Cragside: A DCI Ryan Mystery (The DCI Ryan Mysteries Book 6)

by LJ Ross

  He was gone, obliterated, destroyed, as he’d once destroyed so many others.

  They felt no guilt, only a deep and abiding sense of peace they hadn’t known in over forty years.

  “Do you think it’s all over now? Martin killed Victor and Alice and now he’s killed himself. Surely that’ll be an end to it?”

  They turned to look at the frightened face of the person seated beside them.

  “I hope so,” they murmured. “I really hope so.”

  And it was true.

  They hoped Ryan would leave it to rest now, to move on with his happy life. He had so many years ahead of him, untarnished by tragedy of the kind they’d been forced to live with each day. How could he understand the kind of pain they’d suffered, that their whole family had suffered? It was right and proper for him to step back and leave it be.

  But as Ryan re-entered the room, they recognised the fierce expression he wore. It spoke of incorruptibility and an unyielding, uncompromising search for the truth, however unpalatable.

  Their eyes closed briefly and when they re-opened, they were resigned.

  So be it.

  CHAPTER 31

  Thursday 18th August

  “I want you to forget everything you thought you knew about this case.”

  Ryan’s bald statement was addressed to his team, who had assembled for what he had unsmilingly termed a ‘crisis briefing’. Each of them had worked long past midnight and showed signs of fatigue but they’d arrived at his cottage promptly at eight o’clock just the same.

  “I’ve had some news from Jeff Pinter already this morning,” Ryan told them. “He’s finished Victor Swann’s post-mortem and his findings put a very different complexion on matters.”

  Ryan stood with his back to the wall, where he’d tacked up a line of five photographs, consisting of the Gilberts, Maggie, Charlotte Shapiro and Dave Quibble, beside images of Victor Swann, Alice Chapman and Martin Henderson. Beneath that, he’d created a list of secondary suspects, including the serving staff and guests who had been present in the house the previous evening.

  He moved across to tap a finger against Victor’s face.

  “Pinter believes the evidence points to an accidental fall. There were no marks of aggression on Victor’s body and no indications of forced impact. Added to which, Pinter found something Victor didn’t even know himself: his brain showed all the classic signs that he was developing Parkinson’s Disease, which often leads to a disordered gait and regular trips or falls.”

  There were murmurs around the kitchen table.

  “Lionel Gilbert mentioned something like that in one of his statements,” Lowerson remembered. “He said Victor had been in good health but he was getting on a bit because he was ‘tripping all over the place’. He didn’t mention anything about Parkinson’s, though.”

  “Yes, there’s no record of it in his medical notes, which means Victor was probably unaware of it himself. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest brought on by severe head trauma, as we thought.”

  “He still might have been pushed,” Phillips persisted. “It fits everything we know about his character…the fact he was blackmailing Henderson and Cassandra Gilbert. There may be even more we don’t know about because we still haven’t accounted for all the cash payments.”

  “All that remains true,” Ryan nodded. “Added to which, it’s notoriously difficult to determine whether a death by falling was accidental, suicide or murder.”

  He took a chair at the head of the kitchen table and leaned forward to convey his next message.

  “After this latest development with Henderson, I’ve been asking myself whether we’ve been led down the garden path. We assumed Victor Swann’s death was suspicious because somebody took the opportunity to ransack his locker and his home.”

  “Aye, well that’s a suspicious thing to do,” Phillips defended.

  Ryan held up a hand.

  “Bear with me, for a second, while I propose an alternative scenario.”

  The table fell quiet as four pairs of inquisitive eyes turned towards him.

  “If Pinter is right and Victor Swann’s death was pure accident, we have to assume Henderson ransacked the man’s locker and home simply because the opportunity presented itself. Whatever Swann was using to blackmail him was important enough to extort regular payments and important enough to send him rushing off on the same night the man died, risking exposure to get hold of what we assumed was Victor’s phone.”

  “It must be to do with the Gilberts,” MacKenzie said. “They’re rich and we know how much Henderson liked money.”

  “But what was he planning?” Yates asked.

  “We don’t know yet,” Ryan answered. “I’ll be speaking to the FIU shortly to see if they’ve made any headway on finding the answer. But let’s say Henderson cleaned out Swann’s locker in the early hours of Sunday morning, while we were on site. He needed to find somewhere to stash it inside the house because he couldn’t risk being seen taking it back to his cottage.”

  Ryan picked up a stray paperclip and began to fiddle with it as he transported himself inside the mind of a killer.

  “I think Alice Chapman died because she found Henderson in the act of reclaiming his stolen goods on Sunday night. He thought he was alone but she’d lost track of time—as she often did—and worked after hours. She found him and connected the dots.”

  “He might not have killed Swann but he still killed that girl,” Phillips said obstinately. “We’ve got his DNA.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “I agree that Henderson is still the most likely candidate for Alice Chapman’s murder and I wouldn’t be surprised to find more evidence coming to light once Faulkner’s had a chance to go over his home and car, not to mention his clothes.”

  Phillips folded his arms and Ryan knew what was going through his sergeant’s mind because he was thinking the same thing.

  “I’m disappointed too, Frank. Henderson’s death has deprived Carol and Simon Chapman of a proper trial and justice for their daughter.”

  “Can’t they do it posthumously?” Yates asked.

  “No.” Ryan was firm. “Trials in absentia are extremely rare; it’s almost impossible to have a fair trial if the accused isn’t there to defend himself.”

  “But if the evidence is overwhelming?”

  Ryan sighed.

  “I understand how you feel and, believe me, if the man were still alive, I’d be doing everything in my power to see him convicted for his crimes. But the rules are in place for a reason, much as they might frustrate us.”

  Ryan thought of Alice Chapman’s parents and of how he would tell them that, although he’d found her killer, they’d never be able to look him in the eye. It was easy to talk in terms of black and white but what about all the shades of grey in between? He understood very well the heartache of losing a loved one and of the desire for retribution, but it would not bring them back to life.

  He pushed the thought to one side because if he allowed himself to think too long or too hard about the wheels of justice, he’d pack it all in and never come to work again.

  Irritated, he flung the paperclip back onto the desk.

  “If Henderson didn’t fall but was pushed, I have to ask myself why.” He looked at each of his team in turn, eyes blazing. “Why kill a man who was already under suspicion for murder? It doesn’t make sense because it has nothing to do with what happened to Alice or Victor.”

  “It might have been an accident, if somebody left the lift doors open?”

  Ryan turned to Yates and was glad to see she was asking the right questions.

  “The Gilberts keep the lift doors shut and a safety barrier is put across each of the entrances as an added precaution,” he told her. “Even without it, you could fall against the closed doors and they’d stay shut, so it’s perfectly safe. Last night, Faulkner checked the doors on each level and there were scratches against the lift doors on the first floor, which suggests they wer
e forced open. The CSIs are searching for something long and relatively thin, hard enough to force the doors, like a fire poker, to see if they can match traces of the metal from the lift doors.”

  “You’re saying we’ve got a second killer on our hands?” Phillips asked. “But, Henderson—?”

  “If we stop thinking of Victor Swann’s death as being anything other than an accident and we assume that Alice Chapman’s murder was not planned, I find myself wondering whether Martin Henderson’s death was the only premeditated event in all of this.”

  Ryan sat back and watched the penny drop.

  “If somebody planned to kill Henderson all along, how could they know he’d be there at that time?” Phillips asked.

  “They couldn’t, but maybe they orchestrated a chain of events so that he would be,” Ryan said.

  “How could they know Victor and Alice would die?”

  “They didn’t—don’t you see?” Ryan tried to be patient. “If they only ever planned to kill Henderson, they must have been as shocked as we were to find out that Victor had died. When Alice followed shortly after, they were as much in the dark as we were—no pun intended.”

  “If what you’re saying is true, the other two deaths have given our killer a bit of cover,” Phillips pointed out. “So long as we were looking elsewhere, they could carry on with their plan.”

  “This is all conjecture,” MacKenzie said. “What makes you think this is the right line to follow?”

  Ryan steepled his index fingers and rested them against his lips.

  “It’s the power failures,” he said. “Two deaths happened during those power failures. What if the first one was just a rehearsal and the one last night was the real thing?”

  Phillips slowly began to nod.

  “I can see it,” he said. “Bloody hell, I can see it now. But how do we prove it?”

  Ryan inclined his head.

  “At this precise moment, we haven’t got a scrap of evidence to prove any of that theory. Whoever pushed Martin Henderson to his death probably went home and slept like a baby last night because there isn’t a damn thing to connect them. So far, at least.”

  “I like a challenge,” MacKenzie said, with a wicked grin.

  “Good, because that’s what we’ve got. We need to find out what Henderson did, to whom, and why it was so bad someone killed him for it.”

  Phillips scratched the side of his face.

  “Don’t ask for much, do you?”

  A moment later, Anna stepped into the kitchen and found them huddled around the table with their heads together.

  “You’re as thick as thieves,” she said. “What are you plotting?”

  “A killer’s downfall,” Ryan said, shortly.

  Anna pulled a face and left them to it, feeling sorry for whoever would be on the receiving end.

  * * *

  The working theory that Martin Henderson died because of a past misdeed was not particularly helpful, considering the mounting body of evidence being accumulated by the financial investigation unit alone. Their separate enquiry had already established that the man’s history had been entirely falsified and they were working closely with various government bodies to unravel the lies. Ryan had a lengthy telephone conversation with DI Anika Salam, whose team resources were stretched to the limit and who found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to abandon the investigation now that their prime suspect was dead.

  “I want to help you but we’re snowed under with enquiries,” she said, apologetically. “We could spend weeks on this but, in the end, we’d have nobody to charge.”

  “People like Martin Henderson never work alone,” Ryan argued. “Odds are, you’d find his network and haul in some of the bigger fish.”

  That gave her pause for thought.

  “That’s a lot riding on ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’,” she said.

  “You know he was dirty.” Ryan pulled out every persuasive skill he had and didn’t feel a moment’s guilt about it. “Don’t you want to chase down the bad guys? Don’t you want to see them brought to heel, to pay their debt to society? There are too many people living off the fat of the land—”

  His spiel came to an abrupt stop, as a thought struck him.

  “Land,” he repeated. “It’s been staring us in the face. Why else would Henderson pretend to have a history of estate management? Why come and work at Cragside?”

  At the other end of the line, Salam sat up a bit straighter in her chair.

  “You think he wanted to spin something with the land up there?”

  “Speak to Lionel Gilbert and ask him if he was planning to sell off any parcels of land on Henderson’s recommendation. Then ask him if he’d received an offer from anyone to buy it. I’m betting an offer will have come from a newly formed company, which we will find has closed down its operations in the last few days. Follow that company all the way back and you’ll find your big fish, Anika.”

  There was a short pause on the line.

  “Are you interested in a transfer to the FIU?”

  Ryan laughed.

  “I’ll leave financial crime to the experts. Wouldn’t hurt to take a closer look at some of the local estate agents, while you’re at it,” he tagged on.

  Salam chuckled.

  “Alright, you’ve convinced me. We’ll speak to Lionel Gilbert to see if your theory’s right and take it from there.”

  “One last thing,” Ryan said. “Before he was Martin Henderson, he was Martin Jennings. What have you been able to find from that period of his life?”

  “It seems to have been the only time he wasn’t involved in anything untoward. Until the age of twenty-one, when he changed his name and started to go by Henderson, Martin Jennings was just a lad who worked down at the dockyards in Newcastle.”

  “Why did he change his name around then?”

  “Who knows?” she said. “I can’t see any obvious reason from the files.”

  “Can you send across everything you have?”

  “Consider it done.”

  After he ended the call, Ryan sat back in his chair and considered the type of person Martin Henderson had been. It hadn’t surprised him to learn that Henderson had walked away from a life of honest hard work in favour of one where he was willing to lie, cheat and steal to make a quick buck. It was a question of weak character and, unfortunately, it made their work all the harder. If Martin Henderson had spent over forty years casually trampling over the lives of others in his quest for personal gain, who could say how many enemies he had made in the process? Added to which, his crimes were impersonal; all the deals he had been party to, all the back-handers, had a human cost but they were faceless, nameless people whose pensions or livelihoods had been affected.

  Then again, he had not been too squeamish to kill Alice Chapman in cold blood.

  Who else had Martin Henderson hurt?

  The possibilities were endless.

  CHAPTER 32

  The key to everything came unexpectedly from his fiancée.

  Having dispatched his team on a mission to uncover everything there was to know about Martin Henderson and the five people who remained on his suspect list, Ryan was seated quietly at the kitchen table trawling through background checks. He was disappointed to find there was hardly a speeding ticket among them and was about to harangue the CSIs for any further news when Anna wandered into the kitchen, intending to grab a snack and then leave him to it.

  “Making any progress?”

  She began rooting around in the fridge for ham and cheese.

  Behind her, Ryan made a disgruntled noise.

  “They’re all squeaky clean,” he complained. “I was hoping to see a drunk and disorderly, maybe a few pops for assault.”

  Anna smiled into the fridge.

  “Just too law-abiding, eh?”

  “One of them killed Martin Henderson, I know it,” he muttered. “But until I can find the reason why, they’re wandering around hiding in plain sight.”
/>   Anna reached for a knife and began to lather butter on four slices of bread, not bothering to ask if Ryan wanted a sandwich.

  He always wanted a sandwich.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you know about Martin Henderson so far? Whenever I think of him, I just picture an obnoxious sixty-two-year-old with an ego the size of a small planet.”

  Ryan grinned, despite himself. As summaries went, it was pretty accurate.

  “He was born in Wallsend, not far from our new police headquarters, actually. He used to be Martin Jennings until he changed his name when he was twenty-one.”

  Anna slapped some ham on the bread.

  “Why’d he change his name?”

  “That’s one of the questions I’d like to answer, but I can’t figure it out. There was no death in the family, no trauma on record. In 1975, he was just some lad who worked down at the shipyard—”

  “Bad year to be working at the shipyard,” Anna said, as she began to cut thin slices of cheese.

  Ryan looked up with interest.

  “Why?”

  Anna paused and turned to face him, butter knife still in hand.

  “That was the year The Valiant went up in flames. It was a terrible tragedy, not just for the men working on the ship but for their families and the whole community. We learned about it at school.”

  Ryan felt something click.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Anna set the knife down and cast her mind back.

  “It was before I was born, so I only remember bits and pieces about it from school or from what people have told me.”

  “That’s alright, I’ll look up the detail later. I just want to know the general gist.”

  “Well, you already know shipbuilding was a major industry on Tyneside. Hundreds of men used to work on the ships—it wasn’t really women’s work, back then. Most of them lived locally, in the streets leading down to the docks or just across the river.”

  Ryan knew the area well.

  “The industry was changing in the seventies and it wasn’t as prolific as it had been in years gone by, but they were still building ships and The Valiant was one of them. Halfway through its completion, it went up in flames when the welders started work on the lower decks one morning.”