Grief Encounters

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘All our lives. Sixty years.’

  ‘You were fond of him.’

  The magnified eyes blinked several times. ‘Yes, I was. And I admired him.’

  ‘How’d he been before he died? Was he depressed or anything?’

  ‘No. Just the opposite. He’d found a new friend. A female friend, and she’d put a new spring in his step.’

  ‘Maybe she’d finished with him,’ I suggested.

  ‘Possibly, but when he’d mentioned her, rather obliquely, he told me not to worry. He said it couldn’t last, it was just an enjoyable interlude, and he wouldn’t be doing anything stupid.’

  I wondered how much an average, left-wing, backbench MP might know that could be useful, commercially or otherwise, to an interested third party. There was bound to be something, but would it be enough to set up a honey-pot sting against him? I hadn’t a clue.

  ‘Where does he keep confidential papers?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a safe upstairs.’

  ‘Have you been through it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And found nothing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you looked for these indecent images?’

  ‘Briefly. I haven’t had the time, what with all the other stuff that needed attending to, plus the service to organise.’

  I knew the feeling. I explained about Trojan horses, sounding like an expert, and said that any photos would be buried deep in his system, somewhere. We’d need to go through his files, one by one.

  We started with My Documents and opened the first folder, called Corresp, Constit. There were two screens full of them, with several sub-folders. Then it was Corresp, Edwin, right through to Corresp, PLP. It was going to take months.

  ‘This is hopeless,’ I said, after a few exploratory glances at documents. It meant double clicking on the chosen file, waiting for it to appear, double clicking on a document, clicking to close it and moving on to the next document. It took time, and there were about ten thousand items to inspect. I wondered about using the computer’s search facility, but couldn’t imagine what to tell it to look for. We needed help, but I couldn’t really ask Daniel, and if I brought our experts in they’d play it by the book and it would become public knowledge. I was beginning to whiff some sort of conspiracy and didn’t want to go public, yet.

  I turned to Edwin Turner. ‘Let’s narrow it down,’ I said. ‘Only look at anything dated this year, and over 100 kilobytes. That should make it easier. Make a list of what you’ve done and be methodical. I’ll try to help you when I can.’

  With that, I fled. I had a murderer to catch.

  Ennis’s brother, James Francis, was a bus driver in Doncaster, my men on the job informed me. He started work at five a.m. and finished in the late afternoon. I wondered if deep vein thrombosis was an occupational hazard for bus drivers. No doubt some union solicitor was already working on it. Ennis’s wife was employed in a local bakery, also starting ridiculously early in the morning, and there was no sign of a lodger. I said we’d change the habits of a lifetime and give him an early evening knock at the door. Dave wanted to be in on the action, so I let him pick me up and we headed south to Doncaster.

  He didn’t look unduly surprised to answer the door and find four detectives standing there. Having a brother in jail for the county’s biggest-ever bank robbery probably conditions you to expect anything. I asked if we could come in and he nodded and stood to one side.

  The room was bulging at the seams with furniture before we arrived, and at bursting point when we crowded into it. Brendan was left standing in the doorway. I went straight to the point.

  ‘We’re looking for your brother, Peter Paul,’ I said. ‘Have you any ideas where he might be?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ Ennis junior replied. ‘Last time I saw him he was in Bentley prison.’

  ‘He was released last August. You haven’t seen him since then?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen him since our mother’s funeral in 2002. They let him out for that because he was near the end of his sentence and considered a low escape risk. When Dad died, back in 1993, they refused him permission to attend. I guessed he’d be free by now, but he hasn’t been in touch.’

  ‘What’s he done this time?’ Mrs Ennis asked. She was seated next to her husband, holding his hand.

  ‘Did you ever meet a girlfriend of his called Magdalena Fischer?’ I asked.

  They both shook their heads. ‘No, never heard of her.’

  ‘We weren’t close,’ he explained. ‘Pete’s ten years older than me. We drifted apart.’

  ‘Magdalena was murdered,’ I told them. ‘We’re calling on all her old acquaintances. We think they were living together at about the time of the robbery.’

  ‘I was only eighteen,’ Ennis said. ‘Pete had left home years earlier. There were lots of rows with Dad, and one day he just left.’

  ‘Any ideas where he went?’

  ‘Leeds, we believed. He had friends there.’

  ‘Anywhere else where he might have an affection for, where he might choose to live now he’s free?’

  ‘Not really. Mam and Dad used to like Scarborough, took us there when we were kids. That’s about it.’

  ‘Do you mind if two officers have a quick look around?’ I asked. ‘You can accompany them, Mrs Ennis.’

  ‘Do you have a warrant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think we might be hiding him?’

  ‘We have to consider every possibility.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ She stood up and Brendan and Dave followed her out of the room.

  As they clumped up the stairs I asked if he’d visited his brother in jail. He had, in the early days, and written, but Peter had stopped sending visiting orders and things just fizzled out.

  ‘The money’s still missing,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose he ever asked you about investments or anything like that?’

  ‘No. We never talked about what he’d done. He’d denied it, pleaded not guilty. That’s why his sentence was so stiff. That and the thing with the petrol. The subject was never raised between us.’

  Dave and Brendan came back and Dave gave me a tiny shake of the head. We thanked them and stood up to leave. We’d entered through the kitchen, and as we left I said: ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘It’s bread,’ Mrs Ennis told me. ‘I always bring some home, fresh every day, for our supper.’ She indicated a plastic bag sitting on the worktop, with two large bread cakes in it. I gave her husband a card, told him to ring me if he thought of anything that might be useful and thanked both of them for their help. If there’d been three bread cakes in the bag I’d have been suspicious. As we approached our cars I asked if anybody fancied a curry, but nobody did.

  Edwin Turner had spent all day going through Ted Goss’s computer files without any success. On my way home I drove round to see him at his ex-boss’s house. He looked more desiccated than before, and had even removed his jacket as a concession to the effort he was putting in to the search. I noticed that he wore armbands to keep his shirtsleeves under control. I hadn’t seen a pair of armbands since my granddad died. He removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes on a linen handkerchief, and I had a little bet with myself that he tucked his shirt into his underpants.

  ‘Anything?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did he keep a diary?’

  ‘No. Well, not a personal one.’

  ‘Any idea where he met this woman friend?’

  ‘Sorry. I presumed she was one of his constituents. Some of them fussed over him, liked to mother him. Being an MP isn’t like being a doctor. You’re allowed to…you know…’

  ‘You’re allowed to cultivate friendships within your electorate,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, something like that.’

  I asked him to have a look through Ted’s address book, see if he could find any names for these worthy ladies who pampered their representative. With his permission I collected all th
e diskettes and CDs that had information on them and took them home. If I found anything, I’d let him know. If he found anything, I presumed he’d delete it all. This wasn’t a criminal enquiry, yet. I collected a ready meal from the supermarket, put it in the microwave and shoved the first diskette into my A-drive. Three hours later I logged off and went to bed with a headache and a renewed respect for my late MP. If he understood all the legal mumbo jumbo involved in getting a piece of legislation through all its stages, he was a better man than me. Except I suspected most of it went over his head. It’s the judges who make the laws and rule the country, not the MPs, most definitely not the people.

  Rodway and Clark changed their pleas to guilty and were remanded to Bentley prison. I thought about Gwen Rhodes, sitting in the observation car as it meandered through the Rockies, watching out for elk and bear. We found the girl who’d been tied up and threatened during the bank raid back in 1980, and tracked down four of Ennis’s accomplices. The other two of them were dead. There’s a high attrition rate amongst villains.

  The girl was called Gail and I took Serena to interview her. I’d told myself to expect a 43-year-old, but the woman who opened the door looked nearer sixty. She lived in one of the towers on the project, and the years hadn’t been kind to her, whichever way you looked at it. We sat down in a typical room – TV on, gas fire on, curtains only half open, canary in a cage – and I let Serena tell her that we had reopened the robbery case because the money was still out there somewhere.

  She told us her side of the story. It was all still churning around inside her, and there was no stopping it coming out. Ennis had picked on her because she was the youngest and prettiest. He’d doused her in petrol and threatened to ignite her, and it had been all downhill from there. She’d been a bright girl and had hoped for a career in banking, but she’d had no support from the bank, and counselling didn’t exist in those days. At the end of her probationary period they’d fired her for bad timekeeping, and she’d existed on a series of nondescript jobs since then. She’d been married to a waster who’d left her with two children, and now the kids had moved on. The doctor was treating her for agoraphobia.

  It was a horror story, and I wished Ennis and his gang were there to listen to it. What had been a big, get-rich-quick adventure to them had ruined her life.

  I said: ‘Weren’t you a bit young and inexperienced to be opening up, early in the morning?’

  ‘Yes, but I’d asked for it. Two key-holders started at seven-thirty every morning. They’d lock themselves in and do a quick check of all the rooms. If everything was satisfactory they sorted the mail and distributed it to the appropriate desks. At about half past eight, as the others started to arrive, they’d change the date on a calendar in the window as a signal that all was OK, and unlock the front door again.

  I said: ‘What happened on the morning of the raid?’

  ‘They were waiting for us, on the staircase. They made lots of threats and seemed to know about the calendar signal. Philip – he’s the man I was on with – just said to do as they told us, no heroics. I didn’t feel very heroic.’

  I was looking for the right words when Serena said: ‘You haven’t told us why you volunteered for the early shift.’

  ‘Johnny Mathis,’ she replied. ‘Mum was his biggest fan. He was on at Batley Variety Club that night, and she’d bought us two tickets. She’d never been to anywhere like that before. I asked to start early to give us more time, that’s all.’

  ‘But your mum never got to see him.’

  ‘No.’

  I said: ‘Was there any talk of it being an inside job, Gail? When you were tied up did you notice if any of the employees might be just a little bit familiar with the gang? Eager to help, that sort of thing?’

  ‘No, but I was probably too hysterical to notice. In court he said it was water he splashed over me, but it smelt like petrol.’

  Serena asked: ‘I don’t suppose any of your colleagues bought a posh car shortly afterwards, or moved to a bigger house?’

  Gail shook her head but we already knew the answer. The staff would have been monitored for years afterwards, and a discreet watch kept on their financial affairs.

  She said: ‘What happened to him? I expect he served about ten years and is now living in luxury in Spain or somewhere.’

  ‘No,’ I replied, and told her he’d served the full sentence. There’d been nothing in the papers linking Magdalena with Ennis, but there soon might be, and I’d wanted her to be forewarned. I assured her she was in no danger and told her to ring Serena if she needed to talk.

  There was a message waiting for me when we arrived back. ‘Please contact Edwin Turner.’ The troops were returning, grumbling about the kettle being empty, complaining about the heat, so he’d have to wait. One of the gang was in jail for supplying a class A drug, and had refused to see an officer. Talking to a cop would have ruined his credibility. Two of the others were unemployed and said they’d kill Ennis on sight if they ever met him again. The fourth one thought it was all a big hoot. He regarded himself as one of the nation’s great villains, and intended to write a book about it, one day. He refused to give the interviewing officer a preview of the book, ‘because of all the revelations’, but had failed to arouse the interest of any publisher or newspaper.

  ‘Did we ought to pay him another visit?’ I asked, meaning armed with a warrant.

  ‘No, boss. He’s a tosspot. He thinks the Great Train Robbers stole trains.’

  I went upstairs and brought Gilbert up to date with things. HQ were off our backs for the moment, so we’d give it another week and then go public with our search for Ennis. Crimewatch would find him, but we all have a sneaky desire to do things our own way. We’re supposed to be detectives, not media researchers.

  When I’d finished he said: ‘And what about Ted Goss? Where are we with that?’ so I told him that Agent Turner was busily scouring Mr Goss’s hard disk, looking for indecent images or anything else of interest.

  ‘Let’s do our best for him, Charlie,’ Gilbert said. ‘His politics were a bit loony, but he was a decent chap. I hate to think of his reputation being destroyed by a rag like Britain 2000.’

  Right, I thought as I trudged back down the stairs. Anything you say. Just give me a thirty-hour day and don’t complain about the dip in the clear-up figures. Edwin Turner’s note was still on my desk, so I rang him on his mobile.

  ‘I’ve found some photos,’ he said before I’d finished telling him who I was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘How many?’ I asked.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Two? Is that all?’

  ‘They’re not pornography. One is of him with a woman, in what you might call a compromising position; the other is of the woman.’

  ‘Where did you find them?’

  ‘In a drawer in his bedside cabinet. They’re paper copies, printed off. I knew he had some stuff up there, documents he was working on, things he had to read, so I had a look. He was a great one for reading in bed.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘At his house.’

  ‘I’ll be with you in fifteen minutes. But before you go…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did Mr Goss ever say where he met this woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Fifteen minutes.’

  He was sitting in his boss’s executive chair, idly spinning one way and then the other. I’d knocked and he’d shouted for me to come in. I flopped into an easy chair as if I were a regular visitor and loosened my tie. One VDU was dead and the other showed a firework display screensaver. The room smelt of sweat, and a bluebottle was driving itself demented against the window.

  ‘Did you find anything on the disks?’ Turner asked.

  ‘No, except that I probably need spectacles. Did you find anything on the computer drive?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘So where are these photographs?’

  ‘Right here.’ He stoppe
d swivelling from side to side and handed me a manila envelope. I took it and pulled the contents out.

  They were A4 size, colour printed on normal paper, but still high quality. The first one showed Goss looking bemused into the camera, his mouth open, his tie unfastened. He was obviously sitting inside a car. Behind him, hands over her face, was a woman with her legs drawn up, revealing her preference for stockings over tights.

  The second one was almost a formal portrait. It showed a woman’s face, front on, smiling straight into the camera. She was dark, probably tanned, with black hair in an expensive style. But it was her eyes that beguiled me, took my breath away. They were like limpid pools of milk chocolate, with green flecks in them, and I knew exactly what Superintendent Swainby had felt when I asked him if he’d opened the attachment she’d sent him. ‘It was her photograph,’ he’d said. ‘What do you think?’

  I was convinced it was the same woman as had befriended him. I didn’t know what it was all about, but it had to be the same woman.

  ‘It’s the same woman,’ Turner said, breaking into my thoughts.

  ‘Sorry…’

  ‘In both photos. It’s the same woman.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘You can see her hair. It’s the same woman.’

  He was right. Her hands covered her face but enough of her distinctive hairstyle was visible to say it was the same person in both photographs. It wasn’t enough to hang someone, but I was convinced.

  ‘Have you ever seen her before?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Will you be looking for her?’

  Oh yes, I thought, we’d certainly be looking for her. I didn’t know or care who she was or what she was playing at, but I was certain that I wanted to meet her, needed to meet her. Of that I had no doubts. It was written in the stones.

  Her name came to me in the middle of the night, when ghosts walk the streets and invade the brains of those who have no defence against them. Usually it’s a man called O’Hagan and another called Stanwick. They stand there, laughing at me, shafts of light pouring out of the bullet holes that I put in them. I shield my eyes against the glare and their faces become visible. They have dogs’ heads.