‘Yes, it’s not a company but a person – I got his address from his bank which was the one that received and processed the cheques from Fenn. Whoever he or maybe she is, they live at The Manor House, Hove, Sussex. Anyway, I’ve written out a full report on my findings for you in here.’
He passed over a neatly labelled folder.
‘If there is anything else I can help with, give Reg Frome a call and I’m sure he’ll let me help.’
He stood to leave. Palmer stood and shook his hand.
‘Excellent work Peter, bloody excellent; it knits the whole case together for us. Thank you very much.’
‘My pleasure, sir. Hope to work with you both again soon. Oh, and by the way, on Reg’s instruction I’ve sent a copy of the report up to Bateman’s office. Reg said you’d understand.’
Chapter 15
It didn’t take Claire long to do a complete ID check on Mr S Leyton of The Manor House, Hove; very easy really, as he was the high-profile Mr Stanley Leyton MP for the area.
‘Well, well, well,’ Palmer smiled as he read the findings. ‘I can see the newspaper headlines already: MP in Money Laundering Auction Scam.’
‘I think you’ll find this more interesting, guv.’
Gheeta had been quietly working away on her terminal and handed him a print out,
‘His father was Colonel George Leyton RE, whose unit was attached to the USA 90th Division in the spring of 1945.’
She smiled broadly.
‘Okay, Sergeant – stop doing an impression of the cat that got the cream and tell me why that’s important.’
‘The 90th Division was the Division that opened up the Merker’s salt mine.’
‘The Nazi gold mine that Reg talked about?’
‘Exactly, and according to army records Colonel Leyton’s unit was with 90th to repair bridges and do general repair and upgrade work on the infrastructure that the Germans had destroyed in retreating, so that they could advance quickly and keep the advance going.’
Palmer started to read Gheeta’s print out.
‘As I recall, Reg said a few US troops went home very rich from that mine – looks like we might have found an English Colonel who did the same . Bring in your bucket and spade tomorrow, Sergeant – looks like we are going for a trip to the seaside.’
Claire laughed.
‘Bring me back a stick of rock.’
‘Thought you were more the ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hat type,’ Palmer laughed. ‘And by the way Sergeant,’ he said, turning to Gheeta, ‘It didn’t escape my notice that you said the information you got was from Army Records. I take it that we aren’t officially allowed to access those records without Ministry permission, and it was gleaned using one of your, shall we say, bespoke computer programmes?’
‘I take the fifth amendment sir.’
‘Okay, just that I need to know so that I don’t put anything in Bateman’s damn daily report that could backfire on us.’
‘Daily report, sir?’
Gheeta feigned amazement.
‘I thought you said daily reports were just red tape and a waste of time and you’d never ever do one?’
‘I did. But Bateman went bananas about it and threatened early retirement if they weren’t done’
‘Mrs P. would like that, guv. She’s always telling me you should take the money and retire.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be my early retirement Sergeant. I told Bateman that I’d delegated the filing of daily reports to you.’
Chapter 16
That evening Gheeta sat at her dressing table in the bedroom of her Barbican apartment, deep in thought. She had arranged all her gold jewellery on the dressing table in front of her, glinting as the dying rays from the sinking sun lit it through the panoramic window. She stood and slowly walked through into her living room and stood looking down onto the Thames five storeys below, flowing slowly past as the tide began to turn; the fading sunlight hitting the bow waves from the passing boats flashed and glinted up at her.
She didn’t think she could wear any of that gold again; not now, not after what she knew about where it might, just might, have come from. How would she feel? She didn’t feel good now, just thinking that some part, however small, of her bracelets, necklaces and rings, could be from the body of a POW, their ashes sifted for gold in some awful camp. Christ, what a conundrum for her Asian race –a race that loves its gold so much, profiting from the awful crimes perpetrated on another race by a vicious, awful regime. She wondered if her parents and relatives who had given her these Christmas and birthday presents had ever thought along those lines. But then almost everybody likes gold, not just Asians; and the Royal Mint used tons of it every year on commemorative coins to part gullible collectors from their money. Did they question its pedigree? Even Palmer hadtwo gold teeth. Did he ever think that some part of them could be from the gold teeth of Holocaust victims? She inhaled deeply. The matter of conscience was a hard one to answer.
Her computer pinged and broke her chain of thought. Aunty Raani from America was on Skype.
‘Hello aunty, ‘Gheeta said, settling in front of the screen and turning her webcam on. ‘How are you?’
‘Gheeta, I am very well thank you and so are your uncle and cousins. I have a favour to ask you.’
Gheeta knew what was coming.
‘Who is he this time, aunty?’
It was a long, ongoing quest by her mother and her aunts to find a suitable husband for Gheeta; her father would never consent to an arranged marriage, and knew that Gheeta could well handle the overtures the older ladies of the family made about her single person status. Gheeta was very much her own woman and liked the independence she could afford as a police officer, combined with the healthy annual dividend payment from her shares in the family IT business. An electronic business started by her father as an asylum immigrant fleeing Idi Amin’s brutal Uganda regime in the 1970’s, the business was now internationally respected, supplying computer and mobile phone parts to major suppliers and government organisations worldwide.
Aunty Raani dismissed Gheeta’s bored response with a wave of her hand.
‘He is the son of a very old friend of your uncle. They have a very good business in manufacturing jewellery here in New York, and he is coming over to England to find a suitable shop premises in London – the better part of London, of course. I have said you may be able to assist him. He is very handsome too.’
‘There are lots of very handsome young men in London already, aunty. Maybe I am seeing one of them already.’
Aunty Raani’s face lit up.
‘You are? Who is he? Who is his family? What do they do?’
‘Whooah! I said ‘maybe’ – and in any case I really don’t have time to be a London guide. We are very busy at work.’
‘Chasing criminals.’
Aunty Raani shook her head in disappointment.
‘That is not a job of work for a young lady, Gheeta Singh; not at all.’
Gheeta was feeling tired.
‘Okay, Aunty – give him my number and tell him to ring me when he’s here, and I’ll see what I can do. Now I really do have to go. Give my love to the family. Good night…or good morning, or whatever it is in New York.’
She clicked off the connection before Aunty Raani could tread the usual conversation course of ‘your mother would like to have grandchildren’; the fact that Gheeta’s brothers already had five ‘grandchildren’ for her mother to spoil seemed to be of no consequence.
In her current state of mind, Gheeta could think of nothing worse than showing an Asian jeweller around London.
Chapter 17
‘I thought it was ‘toad-in-the-hole’ tonight?’
Palmer stood in his kitchen as Mrs P. pulled a dish from the microwave and unveiled a supermarket ‘meal-for-one’. She put it on the kitchen table and took a knife and fork from the drawer and handed them to him.
‘It was going to be, but Benji went into hospital this morning and what with taking his
laundry to the cleaners, tidying up his kitchen and then taking some clean clothes into him this afternoon, I haven’t had time to cook anything.’
Benji, real name Benjamin, was Palmer’s next-door neighbour; a retired advertising executive, early sixties going on twenty-one, with pony tail, spray tan, designer clothes, and as far as Palmer could ascertain by the way he spoke, waved his hands about and walked in tiny steps like Poirot, of dubious sexuality – although of course Palmer wouldn’t think to broach that subject to Mrs P. who, together with most of her lady friends, thought Benji a wonderful man. Benji had obviously taken a large pension with his retirement as he took numerous expensive holidays, had a new car every year, spent a fortune on anything he took a fancy to, and was a great favourite with Mrs P., her gardening club, and the local WI. In fact, Palmer was quite jealous of him and the attention he got from the women of the area – attention that used to fall on Palmer quite a lot before Benji arrived on the scene.
‘Has he had an accident then?’
He showed false concern as he sat at the table and looked at the Sainsbury’s offering in front of him.
‘What’s this?’
Mrs P. was busying herself putting on her coat.
‘He’s having a new hip. It’s chicken korma.’
‘What’s wrong with his old hip?’
He refrained from eating the mustard-coloured mess in the dish, mentally earmarking it for Daisy the dog’s bowl as soon as Mrs P. left.
‘Osteoporosis, it’s very common. The joints wear out.’
‘His shouldn’t, he doesn’t do anything to wear them out. Can’t wear them out by sitting in the garden sipping wine all day or mincing down the shops in your flip flops.’
‘Don’t start.’
Mrs P. was fully aware of Palmer’s opinion of Benji, and she gave him a cold stare as she buttoned her coat.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Hospital – I said I’d pop in to see how he is. Three of us from the Gardening Club are going along; cheer him up a little, take some flowers in. Mrs Haskin is driving.’
She glanced at the kitchen clock.
‘They’ll be here any minute.’
‘You saw him this afternoon when you took his clothes in! He’ll be just the same, just a few hours older.’
‘He had the operation this afternoon. I didn’t see him then as he was in recovery. It’s very quick these days; in one day and out two days later.’
‘Did he go private?’
‘No, NHS. He’s in Kings College.’
‘The cheeky bugger – all the money he’s got and he goes NHS. That means the tax payer is funding his new hip; me.’
‘I would expect he’s paid more tax in his working life than you and most other taxpayers. The nurse on the ward was saying the cost for his new hip is twenty-three thousand pounds.’
‘Blimey… What’s he having, a gold one?’
‘I don’t know what they’re made of.’
A car horn sounded outside.
‘That’s them.’
She patted Daisy the dog and gave Palmer a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.
‘Right, I’m off. I’ll try not to wake you if you’re in bed when I get back. And eat that korma before it gets cold.’
And she was gone. Palmer put the meal on the floor by the dog. Daisy sniffed it and turned and walked off into the lounge. Palmer laughed.
‘Yes, I agree.’
He popped outside the back door and emptied it into the compost bucket, before taking a lump of mature cheddar from the fridge and opening the bread bin.
Chapter 18
Mrs P. half opened her sleepy eyes and checked the luminous dial of the bedside alarm clock. Two twenty AM.
‘What are you doing?
She peered over the duvet to where Palmer was peeping through the bedroom curtains into the night.
‘Nothing, Princess. I thought I heard a car pull up. Just making sure it wasn’t for me. Something might have happened in the case I’m working on that needed my presence.’
Mrs P. pulled the duvet back snugly around her.
‘They would have rung you.’
Palmer made his way back to the bed.
‘Anyway, there’s nothing there so go back to sleep.’
He had heard a car quietly pull up and the engine cut out, and the thought of Harry Robson turning up with a firebomb or similar had got him quickly out of bed and to the window. Across the road, away from the street lamp, a car was parked. Palmer saw it just as the sidelights went out. He could make out two occupants, a driver and a passenger in the front. Then he made out the number plate. It was a squad car from Brixton CID pool.
He made his way back to bed, smiling to himself. So, Bateman was concerned enough about his welfare to get surveillance mounted on him at night, eh? Perhaps the Assistant Commissioner wasn’t such an arsehole after all.
Assistant Commissioner Bateman was sound asleep in his bed, content in the knowledge that he’d covered his ‘duty of care’ to his employees charter by having the South Thames Region make a few patrol stops during the night outside Palmer’s house.
Part of him would have liked Robson to blow the irritating old sod to kingdom come. If that did happen, now at least he’d covered his own back.
The pale moonlight couldn’t penetrate the thick rambling buddleia against the side wall of the Palmer front garden; so the officers in the squad car pulling away to answer another call didn’t notice the dark hooded figure crouched hidden within it. When it was sure they were well away from the area, the figure slowly and quietly came out of the undergrowth and keeping in the shadows of the wall and house, made its way to the porch.
Once inside the porch it knelt by the front door and listened for a minute. All was quiet within. Taking a plastic washing up liquid squirter from its pocket, the figure flipped open the cap and began quietly squirting the liquid through the letter box. A smell of petrol wafted back.
Curled up in her comfy bed at the bottom of the Palmer residence stairs, Daisy the Springer raised her head and paid attention as the letter box opened and the tube appeared. This wasn’t normal. Normal was the letter box to open early on Sunday morning and the master’s papers to be pushed through. No, this was not at all normal; especially when a horrid-smelling liquid trickled from the tube. She got out of her basket, stretched her back legs and padded quickly upstairs to the master’s bedroom.
Nudging open the door, she went to Palmer’s side of the bed and putting her front paws up onto it, licked his face.
Palmer was quickly awake, alert and out of bed in a trice. Something had scared Daisy downstairs, and she was telling him so. His first thought was Harry Robson. He came onto the landing and smelt the petrol; his heart beat like a drum as he grabbed the baseball bat he kept behind the bathroom door, switched on the lights and hurried downstairs to face the would-be arsonist.
‘Shit!’
The figure in the porch saw the lights come on and put the box of matches it was about to ignite and toss through the letter box back in its pocket. It backed quickly out of the porch as Palmer reached the hallway and switched on the porch and front garden floodlights.
Keeping close to the wall, the figure was out of the garden and running silently in soft trainers along Palmer’s road and then down two unlit side streets, and it was gone into the night.
Chapter 19
‘I can’t understand Mrs P. taking it so calmly, guv. I’d be out of there and booked into a hotel by now. Christ! What if the bastard had set it alight?’
‘Well he didn’t, did he? And in any case, the amount squirted through wouldn’t have made a very big fire. Would have been able to put it out easily, which is why I wonder what the idea really was. Trying to scare me off the case, or somebody trying to get Robson fitted up? His threats against me in the past are very well known in certain circles; somebody could have latched onto them to settle their own score with me. I’ve made quite a few enemies in my time.’
‘Forensics get anything?’
‘Yes, interesting that. Whoever it was wore size six trainers.’
‘Size six? Then it’s going to be a youngster, guv. Some kid you banged up looking for revenge?’
‘I haven’t banged up, as you put it, any youngsters lately – and Harry Robson couldn’t get his feet into a size six.’
‘Going to be a female then?’
‘Could well be.’
‘Have you been upsetting any ladies lately then, guv? Spurned any romantic overtures?’
Gheeta put her finger to her lips.
‘You can tell me. My lips are sealed.’
They both laughed.
‘Mind you,’ Gheeta continued seriously. ‘Robson could have paid somebody to do it?’
Palmer nodded.
‘He would have done exactly that if it was him. He always was a two-step villain.’
‘Two step?’
‘An old trick: you always put two steps between you and the crime. If Harry Robson had wanted my house torched, he’d have told one of his mates to sort it out, and his mate would have got some other toe rag to do it. Then if the toe rag got caught he’d have no idea who originally ordered the score, leaving Harry in the clear.’
They were in a Sussex Constabulary panda car heading for The Manor House, Hove to see Mr Stanley Leyton MP. Having been awake most of the night as Forensics did all they could in his hall and porch, Palmer had taken the opportunity to sleep all the way down on the train from Victoria Station to Brighton. Sergeant Singh left him to it and went over the case history documents in her shoulder bag and used the train Wi-Fi to read up on Brinks Mat.
‘I think they’d know that wild horses wouldn’t drag you off a case, guv. Let alone scare tactics.’
She looked out of the side window as they came into Hove.
‘Nice houses around here, aren’t they? Bet they cost a bomb.’
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 6