The Maggie Bainbridge Box Set

by Rob Wyllie

  ◆◆◆

  Melody had kept up a running commentary as she led Maggie and Asvina through the house and up the stairs to her bedroom.

  'The kitchen was a nightmare of course. We spent over a hundred grand and it took them three attempts to get the worktops to fit. Cost them a fortune of course and Danny was worried that they might go bust, but they got there in the end, and it is lovely, don't you think? And this staircase, pure marble and so heavy, it took three of their guys just to move each step. But well worth it I think.'

  The bedroom was of impressive proportions and decorated in keeping with the opulence of the house, dominated by a super-king-sized bed with high-end fitted wardrobes around two sides.

  As they entered, Melody was still in full flow. 'The decor in this room is adorable, don't you think? We found this simply excellent designer over in Twickenham who took care of everything. And it was her idea too that we should install a panic room. Apparently all of us celebs should have one, that's what she said. A wise precaution don't you think? The door leads off the en-suite and it's impregnable, I'm told. We've never had to use it of course, thankfully.'

  A young woman in a pink apron holding a cleaning spray and cloth emerged from the en-suite. She smiled and greeted her employer in a thick East European accent.

  'Good morning Miss Montague.'

  'Good morning Bridget. This is Bridget, she's from Latvia or Lithuania, I always get them mixed up. She cooks and cleans for us. She lives in with her husband Gregor who looks after the house and the garden. I simply don't know what we would do without them.' Jesus, thought Maggie, domestic staff? Who can afford them nowadays? And a panic room, for god's sake. How the other half lives.

  'I never had nothing like this, growing up of course,' Melody continued. 'My dad walked out when I was three years old and we never saw him again, me and my brothers. My mum took to the drink after that. Killed her in the end it did. And then we were taken into care.'

  'I didn't know that,' Asvina said sympathetically. 'It must have been awful for you.'

  'Yeah, it was. But I'm a survivor. We all were, me and my brothers.'

  Maggie too didn't know about Melody's tough upbringing, but she could see how it perhaps explained her desire to build a little family with Benjamin Fox. And when that fell apart, to try again with Danny Black, hope triumphing once more over experience. As if she was anyone to talk, knowing now that it was only the ticking of her own biological clock that had persuaded her that marrying Philip would be a good idea. But at least she had Ollie, and for that reason and that reason alone it had been worth it. But she wasn't here to reflect on her own car-crash personal life. There was business to be attended to.

  'Melody, I hope you don't mind me bringing this up, but you will be pleased to hear that Benjamin's sister seems to corroborate your version of events with regard to the intention of the original pre-nuptial agreement. It's not something that could be used in any court proceedings being only hearsay, but it suggests Benjamin may not have been entirely truthful with us.'

  'Bridget, can you give us a moment.' She sat down on the edge of the bed, took a sip of her champagne and gave a cold smile. 'So he's been found out. I am pleased about that.'

  'There is a complication though,' Maggie said. 'Although we haven't seen it yet, Charles Grant told us he has a copy of the agreement too. And that one apparently supports your ex-husband's story. And there is also your solicitor Mr McCartney, whose also I believe supports Benjamin's version.'

  Melody spoke sharply. 'Then they must be lying too. Both of them.'

  She took a cigarette from the pack that lay on the bedside table and rummaged through her bag looking for a lighter. Her hand trembling, she finally managed to light the cigarette.

  'I hate smoking in here,' she said distractedly.

  Maggie frowned. 'I was thinking, and I accept he may not be the most credible witness, that we could perhaps speak to McCartney in prison. Do you think he might be prepared to do that?'

  She shrugged. 'That bastard? How should I know.'

  'But he is likely to remember drawing up the agreement and what it contained?'

  'Suppose so,' Melody said. 'But if you want to try that, you'd be better to send Jimmy. Blake will think all his Christmases have come at once.'

  'So he's gay?' Maggie asked. Not that it mattered, although she wasn't sure if Jimmy would feel the same way when she explained what she would like him to do.

  'As they come,' Melody said. 'I'm sure he's very popular in that nick.'

  Maggie gave her an uncertain look. 'Well I'm not sure about that. But yes, I think we will try and visit him and see if he is able to help us. But coming back to Mr Fox, there's just one more thing I'd like to ask you.'

  'What?' She shot out the word, her growing irritation evident.

  'Benjamin mentioned something about a little arrangement he had with you. Can you tell me what that might refer to?'

  'I've no idea. There was no arrangement with Benjamin,' she replied coldly. 'Have you any idea what it was like for me, finding out that my husband was... was sterile. It ruined everything, all my dreams. I hated him for it. So no, there was no arrangement. I just wanted him out of my life as quickly as possible.'

  'Look I'm sorry,' Maggie said, shocked by the coldness of this woman. Was that all the marriage had meant to her, simply a breeding arrangement? If so, perhaps it wasn't a surprise that Benjamin had bailed out when he met the beautiful Allegra Ross. 'I didn't mean to stir up bad memories. It must have been very painful for you.'

  Melody gave her a disdainful look. 'Painful, is that what you call it? Finding out you'd wasted four precious years, years you can never get back? Oh yes, it was painful all right.'

  She could tell the actress was growing tired of the conversation.

  'Very well,' Maggie said. 'We will see what Mr McCartney and Mr Grant have to say and then maybe we might be able to tidy up this matter to your satisfaction.'

  Melody fixed her stare on Asvina, ignoring Maggie. 'That's why I'm paying you your ridiculous fee Miss Rani,' she spat. 'You need to fix this. Just bloody fix it, understand? Or I'll fix it myself. Now if you will excuse me, I need to get back to my guests.'

  ◆◆◆

  Back in the garden, the band was tuning up whilst the pretty girl vocalist anxiously studied her lyric sheets in a final attempt to commit them to memory. The younger kids, boys and girls alike, had formed themselves into a human snake some twenty strong and were now doing a conga around the garden accompanied by loud shrieks.

  'Met your hero then, did you?' Maggie asked Jimmy. 'What's he like?'

  'Pretty normal guy, I suppose. Good with the kids too. Got some nice pictures.'

  'They'll be talking about this for months,' laughed Asvina.

  'Yeah, but our Melody's not too happy,' Maggie said. 'Suddenly went mental, saying she was paying Asvina to fix all this, and if she didn't, she would do it herself, whatever that means. A bit scary to be honest.'

  Asvina seemed unconcerned. 'Well believe me, I've had scarier clients than her. It will all blow over I'm sure.'

  Jimmy gave a wry look. 'I don't know, she's certainly a scary woman.'

  'But vulnerable too, I think,' Maggie said. 'She told us about her tough upbringing. That kind of experience must shape you for life.'

  And now here she was again, investing all her hopes and dreams in a new man. Maggie didn't like the woman, but she found herself praying that this time it would all work out.

  It wouldn't.

  Chapter 15

  In Frank's world, events were moving slowly, but he wasn't bothered about that, because in his head, the flaky hypothesis that he hoped might form the bedrock of Operation Shark was beginning to look a bit less flaky. Now there was news of an abduction of startling similarity to the Jamie Grant incident, and that was progress, no doubt about it. It had been a hunch and he had learned if not to trust his hunches completely, then at least to give them a decent shot.

  A fair resul
t, but he knew it was just one more piece in the jigsaw. Admittedly, it was shaping up to be a thousand-piece puzzle but figuratively he felt that he had now completed the border, and as all jigsawists knew, things always started to accelerate once you had the border in place. Now he judged it was time to have a wee word with his boss DCI Jill Smart. Jill was the gate-keeper between half-arsed conspiracy-theory bollocks and a live grown-up investigation, with an official case number and all that went with it. With a case number, you could pull together a team, you could bring suspects in for questioning, you had access to a full range of technical support services far beyond what Eleanor Campbell alone could provide. You could even call in a press officer to spout nonsense at the media if you wanted to. The only problem was, Jill Smart guarded case numbers with her life. Because once an investigation got a case number, it had broken cover from the murky secretive world of Department 12B and was out in the open for all to see. Specifically, it got onto the spreadsheets of Chief Superintendents and Assistant Commissioners, target-driven automatons obsessed with clear-up rates who asked awkward questions like why so much money was being spent on a case and why hadn't it been solved yet even when it had only been running for a week. A case number caused Jill a whole heap of hassle and so generally, she didn't give one up without a fight. Even to Frank Stewart, who was the only detective in the department she trusted.

  And making the mission a whole order of magnitude more difficult was the fact that he had already suffered a bit of a set-back, when Eleanor's facial-recognition sweep of the world wide web had drawn a complete blank. The kid in Fox's photograph hadn’t shown up, the problem being, as she had explained in her customary teacher-to-six-year-old manner that she always adopted when speaking to Frank, was that all the commercial recognition capability like Google and Facebook purposely did not work for children, for obvious reasons. On top of that, the GCHQ citizens’ database, which by the way did not officially exist, did not hold details of citizens under the age of eleven.

  Nonetheless he was determined to persevere, this time deciding to make his pitch in person rather than on the phone, reasoning he needed to see the whites of her eyes to judge how well he was doing. And they had much better coffee over at Paddington Green, properly expensive barista stuff with a rich nutty aroma that pervaded the whole building. As ever, the car park had been rammed, but as he never bothered to find a space on his visits anyway, it had been no effort to dump the battered Mondeo as close to the door as possible and block in the sleek Beemers and Audis which were the public-purse provided rides of the most senior officers. He reasoned that since they were supposedly the smartest detectives on the force, it shouldn't tax them too much to find out whose motor it was if they wanted out.

  DCI Smart occupied a cramped office on the third floor, overlooking the rear car park. Originally, she had been given a nice big one in the corner but DCI Colin Barker had objected, citing his longer service as a reason why it should be allocated to him. Cannily, Jill had acceded to the petty request. Everyone in the force thought Barker an arse, and this was just adding one more instance to the charge-sheet. God knows he'd been lucky to survive screwing up that Alzahrani terrorist case, and she figured he was now in the last-chance saloon. It was probably one more strike and he'd be out. And when that happened, she would move back into it before anyone else could grab it.

  Today, however, nobody was in their offices, large or small. A desk in the middle of the vast open-plan space was piled with supermarket-bought cakes and savouries and all around the floor, officers were milling around, laughing and swigging bottled beer. Scanning the scene, Frank spotted his boss and made his way to her.

  'Morning ma'am, so what's going on here? Somebody won the lottery?'

  She laughed. 'Worse than that Frank. Barker's solved the Ross and Fox murders. They've been with the CPS team all morning and they've just given the go-ahead to prosecute.'

  'What, he's solved the bloody thing in three weeks?' It was like hearing a supermodel saying she had brokered a Middle-East peace deal on a night out. 'No chance. Some poor innocent's been fitted up, more like.'

  'Yes, well normally I would agree with you, but it seems on this occasion we may have to give him some credit. It does look like an open and shut case to me.'

  Frank frowned and shook his head. 'Come on ma'am, you and I both know there's no such thing as an open and shut case where Colin Barker's involved. It never is, and it never will be.'

  'Jealousy and bitterness aren't a good look you know.'

  'I'm not jealous or bitter,' he lied. 'So come on, what's the story? And is it all right if I grab a beer?'

  Jill smiled. 'Yes, of course, and I'll have one too. To commiserate of course, not to celebrate.'

  Frank sauntered over to the desk, picked up a couple of beers and scooped a large chocolate brownie onto a paper plate. His super-skinny boss basically didn't eat so he knew she wouldn't think him selfish.

  'So,' he said through a mouthful of dark crumbs, 'let's hear about how the genius detective did it. I'm all ears.'

  She took a sip from her beer before continuing. 'It's that guy you had the run-in with at the Hyde Park demo.'

  'What, Darren Venables? No way. Absolutely no way.'

  'Way,' she said. 'Because Barker's team have worked out what Leonardo is all about, and that led them straight to him.'

  'No way,' he repeated, conscious of the sinking feeling in his stomach. 'Come on ma'am, you know this can't be true.'

  'I'm afraid it is,' she said. 'It looks that way to me.'

  'Really ma'am? I know Venables is a piece of shit but I don't see him killing someone in the name of his poxy little party.'

  But he knew in his heart that wasn't quite true. Venables and his White British League thugs were dangerous fanatics, and well capable of murder in pursuit of their deluded cause. It was just that he considered Venables, the history don turned champion of the neglected white working-class, to be too smart to do any of the dirty work himself.

  'They had been looking at some of his published papers from his time in academia,' Jill said in way of explanation. 'You know he was a professor of history or something? At Oxford.'

  'Well I'm not sure he was actually a professor. I think he was a reader, that's what they called it. That was until he got hounded out by the student body for not conforming to their narrow wee view of the world. Turned him a bit bitter after that.'

  After arresting him, Frank had, out of interest, taken the trouble to read quite a few of the published papers of Mr Venables. The man's worldview was simple and unwavering. Socialist governments screw everything up and in particular, crush progress and innovation. Under socialism, according to D-V, there would have been no Einstein, no Henry Ford, no Crick and Watson. And, according to a particularly vituperative polemic he'd published a few years back, no Leonardo da Vinci either.

  Jill laughed. 'Frank Stewart, I didn't see you as a foot soldier in the class war.'

  'No no, don't get me wrong, he was an arse then, and he still is. But you've heard the old saying along the lines of I don't like what you're saying but I defend your right to say it? I kind of believe in it, that's all. But anyway, let's hear what you've got.'

  'Well I know it's not your thing Frank, but it all hinges around Venables' social media and something he posted in response to a Charles Grant twitter message. Something that was mirrored in some of his academic work.'

  Frank's eyes narrowed. 'Ok....'

  'So obviously Barker's team have been interviewing friends and associates of the victim. And when they interviewed Charles Grant, he told them about a post Venables had made just after his son was abducted. Commie bastards always get what they deserve. He also told them he had been a victim of a long-running campaign of harassment by someone using the name da Vinci.'

  'Aye, I've heard all about that.' Although he hadn't mentioned to Jill that he was intending to find out for himself who was behind it. Now he wished he'd made more effort to chivvy Eleanor Campbell a
long with her investigations.

  'Really?' she said, surprised. 'Well anyway, Grant said he had his suspicions and was now pretty sure that it was Venables. You know, D-V is his nickname, and so there's the link to da Vinci. And that of course gave the connection to Leonardo.'

  Frank was getting that sinking feeling he always got when a precious theory crumbled to dust before his eyes. The theory that Venables hadn't even been a suspect for the murder, let alone the killer.

  'But come on ma'am, that's totally circumstantial, if it can even be described as that. Even by Barker standards, it's a massive pile of crap. I mean, who's going to write their bloody name on a victim, even if it is just a bloody nickname?'

  She nodded. 'Well this is a Colin case, so the case is always going to be flimsy, but the CPS have passed it so I guess it must be half-credible.'

  'Half-credible?' Frank said bitterly. 'That's all they need nowadays is it?'

  'Don't be so cynical until you've heard everything,' she replied. 'So firstly, it turns out that Venables was seen at the awards ceremony where Fox died. You know what that means don't you? That they can place him at the scene of the crime. And they've checked his alibi and he hasn't got one.'

  Frank was struggling to process what he'd just heard. 'So come on, how did Venables explain that away?'

  Jill gave a half-smile. 'He said he'd gone with the intention of apologising to Fox and Allegra Ross for what had happened at the Hyde Park rally. Complete rubbish of course, especially in light of the other things Barker's team found.'

  'What other things?' Frank said despondently. 'What other things?'

  'They found his fingerprints on Allegra Ross's front door. And there was a note. A threatening note, pushed through her door.'

  'No way.'

  'I wish you would stop saying that Frank,' Jill said irritably. 'Yes, it is the case. A note, printed on A4 paper and bearing the symbol of the White British League. It was addressed specifically to Allegra and bore the message commie bastards always get what they deserve. And for the record, Venables has been unable to produce a verifiable alibi to cover the time window of the Parsons Green killing either.'