by Marcia Woolf
In the light of the flickering candles, now reduced to a pool of shining wax, I could see tears streaming silently down Dirk’s face and dripping unheeded from his chin. He reached out, and put one arm around me and the other around Dora, and the three of us stood huddled together in the freezing cold. Then the lights came on.
Instinctively, I pulled away.
“My God. You think I killed him, don’t you? That’s what this is all about.”
Dirk opened his mouth to speak but I wouldn’t let him.
“You’ve discussed it and you think that Hayden wasn’t up the ladder. You think we had a row and I killed him somehow and made it look like an accident. Why is it always me? Why don’t you think Jack killed him, or Shirley? Christ knows, they were both mad at him.”
I glared at Dirk, expecting him to be angry, but he didn’t move, didn’t react at first.
“It was a long time ago, Cookie. The inquest decided it was an accident. That’s what you said, you and Jack, and Shirley.”
“Except now you’re saying Shirley was too drunk to know what happened. And obviously, Jack yelling no, no, no means it wasn’t him – so that just leaves me. So what’s it to be, then? A nice cosy cover-up, just between us three? Or shall we ring for the police?”
Dirk ran a hand through his hair. He walked over towards the fake fire, which had switched itself on with the lights, and stood gazing into the flames.
“We aren’t going to say anything, are we, Dora? We just want to know the truth.”
Dora nodded at me and tried to take hold of my arm, but I drew away.
“The truth? Well, I can tell you he wasn’t trying to commit suicide.”
Dirk spun round, exasperated.
“We all know that was nonsense. Whoever started that rumour was an idiot.”
“It took hold though, didn’t it? Enough people thought that was the truth, at the time. Every redneck who could get his hands on a copy of the National Enquirer swallowed that crap. Then the coroner decided it was an accident. Now you’re telling me it was murder.”
“Dora knows what she heard, and I have to say that I believe her.”
“And what good will it do, if I say she’s right? Hayden’s dead. Shirley’s dead. Jack’s already in prison. There’s only me left to punish.”
They stood, waiting. The flat was starting to warm up now that the power had returned. I took off my coat.
“Fine. There’s a small problem, though. Now Shirley’s gone, the only person who can corroborate what I tell you is Jack, and he’s very unlikely to oblige. Do you still want to hear it?”
They exchanged a glance, and Dora whispered yes.
“Okay, I admit we were all in the library together and there was a row about Jack and me. Hayden had found out about us. He was furious. He blamed Jack first of all, but then he started yelling at Shirley that it was her fault and that Jack wasn’t normal. He said she protected him and lied for him and he would drag us all down because of his – what did he say? Oh yes, lack of moral rectitude. I ask you. Shirley was totally smashed. She threw her whisky glass at Hayden but it missed and broke against the door. Then she picked up the ashtray from the coffee table and went to throw that as well, but Hayden tried to grab it and they started shoving each other. That’s when Jack yelled no, no. I didn’t know how to stop them. Shirley pushed Hayden hard, and he lost his balance and fell backwards over the coffee table and hit his head on the fireplace. It all happened so quickly. Shirley stopped yelling and then she screamed, and then stood totally still, staring vacantly ahead of her. Jack was hopeless. Had no idea what to do. So I checked to see if Hayden was breathing, and he wasn’t. I said, ‘he’s dead,’ but I knew that if we called the police everything would come out about Jack and me, and we’d be separated and taken away from the house, and Shirley would be in big trouble. You have to understand, Dirk: she didn’t know what she’d done. And Jack was just a kid: he couldn’t have coped on his own. I got Jack to help me move the library steps and put the coffee table back with the ashtray on it. We pulled some books off the top shelf to make it look like Hayden had grabbed at them as he was falling, and we moved his body slightly, to make the angle of the fall look different. Then I called the police.”
Both Dirk and Dora were listening intently as I reeled off my story. Now Dora was crying again, but Dirk remained silent, frowning.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” I said. “What now, then?”
Dirk breathed out shakily.
“And this is the truth?”
“Of course it is! Look, the Coroner was right. It was an accident. Shirley didn’t mean to kill him. Why the hell do you think she drank herself to death? If I hadn’t done what I did that night, then Shirley would have gone to prison and God knows what would’ve happened to Jack and me.”
“You’re right,” said Dirk. “It’s a very unsatisfactory explanation. If I speak to Jack, will I get the same story from him? How do I know you haven’t agreed this between you, to put the blame onto Shirley?”
“Dirk, please.”
Dora sat down and stared at her shoes. It was eight o’clock.
“I’m sorry you don’t believe me,” I said. And that was most certainly the truth.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wednesday 3rd December
What Everybody Knows
The next day I had to return to the police station for more questioning. I was surprised to be taken into a rather superior category of interview room with heating and padded chairs. There was no sign of Ollie or Dawn, of course, but after a few minutes spent admiring the décor I was joined by a tall dark-haired man who looked vaguely familiar. Then I remembered him as the guy who’d visited Ollie in hospital when I was there in fancy dress, although he showed no sign of recognizing me. The Big Chief Superintendent himself, Graham Bassinet. Close behind him came another man, shorter and sterner-looking, with an indecisive moustache, neither lustrous nor clipped, almost like a joke-shop disguise he’d just applied. Bassinet introduced him in an offhand way as Mr Bluett: an observer, apparently. I smiled politely and he smiled back, revealing a row of tiny yellowing teeth, stained by decades of nicotine abuse. Bassinet took charge of proceedings while Bluett opened up a notebook and took out a pen.
“Miss Garrity, the purpose of this discussion is to ascertain your role in the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into Lars Henning Nilsson and CBIB Bank. Our discussion is, I assure you, merely exploratory, entirely confidential and is not being recorded, other than in the contemporaneous notes being taken by Mr Bluett.”
“That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?”
“Indeed. You’re an intelligent woman, Miss Garrity, so I won’t beat about the bush. This case began as a straightforward fraud investigation, inasmuch as any fraud is ever straightforward, and became a rather more complex matter quite quickly. There are some – shall we say – involvements in this case which mean we have had to take exceptional steps in order to manage it.”
“I see. But I don’t quite understand why you’re telling me this.”
Bassinet twisted the gold wedding band on his finger thoughtfully, as if it had some inspiring property like a genie’s lamp.
“The thing is, Miss Garrity, your involvement – which was certainly never intended to happen – turned out to be very useful for us. I’m sorry that you seem to have had some rather worrying experiences lately.”
I stared at him.
“Worrying experiences? Like what, exactly?”
He could barely contain a smirk. “Involving archive boxes, for example. I do apologise wholeheartedly for that.”
“And other worrying experiences?”
“Your encounter in the office with Mr Henning Nilsson yesterday. Your meeting in the Royal Academy with – with a woman.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I thought you were talking about the two guys in the grey Mercedes.”
Bassinet and Bluett exchanged a puzzled look.
“Grey Mercedes? I’
m sorry...”
“Ah. Not yours then. Never mind.”
“Miss Garrity, if you have been followed by anybody in a grey Mercedes, I assure you it wasn’t anything to do with this investigation.”
“And being shot at when we were outside The Anchor? Does that count as a worrying experience?”
Another puzzled look.
“No. Worrying, yes, of course. But nothing to do with this matter.”
“Even though DCI Sullivan was shot at as well? And Dawn Sayler? Any of that part of this investigation?”
Bassinet coughed and looked over to his colleague, who was tapping the end of his pencil rhythmically on the blank page. Bassinet leaned towards me.
“Perhaps we can come back to the shooting at a later date. And the Mercedes. The thing is, you became involved in the Nilsson investigation entirely of your own volition, didn’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“What I mean is, DCI Sullivan or DI Sayler, they didn’t at any time persuade you to become involved, did they? You weren’t recruited as an informer?”
“No. I may have said that—”
“You did say that, Miss Garrity. In your statement to the police on 2nd November.”
“I didn’t want to get Ollie – DCI Sullivan – into trouble. Or Dawn Sayler. For consorting with a known criminal, that’s the phrase isn’t it?”
Bassinet smiled. “I understand that the relationship went beyond what might be described as consorting.”
“DCI Sullivan told you that?”
“He had to, once you’d had your encounter with DC Kumar at the Bank.”
“Ah. Yes. Not my finest hour.”
Bassinet smiled again. He seemed to be warming to me, but perhaps the central heating was just turned up too high.
“The fact is, Miss Garrity, that, unless we can come to an understanding, there will, inevitably, be some disciplinary action taken against both DCI Sullivan and DI Sayler as a result of your unorthodox relationship.”
“I see. And they could be made to leave the force over it?”
“That depends.”
Bluett shifted uncomfortably in his seat and wrote something in the notebook. He nodded at Bassinet to carry on.
“You were very helpful to us in tracking down some useful information on Project Alphabet.”
“I did very little. Susie – DC Dillon – had already done most of the work. I just found the notes and handed them over. I’m sorry, by the way. About Dillon. An awful way to end up. Do you know who killed her?”
“I can’t say at this stage. We know how she was killed though.”
“Really? I hope she didn’t suffocate in one of those archive boxes.”
Bassinet looked at me hard for a moment or two, and then blushed a virulent purple. Yes, I thought, it’s quite a joke, isn’t it? Just the thing to have a laugh about. You should try it, mate. He coughed.
“Actually, she was killed by a blow to the back of the head.”
“How awful.”
“Almost exactly the same method of attack as used in the Cascarelli case that you were involved with, down in Sussex.”
Why Bassinet should mention that, at this particular point in our discussion, was a mystery, but he had obviously been reading up on my personal history.
I said, “You can’t think the two are connected, surely?”
He glanced at Bluett.
“No, no. I was merely remarking on the coincidence. You seem to be something of a magnet for that type of assault, Miss Garrity.”
Cheeky bastard, I thought. I wasn’t going to rise to the bait though.
“As you say, coincidence.”
Bluett piped up. I use the term advisedly. He had a thin reedy voice at odds with his rotund belly; a scraping intonation that a crueller person than me might describe as wheedling.
“The weapon used was one of those awards we found in the stationery room.”
“A tombstone? Oh dear. I don’t suppose you know which one?”
He looked startled.
“Which one? Is that relevant?”
I shrugged, while he rummaged through the back pages of his notebook.
“Van Helsing Pyrotechnica. Mean anything to you?”
“Sounds like a fireworks manufacturer.”
He frowned.
“Miss Garrity, could we just come back to the key points, please? You applied for a job at CBIB entirely of your own volition, without any prompting or suggestion from DCI Sullivan or DI Sayler, or anyone else from the Metropolitan Police Fraud and Financial Crime Unit?”
I nodded.
“To the extent that you provided a fictitious CV and a forged reference?”
Another nod.
“And then you provided the National Insurance number of a Miss Donna Cardew, which you claimed was your own?”
“I’m afraid so. It was a delaying tactic.”
“It rather spectacularly backfired. The person you gave it to had personal contact with the tax office.”
“What? Lucy Fleming? Miss Carswell?”
“Yes. You see, Fiona Carswell is a member of HMRC’s investigations team.”
“You mean she was working there undercover as well?”
Bassinet gave another smirk.
“Undercover. I wouldn’t say as well in this context, Miss Garrity, since you were only there under false pretences.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise this was going to be a lesson in semantics. So Lucy, Fiona, whatever she’s calling herself, knew right from the off that I wasn’t who I said I was? Why didn’t she say anything?”
“Oh, she did. Just not to us at the Met. She complained about your presence to her boss – Dame Sally Dannatt.”
There are times, days, when I wonder if I’m living in a parallel universe. Bassinet went over to a cupboard by the door, opened it, and took out a kettle, some cups and saucers and a few ominous little sachets of what I feared might be called coffee. He filled the kettle from a bottle of mineral water and switched it on.
“Dame Sally Dannatt’s team had been investigating CBIB for quite a while before the Met’s Fraud Unit were alerted to the allegations about Nilsson. Completely different matter, concerning Swiss Defence IT contracts, which I believe you know about?”
I tried to appear vague. He looked incredulous.
“Anyway, to cut a long story short, whilst Her Majesty’s Revenue was aware of what we were doing, and appeared to be taking a hands-off interest in it, they neglected to inform anybody at the Met that they already had an operative in position.”
“So Lucy knew about Sam Dillon, and about me?”
“Exactly.”
“And Lucy – sorry, Fiona Carswell – was investigating the bank as a whole, or just Nilsson?”
The boiling kettle clicked off loudly, and Bassinet began to assemble the drinks. He groped around in a box in the cupboard and extracted three small containers of long-life milk.
“Oh, the entire London team at CBIB. Then we rather muddied the water by starting to look at Nilsson specifically, in response to an alert raised by a member of the public. This Alphabet Game business.”
“Then Sam Dillon went missing?”
“Yes, which was only a little worrying at first, until you went in and took over her job, which rather confirmed our fears about her.”
“You mean Sullivan knew, when he found out I was working at the bank, that Sam Dillon could have been killed, and yet he carried on letting me go into work? He knew I was in danger?”
“I’m sure he was concerned. But you had rather got yourself into the situation.”
He handed me a cup of watery brown liquid, with milk and sugar portions nestling in the saucer alongside a badly-stained teaspoon. Bluett butted in again.
“As it happens, it was very convenient for us that you volunteered yourself for the role.”
“Convenient! Is that what you call it? You were using me.”
“I understand that Dame Sally did intervene p
ersonally to warn you off, to no avail.”
“It didn’t feel like she was trying to do me a favour. Strange as it might seem, I thought she must be working for Nilsson.”
Bassinet smiled and offered me a cellophane wrapper containing two disintegrating custard creams. I waved them away. He opened the pack himself and brushed the resulting shower of crumbs onto the floor.
“Miss Garrity, the thing is, whilst we are very grateful to you for taking on the challenge of getting into the bank and retrieving the information we required, I just want to make it clear that you did so entirely voluntarily. You do see, don’t you, that any other motivation for becoming involved could reflect rather badly on certain members of our team?”
I let this sink in for a few moments while I sipped the vile brown stuff, trying to swallow without actually tasting.
“What you mean is, you want me to pretend that I went to work at the bank and found all this suspicious stuff on Project Alphabet and handed it in to the police like I’d found a lost purse in the street? And this just happened to be the very information you needed? And nobody in the Fraud Unit had any idea what I was doing, and nobody put me up to it, especially not DCI Sullivan or DI Sayler?”
Bassinet beamed.
“Exactly.”
“And Lucy – Fiona Carswell – is going to go along with that, is she?”
“She is. In fact, the Revenue are delighted to have had an excuse to piggy-back onto the Met investigation. It means they have access to all the confiscated data files and can conduct their own searches without anybody knowing they’ve done so. If Nilsson comes out of this clean, which is still possible, he won’t be any the wiser, and nor will anyone else at the bank nor – which is quite a coup – anyone in the Swiss Government.”
“Well, as you say, that certainly is convenient. So what do I get out of the deal?”
Bassinet popped the last piece of biscuit into his mouth.