Somebody Told Me (12 page)

‘It’s only a matter of time.’

Lydia made her first contribution. ‘I think our best option is to trace Jack Ledley, the man Bevard met the afternoon he was killed.’

‘That sounds very sensible, Sergeant Flint.’ Hobbs looked in my direction. ‘Perhaps you could let me have a written report by the morning.’ Then he paused and added. ‘Inspector.’

I could see what he was playing at. He was like a parent with a naughty child who wouldn’t say please. Would I play his game? Would I say the magic word for him?

‘Of course. I have another couple of hours of work before leaving tonight. Sir.’

Then Lydia and I left. Walking back to the Incident Room I gradually unclenched by fists and then counted to fifty and then even more slowly to one hundred.

After a morning reviewing all the house-to-house inquiries around Yelland’s home, and listening to Wyn and Jane recounting another wasted morning trying to track down Jack Ledley, I settled into a hope that forensics from Yelland’s blood-spattered kitchen might give us something we could use. I even managed to keep an even temper when I called the forensics lab for an update on the clothing recovered from Norcross’s home only to be told it would take time.

Lydia stood in the doorway of my office. ‘We’ve had details of the staff at Grange Hall and there’s nobody by the name of Janice working there.’ Lydia sat down opposite me, her hair drawn into a tight ponytail. The blusher on her cheekbones gave her face a sculpted appearance.

The window behind my desk let in enough cool air to remind me it was early September although the forecasters had been predicting more mild weather. Noise levels from the shops and offices increased as the weekend approached. Our main suspect for both deaths was Walsh. All I had to do was join the dots. If I could find them.

And Martin Kendall and Bernie Walsh had cast iron alibis. My frustration was off the scale at being unable to see what linked both murders. It meant another conversation with Sharon Yelland to establish who had seen her late husband with ‘Janice’ and then get a detailed description. It would all take time.

‘Get Wyn and Jane to speak to Sharon Yelland so we can track down this “Janice” woman.’

‘Yes, boss.’

I scanned the to-do list I had printed first thing that morning. Acting Detective Chief Inspector Hobbs would have been pleased with my approach to paperwork. ‘And Wyn and Jane can talk to the bookmakers Sharon mentioned at the same time.’

After booting up my computer I scanned the dozens of emails that clogged my inbox, hoping I wouldn’t miss anything too important. Then I turned my attention to the various financial reports on the lawyers and police officers involved in the Bevard supergrass deal. I read financial summaries for the three police officers involved in the case, including the chief superintendent who had signed off on the agreement although the final decision must have gone to one of the ACCs.

Inspector Ackroyd had a house in Caerphilly with a small mortgage. I read about his investments in tax-free savings products and that his wife worked as a teacher. They had two children and everything seemed glaringly normal and unremarkable. The other two officers on his team had no financial problems that merited our attention. Ackroyd’s assurance that his officers were not the source of the leak seemed right. I was pleased, of course. Discovering that a police officer might have been indirectly responsible for Bevard’s death would have been unpalatable.

The most senior of the Crown Prosecution lawyers had more ready cash than I earned in a year, which piqued my interest. After establishing that his bank account had the same level of liquidity for the past three years and that he had disclosed a substantial inheritance after his father died two years previously, which included a flat in a French ski resort, I stopped digging any further.

The last two CPS lawyers had addresses in the more desirable parts of Cardiff. I scanned their CVs and turned to the financial records. Roger Stockes had little in his bank account at the end of each month. I noticed regular payments to a private school and an internet search told me it charged annual fees of more than five times my monthly salary. Having a financial drain on his income would be a motive enough. I dwelt on his file in more detail and found there were irregular patterns of expenditure so I burrowed further.

Lydia appeared at my door. ‘Coffee, boss?’

A niggle worked its way into my mind as I tried to ignore a feeling I had missed something important amidst the bank statements and financial summaries. I went back to Stockes’ CV. I stopped when I reached the details of his university degree: astronomy. It was when I read the name of the university he had attended that my pulse flipped sideways.

I looked over at Lydia. ‘Something wrong, boss?’

I knew exactly where I had read the same information. ‘Roger Stockes went to the same university as Yelland. They both studied astronomy.’

Lydia sounded surprised. ‘So one becomes a prison officer, the other a lawyer for the CPS.’

‘And by happy coincidence one works on the Walsh supergrass deal and the other is a prison officer on Walsh’s billet. Stockes would have had access to all the information about Walsh. He could have mentioned it in passing to Yelland and he sees it as a smart way of making a few extra pounds.’

‘So we need a complete picture of Yelland’s finances.’ Lydia sank back into the visitor chair in my office, a look of resigned acceptance on her face.

‘And we need a complete analysis of Stockes’ finances too.’

The prospect of interviewing a Crown Prosecution lawyer was almost as daunting as interviewing police officers, and with Dave Hobbs more than a ghostly presence in the background I had to be careful how I proceeded.

‘But are we saying that Stockes killed Bevard and then Yelland?’ She gave me a perplexed frown. Lydia was right: this possibility looked remote.

Lydia left and I turned my attention to the file of papers relating to the financial affairs of Roger Stockes. It always amazed me how far back the banks and financial institutions could go when we asked for information as part of a criminal inquiry. I spent the first hour getting a clear picture of his financial position. A generous salary reached the account on the twenty-fifth of each month. Other regular credits into his bank account would need an explanation so I opened a spreadsheet I named ‘queries/income’.

If Stockes was in hock to Walsh, it would be fairly recent so I had decided to go back three years. Then I turned my attention to his outgoings. He had a mortgage, a car loan, regular payments to finance and credit card companies with fancy names. I punched the figures into another spreadsheet I called ‘expenditure’ and which I hoped I could use to establish any unusual patterns. The possibility that Stockes had been the original source of the leak about Bevard’s supergrass agreement appalled me. If he had shared the information with Yelland for some extra cash flow then he deserved a stretch in a high security jail. Perhaps it had been only a casual remark at the end of a drunken evening. And for Yelland it had been a meal ticket he couldn’t ignore.

I noticed that Stockes made regular payments to one of the large supermarket chains and a quarterly subscription to a wine club. I sat back hoping I could make sense of the information on my screen, but all I saw was a tangled web of figures, dates and abbreviations. This was a task better suited to an officer in the economic crime department and I thought of Boyd Pearce. He could help but I knew I couldn’t risk any word of my investigation being shared around Queen Street or the other departments of Southern Division. I dialled his number.

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘Boyd, how’s Mandy and the family?’

Boyd had transferred from my team to the economic crime department before his wife gave birth to their first child and I’d rarely seen him since.

‘They’re great thanks, busy of course. Not a moment of peace when I get home… Are you working on that Bevard murder enquiry?’

I sensed a wistful edge to his question, laced with regret and the possibilities that working on my team again offered an excitement and challenge he missed.

‘I need help with constructing a spreadsheet to analyse income and expenditure for one of the suspects.’

‘That’s not difficult.’ I listened as he explained how to go about creating a document in Excel, using formulas. ‘You need to colour code various months and then calculate totals for each month to see if your suspect has a pattern for taking cash out of his account. That way you can identify any months with irregular payments or withdrawals. For example, everyone has to eat, so if there’s a month when he’s not spending money in the supermarket and he’s not dead then he’s buying food with cash.’

I thanked Boyd, promising to buy him lunch sometime. Our conversation had given me a renewed focus.

It was late afternoon by the time I had anything resembling a working spreadsheet. My euphoria at having succeeded with the paperwork was tempered by a complete lack of any useful information. There was nothing about Roger Stockes’ financial affairs to suggest he was handling large amounts of cash.

I pushed my chair back and threw a ballpoint across the papers on my desk before stalking out into the Incident Room where Lydia was staring at her monitor.

I sat down heavily on one of the office chairs. ‘I’ve been through Stockes’ finances for the last three years. There’s nothing.’

Lydia sat back with a satisfied look on her face. ‘I’ve been working on Yelland’s financial position. It was a complete mess. He was making regular payments to various finance companies. Once he was in arrears with one company he got a loan from another at a higher interest rate to pay off the first. Then he got into a cycle of high interest loans.’

‘How did he break out of that vicious circle?’

‘That’s where things get interesting. In the last year he paid off some of his smaller loans. He had two credit cards with two thousand pounds owed on each. They were both paid off. It helped him with his cash flow but then within two months he was paying money out to online bookmakers.’

‘So once he paid off one debt he starts another.’

‘It looks like that. Perhaps Wyn and Jane will have more information from the bookmakers.’

I stood up, walked over and stared at the image of Yelland pinned to the board. The Incident Room door opened and Wyn and Jane, voices loud in animated conversation, entered carrying large mugs of coffee.

‘I hope you’ve got something positive to tell me,’ I said.

Wyn blinked furiously, and Jane slipped off her fleece and threw it over one of the desks. Once their drinks had been safely deposited Wyn cleared his throat.

‘We spoke to Mrs Yelland, boss,’ Wyn began. ‘All she could give us was the name of the woman who’d seen Yelland in Cardiff. We tracked her down after speaking with the admin section of the prison. She gave us a description but something was lost in translation – the woman had made no reference to Yelland’s girlfriend working in the prison.’

‘Damn, bloody hell. We still need to identify her.’

Jane took a large mouthful of her coffee before announcing in her most important voice, ‘We had a very helpful conversation with the manager of the bookmakers. He knew all about Brian Yelland. He’d run up debts of about three thousand pounds in a twelve-month period.’

It surprised me a bookmaker would allow such extended credit.

Jane continued. ‘A month ago the debt was paid in full. In cash and it wasn’t Yelland who paid the bill. We got a detailed description of the man who called in with a wad of twenty-pound notes.’ She paced over towards the board and pointed at the face of Martin Kendall. ‘He described Kendall down to the hairs on his nose.’

For the first time since the case started my pulse beat a fraction faster.

I reached the top of the stairs in Queen Street and felt my chest tightening. My five-a-day habit was reminding me that I should be cutting down. I pushed open the door to the Incident Room and noticed a short man in an immaculate grey suit standing with Lydia. From the unsettled look on her face and the way her eyes darted around I could tell she wasn’t comfortable.

‘Inspector Marco, good morning,’ he said, his hand outstretched. ‘I’m Roger Stockes. I’d like a word.’

I darted a glance at Lydia and then at the board, hoping that nobody had added Stockes’ name to it. We shook hands and I showed him into my office. Lydia followed.

Stockes made himself comfortable in a visitor chair. ‘I was in a meeting with DCI Hobbs this morning and I thought I would take the opportunity to speak to you. I’m sure you know by now that I was friends with Brian Yelland.’

A meeting with Dave Hobbs? I wondered what they talked about.

‘Brian and I studied at university together.’

I couldn’t make out the accent. It wasn’t Cardiff or South Wales. It had a rounded crisp edge to it that professionals develop to make themselves sound important.

‘We had established that you were associated with Brian Yelland.’

‘We were good friends. And his death was shocking.’ He paused for effect and shook his head solemnly. I could see that Stockes and Hobbs would get along just fine.

Lydia had a suspicious frown etched on her face. I stared over at Stockes wondering why he had decided to come and see me. He had seized the initiative but he could only guess how much we knew already. I found a notebook and reached for the buff folder of papers we had on Stockes from the pile on my desk.

‘What was your involvement with the supergrass agreement?’ I said.

‘The initial case involving the discovery of the DNA in Bevard’s car came onto my desk. The case was handled by one of the dedicated source units. I coordinated the paperwork with a senior prosecutor. The whole thing was signed off correctly.’

‘I’m sure it was.’ I looked down at the papers on my lap reminding myself of all those involved in the decision-making process. ‘So can you tell me who was involved?’

Stockes reeled off the names of police officers and lawyers and I mentally ticked off each one against my list.