Tilly looked tense when she strolled into the yard. Graeme had only known her for two days, but he knew anxiety when he saw it, and instinct warned him to tread carefully. It was time to have a proper conversation, but he didn’t want to scare her off. He’d been through her handbag when she was asleep; he’d also tried to log into her computer, but had found nothing. Johnny had a point: he had been completely sucked in. He needed to find out more about her. His brain screamed at him to walk away, but he couldn’t. He was too fascinated by her. And he liked her.
He smiled warmly and the tension left her brow. She was beginning to dress like a local, the jeans and pretty blouse of the day he’d met her replaced by shorts, flip-flops and a warm gilet. She had great legs. He signalled to her that he wouldn’t be long. The occasion of a launch was always a spectacle and Tilly had shown more interest than he’d thought she might. She’d said she’d love to go out on the boat to watch, but that she had to make a few calls first. He’d arranged to meet her at the marina and left her room. Whatever it was she was up to, he was sure it wasn’t what she said it was.
Finally, he finished what he was doing and strode over to her.
‘Did you bring your smart camera?’ he asked.
‘Oh fuck!’
‘How could you forget that? It’s massive!’
‘I’ll go back for it.’
‘Are you all right? You seem jumpy.’
Up close, she looked pale. Several members of staff glanced over at their boss’s new focus of attention. Tilly kept glancing over her shoulder.
‘Actually, could you come with me?’
‘Of course. What is it?’
‘There were two men hanging about this morning close to the guest house.’
Graeme laughed. ‘Some of the locals are a bit odd.’
She ignored him. They left the marina and walked along the road towards the village.
‘Don’t you think it’s about time you told me what this is all about?’ Graeme said. ‘I mean, I’ve only known you for a day or two, but I think you should just come clean.’
She stopped and looked at him.
‘Oh God, is it that obvious?’
He saw relief on her face, but the fear still sat heavily in her eyes. She was scared of something.
‘Bloody hell, that’s them!’ she gasped. ‘Turn around!’
‘What? Wait.’ He hurried after her in the direction they’d come from. When he glanced back over his shoulder, two men were standing on the corner, talking to each other. They didn’t look suspicious to him, but he also didn’t recognise them.
‘Tilly!’ He jogged to catch up with her and grabbed her arm. ‘Slow down!’
‘Not here.’ She looked terrified now.
‘Where then? What about your room?’
‘Will you go and get my stuff? I can’t go back there. Please!’ She was crying now.
‘Come on, I’ll take you to the office and then I’ll come back and collect your stuff.’
‘Oh shit, my computer’s in there. I need to get it.’
They looked back. The men had gone. Graeme put an arm round her, and they turned and headed in the direction of her accommodation. When they got there, he told her to wait while he went to her room.
‘Be careful!’
‘You can explain everything to me when I come back. Go into the shop; there’s CCTV in there. If you’re really sure that somebody’s out to hurt you, that’s the best place for you to be.’
She did as she was told and walked towards the small convenience store. Graeme went up the stone steps outside the B&B and up to her room, but stopped when he found the door open. He peered around it, and only when he was satisfied that no one was in there did he go in.
The place had been turned over. He searched for her laptop but couldn’t find it. Then it hit him: whoever had done this could now be searching for Tilly herself. He sprinted back to the shop and was relieved to find her peering at the canned goods aisle. She saw that he was empty-handed, but before she could question him, he took her by the arm and led her out of the shop.
‘You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Tilly Knight. I’ve got a place out of town, I’ll take you there.’
Chapter 33
The animal had rotted pretty well. The police tape kept onlookers away but it wasn’t a dead body, just a monkey, so the crowds hadn’t lasted long. News of the find, in the Regent’s Canal, near Bow, had got back to Kelly and Matt, and it had been identified as a cynomolgus primate. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out where it might have come from. The poor thing was being autopsied by a vet. Toxicology and histology might indicate what the scientists were working on when the animal had lived.
Matt had spent the whole of last night trying to convince Kelly that she was needed here in London, but she was adamant that she wanted to go home. She’d got what she’d come for, and HQ in Penrith certainly weren’t going to complain about her returning to the constabulary and saving them a bit of cash. Having her visit the Met under the circumstances was justifiable, and she’d learned a tremendous amount about the case. Not least this morning, as more sightings of the white van spotted at George Murphy’s house flooded in.
After a phone call from Johnny telling her about Graeme Millar’s information, they’d also checked out the vehicle number plate for the white van he’d seen in Portinscale. It turned out to be uninsured and unregistered. The absence of a record raised more red flags: if it belonged to a legitimate building company, the van would be traceable. The plate was given to the ANPR computer to see if they could clock it entering or departing the Lake District. Graeme’s information further puzzled them because Montague-Roland had said that he was unsure if anyone was at the property.
The office thronged with noise and moving bodies, all anxious to finish their current task and move on to the next. It was dizzying but thrilling at the same time. Kelly read an email from a parole officer in central London. A circular had been sent to all the Met’s current databases for criminals recently out of prison or on parole for burglary and aggravated violent assault or murder. It was a sizeable list, but the officer had noted that one of his wards had missed an appointment, and when he was tracked down and warned, the man in question became angry and agitated. It was a common sign that an offender was in trouble, and one that parole officers were taught to look out for, so when the officer heard about a brutal crime involving violence and theft, he thought of his perp.
It was worth checking out. Kelly took it to Matt.
‘Leo Brown? Never heard of him. Who is he?’
‘He has a long record of burglary and assault. He’s ex-army, dishonourably discharged for being tested positive for Class A drugs. He’s a general rogue, always on the lookout to make a few quid – and his aunt owns a nautical antiques warehouse in Islington.’
‘You are pulling my leg?’ Matt grinned. ‘Do we have a photo?’
Kelly nodded and used his computer screen to bring one up. In it, Leo Brown sported a black eye.
‘Where is he now?’
‘He missed another appointment with his parole officer.’
‘I bet he did. Go public with it, let’s smoke him out. Do we have prints and DNA from his prison file?’
‘Yup.’
‘It needs to be shown ASAP to the witness at George’s address. Let’s look at the photo of the geezers in the white van again.’ He brought the images up on screen, but they were too grainy to be sure. ‘Address of the antiques place?’
Kelly gave it to him, and he barked an order through the microphone attached to his computer. A car was instantly on its way to the warehouse.
‘What about the van sighting and the men seen by Graeme Millar at Allerdale House?’
‘No number plate match.’
‘Who is this Graeme Millar?’
‘He’s ex-army. Owns a boatyard, and he’s just been hired by Sebastian Montague-Roland to renovate Allerdale House.’ Johnny was a source of valuable information at t
imes.
‘Ex-army?’
‘Matt, it’s impossible. I know him! He’s a friend.’
‘That counts for nothing, Kell, and you know it.’
‘Stop calling me that! He has no motive.’ She found herself defending somebody just because she liked him, and it felt unethical.
‘Anybody can be bought, and these killings were unemotional.’ He raised his voice. ‘He knows how to handle a weapon, and he was snooping about Allerdale House. What regiment was he in?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve got this wrong, Matt.’
‘You’re too close to a suspect. I wonder if Leo Brown ever served with Graeme Millar.’
Kelly sat down heavily. She needed some fresh air. Being in the office with Matt was suffocating. She looked at her watch. She’d asked the driver to pick her up at 5 p.m. and it was 4.30 now. Her case was all packed and in the boot of the car, and she’d checked out of her room.
‘You can’t leave,’ Matt said.
‘Jesus, Matt. Stop it. It’s even more important for me to get back there now, seeing as you’re hell-bent on the idea of Graeme Millar masterminding the whole thing with a load of army mates.’
They glared at one another. Neither of them realised that a small crowd had gathered in the adjoining office to watch them argue. No one had seen anyone stand up to the DCI before, and it was good viewing.
‘As SIO, I think I’ll have to visit the scenes in the north myself.’
‘What? You would really be that childish, in the middle of a multiple murder investigation?’ Kelly went to walk out, but he held her arm. ‘Let me go, Matt.’
He looked past her through the window to the other offices, and the crowd quickly dispersed. He dropped her arm and she walked towards the door. When she reached it, she turned around.
‘I’ll have my phone and my iPad switched on the whole journey home, and we can work together on updates.’ It was weak and she had a momentary prick of guilt. He looked very alone there in his engine room, with no one to bounce ideas off. He said nothing.
As she walked to the lift, the self-reproach turned to excitement as it dawned on her that not only had she resolved the past in her own head, she was also going to see Johnny very soon. It put a spring in her step and she didn’t look back as she entered the lift. She grabbed a coffee on her way out, and saw that the car was waiting for her, with Emma inside.
It had been a productive trip and she’d achieved what she’d set out to do: namely to give context to the two cases and ensure consistency between the forces. Sometimes, working with the Met could turn into a David and Goliath situation, and she hoped Matt wouldn’t veer away from what they’d agreed now that she’d left. Surely not even he would be that immature. She mulled over his parting words and closed her eyes, willing them to be desperation to get her to stay. She couldn’t believe he’d come all the way to Cumbria just to make a point.
She greeted the driver and her colleague and popped her coffee into a holder. Once she was settled in the back of the car, she arranged her notes and various screens around her so she could keep up to date, and they set off.
So far no one had been able to get hold of Matilda Knight. She had been seen up to now as merely a person of interest, but after her car was caught on the ANPR travelling north, she had moved closer to the top of Kelly’s list. If her journalistic nose had got the better of her, it made perfect sense to check out George’s last days in the Lake District. More worrying was what had happened to her flat. If the woman was in danger, they only had limited time to find her. Kelly put a call through to DS Umshaw and told her to release Knight’s photograph to local units. They needed to find her. She was perhaps the last person to speak to George. It was looking more and more likely that it was his controversial work that he’d been killed for, and speaking to a journalist before a homicide was something that needed investigation. Perhaps she’d gone off radar on purpose. Someone could have easily called her to tell her what had happened to her flat; it was big news in the apartment block where she lived.
Updates popped up on HOLMES. The USB stick found in George Murphy’s car had been examined, and she opened the report. The stick had contained three files. One was a bank statement relating to a private account in the name of George Murphy, held at a Lloyds branch along Wanstead High Street. The only transactions were payments into the account, and transfers presumably made by George to another account they knew to be his primary account. But it was the payments that caught Kelly’s eye. Over ten years, more than one million pounds had come into the account, and every payment was made by the late Lord Allerdale. They’d stopped in January, a month after his death.
She sent a message to Matt asking if they knew where Montague-Roland was. There were several things that needed clearing up, not least the fact that people had been spotted on his property while George was there, and now they also needed to know if he was aware of funding from his grandfather to George. Remembering the last time she’d spoken to him, Kelly guessed he wouldn’t be happy about it, but with the dispute over the will, perhaps he knew already but had chosen not to tell them.
The second file contained scientific data that might as well be written in Icelandic. Kelly didn’t have a clue what it all meant, but she knew that Matt would be finding someone who did as she sat there in the car, still stuck in traffic. There were equations, sums, diagrams and names she’d never heard of, though she did spot a phrase she’d heard before: ‘reward pathways’.
The third file contained the autopsy report on George Murphy’s daughter. Kelly read it carefully, and by the time she’d finished, tears were rolling down her face. She thought of all the autopsies she’d studied, and how George’s daughter might have looked when she’d been cut open and examined. The girl was only fifteen years old, and the report said that she’d been revived successfully after an overdose of heroin, only to suffer a huge myocardial infarction.
Kelly was confused. She found a tissue in her bag and wiped her eyes. Did addiction run in the family? Did George feel guilty about the death of his daughter because he was himself an addict? Ted had been adamant that the amount of drugs in the man’s system when he’d died ruled out one-off use. But that didn’t explain the money invested by Lord Allerdale. No business interests between the old peer and George Murphy had been flagged up by the heir to the estate, so Kelly assumed it was a private arrangement. A phone call to the family solicitors had already confirmed that the original trust arrangement in Alan Montague-Roland’s will had been successfully contested in a lengthy court case and a settlement was being drawn up to amend the terms. His grandson wouldn’t have to wait for the funds after all.
Money.
George was being funded by Lord Allerdale. The funding stops. The millions go into trust. Who controlled the trust?
She rang the solicitors and stared outside. They were stuck in traffic and going nowhere. It’d be a long journey.
Finally a senior partner came on the phone and explained that they were no longer at liberty to disclose the details of the estate of Lord Allerdale because of the new settlement.
‘On what grounds did Lord Allerdale’s grandson contest the will?’ she asked.
‘Oh, he didn’t. Well, not exactly. It was the executors.’
‘And who are they?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘I’m a police officer!’
‘Perhaps you could send me a letter on headed paper?’
She stared into her phone. ‘Are you serious?’ she asked.
‘Of course, madam.’
She hung up. The paperwork involved in getting a warrant for such information was tedious and irritating, but it would have to be done; she tasked Emma, who was doing nothing else.
She sat back in her seat, closed her eyes and wondered what George had been up to. If he was trying to understand the chemistry of addiction, surely that was a good thing and not something that would end up getting him killed, along with his colleagues. It a
lso struck her that Alan Montague-Roland had been an extremely moral man: maybe they should look into him more closely. He had been a champion of dozens of good causes and an active, well-liked member of the House of Lords, campaigning on issues close to his heart, such as education and health.
But he obviously didn’t trust his grandson.
Chapter 34
Professor Miranda Cooper was supposed to have left her office by now. She had no idea how Philip had managed to do it, but the snake had obviously pulled in some favours and massaged some files, because she’d been well and truly sacked. She could appeal, of course, but that would take months, and lots of cash. It was a huge risk to take with money she didn’t have, and to go up against a big corporation like Ravensword was practically suicide. She’d never win against their army of lawyers.
But she could do some digging while she still had access to his office. As well as studying anthropology, she took a keen interest in IT and had always been something of a nerd. When Philip had asked her for a favour a couple of years ago, she’d been more than happy to accommodate him. He’d wanted a private computer set up in his office. The tech department at Ravensword was enormous, led by an eminent professor with a Cambridge degree, so she assumed that whatever he wanted the computer for, it wasn’t legitimate. Who was she to care? She was bedding a married man; ethics had been left at the bedroom door on this one.
Tooting’s penthouse suite was deserted and she let herself in to his office. Whenever the boss was away, his staff couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there and left at five o’clock sharp. She was hoping he hadn’t got round to changing the door code yet, and she was relieved when it clicked open. She edged round the enormous mahogany desk, shuddering as she pictured him sitting behind it like a king, barking orders and making little people squirm. She was curious to see what nuggets he was storing on the computer. Of course, it could just be porn, but she had a hunch that a man like Philip Tooting might have his hands dirty elsewhere.
Bold Lies Page 17