DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crime Thrillers: Books 1-3
Page 32
“Quite right.” He nodded, and we set off back up to the house. “My Rosie will be home later today,” he announced. “She called me just before you joined me out here. I shall heed your advice, Inspector.”
“Thank you, Lord Hocking. My sergeant and I are working hard on this.”
“I appreciate that,” he told me, taking me back through the house, “given that I imagine handling a robbery is a little below your pay grade, hm?” He raised his eyebrows at me.
“I’m usually given more grisly cases, that’s true.” But something about this case wasn’t quite right. Something was nasty about it, only it hadn’t yet come to the surface.
We reached the foyer of the house where Mills was bidding farewell to Lady Hocking.
“There you are, darling.” She reached for her husband, who joined her by the door.
“Please don’t hesitate to call us,” I shook his hand once more, “if anything comes to mind that might be useful. In any way,” I added meaningfully. Lord Hocking looked down at his shoes briefly before listing his head back up to me, a bright, easy-going grin stuck to his face. One that didn’t match the worried glint in his eyes.
The butler opened the door, letting us out, and we collapsed into the car, Mills very quickly roaring it into life and taking us away from the foreboding shadow of the house.
“How did you get on?” I asked him.
He fished into his pocket awkwardly, eyes fixed on the road, and passed me his notebook. I opened it to the page his pen was stuck between and glanced down. A few, brief lines that would mean more to him than anyone else who read them.
“Lara and Rupert,” I read aloud, “with about seven question marks. Mills?”
“I think there’s something between them. I doubt it’s important.”
“You never know,” I muttered, looking back down at the page.
Maids somewhat at odds with family, he had written, but not so far. Not so far as to commit a crime, I completed the sentence in my head.
Cook no problem. Cooks very rarely were in my experience.
“Nothing from any of them that caught your eye, then?”
“No, sir. None of them was there last night, either. Lara was the last one in. She lit the candles and was gone by the time the guests arrived. They all came back-” He broke off with a curse as we clattered over a nasty pothole. “They all came this morning, their usual time, to find the place a crime scene.”
“How exciting,” I muttered.
“Any word from SOCO, sir?” he asked.
I closed his notebook and dug into my pocket for my phone, hitting the button. “Nothing yet,” I told him, “I doubt we’ll get anything useful.”
“Few fingerprints might be nice,” he said.
“Always are. Don’t get your hopes up too high, Mills.”
“Sir?”
“Sharp did the right thing giving this one to us.” I put my phone away, leaning my chin on my hand, peering out the window. “Something’s not right about it.” I turned to look at him. He was frowning out at the country roads, looking at me through the corner of his eye every now and then. “I want to learn more about the family. Lord Hocking had siblings. I want to know what went on.”
“Maybe that’s why there’s a missing painting,” he suggested. “You know, in his study?”
“The skipped generation?”
“Yes.”
“My thoughts, exactly, Mills,” I praised him.
There was work to be done on this. The family looked into, the artist of the painting themselves, and something about Lord Hocking’s attachment to that one, in particular, caught my interest. Something happened in his youth, I suspected, something that wormed its way into all of this.
Seven
Thatcher
Research was not my forte. It was one of the many reasons I was so fond of having Mills around; he could happily sit and plough his way through books, papers and articles, fishing out dates and times and details. I could do it, Sharp had made bloody sure of that, but it didn’t half bore me. There were cases though, where it was unavoidable; when there weren’t trails to follow or clues to link up.
We got back from the house, handing off everything we had found to Sharp, who’s worried stern face hadn’t changed from this morning. As we filled her in, word came up from SOCO via Dr Crowe; she’d found nothing to help us. No fingerprints, no hairs or anything. It appeared to be that our thief had been clever and worn gloves. It was a thought-out robbery then, which ruled out any lingering suspicions of over-rowdy party guests, such as the young ones that had been spotted down the hallways by the waitress; and helped to cement my theory of this being a personal matter. A theory, which thankfully, Sharp echoed.
After making sure people were tracking various art dealings going on around the country, I ended up in the office with Mills, looking into the ancient Hocking family. It seemed that Lord Hocking’s mother had kept her name upon inheriting the house, a fairly bold move of the time, going so far as to give her children the same name, rather than their father’s. Children plural. It seemed that there had been three of them.
Lord Hocking and the aforementioned Rosemary he had told me about. I found an image of her obituary from the local paper at the time; it seemed she had only been sixteen when she had died, a long illness that the doctors couldn’t do anything about. And there had been another brother, a middle child, whose name popped up infrequently, pictures of him even less so. Richard Hocking, who after the death of Rosemary seemed to slip off the face of the earth at the age of twenty-one.
“He changed his name,” Mills called over to me, staring at his laptop. “Took his father’s name after his sister died.”
“What’s the name?” I asked, snatching up a pen.
“Sandow.”
I scribbled the name down, sticking it up on our still very bare board. We’d strung together a loose timeline of the night, a somewhat poorly drawn outline of the ground floor of the house, trying to figure out where everyone had been at each given time.
We’d handed the guest list over to Smith, who obediently trudged her way through, taking statements and any useful alibis as she went; not that there were many. Everyone was too drunk to have extremely clear, and indeed reliable, recollections of the night. And most of them, she told us when she stuck her head into our office, shared the opinion that the staff were the likely culprits. All of them, and the permanent staff at the house, were too loyal, too friendly to commit such a, and she quoted, a heinous act.
I stepped back, looking at the board.
“Richard Sandow,” I muttered. “I wondered what went on to make him do that.”
“He lost his sister,” Mills said, coming around to sit on his desk, looking at the name.
“It’s heartbreaking,” I agreed, “but so much so that you’d change your name and disassociate yourself from the family you had left?”
“You think something else happened?”
“Lord Hocking didn’t tell me he had a brother,” I said, taking a seat on the edge of my desk. “Seemed reluctant to admit that there was someone else other than himself and Rosemary. No name, no picture of him in the house, he’s not in the family portrait. It’s like he’s been wiped out of the place, and from memory too. He also said,” I remembered, holding up a finger, “that brothers seemed to fight a lot. Perhaps that came from his own experience, rather than his observations as a dad.”
“I used to fight with my brother,” Mills agreed, crossing his arms. “We’re better now, but we used to drive my mum up the wall.”
“Maybe they fell out,” I suggested, walking back around my desk, “maybe something happened, Richard leaves the family home, changes his name and wants nothing to do with them anymore. And in return, they erase any and all memory of him from the place, not even bringing him up when I asked.”
“Might be that we have to find him.” Mills scratched the back of his head. “If anyone has any insight into that, it might be him.”
Mills nodded, a little wearily, and slouched back down behind his computer.
I searched for the name first, Richard Sandow, pulling up very little results. His name cropped up on a website for a local hospital, board of directors, very impressive. Other than that, the only other mention of him came from someone’s social media, a picture of him, several years older than the one on the hospital website. The page belonged to a Mary Sandow, a granddaughter, by the looks of it.
I made a quick note, in case we needed her at some later point, and instead searched for Hocking, and the name of the house.
Several results came up, random articles from times the family sold artwork, opened the doors of the house for charity or lent out the land for the local community at Easter. A few controversial pieces from animal rights activists, slating the family for upholding the traditions of shooting and hunting. One of them was fairly recent, and I made a note of it. Activism could provoke extreme responses from people sometimes.
“I might have something, sir,” Mills said, picking up his laptop and carrying it over to my desk, sliding it over and standing behind me, reading over my shoulder.
It was an old article, almost thirty years old, from the Post. A gossip piece, in which the reporter went on to suggest that the middle child of the Hocking family had abandoned his home and brother over an incident from their university days that came back to haunt them.
“Any mention of what sort of incident?” I asked, reluctant to have to trawl through the whole thing.
“The usual story,” Mills told me, “apparently there was a girl involved.”
“There always is. Do we buy that? One girl driving that much of a wedge between a family?”
“Not unheard of, sir. But not very likely, I shouldn’t think. I doubt there’s a woman around who could make me leave my family or hate my brother.”
“Glad to hear it,” I told him.
“There’s more,” Mills reached over, scrolling down the page. “According to the journalist, the two families have ended up in something of a rivalry. Split their friends in two. Some prefer Richard, some Lord Hocking.”
“What exactly would they be rivals over?”
“All sorts, sir. Ridiculous stuff mostly. Horse racing, for one thing. They both used to breed good runners. Just a general feeling of discontent.” He pointed to a quote from an alleged source.
“You can be friends with one but not the other,” it read. “It puts one in an awkward situation. Whoever you don’t choose writes you off entirely. A bitter family feud.”
I slumped back in my chair. “All rather dramatic,” I criticised.
Mills hummed in agreement, taking his laptop back over to his own desk.
“I hope there’d be a good reason for all that.”
“Might be worth finding out who the girl is?” Mills suggested.
“We’ll get to it. Let’s try to find some contact information for Richard Sandow. He might be able to offer some more light on this. My instinct’s still leaning towards Dennis.”
“The butler?”
“Two generations of loyal service,” I reminded him, “of friendship, I mean they basically regard him as family! All about to be thrown away because they don’t want his daughter working there.”
Mills frowned. “What did Lord Hocking say about it?”
“Mostly pinned it on his wife,” I told him, “but he doesn’t seem eager to change her mind.”
“Just because she's a girl? That’s ridiculous. If they trust her, and her father and grandfather, what’s the issue? Make her a housekeeper!”
“That’s what I said.” I leant back, crossing my arms. “Maybe there’s more of a reason as to why they don’t want her.”
“Like what?”
“Like they don’t want her there for some reason,” I shrugged, “like she reminds them of something or stirs up something. Either way, a slight such as that can make a father angry. He might want to act on it and knows exactly where to strike and when to do it.”
“But he hasn’t done anything with it,” Mills pointed out. “There’s been no threat, no ransom, nothing. Maybe it is just going to be sold.”
“But that particular painting, Mills. If I did something to wrong you,” I tried, “very much hurt you. And you decided to take something from my desk,” I waved my hands over the mess, “to make me pay for it. What would you take?”
He looked at the laptop, my phone, the rather nice expensive metal paperweight Dr Crowe had given me for Christmas; and dismissed the lot, his eyes landing on the framed photograph on the corner.
“That,” he nodded to the photo of my mother. She was facing the window at the moment, and I reached over to turn her around. Her face smiled out at me, the familiar surge of guilt rising within me. I smothered it down and turned back to Mills, who was looking between myself and the image somewhat regretfully.
“Exactly my point,” I confirmed. “There are different values we place on things. Now, a painting can still be sold. I’d wager they’d get a bloody good price for it to, enough, let's say, to make sure your daughter would be alright in life. But it’s the fact that they took this one, rather than the others.”
“Made it more painful,” he muttered.
“Still achieves whatever they wanted to achieve,” I said, “only with an extra pinch of salt on the wound.”
Someone knocked on our door, and it opened a fraction of a second later, Sharp leaning against the frame, looking defeated.
“Press has caught wind of the case,” she told me, walking over and handing me her phone. It was unlocked, on a media website where a brief outline of the story had been released.
“Already?” Mills looked confused. “How did it get so fast?”
“I don’t know, and frankly,” Sharp held her hand out for her phone, “I don’t really care.”
I placed her phone back in her hand, meeting her steely gaze.
“Any suspects?” she asked me.
“Nothing concrete, ma’am.”
She muttered a curse word, slipping her phone into her pocket. “What are you doing next?”
“We’re going to look into this rivalry that sprung up between Lord Hocking and his brother,” I told her, earning myself a respectful nod. “See if there’s anything there that might be relevant, or if the brother can shed some light on anything. Mills,” I nodded to him, “is going to some background research into the painting itself. The artist, the value of the piece, all that.”
“You might need a professional,” Sharpe suggested. “It can’t hurt to get someone else weighing in.”
“Do you know any art dealers?” I asked her.
“I don’t. But you can find one. They’ll have an extra ear to the ground, and they’ll know better than any of us when something’s come up on the market from out of nowhere.”
I nodded, making a mental note to find such a person.
“I’m handling the press, and I need to approach the family and make sure they get a statement in order. They’re lying low?” she asked me.
“I suggested it to them,” I informed her. “Advised Lord Hocking to keep to themselves, make sure the house is secure, security up to scratch.”
“Good. I saw Smith,” she said, relaxing slightly against the wall. “It seems most of the guests from last night want to pin this on the waiting staff.”
“We know.”
“One of them,” she said, “specifically mentioned seeing a waitress down the hallway in question. And that she was still there when they left it.”
“Nadia,” I confirmed. “We spoke to her. One of the boys made her feel uncomfortable, so she waited for them to leave, then headed outside to her colleagues.”
Sharp clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Poor girl. Alibi?”
“Her colleagues
confirmed the time she went out to join them.”
“Well, I’m not about to pin a whole case on the suspicious claims of a few drunk rich people,” she sniffed, “and neither would the court.”
“But we will bear it in mind,” I drawled.
She gave me a wry smile. “We always bear it in mind. Back to it.” She nodded to us both. “Let me know if you need anything. Search warrant or any of that.” She rapped her knuckles on my desk and swanned back to her office, the door clicking shut behind her.
“Search warrant might be useful,” Mills said, spinning in his chair. “Check a few properties before they get the chance to sell it.”
“From what we know so far,” I argued, “I think our thief might be too clever to simply take the painting home.”
They used the cover of the party, they wore gloves, and they stole that specific painting. No, this wasn’t the sort of person to leave it lying in the wardrobe or under a bed. They’d had taken it somewhere, and in any case, we didn’t have enough cause to ransack someone’s house. Not just yet, anyway.
“Sir,” Mills began carefully.
“What?”
“About the art dealer.”
“Do you know one?”
“No,” he dropped his gaze, “but someone else might.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t, just fiddled with his stapler. “Stop being so cryptic, Mills and tell me.”
“Well, it might be worth asking Miss Gray. She seems to have a lot of connections.”
I knew for a fact that Jeannie’s interest in art began and ended with marble statues of Greek figures, but I nodded to Mills and banked it in the back of my mind. She does have some very strange connections to people, it had to be said. She even told once that she knew a man who bred peregrine falcons. No clue as to why, but she did.
“I’ll bear it in mind,” I told him, echoing Sharp’s sentiment. He nodded, ducking his head back to the screen of his laptop, returning to his endless slogging through articles and papers. I headed back to the hospital website, deciding to learn as much about Richard Sandow as I could before pitching up at his front door one day, demanding insight into his family’s past.