‘This is where I would like to put the most effort. Now while we only have the witness report of Ms Mockett to put the Toyota near the scene of the crime on that Sunday morning, we certainly do know that a vehicle belonging to Morag Fairburn passed through a number of ANPR cameras within ten miles of Ashtead Common, and finally we have managed to get some CCTV images of the driver.’ He taped up on the whiteboard the best still image they had from the filling station, which showed a side view of the man. ‘This, in my view, is our best lead on the man who killed Mrs Roy.’
‘He’s trying to disguise himself,’ Carl Hoskins said. ‘The hat pulled low, the sunglasses and the beard.’
‘That’s how you dress at the weekend isn’t it, Carl?’ Hodges asked.
‘Ha ha,’ Hoskins said. ‘At least I don’t have Prince Harry’s bumfluff on my chin.’
‘All right,’ Gillard interrupted. ‘Our driver appears to be of Middle Eastern or Indian appearance, unless he has managed to disguise that too. My question is this: it can’t be Harry Roy, because he was still away in India getting his wedding planned. Any other ideas?’
‘Deepak Tripathi,’ said Carl.
‘Okay,’ Gillard conceded.
‘Zayan Lal, the wedding planner?’ said Claire.
‘Can’t be. Harry said they were travelling together for the wedding arrangements.’ Gillard turned to Hoskins. ‘Carl, can you check his arrival with Border Force at Heathrow. Just to be on the safe side?’
‘Righto.’
‘And he, along with Deepak Tripathi, are the two people we don’t have a DNA swab from. Can you make that a priority, Carl?’ The detective constable nodded his agreement.
Claire Mulholland was sitting with arms folded staring at her boss. ‘Craig, given that we’ve charged Waddington, but we don’t believe he did it, why hasn’t he been released?’
This was the question that Gillard had been dreading. He didn’t want to pass the buck to Alison Rigby, but didn’t want to take responsibility for it himself either. ‘It wasn’t my decision.’
‘So that’s why you didn’t invite Christina McCafferty to this meeting?’ Claire asked. ‘So we’re still feeding the press the line that Waddington is guilty, even though we’re pretty sure he is innocent?’
All the other officers turned to stare at her. ‘I shouldn’t feel too sorry for him,’ Hodges said. ‘He’s a nasty bit of work and has got some previous.’
‘No mate,’ Hoskins said to Hodges, poking his colleague in the chest. ‘Miscarriage of bloody justice. Free the Ashtead One. That would be on my placard.’
‘Spare me the sarcasm, you two,’ Claire said.
‘All right, everybody. We’ve got two days. That’s when Waddington gets released. By then I want somebody else in the crosshairs.’
Shireen lifted her arm. ‘Before we finish, I just want to update you on the financial aspects. As you know, Empire of Spice Plc has a huge debt they might struggle to pay. I got a call first thing this morning from the Serious Fraud Office. They don’t want to tread on our toes but they want to know what we’ve done regarding the financial aspects of the case.’
‘I’m more than happy to work with them,’ Gillard said. ‘Let’s set up a meeting. In the meantime, I want Deepak Tripathi here for an interview, which should cook two chickens with one tandoor. Claire, can you set up warrants for his phone, and entry to his home in the case of his absence, so we can pick up some DNA?’
‘OK. Maybe he’ll turn up at Mrs Roy’s funeral this afternoon?’
Gillard chuckled. ‘If he does, we’ll be there to catch him.’
‘Huh. I never get to go to a party during work time,’ Hodges complained.
‘All right, everyone. Claire, I want you to keep your eyes peeled for Deepak, if he has the nerve to turn up. Otherwise I just want you to see what intelligence we can pick up.’
‘Gossip, you mean,’ Hodges whispered to Hoskins, who grinned back at him.
Gillard dismissed the meeting, then beckoned Tweedledum and Tweedledee over. ‘Enough of the jokes. We don’t have much time, you each have your tasks.’
* * *
DC Colin Hodges took only forty minutes to establish that Deepak Tripathi was probably not in Sri Lanka as he had claimed. There were only a handful of airlines offering direct flights, and neither Heathrow or Gatwick Border Force could show a check-in using his passport. To prove it beyond doubt would be a lot more work, Hodges grumbled. Further effort was saved by Research Intelligence Officer DC Rob Townsend, who had tracked Deepak’s mobile with the help of the service provider. The phone was still in Surrey, had been moving around, and had been used for calls to Harry Roy and texts to his ex-wife, Prisha. ‘Triangulation shows that he was in the vicinity of his own home at ten o’clock this morning.’ Townsend looked at his watch. That was ninety minutes ago.
‘Where is that?’ Hodges asked.
Townsend looked at his printout. ‘Oxshott.’
Hodges sighed. ‘Bloody hell, another poverty-stricken individual. Okay, let’s get uniforms to pick him up and then we can get CSI in to give his place the once over.’
* * *
Gillard and Claire were in the unmarked Vauxhall on the A3 heading for London for the funeral of Mrs Roy when they got the message from control that a patrol car had arrived at Deepak’s palatial home, which was just a few miles north. They had a warrant to enter but there seemed to be no one about. ‘Any sign of his car?’ Gillard asked the operator. ‘It’s a midnight blue Bentley Bentayga four-by-four, with a personalised number plate, and tinted windows.’ The operator said she would check.
He had no sooner clicked off the hands-free, when Claire tapped the window. ‘Look, Craig!’
It was the exact car he had just described, tearing off the M25 and joining his carriageway. DP4K was part of the plate. There was heavy traffic, but the Bentley aggressively pushed through the A3’s left-hand lane and accelerated hard in the overtaking lane. Gillard needed to exceed eighty to catch up. He didn’t use the blues, which would alert his quarry.
‘If he spots us, we’re going to struggle, Claire. That is one seriously quick car.’
After a couple of miles the Bentley cut back sharply in front of a Ford Transit, taking the slip road for the A425. The detectives followed at a discreet distance, and alerted control. They were told that the nearest patrol car was twenty minutes away.
It was down to them.
At the queue for the roundabout, the Bentley was in the left-hand lane; the middle lane had a queue of five, so Gillard raced up the empty right lane, and hit the blues and the siren. Every vehicle but the Bentley waited, including those already on the roundabout, allowing the detective to get in, then cut across to the left. That was when Deepak really hit the gas, heading west, overtaking a lorry down the middle of the road, with an oncoming tow truck bearing down.
‘Christ, that’s dangerous,’ Claire exclaimed.
Gillard’s police-tuned Vauxhall was fast, but could not match the Bentley. It was years since he had done the police pursuit driving course, but he now needed to rethink his assumption that Deepak was unlikely to be the boy racer type. The Bentley failed to complete the overtake, instead braking hard and with smoking tyres turning sharp right just in front of the tow truck into a B road leading north-east. It was a clever ploy, but Gillard knew the road. It was a dead straight cut-through which went past Old Burhill golf course, perfect for the Bentley to use its performance. He slowed and turned right after the tow truck had passed, then floored the accelerator to try to make up the half mile of lost ground. The Bentley was already a dot in the distance.
Deepak clearly knew the area, which was within a few miles of his home. He turned off right, onto Burwood Road and when, half a minute later Gillard did likewise, the Bentley had vanished. There were a number of residential streets he could have turned down, both left and right, with large – in some cases enormous – homes. Exploring these would take some time. He stopped, turned off the blues, and called i
n his position. He asked control to check in with Rob Townsend to see how recent a location check they could make on Deepak’s phone.
The two detectives looked at each other. This wasn’t what they had expected. They were both dressed in traditional white for the Hindu funeral. Gillard had complained to Claire that his cream trousers and beige jacket made him look like a minor league cricket substitute – not ideal attire for operational action.
While he was waiting for Townsend’s response, the Bentley re-emerged onto the street from the right a couple of hundred yards ahead and turned right, heading away from him towards Hersham.
‘Righto,’ Gillard said, accelerating hard, with siren and blues on again.
‘He’s certainly giving us the runaround,’ Claire said. The Bentley was speeding, but less than before, and ignored the pursuit. Gillard was right on his tail, unable to see inside because of the tinted rear window. For half a mile the traffic going in the other direction did not allow for an overtake, and the Bentley wouldn’t make room. They finally managed to get past on the outskirts of Hersham, and by pulling in gradually brought their quarry to a stop.
Finally, looking in the rear-view mirror Gillard was able to see the driver.
A woman. A young, very attractive sunglassed blonde with big hair.
Where the hell was Deepak?
* * *
Gillard emerged from the vehicle, while Claire called in their position and asked for backup. He made his way towards the Bentley, indicating to the woman that she should step out of the vehicle. She did so, slowly and quite elegantly. She was tall and slender, wearing designer jeans, white tennis shoes, but a rather moth-eaten looking pullover with bits of grass on it.
The detective approached cautiously, his warrant card held out ahead of him. ‘Is this your car, madam?’
‘No,’ she said, folding her arms and leaning against it.
‘Whose is it, may I ask?’
‘It’s Deepak’s. It’s all right, he said I could borrow it.’ Gillard peered into the vehicle, and opened the rear passenger door to check there was no one else within. He then asked her to recite the number plate, which she could not. He asked her name and address.
‘I’m Victoria Carlton, and I’m his girlfriend. I was just going to the shops—’
‘—at 97 miles per hour?’
‘I’d run out of milk,’ she said, with a more than a hint of irritation in her voice.
‘You must be very thirsty, madam,’ Gillard said. ‘Or are you an amateur racing driver?’
‘What are you talking about? I wasn’t speeding. I just pulled out of my own road a minute ago.’ She pointed behind her, then gave her address, which was on the side road from which she had pulled out.
‘So you deny that you drove this vehicle from Mr Tripathi’s house half an hour ago?’
‘Absolutely. He just drove over to me, and rang me—’
‘Deepak just drove to your house?’
‘Yes. I was doing some gardening, but he asked me to just drive down to Hersham to get some milk.’
‘And that was just a minute ago?’ Gillard realised the company director had made a monkey out of him.
‘Yes.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘He’s probably at my house. Why? What’s he done?’
Gillard didn’t answer the question, but called in to control the news that Deepak was not in the car and had given them the slip. He watched the woman lock the Bentley, then shepherded her into the Vauxhall, and drove off to her home, which turned out to be the only normal-sized three-bedroom semi in the street.
‘Oh,’ she said, as they pulled up outside.
‘What?’
‘He must have taken my car. It’s not here.’
Gillard had suspected something like this. ‘Quick, what’s the registration number?’
She looked at him in amazement. ‘I don’t know, he’s only just given it me. It’s white—’
‘Make? Model?’ He was starting to lose patience with her.
She just stared back. ‘I’m sorry, my mind has just gone blank. I think it’s a Honda. Japanese anyway.’
‘Do you have the registration documents or any paperwork in the house?’ Claire asked, walking her towards her the front door. When she got there, the woman patted her pockets, and then looked at the detectives. ‘Oh, sorry, I think I left my house keys in the Bentley.’
Gillard gave her the kind of stare that would melt steel. With every moment, Deepak was getting further away.
‘Where’s your phone?’
She extracted a state-of-the-art, gold iPhone. ‘Be careful with it. It was a present,’ she said, proudly, offering it to him.
‘Please ring him, now,’ he said.
Victoria was genuinely trembling now, but still hadn’t given up playing for time. She claimed to have forgotten her PIN. ‘I’m so sorry, this is all such a shock, my mind is just a blank.’ She tried to share a self-deprecatory laugh with them, but the detectives weren’t in the mood. It took a full three minutes before she was finally able to access the phone and pull up Deepak’s number, giving the impression of someone who’d never used a smartphone before. She stabbed her finger at the number and waited, with the phone to her ear. ‘It’s switched off,’ she said brightly, offering the phone to him. ‘Would you like to leave him a message?’
Gillard left a short message asking Deepak to ring Surrey Police, adding: ‘Mr Tripathi, If you’re thinking of flying out of the country, we flagged up your passport for an immediate arrest by border control.’ After he hung up he looked at his own watch. Victoria had bought her boyfriend fifteen minutes of valuable time, and at the speed he drove, he could have made twenty miles or more on them. Gillard was relieved to see the arrival of a patrol car, so he could hand over this nuisance of a woman to them. He had to admit she had played her hand pretty shrewdly. They would probably not even be able to get her for wasting police time.
* * *
Colin Hodges and Rob Townsend were furiously working the phones, trying to co-ordinate more mobile units with Gillard’s location, and get a more timely fix for Deepak Tripathi’s mobile phone. The latest data Townsend had was fifteen minutes old, and quite sketchy, but seemed to reinforce the idea that the company director had been travelling at speed east along the A3 towards London. The two detectives stared at Hodges’ computer, which showed the Google map they had just been emailed and which had cell tower locations superimposed.
Hodges’ desk phone rang, and he snatched it up, expecting a further location update. Instead it was the female desk sergeant at Epsom, saying she had a man called Zayan Lal who had walked in. ‘It’s in response to a request from you for a DNA sample, something to do with the Roy case. He has also brought some flight paperwork and his passport.’
‘That’s great,’ Hodges replied. ‘Can you swab him, and get it couriered off to the lab as urgent?’
‘Okay. What you want to do with the flight paperwork?’
‘Just check through it and see that it matches the Border Force e-gate record.’ He gave her the case number, and asked her to photocopy the documents Lal had brought in. He thanked her and ended the call.
‘Who was that?’ Townsend asked.
‘One of Harry Roy’s mates,’ Hodges replied. ‘Now, have we got anything more on Tripathi?’
‘No. They just emailed me to say the phone’s been switched off.’
‘Last position?’
‘Heading west on the A30, just before the M25 junction.’
The two officers looked at each other.
‘He’s going to do a runner, isn’t he?’ Hodges asked.
Townsend nodded.
‘Right, I’ll do Heathrow, Luton and Stansted,’ Hodges said. ‘You do Gatwick and London City Airport.’
‘I’m going to start by requesting the metadata on his phone,’ Townsend said. ‘We’ve got the warrant, but usually takes two to three hours to get it through the service provider lawyers. I want to find
out if he has any e-tickets on his phone.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Shame we don’t have his actual phone, we could have put it through the data kiosk and have the dates in half an hour,’ Townsend said.
‘Such is life,’ Hodges said. They both picked up the phones and went to work.
* * *
Mortlake Crematorium is a low-rise art deco masterpiece, right on the southern edge of the Thames near Chiswick Bridge. It has become a favoured place for Hindu cremations because of the possibility of spreading the ashes of the deceased in London’s great river, the nearest approximation to the Ganges available locally. After a chorus of pleas from the family, the cremation of Mrs Tanvi Roy was finally taking place ten days after her death, following approval from the coroner that all forensic samples that might be required had been taken.
Gillard and Claire, stuck in traffic in the rain and fearing they would be late, parked at Teddington and took the overground train to Mortlake for the last few miles. Approaching on foot, they saw the mourners clustered by the gates, a great sea of white clothing and colourful umbrellas, gathered around three or four black limousines. Claire, in a conservatively cut white knee-length dress with matching pashmina and peep-toe shoes, was a more fashionable figure than Gillard, whose cream trousers had just been splashed by a passing taxi.
At the gates they spotted Kiara, who stood out from the crowd in a dazzling feathered creation and stiletto-heeled white boots.
‘My God,’ Claire said to Gillard. ‘I’ve heard about that dress. It’s apparently made from sustainably-collected swans’ down. Retails on her website for £7,000.’
‘Sustained plucking presumably leading to persistent hissing,’ he replied.
Kiara approach them and thanked them profusely for coming. ‘We’ve finally got a chance to say goodbye to her. It seems such a long time ago that we heard the awful news, yet it was less than two weeks,’ she said. ‘All our lives have changed irretrievably because of this one act of senseless violence.’ A woman in a sari approached with a brass dish heaped with bright red powder. Kiara dextrously anointed both the detective’s foreheads with the vermilion dot, or bindi, which denotes blood sacrifice.
The Body in the Snow Page 24