Dead Man's Footsteps

by Peter James

  How the hell had he got himself into this situation? he asked himself repeatedly. How had he let himself be duped by this bitch? Oh, she’d played it so cutely, coming on to him, playing the horny little slut to perfection. Letting him do everything he wanted with her and pretending to enjoy it. Maybe she was really enjoying it. But all the time she was pumping him so subtly for information. Women were smart. They knew how to manipulate men.

  He’d made the damned mistake of telling her, because he wanted to show off. He thought it would impress her.

  Instead, one night when he was coked out of his tree and rat-arsed drunk, she cleaned him out and ran. He needed it back desperately. His finances were shot to hell, he was up to his ears in debt and the business was not working out. This was his one chance. It had fallen into his lap, then she had snatched it and run.

  There was one thing in his favour, though: the world in which she was running was smaller than she thought. Anyone she went to, with what she had, would ask questions. A lot of questions. He suspected she had already begun to find that out, which was why she was still around, and now her problems had been further complicated by his arrival in Brighton.

  *

  At 9.30 a local Eastbourne taxi pulled up outside the front door of the block of flats. The driver got out and rang the bell. A couple of minutes later, Abby appeared. On her own.

  Good.

  Perfect.

  She was going to the first of the three appointments at rest homes she had made for this morning. Leaving Mummy alone, under strict instructions no doubt not to answer the door to anyone but the locksmith.

  He watched Abby climb in and the taxi drive off. He didn’t move. He knew how unpredictable women could be and that she might easily be back in five minutes for something she had forgotten. He had plenty of time. She’d be gone an hour and a half, minimum, and more likely three or more. He just had to be patient for a little while longer to ensure the coast was clear.

  Then he would not need very long at all.

  83

  OCTOBER 2007

  Glenn Branson pressed the bell and stood back a couple of feet, so that the security camera could get a good look at him. The wrought-iron gates jerked a few times, then began silently to swing open. The DS climbed back into the pool car and drove through two impressive brick pillars on to the circular in-and-out drive, the tyres crunching on the gravel. He pulled up behind a silver Mercedes sports and a silver S-class saloon, parked side by side.

  ‘It’s all right, this place, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Matching his and hers Mercs and all.’

  Bella Moy nodded, some of the colour just starting to return to her face. Glenn’s driving totally terrified her. She liked Glenn and didn’t want to offend him, but if she could have taken a bus back to the office, or walked barefoot on burning coals there, she would.

  The palatial house was partly faux-Georgian, and partly faux-Greek temple, with a columned portico running along the entire width of the front. Ari would die for this place, Glenn thought. Funny, when they’d first got married she hadn’t seemed interested in money at all. That had all changed around the time Sammy, who was now eight, started going to school. No doubt talking with the other mums, seeing some of their fancy cars, going to some of their flash houses.

  But houses like this fascinated him too. It seemed to Glenn that houses gave off auras. There were plenty of others in this area, and elsewhere in the city, that were every bit as large and swanky, but they gave the impression of being lived in by ordinary, decent citizens. Just occasionally you saw a place like this one now, which seemed somehow too flash, and sent out signals, wittingly or unwittingly, that it had not been acquired by honest money.

  ‘Would you like to live here, Bella?’ he asked.

  ‘I could get used to it.’ She smiled, then looked a tad wistful.

  He shot her a sideways glance. She was a nice-looking woman, with a cheery face beneath a tangle of brown hair and no ring on her wedding finger. She always dressed in slightly dowdy clothes, as if not interested in making the best of herself, and he longed to give her a makeover. Today she was wearing a white blouse under a plain navy V-neck sweater, black woollen trousers, solid black shoes and a short green duffel coat.

  She never talked about her private life and he often wondered what she went home to. A guy, a woman, a group of flatmates? One of his colleagues had once said that Bella looked after her elderly mum, but Bella never mentioned this.

  ‘I can’t remember where it is you live,’ he said as they climbed out of the car. A gust of wind lifted the tails of his camel coat.

  ‘Hangleton,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  That sort of fitted. Hangleton was a pleasant, quiet residential sprawl on the east of the city, bisected by a motorway and a golf course. Lots of small houses and bungalows and neatly tended gardens. It was exactly the kind of quiet, safe area a woman might live in with her elderly mother. He suddenly had an image in his mind of a sad-looking Bella at home, caring for a sick, frail lady, munching away on her Maltesers as a substitute for any other kind of a life. Like a forlorn, caged pet.

  He rang the bell and they were ushered in by a Filipino maid, who led them through into a high-ceilinged orangery, with a view down across terraced lawns containing an infinity swimming pool and a tennis court.

  They were ushered into armchairs arranged around a marble coffee table and offered drinks. Then Stephen and Sue Klinger came in.

  Stephen was a tall, lean, rather cold-looking man in his late forties, with greying wavy hair brushed harshly back, and his cheeks were a patchwork of purple drinker’s veins. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and expensive-looking loafers, and glanced at his watch the moment after he shook Branson’s hand.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to be away in ten minutes,’ he said, his voice hard and bland, very different to the Stephen Klinger they had interviewed yesterday in his office after what had clearly been a very heavy lunch.

  ‘No problem, sir, we just have a few more quick questions for you and some for Mrs Klinger. We appreciate your taking the time to see us again.’

  He gave Sue Klinger an appreciative second glance and she smirked slyly, as if noticing. She was a serious looker, he thought. Early forties, in great shape, dressed in a brown brushed-cotton designer tracksuit and trainers that looked like they were fresh out of their box.

  And she had real come-to-bed eyes. Which he caught twice in fast succession and then did his best to ignore, opening his notebook, deciding to focus on Stephen Klinger’s eyes, which might be easier to read.

  The maid came in with coffee and water.

  ‘Can I just recap, sir? How long had you and Ronnie Wilson been friends?’ Branson asked.

  Klinger’s eyes moved to his left, a fraction. ‘We go – went – back to our late teens,’ he said. ‘Twenty-seven – no – thirty years. Roughly.’

  As a double check, Glenn said, ‘And you told us yesterday that his relationship with his first wife, Joanna, had been difficult, but it was better with Lorraine?’

  Again the eyes moved to the left a fraction before he spoke.

  This was a neurolinguistic experiment Glenn had learned about from Roy Grace, and he sometimes found it of great assistance in assessing whether someone was telling the truth in an interview. Human brains were divided into left and right hemispheres. One was for long-term memory storage, while in the other the creative processes took place. When asked a question, people’s eyes almost invariably moved to the hemisphere they were using. In some people the memory storage was in the right hemisphere and in some the left; the creative hemisphere would be the opposite one.

  So now he knew that when Stephen Klinger’s eyes moved to the left in response to a question they were moving to his memory side, which meant he was likely to be telling the truth. So if his eyes moved right, then that meant he was likely to be lying. It wasn’t a failsafe technique but it could be a good indicator.

  Leaning forward, as the
maid put down his cup and saucer, and a china jug of milk, Branson said, ‘In your opinion, sir, do you think Ronnie Wilson would have been capable of murdering either of his wives?’

  The look of shock on Klinger’s face was genuine. As was the double-take on his wife’s. His eyes stayed dead centre as he replied. ‘Not Ronnie, no. He had a temper on him, but …’ He shrugged, shaking his head.

  ‘He had a kind heart,’ Sue added. ‘He liked to look after his friends. I don’t think – no, definitely, I don’t think so.’

  ‘We have some information we’d like to share with you, in confidence at this stage, although we will be making a statement to the press in the next few days.’

  Branson glanced at Bella, as if offering her the opportunity to speak, but she signalled back she was happy for him to continue.

  He poured some milk into his coffee, then said, ‘It doesn’t seem that Joanna Wilson ever made it to America. Her body was found in a storm drain in the centre of Brighton on Friday. She’d been there for a long time and she appears to have been strangled.’

  Now both of them looked genuinely shocked.

  ‘Shit!’ Sue said.

  ‘Is that the one that was in the Argus on Monday?’ Stephen wondered.

  Bella nodded at him.

  ‘Are you saying that – that – Ronnie had something to do with it?’ he asked.

  ‘If I may continue for a moment, sir,’ Branson pressed, ‘we learned yesterday that Lorraine Wilson’s body has also been found.’

  Sue Klinger blanched. ‘In the Channel?’

  ‘No, in a river outside Melbourne, in Australia.’

  Both Klingers sat looking at him in stunned silence. Somewhere in the house a phone started ringing. No one made any move to answer it. Glenn drank some of his coffee.

  ‘Melbourne?’ Sue Klinger said eventually. ‘Australia?’

  ‘How on earth did she get there from the English Channel?’ Stephen asked, looking totally astonished.

  The ringing stopped. ‘The post-mortem has shown that she has only been dead for two years, sir – so it doesn’t look as if she did commit suicide by jumping into the Channel back in 2002.’

  ‘So she did it by jumping into a river in Australia instead?’ Stephen said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Glenn replied. ‘Her neck was broken and she was in the boot of a car.’ He held back the rest of the information he had.

  Both the Klingers sat very still, absorbing the impact of what they had just heard. Finally Stephen broke the silence. ‘By whom? Why? Are you saying the same person killed Joanna and Lorraine?’

  ‘We can’t tell at this stage. But there are some similarities in the way they both appear to have been killed.’

  ‘Who – who would have killed Joanna – and then Lorraine?’ Sue asked. She began twisting a gold bracelet on her wrist round and round nervously.

  ‘Were either of you aware that Joanna Wilson inherited a house from her mother, which she sold shortly before her death?’ Glenn asked. ‘It netted an amount of approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. We are now trying to track down what happened to that money.’

  ‘Probably went to pay off Ronnie’s debts the moment it came into her account,’ Stephen said. ‘I liked the old bugger but he wasn’t too clever with money, if you know what I mean. Always wheeling and dealing, but never getting it quite right. He wanted to be a much bigger player than he had the ability for.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh, Steve,’ Sue commented, turning to face her husband. ‘Ronnie had good ideas.’ She looked at the two detectives and tapped her head. ‘He had an inventive mind. He once invented a gizmo for extracting air from wine bottles that had been opened. He was in the process of patenting it when that – what’s it called? – Vacu Vin came out and cleaned up in the market.’

  ‘Yeah, but the Vacu Vin was plastic,’ Stephen said. ‘Ronnie made his out of brass, the stupid sod. Anybody could have told him that metals react with wine.’

  ‘You said yourself at the time you thought it was smart, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t invest in any business Ronnie was running. Done it twice before and both went down the toilet.’ He shrugged. ‘You need more than a good idea to make a business work.’ He glanced at his watch and looked a little agitated.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Klinger,’ Bella said, ‘did you have any idea that Lorraine had come into a substantial amount of money in the months before she – seemingly – ended her life?’

  Sue shook her head vigorously. ‘No way. I’d have been the first to know. Ronnie left her in a terrible mess, poor thing. She had to go back to work at Gatwick. She couldn’t get any credit because of all the judgements against Ronnie. She couldn’t even scrape enough cash together to buy a car. I even lent her a few hundred quid to tide her over at one point.’

  ‘Well, this may come as a surprise to you both,’ Glenn said, ‘but Ronnie Wilson had a life insurance policy with the Norwich Union which paid out just over one and a half million pounds to Lorraine Wilson in March 2002.’

  Their shock was palpable. Then he added to it.

  ‘Further, in July 2002, Mrs Wilson received a payment of nearly two and a half million dollars from the 9/11 compensation fund. About one and three-quarter million pounds at the exchange rate at that time.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe—’ Sue shook her head. ‘I know at the time she disappeared the police officers we spoke to didn’t seem entirely convinced that she had committed suicide by jumping off the boat. They didn’t say why. Perhaps they knew something then that we didn’t. But Stephen and I, and all her friends, were convinced she was dead, and none of us has heard a single word from her since.’

  ‘If what you are saying is true, that’s—’ Stephen Klinger broke off in mid-sentence.

  ‘She withdrew all of it, in cash, in different amounts, between the time she received the money and her disappearance in November 2002,’ Bella said.

  ‘Cash?’ Stephen Klinger echoed.

  ‘Would either of you have any idea if the Wilsons – or more likely Ronnie – was being blackmailed by anyone?’ Glenn asked.

  ‘Lorraine and I were very close,’ Sue said. ‘I think she’d have told me – you know – confided in me.’

  The way she confided in you about the three and a quarter million quid! Glenn thought.

  Stephen Klinger suddenly stabbed a finger in the air. ‘There’s one thing – could be that Ronnie had taught her this. He liked to trade stamps.’

  ‘Stamps?’ Glenn said. ‘Like postage stamps, you mean?’

  He nodded. ‘Big-ticket ones. He always traded them for cash. Reckoned it was harder for the Revenue to keep tabs on him.’

  ‘Three million plus pounds would be an awful lot of stamps,’ Bella said.

  Stephen shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. I remember Ronnie opening his wallet one night in a pub and showing me this one stamp, all in tissue paper, just one stamp he’d paid fifty grand for. Reckoned he had a buyer who would pay sixty for it. But knowing his luck, he probably ended up getting forty.’

  ‘Would you have any idea where Mr Wilson did his stamp trading?’

  ‘There’s a few local dealers he told me he used, for smaller stuff. I know he dealt with a place called Hawkes down Queen’s Road sometimes. And with one or two places in London, and in New York, as well. Oh yeah, and he used to talk about some big player who deals from home – can’t remember his name – he’s just around the corner in Dyke Road. Someone at Hawkes would be able to tell you.’

  Glenn noted the name down.

  ‘He did say that at the top end of the market it’s a very small world. If any dealer made a large sale, everyone in the business would know about it. So if she spent that kind of money on stamps, someone’s going to remember.’

  ‘And presumably,’ Bella said, ‘someone would also remember if she sold them.’

  84

  OCTOBE
R 2007

  It was Duncan Troutt’s first day on patrol as a fully fledged police officer. He felt rather proud, rather self-conscious and, in truth, a little nervous of screwing up.

  At five feet nine inches tall and just under ten stone, he cut a slight figure, but he knew how to look after himself. A long-time fan of martial arts, he had attained a whole raft of certificates in kickboxing, taekwondo and kung fu.

  His girlfriend, Sonia, had given him a framed poster which read:

  YEA, THOUGH I WALK ALONE THROUGH THE SHADOW OF

  THE VALLEY OF DEATH, I FEAR NO EVIL, FOR I AM

  THE MEANEST SON OF A BITCH IN THE VALLEY.

  Right now, at 10 a.m., the Meanest Son of a Bitch in the Valley was at the junction of Marine Parade and Arundel Road, at the eastern extremity of Brighton and Hove. Not exactly a valley. Not even a small dip, really. The streets were calm at the moment. In another hour or so the drug addicts would be starting to surface. One statistic that the local tourist board did not like to advertise was that the city had the second largest number of injecting drug users – and drug deaths – per capita in the UK. Troutt had been warned that a disproportionately large share of them appeared to live on his beat.

  His radio crackled and he heard his call sign. He answered it with excitement and heard the voice of Sergeant Morley.

  ‘All OK, Duncan?’

  ‘Yes, Sarge. So far, Sarge.’

  The area of Troutt’s beat extended from the Kemp Town seafront back to the Whitehawk estate, which housed, historically, some of the city’s roughest and most violent families – as well as many decent folk. And recent community policing initiatives were resulting in big and positive changes. The warren of terraced streets in between contained the transients’ world of rooming houses and cheap hotels, a prosperous urban residential community, including one of the largest gay communities in the UK, and dozens of restaurants, pubs and smaller independent shops. It was also home to several schools as well as the city’s hospital.