‘Pretty well off, I gather, yes.’
‘Knowing Bradley, that’s the only reason he stuck with her. Well, let’s face it, she doesn’t have much else going for her, does she?’
Phoebe Johnson was an attractive woman. Pleasant, too. Max hadn’t ruled her out as a murder suspect, but he’d always found her fairly easy to deal with given the circumstances.
The ‘circumstances’, as far as Max could tell, were that she and her husband had enjoyed a volatile relationship, possibly because she could be possessive and was prone to bouts of jealousy. As Bradley Johnson had had several affairs during their marriage, Max supposed that was understandable.
Tyler and Keiran were as close as two brothers could be, but Tyler was the one who had been expected to follow his father into the business. It was Keiran, whose last exam results had been poor and who spent more time at parties than at lectures, who had a difficult time with his father. Neither son had been particularly close to their father.
It was possible that all they wanted to hide from him was the fact that they were as dysfunctional as the majority of families.
They finished their coffees and Barbara decided she must call for a taxi.
‘I never bother bringing the car when I’m going to be out all day,’ she explained. ‘It’s a nightmare trying to park and far easier to use taxis.’
She took a pink mobile phone from her handbag, tapped in a number, then changed her mind and hit a number that she had on speed dial.
‘Engaged,’ she explained, hitting the redial button. Four times she tried, and four times she shook her head. ‘I expect the girl in the office is chatting to her boyfriend.’
‘I’ll give you a lift.’ Max needed to be back at headquarters for the six-thirty briefing, and he didn’t really have time for sitting in Harrington’s traffic. But there was always the possibility he might learn something of interest from Barbara McQueen.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’ Maybe Tom McQueen would still be at his auction and Barbara would invite him inside. He couldn’t go poking around in Tom’s office, unfortunately, but, in more relaxed surroundings, Barbara might be more chatty. Yet she didn’t seem particularly chatty today.
Traffic was beginning to build up in readiness for the rush hour, but it wasn’t as bad as Max had feared. They talked about this and that, and all the while Max wondered if Barbara was as innocent as she claimed. Surely she knew she was married to the biggest crook in Harrington?
‘Oh, damn!’ she said suddenly. ‘I was supposed to stop off and collect a couple of cases of wine. Hell, Tommy will go mad if I forget. Max—’ Her tone was suddenly flirty, and very feminine. ‘I don’t suppose you’d stop at Taylor’s, would you? It’ll take me five minutes tops. Promise.’
‘Fine,’ he said. Whether Tom McQueen was home or not, he’d have to drop her off and head straight back for the briefing.
He stopped the car outside Taylor’s Wine Merchants and she dashed inside. In less than five minutes, the young assistant, laughing at something Barbara had said, was carrying two cases of red wine to Max’s car. Once they were stowed in the boot, they continued on their way.
It was raining now. Heavily.
When Max pulled up in front of those huge gates, McQueen’s car was nowhere to be seen. That meant nothing, though. Yesterday, it had been in the garage. Presumably, Barbara’s Mercedes was in the garage, too.
‘Would you mind bringing the car through the gates?’ Babs asked. ‘I’ll get soaked otherwise.’
‘Of course.’
‘Tommy will help me carry the wine,’ she went on. ‘At least, I’m assuming he’s home. He said he wasn’t going anywhere this afternoon.’
Max edged the car forward.
‘One-nine-four-seven,’ she said, giving him the code to unlock the gates.
Max would remember that. There was no knowing when it might come in useful.
He stopped the car about a yard from the front door and was amazed to see her take an umbrella from her bag. She unfurled it before she was out of the car.
‘I’ll give Tommy a shout to help me with the wine,’ she said.
‘No need.’ Max was out of the car and grabbing one of those wine cases. He didn’t want to see Tommy again, for the second day running, and risk accusations of harassment getting back to his boss.
‘Thanks, Max.’ The house keys dangled from her fingers.
‘You’re a star.’
She opened the door—and began to scream.
Max hurried to catch her up and then he had exactly the same view.
‘Holy shit!’
Barbara had been right about one thing: Tom McQueen wouldn’t be going anywhere this afternoon. Anywhere except the morgue, that is.
The atmosphere in Phil Meredith’s office was extremely uncomfortable and Jill wished she could be anywhere else. Even Styal had a more relaxed air than this.
Meredith was in a foul mood, not only with Max, but with the world in general. Jill could understand his feelings of helplessness, but there was no need to vent his anger on her.
‘What I can’t understand,’ he snapped at Max, ‘is what the hell you were doing at the scene in the first bloody place. Christ, how many times had you been warned to keep away from McQueen?’
On first walking into the office, Jill had thought it cool. Cold even. Perhaps Meredith’s anger was responsible for the rise in temperature. She felt like dropping on to one of the leather chairs, but neither she nor Max had been invited to sit so she stood alongside Max.
‘I bumped into Mrs McQueen in town,’ Max explained patiently. ‘I was heading to Starbucks for my first coffee of the day, and invited her along.’
‘Why?’ Meredith demanded in amazement.
‘They have a past,’ Jill informed him. ‘They met years ago apparently. I’m surprised you didn’t know, Phil. It’s the talk of the nick.’
Jill was struggling to walk five yards without hearing about the boss and his new ‘piece of skirt’.
‘We don’t have a past,’ Max argued, staring at her in astonishment. ‘Christ! Who said that? We met once, years ago, and spent a couple of hours in each other’s company.’
Met once? So why was it the talk of the nick? Speculation was that Max and Barbara McQueen were having an affair.
‘So having bought her this bloody coffee?’ Meredith demanded.
‘It was raining,’ Max explained as if he were talking to a pair of morons. ‘She tried phoning for a taxi, unsuccessfully, so I felt obliged to offer her a lift. On the way back, she wanted to stop and pick up a couple of cases of wine. When we got to the house, I took the wine from the car and she opened the front door.’
‘Very cosy. And then?’
‘Then we walked through the front door and found Tom McQueen lying in a pool of blood with six bullets in him.’
Jill shuddered at that. She hadn’t liked Tom McQueen, or Barbara for that matter, but she wouldn’t have wished such a thing on anyone.
Meredith, who’d been sitting behind his desk, stood up and paced across to the window and back.
‘So why in hell’s name is she screaming police brutality?’ he demanded of Max.
Why indeed? Jill wondered. That wasn’t Max’s style, far from it. And if office gossip was to be believed, the pair of them were far too intimate for that.
‘It wasn’t brutality,’ Max scoffed. ‘It was trying to protect a crime scene. She was all over him—insisting he was still alive, insisting that if she removed a bullet he’d be OK. She was hysterical. More importantly, she was destroying evidence. There was more blood on her than him so I had to manhandle her a bit.’
‘You’re like a bull at a bloody gate.’
Meredith, shaking his head in furious bewilderment, returned to his seat. ‘So what have we got?’
‘There are—were—two closed circuit cameras guarding the house,’ Max explained, ‘but they’d both been put out of action. They weren’t concealed so we can’t necessarily assume it was someone who knew the property well. It seems as if someone broke in through the kitchen window. We’re checking every inch of the garden, so something might turn up, but there’s nothing so far.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘His minder, John Barry, has done a runner,’ Max added.
‘Then find him!’
‘We’re on to it,’ Max assured him. ‘We’re still waiting for forensics to come up with something, but we do know it wasn’t the same gun that was used on Khalil. We’re searching the area for the murder weapon.’
Meredith looked at his watch and absently smoothed his thinning hair. ‘I need to make a statement to the media,’ he said. ‘I want you both back here, in this office, in one hour’s time. And I want you to have some answers for me. Right?’
‘Right,’ Jill agreed, too relieved to escape to wonder what sort of answers they might give him or to venture to ask if she was now supposed to be working on the case.
Max didn’t even deign to answer. He had the door open before Meredith changed his mind.
As Max strode towards his office, cursing as he went, and shouting to Grace and then Fletch to forget what they were doing and follow him, Jill wondered if she should suggest a coffee. She decided against it.
‘Right,’ Max said, when the four of them were in his office, ‘what have we got? Grace?’
‘Not a lot, guv.’
‘Fletch?’ Max demanded.
‘Um, about the same, Max. Not a lot.’
‘OK,’ Max said, throwing himself down his chair. ‘Let’s recap. We’ll start in January. Muhammed Khalil, tenant and, let’s say employee, of Tom McQueen, is shot dead. Ten months later, Bradley Johnson, a friend of McQueen’s, is bludgeoned to death. Following that, our chief suspect—
my
chief suspect—’ he corrected himself, ‘turns up looking like a sieve.’
‘You’re assuming the cases are connected,’ Jill pointed out. As Grace and Fletch had pulled up chairs, she did the same. ‘Khalil was murdered almost a year ago, and then nothing.’
‘Nothing? His landlord is shot. I wouldn’t call that nothing.’
‘I meant nothing until now. We don’t know that it’s connected.’
‘It’s connected,’ Max snapped. ‘Khalil, Johnson and McQueen. All connected.’
‘Someone believes we’re getting close to the truth,’ Fletch decided.
‘Then he’s a bloody sight more confident than I am,’ Max retorted.
‘I really don’t see how they’re linked,’ Jill said.
‘Of course they are,’ Max said, dismissive. ‘Khalil was McQueen’s tenant—one who did the dirty on him—and Johnson was close to McQueen.’
‘They had dinner together, and McQueen was invited to a party at the manor. That’s all,’ Jill argued. ‘It’s hardly conclusive, is it?’
‘That’s all we managed to drag out of McQueen,’ Grace pointed out.
‘Quite,’ Max agreed. ‘Right, you two,’ he said, addressing Grace and Fletch, ‘we need to know everything there is to know about Bradley Johnson. We want his every move from the moment he arrived in England all those years ago.’
‘OK,’ Fletch said slowly.
‘We’ve already found out as much as we can, guv,’ Grace argued.
‘Then find more. The reason we’re stumbling about like idiots,’ Max told them, ‘is because we haven’t found the connection. As soon as we know how Johnson and McQueen are linked, we’ll have the answer to this mess.’
Jill wished she felt as confident.
‘Get to it,’ Max urged them. ‘And let me know as soon as you have anything, no matter how insignificant.’
Grace and Fletch went off to do his bidding. Jill stayed where she was.
‘I really don’t think Bradley Johnson is connected,’ she said again. ‘Khalil was shot dead. And as you said yourself at the time, whoever killed him was a damn good shot. That person wouldn’t have gone into a wood in Kelton Bridge to bash someone over the head a couple of times.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s not connected.’
‘Bradley Johnson was hit over the head three times. His killing had a very amateurish feel to it. If it were the same person, they would have shot him. They wouldn’t have risked someone coming along and stumbling across them in Black’s Wood.’
Max thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, you’re wrong, Jill. I understand what you’re saying, but there has to be a connection between Johnson and McQueen. Something deeper than the two becoming acquaintances when Johnson moved to Kelton Bridge. And what the hell brought Johnson to Kelton in the first place?
Why did he choose that particular village? Hm?’
‘Why not? You fancy escaping London and moving to the country so you go on the internet and see what properties are available. If he’d found a similar property in Cheshire or Lincolnshire, perhaps he would have gone there.’
‘And perhaps he wouldn’t. Maybe something attracted him to this particular corner of Lancashire. Maybe
someone
attracted him. Maybe that someone was Tom McQueen.’
Jill wasn’t convinced. Hell, she wasn’t even on the case so what was she supposed to know? All she’d had were snippets of information from Max.
Or was she on the case? Meredith seemed to think she was, but it would be nice to be asked. Or even told.
‘What’s Meredith expecting from me?’ she asked Max.
‘The same as he’s expecting from me. That’s the name, address and contact numbers for our killer—or killers—by early afternoon at the latest.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Simple, kiddo.’
The easy familiarity infuriated her. Either he was having an affair with McQueen’s wife or he wasn’t. If he was, there was no need for him to creep around her.
‘All the same,’ he went on seriously, ‘I thought I could nail McQueen. Who the hell is higher up the food chain than him?’
‘It could be anyone. He was a crook and everyone hated him. Keep pushing people about and, eventually, what goes around will come around.’
‘Hm. And where the hell has John Barry disappeared to?’
‘Who exactly is John Barry?’ she asked, having heard the name mentioned a couple of times.
‘McQueen’s minder. Or driver. Depending on your viewpoint.’
Jill glanced at her watch and Max, seeing that, rose to his feet.
‘Time to see Meredith,’ he said reluctantly.
‘And tell him what?’
‘God knows.’
They were almost at Meredith’s office when Grace caught up with them.
‘We’ve found Peter Lawrence,’ she told them breathlessly. ‘Well, we’ve almost found him. He’s returned to Rochdale, right on our doorstep. We know where he’s living but he was blind drunk on Tuesday night and hasn’t been seen since.’