Deadly Intent (Anna Travis Mysteries)

by Lynda La Plante

“Bloody hell. You’re not back again, are you?”

  “I am Chief Superintendent James Langton and this is Detective Inspector Anna Travis.”

  “Shit—now what is it about?”

  “Can we come up and talk to you?”

  “Sure—mind the stairs, they’re a bit dodgy. I dunno what’s going on. Sandra said she would just go with them.”

  Langton had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Go with whom, where?” he asked quietly.

  “The cops that were here earlier. They searched the entire bloody house. I dunno what they was looking for; Sandra was dealing with them.”

  It was about ten minutes before Langton got the description of the three officers who had arrived at eight that morning: two heavily built, and one very tall and well spoken, who did all the talking. Sandra was told it was in connection with her husband’s death. They had searched every room and then asked if there was anywhere else that her husband might have kept items; she had said that they had a storage bay for their own furniture and some antiques that Julius had been trying to off-load. The three men were polite and totally believable as they asked if Sandra could accompany them to the storage facility. When shown the photograph of Alexander Fitzpatrick, the builder identified him, without hesitation, as being the well-spoken officer.

  Langton got the address of the storage facility and walked out to their patrol car. He was silent as they headed toward New Malden. Anna sat in the rear passenger seat; she hardly said a word, because she knew as well as Langton what they might find at the warehouse.

  “Looking for the drugs,” Langton suddenly said, hardly audible. He lapsed into a brooding silence as they headed from Chiswick down into Kew; then he told the driver to cut through Richmond Park, go across Kingston Hill, then straight down Queens Road, turning left past Kingston Hospital.

  Leaving the patrol car in the car park, they headed toward Brick House Storage Company. There was a security guard in a small hut beside the double doors into the storage facility. Langton showed his ID; he and Anna were led toward two huge doors, similar to a garage but three times the size.

  “The one you want is over to the right; I’ll take you through.”

  Langton thanked him, but said they would find it. He asked if anyone had recently been to open the storage and was told that it was possible, as the man had only come on duty at eleven; there was another security guard who handled the late shift, from seven in the evening until midmorning.

  KT2 was, as he had indicated, along a lane of storage compartments; the last in the row. Langton had the key but, when he twisted the handle, the door was already open. “Doesn’t bode well,” he said softly.

  As the gate swung up, all they could see were sofas, chairs, and tables stacked on top of one another, with many boxes piled in a neat, orderly fashion. They were each labeled—kitchen equipment, crockery, etc.—and only the plastic strips strewn around showed they had recently been opened. There were also some antiques and other furniture piled high: lamps and coffee tables, kitchen stools and beds. They had to squeeze down between the piles of stored items to see more and more straw, and bubble wrap, tossed to one side. Some boxes were open, left on their side.

  “She’s not here,” Langton said as he kicked aside the mass of old newspapers that must have wrapped china or glassware. He took out his mobile and called Sandra’s house as Anna walked back to the entrance and made her way down the first aisle again. Branching off it, not seen at first, was another area, which looked different: there were visible spaces, as if something had been stored and removed. There were scrapings, where a crate could have been moved aside.

  “She’s not arrived home yet,” he said, calling to Anna from the end of the aisle.

  “Something was stored here and taken out,” she said, indicating the spaces. She spotted a hair slide and turned, holding it up for Langton to see, but he was standing by a large cardboard crate. He squatted, resting back on his heels. Taking a pen from his pocket, he inched out a torn, folded piece of white paper from between the two crates.

  Anna continued searching but, finding nothing, she turned and edged around the other side. Her foot crunched on something and she quickly lifted it. It was a single earring; not a clip-on, but a beaded drop. Anna held the earring in the palm of her hand and moved farther around the crates; then she stopped. Wedged between the crates was a body. Sandra was literally rammed in between them, her body almost crushed.

  “I’ve found her,” she said.

  Langton appeared behind her, and said not to touch anything; then he turned away to make a call on his mobile. Anna joined him as he ordered an ambulance.

  “She’s dead,” Anna said quietly.

  “Get out to that security guy. We need to talk to the other man who was on duty before him.”

  Anna left him making more calls to the station, asking for the necessary backup. By the time he joined her outside, she had already made contact with Harry Framer, the night security guard. Langton handed her the scrap of paper. It was a cargo invoice for supplies of medical drugs destined for delivery, but to where, she couldn’t tell, as it had been torn off. There was a part stamp from Gatwick Airport customs, dated six months ago, but the signature of who had taken the order was missing.

  “That’s how he must have been shipping his supplies in; we can run a check on it at the airport,” Langton said, then turned to look back at the massive warehouse.

  Mrs. D’Anton had a broken neck, and substantial bruises to her face and throat. Two of her nails were broken; it looked as if she had put up a fight. By the time her body was being eased out and checked over, both Anna and Langton had talked to Harry Framer. He was badly shaken, seeing the uniformed officers cordoning off the entrance to the warehouse. He said that around nine, just as he was about to get some breakfast, a Range Rover had pulled up. He described the two thickset men who approached him; they were accompanied by Mrs. D’Anton, who did not, as far as he could remember, appear nervous in any way, but chatted to him as he opened the main doors of the hangar. He couldn’t recall if he had even heard the two men speak. The third man had remained inside the Range Rover until the doors were opened; when he got out, he went straight to the hangar. He was tall, well over six feet, and wore a long draped coat. When shown the photograph of Alexander Fitzpatrick, Framer said it was the same man.

  “So take me through exactly what happened.”

  “Well, they went inside. Mrs. D’Anton had her keys. Like I said, it was around breakfast time, so I went to the café up the road, got a coffee and a bacon sandwich, and came back. I said to the tall man that he couldn’t stay parked up outside; he said that they were just leaving. The two guys came out; one was carrying a box, and stashed it in the back of the Range Rover. The tall man was already sitting inside.”

  “So Mrs. D’Anton wasn’t with them?”

  “I didn’t see her, but I reckoned maybe she’d left. I watched them drive out, then went into the security office and ate my breakfast.” Framer was sweating with nerves and kept on repeating that he didn’t see anything suspicious.

  “This box, how big was it?”

  Framer said it was maybe two feet by two, miming the size with his hands; not big, and it didn’t look too heavy. He didn’t know if there were other boxes already stashed in the Range Rover. Langton asked when he had last seen Julius D’Anton. Framer said he had never actually met him, just his wife. The other security guard, when asked the same question, said that, as far as he could recall, although D’Anton used to pay regular visits, he hadn’t seen him for about five or six months.

  Langton gestured for Anna to follow as he headed back to their car. “You know what’s not making sense? The way she’s been beaten up: neck broken, face in bad shape. If you match this killing with the others we’re lining up against Fitzpatrick, it’s not got the same MO. If they were picking up just one box, that I suspect to be Fentanyl, then why not kill her in the same way as Rushton, as Donny Petrozzo? She put up a
fight, but there were three of them; they could have held her down and injected her.”

  “Well, you just said it—there were three of them. Maybe this kill was down to the two heavies.”

  Langton nodded. He was now feeling very uneasy about the two missing children. Both men, he and Anna knew, were involved in taking the sisters to and from the nursery school.

  “I think we should move in on Honour and Damien Nolan. If they don’t know where the children are, then like you, I’m really concerned,” Anna said.

  They drove in silence for a while, then Langton muttered, “He bloody did it again—showed up at D’Anton’s, fake ID, and fucking searched the house before he came here. They said when he was in the incident room, the only person he seemed interested in was D’Anton; placed a chair directly in front of his data.”

  “That’s how he got the address,” Anna said flatly.

  “I keep thinking back on that last case we did together. The children, the baby we found buried in the pigsty.”

  “So why are we waiting to pick them up?”

  Langton stared out of the side window as they headed down the motorway toward Gatwick; she could see his drawn face reflected in the wing mirror. “They can’t make a move without us knowing. I’m not ready for them yet.”

  Anna said nothing. Finding the body of Julius D’Anton’s wife had really affected her. Langton had not had any interaction with her, so the missing shipment of “medical supplies” preoccupied him more than anything else.

  Gatwick customs were very edgy about their inquiry. They produced documents that were all, as far as they were concerned, totally legitimate. The shipment of Fentanyl had been sent via a well-known pharmaceutical company that had shipped many times before to the UK. The documents were checked over and stamped at the customs warehouse; they were subsequently collected by an official, with counterdocumentation, to ensure delivery was made to the various hospitals across London.

  Langton retained his composure, requesting copies of every single paper concerning the shipment. He sat in the patrol car, flicking through them; then passed the papers to Anna. “I would put my life savings on these being very good forgeries; those clowns wouldn’t know shit from a shovel.” Anna read over the vast folder of shipment agreements and collections. To her, they did look authentic, even down to the cases being opened and double-checked. Even the collection papers were seemingly very orderly; yet, like Langton, she had to assume they were forged.

  “He sends this stuff right out in the open and not one person questioned it. Oh—the collection was made by a white van with a medical supplier’s logo! Big fucking deal; somebody did their bloody research.” He shook his head. “That somebody had to be in the UK for a long time to get this organized. We’ll have to check back to the U.S. side, but I doubt it’ll be much help, as this end was so tight.”

  “What do you think it’s worth?” Anna asked.

  Langton shrugged. “Street value, I’d say we’re looking at millions. Thing is”—he tapped the dashboard with his finger—“he would have to have a big network of dealers over here prepared to buy it. I don’t for a second think it was those no-hopers we’ve arrested from the Chalk Farm squat.” He sighed, and then turned to face her, swiveling around in the front seat. “You know what I think?”

  Anna smiled, and shook her head. “There was a major cock-up somewhere?”

  “You can say that again.” He turned back to face the windscreen. “How many boxes do you reckon were stored at the warehouse?”

  “I don’t know. The security guy saw just the one being carried out, but there could have been more in the Range Rover.”

  Langton made the same gesture with his hands as Framer the security guard had done. “Two foot by two foot; easily placed into the back of the Range Rover, right?”

  “Yes, from what he said.”

  Langton grunted, then went into one of his silences.

  Not until they were in front of the team, giving their update, did he add that they would have to work backward. “Fitzpatrick, we know, was short of cash. He put the pressure on Julia Brandon to get four million out from Rushton; he also killed him, because he wanted access to every cent she had squirreled away. We know he has now started to funnel it into various accounts. I surmise that he is not in this deal alone. We’ve gone with the assumption that these two heavies were used by Julia Brandon to act as bodyguards.” He paused. “What if they were something more? What if this shipment was also theirs? Fitzpatrick had done some kind of deal to ship it in, and they would control the dealers. As far as I can tell, Fitzpatrick has been out of the game too long to have these contacts in the UK; it could be he was paid to organize the paperwork, for a cut of the profits.”

  Everyone was attentive, as Langton appeared to be thinking out loud; he clicked his fingers, as if he couldn’t quite get to the conclusion of his theory. He paced up and down along the incident-room board, and then stopped. He jabbed his finger at Julius D’Anton’s photograph.

  Gordon came forward. Via CCTV footage they had traced the white van from Gatwick. It was hired from a “Rent a Van” company a week prior to the collection. The medical logo could easily have been made up and stuck over the sides. Gordon said the hire of the van was done via the Internet; the company was paid in cash, by a Mr. Rodney Fuller, on collection. He had the van for three days before it was returned to their yard, the keys left in their overnight letter box. Langton doubted they would discover any new evidence, as the van had been hired out twelve times since. However, Fuller was described as being very tall, and well spoken…Gordon was sent to the hire company to see if they had any more information.

  Anna had the unpleasant job of returning to Sandra D’Anton’s house with Phil to give the builder the bad news. They would also ask for more details about the men who came and searched, and ask whether Sandra had said anything else that would help their inquiry. Meanwhile the team, along with Langton, had begun the marathon task of working backward through the entire data collected for the case. Still Langton held off from picking up Honour and Damien Nolan. The surveillance team were still present and had reported nothing unusual or suspicious.

  By the time Anna returned, there was hardly a desk or office not brimming with statements and files. Langton was in her small office, files piled either side of him.

  “We didn’t get anything from D’Anton’s house; her boyfriend was in a state of shock, so it was impossible to question him for a while. Outcome was, Sandra had said nothing that he could recall that made him concerned. She said the men were searching for a painting on which her husband had put a down payment, which was why she agreed to take them to the warehouse. It appeared that D’Anton had a habit of putting down payments on antiques, and not paying off the debt, but reselling the items.”

  Langton looked glum as he pressed a pencil into Anna’s desk, making small dents with the point. “I don’t know which way to move,” he said.

  Anna still could not understand why Langton hadn’t brought the Nolans in. “Any sighting of the children?”

  “Nope, nor our two goons. They could be anywhere, right?”

  “With two children plus an au pair, somebody has got to have seen them.”

  “Or know where they are,” he said flatly. He swiveled in her chair, then picked up the last file he was studying. He sighed and then began to jab with the pencil again.

  Phil knocked on the door. “Boss, I’ve got something that’s not quite kosher; it’s connected to the Mitsubishi.”

  “What?”

  “Well, we know it was reported stolen, before it was taken to Stanley Leymore’s. Next we know that Frank Brandon was driving it with, as far as we know, Alexander Fitzpatrick on board. Then we get it sighted in Oxfordshire, this time with Julius D’Anton driving it…”

  Langton sprang to his feet. “No, no! Julius D’Anton was driving it before Frank visited the drug squat—then we discovered the body of Donny Petrozzo in the back—right, Anna?”

>   “Yes.”

  “Shit!” Both Phil and Anna looked to Langton, who was bending forward, rubbing his knee; jumping up out of the chair had made it throb with pain. He hobbled to the door and walked out. “I never got to give him the nitty-gritty,” Phil complained.

  “Which is what?” Anna demanded.

  “There’s no trace of the guy who reported it missing. We have an address, right, but we’re getting a dead phone signal. We’ve contacted the local police to see if they can help us.”

  Anna hurried into the incident room. The Mitsubishi had been reported stolen by a man called Adrian Summers; his address was one of the elegant houses in Hove with direct views of the pebbled beach. The house had been rented on a short lease and, as far as the locals could ascertain, the renter had not been in residence for months.

  Adrian Summers, aged twenty-two, worked as an odd-job man for holiday rentals. The Mitsubishi was registered in his name, and he had reported it stolen. It had been parked on the forecourt of the property. It didn’t help that there had been a spate of car thefts over the past year; although the Mitsubishi had been reported stolen, the police had had no success in tracking it down.

  Langton fired off orders for a team to get over to the house. He wanted it dusted from top to bottom for prints, and for them to remove anything that gave them a clue as to who had rented it. The owners were contacted in the Bahamas; they gave an address and name of the management company. The rental contract didn’t help: it had been taken out in Adrian Summers’s name, and the rent paid in cash for six months; they had also been left a substantial deposit, which remained unclaimed.

  While the team set about tracing Summers and visiting the property, Langton sat in front of the board. Dates, dates—how many times had he asked for the chronological order of events from Travis? It all hinged on this bloody jeep; was it stolen to order by Stanley Leymore? Did he have a string of kids stealing for him, driving the vehicles to his garage and respraying, repairing, replacing the plates? It was doubtful he would be stealing cars for himself; they knew he had sold Donny Petrozzo his Mercedes, so the cars would have been upmarket vehicles that he knew he could move. Brighton police confirmed a spate of upmarket vehicle thefts a while back, but nothing recently. Somehow the Mitsubishi was moved from Brighton to Leymore’s garage. Langton began a list of names: he marked only those who had a direct link to the jeep. First up was this boy Adrian Summers, who had bought the jeep, new, from a Brighton dealer; paid cash. It was next reported stolen, and surfaced: