might be connected, though no member of the team ever came up with a plausible theory as to the connection.

  If all that effort produced any gems of information, they were unable to detect them. Most cases give the investigating officers some point of departure — a trail, however faint, to be followed until it becomes a roadway or a glimpse by a witness to form the basis of a public appeal or a door to door enquiry. But this investigation was producing only a picture of perfect universal respectability. This had to be an illusion because people en masse are seldom models of virtue. They have peccadilloes, large or small. But nothing relevant came near the surface.

  The result was a gradually increasing air of despondency. Detectives may sometimes wait years for the breakthrough in a murder case; but this was a case in which there might not be a victim and, if there was indeed a victim, he had utterly vanished without leaving a clue behind. People do occasionally vanish into the hardcore beneath motorways, but these are usually men at whose departures the police may heave a sigh of relief. But Henry Colebrook, so far as they could discern, was a taxpayer and a respectable citizen. On the other hand, there was always the haunting possibility that Mr Colebrook had departed of his own volition, as he was perfectly entitled to do, and that the spaniels had been liberated out of malice by some of the local tearaways and were running free. The possibility that Mr Colebrook had stolen them and then decamped in accordance with some previous plan began to emerge from the lists of improbable explanations and to assume more and more an almost imperceptible gloss of probability.

  She emailed to Poppy:

  Spot and Honey seem to have vanished totally. Neither they nor their microchips have surfaced. We have, we think, been in touch with every canine organisation in Britain if not the civilised world, but without the least whisper of a helpful reply. For the moment one can only hope that they are alive and well treated.

  In the circs, it is sad but not surprising that your ex is taking it very badly. He was not notable for his stability before this fell on him; only Jackie and the spaniels held him on a level keel. Now he broods. He is convincing himself that his worst fear, that they have been disposed of by some Asian restaurant to their diners, is the truth. It is a measure of his humanity that he agonises over what the dogs, if alive, may be thinking; and it is useless to tell him that dogs do not think coherently, as do some but by no means all humans, he knows different. He seems to be heading for a breakdown or worse. Not drinking or drugging, praise be, but the most massive case of clinical depression that I ever saw. His doctor gave him an antidepressant, but that only switched off his sex-urge – which was not a cure for depression and was soon abandoned!

  It is not for me to make suggestions, but a complete change would help. Could you bring yourself to invite him along with his ladylove (fiancée, did I tell you?) for a visit? Some sunshine and a warm sea, and meeting your dogs again, might ease the waiting period. His first reaction would be to remain on the spot but I think I can convince him that there is nothing that he can do locally and that he could be back here in 24 hours if we get a break. I would promise to keep them informed regularly.

  Her inevitable restlessness was aggravated when Sandy, whose fraud ca
se had turned out to be tangled with a similar series of frauds under investigation by Scotland Yard, was required to visit London regularly and for days at a time. As a minor consolation, Sandy’s absence did at least make it less of a wrench for Honey, with Pippa in tow, to visit her friends the Carpenters at Tinnisbeck Castle, for a couple of days ‘or as long as it takes’, in order to squeeze the last drops of information out of that area while Sergeant Bryant, supervised over the telephone, continued the fruitless round closer to home.

  The first day she spent in the company of Ian Argyll. The other Ian, Inspector Ian Fellowes of Newton Lauder, had put his own small team to local enquiries, but it could not be assumed that Mr Colebrook had vanished on their patch so that the case did not properly belong to them. Thus there was no depth to their reports. Honey went over much of the ground again with Ian Argyll, but there could be no doubt that as far as his own friends, relatives and contacts were concerned, he had done a more thorough job. Each was vouched for by others and nobody had acquired new spaniels. Pat Kerr, who had been introduced to the shoot by George Brightside (the keeper), was known to keep a Labrador-cross-collie and Ian had established that, according to the lady next door, no other breed of dog had been over his threshold in many months.

  While pursuing that topic, Ian Argyll had also set his extended family to enquiring after Mr Colebrook himself. Most of them had met the quiet older man on the day of the shoot without either liking or disliking him; but nobody had seen or heard anything of him since he drove off from the castle shortly after the shoot had broken up. She went over much of the ground again, but Ian had been thorough. A walk about the back lanes of Tynebrook village produced no suggestion of unaccustomed dogs and Pippa showed total indifference.