‘The Sussex file is through now, sir,’ Gheeta called across the room as Claire set the printer clicking away. Palmer put down the pictures and crossed over to take a printout off the tray and read it. The other two did likewise, and the three of them read in silence.
The Sussex victim was one Charles Plant a registered bullion dealer, aged fifty-five; single, and lived above his rented shop in The Lanes, Brighton; no previous convictions, but of interest to the Art and Antiques Crime Unit. It didn’t say why he was of interest to them; in fact it didn’t say much at all. No signs of a break in at his premises, and the landlord had taken a month’s notice from Mr Plant just a fortnight before his demise.
‘Now why would he want to do that then, eh?’ Palmer mused.
‘Do what, guv?’
‘Give a month’s notice on his shop and flat just before he got whacked? Check and see if he gave a forwarding address to the landlord. See if he paid for a mail re-direction at the Post Office, and if so where to.’
‘And if he didn’t?’
Gheeta sensed Palmer was onto something.
‘Well… if not then it points to him about to do a disappearing act and not wanting anybody to catch up with him, which will beg the question: why? Maybe he was trying to avoid somebody, and unfortunately for him they found him. Give George Gregg a call at the Art and Antiques Crime Unit and see why this Charles Plant was ‘a person of interest ‘to them – their answer could put us on the right road. Be interesting to find out what our body at the Cross Rail pit was involved in. Hopefully there will be a connection between the two.’
‘Has to be guv, hasn’t there? They were both in the same type of bag.’
‘And that’s another line of enquiry – names and addresses of every household or individual who’s ordered those bags from every council in the country over the last couple of months.’
Both Gheeta and Claire stopped what they were doing and turned their incredulous looks slowly to face Palmer.
‘Okay, only kidding. But it might be worth sending a couple of the team to Brighton and taking a peek at their list.’
‘I’ll organise it,’ Gheeta said, making a note.
‘And while they are there, tell them to have a snoop around the local shops and pubs near Plant’s old premises. Somebody may have got an inkling of what he had in mind.’
Chapter 4
The next day information came through that body number two from the Cross Rail excavation had turned out to be one John Fenn, a forty-six year-old freelance auctioneer; married, no children, no previous. Death was caused by the same MO as Charles Plant in Sussex, strangulation.
‘So, we have a link.’
Palmer was pleased. It was the next day in the office and the victim detail file had arrived.
‘Bit of a tenuous one, but both our victims were in the antiques game, eh?’
Gheeta threw him a questioning look.
‘Antiques game? Plant was a bullion dealer, not an antiques dealer.’
‘And most bullion these days comes from melted-down antique silverware, and old gold chains and coins; mostly from hard-up pensioners. You see the adverts everywhere – sell us your gold, best prices paid.’
Gheeta nodded.
‘Right, I see. Well, they were in the antiques game, guv; not any more though.’
Palmer stroked his chin thoughtfully.
‘Be interesting to know if they knew each other. Might be worth having a visit to see Mr Fenn’s widow. See if we can get to see her tomorrow.’
Gheeta nodded.
‘Local uniformed chaps have been in and broken the news to her this morning. She’s got a WPC with her for today.’
A loud knocking at the office door was followed by the large figure of George Gregg opening it and entering, a manila card folder under his arm. Gregg had never been one to order the regular burger when ‘extra large’ was available, and it showed; Palmer likened his physique to the same shape as a bowling pin. His big round face broke into a smile as he saw Palmer.
‘How the devil are you, Justin? I thought they’d have retired you by now! Still hanging on, eh?’
‘Cheeky sod,’ Palmer said as they stood and shook hands. ‘You’re older than me George, and still living the good life by the look of you.’
He patted Gregg’s large paunch.
‘Hope you’ve got a double plot booked in the cemetery.’
‘And how are you, Sergeant?’ Gregg asked, turning to Gheeta. ‘You look lovely, dear. Still having to put up with this old fart every day?’
‘I manage.’
‘Well,’ he said, taking the chair in front of Palmer’s desk. ‘Charlie Plant finally pushed somebody too far, did he? I’m not surprised.’
He opened the folder on his knees as Palmer sat back at his desk.
‘Our report said he was a person ‘of interest’ to you, George.’
‘He was, yes. We’ve had our eye on him for some time – one of those people that you know is involved in something but can’t pin it on them. Mostly receiving stolen goods – bits of antique silver mainly, which he moved on or melted down before we could get enough evidence to get a warrant issued. He’d achieved a high ranking in the legal bullion business; well respected, but just a bloody good con man really. As most of the top dealers in that business are – but don’t quote me on that.’
He laughed.
‘Anyway, Mr Plant was getting a bit out of his comfort zone lately. We know he was moving on some high quantities of gold, around the quarter million price range each time.’
‘Pounds?’
Palmer’s interest level shot up the scale.
‘Yes, we suspect he was getting dodgy ingots from somewhere; can’t see enough family heirloom chains and rings coming his way to melt down to make the weights he was selling. We think he was getting the ingots on the black market and cutting them to sell into the jewellery trade.
‘Cutting them?’
‘You get a one kilo ingot which is worth about twenty-five thousand quid, and cut it or melt it down and recast it into several hundred gram ingots at a couple of thousand quid each. Then it’s easy to sell them at a discount off the London Gold Exchange spot price to jewellers – for cash, of course. Probably get rid of fifty at a time in the Birmingham jewellery quarter alone; loads of little factories up there making stuff for the Asian market, with no questions asked if the price is cheap enough.
‘He couldn’t have done that on his own though, could he?’ Palmer said, trying to make two and two equal four. ‘He must have had a few contacts? Somebody must have been selling him the ingots for a start.’
‘Of course he had contacts, one of them being your other corpse, John Fenn.’
He pulled another sheet from the folder.
‘Hang on, George…’
Palmer was lost.
‘How do you know about John Fenn? We only got his name through this morning.’
‘Another ‘person of interest’ to us, Justin, so I get copied into anything on him that goes on the system. I got the forensic and the victim detail reports this morning, same as you.’
‘So, what was Fenn up to then?’
‘The old game of auction ringing.’
‘Ringing?’
‘It’s a very simple scam. Let’s assume something nice comes up for sale at the auction and a few dealers want it, so they get together before the sale and only one of them bids, which means they aren’t pushing the price up by bidding against each other; and then, if they win it, they have a little auction amongst themselves afterwards and split the difference.’
‘Split the difference?’
‘Yes. For example, say there are four of them interested in buying it and one of them buys it for ten grand at the auction. They get together afterwards and start bidding at ten grand, and one of them buys it at, say, twenty grand. That’s ten grand on top of the real price paid; so they split that – four of them – so they get two and a half grand each, which means the end buyer
gets it for seventeen and a half, and saved himself two and a half grand. Plus his mates all get two and half grand each, so everybody’s happy.’
‘Except the person who put it into the auction; he’s been done out of ten thousand pounds.’
‘Yes, but he’ll never know, will he?’
‘Does this go on a lot?’
‘Oh yes, mainly in the out-of-town sales as there are so many of them nowadays. That’s where John Fenn operated; as a valuer and auctioneer he’d get some nice items for valuation and suggest to the seller that one of his country sales would be just the right place to get top price for them. If the seller agreed, then Fenn tipped off his bent colleagues and they went into action.’
‘And his cut?’
‘Usual seller’s commission, buyer’s commission; and instead of the ring splitting four ways it would split five ways to include him’
Palmer leaned his chair back on its back legs against the wall, where the top slotted into the dent he had made over the years by repetition of this action. Perkins, the Yard’s maintenance man, had long ago given up smoothing over the dent, having decided he was fighting a losing battle with Palmer’s habit.
‘Amazing. So Plant and Fenn were working together then?’
‘Don’t know, Justin – could well be. Finding that out is your job, mate. Here, I’ve got a few mug shots for you,’ he said, pulling them from the folder. ‘These people are both Fenn and Plant’s known associates – people they’ve been seen around with a lot, attended sales with, things like that. Most are ‘people of interest’ to us. Maybe a few more will turn up in plastic bags and cut my workload down a bit.’
He smiled and passed the photos across to Palmer.
‘And increase my workload,’ Palmer said, as he glanced at a few of the photos. ‘These could be very handy George, thank you. So, it could be one of these little ‘rings’ went wrong then, or somebody didn’t get what they thought they’d get.’
Gregg shrugged.
‘Have to have been something big to end in two murders, Justin. Something very big.’
‘Hmm… we’ll run these faces past Mrs Fenn, see if she recognises any of them.’
Chapter 5
Sylvia Fenn, the widow, looked young for the wife of John Fenn the mid-fifties auctioneer; Gheeta put her age at about thirty-two. Slim and attractive, she obviously took care with her appearance and greeted them in an expensive Ted Baker blouse and dress, that ran par with the Mulberry handbag left casually, maybe purposely, on the worktop in the Fenn’s kitchen. She sat at the table while Palmer showed her the pictures one by one; it wasn’t yielding any faces she recognised.
He came to the last one.
‘No. Sorry, don’t know him either.’
Gheeta wasn’t sure whether this was the truth, or just the expected reaction from a recent widow whose husband had been tied in with some criminal actions. Fear usually triumphed over honesty; if somebody or some gang could murder your husband, then why not you? Silence could be the best option.
Palmer stroked his chin, rose from the table and wandered over to look out of the window onto the small, but immaculate garden.
‘Who’s the gardener Mrs Fenn, you or your late husband?’
‘Me.’
‘My wife’s the gardener in our house too. It’s a lot of work. You’ve obviously got green fingers, it looks lovely.’
Gheeta smiled to herself. Palmer was taking the ‘shared interest’ route to break down the wall that Sylvia Fenn seemed to have put up between them.
‘Thank you.’
‘Did you notice anything strange about Sidney’s behaviour lately, any changes to his regular routine?’
‘No, everything was good. In fact he was having his best time ever financially. Lots of top end fine art coming in for his sales.’
‘I have to tell you, Mrs Fenn, that he was on the Art Crime Unit’s list of people to keep an eye on. But that was probably because he’d moved into an area where a few, shall we say, suspicious characters operate, namely the bullion market. But I expect he was just seen with them in the course of his legitimate business, eh?’
Palmer was laying paths for Sylvia Fenn to take as a way out of her apparent lack of knowledge of her husband’s dodgy dealings, which Palmer, like Gheeta, felt sure was not true. She knew more than she was letting on.
Mrs Fenn took a deep breath.
‘Well… There were two men he dealt with over the last couple of years that I told him I didn’t feel very comfortable with; but it was his business and he said they were kosher.’
She shrugged.
‘Kosher,’ thought Gheeta. So, underneath the designer West End clothes lurked an East End girl, eh?
‘Any names attached to these men?’
Palmer feigned disinterest by still peering out at the garden, but inside his copper’s heart skipped a beat in anticipation as he awaited the hoped-for answer.
‘Yes, one was a Mr Finlay, I never knew his first name. Sid always referred to him as just Finlay. Could have been his first name, I suppose. I only met him twice. To be honest I didn’t like him at all. Young flash type.’
The name didn’t register with Palmer.
‘You said there were a couple you didn’t feel comfortable with. Who was the other one?’
‘I don’t know his name, he was always with the Finlay chap. But I never was introduced, and he rarely spoke. Heavily built, older than Finlay; around the forty-five to fifty mark I would have thought.
Charles Plant, thought Palmer. He noticed Gheeta taking notes.
‘The Finlay man, were there any peculiar things about him? Broken nose, three eyes?’
He turned and smiled at Mrs Fenn. She smiled back. Gheeta smiled at her too, but she knew this light attitude from Palmer was just to relax the woman and make her memory sharper.
‘Nothing really, but he was always very smartly dressed and his shoes positively gleamed. I always notice a man’s shoes. It gives away his character my mum used to say.’
Palmer was glad his black brogues were clean and polished. Good old Mrs P., even after forty-five years of marriage she would always stand in front of him before he left for the Yard each day and straighten his tie, check his shoes, and put his trilby to the right angle. He smiled at Mrs Fenn.
‘I’m glad mine are clean then. What colour hair did Finlay have?’
‘Jet black, very distinguished. I think it was dyed. Oh!’ she said, seeming to recall something else. ‘And a pencil moustache – I always thought he looked like that chap in Gone With The Wind, but a bit younger.’
‘Clarke Gable?’ Gheeta suggested. Palmer was impressed.
‘Yes, that’s him; very suave. Except his speech wasn’t, that was basic East End.’
‘Bangladeshi?’
It was Palmer’s little joke. Gheeta smiled in appreciation.
‘No, no. English, Cockney like.’
His joke was lost on Sylvia Fenn.
‘Oh, right.’
Palmer picked up his trilby from the back of a Windsor chair where he’d parked it on entering.
‘Right then, well, thank you for your time Mrs Fenn. I think we’ve got a few bits to get to work on, so we’ll leave you in peace. You know where to contact us if you need to.’
‘I hope you catch them Mr Palmer, I really do. How can you do such things to another human?’
‘Don’t get up we can see ourselves out. And I’m sure we will catch them, we always do in the end.’
They bade their farewells and left. In the car on the way back to the Yard, Palmer was unconvinced.
‘She didn’t seem very upset at her husband’s death, did she?’
‘You noticed that too eh, guv? I thought it, but people are very resilient at those times. Some can hold in the grief in public, and let it all out in private.’
‘True, but I think we ought to put Plant and Fenn into your comparison programmes. I reckon Plant was the older chap; with this Finlay character it would tie in. And s
ee if we can’t find a connection between the two of them, Plant and Fenn, other than just the Art Crime department’s suspicions. Need something rock solid. Have Claire get hold of Fenn’s yearly business account statements from Companies House and give them the once over. Let’s hope Gregg comes up with an ID on this Finlay character, that would help.’
Chapter 6
George Gregg couldn’t come up with anything on the Finlay character; Art Crime didn’t have any Finlay on their list of persons of interest. Sussex CID had been busy and trawled the local council files for people who had ordered asbestos refuse bags in the three months prior to Charles Plant’s murder and checked them against known felons in the area. No match, nothing.
‘That’s a shame,’ sighed Palmer as he read the negative result in the Team Room as it came off the printer.
Gheeta was on one PC pulling up Plant and Fenn’s family trees. Claire was checking the CCTV footage from various premises around the Cross Rail excavation for the evening and night before Fenn’s body had been found.
‘This is a bit strange, sir.’
She looked over at Palmer who turned his attention to her.
‘What is?’
‘The cement tanker. They moved it.’
‘What cement tanker?’
‘The one delivering a load late on the night before the body was found,’ Claire explained.
Palmer stood behind her, as did Gheeta.
‘Right, so what’s strange about it?’
‘Well, look.’
Claire played the CCTV footage on her screen.
‘See, the cement tanker comes into the place… and parks up next to the big hole. One man gets out and releases the pipe from the back and dangles it over into the hole. He goes to the back of the vehicle and is about to release the cement through the pipe, when the driver leans from the cab window and stops him. The driver is waving his arm and pointing towards us – us being the CCTV camera. They exchange shouts. The pipe is put back into its clips and the tanker is re-positioned, see? Repositioned so that the back of it is obscured from the CCTV camera’s view. Then the driver joins the other man at the back and, we presume, they unload the cement into the hole.’
LOOT & I'M WITH THE BAND: The DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad series by B.L.Faulkner. Cases 5 & 6 (DCS Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad cases Book 3) Page 2