SHADOW CRIMES a gripping crime thriller full of twists

by MICHAEL HAMBLING

  ‘How did you make contact with these people, and their families outside?’ Barry asked.

  ‘We started off contacting a few people and letting them know what we could supply. After that, it was all word of mouth. The families on the outside all know each other and pass on any news. Once they realised we did what we said we would, we never had any problems. We never had to do any work to get the jobs. They contacted us.’

  ‘And you started in Portland, then moved on to other prisons? Guys Marsh? Then out to nearby counties?’ Barry said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s about it. It was a great little earner.’ Boulden smiled to himself. ‘Maybe we should’ve kept it local. It’s when we started spreading out to Winchester, Devizes and the like that the arguments started. It got too big and we all got uptight with each other. Someone was trying to turn it into a full-time business. That’s what Liam thought. He complained about it, maybe he complained once too often. That was the trouble with Liam, he didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.’

  Sophie looked at him. ‘Who was trying to expand it, Mr Boulden? Bill Mapps?’

  Boulden shrugged. ‘Dunno. Prob’ly, but we wasn’t told. I didn’t see him all that much. He looked after all the paperwork and ordered the stuff through his businesses. But I dunno who made the decisions, not for sure. Who else could it have been?’

  Sophie decided to change tack again. ‘There was an incident in a local bar, two weeks ago. Saturday lunchtime. Tonto Leary threatened one of my officers. What was that about?’

  ‘I dunno. Tonto runs this group trying to stop migrant spongers getting into the country. We want to get all these foreign crappers out. We meet up for a few beers and go to rallies. It’s a free country. Anyway, that’s what we were doing.’

  ‘Who organised the group that day?’

  ‘Tonto, I reckon. I dunno why he went for her either. He’s never done that before. I tried to calm him down. Then I spotted Bill, sitting in a corner. Least I thought it was him. Tonto wouldn’t tell me when I asked him, and we left pretty quick after. Didn’t have a clue she was a cop until she showed her card. Something was going on, but I didn’t know what it was. Dunno why Bill was there, if it was ’im. It got me worried, Liam too.’

  ‘Do you know why Liam was killed, Mr Boulden?’ Sophie asked. ‘We know it was deliberate, and we’re pretty sure it was your friend Leary. Why would he have done that?’

  Boulden’s face took on a haunted expression. ‘I dunno. I’ve been thinking about it ever since it happened. I just dunno.’ He sat, shaking his head slowly.

  * * *

  The two detectives were in the corridor sipping coffee.

  ‘What do you think, Barry?’

  ‘It’s what we’ve been saying for some time. His story holds up. We have no evidence that he was involved in any of the murders, and we know he managed to restrain Leary in that bar incident with Lydia. I tend to believe him, but we’ll need to check his alibi for that night. And if we can trace the van, we can check it for DNA. That would tell us who was in the van and involved in Andrea’s murder. So where do we go from here, ma’am?’

  ‘Onwards and upwards. It’s time to talk to Mapps again. Maybe he’s seen some sense, though I don’t hold out any great hopes. He can’t seem to see the seriousness of the position he’s in, God knows why. His lawyer should be back here by now.’

  Mapps had lost some of his composure of the previous day. He was jittery and looked tired.

  ‘You said yesterday that you’d see me again in a few hours,’ he complained. ‘I’ve been stuck in this place overnight. Those cells are a bloody disgrace.’

  ‘Don’t complain to me, Mr Mapps. Your great friend Eton Taylor, or Tonto Leary as he prefers to be known, assaulted one of my officers with a crowbar yesterday near the quarry where he works. She’s still in intensive care. As you can imagine, I’ve been very busy. He’s in another of our cells, hopefully thinking about his future. We’ll be charging him with attempted murder on top of the other crimes. These violent incidents keep mounting up, don’t they? I thought you should know in case it helps you make up your mind to come clean about all this.’

  ‘I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t assaulted anyone. What they do when I’m not around is nothing to do with me. Don’t try to pin any of that stuff onto me. It won’t work.’

  ‘But you were involved, Mr Mapps. We think you were a member of the group that pushed Andrea Ford into a van and drove her down to the quayside. If a decision had already been made to kill her, and we believe that to be the case, then that makes you complicit in her murder. The same goes for Tony Quigley’s death. Both of them had holidays at your villa in Spain at your expense. We have evidence to prove it, it’s all in your business records.’

  ‘Andrea and I had a thing going a few years ago,’ Mapps said. ‘I took her to Spain because that’s the kind of thing people do when they’re in a relationship. They go away together. It’s fucking stupid to use that to say I was involved in killing her.’

  ‘The holidays were one of the rewards for services rendered. In Andrea’s case, she kept your operations off the police radar. And Tony Quigley? He was a key player in your smuggling operation. His help was indispensable, and you made sure he was well rewarded. Then, when they’d had enough and your demands began to escalate, they both wanted out. They ended up dead instead.’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong. That’s all I’m gonna say. All wrong.’

  Mapps refused to say anything else, and he was taken back to his cell.

  Rae, who’d made a quick visit to Taylor’s home with the forensic team, met them as they left the interview room.

  ‘Eton Taylor has a boat. He keeps it in Portland marina, in the furthest corner.’

  ‘Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go and have a look.’

  * * *

  ‘The one we’re looking for is along here at the end of this pontoon,’ Rae said. ‘It’s called Lone Ranger.’ They made their way along the timber walkway.

  ‘Would you believe it?’ Sophie replied. ‘Just like the old TV series.’

  ‘You’ll have to explain, ma’am,’ Barry said. ‘Doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

  ‘It’s a really old western series that my mum watched when she was a girl. I think it was made into a film about ten years ago. The Lone Ranger supposedly fought for truth and justice. He wore a facemask, which I always found a bit creepy. His loyal helper was an Indian tracker by the name of Tonto. It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?’

  Barry and Rae continued to look bemused.

  They reached the boat, a beautiful, thirty foot sailing yacht, its white hull glinting in the afternoon sun. They climbed aboard and peered into the cabin through the portholes. Barry lifted the canvas cover off the cockpit and the three of them stepped down into the open area. They examined the varnished timber edgings to the cockpit, looking for signs of damage. Barry spotted it, at the rear port corner. On such a perfectly maintained boat, the marks stood out. The layer of shiny varnish had been damaged in several places, consistent with a hard blow with a hammer or something similar. In one spot the timber had been damaged, it’s surface no longer smooth and shiny.

  ‘This is it,’ Sophie said. ‘Problem solved. Let’s get a forensic team in. They can match it up with the fragments found in Andrea’s fingertips, though there’s not much doubt, is there? Those marks could be blood, though someone’s wiped the surface down by the looks of it.’ She looked around at the marina. ‘Maybe someone saw something that night. We might find a witness.’

  ‘How likely is that, ma’am? It was a cold Monday night in January.’

  ‘Boat enthusiasts can be strange people, Barry. There’s no predicting when they might be down here doing some maintenance work on their boat, or even just sleeping off a hangover. Some of these cabins can be nice and cosy. Maybe there’s a record of this boat being taken out last Monday night. Let’s go and pay the harbour master a visit. I wonder why they didn’t report it when we asked
a few days ago?’

  ‘We didn’t know the name Eton Taylor then, ma’am,’ Rae said.

  They spoke to an assistant manager. ‘If the boat went out late in the evening and returned a few hours later, there wouldn’t be a record. Even during daylight hours, small boats come and go as the owners please. We’re not funded for that degree of record keeping. What you’re hinting at is a bit big-brother-ish, isn’t it? Do we really want that level of snooping, just in case it might provide useful information to the police?’

  Sophie sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. It’s just that we could do with some hard evidence about that boat’s recent movements.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t any.’ She still sounded critical. ‘The only CCTV we have is scanning our land entrance, recording who comes in and out on foot or by car. That’s where the trouble lies from our point of view — thieves and vandals.’

  ‘Would you still have the recording for Monday night of last week?’ Barry asked. ‘That might be all we need.’

  The woman remained indignant. ‘Of course. We have a state of the art system here, not some tacky device that uses the same tape over and over again. What do you take us for?’

  ‘Can we see it, please?’ Barry said, smiling slightly.

  They were led to an inner office, where the woman switched on a computer screen and navigated her way to the footage for the night in question. Barry spotted what he was looking for: the arrival of a plain white van at ten fifty in the evening. Eton Taylor was seen to climb out of the vehicle and unlock the security gate.

  ‘There’s someone else in the passenger seat,’ Sophie said. ‘I can’t make out the features. Could it be Bill Mapps?’

  Barry shook his head. ‘It’s too dim to tell. As it is, it could be anyone.’

  ‘Blast. It helps to nail our friend Tonto, but not the people with him.’

  They watched the van disappear from view.

  ‘It’ll give the view from the other side of the van when it leaves,’ Rae suggested. ‘Maybe we’ll get a clearer view then.’

  ‘Good thinking, Rae. Why didn’t I think of that? Am I getting too old? And don’t answer that, either of you, on pain of dismissal.’

  Rae had been right. The return of the van, at four fifteen in the morning, clearly showed Liam Fenners in the passenger seat, peering through the window as the van drove slowly through the entrance. It was Liam who climbed out to close the gate once the van had passed through.

  Sophie frowned. ‘It doesn’t really help, does it? Was there anybody else in that van, other than Taylor, Fenners and Andrea Ford? That’s the key question. According to Boulden, Mapps was there, but this footage doesn’t show him, or anyone else. And the problem is that Boulden’s version of events is second hand. He says he wasn’t there, and we’ve no evidence to the contrary. We need to find the van. A detailed forensic examination might tell us all we need to know. And why wasn’t Fenners still driving on the return? Maybe they’d had an argument? It’s still too tangled up for my liking.’

  Barry and Rae looked at her, puzzled. This evidence nailed Eton Taylor. It put him and Fenners directly in the frame as Andrea’s killers. They already knew that DNA evidence from Quigley’s house had placed Fenners there at some time. Maybe Eton Taylor had been there too and his DNA would show up now that he’d given a sample. It also explained why Taylor killed Fenners a few days later. His death removed possibly the only witness to the events, particularly what happened on the boat that Monday night. Why did the boss seem so ill at ease? Why so dissatisfied?

  Chapter 40: Witness

  Thursday Evening

  Rose Simons and George Warrander had been carrying out house-to-house inquiries near the New World wine bar but had drawn a blank. None of the residents of the flats above the shops and cafes could remember seeing anything unusual on the night when Andrea had been abducted.

  ‘Not surprising really,’ Rose said. ‘It’s January, for God’s sake. Who in their right mind is going to be spending their late evenings peering out at a cold, damp street when they could be tucked up in bed, sipping a mug of rum-laced cocoa? I ask you.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Time’s ticking on, Georgie boy. Let’s hoof it round the corner to the spot where the delightful Andrea was reported to have been pushed into that van. Maybe we’ll strike it lucky there.’

  They found a terrace of rather grand Victorian houses with small front gardens facing a small park on the opposite side of the street. The shrubs and hedges along the boundary were held in check by black railings. They could see clumps of trees and scattered flowerbeds, although these were largely bare at this time of year. Most of the houses had been converted into flats, so it would take them some time to visit them all.

  Rose sighed deeply. ‘There’s a pub at the other end and we’ll have finished our shift by the time we get there. Mine’s a double scotch and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. You’ll be driving us back to the station, so I can only allow you half a pint of piss-weak lager. Think of the health benefits, though.’

  To Rose’s astonishment, they found their witness in the third house, an elderly man who’d been drawing his front curtains just as Andrea and Simon Osman approached on the opposite side of the road.

  ‘It was a few minutes before eleven,’ Bob Hughes said. ‘The news had finished on the TV. I watched the weather forecast and a few minutes of the next programme but it was rubbish, so I decided to go to bed. I was pulling the curtains and I saw them walking along just opposite. The woman looked as if she was in a right state. She was really wobbly on her feet and only stayed up because the man was holding her. She was leaning into him and he was supporting her with his arm around her back and under her armpit. It was odd because she was smartly dressed, and she wasn’t a youngster. That’s why I carried on watching.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘A bit odd really. There was a van parked a bit further along with its engine running. The couple disappeared behind it, so I couldn’t see them. Then the van drove off. When it had gone there was no one there.’

  ‘No one there? Had they moved on and disappeared from view?’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone. But the entrance to the park is about there, so maybe they went in. She might have wanted to be sick for all I know. Or they’d speeded up for some reason and were past where I could see by the time the van moved off.’

  George took a note of his contact details, thanked him for his help and they walked back to their car.

  ‘I know for a fact that the gate is locked at six sharp,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve had to rescue people who’ve got stuck on the railings trying to get in or out at night. So what does that tell us, Georgie? A bit suspicious, don’t you think? Let’s hot-foot it across to your favourite ’tec and report it. Maybe she’ll pay for our drinks as a thank you.’

  * * *

  It was mid-evening before the three detectives were able to visit Eton Taylor’s small, end-of-terrace house in the old part of Portland. Local detectives had been there for some time but had been ordered to stand back and wait for the arrival of the forensic unit. Its members had been there for several hours before Sophie and her team arrived.

  ‘Anything for us, Dave?’ she asked the county forensic chief.

  ‘Most definitely yes,’ he said. ‘Lots of what I call thug-stuff. A collection of knives that are definitely not the kind you find in your average kitchen. Several baseball bats. Combat-style clothes. Balaclavas. Books and magazines about citizen armies and self-defence. Photos of a few well-known extreme nationalists. Exactly what you might expect from an extremist hoodlum. We haven’t finished yet, so just use your usual caution. There’s a mad dog, by the way. We’ve tied it up outside. It’s been snarling and spitting at anyone who goes near it. I don’t really know what to do with it. I’ve called the local RSPCA but I’m not sure they’ll want to take it when they see what it’s like.’

  ‘We’re not expecting it to be a crime scene, not as far as we know. I doubt whether Andrea wa
s ever brought here, or anyone else to be honest. It just gives us an idea of the type of person he is.’

  They had a quick look round the gloomy interior. Posters of men in combat gear lined some of the walls. A pin board in the kitchen held photos of British politicians from different ethnic groups, all defaced with an inked bullet wound in the middle of their foreheads. Pride of place went to a photo of Barack Obama, with a neatly drawn cleaver embedded in his skull.

  Rae shook her head slowly. ‘God, this is sick. Really sick.’

  ‘The forensic people will find more than this, Rae,’ Barry said. ‘There’ll be far nastier stuff on his computer.’

  They left the forensic squad to do their work and returned to the station. Sophie steeled herself to interview Eton Taylor. This was the man who had attacked Lydia with a crowbar. Could she control her anger?

  * * *

  Taylor was exactly as Danny Fenners had described him. Sophie could see why the young, nervous boy had been so scared of this man. He sat leaning back on the plastic chair, narrowed eyes moving slowly around the room, observing the people who had just entered. Eton Taylor, or Tonto Leary as the Fenners children knew him, oozed intimidation like poisonous liquid slime.

  Sophie spoke in a measured tone. ‘We’ve just visited your house, Mr Taylor, and we’ve left a forensic team there. We’ve also examined your boat, particularly some marks on the cockpit edging, and a forensic unit have taken samples. The game’s up. It’s time for you to start talking. We want some explanations. Let’s start with where you were just under two weeks ago, on the Saturday. You visited the Baldwin Bar in Bournemouth. Why were you and your friends there?’

  ‘We can go where we want. It’s a free country.’

  ‘I don’t dispute that. But you instigated an incident that was clearly motivated by racial hatred. Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t like foreigner leeches. I said that to the bitch who came into the bar. I didn’t know she was one of yours.’

  ‘Oh, but we think you did know. The evidence from the bar’s CCTV and the statements from witnesses lead us strongly to that conclusion.’