by Sam Christer
‘I’m sure he was.’ It comes out with a little more acid than Gideon intended.
Lucian feels obliged to chip in. ‘Your father was very driven. Very successful, Mr Chase. He was a pleasure to work with.’
Gideon stays focused on Chepstow senior. ‘And personally?’
He purses his dry old lips. ‘I’d like to think we were friends. We shared the same love of history, same respect of generations gone.’
Lucian withdraws an envelope from a drawer in the desk, keen to get on with the business side of the meeting. Gideon isn’t. ‘My father left me a letter.’
The old lawyer flinches.
‘A suicide note. Do you know of anything that would make him take his own life?’
Cedric’s eyes widen.
Gideon looks from one to the other. ‘Can either of you tell me what he might have done, what he was ashamed of that made him feel so desperate and so depressed?’
Chepstow senior plays with a fold of wrinkled flab beneath his double chin. ‘No, I don’t think we can. There isn’t anything. Certainly not legally. Nor could we share such information, even if we knew, because of client confidentiality.’
Now Gideon can’t hide his annoyance. ‘He’s dead. So I presume such confidentiality doesn’t apply.’
The old man shakes his head like a professor about to point out an elementary mistake. ‘That’s not how we work. We respect our bonds to our clients – for ever.’ He looks Gideon up and down. ‘Mr Chase, let me assure you, to the very best of my knowledge – personally and professionally – there is nothing your father should be ashamed of. No skeletons in his closet.’
‘Skeletons?’ Gideon laughs. ‘My father was a grave-robber. He stripped tombs in Syria, Libya, Mexico and god knows where else. He sold historic and irreplaceable objects to foreign governments or private collectors who had no right to them. I’m sure he had a whole necropolis of skeletons to hide.’
Years of experience have taught Cedric Chepstow to know when arguments are winnable and when they are not. ‘Lucian, please inform Mr Chase of his father’s will and ensure he has a copy.’ He creaks his way out of the chair. ‘Good day to you, sir.’
Lucian Chepstow doesn’t speak until his father has left and shut the door behind him. ‘They were close,’ he says. ‘Your father was one of the few mine spent time with.’
Gideon’s still annoyed. ‘Seem like a good pair.’
The timid lawyer doesn’t respond. He passes a sealed letter over the desk and pulls another copy across his red, leather-edged blotter. ‘This is the Last Will and Testament of Nathaniel Chase. It’s witnessed and fully in accordance with English law. Would you like me to talk you through it?’
Gideon takes the envelope in both hands. His mind still on Cedric Chepstow. The old man probably knew what his father was hiding. Why else react like that? Why the resort to ‘confidentiality’, covering himself with the pathetic ‘to the best of my knowledge’?
‘Mr Chase. Would you like me to talk you through the will?’
He looks up and nods.
‘I should warn you that one of his requests is unusual. Your father made pre-death arrangements at the West Wiltshire Crematorium.’
Gideon frowns. ‘That’s unusual?’
‘Not in itself. Many people prepay and prearrange their own funeral requirements. But after cremation at West Wiltshire he wished his ashes to be scattered at Stonehenge.’
27
LONDON
Jake Timberland saw himself stepping out of the shower this morning and almost died. He dragged the scales from beneath the sink and stepped up to be judged. Fourteen stone. Holy fuck. He stepped off and back on again. It wasn’t a malfunction. At five foot eleven he could carry thirteen but at fourteen, before you know it you look like a fat man’s body double.
His misery morphed into determination. Fifty sit-ups later he could see his six-pack rising through the flab again and felt better.
Now he’s sitting in a winged chair in his club downing the third cappuccino of a breakfast meeting. He’s listening to his guest, Maxwell Dalton, talk about cash-flow problems, the downturn in the economy, a slide in ad revenue and how he needs investment or he could go out of business. Dalton is chubby with big glasses as black as his hair and baggy suit. He runs a website that showcases short films made by the kind of people who can’t get proper jobs in TV.
‘How much do you want and how much do I get in return?’
Dalton laughs nervously. ‘A hundred thousand for 10 per cent?’
Jake’s expression makes it clear that’s not going to work.
‘Twenty per cent?’
He says nothing. His attention is focused on the fried egg on Dalton’s plate.
‘Twenty-five?’ Dalton pleads, then adds, ‘At a push I could go to thirty.’
Jake quite likes the idea of saying he’s in media. No doubt it would increase his pulling power. At a stretch, he could even describe himself as a film producer cum distributor. ‘Maybe we can do a deal. But not at a hundred k and not for thirty per cent.’
Dalton looks disappointed.
A hundred thousand is nothing to Jake. He could even get his old man to stand the whole stash. If not, he could raise it if he cut down on the Cristal, skipped the winter skiing and tanked the overdraft. ‘Listen, Max. I’ll put fifty thousand into your company but for that I want fifty-one per cent of it.’
‘Controlling interest?’
‘Exactly.’
Finally, a glum Dalton spits out a reply, ‘I’m sorry. Forty-nine is really all I’m prepared to go to in terms of equity and for that I’d want seventy-five thousand.’
Jake smiles. ‘I want to help you not fuck you. But that slice is not worth seventy-five. I’ll go to fifty k for forty-nine per cent. Final offer.’
Dalton is in a bad place. With the landlord banging on the door for the rent. ‘All right.’
As Jake stands to shake on the deal, his iPhone buzzes. ‘Excuse me.’ It’s Caitlyn – he instantly recognises her number. He opens the text and when he unzips the picture attachment his eyes nearly pop. Beneath the Union Jack tattoo is: I have the flag. Do you have a pole big enough for it? Call me x.
Jake smiles across the table at Dalton and offers a hand. Could be that he gets to screw two people in one day.
28
Sammy is well enough to go to nursery but Megan’s mum Gloria insists on coming round to look after her granddaughter. For once the DI gets away without a lecture. She’s grateful. After the short drive to Devizes police station, she is at her desk sipping a cup of black tea in the open-plan CID room, reading the full statements of PCs Featherby and Jones.
Gideon Chase is lucky. Very lucky. If the two plods had been more than a village away when the 999 came in, they probably would have arrived too late. Featherby found him unconscious in the hall and managed to drag him outside, before calling the paramedics and fire brigade.
She studies the crime scene photographs, shots of flame-blackened brick walls and burned-out windows. The fire team’s report seems consistent with Chase’s account. No doubt the seat of the blaze was the curtain area of the downstairs study on the west side of the house. No doubt at all. That room and most of the corridor and the adjoining reception area have been gutted. It’ll cost a pretty penny to sort out.
The incident report in her hands says Chase slipped in and out of consciousness until the medics got him into the ambulance and cleared his lungs with pure oxygen. Seems to shoot down her theory that he might have been involved in his father’s death and got an accomplice to fake the attack. Unless of course the accomplice got greedy. In that case, an attempt to kill him would make sense.
But it doesn’t. None of it makes sense.
She puts down the papers and wonders again why Gideon lied to her. He seems decent enough. Intelligent, well turned-out, polite, maybe a bit quirky. But then academics are.
So why lie?
Does he know the man he surprised? Unlikely. Her inf
o says Chase spent most of his childhood at boarding school and his father only moved to Tollard Royal in recent years. Until then they’d lived in more modest accommodation either in the east of Wiltshire or over in Cambridge where Nathaniel was a don.
So why? There are only a few other possibilities. Maybe he’s afraid. Many victims of crime are frightened to identify attackers in case they come back. Or someone else comes back. Fear of being victimised. Makes some sense.
Chase certainly isn’t fearless. Then again, he doesn’t strike her as being particularly afraid either. Not what her mum used to call cowardly custard. There’s another possibility. Maybe he knew the old man was involved in something and it was connected to the intruder at the house. Perhaps Gideon arranged to meet him there, they’d argued, the man threatened or assaulted him, Chase called the police.
It doesn’t fit. She glances down at the report again. There’s no doubt that he was unconscious and left for dead. The man who made the emergency call was calm and composed – not groggy from an assault and with a chest full of smoke.
But she feels close to the truth. Nathaniel Chase was up to something bad. She’s sure of it.
‘Baker!’
Megan looks up from her desk and her heart sinks. DCI Jude Tompkins is heading her way. These days the forty-year-old blonde is certifiably insane. Jumpier than a box of frogs. Her upcoming marriage – her second – is the cause of the manic personality shift.
‘Are you done with that suicide yet, Baker?’ She settles her crash-dieting-behind on the edge of Megan’s desk.
‘No ma’am.’ Megan fans out the PC statements. ‘I’m just going through the reports. There was a fire at the dead man’s house.’
‘I heard. What are we talking, burglars? Squatters?’
The DI explains. ‘The son went back there after we asked him in to talk to us. He found an intruder in the study about ready to torch the place.’
‘What was he, some kind of a junkie?’
‘We don’t know. He knocked our man unconscious and left him for dead. If a local patrol hadn’t been around the corner, the Chase family line would have come to a complete end in just forty-eight hours.’
Tompkins takes it in. Unsolved burglary, arson and attempted murder are not what she wants on her crime sheets. The whole division is under pressure to improve the figures. ‘I get that it’s more complicated than I thought. Can you juggle another case as well as this one?’
It’s not really a question. The DCI drops the file on Megan’s desk. ‘Sorry. It’s a missing person. Give it a look over for me.’
She watches the DCI turn and leave. Delegation is a wonderful thing. You just shift your garbage to someone else’s bin and leave them to jump on the lid until they get it to fit. ‘Boss, any chance of an extra pair of hands?’ she calls.
Tompkins stops and turns. A smile on her big round face.
Megan knows it’s hard to turn down a plea for help in an open office. She gives the DCI a desperate look. ‘Just for a day or two?’
Tompkins beams. ‘Jimmy Dockery. You can have Sergeant Dockery for forty-eight hours, then he’s back on vice.’
Megan shuts her eyes. Jimmy Dockery? She puts her hands over her ears, but it makes no difference. She can still hear the whole office laughing.
29
The Henge Master has been expecting the call.
It was simply a matter of when. He excuses himself and steps away from the highly distinguished company. He has two phones in his pocket. A BlackBerry that he uses publicly and a cheap Nokia that is a ‘burner’, a no-contract, non-traceable phone with credit he can purchase almost anywhere. He takes out the Nokia. It’s Cetus.
‘Can you speak?’
‘Wait a moment.’ The Master walks into an open courtyard. ‘Go on.’
‘The Chase boy has just come in for his father’s will.’
The Master searches a jacket pocket for his cigarettes. ‘And?’
‘He was asking what Nathaniel might have been ashamed of.’
‘He used that word, did he? Or is it your interpretation of what he said?’
‘He used it. He told Lupus that he’d been left some kind of letter. Apparently, the police recovered it from the scene.’
The Master lights a Dunhill with a gold monogrammed lighter. ‘What’s in it? Some form of accusations or confession?’
Cetus tries to allay his fears. ‘Nothing so drastic. If there had been anything explicit in there, no doubt the gentlemen of the constabulary would be camped in my office asking awkward questions.’
The Master blows out smoke and looks across the courtyard. ‘But they have been in touch. You said so and Grus says some DI thinks she’s got herself something of a case.’
‘That’s true but it’s routine. They found invoices in Nathaniel’s study and wanted to know if we still acted for him. And don’t worry about the DI.’
‘I shan’t.’ The Master paces a little. ‘From what Nathaniel told me, they had a fractured relationship. Unfortunately, his son is unlikely to be our friend.’
‘That would fit with his behaviour at my office.’
The Master thinks for a few moments. ‘A shame. Given his father’s contribution to the Craft, he’d have been an asset. Did the police ask about the will?’
‘Of course.’
‘And presumably he gets everything?’
‘Everything.’
‘You must have done well out of this fee-wise.’
Cetus is offended. ‘I treated Nathaniel well. He was a friend, remember.’
The Master berates himself. A crass remark. ‘Forgive me, I shouldn’t have made light of the situation.’ He looks to a junior colleague at the edge of the courtyard pointing to his watch. ‘I’m going to have to go.’
‘Are you thinking of postponing?’
‘We can’t.’ The Master takes a final draw on the cigarette before dropping it and grinding it into the gravel. ‘The divination is clear. The completion must be at midpoint between evening twilight on solstitium and morning twilight of the day after, or it has no meaning.’
Cetus is quiet and the Master senses something. ‘We will be ready with the second offering, won’t we?’
‘We will. All will go as planned. But what of Chase the Younger?’
The Master nods at the colleague hovering not far away. He silently mouths that he’ll only be another minute. After the man is gone, he concludes the call: ‘I will have the son taken care of. Just make sure the other arrangements go as planned.’
30
Caitlyn’s instructions were clear. Rent a room. Chill a bottle of champagne. Put two tubs of Ben & Jerry’s in the minibar – any flavour except Cake Batter. Run a bath – three quarters full. No smelly stuff – just water, hot water. Bring protection. Non-flavoured and ribbed. At least five. Make sure there’s plenty of dope and ecstasy.
Caitlyn is plainly used to getting whatever she wants. Fine by him. At least there’s no mistaking what this get-together is going to be about. No need for small talk, no painful progressing from kiss to fumble to hopefully much more. He has cancelled everything he had planned for the rest of the day. Which wasn’t that much.
He has little problem getting the stuff. He already has a block of Lebanese Black and a few days’ worth of Es and he picks up the ice cream and a couple of bottles of Louis Roederer Cristal in the Food Hall at Selfridge’s. Then he drives over to Hyde Park and books a suite at Été, a discreet boutique hotel noted for its French cuisine. Even he considers arguing over the thousand-pound room tariff – then he remembers that he’s now in the media and is about to bed a celebutante.
The suite turns out to be almost worth it: a king-size bed draped in a golden quilt, heavy matching window curtains lined in burnt orange and tied back to reveal a small terrace and some white metal seating. He draws the curtains and lights the Egyptian-style pot lamps either side of the bed.
He plugs his iPod into a docking station. What to put on? The sudden question scares hi
m. You can tell a lot about a person from their choice of music. He wheels through some of his later downloads and settles on Plan B’s The Defamation of Strickland Banks. ‘Love Goes Down’ is coming to an end when there’s a rap on the door.
It’s smack on two p.m. He was sure she was going to be late. He was wrong. He opens the door. She’s carrying a light-cream coat over her arm and wearing a near-translucent gathered-sleeve tea dress. ‘Don’t just stare, let me in!’
He steps aside. ‘Sorry, you just look so …’ He realises she’s worried about being seen and shuts the door quickly. ‘… beautiful.’ As he turns she’s right next to him. She drops the coat and a small matching handbag and kisses him. It’s like being gently electrified. Flows all the way through him. This is already about more than the great sex he knows is going to follow.
Caitlyn breaks for air and smiles. ‘I have an hour. That’s all. Sixty minutes. Let’s get started.’
31
DEVIZES
Detective Sergeant Jimmy Dockery is Wiltshire’s Horatio Caine. Or so he thinks. He speaks slower than a dying man with asthma and even on the dullest days wears sunglasses. The kind that went out of fashion with Top Gun.
Bullied as a kid, the ginger whinger got his own back by becoming a cop. The only problem is, unlike the CSI: Miami lieutenant, he’s not a hot shot. He’s not even a lukewarm shot. But he is the Deputy Chief Constable’s son and everything pales into a ginger fuzz after that single fact.
‘I heard you need help, Detective Inspector.’ He hovers over her shoulder, then slides into a seat alongside and flashes his best smile. ‘Glad to be of service.’
Megan feels a shiver of revulsion. ‘Thanks, Jimmy.’ She pulls over some stapled statements and a thick file. ‘This is background on the Chase suicide. You know about that, don’t you?’
He looks blank.
She resists screaming. ‘Professor Nathaniel Chase, international author, archaeologist, antiquities trader, has a place out on Cranborne Chase, at Tollard Royal where the rich folk live.’