‘Isn’t it possible that the two cases aren’t even connected?’ Sergeant Matthews asked.
‘They’re connected,’ Flint replied.
But he didn’t feel quite as confident as he sounded. The prime suspect in the killings of Edward, Tony and John Conroy still had to be Paul Taylor, yet wasn’t it stretching things just a little too far to argue that Taylor had slipped quietly into the village in the middle of the night, committed another murder, then slipped quietly out again?
‘Perhaps Paul Taylor didn’t kill the Conroys after all,’ Matthews suggested. ‘Perhaps none of them was ever the intended victim.’
‘Go on,’ Flint encouraged.
‘Say it was Bill Harper who was intended to die all along, and when he survived the crash, it was just a case of the killer waiting for another opportunity to come along.’
‘You’re forgetting the fact that the Jaguar in which Bill was supposed to be travelling broke down,’ Flint reminded his sergeant. ‘That was an act of God. There’s no way the killer could have known about it in advance.’
‘The boffins in Bristol might have got it wrong,’ Matthews said, reluctant to abandon his theory. ‘Perhaps the Jaguar had been tampered with, and they just didn’t notice it.’
‘But if the intended victim was Bill Harper, why didn’t the killer just interfere with the Jag’s brakes and leave the BMW alone?’ Flint asked.
The chief inspector glanced down at the top brass conference which was going on below them. Inspector Hawkins had detached himself from the group and was heading in their direction.
‘My boss has been on the phone to your boss for the last half hour, and between them, they’ve decided on a joint operation,’ the local policeman said, as he drew level with the two Welsh detectives.
‘And who’ll be in charge?’ Flint asked.
Hawkins grinned. ‘They were a little vague about that.’
Yes, that was only to be expected, Flint thought, because this was the kind of investigation that the press might soon start calling ‘incompetent’ – and neither of their bosses would want to be too closely associated with it once the shit started to fly.
‘I’m sure we’ll work out some arrangement between us,’ he said to Hawkins. ‘Would you mind if I finish this little chat with my lad before I bring you up to speed on the way our minds are moving?’
‘No problem,’ Hawkins assured him.
‘So where were we, sergeant?’ Flint asked Matthews. ‘Oh yes, here’s a possibility we’ve never considered before. What if it wasn’t a question of trying to kill just the people in the Jag or the ones in the BMW? What if the killer – for some twisted reason of his own – wanted to get rid of the whole lot of them? He got three of them the first time, now he’s added Harper to his list and … Jesus!’
And that was when my old friend Owen Flint started to get seriously worried about me.
It must have been just after his discussion with Matthews and Hawkins that Owen Flint made the first call to me. I ignored it, as I ignored the five or six other calls he made in the next hour and, in the end, I switched my mobile phone off.
By early afternoon, I had crossed off four villages from my list and was driving towards the fifth when I heard the news item on my car radio which made my blood run cold.
‘In further developments following the murder of Cheshire businessman Bill Harper,’ the newsreader said, ‘the Cheshire police would like to interview Mr Robert Conroy, whose current whereabouts are unknown. Mr Conroy is believed to be driving a Ford Granada, licence plate number …’
My hands were suddenly gripping the steering wheel so tightly that it almost felt as if I would crush it to powder.
Bill Harper was dead!
And the police wanted to talk to me!
Could they really believe that I was involved?
But what they believed or did not believe was an irrelevance. I couldn’t afford to be in police custody, even for a day, because, for Marie’s sake, I had to find Paul Taylor before they did.
TWENTY-THREE
Susan Harper – Bill Harper’s widow – was dressed in jeans and an old sweater. She sat on the edge of the sofa in the living room of her executive-style detached house at the edge of the village, with her arms folded across her chest and her hands clasping her forearms as if to ward off the cold. She looked like a thirteen-year-old kid who’d just been told that her dog had been run over, Flint thought.
‘We need to know what your husband was doing down by the mere last night, Mrs Harper,’ Inspector Hawkins said.
‘He was swimming,’ the young woman told him. ‘He … he really liked to swim.’
‘And what time did he go for this swim of his?’
‘It was around eleven o’clock. I know that, because the late film was just starting on BBC1.’
‘Bloody funny time to go swimming,’ Hawkins said.
‘He always swam at night. He preferred swimming in the nude, you see, and since he didn’t want to offend other people, he left it until after dark.’
‘Weren’t you worried when he didn’t come back?’
‘I didn’t know he hadn’t come back. The film on the television wasn’t very good, so I decided to go straight to bed.’
She was lying, Flint thought. But why was she lying? She was no killer – he’d stake his professional reputation on that. She wasn’t even someone who’d conspire with a killer. So just what was she covering up?
‘When he went down to the mere, did you ever go with him, Mrs Harper?’ he asked.
Susan Harper shook her head. ‘He was quite happy to go on his own, and I don’t like getting into cold water.’
‘Tell us about your friends,’ Hawkins said.
The question seemed to bewilder Susan Harper. ‘Well, there’s the Conroys …’ she began.
‘I don’t mean your husband’s business acquaintances,’ Hawkins interrupted her, probably not intending to be quite as sharp as he sounded. ‘I’m talking about people you saw socially.’
‘Perhaps, in this case, that’s the same thing,’ Flint suggested.
Susan Harper smiled gratefully.
‘That’s right,’ she agreed. ‘Bill says … Bill said … that it was always a good thing to mix business with pleasure. That’s why, when we entertained, it was always somebody from the company. And when we went out, it was usually because we’d been invited by people Bill worked with.’
‘How would you describe his mental state in the last week or so?’ Flint asked.
Susan Harper brushed a stray strand of hair away from her eye.
‘I’m not quite sure I know what you mean,’ she confessed.
I mean, did he feel threatened? Flint thought. Did he act like a man who thought he might get his brains bashed in someday soon?
But he knew he couldn’t be as blunt as that with someone in Susan Harper’s fragile emotional state.
‘Well, for example, he must have been excited about his promotion, mustn’t he?’ he said – not because he expected her answer to be very revealing, but simply as a way of getting her talking. ‘And since it’s not every young businessman who goes from being a humble executive assistant to joint managing director in one mighty bound, I should imagine he would have been surprised, too.’
‘He wasn’t surprised, actually,’ Susan Harper said. ‘Not at all.’
It was at this point that he felt goosebumps, Flint would tell me later.
‘Obviously Bill wasn’t surprised when it was announced,’ he said, ‘because Philip Conroy would have told him in advance, but there must have some point at which he said something like, “You’ll never guess what position I’m going to be promoted to, Susan”.’
‘No,’ Susan Harper said. ‘He never said anything like that. But then, he never discussed business with me anyway. “Men take care of business, and women take care of the home,” he’d tell me. He was very old fashioned, in some ways.’
He sounded like a bloody Neanderthal – in most ways �
�� Flint thought.
Susan Harper frowned.
She’s trying to think of something useful to say, Flint told himself – she may have lied before, but she really wants to help me now.
‘There was one occasion when he seemed excited,’ Susan said.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘He rang me up and told me that next year, we’d go to the Caribbean for our holidays. He said that was where all the jet set went. I asked how we could possibly afford it, and he told me not to worry, because we were going to have plenty of money from now on.’
‘You say he rang you. Where was he ringing you from? Was he in his office?’
‘No,’ Susan said, ‘he was calling from the hospital in Bridgend.’
‘How long after the crash would this have been?’
‘It was the same day.’
So even before Philip Conroy had become the new boss of Conroy Enterprises, Bill Harper had been confident he’d secured a first-class seat on the gravy train.
How was that possible?
I was tuned into Radio Two, seeking distraction from my predicament in the music that I’d listened to when I was young and still hopeful.
It wasn’t working!
I needed more than a few songs from the likes of 10CC and Rod Stewart to make me forget – if only temporarily – that I was a fugitive from justice.
In fact, I was still hyper-aware of my situation. The driver of every car that passed me on the other side of the road seemed to be looking at me strangely, and I found myself continually gazing into my rear-view mirror to see if people in the vehicles behind me were noting down my registration number.
I’d only been on the news once, I told myself, and even then, the announcer hadn’t specified where I was, because nobody knew where I was. So it was surely unlikely that the whole population of Lancashire had been galvanized into action, and was now determined to hunt me down like a dog. It certainly wouldn’t have galvanized me if I’d heard a similar message about someone else. I wouldn’t now be spending my time examining the face of every man I saw, and wondering if he was the one the police were looking for.
The petrol gauge on my dashboard showed I was getting very low on juice, and when I saw a country garage with three petrol pumps in its forecourt, I signalled that I was about to pull into it.
‘It’s only been broadcast once,’ I kept repeating as a kind of safety mantra. ‘It’s only been on the air that one time.’
And then the programme I’d been listening to switched over to the news desk – and the treacherous newsreader said, ‘The Cheshire police would like to interview Mr Robert Conroy, whose current whereabouts are unknown. Mr Conroy is believed to be driving a Ford Granada …’
I switched off the radio as I pulled on to the forecourt, but there was no guarantee that the same programme wasn’t playing in the garage workshop.
I watched as the stocky middle-aged man in grease-streaked overalls made his way leisurely from the workshop to the pumps, and was acutely aware of the fact that he might already have noticed that the number plate of the car was the same as the one which the newsreader on the radio had said was being driven by a wanted man.
An almost overwhelming urge was building up in me to switch on the engine again, hit the accelerator, get the hell out of there, and find somewhere safe to hunker down. But even as I was experiencing the urge, I knew I couldn’t allow myself to give way to it, because if I went into hiding, I wouldn’t be able to search for Paul Taylor – and if I wasn’t looking for him, then there was no point in trying to evade the police any longer.
The attendant gave me barely more than a glance when I asked him to fill the tank, and it was probably his obvious indifference which gave me the courage to produce Lydia’s picture – along with my usual line about looking for a very dear old friend – when I was paying him.
‘No, I can’t say I have seen anybody like that round here,’ he told me. ‘The name Hornby don’t ring no bells with me, neither. But there was a family called Hornbill who had a farm on the edge of the moors some years gone, if that’s any good to you.’
‘No, I don’t think it is,’ I said.
I took the picture back from him and was sliding it into my wallet when I saw another face from another photograph smiling up at me. I pulled it out and handed it to the attendant.
‘How about her?’ I asked him.
‘You seem to be looking for a lot of girls,’ he said suspiciously.
I cursed my own stupidly and clumsiness. If Marie had been after information, she’d have pumped him dry without him even noticing it, but I’d only asked him two questions, and already he was starting to look at me as if I was some kind of pervert.
If I was going to survive on the run, I’d have to do better than this.
‘This woman is the other one’s sister,’ I said.
‘She don’t look much like her.’
‘They’re stepsisters – same father, different mother,’ I improvised wildly. ‘That’s probably why they look so different.’
The attendant nodded, took Marie’s picture between his thumb and forefinger, and held it up to the light.
‘Thought so,’ he said.
‘You have seen her?’
‘Yes, she’s not the kind of girl you easily forget, is she?’
‘When did you see her?’
‘I think it must be two or three days ago. She filled up here just like you did.’
‘And you’re absolutely certain it was her?’
‘Pretty sure. She was driving a black Golf GTI, if I remember rightly. She had a nice smile, and she spoke with an Irish accent.’
There was no doubt about it. It had to be Marie.
I should have been glad to get the conformation that my search was running along the right lines. Instead, I felt my heart sink, because I’d been hoping all along that I’d been wrong about her helping Lydia to hide Paul – and now that hope was gone.
Owen Flint and Inspector Hawkins sat opposite my cousin in the lounge of the big house which overlooked the mere.
‘It must have been a great shock for you to hear about Bill Harper’s death,’ Flint said.
‘A great shock,’ Philip agreed.
And he did look as if he really was shocked, Flint thought. His face was unnaturally pale, and his hands were twitchy.
‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt him?’ Flint asked.
‘Might have wanted to hurt him?’ Philip repeated, in a hectoring voice. ‘That’s a nice way of putting it, isn’t it? Don’t you mean “might have wanted to kill him – might have wanted to smash his head to a pulp”?’
My cousin buried his face in his hands and emitted what may have been a sob.
Flint watched him, unmoved, and when Philip uncovered his face again, he said, ‘I hope you feel strong enough to carry on with this interview now, sir, because if you don’t … well …’
‘Yes, I feel strong enough,’ Philip said, interpreting Flint’s words as a threat, just as he’d been intended to. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that, but, as you can imagine, I’m still rather upset. And in answer to your question, no, I can’t think of anyone who would have hated him that much.’
‘How did he get on with the people he worked with?’
Philip hesitated for a second before speaking. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, chief inspector, he wasn’t too popular with some of them – perhaps even with the majority.’
‘And why might that be?’
‘Bill wasn’t the kind of man who suffered fools gladly, and he could be quite direct with anyone he thought wasn’t up to the mark. But I certainly can’t imagine one of his co-workers disliking him so much that they’d want to murder him.’
‘Could I ask you where you were between eleven o’clock last night and one o’clock this morning, sir?’ Flint asked.
‘Are you saying that I killed him?’ Philip demanded.
‘No, sir,’ Flint sa
id mildly. ‘I’d just like to know where you were at one o’clock this morning.’
‘I was in bed.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘From what you told me the last time we talked, that’s a rare occurrence indeed,’ Flint said. ‘It’s a great pity that, for once, you seem to have given your Casanova complex a rest.’
‘I should be the last person you suspect, for God’s sake,’ Philip said. ‘I was Bill’s boss! I gave him his big break only a few days ago. Why should I want to kill him?’
‘Yes, I’ve been wondering about that myself,’ Flint said.
‘I beg your pardon!’
‘I was wondering why you’d given him such a big promotion. And what’s even more puzzling is that Mrs Harper said he seemed to know about it long before it was official.’
‘Bill always knew I had big plans for him,’ Philip said. ‘He must have guessed that with the death of three of the directors, there’d be a major role for him to play in the firm.’
‘What I’m still not clear about is why you had big plans for him,’ Flint said musingly. ‘I mean, by your own account, he was a fairly abrasive character, and he certainly didn’t have any experience of running a large organization like Conroy Enterprises.’
‘Bill was an achiever. I admire that. Besides, I knew I could trust him, because as long as I was boss he’d give me his total loyalty – and he’d let me know about those who didn’t.’
‘So he was going to be your spy within the company, was he?’ Flint asked. ‘Your nark?’
‘He was going to be my joint managing director, and share the burden with me,’ Philip said coldly.
‘One other question, Mr Conroy,’ Flint said. ‘I accept it is perfectly reasonable that you don’t have an alibi for last night, but you do have an alibi for the night someone sabotaged the braking systems of the car in which your father met his death, don’t you?’
‘That’s right, I do,’ Philip agreed. ‘As I told you before, that night I was with a woman.’
‘But you won’t give us her name.’
The Company Page 22
