Gareth Dawson Series Box Set

by Nathan Burrows

  As the kettle boiled, she heard the front door to the office open, so Laura peered round the door of the kitchenette.

  “Morning, Paul,” she said as she saw her boss walking into the room. He looked up and gave her a bright smile.

  “Morning, Laura,” he replied. “You’ve got the kettle on, I see. What a star.” She smirked. The only time Paul had ever made her a drink was when he had interviewed her for the position.

  “Everything okay?” Laura asked. “Not like you to have a day off sick.”

  “Right as rain, my dear,” he replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Right as rain. Are those all for me?” He gestured to the larger of the two piles of mail with a look of surprise on his face.

  “I’m afraid so. But any that you don’t need to be dealing with, just sling them my way.” Laura crossed the room and sat down behind her desk, a mahogany captain’s desk that, according to Paul, had once graced the deck of a Royal Navy ship’s wardroom. “Your clock’s stopped, by the way.”

  “Oh, so it has,” Paul replied, still leafing through his letters, “but even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day. I’ll get the old girl going again, shall I?”

  A few moments later, with the reassuring deep ticktock of the clock echoing around the office, Laura heard Paul sit down in his office with a contented sigh. She smiled, pleased that he was back at work. There was no reason why she couldn’t have reset the time and wound the clock, but she knew how much pleasure Paul took from doing it himself. It was part of his morning routine. That, and pretending to be surprised at how much mail he had.

  Laura was half-way through checking her e-mail when she realised that Paul had come out of his office and was standing next to her.

  “So, Laura,” he said, “tell me what’s happening with the McGuire case?”

  “There’s been a few developments,” she replied. “I was round there yesterday with the police.” Seeing his eyebrows arch, Laura continued. “Gareth was busy, so he asked me to pop round. You were off sick, so I thought…”

  “That’s absolutely fine, Laura,” Paul said with a smile. “What were these developments?”

  “It was Malcolm and Kate,” Laura said. “They said that they’ve only found Mr McGuire’s hand. The rest of him is still at sea somewhere.” Paul’s eyebrows went back up.

  “Really?” he said. “How unfortunate for the poor woman. How did she take it?”

  “She was shocked, obviously,” Laura replied, “but she took it pretty well, all things considered. I am a bit worried about her, though. She looks like she’s lost weight, not taking care of herself properly. That sort of thing.”

  “Hmm. Probably one for Gareth, I suspect. Will you be having a chat with him at some point?”

  “He’s taking me out to dinner on Friday, but I’ll give him a bell today.”

  “Dinner indeed,” Paul said with a smirk. “Anywhere nice?”

  “I’ve not chosen yet.”

  “Roger Hickman’s is rather lovely,” Paul replied. “On St Giles’s. Or if you want to go a bit further, Morston Hall up on the coast kept their Michelin star this year.” Laura smiled, imagining Gareth’s face if she said she wanted to go there.

  “I was thinking more Wetherspoon’s, to be honest. Lasagne and garlic bread, with a glass of cheap plonk, for a tenner.”

  “You absolute philistine,” Paul said with a deep laugh, “but you absolutely cannot let him take you there. I forbid it. Now, I went to the Adam and Eve on Bishopsgate a few weeks ago. Very good food, and much better than a ‘spoons’.”

  “Check you out, all down with the kids,” Laura replied. “I’ll have a look at their website.”

  “So, are you going to go with a presumption of death for the McGuire fellow, then?” Paul said, back to business already.

  “Yep, Judith’s e-mailed me all the paperwork through.” Laura nodded at her screen. “But there is something else.” Paul perched on the edge of her desk and crossed his arms, just as she had watched him do on many occasions. It was his ‘tell me more’ stance. “I went for a coffee with Kate—the policewoman—yesterday, and she let something slip.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It’s more what she didn’t say,” Laura replied, thinking back to the previous day. “We were having a chat about nothing in particular, and I asked her if there were any other lines of enquiry that they were following into Mr McGuire’s disappearance.”

  “Probably not the best question, my dear. What happened?”

  “She just shut up shop. Like the shutters came down over her face.”

  “She is a copper, Laura,” Paul replied. “Not really surprising. If she’d asked you about one of your clients, that would be your response. At least, I hope it would be.”

  “You know it would be, Paul,” Laura said, frowning at his last comment. “But if there weren’t any lines of enquiry, then why didn’t she just say so? They must be looking into something.”

  Paul stood and walked halfway back to his office before pausing.

  “I’ve known Malcolm for quite a long time,” he said. “He’s very thorough. He’ll be dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ’t’s, just like a good policeman should.”

  Laura didn’t reply as Paul’s chair squeaked as he sat back down behind his desk. He was right but, at the same time, Laura knew that something was going on behind the scenes. She shook her head and picked up her phone from the desk to send Gareth a text message.

  Have you heard of a place called Morston Hall?

  22

  Malcolm squinted at the computer screen in front of him. Although he’d been putting it off, it was probably time to go back to the opticians for some stronger glasses. He just didn’t like the fact that to do so would be an admission of ageing on his part.

  He tutted and clicked the print icon on his screen. A few seconds later the printer on the other side of the office whirred into life. He walked over to retrieve his printing, collecting a highlighter pen from one of the other desks on the way back to his own.

  Malcolm ran his eyes over the first page, frowning as he tried to orientate himself to the rows of figures. This was, he reflected, exactly why the police had financial experts. The bank statement he was looking at was complicated—it looked nothing like his own statements that he used his computer to view, but to be fair it had been a while since he’d looked at a proper printed out one.

  Philip McGuire’s bank account looked to Malcolm, at least on first glance, pretty normal. Once he had worked out which column was which, Malcolm was able to identify routine purchases. Groceries from Sainsbury’s, visits to various clothes shops, and a lot of transactions in a corner shop. Malcolm pushed his glasses onto the top of his head and rubbed his eyes before returning to the computer screen and bringing up the e-mail that Jon Brandon had sent him.

  Hi mate.

  I’ve attached McGuire’s financials. The financial forensics lot have got a backlog a mile long, and seeing as he’s dead, they’re not that interested. But I’ve found something screwy. Can you have a look and see if you can see it too?

  Cheers, Jon

  Malcolm looked down again at the paper, but whatever Jon could see was eluding him. The most notable thing that he could see was that Philip McGuire wasn’t very good with a petrol pump. Every transaction for fuel went over the pound mark by a couple of pence. He picked up the printed statements and made his way into the main office, looking around to see if Kate was at one of the desks. He saw her in the corner of the room, so made his way over to her.

  “Kate, how are you with bank statements?”

  “Oh, hi, sir,” she replied, jumping slightly at the sound of his voice. “Sorry, didn’t hear you coming.” Malcolm put the sheets of paper down in front of her, followed by the as yet unused highlighter pen.

  “These are from the McGuires’ joint account. The NCA have sent them over and asked me to have a look.”

  “Why would the NCA want you to have a look at the
m? Not being funny, but you’re a super. This is a bit tactical, isn’t it?”

  “It’s more of a favour for a friend, to be honest,” Malcolm replied. “Their interest in McGuire is waning now that he’s no longer in the land of the living, but a mate of mine down there thinks he’s seen something odd.” Kate leaned forward to look at the papers. “Buggered if I can see anything, though.”

  “Sure, I’ll have a look.”

  Twenty minutes later, Malcolm was lost in what had to be Norfolk Police’s most horrible spreadsheet. It detailed resource allocation across the entire county, but no matter how he tried to make the columns add up, he didn’t have enough of them to spread anything other than a thin layer of blue across the area.

  “Sir?” He looked up to see Kate at the door of his office. Relieved to have something other than Excel to think about, he closed the spreadsheet down.

  “How d’you get on?” he asked. From the numerous bright yellow highlighted areas on the piece of paper in her hand, she had got on a lot better with the bank statements than he had.

  “Yeah, I found a few oddities,” she replied brightly, placing the paperwork in front of him and walking to an adjacent desk to get a chair. Malcolm looked at her, seeing the enthusiasm in her eyes that he’d had when he was just starting out. He made a mental note to make sure he nurtured that as much as he could before it was too late. “Now, look at this column.”

  Malcolm looked as Kate used a well-manicured finger to indicate a column that she had highlighted.

  “What am I looking at?” he asked her.

  “This is the card that was used for the transaction.” Kate ran her finger down the column. “See? It’s all just the one card.” Her finger moved to the top of the page. “But it’s a joint account.”

  Malcolm looked at the names on the statement.

  “So the wife doesn’t use the joint account?”

  “Looks that way. It’s unusual, but not enough to get concerned about. The last transaction is on the day he disappeared—a few quid in a corner shop in Cley-next-the-Sea on his way to the dive site, maybe?”

  “Sandwiches, a couple of cans of drink. That would be about right.”

  “We could check the CCTV of the shop?”

  “We could,” Malcolm said, “but it’s unlikely that they’ll still have the recording after a month. Places like that, especially out in the sticks, tend to reuse the same media over and over again. There was a place in Hunstanton that got turned over last year, and they were still using a video tape.”

  “A video what?” Kate asked. Malcolm looked at her, and the smile on her face.

  “Very funny, Kate,” he replied. “What else have you got, apart from sarcasm and no respect for your elders and betters?”

  He watched as her finger pointed at a transaction dated about a month before Philip disappeared. It was a payment of £1500 to a bank account, and when Kate flipped the page to show him the previous one, there was a similar payment the previous month.

  “What’s a swift code?” Malcolm asked, looking more closely at the transaction.

  “It relates to the bank where the account is. The first four letters are the institution, the next two are the country. Then it’s the location, and finally, the branch code.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I just Googled it,” Kate replied with a smirk. “But over the last six months, McGuire has paid almost ten grand to an account in Denpasar.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Bali.”

  23

  Gareth was standing over the road from the law offices, waiting for Laura to finish work. He’d been on a job at an estate agent not far away who’d been burgled four times in the last year, so figured he might as well wait for her.

  Why anyone would want to burgle an estate agent was beyond him, though. When he used to steal stuff for a living, an estate agent was about the last place he would have targeted. Even though he was very strict about only going after businesses with insurance, as opposed to people’s houses, about the only thing worth nicking in an estate agent would be the computers. Hardly a good return on investment, given the price of secondhand computers. Let alone stolen secondhand computers.

  He saw the door to the law firm open, and Laura and Paul Dewar step outside. Paul turned away to lock the door, and Gareth raised a hand in greeting to Laura. She waved back, said something to Paul, and crossed the road. In her hand was a paper shopping bag from Jarrolds, an upmarket department store in the city centre. As she approached him, Laura looked down at the bag before rolling the top of it closed.

  “Hey, you,” she said as she walked up to him. “Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

  “I had a job just down the road, so thought I’d stop by. Fancy a drink?”

  “Sounds good to me. Where d’you fancy?”

  “The Royal Hotel’s just over there,” Gareth replied. “How about there?”

  As they walked towards the elegant Victorian building, Gareth looked up at it. It was a fine building, five stories high and almost gothic. It also had a chequered past, or at least it did for Gareth.

  A few moments later, they were sitting in the Art déco bar, which didn’t look as if it had changed much since the 1920s. The hotel had been taken over by a new manager earlier that year, but either he had no money or he liked the style, as it hadn’t changed a bit since he’d taken it on. The only thing that had changed, Gareth thought as he stared at the meagre change in his hand, were the prices. He’d bought a pint of lager and a glass of white wine and not come away with much change from a twenty pound note.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered as he put the change in his pocket. “They’re bloody London prices now.”

  “Stop whingeing, Gareth,” Laura said, smirking. “It was your choice to come here. So, tell me about your job?”

  “It was an estate agent. They’ve been done over four times in a year. God knows why. Bugger all to nick that I could see, and I should know.” Laura didn’t reply, and Gareth looked at her. Her forehead was creased into a frown.

  “Keys.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Have you checked to see if any of the houses they’ve sold or rented have been burgled?” she asked him. “Most people don’t change the locks when they move in somewhere, do they?” Gareth sipped his pint of lager, which tasted exactly the same as one in the Heartsease would at half the price, and thought about what she had just said.

  “Bloody hell, Laura,” he said, reaching for his phone. “I never thought of that.” After a brief conversation with the manager of the estate agent he had just left, he put his phone away. “He’s going to contact the police. Thank you.”

  “See, I’m not just a pretty face.” Laura sipped her drink, eyeing him over the top of the wineglass. “You can thank me properly on Friday night when you take me out for dinner.”

  “Ah, yes,” Gareth replied. “This Morston Hall place? It’s, er, it’s a bit of a trek, isn’t it? All the way to the coast for a meal?” After her text suggesting the place, Gareth had looked it up on Google, much to Tommy’s amusement. The entrées alone cost more than he would normally spend on an entire meal, as Tommy had delightfully pointed out to him.

  “Do you think?” Laura put her glass down on the table and ran her fingers up and down the stem. “I think it looks rather lovely.” She looked at him with a forlorn expression. “But if you want to go somewhere more local, that’s fine.”

  “No, no,” Gareth said, momentarily distracted by her fingers. “I promised you a dinner, and if that’s where you want to go, then that’s fine.” As he watched, a slow smile spread across her face.

  “I’ve heard the lobster’s particularly good,” she said, still smiling. “Well fed, apparently.”

  “Oh,” Gareth replied slowly. “You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?” Her smile turned into a laugh.

  “If you think I’m ever eating lobster, or crab, or even fish from Norfolk for a while, you’ve got ano
ther thing coming,” she said, giggling. “Besides, have you seen the prices?” Gareth nodded. He had.

  “It’s not cheap, is it?”

  “Er, no,” Laura replied. “I wouldn’t do that to you. Paul suggested the Adam and Eve up on Bishopsgate. Have you been there?”

  Gareth thought for a moment. He remembered Jennifer talking about it a while ago, but they’d never been there.

  “No, pretty sure I haven’t. I’ll book us a table, will I?”

  “Yeah, that would be good. I’m looking forward to it.” Gareth waited for a few seconds to see if Laura was going to say anything else. She did, but it wasn’t about the meal. “How’s Annette getting on?” He took another sip of his lager before replying.

  “Not brilliant, I don’t think.”

  “Me neither,” Laura replied. “I need to go round there at some point with the paperwork for getting Philip declared dead, but when I was round there the other day, she looked pretty rubbish.”

  “In what way?”

  “Er, well, I don’t know, really.”

  “Just tell me, Laura.”

  “She looked like shit, to be honest. Like she wasn’t taking care of herself, physically speaking. No make-up, for example.”

  “Just because she hadn’t put a bit of lippy on for the Old Bill, Laura, doesn’t mean that–”

  “It’s more than that, Gareth, trust me. She’s struggling big time, I reckon. She’s lost weight, she doesn’t look like she’s washed her hair since she found out about Philip. Her clothes were, well, not ones most people would want to be seen in.”

  “Okay,” Gareth replied. “Okay. I’ll pop round, have a brotherly chat.”

  “Might be an idea. Tell her I’ll be in touch over the next few days,” Laura said as she finished the last of her wine. She reached down and retrieved the paper bag from Jarrolds, its top still tightly closed. “Right, I need to get going. Things to do, people to see. Thanks for the drink.”