‘I don’t see that my financial affairs have any bearing on this,’ snapped Wilson, recovering his haughtiness and interrupting me sharply.
Any minute now I thought he was going to ask if we’d got a warrant to search his house. I have to admit that the possibility of obtaining one was crossing my mind.
‘The only reason I ask is that we’re also investigating a large-scale share fraud that’s connected with the murders. Have you ever invested in, say, an IT development company in Buenos Aires or in a cargo of oil allegedly being shipped from Nigeria? Both of them failed to yield any dividends.’
‘Good God no,’ said Wilson vehemently. ‘I’m not stupid and that sort of fraud is going on all the time. Well, you’d know that better than me, Chief Inspector,’ he added, making a rare concession that someone might know more than he did. ‘If you’d care to follow me, I’ll show you what sort of investments I make.’ He was clearly at pains to distance himself from our probing questions and from the implication that he was connected with the murders.
We crossed the hall and followed Wilson into his sitting room.
‘This is my wife Helen,’ said Wilson, waving casually at an attractive raven-haired woman wearing tight-fitting white designer jeans and a long white sweater around which was a gold chain, all of which probably cost a fortune.
‘Good afternoon, madam,’ I said.
‘These gentlemen are from the police, darling. They’ve come to see me about that awful fire last Thursday night or Friday morning or whenever it was. The chief inspector was just telling me that the two people in it were murdered.’
‘Oh, really? How interesting. I’ll leave you to it, then, Guy.’ Helen Wilson finally looked up from the magazine she was reading, appraised Dave and me scathingly, but said nothing to us. Clearly a double murder virtually on her doorstep was not something that excited her. ‘Anyway, I’ve some telephone calls to make.’ The ice maiden rose from her chair, ignored Dave and me, and tossed her magazine on to the seat before leaving the room without a backward glance. She appeared to be quite a few years younger than Wilson, but first impressions were that she shared his arrogant attitude. She certainly didn’t seem to enjoy having two common policemen sullying her elegant sitting room.
Wilson crossed to an oak cabinet, unlocked a safe that was secreted inside and took out a book in a plastic bag. ‘This is the sort of investment I make, Chief Inspector. It’s a first edition of John Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. It retailed in nineteen fifteen for a shilling.’ He paused. ‘That’s five pence in today’s currency, but now it’s worth somewhere in the region of twelve thousand pounds.’
Good for him,
I thought,
but Guy Wilson was not the sort of man who would admit to having been swindled, even if he had. It wouldn’t be good for his image.
‘How fascinating,’ I said, but failed to see why anyone would want to pay that much for a book. If I really wanted to read
The Thirty-Nine Steps
, I could probably pick up a paperback edition for a few pounds in a bookshop or even less at a charity shop. But perhaps I’m an iconoclast.
‘I could download that on to my Kindle for a few quid,’ commented Dave, playing the dim copper, something he’s very skilled at doing when the mood takes him. ‘It might even be free.’
‘Really?’ said Wilson scathingly. The mere mention of a Kindle seemed to offend him.
‘This silver car you saw on the night of the fire . . .’ Dave walked to the window and stared out at the site of the camper-van fire. ‘Had you ever seen it before, perhaps during the days leading up to the fire?’
Wilson answered immediately. ‘No. At least, not as far as I can recall. I did see a sports car that stopped there about a week ago. But I think the driver was just using his mobile.’
‘Did you happen to hear any shots just before the fire?’
‘No, I didn’t. But he’d’ve used a silencer wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, I never thought of that, sir,’ said Dave, turning from the window, but his sarcasm escaped Wilson.
‘Have you anything to add to what you told Inspector Ebdon, Mr Wilson?’ I asked.
‘No, I told her all I know. That I saw a small silver car leaving just before I saw the van go up in flames.’
‘Just now you mentioned seeing a sports car,’ I said. ‘Any idea of its make, colour, anything like that?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Do you own a car yourself?’ asked Dave casually.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve got a Lamborghini and before that I had a Porsche. But I’m thinking of trading in the Lamborghini for a Ferrari later this year. Unfortunately, and to my chagrin, I just missed laying hands on a 1920 Haxe-Doulton. It was made by an American firm in Detroit that went bust the following year. A good investment if I’d’ve been able to get it.’
‘Really, sir?’ Dave sounded enthusiastically impressed. ‘You’re obviously well up on sports cars, then.’
Wilson preened slightly. ‘I think I can safely say that I know my way around them, yes.’
‘But you couldn’t identify the sports car you saw outside your house a week ago.’ Dave shut his pocketbook and tapped it with his pen.
‘All I can say is that it was one of the cheaper models,’ said Wilson, irritated that Dave had so easily made him appear foolish. ‘I’m not awfully familiar with the lower end of the market.’
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Wilson,’ I said, as Dave and I made to leave.
‘What d’you think, guv?’ asked Dave, as we drove away from Wilson’s house.
‘I don’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would set up a job like the murders of Eberhardt and Schmidt bang opposite his own house, Dave. Mind you, I don’t think he’s the brightest star in the firmament, despite his airs and graces and his bluster about clever investments. Nevertheless, it seems an odd coincidence that his was the address that the sender of those emails singled out for the killing ground.’
‘D’you think he’s clever enough to try a double bluff, guv?’ asked Dave. ‘Pretends to be an airy-fairy pseudo-intellectual, but is smart enough to cover his tracks.’
‘Possibly,’ I said, ‘but we’d need more evidence of his involvement. Much more.’
‘I wonder if there’s anything in his sighting of this sports car,’ said Dave.
‘I shouldn’t think so, but we’ll bear it in mind.’
‘D’you think he had anything to do with Samson Adekunle’s murder, guv?’
‘I don’t see our Mr Wilson as a torturer, Dave. He’s much too squeamish and the sort of barbarism that was done to Adekunle would more than likely make him throw up.’
‘Shouldn’t we have asked him where he was when Adekunle was murdered, guv?’
‘When
was
he murdered,
Sergeant
?’ I said, employing Dave’s little ploy of formal address. It wasn’t often I was able to turn the tables on him.
‘Ah!’ said Dave.
I
was on the point of leaving the office when I received a telephone call from the detective inspector at Brighton.
‘It’s about your man William Rivers, guv. The post-mortem showed that he was in the advanced stages of pancreatic cancer. The pathologist reckoned he had only a matter of days to live.’
And that presumably explained his suicide. But it didn’t solve the question of whether he’d told a former colleague about being swindled. And if he had, whether that colleague had acted upon the information.
On Friday morning, the first of the scientific reports about Samson Adekunle’s murder came in.
When Linda Mitchell arrived in the office she was looking stunningly attractive, something that hadn’t really registered with me before. Wearing her day clothes rather than the unflattering protective coveralls in which we saw her at a crime scene, she was attired in a smart grey trouser suit and wore her long black hair loose.
‘You’re obviously giving evidence in court this morning, Linda?’ suggested Dave casually.
‘What makes you think that, Dave?’
‘Because you’re wearing your Old Bailey outfit,’ said Dave.
‘But I always dress scruffily to go to court, Dave. Like you do,’ said Linda, and turned to me. ‘We found fingermarks all over the Clancy Street address, Mr Brock. We’ve identified one set as belonging to Adekunle, but there’s no trace of any of the others in records. It’s possible, I suppose, that some of them belong to a cleaning woman. Assuming, of course, that he allowed anyone to come in to clean up. Although in view of what he was involved in, I think that that’s unlikely. The other possibility is that most of them belong to previous tenants or visitors. The only prints in Adekunle’s car were his own.’
‘I doubt that any of them belonged to our murderer,’ I said. ‘He seems to have been very careful.’
‘There were no weapons anywhere in the house either,’ continued Linda. ‘I understand from Doctor Mortlock that the victim was tortured in a variety of ways. But we didn’t find a whip, although there was that piece of bloodstained rope we found near the body.’
‘Any joy with tracing the rope, Linda?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid not. It was fairly standard stuff, the sort you could buy at almost any hardware store or DIY supermarket, and the blood on it was Adekunle’s. The killer might’ve brought it with him or found it in the house somewhere, although we didn’t find any similar rope. We examined the rack of kitchen knives and one of them was missing. But the one that was found near the body seemed to match the kitchen set and that, of course bore traces of the victim’s blood. There were no cigarette ends anywhere in the house, either.’ Linda laughed. ‘But we did find a bit of cannabis secreted in the toilet cistern. How original is that?’
‘You can forget about the cannabis, Linda. I’ve got enough on my plate without worrying about that sort of nonsense. But if anything else crops up, you will let me know, won’t you?’
‘Of course, but there are a couple of other things, Mr Brock. We got our tame locksmith to open the safe. Inside was a bundle of banknotes, ten thousand pounds in used fifty-pound notes to be precise. If they’d been new, we might’ve been able to find out when and where they were issued.’
‘I doubt that that would’ve helped much,’ I said.
‘And then there were these.’ Linda displayed a sheaf of bank statements. ‘They relate to an account in the name of Trudi Schmidt, one of the camper-van victims. The account is at something called
Sparkasse
with an address in Essen. Would that be the name of the bank?’
‘Not specifically, Linda.
Sparkasse
is German for savings bank. But that’s all very interesting. Why, I wonder, should Adekunle have been holding Trudi Schmidt’s bank statements?’
‘Perhaps he was the banker for the whole scam, or at least the United Kingdom branch,’ said Dave.
‘We’ll see if Horst Fischer can shed some light on it. Thanks very much, Linda,’ I said. ‘It gives us something else to work on. By the way, where’s the cash now?’
‘At the moment, it’s in the safe in the property store at Paddington police station. Sergeant Wright took charge of it.’
‘Thanks, Linda. I’ll have a word with him.’ ‘Shiner’ Wright was the laboratory liaison officer whose task, among others, was to preserve continuity of evidence. ‘You said there were two things.’
‘I thought I’d save the best bit until last. This was also in the safe.’ Linda produced a dark green document and handed it to me. ‘Adekunle’s Nigerian passport.’
‘I wonder when he arrived in the UK,’ I said, flicking through the pages of the passport.
‘Officially, it appears that he’s not here, Mr Brock. There’s no entry stamp.’
‘So, he was probably an illegal immigrant. Well, there’s a surprise. But at least we know how old he is and that he was born in somewhere called Calabar, for what good that’ll do us. I’ll get checks run with the Border Agency and the Nigerian High Commission.’
‘Good luck,’ said Dave quietly.
Ten minutes later, Kate Ebdon appeared in the incident room, but unlike Linda, Kate was wearing her usual working outfit: jeans and a man’s white shirt.
‘After a great deal of messing about with the local authority, the land registry and God knows who else, I’ve managed to trace the owner of the Clancy Street property, guv.’ Kate referred to her pocketbook. ‘After a few false starts I eventually tracked down the local estate agency that’s responsible for renting out the property and spoke to the manager. The property’s owned by a Lucien Carter and apparently he resides abroad. Very much the absentee landlord by all accounts. But the agent has never seen Carter and hasn’t got a clue where he lives.’
‘None at all?’ I asked.
‘The best he could suggest was that he thought he might be in France, but he’d got nothing to back it up with. All he could tell me was that Adekunle rented the property on a two-year lease about a year ago. I seized a reference that Adekunle gave the manager when he signed the agreement, but it’s almost bound to be duff. It’s on expensive notepaper purporting to come from a New York letting agency in East 92nd Street and stated in glowing terms that Adekunle was the sort of tenant anyone would be delighted to have living in their house.’
‘Lucien Carter won’t think so now that there’s blood all over his expensive carpet,’ said Dave, and paused. ‘Unless it was Carter who put it there.’
‘That letter’s bound to be a fake, but I’ll have a word with Joe Daly,’ I said, taking the plastic-shrouded document from Kate. Daly is the resident FBI agent in London whose official title is legal attaché at the United States Embassy. ‘Any luck with house-to-house enquiries?’
‘No, guv. The nearest neighbours reckoned they’d never set eyes on Adekunle, and certainly never saw anyone entering or leaving the house. Must’ve been a night bird.’ Kate paused to laugh. ‘I interviewed one old biddy who lived opposite and who said she definitely thought there was something funny about the house, but as evidence goes, it’s crook. I think she just enjoyed a yabber.’
‘Perhaps you’d translate that for me, Kate.’ I was gradually getting to grips with Australian slang, but some of Kate’s more obscure words still eluded me.
‘“Crook” means that in terms of evidence it’s no good and “yabber” means she just enjoyed having a chat,
sir
,’ said Kate, with a cheeky smile. It seemed that she’d caught the ‘sir’ habit from Dave.