Flawed

by Jo Bannister

  ‘But - Achille Bellow?’ objected Deacon. ‘Achille Bellow setting up shop in Dimmock would be like the Pope turning up as parish priest at St Simeon's, Edgehill.’

  ‘I expect that's what the chief of detectives in Marseilles said when people first reported seeing Bellow on his manor. He had an operation in France, England was his natural next move. And if he wanted a base in England, why not Dimmock? We're on the south coast, handy to some big ports but probably just off the Interpol radar. I can think of worse places to work from.’

  ‘I'd have heard about it,’ said Deacon with certainty. ‘Achille Bellow setting up shop in Dimmock? Every villain from Bournemouth to Dover would have been bleating about it!’

  That was a valid point. Every pond has little fish and big fish; but introduce a barracuda and they all get in a flap. ‘So maybe he was doing it the smart way. Working through someone who was already established in the area. A partnership - Bellow's money and contacts, the local guy's setup. We wouldn't necessarily hear about that. At least, not for a while.’

  ‘The smart way wasn't smart enough to stop him getting killed,’ Deacon pointed out.

  ‘Well - if he was trying to move into this area, however discreetly, the local thuggery would know about it before we did. They were going to feel it in their pockets. If Bellow was bringing in cut-price working girls, the guys behind our resident toms - Joe Loomis on the one hand and Terry Walsh on the other - were going to notice a drop in profits. They weren't going to be pleased. They might have been displeased enough to do something about it.’

  ‘Like kill him?’

  ‘Like kill him,’ agreed Voss. ‘According to my witness, Walsh took Bellow out on his yacht, shot him and dumped him in the sea.’

  ‘I don't buy it,’ rumbled Deacon. ‘Why Terry? If someone was going to kill someone, Joe's the one with the record of violence. Hell's teeth, we both know that! Terry's a crook -Joe's the thug.’

  ‘You mean, he's the one we've caught at it.’

  Deacon conceded that. ‘Your witness.’ He'd noticed that Voss had avoided giving him a name and made a point of not asking for one. ‘Does he say he was there when Terry shot Bellow - that he saw it happen?’

  ‘No. He overheard him boasting about it a few days later.’

  Deacon's eyebrows rocketed. ‘Oh come on, Charlie! Terry's certainly a criminal. He just might be a murderer. But a guy who boasts about it in front of people he doesn't know he can trust? He's smarter than that. You know he's smarter than that.’

  Voss felt the sting of criticism. ‘Maybe smart enough to guess that would be your reaction?’ He saw astonishment in Deacon's eyes and hurried on. ‘Look, I'm asking you because I don't know whether it's plausible or not. You've known Walsh a lot longer than I have. We both know he's a crook -the question is, what kind of a crook? How far would he go?’

  ‘Not that far,’ insisted Deacon. ‘Not unless he was cornered and fighting for his own survival.’

  ‘Achille Bellow wasn't a pillar of anyone's community,’ Voss pointed out. ‘He was a nasty and deeply dangerous man. Maybe Walsh thought he was fighting for survival.’

  Deacon gave an elaborate shrug. ‘I suppose it's possible. Almost anything can happen. Most things that could happen don't happen, but some things happen that you wouldn't expect. The Prince Regent's supposed to have slept off a blinder in my house when it was the town jail. I don't know if that's true but I could believe it. I'm not sure I believe that a conflict of interests led Terry Walsh to shoot Achille Bellow and sling him off his boat. And I definitely don't believe that Terry was overheard boasting about it by someone who was then prepared to talk to you. This witness. Is he credible? How much do you know about him? Can you trust what he says? You're playing with the big boys here, you can't afford to harness your reputation to a flawed witness. Can you put him close enough to Terry to overhear what he says he overheard?’

  Voss was circumspect. Just in case…well, just in case. ‘He's a professional man. He was advising Walsh until just after Bellow died, then he was sacked. We have independent confirmation of that.’ Findhorn had furnished him with the date on which Leslie Vernon was paid off.

  ‘Could that be a motive? Terry fired the guy and he saw a chance to get his own back?’

  ‘It's a possibility,’ admitted Voss. ‘Another is that Terry realised he'd had a close call and got rid of him before he overheard something that could be proved.’

  ‘So it's just one man's story? There's no corroboration?’

  ‘Not yet. But then, I haven't started looking. If Terry took Bellow out on his boat, someone may have seen them. If I can come up with a good enough reason I can get The Salamander checked for fingerprints and DNA.’

  ‘After eight months?’ Deacon knew it was possible. He also knew it was harder than the cop-shows make it look. If Walsh was the man they all suspected, he knew how to clean up after himself. ‘I wouldn't count on it.’

  ‘Because Walsh wouldn't kill Bellow? Or because he wouldn't leave any evidence that he'd killed Bellow?’

  Deacon was getting exasperated. ‘Charlie, I don't know. If you were asking about an innocent bystander or the proprietor of a corner shop, I'd be pretty sure Terry hadn't killed them. Achille Bellow? – maybe. If he was ever here at all, and if he was muscling in on Terry's territory – maybe. We know Bellow washed up on a beach across the Channel from here, and we know Terry has a boat. But…’ Deacon's eyes narrowed.

  ‘I'll tell you what the problem is, Charlie Voss. There's nothing clever about it. You grab your competitor, shoot him and dump him in the sea – yes, sure, pretty effective, but anyone could do it. From Terry I'd have expected something…more elegant.’

  Now Voss's eyebrows climbed. ‘Elegant?’

  ‘Elegant,’ insisted Deacon.

  Voss pursed his lips. ‘You've known Terry Walsh since you were boys. Maybe, deep down, you still think of him as a street-urchin with an eye to the main chance. But you grew up, and so did he. Maybe he's been playing rougher than you know for a while. Hell, we never managed to prove anything - why would we get lucky with murder? That doesn't mean he hasn't gone that far. This may not even be the first time.’

  There was a steely edge to Deacon's voice. ‘You think, because I underestimated him, he's been getting away with murder?’

  ‘That wasn't what I said!’ But actually, it wasn't far from what he meant. ‘Chief, I don't know any more than you do. I've been given a lead and I have to follow it up. Before I started, I wanted to know if it sounded feasible to you or not.’

  ‘And I've told you,’ growled Deacon. ‘No, it doesn't. Not really.’

  ‘OK then,’ said Voss.

  ‘OK.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When Voss got back from Worthing he checked what Vernon had told him with the one source he could think of that might be able to confirm it. And came up trumps. There was a glow in his eyes and a kind of suppressed excitement in his voice when he hurried round to DI Hyde's office.

  ‘I called the marina. Apparently, people file the equivalent of a flight-plan when they're going to be out overnight. It's a safety measure – it means someone would be missed if he didn't turn up where he said he was going to be around the time he said he was going to be there. Terry Walsh filed a sailing-plan for The Salamander for the weekend June 24th to 26th. He said he was heading over to Le Havre.’

  ‘Which is a distance of…?’

  ‘Less than a hundred miles,’ said Voss. ‘Salamander would do it under power in a day. Breakfast in Dimmock, supper in Normandy.’

  ‘Is there a record of who was on the boat?’ asked Alix Hyde, watching him closely.

  ‘Not a list of names, no.’ He hadn't finished: she kept watching. He referred back to his notebook. ‘They have it down as Mr Walsh and guest, crew of three.’

  ‘Guest,’ echoed Alix Hyde.

  ‘That's what it says, yes.’

  ‘And Achille Bellow was found dead on June 26th.’

  �
��Yes.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  ‘Midway between Le Havre and Dieppe.’

  ‘And is that feasible?’

  The marina was run by experts, people with vast experience of boats and tides and weather conditions. Voss had quizzed them until he was sure of his facts. ‘If Achille Bellow was on The Salamander when she left Dimmock at eight-fifteen a.m. on June 24th, he could have been well on his way to Spain by the 26th. She's a serious sea-going yacht: she regularly makes passages between here and the Mediterranean. Terry could have taken Bellow back to the Balkans if he'd wanted to. He could sure as hell have taken him halfway to France.’

  Detective Inspector Hyde looked like a woman who was trying not to get too excited. ‘So we have Walsh and a guest sailing for northern France two days before Bellow's found dead on a beach in northern France. It doesn't prove Vernon heard what he says he heard, but it certainly suggests he may have done.’

  ‘Grounds to do a search on Salamander’

  Hyde gave it some thought. ‘I don't know. I'd almost like to hold that in reserve. If we search her and find nothing, we've rather shot our bolt. If we can put Walsh and Bellow together on the deck of The Salamander on the last weekend in June, and we can't find anyone who saw Bellow alive after that, then we have a case with or without forensics.’

  ‘I thought I'd take a picture of Bellow to the marina, talk to people who'd have been out and about at that time. And see who else was off the coast of Normandy that weekend. Maybe someone can put Salamander even closer to where Bellow was found.’

  By now Hyde had given up trying to contain her pleasure. A little smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘You're pretty good at this, Charlie. At seeing both the big picture and all the little pieces that make it up. Not everyone can do that.’

  ‘I had a good teacher,’ said Voss.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hyde levelly. ‘Still, the time must be coming you'll be wanting to spread your wings. There's a limit to just how far you can go in a small seaside town.’

  Voss forbore to comment. There was something unseemly about insisting that, on the contrary, Dimmock was a hotbed of crime, vice and psychosis, and a detective could get all the experience he wanted just by waking up here every morning.

  ‘You know, if you did want a change,’ continued Hyde, ‘I'd be happy to help.’

  Nobody resents a compliment. ‘Thanks. I haven't given it much thought.’

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  None of which was helping to get Terry Walsh out of circulation. ‘In the meantime,’ said Hyde, ‘what have we got? We've got an accountant who overheard Walsh claiming to have killed Achille Bellow and slung him in the sea. We've got Walsh's yacht in the Channel off Normandy a couple of days before Bellow's body was found. We've got documentation of an unidentified guest on board. If we just had independent…’

  Her voice petered out and her eyes went distant. ‘And actually,’ she said softly after a minute, ‘we have. We have someone who was still close to Walsh in the period leading up to this and who's already expressed an interest in talking to us. If there was bad blood between Walsh and Bellow, it didn't start on June 23rd. It had probably been coming for weeks. Bellow muscling in on Walsh's territory, Walsh warning him off, Bellow surrounding himself with Eastern European weight-lifters. Someone who was part of that circle would have heard the raised voices and stamped feet.’

  ‘Who…?’ But before the word was out of his mouth, Voss knew. He tried and failed to keep the whistle out of his voice. ‘Susan Weekes’

  ‘Susan Weekes,’ agreed Hyde. ‘She knew Walsh – that's incontestable, everybody agrees that she knew him. Even on the Walshes’ account she had a crush on him, hung around him any time he was in The Dragon Luck. She was still working at the casino when Bellow was killed. There's every chance she heard Walsh threatening what he'd do if Achille Bellow didn't back off. She may even have heard him boasting after the event, the way Vernon did.’

  Voss thought about it. ‘It's possible. But even if she did, who'd believe her?’

  ‘If she was all we had,’ Hyde conceded, ‘no one. But if she's confirming things that we've got other witnesses to, everyone will believe her.’

  It was true. Weekes on her own was clearly a flawed witness. But she could still add weight to the case against Terry Walsh, and they knew she was willing to do it. It remained to be seen if she had anything useful to say. ‘Do you want to see her again?’

  Hyde's smile broadened. ‘No. Charlie, I think you should do it. I want your name on this. I want you to get the credit you're due. Find out where she is now. Go and see her.’

  Susan had had a rough month. Not agonising or terrifying so much as grindingly unpleasant. She'd considered the possible consequences, good and bad, of a career in drug smuggling and had thought herself prepared even for the worst. But no one is ever prepared for the mind-numbing, soul-sapping drudgery of prison life, and one of the hardest things to deal with is the company.

  On the whole, they're not nice people that you meet in a remand wing. Yes, legally they're all innocent until they're proven guilty, but most of them will be proven guilty and most of the others will get off on a technicality. Even in the remand wing of a women's prison, you meet hardly anyone you'd want to take to the office party. You meet stupid women, and greedy women, and sly and vicious women, and women who never look you in the eye. You meet women so degraded by their lives that prison seems a step up, and others so enraged by their circumstances that a careless word can lead to mayhem. It's a fallacy, that There but for the Grace of God thing, dreamt up by the terminally empathic Lots of people have bad luck in their lives. Most people don't respond to it with the sort of actions that get you sent to prison.

  Susan was sharing a room – and it was called a room, not a cell, and it had gingham curtains at the high windows and what almost amounted to an en suite – with a woman who'd got away with passing dud cheques, right up to the moment that she found something wrong with a pair of designer boots and demanded a refund. She was called Tracie, and had six children by four different men, and spent all day and most of every night recounting their deeply unedifying activities. Susan didn't find her frightening so much as a crashing bore.

  So she greeted Charlie Voss like an old friend and was happy to talk to him, about The Dragon Luck and Terry Walsh and his business, for as long as Voss would listen. He bought her cups of tea. If he hadn't, she'd have bought him some to prolong the interview and delay the moment when she'd have to go back and find out what happened to Trade's daughter Simone in Lanzarote.

  ‘You told us you were Terry Walsh's mistress,’ said Voss, gently reproving.

  ‘So?’

  ‘That's not how Terry remembers it. Or Mrs Walsh, come to that.’

  ‘And you believed them?’ The woman tried for indignation but hadn't the spirit left to carry it off. ‘Of course you believed them. They've got money.’

  ‘We didn't just take their word for it. Mr Deacon investigated. He found no evidence that it was true.’

  Susan sniffed. ‘So what are you doing back here? Don't you think if I could prove it I would have done?’

  ‘You talked about Terry doing business behind the scenes at The Dragon Luck. Not bulk paper business – the other kind.’

  ‘So?’ she said again.

  ‘You heard him talking enough to know where most of his money was coming from?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And who his competitors were? Rivals – men who were fighting for a slice of his cake?’

  ‘I suppose.’ For the first time she sounded a little doubtful.

  ‘Do you remember any names?’

  She got one almost without thinking. But then, Mrs Puddy who ran the knitting-wool shop in Baker's Lane could have done as well. ‘Joe Loomis.’

  ‘We know about Loomis,’ agreed Voss. ‘Anyone else? Anyone new – maybe in the last year or so?’

  Susan gave it some more thought. ‘Yes. But I can't remember
their names. Terry didn't like me to look as if I was listening.’

  Voss nodded. ‘What about a man called Achille Bellow?’

  Susan's brows drew together in a little frown of concentration. Then it cleared. ‘Yes. Terry said he was taking too much of his business and he was going to have to do something about him.’

  ‘Like, report him to Immigration?’ hazarded Voss. ‘Or drop him in the Channel in a concrete life-vest?’

  ‘The Channel,’ said Susan Weekes firmly. ‘Definitely the Channel.’

  Dimmock's marina wasn't on the scale of, for instance, Brighton's. Until ten years earlier it had been Duffy's Boatyard, a couple of sheds, an area of hard standing and a slipway into a dredged area of the Barley estuary. It did a steady trade rather than a roaring one, building two or three wooden sailing-boats a year, refitting a few others, doing winter haul-outs and scrub-downs for more again.

  It was the third generation of Duffys who spotted the magic word grant and recognised that a marina is only a boatyard in its Sunday best. They built a mole out into the estuary, installed pontoons, decorated the office and soon filled every berth. It wasn't the grandest marina on the south coast, but cognoscenti considered it had charms all its own. She was called Becky, she ran the office, and defied the experience of lifetimes by being both decorative and efficient.

  She looked at the photograph Voss showed her and listened carefully to what he wanted to know. Then, herself unable to help, she took him outside and introduced him to two old salts in guernseys and sailcloth caps. They were sitting on the weather-bleached deck of a gaff cutter even older than they were, apparently knitting rope. ‘They're always here,’ murmured Becky. ‘They live on board. They don't sail any more, they just sit there watching the boats come and go. If anyone saw the man in your photo, they did.’

  And they did. ‘Foreign gent,’ grunted the slightly older and more grizzled of the Hawkins brothers. ‘Talked with an accent.’

  Voss's heart hammered against the inside of his ribs. He nodded. ‘And he was with Mr Walsh?’