48 Hours - A City of London Thriller

by J Jackson Bentley

  “What is Nana?” I asked, showing a degree of ignorance that the other two could not comprehend. Alana patronised me with a patient explanation.

  “NaNA is the National News Archive. It attempts to scan all of the newspapers published and digitise their content. It goes back to the 1800s now and is relatively complete back as far as the 1960s.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it,” I admitted, not understanding how such a valuable resource had escaped my notice.

  “That’s probably because it’s a subscription service on a secure server, and the subscription is between six hundred and two thousand pounds a year.” I must have looked shocked because Alana tried to explain. “It’s good value for money if you are a foundation member, like Vastrick. We get complete access to both the digitised archive and the hard copies. We can print as much as we like and as we pay so much we are allowed to use the universal search engine, which will look for a word or phrase or person anywhere in the archive. The regular users can only search for a particular edition, and they have limited printing rights.”

  “OK, I accept I might be ignorant. What did you find?” The front page of a long defunct newspaper was pushed in my direction. It had a blue banner with white lettering that proudly proclaimed “TODAY, Britain’s only colour newspaper”. There was a wide angle photo which showed three well known rock stars, including a young looking Fisher, with five more soberly dressed men behind them. In the background we could see the crowd of over a hundred thousand excited rock fans.

  “Look closely, Josh, on the back line, on the extreme left. That is a young looking Arthur Hickstead sharing the stage with the stars of Rock Relief 88, twenty two years ago.”

  Alana explained that the concert had been held in July and that the shadow cabinet had all been on holiday and so they were represented by a member of their party’s ruling National Executive Council, Arthur Hickstead. As the Trades Unions were donating one million pounds, Arthur was being interviewed just before Elton John came on stage. The TV audience at that point was a UK record and, as it was a simulcast with the USA, Hickstead had a chance to address more people than the Prime Minister could hope to reach and he obviously relished the task. When the camera came to him he was beaming, and he began a short prepared piece about helping Africa’s workers in being represented. But within seconds of him beginning his speech, Don Fisher stormed into the tent studio, grabbed the camera lens and looked straight into it. He might have been high on something but he said, and I quote: ‘This is all bollocks, there are kids starving out there, get your hands in your flaming pockets and give ‘til it hurts. The suits will give their money because it looks good on the balance sheet but we want your cash and we want you to care.’ Arthur never appeared on camera again because, after the foul mouthed outburst, Fisher used another F word, not flaming as I just said. The producers cut Arthur’s speech and had the cameras cut away to Elton John.

  In the Guardian the next day, Arthur Hickstead was described as being livid when he was quoted as saying ‘We have given a million pounds to this charity and we expect more respect. That foul mouthed yob won’t get another penny from us.’ Behind him a crowd of young adults booed him and, according to the reporter, he stormed off and boycotted the after concert event.”

  That could have been a good motive for blackmail, I supposed, being humiliated in front of the UK’s biggest ever TV audience. We thanked Alana for her help and were about to go back to the operations room when my BlackBerry rang. The screen informed me it was Inspector Boniface.

  “Hello, Inspector.”

  “Josh, can you come to the station as soon as possible? Don Fisher wants to speak to you.”

  Chapter 38

  City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Tuesday 4pm.

  I have to admit that at school and college I was a radical. I was very anti-establishment, but there was something that irked me even more than the establishment, and that was sell-outs. I loved punk rock music and its sentiment, but I naively believed that the bands were shunning riches, the high life and celebrity that they claimed to hate so much. So, when they all made their money and joined the very establishment they had purported to be rebelling against, I was disgusted and disappointed. To me, principles are for life, and I know some very rich people who are still radical and anti-establishment. To see millionaire pop stars living the high life they raged against when they were struggling sickened me.

  In my opinion Don Fisher was both a sell-out and a hypocrite. He looked like a rebel, his grey and receding hair usually worn in a ponytail, suit jacket over torn jeans, unshaven, but he wasn’t. I recalled seeing him in an interview on TV two years ago, when he told working class parents not to take their families to McDonald’s or out to dinner but to give the money to his charity instead. The interviewer, who had been a well-known left wing agitator in his youth, asked Don why his eldest daughter was out on the town wearing six hundred pound shoes and carrying a designer bag of equal value if he was so concerned about families wasting money. Don replied that his kids were grown up, and they made their own choices. The interviewer pointed out that two of his kids were in full time education and one had an internship earning her fifteen thousand a year. He must be subsidising their jet set lifestyle, he suggested. Don hadn’t liked the questions about his family or his partying with the very establishment figures he made his reputation disparaging, and stormed out of the interview.

  It was mainly for this reason that I was unlikely to be star struck by meeting a singer who had made most of his fortune by being a famous foul mouthed charity promoter, and not by his singing.

  ***

  Dee was still not leaving my side, and so when I went into the conference room she came with me, of course. I think she also wanted the chance to see Don Fisher close up.

  We were ushered into the room, and Don Fisher was polite towards us, shaking hands and flirting with Dee. Then in an instant he changed, and with a wave of his hand he dismissed his solicitor and the uniformed policeman who had been taking his statement.

  “Get out; I want to talk to these two alone.” In their position I would have slapped him, but they left the room somewhat meekly, smiling deferentially. When we were alone he leaned forward and spoke quietly.

  As I looked at him I realised that he looked much older than his forty six years. His complexion was beyond pale; his hair was grey, wiry and lacked condition. I noticed that his eyes were rheumy and yellow in the corners. His face was heavily wrinkled, especially the eyes and forehead. He had the lines most associated with those who have squinted through a lifetime of smoking to keep the smoke out of their eyes. His thick Birmingham accent seemed more pronounced as he kept his voice down.

  “This bastard threatened my daughter and I’m going to see him dead. Are you going to help me?”

  “No,” I answered, equally quietly.

  He frowned, paused and hissed. “If I was you I would cooperate.” There was a distinct threat behind the words that made me angrier than I had ever been.

  I answered in a barely controlled voice. “How do you even know it was Lord Hickstead who blackmailed you?”

  “Who else would it have been?” he snarled.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I postulated, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Maybe it could be one of those lowlifes who shag your daughter on a one night stand, take sordid photos of her and post them on the internet for everyone to see.”

  The aging rocker leapt to his feet, his face purple with rage. I stood up and faced him, ready for a fight. Dee pushed me down in my seat.

  “That’s enough, Josh. He might be rude but he’s a victim, too, and that last comment was below the belt.” She turned to Don Fisher next. “And you can sit down too, before I put you down.”

  He sat down abruptly, and I apologised. I felt calmer now.

  “I’m sorry. Your daughter is still only twenty, and we all make mistakes when we’re young. She’s a pretty girl and no one deserves to have th
eir life threatened.”

  He was calmer, too, when he spoke. “Bloody kids! My parents told me ‘what goes around comes around’ when I was rebelling and making their lives hell. I hated them then, now I realise I love them more than life itself and always did. Wisdom comes a bit too late for some of us. My two youngest won’t get the same freedom.”

  Dee brought us back to the point.

  “Look, Don, I don’t know if you remember Arthur Hickstead?” He shook his head; he had no idea who Arthur was. “Well, in 1988 at the Rock Relief concert he was giving a live TV interview, and was about to take credit for a million pound donation when you burst in and made your famous, ‘get your hands in your pockets’ rant. He felt humiliated, according to the newspapers the next day.”

  “I remember the rant, as you call it, but possibly because I’ve seen it so many times on TV since. I don’t remember interrupting anyone, but I wasn’t entirely lucid at the time. I did that after I’d taken a little something to keep me awake. It had been a long and stressful couple of days.”

  “So, you and Josh are going to get payback, but not by attacking anyone. This man is powerful and well connected; he enjoys his position and the power it brings. The best punishment would be his fall from grace, imprisonment, loss of freedom and the removal of his title. If you want to help, tell us what happened to you and we’ll explain what we know.”

  We listened as the angry father in Fisher came to the fore, and he described how he had been in bed reading a book when a text came through on his business iPhone. He almost ignored it because that was the number used by the media and his business contacts, and he didn’t want to be bothered at that time of night. Nevertheless, he did look at it, and the picture that followed, and he had been shocked beyond words. There on his screen, looking glamorous in a long, low cut dress, Lavender Mali Fisher smiled for the camera. Crosshairs had been added to her forehead.

  Jim the blackmailer had allowed Don Fisher forty eight hours to raise one million pounds, but realistically it would have to be paid before the bank closed and so he had around forty hours in reality. Twenty four hours out of those forty, the banks would not be open. Nonetheless, he raised the cash – his personal fortune has been estimated at over a hundred million pounds, after all - and arranged to have it picked up. Until the payment had been confirmed, Angel, Lavender and Tawny were told to stay either in their flats or at home. Seemingly, Lavender got bored with being stuck indoors with nothing to do, and went out to a nightclub which had sent her an invitation to attend the reopening of their refurbished electro pop dance room. She was advised by a guy in a tuxedo to leave by the back door, as the press were waiting for her at the front. She complied, and got paint balled. It was just one shot, but a painful one, on her bare back.

  Don Fisher had one of his men drop off the bag with the guest at table nineteen at Cosmo’s Seafood Restaurant, on the Strand, as instructed. The man at the table was little more than a boy. He appeared to be Arabic, and this was confirmed when he thanked the man for bringing his bag with the words:

  “Tell Don that Jim is grateful for his cooperation.”

  Don’s man waited in a shop doorway across the street and watched the restaurant, but the boy with the bag never emerged. Don never heard from Jim again, and had been surprised when he found out that the police knew he had been blackmailed.

  We told the rocker what we knew, and he concluded that it was a slam dunk that it was Hickstead. I agreed with him, but noted that the police needed an iron clad case.

  To my surprise, Fisher told us that the police were going to pick up Hickstead for questioning and perhaps get a warrant to search his accommodation. The problem was that no-one knew where he was staying. His credit card had not been used since he had used it to buy rail tickets to and from Leeds on Friday.

 

  Chapter 39

  City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Wednesday 8am.

  DS Fellowes tapped on Inspector Boniface’s door before entering. As soon as he was in the room he was sharing his good news.

  “Inspector, we were checking Hickstead’s credit card purchases to see if we could find out where he was staying and we came across this item. I’ve highlighted it in yellow.” Boniface took the printout and read that the card had been charged two hundred and eighty six pounds by VLM Ticketing.

  “Who are VLM?” Boniface asked.

  “They fly daily from London City Airport to Rotterdam, and it seems that Lord Hickstead has a flight booked at five this evening, with a return flight early tomorrow morning.”

  “He must be selling the diamonds,” Boniface said, thinking out loud.

  “That’s what we think, sir.”

  “OK, Fellowes, this is what we do.”

  The inspector laid out a plan to track and find the diamonds, a plan which he was optimistic would produce results.

  ***

  Dee was concerned at how tired both of us were feeling and so she reset my alarm without me knowing. As a result, I slept until almost eight, whereas I was often up before six.

  We ate a relaxed breakfast and neither of us were city ready, still in our lounging clothes. Dee suggested that we head in mid morning, and I agreed. As we sat and chatted, she asked about my family. I told her about my parents up in the Midlands, and my brother, all of whom felt responsible for me because I was the youngest and had no wife to take care of me. Dee thought that was amusing, given the perils I had faced this past week. She then asked if she could see pictures of them, and so, for ease, I went to www.webshots.com on my laptop and opened my account. My albums were all listed. I opened the one which I had ingeniously named Family Album.

  “Do your worst,” I said as I turned the laptop to face her. She spent a lot of time grinning and laughing out loud at the photos of me from childhood to the present day. Many of the older photos had been scanned by my parents, but most had been taken with a digital camera.

  Having scrolled through the photos, she alighted on a picture of me dressed as Charlie Chaplin at a fancy dress party.

  “When was this taken?” she asked. To be honest I could barely remember the event. I think I might have been helped home by my friends that night.

  Underneath the photo was a button headed ‘more info’, and I pressed it. A new panel opened up and we could see that the photo had been taken on February 14th 2004. We could also see that it had been taken with a Canon Eos, for a 60th of a second at f16, and that the flash had fired.

  Dee looked closely at the data before asking a question. “Do all digital cameras do this? I mean, do they all record this type of data?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Well, at least all of mine have. The information is stored on the memory card automatically.”

  “In that case we’ve almost certainly been missing some crucial evidence linking Hickstead to the deaths and the blackmail attempts,” she stated.

  I realised that she was right. The Peer had taken pictures of Lavender Fisher, myself, and Richard Wolsey Keen, and we had access to all of the emailed photos. If His Lordship had not removed the data before sending the pictures, we could hopefully extricate some valuable evidence from them.

  I spun the laptop around and closed the open windows before clicking on My Photos and opening the two photos of me that had been sent by the blackmailer to my BlackBerry. I right clicked on the thumbnail of the photo that showed me with crosshairs on my head, and clicked ‘properties’.

  There it was in front of me;

  DSC100145

  Saved by: Photopaint XII 10:08

  Taken: 11/08/2010, 9:12

  Nikon Coolpix P100

  Autoflash on. Not used.

  1/125th sec

  F5.6

  This was picture number 145 taken on the Nikon Coolpix on the day my first threat had been received. It had been manipulated using Corel Photopaint, image editing software.

  Whilst I found out what I could about the camera on the internet, Dee called DS Fellowes. She was becoming
closer to him than I would have liked.

  “DS Fellowes is emailing the other photos to your email account now,” she said as she hung up.

  It appeared that the Nikon Coolpix P100 was a new model which had only recently been released by the manufacturer, and that as it was a ‘bridge camera’, a camera that comes somewhere between a compact and a full sized Digital SLR camera, and as such it had a limited market. Nonetheless, I guessed that they had probably sold thousands of them.

  A voice that sounded just like Joanna Lumley announced that I had email.

  For the next ten minutes Dee and I looked at all of the photos, printed them with their details and assembled the print outs. We were both excited about our findings.

  Each photo was numbered in chronological order. The first photo was of Lavender, numbered DSC100131, and the last was of Richard in the park and was numbered DSC100153. They had all been taken with a Nikon Coolpix P100 and most had been edited by Photopaint.

  Dee summarised the value of the evidence we had uncovered, but I had already worked out for myself what it meant.

  “If Hickstead owns a Coolpix P100, a quick look at it would tell us whether the camera numbering sequence matched the photos we have from the blackmailer. If he has a laptop loaded with Corel Photopaint XII, that would be even more convincing. And, with any luck, a forensic examination of the hard drive will confirm that those pictures have been on his computer.”

  She paused and breathed in deeply. “Josh, we might have him.”

 

  Chapter 40

  City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Wednesday, Noon.

  Inspector Boniface was grinning from ear to ear as he read from a note which had just been passed to him. He then pressed the intercom.

  “You can send DS Fellowes in now.”

  We had been so elated by our find that we immediately contacted the police and emailed them all of our data. They promised to act on it straight away, and asked us to call in for an update.

  “You two are regular Miss Marples. I guess that someone would have come up with this information, given time, but you were there first. What’s more, I think our follow up research will cheer you up no end.”