Murder Ring (A DI Geraldine Steel Mystery)

by Leigh Russell

  She observed Laura approach the body, waiting for her to break down, but the widow remained silent. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she turned to Geraldine and nodded.

  ‘You can confirm this is your husband?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s David.’ Her voice broke but she didn’t sob.

  Geraldine took her back to the visitors’ room and offered her a cup of tea. She shook her head and asked for a glass of water. Although she was shaking, she still didn’t break down.

  ‘No sign of my ring then?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You must think I’m a gold digger, and that I care more about my jewellery than my husband, but it’s the sentimental value. It was my engagement ring. He’d just had the stone reset.’ She sighed and turned in her seat to look directly at Geraldine. ‘I know David was older than me, a lot older, but we were happy. We loved each other.’

  ‘We checked his trouser pockets.’

  ‘What about his jacket?’

  ‘He wasn’t wearing one.’

  ‘Really?’ Laura looked irritated. ‘He must have left it at the office. It wasn’t a nice night. It was raining and the damp gets to his chest. He should have been wearing his jacket. I don’t understand why he didn’t have it on. We only bought it last week. I wonder if my ring’s in his jacket pocket?’

  ‘Once the forensic team have finished with his clothes, they’ll be returned to you,’ Geraldine said gently. ‘I’ll make sure we return everything to you. But not his shirt or jumper, I’m afraid.’

  Laura nodded. ‘I understand. They must be…’

  ‘Would you like some more water?’

  ‘I’m OK, really. I’d like to go home now, if we’re done here.’

  ‘We’re finished. I’m sorry again for your loss.’

  Having completed the necessary documents concerning the identification of the body, Geraldine went to David’s office to collect his jacket. A harassed-looking woman greeted her and introduced herself as the office manager.

  ‘We’re all devastated about it,’ she said when Geraldine introduced herself. ‘What a thing to happen. He was such a nice man. A real gentleman. Oh, I know he left his wife and married Laura. It caused a lot of gossip at the time, the way she behaved.’

  ‘The way she behaved?’

  ‘Throwing herself at him like that. But he went through with it. He married her. So she must have had something. I mean, we all thought she was nice enough when she was working here, but look what happened.’

  Geraldine listened to her gossip for a while before asking if the office manager knew of anyone who might have wished to harm David.

  ‘Harm him?’

  ‘Did he have any enemies?’

  ‘Apart from his ex you mean? I don’t suppose she was too pleased with him.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  The woman’s eyes widened in surprise as she understood the reason for the question. ‘We were told he was mugged. The young constable who came here to ask about David told us it was a mugging that went wrong. We all thought David must have fought back. We’d been out together for a meal on Monday night because one of the staff’s leaving. We’re a small team here so we like to do that. David had drunk rather a lot, I think. Do you think it was something else then, not a mugging that went too far? Is that what you came here to tell us?’

  Geraldine reassured her that she was just asking routine questions while she was there. She had come to collect David’s leather jacket.

  ‘His jacket? I haven’t seen it.’

  They looked on his chair and under his desk in case his jacket had fallen down. There was no sign of it. The office manager was sure he had been wearing it when they went out on Monday evening.

  ‘I can’t think why he wouldn’t have been wearing it. It was a miserable night, quite chilly as I remember, and he had this lovely jacket, really soft leather, you know. It must have been expensive. You can tell.’

  Geraldine couldn’t overlook the possibility that someone in the office had stolen the jacket, possibly with a view to pocketing the expensive ring David was carrying. There was only one way to be sure David had removed his jacket from the office himself.

  The manager of the restaurant where the staff had gone for dinner on Monday recalled the party of six but couldn’t remember whether David had been wearing a leather jacket or not. He offered to show Geraldine footage from the security camera at the entrance. After some fiddling around, he found the right section of the film. Geraldine stood behind him, watching over his shoulder, as he ran it on his computer screen. At seven thirty, David’s office party arrived. He was wearing his jacket. The manager grew defensive, insisting no one had left a jacket in the restaurant that evening. Geraldine wondered whether he was protesting too forcefully. There was no reason for him to grow so agitated, unless he had found the jacket and pocketed the ring himself.

  ‘Can we find the frames where he’s leaving?’

  ‘Wait, I’m looking.’

  Geraldine waited as the film sped by. At last the manager stopped it. Together they watched David leave the restaurant. It was ten thirty on Monday evening. He was wearing his jacket.

  Geraldine’s next visit was to David’s ex-wife. He had been married to his childhood sweetheart, Elaine, for twenty-seven years, before he abandoned her to marry his twenty-nine-year-old personal assistant. His two children were not very much younger than his second wife. Elaine and her children still lived in their family house in Edgware. Geraldine drove there after checking in at her office for any new developments. Having logged her report, registering the suspected theft of a valuable diamond ring and a leather jacket, she set off. Elaine lived in a large house, set back from the road. A statuesque woman, she was visibly shocked to hear about her ex-husband’s death. White-faced, she stared at Geraldine, shaking her head in disbelief. Geraldine had to repeat the information three times before the other woman seemed to take it in.

  ‘He’s dead then?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. You said he might have been murdered? How can I tell my children?’

  As though she knew Elaine was thinking about her, a young woman burst into the room. She looked about the same age as Laura, not yet thirty. Geraldine was correct in assuming she was the dead man’s daughter. Seeing her mother in tears, she demanded to know what was going on. When Geraldine told her that her father had been shot during the course of a mugging, the young woman burst out crying.

  ‘How could anyone do that?’ she spluttered through her tears. ‘How could it happen? How?’

  By contrast to her hysterical daughter, Elaine was tearful but controlled. She thanked Geraldine, who left her attempting to console her daughter.

  7

  HE HAD TOLD Gina he knew a guy who could give him an honest valuation of the ring. That wasn’t true. Most of his loot went to an old bloke called Joe who ran an antique shop in Portobello Road. He took what he could, no questions asked. That was all Lenny needed, a regular fence who didn’t give him any grief. The trouble was, this ring was out of Joe’s league. There was a chance it could be worth a lot of money. Lenny had the ring in his pocket, and he needed to turn it into cash. On Gina’s finger, it was of no use to him at all. A chance like this didn’t come along every day. He needed someone to buy the ice off him directly, without a middle man, for a good price, and replace it with a nice bit of glass.

  He asked around and tracked down a contact he thought would be able to help him.

  ‘So you’re going to sell the rock, and replace it so she don’t see no difference, and you get to pocket the dosh?’ Berny nodded his head. ‘Nice. If you don’t mind ripping off your old lady.’

  Lenny shrugged. ‘Don’t make no difference to her. She’ll never know.’

  ‘So what are we talking about?’

  Lenny took a swig of his pint and narrowed his eyes, weighing up how much he should tell his former cell mate. They had become close, sharing so much time togethe
r. Prison could do that. But he didn’t trust the weaselly man facing him across the table.

  ‘It’s just a piece of jewellery,’ he said. ‘I’d show you but I haven’t got it on me right now.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t.’

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. No doubt Berny was speculating about why Lenny wasn’t taking this piece to his usual fence.

  ‘So? Do you know anyone?’ Lenny asked.

  ‘Not directly. But I know who would know.’

  The longer this went on, the more people were going to hear about Lenny’s find. He needed to get rid of it quickly, and get his hands on some dosh. But he had to have a ring to return to Gina. He couldn’t afford to piss her off too much. She had too much on him, enough to put him inside many times over. He wouldn’t put it past her either. She could be a vindictive cow when the mood took her. He leaned forward.

  ‘Look whoever takes it on gets his hands on a nice rock at a knock-down price. I ain’t gonna ask much for it, a lot less than it’s worth that’s for sure. Only it’s got to be replaced right or she’ll know I done her.’

  Berny made a crude joke about Gina being screwed and Lenny pretended to laugh.

  ‘Look, can you help me or not? Only I ain’t got all day.’

  ‘Tell you what, I know exactly the right bloke for the job.’

  ‘And he won’t talk?’

  ‘What he knows could put a whole bunch of us away for years. Silent as the grave he is. I’d trust him more than me own grandmother, who’s rotting in hell.’

  Lenny nodded. This sounded promising.

  ‘It’ll cost you, mind.’

  Berny narrowed his eyes, considering how much Lenny might cough up in exchange for the contact. ‘He’s worth his weight in gold to you.’

  ‘How much?’

  They haggled for a while. They both knew they’d reach a figure sooner or later. However hard Lenny tried to hide his desperation, Berny had him over a barrel, and he knew it.

  ‘I could take it elsewhere,’ Lenny blustered. ‘There’s this bloke I know…’

  ‘No worries,’ Berny nodded. He finished his pint and stood up. ‘See you around then.’

  ‘No, wait.’

  Berny sat down again, a faintly puzzled expression on his wrinkled face.

  ‘What you after now?’

  ‘You know bloody well what I want. What we’ve been talking about all this time.’

  ‘Oh,’ Berny pretended to be surprised. ‘And there was me thinking you’d decided to go elsewhere. Well, you know my price.’

  Lenny scowled. It was steep, but it was that or nothing. Gina wasn’t the only one getting screwed. With a sigh he nodded.

  8

  ALTHOUGH THE CANTEEN food wasn’t bad, Geraldine would have preferred to get away from the premises altogether. Ready for a break, she regretted having agreed to meet her sergeant for a late lunch.

  ‘Something smells good,’ Sam said with a smile as she joined Geraldine in the queue.

  ‘I thought you’d never notice my sexy aftershave,’ a constable replied, putting his head on one side with a silly grin.

  They sat down, Geraldine with a salad, Sam with a plate piled high with sausages and a heap of chips.

  Sam broke the silence. ‘You seem a bit glum.’

  Geraldine shrugged.

  ‘What happened about your mother?’

  Geraldine put her fork down with a sigh. Adopted at birth, recently she had decided to contact her birth mother. Her request for a meeting had been refused. Geraldine knew it was irrational to take the rejection personally. All the same it was depressing to know that the woman who had given birth to her didn’t even want to meet her.

  ‘Nothing,’ she admitted. ‘She didn’t want to see me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else. There’s plenty to discuss.’

  The disappearance of the victim’s leather jacket puzzled Geraldine. Somewhere between leaving the restaurant and being shot, it had vanished.

  ‘What it is this obsession with leather?’ Sam replied. ‘I never had you down as a secret fetishist. You think you know people…’

  If another sergeant had addressed her like that, Geraldine might have been tempted to reprimand her for cheek. As it was, she smiled.

  ‘Look,’ Sam went on in a more serious tone, ‘don’t you reckon the killer must have taken the jacket off him before he shot him? Otherwise it would have been bloodstained and no use to anyone. There was no point in ruining an expensive jacket when he could walk away with it himself. It was nearly new, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Laura said he’d only had it a week or so.’

  ‘There you go then.’

  Geraldine nodded. ‘So what you’re saying is, find the jacket and we find the killer.’

  ‘That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking. I mean, all we’d have to do is find someone wearing a leather jacket in London. Can’t be more than a million or so of those walking around.’

  Geraldine agreed the imagined scenario made sense. They hadn’t been able to see the jacket clearly on CCTV film, but Laura and the manager at David’s office had both remarked on how smart it was. Laura had told Geraldine it was expensive. It might have caught the mugger’s fancy, when he had been about to ask David to hand over his money. In the time it took for David to remove the jacket – perhaps fumbling with the buttons in his panic – he would have had a good look at the mugger’s face. It might have been that, or something David said, that caused the mugger to turn killer. Realising what he had done, or perhaps simply satisfied with his haul, the gunman had run off.

  ‘So something – or nothing – provoked him to shoot and he ran off before anyone came along to see what the noise was about. My guess is he scared himself off. I agree it sounds stupid, but I daresay the killer isn’t Brain of Britain. Probably high as a kite and didn’t know what the hell he was doing.’

  ‘And we sit back and let someone like that run around with a gun.’

  ‘We can’t stop it.’

  Geraldine sighed. ‘We could try.’

  Looking for one particular gun in London had become as difficult as looking for a specific leather jacket.

  ‘How?’ Sam challenged her. ‘If we ask nicely, everyone in possession of an illegal firearm will meekly hand it over, is that the idea? Oh, except those people who actually want to keep it. And why would that be? Because they might want to use it one day? It’s a no brainer. Only the good guys will play ball, law-abiding citizens who probably aren’t comfortable owning a gun anyway. It’s naive to the point of idiocy to think otherwise. Society’s riddled with illegal weapons and the sooner we arm ourselves the better.’

  ‘The day the police walk the streets with guns will be the start of a bloodbath.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you trust your colleagues not to go around shooting at people?’

  ‘That’s not the point. Do you have any idea how many people are shot every day in America? About three hundred. That’s every day. And the police there are armed. They say one in three people in America know someone who’s been shot. It’s like the witch burnings here in the Dark Ages. People are being killed, Sam. Arming the police doesn’t solve anything.’

  ‘That’s because everyone in the US has a gun. It’s nothing to do with the police being armed.’

  ‘Look, we’ll have to agree to disagree for now, because we need to get back to work.’

  ‘You mean you know I’m right.’

  ‘Bollocks. It’s self-evident that an armed police force solves nothing. But now we do need to get back to work. So, ballistics have confirmed that the bullets were all fired from the same gun, an old Smith and Wesson double action. There are a lot of them around, mostly illegal, so that’s not much help. Let’s focus on the jacket for now.’

  There was a chance the jacket could give them a lead. Geraldine instructed Sam to set up surveillance of film from security cameras along Wells Street. With a team searching for a fig
ure leaving Wells Mews in a jacket like the one they had seen on the victim, they might be able to see the direction the killer had taken after he had shot David. The chances of recognising the victim’s jacket were slim, but it was possible. Geraldine left the canteen and made her way along the corridor to the detective chief inspector’s office. Not having worked with him before, she thought it best to explain her decision to him face to face. She was asking for a team of officers to search through hours of CCTV footage for a glimpse of a jacket they were unlikely to recognise.

  Before she reached his door, there were sounds of a disturbance behind her and Adam burst from his room.

  ‘I know,’ he told Geraldine. ‘I’m on my way to the incident room now.’

  Baffled, Geraldine turned and followed him back along the corridor. Clearly some new information had been received, but before she had a chance to ask what had happened, he disappeared into the incident room. Entering behind him, Geraldine saw Sam and hurried over to her.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘You mean you haven’t heard?’

  ‘I was away from my desk for a moment. Honestly, you only have to blink in this place. What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘They’ve got the killer’s DNA!’

  Geraldine gaped as the detective chief inspector began to speak.

  ‘You must all know by now that forensics have found the killer’s DNA. It seems he was stupid enough to spit at his victim. At any rate, saliva has been found on the victim’s face, and it isn’t his own.’

  A cheer went round the room. A grinning Adam held up his hand for silence.

  ‘It gets better.’

  ‘Please tell us we have a match,’ Geraldine muttered.

  ‘We have a match,’ Adam went on, and this time the cheering officers were not so readily quietened. ‘His name is Leonard Parker, known as Lenny. He was released from the nick on Monday and went on a bender – his saliva was mostly alcohol. Let’s go and pick him up.’