by Graham Ison
This was always the problem with boiler-room scams, so called because of the high pressure salesmanship that went with the fraud. People who have been defrauded will often stay quiet for fear of what other people, including the police, will think of their stupidity at falling for a silver-tongued con man at the other end of a telephone.
‘It sounds as though Lucien Carter is at the back of it, Henry,’ I said.
‘Maybe. The brigade financière – our fraud department – followed up the address in Paris that the letters purported to come from, but it was no surprise that the address didn’t exist. Their investigators also found out that the funds could not be traced, and that was no surprise either. A lot of wire transfers all over the place, it seems, but they couldn’t tell where the money finished up. I’ve put Lucien Carter’s name into our central computer. If his name comes up anywhere, I’ll let you know. Can you give me the telephone number of the FBI office dealing with him?’
‘It’s the New York office of the FBI, Henry,’ I said, and gave him the details. ‘The special agent in charge there has been in touch with Joe Daly, the FBI agent at the American Embassy in London. I’ve also made contact with the police in the Bahamas.’
‘D’accord. I’ll come back to you if I get anything else, ’Arry.’
Once again the enquiry had ground to a standstill pending information from sources beyond my control.
I had no sooner finished my conversation with Henri Deshayes when Kate Ebdon appeared in my office doorway. ‘I’ve spoken to the Border Agency, guv,’ she said. ‘They have no record of a Samson Adekunle having entered the UK.’
‘As I thought, he’s an illegal immigrant. Either that or their records aren’t reliable.’
‘Surely not,’ said Kate, with mock disbelief. ‘But the Border Agency wants to know what we’re doing about it.’
‘What we’re doing about it? Bloody sauce. What did you tell them, Kate?’
‘I said they could have his body once we’d finished with it.’
‘Joking aside, Kate, what does happen to him, once the coroner releases the body?’
‘As I understand it, the local authority is responsible for burying him. At the taxpayers’ expense, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but don’t tell Dave. That sort of thing gets him all hot and bothered.’
‘I also had a word with the Nigerian High Commission, but they didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know.’
‘And that, Kate, is par for the course,’ I said. ‘Nigeria is the centre of the scam world.’
No sooner had Kate disappeared than Tom Challis appeared in my office clutching an open stationery book.
‘I’ve tracked down the Deacon family, guv.’
‘Who the hell are they, Tom?’ I was becoming totally confused with the ever increasing number of names that continued to crop up in our enquiry.
‘You remember asking me to track down William Rivers’s relatives?’
‘Right, I’m with you. What about them?’
‘George Deacon is William Rivers’s great nephew and the grandson of Rivers’s sister Gladys. As he’s aged twenty-five, I thought he might be a likely runner for the toppings. I can’t see his parents getting involved in a triple murder, and the grandparents are both dead.’
‘Have you got an address for him?’ I never ceased to be amazed at the detective skills of my younger officers. In common with other coppers of my generation, we misguidedly thought that we were the best detectives there were or ever had been.
‘Yes, guv, he’s living at Ealing.’
‘I’d better have a word with him, I suppose. Thanks, Tom.’
‘D’you want to go now, guv?’ asked Dave.
‘No, we’ll leave it till this evening. He’s probably at work.’
It was about half past three that afternoon when Joe Daly strolled into my office.
‘Joe, what brings you here?’ I asked.
‘I’ve just been across at the Yard enjoying one of your senior officers’ lunches,’ said Daly.
‘Is “enjoy” the right word, Joe?’
‘The food was fine, but your commander sure knows how to shoot the breeze. I reckon he went on for about twenty minutes or more.’
‘Is that all?’ I said. ‘That’s quite brief for him.’ I’d wisely pleaded pressure of work to avoid joining the commander’s audience.
‘At least I was sitting next to Alan Cleaver,’ Daly continued. ‘He’s got a few good stories to tell.’
Dave, having been alerted to Joe Daly’s presence, appeared in my office with three cups of coffee. ‘Not as good as your embassy coffee, Joe,’ he said, ‘but we’re an impoverished nation now.’
‘Remind me to send you a food parcel, Dave.’ Daly took a sip of coffee and grimaced. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean.’ He put his cup and saucer on the corner of my desk and didn’t touch it again. ‘The reason I’ve called in, Harry,’ he said, ‘is that a couple of agents from the New York office interviewed Carter this morning in Rikers.’ He took an email from his pocket and handed it to me.
‘And you’ve got it already?’ I queried, as I began to read O’Grady’s report.
‘New York is five hours behind us, sir,’ said Dave smugly, the ‘sir’ implying that I should have been aware of this widely known fact.
‘I reckon your sergeant’s a wise-ass, Harry,’ said Daly, treating Dave to a high-five.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I said, skimming through the email. ‘This report doesn’t say much that we didn’t know already,’ I added, returning the brief report to Daly. ‘I reckon Carter knows exactly where the money is, but isn’t saying.’
‘That was my take on it, Harry. After all, what’s he got to lose? He probably thinks he’s going to spend the next twenty years in a federal facility, so why give anything away. In fact, Fernandez probably gave Carter his usual spiel about shaping up for twenty-five to life. I know Fernandez and he’s got a big mouth, and sometimes he’s too smart at making comments of that sort. One of these days he’ll come up against a defence attorney who’ll take him to pieces on the stand.’
George Deacon’s apartment was in a modern block in Ealing, and Dave and I arrived there at a little after six o’clock that evening.
The barefooted well-endowed girl who opened the door of the flat looked to be no older than twenty, if that. She was wearing a pair of white shorts and a tee shirt that bore the single word ‘YES’ followed by an exclamation mark.
‘Mrs Deacon?’ I asked, being fairly sure that she was not.
The girl laughed. ‘Not yet. I’m Tricia Hardy, George’s fiancée. Did you want to see him?’ She spoke with what I thought was, and was later confirmed as, a Canadian accent.
‘If he’s in,’ I said.
‘Sure. Come on through.’ Tricia Hardy seemed quite happy to admit two complete strangers into the apartment without querying who we were or why we were there. No wonder crime in London is rife.
‘Hey, Deacon, get off your butt. There’s a couple of guys here to see you,’ said Tricia, addressing a young man reclining on a sofa. He too was attired in shorts and a tee shirt, although his bore ‘CALGARY’ in large letters.
‘Who the hell are you?’ demanded George Deacon, tossing aside the book he’d been reading. Slowly and apparently in some pain, he stood up and gazed suspiciously at Dave and me. I thought I sensed an element of fear in his appraisal. Either that or he was more aware of crime in the capital than was his fiancée.
‘We’re police officers, Mr Deacon,’ I said, and effected introductions.
‘From Scotland Yard, you say?’
‘That’s correct, sir,’ said Dave.
‘Well, I haven’t got a car, if that’s what you’re here about. I go everywhere on a bicycle.’
Funny,’ I thought, how people always assume that a visit from the police has something to do with an infraction of traffic law.
‘How very green of you, sir,’ said Dave.
‘What’s this about?’ Deacon asked. He waved at the sofa. ‘Take a pew.’ He squatted on a beanbag and Tricia sat on the floor with her legs crossed. She moved with enviable suppleness and looked as though she might be good at yoga.
Dave picked up the book that Deacon had been reading and glanced at the title. ‘Crime and Punishment. Good luck! I always found Dostoevsky a bit heavy going.’
‘So do I,’ said Deacon, apparently unsure what to make of a detective sergeant with a knowledge of Russian literature, ‘but I’m doing an Open University degree.’
‘I understand that you’re related to William Rivers, Mr Deacon,’ I said, steering the conversation back to the purpose of our visit.
‘Who?’
‘William Rivers. I believe he’s your great uncle. He lived in Pinner.’
‘Oh, him. I never met him. Bit of a recluse according to my mother. From what she told me, he was a bloody-minded old soldier. I gather that he didn’t have much to do with the rest of the family. I heard that my Auntie Stella had a blazing row with him, all because she married some Indian guy. Anyway, why have you come to see me about him?’
‘He’s dead, Mr Deacon. He committed suicide in Brighton just over a week ago.’
‘As a matter of interest, Chief Inspector, why are you telling me all this?’ Deacon was unmoved by the news of his great uncle’s death, but as he’d never met him that was understandable.
‘We have reason to believe that he was defrauded of some ten thousand pounds.’
‘Where on earth did he get that much money from?’ Deacon’s face registered a shock similar to that displayed by Stella Kumar when we’d told her the amount of money her father had accumulated.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, declining to pass on what James Milner had told me about Rivers’s black market activities in Germany at the end of the Second World War. ‘The only reason I’m here is to find out whether you knew anything about this fraud.’ And to see if you were responsible for my three murders.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it.’ Deacon shook his head. ‘Mind you, I might’ve got to know him if I’d found out he was worth that much. Might even have gone to the funeral. But I suppose that’s taken place.’
‘Yesterday, as a matter of fact, sir,’ said Dave.
‘Oh well, we wouldn’t’ve made it anyway. Trish and I only got back last night.’
‘Got back?’ I queried.
But it was Trish Hardy who answered. ‘We spent almost the whole of July in Calgary, Alberta. It’s my home town and I thought I’d better show Deacon off to my folks before I agreed to marry him.’ She laughed. ‘He decided to have a go at the rodeo, that’s why he’s aching all over,’ she volunteered. ‘I told him not to, but he’s bloody-minded when the mood takes him, but not as bloody-minded as the mustang was.’ She seemed devoid of any sympathy for her fiancé’s escapades, and laughed.
‘Sorry I couldn’t help you with this fraud business,’ said Deacon, as he limped to the door to show us out. ‘But as I said, I never met the old boy.’
And that crossed George Deacon off our list of suspects. Subject, of course, to the usual checks.
FOURTEEN
It turned out that Joe Daly’s flying visit earlier that afternoon wasn’t the end of the Lucien Carter affair, although in another sense it was. The question of Carter and where he’d put the money ended abruptly with a telephone call from the London FBI agent just after Dave and I returned from interviewing George Deacon. And after I’d given Colin Wilberforce the task of confirming George Deacon’s story that he and Tricia Hardy had spent the whole of the last month in Calgary.
‘Harry, can you come across to the embassy? I’ve got some bad news, although you might not think it’s bad.’
‘What sort of bad news, Joe?’
‘I’ll tell you when you get here, but I’ve just opened a bottle of Jim Beam that might help to ease the pain and suffering.’
I didn’t like the sound of that, and Dave and I hastened to Grosvenor Square without further delay.
We were joined in Joe Daly’s office by Darlene. It seemed that it was Daly’s close of play relaxation when he and his secretary enjoyed a few drinks.
Joe poured substantial measures of his Kentucky whiskey into chunky tumblers and handed them round. ‘You guys want ice?’ he asked.
‘Certainly not, Joe,’ said Dave. ‘We’re British.’
‘So, what’s this bad news?’ I asked, having taken a sip of Daly’s whiskey.
‘Lucien Carter’s dead.’
‘Dead? What happened?’
‘First reports say that he was murdered by another inmate, but enquiries are ongoing.’
‘I’ll bet they are,’ said Dave quietly.
‘How the hell did he get topped in Rikers?’ I asked. ‘I thought that prison was as tight as a drum.’
‘Sure it is,’ said Daly, ‘but these things happen. If some inmate decides to take another one out, he’ll do it somehow. According to the information that O’Grady of our New York office was given, Carter was in the exercise yard when another remand prisoner stabbed him.’
‘Do we know who this other guy was?’
‘Not yet. I’m waiting on more details, but I’m wondering if whoever killed Carter had gotten paid to take him out.’
‘Yes, so am I,’ I said thoughtfully as I considered this latest twist in my murder enquiry. ‘Are your guys doing the investigation?’
‘No, Harry. Investigations like that are done by the New York Police Department. They won the fight with the Bureau and the Department of Corrections. Believe me, if you think you’ve got turf wars here, you ain’t seen nothing.’
The following day, I sat in my office mulling over what we knew so far. It wasn’t much beyond that the fact that I had three unsolved murders on my hands and no idea how to solve them.
Dave and I went out for lunch at our favourite Italian restaurant, and I spent the afternoon trawling through the mass of paperwork that had been mounting up since a week ago last Friday.
I made a decision. ‘We need to talk, Dave,’ I shouted through my open door. ‘Grab some coffee and come in.’
‘On its way, guv.’ Five minutes later Dave appeared with two cups of coffee, and kicked the door shut with his foot.
‘Take a pew, Dave. I’ve been thinking that we’ll have to go public with these damned murders because we don’t seem to be getting anywhere.’
‘True, sir,’ said Dave. ‘But that won’t help with Carter’s murder in Rikers.’
‘We’ve got enough of our own murders without worrying about that,’ I said. ‘Anyway, that’s down to the NYPD.’
‘But surely there’s a connection with our murders,’ said Dave.
‘I shouldn’t think there’s any doubt about it, but getting to the bottom of that particular topping rests with our American friends. It’s nothing to do with us.’
‘But we could take a trip over there, guv,’ suggested Dave. ‘We might find out something that they’ve missed.’
I gave the impression of giving the matter some thought. ‘Good idea, Dave. I could go over there on my own and leave you here to oversee the UK end of things. I doubt that the commander would sanction both of us going.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Dave.
I rang the head of Press Bureau at the Yard.
‘Bob, I want to release details of my three murders to the media.’
‘I fielded a few enquiries about the camper van fire just after it happened, Harry, but interest seems to have died down. These things don’t stay in the news longer than about twenty-four hours at best. All that was released at the outset was that there was an unfortunate fire at Richmond in which two people lost their lives. And the media seems to think that the Adekunle murder was a random burglary gone wrong. D’you want to tell the world about all three of them now?’
‘I think it’s the only way we’re going to get any help, Bob,’ I said, and went on to give him chapter and verse about th
e deaths of Eberhardt, Schmidt and Adekunle, but without any mention of the share scams that appeared to be the motive for their murders. I didn’t say anything about the death of Lucien Carter in Rikers. I doubted that anyone in the UK would be able to offer any information about that, not that there would be much I could do with it if they did. Except to pass it on to the NYPD.
Then I sat back, metaphorically, and awaited the flood of information that would undoubtedly be forthcoming from concerned and helpful members of the public. If only!
‘D’you think we will get anything out of the press release, guv?’
‘I hope so, Dave, but don’t hold your breath.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s damned near half past seven. Go home, and give Madeleine my regards.’
‘She’s on tour in Russia, guv. She’s currently at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg where the Kirov ballet company usually performs. She won’t be back until Sunday morning. Looks like another microwave supper.’
The murderer picked up the newspaper and stared in horror at the front-page article about Eberhardt, Schmidt and Adekunle. He wondered if it had also been on the TV, but as he had no access to a television set, he didn’t know.
He firmly believed that he’d covered his tracks and that the original press stories about the two deaths in the camper van being an unfortunate accident had meant an end to it. But now he saw the frightening announcement that the police were regarding them as murders.
Even more unsettling was that Scotland Yard was now linking those deaths to the murder of Samson Adekunle. He’d been sure that his anonymous and deliberately belated telephone call to the police had given them the impression that it was a random killing resulting from a bungled burglary. Press reports had thought so, too.
His mind went back to the old fool with the dog who’d seen him shooting at a tree in Richmond Park, and wondered if he’d told the police what he’d seen. Not for the first time he cursed himself for his foolishness. After all, he’d had enough practice at the German gun club; he didn’t have to do more in public. That was just bravado accompanied by a firm belief that he wouldn’t be caught.
Fortunately, he hadn’t given the secretary of the gun club in Birmingham his real name, and the ploy of taking a room with Mrs Patel would have made it more difficult for him to be found. However, he was confident that his theft of the firearm from the gun club near Essen would not be discovered by the British police, even though he’d been obliged by the nit-picking Germans to give his real name and produce his passport.