by David Barry
‘But we know the Bayne family stayed the night at a hotel near Carlisle to break the journey. If they were followed from the south, maybe the killer also stayed at the hotel. He would have needed to register, using a false name and address.’
‘Which gets us nowhere.’
I tried to sound optimistic, even though I didn’t feel it. ‘Listen, Bill, at least it’s a start. Even a false name is something to go on, as it could lead who knows where.’
‘Convince me.’
‘The thing that puzzles me is why the police never followed up on the Bayne’s overnight stop to get the guest list from the hotel. There was nothing in Alice’s file about that.’
‘They probably got too hung up on the motorcycle angle. Bit like the Yorkshire Ripper case when they focused their enquiries on a Geordie because of the accent on the hoax tape.’
‘Yeah, all those man hours wasted. Think what it must have cost Strathclyde police in time and effort to search the CCTV for motorcycles.’
Bill exhaled noisily, displaying frustration. ‘But we’re only guessing about the killer using a van and tracker. We have yet to get any evidence. And as it happened eleven years ago - ’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘She’s paid half a million into our bank, so we’ll do our best to come up with some answers. More than that she cannot expect.’
‘Call me old fashioned, Freddie, but I’d expect a lot more for that sort of money.’
‘Cheer up, mate. Here’s the turn off. We’re nearly there.’
***
At the firm near Reading we drew a blank. As we were good customers, having spent over two grand with them on equipment, they were helpful and we didn’t have to drop them a backhander for information. It took them a while to scroll back eleven years, but in this instance, thank God for computers. But all they could tell us was that apart from a contract with Thames Valley Police for some vehicle trackers, and two large organisations who wanted to check the legitimate mileage of their sales reps, there was not a single tracker sold to an individual around that time.
The outcome was the same at the next two firms. No individual trackers sold, except for one of the companies selling just two units, but they were sold to a very reliable and long-established private enquiry agency in central London. This left us with the company in Woking, which we had already noted was not far from Guildford where Tim Bayne’s firm was located, and his house was equidistant between the two towns.
The firm, Tech-Intelligence, was a unit in the centre of a small industrial estate on the outskirts of Woking. Like most of these technical surveillance firms, most of their business was mail order, and in front of their unit stood a small van, its back doors open, displaying piles of boxes, clearly being loaded for deliveries. We parked in the road, walked up the slight incline and parking space, and entered their reception area, which wasn’t dissimilar to the other three we had visited. I pressed the bell on the counter and we thumbed through their catalogues while we waited.
‘So what we gonna do about next year?’ Bill said.
I threw him an enquiring look and waited for him to elaborate.
‘There’ll be a change in the law. Private investigator’s will have to be licensed. How the hell will we get accreditation for our company?’
I banged the counter lightly with my fist, demonstrating a positive attitude. ‘If we solve this case - bearing in mind that we could succeed where the police have failed - we’ll be flavour of the month. It’ll open doors for us.’
‘And if we don’t solve the case?’
I was about to give him my answer, but we were interrupted by a door behind the counter opening and a middle-aged man slithered across the floor to greet us. I’m not exaggerating when I say slithered, because the man had a shifty demeanour, and sidled from door to counter like a reptile. I almost expected him to hiss when he spoke.
‘Yes, what can I do for you?’
He was middle-aged, of medium height, and wore a thick tweed jacket with striking checks, a striped shirt and tie, resulting in a combination of clashing patterns and colours, as if this display of sartorial hideousness was a deliberate attempt at irony. If that wasn’t enough, it was difficult to take my eyes off his balding head, thinly disguised with the worst comb-over I’ve ever seen, greasy strands of dark hair plastered in strips onto his head, fooling no one but himself.
I didn’t dare look at Bill, otherwise we might have lost it completely.
Like the other surveillance firms we had visited earlier, I put our business card on the counter in front of him. ‘I regret we’re not here to purchase any equipment,’ I said. ‘But we’d like some information if possible.’
He sniffed loudly. ‘What about?’
‘About a product you may or may not have sold about eleven years ago.’
‘Sorry. No can do.’
‘Oh? And why’s that?’
‘We don’t give out information about our customers.’
‘Perhaps I could have a word with the manager then.’
He sniggered and pointed at the window behind me. ‘See that van just leaving - whoops! - there it goes round the corner.’ He giggled again, enjoying some sort of private joke. ‘That van contains our manager, a personal delivery for an important customer. So you’ve just missed him.’
I restrained my impulse to grab the little squirt around the throat, and gave him a strained smile as I took my wallet out. His eyes lit up and he glanced over his shoulder furtively, perhaps afraid of another employee entering to queer his pitch.
Bill leant forward and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘We can pay for this information. Providing, of course, the information we require is available. We are talking eleven years ago.’
‘That’s not a problem. If we sold something, and you can give me the rough idea of the date, I can look it up. So how much are you prepared to offer for this obviously important information?’
I took out three twenties and put them on the counter. He stared at me and ran a reptilian tongue over his thin lips.
‘I think you can do better than that. I’m taking a huge risk, and passing on confidential information could get me into serious trouble. So that’s got to be worth at least a hundred.’
I looked him in the eye, letting him know what I thought of him before I took out another two twenties and placed them on top of the other three. As he went to pick them up, I slammed a hand over them.
‘Information first.’
‘But what if I don’t have the information you require? After going to all the trouble of searching our records...’
‘You’ll still get your money,’ I interrupted him. ‘We just want to know if you sold a car tracking device to an individual rather than a company, sometime around July in two-thousand and two.’
He frowned deeply and stared into the distance. ‘I know it’s a long time ago, but I seem to remember - hang on a second. I’ll look it up to make sure.’
He glanced at the door, probably hoping he wasn’t going to be disturbed, then slithered hurriedly to the other end of the counter and began clicking a computer keyboard while staring intently at the monitor. After a nail-biting five minutes, with the tension and excitement growing inside me, I watched as he scribbled something on a scrap of paper.
‘Yes, I can vaguely remember this man. I was the one who sold him the tracker. And I have his name and address here.’
Feet scuffing the floor, he sidled back along the counter and handed me the paper. On it was written the name: “Peter Chapmays,. 9 Coach Road, London SE1 2XT.”
Peering over my shoulder, Bill said, ‘We made enquiries at some other surveillance equipment firms, and they said they often sell to customers who probably give false names and addresses.
The salesman shrugged. ‘Not a lot we can do about that, is
there?’
‘Did he pay cash?’
‘I think he did, yes.’
‘I don’t suppose you can remember what this man looked like.’
‘Not really. I seem to think he was fairly ordinary-looking. Except - ’
I released my hold on the money and pushed it towards him. ‘Except what? What can you remember?’
‘Well, I happened to be outside, loading one of our vehicles. He drove up in a van, parked alongside it and came into the office. As I was about to follow, I happened to glance inside his van and I saw a motorbike in the back. At first I thought he might be some sort of racer - scrambling or motocross. But I think it was a road bike.’
I exchanged a look with Bill and saw the faint glimmer of a smile.
‘I think that’s why I remembered him so clearly,’ the gadget salesman went on as he pocketed the money, ‘because I thought it was unusual to transport a motorbike, when he could so easily have driven it to pick up the electronic tracker in half the time. Our trackers are only this big.’ He held his hands together, indicating a space between his fingers of three or four inches. ‘It could easily have fitted into his pocket.’
I saw him tap his own pocket, the one with the money in it, and his lips pursed into a prissy little smile. Much as I disliked the man, I had to admit the information he’d given us was good. And if his memory was that reliable going back eleven years -
‘Hang on to my business card,’ I told him. ‘And if you should remember anything else about this customer, give us a bell.’
I was about to turn away when I spotted a crafty glint in his eye.
‘And would this information be worth another little tickle?’
I knew then that he’d probably feed me any old codswallop just to get his greedy little mitts on the necessary. So I said before we exited, ‘I was hoping you might provide any supplementary information as compensation for my generosity.’
I heard him snigger just before I closed the door. Back in the car, I asked Bill what he thought as I tapped in to the internet on my smart phone.
‘Hmm. Suppose I didn’t want to give away my identity,’ he reflected, ‘I’d call myself Brown, Smith or Jones. If it is the man who killed the Bayne family, why would he pick such an unusual name, drawing attention to himself?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied, ‘it’s because he’s got a false ID which looks official. A passport and bona fide-looking documents in that name.’
‘An identity stolen from someone else perhaps.’
‘Could be,’ I said, as I got the UK Streetmap up on the screen, then tapped in Coach Road and the postcode.
‘Have you found it?’ Bill asked.
‘There’s no such address.’
‘I could have told you that without looking.’
I sighed. ‘But we still needed to check it out. Now let’s go and have a word with this Ed Warren.’
Chapter 8
Next stop was Kingston-upon-Thames. By now it was gone half-two and we were feeling hungry and thirsty. We decided we could grab something after we’d spoken to Ed Warren, especially as Nicky had made the appointment to see him at three and it would take us about thirty minutes to get to his place.
Halfway up Kingston Hill we turned off into Park Road, and took the third street on the left, and his street was on the right, an area of small Edwardian terrace houses, most of them neat with a modest appearance of comfort and faded elegance, stained glass above the doors, with many houses proudly showing-off abundant hanging baskets. The sort of houses which could have been bought for a song back in the sixties, and would now fetch three-hundred thousand - and the rest.
If the street seemed a trifle overdone in it’s ostentatious display of floral symbols of affluence, there was no such flamboyance at Warren’s house, which was the most rundown in the street. The windows needed cleaning and, instead of curtains in the front room, there was a venetian blind, jammed at an oblique angle, as though someone had attempted to open it hurriedly and then abandoned the attempt. The ill-chosen brown paint on the front door, chipped and curling at the edges, resembled potato peelings, and a green wheelie bin, crammed to bursting with old newspapers and garbage wrapped in plastic supermarket bags, stood slipshod in the small front garden, highlighting the building’s aura of neglect, a sneering carbuncle in an otherwise immaculate street.
I rang the front doorbell and we waited, listening for the sounds of footsteps. We heard a female voice shouting something unintelligible, followed by a man yelling, ‘All right! I’m going! I’m going!’
After a few minutes the door was thrown open. While the neglect of the building had prepared us for perhaps a single man, too busy and industrious to lavish attention on domestic matters and his property, we were unprepared for what greeted us.
‘You must be the private detectives,’ he slurred and grinned. ‘Super sleuths. I hope you’re not packing a rod.’ He giggled at his own wit.
I was shocked to find the man whose newspaper photograph I’d seen in Alice’s file had changed drastically. Although the picture was probably taken ten or more years ago, this overweight man, with a bulbous nose, red-rimmed eyes, and badly in need of a shave, was nothing like the businessman and manager of the software company.
‘Mr Warren?’ I enquired, to make sure it was him.
‘Yes, but please call me Ed. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your names.’
‘I’m Freddie Weston and this is my colleague Bill Turner.’
He didn’t offer his hand, but stood aside and gestured along the hall. As we walked inside, squeezing past his bulk, I caught a stale sweet smell of liquor on his breath, and I wondered how far gone he was. He pointed to the door on the right.
‘Go into the front room. Bit crowded in there but it’ll have to do. Though I don’t see what else I can tell you about Delphic Digital, other than what a stupid fucking name it is for a software company.’
We entered his living room which was a tip. Brown padded envelopes lay in heaps beneath the window, stacks of audio CDs were strewn across the floor, and cardboard boxes were piled high along one wall. The only furniture in the room was a desk with a laptop and printer, a two-seater mock-leather sofa with frayed arms, and an upright chair with a high back.
I sat on the settee next to Bill, and Ed Warren sat in the upright chair facing us. ‘As you can see,’ he said, waving an uncoordinated arm about, ‘this is my office. I run our business from here. When I got my redundancy payment from Bayne’s software company, I bought this small existing business. Mail order. Music CDs for the specialist market. Medieval chants, madrigals, harpsichords - that sort of thing. Very esoteric.’
‘D’you sell much of it?’ Bill asked politely.
Warren shrugged and was about to answer when a woman with enormous sagging breasts lurched through the open door. ‘Do we fuck!’ she slurred, and almost tripped over a box of CDs, which she attempted to kick, missed and staggered sideways, grabbing the wall for support. Her waistline was a revoltingly mushy spare tyre which wobbled from the effort it took her to keep from falling over.
‘Angela!’ Warren admonished, but with a laugh. ‘Get back in your cage. You know you’re not allowed in here when we have visitors.’
‘Well fuck you!’
He laughed again, as if this was all part of a well-rehearsed double-act. ‘Such repartee. You’ve been reading Oscar Wilde again, haven’t you?’
She ignored him and stared at Bill and me. ‘So sorry.’ It came a out as show shorry. ‘I didn’t know we had guests.’
‘I told you, Angela,’ Warren yelled. ‘How many more times? They’ve come to ask me about the Delphic company.’
‘Ask about what?’
‘The company I used to work for.’
‘Until the bastards sacked you.’
‘They didn’t
sack me. I was made redundant when the company disbanded.’
He might have saved his breath. She was too far gone to comprehend rational explanations. Eyes glassy, she leaned towards Bill and me, and made a drinking gesture.
‘Would you lie-kadrink?’
We shook our heads in unison. ‘I’ve got a long drive,’ I explained. ‘And we’re both working really. That’s very kind of you but - no thanks.’
‘Oh, well suit yourselves.’
She staggered out of the room and I let my breath out gently, relieved we could now question Warren on his own. We heard her stumbling along the hall, and Warren called out, ‘Don’t open another bottle. It’s too early yet.’ A door slammed, and then Warren explained apologetically, ‘It’s Angela’s birthday, so we thought we’d celebrate. We’re not usually like this.’
And there really is a Gotham City.
‘I know you probably explained all this to the police in two-thousand and two,’ I said, ‘but was there anything going on in Bayne’s company that made you suspicious? Something dodgy going on?’
A rasping sound as Warren scratched his unshaven chin before answering. ‘Nothing that would make you think someone would want to kill him.’
‘But anything else suspicious? Or maybe suspicious is too strong a word. Something minor? Something going on that wasn’t quite kosher?’
He thought for a bit. Then: ‘Well, the company seemed to be making far more money than it deserved. It’s hard to explain. I knew we were turning over millions each year, but the firm was quite small and didn’t employ that many staff.’
‘Is it possible,’ Bill said, ‘that he could have been making his money criminally, and using the software company to launder the proceeds?’
Warren smirked, indicating we were stating the obvious. ‘Don’t you think the police went into all that at the time? They had to find a good fucking motive for his death and they never could. The only thing I could think of were the games he created.’
‘Games?’ I questioned.
‘Yes, I often wondered if he created games which he sold to other companies.’