Within twenty minutes they had got hold of a key. The young agent who had turned up, officious and self-important, wanted to hang around, obviously looking for a story to tell his wine bar mates. Tanya took the little bunch of keys with their cardboard tag, signed the receipt on his tablet computer, and sent him on his way. He was disgruntled and disappointed. He might have argued longer but the rain was coming down in sheets now, dripping from the trees, running along the gutters. The occasional car swooshed past and just a couple of people, hunched and hurrying, dashed from cars and into the warm and dry.
Charlie and Kate were out of the car before Tanya had a chance to answer the call as it came in from Bob Scunthorpe. Paul Harris, who had been in the front passenger seat, barely speaking, clambered out behind them. She could put him out of his misery, tell him it was okay and not to worry, but she was enjoying his discomfort. She could report him, send him on a sensitivity course; in truth he probably needed that. She had already decided she wasn’t taking it any further, but it would do him good to worry for a while longer. Maybe it’d make sure he was on her side if she ever needed it. Cynical perhaps but you did what you had to do. He trudged through the puddles after the others, through the narrow hallway and up to the second floor.
Chapter 51
Though it wasn’t very large, the flat was bright and airy. They opened the door, Tanya yelling out that it was the police and they were entering the premises, but they already knew it was empty. It had the closed and silent feel of a deserted property. They stopped in the hall to pull on blue nitrile gloves and to cover their damp shoes with plastic protectors. As they moved down the hallway, Charlie and Kate turned into the bedroom and Paul went into the lounge. It was tidy and clean, but the kitchen stank of a rubbish bin badly in need of emptying.
Tanya walked across the tiles, batting away flies the nearer she came to the sink unit. Obviously, the bin was inside the cupboard and when she opened it the smell was intense. The lid lifted automatically, and she peered inside. She didn’t expect to find anything too dreadful, but it was still a relief to see only empty food containers and what looked like decaying fish skin, which was the source of most of the stench.
There were a couple of glasses on the draining board, a pair of rubber washing up gloves and a dishcloth folded over the top of the tap. It was all very ordinary, and very tidy.
Tanya left the kitchen and joined the others in the bedroom. They had begun a preliminary search of the drawers and cupboards, but they would need to bring in the SOCO team to do the job properly. The wardrobe held jeans and skirts and jackets, a few dresses, all on hangers, some of them covered with plastic bags. They were divided into colours and weights, winter and summer. Belts were hung on hooks behind the door. Shoes were bundled in the bottom, high heeled court shoes, trainers, flats. Tanya glanced at the drawers the others were examining, everything was folded, even the knickers, bras and scarves were in organisers, neatly tucked into their separate spaces.
“Bloody hell, she was a neat freak. I should take pictures to show my girls,” Kate said.
Tanya turned back to the wardrobe and the mess of shoes. “Charlie, give me a hand with this, will you?”
They lifted out the footwear and she felt around the edges of the wooden boards. They knew already what this was all about, it was just a question of finding the way in. At the rear corner was a tag of black plastic. “Photographs, please, Charlie.” He pulled out his smartphone and made sure the date and time stamp would be recorded on the images. It was a neatly made box, the sort of hiding place that would be useful for jewellery, or important papers. Or several bags of white powder, more containing colourful pills and blocks of dark resin. Tanya didn’t touch them. She didn’t need to.
“Send me the images, Charlie.”
While they waited for the SOCO team to join them, they had a perfunctory look around the rest of the flat, but they knew they had found the mother lode. Tanya was impatient to get back to her incident room, so they could record all of this and decide where it took them.
“I want Freddy Stone back in. Tonight. Tomorrow first thing, Charlie, we need to move things along with the hunt for Colin’s shopping trolley.” She allowed herself a smile. “This is big, this is what we’ve been looking for, we just have to find out who was involved with what. Right, back to headquarters. Charlie, you wait here until the SOCO team arrive, Kate and I will go with Paul if he can promise to keep his hands to himself.”
The final comment had the detective sergeant blushing yet again and the others looking from one to the other in total confusion. She spun on her heels and marched out of the flat grinning broadly.
Chapter 52
“Right, let’s get on this.” Tanya stormed into the incident room leaving Kate and Paul scurrying to keep up. She brought the rest of her team up to date, including the four civilian assistants who were helping to collate the paperwork and watch endless CCTV footage, looking for Colin’s last walk.
“These drugs,” she passed her phone to Sue to look at and pass around, “we have to assume that they play a big part in what has happened to this woman. It’s impossible that they don’t. So, how, why and who? Let’s go back over what we’ve got. I want Freddy Stone in here now, he was in that alley for more than just a leak, I’m convinced of it. Either he was just in there to score, and it looks now that it could very likely have been from Suzanne Roper – why else would they both be there at the same time? – or, he was supplying her with drugs. Dan, take Paul and bring him here. We’re not going home until we find the link in this. I’ll clear the overtime.”
“What about Colin, boss?” Kate asked.
“I don’t know yet. Either he was involved, unlikely but not impossible, or he somehow found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Seems a bit extreme to chase him and kill him but he’s dead and somebody did it.”
“If anything occurs to any of you, go through Kate, she’s got the best handle on all of it. I’m in my office, I need to ring the DCI and let him know what’s going on.”
Bob Scunthorpe was pleased but cautious. “It’s a move in the right direction, I won’t deny that. Drug supply and murder are not the same thing though, Detective Inspector, and why was she in the storage unit if she was meeting Freddy Stone? You’ve a bit to sort out yet. Well done though, keep on it.”
She made a cup of coffee and took a couple of the painkillers, the nagging ache in her arm was coming between her and clear thinking. She would have a Red Bull if she needed it. Okay, she was messing with her brain, but there would be time enough to recover when all this was over.
It wasn’t very long before Kate knocked on the door, sheets of paper in her hands. “I’ve got a couple of things here. I didn’t know about them until I started to go through the things that…” She stopped.
“Yes. Until…”
“Well, they were done while I was out. A fair bit has come in from the lab.”
“Who received them?” Tanya asked.
“Erm…”
“Detective Sergeant Harris?” Tanya didn’t need a response, then she softened. “Kate, there was a bit of a thing in the car.” She laughed at the look on the woman’s face. “No, nothing really bad. He forgot himself for a moment.” She told Kate about the incident with the seat belt and they had a laugh and then she sobered.
“So, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. We’ll assume that he was knocked off balance so much that he forgot to fill me in on what had come in. But I want a word as soon as he comes back,” Tanya said.
“Yes, boss. Anyway, the lab has been able to get a DNA sample from the vomit.”
“What vomit?”
“There was vomit in the door frame, probably protected from the heat by the door itself?”
“Do we have an identification. Colin, Suzanne, Freddy?”
Kate shook her head. “None of them I’m afraid.”
“What? That can’t be possible.”
“Sorry, ma’am, but it’s here.
There’s a report about Suzanne, she ate fish as her last meal and from what we saw in the flat, well, it doesn’t seem that she was sick.”
They paused for a moment thinking of the stinking bin, the evidence of the woman eating in her neat kitchen with no idea that within hours she would be dead.
“Okay, let’s just think this through. Could it be that this vomit is from another time? People vomit in alleyways near to pubs, it’s what they do.”
Kate was already shaking her head.
“Apparently it was possible to match it to a stain on the floor that would indicate that the pool was inside, dried out by the heat, except for this small amount.”
“Oh bugger, you know what this means?” Tanya said. “Somebody else was there. Oh Christ, just when it was all coming together.” She threw her pen across the table. “Never mind, let’s just carry on for now. Have you got anything else?”
“Still working through the stuff the civilians have been doing, but I thought you’d want to know about this.”
“Yes, thanks, Kate. Let me know when the lads get back, will you?” She waited for the door to close before lowering her head into her hands and cursing with most of the swear words she knew and just a few that she made up on the way.
Chapter 53
Tanya heard Paul and Dan in the corridor and went out to meet them. Charlie was back, just turning into the incident room and he hung about to listen. “Where have you put Stone?”
“Nowhere, boss.”
“How do you mean?”
“We haven’t found him. Not at home, we spoke to his mum. He still lives with her. Nice lady, worried because he hasn’t been back since last night. He hadn’t turned up for his job, he does a shift in a bar and he should have been in by four. They said that he was usually pretty reliable,” Charlie said.
He saw Tanya’s raised eyebrows. “Yes, surprised us as well, but they seemed to think quite highly of him, to be honest. Just goes to show you. Anyway, we spoke to his best mate who also works in the bar and he hasn’t seen him. Tried to phone him, no answer. He doesn’t have voicemail apparently, so it just rang out for a while and then they gave up.”
“Shit! He’s done a runner,” Tanya said.
Kate was already heading for the phone on her desk.
“Charlie, I’ll arrange an alert for the ports and airports. You get on to traffic, get them watching for his car. We don’t know how long he’s been gone but we’ve got to look. Bugger it. I don’t believe this. Will somebody organise a trace on his phone? Kate, you do that.”
“Yes, boss, on it.”
She heard the flurry as the rest of the team were brought up to date.
“Ma’am, could I speak to you?”
“Not right now, Sergeant Harris, I need to move on this.” She assumed Kate had sent him, and he was standing with his tail between his legs, expecting a dressing down about the seat belt incident and his tardiness in reporting the DNA result. But he was holding up another piece of paper, waving it back and forth. She frowned at him and pointed at the visitor’s chair beside her desk. He sat and waited in uncomfortable silence while she made her call, set the search in motion. She turned to him. “What do you want, Paul?”
“It’s this report, ma’am. It’s only just come in, it was on my computer. It had been sent to traffic by mistake and they have only just found out where it was meant to go,” he said.
“Well, come on then, spit it out. What the hell is it? And if it’s got nothing to do with Freddy Stone, it’d better be important.”
“It’s the cars, ma’am. The ones in the warehouse.”
“Yes, what about them?”
“There were two. One was a Ferrari,” he glanced at the printout, “the other was a Honda. Well, the Honda was stolen. The fire officer rang with the VIN. But the numpty who took the call assumed it was for traffic and just sent it on to them by internal mail. They found the theft report, but didn’t know what it was all about, so it’s been ping-ponged back and forth until eventually someone connected the dots.”
“Right. Owner’s details.” She held out a hand. “I want to speak to them as soon as possible, and Alan Parker. I need to speak to him tonight. I want Kate in here right now. Come on man, move.”
He was out of the door before she had finished speaking.
“Ma’am.” Kate was at the office door in seconds, the whole place was alive, it was the first time they’d been so motivated.
“Kate. How do we know where Alan Parker was when his place went up in smoke?”
“His wife told us he was in Dubai.”
“Did we follow it up? Do we have his flight details, copy of his ticket, anything from the border force telling us when he came back into the country?”
“I don’t know, boss. I don’t think so.”
“Find out for me. Matter of urgency. I’d have known all this if I hadn’t been buggering about in Edinburgh.” She caught the look on Kate’s face, and knew that she’d offended her with the inference that they’d let something slide without her there.
She began to pace the incident room; the air was sharp with tension. She marched over to Paul Harris’s desk and glowered at him as he tried several times to call the owner of the stolen car. He replaced the receiver and shook his head.
“There’s no answer, ma’am. I’ve left a message,” he said.
“Where are they?”
“Harrogate.”
“Right get on to the local nick up there, I want someone round to the house. I want chapter and verse. Exactly where it was stolen, time, location, everything and then I want CCTV of the area. I want to see who nicked that bloody car and how it came to be a part of my crime scene. Nobody will have bothered, you know as well as I do that it will have gone onto the database, been issued with a crime number for the insurance and that will have been it. But we need to see who nicked it. Well, do it now, Sergeant, what are you waiting for? Come on man, move.”
She felt the silence around her and knew that, if he wanted to, Harris could cause trouble for her. She had given him a dressing down in front of his colleagues. It was unacceptable. She turned away and stamped back into her office; she was upsetting them all. Right at that moment she didn’t care. When the shit hit the fan it could cover her, just as long as, before that happened, she had found some sort of justice for Suzanne Roper, and even more now, for Colin, who she deep down believed was more than likely an innocent bystander in all of this.
Her mobile phone rang, she picked it up and stared at the screen. Fiona’s name and caller ID, and a cartoon picture of the Loch Ness Monster had popped up. She clicked the off button. ‘Not now. No, not right now.’
Chapter 54
Three hours had passed, everyone was jaded and tired but there was no forward movement. Tanya let the civilians go, there was little more that they could do. Paul couldn’t reach the owners of the stolen Honda, and the Yorkshire police weren’t much help. It was late, the shifts that were on duty in Harrogate were dealing with speeding drivers and town centre drunks. ‘First thing in the morning’, was the best that Paul could get from them. It wasn’t life and death, it was an old case, just a stolen car, and Tanya had to bite back her frustration.
“Did you tell them where it was found?” she snapped.
“Yes, boss, but they’ve no spare bods and the CCTV will take time to trace. Sorry, boss, there’s nothing we can do.”
She spun away and stood for a minute in front of the images of her victims. Kate held up the copies of Suzanne’s bank statements. She had already gone through them with one of the civilians and they had highlighted interesting items. “Ma’am, do you want to see these?”
Tanya nodded, at least it was something.
The monthly rental payments for the flat were paid by direct debit. There were utilities payments and Boden, M&S, Burberry and Selfridges were just a few of the names that poked at Tanya’s conscience. Names she had become so familiar with. Suzanne Roper had been as extravagant and generous to her
self as Tanya had been before the guillotine had come down on her spending.
Roper’s accounts, however, showed no problem with the outgoings. There was a regular trickle which she had deposited herself, in cash at different bank branches. The amounts varied from a few hundred to a couple of thousand and other amounts were taken out in cash, again at different branches. There was no discernible pattern until April. A payment of nine thousand pounds had boosted the already healthy balance in the most active current account; it was moved within days to savings. It was just below the amount which would be cause for a money laundering alert. That alone was interesting, but there was another of the same amount the next month and another two months later, all shifted to a higher interest scheme.
“We need more information about those payments. Get on to the bank first thing in the morning, find out where they came from.” Tanya told Kate. “She doesn’t have a job, no family; the money she has paid in herself is more than likely the profit from her drugs dealing, all cash – we can’t trace that. But this is something else and we need to know what. It looks as though she was building up a little nest egg. What with? What was she up to? Prostitution doesn’t pay this sort of money and the drugs she had weren’t in this league.”
There was still no news of Freddy Stone. The street patrols were on the lookout near his home, a squad car was driving past regularly. Tanya would have liked someone parked outside but with a shortage of troops on the ground and lack of anything absolute about his involvement, she couldn’t make it happen. She had to admit that it was highly unlikely he’d be wandering around at this time of night in the town, when he hadn’t been home or to work. No, she was sure that he’d run, and it was going to be pure luck if they found him.
The mobile unit sent to pick up Alan Parker came back empty-handed. The house was in darkness, there were no cars in the drive. A neighbour taking her Labradoodle for its bedtime walk told them that she thought Mrs Parker had gone back to her mother’s. She’d seen the car being loaded with suitcases the day before when ‘little Benjie’ had his morning walk.
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