In Love And Murder, page 16
This was more interesting. Gina had been running searches about Hugh Avery-Blanchard, MP, including his parliamentary voting record, his responsibilities at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and his involvement in a local planning matter that was proving to be controversial. There were also searches into Nick Damon’s various companies and business interests, as well as the judge, Graham Neville, and other guests who had attended Friday’s party.
After working through all of Gina’s search history for the past two months, Ffion refilled her empty mug with more chamomile tea, and began to go through the various documents stored on the laptop. In addition to essays, lecture notes and other student work, Gina had been writing several articles intended for publication in the student newspaper. Some of these were music and theatre reviews, but one folder was dedicated to Hugh Avery-Blanchard, and in particular to the building project that marked the intersection between the MP’s interests and those of Nick Damon’s.
Ffion began to read from the most recent document.
MP Takes Backhanders from Local Businessman
What links the Member of Parliament for Witney, Mr Hugh Avery-Blanchard, and the millionaire businessman and owner of several construction firms, Mr Nick Damon?
Avery-Blanchard, who is a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is expected to over-rule local concerns and to give approval for the development of a massive building project that will change the shape of village life in West Oxfordshire forever. Local residents have branded the proposed housing development a blight on the landscape that fails to take into account the needs of the community.
This newspaper can now reveal that Avery-Blanchard, who is married with two children, and who has frequently spoken out about a “decline in moral values” has secretly attended masked balls at the home of developer, Nick Damon, at which “wild orgies” and “debauchery” have been reported.
Not only does this expose Mr Avery-Blanchard’s shameless hypocrisy, but it also suggests a strong personal connection between two powerful men, hinting at bribery and corruption taking place at the heart of government…
After reading the full document, including the various notes that Gina had made for herself, Ffion concluded that the article was a work in progress, requiring further substantiation before the allegations could be made to stick. But Gina clearly intended to find out more, and perhaps had gone to Friday’s party seeking firm evidence for her accusations. Her audio recording had no doubt been an attempt to catch Avery-Blanchard or Damon, or both, in some kind of incriminating act or admission of guilt.
From what Ffion had seen and heard, it would appear that Gina had failed to uncover any watertight evidence, but she had obviously been getting close to her quarries. It was certainly conceivable that either Damon or Avery-Blanchard had discovered what she was up to and had decided to take action to stop her.
If that was the case, it was possible that Dr Nathan Frost’s theory that he’d been set up as a fall guy for the murder might hold some truth after all. Ffion tapped her teeth with her pencil, running through the various connections in her mind and testing her hypothesis for holes. She couldn’t see any.
She reached for her phone and dialled Bridget’s number.
*
Dr Nathan Frost sat uncomfortably in his chair, studying the familiar, yet now strangely alien surroundings of his room in college. Everything was just as before – the wooden chairs with their somewhat threadbare cushions, the sagging bookshelves, the faded curtains, the carpet worn unevenly where so many feet had trodden – but he felt that he was seeing it all through fresh eyes.
Outside, the college quadrangle stood unchanged, much as it had done for centuries. Yet the gold stone buildings and striped green lawn couldn’t hide the fact that something vital had been extinguished. There was an absence in the world, a void where a wide, happy smile framed by long red hair had once faced the future, full of hope, and was now gone. The ghost of Gina Hartman would linger in his heart for as long as he lived.
‘Dr Frost?’
He jerked in his seat, startled out of his introspection by the sudden interruption of the voice.
‘Dr Frost, are you all right?’
Two girls sat opposite him. Lizzie and Lucy. He still had no idea which was which.
‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m fine. Do continue.’
The girls exchanged glances. ‘Dr Frost,’ said Lizzie or Lucy, ‘we’re waiting for you to begin the tutorial.’
‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ He sat up straighter, struggling to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Simple everyday actions seemed, for some inconceivable reason, to be beyond him at present. ‘Please, read out the title of your essay.’
Nervously, one of the girls cleared her throat and began to read from the sheaf of papers she held in her lap. ‘By making his bargain with the devil, is Faust responsible for his own downfall?’ She paused, glanced up at him for confirmation, and then began to read her essay aloud.
Frost twitched in embarrassment as the girl proceeded to answer the question he had set. At the time – just a few days earlier – he had felt it to be a good question, designed to tease out the essence of Goethe’s play even from the pen of the least able student, and yet to offer room for the more gifted to give full reign to their analytical powers.
Now it seemed so trite, so obvious.
In view of his recent experience, the answer to the question was abundantly clear to him. He wondered how on earth he could have posed it to so many of his students for so many years. What had he been thinking?
He began to squirm in his chair as he listened to Lizzie or Lucy speak. He raised a hand. ‘Stop!’
She looked up, startled.
‘Stop,’ he said more gently. He had no wish to alarm her. He knew that he must have already caused enough trouble in his young charge’s mind.
The two girls watched him, puzzled.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ he began. ‘Yes…’
A thought was taking shape in his mind, coalescing out of the cloud of confusion that had surrounded him since he had woken up with Gina’s cold corpse beside him. He blinked to rid himself of the image and to focus his powers of concentration. Yes, another question was forming – one that felt far more urgent and compelling.
Vital, in fact.
He leaned forward eagerly. ‘Let’s talk about this instead. Having accepted Mephistopheles’ bargain and set the disastrous train of events in motion, what might Faust have done differently to avoid his fate, or was his downfall inevitable?’
The words seemed to flow naturally from his lips. After thirty years of setting the same essay, year after year, he was surprising himself with uncharacteristic novelty. Only a few days had passed, yet everything had changed. He was no longer the man he had been. He could never be that man again. Was it possible that what had at first seemed like a catastrophe was in fact an opportunity to reinvent himself?
‘Dr Frost?’
The two girls seemed embarrassed by his behaviour, but he didn’t care. He repeated the question, then dismissed them with a wave of his hand. ‘Go on. Write it. Come back next week and tell me what Faust might have done to avoid his downfall.’
Tell me what I might yet do, he could have said. Tell me how I can save myself.
16
After getting the Chief Super’s permission to travel to London and interview Hugh Avery-Blanchard for a second time, Bridget drove directly to the railway station and just managed to catch the fast train from Oxford to Paddington.
Once installed in her seat, she sent Chloe a quick text to say that she’d be late home, again. Chloe replied to say that was no problem, and that she was planning to go into Oxford anyway and get a pizza with friends. Bridget resisted the urge to caution her daughter not to get into any trouble, and to nag her about homework. Instead she told Chloe to take care, and to make sure she was back by nine.
There had been no further communiqué. And nothing at all from Jonathan. But then Bridget hadn’t really expected anything. He would be focussed on Angela today, visiting her parents in Angela’s home town of Cheltenham, and laying flowers at her grave. Bridget wondered if it would be appropriate to send him a message of goodwill or sympathy, but it was impossible for her to think of the right words. In the end she decided it was best to let him be. She didn’t want to seem as if she was staking her claim to him, today of all days. No doubt he’d get in touch himself when he returned.
As the train hurtled through the picturesque villages of Goring and Pangbourne, Bridget tried to put her personal concerns aside and to think about how she was going to handle Hugh Avery-Blanchard, MP.
Before setting off she’d made a rather laborious phone call to Cynthia Duckworth at the MP’s constituency office, who, after some effort on Bridget’s part, had eventually yielded the information that Mr Avery-Blanchard would be spending the afternoon at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on Marsham Street. Cynthia had been at pains to stress how busy Mr Avery-Blanchard was and that it would be impossible for him to make time to see her at such short notice. However, a call to the Ministry had proved more helpful, and the person in charge of his diary, a much more obliging assistant called Ahmed, had conceded that the Under Secretary of State had a thirty minute window available between five and five thirty, and that if Bridget arrived promptly, he would make sure that she was able to see him.
Bridget checked her watch. The train was due to arrive at Paddington at four thirty-six. It would take too long to get to Marsham Street in central London using the notoriously unreliable Circle line, so she decided to take a cab and charge it to expenses.
It might have been easier to get the Met involved and ask them to obtain a DNA sample from the MP, but Grayson was adamant that involving another force would risk leaking details of the case to the wider world, something he was at pains to avoid. Besides, the last time the Met had got involved in one of her cases, Bridget had found herself working alongside her ex-husband, Ben, an experience which had left her very keen to keep everything in-house.
She knew that Grayson was putting his neck on the line in allowing her to proceed. The Chief Constable wouldn’t be happy if word got back to him about what Bridget was about to do.
‘I’ll be as discreet as I can,’ Bridget had promised. ‘But it’s really up to Avery-Blanchard whether or not he chooses to cooperate. If I’m forced to arrest him, then discretion flies out the window.’
But she was determined to obtain the DNA sample she needed, especially after receiving a phone call from Jake, who informed her that Apollo was the alias that Avery-Blanchard had used at the party, which meant that it was his door that Gina had been knocking at when she was attacked. A subsequent call from Ffion confirming that Gina was investigating possible corrupt dealings between the MP and Nick Damon identified him as prime suspect.
After a short delay outside Slough due to engineering works, the train finally pulled in to Paddington only five minutes late. Bridget made a dash for the taxi rank, jumped in the back of the first cab and gave the driver the address. As London cabbies were known for their talkative and inquisitive nature, especially where anything to do with politics was concerned, she busied herself with her phone to dissuade casual conversation about why she was travelling to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and was rewarded with a largely conversation-free journey, punctuated only by occasional maledictions from the front of the cab directed at other drivers.
After a convoluted trip across London, skirting Hyde Park and Green Park, the taxi pulled up outside a large modern building. With its louvered horizontal slats, the ministry building resembled a multi-storey car park.
Bridget paid the driver and got out. She was already fifteen minutes later than she’d hoped to arrive. On arrival in the building, which the ministry shared with the Home Office, she was forced to wait patiently while her bag went through an airport-style security scanner. On clearing security, she went to the desk where she was asked to fill out a form, and was issued with a lanyard to wear around her neck.
She checked her watch again and saw that her window with the MP was perilously close to closing. But after all this effort, there was no way she was going back to Oxford empty-handed.
Ahmed, who had been encouragingly helpful on the phone, was waiting for her in reception. Now the look on his face at her late arrival seemed much less accommodating. Bridget wondered if his boss had censured him for agreeing to the meeting in the first place. The thought of having Hugh Avery-Blanchard as a boss made her feel a pang of sympathy for the young assistant, even though he now seemed determined to put her off.
‘I’m not sure the minister will be able to see you, after all,’ he muttered as he led her through a maze of corridors and open-plan work spaces. ‘Perhaps it would be better to come back another day?’
‘No,’ said Bridget. ‘I don’t think so.’
Eventually they came to an office with a plain wooden door. Ahmed gave his watch a final pointed look, but under Bridget’s stern gaze, he knocked rather hesitantly.
An abrupt voice said, ‘Enter.’
Ahmed opened the door nervously. ‘Detective Inspector Bridget –’
‘I know who this woman is,’ snapped Avery-Blanchard from behind his desk. ‘I don’t have time to –’
‘Mr Avery-Blanchard,’ interrupted Bridget, ‘or should I refer to you as Apollo?’
The MP closed his mouth rather suddenly as Ahmed looked between the pair of them in bewilderment. ‘Close the door,’ commanded Avery-Blanchard, dismissing his hapless assistant with a wave of his hand.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded of Bridget. ‘I thought we had concluded our discussion yesterday evening.’
Bridget took a chair, though none had been offered, and sat down. ‘Since then, further information has come to light. The alias you used at Mr Damon’s house party, for instance.’
‘I see. What of it? Are you planning to arrest me for assuming a false identity?’
‘No, but I would like to know if you were aware that Miss Gina Hartman was investigating your relationship with Mr Damon, and in particular your involvement with a planned housing development in your constituency.’
The MP took on the look of a startled hare. ‘She was what?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘What was there to know?’ he blustered. ‘I have nothing to hide about my dealings with Mr Damon.’
‘And yet yesterday you threatened to sue me for slander if word got out that you’d attended his party.’
‘I… may have been a little over-defensive about that. With hindsight –’
‘Mr Avery-Blanchard, provided that you cooperate fully with the police investigation, there is absolutely no reason why anyone needs to know about your private affairs. Your wife included.’
‘Good, I –’
‘All I need from you today is a sample of your DNA.’
The MP glowered at her mutinously. ‘And what if I refuse?’
‘Then I shall have no choice but to arrest you on suspicion of murder.’
The MP’s red cheeks flushed crimson with indignation. ‘You wouldn’t dare!’
Bridget smiled sweetly at him. ‘Do you really want to put that to the test?’
Five minutes later she was back outside the building, the DNA swab safely in her bag.
‘Paddington station, please,’ she said to the driver of a waiting cab. ‘As quick as you can.’ There was a fast train back to Oxford in twenty minutes and she intended to be on it.
*
Jake was glad to leave the smoke-filled offices of Angel’s Escort Agency behind and to drive back to Oxford with Ryan.
‘You know that the air quality is seriously bad when even the motorway smells fresh by comparison,’ remarked Ryan. ‘Still, it was worth it to get another look at those girls, don’t you think?’
‘Mm,’ said Jake, distractedly.
‘Wishing you could take one home with you, eh? Or are you busy thinking about another girl? Things not going so well between you and Ffion?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Jake, not the least bit inclined to discuss his love life with Ryan.
‘Yeah, she can be a real harpy, can’t she?’ said Ryan. ‘I don’t envy you, mate.’
‘Thanks for your sensitivity,’ said Jake. ‘I knew I could count on your thoughtful input.’
‘Just ask if you want some more where that came from.’
‘I will.’
After dropping Ryan back at the station, Jake debated what to do next. He really wanted to speak to Ffion face to face, but didn’t want to risk another argument by dropping in on her unannounced. Instead he picked up his phone and called her.
‘Hey,’ she said, her voice sounding less abrupt than last time they’d spoken. ‘How was London?’
‘It was all a bit sleazy, really.’
‘The escorts, you mean?’
He laughed. ‘Ryan, mainly. How was your day?’
‘Interesting. I went to the post-mortem with the boss, then spent the afternoon ferreting out information from Gina’s laptop.’
‘Okay,’ said Jake, hoping she wouldn’t tell him anything about the post-mortem. The thought of slicing up dead bodies always made him feel queasy. ‘So, what would you like to do this evening?’
He was fully prepared to go round to her place and eat a plate of lentils, if it meant they could talk properly and openly. He wanted to explain to her once again that Brittany meant nothing to him, and to get Ffion’s reassurance that she trusted him.
‘Shall we go out for a meal?’ asked Ffion. ‘Maybe we could get a takeaway and eat it back at your place.’
