The Village Fate

by William Hadley

  “It might have been, I remember a few weeks ago she got a letter from the solicitor because she asked me to pay their bill, which thinking about it was a bit odd, I’d have thought it would come from the estate.”

  “Was the estate very much?” asked Josie

  “Her mum had lived in the same house in Highgate all her life, it was her grandparents’ home before that. Both Maggie and Trevor grew up there, it’s got four bedrooms and quite a big garden. Anyway I looked on Rightmove today and found you can see how much homes have sold for in an area.”

  “And how much did it sell for?” Asked Josie

  “Two point nine million pounds. Even after taxes they would have cleared about a million each,” replied Angus. “She could have paid her own solicitor’s fees,” he said under his breath.

  “And she didn’t share it with you?” asked Josie

  “No, I think I’d have remembered, don’t you?”

  The tea was all gone, and as she needed to stretch her legs, Josie asked if Angus could show them around the house. The first room they visited was the lounge, there were two lounges Angus told them and a sitting room. This, the formal lounge, had a scattering of chairs, a table which doubled as a chess board and a large open fire.

  “We don’t use this room very often, Christmas mostly, or if the children have friends over and we want to escape. It’s got no telly, it’s mostly for chatting, reading, and snoozing.” Next they went to the dining room. As Josie had suspected it had a large centre piece table with a “carver” chair at each end and four others along each side. There was easily room for twelve. The walls were lined with tapestry, as well as some fine paintings. He’d collected pieces from a minor artist, but still they were very good. Angus stood and looked at a work in oil paints. It was a horse and groom with a wood in the background and a small white dog nearby. “Influenced by Stubbs you know, if this was one of his originals it’d be worth about ten million quid. I only paid six hundred and fifty, the value might go up if the artist dies and his work becomes popular, but I bought it because I think it looks nice and the dog looks like Hamish. Maggie doesn’t like horses; she says that even in a painting one can set off her hay fever. ”

  “Would anyone have wanted to hurt your wife Mr Macintosh.” asked the PC.

  “No. I don’t think so. I mean she may not always be loved by everyone. Even I can find her irritating at times. But I don’t think anyone would really want to harm her.”

  “What about Maggie herself? In the photos she’s very thin, does she have some sort of eating disorder? Has she ever self-harmed?”

  “God no. She trains in that bloody gym all the time, that’s all. No, She’s the last person who’d do anything like that. Why do you ask?”

  “We have to assess the level of risk there might be to Mrs Macintosh, we need to determine her state of mind at the time she was last seen.”

  “When I left her on Friday she seemed fine. She may not have wanted me to go, but that was more about stopping me from shooting anything than having me around for the weekend.”

  “What about children, do you and Mrs Macintosh have any?” asked Josie

  “No. Maggie said that she didn’t want children, she’s not very maternal. I’ve got two from my first marriage. They’re weekly boarders at a school. I wasn’t keen but Maggie insisted, she said it would be good for them.”

  “Has anyone told the children their stepmother is missing.” Asked Josie.

  “Yes, I phoned the headmaster last night and he was going to tell them this morning. I said I’d call when Maggie showed up, they’re coming home for the bank holiday weekend. I’m supposed to collect them on Friday evening.”

  “I’m sure this will all be sorted out by then, you shouldn’t worry.” Said Josie with a touch of softness in her voice.

  The next room they visited was Maggie’s study. It looked like any “working from home” office, except the furniture was a bit more comfortable, there was a large TV screen and Josie noticed a Bose sound system tucked away in the corner. A well padded leather chair with a plain desk were positioned in front of the window which looked out across the pool and lawn. In the distance a tractor was going from left to right across a field. On the desk was the usual detritus of a household bills waiting to be paid or filed. There were some notes about what day the bin men would collect garden waste, and a glossy leaflet from the council about recycling. The draws had a few bank statements, a chequebook and a handful of pens. A small pink notebook held old shopping lists and things Maggie had wanted to remember, mostly they were crossed out or ticked. The book was full and she’d not got around to throwing it away yet.

  “Does your wife have a computer Mr Macintosh?” asked the Detective Sergeant.

  “Yes, she has a laptop, if she hasn’t taken it with her it’s kept in here,” said Angus opening what looked like two draws in the desk but was in fact a small cupboard. He pulled out a regular black laptop, charging cable and a mouse.

  Angus put it on the desk, opened the lid and pushed the power button. After a moment a blue light began to blink and the windows program came to life. The prompt asked for a password and he typed Maggie. “She’s no good with technology,” said Angus. “She can just about send an email and watch programmes on Netflix but otherwise she’s useless with these things.”

  The laptop was going through its start-up sequence, after a few seconds the screen was filled with a background image. Angus and the two police officers were treated to an image of Maggie, lying on her side and propped up on an elbow. She was on a sun lounger at the back of the house, the sky was clear with not a cloud to be seen. The pool shimmered blue without a ripple on its surface and in the background a golden crop was ready to be harvested. Maggie lay with a tall glass of something iced in her hand, she was smiling at the camera, gloriously comfortable and completely naked.

  For a heartbeat they all stood and admired the photo, PC Tipton thought Mrs Macintosh looked pretty good. Josie wondered how Maggie would look after two children and a decade of shift work. Angus wanted to know who’d taken the picture. Not him for sure, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his wife without her clothes on.

  It was Paul who broke the spell. He coughed and said, “We’re going to need a photo of Mrs Macintosh for our report sir. But maybe not that one, do you have something that’s a bit more suitable for publication. In case we need to circulate it to the press?”

  “Yes, yes I’ll find you one,” said Angus dragging himself back into the moment. “Give me an email address and I’ll send you one to use.”

  Josie recited her work email for Angus to write down. “Can we see her email account please sir,” asked Josie praying that it wouldn’t bring too many more surprises for Angus. She’d seen the look on his face and it was obvious he didn’t know about her screen saver. Maybe he was discovering a new side to his wife, and doing so in a rather public way.

  Angus touched the icon for the email and the image of his wife disappeared, it was replaced by a list of emails not yet open. On the left were the usual folders for sent, junk and deleted mail as well as a number of folders marked House, Gym, Angus, Tish, Trevor and Grant. They scanned through the new mail. There was one from Tish asking for her to call when she got it.

  “Tish is the trainer? Is that right, sir?” asked Paul.

  “Yes, they chat all the time.”

  The next email was from her brother who said he was looking forward to seeing her soon, that everything was ready and he said that Grant had been “an absolute darling.”

  “Who’s Grant,” asked Josie.

  “Don’t know. She’s never mentioned a Grant to me. Trevor’s boyfriend is called something I can’t remember, but he’s not Grant.”

  “There’s a folder called Grant,” said the constable. They clicked it and were asked for another password. First Angus tried Maggie but that didn’t work so he tried Macintosh, still nothing, then at the suggestion of Paul, Angus typed in Ma31t054 and it wor
ked.

  “How on earth did you get that,” said the detective sergeant.

  “Quite simple ma’am,” said a smiling PC capital M for a surname, a, c is the third letter of the alphabet, 1 looks like an I, t was going to be next but I didn’t know if it would be small or caps, 0 looks like an O and the five and four look like sh.”

  “Bloody hell, Paul you should be in CID, it would have taken me a week to guess all that.”

  “Well it helped that it was written on the back of her notebook ma’am, just under where it says “password for Grant.” He smiled.

  “Oh, I see, but well spotted anyway” said Josie, a bit embarrassed that she’d not noticed it there.

  On the screen they were looking at a conversation between Maggie and someone called grant@beaghost.com. It started with an introduction from Trevor and then he dropped out.

  Grant was telling Maggie how to vanish. How, if she wanted to, she could walk out of the house, disappear and never be found. Maggie in turn was telling Grant how she wanted to leave her husband and start a new life. He told her to carry on as normal, make plans for the future with her husband, accept invitations for dinners with friends and, if it was what she’d usually do, book a family holiday. He said it was important not to look as if she was scheming to leave. But she should start turning assets into cash or something which could be easily exchanged. Maggie told Grant that she had a large sum of money, but she didn’t say how much, which her husband didn’t know about. She told him that it was important she moved it in an anonymous way. Initially they had talked about high value watches, jewellery or diamonds, but Maggie said the money was too much for jewellery and that she didn’t like the idea of a paper trail, receipts and so forth. She wanted to do it online if she could.

  After a few more messages Grant had given Maggie a crash course in how to buy Bitcoins. He said she should buy them through a non-registered seller, that would keep the information she had to divulge to a minimum. So long as she kept the fifty-two digit code safe no one could access them except her. The conversation ended with a few pleasantries, and he thanked her for depositing his consulting fee into a bitcoin account.

  Angus clicked on the folder named Trevor, again he was asked for a password. This time he went straight to Ma31t054 and was back into their conversation. There was a lot of brother and sister chat, family stuff and how Trevor’s latest production was being panned by the critics. According to his brother in law they were all ignorant, too stupid to understand his genius.

  Trevor told Maggie about a boy he had met on Grinder while his partner had been away. Maggie confided that she had a new gardener, Giles. To his horror, Angus read how the new gardener brought an assistant with him, an older man who did all the work while she and Giles screwed each other’s brains out. As the three of them read her emails it became clear that Maggie was sleeping with everyone and anyone. Everyone except Angus that is. She told of how she wanted to leave her husband and how she’d had enough of living in the country, with what she called “these small minded carrot crunchers.”

  Another strand of conversation had been about their mother’s house. What Angus had discovered was correct, it had sold for just under three million pounds. Death duties had taken nine hundred and twenty thousand. They’d pocketed a little over a million each. Maggie started talking about how she wanted to get away from Angus and how Wimplebridge was suffocating her. She wanted to come to New York and live with her brother, but how could she, without her husband finding out about the inheritance.

  At this point Trevor had introduced Maggie to the faceless Grant at b-a-ghost. A few days later Maggie and Trevor were talking again, she said she had set up a “wallet” and bought five hundred pounds in bitcoins.

  So that’s where the “Spa” money must have gone, thought Angus.

  Evidently they had talked on the phone. The next message from Trevor said he had accessed her account and moved the coins into another wallet, one he’d set up for them both to use. He suggested she move the inheritance money from her bank into her bitcoin account, from there she could transfer it to the one in their joint names.

  His said that when she arrived in New York they should go to a bank and buy investment bonds. They would use her bitcoins as payment. At a separate bank she should use the bonds to open an account. She could use his address as her place of residence. The whole thing needed to be done quite swiftly, she should buy the bulk of the coins a day or so before she left the UK. Their price fluctuated he explained, and they didn’t want them to go down too much while she was holding a million pounds worth. Maggie agreed, she said she would move the money as soon as Angus left for his weekend in Scotland.

  The final conversation with Trevor was dated Saturday, just four days earlier. Angus and his dog were away in his beloved Scotland. She was ready to go but she’d had to set up a new Bitcoin account. Trevor asked why she needed a new account; didn’t she trust him? Of course she did, he was her brother, but she had left the account details on the table and ‘Tish had asked what all the letters and numbers were. Maggie told the trainer it was an anagram of names and birthdays, but her friend had clearly not believed her. To be on the safe side she’d opened a new account. She’d move the funds when she got to New York, she just wanted to keep control of the money for a few more days. Trevor told his sister to be more careful about who saw the password. She said not to worry, the new one was hidden somewhere very safe.

  Angus was staggered, his airhead wife wasn’t such an airhead after all. She had a fortune of her own and had been planning to leave him for months. Well she could bloody well go, and take the money with her, he didn’t need it and he hoped she’d choke on it.

  In another conversation Trevor and Maggie had discussed how she’d get into America. Would she need a visa? No, just an ESTA form, which stands for Electronic System for Travel Authorisation, she’d get one through the Visa Waiver Program he explained. It should be no problem so long as she was booked on a flight home within ninety days. They knew she had no intention of getting on the return flight, and that part of the fare was money down the drain, but it would make getting into the country much more simple. She could book all the tickets she needed online and pay using Trevor’s card. Doing it that way they wouldn’t raise suspicions back in Wimplebrige.

  They agreed she would go by taxi to the station at Warwick. There was nothing unusual about that, she often used a cab when she was going to London for the weekend. This time however she’d ignore the Chilton Railways express on platform two. She’d catch the more pedestrian service from platform seven. It seemed to stop everywhere as it went south and west to Cardiff. She’d spend the night in the Principality’s capital before heading north to Anglesey. This leg would take about six hours. Again she’d be on a provincial train and of course paying cash for her ticket. The train’s arrival at Holyhead was a few minutes prior to the departure of the overnight ferry to Dublin. In the morning a short cab ride from the ferry terminal would take her to the airport. Next stop Toronto.

  Maggie pointed out that it was just a hundred and forty five miles from Wimplebridge to Holyhead, she could drive it in three hours, but it would take a day and a half to get there by train. Trevor emphasised the importance of being inconspicuous. Under no circumstances should his sister be tempted to drive across Wales or leave the car at the ferry port. “You might as well put up a fucking great neon sign saying “Look for me here,” he wrote.

  From Toronto Maggie would travel to New York by train. Although not the most direct route, Trevor suggested she started by going to Montreal. From there she could travel south, across the border and through some of New England’s most beautiful countryside. American trains were quite different from British ones he said, they were like hotels on rails, she’d not notice she was moving at all. The trip would take about fifteen hours.

  Three days after leaving the Manor in Simplebrige, as Trevor called it, Maggie would be with her brother, free from her husband, and quite rich. I
f anyone was looking for her, they’d start by searching flights from England to the United States and she wouldn’t appear on any passenger lists. By the time they pieced together her route into Wales, through the republic of Ireland and south from Canada, she’d be in Greenwich Village sipping cocktails. She’d have a new identity and a new life.

  Angus sat back, he was shocked. “If she’d wanted to leave, why didn’t she just say?” he asked. “I don’t know why she has to be so underhand, I’d never do anything to hurt her, I’ve given her everything she ever asked for.”

  The police officers shared a look, it was obvious that Angus had known nothing about his wife’s plans, or her promiscuous lifestyle. Either that or he’d just given an Oscar winning performance.

  “Angus,” said DS Robinson, “it looks as if Maggie’s been planning this for some time. Maybe she wasn’t the person you thought she was. It appears that she’s intentionally gone away, and that’s important because of the way we classify missing persons.”

  On her fingers she began to count, the way she’d been taught to emphasise things when a cadet at Hendon. “There are three types of missing person. The first is someone who’s a lost person. This is someone who wants to be found, they might have gone walkabout and don’t know where they are. It’s often a child or an elderly person who’s infirm or confused and I don’t think Maggie falls into this category. Next there’s a missing person who’s under the influence of a third party. This would be a kidnap or abduction victim. Angus, can you think of anyone who would wish Maggie harm? Or maybe someone who might want to use her to get to you?”