Christmas Cat Blues, page 21
“Excellent.” He turned to Molly. “I thought I’d come down here and join you two. I was getting a bit lonely up there.”
He opened the wallet folder as he spoke and began spreading the contents in front of him. Molly cast her eyes upward.
“Jeremy, I think that you should leave all that alone now. You’ve done what you can. Let the police do their job.”
Jeremy opened his mouth to reply and then closed it again. She was right, of course. But somehow, somewhere at the back of his mind, he couldn’t help thinking that if he searched a bit harder, looked a little more closely, he just might find the thing that he was looking for. The problem was of course that he didn’t know what that thing was. He picked up Adam’s notebook again and flicked through it. He’d been through it so many times now that he knew it practically word for word. In fact, he’d made notes on the notes. He put it back down again and picked up a Foundation newsletter. There was Dick, looking serious and important in his immaculate grey suit, seated at his imposing desk, eyes cast down, pretending to study what presumably the reader was supposed to think was an important document. It was, he thought, just as likely to be copy of the Beano. He sighed. The sooner that Dick retired the better.
He dropped the newsletter back on the table and pulled the next one towards him. It was a real archive piece, produced he guessed, in the nineteen seventies. The main photograph showed the Foundation staff standing by a Christmas tree. He smiled to himself. The woman to the left of the picture was wearing exactly the sort of dress that his mother used to wear. Knee length crimplene with a neat little belt. She even had the same sort of hair style. Softly waved and flicking slightly at the ends. He picked it up and half turned to Molly to show her when his eye was caught by the newsletter beneath it. This one was much more recent. He glanced to the top of the page. It had been produced just three months ago. The main picture in this one showed one of the managers handing over a key to a new tenant. And clearly showing in the cuff of his shirt as he shook hands was a gold cufflink set with a pale blue stone.
51
Jeremy leaned on the golf club bar and took a long gulp from his pint of beer. The lunch-time rush had gone and the bar was half-empty. The Christmas lights and decorations were up and, Arnold, the barman, was wearing a Santa hat with a bit of tinsel wound around it and a fake white beard. Being a tall thin man of a naturally lugubrious expression, Jeremy thought that it made him look rather sinister. Just as well that children weren’t allowed in the bar, they’d be carrying them out screaming. Next to him Carlos sipped at his half of lager. He had been initially reluctant to buy it for him but then he recalled a vague memory of reading somewhere that youths of sixteen or seventeen could drink alcohol with a meal provided that it was bought by an adult. Well, the golf club was a private members club and it did serve food. Anyway, it was Christmas and he doubted that the golf club would be at the top of the list for police raids.
He glanced sideways at him. It had been a good idea to get Carlos out of the house this afternoon. He had been excitable and on edge ever since receiving Teddy’s postcard and today seemed like as good a time as any to give him his first golf lesson. On the whole, it had been rather successful. Jeremy hadn’t really been surprised. Carlos had all the makings of a good golfer. He was tall and lean and had a natural swing and a good eye. It would, he thought, be an idea to build these sessions into their weekly routine. Apart from anything else, he thought, casting a rueful glance down at his stomach, it would give him some much-needed exercise as well.
He looked up as Dave strolled in and joined them at the bar.
“The usual?”
Dave nodded.
“Shall we grab a table?”
Holding their drinks, the two men and Carlos made their way towards a table in the corner and sat down. Carlos straightened his shoulders and assumed a serious expression, flattered to be in the company of grown men. Although given what he’d learned of his father, Jeremy thought, he probably hadn’t had much practice.
“I called round at your place as soon as I came off duty.” Dave took a sip from his pint. “Molly said that you were here. I thought that you’d want to know.”
Jeremy put his pint down.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“We took him in a couple of hours ago. He came quietly but he’s not saying anything. He just sat back and called his solicitor.”
“Was it the cufflink?” Carlos, his tone eager, leaned forward.
“Pretty much,” said Dave. “We knew that, certainly as far as Annie was concerned, everybody who was in Fireside House that day was a suspect, given that there were no visitors and no strangers reported hanging about and it would have been too much of a coincidence not to have linked her death with Adam’s. The cufflink at least gave us something to make a start with.”
“Isn’t it all a bit, you know, circulation?” asked Carlos.
“Circulation?” Dave looked puzzled.
“Circumstantial,” Jeremy translated. Years of working with teenagers had developed his skill at interpreting down to a fine art. He considered his best effort to be the day he had been marking some homework and had finally managed to translate ‘I was groping with my wok’ to ‘I was working with my group’. The boy who had written it, he recalled, had been a small blond wiry lad who, in spite of his inability to grapple successfully with the English language, had been a gifted musician. Jeremy had heard him once playing on the battered old upright piano that stood in the corner of the long defunct music room at Sir Frank Wainwright’s. He had looked embarrassed when Jeremy had put his head round the door to find out where the music was coming from and had stood up and quickly shut the lid of the piano, almost certainly anticipating that he was going to get a bollocking for being in there. Instead, Jeremy had simply sat down and asked him to continue. He remembered that afternoon well. It had been a little oasis of calm and beauty, a unique occurrence at Sir Frank’s. He wondered where the boy was now. By rights he should have been playing for a symphony orchestra. Probably he was working for the minimum wage in one of the huge warehouses that banked the ring road. Just like Carlos might have been if he and Molly hadn’t fostered him.
“Well, yes,” Dave conceded. “It is circumstantial. But there’s no doubt about the fact that the cufflink was found on the kitchen floor of the Mistletoe Hotel the day after the Foundation Christmas lunch, and that it looks very much like it belonged to him. As evidenced by the picture in the newsletter. And also, he had no business being in the kitchen.”
“He could just say that the cufflink wasn’t his,” said Carlos. “That loads of people might have had cufflinks like that.”
“He could,” admitted Dave. “But we took it to a jeweller in town who confirmed that it would have cost a pretty penny so probably not owned by loads of people. But I take your point. Anyway, it’s a start. It’s given us a reason to take him in for questioning. We’ll just have to keep digging until we get some more. We’re going to do another sweep around Fireside House tomorrow. If we can place him in the basement somehow, it will help.”
“How long can you keep him,” asked Jeremy.
“Twenty-four hours and then we have to either charge or release him. Although,” he added, “we can apply for an extension if the charge is likely to be a serious one, which this is.”
“What did you find out about Henry Holdings?” asked Jeremy. “Did you get anything there?”
Dave looked glum.
“Not really. Going through the transactions, they’re genuine enough. There is a company called Henry Holdings and they did sell property to the Foundation, albeit at vastly inflated prices but that in itself isn’t a crime. People pay over the odds for things all the time. Caveat emptor and all that.”
Carlos looked interested. More new words to impress Teddy with.
“Cave what?” he asked.
“Caveat emptor,” said Jeremy. “It means buyer beware.”
Carlos nodded. He wasn’t sure how he was going to work that one into a conversation but he’d give it his best shot.
“Anyway,” continued Dave, “all the paper work is in order. They were legitimate sales. If we’re lucky we might be able to get some kind of deception or fraud charge to stick. But that’s assuming that we can find someone to stick it to. We can’t seem to unearth who’s behind the company.”
“What about the purchase money from the properties? It must have been paid somewhere.” Jeremy sounded puzzled. “Can’t you track it through bank accounts or something?”
“We tried that. The money was siphoned off from the Henry Holdings account into the accounts of people who really exist. Foundation tenants who knew nothing about it.”
“Can you just do that?” asked Carlos. “I mean just sort of open an account in somebody else’s name?”
“It’s easier than you might think,” said Dave. “It’s not like the old days when you had to actually go to the bank and do things in person. If I remember correctly, you had to have references as well. But now days lots of this stuff is done online. And all the details of the tenants were on file at the Foundation. Dates of birth, national insurance numbers, the lot.”
Jeremy looked thoughtful.
“Right. So where did the money go after that?”
Dave grimaced.
“Into a range of off-shore investment accounts about which the tenants…”
“Knew nothing,” Jeremy finished for him. “Can you get anything there?”
“We’ll try but it’s not as easy as you might imagine. These accounts are held off-shore for a reason.”
“What about the directors of Henry Holdings?” Jeremy persisted. “They must be listed somewhere.”
“Again, they’re apparently tenants of the Foundation. We’ve interviewed them, of course. But none of them seem to know anything about it. And I believe them.”
“What happens now then? I mean, it’s obvious that someone at the Foundation is behind Henry Holdings.”
“The problem is, finding out who that someone is. The details on tenants are held on file. Pretty much anybody at Fireside House has access to them. So, in theory, everybody who works there is a suspect.”
Jeremy looked appalled.
“Not the office staff, surely? They didn’t have a say in which properties were purchased.”
Dave shrugged.
“One or more of them could have been an accomplice. Just because they’re nice women, it doesn’t mean that they’re nice women.” He paused. “If you see what I mean.”
Jeremy nodded. It was true. Beth, the erstwhile school secretary who had fleeced the school of thousands, had been a nice woman.
“Anyway,” Dave continued, “we’ll obviously get the IT forensics onto Henry Holdings. Other than that we’ll have to hope that either he’ll crack, which I doubt, or some DNA will turn up somewhere where he shouldn’t have been. Interestingly, he was already in our system.”
Jeremy looked astonished.
“No! What for?”
“Handling stolen goods. Received a suspended sentence when he was fifteen. Couldn’t believe it when I saw it. There it was in black and white. Harry Field.
52
Harry sat in the gloomy little interview room and stared at the wall on which somebody had scribbled the letters acab. He smiled suddenly. When he was a teenager he and another lad had been stopped by the police on suspicion. On suspicion of what they hadn’t clarified. When the other boy had been asked why he had the letters acab tattooed on his forearm the lad had simply replied that it was to remind him. Of what, the copper had asked. And with an entirely straight face and an angelic smile the lad had said, “always carry a bible.” He wondered what had happened to that boy. Probably a cabinet minister by now.
He leaned back and stretched, clasping his hands behind his head. He glanced across at the uniformed officer sat in the corner, his face impassive. Presumably he was there to guard him. From what? What did they think he was going to do? Start running amok through the police station? Apart from anything else, he didn’t have the energy. He sat forward again, flicked a speck of cotton from his trouser leg, and pinned his elbows to the table. So far he’d said nothing and until his solicitor arrived he would continue to say nothing. It was bloody bad luck about the cufflink though. His instinct had told him that he needed to find it and his instinct had been right. He had just been looking in the wrong place.
Was it, he wondered, possible to extract DNA from gold? Probably. They could get it from almost everything else. Anyway, if they did, all he would have to do was to come up with a plausible story as to why he was in the hotel kitchen on that day. Or why somebody else had picked the cufflink up and put it in the kitchen. They wouldn’t get his DNA from anything else in there, he was certain of that. He’d touched nothing, just poured the powder into the claret jug, making sure that he kept his hands free from any surface. He had even had the presence of mind to wrap his hand in his handkerchief, just in case. The basement was another matter, though. He might well have left some trace down there when he was searching for the cuff link. But just because the managers generally didn’t go down there, it didn’t mean that they never went down there. Anyway, he’d think of something. Some reason why he had found it necessary to visit the basement. Coming up with plausible stories was a thing that he’d been doing all his life. It was how he made his living. All he had to do was keep his cool, which was something else that he’d been doing all his life.
Through the open door he watched as a drunken miscreant was hauled off to a cell by two burly police officers, the unmistakeable stench of urine and stale sweat wafting through as they dragged him past. The smell, redolent of underpasses and public lavatories in town centres, pulled the unwelcome image of his mother to mind. The last time that he had seen her, lying on her stained and reeking bed, floated in front of him. That Christmas night the sound of her drunken snoring had reverberated through the whole of the flat and he had lain in his little bed silently hating her. Christmas had been no different to any other. She had got up late with a hangover and then given them some cheap toys which they were too old for and which looked distinctly second-hand. After drinking half a bottle of cheap sherry, she had made her usual marginal effort at cooking Christmas dinner which had consisted of dried out chicken, lukewarm gravy and burnt potatoes, and then she had gone out to the pub. He and his brother and sister had huddled together on the sofa watching television and eating sweets. She had returned several hours later, barely able to stand, and collapsed on her bed.
It hadn’t been difficult to creep into her room and locate the bottle of cheap vodka that she always kept by her side. She had barely stirred when he had pinched her nostrils together, forced her mouth open and poured the vodka down her throat. She was heavy but she was weak. All her flesh was broken-veined blubber with no strength behind it. At one point she had struggled to sit up, half-choking, coughing and spluttering, but he had continued holding her down by one shoulder and pushing the neck of the bottle further into her mouth until it had all gone. Then he had stood and watched and waited for her to die. He had decided that if necessary, he would place a pillow over her face but he hadn’t needed to. She had simply stopped breathing.
He knew that very few questions would be asked. She was well-known both to the police and to the local surgery and hospital where she had been taken on a number of occasions having been found lying in the street or, as on one memorable occasion, kicking the wheels and hammering on the windscreen of a stationary car while the terrified driver sat inside. All he had to do that night was keep it simple. And he had. After carefully arranging the now empty vodka bottle in her hand, he had telephoned for an ambulance, saying that he had discovered his mother in that condition and that he couldn’t waken her. The ambulance had arrived and taken her away. There had been little interest. Nobody had asked why he had gone into her room in the first place. She had been a nuisance when she was alive and the authorities were glad to see the back of her. Her funeral had been a simple local authority affair which had been arranged by a local government officer with responsibility for such matters. His father was in prison again but wouldn’t have been interested even if he hadn’t been. Harry had never felt guilty and he didn’t feel guilty now. And neither did he feel guilty about Adam or Annie. They had threatened him and it had been necessary to get rid of them. It was their own fault. All right, he would admit that he got a certain thrill out of it, as much for not being caught as the actual act, although that looked as though it was about to backfire, but he wasn’t mad. He wasn’t a complete lunatic, not like Bruce.
He half-smiled at the memory of Bruce. He had been the minder at the house where he lived with the women. Almost as wide as he was tall, with a number of teeth missing and an interesting scar that meandered down the left side of his face, he was exactly the kind of person that you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark night. Or any night. Where Bruce had been recruited from, nobody knew. He had simply turned up one day and announced that henceforth he was responsible for security. The women hadn’t minded. They sometimes had difficult punters and a bit of muscle around the place wouldn’t do any harm. Bruce had drunk tea with Harry sometimes in the kitchen, poring over a tabloid that he could barely read and pausing occasionally to instruct Harry in the best methods of torture. He had described the gruesome details as simply and as casually as explaining how to mow a lawn. The last Harry had heard of him he had begun to identify as female, renamed himself Lena, and had opened a tea shop in the north of England.
He pulled his mobile out of his pocket and began scrolling through it. Nothing of any interest. He had half-wondered if Max would crack and call him. Nigel wouldn’t, he knew, but Max might. If he did, he would just not accept the call. Anyway, those two would be safe as long as they kept their mouths shut. They had covered their tracks as far as humanly possible and he had kept an absolute poker face when the police had asked him about Henry Holdings. He leaned back and stretched again. If this went to trial, whether he was found guilty or not, it would be the end of his dream of starting his own agency. Not many clients would willingly sign up with somebody who had stood trial for murder. He realised suddenly that he didn’t care very much. If he was found guilty then he would be a model prisoner and serve his time. The money would still be there. If he served ten years he still wouldn’t be quite sixty. He could go abroad and start a new life. Buy a yacht and sail the world. Or maybe, he grinned suddenly, stay in England. Live in a village. Go to church and live the life of a model parishioner.
