by Iain Cameron
‘If you remember, I had a bad meal at the Savoy the last time we went there, so my judgement’s somewhat coloured. Ray’s right though, Lyn, you do make a very fine plate of scrambled eggs.’
After breakfast, they walked down the hall to his study. It was a large room, in keeping with the grandiose dimensions of the house, and around the same size as the one he’d once occupied on the top floor of a tower block in Leadenhall. By anyone’s standards it was an impressive room, with bookcases lining the walls, and a large open area between the door and his desk at the far end of the room. It was floored with wood, while his chrome and glass desk sat on a twenty-five-thousand-pound rug imported from Turkey.
The study in other people’s houses was often the place where they kept up with football and celebrity stories, or placed Amazon orders. In his case, and for the last ten years he had been in business, it had been an extension of his main office in London. He would conduct key meetings at home, meet foreign dignitaries, and sign important documents. Even now, it was to become the nerve centre for his latest business venture. It was also the place where he and Clare had first made love, the cleared desk used for a purpose unintended by the Italian manufacturers.
Clare sat at his shoulder while she looked at the email from the corporate financiers who had brokered the deal to sell all the businesses in the Raybeck group. After reading, she gave him a passionate kiss.
‘Well done you. You’ve at last realised your dream, four years in the making.’ She pulled away just as his hand reached her breast and started to massage. She took a seat at the other side of the desk. It not only stopped him going further, it created a formal barrier, a cue to him that she wanted to talk business.
For the next hour they discussed the next steps they would take in trying to become investors in technology start-ups. As usual, he was gung-ho and keen to make an immediate start, but Clare hauled his reins back. She said they first needed to develop a corporate statement, spelling out the type of companies they wanted to invest in, the relationship they wanted to have with them, and any ethical barriers that would stop them investing. The statement wasn’t only for them, it was also for the target companies, to give them an idea of their financiers’ long-term objectives.
All investments would be made from a vehicle owned by Clare and himself. She had money to invest, as she had taken his advice on several occasions in the past, and had bought shares in companies that he was convinced were expected to rise in value. He had also gifted her ten million when he’d sold his ‘baby’, a chain of two hundred and fifty coffee bars with branches in all major towns and cities in the UK, and the same coverage in many other European countries.
She was the love of his life. The reason why he had initiated an expensive divorce, why he had liquidated all his assets, why he had started a new business with her as an equal partner.
His phone rang. When he saw who it was, he signalled to Clare, who got up and left the room. She would think it was a terse call from his soon-to-be ex-wife, complaining about the behaviour of his lawyers, but it wasn’t. It was Pete Hammond, the man who sorted all the problems he couldn’t.
‘Hi Pete, tell me some good news.’
‘I got what you wanted.’
‘Excellent news. Did it give you any problems, anything I should know about?’
‘Nah, nothing I couldn’t handle.’
‘Great. I’ll meet you at the usual place; you bring the coffee, I’ll bring the doughnuts.’
‘Ha. See you then.’
FIVE
Following the Thursday evening briefing of the murder team, Henderson called his three sergeants: Carol Walters, Harry Wallop, and Vicky Neal, into his office. They sat around a laptop, looking at the CCTV pictures taken by the camera in the reception area of the Jonas Baines building.
They first viewed a drunken Martin Turner arriving. He entered the building and staggered towards the stairs, and if not for the hand reaching out and grasping the banister, would have fallen flat on his face. When he disappeared upstairs they spun the pictures forward, and using a printout from the security system, stopped it seconds before the intruder arrived.
They ran the sequence but spotted nothing of value, as for most of the time, he had his back to the camera. They spun it forward once again and started the playback moments before the intruder came down the stairs.
After a minute or so Henderson said, ‘Stop right there.’
Walters halted the picture and bumped it back a few frames to try to sharpen the image.
‘It’s the best I can do, gov.’
‘This person,’ he said, pointing at the screen, ‘is clad from head to toe in black. For good measure, he’s also wearing a woolly hat and a scarf around his mouth. A protection from the cold outside, for sure, but I also suspect to hide his face. What else can we discern?’
‘Comparing him to the height of the reception desk, he looks taller than average, and well-built; not fat, but muscled,’ Carol Walters said.
‘Do we all think it’s a man?’ Vicky Neal asked.
‘Based on his shape and size, I do,’ Henderson said.
‘What about you, Harry? You’re very quiet?’
‘I suppose so,’ Harry Wallop said. ‘He doesn’t have the build of any woman I know, except maybe a Russian athlete.’
‘You need to get out more,’ Neal said.
‘Anything else visible?’ Henderson asked.
‘What’s that on his hat?’
‘I’ll zoom in.’
‘I’m not sure what that is. Three C’s?’ Neal said.
‘Ah, I recognise it,’ Henderson said. ‘It’s the Canterbury Clothing Company. They’re big in Rugby circles.’
‘The letters are in the shape of an animal.’
‘It’s a kiwi. Canterbury are from New Zealand.’
They stared at the screen for another half-minute.
‘I don’t think there’s much more we can extract from this,’ Henderson said. He looked around at the faces of his colleagues, and they nodded. The laptop was pushed to one side.
‘What do we know about the entry card used by the perpetrator?’ he asked.
‘It belonged to a lawyer at Jonas Baines called Trevor Robinson,’ Neal said. ‘He reported it missing yesterday.’
‘The name Trevor Robinson rings a bell. Ah yes, isn’t he the guy who shared an office with our victim, Martin Turner?’
Walters flicked through her notebook and scanned several entries. ‘Yeah. They shared an office and both are involved in criminal defence. Martin being the senior man.’
‘What’s the age difference?’
Walters consulted her notebook again. ‘The victim’s forty-five, Robinson, thirty-three.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s assume this: Trevor is a lad about town, and while in a bar or a club, he leaves his jacket on a stool. When he’s not looking, someone dips his pocket and takes his key card.’
‘Sounds plausible.’
‘Is it though?’ Henderson said. ‘How would the thief know which building the card was for? Most of these things don’t bear a company name. Do the ones at Jonas Baines?’
‘I don’t know,’ Neal said, ‘but I’ll find out. What if the killer saw him coming out of Jonas Baines and pickpocketed him, or removed it from his abandoned jacket after following him to a pub?’
‘Possible. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be easier if someone was visiting their office, and either took it from Robinson’s jacket if it was perhaps hanging on a peg, or picked it up from his desk?’
Neal’s face lit up. ‘If so, all we need to do is find out the names of everyone who was in their office the day Trevor thought his card went missing. One of them will be our killer.’
‘Maybe not our killer, Vicky, but perhaps the person who stole Robinson’s entry card. One thing at a time.’
‘One way or another, it sounds like a decent lead.’
‘It does. Vicky, follow this up. Take Sally and interview Trevor Robins
on. Explore the issue of his missing entry card, and also try to find out how deep the victim’s enmity was towards him.’
‘You think it might have been him?’
‘Joanna Woodford told us Turner and Robinson didn’t get on; I think thoroughly disliked were the words she used.’
‘It’s a bit like pissing on your own doorstep, don’t you think?’ Harry Wallop said. ‘I mean, if it was him, he must have known he’d be a suspect. One, because it was his security card that was used by the perp, and two, because he shared an office with our victim.’
‘There’s a number three, Harry,’ Henderson said. ‘He’s also a defence lawyer and knows how these things work, but domestic murders pan out in much the same way. If a woman is found dead, the husband will be the first person in the frame. He knows this before he murders her, but he still does it.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I can imagine another scenario,’ Walters said, ‘where Robinson is working late. Turner comes in pissed, they’re both tired and irritable, and after an argument about something, Robinson snaps and stabs him. He then calls a mate to use his card and pretend there’s been an intruder.’
‘We’ve got a list of all the movements in and out of their building for that day and night,’ Neal said. ‘I’ll go through it and track Trevor Robinson’s, find out if he left work at the normal time or not.’
‘Good. Let’s move on and take a look at the criminals Martin Turner was responsible for defending.’
‘The list they gave us,’ Wallop said, ‘was for cases over the last five years. They can supply other years if required. What we’ve done is compile a spreadsheet, listing the name of the criminal, the crime they committed, the outcome, and the criminal’s opinion of their defence.’
‘Okay.’
‘We’ve split this into three: one for major crimes, that is, those facing an inordinately long or life sentence; intermediate crimes, a ten-year-plus sentence; and lesser crimes, fewer than ten years.’
‘I like that approach,’ Henderson said. ‘Let’s start with the bad boys.’
‘First up is John Pope. Accused of murdering his business partner over a land sale. Turner could do little about compelling forensics, and he got life. Died of cancer in prison nine months back. We’ve looked at reports of the story in the media, and nowhere does he criticise his defence team, nor was he upset about the result. He expected it, he said.’
‘Did his family or associates express any disquiet about the outcome at the time?’
‘We couldn’t find any evidence.’
‘Okay, put him to one side for the time being.’
‘Next is Bruce Nolan, a scrapyard owner from Newhaven. Blood dripping from a crushed car brought forensics into his scrapyard, and they found it belonged to a man who had tried to blackmail him. Nolan had been having an affair with his wife. He claimed he had nothing to do with the murder and that it was only the ineptness of his defence, in the form of Martin Turner, that had got him sent down.’
Henderson remembered the case now. The Argus enjoyed a field day with grisly headlines and puns about being left on the scrapheap.
‘Is this the first chink in Turner’s armour?’ he asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I was wondering how a guy who drinks nearly every night, and on occasion sleeps on the floor of his office, manages to function in his day job. I imagine there are days when he doesn’t, and maybe this was one of those.’
‘Could be. I don’t know if Nolan was bad tempered and irascible before being accused of murder,’ Wallop continued, ‘but according to prison reports, he was like a bear with a sore head behind bars. He constantly berated his lawyers to launch an appeal. Eventually they did, and he won.’
‘Put him on the interview list, Harry.’
‘With pleasure, gov.’
‘Who’s next?’
‘Dominic Green.’
‘I don’t think anyone in Sussex will forget him,’ Henderson said, ‘although I think it was before your time here, Vicky. A top drug baron with a network of smaller dealers all over Sussex. Owned a manor house near Horsted Keynes and was, by all accounts, untouchable.’
‘He was facing life for kidnap, drug importing, and being an accessory to murder,’ Wallop said, ‘but good work by Turner got this reduced to six years. As we know now, he’s a free man, and running a food business close to where I live in Shoreham.’
‘As much as Green should feel thankful to Turner and his barrister, I don’t trust him one bit. Put him on the interview pile.’
‘Righto. Next up is Raymond Schofield.’
‘I remember this one,’ Walters said, ‘it was in all the papers at the time.’
‘No wonder,’ Wallop said, ‘he’s a multimillionaire who, at the time, ran a company called Raybeck Leisure Plc, an international business with hotels and coffee shops, six marinas, and a chain of health clubs. To try and sweet talk Allan Blake into selling his health clubs, Schofield took him on a trip aboard his yacht. While off the coast of Bretagne in France, they hit a storm and Blake disappeared over the side. His body has never been recovered. When Schofield returned to port and reported the incident, Blake’s blood was found on the deck and in the main cabin. Schofield was accused of murder, the CPS claiming Blake was reluctant to sell, but now with him out of the way, his widow had agreed to do so.’
‘He can’t have any complaints against Turner, can he? If I remember right, he was acquitted.’
‘You’re right. He heaped praise on his barrister, and on Turner in particular for all the detailed work he had done to counter the impact of the prosecution’s forensic information.’
‘Put him on the aside pile with the first guy,’ Henderson said. ‘Even though we’re dismissing them now, they’re gone but not forgotten. If anything comes up in the investigation to connect them, we’ll haul them back out.’
For the next couple of hours, with the help of coffee and some sandwiches brought over from the staff restaurant, they ploughed through the rest of the list. It wasn’t a large number of individuals, as they were looking only at those represented by Martin Turner. The firm had a large team of other criminal lawyers and paralegals who would have dealt with many more cases.
Before setting out to review the client analysis, the logic behind it had been thrashed out. They expected the motivation to kill Turner would have come from a serious criminal who believed it was their lawyer’s fault they served time in prison. By the end of the review, several people fell into this category: Bruce Nolan from the life sentence group, and six others from the ten-years-plus group. With the addition of Dominic Green, it gave them eight persons of interest. What Henderson and his team needed to do now was track them down and have them answer some serious questions.
SIX
A loud beep-beep-beep resonated around the yard as the car transporter reversed. The noise brought Bruce Nolan out of the Portakabin that served as the office, a resting place for his workers, and a place where they could eat meals.
He looked around but couldn’t see Pedro. He cupped his hands. ‘Pedro you motherfucker. Where the hell are you?’
A flushing sound came from the Portaloo away to the right. The door was flung open and the man in question came out, hauling his trousers up while trying to stop his copy of The Sun flying off into the wild blue yonder in the folds of a whipping wind.
‘Can’t a man have a sheet in peace around here?’ Santiago Rodrigo González,’ said, his hands trying to add emphasis to his words, but lost inside flapping pages of newspaper.
Pedro, which they called him for short, had arrived in the UK over ten years ago, but still hadn’t lost his Bilbao accent.
‘Not when there’s a truck needing unloading. Get your arse moving.’
The transporter contained twelve car wrecks. It wasn’t possible to determine where one started and another one finished in the untidy tangle of mangled plastic and metal, but Nolan had seen the invoice.
The del
ivery was a mix of cars that had been involved in bad smashes and written-off by insurance companies, and those that had come to the end of their useful lives. To those in the scrap business, a new car wrecked in a serious crash was a goldmine. Often, parts of the engine were still intact, and so were fuel and oil pumps, alternators, and sometimes even radiators could be extracted and sold.
In addition, the catalytic convertor, containing valuable palladium and platinum, could often be salvaged, as well as some of the electronic gear inside. He knew a guy on the lookout for any decent ECU, the Engine Control Unit, the electronic circuits that controlled most of a vehicle’s systems. What he did with them, Nolan didn’t know; all he cared about was that he paid top dollar for any still intact.
The old bangers were good for nothing, other than putting them in Big Daddy, the crusher that could turn them into a cube of metal. These were sold for a reasonable sum, but nothing compared to a good insurance write-off.
Nolan returned to the office wondering where Jake had gone now there was work for him to do.
He was about to sit down at his desk when he heard a noise behind him. Jake was lying on the settee at the back of the office, reading a novel.
‘Jake, what the fuck are you doing in here?’
‘Taking a break, boss. I spent a couple of hours this morning stripping copper out of all those thick wires we got from that old power station in Essex. I’m knackered.’
‘You can sleep when you’re dead. Get out there and help Pedro. A transporter’s just turned up.’
With reluctance he got up, bitching about his job and his shitty boss in Serbian. Nolan was no linguist, but he had heard the words so often he knew what the insolent sod was on about.
‘You’re lucky to have a job, you lazy bastard.’
Jake slammed the door in protest. Nolan went back to what he’d been doing. He took a seat behind his worn and scratched desk, rescued from a skip, and opened up the lid of his laptop. He loaded the couple of websites he used most often to sell scrap metal to see if he could get a good price for the six kilos of copper he now had in the store.