Murder Sky High: detectives crack the mystery of a deadly cargo, page 4
‘Thank you, Dr Norris. You’ve certainly given me plenty to think about.’
‘You’re welcome. I just hope you appreciate that I had to put a rocket under your lab guys. If I hadn’t kept at them, we probably wouldn’t have had the results until next week.’
‘Thank you again then.’ Gawn meant it. With at least one of her prime witnesses leaving the country today and the victim’s son arriving, these results were good timing.
‘Is everyone around here so formal all the time?’
‘I suppose we are a bit.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘I’m Gawn.’
‘Jenny.’
‘Yes, I know. Thank you, Jenny.’
Gawn wasn’t used to pathologists who speculated about their victims or followed their hunches to prove a point. She hoped this new woman didn’t see herself as some sort of Quincy. But her comments did open some interesting lines of enquiry for them. Had de Bek been smuggling? And if so, what? Drugs was the likely answer but she could imagine there might be other possibilities. They needed to get a full background on this man and find what he might have been involved with. Now it was becoming urgent. Three days had passed. Evidence would have been lost and witnesses could be dispersing to the four corners of the globe. Hell!
Gawn rang off quickly thanking Jenny again before she cut off the call. She needed to contact Harris urgently. With any luck he would still be at the mortuary with de Bek’s son. They needed to speak to him straightaway.
After five rings, which saw Gawn’s impatience rising, she heard Harris’ voice on the line.
‘Boss?’
‘Sergeant. Are you still with Mr de Bek?’
‘Yes, we’re just waiting for him to identify his father’s body.’
‘When you’re finished there, bring him straight here please. We need to speak to him.’ She offered no further explanation.
Chapter 7
Nico de Bek was a younger version of his father; what his father might have been like about twenty years ago. Except his dress sense was very different. He was wearing a pair of tight jeans with their designer tears, a cowl-neck sweater in garish colours which didn’t seem particularly appropriate attire for a death in the family and what Gawn thought was called a reefer jacket. The word reefer immediately reminded her of marijuana and Seb’s silly T-shirt he wore around the house calling for it to be legalised. He thought it was amusing with her being a police officer – another sign of his schoolboy sense of humour. The Dutchman’s dirty fair hair was tied back in a ponytail exposing an earlobe holding three colourful earrings adding to the gold stud she had already noticed in his eyebrow. As they shook hands she glanced down and noted the nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand.
‘Mr de Bek. Thank you for coming in to speak to us. Sorry for your loss. I know this is a difficult time for you.’
They were talking, not in an interview room but in a space normally reserved for victims of sexual assault or children involved in a crime. The chairs were leatherette-covered easy chairs rather than hard grey plastic but they had seen better days. One had a slash across the seat allowing grey stuffing to peek out. The centre of the room was dominated by a scratched wooden coffee table which bore the ring marks of teacups and glasses of juice accumulated over the years. The walls were painted in a pale green and there were floral curtains on the windows trying to inject a homely touch. Not exactly interior decor at its highest but better than a sparse, bleak interview room when you had just identified your father’s dead body.
‘Is there a problem? When can we get our father home?’ He was holding his emotions in but it was clear he was in a distressed state. He couldn’t keep his hands still. He rubbed his right thumb over the knuckles of his left hand in a nervous gesture. Gawn noticed a piercing in his tongue which gave his speech a slight lisp.
‘Mr de Bek, I’m sorry to have to tell you but we believe your father may have been involved in criminal activity or the subject of some sort of assault.’
Gawn left it at that and watched carefully to judge the young Dutchman’s reaction. She knew she was taking a bit of a stab in the dark here. If Nico de Bek denied absolutely that his father was involved in anything criminal she would be against a brick wall. She had no evidence, only supposition. An instant look of disbelief passed across his face. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound came out.
‘Can I get you some water or a cup of tea, sir?’ Harris asked. Because he hadn’t had a chance to talk to his boss before the interview, the news that de Bek had been up to no good was new to him too.
‘Can you think of anything your father might have been involved in? Any shady business deals?’
‘Involved? What…’ he started and then stopped, unable to get the words out.
‘He had evidence of drugs on his body.’ She didn’t explain what kind, allowing him to jump to his own conclusions.
‘My God, it all sounds like something out of a movie. My father wasn’t a junkie. He loathed drugs. He would have had drug-pushers put away for life.’
De Bek reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a packet of cigarettes.
‘I’m sorry, you can’t smoke here, sir,’ Gawn said, not unsympathetically.
Stuffing the packet back again, de Bek spoke. His voice was barely louder than a whisper.
‘My father was a bookseller and antiquarian. He wasn’t a drug addict or connected to any criminals.’ After the briefest of pauses he added, ‘Do you think he was murdered?
It seemed like a big jump to make; a strange question to ask.
‘Why do you ask that, Mr de Bek?’
‘I don’t know. My father was fit and healthy. I just thought when you told me about the drugs that maybe someone had killed him.’
It sounded like a bit of a flimsy reason and Gawn wondered if Nico was as surprised as he had seemed. Did he know more?
The young man looked stunned.
Although he hadn’t responded to Harris’ offer, when the sergeant came back and proffered some water, de Bek took it. His hand was shaking as he lifted the plastic cup to his mouth and some of the liquid spilled over the rim and fell on his lapel.
‘Do you know what your father was doing in Belfast; who he was meeting?’
‘I don’t know any specifics about his work. I guess he was probably meeting someone to discuss the sale of a book or maybe delivering one to somebody. His boss would know.’
‘Who did he work for?’ Gawn didn’t have this information yet. The Politie had been slow getting back to her.
‘Antiquariaat Meyer. His boss is… was Gert Meyer.’ The young man seemed to gather himself together and looked straight at Gawn. ‘I need to phone my mother and my sister to let them know about Papa.’
Gawn would have liked to question the Dutchman further. She needed to try to get an angle on his father and what he might have been up to but she was mindful that the young man was in an emotional condition, maybe even in shock at the news of his father’s death and she couldn’t push too hard. She would leave it for now but not for too long.
‘My sergeant will arrange a car to take you to your hotel but we may need to speak to you again before you leave.’
They all stood and Gawn extended her hand.
‘Once again, our sympathies, Mr de Bek.’
He ’didn’t reply, just acknowledged her comment with a nod of his head. Harris led him out of the room. And Gawn watched them go, thoughtfully. What had seemed like a straightforward case of natural causes and a jittery or overenthusiastic newbie pathologist could be something very different. De Bek may not have been murdered but there was something strange and, she added to herself, something criminal going on. She was getting more and more sure of it. She would need to speak to the Drugs Squad and see if they had any knowledge of the man or any whispers about drugs coming into the country from the Netherlands. But she didn’t want to approach them directly. She knew what would happen then. They would sweep in and take over. She felt that familiar sense of expectancy at the start of a new case, the rush of adrenaline that she always got. Someone had once accused her of being an adrenaline junkie – she smiled at the thought.
Chapter 8
Gawn was in her office going over the forensics report from the plane when Harris returned.
‘I just hope these boys did a thorough job.’ She didn’t usually criticise colleagues to others and especially to a new member of the team like Harris. She didn’t know him well enough yet to know if she could trust him, if he was a team player.
‘I’ve had a look at that report, ma’am. There was no mention of any drugs.’
‘No. If anything had been hidden they would have found it. I’m sure of that. What worries me is that none of the passengers were searched. If de Bek didn’t have any drugs on him, then he may have hidden them or passed them on to someone else.’
‘We weren’t sure we were even dealing with a crime then so there was no probable cause to search anyone,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘Are we even so sure now, ma’am?’
‘Until we get information from the Politie we can’t be sure about anything to do with drugs or smuggling. But what we do know, Michael, is that de Bek was meeting someone here. Whether it was about a book or about drugs or something else, we need to find out. Urgently. We’ve been wasting time.’
‘What about de Bek himself? Couldn’t we find out more about him ourselves without waiting for the Dutch?’
If they had been busy, she would probably have told him just to let it go, wait and see if the Dutch came up with something. Manpower and budgets were always stretched. But the truth was she had time on her hands. They had cleared their last big case and now she was facing a mound of paperwork and no excuse to ignore it.
They had been sitting on their hands for three days not sure if they had a crime to investigate or not and maybe they still weren’t. They had waited for the Dutch authorities to get their finger out instead of putting pressure on them. It was easy to excuse it because it had seemed likely de Bek’s death had been due to natural causes, which of course they now knew it was and there was no crime involved in it but something was alerting Gawn’s senses. Maybe de Bek wasn’t smuggling anything this time, but she felt there was something about the man and his trip to Belfast that meant trouble. Excusing their inaction and accepting it were two different things and Gawn was harder on herself than she was on anyone else. So, she was not going to excuse the fact that they knew no more about their dead man than his name and occupation. She was going to get something done about this as quickly as possible.
‘We certainly should. I want you to contact the Dutch police again and hang on until you get some answers. Don’t let them fob you off. Make a nuisance of yourself. And set the others on to background checks of our witnesses. We can’t just take anything at face value. If de Bek had drugs with him, he didn’t have them on him when he died. If it’s possible that he passed them on to someone then we need to know more about potentially everyone on that plane but let’s start with the ones closest to him. Let’s see what we can find out for tomorrow. We’ll have a briefing at ten in the morning. You can lead it.’
Harris was both pleased to be given this responsibility but also terrified. It was the first time he would have to do this in front of his new boss and he feared making a mess of it.
‘I’m going to speak to Dr Norris again,’ Gawn said.
When Harris didn’t immediately stand up, she added, ‘Well, what are you waiting for, Sergeant?
Chapter 9
Gawn had phoned Jenny Norris’ office only to be told she would be in a meeting until five. Hearing that, she decided to drive across and talk to the pathologist face to face. She was waiting, glancing distractedly through a magazine in reception at five o’clock when the doctor walked out of the corridor into the foyer. Gawn almost didn’t recognise her. She was dressed in casual jeans and an Aran sweater. A pair of cowboy boots completed the look. The whole outfit made her look younger.
‘Gawn. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Is it me or are you here to see someone else?’ Her surprise showed in her voice but her genuine pleasure showed in the toothy smile which extended across her face.
‘You, I’m afraid, Jenny. I hope you don’t mind me just showing up like this.’ She knew Munroe liked everything done by the book. She would never have just dropped in on him with a query.
‘Of course not. What can I do for you?’
‘I should have asked you this morning when you phoned but you took me by surprise. Can you give me any indication of when de Bek might have been smuggling? I mean was it something recent, something long term? I suppose I’m asking, could he have had drugs inside him when he got on the plane?’
The woman took only a second to consider her answer.
‘I wish I could tell you. The damaged tissue was quite recent but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t been using this means of smuggling for some time. He might just have been careless and injured himself. On the other hand it doesn’t mean he wasn’t smuggling on Monday. I suppose you’ve checked if he used the toilet on the plane.’ She paused and waited for Gawn to reply.
‘I don’t think we asked about that directly. Everyone seemed to suggest he had been out of it, as one of the witnesses called it, more or less right away. But I suppose he could have gone through customs and security and then used the facilities in the airport and put anything he had inside him into his bag.’
‘Did you find anything in his bag?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t smuggling on this trip.’
A sudden thought seemed to strike the doctor.
‘Look, instead of talking here, I’ve been promising myself a nice cold drink tonight after a long hard day. Why don’t you join me and we could continue our conversation in more pleasant conditions?’
Gawn nearly dismissed the invitation out of hand. She was annoyed with herself. She didn’t think she’d be good company. Anyway she hadn’t ever really socialised much with colleagues and never with anyone outside her team. But then she asked herself, why not? A casual drink, a chat with a new colleague, it would put in an hour and help her delay phoning Seb, something which she had left so long, she was now dreading.
‘OK. Thanks. Where do you suggest?’
‘What about the John Hewitt? Do you know it?’
Gawn did.
‘Then I’ll see you down there.’
They parted and Gawn found herself unexpectedly buoyed up by the idea of a quiet drink with this interesting woman.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, after fighting her way through the evening traffic on the Westlink, Gawn found a parking space in Talbot Street just by the side of the cathedral. Her eye was attracted to the illuminated stainless-steel Spire of Hope on top of the grey Portland stone building, a building she had never been inside. As she approached the John Hewitt bar she could see people standing outside even though it was a chilly evening. She looked into the brightly lit interior and was dismayed to see how busy the bar already was. There would be no quiet chat, no talk about de Bek here. She spotted the doctor sitting near the window, at a table for two with a bottle of wine and two glasses already on the table in front of her.
‘Sorry. I got caught up in traffic.’
‘No problem. It gave me time to get the wine in. I hope that’s alright. You’re not a craft beer person or something, are you?’
‘God, no.’
Jenny poured out two large helpings of the wine. ‘Cheers!’
‘Sláinte!’ Gawn responded.
‘I haven’t been in here for years. I wonder what the food’s like.’
‘Pretty good I think.’
‘I only had a fairly mediocre sandwich at lunchtime. You know, soggy tomatoes and limp lettuce.’ Gawn noticed she still pronounced tomatoes the American way. ‘I think I fancy something to eat. Would you like to join me?’
Weighing up the fact that when she got home she would be faced with an empty flat and an even emptier fridge and the prospect of having to phone Seb or staying here and enjoying a drink and meal with Jenny, there wasn’t much of a decision to make.
‘Why not? I didn’t even manage a sandwich, just a biscuit with my morning coffee.’
They ordered some food and chatted over the hubbub all around them. They were pleasantly surprised when a duo appeared in a corner of the bar and started to sing a string of songs, some traditional ones they recognised and some new to them. The meal had been delivered to their table surprisingly speedily and both had tucked in enthusiastically. They’d finished the bottle of wine and Jenny was debating if they should order another.
‘I won’t have any more, thanks,’ Gawn said. ‘I’m driving and I don’t want to end up being breathalysed.’
‘That would really be something – new assistant medical examiner leads chief inspector astray.’ She held up her hands as if she was holding up a newspaper and reading the headline on the front page. She laughed at the idea.
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first you’ve led astray.’
Gawn caught a gleam in Jenny’s eye and realised their conversation had sounded dangerously like flirting. It was then she suspected Jenny might have the wrong idea about her. If Gawn had got it wrong and was seeing signs that weren’t there, then no harm done. She remembered how snappy Norris had been with Harris when he had commented about de Bek being gay. She decided she should make her situation clear so there could be no embarrassing misunderstanding.
‘Anyhow, I have to phone my boyfriend when I get home and he wouldn’t be too pleased if he thought I’d been out getting drunk with a friend.’
