The Ardmore Inheritance

by Rob Wyllie

  'Geordie.'

  'Yeah Geordie, soz. Anyway, watch this.'

  She punched in another few characters and a series of blue flashing dots appeared on the map.

  'So these are the locations where he sprayed that weird graffiti and you can see on the label below the dot the date and times he was there.'

  Frank stood up and peered at the screen through narrowed eyes.

  'Aye, so it's mainly in the London area but there's that one up in Manchester I can see. I'm guessing that's ACC Frost's place?'

  'I wouldn't mind getting an invite there myself some time,' Ronnie French said. 'Know what I mean?'

  'Two things Frenchie,' Frank said, giving him a wry smile. 'First, Assistant Chief Constable Frost clearly prefers women. Secondly, even if she didn't, an old fat bastard like you would have no chance.'

  'Doesn't bother me,' French said, shrugging. 'A man can dream, can't he?'

  'Aye, well dream on mate. Anyway Eleanor, where were we before we interrupted you?'

  'These are the locations where we know he was active,' she repeated, pointing at the flashing dots. 'So Jayden plugged the times and places into his cool software and ran a cross-reference sweep.'

  'It's cool,' Jayden confirmed, his lilting Caribbean accent a perfect match for his laid-back demeanour, 'but I can't take the credit for it. It was developed by a bunch of hucksters over at GCHQ, really smart guys. I just run it.'

  'Not just guys,' Eleanor said sharply.

  'I think Jayden means guys in the non-gender-specific sense,' Frank said, jumping in. The last thing he wanted was the easily-offended forensic officer having a punch-up with the spook who was going to help him crack the case.

  Jayden shrugged. 'Yeah, it's like Frank said. But we need to keep that kind of information secret, even the gender of the computer scientists. We don't want any of the bad guys getting to know too much. You'll appreciate that Eleanor of course.'

  Frank doubted if she did, but their joint intervention seemed to have calmed the situation.

  'Sweet,' she said, somewhat uncertainly. 'So can you demo it Jayden?'

  'Sure,' he said, 'pass me the keyboard.'

  She slid it along to him and without looking up, he punched in a few characters. On screen, a dense grid of numbers popped up to obscure the map, the rows scrolling downwards quicker than the eye could read.

  'This is the cell-phone sweep,' he said. 'There's a heap of tin in their datacentre so it can process six million records a minute. It's awesome.'

  'Tin,' Frank said, recalling Eleanor's earlier explanation. 'That's the computers, isn't it?'

  'Yeah, we call it tin,' French said, nodding. 'Us IT geeks.'

  Along the bottom of the display, a green progress bar was edging gradually towards one hundred percent.

  'Should only take another minute or so,' Jayden said, nodding towards the screen. 'We've ran it before so it'll remember all the index records. Speeds it up by a factor of eight, sometimes ten.'

  'Good to know,' Frank said, uncomprehending.

  The sat in silence as the computer sped towards completion, announcing its victory with a pop-up dialogue-box that read Match Successful.

  'See, that's it,' Jayden said, pointing again at the screen. 'There's the match.'

  'There's two numbers in that wee box,' Frank said, squinting to read the small type. 'Am I reading that correctly?'

  'Sure,' Jayden confirmed. 'We're assuming one's his normal phone and the other's one of the burners he uses for his iCloud hacking. Although both of them are unregistered pay-as-you-goes.'

  'Shit,' Frank said, unable to hide his disappointment. 'So that means we can't track him down after all?'

  Eleanor shot him a smug smile. 'Why don't you show him Jayden?'

  'Sure,' Jayden said for the third time, prompting Frank to wink at Frenchie. This MI5 guy was nothing if not obliging.

  'So once we can tie a number to an individual, it makes no difference whether they're on contract or not. We might not have their name and address, but we just dial in our hotspot clustering add-on. That nails them every time.'

  Frank laughed. 'I've been doing pretty well to keep up so far, even if I say so myself, but this one's got me. Hotspot what?'

  'Hotspot clustering,' Eleanor repeated in the teacher-to-five-year-old tone that she liked to use on him from time to time.

  'We wouldn't expect the layman to understand,' Jayden interjected, his tone apologetic. 'What it does, is it looks for concentrations of cell registrations in particular geographical locations over a defined period of time.'

  'Meaning?' Frank asked.

  'It can show the locations that the suspect visits the most.'

  'Got it. And now I hope you're going to show me?'

  'Sure man.' He stretched over to grab the mouse from Eleanor then focussed the pointer on a scrolling menu at the top of the screen. 'The option's in here somewhere. Yeah, there it is.'

  This time a series of flashing green dots appeared on the map, Frank noticing they were of varying intensity.

  'What are we looking at?' he asked, although he thought he might already have figured it out.

  'This is a twelve-month visualisation,' Jayden explained. 'It looks back over that timeframe and shows the places he's visited most often in that period, or at least where his phones have been. We can extend it back five years if we want, although that takes an age to process. But yeah, the bigger and brighter the dot, the more times he's been there. And just to be clear again, it tracks where his phone has been. Doesn't mean he was with the phone at the time.'

  'But it's pretty likely he was.'

  'Sure,' he conceded.

  'But I do get it, what it's telling us,' Frank said, nodding at the screen. 'It's all the places he likes to visit.' Suddenly, he had a thought.

  'Jayden mate, can you scroll it up to the right a bit? Aye, that's it. Just there.'

  And there it was. Confirmation. Once again he kicked himself for not cottoning on to the bleeding obvious, and before the obvious connection was pointed out to him by his brother too.

  'Look here Frenchie, seems like he's a Newcastle supporter. Season ticket holder I'd guess by the number of times he must have been up there.'

  'Poor bastard,' French said, laughing. 'Poor Geordie bastard.'

  So the guy was from Newcastle. It was good to know, but Frank wasn't sure how that would help them identify him. But at least they had a pretty good idea where he lived, given the location of the brightest dot on the display. Right here in London.

  Frank wandered up to the screen and pointed. 'And this one here, I'm guessing this is where we hit the jackpot?'

  'That's right,' Jayden nodded. 'That would be where he lives, most likely.' He flicked the scroll-wheel on the mouse to zoom in. 'Vicarage Crescent, SW1.' The screen filled with the image of a modern purpose-built apartment block, the sort that were snapped up for stupid money by young professionals. Young professionals like the over-confident Geordie, whose goose was now going to be well and truly cooked.

  'Well well well,' Frank said, smiling. 'This is a result, isn't it? Very well done you three, very well done.' He doubted if Ronnie French had had much to do with any of it, but then again, it was Frenchie that had procured the services of Jayden Henry of MI5, so maybe he was being a bit harsh. He was just about to sit down again when he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. Another green dot, fainter this time, but it was the location that interested him. Very much.

  'Jayden mate, see that one there? Can you zoom in on it please? Aye, that one.'

  Bloody hell. Bloody hell.

  'Can we get a date Jayden, when he was there?'

  'Sure.' He clicked again on the menu, and a table of dates and times popped up.

  'There it is. About six months ago. He was there from about eleven at night until two in the morning, there or thereabouts.'

  Bloody hell. Frank didn't need to check the date because he'd long ago committed it to memory. It was the night up in Ardmore H
ouse when Commodore Macallan had murdered his son then turned the gun on himself. And if Jayden Henry's cool software was to be believed, their boy Geordie had been there too.

  Now that was something that was going to take some explaining.

  Chapter 22

  Maggie wasn't really sure why she was feeling so bad about the Macallan case. No-one could deny they they'd tried their best, and after all it wasn't really their fault if the potential beneficiaries were refusing to play ball. But when she thought about it a bit more, she began to realise what it was that was bugging her. Simply put, she just didn't like to let Asvina down after the faith her best friend had continued to show in her little detective agency. It wasn't a matter of money, and in fact Ms Rani was likely to do very well out of the matter if the whole horrible mess ended up in court, as seemed increasingly likely. It was more a matter of reputation. As executors, Asvina and her firm had a duty to discharge the provisions of the will in as economical manner as possible. If it got round that they had raked in tens of thousands of pounds in fees in the process, people might start to ask how hard they had really tried, and that was something that might very well lose them business in the future. That above all was the reason why Maggie wasn't going to give up on the matter without one final attempt to reach a settlement.

  The problem was Kirsty Macallan and her husband had now imposed a strict radio silence, refusing to respond to any of her phone calls, emails or messages. So there was nothing for it but to turn up on their doorstep and hope they were in, which explained why she was driving around Fulham, semi-lost, early on this Saturday evening. And with her son Ollie in the back of the old Golf, this being the day their nanny had off. He'd thrown a minor strop because she'd insisted on taking the car rather than the tube, but now, glancing in the mirror, she could see that peace had been restored. It was just that Ollie loved trains and it would have been a rare treat for him, but it had been raining and it was a ten-minute walk from their home to the nearest station.

  Suddenly he shouted, 'I saw the sign mummy. Clonmel Road. You missed it.'

  'Thank you darling,' she said, smiling into the mirror. Now, unfortunately, she was going to have to do a three-point-turn in this narrow suburban street and three-point-turns weren't exactly her speciality. She'd punched the address into Google maps on her phone but following its directions wasn't her speciality either. It was lying on the passenger seat and seemed to be giving her the option of carrying straight on, which was a whole lot better. That was if she'd read the arrow symbol correctly. So maybe she could just go round the block again and this time she wouldn't miss the turn-off. Both suppositions turned out to be true, and a few minutes later she was squeezing into a parking space alongside the Overton's mid-terrace home. She noted the sign that warned it was residents parking only, but what she needed to say was only going to take five minutes. They jumped out of the car and made their way up the short path. And there it was, just to the left of the door, painted on the wall in defiance of Frank Stewart's law of coincidences. The latest Geordie mural.

  The scene depicted an old house by a lake, surrounded by tall pine trees and with a setting sun reflecting off the surface. And beneath the painting, the ornate signature of the artist. She was no expert, but the image was captivating and all the more so because it had been executed in monochrome, and evidently with just a few sweeps of an aerosol can.

  'It's really nice isn't it?' she said to her son, then remembering she was a lawyer added, 'He must be a very clever man although we shouldn't really approve of painting on the walls of people's houses.'

  'S'all right I suppose,' Ollie shrugged. She knew he wouldn't be impressed, since the subject matter was neither a fast car nor a footballer.

  The door was answered by Rory Overton, as in her previous visit holding his daughter in his arms. By his expression, she gathered he wasn't pleased to see them.

  'What do you want? I thought we made it plain we don't want anything to do with you.'

  She nodded towards the painting. 'It's rather good isn't it? Reminds me a bit of Loch More when I come to think about it.' For a moment, she wondered if the work had actually been commissioned by the Overtons themselves, another marketing exercise to further boost the reach of Kirsty's social media channels. But apparently not.

  'It's nothing but mindless vandalism,' he said, 'and we're sick of everyone coming round to gawp at it. I've got some people coming to wash it off tomorrow thank god. Anyway, what do you want?'

  She smiled, remembering the phrase employed by Alison Macallan. 'There's been a development. Can we come in? It'll only take five minutes, no more than that.'

  'All right then,' he said grudgingly. 'But you'd better be quick. We're going out to dinner in a minute.'

  Maggie heard Kirsty's shout from down the hallway. 'Is that the sitter darling? We need to watch our time.'

  'No, it's that lawyer woman,' he shouted back. 'She says there's been developments. God knows what that means.'

  It had been a while since she'd been a lawyer in the practising sense, but she let it pass. Overton led them through to the kitchen, where Kirsty was removing the cling-film from a tray of sandwiches, presumably for the still-to-arrive babysitter. She was wearing a tight-fitting black knitted dress and silvery stiletto sandals, with a string of expensive white pearls adding to the effect of quiet sophistication.

  'Hello again,' she said, her manner pleasant in stark contrast to her husband's. 'And this must be your little boy.'

  'Yes this is Ollie,' she said, patting him on the head. 'He's eight and growing by the minute. But I must say you look lovely Kirsty, and that dress is absolutely beautiful. And the pearls too, they match so well.'

  She smiled. 'Thank you. Rory's arranged for us to meet some friends for drinks and then we're having a late dinner. It's all been a lovely surprise, and I've still no idea where we're going. You won't tell me, will you darling? The dress is by Dior by the way. Rory wanted me to wear it tonight. It's his favourite.'

  Why wasn't she surprised that this woman selected what she should wear based on what her husband liked, rather than her own preference? And it seemed he had decided where they should go for a drink and where they should have dinner too. She'd only met Rory Overton once before, but she already decided she didn't like him one bit. There was something controlling about the man, and that was something she hated, having suffered it in her own ill-fated marriage to Philip. But then she remembered that this was the Macallan twin who had made the shameless pass at Jimmy at Dr Angus McLeod's sixtieth birthday party. Perhaps Rory Overton had grounds to believe his wife needed controlling, although it still didn't excuse it.

  He handed the child to his wife then gave Maggie a sharp look. 'You can see we're in a rush. So just say what you came to say, and then you can leave.'

  'Ok, I will. I wanted to talk to you about Susan Priest. You know she's dead I assume?'

  The Overtons looked at one another as if silently deciding how to react. Finally Kirsty said,

  'Yes, of course we heard. It was such a tragedy. We were very upset, weren't we darling?'

  Her husband nodded, although if he was upset he was doing a good job of disguising the fact.

  'You'd been in touch with her not long before that hadn't you?' Maggie said. 'Why was that?'

  Kirsty looked as if she was about to answer when her husband cut in.

  'Who says we have? And what business of yours is it anyway?' His tone was nakedly aggressive and Maggie didn't much like it.

  'Look, I'm just trying to doing my job,' she said, standing her ground. 'Which as you know is to try and sort out the mess of your late father-in-law's will. Because if we can't reach a settlement with all parties, then the only people who are going to benefit from that mess are the lawyers. But that's what you were trying to do too, wasn't it? Come to some arrangement with Susan so that she supported your version of the story?'

  'I don't know how many times I've told you,' he growled. 'Kirsty is the elder twin and we ar
e in a position to prove it should we be asked, and we didn't need a deal with Susan Priest or anyone else to do that. So you're wasting your time here I'm afraid.'

  Maggie gave him a puzzled look. 'Forgive me if I'm missing something, but I don't see how you can prove it.'

  'Let's just say we've done some research in Canada since your last visit and leave it at that. Now as I said, Kirsty and I are going out in a few minutes so if you don't mind we need to wrap this up now.' He pointed towards the hall, wearing a forced smile. 'I'm sure you can find your own way out, and please, don't come back again.'

  As Maggie squeezed Ollie's hand and turned to go, she smiled at Kirsty, who was wearing an expression that wasn't difficult to decipher. Incomprehension. If Rory Overton had been conducting research in the twins' birthplace, then he certainly hadn't told his wife about it. And there was something else. When she had brought up the subject of Susan Priest, she had noticed a wave of alarm sweep across Kirsty's face.

  But she hadn't just come to talk about the dead nanny. She'd promised Asvina she would do everything in her power to broker a settlement and she owed it to her friend to give it one last attempt. And there was still the matter of Alison Macallan's little deal to be examined. Which twin had she made it with, Kirsty or Elspeth?

  'Look Kirsty, I really need you to think about a negotiated settlement, because if you don't, then it will simply come down to whom a judge finds to be the most credible witness on the day. Is that going to be Alison your stepmother, your sister Elspeth, or yourself. On that decision your whole future depends I'm afraid.'

  'Is she right Rory?' Kirsty Macallan said, suddenly sounding alarmed. 'Shouldn't we at least consider this agreement, to see what it is she's proposing?'

  But Rory Overton didn't seem in the least concerned. 'Miss Bainbridge, I'm perfectly happy with our situation as I told you before. I'll say it again, Kirsty is the elder and we can prove it. So if you don't mind, this conversation is over.'

  It was naturally Ollie who had pointed it out to her as they returned to their car, the flashy Golf GTi, parked just in front of them. With the registration number KIR 5T.