by Janet Neel
There was a crash from the bathroom.
‘Oh God. We have to get you out of here, darling. I’ve just wrecked the shower.’
He came out into a patch of sun, laughing and drying his hair, the long, hard-muscled body looking like a sketch for a statue, and she almost opened her mouth to say that she would come back with him to his flat.
‘I must go. I’ve got a two o’clock list. I’ll just check my calls.’ He reached across the bed to fish in his coat pocket and laid the phone on the bed, pressing buttons and stroking her cheek with his spare hand. ‘Three calls.’ He raised his eyebrows at her and settled to listen while she wrapped the rug round his shoulders.
‘My father’s secretary,’ he reported, disbelievingly. ‘Will I call urgently? No, I bloody will not. Hang on.’
She felt his shoulders stiffen and moved to look at his face. All the lines had suddenly gone straight and he looked alert and wary. ‘The Metropolitan Police. Detective Chief Superintendent McLeish or Detective Inspector Davidson. Will I ring in at once?’
They stared at each other.
‘I wonder what the bastard’s done. Beat up my stepmother perhaps.’ He was punching in a number, face tight with concentration.
‘Detective Inspector Davidson? Antony Price here. Where am I? Well, in Ealing. Why? My father? Yes, but what has happened? No, I’ve got a car here. Look, I mean I’m operating at 2 p.m. No. Well … right.’ He put the phone down. He looked simply astonished, eyebrows raised, mouth slightly open. ‘Something’s happened to my father. They won’t say what. That means he’s dead. I’ve heard them in Casualty when I was a houseman. They want me now and they want me to cancel my list. So he’s dead.’
Annabelle opened her mouth to protest, to dispute, and tried to hug him, but he sat, limp, gazing at the opposite wall.
‘You can’t find the partner either? Doing well between us. Keep at it. No, Mrs Price is all right. I’m seeing her later.’ John McLeish put the phone down and reminded himself that the first day of a murder investigation was often like this; the man in charge kicked his heels while all the procedures were put in place, and the deceased’s contacts found. Davidson had located the elder son, the wife was reclining in a bedroom in the house of a woman friend, and he had taken statements from two key players, Margaret Howard and Miles Arnold. Margaret Howard had been of limited usefulness. She had been blamelessly deployed from 4 p.m. on the Friday until 9 a.m. on the Monday – until she had left to meet Miles Arnold on the doorstep – looking after an aged and bedridden aunt, so that the usual minder could have a weekend off. He had considered the slight middle-aged woman in front of him and had decided that while it was theoretically possible that she had left her aunt sleeping in Ealing and crept back to the office to murder her employer, in practice he would not devote much emotional energy to the proposition. In the interests of leaving no stone unturned, however, one of the team he had set up for the case would talk to the aunt sometime later in the day. He would be having the first of the regular daily meetings with the team shortly and he might as well contain his soul in patience and get through the in-tray. Much to his relief the phone rang.
‘Davidson.’
‘Bruce. Where are you?’
‘At Notting Dale. We’ve got a room here. I have Mr Francis Price with me.’
‘Had a chat, have you?’
‘Aye.’
‘Useful? Where was he Friday?’
‘There’s a problem about that.’ McLeish heard a door bang. ‘That’s better. He was out of it, he says. He’s a druggie, ye remember. Doesna know much after lunch on Friday till about Saturday. He says.’
‘He’ll have to do better than that.’
‘He’s given us a couple of places he thinks he was at. I’ve sent a constable. Trouble is, John, if we let him out on the street we may not find him again that easily.’
McLeish considered the point. ‘What state is he in now?’
‘Needing a shot.’
‘Keep him. I’m coming.’
Bruce Davidson would be right about the man’s state; he had put in a couple of years with Narcotics. Both sons were suspects, prima facie, and it would be as well to see this one now on the same day as the discovery of the body.
It took fifteen minutes before the car pulled up at Notting Dale and he plunged up the familiar steps. The young man he would meet was her stepson not her son, he reminded himself, and was not therefore surprised to meet a man much darker than Mrs Price and tall, as she was not. Good-looking bloke, but you could see he was a druggie, the wide hollowed dark eyes in the thin face, the pale skin, the painful, pitted sores round the mouth told you he was an addict. Heroin most likely. He was said to be twenty-seven but looked younger, like a sick seventeen. As Bruce Davidson had said, he was on edge, licking dry lips in between taking impatient pulls at a cigarette which he threw away half smoked as McLeish went through the preliminaries.
‘I told your friend here,’ he said, moving uneasily in the hard chair. The collar of his shirt was ingrained with dirt, and he smelt, faintly but distinctly. He yawned widely and scratched at his knee, then squirmed again in the chair, rubbing his shoulders against the back. Suppressing the need to have a scratch himself, McLeish explained that his story had hardly been comprehensive or reassuring, to the extent that he might well find himself in custody until he could produce some better answers.
‘You can’t do that.’
McLeish did not comment and he and Davidson watched as Francis Price pulled the last cigarette from a packet and took three attempts to get it alight.
‘I told him. I got up about … what … five in the afternoon. I went round to my brother’s flat on Friday about eight o’clock, but he wasn’t there.’ The wide mouth trembled and he looked suddenly like a little boy whose mother was not at the school gates to meet him.
‘Was he expecting you?’
McLeish got a look of instant disconcerting hostility. ‘No, he wasn’t, but he hadn’t said he was going out.’
‘When had you last seen him?’
‘The day before. Thursday.’
‘You’re close to him, then?’
‘Yes. Yes, he’s always helped me.’
‘Bought you drugs?’
Francis Price looked at him sharply. ‘You can’t speak to me like that.’
‘You have three convictions for possession of Class A drugs, Mr Price, two of them recent. And you told Detective Inspector Davidson that you could not remember much about Friday evening.’
‘I’m off drugs.’ He stared at them from the depths of the chair, lips pushed together like a child. ‘My brother’s a doctor – a surgeon. He doesn’t approve of any drugs.’ He sounded ridiculously proud of his brother’s stance. ‘I wasn’t feeling well on Friday, I thought I had something really wrong so I went round to Antony.’
‘What about your doctor?’
‘I haven’t got one.’
That was probably true. Hard-pressed London GPs were unwilling to keep an addict on their books. They were difficult to handle, prone to every known illness, and often violent when refused anything. And they were Aids risks, and alarming to other patients. He began to feel some sympathy for Antony Price, surgeon and brother to this human mess.
‘So when you couldn’t find your brother, what did you do?’ He watched the man fidget, reminding himself that he was twenty-seven, although it was difficult to think of him as grown-up. ‘You must have been rather upset.’
‘I was. Yes, I was.’ Francis Price was searching his pockets frenziedly, near to tears. ‘You haven’t got a cigarette?’
McLeish, a non-smoker, looked round but Davidson had a packet out. He held a match steady while Francis Price managed to co-ordinate sufficiently the cigarette and his shaking hands. He dragged in a lungful and started to cough, the thin chest heaving. Bronchitis at the very least, perhaps nearer pneumonia by the sound of it, McLeish thought, and saw his alarm mirrored on Davidson’s face.
‘That’s a
nasty cough.’
‘I know. That’s why I wanted Antony. I thought he might have let me stay for the weekend. The place I live is cold and there’s no one there to bother.’
‘So when you couldn’t find him what did you do?’ He waited while Francis had another fit of coughing. ‘You went to see your father?’
‘You have to be joking.’ Well, that had come out loud and clear, without any scratching, fidgeting or graveyard cough.
‘You didn’t get on with him?’
‘I hate the bastard. Hated him, I mean.’
McLeish caught Davidson’s warning look. ‘Mr Price, you are aware that we believe your father may have been murdered?’
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
‘Who do you think would have had cause?’
‘Anyone who knew him.’ Francis Price was rocking forward, flushed now, arms crossed, hands obsessively rubbing his forearms. ‘He was a rotten father and he used to beat our mother till she gave up and died. Even Sylvia – you ask Antony. He tried to make her sue him, but she wouldn’t go to court.’
‘So you didn’t go to your father. Where did you go?’
‘Back to where I live. I was ill. I took a lot of aspirin – about six, all I had, and I woke up late on Saturday.’
‘What then?’
‘Well, I tried to phone Antony but he wasn’t answering. And he doesn’t always ring me back. So I just stayed in bed.’
He was not looking at either of them and both experienced policemen considered the hole in this narrative. This young man was undoubtedly ill, but he was also an addict; had he really managed to get through the whole of Friday night on nothing more than aspirin?
‘You didn’t go out at all? Did anyone else in the house come and see you?’
Yes, it transpired, rather slowly, somebody had. And he had then felt better and got up for a bit before going back to bed. By Sunday night he had indeed felt well enough to seek out his brother Antony again, but he was out.
McLeish thought about this unpromising recital and decided he was not at all happy with the story. ‘Mr Price, we’ll get you some tea and something to eat, while your statement is typed.’
‘And a cigarette?’
Davidson shook one out of the packet and left it and a couple of matches. ‘Not a lot he can set fire to in there,’ he observed as they closed the door behind them.
‘Just as well. You found the brother?’
‘I did. And told him the odds. He’s gone over to the mortuary with Dennison. Well, we havenae got formal identification yet, and the bloke’s a surgeon. He’s not going to pass out.’
‘He may not meet many very dead bodies in his line of trade. Where was he, anyway?’ McLeish asked, remembering that he had not been at his flat on Sunday night when his brother had called.
‘With a girlfriend, seemingly.’
‘Lucky man. Get him up here, Bruce. I want someone to take that lad home – the one we’ve just talked to.’
‘If I were him, I wouldn’t be keen.’
‘I’m not very happy about discharging a sick suspect on to the streets. He could vanish. Or die. I’d like him parked with someone who thinks they’re responsible for him.’
‘Right. I’ll just take a wee look at him.’ Davidson turned back down the corridor and peered through the spy-hole. ‘I think he’s asleep. I’ll just check what he did with my cigarette.’ He was out again before McLeish could feel it necessary to follow. ‘Silly wee man. Asleep but restless. He’ll wake up again.’
McLeish found his driver and set off back to the Yard, deciding it was time to talk to Catherine. He had left a careful message that morning with her staff, in the interests of interdepartmental cooperation. But she had talked to him about William Price and it was only proper that he should personally repay the compliment. He thought briefly of his wife and decided crossly that he need not. She had been unmoved by the news that Catherine Crane was once more in the same building as him, confining herself to observing that women who only fancied chaps belonging to other people needed to grow up. He had felt this was overly smug, particularly given her own track record, but had decided to keep his head down. He used the car-phone and, finding Catherine at her desk, invited her to join him in his office.
It did feel comfortably like old times, he acknowledged, rising to greet her as she walked in, but now he was senior enough to have three chairs and a low table around which he could invite people to join him. He asked for tea, receiving a quick speculative look from his secretary. The whole building probably knew their joint history, brief though it had been, he understood, resignedly.
‘This must be your prospective customer. My corpse, I mean.’
‘It is. He is.’
‘Are you out of it then, now he’s dead? The Fraud Squad, I mean.’
‘No, not at all. There’s a partner, Luke Fleming. Have you met him yet?’
‘He is in Majorca, overseeing some building work, apparently. We haven’t talked to him yet.’
Her eyes widened. ‘But John, he may have run. I mean, whatever was going on, he must have been in it.’
‘It’s not as bad as I’m making it. He’s touring about six sites, the secretary says. He rang on Sunday and told her where he was, it’s just that he’s not there now. Not due back until tomorrow, and we’ve asked the Spanish to find him and break the news. Does he have to have been involved?’
He watched with pleasure as she thought how best to present it to him quickly. She was clever as well as beautiful, was Catherine, with a good, clear, hard mind, infinitely better than most of her male colleagues.
‘It’s a limited company with three directors. The deceased, his wife Sylvia, and Luke Fleming. All directors of a company are responsible for what goes on.’
‘What, even if they are non-executive?’
She looked momentarily exasperated. ‘There is no difference at all in law between an executive and a non-executive director. The law doesn’t recognise the idea of non-executive, to put it another way.’
‘So Sylvia Price would be liable too?’ He didn’t want Catherine finding him slow.
‘Yes. But, contrary to what I just said, she might get away with a bit. Juries tend to accept that people put their wives on as directors for tax reasons rather than because they know anything about the business.’
‘So where do you go from here? We … I … would find it useful to understand exactly what you were looking for. After all, this might be the murder motive.’
‘It is murder, is it? I mean not an accident?
Bruce Davidson, he thought resignedly, indefatigable as he was and no doubt still hoping he might be in with a chance. ‘It might have been an accident, but it doesn’t seem likely. The table was heavy and Forensic report no prints at all on it. Wiped clean. And someone came in through the window. So. I think it’s murder.’
‘That’s good enough for me,’ she said, with a glancing look under her eyelashes that left him short of breath. ‘What we … I … thought was that they were at the very least overtrading; that they’d sold more timeshares than there were places for the customers. Now that might have been all right if they could get another couple of developments going quickly, but that takes cash and it was beginning to look as if there wasn’t enough to go round. That would leave them, assuming we’re right, with two choices: go on getting in more cash, or take what they had and run.’
‘Which were they doing? Or a bit of both?’
She gave him the measured look of approval which he remembered very well. ‘That’s right, because whichever way it came out they’d need to get in as much cash as possible. Either to dig themselves out of a hole by getting a new development started, or to give themselves a bigger chunk to vanish with.’
‘Where would they go? I felt reasonably happy about Mr Fleming in Majorca because Spain’s no good to crooks any more, even if they could stand the neighbours.’
‘That’s right, it would have to be outside the EC. Brazi
l’s still good, so are most places down there. We’ve never got Ronnie Biggs back.’
‘You got any proof at all, Catherine? I mean anything that would hold up to a charge?’
‘Not enough,’ she admitted. ‘But I know it’s right.’
‘Mm. So why would anyone murder Mr Price? He doesn’t have dissatisfied customers yet, as far as you know. And anyway, they’d want their money, rather than his body, wouldn’t they?’
‘That’s right, and I wasn’t thinking of a customer. The thing about fraud, John, is that it gets everywhere. William Price was the salesman, he took the cheques. He could have been hanging on to some of them for his own personal nest egg somewhere. His fellow directors wouldn’t like that, they’re all responsible. But if he’s dead you can pile all the shit on him.’
‘Last thing he did of course. Shit.’ He was appalled to hear what he’d said. She looked back at him, momentarily taken completely aback.
‘Sorry,’ he said, feeling himself go scarlet. ‘Forget that. It’s been a long day.’ He found his cup of tea and drank it down to the bottom. ‘Now, you were saying that it could have suited any of his co-conspirators to see him dead, because then they could say he’d been doing it all. Only it would have needed to look like suicide, and it doesn’t. Or not enough.’
She had recovered her equanimity, he saw, but she was deciding how to go on. ‘Perhaps having him dead was enough, given that I hear there’d been a break-in,’ she said, carefully. ‘It could have been the burglar after all, none of them need be implicated.’
‘When you say “them”, you mean Mrs P and the other bloke, Luke Fleming.’
‘And just possibly Mr Miles Arnold MP.’
‘Now him I met, and I’ve had him looked up.’ He walked over to his desk, glad to get up and move about, and found the piece of paper. ‘Seven directorships or consultancies on his sheet.’
She made no movement to take the paper, and he realised that she would have done her homework too. He considered the paper again. ‘Hang on. He wasn’t a director of Price Fleming. Would that help?’
‘In terms of what he could be charged with, yes. In practice, not a lot, do you think?’