The Lady of the Lake

by Peter Guttridge

‘Then, all this shit will be piled on top of me where my private life is more important than my acting career and my acting will be washed away in the flow of it.’ She looked at them fiercely. ‘You promised me!’ She sounded in true pain. ‘And I trusted you!’

  Heap started to speak.

  ‘Not another fucking word from you.’ She pointed at Gilchrist. ‘Or you. If you ever want to talk to me again, talk to my lawyers.’

  She stood behind the door again, opened it and gestured for them to go. They stepped outside and turned. ‘Why do I never fucking learn that I can’t trust anybody?’ Grace said quietly as she slammed the door.

  Gilchrist and Heap didn’t speak until they got in the car. ‘Let’s get some local coppers to flush out people on her land at least,’ Gilchrist said. ‘I’m not sure there is anything we can do about the drones.’

  ‘Donaldson,’ is all Heap said in response.

  Gilchrist called the local community policeman and Lewes police station to organize shifts for a couple of officers to guard the perimeter of Grace’s property. Then they drove back to her hotel in silence. In the car park, Gilchrist said: ‘Come and have a drink in the bar, Bellamy. Please. Don’t leave me feeling like this.’

  They settled in the bar by the log fire – the weather was on the turn. Gilchrist had a large Sauvignon blanc but instead of his customary beer, Heap ordered a double Laphroaig. He saw Gilchrist’s raised eyebrow. ‘I’ll leave the car here and walk home,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t that. This has really got to you, hasn’t it?’

  ‘She’s right, Sarah,’ Heap said. ‘She shared with us her most fiercely kept secrets and tomorrow, when the first editions come out, it’s going to be out in the world for everyone to gloat over and comment on.’ He saw Gilchrist start to speak and he continued: ‘I think I know what you’re about to say. It wasn’t us it was Donaldson. But it was us. We didn’t care for her privacy as we had promised.’ He took a sip of his drink. ‘And now we have to make amends.’

  Gilchrist nodded and glumly chinked her glass against Heap’s.

  ‘So how can we? She’s right about the shit storm I’m sure – she knows more about this tabloid stuff than we do and what with the internet and all the social media as well, we can’t close that sewer door.’

  ‘Can the police commissioner do anything – an injunction or something like that – to prevent the tabloids printing the story?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Gilchrist said. ‘But that would just pique interest and you can’t control the internet.’

  ‘Let’s go after Bosanquet. See if he’s involved with what has been going on here. Find a way to shut him down before he can make her life even more difficult.’

  ‘We go to Morocco? I told you Chief Constable Karen Hewitt won’t sign off on that.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be us,’ Heap said quietly, relishing a bigger sip of his whisky.

  ‘You mean Jimmy Tingley? And if you do mean Jimmy Tingley, what else do you mean? We can’t just keep using him as our guided missile.’

  Jimmy Tingley was ex-SAS and the best friend of Bob Watts and had helped them out unofficially and sometimes not entirely legally over recent years.

  As if he hadn’t heard her, Heap went on: ‘Then we see to Don Donaldson.’

  ‘See to him how?’

  ‘Report him to Disciplinary. Get him demoted or kicked out altogether.’

  ‘Bellamy, you know we can’t do that. That goes against the entire Us versus Them ethos of the police. We don’t rat on our own.’

  Heap emptied his glass. ‘Lovely smoky smell and taste this. Peaty.’ He looked at Gilchrist. ‘I’m not asking you to do it, Sarah. I’m going to do it. I’m not one of the gang. I’m not signed up to this tribal thing. I’m not like the others – they know it and I know it. I don’t mind that. I’m comfortable with who I am. But Donaldson has been given a long enough leash and I think it’s time somebody hung him from it.’

  ‘Don’t lump me in with the gang,’ Gilchrist said quickly.

  ‘I wasn’t but you still have more to lose than me.’

  Gilchrist, mollified, studied him over the rim of her glass.

  ‘Has this got anything to do with the fact that you like Nimue Grace?’

  ‘You mean that I have a crush on her because she set out to enchant me and succeeded?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to put it like that, but since you’re the one saying it …’

  ‘Underneath all that charm and charisma I see a vulnerable, lost woman who needs our help.’

  Gilchrist nodded slowly and put her glass down.

  ‘And faced with women like that, good men like you are doomed. Oh, dear.’ She shrugged. ‘Oh, well, at least there’s one positive outcome from all this.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’ve been calling me Sarah for the past half hour without it sounding odd.’

  Oddly, there was nothing in the next day’s papers about Nimue Grace and the murders. Over the rather nice breakfast in Pelham House, Gilchrist got an animated call from Bellamy Heap.

  ‘Good morning to you, Bellamy. It’s not like you to be so excited.’

  ‘You obviously don’t know me then, ma’am. Remember that thing Bilson said: coincidence is not the same as correlation?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Gilchrist said, chewing on another piece of toast.

  ‘On my walk home last night I was going through the options. Said Farzi was somehow responsible for the death of Rabbitt, Antonio and, somehow linked, Joe Jackson. Or the Albanian hard mob did two of them and poor Joe was a separate thing altogether. Or, unlikely, Nimue Grace killed the lot or her ex, or and or and or – so many possibilities.

  ‘Kate was fast asleep when I got home and I was buzzing so I glanced at that pamphlet, the Hassocks blockade, that has been staring us in the face throughout the investigation. The guy who wrote it lives in the cottages near Ms Grace. He gave her a copy to get a blurb.’

  ‘I remember the pamphlet. Burning cars blocking a street on the cover.’

  ‘Some years ago, back in the day when Hassocks still had three banks on the high street and before the sorting office for Royal Mail was closed down, there was an armed bank robbery of all the banks, the sorting office and the sub-post office in the village. Multiple armed robberies, rather. Very organized. They blocked off either end of the high street with cars across the road first, then two men hit the bank at the Ditchling end of the high street; two others hit the sub-post office in the middle of the high street at the same time as two more hit the bank across the road from that. Four in the sorting office and two in the bank opposite. Around ten men in total, not including the two getaway drivers stationed at either end of the town. Balaclavas, sawn-off shotguns and baseball bats. It was like the Wild West – as they got away in two different directions they set fire to those cars blocking the road at either end of the high street.

  ‘It made all the nationals, of course. Especially as they just disappeared. The initial assumption was they had reached the A23 and either gone south towards Brighton or north towards the M23 and London – or who knows where.

  ‘The following day a burned-out car was discovered in the National Trust car park at Ditchling Beacon and a couple of weeks later an abandoned car was found in the multistorey car park at Gatwick.’

  ‘They got away clean?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘As far as anyone knows. Certainly the money was never recovered but nor did it appear in circulation. The money from the banks that is, where the numbers were traceable. The sub-post office money was not traceable anyway so it’s impossible to say what happened to that. Or exactly what got stolen from the sorting office, although they were, apparently, selective in there.’

  ‘And they were never caught.’

  ‘Never,’ Heap said.

  ‘So what are you thinking?’

  ‘Well, the guy who wrote the pamphlet is making connections with the Great Train Robbery.’

  ‘Same people, you mean?’

>   ‘No, no. That too was very carefully planned and executed, although the Great Train Robbery was disastrously managed at the end when it came to fingerprints. Until then, they were very professional. They stopped the train where they had multiple escape routes onto motorways. They were London thieves and could have got to London in a couple of hours. Or anywhere for that matter. But they did a very clever thing. They didn’t really go anywhere. Knowing the police would be pretty quick to establish road blocks they went no more than twenty miles to a farmhouse they’d rented earlier. And they holed up there for a week.’

  ‘You’re saying that maybe these robbers in Hassocks did the same thing around here?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘That’s what this historian is suggesting.’

  ‘Does he suggest where they might have holed up?’

  ‘No, but he found that Plumpton Down House was empty at the time. Theoretically.’

  ‘And they stashed the money there? And never spent it?’

  ‘Well, if it has only been found now, none of it would be usable. The new plastic currency has replaced the old money. There’s a new £50 note.’

  ‘Why would they not have spent it, Bellamy?’

  ‘The robbers had been put away for something else.’

  ‘What – all of them?’

  ‘All the ones who knew where the money was.’

  ‘So Joe Jackson stumbles on the money at the lake. How?’

  ‘The white containers, ma’am,’ Heap murmured.

  ‘We’re talking about those blooming white containers?’

  ‘I think we are, ma’am.’

  ‘You’ve reverted to ma’am, by the way.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s OK – but please don’t do it twice in the same exchange. So, Joe Jackson was one of the filmmakers down at Grace’s lake. The white containers were full of money. Old money, so not county line drug dealers. Not illicit cannabis growing in vineyards. Something else – this robbery.’ She tapped her teeth with her pen. ‘This whole thing could be about something else.’

  ‘Not all of it but we probably will have to look in other places too,’ Heap said.

  ‘So, bank robbery, the culprits go away for a long stretch and while they are away the Bank of England replaces the old currency with new stuff. Richard Rabbitt and/or Joe Jackson stumble upon it when the water is particularly low.’ Gilchrist rubbed her cheek. ‘Yet, Bellamy, you say nobody has any idea who did the Hassocks robberies?’

  ‘I didn’t quite say that, ma’am. I said that nobody was brought to trial for it. A professional robber called Graham Goody was suspected of masterminding this – he’d been involved in the Brink’s-Matt when he first started out. He was nabbed at his villa on the Costa del Crime for drug smuggling just a couple of months after the Hassocks blockade. We need to check if/when he has been released.’

  ‘But what about all the others? They all got nabbed for this or that for long sentences?’

  ‘As I said, maybe they didn’t know where the money was stashed?’

  ‘So they accepted that they had worked for nothing? I don’t buy that. They’d come looking for Graham Goody, in jail or out. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Who are his known associates?’

  ‘I’ll find out, ma’am,’ Wade said.

  ‘And when did Goody get released?’

  Heap was working on his iPad. ‘He didn’t. He’s still inside. In Lewes actually.’

  Gilchrist smiled.

  ‘Well, that’s handy. Make an appointment for later today.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  Sarah Gilchrist got to Lewes Prison before Heap. As she was waiting in reception, DI Mountain walked in. They had encountered each other briefly on Gilchrist’s last investigation.

  ‘How are you, DI Gilchrist?’

  ‘Getting there.’

  ‘How are you getting on with DS Donaldson?’

  ‘You know him?’ Gilchrist asked.

  ‘Our paths have inevitably crossed.’

  ‘Well, what do you think of him?’

  DI Mountain looked at Gilchrist intently. She seemed to be weighing something up.

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course honestly.’

  ‘He’s an arrogant pig who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. But I assume you already knew that.’

  ‘I did already know that.’

  ‘He’s not much of a team player, is he?’

  ‘As you say – hasn’t taken you long to suss that out?’

  ‘It was obvious from the get-go. The report you made was quite exposing for Nimue Grace. You expected him to keep it confidential?’

  ‘Where is he now?’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘In hospital. Had some kind of attack – found in a corridor at Haywards Heath unconscious on the floor – so he’s being checked out. Bruising under his chin, no other signs of a bad fall apparently.

  ‘An attack? You mean like a seizure or something?’

  Mountain shrugged. ‘Nobody knows. But the docs advised him to take the rest of the week off. Then, I hear, he’s either going on suspension for inappropriate dealings with the press or being called back to Gatwick to be on the alert for the latest drone attack. He’s the whizz on drones apparently. Hard to believe he’s a whizz at anything but there you go.’

  She looked beyond Gilchrist. ‘Here’s your sidekick.’ Heap approached and shook her hand. Mountain nodded to both of them. ‘Let me just go ahead and set this up. Won’t be a mo.’ She called back over her shoulder. ‘Job well done, DS Heap. The drinks are on half the local force next time you’re in the pub.’

  Gilchrist looked at Heap. ‘What was that about?’ Heap shrugged.

  ‘Mountain was just telling me Don-Don was found in a corridor earlier today, unconscious on the floor.’ Gilchrist thought for a moment. ‘Know anything about that?’

  ‘No,’ Heap said. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  Heap shrugged.

  ‘That drink culture is hard to stamp out. Is he all right?’

  ‘Bruising under his chin, no other signs of a bad fall apparently. They don’t know if he had some kind of seizure. Docs advised him to take the rest of the week off. Then his suspension will come through with luck.’

  ‘Then he’s out of the way. Excellent.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a seizure, was it, Bellamy?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by a seizure.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s going to be that easy, do you? He’s going to be out to get you.’

  Heap was thinking back. He hadn’t exactly been looking for Donaldson but he’d found him, in a quiet corridor between offices.

  ‘So you’re trying to get me suspended, Junior G-Man,’ Donaldson called as they approached each other from opposite ends of the corridor. ‘Punching above your weight, ain’t you, Boy Detective, taking me on?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Heap said, trying to move past him. ‘You’re not supposed to leak confidential information to the press.’

  ‘Why don’t we see now?’ Donaldson said, knocking the sheaf of papers out of Heap’s hand. ‘Just you and me.’

  ‘That didn’t end so well for you last time, if you remember,’ Heap said. Some years ago they’d had a tussle in which the then newly arrived Heap had floored muscle-bound Donaldson.

  ‘Yeah, well, I know what a sneaky git you are now, don’t I?’

  ‘Outside then, when I’ve delivered these papers,’ Heap said, gesturing to the scattered pages on the floor. He took a step back and bent sideways with a little twist of his waist to the left. As he extended his left arm towards the papers he clenched his fist, then came back up suddenly, twisting back to the centre and curling his left arm and punching upwards with the clenched fist. The upper cut, given double the force by delivering it from so far down, caught Donaldson just under the tip of his chin.

  Donaldson’s head snapped back as his whole body crumpled. Heap stepped forwar
d and clasped his arms round Donaldson’s waist to take his weight and guide his fall. When Donaldson was almost on the floor, Heap moved his hand to cradle his head and lower it, almost tenderly, to the floor. He looked at him for a moment, ensuring his air passages were open, then picked up his papers and carried on down the corridor.

  He looked at Gilchrist now. ‘I know. And it won’t be with fists this time. Not with his glass jaw.’

  ‘So it was you.’ Gilchrist shook her head. ‘Bellamy Heap. What will become of you?’

  FIFTEEN

  Graham Goody was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his fifties. He was good looking and confident. In the interrogation room, he gave Gilchrist the once-over, and nodded at Heap and DI Mountain.

  ‘I understand why you’re here,’ he said. ‘But what do I get out of this? If I had nicked all this money you say someone has now nicked from me, what do I have to gain now that it’s all gone?’

  ‘Somebody is murdering any person who these days might conceivably be inadvertently linked to the money. One of your colleagues?’

  ‘I repeat, what’s in it for me?’

  ‘Well, if you fessed up to the robbery and named your colleagues that could go well for you.’

  Goody threw his head back theatrically and laughed loudly. ‘Do you think I’m slow or something? If I admit to armed robbery, even if no one got hurt – which they didn’t – they wouldn’t just add another long sentence to my existing one, they’d throw away the key. Armed robbery is treated as a beast of a different colour to the drug-smuggling charges I’m in here for. Rightly or wrongly. And as for giving up my colleagues in this alleged crime … dream on.’

  Gilchrist leaned forward. ‘There’s a killer on the loose out there – two, possibly three deaths and counting. And it’s possible all the deaths are linked to the money you allegedly stole in Hassocks fifteen years ago. You help us get him and it will help you substantially. Looking at your sheet and other stuff that unofficially you’re linked with, violence has never been your thing. Ever. The threat of it, sure, but you’ve never gone through with it.’

  ‘True enough,’ Goody said.

  Heap nodded. ‘Now either that’s because you were too much of a wuss and got your oppos to do the stuff you were too sensitive to do yourself or because you genuinely didn’t agree with violence.’