by Crossfire
I touched his foot.
“And do you know, Alex, if you inject insulin between someone’s toes it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find the puncture mark on the skin, and the insulin would be undetectable, because you create it naturally in your body? It would appear you died of a seizure followed by a heart attack.”
The statement wasn’t entirely accurate. The insulin used nowadays to treat diabetics is almost exclusively synthetic insulin, and it can be detected as being different from the natural human product.
But Alex wasn’t to know that.
“Now, then,” I said, smiling and holding up the syringe to him again. “Between which two toes would you like it?”
16
I was worried that he was going to pass out. His eyes started to roll back in their sockets, and his breathing suddenly became shallower. I didn’t want him to have a heart attack simply from fear. That might take some explaining.
“Alex,” I shouted at him, bringing his eyes back into focus on my face. “You can prevent this, you know. All you have to do is cooperate and answer all my questions. But you have to be completely candid and tell me everything. Do you understand?”
He nodded eagerly.
“And do you agree to answer everything?”
He nodded again.
“Nothing held back?”
He shook his head from side to side, so I stepped forwards and tore off the tape from across his mouth.
“Now, for a start,” I said, “who killed Roderick Ward?”
He still wouldn’t answer.
“I won’t give you another chance,” I said seriously.
“How do I know you won’t kill me anyway, after I’ve told you?”
“You don’t,” I said. “But do you have any choice? And if I gather enough incriminating information about you, so that you would also be in big trouble if you told the tax man about my mother, then we would both have a weapon of mass destruction, as it were. Either of us telling the authorities would result in the very thing we were trying so hard to prevent. We would both have the safety of mutually assured annihilation, a bit like nuclear deterrence. Neither of us would use the information for fear of the retaliation.”
“But you could still kill me,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed, “I suppose I could, but why would I? There would be no need, and even I don’t kill people without a reason.”
He didn’t look terribly reassured, so I untaped his foot from the spindle and then pulled him across the floor so he was sitting up with his back against the wall by the kitchen door.
“Now,” I said, sitting down once more on the upright chair. “If you didn’t kill Roderick Ward, who did?”
I still wasn’t sure he would tell me, so seemingly absentmindedly, I picked up the syringe and made another fine spray of fluid shoot from the needle.
“His sister,” Alex said.
I looked at him. “Stella Beecher?”
He seemed surprised I knew her name, but I’d already shown him the note he had sent to her. He nodded.
“Now, why would she kill her own brother?”
“She didn’t mean to,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“You mean the car crash?”
“No,” he said. “He was already dead when he went into the river. He drowned in a bath.”
“What on earth was Stella Beecher doing giving him a bath?”
“She wasn’t exactly giving him a bath. They were trying to get him to tell them where the money had gone.”
“What money?” I asked.
“Fred’s father’s money.”
I was confused. “Fred?”
“Fred Sutton,” he said.
Old Man Sutton’s son. The man I had seen in the public gallery at Roderick Ward’s inquest.
“So Fred Sutton and Stella Beecher know each other?” I asked.
“Know each other!” He laughed. “They live together. They’re almost married.”
In Andover, I thought, close to Old Man Sutton and his nursing home. So it had been no coincidence at all that Stella Beecher had moved to Andover.
It took more than an hour, but in the end, Alex told me how, and why, Roderick Ward was found dead in his car, submerged in the River Windrush.
Ward had been introduced to Old Man Sutton by Stella Beecher, who had been in a relationship with Detective Sergeant Fred for some time. Unbeknownst to either Fred or Stella, Roderick had somehow conned the old man into borrowing against his house and investing the cash in a nonexistent hedge fund in Gibraltar. Fred found out about it only after he’d seen the brick being thrown through his father’s window. It was like a soap opera.
“How do you know all this?” I asked Alex. “What’s your connection?”
“I worked with Roderick Ward.”
“So you are implicated in this sham hedge-fund business?”
He didn’t really want to admit it. He must have known that my mother had been conned in the same way. He looked away from my face, but he nodded.
“So who’s the brains behind it?” I asked.
He turned his eyes back to mine. “Do you think I’m stupid or something?” he said. “If I told you who it was then you wouldn’t need to kill me because they’d do it for you.”
Actually, I did think him stupid. But not as stupid as Roderick Ward. Fancy stealing from the father of your sister’s boyfriend, especially when the boyfriend just happened to be a police detective—now, that was really stupid!
“Let’s go back to Roderick Ward,” I said. “Why did you send a note to Stella Beecher saying you had the stuff? What stuff? And how did you know Stella anyway?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “But I knew her address, because Roderick had said it was the same address he used, the one in Oxford.”
“So what was all this about having the stuff? And hoping it was in time?”
“Fred Sutton had been harassing Roderick and me at an office we’d rented in Wantage, threatening us and so on.”
I didn’t blame him, I thought.
“He told me that he’d get a warrant for my arrest, and he’d use his police contacts to fit me up good and proper. He said I’d get ten years unless I gave him some papers he wanted about where his dad’s money had gone.”
“So why the note?” I asked.
“I made the copies of the papers, but he didn’t come to collect them on the Monday morning as he’d said he would. He told me he’d definitely be at the office by eight, and I was waiting. But he didn’t come all day, and Roderick didn’t show up, either. I thought the two of them must have done a deal, and I would end up carrying the can. I was shit scared, I can tell you. And I had no other way of contacting him, so I sent the note.”
So I had been wrong about “the stuff ” being something to do with my mother’s tax papers, and also “in time” had not been about before Roderick Ward’s “accident,” but about before getting an arrest warrant issued.
Never assume anything, I reminded myself.
But I’d been right about one thing: Alex Reece was indeed stupid.
“So how do you know that Fred Sutton and Stella killed Roderick Ward?” I asked him.
“Fred pitches up first thing the next day and demands the papers, but I told him to get stuffed. If he thought I was going to take the blame for what Roderick had been doing, he had another think coming. But he says Roderick’s dead and I’ll go the same way if I didn’t give him the papers.”
He paused only to draw breath.
“So I says to him that I didn’t believe him that Roderick was dead. I told him he was only saying it to frighten me. He tells me that I should be frightened because they murdered him in the bath, but then he thinks better of it and claims it was an accident, that they’d only meant to scare him into telling them where the money had gone. But Fred says that Stella pulled his feet and his head went under and he just . . . died. Killed her own brother, just like that, Fred said. One minute they were asking him questions, t
he next he was dead.”
“So did you give Fred the papers he wanted?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “But they wouldn’t have done him much good. It’s been ages since his money went, and they change the numbers and stuff all the time.”
“‘They’?” I asked.
He clammed up tight, pursing his lips and shaking his head at me.
But I’d been doing a lot of thinking while I’d sat waiting in Greystone Stables and in the Newbury coffee shop, and the more I had thought about it, the more convinced I had become.
“You mean Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway,” I said. It was a statement rather than a question.
He stared at me with his mouth hanging open. So I was right.
But it had to be them.
“And who is Mr. Cigar?” I asked him.
He laughed. “No one,” he said. “That was Roderick’s idea. They all thought it a great joke as they puffed on their own great big Havanas.”
“And Rock Bank Ltd?” I said. “Is that a myth too?”
“Oh no, that exists, all right,” he said. “But it’s not really a bank. It’s just a Gibraltar holding company. When money comes in, it sits there for a while, and then leaves again.”
“How much money?” I asked.
“Depends on how much people invest.”
“And where does it go when it leaves Rock Bank?”
“I arrange a transfer into another Gibraltar account, but it doesn’t stay long there either,” he said. “I don’t know where it goes then. I’m pretty sure it ends up in a secret numbered Swiss account.”
“How long does it stay in Rock Bank?”
“About a week,” he said. “Just long enough to allow for clearance of the transfer and for any problems to get sorted.”
So Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd had no assets of its own. No wonder the London-based liquidation firm was attempting to pursue the individual directors.
“And where does it come from?” I asked him.
“The mugs,” he said, with a laugh.
“You’re the mug,” I said. “Look at you. You don’t look quite so clever at the moment. And I bet you don’t get to keep much of the money.”
“I get my cut,” he boasted.
“And how long in prison will your cut be worth when this all falls apart, as it surely must? Or when will Warren and Garraway decide you are no longer worth your cut? Then you might end up drowned in a bath, just like Roderick.”
“They need me,” he boasted again. “I’m the CPA. They need me to square the audit. You’re just jealous of a successful business.”
“But it’s not a business,” I said. “You are simply stealing from people.”
“They can afford it,” he said, sneering.
I wasn’t going to argue with him, because there was no point. He probably agreed with the philosophy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
“So how do Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway know each other?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But they’ve done so for years. Long before I met them.”
“And how long have you known them?” I asked.
“Too long,” he said, echoing what he’d said to me at Isabella’s kitchen supper.
“And how long is that?” I persisted.
“About four years.”
“Was that when the fake-hedge-fund scheme started?”
“Yeah, about then.”
“Is that what you were referring to when you had that little spat with Jackson Warren, you know, that night when I first I met you?”
“No,” he said. “That was over his and Peter’s other little fiddle.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“No way,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve already said too much as it is.”
At least he was right on that count.
“You think the Revenue will investigate their other little fiddle?” I asked him, thinking back to the supper exchange between him and Jackson. What was it he had said then? Something about that there was no telling what else the Revenue might dig up. “And you’re worried about that investigation finding out about everything else?”
It was a guess but not a bad one.
“Bloody stupid, if you ask me,” he said.
I was asking him.
“Why take the risk?” I said.
“Exactly.”
“So their other little fiddle is about tax?”
“Look,” he said, changing the subject and completely ignoring my question, “I had a few beers on the flight, and now I desperately need to take a piss.”
I thought back to my time in the stable. Should I make him wet himself just as I had been forced to do?
“Come on,” he shouted at me. “I’m bloody bursting.”
Reluctantly, I took a pair of scissors from my rucksack, leaned down and cut the ties holding Alex’s hands behind his back.
“I might run away,” he said, sitting up and rubbing his wrists.
“Not like that you won’t.” I pointed to the plastic ties that still bound his ankles together.
“Come on,” he said. “Cut them too.”
“No,” I said. “You can hop.”
Grudgingly, he pulled himself upright and hopped into the bathroom beneath the stairs.
I thought it unlikely that there would be a phone in the bathroom, but nevertheless, I took the precaution of removing the house telephone from its cradle in the kitchen. You can’t dial out on one extension if another is off the hook, and his cell was still lying, switched off, on the kitchen counter where I’d left it.
Alex was taking his time, and I was beginning to think he might be trying to escape out of the bathroom window, when I heard the flush. Presently, he reappeared, hobbling out into the hall.
“Cut these bloody things off,” he demanded angrily. He had obviously been using the time to try to break the plastic ties around his ankles, but I knew from experience that they were tougher than they looked. Much tougher indeed than his skin, which was chafed and reddening.
“No,” I said.
“What the bloody hell more do you want?” he asked angrily.
“My WMD,” I said.
“Eh?”
“My weapon of mass destruction,” I said. “My nuclear deterrent. I need some hard evidence.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Evidence of conspiracy to defraud my mother of one million U.S. dollars.”
“Dream on,” he said, smiling.
“Maybe I should just ring up Jackson Warren and ask him about my mother’s money, telling him that it was you who suggested I did so.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said, looking a little worried.
“Don’t tempt me,” I said.
“He’d bloody kill me just for talking to you.”
Good, I thought. It was much to my advantage that Alex remained more frightened of Jackson Warren than he was of me. That alone would prevent him from telling Jackson anything about this nocturnal encounter. Maybe that in itself was my nuclear deterrence.
“Or perhaps I should call Jackson and ask for the number of the Swiss bank account into which he and Garraway put all the money they steal.”
“You’d better bloody not,” Alex said. “Or I’ll be onto the tax man about your mother.”
I strode into the kitchen, and he hobbled in behind me. I walked straight past his flight bag, and I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as he pushed it farther out of sight beneath the table. I didn’t mind one bit that Alex believed I hadn’t accessed his computer.
“Sit down,” I said sharply, pointing to one of the kitchen chairs.
I don’t think he really knew how to react. He didn’t move.
“Sit down,” I said again, in my best voice-of-command.
He wavered, but after a few seconds, he pulled the chair out from under the table and sat down while I sat on the chair opposite him.
“So whose idea was it to get my mother’s horses to lose?�
� I asked.
“Julie’s,” he said.
“So she could bet against them on the Internet?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “She just wanted to give her old man’s horses a better chance of winning. He gives her such a hard time when they lose. It was me who bets against the horses on the Internet. Not too much, like, not enough to attract attention. But it’s been a nice little earner.”
Amateurs, I thought. These people were amateurs.
The doorbell rang, making both of us jump. It was followed by a persistent gentle knocking at the door. I glanced at my watch. It was ten to one in the morning.
“Stay there,” I ordered. “And keep quiet. Neither of us wants the police involved in this, do we?”
Alex shook his head, but I thought it most improbable that the police would knock so softly. They were far more likely to break the door down.
I walked through into the dark front room and looked out through the window. Julie Yorke was standing outside the door, rapping her knuckles gently against the glass. I went back into the hall and opened the door.
“What have you done to him?” Julie asked in a breathless voice.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Where is he, then?” she demanded.
“In the kitchen,” I said, standing aside to let her pass. I glanced out at the dark and silent road and closed the door.
When I went back into the kitchen Julie was standing behind Alex, stroking his fine ginger hair. In other circumstances, it might have been a touching scene.
I could see that she was still wearing a nightdress under her raincoat.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked sarcastically.
“I had to wait for my bloody husband to drop off,” she said. “I’ve taken a bloody big chance coming here, I can tell you. I tried to call, but it was permanently engaged and Alex’s cell went straight to voice mail.”
I looked across the kitchen at the house phone still lying off the hook on the countertop, and at the switched-off cell alongside it.
“I thought I told you not to contact Alex,” I said sharply, pointing to her.
“You said not in the next thirty-six hours,” she replied in a pained tone. “That ran out at ten forty-five this evening.”