Kill and Tell (10 page)

Ockingham Manor appears to have retired early for the evening, with just a solitary orange glow from an upstairs room. There are three cars in the driveway: Attilio’s Range Rover Sport, a workhorse Land Cruiser and a yellow Porsche Boxster that Staffe recognises.

Rimmer parks up and says, ‘Looks like they’re in bed.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Staffe. ‘How do you want to play this?’

‘We’ll talk to Attilio and Helena separately, to start with.’

‘You’ll be lucky.’

‘We’ll do this my way. We agreed.’ Rimmer rings the bell and they wait a while before Attilio opens up, saying, ‘What the hell do you think you are up to, calling unannounced at this hour?’

‘We have new information relating to your father,’ says Rimmer. ‘I would like to talk to you. And DI Wagstaffe here will ask your wife a few questions, too.’

‘He won’t.’

‘I’m afraid I insist,’ says Rimmer.

‘She’s not here,’ says Staffe. ‘But we still need to talk about the night your father was taken.’

‘I was entertaining friends. You know that.’

‘Your father was still alive when you were entertaining your friends,’ says Rimmer.

‘How do you know he is still alive?’ says Attilio, standing to one side, showing the two policeman in, watching Staffe as he clocks a pair of slingback shoes in the doorway to the drawing room.

‘We didn’t say he
is
still alive. We said he was alive that night.’

‘After the reading of the will, surely you can’t think I had anything to do with my father’s abduction? I had nothing to gain.’

‘Money isn’t the only motive,’ says Rimmer.

‘It’s late to be doing your books,’ says Staffe.

 ‘What?’ says Rimmer.

‘Goldman and Son provide quite a service.’

‘Emma!’ Attilio calls, up the stairs. ‘When you’ve reconciled the balance sheet, you can go.’

Staffe says, ‘Will Abie Myers be pushing a bit more your way now he stands to benefit so?’

‘We have a small string of his horses. That’s all,’ says Attilio.

Rimmer takes out a notebook, says, ‘I have some questions.’

‘I’ll wait here,’ says Staffe, watching Rimmer follow Attilio into the drawing room.

Within a couple of minutes, Emma Thyssen-Wills appears at the top of the wood-panelled staircase. Her hair is dishevelled and she pads down the stairs barefooted even though she is wearing a cocktail dress that shows her fine legs off to their full. When she is near, Staffe says, ‘I thought Anthony Goldman had released you.’

‘Don’t be clever, it doesn’t suit. Let’s go in the kitchen.’ Up close, her bruising has subsided a little and her tooth has been capped. There are pinpricks of perspiration above her broken top lip.

‘Dark horse,’ he says.

‘I’ve had a rough ride. He’s a kind man and I can help him. There’s nothing to this. Nothing at all.’

‘The rough ride?’ says Staffe. ‘That wasn’t him?’

‘Attilio couldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘Your life hasn’t exactly improved since his father disappeared.’

Emma touches the broken skin of her lip with the tip of her tongue.

Staffe looks at her attaché case, says, ‘Attilio can’t look after you, but I can, and that’s a promise.’

‘I don’t need protecting. But I am very fond of Carmelo. He has a good heart.’ She opens her small case and pulls out two sheets of A4. ‘This didn’t come from me,’ she says, handing him the sheets. ‘A balance sheet only paints a picture of a given day. With the Trapanis, you need a grasp of history. It all goes way back, and believe me, there are far too many given days for me to ever understand them.’

Staffe reads through the summary of Ockingham Stud’s assets and liabilities, then its management accounts for the last quarter. The company is just about solvent, thanks to a handsome profit in the last month. Training fees were heavily reliant on Fahd Jahmood, but projections for the next quarter show these to be reduced to nil. This, however, is more than balanced by a vast increase in training income from Abie Myers.

In the balance sheet, the capital value of the stud attracts an accountant’s note, referring to a contracted sale of the Ockingham Stud to Blackfriars Holdings, just weeks ago, resulting in an increased valuation from £750,000 to £2.75 million. Without this, the company would have lost two million pounds.

Staffe says, ‘Blackfriars. I can find out with a few searches – but would you just save me half a day?’

‘As a taxpayer, shouldn’t I want to see you putting your back into this investigation, inspector?’ Her eyes crinkle.

‘You want to improve the odds of me finding Carmelo alive?’

She nods.

‘I bet Blackfriars Holdings is owned by Abraham Myers’ trust.’

‘Save yourself a morning at Companies House. It’s Abie, all right. You’ve got my back, haven’t you?’

‘Do I need to?’

‘What do you think?’

Rimmer comes into the kitchen, says, ‘I’m done.’

‘I’d like a word with Attilio.’

‘Pennington said this is my lead. I don’t want you undermining my authority. Now, let’s go.’

Outside, on the Ockingham gravel, Staffe says, ‘Was Carmelo brought here the night he died?’

‘No.’ Rimmer’s jaw is set.

‘I’d still like to talk to Attilio.’

‘No!’

Staffe steps back, says, ‘Are you all right, Rimmer?’

‘Can’t you call me Frank? Can’t you treat me as an equal, for crying out loud?’

‘Did he give you the impression his father came here that night?’

‘He did everything to give me the opposite impression. But Fahd Jahmood was here. We’ll ask him.’

‘You think you can get Jahmood to talk?’

‘I’m pretty sure he’s been having an affair with Attilio’s wife, Helena.’

‘What! How the hell do you know that?’

‘I fancy a pint. There’s a pub down the road called the Crooked Billet.’

‘It’s almost closing,’ says Staffe.

‘I took the trouble to befriend the landlord. He has no time for the new lord of the manor and a few whiskies down the line, his tongue loosened up. We’re good for a late one.’

‘Oh my, Frank.’

‘And you can tell me all about Ms Thyssen-Wills.’

Josie hasn’t been in Pulford’s flat since they remanded him for the murder of Jadus Golding. No one at Leadengate, Pennington included, had seriously considered the possibility of Pulford not getting bail, but they got that idiot Judge Hislop who had clearly got a call from the Home Office. A young black man dead, a policeman suspected, an election round the corner.

Pulford was on the ragged edge when Josie came here that last time. He had a stack of papers on his table. If only she knew where they are now, they might tell her who Pulford was trailing in those weeks before Jadus was murdered, but as she begins to take the flat to pieces, yard of carpet by length of floorboard, she prays it doesn’t lead her all the way back here.

Josie moves up to the loft, accessed from the bathroom. It is hot and the small fibres from the insulation prick her skin. She works along the joists, checking in boxes and lifting up the insulation to see if anything is hidden, but finds only a few bundles of essays from university and Hendon.

She sits on the edge of the loft hatch and looks down onto the old-fashioned Victorian toilet with its high cistern. The floorboards are stripped and all the nails are undisturbed. The only place he could hide something down there would be in the cistern, so she eases herself down, feeling for the chair with her pointed toe. It reminds her of doing ballet. She used to love those Saturday mornings, before her mother became ill; before she realised what a bastard her father was.

Josie lifts the lid, surprised how clean it is. She feels sad, thinking how Pulford must have done his housework, how happy he was to get this place after his struggle against the demons of gambling. Peering into the cistern, there is nothing inside, so she replaces the lid, climbs down and braces herself for the worst part, reaching into the toilet. She runs her index and middle fingers under the rim of the bowl, where the water feeds. It is dry, unsurprisingly, and she scrubs her hands vigorously in Pulford’s lime-scaled basin.

While she is here, she may as well have a pee, so she takes a seat and looks out into the hall. She dabs, pulls up her pants and straightens her skirt, then flushes and returns to the basin to wash her hands again. Leaving the bathroom, something seems absent, but she can’t tell what it is.

Josie peers down the hallway. Pulford’s bedroom is one way, the open-plan living room the other. It is so tidy compared to the last time she was here. He was such a mess, yet it is pristine now. Then it strikes her. The flat is silent, totally silent.

There is no watery hum from the flush being pulled and she looks back at his toilet, returns to pull the chain a second time; then a third, just the faintest trickle of water coming through where her fingers had been. Yet the cistern had been full before. She climbs back on the chair, steadying herself by gripping the long pipe that serves the toilet from the cistern. Sure enough, the cistern is full. The pipe, clearly, is obstructed and now she sees where the join in the pipe is discoloured. A canny place to stuff something you want secreted.

Josie unfurls the papers which Pulford had rolled tightly, wrapped in cling film and then taped up in a bin liner and stuffed into the downpipe to his toilet.

The photocopies of the forensic reports are here, proving the gun which fired the bullet killing Jadus Golding had also been used to discharge two rounds into Staffe. There are also accounts of the meetings with Shawne Haddaway and Brandon Latymer who each have stonewall alibis, having been at a rap concert in Manchester the night of Jadus’s murder. And there is a copy of the official interview with Louis Consadine, a juvenile. ‘Louis,’ says Josie, to herself. Louis, of whom Pulford wrote in the margin: ‘dodgy alibi’ and ‘check brother. Curtis’.

Amongst the papers is a photograph of Brandon, taken on a telephoto lens, judging from the depth of field. Brandon is leaning against his Cherokee Jeep and with him is a woman Josie last met in the City Royal morgue, Jasmine Cash. Jasmine and Brandon are embracing – to put it politely. Jasmine, the grieving mother of Jadus Golding’s daughter, seemingly happy in the clutch of Jadus’s friend and associate.

Lastly, there is a handwritten printout of times and locations, headed ‘BL Tracker’, which appears to describe the precise movements of Latymer for a week: from the evening before Jadus’s murder until the day before Pulford was arrested on suspicion of Golding’s murder. Josie knows for a fact that Pulford had neither sought nor obtained official sanction for the use of such a device.

She calls Staffe. Judging by the choral music in the background, he is in Rimmer’s car. ‘Pulford was on Brandon Latymer’s case. I’ve found the forensics report, a photograph of Brandon with Jasmine Cash—’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely, and there’s an unauthorised tracker on Brandon – from before Jadus Golding was murdered and after, too.’

‘That could be good. Or not,’ says Staffe.

‘You mean he could have been baiting Brandon Latymer to get to Jadus.’

‘You can imagine what Latymer’s lawyer would say.’

‘And Louis Consadine was on his radar. Seems Pulford thought his alibi for the night Jadus was killed wasn’t quite waterproof.’

Josie picks up the photo of Brandon with Jasmine Cash, examines its back. ‘The photo of the best mate and the widow was printed at Jessops on Tottenham Court Road, three days before Jadus was killed.’

‘So they were already together before Jadus was killed.’

‘And Pulford mentions Louis’s brother. I didn’t know he had a brother. Curtis. What do we do with it all, sir? We’re going to have to show it to Pennington sooner or later.’

‘There’s some due diligence first.’ He lowers his voice. ‘Before we go putting the wind up the DCI.’

He sounds distant, kind of lost, and Josie wishes he was here, so they could work it out together.

Staffe turns away from Rimmer, shields the phone, says, ‘Look after yourself, Josie.’ He hangs up and watches the road ahead shift, Rimmer’s headlights panning across the Crooked Billet, with ivy growing up its half-timbered frontage. They pull into the car park, past a clutch of smoking locals who give them the evils as they park up.

Rimmer introduces Staffe to Rodney, who clearly has mixed feelings about seeing Rimmer again, having had his tongue so liberally loosened the last time, but as they sit down in the snug, Staffe senses that Rodney cannot resist a swelling of pride at being visited by not one, but two police inspectors.

Staffe looks across at the locals, coming in from a smoke, and after a while, says to Rodney, ‘Would these chaps have been in, the night Carmelo disappeared?’

‘Bilbo’s in every night, and Fran is a brainiac. It was quiz night.’

‘And who is the other fellow?’

‘Gavin’s a lad at Trapani’s yard.’ Rodney looks at his diary. ‘It was Epsom. Just down the road, so I’d say he was in.’

‘I’ll have a quick word, if that’s all right.’

‘Don’t scare the horses,’ quips Rodney.

Staffe explains to the three locals that he is up from London and investigating the disappearance of Attilio Trapani’s father, and two of them look at him warily, but Fran, the mechanic, says, ‘Has he got something to do with it, then, that arrogant bastard? I used to work on the estate, for Mister Ballantyne. Now he was a gentleman, but that eyetie, my godmothers!’

The other two stand up, ready their fags, and Fran says, ‘Smoke?’ jiggling his packet of Regals towards Staffe, and even though he doesn’t, Staffe takes one, goes with them.

The door is on the crest of a bend in the road. Staffe draws on his Regal and they all watch a car as it slows, changing gear for the bend. The locals raise their hands to salute the driver.

‘Fuckin’ Mitch. Dirty bastard, still slipping Slowcombe’s wife while he’s away,’ says Gavin, the lad.

‘Can’t blame him,’ says Bilbo.

‘You work with cars,’ Staffe says to Fran.

‘Who’s told you that?’

Staffe nods down to Fran’s oily fingers, the nails stained black as boot polish. ‘I saw a Boxster in the drive just now,’ says Staffe, scathingly.

‘That’d be that piece he’s been seeing,’ says Bilbo.

‘The accountant woman,’ says Gavin.

Gavin, the lad, stubs out his cigarette and says, ‘I’m off.’ He drunkenly climbs a stile on the other side of the entrance to the car park, stumbling down, and staggers into the night.

‘He’s gone off without his bike, again,’ says Fran, nodding to an old butcher’s bike leaning against the wall. They stub their fags underfoot and go back inside.

When Staffe sits back down, Rimmer says, ‘We need to find out why Fahd Jahmood really withdrew his horses from Attilio Trapani’s yard.’

Staffe’s thoughts turn to Brighton and the past. He slaps Rimmer on his shoulder and says, ‘Good man.’ Rodney beckons them to the bar with the wiggle of a fine bottle of malt and Rimmer goes across. Staffe watches from afar, nods his agreement when Rimmer suggests they stay the night.