by Dane Cobain
“That’s not it at all,” Cholmondeley lied. “I’m just worried, James. Worried about the case. We need to catch the bastard who’s behind it before we find another body.”
Chapter Fifteen: A Meeting with Tom Townsend
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Detective Inspector Jack Cholmondeley placed a call consisting of six words: a surname and an address. Leipfold knew the drill. They’d followed it before. After the call was over, they’d both pretend it never happened.
Leipfold checked his watch, surprised, and surmised that the boys in blue had already finished asking their questions, probably because they didn’t know which questions to ask her. And so it was that James Leipfold found himself hopping on the tube again, lamenting the loss of Camilla while making his way to Shelden Street where Jayne Lipton lived.
Jayne answered the door after his second knock. She kept the chain on but she seemed happy enough to talk.
“I doubt I’ll be much help,” she warned him. “I’ve already told you everything I can.”
“That’s okay,” Leipfold replied. “Although you haven’t told me anything. I’m not with the police. I’m…well, I’m more what you’d call a consultant.”
“Same thing,” Jayne said.
Leipfold looked at her, curiously. She looked a little like Marie Rieirson – not unusually so, but they had a similar style. Jayne was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of skinny jeans, and her auburn hair was tied back and hung loosely on her shoulder. Her eyes were dark and her expression was neutral. She gave nothing away.
“Can you tell me how you know Marie Rieirson?” Leipfold asked.
“Sure can,” Jayne replied. “We used to live together. A friend of a friend introduced us when I first moved to London. She was looking for a housemate and I was looking for a house. I moved in a couple of days later.”
“And you’re the person who reported her missing?”
“Yeah,” Jayne said. “She wasn’t answering my calls. I went round to see if she was at home, but no one answered. I called her parents. They hadn’t heard from her, either. We were worried, so I slept on it and ended up calling the police when there was still no sign of her.”
“You did the right thing,” Leipfold said. “And you have no idea where she might be?”
“If I did, I would’ve found her already.”
“I thought as much,” Leipfold said. “And what about Donna Thompson? Ever heard of her?”
Jayne seemed to consider the question for a moment, but she eventually shook her head and said, “Sorry, sir. I’ve never heard of her.”
“It was a long shot,” Leipfold replied. “But a shot worth taking all the same. Listen, Ms. Lipton, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I’m not even sure if this is the same case as the one I’m supposed to be working on. But rest assured. We’ll find your friend, whether I find her or whether the police beat me to it. Now, is there anything else you can tell me that might help me to track her down?”
“No,” Jayne said. “Nothing.”
“No friends? Anyone she might have confided in?”
“Well,” Jayne murmured, “there is the one, I suppose. A guy called Tom Townsend. She used to work with him at the theatre. I always thought there was something going on between the two of them. Maybe they ran away together.”
“Maybe,” Leipfold replied. “But I doubt it.”
* * *
Constable Groves had drawn the short straw, which was why she had the tedious job of watching the forensic team as they combed the car for clues. She understood what they did, of course. She just couldn’t understand how they did it. As a relatively new member of the force, she didn’t hold the same prejudices as Gary Mogford and Jack Cholmondeley, but she still viewed forensics as a strange mix of science and magic, some sort of hoodoo that they did to put the bad guys behind bars.
But that didn’t stop her from watching them as they pored over the surfaces, dusting for prints, scouting for fibres and doing whatever the hell else they did so that they could take samples back to the lab.
Constable Groves nodded at one of the scientists as he withdrew from the vehicle. “How’s it going?” she asked.
“Slowly,” the man grunted.
“Anything promising?”
“Not really,” he said. His voice was muffled by the mask he wore, but he made no effort to pull it aside. Groves wasn’t surprised. The forensic team was notorious for following protocol. They knew that the slightest breach could come back to bite them in the ass and stop a bad guy from being brought to justice. “Couple of hairs and fibres.”
“Enough for a DNA match?” Groves asked.
“Yeah,” the man replied. “If we have a sample to compare it to. I can’t promise we’ll find anything, though. It’ll take a couple of days to run it and we might not get a hit. We’ll have to hope we have a suspect in the database.”
“You’d better get a move on,” Groves said. “Cholmondeley is impatient. He’ll take it out on me if you take too long.”
“Why?”
Groves shrugged her shoulders and looked over at the car again. “He just will,” she said. “I think he sent me here to keep an eye on you. He—”
Constable Groves was interrupted by a shout from one of the scientists who was inspecting the car, and she was two and a half steps towards it when she was pulled back by the man she’d been talking to. His gloved hands were heavy on her arm. They pinched her like a vice as he yanked her backwards.
“Don’t!” he commanded. “Not yet.”
Groves nodded at the man who released his grip. The two of them edged slightly closer to the vehicle. A couple of new faces, still hidden behind masks and with their hair covered by lightweight nets, burst on to the scene and rushed over to the car.
“I can’t see,” Groves murmured.
“Me neither,” the man whispered. Then he raised his voice and shouted, “Hey, what are we looking at?”
“I found something,” someone replied.
Another man muscled his way forward, and Groves recognised him immediately as Sergeant Joe Riggs, the tall, broad-shouldered liaison between the crime lab and the rest of the station. He was a good-looking chap with chiselled features and fair hair that poked out from his hairnet. He nodded at Groves and approached the vehicle, where one of the scientists was holding something up to the light in a gloved hand.
“What is it?” Riggs asked. “What did you find?”
“We’ve got a ring,” the man said. “Platinum, by the looks of it. With a diamond. An engagement band, perhaps?”
Riggs leaned in for a closer look. The tension in the air was electric, almost unbearable.
“So it is,” Riggs said. “Bag it, tag it and get it back to the lab. And someone give Jack Cholmondeley a ring. No pun intended. He’s going to want to know about this.”
* * *
Leipfold was on the tube again, still mourning the loss of Camilla. He hadn’t realised how much he relied on her until after he’d handed the keys to Greg Bateman. She was a part of his personality, like the strict habits he’d picked up in the army or the way he read the papers and completed the crosswords.
This time, he was looking for Tom Townsend. It was a Monday afternoon, so Leipfold had a good idea of where to find him. As long as he was either at home or in his studio, he knew exactly where to look. It didn’t take long to track him down to the latter.
But Townsend wasn’t alone. Leipfold had a habit of listening at doors before he opened them, another life-saving trick he’d picked up while on tour in Kuwait. Sometimes it paid off and sometimes it didn’t. This time, it was worth it.
He could hear Townsend’s voice, as well as the voice of a woman. Leipfold recognised the husky tones of Eleanor Thompson, although her clipped, receptive voice had lost control and turned into the shrill song of a harpy. Townsend wasn�
��t any better. He shouted right back at her. Leipfold could picture him, using his height advantage to tower over her like an angel of death.
Their voices were distorted through the wooden wall, but Leipfold could hear enough to make out odd snatches, like Townsend shouting “keep your voice down.”
Then Mrs. Thompson said, “Make sure no one hears about that plan of yours.”
Townsend mumbled something vague and then the two of them stopped talking. There was silence for a moment, followed by the sound of approaching footsteps. Leipfold barely had time to back through a nearby doorway – interrupting a pottery class – before Eleanor Thompson marched past. He watched her through the frosted glass in the classroom door, a shimmering blur of movement that was still unmistakably her. It was in her walk, perhaps.
Leipfold opened the door again and peered out, catching the back of her head as she shuffled around the corner. She was talking to herself in a low voice. She didn’t turn around to look at him.
Someone cleared their throat and Leipfold turned around. The pottery teacher, a man in a floppy black hat and clay-spattered jeans who had a long, matted beard and unkempt, ash grey hair, was staring at him, waiting for an explanation.
Leipfold smiled sheepishly and apologised, spent a couple of minutes learning about Delftware and then walked back out into the corridor. He knocked on Townsend’s door, a relic of the old warehouse that was a work of art itself, and waited. When the door opened, Townsend didn’t look surprised to see him.
“Mr. Leipfold,” he said, shaking the detective’s hand and gesturing for him to take a seat on a comfortable futon. It was a poky little room, barely big enough for the two men to fit in. “What can I do for you?”
“Perhaps you can help me,” Leipfold replied. “We’ll see. Marie Rieirson is missing.”
“I know,” Townsend said. “I’ve been trying to get hold of her. I haven’t seen or heard from her since our second show. We had to reschedule the dates, and I’m this close to scrapping it altogether.”
“What happened to ‘the show must go on’?” Leipfold asked.
Townsend shrugged. “What would you do in my place?” he asked. “I’ve tried to find a replacement, but people are saying that the play is cursed. I’ve lost two leading ladies in a couple of weeks. Maybe they’re right. It is cursed. Besides, even if I could find a replacement, we’ve lost half of the supporting cast. My reputation is ruined. What other option do I have? You haven’t heard from Marie, have you?”
“Why would I have heard from her?” Leipfold asked. “Don’t answer that. No, I haven’t heard from her. No one has.”
He paused for a moment and riffled through the pages of his notebook. He jotted something down and then looked sharply across at Tom Townsend.
“Are we done here?” Townsend asked.
“Why?” Leipfold replied. “Have you got somewhere that you need to be?”
“No,” Townsend said. “Nowhere. I’ve got a clean calendar all day.”
“I bet you have,” Leipfold murmured. He stroked his chin thoughtfully, hiding the ghost of a smile as it inched across his face. He knew damn well he was taking up Townsend’s time, and he was enjoying it. Besides, the man was a show-off. “So no meetings? No rehearsals?”
“None,” Townsend said. “I’m here alone all day.”
“Is that right?” Leipfold asked. “So you didn’t happen to see Eleanor Thompson?”
“Nope,” Townsend said. “I’ve never met the woman.”
“I see.”
Leipfold paused again and stared at him. Townsend crumpled uncomfortably and folded his arms defensively.
“She was here, you know,” Leipfold said. “Right here. I saw her. I saw her, and I saw you. You talked to her.”
“No way.”
“Damn it, don’t lie to me,” Leipfold growled. He took a step closer, and even though Townsend was taller than him, he shrank back like a spider from the light. He backed away still further until he was trapped against the wall and then he flinched as Leipfold leaned in. “Tell me the truth.”
“Okay, okay,” Townsend protested. He brought his hands up to protect his face and tried to lean away from Leipfold. “I’ll tell you. But understand that I’ve done nothing wrong. It’s all Mrs. Thompson’s fault. Perhaps you should talk to her instead of taking up my time. She wanted her daughter to have a proper job, whatever that is. She offered me a chunk of money if I turned Donna down for the role in Driven.”
“The part that Marie Rieirson is playing?”
“That’s the one,” Townsend said. “But I did something bad, Mr. Leipfold. I took the woman’s money and told her I’d do it, and then I kept it. And I kept Donna on, too. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did. The girl could act, Mr. Leipfold. I had to keep her.”
“And then she died,” Leipfold said.
“And then she died,” Townsend agreed. He seemed sad, but maybe not as sad as he ought to have been. Leipfold guessed, correctly, that Townsend hadn’t really processed it. He seemed more upset that his play had almost been derailed, more put out about finding a replacement than about being invited to the funeral.
Leipfold sighed. “Was there any animosity between the two of you?” he asked.
Townsend hesitated, picking his words with care. “Not exactly,” he said, eventually. “See, Donna and I were an item for a while. I broke things off when they started to get too serious. Poor girl. But she didn’t hold it against me.”
Leipfold checked his notes again. “On the night of Donna’s death, you were with Marie Rieirson, correct?”
“Correct,” Townsend replied. “We were seeing each other too, but Donna didn’t know about that.”
Leipfold scribbled something else in his notebook and fixed Tom Townsend with a cynical stare.
“Are you sure about that?” he asked.
* * *
Maile was holding the fort back at the office. She hadn’t worked there for long, but she’d already learned that when the doorbell rang it was the postman and when the telephone rang it was a salesman or a wrong number. Leipfold’s office wasn’t the busiest of places, but it had a frenetic energy of its own when he had his head down in a case. Despite being just around the corner from Marylebone Station, they didn’t get many walk-ins. The entrance was on the edge of an alleyway and visitors had to buzz for entry and then climb a flight of stairs.
Leipfold and Maile shared the building with another office downstairs, but the place had been empty for a couple of months after the previous occupants, a graphic design firm, moved out into a building of their own. There was a story behind that, but Leipfold had never told her what it was.
Leipfold said he liked the peace and quiet, and Maile agreed with him. With Leipfold out and about, that left her with the run of the place, which meant she could listen to metal while carrying out an investigation of her own. The boss had left her in charge of the Fisher case, and Maile felt like it was her moral responsibility to get to the bottom of it, to reunite the woman with her money and to earn Leipfold a chunk of cash while she was at it.
Maile’s first port of call was to check up on the email provider. The address was registered with a company she’d never heard of, Omegaserv, but she did a little digging and found a website and a couple of social media accounts. On their website, they proudly boasted eight million users and featured a quote from a guy called John Mayers, a name that she vaguely recognised. They also had a live chat app, which she logged into with a false name so she could ask a couple of questions.
The woman she talked to had a poor grasp of English and a good grasp of protocol, but Maile knew how to game the system. Through a combination of technical knowhow, duplicity and good, old-fashioned blagging, she convinced the woman to reset the account’s credentials. Maile knew that if anyone found out, the woman could lose her job.
But hey, she thoug
ht, survival of the fittest.
With the login details in hand, she hopped into the inbox. It turned out to be a dummy account, created for the sole purpose of contacting Mrs. Fisher. Maile noted with growing interest that the account’s owner, whoever they were, had read her frantic requests for her money back. They just hadn’t bothered to reply.
She was also able to access a whole heap of personal information. While most of it looked spurious, including the name it was registered to, she managed to find a couple of references to the Channel Islands and a company called Fulwood Scientific. Familiar, as always, with the theory, Maile knew that most people allowed forms to complete themselves with the data they’d used elsewhere, which gave her a little hope that the information had slipped through unnoticed.
Maile updated her case notes and took a quick break to make a fresh cup of coffee before returning to her desk and cracking on with phase two. She knew she was easily distracted, but she could also apply herself when she wanted to. Resisting the urge to check her emails, Maile booted up a couple of search engines and started running different keywords. She used a piece of software that she’d developed herself. It ran different combinations of keywords and aggregated the results to pinpoint pages of interest. It was one of her favourite tricks, but for once, it failed to deliver. As far as the internet was concerned, Fulwood Scientific didn’t exist.
Which made Maile wonder what the hell it was doing in a scam artist’s email account.
* * *
“So where are we at?” Maile asked. Leipfold was back in the office, and Maile was trying to distract the boss before he kicked her out so he could go wherever it was that he went when they weren’t at work. Leipfold knew what she was doing, of course, but he humoured her. He needed her in a good mood. He had a little job for her, but it could wait until the morning.
“I’m assuming you’re talking about the Thompson case,” Leipfold said.
“Of course,” Maile replied. “What’s new?”