Porson came to the meeting the next afternoon, carrying a mug of tea on top of which was balanced a plate bearing a Chelsea bun. The troops parted deferentially for him, but he eased his way to the back of the room and perched on a desk. ‘Carry on,’ he said. ‘I’m not here. I’m a fly on the wheel.’
Slider nodded to Hollis, who went through the basic facts of the case so far: the shout, Catriona Aude, the Firmans, the school’s CCTV, the gun’s provenance. Then Slider took over.
‘We’re assuming, for working purposes, that deceased was in fact David Rogers and that death was in fact caused by the single gunshot at close range to the back of the skull. There’s no reason at the moment to doubt either of these basics, so let’s not complicate an already difficult case. Swilley, what did you find out about Aude and her flatmates?’
‘Nothing suspicious, guv,’ Swilley said. ‘She shares a flat with two blokes and another female. She pays the least and gets the smallest room, and it’s a bit of a pit: clothes, make-up, sounds, magazines – never seen so much shite. She wouldn’t want a cleaner, she’d want a curator. But there’s nothing sinister in there. The flatmates seem decent, normal types. They’ve all got steady jobs, no big debts, no big spending habits. No obvious drug use. The four of them do the usual things – go to pubs, go clubbing, watch telly, have friends round. The two men have got semi-permanent girlfriends. The female and Aude were playing the field – looking for The One, according to the other female. I got plenty about that. Usual rant about how impossible it was to find a bloke who’ll commit these days.’
‘She was telling the wrong person,’ Atherton said. ‘Look how often you turned me down.’
Swilley ignored him. ‘It sounds as if Aude was the more desperate of the two. Always getting off with unsuitable blokes. One-night stands. Nothing lasting more than a couple of months at best. They were quite excited about Rogers. Pleased for her. He was a bit out of her usual class: money, nice manners, and the fact he wasn’t married was a real bonus. She told her flatmates he was a consultant at a hospital, but that was about all. They said he was generous with his money – took her to posh restaurants, gave her a couple of nice presents. Anyway,’ she concluded, ‘I can’t see she was in on it, guv. The impression was she was really stuck on him. Apparently she thought the relationship was going places, talking about something permanent down the line. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience.’
‘So you think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ said Slider. ‘OK, we’ll put her to one side. The only other contact we’ve got at the moment is Rogers’s ex-wife.’ He ran through the interview with Amanda Sturgess and related Connolly’s story about the relationship between her and Frith. ‘Whether the barmaid Maureen is right or not, there is obviously more to it than Amanda told us. The divorce seems to have been acrimonious – on her part, at least. She didn’t mention anything about Frith or helping him to buy the stables, and while there’s no reason she should have, she did seem anxious for us not to speak to him when he came in. Who’s been looking into this agency of hers?’
‘Me, guv,’ said Mackay. ‘It’s pukka, all right. Does good work. Big employers these days have got to take on a certain number of disabled by law, but there’s nothing token about it. It’s got a good name with the disabled charities and lobby groups I contacted.’
‘Who’s the Beale of “Sturgess and Beale”?’ he asked.
‘She’s a Nora Beale, married, lives in Ealing, used to work for an ordinary employment agency, got a disabled son, decided a specialist agency was needed. Met Amanda at some social do when Amanda first moved there. Her and Amanda set up the agency together and they do all the work, bar one girl who does the clerical.’
‘Which makes our Mandy thoroughly worthy and out of the frame for First Murderer,’ Atherton said, but discontentedly.
‘We still don’t know what Rogers was doing for a living,’ said Slider. ‘What about this Windhover? Have you found out any more about it?’
Atherton answered. ‘It’s the Windhover Trust, in full, and it’s a part of something called the Geneva Medical Support and Research Foundation. The British arm, if you like. It has an address in SW1 but it’s only an accommodation address. Everything is forwarded from there to the parent organization in Geneva, and we haven’t been able to find out anything more about that, except that it’s supposed to be non-profit making. The website is outstandingly unhelpful, with little more than an address and a mission statement, and the authorities won’t play ball. You know what the Swiss are like. They didn’t stay out of the EU to answer questions to the likes of us. There is something called The Windhover Outreach, which does vaccinations in Africa, but whether that’s part of the same thing I haven’t been able to find out yet. And what they were paying David Rogers a hundred and eighty kay a year for is anyone’s guess.’
‘It’s not a huge amount,’ Slider said. ‘And yet he must have been giving them some value in return for it.’
‘Advice. Expertise,’ Hollis hazarded. ‘Maybe he was a consultant in that sense – like a business consultant.’
‘Certainly possible,’ said Slider.
‘And yet,’ said Atherton, ‘he doesn’t seem to have been living on it, or not entirely.’
‘Consultants don’t usually consult only for one company,’ Slider said.
‘No, but anyone else he was working for wasn’t paying him a salary into his bank account,’ Atherton pointed out.
Porson stirred restively. ‘This is all airy-fairy stuff,’ he objected, forgetting his temporary membership of the diptera muscidae family. ‘It’s hard evidence butters the parsnips. What about that CCTV tape? What did you get off that?’
Hollis answered. ‘We got the number of the parked car, sir. Right enough it went back to a resident of Masbro Road, a John Fletcher. We caught him at home last night and got some lifts off the bonnet. Luckily he’d not cleaned it for a while, and even luckier that’s not a place people put their hands a lot. We took his fingerprints for elimination purposes, anyway. But there was a good set of four fingers and a palm in the middle of the bonnet, matching where we saw the suspect on the CCTV put his hand to balance himself. He must have took off his gloves when he left the house.’
‘It’s the old saying, they always make one mistake,’ Porson pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Hoist with his own canard. Have you run the prints?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Slider answered. ‘There’s no match in the records.’
‘Ah well, can’t have everything, I suppose,’ said Porson, evidently disappointed. ‘But at least when you do get a suspect—’
‘We’ll have something to nail him with,’ Slider concluded. ‘It’d be a nice short cut if the prints matched Frith, but he has no criminal record, and at the moment we don’t have enough to ask him to give a sample.’
Porson grunted in acknowledgement of the point, drained his tea mug, and said, ‘All right, what about the other car? The suspect’s?’
‘It’s a BMW seven-series. Black. The best we could do after the lab had enhanced the pictures was a partial number, missing the last digit and with some doubt as to whether one number was a three or an eight. It gives us quite a lot of cars to check. We’re working on that. And we’ve also put the possible variations into the ANPR at Hendon, see if we get a ping.’
The Automatic Number Plate Recognition system was the computerized record of the millions of photographs a day taken by a network of cameras, some of them part of the congestion charge set-up, others placed on motorways, at road junctions, outside petrol stations, important buildings and so on. Very few members of the public knew about the system, which Slider thought was probably just as well, as there were certainly civil rights implications about the level of surveillance to which the general public was being submitted without its consent. But the images were so well defined that the registration numbers were able to be processed automatically by the central computer. Enter a number, and if that car had passed any of the
cameras it would be ‘pinged’ and its route could be tracked. In many cases, the faces of the front seat occupants could also be clearly identified.
‘All right.’ Porson nodded. ‘Well, let me know if anything comes of that. Do we know what car Frith drives?’
‘Haven’t found that out yet,’ Slider said.
Porson didn’t need to say the obvious. ‘What else? Have you got Rogers’s phone dump yet?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Hollis answered. ‘Seems to be all social. Restaurants, clubs. Garage where he got his car serviced. A lot of women – most of ’em appearing in his address book. He doesn’t seem to have had any men friends. Dunno if that’s strange or not. Nothing work related. Hasn’t rung the only number we have for Windhover, nor any other medical establishment. And he didn’t make any calls on the morning he died.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Slider said. ‘Aude said he got a phone call early in the morning, and went into his dressing-room and rang someone on his mobile.’
‘Yes, guv,’ Hollis said. ‘She must have been mistaken.’
‘She said she heard him talking.’
‘Must have been talking to himself, then. Or she was dreaming. The fact is there’s no call logged on either his mobile or his landline.’
‘She was in flitters after what happened,’ Connolly pointed out. ‘Wouldn’t be strange if she got herself all mixed up. Coulda been another day the phone call bit happened.’
‘I suppose that must have been it,’ Slider said. ‘What about his landline?’
‘Nothing of interest there, except that he made quite a lot of calls to his ex-wife.’
‘She told me she hardly ever spoke to him,’ Slider objected.
Hollis nodded. ‘Definite porky, that.’ He took up another piece of paper. ‘He’s rung her four times in the last three weeks, the last call a week before he was killed, lasting eighteen minutes. You wouldn’t forget a call like that.’
‘She may just have panicked, given he was murdered, and tried to distance herself from him,’ Slider said. People did things like that all the time. ‘It probably had nothing to do with anything. Still, I’d like to know what they talked about.’
‘I like it when people lie,’ Porson said, rubbing his hands. ‘Gives you a reason to ask more questions. Find out what car this Frith character drives. And I could stand to know where he was on Monday morning. Given he’s the nearest thing you’ve got to a suspect.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Slider. ‘Provided we can find out without being obvious. He’s not a suspect until we know he’s done something suspicious.’
‘Can’t find out if he’s been suspicious until you ask. Which came first, the chicken or the road? Well, keep at it. I’ve got to go and tell Mr Wetherspoon where we are.’
That’d be up the junction without a paddle, Slider thought. It’s a long road that gathers no moss.
Connolly’s work in setting up a rapport with Andy Bamford reaped its reward, saving her another trip to Sarratt. She rang her ‘for a chat’ and found her new friend only too eager, though she was obliged to book the first of a course of lessons to allay possible suspicion that she was time-wasting. Still, she could always cancel later. In the course of the ensuing bunny, Connolly had as much difficulty in easing Andy round to the subject of Robin Frith as in getting a compass to point north. After considerable discussion of the horse he had taken for hydrotherapy and how good he was with animals and how much he cared for them – ‘They’re not just a way to make money to him, like a lot of trainers I could mention,’ – and his prospects of having another winner at Badminton this year, Connolly said eagerly that she was really keen to meet him, asked wistfully if he would be taking her lesson, and added, ‘Oh, d’you know, I think maybe I saw him when I was going through the village the other day. Early Monday morning. I bet he comes in really early, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah. He’s here by seven most mornings.’
‘It could have been him, then. Does he drive a black BMW – a seven series?’
Andy laughed. ‘A Beamer? No, he’s got a four-by-four, a Mitsubishi Shogun. He wouldn’t have room in an ordinary car for all the stuff he carries – tack and rugs and everything. And it has to pull a trailer. It is black, though.’
‘Oh,’ said Connolly, sounding disappointed. ‘I was sure it was him. It was a dead handsome man in a black BMW. Maybe he has an ordinary car as well? I could swear I saw it going into your stables.’
‘Well, he might have another car, I don’t know, but I’ve never known him bring it here,’ Andy said. ‘He always comes in the Shogun. Anyway, he wasn’t in early Monday morning, so that can’t have been him. He had an appointment at Archers, the feed merchant in Hemel, at eleven and he said it wasn’t worth coming in first. He said he’d work from home and go straight there, so he didn’t come in until the afternoon.’
‘So it doesn’t get us any further forward with the car,’ Connolly said to Slider. ‘He might or might not have a Beamer. And anyway, guv, it occurs to me any murderer might hire, borrow or steal a car rather than use his own, when he’s going to a murder.’
‘That thought had occurred to me, too,’ Slider reassured her. ‘We have to cover the bases.’
‘Right, guv. But if the feed merchant’s his alibi, that’s easy enough to check.’ She looked at him hopefully.
Slider thought a moment. If Frith had been at the stables, all present and correct, at the appropriate time, he would happily have dropped him, having no real reason to suspect him of anything. But by his own rule of clearing as you went, he ought at least to make sure the man was accounted for. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Check it out. Discreetly.’
‘Sure, they’ll never know I’ve been there,’ she assured him. ‘I’ll be in and out like Jimmy the Dip in a punter’s pocket.’
Slider had just got back to his office when Joanna rang. ‘Is it any use asking you about having the children over at the weekend?’ she asked. ‘Irene just rang. She and Ernie want to go to a bridge rally thing at Aylesbury, organized by Rotary. Sooner them than me.’
‘I’m with you on that one,’ Slider said, settling in behind his desk. The cup of tea someone had brought him before he was interrupted had got tepid. He didn’t like tea unless it was almost too hot to drink. He pushed it sadly away.
‘Well, she sounded really keen. Did you never play together?’
‘Oh, once or twice. I don’t mind it as a game, but I can’t treat it like a religion, like these real bridge enthusiasts. But Irene liked it as a way to meet what she called nice people.’
‘Aren’t we nice people?’ Joanna said indignantly.
‘I’m a policeman, and you’re a policeman’s wife. Of course we’re not nice.’
‘I’m a musician.’
‘Comes out the same. Irene never approved of anyone who worked unsocial hours. I think ideally she’d have liked to marry a solicitor – office hours, nice suits and plenty of money.’
Joanna laughed, but a little reproachfully. ‘She can’t really be that shallow. You loved her once.’
‘I’m sorry. I did, of course. And she has many good qualities. I just never brought out the best in her. Dad always used to say there was only one reason marriages broke up – you weren’t suited to each other.’ Hollis appeared in the doorway, with Atherton behind him. ‘I’ll have to go. Someone wants me.’
‘I certainly do,’ Joanna said seductively. ‘And just as soon as you get home I’m going to get you out of those wet clothes and into a hot bath, young man.’
He grinned, feeling his automatic twitch of reaction to her. Even after all this time . . . Ain’t love grand? ‘Stop it, people are watching,’ he said. ‘What was it you phoned me for?’
‘This weekend. Having the children.’
‘Oh yes. Of course, by all means, but you know I can’t promise I’ll be there. But if you’re willing. And around.’
‘I’m around except for Saturday night – repeat of Friday’s concert. But your dad can babysit.’
‘Thank God for Dad,’ Slider said.
‘I’ll second that,’ said Joanna.
‘Guv, we’ve got to the end of the possibilities on that reg number,’ Hollis said, the list in his hand. ‘We struck off all the 03s to start with. McLaren says that car on the CCTV couldn’t be that old. It’s got the all-in-one intake grille, and that didn’t come in until 2008.’ He looked at Slider, who got the significance.
‘Right.’ He nodded.
‘McLaren might be a pain –’ Atherton put it into words – ‘but he does know about cars.’
‘So that cut it down a good bit,’ Hollis went on. ‘Then we ran the possible 08 numbers that were issued to BMWs, and there weren’t many of those.’ He looked down at his list. ‘Just six, in fact. We’ve checked them out and they’re all accounted for. D’you want me to go over them with you?’
‘No, I trust you. So what does that leave us with?’
Hollis picked it up. ‘There was one car, with the last letter a W. It was an Astra, not a BMW, but it was in an RTA a couple o’ months ago and written off. Went to a scrapyard in Stanmore – Embry’s.’
It was a well-known ploy. Just as those wanting a false identity trawled churchyards for names of people who died in infancy but would have been the right age had they lived, so those wanting false number plates trawled scrapyards for dead cars of the right vintage.
‘It’s worth looking into,’ Slider said. ‘Let’s put that number through the ANPR. If we get a ping on a dead one, we’ll know we’re in business.’
‘Might get a picture of the driver, too,’ Atherton said. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’
‘It would be wonderful,’ Slider said, ‘if it were Robin Frith. But if it’s a complete stranger . . .’
‘Anyone can hire a professional killer.’
‘Yes, but tracing him back to the one with the motive is the good trick,’ Slider concluded.
The ANPR did its thing and the number of the scrapped car duly came up, striking joy into all hearts.
‘What you might call,’ Slider said, looking round at the happy faces, ‘a motorized transport.’ Given that the carcase belonging to the number was mouldering in its unmarked gave, it was the strongest indication that they were on the right lines.
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