by Janet Neel
‘The tape on the safe is unbroken, sir. Forensic took all the contents except the cash, which should be in the big safe in the outer office.’
‘It is.’ Judith Delves, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, had got the main safe open.
‘We’ll need to seal this office and take everything out,’ McLeish said, raising his voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, seeing Judith Delves’ face. ‘Someone must have been looking for something, you see.’
‘Cash, presumably. Someone knew we were a building site here and closed up after dark.’ She was very near the end of her rope, and McLeish remembered that it was her chef who lay unconscious in St Thomas’s, without whom reopening the restaurant must be difficult if not impossible.
‘Miss Delves, could we have a word?’
He led her back into the main office, indicating to Bruce Davidson that he should attend while the DC deployed himself elsewhere. He could hear someone coming up the stairs and turned to dispose of the interruption, but it was Matthew Sutherland, in a suit, a sight sufficiently unusual as to give him pause. The lad looked older and more sharply focused, the dark red hair short and tidy.
‘Chief Superintendent.’
‘Good morning, Mr Sutherland. How is your client?’
‘Still unconscious. I need to tell you without his formal consent about an agreement he has recently made. If Miss Delves has not already told you.’
‘I haven’t. Is it relevant, Matt?’
The relationship had obviously become easier between these two, he noted.
‘It feels as if it is,’ Matt Sutherland said, uncompromisingly, and she sighed, made coffee and they sat, she and Matthew perched on desks, and McLeish and Davidson disposed uneasily on the bent-wood chairs.
He listened to their joint recital, Matthew’s customary spare, economical clarity of explanation, somewhat blurred by Judith Delves, who was exhausted and repeating herself, and adding superfluous detail.
‘So you haven’t actually handed over the money, Mr Sutherland?’ he asked, when he was sure they had finished.
‘No. But they knew it was coming today. And Peter – Peter Graebner – made a call this morning and says he is reasonably sure they – the bookies – had nothing to do with the attack. Distressed to have their good faith called into question.’
‘The lass with him makes it clear that they were here for other reasons, and surprised an intruder,’ Bruce Davidson observed and got a direct look from Matthew.
‘My first thought, however, was that he’d been followed. Or that someone who knew his habits was lying in wait for him. It seemed better for the police not to waste time going down that track.’
‘I would have been glad to know about Mr Gallagher’s financial problems – and this agreement – a bit earlier.’
Judith Delves, blushing, started into an incoherent defence, but McLeish had addressed himself to Matthew and was waiting for an answer.
‘My client would have told you as soon as the money had been handed over.’
‘Why would you have advised him to wait until then?’ McLeish intended to remind young Sutherland that he was professionally an officer of the court, and saw from the way Matthew was gritting his back teeth that he had succeeded.
‘It was the best I could do,’ he said, baldly, and McLeish only just managed not to laugh. ‘And besides,’ he added, recovering ground fast, ‘we had no reason to believe that my client was your prime suspect in the murder of Mrs Marsh-Hayden. Quite the contrary, in fact.’
From Tuesday morning, when Richard Marsh-Hayden had ended up in hospital full of paracetamol, it had indeed been the case that the police were not seriously looking for anyone else for the murder, as McLeish mentally conceded.
‘I was instructed on Sunday in relation to this agreement.’ Matthew, who was fully as quick and observant as a good policeman, pressed his advantage.
‘You knew, however, before then that he was in financial difficulty.’
‘So did you. He came to me because the police had been stirring up his creditors.’
‘It’s not the same as being told, in good order. You don’t get the same answers.’ McLeish, stung, spoke evenly, and Matthew sat up straight on his uncomfortable perch.
‘I accept that. And you would have been told had we been asked, or had the information seemed relevant. As it now does.’
McLeish, accepting the formal stand-off, thought of delivering the weary speech about the life of investigating officers being made intolerable by people concealing information they did not think relevant, the innocent having nothing to fear, but desisted. It was the wrong audience; the majority of the Graebner Associates clients were guilty, and probably of more than what they were charged with. Matthew’s first duty, now and always, was to present his client’s best side and suppress the worst without actually misleading the police, and he knew it. But Bruce Davidson’s controlled fidget reminded him that all this was a bit more relevant than Matthew was admitting; Judith Delves now controlled twenty per cent rather than fifteen of the Café de la Paix shareholding. Well, it wasn’t the magic twenty-five per cent that you needed to get effectively in the way of the majority, but with the Marsh-Hayden shares in limbo, she had twenty per cent to Michael Owens’ thirty-two and a half, and could not at the moment be swept aside. He looked cautiously at Judith Delves; she was drinking coffee without tasting it, hands trembling on the cup, eyes fixed sightlessly on some internal obsession, still in shock.
‘Miss Delves, have you been up all night?’
‘Yes.’ She came back to herself and looked at him over her coffee cup. ‘And I must start ringing round to see if I can borrow a head chef. Just for a week from next Friday, just to get us open.’ She looked longingly at the telephone, then at her watch and reached over for more coffee, spilling a bit as she poured it.
Matthew Sutherland’s eyebrows had gone right up and McLeish mentally agreed with him. It was by no means a foregone conclusion that Tony Gallagher would recover consciousness, never mind be fit to turn out 250 covers in two weeks’ time. A tap at the door distracted him and he got off the chair carefully to open it.
‘Sir, excuse me. A Mr Owens is here, says can he see Miss Delves?’
‘Send him up.’ It would be a good moment to see where the relationship stood between the only two shareholders in Café de la Paix who were neither awaiting burial nor unconscious in hospital.
‘I’ve come to collect Judith,’ Michael Owens announced, uncompromisingly. He looked bigger out of a suit, dressed much as McLeish’s brothers-in-law, in jeans and a beautifully cut leather jacket. Only, McLeish observed, big lads like him ought not to wear leather jackets. His brothers-in-law had once dragged him to the excessively expensive shop which provided their jackets, and all, including the cutter, had agreed that no one of six foot four inches and built like the ex-rugby player he was could wear a leather jacket without looking as if they had just got off a motor-bike, no matter how careful the cut.
‘You’ll be at your office later?’ McLeish was prepared to let him sweep Judith Delves away; she was hardly likely to have been implicated in an attack on the chef, she needed him to reopen her treasured business. There was a difficult pause, and he sat up mentally.
‘No. I won’t be going in today.’ Owens was sounding constrained, and Judith Delves was looking agonised. She opened her mouth, visibly remembered Matthew Sutherland’s presence and closed it again.
‘Mr Sutherland. Thank you for coming. Where can we find you later today?’
‘I’m going to my office.’ Matthew was sounding unbearably smug, and McLeish gave him a look which got him out of the room, escorted by Davidson.
‘Mr Owens?’ he prompted, when Bruce Davidson had returned.
‘I won’t be going back to my office at all. I resigned yesterday.’
No one is fired in the City, Francesca had told him, unless found with both hands actually in the till. They resign, typically ‘to follow their own interests’. Like reading
the newspapers and sullenly taking the children out for walks, she had added The events at Café de la Paix seemed to have claimed another victim.
‘Have you been up all night as well?’ he asked, cautiously.
‘No.’ He realised Owens was in a rage. ‘No one told me what had happened but I got worried when I rang Judith this morning to wake her, as I had promised last night, and she wasn’t there. So I rang up here and heard what had happened.’
‘I’m sorry, Michael, but there wasn’t anything to be done. That couldn’t wait, I mean. And … and I knew you hadn’t had a good day, so I thought …’ Her voice trailed away and McLeish waited, poised to intervene; Judith’s reference to the events of yesterday had served only to inflame.
‘You thought wrong,’ Owens said, rudely. ‘But you’re not making sense generally, and you need some sleep. Come home, leave this lot here to get on, and they’ll call me at your flat if there’s any change in … at St Thomas’s.’ He reached for her hand, awkwardly. ‘Come on, darling. Home.’ She was sitting, unmoving, and looked at McLeish in complicated appeal, which Owens noticed. ‘Wait a minute. What was Matt Sutherland doing here? Looking for compensation for occupational injury for his client, I suppose?’ He looked enquiringly at the policemen who gazed back, stolidly.
‘No,’ Judith said, putting down her cup and visibly nerving herself to her task. ‘Although we may owe Tony, he did chase someone away. No. He had come to tell Mr McLeish … Chief Superintendent McLeish …’ She stopped and put a hand to her throat.
‘What?’ Michael Owens obviously wanted to shake her, but confined himself to glaring at the policemen.
‘That he had drawn up an agreement under which Mr Gallagher charged his shares to Miss Delves in return for a loan sufficient to pay off his gambling debts,’ McLeish said without expression.
‘You what?’ Michael Owens rounded on his fiancée. ‘You’re mad. You won’t get that back.’ He stared at her. ‘You were buying his shares. Or buying control of them at least.’
McLeish, out of sheer humanity, might have intervened, but Judith, exhausted, at war with her boyfriend, and having lent a substantial sum to her chef now lying unconscious in hospital, was weeping silently and pathetically, tears pouring down her face.
‘Oh God. Judith.’ Michael Owens scrabbled for a handkerchief and wiped her face for her with great tenderness, desperate to give comfort. ‘It’ll be all right, we’ll get through this, I’m here,’ he said, with love, totally unconscious of McLeish. ‘Come on, let’s get you home and into a bath, and it won’t all seem so bad.’ He looked round wildly, and McLeish handed him a box of Kleenex. ‘Right. Thanks. Look, Superintendent, you can see she’s not in shape to deal with anything. I’ll take her back and you can talk to her later.’
‘That’s fine,’ McLeish said, placidly. ‘I need also to take a statement from you.’
‘What about?’
‘We need to know where everyone was earlier this morning. At the time of the attack.’
‘Oh that, yes.’ He turned distractedly to Judith who was weeping silently but continuously down his shirt. ‘Well, I can tell you now if it will save bothering us later. We had dinner together, went back to Judith’s flat and I left, oh, about one o’clock I suppose – I wanted to get back to my own place. I drove myself.’
Only a rich man would have felt it necessary to state that qualification, McLeish thought, then pulled himself up. He, too, was driven more often than he drove, as senior policemen are.
‘And you didna drop by the Café for anything?’ Bruce Davidson asked.
‘No. It’s on my way home and I probably glanced at it, but I didn’t see anything out of the way. Or I would have stopped.’ He cradled Judith against his shoulder, stroking her back gently, making McLeish for all his experience feel like an intruder.
‘Was it all dark there, or did you see any light?’ Bruce Davidson, made evidently of sterner stuff, was pressing on.
‘I really didn’t look but I’m sure I would have noticed a light. So I guess there wasn’t one. Better now?’ This was addressed to Judith who was showing signs of recovery and feeling for a handkerchief. She looked up at him and nodded.
‘I ought to stay,’ she said, weakly.
‘Rubbish. Lots of competent people here.’
‘Tony isn’t.’
‘I’ve never quite trusted him, as you know.’ Judith’s face crumpled. ‘Sorry, don’t start again. But Marco is here, I saw him as I came in, so’s Mary, and those carpenters don’t need telling, they’re going like the clappers. It’s all all right. Come on.’
McLeish and Davidson, left in possession, waited a decent minute upon their exit and looked at each other.
‘Loves her, it seems.’
‘Oh aye. Thought he was going to carry her downstairs.’ Davidson brooded. ‘Wonder why he lost his job?’
‘We’ll need to check. But this lot can’t have helped. I don’t suppose merchant banks like their directors involved with murder.’
‘Or suicide.’
‘If that’s what it was.’
‘You’re no’ happy, John?’
‘Not quite, but you know how it is.’
‘This one was mebbe just an intruder, coming in to see what he could nick, hit out because Gallagher was between him and the door.’
‘Well, he knew what he was doing, didn’t he?’ McLeish said, slowly. ‘One blow, then another to make sure, Doc says – sorry, I had a message too – that’s what the X-ray says. He was looking for something, I don’t know what.’
‘He’d have had a job with the mess in there.’ Bruce Davidson objected. ‘Besides what was he looking for? Something in the accounts? They’re in the big safe. Miss Delves checked this morning.’
‘I don’t know, Bruce, but that’s what I think. Get Forensic on the blower and tell them we want that file of letters back soon as they can so we can look at them.’
Bruce Davidson was going through his case, methodically ‘Got it. A wee message from the Marsh-Hayden solicitors, asking if we can release both bodies. Both families want a funeral. ‘Course they do.’
McLeish sighed. ‘No. We can’t. I’ll talk to them.’
‘You’re really worried then, John?’
‘I’m not sure, but I’m not going to be hurried. We’ll go back now, and you make bloody sure no other bugger is taking any of the team away.’
Judith Delves woke from the deep sleep of physical and mental exhaustion and blinked at the familiar curtains. The light had shifted and she sat bolt upright, beset by anxiety. She scrabbled for her bedside alarm clock, couldn’t find it, and shot out of bed, panicked. She was wearing a nightdress, she observed, in her rush to the door and she remembered having a bath.
‘Michael,’ she said, ‘what’s the time?’
‘Just past six o’clock.’ She stared at him, distraught, and he raised a hand. ‘No need to panic. The carpenters should finish tomorrow, and I’ve told the decorators they’re on for Sunday. We need the time to clear up. Mary has rescued the management accounts from something called Forensic. I tried to go in and tidy up the back office, but it was full of policemen and I was told to go away.’
He was sounding justifiably smug, and she sank into a chair. ‘Tony?’
‘Still unconscious but no worse at three o’clock. Stable seems to be the word. I wasn’t allowed to see him either.’
‘But you tried. Thank you.’ He was boiling the kettle, his back to her and she remembered belatedly that he had only been free to do all of this because of his own professional disaster. She had been less than sympathetic too, she thought wearily, but yesterday nothing mattered to her much except getting the restaurant open and trading. ‘Darling?’ she said to his back. ‘Thank you for bringing me away this morning. I just … well, when I heard about Tony I seem to have gone a bit mad. It just all seemed impossible.’
He turned, with the neatness of the athletic, and put the tray down on the table and she saw that he was keeping hi
s temper with an effort. ‘You are a bit mad, darling. I brought you home because you were going to collapse and you will have a breakdown if you go on like this. Can you not accept that it is just too difficult to go on? It’s an enormous management responsibility even in normal times and when you’re trying to restore one restaurant at the same time, it’s just ridiculous.’
‘I do know,’ she said, gabbling in her anxiety. ‘I have to get a general manager, I do accept that, there just hasn’t been time.’
‘And a head chef. And a new sous chef, and two commis.’
‘A sous chef?’
‘Jean-Pierre resigned, not surprisingly. He wasn’t under any illusion about what his wife was doing there with his boss at one in the morning. She’s gone too, if you care about that. It’s just too much for you, and the more so if we are ever going to get married.’
She stared at the table, unable to marshal much of an argument, but suddenly heard Francesca McLeish telling her, with relish, the story of the convicted felon and Louis XIV’s horse, as an argument for procrastination when no advantage could be gained by action. ‘You’ve been very patient,’ she said, meekly, ‘and I will think about it all again. But we will all be in a weak position if we don’t get this place open. I feel I owe it to Richard and Selina. And Tony, who may be going to need money very badly. And us,’ she added, and wished she hadn’t when she saw his face.
‘There is no way,’ he said, teeth gritted, ‘that I could need the extra cash we just might get badly enough to put up with this kind of hassle. I should have got out a couple of years ago. I stayed in because I liked the people and felt, God help me, some loyalty to the place. But if you are thinking that I might want to work in this place, or to get the last sixpence out of selling it, forget it. I’ll be back in a job easily, you wait and see. I can earn several times what you’ll ever get out of here.’