Make Them Pay (8 page)

‘It is connected, Lady Fairfax,’ said Dave, smiling almost beatifically and as usual oozing charm as he did whenever he dealt with old ladies. ‘Those officers are colleagues of ours.’

‘It’s such a dreadful business. I don’t know how I was so stupid as to get mixed up in it. But they threatened to go to the police if I didn’t make the second payment. They said I’d entered into a parole contract, whatever that is.’

‘It’s legal jargon for a verbal agreement,’ said Dave, ‘and in these circumstances not worth the paper it’s not written on.’

Lady Fairfax appeared bemused by this bit of Dave Poole doubletalk and smiled. ‘I see,’ she said, but I doubt that she did.

‘What are we going to do about Rivers, guv?’ asked Dave, once we were back at Curtis Green.

‘Supposing Rivers has in fact gone to Brighton, Dave, it might be worth asking the local police to keep a look out for his car. Charlie Flynn will give you the details.’

‘If that’s where he has actually gone,’ said Dave pessimistically.

‘We just have to hope that his neighbour was right,’ I said. ‘If the local law down there are lucky enough to spot it ask them to let us know, but to take no other action. If they do manage to locate him, we’ll take a trip down there and have a word. It could be that he really has gone on holiday.’

‘Yeah, maybe, guv, but it seems all too convenient to me that he vamooses straight after Eberhardt and Schmidt were murdered. There we have an ex-SAS geezer who suddenly takes it on the toes just after Charlie Flynn called in to see him.’ Dave regarded everyone involved in an investigation as a suspect until proved to be innocent. ‘Guilty knowledge, no doubt about it,’ he added, just to make his point.

‘You might be right, Dave. It seems odd that he took off straight after he’d had a visit from the police. However, there are some loose ends to be tied up.’ Although I knew damned well that the address on the letters sent to the ‘investors’ was false, I had to show in the final report that this had been checked. And that meant a trip into the foreign territory cared for by the City of London Police.

The address on the letter received by Lady Fairfax turned out to be premises occupied by a firm of solicitors. In my view, not the smartest move on the part of the share-pushers. But as it happened, the lawyers hadn’t even opened the letters that had arrived at their address.

‘Yes, we had quite a few letters addressed to this fellow Anthony Cook,’ said the senior partner, after he’d consulted his office manager, ‘but we sent them back to the post office marked “Not known at this address”.’

‘You weren’t interested in why letters for this man kept arriving here?’ I asked, just for the hell of it. ‘Didn’t you open them to find out?’

‘They were not opened because so to do might have constituted an offence under Section 84 of the Postal Services Act 2000,’ said the solicitor. He was a smug sort of character, mid-forties and expensively suited. ‘And lawyers are not in the habit of breaching the law, Chief Inspector, as I’m sure you appreciate.’

Really? I’ve certainly known a few who’d bent it, to say the least.

‘If any such letters arrive in the future, perhaps you’d let me know.’ I handed the lawyer one of my cards. ‘I’ll arrange for an officer to seize them as evidence in a case of double murder I’m dealing with. I’m sure you’ll agree that such action will exonerate you from any allegation of interfering with Her Majesty’s mails.’

‘Quite so,’ said the solicitor acidly.

So much for that. Now we had to look into the matter of the discontinued 0845 telephone number that Lady Fairfax, and doubtless the others, had tried calling. But I knew what the outcome would be.

Back at the office, I set Colin Wilberforce the task of discovering details of the subscriber from British Telecom. Or BT as it now styles itself in the prevailing fashion of using abbreviations for everything. It took him about ten minutes.

‘According to the director of security at BT the number has never been issued, sir,’ said Wilberforce.

‘But Lady Fairfax said that it came up as disconnected,’ I said.

‘It would’ve done, sir. I was told that it’s the standard recorded response to numbers that have been disconnected or never issued.’

‘But how was our mysterious share-pusher lucky enough to come up with a number that had never been issued?’

‘He probably kept dialling 0845 numbers until he hit on one that had been disconnected and then put that on his bogus letterhead,’ suggested Dave.

‘Sounds right, sir,’ said Wilberforce. ‘It was a bonus that it hadn’t been issued, but in the event it didn’t matter.’

‘It wouldn’t’ve really have made a difference if he’d picked any number,’ said Dave, as usual getting to the nub of the matter. ‘After all, he picked a solicitor’s address for his letterhead.’

‘One other thing, Colin,’ I said. ‘Get on to the delivery office that serves the solicitor’s address and find out what they did with the Anthony Cook letters that were returned to them.’

Later that night we had surprisingly good news from Brighton, although at the time we didn’t realize how surprising or that it wouldn’t be good. At near midnight, a Sussex traffic-division officer had seen Rivers’s Renault Twingo and followed it to a guest house. The driver – a man in his eighties, it was reported – had alighted and gone inside. It was that simple! I never cease to be amazed at how often uniformed constables will find someone for whom the CID had been searching for days if not months. Not that that was the case here. Less than twelve hours was pretty good going.

The Sussex police message had come in straight after the discovery, but the night duty incident room staff had wisely decided not to bother me with it.

T
he next morning I entrusted myself to what Dave calls his purposeful driving, and we arrived at the guest house at about half past eleven. William Rivers’s car was parked outside. The guest house was one of those seedy establishments that had a signboard boasting a sea view, but a sight of the sea could probably be achieved only by standing on a chair in the attic.

Dave and I walked into the entrance hall and I banged a table bell on a desk that bore the optimistic sign ‘Welcome’. That the owner was a harridan in her fifties and as dowdy as the guest house itself came as no surprise.

‘We haven’t got any vacancies,’ said this vision of loveliness, viewing Dave with obvious distaste.

‘That’s all right, this is the last place on earth I’d want to stay,’ said Dave, who was quick to recognize a racist when he met one.

‘We’re police officers,’ I said. ‘I want to speak to Mr Rivers, one of your guests.’

‘I don’t know as how he’s in,’ said the woman, obviously intent upon being as obstructive as possible. I got the impression that she didn’t like the police and idly wondered why, but it wasn’t my concern. ‘He never come down for breakfast this morning, but I’ve got more to do than run about after guests what can’t be bothered to get out of their bed of a morning.’

‘Perhaps you’d find out if he’s in,’ Dave suggested, ‘or we could go round knocking on doors until we find him.’

The woman tossed her head as she realized it would be futile not to cooperate. She snatched at the telephone and dialled a two-digit number, but replaced the receiver after a few moments. ‘He’s not answering,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure he’s in. Perhaps he’s asleep. It’s Room Five, top floor,’ she added tersely and walked away muttering to herself.

We trudged up two flights of worn nylon-carpeted stairs and Dave knocked on the door bearing the number of Rivers’s room. The number was a cheap stick-on affair, the sort that people buy at DIY shops to put on their dustbins.

I pushed open the door. Sprawled across the bed was a fully dressed man. There was a pistol in his right hand, and blood had stained the bedclothes and was congealed on his neck from a head wound. His eyes were wide open.

Dave crossed to the bed and felt for a pulse. He looked up. ‘He’s a goner, guv,’ he said. ‘Still, he could hardly miss at that range.’

‘Bloody hell!’ I said. This untoward event introduced an unnecessary complication into our investigation. Not because Rivers, and I’d no doubt it was him, had obviously committed suicide, but because it would now mean involving another police force.

I took out my mobile phone and paused. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got the number of the local nick, Dave, have you?’

‘It so happens I have, sir,’ said Dave and reeled it off from memory. It was one of Dave’s little foibles that he always called me ‘sir’ whenever I made a fatuous remark or asked for something I should’ve known. And he always called me ‘sir’ in the presence of members of the public.

I called Brighton police station and asked for the detective inspector. Having eventually made contact, I introduced myself and went on to explain our interest in William Rivers and what had happened.

‘Oh dear! What appalling bad luck,’ said the DI, and laughed before promising to come and take a look.

Twenty minutes later, he strode into the room. There’d been no flashing blue lights, no sirens, and no hordes of policemen stringing out miles of blue and white tapes, just the DI in a small unmarked saloon car. But then this was not the make-believe world so beloved of crime scriptwriters.

‘What’s the SP, then, guv?’ asked the Brighton DI, as he strolled into the room.

I explained, as briefly as possible, the murder enquiry in which I was involved and that it had, in my view, led to Rivers’s suicide.

‘I don’t suppose he left a note or anything,’ said the DI as, hands in pockets, he surveyed Rivers’s dead body.

‘Nothing that I could find.’

‘Reckon he’s your man for this topping of yours, then?’

‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but could you arrange for a ballistics test on the pistol? With any luck it’ll turn out to be the murder weapon, and it’s a point two-two, the same calibre that was used by our killer.’

‘You can take it with you if you like, so long as you let me have it back.’ The DI glanced around the room, taking it all in. ‘Well, I’d better call up the cavalry and get them to clear up the mess. I’ll let you have anything we find, guv.’

‘Thanks, much appreciated,’ I said. ‘D’you mind if we take his house keys? I think a look round his drum might be profitable.’

‘Not at all,’ said the DI, ‘so long as you sign for them.’ He seemed very keen on paperwork and I wondered if he’d ever met our commander.

The DI produced his pocketbook and made an entry, and I signed for the pistol and the keys.

‘There’s one other thing,’ I said. ‘He’s got a car outside. I’ll take a look inside, if it’s all the same to you, but then I’ll leave it to you to dispose of.’

‘No problem.’

‘I’ll drop the car key back when I’ve finished.’

‘Right,’ said the Brighton DI, and began to make calls on his mobile phone. ‘Be lucky, guv,’ he added while waiting to be connected.

Dave and I descended to the ground floor.

‘What’s going on?’ demanded the ‘chatelaine’.

‘Any minute now you’ll have hordes of policemen swarming all over the place to investigate the death of Mr Rivers,’ said Dave. ‘He seems to have blown his brains out.’

‘But what will the other guests think?’ The woman’s face registered horror. ‘This is a respectable guest house,’ she complained.

‘Not any more it’s not,’ said Dave.

We made a cursory examination of Rivers’s Renault Twingo. There was the usual unpaid parking ticket and an empty cigarette packet, but there was nothing to excite our interest. And certainly nothing to point to Rivers being our murderer.

When we got back to London, I took Dave into my office and we settled down to work out where we were going to go from here.

‘D’you reckon he did top Eberhardt and Schmidt, guv?’ asked Dave, tossing me a cigarette before crossing the room to open a window. We’d both tried to give up smoking and not even the draconian rules that forbade smoking in police buildings, which we were now breaking, had had the desired effect.

‘I’m damned if I know, Dave. If the weapon he used to off himself with is the one that killed them, then yes, I think we might have a result. But this name Adekunle that Horst Fischer found on Eberhardt’s computer still bothers me. There’s got to be a connection there somewhere.’

‘So, what’s next?’ asked Dave.

‘Get the pistol across to ballistics, and then we’ll have a look round Billy Rivers’s house.’

Colin Wilberforce was hovering when I left my office.

‘What is it, Colin?’

‘The Anthony Cook letters, sir. The local delivery office returned them all to the senders.’

‘Really? I wonder why Lady Fairfax didn’t mention that.’

At ten o’clock the following morning, Dave and I arrived at William Rivers’s house in Pinner. I had arranged for the local police to be on hand with a rammer with which to force an entry, just in case. But the keys we’d taken from Rivers’s body fitted the lock. I dismissed the locals and in we went. But not before the helpful neighbour appeared on her doorstep.

‘Everything all right?’ she asked, obviously excited by the arrival of the police.

‘Couldn’t be better, madam,’ said Dave.

The inside of the property was exactly as I imagined an old soldier’s would be. Despite Rivers having reached an age when most elderly people get slovenly and forgetful, the house was immaculately tidy and everything was lined up and in its allotted place. Even Colin Wilberforce would’ve been impressed at the man’s somewhat ascetically ordered way of life.

We were looking for documentary evidence that might point to Rivers being our murderer. But all we found was an address book, the usual bills and junk mail, and a week-old newspaper. I knew that Charlie Flynn had taken the papers that Rivers had received from the bogus share-pusher, but given the amount of money he’d invested, I did wonder whether he might’ve had a safety deposit box somewhere. However, we found no evidence to indicate that he had. In short there was nothing in the house to make us believe that Rivers was our killer. Neither was there a letter from Anthony Cook that had been returned by the post office.

‘I suppose we ought to let Lady Fairfax know that Rivers has topped himself, guv,’ said Dave.