Richard said, ‘It was you who was upstairs eavesdropping on us at the hotel, was it?’
‘That’s right.’ Ben turned to Camille. ‘And I just knew I had to get away, I had to get my head together. Work out what my options were.’
‘You knew how it would look, you trying to get away?’
‘I knew how I already looked to you. What difference did it make?’
‘Then can I ask,’ Richard said wearily, to make it sound like the question wasn’t that important, ‘what do you know about the notebook that had all your names written out for the Sunrise Healing where Aslan was killed?’
Ben cocked his head, puzzled by the line of questioning. ‘How do you mean?’
‘For example,’ Richard explained, ‘was it you who removed it from the board after Aslan was killed?’
Ben was puzzled. ‘No. Has it been removed?’
Richard looked over at Dwayne, who knew what his silence was asking of him.
‘I’ve been through Mr Jenkins’s luggage, sir, and there’s no reporter’s notebook here at all. Or anything incriminating as far as I can see.’
With a quick nod of thanks, Richard turned back to Ben, but now it was Ben’s turn to ask a question.
‘Why are you interested in the notebook? It was just a list of our names. You know, the people who’d been chosen for the Sunrise Session the next day.’
Richard decided to change the subject.
‘Would it surprise you,’ he said, ‘if I told you that you were the only person in the murder room who hadn’t lost money to Aslan Kennedy in his Ponzi scam twenty years ago?’
Ben was stunned. ‘What?’
Richard held Ben’s gaze. ‘Of the five people who were locked in the murder room with Aslan Kennedy, you’re the only person who he never stole any money from.’
Ben’s mouth opened to say something, but then it closed again. He was speechless.
‘You see,’ Camille said, ‘Aslan had been inviting some of the people he’d stolen from in the past out here on all-expenses-paid holidays—as his way of making amends—but this was the first time he’d allowed four of them to be at The Retreat all at the same time.’
‘And we want to know how you came to be locked up with them all in the murder room when Aslan was killed,’ Richard finished.
Ben licked his lips. ‘I have no idea. You have to believe me. You see, this is exactly what I knew would happen. You don’t believe me.’
Richard looked at Ben and decided it was time to step up a gear.
‘Damned right we don’t,’ he said. ‘So, seeing as Aslan didn’t invite you out here, can you even begin to explain how you ended up on the other side of the world in a paper and wood house at the precise moment that your ex-cellmate was brutally slain?’
Ben was taken aback. ‘How do you mean?’
‘We know Aslan didn’t invite you, so what are you doing here?’
Ben looked hurt, and thought for a moment. He then plucked at the light pink shirt he was wearing to let some air circulate, the heat clearly prickling his skin underneath—and Richard noticed beads of sweat on his forehead. Good. He was feeling the heat, literally as well as figuratively.
‘Alright,’ Ben eventually said, ‘but what I’m about to say is going to sound like it’s incriminating me. That’s why I wanted to see my consul. I wanted to give my statement direct to someone who wasn’t going to misrepresent my words.’
‘You think we’d frame you?’ Richard said with a touch of needle.
‘I don’t trust the justice system in Europe. I definitely don’t trust the justice system in the Caribbean.’
Richard saw Camille, Dwayne and Fidel bristle at this, but he was quick to hold up a finger to silence his colleagues before they could speak. Instead, he smiled for Ben’s benefit. The smile was entirely mirthless.
‘Go on.’
Ben shifted his weight again, still not happy. ‘Have you got a glass of water?’
‘Of course,’ Richard said.
As Fidel brought over a glass of ice-cold water, Ben spoke of his life since leaving jail. How hard it was to put the past behind him; but how rewarding it was, too, even though he knew that no matter how hard he tried, he’d never really escape his past. And that’s what had happened.
‘About a year ago, I was contacted by this ex-con I’d known in Brixton. A guy I only ever knew as Ratty. He was called Ratty because that’s what he was like. A rat. Anyway, I knew he’d got out soon after me and he’d tracked me down all these years later—god knows how—but he said he’d heard I was now making a mint and would I be interested in employing him for his financial services. That’s what he called them. But when he got into the nitty-gritty, all I could tell was it involved moving money in and out of off-shore accounts faster than the authorities would be able to keep up with it, it seemed dodgy as hell. No better than money laundering.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I told Ratty to get lost. And you can check my bank accounts—my company accounts. I’ve been on the straight and narrow ever since I got out of jail. I can account for every cent I’ve earned, and every cent I’ve paid in tax.’
Camille smiled. ‘Don’t worry. We checked you out.’
‘Thank you,’ Ben said, but a little warily. ‘Anyway, so I was telling him thanks but no thanks on the financial services, but just before he hung up he said had I heard that my old mate David Kennedy was up to his old tricks?’
This got the police’s attention. Even Fidel and Dwayne stopped what they were doing so they could listen in.
‘I’m sorry?’ Richard said.
‘Ratty told me that David Kennedy had changed his name to Aslan, that he was pretending to be a Spiritual Guru out in the Caribbean and was on the con again.’
The police all froze.
Eventually Richard said, ‘He said that, did he? That David was now called Aslan and he was conning people again?’
‘That’s right. Ratty said he knew the off-shore accounts David Kennedy had used back in the day, and not only were they active again, but he’d heard on the grapevine that he was up to his old tricks again.’
‘Did your friend Ratty say how Aslan was conning people?’ Camille asked.
‘No. And I didn’t ask. He had to be lying. That’s what I told myself. But the thing is, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What if I was wrong? What if David had really gone back to his old ways? So I went to the internet to see if I could find anyone called Aslan working as a guru in the Caribbean, and there he was. At first I didn’t see how it could be David. He looked nothing like how I remembered him. But if I imagined David fifteen-odd years older, much more tanned, having lost a lot of weight—his hair having gone completely white, and also having grown a long white beard … well, then maybe it was him. But I’m telling you, I wasn’t sure.
‘But the website had an email address, so I sent him an email—you, know, just saying hello from an old friend—and he replied within about a minute saying he didn’t know who I was and telling me not to make contact again. I’ll be honest. I was shocked. David and me were like that in prison’—here, Ben held up his hand and crossed over his first and second fingers—’so I sent another email a few minutes later saying that it was me in no uncertain terms, only this time the email I sent bounced back saying “address unknown”—or whatever that message is you get when you get the wrong email address.’
‘When was this?’ Richard asked.
‘A couple of months back. Maybe three.’
‘You were in touch with Aslan three months ago?’ Richard asked, to be clear.
Ben didn’t know why Richard was so interested. ‘Yeah. Something like that.’
‘But we’ve been through Aslan’s emails on his computer,’ Camille said. ‘We didn’t find any emails from you.’
Ben was surprised. ‘Maybe he deleted them. I sent them.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said fishing out his smartphone. ‘I should s
till have the emails on my phone. Hold on, let me do a search.’
As Ben was saying this, he got up his email programme and typed into the search field. After a few moments, he handed his phone over to Richard.
Richard looked down and saw the email thread between Ben and Aslan, and it was just as Ben had said. The first message was sent from Ben’s Portuguese email address at 11.05am and it said:
Hey David, is this you?
Hope life’s treating you well after Brixton.
Yours
Ben Jenkins
At 11.08, Aslan had replied:
Don’t contact me again under any circumstances.
I have left the past behind.
Then, at 11.10am, Ben had replied:
What?! It’s Ben Jenkins here, C3397KB.
I’ve been speaking to Ratty. What’s going on?
Richard looked up briefly from the smartphone screen. ‘C3397KB?’
‘It’s my prison number,’ he said, ‘as David knows well.’ Richard looked down at the screen one more time to see that although Ben had sent the message at 11.10am, the reply had come back from the server the very same minute saying:
Mail Delivery Subsystem
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email protected]
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (State 12): 552.5.2.2
Richard could see that Ben had re-sent his follow-up email again a few minutes later—and again a few minutes after that—and both times the message was immediately bounced back as being undeliverable.
Richard guessed what must have happened. Immediately after the first email had arrived, Aslan had added Ben’s email address to his spam list and, in effect, instructed his email programme to send back a ‘not known at this address’ email when he then got any further emails from Ben.
Richard called over to Fidel and asked him to get back in touch with Aslan’s email service provider. Now they had a specific email exchange to get them to look for, there was a better chance they’d agree to do it.
‘You don’t believe me,’ Ben said.
‘As it happens, I do,’ Richard replied. ‘But I’m interested in gathering evidence that will stand up in court. And if your email provider has the exact same message on its servers, then that will prove this is a real email trail.’
Richard had difficulty keeping the excitement out of his voice as he said this, because there was another reason why Richard wanted Ben’s email trail categorically proven and that’s because he’d noticed that the whole email exchange had happened at least three weeks before Saskia, Paul and Ann had received their invites to take part in a free holiday at The Retreat. Finally—for the first time—here was definitive proof that at least one person inside the Meditation Space when Aslan was killed not only knew Aslan’s real identity, but had also been in touch with Aslan before he’d invited the Ponzi victims to the Caribbean.
Logically, then, Richard found himself thinking, Ben was still their prime suspect. Not that Ben needed to know this. To Ben, Richard tried to sound disinterested as he asked, ‘So your old mate David was shunning you now that he was going around the place saying he was Aslan. How did that make you feel?’
‘It’s not how you treat an old cellmate,’ Ben said. ‘I was angry. But I tried to put it to one side. If David wanted to be like that, then it was none of my business. For the next month or so, it would maybe pop into my head from time to time that he’d turned his back on me, but I tried to forget about it. Then, one day I was planning a holiday for myself, but you know what it’s like. When you already live in a holiday destination, it’s kind of hard to know where to go. But a mate had suggested I go to a health farm and that’s when it occurred to me. I could come to The Retreat. Because Aslan might be able to fob me off with an email, but it would be harder to do it if we were face to face.
‘And to be honest, I also wanted to see him because I just couldn’t believe he was on the con. Honestly, this was the guy who’d turned my life around; I couldn’t square that man with the one who’d sent me the email. So I booked a two-week holiday at The Retreat.’
‘Did you have any further communication with Aslan—or David—following that first round of emails?’ Richard asked.
‘No way. I have my pride. I just wanted to see his face when he saw me.’
‘And how was it when that happened?’
Ben paused a moment and finished his glass of water. He then looked at the police, briefly composing his thoughts.
‘Okay, so I checked in. Didn’t see him. Went to my room. Still didn’t see him. And then when I went down to the beach, that’s when it happened. He was coming up the path—dressed in this long white Indian-style top and what looked like pyjamas. And when he saw me, you should have seen his face. Total shock. It was kind of obvious he wouldn’t be able to dodge me now. But to his credit, he came up to me, didn’t say a word, just gave me a big hug. I reckoned it was his way of saying sorry.
‘Anyway, within a few minutes, he’d told me everything. How he’d turned his life around. How he’d come out to the Caribbean and finally found the peace we’d both talked about when we were in prison together. But I had to know if what I’d heard was true and I told him outright that there wasn’t any point lying to me, I’d heard the whole place was a con. He tried to deny it at first, but the thing is, I knew some of the details of the bank accounts in the Caribbean. How even our old mate Ratty knew what he was up to. And the more I told him what I knew, the more I wanted him to tell me I was talking rubbish. That it was all lies. But when I’d finished speaking, he looked at me and I could tell he was weighing up if he could lie to me like he’d lied to everyone else. He decided to tell me the truth.’
‘And what did he say?’ Camille asked.
‘That what I’d said was true,’ Ben said. ‘That he was back on the con.’
Richard and Camille shared a sharp glance.
‘When did he tell you this?’
‘That first day I came out here.’
‘And four days later he was dead,’ Camille said.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ Ben said, holding up his hands.
‘Where did you have this conversation?’ Richard asked.
‘I’m sorry?’ Ben didn’t understand.
‘Is there any chance your conversation with Aslan where he admitted he was on the con again was overheard by anyone else?’
‘I don’t know. We were just in the garden. You know, walking.’
‘Then please, think very carefully. Do you remember seeing any of Paul or Ann Sellars—or Saskia Filbee—in the vicinity—or walking past—while you were having this conversation with Aslan?’
Ben thought long and hard before answering. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve no idea. I didn’t really know what any of those people looked like yet. Not until a few days later when we all went to the Sunrise Healing.’
‘But tell me—now you’ve told us this—was it you who was in Aslan’s office arguing with him the night before he was killed? Telling him you wouldn’t let him get away with it?’ Richard asked.
Ben shook his head. ‘No way. I don’t know who that was, but it wasn’t me.’
‘And you expect us to believe that?’
Ben sat forward in his chair, clearly fed up with the whole process.
‘To be honest, I don’t care any more what you believe, all I know is I’ve now told you everything. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
Fidel called over from his desk, indicating Aslan’s laptop as it sat open on the desk in front of him. ‘Sir, you should know, I’ve been onto Aslan Kennedy’s email provider. They’ve agreed to look for this one email exchange, but I’ve also been looking through Aslan’s preferences for his email programme and Mr Jenkins’s email address is indeed on his spam list. Any emails that Mr Jenkins sends to As
lan Kennedy are automatically bounced back, just like Mr Jenkins is saying.’
‘You see,’ Ben said, turning back to Camille and Richard. ‘David Kennedy might have changed his name to Aslan, but he’s still the same crook he’s always been. He admitted as much to me himself.’
Richard and Camille looked at each other.
If Aslan had started conning people again, this changed everything, didn’t it? But what was the con this time?
The office phone rang, and Dwayne ambled over to answer it. After a few moments, he turned back to his boss and said, ‘Chief, it’s Dominic De Vere up at The Retreat. He says he’s found the missing notebook.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘I was just walking past,’ Dominic said to Richard as he stood in the main hallway of The Retreat, ‘and then I realised. It was back.’
Dominic pointed at the noticeboard and Richard could see that what he was saying was true. There was indeed an old spiral-bound reporter’s notebook hanging off the old nail. What’s more, the notebook was turned over to the Sunrise Healing session that had been arranged for the day that Aslan was killed. But what was it doing there? Who’d put it back? Why had it suddenly reappeared?
‘And I don’t understand,’ Dominic said. ‘Because this is the list for the Sunrise Healing the day that Aslan died. But the five names chosen here aren’t any of the people who went into the Meditation Space with him.’
Richard could see that Dominic was right. None of Julia, Saskia, Paul, Ann or Ben’s names were on the list. These were five completely different names.
Richard had a good idea how this might have happened, but he wasn’t saying for the moment. Instead, he put on a pair of evidence gloves to bag the notebook, and, as he did this, he tried to work out how best to proceed. First Ben had been missing. Then they found him. Then Ben had told them that Aslan had admitted that he was back on the con again. And now a crucial piece of evidence had suddenly turned up—but with a different list of names to those that had attended when Aslan was killed.
A Meditation on Murder Page 22