Tiger Blood (DS Webber Mystery Book 2)

by Penny Grubb

  ‘So it was a bit of blow when she got ill and he had to look after her.’

  ‘Exactly. Sounds like he was on his own and lonely. Having a wife around perked him up. Didn’t do much for her though. D’you think Michael would come clean with you about the friend?’ Suzie looked across at him as she asked.

  Ahmed shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I could push him on most things but that seemed to be a matter of trust between them.’

  ‘Hmm, OK then. Probably best if you go after Edith Stevenson.’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘Depending on what I find on the first Mrs Drake, we’re going to have another go at this. I’ll take Michael Drake this time, and you go for Stevenson. She was one of the quintets. She must have known Tina Tippet, the first Mrs Drake. Wouldn’t it be interesting if she turns out to be the mystery friend that the second Mrs Drake is staying with? And I can’t risk turning up on her doorstep in an official capacity if Tiffany might be there, not after the stunt at the hospital.’

  ‘But what is it that you’re chasing here?’

  ‘Remember Brad Tippet and his grudge against the Chief Super? What if there was something in his accusations all those years ago?’

  ‘That his sister was murdered? But she wasn’t. Tippet’s delusional.’

  ‘What if he isn’t? What if Tina Tippet was bumped off just for being Michael Drake’s wife? And what if whoever targeted Drake’s first wife now wants a go at his second? Who’s still on the scene from the old quintets days?’

  ‘Edith Stevenson.’

  ‘Yes, and Michael Drake himself. Never discount the nearest and dearest.’

  After a pause, Ahmed added, ‘There’s Brad Tippet too.’

  ‘Brad Tippet? Do you think he could have killed his sister? Why?’

  ‘No, I was thinking that maybe she died of natural causes just like her death certificate says, but we know he’s never believed it. He’s nursed one hell of an obsession for a long time. He thinks Drake killed her. Maybe this is payback time.’

  * * *

  Ahmed huddled into his jacket as he tucked himself close to the radiator. He slipped the headphones over his ears and picked up a notebook. Aware of Suzie’s scrutiny, he clicked the play button and settled back to listen. While she was watching, he would take the recording step by step, documenting, cataloguing. He read her motives. She would wait for him to become engrossed; wait until confident he was well embedded in the task, and then she’d be off.

  She had covert plans just as he had. He could see her now, her focus shifting from keeping an eye on him to the online databases she was trawling, probably for Michael Drake’s first wife … Brad Tippet’s sister … part of the tangle of old friends, old jealousies, disappearances, suicides and at least one murder. He wondered what she would find, his attention shifting for a moment to her agenda and away from his own. Was she right? Were the elusive motives tied in with who the victims were married to and not who they were?

  Was Tiffany Drake at risk? She could have died yesterday but suicide wasn’t murder. An image of Pamela Morgan floated in his mind … a straightforward suicide … but China Kowalski hadn’t travelled thousands of miles on a whim, whatever Webber thought. Somewhere she’d nursed a solid certainty.

  Suzie’s surveillance lost its intensity, but it was too soon to fast-forward the recording. His plan was to listen in detail to Kowalski talking about the 1985 reunion. What had Webber called it? A mess of motives in there somewhere. Once he had that part of the recording analysed the key job was done and he would be free to root about for Boots Boy, clearly the handle of someone they’d identified as close to Tom, maybe even his killer.

  He became aware that Suzie was standing over him. He paused the recording and removed the headphones.

  ‘Robert Morgan died a long time ago,’ she said. ‘Thirty years … a lifetime.’

  He murmured agreement.

  ‘Tom Jenkinson’s the here and now.’ Her stare remained hard.

  He nodded again, wary. This sounded like it was leading to tacit approval to get digging on the wrong case, but that wasn’t what he read in her expression.

  ‘Suppose they don’t find anyone,’ she said. ‘Despite everything, just suppose they don’t get a viable suspect. What if the case goes cold?’

  A chill ran through him. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

  ‘It could,’ she said. ‘Then there’ll be some future version of you sitting in a space-age incident room looking back and wondering why no one did better at the time. Tom Jenkinson’s death will seem as irrelevant to them as Robert Morgan’s seems to you now.’

  Ah, so she’d seen through him. ‘It’d be different,’ he said. ‘At least we’d be leaving a proper enquiry behind us. Robert Morgan was treated as accidental death.’

  ‘Doesn’t he deserve justice then, because we got it wrong?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ he snapped, clamping the earphones back over his ears and turning away. She had no right to imply he wasn’t giving everything to the case. OK, so he’d been following the other enquiry as closely as he could, but no one would get short-changed. He risked a sideways glance. She’d turned away. He un-paused the recording.

  Webber’s voice asked Kowalski why she’d insisted on speaking to him personally. Ahmed listened to her precise tones as she outlined her reasoning. He was surprised to learn that Webber had interviewed the Chief Super’s father at some point and Kowalski seemed to know about it. And there’d been some kind of contact between her and Webber,

  ‘… I thought about your email and what you’d said about the quintets …’

  Ahmed wondered why none of this was clear in the file. Maybe Melinda Webber had had a hand in it somewhere.

  ‘… decided that I needed to talk to you and it may as well be on my way home so I took a bit of a detour.’

  ‘A bit of a detour?’ Ahmed heard his own incredulity echoed in Webber’s response.

  It wasn’t an easy recording to follow. Webber had warned them there hadn’t been an interview room free. The background buzz of conversation and bustle was a constant irritant. He had to concentrate so hard that he wasn’t aware Suzie had crossed to the far side of the room until a movement caught his eye. He paused the recording again as he watched her. She was absorbed in something and paying him no attention. Time to act.

  It took a while … stop-start … fast forward … check on Suzie … He found it late in the recording, four fifths through he judged. A quick glance round at Suzie then he adjusted the window on the screen so the slider didn’t show. If she looked over his shoulder she wouldn’t see that he’d jumped almost to the end.

  Webber sounded calm enough and Kowalski probably didn’t notice anything but Ahmed could hear the underlying irritation as Webber cast about trying to keep the woman focussed, fishing for how well she’d stayed in touch and with whom. Her replies were heavy, Ahmed could hear the sleepiness behind her words until Webber said, ‘You all met up in 1985, didn’t you?’

  At once her tone lifted as she leapt on the question. ‘That was it. Yes, that was the start of it. The 1985 reunion. We were all there.’

  Webber murmured prompts, but Kowalski didn’t need pushing now. She scrabbled to articulate what might be the specifics that Webber had been sure had brought her all this way. She should have written it down, Ahmed thought, should have anticipated the effects of jet lag.

  ‘Are you saying that’s the first time you thought something was wrong?’ Webber’s voice.

  ‘I thought something wasn’t right … first time? I’m not sure … let me think. It was a bit like meeting strangers. I cut ties with them after Quinny’s Canadian died.’

  ‘But you’re talking about the reunion that happened the year before he died, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I suppose so. It’s all run together over the years. I hated the way they treated Quinny, like they were trying to jolly her out of it. I mean we all knew it was a big mistake for her to marry him, b
ut she was pretty cut up about his death, especially the way it happened … those animals hunting him down. And there were Edie and Michael trying to take her out of herself. At the funeral for heaven’s sake! I met Gary’s wife there. She was OK, a nice woman. Not Gary’s calibre of course but she was kind to Quinny, diverted the others, smoothed things over.’

  Ahmed nodded to himself as he made a note. This matched what Joyce Yeatman had told him about Robert Morgan’s funeral. She too had taken against Michael Drake and Edith Stevenson; said they’d been callous.

  ‘Robert Morgan wasn’t chased,’ Webber’s voice told China Kowalski. ‘We now know it didn’t happen like that. He … uh … wouldn’t have known anything about the tigers.’

  ‘He wasn’t …? But everyone said … Quinny needs to know that … needed to know … it’s too late now. Do you know how much it must have haunted her? Why didn’t anyone know at the time? Are you sure?’

  ‘You say you cut all ties, but you were at Gary Yeatman’s funeral ten years later?’

  ‘Of course I was!’ Ahmed heard indignation in her tone. ‘We went to all the big events, the graduations, the marriages … the funerals. Except that Tilly never had a funeral … and Michael couldn’t be at Gary’s graduation because his wife was dying.’

  A buzz that didn’t belong to the incessant background noise from the recording pierced Ahmed’s shell. The phone behind him was ringing an incoming call. A glance at Suzie. She stared at a piece of paper, one of her fingers tracing something along the screen as her gaze bounced back and forth, screen to paper. He wondered what she’d found.

  Blowing out a sigh, he pulled off the headphones and reached back to pluck the handset from its rest.

  ‘DI Davis?’ a voice rapped out before he could speak. He recognized the clipped tones of the woman from the lab. In his head he toyed with a comment about not realising she knew how to use a standard phone.

  ‘Out.’ He matched her economy with words. ‘DC Ahmed here. Can I help?’

  ‘Yep. Second body … gravel pit. The one underneath William Jones. It’s your post office guy. The big brother.’

  ‘OK.’ He grabbed a pen. ‘Any timings for us?’

  She grumbled something in an undertone before replying. ‘Hard to say. Might get more when we’ve run tests. Best guess? Jones has been down there 20 years; the other one longer by ten years. At least.’

  ‘Can’t be any more than ten years longer,’ Ahmed pointed out, ‘assuming he was alive when they did the post office job. Sounds like he was killed on the spot when the car was dumped, and someone’s been stacking bodies. Anything to say it’s the same person coming back to the grave?’

  A huff of exasperation. ‘You guys seem to think we dig up a log book with each artefact. We’ll find what’s there to find but it’ll take time. One thing we have that you should have found for us; there were some excavations done. There would have been diggers on site, the means to dig large holes. It wouldn’t take long in that terrain to get really deep.’

  Ahmed pursed his lips in annoyance. He’d checked the history of that site himself. It hadn’t been touched in the right time window. ‘Do you mean the animal remains? We’ve dated those more or less. There were no records of anything official.’

  ‘Only just found this one myself and no, not the animal remains. That’s a different pit.’

  ‘What then? Does it coincide with the time of the robbery or of Jones’s burial?’

  ‘Test pit to see if they could reroute the bypass. Land wasn’t stable enough.’

  Ahmed drew in a breath as he struck a line through the note he’d just written. ‘Yes,’ he said coldly. ‘I know what you mean. I found that. It predated the post office job by 15 years if I remember right. That makes it 45 years ago. How the …?’ He paused and forced his voice to remain even. ‘How does that help? The guy was alive at the time of the robbery so he clearly wasn’t buried 45 years ago.’

  ‘No,’ she said and he could tell from her tone that a half-smile tinged with smugness had curved her lips, ‘but the third body, the one they’ve just found underneath him probably was.’

  Chapter 40

  Suzie was getting ready to go now. She’d pulled a face when he told her about the latest find up at the gravel pits. ‘Too long ago to be relevant,’ had been her comment, ‘but what’s the betting whoever buried the second body knew who’d buried the first. Father … uncle … that sort of thing. Otherwise why go back to just the same place? Can’t be coincidence.’ Their eyes had met briefly. They both wanted to shove this latest development on to the back burner as they chased their own priorities. Her parting shot had been a nod towards Webber’s office. ‘Tell one of them before you go out after Stevenson.’

  As soon as her footsteps receded, he was across the room grabbing a heap of new paperwork, returning with it to his desk, switching his computer away from the Kowalski recording and firing up the databases that were going to give him the answers he needed. He riffled through the papers, jotting down new areas, wanting to have skim-read everything and returned it to its place before he was disturbed.

  Everyone was out chasing down witnesses, tightening the noose around Tom’s killer. They had someone called Boots Boy in the crosshairs. They’d linked Tom to him … or her … the paperwork he’d read so far didn’t specify. Having gleaned as much as he could from the documents, he replaced them and went back to his online search. He couldn’t hide his electronic tracks but he’d worry about that when someone challenged him. For now, he needed to know.

  It didn’t take long. The groundwork had already been done. Solid links had been unearthed between Tom and Boots Boy, solid links that went back months. As the story unfolded a heavy weight pressed on his shoulders. Boots Boy was the handle of the wingman to a big player referred to as Streetwise. For all the progress that had been made, neither handle was attached to a real name. Tom had been in deep. This hadn’t happened overnight. Tom had deceived him so comprehensively it was like reading about a different person. He felt the crease at his brow as he sat back to pull in a couple of deep breaths. How could he have been so wrong?

  Something inside rebelled at the idea. He had been turning Tom’s life around, he knew he had. OK, so Tom had been a bigger player than he’d realised and he’d hidden it well, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t wanted to get out from under the yoke. He remembered Melinda Webber’s words, Martyn said you were winning; said you’d have turned him right round in another few months. He didn’t know if he liked Martyn Webber’s wife but there was a side to her that he found appealing. She’d seemed genuinely interested in his forthcoming marriage, that made a nice change. On the other hand she’d taken shameful advantage at times of being Webber’s wife.

  The story got no better the deeper he dug. It seemed to be a Scandinavian connection they were following, a major drugs cartel.

  Why hadn’t Tom confided in him?

  A sudden thought. He looked round. No one to challenge him. Pulling the keyboard on to his lap he typed furiously, linking in to different systems, gritting his teeth at slow connections. Kids with Potential, the familiar logo filled the screen. He logged in and typed Tom’s name. He’d spent hours with Tom, written reams of notes. He knew that the current enquiry would have been all over his records, but they hadn’t known Tom the way he had. It had taken a long time to build trust, to learn to decipher Tom’s defensively coded pronouncements. Maybe Tom had already told him and he’d missed it.

  He searched for every term he could conjure up that might be relevant; he read the notes, scoured the plans they’d hatched together. There was nothing. He’d been so certain, but there was nothing. He banged his fist on the desk as the frustration bubbled up. Tom would have told him all about Boots Boy and this Streetwise character, of course he would. If he’d only done it sooner they might have been able to protect him.

  He logged out. He’d been searching the system for a long time. No ground gained. He had to get past this and get on with what he wa
s supposed to be doing. His line of thought paused. Edith Stevenson. Despite Davis he’d not lost his certainty that she was the so-called man on CCTV heading to see Tom. But the cold case … Robert Morgan, the quintets, animal rights groups releasing tigers years ago … it was a million miles from Scandinavian drugs rings.

  Or was it? Who had ever checked up on those sorts of contacts? China Kowalski thought nothing of circumnavigating the globe on a whim … Edith Stevenson was keeping out of their way for a reason. And … his thoughts went back to something that had bugged him all along … no one had ever questioned Brad Tippet’s old neighbour, Mrs Bell, on anything other than the car.

  His theories were as nebulous as Suzie’s, but he was determined to follow them up. She wanted him out after Edith Stevenson anyway. It wasn’t so much of a detour to go via Mrs Bell’s.

  Voices … Davis and Webber … a door swinging open. Good timing. He had one task to complete before he could set off.

  They were standing in the corridor outside Webber’s office. Davis had a sheaf of papers in his hand. They were looking at them, talking. Their faces were turned away, no lips to read. Ahmed moved quickly but quietly, picking up his coat. He slipped through the far door, the bend in the corridor would partly obscure his approach.

  As he drew nearer the low rumble of conversation became audible as words. He paused.

  ‘… if that’s right, that corroborates the positive ID on Boots Boy.’ Satisfaction underlay Davis’s words.

  They both paused and glanced up as footsteps approached. Ahmed pressed himself to the wall and slid backwards a couple of steps, bending over his phone simulating interest in the blank screen as people pushed past. No one challenged him. Neither Davis nor Webber noticed him.

  ‘… can rule him out then.’ Webber’s voice didn’t sound as upbeat as Davis. Ahmed felt bleak with him; he wanted to hear optimism. He wanted suspects caught and charged.

  ‘Exactly’ – Davis again – ‘which cuts the suspect list down to one.’