‘Do you want her brought to the Yard tomorrow for an interview, sir? She should have her brief by then,’ Gheeta asked.
‘No, I don’t think so; anyway, not until Mr Frome and his SOCA team have had a good look at this lot. Mind you, if her fingerprints are on both the guns she’ll have a bit of explaining to do. But I’ll bet they aren’t.’
‘She was a bit confused when she came down the drive, sir,’ Johnson explained. ‘But the gist of what she said was that East shot Kershaw, and then Alexander and East shot each other.’
‘Could well have happened that way, we’ll see. Right then, not a lot we can do here. Rayson has insisted you go back tomorrow, so if you’ll hang on here for Mr Frome and turn the crime scene over to him, that should see you two finished. He will arrange for Pathology to remove the bodies.’
You could almost hear their faces drop. Palmer shook their hands.
‘My Serial Murder Squad is a small unit, lads; just myself, Detective Sergeant Singh here, and Claire. So we have a list of tried and tested detectives from other units that we call on when we need more boots on the ground, as was the case with this little caper. You two are now on that list, gentlemen. So, in the words of that awful Vera Lynn song... we’ll meet again.’
They turned and left the room.
‘Vera Lynn, guv? That’s a new one.’
‘Didn’t I ever tell you about the time I pushed her off a chair?’
‘You what?’
She looked at him, wide-eyed.
‘I was eight years-old. I had queued for an hour at the annual Boys and Girls Exhibition at Olympia to get Tom Finney’s autograph, and just when I was next in the line he buggered off and Vera Lynn took his place.’
‘So you pushed her off her chair?’
‘Well not intentionally, no. But her daughter snatched my autograph book and put in front of her to sign, and I tried to snatch it back. She held on and I held on, but she was stronger and I let go, and she toppled backwards off her chair.’
‘Oh my God!’ Gheeta laughed.
‘Wasn’t funny at the time; I was hauled into the security office and they phoned my dad to come and collect me.’
‘I bet he was pleased,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Ex-Eighth Army, The Desert Rats; Vera had been out to the desert to entertain them in the war, so he wasn’t pleased, no. Must have slapped me round the head twenty times on the way home. Mum was more sympathetic though when I explained about the autograph book.’
‘Was she?’
‘Only slapped me round the head ten times.’
CHAPTER 22
There was nothing urgent to do with the case; it felt like it had wound itself up on its own, so Palmer decided he and Gheeta would have the next morning off to relax for a few hours and recharge the batteries. Reg Frome’s initial Forensic Report and the Pathology Report wouldn’t be ready until the afternoon, so the only business would be to update AC Bateman. Get it out of the way first was Palmer’s thoughts as he trudged up to the fifth floor that afternoon. He’d spent the morning at home, not relaxed recharging his batteries but writing out a brief update report on the activities of the previous day; Bateman was a stickler for reports and paperwork and Palmer found it less hassle to just give him something to read, however light and incomplete; otherwise there would be memos flying down from above asking for updates.
The rest of the morning had been spent taking Daisy round Dulwich Park for a walk, and avoiding Benji who was pottering about in his garden with the barbecue and sending puffs of smoke up into the air like a Red Indian message.
He got to the office early in the afternoon and checked in with Claire to see if there was any statement from Gail Alexander posted on file as yet. There wasn’t.
‘Well, that was a bit of a surprise ending.’
Bateman put down the report on his desk and sat back in his chair.
‘I thought it tidied everything up nicely, sir,’ said Palmer, raising his eyebrows questionably.
‘Certainly does that.’
‘You’ll be able to give the press a happy ending, sir.’
‘Happy?’
‘Well, no members of the public were injured, except poor old Fred Knoble; no imminent gang wars on London’s streets; and DCS Palmer triumphs again. Don’t forget to tell them that last bit, sir.’
He gave Bateman a big smile, which was returned.
‘Yes, well I’ll go along with the no public injured and no imminent gang wars, but I think I’ll leave out the bit about DCS Palmer triumphs again. I understand your fan mail is beginning to clog up our post box as it is.’
‘On a serious note sir, I think we ought to hang fire on any press statement until I get the witness statement from Gail Alexander, just to be on the safe side. One thing has been bothering me about the shootings.’
‘Go on?’
‘Why wasn’t she shot? If East killed Frank and had made off, I’m sure she’d put out a big money contract on him; so why didn’t he shoot her too?
‘Frank Alexander shot him before he could?’
‘Maybe, but the sequence of the shots is just bugging me.’
Bateman knew that if something was bugging Palmer, there would be a reason; he may not have liked Palmer that much as a person and would have dearly loved to combine the Serial Murder Squad with Organised Crime, but when it came to doing the job Palmer was top man. If he wasn’t happy about something, his intuitions had come up tops so many times in the past that it was best to let him run with it.
‘Okay,’ Bateman nodded. ‘Let me know when you are happy to close it.’
He stood up, which was the signal that the interview was over. Palmer stood and ferreted around in his pocket, bringing out a pound coin.
‘You haven’t any change for a pound sir, have you?’
‘Change for a pound? Whatever for?’
‘I want to take a couple of coffees down to Sergeant Singh and Claire; you get a better blend up here in your machine than we do downstairs. I’ve got one fifty pence, need two more.’
Bateman checked his change and did the swap. At the machine Palmer fed the first two coins in – milk no sugar for Gheeta, milk with sugar for Claire – and put their coffees on a window sill. He fed the last fifty pence coin in for his cup – black no milk no sugar – and watched as the inviting dark liquid streamed down Trouble was, the cup that should have preceded it didn’t.
When he got back to the Team Room he gave Gheeta and Claire their coffees, sneaked a fifty pence piece from the drawer in his office and joined them with a cup of dishwater from the machine on their floor. Gheeta set a printer buzzing away.
‘Gail Alexander’s witness statement is through, sir; pretty straightforward. Seems East sneaked in from the golf course where he’d been hiding in a greenkeeper’s hut all day. An argument started because Kershaw, who must have been the chap our guys saw go in the front, wanted money, or he’d tell the police Alexander was involved in the robbery. She says he wasn’t and it was all East’s doing, and the first she and her husband knew about it was when it was on the news. East lost his temper with Kershaw and shot him, and when Alexander refused to give East money to get him out of the country, he accused him of grassing – her word not mine – and shot him too; then he was about to do the same to Gail when Frank, who was injured down on the floor, pulled a gun and shot him. Bang, bang, bang: three corpses.’
She pulled a copy off the printer and handed it to Palmer. He read it in silence for a while.
‘Total rubbish. We know Frank Alexander knew what was happening ‘cause he was at the snooker club; and what was he doing going to his office earlier that evening and then onto Freddy Doorman’s? She must know what he was doing; she’s been coached through this. Who is her brief?’
Claire looked at the screen.
‘Bird’s Solicitors, Wandsworth.’
‘Oh right, the top criminal defence solicitor’s firm. Yes, she’s been coached through this alright.
�
��Do you want to bring her in for a chat now then, guv?’ asked Gheeta.
‘No, I don’t think so; not yet, anyway – she’d just stick to this story. We can’t disprove it, and I can’t see her shooting anybody; no reason to. She’s living the good life; if anybody fell into a barrel of pooh and came up smelling of roses, Gail Alexander did. Unless the fingerprints tell a different story, she’s just a witness.’
They didn’t. The fingerprints forensics found confirmed Gail Alexander’s story of who shot whom with which gun.
The coroner held inquests, and as all three deceased were murdered by ‘person or persons known’, the inquests were standard procedure and closed. The bodies were released to the families and Bateman decided to slip the case into ‘non-priority’ status, with a view to closing it when all the reports were filed and signed off. Palmer wasn’t too happy at that, but all he had was a hunch, a feeling that something was not right; and you can’t keep a case open on a hunch.
Robert Kershaw’s funeral was quite well-attended by the South London petty criminal element, although the Knoble family didn’t show. George East’s was very quiet with few mourners, but Frank Alexander’s was the full menu: horse-drawn glass carriage carpeted in white bloom wreaths, second carriage with Gail and family members, then twenty-two stretch limos full of the rich and powerful of the UK crime scene, from London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, including Freddy Doorman and his minders, plus a few of the past ‘names’ from the Richardsons’ gang and others who were still alive. They recounted past demeanours as they packed the church alongside the new kids on the block, who were paying their false respects to Gail while working out which parts of Frank’s empire they could now muscle in on with East out of the way.
Taking full advantage of the occasion, the Met’s Organised Crime Division had eight ‘snappers’ covering the funeral, sending hundreds of digital pictures of known and unknown faces back to be run through the Automatic Facial Recognition database, analysed and filed on hard disks. They also had two video operators live-streaming back to the office from good vantage points they had taken up long before the hearse and mourners arrived.
Palmer had also taken advantage of Alexander’s funeral being on a Saturday to avoid Benji’s barbecue. He sat in the Organised Crime team room with Gheeta and some of the OC officers, watching the big screen as the video streams from the funeral came in.
He had asked Gheeta to come along, although it was a Saturday and the case was closed, as he saw it as an opportunity to introduce her to some of the Organised Crime Division detectives, as he was sure that as soon as Bateman managed to retire him the Serial Murder Squad would be amalgamated with OCD to cut costs.
‘If we could go in now and put this lot behind bars for a few years, we’d solve ninety per cent of UK crime in one go,’ said an OCD Superintendent.
Palmer nudged Gheeta and pointed at the screen.
‘There’s Freddy Doorman. Good heavens, he’s with Chris Lambrianou! I thought he was dead.’
‘Who, guv?’ asked Gheeta.
‘Chris Lambrianou, one of the Lambrianou brothers; part of the Krays’ firm. That’s Eddie Richardson, too – he must be pushing ninety now, and he’s got half his old firm with him. Oh, here come the big boys.’
He pointed out some figures.
‘That’s the Adams family – thought they were all inside, must be on day release. There’s two of the Araf brothers, and, if my eyes don’t deceive me, Mr Noye and Mr Norris in deep conversation with David Hunt and Michael Seed. Seed is rumoured to be the Hatton Garden robber they called ‘Basil’.
He sat back in his chair and let out a long breath.
‘Well, well, well, I had no idea Alexander was riding in such exalted company.’
The OCD Superintendent laughed.
‘Maybe he wasn’t. These top guys use a funeral as a legitimate cover to meet and do business. Probably be a few million quid’s worth of cocaine deals done in the back pews of that church today.’
CHAPTER 23
All was not well; all was definitely not well. As Palmer arrived home he couldn’t turn and park in his front drive because it was blocked... by a fire engine.
He followed the hose from the fire engine up his front garden, along the side path of the house and into the back garden where the firemen were clearing up what was left of two burnt fencing panels and some charred remnants of one of Mrs P.’s prized yellow buddleia shrubs.
Through the burnt-out gap he could see a small crowd of what must have been barbecue guests standing well back on Benji’s lawn – or what was left of it – their plates and wine glasses discarded beside them. Benji and Mrs P. stood in front of them, watching the firemen work; both had blackened faces, and Harry and Meghan on Benji’s tee-shirt had blackened faces too from where he had wiped his hands.
Palmer stood on his side of the gap and looked across to them.
‘How was the barbecue?’ he asked with a sarcastic lilt to his voice.
‘It melted and fell onto the fence,’ came a near-tearful reply from Benji.
‘It what?’
One of the firemen looked over to Palmer.
‘Chinese, cheap metal – low melt point. Should be banned.’
‘Bit late now.’
Mrs P. moved nearer.
‘Those damn rocks got too hot; it was supposed to turn itself down, but the thermostat must have failed. They just exploded and the whole lot sort of collapsed in a molten heap against our fence, and the lot went up like a bonfire.’
‘Anybody hurt?’ Palmer thought he had better ask.
‘No.’
‘Well, I did say you can’t have a barbecue without charcoal. Hot rocks indeed.’
He moved a smouldering piece of fence with his foot.
‘There is a good side to all this.’
‘There is?’ Benji said, brightening up.
‘Yes, you’ve got plenty of charcoal for next time.’
CHAPTER 24
After the funerals the press got bored and moved onto other things. Gheeta and Claire put the final case reports together for Palmer to sign off, and Bateman officially closed it after receiving them; after a fortnight Palmer had to admit he hadn’t anything concrete that could be used as a reason to keep the case active.
He still had that unfinished business feeling, probably because it was unusual to close a case without having some villain being put away for a number of years; and as his cases involved serial murders it was usually a fair number of years. But not this time; that was a strange feeling.
The eureka moment came as he shuffled once more through the logistics of the Alexander house killings. Everything was fine and dandy in the SOCA and Pathology reports, except for one thing. It was in the Pathology report on East. He died from a single shot to the temple with an exit wound at the back of the head; but the diagram of the bullet’s route showed the exit wound below that of the entry wound on the temple. Palmer hurriedly checked the photos of East from the Path Lab. Sure enough, the exit wound was below the entry wound, a good fifteen centimetres below.
Palmer sat back in his chair and pushed it up on its back legs against the wall where it slotted into a large groove he had made over the years. He ran through Gail Alexander’s statement.
‘East was about to shoot me when Frank, who was injured and dying on the floor, pulled a gun out and managed to shoot him...’
Palmers brain went into overdrive.
How can a bullet, fired from the floor upwards into the temple of a man standing up, do a U-turn and exit at a lower place than it entered?
It couldn’t. Gail Alexander was lying.
Bateman took a little convincing to reopen the case and would have to get permissions from above his pay grade to do so, but the Pathology Report clinched it, and he knew that Palmer would be like a dog with a bone until he was satisfied that Gail Alexander was either a killer or had made a mistake in her statement and needed to rectify it. As there was no great urgency, no further l
ives at risk, it took a further fortnight for the powers that be to permit the case to go live again, and for Palmer to set up an interview with Gail Alexander under caution.
The Alexander house was empty, a For Sale sign wired to the gates. The estate agent quoted ‘data protection’ when refusing to give Palmer Gail Alexander’s new place of abode, and Palmer quoted ‘obstructing the police in their line of duty and a night in a cell’, which loosened the agent’s tongue. Gail had put everything into the hands of her solicitors, the sale of the business’s and the house.
The solicitors were more cooperative and quite agreeable to Gail being interviewed personally; they would have to ask her, of course, and the trouble was, she had moved lock stock and barrel to the Alexander house on Tenerife. It was in her name, so why shouldn’t she try and start a new life out there?
It only took a couple of days for the solicitors to come back with an answer: yes, she was quite happy to be interviewed out there.
It took considerably longer for Palmer to get permission – firstly from ‘upstairs’ to take a trip to the Canaries, and secondly from the local police on the island who are split into three separate forces, with each one having to okay the trip, and all wanting to know the reason for the interview as it had taken a long time to rid the Canaries of the bad name it had for being a safe haven for gangsters on the run.
Three weeks later, all was in place. Mrs P. packed a tube of sun cream factor five in Palmer’s overnight bag, although he kept telling her he would be in and out in a day and would not be lounging on a beach.
‘You’ll still be in the hot sun, not worth taking the risk. Skin cancer can kill.’
‘So can dodgy barbecues.’
CHAPTER 25
The day was hot, the sun was blazing down on the Island of Tenerife, and Gail Alexander was relaxing beside the pool at her luxury villa.
Burning Ambition (DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad Book 7) Page 11