15
In my experience, outside of Calloway at least, cops were the absolute worst in calling people back. I had left a message and e-mail for DI Dunsmore shortly after meeting up with Ian, but she had yet to follow up. I found her pic on LinkedIn and spent the morning pacing outside the Met HQ in Whitehall, keeping one appreciative shop owner in more than a few quid for a coffee and two refills. Finally, shortly before 11, Dunsmore appeared, exiting the building and chatting with a colleague. I made my move as she said good bye and stepped to her car.
“So you’re Grayle,” she said after I introduced myself.
“Afraid so. Got a minute?”
“Barely.” She glanced at my coffee. “But then again, I wouldn’t say no to one of those.”
“My pleasure,” I said, and we stepped across to the caf. I tipped big, earning an appreciative smile from the owner. She carefully poured half a packet of sugar into her coffee, stirring it in slowly. I waited until she was done. We sat.
“You know the Duclos wife has hired me to help with the investigation,” I said. “So I’m just looking to introduce myself, swap info, see if we can’t help each other out a bit.”
“We typically advise against families seeking private assistance in these matters.”
“That why you dodged my voicemail?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing discourteous. Just not a lot going on with this case as of yet, and lots going on with others.”
Dunsmore was very tall—I’d say pushing 6 feet—and had shoulders broad enough that her pantsuit jacket was struggling a bit at the seams. She clearly had some serious athletic experience in her past.
“Am I right in assuming you’re lacking a sense of urgency here, DI?” I asked.
Again, another shake of the head.
“It’s all about resource allocation,” she said. “You know what happens when someone reports a missing person to us?”
“My previous missing person experience was a bit off the proverbial track, so you’ll have to fill me in a bit.”
“We ask if the person is in immediate danger. Mrs. Duclos said yes. We contacted her immediately, interviewed her, but frankly, I can’t see any risk. Therefore, the case loses precedence to other life-and-death investigations.”
“She seems pretty busted up about it.”
“Of course,” Dunsmore said, not without sympathy. “It’s her husband. But look at it from our perspective, Mr. Grayle. A rich man goes missing, cleans out his bank accounts, and leaves not a single message of his whereabouts. In our experience, that means he doesn’t want to be found.”
“Yeah, I get that, but… why?”
She smiled a bit, and I wondered if Dunsmore wasn’t enjoying feeling like my learned elder.
“Lots of reasons. Running from debt. Running from responsibilities. Running from a life he may not want. He wouldn’t be the first wealthy, middle-aged guy to pull this move.”
“So, as for the current status of this investigation, you’d describe it as—”
“What do you have?” she interrupted. “You got anything new or interesting on this?”
I put on a practiced air of resignation, which was, to be fair, only half-faked.
“Not a thing. Guy was a loner. Not likely he had any real enemies. But like you said—maybe he just wanted to disappear. I read something in The Atlantic about this—male mental health issues at an all-time high, massive upswing in depression, lots of guys doing themselves in.”
“Well, there’s no evidence that he killed himself,” she countered. “He did clean out his accounts, remember. So he obviously has some sort of plan, or at the very least, the goal of staying alive for at least the foreseeable future.”
“So… we’ll find him when we find him?” I asked.
“I’m confident he’ll turn up, eventually. We are investigating, but for now—not our top priority.”
“Well, thanks for this,” I said. “I know I kept you, so I appreciate it.”
“No worries, happy to help,” she said. “But please do keep us posted on anything you might uncover in your own pursuits.” She handed me her card.
I made a show of studying it.
“How’d you become a copper, DI Dunsmore?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “All the usual reasons, I suppose. Wanted to help people. Wanted to make a difference. Liked Prime Suspect.”
“I hear ya. How do any of us become the things we end up being?”
“One thing just follows another. It’s a bit scary, really.”
“I think that every kid should get that as a warning, soon as they turn 13, crocheted on a pillow or maybe printed on a t-shirt,” I said.
“To mark the end of childhood. I get it.”
I glanced at her left hand. Dunsmore was married.
“You got kids?” I asked.
“Two. Boy and girl, 10 and 8. You?”
“Girl. 14. She lives in Switzerland with her mom. Geneva.”
“That’s tough.”
I shrugged. “This is where a lesser man might say ‘it is what it is.’”
“You’re taking the high road. Commendable.”
“21st century families aren’t all Rockwell paintings,” I said. “Besides, I hear you’re a bit of an up-and-comer. Must be tough on your family life, too.”
“Balance is key,” she said, measuring her words. “Balance is everything.”
She fell silent. I had possibly overstepped. I backtracked.
“Well, again, thanks,” I said, standing and extending my hand. She shook it. Firm grip, and the hands were nowhere near soft.
“You’re my first PI,” she said. “We don’t usually overlap with you lot that often.”
“Well, I used to chase cheating spouses. Made a pretty good living from it.”
“I had heard that was pretty lucrative. Why the change?”
“I thought I had enough of seeing people at their worst.”
“So what’s different now?” she asked. We stepped back into the street and I walked her to her car, her keys jingling in stride.
“Not much, really,” I said. “But that's OK. The universe doesn’t care about our attempts at self-improvement. And neither do our bills.”
16
Later that night. Ayesha had arrived and I buzzed her in—apparently there was progress in her tail job on Bowering’s bartender that needed reporting, as well as an update on the Yannick Duclos’ financials. I was online, researching as much as I could about Mrs. Duclos—I felt there might be more there for me to dig into, following Cranston’s comment. I was also, admittedly, restless.
Despite entering what I considered a relatively tidy apartment, Ayesha rolled her eyes as she slid into my well-worn easy chair.
“You live like a student,” she said, surveying the bland interior and piles of old CDs and magazines on the floor.
“Hey, you’ve been here before,” I said. “Why the sudden scorn?”
“We know each other a bit now. I don’t have to play super-nice all the time.”
“Speaking of—” I said, nodding towards her takeaway bag. She had picked up a chicken burger and Coke from the shop across the street.
“What?” she said. “You’re big boy. Get your own treats.”
“Well, it’d be nice to welcome visitors bearing gifts on occasion.”
“I’m not you guest, and I am not your secretary,” she said. “I am, however, on the clock.”
I carried my laptop form my desk to my couch, clearing a neat row of empty diet soda cans and a bowl of crisps from the coffee table before laying it down.
“My attention is yours, wholly undivided,” I said. “Let ‘er rip.”
“So, Bowering’s guy checks out. Pretty straight kid. Has a girlfriend, but no outrageous social issues I can see. Goes to work, goes home, sees his mates a night or two at another pub.”
“OK, then,” I said. “He’s hardly positioned to be brought into a life of crime an
d underworld intrigue.”
“Agreed. From my observation, he seems resistant to temptation.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, he lives with another guy,” she said. She opened her notes on her phone. “Kid named Fenske. This young man is a whole other matter.”
She then took a hearty bite out of her burger. Say what you want about combat veterans’ occasional lapses in social graces—they could tell a story. Really knew how to let the suspense build.
“Go on,” I finally prodded.
She took a slug of her soda, just to irk me for a sec before jumping back in.
“Fenske is not nearly as well-behaved a young man. He has a lot of women coming in and out of the place, plus he deals. He uses a bit too, but nothing too crazy.”
“What’s he dealing?”
“Coke and H,” she said. “His personal use is limited to coke. Maybe a little molly.”
“So, standard young degenerate stuff. What’s the issue? You said Raynott’s squeaky clean.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” she said, balling up her wax paper and again sipping deeply from the soda. “Fenske’s supplier is a guy I know from some other jobs. This guy, Marshall Zanetti, is not an aspiring criminal. He is the real deal. And he moves a lot of heroin in this town. He and his crew have gone toe to toe with the Somalis and have carved out a pretty big swath of the recreational users in the posher SW postcodes.”
“Posh like West Brompton,” I murmured.
She nodded, smiling wide.
“So Duclos was using?”
“Oh, that I don’t know. But I do know who Zanetti gets a lot of his product from.”
“Do tell.”
“The name Klodjan Copta mean anything to you?”
Copta—billionaire yacht owner, Rolex wearer and Turkish cuisine enthusiast.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does. That was the guy Duclos was friends with. The photo I told you about.”
“I know,” she said, clearly pleased with herself. “I pulled a chunk of his financials, too.” She pulled a folder from her bag and handed it to me.
“How’d you get this?” I asked.
“Friend of a friend. That’s all I can say.”
“Friend of a friend, as in, this is legally in your possession…?”
She leaned back in the chair, shaking her empty cup to hear the ice rattle. “Oh Thad,” she said. “You’re adorable.”
I closed the folder and affected what I hoped was a non-adorable hardness to my face.
“Why don’t you just give me the quick-and-dirty?” I asked.
“Well, he has a lot of irons in the means of production fire,” she said, unfazed. “Shipping, mainly, but also some tech stuff. Real estate, too. From the looks of it, a lot of it is all legitimate. But he has been moving H for a long time and burying it in at least four shell companies. He might be a proud member of the ruling class now, but heroin is what got him started.”
I had a sudden flashback to Copta’s driver, Magnus, realizing that the man with the quiet demeanor and hawk-like gaze was also his protection.
“Might be something, might be nothing,” I said quietly, more to myself than to her.
“You kidding? Your financial whiz Duclos goes missing, and he’s friends with this guy. This guy, who he and his firm may been helping to keep a lot of money away from any authorities’ prying eyes.”
“So, what? Duclos was a user, became a problem, and they had to get rid of him?”
“Sure, that’s one option.”
The other landed, hard, in my still-tender gut.
“Or he screwed up,” I said. “So they got rid of him.”
She leaned forward, placing hands on top her knees.
“Thad,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re getting paid here, but I hope it’s a lot.”
“It could be OK,” I said. “In terms of the pay out.”
“I just say it because right now your big lead is that the missing Duclos was maybe clipped following his possible deep involvement in a heroin money laundering ring.”
“Yeah, I got it,” I said. “You enjoying the dramatics?”
“Hey, I thought you’d be happy. This is some good legwork here.”
“It is, for sure. Well done. But I’ll make the decisions regarding the direction of these investigations.”
She gave a nod of assent. Ayesha, to her credit, was never quick to take offense or stand on ceremony.
“You still thinking the wife angle?” she asked.
“Just something about how Cranston looked,” I said. “Like there was a lot more to it all on the homefront.”
“Husbands kill wives,” Ayesha said. “Wives don’t typically kill husbands. Plus, there’s the money. He cleaned out their accounts.”
I shrugged. “Maybe if someone did him in, they forced him to transfer all that cash.”
“I suppose a PIN is small beer weighed against getting killed.”
“Which we don’t know even happened.”
“Sure,” she said, stretching. “I’m not entirely sold on the murder angle, either. But this is what we’ve got. So: who you gonna hit up first?”
“Mrs. Duclos,” I said. “It’ll be a short conversation, either way.”
“You think she actually murdered him?”
“Not literally, no,” I said. “But trust me. There’s more than one way to kill a man.”
17
Upon some consideration—undertaken in the time it took me to kick Ayesha out and drudge up something resembling a late dinner from the back of my fridge—I decided a different tactic would be needed to work the Mrs. Duclos angle. Hence me standing around outside this upscale yoga place a few blocks west of Sloane Square station early the next morning. The exiting clientele were uniformly female, slim and well-postured, despite what I had read was a furnace-like interior to help keep them limber during their poses. The rich even sweat better than we do.
I spotted Yvette Costley pretty easily. Even in this crowd, she stood out a bit. Despite being on the other side of 40 and an hour of hot yoga, she was summarily striking, making her way down Cale Street with her finishing school posture well intact.
She stopped to peer into a shop window, some vintage place with wooden trains going for 200 quid and mint-condition lifestyle magazines from the 1940s. I ambled next to her, pretending to be taking in some of the wares myself.
“Bit steep,” she remarked.
“Oh, for sure,” I replied. “But what’s the price of a child’s happiness?”
She nodded at an electric train set, coming in at just under a grand. “I think we may have just set it.”
“Good thing mine has outgrown these things,” I said. “Or was never interested.”
“Lucky you,” she murmured. She turned and faced me, drawing herself somehow a bit taller. “You’re Mr. Grayle, I assume?”
“I am. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”
“You were tough to turn down. You mentioned Annie and her missing husband. I had seen something about in the paper. Dreadful stuff.”
“Undoubtedly,” I agreed. I had spent a few hours digging around Annie Duclos’ social media presence when Ayesha finally got out last night, and Yvette was a good fit for what I needed: They had worked together in some online children’s clothing boutique a few years ago, and shortly after had stopped popping up in each other’s shared pics. In other words, an old, and possibly former, friend who had some knowledge but wasn’t likely to run back to Annie with details of our chat.
I handed her a cold bottle of Evian.
“Thoughtful,” she said, uncapping it.
“The best bribes usually are. But there’s still door number 2.” I tapped my suit’s breast pocket.
“What do you want to know?”
“Like I said, I’m trying to find Yannick. But I’m thinking of looking a bit closer to home, first.”
She unscrewed the cap and took a polite sip. In the early morning sun, there was still the gl
oss of her workout staining her forehead and throat.
“A marriage is a complicated thing, Mr. Grayle,” she said.
“I know all too well. I guess I’m wondering if theirs was classically complicated or somewhat more unconventional.”
“How so?” She took another sip, a deeper one.
“Do you think she might be interested in seeing him disappear?”
Yvette laughed.
“No, God no,” she said. “Annie was a happy rich housewife, and those need husbands. Especially ones like Yannick.”
“He was accommodating?”
“He was a mug. What I’m guessing you’d call a pushover.”
“What was the problem?”
“Nothing, as long as he did what he was told. Look, Yannick was a good guy. Just a bit soft.”
“I heard he had played a bit of sport when he was younger. Rugby. Doesn’t sound too soft to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “There’s many a man who can easily stare down a real beating and not even flinch who would never imagine standing up to their wives.”
“Was Annie particularly demanding?”
It was shortly after 8 a.m. Yvette took a glance around as the sidewalk was starting to crowd a bit.
“Annie usually gets what Annie wants,” she said. “She ran that house. Yannick was happy to let her. He worked long hours and he wasn’t always a lot of fun. He was moody a lot.”
“Depression?” I asked.
“I’m no mental health professional, but I’d say so, yeah. I know she took off for a couple of weeks last year. Get some space.”
“Did you ever hear of him talking about anything strange or unusual about work? Anything that stood out as maybe a bit shady?”
“Well, he was friends with that Copta guy. He didn’t really talk about it, but Annie wouldn’t shut up about the yacht and how rich the guy was.”
This caught me.
“Annie knew Copta?”
Yvette nodded. “Oh yes. Apparently, they all socialized as families, a few times at least.”
“Funny. Annie never mentioned that.”
“Is it important?”
Ten Grand Page 7