by Peter James
It was the one stamp dealer in the city whose name Hugo Hegarty had omitted to give her.
‘It’s Sarah Smith,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way over, just waiting for a taxi. What time do you close?’
‘Not till 5.30,’ the man said.
An anxious fifteen minutes later the taxi appeared.
108
OCTOBER 2007
The Witness Interview Suite at Sussex House comprised two rooms. One was the size of the sitting room of a very small house. The other, which could just fit two people side by side, was used solely for observation.
The larger room, in which Glenn Branson sat with Bella Moy and a very distressed-looking ‘Katherine Jennings’, contained three bucket-shaped armchairs, upholstered in red, and a bland coffee table. Branson and Abby each had a mug of coffee in front of them and Bella was sipping a glass of water.
Unlike most of the gloomy interview rooms down at the well-worn Brighton Central Police Station in John Street, this one felt bright and actually had a view.
‘Are you happy for this to be recorded?’ Branson asked, nodding up at the two wall-mounted cameras pointing down at them. ‘It’s standard procedure.’ What he did not add was that sometimes a copy of the tape would be given to a psychologist for profiling. You could learn a lot from just the body language of some witnesses.
‘Fine,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.
He studied her carefully for some moments. Despite her face being drained and all scrunched up in misery, she was an extremely good-looking young woman. Late twenties, he guessed. Black hair that was cut a little severely and almost certainly dyed, because her eyebrows were much lighter. Her face was classically beautiful, with high cheekbones, a large forehead and an exquisite nose, small, finely chiselled and very slightly turned up. It was the kind of nose that less fortunate women paid thousands of pounds to plastic surgeons to try to achieve. He knew that because Ari had shown him an article on nose jobs once, and he had looked for signs of surgery on women’s noses ever since.
But the young woman’s most striking feature was her eyes. They were emerald green, mesmerizing, feline eyes. Even with her wretched expression, they still sparkled.
And she knew how to dress. In designer jeans, ankle-length boots – admittedly scuffed and dusty – a belted, black, knitted polo neck beneath a long, expensive-looking fleece-lined jacket, she was pure class. A few inches taller and she could have stepped off a catwalk.
Branson was about to start the interview when the young woman raised a hand. ‘It’s actually not my real name that I gave you. I think I ought to clarify. It’s Abby Dawson.’
‘Why were you using a different name?’ Bella asked gently.
‘Look, my mother’s dying. She’s in terrible danger. Could we just – just—’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I mean, do we need to go through all this? Can’t we just – just do that later?’
‘I’m afraid we do need to get all the facts, Abby,’ Bella said. ‘Why the name?’
‘Because …’ She shrugged. ‘I came here, back to England, to try to escape from my boyfriend. I thought it would make it harder for him to find me with a different name.’ She shrugged again and gave a sad smile. ‘I was wrong.’
‘OK, Abby,’ Glenn said, ‘would you like to tell us exactly what has happened? Everything we need to know about yourself, your mother and the man you say has kidnapped her.’
Abby pulled a tissue out of her brown suede handbag and dabbed her eyes. Glenn wondered what was in the plastic groceries bag that lay on the floor beside it.
‘I was left a collection of stamps. I didn’t know anything about them – but by coincidence I was going out with – dating – this guy Ricky Skeggs in Melbourne, who was in the rare stamp and coin business in quite a big way.’
‘Is he connected to Chad Skeggs?’ Branson asked.
‘It’s the same person.’
‘Chad and Ricky are both derivatives of Richard,’ Bella said to Glenn.
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I asked Ricky to take a look at them and tell me if they were worth anything,’ Abby continued. ‘He took them away, then gave them back to me a couple of days later. He said there were a few individual stamps that were worth something, but most of them were replicas of rare stamps, collectable, but not valuable. He said he could probably get a couple of thousand Australian dollars for the lot.’
‘OK,’ Glenn said. Her eyes made him uneasy, they were all over the place. He felt he was getting a rehearsed performance, not something from the heart. ‘Did you believe him?’
‘I didn’t have any reason not to,’ Abby replied. ‘Except I’ve never been a very trusting person.’ She shrugged again. ‘It’s not in my nature. So I’d made photocopies of all the stamps before I gave them to him. When I checked with the ones he gave me back, they all looked the same, but there were subtle differences. I confronted him and he told me I was being delusional.’
‘That was smart that you made the copies,’ Bella commented.
Abby looked at her watch anxiously, then sipped some coffee. ‘Anyhow, I was glancing through one of the specialist magazines in Ricky’s flat a day or so later, and read an article about a rare stamp auction in London. It was about a Plate 77 Penny Red that went for a record price of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. And I recognized it as looking similar to the plate of Penny Reds I had. I checked the newspaper photo against my own stamps and to my relief I could see they were very similar but not absolutely identical, so it wasn’t mine he had sold. But I then panicked that Ricky was going to try to sell them.’
‘Why did you think that?’ Bella probed.
‘There was something about the way he acted over the stamps that made me very uncomfortable. I just knew he was lying to me.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyhow, a couple of days later he was blasted out of his skull on cocaine – he snorted it all the time – and then early in the morning he crashed out into a deep sleep. I went on to his computer – he’d left it logged on – and I found several emails to dealers around the world, offering stamps that were clearly mine for sale. He was very clever. He’d broken them down into individual stamps and plates so they couldn’t be identified as one collection.’
‘Did you confront him?’ Glenn asked.
She shook her head. ‘No, he’d boasted to me the first time we met how easy stamps were to conceal, that they were a great way of laundering money and transporting it around the world. That even if you got stopped, most customs officers wouldn’t have a clue there was any value to them. He said the best place to hide stamps was inside a book – a hardback novel, anything like that, which would protect them. So I just searched his bookshelves. And I found them.’
Bella smiled.
Branson watched Abby’s face, her eyes, absorbing it, but not comfortable. This wasn’t the whole story. There was something she was omitting, but he had no idea what. Clearly, she was smart.
‘What happened then?’ he asked.
‘I did a runner. I took the stamps, crept home, packed a bag and flew to Sydney on the first flight I could get in the morning. I was scared because I thought he would come after me – he’s extremely sadistic. I made my way to England via Los Angeles and then New York.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police in Melbourne and report what he had done?’ Glenn asked.
‘Because he scared me,’ she said. ‘And he’s very clever. He’s very good at lying. I was worried he would spin the police a story and get them back. Or that he would come after me and hurt me. He’d already hurt me once.’
Glenn and Bella shot each other a knowing glance, remembering Chad Skeggs’s history with the police in Brighton.
‘And I needed the value from them badly,’ Abby said. ‘My mother is extremely sick – she’s got multiple sclerosis. I need the money to pay for her to be in a home.’
Glenn picked up on the way she said that last sentence. Nothing he could put his finger on, but she said it in a strange wa
y, as if that would be justification for any action. And it just struck him as strange that she said the word need. If someone took something that belonged to you, it wasn’t a question of whether you needed it. You had a right to it.
‘Are you saying it will cost millions to keep your mother in a rest home?’ Bella said.
‘She’s only sixty-eight, although she looks a lot older,’ Abby replied. ‘It could be for twenty years, maybe more. I don’t know what it will cost.’ She sipped some coffee. ‘Why does that have any relevance? I mean – if we don’t do something quickly, she won’t survive. She won’t.’ She buried her face in her hands again and sobbed.
The two detectives shot each other a glance. Then Glenn Branson asked, ‘Did you ever meet someone called David Nelson?’
‘David Nelson?’ She frowned, dabbing her eyes, then shook her head. ‘The name rings a bell, I think.’ She hesitated, then went on, ‘David Nelson? I think Ricky may have mentioned the name.’
Branson nodded. She was lying.
‘And the stamps – are they here in England now?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Safe, under lock and key.’
He nodded again. Now she was telling the truth.
109
OCTOBER 2007
All Nick Nicholl wanted at this moment was a good night’s sleep. His problem was that it was 8.30 in the morning and he was in the back of a blue unmarked Holden police car, in brilliant sunshine, heading away from the airport complex towards downtown Melbourne. They were on a wide, multi-lane highway which, to his eyes, could as easily have been in the USA as in Australia, except that the driver, Detective Sergeant Troy Burg, was sitting on the right.
Some of the road signs looked similar to those in the UK, but some were a different colour, blue and orange a lot of them, he noticed, and the speed limits were in kilometres. He stared at a slim black box on top of the dash, at a touch-screen computer mounted on the front binnacle and at the big shiny buttons all around it. It was like an adult version of a child’s computer. Although Liam wasn’t old enough yet, Nick was already looking at educational toys for him.
He was missing him. Missing Julie. The prospect of spending the weekend in Australia without them, with just bloody Norman Potting for company, filled him with dread.
The avuncular Detective Senior Sergeant George Fletcher, in the front passenger seat, seemed well briefed and got straight down to business after a few pleasantries. His taciturn colleague, a decade younger, drove in silence. Both the Australian detectives wore freshly pressed white shirts, patterned blue ties and dark suit trousers.
Potting, dressed in what looked like a demob suit, had briefly lit up his pipe the moment they stepped out of the airport terminal and he now emitted a rank odour of unaired fabric, tobacco and stale alcohol fumes into the car. But he seemed remarkably breezy after the lengthy journey, and the young Detective Constable, also in a suit and tie, envied the older man’s constitution for that.
‘OK,’ Fletcher said, ‘we haven’t had a lot of time to prepare but we’ve made a start on all the lines of enquiry. First thing we can report on is the trawl of immigration records for people with the name David Nelson who have entered Australia since 11 September 2001. We have one that is particularly interesting in terms of your time profile. On 6 November 2001, a David Nelson arrived in Sydney from a flight from Cape Town, South Africa. His date of birth puts him at the right age.’
‘Did he give an address?’ Norman Potting asked.
‘He came in on an Australian passport with a five-year residence visa, so we didn’t require that information. We’re now checking our Law Enforcement Assistance Programme. That will tell us if he has a driving licence and any vehicles registered in his name. It will also tell us any known alias he may have used and his last known address.’
‘He could be anywhere, couldn’t he?’
‘Yes, Norman,’ Nick Nicholl reminded him, ‘but we know that he had one old friend, Chad Skeggs, in Melbourne, so there’s a good chance he came here – and might still be here. If you are going to do a disappearing act and fetch up in a new country, you need someone you can depend on, someone you can take into your confidence.’
Potting considered this. ‘It’s a valid point,’ he conceded a tad grudgingly, as if he didn’t want to be outsmarted in front of these seasoned detectives by his junior.
Troy Burg said. ‘And we’re checking the Revenue to see which David Nelsons have a TFN.’
‘TFN?’ Potting queried.
‘Tax File Number. You’d need that for employment.’
‘Legitimate employment, you mean?’
Burg gave a wry smile.
‘We have something else that could be a connection,’ George Fletcher said. ‘Mrs Lorraine Wilson committed suicide on the night of Tuesday 19 November 2002, correct?’
‘Allegedly,’ Potting said.
Four days later, on 23 November, a Mrs Margaret Nelson arrived in Sydney. Could be nothing,’ he said. ‘But the age on her passport is about right.’
‘It’s not that common a name,’ Nicholl said.
‘It’s not,’ Detective Senior Sergeant Fletcher said. ‘It’s not rare, but it’s not common, I’d say.’
‘I think we should run through the agenda we put together, see if it works for you guys,’ Troy Burg said.
‘So long as it includes beer and tottie, it works for me,’ Potting said, and chuckled. ‘Tinnies, isn’t that what you call ’em?’
‘You mean girls or beer?’ Fletcher grinned at him, eyes twinkling good-humouredly.
In the distance, Nick Nicholl could see a cluster of jagged high-rise buildings.
‘You guys are in for a treat tomorrow. George’s going to cook for you. He’s a genius. He should have been a chef, not a cop,’ Burg said, becoming animated for the first time.
‘I can’t boil an egg,’ Potting said. ‘Never could.’
‘I think you’ll want the best part of a week here to get through everything,’ George Fletcher said.
Nick Nicholl groaned inwardly at the thought.
‘We’ve been given a list of what you need to see,’ Fletcher said. ‘You just tell us if you want to skip some of it. We’re going to take you out to the Barwon river, where Mrs Wilson’s body was found. Then you might want to see the car – we have that in the pound.’
‘What are the ownership records on the vehicle she was found in?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
‘The car had false number plates and its serial numbers had been filed off. I don’t think we’re going to get much from it.’ Moving on, he said, ‘I imagine you will want to see Mrs Wilson’s remains so we’ve set up a meeting with the pathologist.’
‘Sounds good,’ Potting said. ‘But I want to start with Chad Skeggs.’
‘We’re going there now,’ Burg said.
‘You guys like red wine?’ George Fletcher said. ‘Australian Shiraz? It’s Friday, so Troy and I thought we’d take you to a place for lunch that we like.’
At this moment, Nick Nicholl felt desperately in need of black coffee, not any kind of alcohol.
‘You bet,’ Potting said.
‘George knows his way around Australian Shiraz,’ Troy Burg said.
‘Are we going to see you over the weekend too, Troy?’ Potting asked.
‘Sunday,’ George said. ‘Troy’s busy tomorrow.’
‘I’ll take you guys to the river on Sunday,’ Troy said. ‘Show you where the car was found.’
‘We couldn’t do that tomorrow?’ Nicholl asked, anxious not to waste any precious time.
‘He’s busy most Saturdays,’ George Fletcher said. ‘Tell them what you do on Saturdays, Troy?’
After some moments, reddening a little, the Australian Detective Sergeant said, ‘I play the banjo at weddings.’
‘You’re joking?’ Norman Potting said.
‘He’s in big demand,’ George Fletcher said.
‘It’s how I switch off.’<
br />
‘What do you play?’ Norman Potting asked. ‘“Duelling Banjos”? Ever see that film Deliverance?’
‘Uh huh, I saw that.’
‘When those hillbillies tie the guy to the tree and butt-fuck him? With the banjo music playing?’
Burg nodded.
‘That’s what they should have at weddings, not the “Wedding March”,’ Potting said. ‘When a man gets married that’s what happens to the poor sod. His wife ties him to a tree and butt-fucks him.’
George Fletcher laughed genially.
‘Know the similarity between a hurricane and a woman?’ Potting asked, on a roll now.
Fletcher shook his head.
‘I think I heard this,’ Burg murmured.
‘When they come, they’re wet and wild. When they go, they take your house and car.’
Nick Nicholl stared out of the window miserably. He’d already heard the joke on the plane. Twice. He saw a row of low-rise apartment blocks ahead. They were driving down a street of single-storey shops. A white tram crossed in front of them. A short while later they crossed the Yarra river and passed a geometric building in a wide plaza that looked like it was an arts centre. Now they were entering a busy downtown area.
Troy Burg made a left turn into a narrow, shaded street and parked outside a shop advertising itself as a bottle store. As Nick Nicholl climbed out of the car he saw the shop had a bay-windowed, Regency front that looked as if it had been modelled on one of the antiques shops in Brighton’s Lanes. The window was filled with displays of rare stamps and coins. In gold Olde Worlde lettering above he read: CHAD SKEGGS, INTERNATIONAL COIN AND STAMP DEALERS AND AUCTIONEERS.
They went inside and a bell pinged. Behind the glass-topped display counter, showing more stamps and coins, stood a skinny, tanned youth in his early twenties with spiky, bleached blond hair and a large gold earring. He was dressed in a T-shirt with a surf board emblazoned on it and faded jeans, and he greeted them as if they were long-lost friends.