“We know who it is, don’t we?”
“Do we?”
Toby snapped his head round so fast, Joe was sure he must have ricked his neck. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Joe ran through the same explanation he had given Sergeant Hollis, and concluded, “How could she get away so fast? The short answer is, she couldn’t. Why did she leave her clothing behind? And her work? Answer: she didn’t.”
“Her car was gone. That shows you’re wrong. She legged it. In a hurry.”
Joe shook his head slowly. “I may be getting on, but my eyesight is still pretty good, and my hearing is perfect. Between me leaving my room and getting to the window in your father’s room, she hadn’t time to get far, and even without lights, I’d have seen her driving away. If I hadn’t seen her, I would have heard her. A powerful little car like that makes a lot of noise. It was moved earlier. Probably soon after we all turned in last night. But then, it leaves us with another problem. If she was on foot it would have been even harder for her to disappear so quickly, wouldn’t it?”
“And the answer?” Toby still sounded harsh and unwelcoming.
Joe again assumed it was concern for his father, and answered, “Two possibilities. One, she left by another route. I’ll look into that when we get back. Two, she never left at all.”
“But you just said the police are checking the house. If she’s there, they’ll find her.”
“There are plenty of other places she could hide.” Joe smiled. “Aren’t there?”
Toby did not answer. Instead, he stared away to the double doors which led from the waiting room to the treatment cubicles as if willing them to open and his father to walk out.
He turned back to Joe. “Why should I be suspected of attempted murder?”
Joe appreciated the change of subject. “I never said you were. It was Alistair who suggested it.” He fell silent for a moment, wondering which way to take the debate. “We’re working on the assumption that because she’s missing, Katya carried out the attack. “You know, murders, even botched attempts, are composed of three elements. Means, motive and opportunity. The means is obvious. Any one of us could have picked up that kitchen knife. Opportunity well, again, we think it’s Katya, but in fact, any one of us could have had the opportunity if we’d arranged it properly.”
“I was in bed. With my wife.”
“And she was awake all night, was she? She can testify that you were there the whole time? No. It may be unlikely but those are problems the serious killer could get around. What I’m driving at, Toby, is motive. Who has a motive for wanting Sir Douglas dead? We’re all pointing the finger at Katya, but what’s her motive?” Joe let the question hang for a moment. “You, on the other hand, do have a motive. You stand to gain full control of Ballantyne Distribution if the old man dies.”
Toby looked away again. He got to his feet, crossed to a vending machine, and bought two coffees. Joe had not seen his face when he walked away, but he guessed it was one of raw anger. When he returned, however, he was calmer, though still a long way from serene.
He passed one of the two cups to Joe, and took his seat. “Murray, I already have full control of the company. Dad never shows his face there. He doesn’t even attend board meetings anymore, other than online, and even then it’s only to cast his vote.”
“And that can be problematic, can’t it? He always gets what he wants. He told me so, yesterday. His shareholding is such that he can outvote all of you whenever he wishes. That means you don’t get what you want. Like, oh, I dunno, like shutting down your distribution arm, and putting the work out to contract.” Joe took a sip of the coffee, found it too hot, and placed it on the floor, near his foot. “Your father told me that was your idea. Get rid of all those trucks, all those trailers, all those drivers and save the company a lot of money.”
“The idea had less to do with saving money, than easing the complications involved in running a fleet of trucks,” Toby argued, “ but it’s true, we would have saved a few million a year. Let me remind you, we are one of the largest family run businesses in the UK if not Europe. The notion that I would try to kill my father in order to gain a tiny percentage point in increased profits by implementing a policy he was against, is ludicrous.”
“I don’t doubt it. But the police may take a different view.”
“We know who attacked him. If not Katya, why has she gone missing?”
Joe had no answer. He suddenly felt himself on the point of exhaustion. Sleep threatened to overtake him at any moment. He bent and collected his coffee again. It was not much cooler, but he was in need of the refreshment if only to help keep waves of fatigue at bay. He checked the wall clock against his watch. Both told him it was coming up to half past six, and he reminded himself that it had been near eleven thirty when he went to bed, and the scream of the siren woke him again just after three. Less than four hours sleep, and he had been on full alert ever since.
He took in more coffee. “All right, let’s concentrate on Katya.”
Toby jumped and spilled a blob of coffee over his lap. Taking a tissue from his pocket, he clucked and fussed over cleaning it up.
“Sorry. I didn’t realise you were nodding off too,” Joe apologised.
“It’s been a long night.”
Joe yawned. “And it ain’t over yet. Katya Nolan.”
“What about her?”
“What do you know about the agreement between her and your father? All Sir Douglas told me was that she had agreed to work for him, and was paid a retainer up front, with the promise of more money to come.”
There was a delay as a doctor, looking tired and drawn, his green overalls covered with smears of what looked like blood, came from the treatment rooms. But he approached reception, not them. Toby, who had perked up at the sight of him, slumped again.
“The agreement? Right.” Toby drew a breath and paused, marshalling his thoughts. “It was worth about sixty thousand to Katya. She was paid twenty thousand up front. The next twenty thousand would be due on receipt of the completed manuscript and family tree, and the final payment would be made on publication.”
Joe ran a few calculations round his sluggish brain. “So all up, she’d be looking at a timescale of what? Two years?”
“About that, yes. The publication would be the longest haul. It’s one thing to sign the thing over to a publisher, and an entirely different matter for him to get it out there on sale.”
“What kind of family papers was she given access to?”
“Everything,” Toby replied. “My father wouldn’t hold back.”
“Skeletons in cupboards?” Joe yawned again, and Toby mirrored it like it was infectious.
“I see what you’re getting at now. You’re thinking she may have stumbled across some dark and dirty family secret, and took it to Father demanding more money or she spilled the beans. When he refused, she tried to kill him.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Joe replied. “I’m trying to dig up a motive for Katya to attack your father, but this was not a spur of the moment crime. This was premeditated.”
“The brilliant sleuth has deduced this, has he?” There was no mistaking the sneer in Toby’s words. “Unless you were helping her, you cannot possibly know that, so how can you hope to establish her motives.”
Finishing off his coffee, Joe reflected that under other circumstances, he would pound Toby with a series of devastating, logical deductions, rounding off with a humiliating retort. But he was tired and the younger Ballantyne was under enough stress already.
Instead, he settled for a simple, rhetorical question. “How many people do you know who take a kitchen knife to an unplanned meeting?”
Toby’s face flushed with embarrassment. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No worries. That’s the problem, Toby. We know she left the dining room early to visit the toilet, she said, and it’s a safe bet that she switched off the CCTV cameras. Ten to one she also stole the knife from the k
itchen at the same time. But the knife tells us that if she went into your father’s room in the early hours, it was with the express intention of killing him. It was only the air horn which saved his life… at least, we hope it saved his life.”
“I see that now.”
“Good.” Joe tried to shake his addled brain into action. “So we need to establish what had gone on prior to last night, prior to the first of the notes arriving, in order to make her want to kill him. And I ask again, could she have dug up some secret, tried to pressure the old man, and come up short?”
Toby nodded his head slowly, dejectedly. “It’s possible, but if you were to ask me what that secret might be, I don’t have any answers.” He, too, finished his coffee, took both cups and crossed the waiting room again, to drop them in a waste bin. Coming back, he sat down. “What is taking these people so long?”
“Surgery,” Joe said. “They’re not mending a broken gas pipe. They have to get it right. I should think that counts double for a man your father’s age. Now come on, Toby. You say this could have happened, but even if you don’t know the nitty-gritty, how can you be so sure?”
Toby sighed and ran tired hands over his face. “Do you remember your grandfather?”
“Barely,” Joe said, while privately wondering where the young Ballantyne was going. “I was only a kid when he died. He was a Yorkshire miner. Those were dirty words thirty years ago. All I really remember is this big man who always spoke his mind. He was afraid of nothing and no one. I suppose there’s a lot of him in me.” Joe laughed at the memories springing into his head.
“A different man to my grandfather,” Toby said. “Or maybe not that much different. He wasn’t a miner, of course, but a wealthy businessman. High church. Pious as hell. I swear if he hadn’t been who he was, he would have become a preacher. I was in my early teens when he passed away, and there’s only one memory which sticks in my mind. I got caught out throwing stones at the old summer house. Smashed a couple of windows. I tried to lie my way out of it by blaming Verity, but Granddad knew. Before he gave me a good hiding, he warned me, ‘never tell lies. If you’ve done wrong, and you’re caught out, own up’.”
“Sound advice,” Joe said. “The world would be a much better place if everyone lived by that code.”
Toby nodded. “Dad thought so, too. And that’s why Katya, if she learned of anything, would have failed to get a penny out of him. You can’t blackmail him, you see. Sure, he likes to control the release of news. You know that better than anyone, after what happened in Blackpool over Easter. Most large corporations and wealthy people are the same. They control the news as far as they can. It helps to mitigate the outcry. Be that as it may, if Katya brought out any dirty linen, he would have refused to pay her, and come into the open with it himself.”
“Even if it was criminal?”
“Where Dad is concerned, it would never be criminal. If she found something earlier in the family, before Granddad’s time, say, and that was criminal, well… even then, Dad would have broken the news, not her. He is impossible to blackmail. So if she tried and failed, maybe that was why she attacked him.”
Joe shook his head. “Doesn’t quite hang together, does it?”
“Well, it seems to me a perfect explanation.”
“You think so? Tell me, when do you think she confronted your father with this supposed secret?”
Toby considered the question while watching the doctor at reception turn and go back into the treatment area. “Sometime yesterday. During the day. Before you arrived, or perhaps a little later.”
“So, let’s just imagine the situation,” Joe suggested. “She discovers that in the early nineteenth century, Ballantyne Distribution was employing children in slave labour conditions and your great-great-great grandfather was bedding the young women, knocking even more slave-labour children out of them. Katya approaches Sir Douglas and says, ‘pay me a hundred grand or I sell this to some left-wing rag’ and your father tells her where to go. After all that, he then insists that she attend his birthday dinner? I can’t see it somehow, and anyway, it doesn’t square with the threatening notes arriving in the last week or two.”
“You have other ideas?”
“No. No, I don’t. Not yet. But you might, and you can guide me on them. First we need to put Katya through the wringer. If she really did uncover something, there’s only one place we’ll find it.”
“And that is?”
“In her notes. The box file I was skimming through while we waited for the cops to take statements. The box file I gave to the cops.” Joe, having already decided he would not bring Toby fully into his confidence, pressed on before the younger man could interrupt. “I’ve looked through them, and they don’t make much sense to me, but I have a friend who’s a genealogist. She could probably make more of them.”
“She’s local?”
Joe shook his head. “She lives in Cragshaven. Near Scarborough.”
“But, bloody hell, that’s almost a hundred miles from here.”
“A hundred and twenty if you’re counting. Maddy Chester would do it, but she’d want the story for her TV spot.”
“Hang on. Shouldn’t you give those notes to the police?”
“Didn’t I just say I did?” Joe yawned again. “And I’ll tell you what will happen to them. They’ll be passed to a junior officer with instructions to read them, then report. In the meantime, they’ll go on looking for Katya and picking over the scene of the crime for forensic evidence. It could be three or four days before they act on whatever may be in the notes. I can have Maddy here later today, and we’d have an answer by tomorrow… if there is anything to answer.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Twofold. First, permission. Legally the notes belong to Katya, and after her your father. Since he and she are out of the equation, you’re next in line. You’re, er, not power of attorney. What’s the term I’m looking for?”
“In loco parentis?” Toby suggested. “Not strictly accurate, but if we assume my father to be the parent of the notes, then it sum up the position. If you’ve already given them to the cops, how will we let your friend look over them?”
Joe smiled. “That’s the second problem and it’s where your influence comes in. You could pressure the cops into letting us photocopy them.”
Toby’s face said he found the prospect appealing. “And you can get this lady down here today?”
“I can try. I’ll wait until after nine before I ring her. She won’t be out of bed before then.”
Another doctor emerged from the treatment room. She wore hair covering and a surgical mask suspended beneath her chin, and from her eyes, she appeared as tired as Joe felt. Both men watched as she approached reception. There was brief, inaudible conversation between her and the receptionist, who pointed once or twice at Toby. At length, the doctor detached herself from the reception counter, and crossed the floor to join them, whereupon Joe and Toby stood.
“Mr Ballantyne?” she asked and Toby nodded. She concentrated on Joe. “And who are you, sir?”
“Joe Murray. I’m a friend of Sir Douglas.”
She switched her gaze back to Toby, who reassured her. “Anything you have to say, you can say in front of Mr Murray. Is my father alive?”
“Yes.”
Relief flushed through Toby, and Joe felt it himself.
“The wound is not particularly critical, but he has lost a lot of blood and at his age, that’s not good. Tell me, Mr Ballantyne, does your father take sleeping pills and antidepressants?”
“No.” Toby was quite definite. “My sister does. Why do you ask?”
“Early analysis indicates levels of two prescription drugs. Doselupin, which is an old antidepressant. It’s no longer routinely prescribed. SSRIs are more in line with modern thinking. The other drug is Zolpidem tartrate, a sleeping pill. Are they the same drugs your sister takes?”
“I can’t be sure. I’d have to ask her.”
“I’l
l bet they are,” Joe said. “And they were slipped into his drink or coffee earlier in the night.”
Both the doctor and the younger Ballantyne stared.
“I said to Rodney earlier, that it was odd your father hadn’t cried out. I’m a light sleeper, if he had, I would have heard him. It was also odd that he didn’t appear as if he’d suffered any pain in the attack. If he was doped up, then that would explain it.”
Toby shrugged. “So who let the air horn off?”
“That,” Joe agreed, “is an excellent question.”
Slightly nonplussed, Toby turned back to the doctor. “What’s the situation now?”
“For the time being we’ve put him in the High Dependency Unit. He’ll be closely monitored, and assuming he makes a good recovery, we’ll move him to a ward as soon as we can. That’s unlikely to be any earlier than tomorrow.”
“Can I see him?” Toby asked.
“He’s heavily sedated and he won’t be able to communicate, but yes, you can visit.” Again, she eyed Joe. “One person at a time.”
“That’s no problem,” Joe said. “Toby, you go see the old man, and when he wakes up, give him my regards. I’ll go back to the house and pass on the good news.”
With a curt nod, the doctor left.
“There is just one thing before you go,” Joe said. “After Katya, I still figure you have the biggest motive, but I also don’t believe you did it. So who else?”
“The doctor seems to think Hermione had a hand in it, but I don’t think so. If her prescriptions were used, then someone must have stolen them. And the suspect is obvious. Rodney Asquith.”
Once again Joe was tempted to tell the younger Ballantyne what he had found in the envelope. But he refrained. “I thought so, too, but your father was persuaded otherwise. The way I see it, the only thing Rodney would stand to gain is money, and Sir Douglas said he wasn’t interested in it.”
“I’m no actor, Murray, but even I could fake that. Couldn’t you?”
A Killing in the Family Page 10