by Nick Louth
‘It is wrong that evil men like Neville Rollason should ever be released from prison,’ the actor’s voice said, softly. ‘He’s never really been punished, has he? Prison isn’t really a punishment any more. Those segregation cells are luxury, really. They have TV and books and everything.’
‘What are your plans?’ the presenter asked. Wright thought he detected a note of eagerness in his voice.
‘Well, let’s put it this way. After we’ve finished with him, he won’t be up to any more of his old tricks.’
‘Is that a threat of violence?’
There was a laugh. ‘You can take it any way you want. But it will be justice.’
Wright snarled and pointed a finger at the screen as if the vigilante could hear him. ‘You’ll not get me, mate.’
The presenter said: ‘In Mr Rollason’s case it seems that his release by the Parole Board is closely tied to his agreeing to identify places where he buried the bodies of two of his victims. So what do the families of the victims think?’ The TV cut to a living room, where a frail elderly couple sat on a settee, the woman holding a handkerchief close to her nose. ‘Mrs Cooper,’ the presenter intoned. ‘Describe what it’s been like for you to deal with the knowledge that the killer of your son will be released in a few days.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘My Daniel is lost to me for ever. He’s got no life, and we’ve only got grief. But somehow this… beast is to be let out.’
‘Was it not a comfort to you to be told of your son’s final resting place?’
The woman’s already-lined face folded in upon itself even further at the question and she was unable to speak. But her husband, his arm squeezing tighter around her shoulder, said: ‘It’s true, it gave us some comfort, but if we knew that the murderer would be allowed out, we would never have agreed. It’s barbaric.’
Wright rocked back in his chair and laughed at the screen. One week and one day, that’s all he had to wait.
‘I understand you were notified of the release date by the Ministry of Justice only last week,’ the presenter said.
‘That’s right,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘It’s a horrible shock. I just hope no other mother has to go through what I’ve been through over the last thirty-five years. My son would be nearly forty-seven now.’
‘I tell you what else,’ her husband said. ‘I don’t agree with Rollason being given a new identity. That’s just not right. That means he could soon be anywhere.’
‘That’s right.’ The prisoner chuckled, turning off the TV. ‘That’s absolutely right. Anywhere I bloody want.’
* * *
Elvira Hart was just getting ready to go to bed when she heard a noise like footsteps outside on the gravel path. Nudging aside the lace curtains and peering from her houseboat window, she couldn’t immediately see anything. She was moored on the northern side of Ash Island, and though it could be quite busy with pleasure craft during the day, this late at night it was very unusual to hear anything nearby apart from ducks and geese. Neither of the neighbouring houseboats were occupied. The owners were abroad and had both left her keys. As far as she knew she was the only one currently resident on this side of the island. She checked the brass clock on the mantelpiece. It had just gone midnight.
She opened the casement window in the lounge a crack so she could hear better. There was nothing to be seen in the river itself. She thought about opening the front door to look out on the path but felt a cord of fear in her gut. The dead body on the shoreline just three days ago had overshadowed her dreams ever since. She was just about to close the window when she heard more footsteps – and something else. It sounded like the low whirr of a bicycle being wheeled. She crossed to the other side of the room, switched on the porch light and looked out of the tiny leadlight window next to her front door. Yes, there was a man, with a bike and a head-torch. This was a private island, and he shouldn’t be there, especially at night. Elvira tried to pluck up courage to open the front door, to chastise this person for scaring her. But as the seconds rolled by she found she didn’t dare.
Things had changed in the last three days. She had told the two policemen who had come to interview her that she never worried about her safety. It was true, when she herself had walked or run in parks alone at night, that there had never been any frightening incidents. She had always projected self-confidence and capability. But things were different now. Suddenly she realised that the discovery of that poor man’s body had robbed her of a freedom. A freedom from worry and anxiety. She just hoped and prayed that this didn’t cast her back to the dark days, to the terror that had almost destroyed her. She was eighty-one, but she could fight.
She took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and went out to confront her fear.
Chapter Twelve
Tuesday
It had been a quiet night at Staines police station, that’s what the duty log showed when Sergeant Vince Babbage arrived at Kingston Road to start his shift on the desk at seven a.m. For once there was no one in the cells. He was just thinking about going to get a coffee when a call was passed through from the control room. A report of a suspicious intruder on private land.
‘Righto,’ Babbage said when the call was patched through.
‘Hello. My name is Elvira Hart, and I’d like to report an incident from last night.’ In cultured tones she went on to describe the noises she had heard and then how she had opened the door to confront the intruder.
‘Madam, I really don’t think that was a good idea,’ Babbage said, scratching at his ginger beard. ‘You shouldn’t put yourself at risk. You should call 999.’
‘And wait half an hour for you to arrive? Well, I did open the door and I saw this rather scruffy individual with a bicycle and head-torch. I asked him what he thought he was doing terrifying residents at this time of night.’
‘What did he say?’
‘It was most peculiar. He said he had come to lay some flowers on the water for the dead man.’
Babbage put down his pen. ‘Sorry, I’m not with you here. What dead man?’
‘I told the operator. I’m the woman who discovered the dead body here on Ash Island three days ago. I was interviewed by your colleagues about it. It was just by my houseboat. Now I have this strange man coming along late at night, claiming to lay flowers for the victim.’
‘That’s very distressing for you,’ Babbage said.
‘Well indeed, but don’t you think it might be pertinent to the case? As I understand it no one has been arrested for this murder, and whoever this person was knew exactly where the body had been found. I don’t think that had been publicised.’
Babbage conceded the point, thanked the lady for her public-spirited intervention and said that an officer would be round to interview her later that day.
* * *
Gary Tilling heard the letter box clack and shuffled out to the front door in his slippers. There was a sheaf of post. Not normal for a Tuesday. More like a Thursday delivery. Opening the envelopes, the first thing he saw was that the service was due on the stairlift. He’d ring them up today and make an appointment, even though she’d not been able to use it for five years. He sometimes wondered if her mobility would ever improve. Mum’s health had got worse and worse over the years. Osteoporosis, type two diabetes, and now ankylosing spondylitis on her spine. Some days she could hardly move. Looking after her had occupied more and more of his time.
Fortunately, she had found a surprising array of new hobbies over the Internet, things that with his technical knowledge he had been able to help with. A bedridden woman thirty years ago would have been able to do nothing but watch TV. But now she was able to roam the world, talk to people and even earn a kind of living. As the kettle boiled, he picked up the teapot and warmed it carefully, then poured boiling water over a scoop of lapsang souchong leaves. He then picked up a large package, the size and weight of a bale of toilet rolls, which had come from South Korea yesterday, the usual Monday delivery. He broke open the pack
age and pulled out a crisply wrapped cellophane packet, one of a hundred within. This was a new flavour. He couldn’t read the Korean script, but the picture of what looked like a sea vegetable made it clear. He wondered how his mother would get on with it. He looked at his watch. She would do a little practice this morning and then was due on screen this afternoon at what she called Chinese dentist: two thirty. It was her little joke, one that she never ceased to find amusing.
There was one final letter, a small, neatly handwritten envelope, posted in Buckinghamshire on Friday. It was addressed to his mother using her old married name. That was weird. After the divorce the whole family had gone back to her maiden name. He took it up to her, with her tea, and went downstairs.
The scream he heard from her a minute later had him racing back up to see what was the matter.
* * *
Detective Inspector Claire Mulholland had set off earlier than usual for her shift at Surrey Police’s Mount Browne headquarters. After setting a breakfast for her teenage kids, she had to give her plasterer husband Baz a lift to his first day on a new contract, while his van was being serviced. ‘I’ve been booked for a week on this job,’ Baz said, as they skirted the high brick wall encircling the Holdersham Estate near Walton-on-Thames.
‘I didn’t realise you meant here. So you’re working for the sheikh?’
‘Yep. It’s billionaires’ alley round here. It’s a bit of a rush job, and they’re paying double time. It’s got to be done by this time next week. Jakes recommended me.’
‘Ah. He’s the eccentric one, isn’t he?’
‘He’s all right. Hadn’t seen him for months until this. Dead easy to work with, if a little boring. Never get a peep out of him. He’s got them things in his lugs all day. Classical music. He let me listen to it once. Sounds like an orchestra tumbling down a hill.’ He laughed.
‘So do you have to keep your radio turned off?’ Baz’s own device, a much bespattered item, was sitting on a dust sheet in the boot, along with his tools.
‘No, but I keep it low.’ Baz turned to her. ‘I forgot to mention. Jakes was interviewed by some of your lot last week.’
‘What do you mean “some of my lot”?’ she asked in mock offence.
‘You know, the filth, the Old Bill, the pigs.’ Barry grinned at her. It was part of their family repartee for Barry to slag the police off as corrupt while she denigrated him as an unskilled labourer. The kids loved it. When they were younger they would, at her instigation, pile on him on the sofa while he was watching TV to make an arrest, with nee-nah siren noises and the aid of Dexter the overexcitable Irish wolfhound. Barry, affable as ever, always agreed to be locked in the cupboard under the stairs with the vacuum cleaner for a couple of minutes.
‘It’s about this body that was found on the island in the Thames.’
‘Ah, Craig’s just been given that case. Did Jakes see something?’
‘Nah.’ Baz crinkled his face sceptically. ‘Jakes never sees anything beyond the edge of the trowel. He’s away with the fairies half the time, I tell you. Did you know that he’s got a master’s in philosophy from the Open University?’
‘What’s he doing as a plasterer, then?’ she asked, taunting him again. ‘Playing with the great unwashed.’
‘He went bonkers for a while,’ Baz said, picking from the back of his neck a dried lump of plaster that he’d missed in the shower. ‘Couldn’t hack it.’
‘Bonkers: you are so PC, Baz. The full empathic mental health lexicon.’
‘I love it when you use big words, Claire.’ He laughed, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Okay. Technically, Jakes was doolally at first, then he went bonkers, and now he’s just fucking mad.’
Claire laughed as they arrived outside the gatehouse, guarded by ten-foot-high wrought-iron gates and stone lions on plinths.
‘Right, this is me.’ Baz turned to her. ‘Jakes does have a bit of an excuse, though. His family fell apart. No mum or dad, just a mad sister.’
‘When was that?’ Claire asked.
‘Long time ago, when he was little.’ Baz got out of the car and picked up his tool bag and radio from the boot.
‘Be kind to him, then,’ Claire called through the open window.
‘I am,’ Baz replied over his shoulder as he strode up to the gatehouse. ‘I always am.’
* * *
Half an hour later Baz was standing in the shell of a newly constructed single-storey building. Jakes told him that it was to be a reptile house. The building was partially divided up by numerous stud walls, each of which had a large low window-hole. Baz guessed that those apertures would house glass tanks for the creatures.
‘Is he turning this place into a safari park, then?’ Baz asked.
‘No,’ Jakes replied. ‘He said it’s not going to be open to the public. It’s mainly for conservation.’
‘So what do you know about this van Steenis bloke?’
Jakes chuckled. ‘Quite a lot. I read about him. Born in Southern Rhodesia, as it was then, now Zimbabwe. He founded his own bunch of mercenaries and made friends with some dodgy dictators.’
‘That’s a good way to get rich.’
‘Yeah, but he doesn’t own this place. He just manages it. He used to be employed by Mobutu Sese Seko, the Zairean ruler, to eliminate his political enemies.’
‘Jesus!’
‘That was decades ago,’ Jakes said. ‘Having met van Steenis, I find it hard to believe. He really cares for animals, you can see that.’ He turned to look at Baz. ‘Back in the early Eighties, this used to be a preparatory school called St Thomas’s. I went here for a term when I was six. Awful place.’ He cringed as if in remembered pain. ‘The old swimming pool I tried to learn to swim in is going to be part of a covered enclosure for the Nile crocodiles.’
The plasterers worked hard without a break until early afternoon. Baz watched in admiration as Jakes strode about in his stilts, covering up the ceiling fibre-tape between the plasterboard prior to the main skim. Baz had never got on with stilts. He had tried the two-foot-high metal platforms, which are clipped to the boots and secured by retaining straps to the calf. They had made him feel clumsy. Still, seeing Jakes, he had to admit it was hard to beat for quick work on ceiling scrim. Baz, doing the main overhead skim, worked off a more laborious framework of inverted milk crates with planks on them. Jakes was a bit of a prodigy with the trowel, Baz had to admit. Just the right amount of pressure, just the right forearm movement. Barely a ripple disturbed the surface. From his apparently effortless rhythm, it was hard to guess that Jakes suffered from tennis elbow, caused by the relentless weight of the wet plaster on the rectangular hawk, held always in his left hand, ready to be scooped up and trowelled on.
It was gone two when Baz called a halt and burrowed into the plaster-spattered knapsack containing his packed lunch and flask. He went outside and lay on a patch of grass, soaking up the sun. Jakes, who never ate while working, wandered off, still wearing his earbuds. Baz had just finished the last of his coffee when he saw Jakes running back. He looked distressed, his gangly arms and legs disordered.
‘What is it, mate?’ Baz asked.
‘You’ve got to come and see this,’ Jakes said, clearly a little out of breath. ‘You’re not going to believe it.’
Chapter Thirteen
Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard had been stuck at the computer all morning. He had been puzzling over the discrepancy between the number of people who had been seen in chef Anton St Jeanne’s white BMW by witnesses – three – and the claim by the man himself that only he and his girlfriend Leticia had been there. Did Mr St Jeanne have something to hide? The search of his car had turned up nothing of obvious interest. The boot had contained some decorating materials, and an unopened wine box. There was no trace of human hair, blood or anything else that would get a crime scene investigator excited. Samples from the seats were currently being tested to see if there was any match to the DNA of the dead man. That would take another day to come thr
ough.
The detective often took an elliptical approach to a difficult problem, so he had spent quite a while on Companies House, looking up the details of ASJ (Kingston) Ltd, the company that owned the restaurant J’adore Ça.
The listing details showed it had been incorporated four years previously, with Mr St Jeanne as sole proprietor. It had made a loss of increasing size every year, starting at £25,000 and finally exceeding £75,000. Gillard was no expert on corporate finance, but it seemed to him that unless something improved, J’adore Ça was heading for bankruptcy. There was something else significant too, perhaps the most interesting information he had gleaned so far. Just over eighteen months ago, an additional director had been appointed, with a forty-nine per cent share in the business. His name was Mr L. Churchill Jenkins. That name didn’t flag up anything significant in Gillard’s mind, but the address of the director certainly did. It was Effingham House, a notorious tower block in south London, rife with drug dealing. When Gillard checked across on the Police National Computer, he found that the flat number mentioned corresponded to a known gangster by the name of Leroy Churchill Jenkins, better known as Leroy Ceejay, a man with ambitions in the world of rap, but more significant achievements in the arena of drugs. Cross-referencing to the man’s criminal record, he saw that Jenkins was thought to be head of the Mambas, an organised crime group with its own amphetamine-manufacturing operation.