Atherton felt the disappointment of deep conviction that Freddie Bell was telling the truth, and that this was the end of a potentially promising trail. He also knew his time with Bell was fast running out and that he’d be unlikely to get more than one more question in before the emperor chucked him out. And given what appeared to be Bell’s ample connections with the government, he knew what it would be. It might not be anything to do with the case, but it was the thing most of all that he wanted to know.
‘Why did the DTI want to get rid of Ed Stonax?’ he asked. ‘What had he done?’
‘It wasn’t what he’d done so much as what he was going to do,’ Bell said promptly. ‘He’d found something out and he wanted to investigate it and make it public, as if he was still a bloody journalist. I told him he wasn’t working for the BBC any more, he was out in the real world where real things happen and people get hurt. He wouldn’t listen. They said he could go quietly, take a nice big settlement and keep his mouth shut, or he could do it the hard way. So what did he do? Wanker.’ Bell’s face was hard now, and yet Atherton felt he could discern something softer imperfectly hidden in his eyes. Regret?
‘So what was this thing he had found out?’ Atherton asked.
‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know,’ Bell said briskly. ‘And if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s none of my business – and it’s none of yours, either.’
‘Everything becomes my business in a murder investigation,’ Atherton said.
‘Then you’re as big a fool as he was. I hate bloody Boy Scouts! I said to him, all you’ve got to do is keep your mouth shut. I said, who’s the loser? And d’you know what he said? He said, the truth is the loser.’ He made a sound of disgust. ‘I told him to grow up. And now look where he is.’
One of the phones rang, and he snatched it up as if glad of the distraction. ‘Yeah? All right, cut him off. Who? No, Lorraine’s got those figures. Put him on to her. All right, I’ll be through in a minute.’
He put the phone down and stood up, and Atherton was obliged to do likewise. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a business to run. You’ll have to go.’ He walked across to the door on to the corridor and opened it, holding it for Atherton, and said, ‘I’ve told you everything I know, and I don’t expect to see you or any of your little friends here again, savvy? Otherwise I might have to stop being polite, and I wouldn’t like that.’
Atherton didn’t like being threatened, but he had no hand to play. He said politely and meekly, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and Bell nodded, as if it was his due.
Atherton stepped through the door, and as it was closed behind him, Bell said, ‘And tell your boss he’d better not go stirring up any hornets’ nests. Keep his nose out of other people’s business or he might get it bitten off.’
‘Is that a threat?’ Atherton said, surprised at its brazenness.
Bell gave an impatient shrug. ‘It’s a friendly warning. There are some people who don’t like him, that I wouldn’t want to piss off.’ And he closed the door.
The delectable Rain Forrest was walking towards him, alerted by some means to his departure. ‘I’ll take you back to the lift,’ she said, smiling pleasantly.
‘I’m sure I can find it myself,’ he said acidly.
She shook her head like a nanny with a sulky child. ‘We like to know that visitors have left the building, and aren’t wandering round unsupervised. Mr Bell didn’t get where he is today by being careless.’
‘You’re beautiful, intelligent and kind,’ Atherton said. ‘What are you doing working for an outfit like this?’
‘Like this?’ she said, with what seemed like genuine surprise. ‘It’s a thriving international business. What can you mean? And Mr Bell is a very good boss.’
‘You just don’t seem like the type,’ he said glumly.
She actually patted his arm. ‘You did very well in there. Better than I expected.’
‘You were watching?’
‘Everything that happens in this building is monitored and recorded. What did you expect?’
‘So I’m on tape for ever, am I?’
‘Oh, I except you’ll get wiped at some point in the future.’
They had reached the lift. She pressed the button and the door opened at once: no-one had used it since him. ‘I’d really like to get to know you,’ Atherton said, turning to face her, holding the door with one hand to stop it closing. ‘Would you like to go out somewhere? Dinner tonight.’ She shook her head. ‘Tomorrow night?’
She pushed him gently back into the lift and pressed the G button. ‘I have you on video,’ she said. ‘Whenever I miss your face, I can always watch that.’ And she stepped back out as the door closed, still smiling and shaking her head.
‘So, how was it?’ Slider asked as Atherton came in. ‘It must have been hard to get anything out of him.’
‘I don’t know when I’ve done anything harder, unless it was getting a kitten out of my bedroom slipper,’ Atherton said. ‘He was positively forthcoming.’
‘Then why the air of disgruntlement?’
‘He says he knew about Stonax and the woman and didn’t mind, and I believe him.’
‘Oh. That’s a shame.’
Atherton told him the whole story, ending with the ‘friendly warning’.
‘I wonder who he meant by “your boss”,’ Slider said. ‘Me? Porson? Wetherspoon? The AC?’
‘I don’t think it was the Home Secretary,’ Atherton said. ‘He’s obviously got a lot of government contacts and equally obviously likes keeping on the right side of them. I’m sure he knows what was behind Stonax’s sacking, but I’m equally sure he’ll never tell us.’
‘And you think that’s important?’
‘I don’t know,’ Atherton said. ‘It was obviously a big thing in Stonax’s life, but it was nearly a year ago, and if anything was going to happen to him because of it, you’d have expected it to be then.’
‘Unless he was still investigating, and getting closer,’ Slider said.
Atherton shrugged. ‘I suppose mostly it just bugs me not knowing what he’d found out. I don’t like not knowing.’
‘Well, we haven’t got many other lines to follow up,’ said Slider. ‘Why don’t you look into it? Interview Sid Andrew and the woman – whatever her name was—’
‘Funny how nobody remembers,’ Atherton said moodily.
‘And ask them what it was all about. Go on from there. And go through his papers, try and find out what he was doing these past months. We’ve got his diary to go through, his latest correspondence, and they’ve taken his computer to Jimmy Pak to examine. Enough there to keep us all busy for a day or two.’
‘Right,’ said Atherton, pulling himself together. ‘First find out the woman’s name, then find out where she and Sid Andrew have gone. A bit of phone and computer work there. And on the subject of computers . . .’
‘You’d better find out how Emily’s doing,’ Slider supplied for him. ‘She’s had her head down all day, as far as I can tell – no-one seems to have seen her. In fact, I dare say she needs a cup of tea. I could do with one as well.’
They had found her a corner and a desk, in the room that housed the photocopier. There she had settled in with case notes, files, and Atherton’s laptop, which he’d rigged up to a printer borrowed from the desk of one of Ron Carver’s firm who was on holiday. When they went to rescue her, she looked up from a sea of papers in surprise. ‘I didn’t realise it was that late. I’ve been so absorbed.’
A good thing, too, Slider thought. Nothing like work for keeping your mind off things. He saw the realisation come back to her almost at once; but she braced her shoulders with a determination not to brood about it.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked. ‘Any luck?’
‘Nothing so far, I’m afraid,’ Slider said. ‘I’m thinking we really need to know what your father was doing since he left the DTI. There might be some clue in that, so we’re looking at his diary and computer, a
nd we’ll probably have to go through all his papers. You may be able to be of help to us there.’
‘Anything I can do, you know I will,’ she said. ‘But this looking into Trevor Bates has been very interesting. He’s quite a man. Evil, but interesting.’
In the canteen they got three teas and three slabs of bread pudding (which the canteen did very well) for sustenance, and took them to a table by the window. There was a day outside, Slider noted with vague wonder. He sat down next to Emily as Atherton had sprung into the chair opposite her, and he realised his colleague wanted to be able to look at her face. He was that far gone.
‘So what have you found out?’ Atherton asked her.
‘Nothing really about where he might be. I’ve mostly been catching up on his past history, which I suppose you know all about, but was new to me. He’s had his fingers in a lot of pies. He must have a brilliant brain.’
‘Pity it’s so misdirected,’ Slider said.
‘Yes. But here’s the thing I found this morning that interested me particularly. You know that he was being moved to the secure remand facility by a private security company, Ring 4?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Slider. ‘Most prisoner movements are undertaken by private companies. The Home Office contracts out a lot of services to the private sector now.’
‘It’s a good name, isn’t it: ring for security? But I didn’t realise they did that kind of thing. I always thought they delivered wages and collected the cash from banks, and so on.’
‘They do everything,’ Slider said. ‘They’re one of the biggest security companies in the country. They cover every aspect from guarding dockyards and moving bullion right down to domestic burglar alarms.’
‘And security doors,’ Atherton added. ‘That’s why the man who contacted Dave Borthwick pretended to be working for Ring 4. It’s probably the first name that sprang to his mind.’
‘I see. Well, here’s the thing that really intrigued me,’ Emily said. ‘You said the van was held up and Bates was freed, but there’s never been an inquiry into how it happened.’
Slider and Atherton looked at each other blankly, and then Atherton said, ‘There must have been.’
‘I’ve been through every record I can access, and there’s nothing. No internal investigation at Ring 4, no report by the Prison Service, no inquiry by the Home Office, nothing from Woodhill – which is also privately run, of course. And what’s more,’ she added, before they could say anything, ‘there was nothing in any of the newspapers either. Now don’t you think that’s odd? There was lots and lots about his arrest, rehashing the murder with all the sleazy details, because let’s face it the public loves that sort of thing so the papers latch on to it. Yet when this terribly interesting murderer goes missing from the back of a prison van, there’s nothing in the papers at all.’
‘There must have been something,’ Slider protested. He looked at Atherton. ‘I don’t read the papers, but you do. And you watch the television news. It must have been covered.’
Atherton was frowning. ‘We were told about it personally by Mr Porson,’ he said, ‘but I can’t remember at this distance whether I saw anything in the papers. I’m assuming I must have, but we were very busy about then and I can’t recall specifically—’
‘No need to rack your brains. You didn’t,’ Emily said with a little understandable triumph. ‘I’ve looked up every newspaper for the day and for two weeks afterwards, and the only report is in a local paper, the Woburn Courier, which says that a prison van was held up on the way to Woodhill and a prisoner, Trevor Bates, escaped. And there was a stop press in the Telegraph. Neither gives any details of how it happened, and the Telegraph doesn’t even mention Woodhill or Bates by name – it just says “a prisoner”. And after that, nothing. Now don’t you think that’s odd?’
‘It is odd,’ Slider said, ‘but I’m not sure what you’re suggesting.’
‘Well, look,’ she said, ‘the first report must have come from someone local to the hold-up, probably the local police. Someone on the local press must have had a contact at the Telegraph, and it made it to their late-edition stop press. But the next day the whole thing is killed stone dead. In normal circumstances there must have been a heck of a lot of people who would know who was in that van – the Ring 4 people, the people at Wormwood Scrubs where he went from, the Woodhill people who must have been expecting him – and all their wives and children and friends and secretaries, because people do talk to their families even in these inarticulate times. But nothing gets out. So either there was some very heavy duty leaning to keep it quiet, going on from the very top – which I suppose would be the Home Office?’
‘Ultimately, yes,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose they might have wanted to suppress it so as not to alarm people.’
‘But when dangerous prisoners escape,’ Emily said, ‘they usually put it out so as to warn people not to approach them.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘The other possibility,’ Atherton said, ‘which I suppose you’re building up to, is that he was deliberately sprung.’
Slider looked at him in surprise, but Emily was nodding. ‘It’s the only thing, to my mind, that makes sense. The whole thing was done secretly, so that only the people involved knew about it – and they wouldn’t tell.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ Slider said. ‘It would take connivance at a very high level. Someone very, very high up would have had to decide on it and plan it, and I can’t believe—’
‘Can’t you?’ Atherton said.
‘You’re being needlessly cynical. Even if there was one corrupt person high up in the Home Office, he couldn’t do it all on his own. There’d be high-level police involvement.’
‘But look,’ Emily said, ‘Bates did have connections with the government, and at a high level. He provided them with important services. Suppose it was thought to be for the greater benefit that he was got out and allowed to carry on performing those services, rather than mouldering in prison where he could do no good? That could be a good motive, even if it involved corruption in the execution. A lot of people, acceptable people, think it’s OK to do evil that good might come.’
‘That’s true,’ Atherton said. ‘And there are quite a few of them in the Job. You know that,’ he said to Slider. ‘We’ve all known cases where the evidence has been buffed up a bit so as to put a real villain away. When you know someone’s guilty and you just can’t get enough for the CPS – well, the temptation’s there. And I don’t believe there’s one copper in ten who would think that was morally wrong, even if they don’t do it themselves.’
‘We don’t do that,’ Slider said stubbornly.
‘But others do,’ Atherton said. ‘And maybe we should, now and then. How many times have we busted our balls catching some villain, and then he walks away because the CPS won’t prosecute?’
Slider shook his head in frustration. ‘You can’t start sub-dividing justice—’
‘Oh, justice! Since when was it about justice?’ Atherton said, as the frustrations of the Job burst out from years of restraint. ‘Was it justice when Richard Tyler murdered his mother and his lover and got away with it because he was an MP and a junior minister and had the prime minister’s ear? He swanned off to a cosy billet in Brussels, if you remember, instead of doing life in Pentonville.’
‘Richard Tyler?’ Emily queried.
‘I’ll tell you some time,’ Atherton said, calming down. ‘We’re getting a bit off the point, here.’
‘I’m glad you noticed,’ Slider said.
‘The point is that it might have been decided at the highest level that it was a good thing for Bates to be sprung.’
‘“Might” is not evidence,’ Slider said, ‘though I accept your main premise.’
‘I’ll tell you what is evidence,’ Atherton said. ‘The fact that Mick Hutton wasn’t asked to monitor the mobile number we gave Porson to give to Palfreyman.’
‘There could be any number of re
asons for that. Quite possibly there was just an administrative delay in asking for it. And now, of course, there’s no point.’
Atherton shook his head. ‘You live in such a rosy world.’
‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ Slider said, ‘it’s me he’s threatening. That’s not so rosy. I just can’t let you rush off with suppositions that have no foundation.’
‘Richard Tyler,’ Emily said. ‘Why is that name familiar?’
‘I just told you it,’ Atherton said, regaining his humour.
‘He was a junior minister in the Department of the Environment,’ Slider explained.
‘Oh, of course, that must be it. Dad will have mentioned him.’ She frowned in thought. ‘Wasn’t he supposed to be a bit of a high flyer?’
‘They thought at one time he could become the youngest ever prime minister,’ Slider said. ‘We looked at him in a murder case. I was convinced he did it, but we had no evidence, nothing we could put up in a court of law. Then a couple of months later he got into some financial trouble, resigned his seat and was sent to Brussels.’
‘Something about insider dealing on some shares,’ Atherton said. ‘They couldn’t pin it on him but it was enough to have him sent into purdah for a bit.’
‘Porson said at the time that would be punishment enough,’ Slider said. ‘The fact that he’d never be prime minister now. But Brussels, with a big salary, bigger expenses and even bigger pension, and for doing what?’ Slider had seen Phoebe Agnew dead, at the hands – he believed – of her own son. And the gentle, bumbling Piers Prentiss, Tyler’s lover. It didn’t seem like enough punishment to him.
‘Yes, I remember it now,’ Emily said. ‘He was made EU Commissioner for Infrastructure. The big Euro engineering projects – airports, bridges, dams and so on. He’s coming back to England now, though.’
Game Over Page 13