The Clifftop Murders (Dorset Crime Book 2)

by Rachel McLean

  Leonard’s front door was daubed with graffiti. Dennis hammered on it.

  “Go away!”

  “Mr Leonard, I just want to ask you some questions. I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”

  “You ain’t got no warrant, you can’t do nothing.”

  Dennis placed a fist on the door. He wished he had Uniform here with him, the enforcer that could break through the door. But he had no legitimate reason to force his way into this flat. All he had was the knowledge that Steven Leonard was the defendant in the case that had been missing in Ameena Khan’s files. That Ameena Khan’s PA had warned the DCI about it. And of course that Steven Leonard had intermittently worked for one of the dodgiest families in the whole of Dorset.

  “You still working for the Kelvins?” he said through the door.

  Silence.

  “You’re not answering my question?”

  The door opened. An overweight, balding man stood behind it. Dennis knew Leonard was only thirty-four, but he looked twenty years older. He wore a thin t-shirt with holes around the belly and a pair of shorts that looked two sizes too small.

  “I don’t work for them no more,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” Dennis replied. “I heard you’d been in trouble lately.”

  Leonard shook his head. “I got off. Remember?”

  Dennis looked down to the man’s ankle. The fact that he was dressed in shorts made it obvious that he was wearing an ankle bracelet. Dennis and Steven Leonard had very different views on what constituted got off.

  “How long are you going to be wearing that for?”

  Leonard dragged a hand across his face and sniffed. “None of your business.”

  “You see, it is my business,” replied Dennis, “because your name has come up in connection with a murder inquiry.”

  Leonard scowled at him. “No idea what you’re talking about, mate.” He pushed the door.

  Dennis considered leaning into it, holding it open. But he was alone here and he knew what kind of man Steven Leonard was.

  “I’ll be back,” he told him. “My boss has got questions for you.”

  Leonard spat on the lino outside the door. “Your boss can fuck off.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Lesley patted the roof of the squad car and watched as it drove off along Harry Nevin’s road. She surveyed the man’s house. It was broad, made of red brick, and set back from the road. The front garden was filled with healthy looking shrubs and mature trees.

  A house like this would put you back a bob or two, she thought. But then Harry Nevin was a senior partner in a prestigious law firm. He wasn’t short of that bob or two.

  She approached the front door and pressed the buzzer. She pulled her shoulders back, straightening her jacket and tugging at her hair so she didn’t look like she’d spent the last hour on a windy beach.

  The door opened and Ffion Nevin stood blinking at her. “What is it?”

  Lesley held up her ID. “My name’s DCI Clarke. Can I come in please?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I think we should do this inside.”

  The woman gripped the door. “What’s happened? Where’s Harry?”

  “Please, Mrs Nevin. Let’s sit down somewhere.”

  Mrs Nevin’s face paled. She backed away from the door, letting Lesley walk in behind her.

  Lesley closed the door and scanned the hallway. Three doors led off: a kitchen, a dining room, and a bright living room. Lesley gestured towards the living room with her head. Mrs Nevin nodded and Lesley walked through.

  She took a seat and waited for the woman to do the same. Mrs Nevin lowered herself into the chair, her eyes not leaving Lesley’s face. “What’s happened to him?” she said. “Was he at his mistresses?”

  “I’m afraid he wasn’t,” Lesley replied. “We went there and she hadn’t seen him.”

  “So where was he? Don’t tell me he’s got another woman.”

  Lesley leaned forwards. She placed her hands on her knees and licked her lips. She hated this, no matter how many times she’d done it before.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mrs Nevin.”

  The woman stared at her. Blotchy red dots formed on her cheeks.

  “We found your husband on Boscombe Beach this morning,” Lesley continued. “I’m afraid he was dead.”

  Mrs Nevin grasped the arm of the sofa. “No he’s not, you’re lying.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs Nevin. I was able to identify your husband myself. But we will need you to come in later on, and do so formally. In the meantime, is there someone who can come here, or who you can go to?”

  Mrs Nevin narrowed her eyes. “What happened to him? Did he drown?”

  “We found him at the bottom of the cliffs,” Lesley said. “He’d fallen down them.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “It doesn’t look that way. We think somebody pushed him.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Pushed him?”

  “That’s what we’re working on.”

  “So who? One of his clients? Oh, shit...” The woman looked away.

  Lesley cocked her head. “Is anybody else here?” She hadn’t heard movement or voices in the house and didn’t know if the couple had children.

  “No,” the woman replied. “It’s just me and Harry.” She clutched her knee. “Or, it was.”

  Lesley leaned forward. “Is there anybody who might have wanted to hurt your husband?”

  “He’s a criminal lawyer. I’m sure there are plenty.”

  “But anybody specific? Anyone he or his firm had been working for recently?”

  “Do you think this is linked to that Ameena Khan woman?”

  “We don’t know right now,” Lesley replied. “We don’t want to jump to conclusions. But we will investigate the possibility that the two deaths are related.”

  She resisted telling the woman that Harry Nevin had been their prime suspect in Ameena Khan’s death. Now that he was dead, she was rolling back on that assumption.

  “I don’t know anything about his clients,” Mrs Nevin said. “He doesn’t talk to me about work.”

  “Did any of them come here?” Lesley asked. “Did he have meetings in the house?”

  The woman frowned. “Sometimes. Sometimes he had evening meetings here so I wouldn’t have to be on my own.”

  “Who did he meet in the evenings?”

  “He’d let them in and take them straight to his study. I didn’t see them.”

  Lesley looked towards the door. “Can you show me where his study is, please?”

  The woman stood up, her movements jerky, and led Lesley out of the room and into the kitchen. The kitchen spanned the back of the house, with large windows overlooking a long garden. She took Lesley through a door at the rear of the kitchen, leading back in towards the house. It looked like it might have been a garage conversion.

  “It’s in here,” she said.

  Lesley stepped into the room. It was larger than a garage conversion, a spacious room with a handsome oak desk in the centre and a broad bay window to the front. Documents lay in neat piles on the desk and a mobile phone sat beside them.

  “Is that your husband’s phone?” Lesley asked.

  Mrs Nevin shrugged. “I guess it must be if it’s on his desk.”

  “He didn’t take his phone out with him yesterday?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since he went to work yesterday morning.”

  Lesley approached the desk. The phone was a basic model, not a smartphone.

  Why did Harry Nevin have a burner phone?

  She turned to Mrs Nevin. “I’m going to have to take this.” She pulled gloves out of her pocket and an evidence bag. She placed the phone inside.

  She looked around. “We’ll probably need to search this room as well. Take his computer, his files.”

  The woman nodded. “Do what you need to.”

  Lesley looked at her. “Do you have anyone you can go
to? Any family nearby, friends?”

  Mrs Nevin swallowed. “My mum lives in London. I could go there, but I’d rather be here.”

  “I can understand that,” Lesley replied. “Have you got a neighbour you could be with? I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

  The woman shook her head. “It’s not that kind of street. The house next door is empty half the time. People who own it use it as a holiday home.”

  “You must have some friends?”

  Mrs Nevin stared at her. “They’re not the sort of friends who…” She frowned. “Yeah. I can think of someone.”

  “Good,” Lesley said. “Do you want me to call them for you?”

  “I’ll do it.” The woman’s voice was thin.

  The woman was genuinely shocked. Whatever her husband had been up to, it seemed unlikely that she knew anything about it or was involved.

  “Did you know anything about a man called Steven Leonard?” Lesley asked.

  Mrs Nevin shook her head. “Steven who?”

  “He was a client of your husband’s firm. I’m wondering if he might have come to the house at some point?”

  The woman shrugged. “Sorry. Harry sometimes talked about stuff that was stressing him out, but nothing specific. He told me about his arguments with Aurelia Cross, but didn’t talk about individual cases. He was a lawyer, he knew better than to do that.”

  Lesley nodded. “We’ll send a family liaison officer here to support you. But in the meantime, you call that friend of yours. You need somebody with you.”

  Mrs Nevin looked around the room. “I don’t know where my phone is.”

  “It’s OK,” said Lesley. “I’ll help you find it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Aurelia Cross had an office in the far corner from Harry Nevin. Dennis sat in a chair, waiting for the woman to appear. A PA had ushered him in, her movements jumpy. She’d offered him a coffee and looked relieved when he’d rejected it.

  Dennis gazed through the window beyond the desk. There was a view towards the sea. Nice place to work, he thought. He glanced behind him towards the other corner of the offices, where Harry Nevin should have been.

  Had the man been in here at all yesterday? Had he conferred with his colleagues about what he was working on? Did they know if he was the man who had killed Ameena Khan?

  His phone buzzed: the DCI. She was with Ffion Nevin. Dennis looked up as the door opened and Aurelia Cross walked in. “You again.”

  He stood up. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  She gestured towards the chair. “Sit back down. Let’s get this over with.”

  “This isn’t a follow up from our previous interview,” he told her.

  “No? So what is it, then?” She rounded the desk and sat down. She leaned back in her chair, her hands steepled under her chin.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news.” Dennis watched for her reaction.

  “Bad news? We get a lot of that round here.”

  “It’s your partner, Harry Nevin.”

  The woman’s face darkened. “What’s he done now?”

  Dennis felt his brow furrowing. “What do you expect him to have done?”

  She waved in dismissal. “You know what I mean. I don’t really think he’s done anything. What’s up? What are you here for?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead, Mrs Cross.”

  “Dead?”

  “His body was found this morning on Boscombe Beach.”

  The woman straightened in her chair. She jerked forward and placed her hands flat on the table. “Dead? Harry?” She pulled in a breath. “Harry’s bloody immortal.”

  Dennis winced at the language. “The body hasn’t been formally identified yet, but it is Mr Nevin. I’ve been there myself.” He didn’t tell her he hadn’t seen Nevin’s body. The DCI’s word was enough.

  Aurelia Cross’s gaze flicked out towards the outer office. “Who else knows?”

  “My DCI has gone to inform his wife. And there were some press at the scene.”

  “Press? You can keep them away, I don’t want any speculating.”

  “There’s not much we can do to control what they print,” he told her. “But what I would like is to find out what Mr Nevin has been working on. Who are his current clients? Is there anybody who might want to hurt him?”

  “You think he was murdered?” The woman’s eyes were wide.

  “We do. That’s a surprise to you?”

  A shrug. “You found him at Boscombe, I assumed he threw himself off the cliffs.”

  “Why would Mr Nevin want to kill himself?”

  She raised her hands in a shrug. “Middle aged man. Midlife crisis. Stress at work. Plenty of women on the go. God, the grief his wife gives him. Not to mention his mistress.”

  “You know about his girlfriend?” Dennis asked, his lip twitching.

  “Everybody knows about his girlfriend,” she replied.

  Dennis shuddered. Men like Harry Nevin treated women despicably. They had no sense of what was proper. “Do you think his wife might have wanted to hurt him because of his being unfaithful?”

  Cross shook her head. “No, no. She wasn’t that sort of woman. She’ll be gutted. She loves him, despite the fact he’s a shit to her.”

  Dennis clenched his jaw. “We need to know the names of the clients he’s currently representing, and anybody who might wish him harm.”

  Aurelia Cross shook her head. “We’ll be here for quite a while if you want the answer to that.”

  Dennis eyed her. “I’ve got quite a while.”

  There was a knock on the door. He turned to see Elsa Short outside, looking at Aurelia Cross. Cross beckoned her in and she opened the door.

  “Elsa, you need to know what’s happened.”

  Elsa Short nodded at Dennis. “Morning. What is it?”

  “I’m afraid Harry Nevin is dead,” he told her.

  Short raised an eyebrow. “Harry?” She lowered herself into the chair next to him. “Ameena and Harry both in one week?” She looked at Aurelia Cross. “What will our clients think?”

  Cross gave her a disapproving look. “I imagine that they’ll be concerned for the welfare of Harry’s wife, just as we are.”

  The younger woman scoffed. “His wife, and his girlfriend, and the rest of them probably.”

  “Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” said Cross.

  Dennis looked at her. She had been speaking ill of him before her colleague had entered. He wondered what kind of relationship the two women had.

  Short turned to Dennis. “What happened?”

  He recounted the details of Nevin’s body being found. She watched him, her expression one of shock. He couldn’t tell if it was genuine. Did she know more than she was letting on?

  “I need to ask both of you where you were last night,” he said.

  The two women nodded. “We can do that,” said Cross. “Let us check our diaries.”

  “And I will need the details of Mr Nevin’s clients and anyone who might have wanted to hurt him.”

  Elsa scoffed. “That’ll be a long list then.”

  She was the second person who’d said that. Dennis wondered what Harry Nevin had done to annoy so many people. “Even so,” he said, “I’ll need the information.”

  “We’ll collate it,” said Aurelia Cross. “One of the PAs will send it over to your office.”

  “Thank you.” Dennis pulled two copies of his business card from his pocket and placed them on the desk. “If you think of anything, please call me.”

  “Of course we will,” said Cross. She stood up, indicating that the meeting was over.

  Dennis looked up at her. Aurelia Cross had a way of making you feel like an interloper. “Call me,” he said. “Anything at all, I want to know.”

  “Or your DCI,” said Short.

  “Or my DCI,” he replied.

  Elsa Short stared into his face for longer than felt comfortable. “We will,” she said. She stood up and left the room, leaving
Dennis to follow her.

  Chapter Forty

  Lesley arrived back at the office having managed to get a lift in yet another squad car. Next time, she’d take her own car. Driving with Dennis meant she could be abandoned at a crime scene, or with a witness.

  She walked into the outer office to find Tina the only person there.

  “Hello, Ma’am,” said Tina. “How was your morning?”

  Lesley grimaced. “You don’t have to ma’am me.”

  “Sorry.”

  She sighed. “It wasn’t good. Ffion Nevin is a mess.”

  “Ameena Khan, and now Harry Nevin. How did Nevin die?”

  “We don’t know for sure yet, but it’s looking like he was pushed off the cliffs. Near Boscombe Pier.”

  Tina frowned. “Boscombe Chine. Lovely there, I took my brother at the weekend.”

  “Chine?”

  “It means a ravine running down to the beach. Local word.”

  Lesley nodded. More dialect. “You’re right. A nice spot for an ice cream and an afternoon on the beach. Not a nice spot to find a body, like that poor family and their toddler.”

  Tina grimaced. “Poor kid.”

  Lesley nodded, her face tight.

  Tina looked away from Lesley towards the window, both of them lost in thought. Lesley hoped the child was too young to remember what he’d seen. His parents certainly weren’t.

  Lesley shrugged to pull herself out of her reverie. “We need to get to work. Where’s Mike?”

  “He went to the evidence store from the Ameena Khan case. Wanted to talk to the Evidence Manager about comparing forensics from the two deaths.”

  “Good. Anything come in yet?”

  Tina shook her head.

  “OK. Make contact with Gail, tell me if she finds anything.”

  “I already left a message with her, boss.”

  Lesley smiled at Tina. For a uniformed constable, she was showing promise as an investigator.

  She leaned back and grabbed a pen from Mike’s desk. She tapped her teeth with it. “Ameena Khan and Harry Nevin. I want to know what the connections are between the two of them. Apart from them working for the same firm. Did Ameena work on the same cases as Nevin? Did they share a social life? Did they have any friends? Were they having an affair?”