by Luke Delaney
‘Looks that way. Speaking of which, how is Sean?’
Sally tried to hide her suspicion about the true nature of Sean and Anna’s relationship. She barely knew Sean’s wife Kate, and didn’t particularly like the little she did know, if she was honest, but still she felt strangely compelled to protect Sean’s marriage – some deep instinct in her warning he could be lost into a world of turmoil without her and their two young daughters. In Anna, she sensed a threat.
‘Sean’s Sean,’ she answered. ‘He’s fine, as usual. Bull in a china shop, all guns blazing, shooting from the hip and God help anyone who gets in the way.’
‘Hasn’t changed then,’ Anna joked.
Sally forced a smile. ‘Same old, same old.’
‘Well,’ Anna told her, getting to her feet. ‘I’d better get on with what I’m being paid for. Do you think Sean would mind if I borrowed his office?’
‘No,’ Sally said and immediately regretted it. ‘Or you could share with me.’
Anna looked around. ‘Looks like you’re already sharing the rent.’
‘Ah. Yeah. DS Donnelly,’ Sally admitted.
‘I think Sean might tolerate me a little better.’
‘I take your point. Is there anything you need?’
‘No,’ Anna told her. ‘I already have the file and the video. That’s all I need for now. I’ll see you later for coffee perhaps?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Sally replied, trying to sound a lot friendlier than she felt, watching Anna float from the office and into Sean’s. ‘This is not good,’ she whispered to herself. ‘This is not good at all.’
‘Are you sure this isn’t a professional hit made to look like something else?’ Donnelly asked as they approached Elm Park Road in Chelsea – the victim’s home street and the place he was abducted from.
‘I’m not sure of anything yet,’ Sean admitted, ‘but if he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar while laundering someone’s money, especially if they’re Eastern European or South American, they wouldn’t want to hide what they’d done. They like to make public statements – keep everyone else in line. And the abduction too doesn’t feel right. If it had been organized crime they would have lured him somewhere – somewhere quiet and out of sight. But I’m not ruling anything out until we know more.’
Donnelly parked as close as he could to Elkins’s home. Sean was out the car before he’d had time to kill the engine, looking up and down the upmarket street – looking for ghosts. Donnelly soon joined him.
‘Hell of a place to abduct somebody from,’ he offered.
‘And in daylight,’ Sean added.
‘A confident customer.’
‘Or insane.’
‘Either way the whole thing was seen by a couple of witnesses – both saying the suspect’s white van was parked in the street already, waiting for Elkins. So he wasn’t followed.’
‘Not yesterday anyway,’ Sean explained, ‘but he was followed at some point, otherwise how could the suspect know where he lived and the fact he regularly walked from the tube station to his home? Unless he already knew him – knew his habits.’
‘Someone who worked for him in the past?’ Donnelly suggested.
‘In the City?’
‘No. These people have a lot of hired help. I was thinking more a disgruntled gardener, or maintenance man, or even a husband of a cleaner his missus sacked.’
‘Possibly,’ Sean agreed. ‘It’ll all need to be checked out. It’ll be nice if it’s that easy.’
‘Shall we do the witnesses first or the family?’
‘The family,’ Sean replied. ‘Get it over with.’
‘If you don’t want to see them you don’t have to,’ Donnelly offered. ‘I can always come back later with Sally.’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I want to see them, or his wife at least.’
‘Fair enough.’ Donnelly didn’t argue. ‘After you.’
Sean walked the short distance along the immaculate street and climbed the short flight of steps to the shining black door of number twelve. He imagined Paul Elkins coming home to this door, day after day, content and confident, untouched by the problems normal people had – unable to imagine something like this could ever happen to him. Was that what the killer wanted – to drag the wealthy and privileged into a world where they could feel the pain of everyday life? Had the killer felt too much pain to bear? He took a deep breath and rang the doorbell – avoiding the heavy-looking metal door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head that looked like it would wake the dead. The last thing he wanted to do was advertise their presence. It was only a matter of time before the media discovered the victim’s home address and came crawling around, but he wanted to keep things quiet for as long as he could.
After a few seconds the door was opened by a short, stocky man in his late twenties wearing spectacles and dressed in an inexpensive-looking dark suit. He eyed them suspiciously. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked with a slight London accent.
Sean knew immediately he was a fellow detective as he showed him his warrant card. ‘DI Sean Corrigan from the Special Investigations Unit.’
‘DS Donnelly,’ Donnelly told him without producing his identification, ‘from the same.’
The other detective seemed to immediately relax. ‘Am I glad to see you,’ he whispered. ‘I was told you’d be taking this one over. Babysitting the family of a murder victim isn’t exactly my thing. DC Jonnie Mendham, by the way. You’d better come in.’ He stepped aside and allowed them to enter before closing the door and continuing to talk in a whisper. ‘They’re all gathered in the living room,’ Mendham explained. ‘Mrs Elkins and her two kids, Jack and Evie. There’s also a friend of Mrs Elkins here too, Trudy Bevens – a shoulder to cry on and all that.’
‘Fine,’ Sean acknowledged as he and Donnelly followed Mendham towards the living room and the desperate sadness he knew he’d find inside.
‘Any idea how long it’ll be before you send someone to take over from me?’ Mendham’s voice held a slight pleading note. ‘I’m not trained for this family liaison stuff.’
‘Soon enough,’ Sean answered carelessly. ‘Until then just keep a watch out for reporters and make sure they don’t speak to anyone they don’t know on the phone. Remind them details of the investigations are confidential and not to be shared even with family and close friends until I say it’s OK.’
‘No problem,’ Mendham agreed in a whisper. ‘Just get me out of this mausoleum.’ He opened the living-room door before Sean could reply and raised his voice to its normal volume. ‘Mrs Elkins,’ he addressed the attractive woman in her late forties who remained seated as she looked up at them – her appearance still immaculate despite the circumstances, her ash blonde hair framing her tanned face and piercing blue eyes that had reddened somewhat with crying.
‘Yes,’ she answered as strongly as she could, her voice wavering somewhat.
‘This is Detective Inspector Corrigan and Detective Sergeant Donnelly from our Special Investigations Unit,’ Mendham explained. ‘They’ll be taking over the investigation.’
‘Why?’ she asked in a slightly clipped accent.
‘It’s the way things work,’ Sean spoke to her for the first time as he scanned the other faces in the room – a weeping girl of no more than eleven or twelve who sat close to her mother wrapped in a protective arm, a stoical-looking boy probably about fourteen and Mrs Elkins’s tearful friend. ‘Most serious and unusual cases get passed on to us. We have a certain amount of experience in dealing with investigations like this.’
‘I wasn’t aware that anything like this had ever happened before,’ she questioned him.
‘It hasn’t,’ he agreed. ‘I meant experience in dealing with things that are a little out of the ordinary.’
‘A little out of the ordinary,’ she repeated, looking at him blankly. ‘My husband’s dead. Murdered by some lunatic.’
‘And we’re very sorry for your loss,’ Donnelly intervened. ‘We’re here because we’
re best equipped to find whoever did this and bring them to justice, but we need to ask some questions. Maybe it would be better if the children weren’t here for that.’
‘No,’ she snapped back. ‘We stay together. I’m not about to let them out of my sight. Not until you’ve caught this madman.’
‘Fair enough.’ Donnelly didn’t argue. ‘I reckon I’d be the same. Do you mind if we sit down?’
‘Sorry,’ she apologized. ‘Of course not. Please.’
They both sat on the same large sofa opposite Mrs Elkins and her daughter, Sean glad of the large size of the room – just the thought of being trapped in a small room with this many grieving people was enough to make him feel claustrophobic.
‘I appreciate this must be very difficult,’ Sean tried to say the things she no doubt expected him to say, ‘but our questions really can’t wait.’
‘I understand,’ she assured him. ‘Ask what you need to. Let’s just get it over with.’
‘What time did your husband leave for work yesterday?’ Sean asked.
‘Not long after seven,’ she answered. ‘His usual time.’
‘A hard-working man.’ Donnelly tried to ease the tension.
‘You don’t get to where Paul was working nine to five,’ she told them. ‘It takes dedication and sacrifice.’
‘Yet he was abducted at about five pm – in the street outside,’ Sean reminded her. ‘So he didn’t always work late?’
‘No,’ she agreed, slightly defensively. ‘Not always, but most days. Does it matter?’
Did you know he’d finished work early? Sean asked the killer silent questions. Did you somehow know?
‘Did he call you at all during the day?’ he asked, more to try to establish a rhythm of questions and answers than hoping to discover anything useful, ‘or contact you somehow?’
‘He called me a couple of times,’ she answered. ‘Once in the morning and again early afternoon – to let me know he was about to leave work.’ She suddenly choked up, her tears contagious amongst the other women while the boy looked on blankly. Was the boy somehow involved? Sean asked himself, before deciding he was most likely still in shock. The tears would come later. ‘It was the last time I ever got to speak to him,’ she managed to say.
‘Why call twice?’ Sean asked, trying to remember the last time he’d called his wife Kate more than once a day just for the sake of it. ‘Was something troubling him?’
‘No,’ she answered tearfully. ‘He usually called me twice or more a day just to say hello. No particular reason. I think he worried I’d get bored if he didn’t.’
‘But he didn’t seem worried about anything?’ Sean persisted.
‘No,’ she insisted.
‘Didn’t mention anything at all?’
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘What could he be worried about?’
‘He was the CEO of Fairfield’s Bank, yes?’ Sean asked.
‘So?’
‘Not exactly the most popular people in the world right now – bankers,’ he reminded her.
‘I understand that,’ she assured him, ‘and I know this madman used that as some type of twisted justification to commit murder, but Paul was a good man. He believed in responsible banking. He was as interested in making extra pounds and pennies for ordinary people as he was millions for multinationals.’
Sean couldn’t help but roll his eyes around his salubrious surroundings. ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ he said as tactfully as he knew how, ‘but from the outside he would have looked like just another wealthy banker.’
‘From the outside,’ she pointed out. ‘This monster knew nothing about Paul. He gave away thousands to charity. I used to joke that he’d give away everything we had if I’d allow him – make us homeless.’
‘Why?’ Sean asked, not sure where his questions would take him, but asking anyway. ‘Did he feel guilty about his wealth for some reason?’
‘No,’ she bit. ‘Why should he? Why should we? We’ve worked hard for everything we have. We both have. But there’ll always be jealous people who would rather just take what we have than earn it for themselves.’
Sean imagined her and her dead husband’s backgrounds – wealthy families sending them to the best schools and the best universities, feeding them in to the network of the privileged to ensure they’d be groomed for the top jobs. He swallowed his resentment.
‘So you think your husband was killed by someone who is jealous of him?’ he asked.
‘Of course he was,’ Mrs Elkins insisted. ‘What else could it be?’
‘Do you have someone in mind?’ he encouraged her. ‘Someone you know was jealous of your husband?’
‘No.’ She shook her head and pulled her daughter closer. ‘We don’t know anyone who could possibly do anything like this. Paul was killed by a stranger – a bitter, jealous stranger.’
‘And work?’ Sean persisted. ‘Was there anyone he’d been having trouble with at work?’
‘Look.’ She closed her eyes and tried to compose herself. ‘Paul was a very senior executive. It would be unrealistic to think there wasn’t a degree of professional jealousy, but nothing that would lead to this.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Sean told her. ‘Jealously can make people do terrible things.’
‘And it has,’ she agreed, ‘but not by someone we know. Paul was liked. He was a good man. He cared about other people – including the people he worked with. No one would have hurt him. My God,’ Mrs Elkins suddenly said as she began to sob heavily. Her friend quickly took some tissues from a box on the table in front of her and handed them to her. ‘I’m already talking about him in the past tense.’ Her daughter’s sobbing also intensified as Sean looked on; the need to escape to the sanctuary of the street was beginning to overwhelm him. He breathed in deeply and steadied himself.
‘What about someone else?’ he asked. ‘Someone who worked at the house maybe?’
‘No,’ she insisted, shaking her head again. ‘We only have the cleaners, and Rosemary who helps out with the children, and Simon the gardener, but no one else and they all loved Paul. He looked after them well.’
‘Was he having any trouble at work,’ he pressed, ‘from an unhappy customer – any threatening phone calls or letters – emails?’
‘Not that he told me of,’ she assured him. ‘I mean, when things were at their worst, when the banking crisis thing first started, there were threats to the bank, but nothing Paul seemed worried about. He didn’t mention anything specific. But he never talked about work at home. Maybe the bank can tell you more – I’m not sure, but this all seems a bit pointless. He was taken by an insane murdering animal, not a jealous colleague or bitter employee, and if you don’t catch him he’ll do it again,’ she warned them. ‘He’s as good as said he will.’
Sean and Donnelly looked at each other for a long few seconds before looking back at Mrs Elkins.
‘I think we have everything we need for now,’ Donnelly intervened. ‘A Family Liaison Officer from Special Investigations will come to see you later, and rest assured we’ll be in touch as soon as we find out anything. In the meantime, if you think of anything, anything at all, just tell the Family Liaison Officer.’
‘And that’s it?’ she asked. ‘Paul is murdered – a brief visit from the police and we’re supposed to just get on with our lives?’
‘No,’ Sean warned her. ‘I’m sorry, but this is just the beginning. It won’t be over until we find the man who did this.’
Mrs Elkins looked to the ceiling before taking a more conciliatory tone. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been unreasonable. It’s just I can’t believe this has actually happened. It all seems so impossible.’
‘No need to apologize,’ Sean assured her, getting to his feet. ‘You’ve suffered a terrible shock. Best thing I can do for you now is find the man who did this.’ He pulled a business card out and placed it on the table in front of her. ‘Call me if you need anything – any time. Don’t get up. We’ll see ourselves out.’
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nbsp; Donnelly pushed himself off the sofa and followed Sean out of the room towards the front door, with Mendham following close behind. ‘Any idea when you’ll get your Family Liaison Officer here? I don’t fancy being stuck here long,’ he asked.
‘They’ll be here when they’re here,’ Sean reprimanded him.
‘Cheer up, son,’ Donnelly told him. ‘It’s not all car chases and kicking down doors. Sometimes we have to earn our meagre wages.’
‘You won’t be here too long,’ Sean assured him as he opened the front door and walked into the street without turning to see Mendham’s frustrated gestures at being abandoned.
‘What now?’ Donnelly asked.
‘You said there were witnesses,’ Sean reminded him. ‘We might as well speak to them seeing as how we’re already here.’
‘Aye,’ Donnelly agreed. ‘So which one do you want to see − the housekeeper or the yummy mummy?’
‘I’ll take the mum.’
‘That figures. Name’s Angela Haitink. Number eighteen.’
‘Thanks,’ Sean told him and headed off without saying more. A few seconds later he was standing on the steps of a five-storey white Georgian house with a black door so shiny it made his reflection vibrate when he used the ornate chrome knocker.
Interviewing witnesses was never something he’d enjoyed. He always milked them for everything and anything they were worth, but he found their inaccuracies and hesitancy frustrating and annoying. He reminded himself not to treat Angela Haitink as a suspect. After almost a minute the door was answered by a tall, slim woman in her mid-thirties, with short blonde hair in a ponytail, wearing a designer tracksuit and trainers that he guessed would cost him a week’s wages. Her similarity to the mothers of the children taken by Douglas Allen reminded him of the impending trial he’d almost forgotten about in the fury of a new case.
‘Yes,’ she asked, her accent exactly what he expected. ‘Can I help you with something?’ She looked him up and down as if he was an unwanted salesman.
He opened his warrant card and waited for a change in her expression that never came. ‘Angela Haitink?’ he asked. She nodded yes. ‘Detective Inspector Corrigan. I’m investigating the murder of Paul Elkins. I understand you witnessed his abduction?’