Contents

Chapter One. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ..3

Chapter Two. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...5

Chapter Three..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....12

Chapter Four.. .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ...20

Chapter Five.... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ..27

Chapter Six... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .....32

Chapter Seven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...38

Chapter Eight. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..........44

Chapter Nine... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...49

Chapter Ten. .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... ... .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... .61

Chapter Eleven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .65

Chapter Twelve - Epilogue... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .......68

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2

Chapter One

I had failed. I had failed, and the evidence of my failure lay dead at my feet. Linda Lafferty was dead; dead at just twenty-one years of age, and it had been my job to protect her.

To be fair, nobody had ever envisaged anything like this. The protection that I had been expected to provide was no more than saving her from being jostled by fans, to keep over-nosy reporters and photographers from crowding her too closely. Never had we expected an assassin’s bullet from the shadows behind the hotel where she had been attending the press conference for her latest film.

It had been my idea to exit the hotel via the back kitchen door, only yards from where my car, an anonymous Vauxhall Vectra, was parked. That way, I reasoned, she would escape the pointless yelling and shoving of the press at the front door. Linda had happily agreed, and her agreement had cost her her life.

She was, no she had been, the hottest rising star in the British film scene. Twenty four months earlier, as a complete unknown to the majority of the film going public, she had been cast as a blood-chilling teenage psychopath in a film which had received rave reviews – and those reviews were unstinting in their praise for this young girl who had combined the portrayal of evil incarnate with a face of incredible beautiful. She had completely stolen the film from the more experienced stars, male and female, to whom she had been cast as an opponent to be vanquished. Her success was such that a second film had quickly followed - it was still on general release – and had been equally acclaimed. This time she had been the good girl – playing a female detective overcoming male chauvinism from her colleagues, deadly danger from the criminals, and a triumphant solving of the case which had baffled everyone else.

Put down baldly like that, it didn’t sound much. You had to have seen her to appreciate the sheer magnetism of both performances.

The press conference had been to announce her third film, which was due to start shooting in a few weeks time. Now it never would, or if it did, some other actress would have the unenviable task of filling the role Linda should have played.

I dropped to my knees beside her body, hoping for signs of life and shielding her from the chance of a second shot from the shadows. That was my job – protecting the principal, not trying to apprehend the shooter. My search was hopeless, as I had known it would be. She had fallen face down as the bullet hit her, and I gently turned her over. Twelve years on the Army had familiarised me with death, and there was no doubt that death was present here. The bullet had entered fractionally below her left breast; it must have penetrated her heart, killing her virtually instantly.

My mobile was in my hand and I dialled 999 for the police and the ambulance service, knowing full well that the latter would be doing no more than transporting a corpse.

The police arrived almost immediately; I had forgotten that there had been a couple of constables at the front door of the hotel for crowd control, and they were first on the scene, but only minutes later a police car arrived and a man who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Laine took charge. I was escorted back inside the hotel to await being questioned whilst Laine and his subordinates busied themselves at the crime scene.

It must have been twenty minutes or more before he came to see me. Whilst I was waiting, I used my mobile to let Alan Hammond, who had given me this job, know what had happened. He was understandably horrified, but agreed with me that there was no point in him coming to the hotel, at least not for the moment.

I had been put in a small office off the main reception area and it was there that Inspector Laine seated himself opposite me and took a notebook from his pocket.

“Can I have your name, please?”

“Amherst, David Charles Amherst.”

“And your date of birth and address, Mr. Amherst?”

“Thirtieth of May, ninety seventy five. I live at Flat 4, 14, St. Mark’s Hill, Surbiton.”

“Can you tell me what happened this evening – right from the time you brought Miss Lafferty to the hotel – I understand you drove her here?”

3

“Yes, Inspector. I do occasional work for the Hammond Agency. It’s run by an old Army colleague of mine and we provide, I suppose that you call it, low-level body guarding. Nothing high profile, not protecting politicians against terrorists, or anything like that. The agency also sends bodyguards abroad with business men, sports stars, that sort of thing, but nothing very dramatic. Tonight was, or should have been, a sort of typical lowest level job. I picked Miss Lafferty up from her flat in Richmond, drove her to the hotel, left her once she was through the front door and safely absorbed by the film people, and then went and changed cars.”

“Changed cars?”

“Yes. I brought her in a Bentley – all part of the film star image. However, I would have taken her home in my own car – that’s the Vectra parked round the back. The idea is to attract less attention if she wanted a low profile exit, which was the case tonight. On other occasions the Bentley, or something similar, might have been used both for arrival and departure – it all depends.”

“Does the agency do a lot of this sort of work?”

“Quite a bit. Alan Hammond – he’s the owner – has a permanent staff of about seven or eight and also calls on several folk like myself on an occasional basis.”

“Where is the agency based?”

“In the Euston Road, in that arcade of shops in front of St. Pancras station – it’s number 12.”

I reached into my pocket, took out my wallet and extracted one of Alan’s business cards which he tucked away in his own wallet.

I studied this policeman carefully. He was, I would guess, about forty-five years old, slightly built, no more than five feet seven and ten stone or so. Thin sandy hair was combed back from his forehead, which was high and lined with worry lines telling of years of problems. His eyes, pale blue in colour, looked tired, although given that it was now well after midnight, that was understandable. His suit, a not too brilliantly fitting effort is an undistinguished shade of brown, was crumpled, the collar his blue and white striped shirt, which clashed with his tomato coloured tie, likewise. It looked as though he was at the end of a long, hard day.

“Thank you, Mr. Amherst. Now, tell me what happened when you left with Miss Lafferty.”

“I had already had a look around the place yesterday when Alan – that’s Alan Hammond – asked me if I could do the job. I knew that the studio – and Miss Lafferty – wanted a quiet exit for her because they didn’t want too much attention on the star to the exclusion of the director - he is apparently another rising star of the industry. I got all this from Alan, so I took a look round. The kitchen back door was the obvious escape route as I could park within a few yards of it.

“When it was time for us to leave – I had been sitting at the back of the stage where the film people were sitting, I escorted Miss Lafferty out into the corridor. From there you turn right to go back to the reception area, left for the kitchen area which was the way we took, of course. I walked out of the back door ahead of Miss Lafferty, about two or three paces in front of her. She could only have taken three steps, four at the most, when the shot was fired. She went down straight away as I turned back towards her. The shot had come from beyond my Vectra and I went down on my knees to shield her. There was no further shot, so I turned her over – she had fallen face down – to check for signs of life, but there weren’t any. Then I dialled 999.”

“Did you see or hear anything of the shooter?”

“Didn’t see anything other than the flash of the shot. He presumably ran away after firing, but I didn’t hear anything – my ears were still ringing from the noise of the gunshot. In that narrow alley, with brick walls all around, it was very loud.”

“Any other thoughts, Mr. Amherst?”

“None of any use. I know that this hotel has been used by the film studio for this sort of occasion several times in the last couple of years. I have never worked here before, but I know that Miss Lafferty was here last month for a studio presentation of some sort. One of the agency’s other operatives was with her on that occasion – Alan can tell you who it was as I’m not sure myself. I don’t know if the rear exit was used that time – again, Alan could tell you.”

4

“Well, Mr. Amherst, thank for all that. Could I ask you to call in at the station tomorrow – no I suppose I mean later this morning – and make a formal statement?”

“Yes, of course, Inspector. Any particular time?”

He looked at his watch and frowned at what he saw; I got the impression that he spent a lot of his time frowning.

“How about ten thirty? Ask for me, or if I am not there, Sergeant Collyer – she’s my number two.”

I got up to take my leave when he spoke again.

“Oh, one other thing, Mr. Amherst. You said you only do occasional work for the agency. What else do you do?”

“I’m a freelance journalist – I’ve done a bit of work for some of the nationals, and a variety of magazines.”

I could see his estimation of me plummeting by the second, but he contented himself with a simple nod of acceptance. I decided not to expand on what I had said; to tell him that most of my stuff had been investigative work into miscarriages of justice and police incompetence would hardly have made his day.

I had expected to drive home and go to bed, but I discovered that the police were retaining my Vectra as part of the crime scene, so I booked into the hotel, where I spent a less than satisfactory night as I reviewed the earlier happenings, demanding of myself if there was anything that I could have done to prevent the death of the girl I was being paid to protect. I suppose that I dropped off eventually, but when I got up that morning I felt very far from rested.

Before calling at the police station, I went to see Alan Hammond and gave him a full account of the events of the night. He hears me out patiently, leaning forward in his leather swivel chair, his elbows on the desk and supporting his chin. His eyes, deep sat in his tanned face, never left mine. When at last I finished he leant back in his chair and swept his hand through his greying hair.

“Christ, Dave, what can I say? Any ideas as to how it was done?”

“Well, somehow the shooter was expecting us – must have been. It’s a back alley there and off the beaten track a bit, but only a bit. He couldn’t have hung around for very long without being noticed. If by nobody else, the cooks are frequently in and out to put stuff in the dustbins.”

“Look, Dave, sorry and all that, but I’m not going to be able to use you again, at least not for a good while.

Nobody’s going to be thrilled at being looked after by the guy who had Linda Lafferty gunned down in front of him.”

She had actually been behind me, but I didn’t correct him. I could well understand his point of view and accepted it. Alan and I had served in the Army together and it was an old pals act for him to offer me the occasional job in the way he had. Now he had to worry about what Linda Lafferty’s death would mean to the agency; it certainly wouldn’t enhance its reputation.

“That’s OK, mate – I understand. I just hope it doesn’t harm the agency too much.”

“Well, it won’t help us here, that’s for sure. Hopefully our work abroad won’t be affected; the poor lass hadn’t yet made a name for herself in the countries we operate in.”

And now she never would, I reflected sadly as I left to keep my appointment with the police.

Chapter Two

As I had half expected, Inspector Laine was not available when I arrived at the police station so, as instructed, I asked for Sergeant Collyer. A few minutes wait and a young women emerged from the corridor leading off the reception area.

As I rose to meet her, she offered her hand.

“Mr. Amherst? I’m Detective Sergeant Lucy Collyer. Thanks for coming in. Would you come with me, please?”

I followed her into the corridor and then into a small office equipped with a table, a couple of chars and a computer and printer. She waved me into one of the chairs and took the other herself. I took a good look; DS

Collyer was well worth a good look. She looked about thirty, dressed smartly in a crisp white blouse and black skirt, blonde hair to her shoulders surrounding an oval face featuring bright blue eyes and a full mouth, 5

respectively above and below a small, straight nose. If I had seen Inspector Laine as his usual self the previous night, he and his deputy could scarcely have presented a greater contrast.

She posed her hands expectantly over the computer keyboard and waited.

“When you are ready, Mr. Amherst.”

“Er, how do you want me to begin?”

“Well, if you can just go through everything that you can remember from last night. Could you start from when you picked up Miss Lafferty?”

So I repeated, although in greater detail, what I had told Laine at the hotel. When we had finished, and I had signed the resultant witness statement, I asked about my car.

She looked sorry.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Amherst, but we need to keep it for the moment. As you say, the killer was behind it when he fired. He may have left fingerprints, or other physical evidence on it. Our forensic people will be as quick as they can, but I’m afraid it will be at least a day or two before we can let you have it back.”

I nodded in resignation. I had expected as much, so I took a train back to Surbiton, where I hired a car – I had wanted the the cheapest on offer, which proved to be a Fiesta too small for me to drive in comfort, so I settled for the next cheapest, a Vauxhall Astra.

Once back in my flat I reviewed yet again what had happened. Try as I might, I could come up with no way in which I could have prevented what had happened. It would have needed a team of operatives to prevent such an assassination, with an advance team (possibly as small as one person) ensuring that the area was secure before Linda Lafferty and I came out.

Should I have left her in the kitchen area and gone out alone to make sure that nobody was waiting for us?

Had I done so, would the killer have left the scene? In theory that could have been an improvement in what I had actually done, but only in theory, as it would have meant leaving the girl alone – and the first rule for a bodyguard is never to abandon your principal in a public location.

It all boiled down to the fact that nobody had imagined a threat of anything like the magnitude of what had actually existed.

I changed track and reviewed my own situation. My journalistic work paid well, but it was spasmodic. At the moment I had nothing on, one of the reasons that I was grateful for Alan’s jobs. My last article had appeared over three months earlier, and my resources were beginning to look a little slim, and I wondered if I should not try and find some sort of short-term employment to tide me over until I could get a commission for another story in order to avoid having to dip into my savings.

I also wondered if it was not time to try and find something more settled than my current lifestyle. I had now been out of the Army for nearly five years, during which time I had moved flat three times. The first two had been intentionally temporary; my current flat I had now occupied for over three years. It met my needs and I had no plans for an immediate move, other than for the fact that it was in a fairly expensive location and now that Alan’s jobs had dried up for the foreseeable future, perhaps I should look for somewhere cheaper.

I switched on the TV news; as expected, Linda Lafferty’s murder was the leading story. The police were appealing for witnesses who might have seen anything at the back of the hotel, or for that matter, anyone with any information at all. As usual, some ‘expert’ was trotted out to talk about the nature of such a killer –

the Jill Dando murder was mentioned, a classic unsolved killing assumed to be by some deranged individual, and the inference made that this would go the same way.

It had happened too late to make the day’s papers, but it was bound to feature large the next day. I did wonder if my own story might have a value to the press but shied away from the idea in self-revulsion. No matter how hard up I might be, my pride wouldn’t allow me to parade my failure to the world in return for a bit of cash.

As it happened, the very next day I was phoned by the editor of one of the magazines I had worked for in the past. Would five hundred interest me in a brief article on gangland killings, following the drug-related murder of yet another London teenager? It only needed a bit of background digging, a digging into my own quite extensive archives on such matters, and a one page article by the end of the week to meet the deadline for the next issue. I accepted gleefully and three days later E-mailed him the finished article which he was 6

happy with. So, no need to worry about the rent for the month, and for the moment next month after could look after itself.

By the next week, with no progress made, Linda Lafferty’s murder had faded from the front pages and was well down the local TV news. Soon, I knew, it would vanish altogether from the public eye. I was wrong.

The following Monday’s papers had screaming headlines on their front pages ‘Another actress slain’ or variations thereof.

Amanda Hancock, like Linda Lafferty, was an up-and-coming young actress, who had started her acting career as a child in a variety of TV programmes, but it was only in the last couple of years that she had started to make a name for herself. Almost exactly one year older than Linda, she was working with the same studio. She had attended a first night showing in Liverpool of a film in which she had played a minor role.

After the film was over she had intended to go to a restaurant with friends, but as she left the cinema – in her case by the front entrance – she was killed by a single gunshot wound from the other side of the street. This time the gunman had been seen, but his dark clothing, which, I suppose inevitably, included a hood hiding his features, had rendered him unrecognisable and he had vanished from view whilst folk were still diving for cover or dashing about in terror. Unlike Linda, Amanda had not had a bodyguard of any sort with her, although even if she had, he would have been no more capable of protecting her than I had been in the case of Linda Lafferty.

The two killings had taken place just over a week apart and were separated in distance by a bit over two hundred miles. They were, of course, within the jurisdiction of two different police forces, but the respective chief officers emphasised that the forces would be sharing information on all progress.

Over the next few days, whilst the police were unable to add anything to their original statements, there was a frenzy of speculation in the media. It emerged that, although Amanda had been killed in Liverpool, she lived, like Linda, in outer London, in her case in Bexley Heath. Both girls had lived alone, both were seen as having big futures, although Linda was clearly the more successful to date despite a shorter career by several years. Another interesting facet was that both had the same agent, a company called Screenways. Neither girl was in a permanent relationship, as far as was known, and friends of both were reported as devastated and unable to understand why anybody should have any reason to do them harm. Sadly, all routine in such circumstances.

I was intrigued, as was much of the media. Was the second killing a copycat crime? Were they both the work of a single individual with some grudge against actresses in general or these two luckless girls in particular?

Did they have something in common that had marked them down for murder?

Incredibly, these theories were still being bounced around in the press, on TV and on the radio, when there was a third murder of an actress.

Again the victim was shot, again she had been at a public function. Lisa Vaughan, however, didn’t totally match the profiles of the first two. At thirty-four she was somewhat older and had far more screen experience behind her, including a number of parts in long running TV dramas, making her the sort of actress whose face is instantly recognisable, but whose name often escapes the memory. Another difference; unlike Linda Lafferty and Amanda Hancock, she was married. Her husband, William Vaughan, a successful business man, was out of the country at the time, leaving his wife to attend a charity dinner in the city accompanied by her brother, Richard Cartwright, who was himself an actor, although by no means as well known as his sibling.

Again, a single gunshot had sufficed; again the murder occurred in public, taking place as Lisa and her brother were leaving the hotel which had been the location for the dinner.

Once again the killer had been briefly glimpsed but had easily escaped in the confusion.

The papers were having a field day. Screaming headlines denounced every possible cause for the killings, from a too lenient judiciary, to the breakdown of family life, to violence on TV,... You name it, somebody blamed it.

But, to increasing horror and fear in the whole acting profession, whose members were scarcely daring to stir out of doors, there was a fourth killing. Like Lisa Vaughan, Sandra Field was older than the first two victims and, again like Lisa, she was married, although, again like Lisa, she was childless. She was married to Charles Field, a financial advisor specialising in company restructuring, whatever that meant. The murder 7

took place in Birmingham, when Sandra Field was out with a cousin; she was staying in the city for a few days to visit family and was shot down in the street as she emerged from a cinema.

So we now had four victims, murdered in four different locations, impinging on four different police force –

the Met, Liverpool, City of London and Birmingham.

The following week there was fearful anticipation that another woman would be gunned down. There were calls for actresses to be given police protection – various senior police officers quickly pointed out how totally impractical was such a suggestion.

Nothing happened. Nor did it the following week, nor the week after that. We were now in late November; no actress had been murdered for three weeks. Was this a lull, or was the murderous spree over?

The lull continued and we moved from November into December and then into the New Year, still with more killings and still with no reports of any progress from the various police forces.

It was at this point that I decided that I would try and investigate the murders myself. I had a personal axe to grind, after all.

My first thought was to ask who, if anybody, was benefitting from these deaths. It was interesting that Linda and Amanda, the first two to be killed, both used the same agency, Screenways, but the other two didn’t.

Lisa Vaughan was a client of Marcel Harding Associates, Sandra Field used Telemagic. Similarities between the agencies? Screenways was quite new, formed on 2007, the other two had been in business for over thirty years. Judging by their websites, Screenways was much smaller than the other two.

Was there anything, apart from the obvious one that all four were actresses and all at least reasonably successful, that was common to all four women?

Money? Was it possible to identify if anyone benefitted financially from the deaths? Would anyone tell me?

Clearly, the police would have pursued that avenue of enquiry, but if they had found out anything, they weren’t saying. Presumably all four women had been making money – but how much? And was it enough to kill for even in the extremely unlikely scenario that all four had named the same beneficiaries? The more I thought about it, the more I inclined to the theory that the killings were the work of an attention seeker of some kind who had an imagined grudge. But if that was the case, why these four? You could not see these killings as opportunistic. All four lived in London but only two had been killed there. The killer – always assuming, of course, that only one killer was involved – had followed Amanda Hancock to Liverpool and Sandra Field to Birmingham.

I reread all the sensible reports of the killings, leaving the tabloid efforts to one side. Two of the women, Lisa Vaughan and Sandra Field, were married. When a married person is murdered, the spouse is an automatic suspect and, far too often the culprit. In this case both William Vaughan and Charles Field had unimpeachable alibis. Vaughan had been in Italy meeting with some possible backers for an expansion of his business – he imported large quantities of Italian marble for the luxury end of the building trade. At the time of his wife’s murder he had been dining with five Italian business men. Field, the financial advisor, had been in London whilst his wife was being killed in Birmingham. He had been in a series of meetings with the board of a struggling building firm trying to stave off bankruptcy.

Did any of the victims, the husbands of the married women, the brother of Lisa Vaughan, know any of the others? Linda and Armanda must certainly have met – they worked for the same company and although they had not appeared in the same film at any time, it seemed certain that with several films in varying stages of production at any given time, they must surely have met even if only casually.

With the other two, my digging into their careers brought up the fact that they had both appeared in a BBC

TV drama some two years earlier, and going further back, they had also both been in the cast of a costume mini-series on ITV some five years ago. So, they certainly knew each other, although I had no idea how well.

So there was a slight connection between the woman seen as two pairs – the ‘young’ pair and the ‘older’

pair. Did it mean anything?

One thing certainly connected the four of them. The police had released the news that all four had been shot with the same weapon, a 9mm pistol, possibly a Browning Hi-Power. The Browning must be one of the most popular pistols ever made in that calibre, with well over a million having been made since it was introduced 8

in 1935; it is still being made in quantity today. These ballistic results strengthened the assumption that a single killer was involved.

I wondered how I could make some sort of entry into the case to give myself a start for some sort of article.

One thing was certain; if I could come up with something credible I was guaranteed a ready market. I doubted very much that the two husbands would be willing to see me – why should they want their pain raked up and raked over by a stranger?

I decided to start with the two younger women. As they had both had the same agent it seemed logical to start with that agency. I looked up their website and identified the CEO as one Julia Glendenning. I checked the phone number and dialled it. A female voice answered.

“Screenways. How can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak with Julia Glendenning, please.”

“Who is calling?”

“My name is David Amherst. She doesn’t know me, but could you tell her that I was with Linda Lafferty the night she died.”

There was a long pause at the other end.

“Would you hold the line please.”

I waited for perhaps five minutes or more before a different female voice came on the line.

“This is Julia Glendenning. I must warn you that all our calls are being recorded and if you are another of the sick hoaxers we have been having, you will be reported to the police.”

“Ms. Glendenning, I am sorry to hear that you are being subjected to hoax callers, but let me assure you that I am not one of them. I was the man with her when she was shot. I’d like to talk to you because I feel very guilty about what happened, even if I couldn’t have prevented it. I want to try and find out why it happened.”

“Isn’t that what the police are trying to do?”

“Yes, but they don’t seem to have done too well so far, do they?”

There was another long pause.

“What do you want to talk about, Mr. Amherst?”

“I want to try and find some link between Linda, Amanda and the other two victims. Would it be possible for me to meet with you.”

Another long pause; Julia Glendenning didn’t seem to be one to rush matters.

“OK – do you knew where we are?”

“Yes, I looked up your website.”

“Right – I’m free this afternoon as it happens. Can you make it for four o’clock?”

“Yes, no problem at all – I’ll see you then. Goodbye”

“Goodbye, Mr. Amherst.”

I had checked their address; their office was in Praed Street, near St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, so I decided to leave my car at home and go by train and Underground. Punctually at four o’clock I presented myself at the reception desk of Screenways.

Julia Glendenning proved to be an attractive thirty-something, dressed in a navy blue trouser suit, the jacket unbuttoned to reveal a scarlet silk blouse and scarf, a quite spectacular combination which went well with jet-black hair cut in a pageboy style. A smooth complexion was highlighted by dark, almost black, eyes.

Altogether, not a woman to be overlooked nor easily forgotten.

She led me into her office and invited me to be seated, then sat herself down behind her desk. She placed her elbows on its surface, steepled her hands, and rested her chin on her upturned fingers. She gazed directly at me.

“So, Mr. Amherst, why did you ask to talk to me?”

“As I said on the phone, I was with Linda when she was killed and I feel that I owe it to her to try and find out why it happened. I also want to try and find out what the connection was between Linda and the other murdered actresses. In addition to the sort of work I was doing with Linda – which is only a casual thing – I am also a freelance journalist – I don’t want you being under any misapprehension on that score.”

9

“Don’t worry, Mr. Amherst – I’m not. I looked you up and scanned your gangland article whilst you were waiting on the phone for me this morning. If I thought you were a muck-raker like some of the things that have been written about the women, you wouldn’t be sitting in my office. Now, Linda and Amanda weren’t just clients – they were also friends and it really hurts me that not only have they been killed for no apparent reason at all, but there seems to be no likelihood of the police ever catching the man responsible for it. So, what do you want to know from me, and how can I help?”

I was even more impressed with Julia Glendenning.

“Well, one of the most common motives for murder is money – although I can’t really see how it fits in here, unless in some way somebody benefitted financially from all four deaths.”

She looked pensive.

“Well, this agency was a beneficiary in the case of Linda and Amanda. We take out a policy, although not a very big one, on all our established clients. After all, our commission on the work we get them is our only source of income. We are a pretty small agency – just Brenda on the front desk, whom you met when you came in, an assistant, Helen Hughes who works mornings only, myself and Jerry King, my business partner.

Jerry doesn’t actually work day to day here; he was the source of our start up capital from one of his other businesses – he runs a couple of employment agencies, one in the UK and one, based in Paris, for Europe.

They specialise in financial and admin jobs mostly. I used to work in the UK centre and Jerry encouraged me to branch out into this. He pops in from time to time to see how we are doing.”

She hesitated.

“Sorry, that’s a bit off track – what I was going to say is that we had insurance policies on both Linda and Amanda. They were for twenty thousand pounds each and the insurers paid up without any questions. I don’t know if the agencies for the other women had a similar arrangement – you’d have to ask them. Anyway, this agency received forty thousand pounds as a result of the murders. I hope that you will agree that forty thousand, set against fees for years to come, isn’t much of a motive for two murders.”

“No, not really. Tell me, is there anything that you can think of that linked Linda or Amanda, or both of them, to Lisa Vaughan or Sandra Field?”

She shook her head.

“No, as you can imagine, that was one of the first things that the police asked me, and it is something that I have been asking myself ever since – and I’ve come up with a complete blank. Linda had only been acting for a couple of years, Amanda a good bit longer – she started as a child. Linda didn’t have time to be on the same project as the others; Amanda might have done, although if she did I haven’t found such a link. I didn’t know Lisa or Sandra personally, although I knew of them, of course, and I must have attended project launches or dinners or other events were they were also present, although to be honest, I can’t remember any such off hand.”

“What can you tell me about Linda and Amanda?”

“Well, as you know, Linda was just short of her twenty-second birthday, Amanda just short of her twenty-third. Both girls had their parents still living – Linda’s live in Brighton, Amanda’s in Reading. Linda left home when she was just over eighteen to try her hand at acting. She came to London and at first she shared a flat not far from here in Eastbourne Terrace with a couple of other girls, one of whom she had known at school.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Isn’t this a bit of a pricy area for three youngsters?”

“That’s what I thought, but Samantha – that’s Samantha Garrett, the school friend – has pretty wealthy parents, so I suppose there was a bit of parental help there. Certainly there was for Linda; her folks are also not short of a bob or two.

“Anyway, after her first film success Linda decided that she could afford her own place, so she moved to the flat in Richmond.”

“How did she come to be your client?”

“She did a search on the net for theatrical agencies, saw our site, realised she was just round the corner and came knocking on the door. I took one look at her and knew that she had something about her. It just radiated 10

from her. I got her a screen test and the rest, as they say, is history. From my point of view it was really just luck.”

“And Amanda?”

“She already had an agent – she had been acting in TV, just minor roles, since she was twelve. She was unhappy with the agent, felt that her interests weren’t being pushed hard enough, so again, saw our website and got in touch. Because her existing agent saw her as small fry she only had a short-term contract, so there was no problem in her switching to us when the contract expired just two years ago. If you look at her career since then, I like to think that she made the right move, as we got her better roles than she had been used to before and her career was on the up and up – until that bastard killed her.”

“What was her previous agency?”

“It was Marcel Harding Associates.”

“Isn’t that the agency that Lisa Vaughan was with?”

“Yes, but they are very big – got dozens and dozens of clients, not like here. I always think that they are too big – they concentrate on their big names and tend to give the others a second rate service. If they were really up to the mark they should have realised that Amanda was good for much better roles than they were finding her.”

“What do you know about the girls’ backgrounds? At the time it was said in the media that they neither of them had a long term relationship with anybody, but surely they must have had boyfriends?”

“Amanda certainly did – quite a few, but none lasted. Linda, I don’t honestly know. Off stage she was very reticent about her life; I think that I knew her better than anybody except her parents, and even I didn’t know who she might be seeing. There was one thing,” she paused, “at her funeral there was a young man whom I had never seen before and who was clearly very upset. I didn’t get a chance to speak to him, but I saw him talking to Linda’s parents at quite some length. But then, one boyfriend or dozens, it wasn’t a boyfriend who killed them, now was it?”

I had to agree that the idea of a boyfriend being responsible for all four murders was ludicrous. One murder –

always a possibility, but four – no chance. No, there was some other reason at the back of these killings.

“True, and the thing that puzzles me above all else, is how did the killer know that I was going to take Linda out by the back door? The others I can understand. In each case he could have followed them to where they were going, waited for them to come out and shot them, but that doesn’t stack up for Linda. OK, it was easy to know that she would have been at the event but how could he have known to wait at the back exit? I drove her to the hotel and left her there once she was taken under the wing of the studio people. I had looked the place over the previous day and decided the easiest way to get her away quietly was to use that rear exit, but I didn’t tell anyone that day, and I only told Linda herself when I was actually driving her to the hotel – I asked her if she still wanted a quiet exit or if there had been any change of plan. The only thing I can think of

– and it is so remote a chance that I really can’t credit it, is that someone told him that they had seen me looking the place over the previous day.”

“No,” Julia contradicted me, “the hotel is a very frequent host for the sort of media event that took place that night, and that rear exit is quite often used in the way you did with Linda. It was known that Linda would be there weeks ahead, and if he had done his homework, he could easily have discovered the exit himself – so the likelihood of him waiting there is quite high. It was no secret that the studio wanted the director, James Barford, to have a good long session with the press after the formal launch. Given that, it was quite a good chance that Linda would slip out the back to avoid causing a distraction by leaving the way she had come in.”

This put a new slant on things. I hadn’t realised that the rear exit was such a well-known escape route. The news solved what had been my biggest puzzle.

“Oh,” I said, “that does put a new complexion on things. What I thought was the biggest mystery, isn’t such a great deal after all. But although that helps with ‘how’ – I’ve still absolutely no idea as to ‘why’ – unless, of course, we are dealing with a deranged mind. Tell me, Ms. Glendenning..”

“Julia” she interrupted.

11

“Thank you – I’m David, by the way, tell me Julia, did either of the girls ever receive any hate mail?

Threatening phone calls, that sort of thing?”

“They both got a few unpleasant letters – I’m afraid that it goes with the territory – and I showed them all to the police, but they didn’t see them as very serious.”

“How come you had them?”

“One of the services that we offer all our clients is to act as a post box for incoming stuff. That way they can keep their actual address private; also if they are away they don’t have to worry about letters that might be important not being seen. Of course they always give friends and family their actual address – we don’t get any personal stuff.”

“What happened to those letters?”

“The police kept the originals – but I am paranoid about losing correspondence. I was sure that the police would want to see them, probably keep them, so I had copies made.”

“Might I see them do you think?”

“Don’t see why not.”

She turned away from her desk to the row of filing cabinets behind, opened a drawer and extracted two slim manila files and handed them across to me.

I leafed through them; as Julia had said, there was some unpleasant stuff in them, but not what I was hoping to find – letters to both girls from the same person, and preferably several to each from that same person. I could see why the police hadn’t attached much importance to them. None of them were death threats or even threatening any form of violence, just the product of unpleasant, envious people spewing out their inadequacies at people doing better with their lives than they themselves were.

I handed the files back, disappointment presumably clear on my face, because Julia shook her head and echoed my own thoughts.

“Nothing really there, is there?”

“No, I can’t see any of that lot having anything to do with the murders. They’re just jealous people, not dangerous ones as far as I can see.”

“So, what is your next step?”

“Well, I’d like to talk to everyone who might know anything – the girls’ parents, friends, anyone who might have any idea at all as to someone who might want to hurt them both? There must be some sort of connection between all four women, it just hasn’t been found yet. I really need to talk to the husbands of the other two and their circle as well, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t want to talk to me – for that matter I wonder if Linda and Amanda’s people will want to talk to me.”

“Well, I can help there. I’ve met with the parents quite a few times and I am sure that if I introduced you they would be more likely to be happy to talk to you.”

“Thank you – that would be a great help.”

“No thanks needed, as I said, Linda and Amanda weren’t just clients – they were friends and if I can help in any way to get at whoever killed them I will be only too pleased.”

She looked at her watch.

“Hmmm, five thirty. Why don’t I ring the girls’ parents and see if we can set up meetings?”

“Yes please.”

She phoned both sets of parents and explained what I was trying to do. There was initial reluctance in both cases, but she talked them round and promised that she would herself also be present. That was the clincher; obviously she had got on well with the families – or as well as could be expected given the circumstances, and meetings were arranged for the following two evenings.

Chapter Three

We agreed that I would do the driving, so I picked Julia up from her office at six o’clock the following evening and drove to Brighton to talk to Linda’s parents. When we arrived at their house I could see what Julia had meant about them not being short of a bob or two. They lived in a large detached house set in the 12

best part of two acres of lawn and flower beds. It looked so opulent that I had a feeling of mild disappointment that our ringing of the bell didn’t result in our being met by a butler, or at least a maid.

Instead, the door was answered by a pleasant looking woman of about fifty, dressed in a woollen twinset with a single row of pearls at her neck. Short dark hair, beginning to show early signs of grey, was swept back from her face, a face dominated by dark brown eyes which regarded me quizzically, Julia with pleasure.

“Julia, it’s good to see you again – and you must be Mr. Amherst. Do come in, both of you. George is in the lounge.”

We were ushered into a large, airy room with a huge picture window looking out onto the immaculate garden. George Lafferty was tall, at least six feet three or four, and spare in frame. Dressed in light grey flannels and dark blue blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, a crisp white shirt adorned by a tie of green, red and black stripes, he regarded us both with reservation in his sun-tanned face. A shock of grey hair, neatly cut and combed complemented deep set grey eyes set in a face that showed a plethora of worry lines; he looked a man far from happy with his current situation.

He came across to greet us, his hand outstretched to shake Julia’s.

Looking at the setting and the company, I was glad that I had decided to dress formally, wearing my best suit, the dark grey with the faint pinstripe, and my regimental tie.

“Julia, welcome.” He turned to me, the hand outstretched again, I took it in my own and received a firm handshake.

“Mr. Amherst, I am pleased to meet you, although I’m not sure what you hope to achieve. Still, sit you down.”

He waved us to one of the three settees arranged in a U-shape in front of a large open fireplace, in which a log burnt gently.

We all sat and I spoke.

“I see you were in the Green Jackets, Mr. Lafferty.”

He looked at me with renewed interest, especially my tie.

“Yes, did thirty years, retired in ’04. You served yourself, I take it.”

“Yes, but only twelve years. I came out in two thousand and six.”

A little gentle manoeuvring, both of us wondering about the other’s service.

“You were a Para, I take it?”

“Yes, Three Para.”

“Oh, so you’d have been in Iraq?”

“Yes – the oilfields, and then Basra.”

“Oh, I was there just before I retired – hot and nasty are my memories of the place. As company commander I seemed to do little but worry about getting enough water for everyone – my quartermaster was a godsend.”

Message made, received and understood. As a company commander he would have been a major. Thirty years, retiring as a major, made him steady, but no star.

I was tempted to make him dig for information, but decided to be open.

“I came out as a captain – with all the cuts I couldn’t see much point in staying on.”

Mrs. Lafferty interrupted.

“Come on, you two, this isn’t a reunion. Mr. Amherst, how can we help you – and what do you hope to achieve?”

A mental change of gear brought me back from the heat and blood of Iraq.

“As you know, I was with your daughter that night. I know that there was nothing that I could have done to save her, but I still feel guilty about it. I’m sure that there must be some sort of link between Linda and the other murdered woman, although nobody so far has been able to find it. One of the problems, as I see it, is that four police forces are involved. I know that they have said that they will fully share information, but I’ve had experience – and I’m sure that you have, Major – of just how difficult, even with the best will in the world, to make that sort of thing work as well as a single organisation with overall responsibility.”

13

“So, as one man, you hope to succeed where the police have failed?”

“Well, I certainly intend to try my very hardest. I would like to talk to as many of Linda’s friends as possible, and it would be a great help if you, as her parents, would prepare the ground for me.”

She continued.

“Well, we can certainly do that, and I can only hope that you can do something to help bring the swine who killed our girl to justice.”

Julia spoke for the first time since we had sat down.

“Jane, at Linda’s funeral I saw a young man who seemed very upset. He spent some time talking to you and George, but I never got to meet him. Who was he?”

Mrs. Lafferty thought for a moment.

“Oh, you must mean Kenneth - Kenneth Harrison. He’s my brother’s son, Linda’s cousin. They were very close as children, although we haven’t seen much of him over the last couple of years or so. He’s a bit older than Linda – must be twenty four or five now. He was always a big brother figure to Linda when they were growing up.”

“What does he do?”

“Oh, he’s a policeman, a detective constable in London.”

My interest quickened. Perhaps, just perhaps, Kenneth Harrison might be a useful contact.

We left the house with a list of names of Linda’s friends and the promise by the Laffertys that they would them all and ask them to talk to me.

The next evening saw us in Reading to talk to Amanda’s parents. The Hancocks lived in a house less grand that that of the Laffertys, but still very comfortable – a modern, detached four bedroom dwelling with a fair sized garden to it.

We were met by Mrs. Hancock, who turned out to be a tall, slim woman, slim almost to the degree of gauntness, with hollow cheeks and sharp bones the dominant features of a face that bore signs only of worry and sadness. She was, I knew from Julia, fifty-two years old, but meeting her for the first time, she could well have been ten or more years older. The impression was strengthened by the way her simple woollen dress, adorned only by a thin black leather belt at her waist, hung on her frame. Clearly she had lost a fair amount of weight in the recent past; there was no sign of Mr. Hancock.

“Gillian, how have you both been?” Julia enquired.

“Not too good, to be honest. The big worry,” she looked at me uncertainly – we were, after all, strangers to each other - but she decided to press on, “is Eric. He cannot come to terms with what has happened, cannot bear to talk about it – that’s why he isn’t here with us. If somehow Mr. Amherst can provide some sort of lead over Amanda’s death, well I think that it may save Eric’s sanity. He has been on sick leave ever since it happened and I wonder if he will ever be able to go back to work."

She stopped abruptly, and turned away from us, but not before I had seen the tears welling in her eyes. She turned back to us.

“Sorry about that, but it seems to happen a lot nowadays.”

The more I looked at this wreck of a woman, the more determined I became that somehow I would find a chink in the killer’s cloak of invisibility which had so far kept him safe. This blameless couple were clearly living in purgatory, a purgatory they had done nothing to deserve.

As with the Laffertys, we went through the names of friends and, again as with the Laffertys, had a promise that each person on the list would be phoned by Mrs. Hancock and urged to talk to me.

We left the Hancocks in a sombre mood. The more I thought of the task that I had set myself, the more I wondered what, if anything, I would be able to achieve, and I felt that Julia shared my doubts as to my ability to make any difference.

We had driven in my car, so I took her home to her flat in Twickenham. Her flat turned out to be in a fairly modern small block in the Whitton Road, conveniently situated for the town centre and the station. Knowing the area – I lived only five miles away, I realised that it would be pretty pricy and wondered how well off Julia was from her agency.

As we turned off the road and drew up outside the block, she looked at her watch.

14

“Fancy a coffee?”

“Yes please.”

The interior of the flat reflected the character of its occupant – nothing fussy, but everything of quality.

“I like your flat,” I observed, looking round appreciatively.

“Glad you like it. Costs a bomb, but it is so convenient for everything – the station is just round the corner.

To be honest, I could never have afforded it myself at the start – I’ve been here six years – but my folks helped out until I could cope myself.”

“That was good of them – and I can understand why you like it. Makes my own place look a bit dowdy.

Where do your parents live?”

“Oh, they are the typical retired ex-pats. They live in France, in Brittany in a small town south of St. Malo.

Dad was a property developer and did well at it. He actually had a share in this building, which is why I was able to get the flat in the first place. He sold all his holdings, including here, two years ago when he finally decided to retire and he and Mum went to live permanently in what had been a holiday home. What about you – what family do you have?”

“Nobody. I was an only child. My mother died of cancer when I was still at school and my father died not long before I left the Army.”

“Oh, I’m sorry – must have been lonely for you.”

“Not too bad – as I said, I was still at school when my mother died, but I was nearly seventeen, not a little child. Dad and I got along OK – he was an architect so it wasn’t as if he was away from home for ages, like being in the services, or the oil business or the like. He thought that my joining the Army was a good idea as it gave me instant independence.”

She busied herself making coffee and we sat on comfortable black leather chairs at a low glass topped table to drink it.

“So,” she prompted, “what do you think so far?”

“Well, I’ve got a lot of people to talk to just with Linda and Amanda’s circles. I also want to talk to the two husbands, although I wonder if they will want to talk to me, - still, won’t know until I try.”

“I wish that I could help more, but I really can’t leave the business – as you have seen, it is pretty much of a one girl band.”

“No, you’ve been a great help already. I’m sure that the Hancocks at least, would never have had me inside the door but for you.”

She shrugged dismissively.

“It was the very least that I could do – I only wish that there was some way I could help with the husbands.”

She stopped abruptly.

“Actually, I think that I may be able to help a little bit. You know that Amanda was with Marcel Harding before she came to me? Well, I happen to know one of the people there quite well and she might be able to effect an introduction to Mr. Vaughan for you. Her name is Sally Gregson; I’ve got her home number –

suppose I give her a ring and see if she can help at all.”

“That would be great if she can help at all.”

Wasting no time, Julia picked up her phone and dialled a number. There followed a good ten minutes of explanation and general chat, at the end of which she put down the phone with a satisfied sigh.

“Sally will be only too pleased to help. She didn’t handle Lisa Vaughan herself, but one of her colleagues did and she will talk to him in the morning to see if between them they can get you an entrée to Mr. Vaughan.

The other husband, Charles Field, well, Sandra was a client of Telemagic – I’m afraid I don’t know anybody there at all.”

“Well, if I can talk to Vaughan, that will be a big help.”

I took my leave of Julia shortly afterwards, with at least a course of action available to me. Where, if anywhere, it would lead, heaven alone knew.

I started the next day, phoning some of Linda’s friends; true to her word, Mrs. Lafferty had phoned ahead of me, so I was made more welcome than might otherwise have been the case, but I learnt nothing of value that 15

I could see. I tried and failed to get hold of her cousin Kenneth Harrison – he worked in Belgravia police station, near to where Linda’s murder had taken place, but my messages left for him had gone unanswered.

Two days later, after more meaningless discussions with friends not only of Linda but of Amanda as well, I met with Sally Gregson and her colleague who had handled Lisa Vaughan’s account – Larry Clarke.

I went through my normal routine of what anybody might or might not know and also how they might persuade Vaughan himself to see me.

It was Sally who made the comment that set me thinking of a possible new line in the enquiry. A good looking girl dressed to impress in a scarlet trouser suit, the jacket of which was over a white silk blouse setting off a fresh complexion and silver blonde hair cut level with her jawbone but tucked behind her ears.

Her companion, Larry Clarke, could scarcely have been more different, his plain, clearly aged, grey suit and dark green tie over a pale grey shirt, exuding anonymity from every pore.

“You know, David,” she said, “that hotel – as Julia told you it is a pretty popular venue for the sort of event that Linda was murdered at. In fact, Lisa had been to five or six events over the last five or six years. The most recent was in January this year, and I know that she used that back entrance that time with her companion because I was there and saw them leave.”

I pricked up my ears. At last, a vestige of a trace, no matter how tenuous, between two of the victims.

“Who was she with?”

Sally furrowed her brow, then shrugged.

“Sorry, can’t remember – or perhaps it was someone I don’t know. I have a vague recollection of a man in a dinner jacket and with dark hair, but that’s about it.”

“Would it be possible to find out?”

Larry cut in.

“Well, we can check the guest list for the day, but there would have been a lot of men, nearly all wearing dinner jackets, and no real way of telling who left with Lisa.”

True their word, they brought up the details of the event on a computer screen and we all examined it.

“Oh,” said Larry, “look at that – she had her husband with her, so it was probably him you saw leave with her.”

“Makes sense,” Sally declared, “Lisa was only one of the crowd there, not a leading light, so if they wanted to nip off a bit early, that would be the logical route for them to take rather than draw attention to themselves by going out the front.”

So Lisa and her husband were both aware of the back door route from the hotel. I started to wonder about the husband, but then remembered that he had a rock solid alibi for his wife’s murder, and why should he harbour any malice towards Linda?

“Do the police know about Lisa and Vaughan knowing about the back door?”

They looked at each other uncertainly. It was Larry who spoke.

“I don’t know, but if they did it wouldn’t have been from us – they never asked me anything about the hotel

– why should they? Lisa was killed in Liverpool, two hundred miles or more away.” He turned to Sally. “Did they ask you anything about it?”

“No, they only spent a few minute with me after they had got as much as they could from you, and I think that they only spoke with me because I make the arrangements for bookings for that sort of thing. They only asked me about Liverpool – how long ahead had I made the booking, who would have known about it – that sort of thing.”

We still hadn’t come up with any idea as to how to persuade Vaughan to see me, and I was beginning to despair that we could, when Larry had another idea.

“You know, Mr. Vaughan was in here about a fortnight after Lisa was killed, asking if there were any personal effects that she might have left with us for any reason. I believe he went to the studios that Lisa had worked at with the same question. At the time I said no – I was the obvious person to ask because I had been dealing with Lisa’s account for some years, but I never really checked, to be honest.”

I thought of Julia’s rather scathing comment about Marcel Harding’s rather blasé attitude towards their lesser lights and could well imagine the lack-lustre Larry not bothering to check properly.

16

I pretended not to notice the dagger look that Sally directed at him.

“Well, do you think that there might be, Larry?”

He looked uncomfortable, clearly beginning to wish that he had kept his mouth shut altogether.

“Well, you know that old store room that got flooded a couple of years ago?”

“Yes,” she turned to me, “we had some sort of plumbing disaster, water all over the place downstairs and especially in the basement.”

“Well, Gerald,” he turned to me, “that’s Gerald Harding, the number two around here, asked me to find some space for old correspondence with a lot of folk we no longer handle – mostly because they’ re retired or dead. Well, I bunged some of my own old files in there as well – just no space for them in my own office any more. There was something from just about every client I’ve handled. It was all old stuff, and in the unlikely event of it being needed at some time, I knew where to find it. Fact is, when Mr. Vaughan asked, it had completely slipped my mind, but there is bound to be something concerning Lisa down there. I suppose that we could always say it had come to light, and offer to return it to him.”

“Suppose he says he doesn’t want it?” Sally queried.

“Tell him you’ll need him to sign a disclaimer so that the papers can be shredded.” I suggested.

“Yes, that would seem reasonable,” she agreed, “but how do we get from that to you talking to him?”

We mulled that over between us for some time without coming to any conclusion. It would be the simplest thing in the world for Vaughan to simply say that he wouldn’t see me, or even if I arrived with the papers, to refuse to talk to me. I was very reluctant to just roll up and hope – that way seemed to promise very little likelihood of success.

Finally, I reluctantly concluded that a different approach altogether was called for, one which would offer Vaughan a possibility of learning more about his wife’s death and encourage him to talk to me in depth.

“What actually is in those papers?” I asked.

Larry thought for a moment.

“Well, there is early correspondence between Lisa and the agency - it’s before my time, as it goes back to her first dealings with us in 1993 when she started out as a seventeen year old. She wasn’t Lisa Vaughan then, of course, but Lisa Cartwright. Unlike a lot of actresses, she didn’t keep her original stage name when she married – she married young and at the time she had hardly made any impact, so she – and we – were happy to see her sort of ‘reappear’ as Lisa Vaughan. She was only twenty when she married. Up to that time she had played a few minor roles in second feature sort of level films and some stage and TV work. It’s only in the last few years that she has become a regular face on TV with an occasional film appearance. She isn’t

– wasn’t – a big name, but she did pretty well, never short of work. Oh, back to the papers. As far as I can remember there are copies of her first contract, when she was still Lisa Cartwright, the new one drawn up when she married – just to put the name right, really, and a few letters about a dispute over fees.”

I pricked up my ears at that.

“Was the dispute resolved?”

“Not really, because it occurred just before she married – literally only a few weeks, and I suppose with that to keep her occupied she let it slide.”

“Was there much money involved?”

“By her standards quite a reasonable amount. I did look at those papers before putting them away, and I reckon that she was actually owed about five thousand pounds, which would have been well worth her sticking to her guns over. She didn’t, and my predecessor in handling her account saw no reason to do anything about it if she couldn’t be bothered herself.”

Perhaps, I thought to myself, there was a possible means of entry to Vaughan in the money. OK, five thousand wasn’t a lot, but every little helps, and if he could screw interest as well as the original amount out of Marcel Harding, it might be worth his while to dig into it.

It was then that an idea of a possible approach started to form in my mind.

“Tell me,” I asked, “would the agency have any objection to me taking these papers to Vaughan and telling him that you had let me browse through them as part of my investigating the murders?”

17

“Can’t see why we should have,” Sally responded instantly, before Larry could get a word in. The hesitated before going on more slowly.

“The only sticking point might be that money – if Lisa couldn’t be bothered to chase it up, why should we make her husband a gift of it?”

“Well, suppose I told him about it anyway? After all, I know about it now – I could always try and buy my way into his confidence with it.”

That stopped them both in their tracks. Sally looked at me far less favourably than had been the norm up to that point.

“So, David, you would use the help that we have given you to land our agency with a bill it isn’t expecting?”

I looked her full in the face.

“Sally, I’m trying to find out why your client was killed and who did it. The police seem to have got nowhere on it. Don’t forget – nobody knows what we are dealing with here. Four dead actresses – just because the killer seems to be taking a rest, doesn’t mean that he might not kill again. There are two possible scenarios here – either there is some connection between the four women which got them killed, or we are dealing with a maniac who is killing for his own perverted reasons and who might start up again at any moment.

Wouldn’t you like to help ensure that doesn’t happen Don’t forget – you have a lot of female clients –

suppose he starts up again and it is another of your people that he murders?”

She wasn’t totally convinced, but I could sense that she was wavering.

“OK,” she said with some reluctance, “I’ll take a chance.”

“Just a minute, Sally,” Larry objected, “Lisa was my client and if we do get saddled with a bill over this it’s me that Gerald will be talking to, not you. No, I don’t like it.”

“So why not ask Gerald?” I asked.

So, half an hour later, we were closeted with Gerald Harding, an energetic looking man of about forty-five, with short, neatly trimmed grey hair setting off a deep sun-tan. Dark, deep-set eyes regarded me appraisingly; whilst the smartly cut dark blue suit, immaculate white shirt and maroon tie all proclaimed quality clothing on a successful business man. His office, large, light and airy with expensive, Scandinavian looking furniture, told the same story. In the interim before coming to see him, I had gleaned that although nominally the number two man in the agency he was effectively the head honcho, as James Marcel, the senior partner, was virtually retired, leaving all the day to day running, and much else besides, in Gerald Harding’s hands.

He heard me out in silence as I explained what I was hoping to achieve, then thought for a few moments before coming to a decision.

“Right,” he turned to Larry, “Larry, I know that you handled Lisa’s account, but she had been a client of this agency for a long time and had always been loyal to us. If you check back to when she first came to us and look at her then contemporaries, you will see that precious few of them are still with us – they’ve gone elsewhere because they have felt that they can do better for themselves. To be honest, some have done better as a result – we aren’t perfect – but some haven’t. Serve ‘em right. OK, if this results in bit of a bill for the agency, we can afford it – and if it helps find out who killed Lisa and the others, then I will be happy to think that we had a hand in that help.”

I was pleasantly surprised. To be honest, I had expected rejection; asking to see Harding was my last throw of the dice, as it was clear from Larry’s reaction that Sally’s support, half-hearted at most, would not have overcome his opposition. I prepared to take my leave.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Harding...” He interrupted me.

“It’s Gerald, everyone calls me Gerald, and it’s David, right?” I nodded. “I wish you the best of luck with what you are trying to do, David, and if there is any way in which you think that the agency can help further, please don’t hesitate to come to us.” He turned to the other two.

“Sally, Larry, thank you for bringing David to see me. You did the right thing, and I’m glad that you didn’t just let him go ahead without running it by me, If a bill had resulted I might have blown my top if I hadn’t heard the whole story beforehand.”

18

The two of them looked relieved; I got the distinct impression that Harding ‘blowing his top’ was something to be studiously avoided.

I had decided on my course of action in my approach to William Vaughan, but before I did so I had decided to speak to Lisa’s brother, Richard Cartwright, who had been her escort the night that she was murdered.

I met him at his house, a well proportioned, detached three bedroomed building in the ‘much sought after’ as the estate agents would doubtlessly describe it, Hurst Road, fronting onto the river bank and just across the Thames from Hampton Court. I was impressed. Properties in that area are expensive, and this was a good one. It must have been worth well over half a million pounds. Clearly Richard Cartwright wasn’t on the breadline.

Richard Cartwright met me at the door; tall and slim, his face vaguely remembered from TV with its ‘upper crust’ features, set off by ‘elegant casual’ clothing, he showed me into a large lounge at the back of the house, the windows looking out onto a small but well maintained garden.

“Mr. Amherst, I am very pleased to meet you. I can’t tell you how much I hope that you find something, anything, that the police have missed.”

“Thanks for seeing me. Tell me, Mr. Cartwright, do have any suspicions as to who might be responsible for your sister’s death?”

“Of course I do – it’s her husband. I told the police so at the start, but they ridiculed the idea. Said that he was in Italy at the time, I told them that in that case he must have hired somebody to do it.”

That pulled me up short. So far, whether in what had been reported in the media, or in talking to the people at Marcel Harding, there had been absolutely no mention of any suspicion falling on the husband.

“Why do you say that, Mr. Cartwright?”

“Money, my dear chap, money.”

“In what way?”

“She was going to divorce him – found out that he was screwing some little tart from his office, and not for the first time. So, she decided that enough was enough and told him so. Two weeks later, she’s dead and he’s looking to inherit everything.”

Again, this was all totally new to me and I pressed for further details.

“I don’t know how much you know about William’s business?”

“I know that his company imports Italian marble and that’s why he was over there when your sister was killed.”

“Yes – he actually imports much more than just marble – he imports a whole range of high class building material – South American hardwoods, costly tiles from Spain and Italy, fancy fittings from America, all that sort of thing. It was a flourishing business until the recession bit. Nowadays, however, there is a lot less call for such things – people can’t afford them. His firm has always held pretty large stocks of their various items, so he was always, or nearly always, able to say to a developer or an architect,’ Yes, I can let you have that straight away’. That was all very well and fine when the market was good, but now he is stuck with large stocks he can’t move and which cost him a fortune. When he was in Italy he wasn’t looking to do more business; he was actually wriggling out of contracts that he could no longer afford to take up. He wanted Lisa to put her money into the business, but she had more sense – she could see that it was on the slide and she refused to throw good money after bad. Now, of course, he’s looking to get her money anyway. And another thing – they both took out quite large insurance policies on each other a few years back, so now he’s already got that money.”

My head was reeling; all this seemed a first class motive for murder; given that Vaughan was out of the country himself at the time of the killing, surely there was a possibility, surely, that Cartwright was correct in his assertion that Vaughan had employed somebody else to actually pull the trigger?

“How much money is involved, Mr. Cartwright?”

“Our mother died just on two years ago. In her will she left Lisa and me a quarter of a million each. The insurance policy – Lisa actually showed me hers when she took it out on him – was for quarter of a million 19

and she said that both policies were for the same amount. She had jewellery that her grandmother left her – I don’t know how much it was worth, but I should imagine that it was quite a bit.”

One thing about all this puzzled me.

“Tell me, Mr. Cartwright, when your sister was so well off, why did she work as an actress – or as anything for that matter?”

“Well, she’s only had that sort of money since our mother died, of course, although thanks to dad we were neither of us ever in any danger of starving. But above that, the same reason as me. Loved it. Right from when she was a little girl, it was all she ever wanted to do, so she did it. OK, she was never a star, try as hard as she might, but she loved it. I suppose because she was so keen on it that it had a big part in my own decision to be an actor. Again, I love the life – and because I’m not dependent on it for my bread and butter, I don’t have to worry that the next part might never come as so many poor wretches in the profession do.”

Not for one moment had I realised that Lisa Vaughan was reasonably wealthy; I wondered if the folk at Marcel Harding appreciated just how well off she had been and whether it had affected their attitude towards her. The few thousands that the agency owed her, and which I had hoped to use as bait for Vaughan, now seemed chicken feed. I could well imagine that he would be totally dismissive of it if he now had his hands on over half a million pounds. Cartright’s next words added a new twist, however.

“Of course, what he wasn’t expecting was that Lisa had changed her will only a week before she was murdered. In the new will she left everything to my father and myself, so Vaughan has had one hell of a shock.”

There was a vital question to be asked, and I asked it.

“Do you know if he knew of the new will before or after your sister died?”

Cartwright gave a wolfish grin, transforming his pleasant, placid features into something quite vicious.

“Not until afterwards, so when Lisa died he thought that he would get everything. He says that he will contest the will, but our lawyers tell us - that’s my father and me – that he hasn’t a hope of overturning it.”

So perhaps a few thousand might not be such chicken feed to Vaughan after all.

“Did the police say anything about all this?”

“Not a word. I made sure that they knew, but they made no comment to me. To be frank, I think that the police believe that I am just trying to stir it up for William. Well, I’m quite happy to do that – I’m sure that he is behind her death.”

“But what about the other women?”

“Smokescreen. Where do you hide a tree? In a forest. Kill three other women and it looks like a serial killer of some sort – a nut case or a grudge holder of some sort.”

I didn’t admit as much, but I had been thinking along the same lines myself. It seemed too evil to be contemplated – to kill three innocent victims at random to muddy the waters over the murder of a fourth –

but I knew only too well that just such evil abounded in the minds of some people.

I was more determined than ever to speak with William Vaughan.

Chapter Four

I had hoped to contact Vaughan straight away, but I had to wait. He was out of the country again, this time, according to his office, in Spain for several days, so I had to possess my soul in patience.

In the meantime, I managed at last to get in touch with Kenneth Harrison, Linda’s cousin in the Met. He was non-committal over the phone, but, probably as the result of pushing from Mrs. Lafferty, agreed to meet me outside work time. We settled on a meeting at The Bag O’Nails pub in Buckingham Palace Road, only a short walk for him from Belgravia police station so that he didn’t have to find somewhere to park. Knowing the nightmare parking can be around there, and having no wish to contribute to the rapacious congestion charge for inner London, I made my own way there by tube.

Kenneth Harrison turned out to be a stockily built individual with thinning blonde hair and tired looking eyes making him seem older than his twenty-six years. He greeted me warily.

20

“Mr. Amherst, let me make it clear that I am seeing you only because my aunt Jane has been pestering me to do so. I can’t – no, I won’t – pass on anything about the investigation of her murder to you. In fact, I know very little anyway. The team dealing with it works out of my station, but I’m not part of it – in any case, as her cousin, I couldn’t be.”

“That’s OK – I perfectly understand. I just wanted to let you know what I am trying to achieve. I’m not expecting you to help in any way, but as far as I am concerned, running what I know past you might just be helpful to you. It’s a slim chance, I know, but I don’t want you to think that I am off on some ‘scoop of the year’ exercise. Your cousin was only about six feet from me when that bastard, whoever he is, shot her. If I had known that she was in that sort of danger I could – and would - have prevented it. As it is, I feel that I owe it to her memory and my own peace of mind not to pass on by over this.”

“Leave it to the police, Mr. Amherst, leave it to the police. What do you think that you can achieve that we can’t?”

I shrugged helplessly.

“To be honest, probably nothing – but I have to try. I just can’t get out of my mind the image of that talented, lovely young girl being cut down in front of me like that.”

“In front of you? I thought that she was behind you.” He stopped, aware that he had given away the fact that, involved or not, he at least had some knowledge of what had happened.

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be clever – just speaking metaphorically. Yes, she was actually a couple of paces behind me, but the moment the shot sounded, I turned towards her, so I actually saw her fall.”

He nodded in acceptance, and I went on to tell him what I had learned about the Vaughan family set-up, in particular the financial situation.

“I’m sure,” I concluded, “that the Liverpool police have passed all this one, but the idea that Linda, Amanda Hancock and Sandra Field were all a smokescreen, appalling though it is, does seem to have some credence, doesn’t it?”

He looked somewhat more amenable and nodded.

“As I said, I’m not on the team, but I’m sure that they would have passed that sort of thing on – still, no harm in mentioning it to a mate of mine who is a DC on the team, but don’t expect any feedback from me.”

“That’s fair enough,” I said. “Look, in the admittedly unlikely event of me finding something useful, who should I tell?”

“Well, Inspector Laine is the senior officer in the investigation so tell him, or leave a message for him. You met him at the time, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did – OK that’s what I’ll do.”

And that was as I far as I got with Kenneth Harrison at the time.

My next port of call was my eagerly anticipated meeting with William Vaughan. He was back from Spain and agreed to meet me at his home two evenings later. He lived in a detached house in King Edward’s Grove, Teddington, a pleasant, tree-lined road of house mostly dating from the thirties. Vaughan, when he opened the door to me, turned out to be a plump individual a bit below average height, with the beginnings of a paunch and hair, although glossy black and plastered to his skill, that was beginning to both thin and recede. From the potted biography on his firm’s website, I knew him to be forty-eight years old, but he had those plump features which often defy aging for many years. He ushered me into a large lounge, dominated by a huge TV fixed to one wall and an antique sideboard, upon which reposed a number of shields and cups, the sort one gets for some sort of sporting success, against the opposite wall. The two clashed horribly.

He sat me down on a low, leather covered easy chair and sat himself down on a similar, but slightly higher and more upright chair opposite me. I recognised the gambit; a common enough one when someone is trying to dominate another.

“So, Mr. Amherst, what can you tell me?”

“Well, as I explained on the phone, I’m a journalist and I thought that as quite a bit of time has now passed since the death of your wife and the other women, it might be time to write something to try and spur the police into a bit more action. In the course of my research I spoke with people at the agency that used to have 21

your wife as a client, and in the course of it they let me see some papers. Those are the papers that I mentioned, and when they said that in the normal course of events they would be destroyed, I reminded them that they really shouldn’t do that without checking with you as your wife’s beneficiary. They were a bit reluctant to get in touch with you and I know why. I don’t think that they realised that, although I had been through the papers only cursorily, I had seen a comment that there was money owing to your wife from some years ago which had somehow never been paid.”

“How much?”

“ I don’t know,” I lied, “but I thought that it was only right that you should be made aware of it. After all, as far as I can see, it is rightly yours.”

“Well, of course it is – I’ll chase them up right away – they aren’t going to get away with short changing me, I can tell you.”

I knew that as far as Vaughan was concerned the conversation was effectively over, but before he could start to make ‘time you went’ noises, I opened the briefcase that I had brought with me. Inside was quite a sheaf of paper, which I extracted and handed over to him.

“These are the papers they had; when I said that I was going to see you they asked me if I would deliver them and save them the bother – they also asked that you sign a receipt for them.”

I passed over a single sheet of paper; Vaughan scanned it briefly, took a pen out of his inside jacket pocket, and scrawled his signature at the bottom

“Tell me, Mr. Vaughan, do you have any idea who might have killed your wife.”

He had the grace to look concerned, although it was clearly the first time his wife had entered his thoughts since I arrived; only some money that she represented.

“No, I haven’t. The police asked me the same question, of course, but I have simply no idea. Lisa was a popular women, a successful actress with a wide circle of friends and we were very happy.”

Time to prick the bubble of his self-satisfaction a little.

“So, this story that she was looking to divorce you isn’t true, then?”

He glared at me.

“Who told you that?” he demanded.

“I’m a journalist, Mr. Vaughan. We never reveal our sources. Just let me say that I heard it more than once.”

That was true, although the implication of more than one source wasn’t. Richard Cartwright had, indeed, told me more than once that his sister was looking for a divorce.

Vaughan was wrong-footed and searching for a suitable reaction. Finally he came up with one.

“I think that you had better go, Mr. Amherst. I have nothing further to say to you.”

“Very well, I just thought that you might like the opportunity to put your side of the story. I am going to write a story, you know, although I haven’t yet decided on the slant I will take. ‘Did the husband stand to gain from his wife’s death’ is one possible avenue.”

The glare became livid fury.

“You print anything like that and I’ll sue you and whatever fucking rag of a paper you work for.”

“Don’t be silly, Mr. Vaughan – suing won’t get you anything – our lawyers will make sure of that. Instead of threatening, why don’t you tell me your side of things?”

He hesitated – and was lost.

“Come on, Mr. Vaughan, tell me what you see as your side of the story – why let others set the pace?”

“Look, I’m just going to say that anyone saying that we were going to be divorced is fantasising. We had our differences, who doesn’t, but that was all.”

I had given some thought as to whether to reveal that I knew about Lisa Vaughan’s changed will and had decided to make up my mind as to what to do according to how things panned out. I now decided to keep my knowledge to myself, at least for the present.

“So, that is what you want to say? No divorce, and anyone who thinks it has got the wrong end of the stick.”

“That’s it exactly.”

I rose to my feet.

“Right, thank you very much for your time, Mr. Vaughan.”

22

I left it at that, knowing that Vaughan had been given something to think about. My next course of action was to talk to Sandra Field’s husband, Charles Field. Here I was working in the dark; I had no means of gaining the help of the agency that had handled her affairs – Telemagic – in the way that Julia had gained me entry to the Marcel Harding people. If, as I was beginning to think, the only intended victim in all this was Lisa Vaughan, I would be dealing with a bereaved husband and I had had no foreknowledge to justify my involvement.

I had done a bit of background work on the man. He was a ‘financial advisor’ a job description which can cover a multitude of sins. He had a website, from which I had discovered that his company, Field Associates, was in effect not much more than a one-man band, the associates comprising just three other people. One of those, judging from the staff photos on the website, was a young woman of about twenty-five who was described as the firm’s specialist in tax efficiency; her name was Jenny Troughton. The other two were men, describes as associates specialising in management systems. Both looked to be in their thirties; their names were Victor Beneton and James Childs. I briefly considered trying to get to Charles Field by posing as a prospective client, but rejected the idea. I had no finances worthy of the name to be advised upon, and to be seen to take such an approach could only lead to suspicion and antagonism from Field. No, there was nothing for it but a direct approach to the man, so I telephoned him at his home. I was expecting to be rebuffed by a man who would probably have no wish to discuss his wife’s murder with a stranger, and a stranger who was a journalist to boot, but to my surprise he invited me to visit him the following evening.

He lived in Manor Road, Teddington, a road similar to that in which Vaughan lived, and only about half a mile away from it.

He answered the door clad in casual clothes, jeans and a thin sweater over an open-necked shirt, a glass of what looked like whisky in his hand. A tall man, six feet two or three, and slimly built, he looked as if he hadn’t sleep in days, hollow-eyed and unshaven, his grey hair unkempt.

“Mr. Amherst, come in please.”

He led me into a largish lounge, rather similar to that in the Vaughan house, although furnished in better taste, and waved me to a chair. He stood uncertainly before me.

“Can I offer you a drink?”

I was about to refuse, but at the last second changed my mind. He looked for all the world as though he was drinking for solace, and to make him drink alone might have embarrassed him.

“Thank you. I’ll have Scotch and water if you have it, please.”

He busied himself at the sideboard, pouring my whisky into a heavy cut glass tumbler the twin of his own.

As he did so, I noticed that, like the sideboard in Vaughan’s house, it was adorned not only with a drinks tray, but several trophies.

Before coming, I had thought long and hard as to what to say to this man. I was not going to mention my suspicions of Vaughan; I had absolutely no proof and I could well be totally wrong in my suspicions of the man. No good could come of telling Field that I had a suspect in my mind and that the callous murder of his own wife was but a smokescreen to hide a particularly grubby crime.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr. Field. As I said on the phone, I was with Linda Lafferty when she died and I feel as if I must try and do something to identify her killer, as to date the police seem to have achieved nothing.”

“It would be a blessing if you could, Mr. Amherst. Ever since Sandra was killed I have been in hell. Nothing seems to matter anymore – I haven’t been in my office for days – at first I tried to throw myself into my work, but as luck would have it, we are going through a quiet patch, so there is precious little to throw myself into. In fact, I am seriously considering throwing the whole thing up and closing the company down.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I would be throwing my people out of work – and they have been tremendously supportive over all this – I would close it down tomorrow. As it is.....”

His voice tailed off and he sat there, gazing blankly into the distance. He reminded me of Gillian Hancock, Amanda’s mother – someone destroyed by what had been done to them.

“Forgive me, Mr. Field, this must be awful for you, but I would like to know if you can think of any reason why your wife was killed, any thought as to someone who might have wished her harm?”

23

He shook his head slowly, unshed tears glistening in his eyes.

“No, no reason, nobody – she was a popular woman with lots of friends and acquaintances. She was a successful actress, but not a big name, not somebody you would expect to create feelings of jealousy. I just don’t understand it.”

He tailed off again, then got to his feet, crossed to the sideboard and poured himself another drink. He waved the bottle in my direction, but I indicated my scarcely touched glass in negation. He sat down again, and looked at me.

“Tell me, Mr. Amherst, do you have any idea, any idea at all, why this happened?”

“To be honest, no. What worries me is that your wife, Linda Lafferty, Amanda Hancock and Lisa Vaughan were all murdered in different police force areas, so their deaths are being investigated by totally different teams. The police say that they are all working in close cooperation and that this causes them no problems, but I really do wonder. With the best will in the world, that sort of separation can lead to things being missed because there is no overall source of control and command.”

He nodded his understanding.

“Tell me,” I continued, “I believe that your wife and Lisa Vaughan knew each other quite well.”

“Oh yes. They had appeared in the same TV shows a couple of times, and in fact we had dined with Lisa and William a few times; there is a local restaurant we all happened to like. In fact the last time..” he broke off, clearly in the grip of emotion. He took a swallow, a large swallow, of his drink, then continued.

“The last time we met there was only a few days after Amanda Hancock was murdered. As you can imagine, we speculated about it, especially following as it did so soon after Linda Lafferty. Both Lisa and Sandra were worried about what had happened; Lisa in particular seemed to have a premonition that there would be more killings – she was convinced that some nutcase had taken it into his mind to murder prominent actresses.

Sandra pooh-poohed the idea, reckoning that the two girls were probably killed by jilted boyfriends and that it was all a coincidence.”

He broke off again; he was clearly suffering in recounting all this, but I felt that I must make sure that anything, anything at all, which he might know could perhaps be important. He took another swallow of the whisky, collected himself, and continued.

“It was only a few days later that Lisa herself was dead. Sandra was totally devastated. From not believing Lisa’s idea of a homicidal maniac on the loose, she became an instant believer. In fact, she had been intending to go to a film dinner just a day or two later, but pulled out, saying that she had no intention of providing the killer with another target. It was because of that that she decided to visit her cousins in Birmingham. She thought that out of the public eye she would be safe.”

It was too much for him. This time the tears were shed; I waited patiently. At last he wiped the back of his hand angrily across his eyes.

“I’m sorry about that; where was I? Oh yes, she went to the cousins and it didn’t save her.”

“Who could have know that she went there, Mr. Field?”

“Well, me, of course, and the cousins – they are sisters, both married, both live in Birmingham and Sandra doesn’t see very much of them now, although they were all close when they were younger. Apart from that, well, she told her agency people that she would be away – I don’t know if she told them were she was going.”

I wondered uneasily if there could have been some sort of leak from Telemagic, but if so, from whom – and to whom? I began to realise that the killing of Sandra Field didn’t sit at all happily with the other three. They had all died at public events, events that the killer could have known about quite easily. Sandra Field, on the other hand, had clearly been stalked as a specific target. For the killer to have chanced upon her was just too wild a coincidence to be given any credence at all.

“I suppose the police have already asked you all this, Mr. Field.”

“Yes, of course. They kept on about it must be someone that she knew, or at least who knew her, to have been in Birmingham when she was. I’m sure,” he hesitated, then went on, “I’m sure that they suspected me, perhaps even still do, but I was in London, meeting with people at Hargreaves and Wilson – they are a small 24

manufacturing company in Wimbledon and they were in considerable financial difficulties. I was advising them on the best way forward if they were to avoid bankruptcy.”

“Did you succeed?” I asked, trying to move to a less emotive area.

“Too early to say, but it is a case of so far, so good.”

“Can you think of nobody else who could have known where your wife was going to be that day?”

He shook his head helplessly.

And that was about that. I thanked him profusely, apologised even more profusely for asking about such painful memories, and took my leave.

Once back home, on an impulse, but not after a brief trawl of the net, I phoned Julia Glendenning.

“Julia, it’s David Amherst. I wondered if you would like a spot of dinner this evening and to let me bring you up to date, not that I’ve made much progress, I’m afraid.”

“David, lovely to her from you. Yes, I’d love to eat this evening – you couldn’t have picked a better time.

Today has been really rough and I need to get away from it all. Where and when?”

“Suppose I pick you up about seven? I noticed a restaurant on the net before ringing you which seems to have pretty good reviews – the Tangawizi – do you like Indian food?”

“Love it – and I although I’ve never been to the Tangawizi, some of my friends have and liked it, so let’s give it a whirl.”

So, later that evening, we were seated in what proved to be a very comfortable restaurant, enjoying excellent food whilst I told Julia everything I had done and all I suspected. In particular, I concentrated upon the unbelievable Mr. Vaughan and his lies about the impending divorce.

“So,” I concluded, “I am just about convinced that he had his wife murdered. He is just so unconvincing as a grieving husband that I would need a lot of convincing as to his innocence. Field, on the other hand, is another story entirely. The poor devil has been totally destroyed by all this – he is hitting the bottle, not going in to work, looks a mess.”

Julia made sympathetic noises, then said what had been going through my own mind.

“So what now?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, “I am sure that the police know all of this, but they don’t seem to be getting anywhere with it. You know, I realise that I keep harping on about it, but I am sure that having four teams investigating these four killings is a mistake. One thing that I suppose I could follow up on – when I spoke with Charles Field he said that apart from himself and the cousins she was visiting, only the Telemagic agency people knew that she would be there. I could try and follow that up, although it seems a pretty vague hope that it could mean anything.”

We switched to discussing other things before all the talk of death depressed us. Julia’s parents, she had already told me, were still living, but now she spoke about her childhood, a childhood spent as an only child, but with a good circle of friends, many of whom she still kept in touch with, in stark contrast to myself.

Twelve years in the Army had meant that I had totally lost touch with the friends of my youth and since leaving the Army I had also lost touch, with the exception of Alan Hammond who had given me the bodyguard jobs, with the people I had known there.

I dropped her back at her flat and we agreed to repeat the evening sometime, a vague, but more or less definite agreement, as I found that I was becoming quite attracted to Julia Glendenning.

That night I found it difficult to get to sleep. I had this feeling that somewhere, somehow I had seen or heard something that I ought to have recognised as relevant to what I was trying to do, but whatever it was, it eluded me, and I finally dropped off in the small hours, still fretting.

The next day I determined to follow up with Telemagic on who might have been aware of Sandra Field’s movements over those fateful days. I felt that just approaching them cold was unlikely to succeed, so first I phoned Gerald Harding at Marcel Harding.

“Gerald, it’s David Amherst.”

“David, any progress? Anything we can do to help?”

“No progress yet, I’m afraid, but I wonder if you can help. According to Sandra Field’s husband, apart from himself and the cousins she was visiting, the only people who knew that she would be in Birmingham were 25

Telemagic, and I’d like to talk to them, but I can well imagine that just rolling up out of the blue is unlikely to work. I was wondering if you know anybody there and could smooth my path for me?”

“I’m sure I can – leave it with me and I’ll get back to you.”

True to his word, he phoned back less than an hour later.

“David, Gerald. I’ve spoken with Telemagic and cleared your way with the Giles Jennings, the CEO, but the person you need to talk to is Helen Lombard – she’s the person who actually dealt with Sandra Field’s account. Giles has told her that you will be calling. I’ve got the number of her private line.”

He rattled off the telephone number and that afternoon I presented myself at the Telemagic offices in Euston Road, by coincidence only a few doors away from Alan Hammond’s premises.

Helen Lombard turned out to be a tall, well built woman of about forty with shoulder length red hair setting off a pale complexion dominated by bright green eyes, the greenest eyes I have ever seen on a person. The eyes were further accentuated by her eyebrows which, unlike her mass of hair, were so pale as to be almost invisible. A severe black trouser suit, set off by a scarf the colour of her hair completed the ensemble of a smart, attractive business woman. I explained to her what I was trying to do and asked who would have known about Sandra Field being in Birmingham in the days leading up to her death. She looked puzzled.

“Well, nobody here. I mean, why should we need to know? If I needed to get in touch I would just have phoned her on her mobile – she always had it on.”

I was stymied. Had Charles Field lied to me, or was he simply confused, assuming something that had not actually occurred?

“Tell me, did Sandra receive any hate mail, threats, that sort of thing?”

“A bit – I’m afraid just about all our clients do, There are some pretty sick people out there who love to spill out their spite and jealousy at those they see as suitable targets, but there was nothing that looked serious.

I’ve been doing this sort of job for a long time, Mr, Amherst..”

“David, please,” I interrupted. She nodded.

“Yes, a long time and I have seen far worse. What we had for Sandra the police took away to look at, but I got the impression that they didn’t think it was of much relevance.”

So, much the same story as with the others. Some unpleasant stuff in the post but nothing that the police seemed to take seriously.

“You didn’t keep copies, did you?”

“I did, as a matter of fact – I don’t like to part with papers, and I knew the police would want those letters, so I photocopied them.”

“Do you think that I might see them?”

“Of course.”

She rose, crossed to a filing cabinet, and brought a slim manila file over to me.

“Here they are.”

I went through the file, looking for similarities to those I had seen for Linda Lafferty and Amanda Hancock in Julia’s office, but nothing leapt out at me, and I reluctantly handed the file back to Helen, thanked her for her time and took my leave. Marcel Harding, or more particularly the scarcely earth-shattering Larry Clarke, hadn’t thought to keep copies of the hate mail for Lisa Vaughan, but I supposed that there was no reason to expect that they would have shown anything substantially different.

One thing, however. As nobody at Telemagic had known that Sandra Field was going to be in Birmingham, that left only her husband and her cousins as the source of information for the killer. In my mind I began to formulate my next step.

I knew from the reports in the media that when she had been murdered, Sandra Field had been with one of her cousins. The two women had visited a cinema, which I looked it up on Google maps. It was in a narrow street with a number of side streets leading off it, all of which connected up. In the confusion after the shooting, the killer had simply made his getaway down one of those streets – none of the witnesses at the time had noticed him; they were all more occupied in running for cover, highly understandable in the circumstances.

26

I had the germ of an idea beginning to formulate in my mind, an idea I didn’t like, but one which seemed to offer an explanation of the mystery.

The next morning saw me parked in King Edward’s Grove, a few house along from, and on the opposite side of the road to, William Vaughan’s house. I had a camera with me and after a wait of half an hour or so I was rewarded with the sight of Vaughan leaving the house. A couple of quick shots and I drove away before he might see me.

Later that day I scanned our local paper and identified several photos of men with a passing resemblance to Vaughan. A visit to the paper’s office and I came away with prints of the photos on which those men had appeared and once home I trimmed the prints down to concentrate on just the men’s faces. To the selection I added one of my own prints of Vaughan himself. I was now ready for the next step.

Chapter Five

It was three days later and I was in Birmingham. The intervening time had been spent mostly talking once again to a number of the people that I had spoken to earlier about Linda and Amanda’s murders, showing them my collection of photographs and asking if any of the faces seemed familiar. I hadn’t got any truly positive feedback, and I had received three or four possible identifications of one or other of the anonymous men. But I had also had one person fairly sure that she had seen Vaughan at the event at which Linda had been murdered.

The picture had been identified by Hazel Morgan, a twenty year old who had been at the launch as a member of the cast of the film. She had known Linda fairly well and like her was a client of Julia’s – indeed it was Julia who had originally given me her name.

She had looked long and hard at the five pictures I had laid on the table in front of her. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow in concentration. Finally, she placed a fingertip on the picture of Vaughan.

“I’m not one hundred per cent sure, but I think that he was there.”

“Did you know Lisa Vaughan?”

She shook her head.

“No, I knew of her, of course, but I’d never actually met her.”

“That picture is of her husband.”

She looked disappointed.

“Oh, then it’s possible that I have seen him at some different event or other – but I think it was the night Linda was killed.”

I already knew, of course, that Vaughan had been on the guest list that night; this was the nearest that I had come so far to confirming that he had actually attended.

Now, however, I was in Birmingham to meet Glenda Burroughs, Sandra’s cousin who had been with her when she was killed. It had taken all my powers of persuasion to get her to agree to see me. Clearly, she had been extremely upset by what had happened and initially had no wish to relive the event, but I had managed to wear her down.

Now I sat opposite her in the lounge of her semi-detached house on the outskirts of Birmingham. Her husband was at work, her two teenage children at school, so we had the place to ourselves whist she recounted the terrible day.

“Sandra was staying at the Radisson Blu Hotel, near the railway station – she’d come up by train. She had visited with Doreen – that’s my sister, the previous day and that day I took the bus into town – it’s just not worth driving in, parking gets worse every day – and I met her at the hotel where we had lunch together.

After lunch we went to the cinema for the late afternoon programme. They were showing the film she was in and I thought it was very good, then after the film finished we came out of the cinema and that is when it happened. Everywhere was pretty busy and by then it was just about dark. Sandra stopped as we came out...”

She stopped and looked my full in the face.

27

“It was awful. I will never, ever forget it. This man was no more than ten or twelve feet away and he had a gun – I didn’t really believe it could be happening – and he just shot her – just shot her...”

Her voice tailed off and she sat still, her eyes focussed on some terrible memory that only she could see. She made a conscious effort to recover, then continued.

“Sandra fell, and everyone was screaming and the man just sort of stepped away and disappeared amongst the crowd. I went to her and her jacket had fallen open and her blouse was covered in blood. I called 999 on my mobile for an ambulance, but by the time it arrived it was much too late. I don’t know who called the police – I didn’t – I just wanted an ambulance for Sandra.”

“Did you see the man’s face at all?”

“Only a glimpse.”

I produced my picture gallery and spread them out on the table.

“Do any of these faces look familiar?”

She studied them closely, staring fixedly at each in turn. Finally, and hesitantly, she reached out and touched the picture of Vaughan.

“ That might be him, but I can’t pretend to be certain.”

So now I had two possible sightings of Vaughan at a murder scene, one of which, if right, made him the shooter. It was time to pass on to the police what I had discovered, so the next day I called at the station and asked to see Inspector Laine. As before he wasn’t in, but the attractive Sergeant Collyer was, so it was to her that I passed on my findings. She promised that they would be looked into, but made it clear that the police were unhappy at me nosing around and whilst they couldn’t actually stop me, they be grateful if I would desist. I was about to remind her that I had actually made more progress in finding some sort of link, at least between two of the killings, than the combined efforts of four police forces when Laine himself walked into the room. The crumpled look that I had seen when he questioned me on the night of Linda Lafferty’s murder was still in evidence, in stark contrast to his well groomed deputy.

“Ah, Mr. Amherst. Glad I caught up with you. I trust that you have told everything that you know to Sergeant Collyer?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, thank you for that. Now, one more thing. I really don’t want you charging around muddying the waters any more. I would hate to have to charge you with obstructing the police in the execution of their duty, but I will if you make me.”

I took a deep breath before replying. I exhaled, letting the immediate anger dissipate before I really lost my cool.

“Inspector, I am a journalist and I am pursuing a story. If that puts your nose out of joint, then I am very sorry, but I am not going to stop looking into the story because you find it inconvenient that I have actually made more progress than the four police forces involved. If you want to arrest me – go ahead, but I would advise you to be careful how you do it. The arrest itself would make a good story, and it would be a story that you and your force would not look good in.”

We glared at each other, then he backed down.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Amherst. Sergeant Collyer will show you out.”

I followed Sergeant Collyer’s delectable figure down the corridor and into the reception area. As we reached the main door she turned round and faced me.

“Mr. Amherst, I’m sorry that the DI upset you, but he is under a lot of pressure over all this.”

“Oh, I’m not upset. Angry at attempted police intimidation, but not upset.”

She looked genuinely concerned and I took another deep breath before saying anything else.

“Look, sergeant, I really do not want to get in the way of the police investigation, but I am going to pursue this story no matter what. Linda Lafferty was shot dead under my eyes and I owe it to her to keep digging.

Despite the attitude of your DI, if I do find anything else out, I will bring it to you.”

She gave me a half smile and I left, still quietly seething over the way that I had been treated. Later that day I got in touch with Julia and suggested dinner again. It was another very enjoyable meal and this time we disposed of my discoveries in a matter of minutes and then moved on to more personal matters.

28

“Tell me, David, have you never been married?”

She saw the flicker of expression on my face.

“Sorry, have I gone too far?”

“No, it’s just a painful subject. No, I’ve never married, but I came very close to doing so. My fiancée was killed in a road accident three weeks before the wedding was due to take place.”

She reached across the table and laid her hand over mine.

“I’m so sorry, sorry for you and sorry I asked.”

I shook my head.

“No need to be. I’ve come to terms with it – I’ve had to. It’s just that I don’t think about it much anymore; there was a time when it dominated every thought, every moment.”

“What happened?”

“Kathy, my fiancée, was out doing some shopping. A couple of kids out joy-riding in a stolen car shot a red light and went into her. All three of them were killed outright. Nothing anyone could do, and I didn’t even have anyone to blame – at least not anyone living. Kathy was twenty-four. The lads in the car were sixteen and fifteen. A total waste of three lives.”

As I spoke I could remember the horror and disbelief I had felt when my CO called me in to break the news.

We had been on detachment in Germany on a joint NATO exercise and he gave me a week’s compassionate leave to sort things out. I flew back to the UK as soon as possible and met up with Kathy’s parents and brother for the funeral. We all promised to keep in touch, but in fact I never saw them again. The battalion was sent to Iraq the next month and by the time we returned it somehow seemed wrong to look them up and remind them of their loss.

Julia let her hand on mine and looked into my eyes with an expression of sorrow mixed with understanding.

“That must have been really awful for you,” she said, “and I really am sorry that I caused you to have to think about it again.”

“What about you,” I asked, keen to change the subject, “has there ever been anyone in your life – for that matter, is there now?”

“Not now, but there was once. In fact I have been married. It started when I was nineteen. I was at university and I met this guy who really seemed to be the answer to a maiden’s prayers. He swept me off my feet – and to be strictly honest, had me on my back - within a week of us first meeting. We continued to be ‘an item’ as they say, all through university, and once we had both graduated, we got married. My parents were dead set against it – they both took an instant dislike to Derek – Derek Ross, that was his name, and I guess that their opposition only strengthened my resolve to get married. It only lasted about ten months – that was how long it took me to discover that I wasn’t the only string to his bow. A storming row ensued, in which I discovered that I had even only been one of several girls he was screwing in our university days, and in which he knocked me about a bit, and that was that – divorce as soon as possible followed and I have never seen him from that day to this.”

She twirled her wine glass between her fingers, a far away expression on her face as she recalled the unpleasant past. Then she shrugged her shoulders and handed the glass to me.

“More wine, please, David, before I get totally maudlin.”

“Well,” I said, as I refilled her glass, “despite all that, you seem to have done pretty well with your life since.

CEO of your own company, a success in what you do, you can be proud of yourself, surely.”

She continued to gaze into the far distance.

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, and I love meeting some of my clients, Not all, some of them are egos supported by inadequacies, but there are also the genuine talents, like Linda, which is why I so much want to help catch her killer if I possibly can. She had a great future; as an actress she would have brought pleasure to thousands of people, quite apart from her own enjoyment of her art, and some bastard took it away from her – and from the rest of us.”

I was touched by her obvious sincerity over her desire to see Linda’s killer caught. I lifted my hand from under hers, took the hand in mine and gently squeezed it.

29

“You know that if there is anything that I can do to find out who it was, then I will do it. I will never forget what happened that night, and I will never rest until whoever killed her is caught.”

She returned the hand pressure.

“I know that, David.”

We finished our meal and left the restaurant in a mode of quiet companionship enhanced by our respective revelations. I drove her home and accepted her invitation to come up to the flat. As I remembered from my previous visit, the flat was a two bedroom affair on the top storey of four, with a view out across lower buildings on the opposite side of the road to some greenery in the middle distance – as good a vista as one might hope for in a crowded area of suburbia.

Inside, the flat was tastefully decorated in soft, warm tones and I was left to examine it as Julia disappeared into the kitchen to make us some coffee. The walls had a number of abstract pictures, again in muted tones which complemented the decor. On my first visit I had taken little notice of them, bit now, looking more closely at one of them, I saw that the artist’s name appeared in the bottom right hand corner, together with a date. The name was J. Glendenning, and the date 1986. For a moment I thought that Julia must be the artist, then remembered that in 1986 she would only have been about eight years old, so unless she had been some sort of child prodigy, this was not her work. Intrigued, I went round the room looking at all the pictures.

There were six in number, all but one signed ‘J. Glendenning’ and dated in the last three years. The exception was signed ‘J. Land’ and dated 1969. Whilst sharing the muted tones of the others, it somehow had a vibrancy that they lacked. The five were room decoration; this one was a picture in its own right.

At that point Julia returned bearing a tray with coffee cups and biscuits and set it down on a low coffee table flanked by two low black leather settees. She saw that I was examining the ‘J. Land’ painting.

“What do you think of my mum’s pictures?”

“She painted these?”

“Yes. The one you are looking at she did whilst she was at art school and it’s the only one of her early paintings that I have. The others she painted specifically for me. That one – she waved at the picture dated1986 – she painted to celebrate my eighth birthday; the others she painted for me when I moved in here.

Actually the story of her paintings is a bit sad. When she was at art school all the tutors were very impressed with what she painted and prophesised a great future for her. In fact, her early work is quite valuable. As a young woman needing to make her way she sold most of it and a Land picture nowadays will fetch several thousands at auction. But then, somehow, she lost her way as an artist. It just about coincided with her first meeting dad and then getting married, setting up house, having me, that sort of thing, as though ordinary life had somehow squeezed the gift out of her. That 1986 picture was the first thing that she had painted for five or six years and she said that she did it to see if she could recapture what she used to have, but she couldn’t.

Oh, it’s nice enough and I’m glad she gave it to me, but she had to accept that the old gift was gone and wasn’t coming back. When I got this place she did the others purely as wall space fillers. I like them and I wouldn’t want to be parted from them – but they aren’t in the same league as her early stuff.”

“Did you inherit any of her gift for painting?”

“No, the only painting I can manage is to redecorate the walls. No, I’m afraid I’m totally without talent in that field.”

“Well, at least you can bask in the reflected glory from your mother.”

“What about you, David – your father was an architect, you said. No yearnings to do the same sort of thing?”

“No, it never interested me at all. Going into the Army was something that I decided that I wanted to do from quite an early age – probably about twelve or thirteen. I don’t even know why – it just was if you follow me.”

We settled down side by side on one of the settees with our coffee and I reflected on what I was learning about Julia and deciding that everything that I had learned, I liked. After Kathy’s death there had been no serious attachments for me; somehow nine years had slipped by without anything more than a couple of occasional one night stands which had left me feeling as though I had betrayed Kathy’s memory. I began to wonder if it was time to look for something with more meaning.

Almost as though she could read my thoughts, Julia looked at me.

30

“David, all this talk of the past is making me feel lonely. Will you stay with me tonight? I don’t want to be alone.”

Then she was in my arms and we kissed as though the world would never end, as thought breath would never be needed.

I woke the next morning with Julia snuggled against me, breathing softly in her sleep. I lay there for a long while, gazing at the ceiling without really seeing it, as my mind wandered through the events of the night. I was determined that Julia would be someone very special to me, and I hoped that she felt the same way about me, but only time would tell.

At last she stirred and slowly opened her eyes to find me gazing into them.

“Good morning,” she said sleepily, “do I know you?”

We both broke into laughter at that; then it was the morning routine as she got ready to leave for her office and I to go home. Before we parted, however, we had agreed that I would return in the evening.

I got home and wandered about the flat, wondering what the future might hold. Being with Julia suddenly felt right and natural, something that I had not felt since Kathy’s death. I changed into fresh clothes and at last, after a couple of hours, decided to give more thought to the murders.

No sooner had I done so, than the telephone rang. I picked up the handset.

“David Amherst.”

“Mr. Amherst, this is DS Collyer.”

My attention was immediately aroused, wondering what had caused this approach from Laine’s deputy.

“Yes, Sergeant, how can I help?”

“Well, actually I think that I can help you.” I could detect hesitancy in her speech and wondered just what she had to say to me. “Look, I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I want to save your time and my DI’s temper. I know that you found someone who thought that she saw Mr. Vaughan at the film launch where Linda Lafferty was murdered. She was quite right – he was there, but we already knew that. We also know that it is quiet impossible for him to be the killer. The thing is, the room in which the launch took place has several security cameras in it. One of the first things that we did was to review the footage from them. All the films carry a date time group so we can be sure of who was where and when. One of the cameras shows you escorting Miss Lafferty out of the room; another camera shows that at that precise moment Mr. Vaughan was sitting at a table with his wife and six other people. That camera shows him still at that table ten minutes later, by which time the murder had already been committed. So you see, there is no way that he could have been the killer.”

The news came as a body blow. I was convinced that Vaughan had somehow had his wife killed, and his presence at the scene when Linda Lafferty was killed had seemed to tie in, although not totally if his alibi for the time his wife died continued to hold up.

“I see. But what about Mrs. Burroughs’ possible identification of Vaughan as the killer of Sandra Field?”

“As you say, Mr. Amherst, only a possible identification, and I am sure you know as well as I do how unreliable such an identification can be, even under the best of circumstances.”

I thanked her for her courtesy in getting in touch with me and replaced the handset, my mind racing. I had seized upon Glenda Burroughs possible identification of Vaughan and leapt from that to the assumption that his presence at the film launch meant that he had killed both Linda Lafferty and Sandra Field. Now I had to accept that at least as far as Linda Lafferty was concerned he was in the clear. So, what did that mean? I still had the stumbling block of his apparently unbreakable alibi for his own wife’s murder. And now he could not have killed Linda Lafferty either. So, what about the other two. As far as I was aware, he had no alibi for their deaths. Could it be possible that there were two killers? Vaughan and another? If Vaughan had indeed hired or otherwise obtained, somebody to kill his wife and to kill the others as a smokescreen, surely that person would carry out all four murders. If Glenda Burroughs really had seen Vaughan outside that Birmingham shoe shop, it made little sense. Why hire a killer for one murder and not the others? Perhaps it was as mundane a consideration as not being able to pay for the multiple murders? But he had an alibi for his wife’s murder; in that case, why the need for the smokescreen of the other killings?

31

Perhaps, after all, it hadn’t been Vaughan that Glenda Burroughs had seen but a man with a slight resemblance to him.

I dawned on me that in all my considerations, I had allowed the murder of Amanda Hancock to virtually disappear from my thoughts. Nobody I had spoken to had come up with anything helpful about her killing.

Shot from across the street as she had emerged from the cinema, it had been the longest shot of all. I had looked up the cinema an Google Street View and the gunman must have fired from a good forty feet away.

Linda Lafferty had been gunned down from a range of about thirty feet or a little less, Lisa Vaughan from about the same range, Sandra Field from no more than ten or twelve feet away. Nothing exceptional about the shooting; it was all well within the competence of any reasonable pistol shooter. What stood out, however, was the sheer nerve of the shooter in the actual execution of his plans.

Amanda’s killer had escaped in the inevitable confusion, simply melting away in the panicking crowd, as had been the case in the killings of Lisa and Sandra. Only in Linda Lafferty’s case had the killer not been able to immediately melt into a crowd. The alley from where he had fired had been empty, although fifteen yards or so away there was a street pavement to lend him camouflage.

Taking the actual shots would not have been very difficult for an accomplished shooter. There was one oddity – in each occurrence, only a single shot had been fired. In my time in the Army I had been trained in the use of a pistol and the instructors had always emphasised to fire twice – and more often if needed,. One shot kills with a pistol under combat conditions, they claimed, were the province of James Bond and John Wayne. Unless a vital organ was hit, a single pistol bullet was unlikely to instantly incapacitate an enemy, who might then be able to shoot back even if he succumbed to his wound soon afterwards. Admittedly, none of the women were armed; obviously the shooter was in no danger in that respect, but even so, I would have expected him to fire at least twice to be sure. He was either very skilled and confident, or not so skilled, over-confident and very lucky. I knew that Linda Lafferty had been shot in the heart; I knew that the others had all been shot in the torso, although precisely where their wounds had been located I knew not. In the case of Sandra Field, her killer had been close enough to place his shot precisely; the other two were more challenging, but clearly within his competence.

As we had agreed, I went round to Julia’s flat that evening and brought her up to date with what Detective Sergeant Collyer had told me. She furrowed her brow in concentration.

“So, if it couldn’t have been Vaughan who killed Linda, is it likely that it was actually him that Glenda saw?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, “the more we find out, the more confusing everything seems to get.”

“Could it be that we are just plain wrong about Vaughan? That he is just a thoroughly unpleasant individual, but not a killer, and that it is somebody else entirely?”

“Well, if that is the case, we are back to square one and I don’t have the slightest idea where to turn next.”

Julia gave a deep sigh, then smiled at me.

“I know where to go to next – let’s go to bed.”

So we did, to much mutual enjoyment and satisfaction.

Chapter Six

At some time in the early hours I woke from a dream, a dream in which I was walking along a corridor, at the end of which stood a figure in a long, hooded garment like a monk’s habit. He, or she, it was impossible to tell, was turned three-quarters away from me, right arm outstretched and holding a pistol. As I approached, the pistol was fired; there was no sound, just the muzzle flash. I continued my approach and the figure started to turn towards me, the pistol still held in the outstretched arm. However, just as the figure had almost turned round far enough for its face to be seen, I found myself back at my starting point, and the sequence repeated again and again, until at last I awoke, with a sensation that I had seen or heard something in the course of my digging that I had not understood, but which was important. I lay still, not wanting to disturb Julia who was snuggled up against me, sleeping peacefully.

32

What, I wondered, had triggered that dream? I am a person who dreams very rarely, but when I do it is almost invariably triggered by something real, a conversation perhaps, or an unusual sight or smell. I racked my brains trying to attach some meaning, some understanding, to the dream, but without success. I glanced at the bedside clock – it was half-past two in the morning. I let my mind drift again and eventually went back to sleep.

All the day I had this irritating feeling that there was something just out of reach that I should have recognised as important at some time. I tried to analyse what it might be; I had visited a number of people in their homes, others I had met in cafes or pubs, in discussions with those I had hoped might throw some light onto the murders.

I had returned to my own flat to change my clothes; again we had agreed that I would return to Julia that evening, and I was idly casting my eye over my bookshelf as I tied my tie, when one book in particular caught my eye. It was an American publication on guns and ammunition that I had bought many years earlier. As I looked at it, I realised that I had solved one of the mysteries about the affair – not the mystery, but a subsidiary one. I wondered if I should pass what I had discovered onto the police, given my previous reception. It was something that wouldn’t really help find the murderer, so I was unwilling to risk a further rebuff. The police might have already make the connection themselves; on the other hand, perhaps they had not. Reluctantly, I picked up the phone and dialled the number that DS Collyer had given me.

“DS Collyer.”

“Sergeant, it’s David Amherst.”

A pause; then.

“Yes, Mr. Amherst.”

“Look, I have worked out something about the killer which might be a help to you.”

“Look, Mr. Amherst, I am very busy at the moment,” my heart sank, “but if you think what you have is really helpful I can meet you this evening briefly – I’ll be off work about seven – do you know the Bag O’Nails pub?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ll meet you there at seven – don’t be late.”

“I’ll be there.”

At seven, having told Julia where I was going, I met DS Collyer. I was on time; she was ten minutes late.

She declined my offer of a drink and demanded to know what I had to say.

“OK,” I said, “deductions on my part. One; it has been announced that the weapon was probably a Browning Hi-Power. To be able to say that you must have recovered one or more of the bullets in a good enough state to be identified ballistically. It would also be helpful to have the cartridge cases. Two; you haven’t found any cartridge cases.”

She looked at me quizzically. “How have you worked that out?”

“The shooter only fired once at each victim.”

“So?”

“I was an Army officer for twelve years. For much of that time a Browning Hi-Power was my personal sidearm. It is a reliable weapon and very effective, but any experienced user will normally fire at least twice to make sure – we call it a ‘double tap’. The killer isn’t stupid – his success shows that. So why did he only shoot once each time? Easy answer. He only had one shot. That is illustrated by something else. At the ranges at which he fired, a bullet from that pistol will normally pass clean through a person’s body unless it is stopped by a major bone. There has been no mention of anybody else being injured – and in those crowded situations that is almost unbelievable. Another point – no cartridge cases recovered.”

“He could have picked them up.”

“You can’t really believe that. The Browning throws the empty cartridge out to the right and slightly forward. It will travel anything up to ten or twelve feet – and when it hits the ground – concrete or paving slabs in all four cases – it will bounce. No way did he have time to look for them. So, if they had been ejected your people would have found them. You didn’t, so they weren’t there to be found. So, my 33

conclusion. Our shooter is well up in understanding ballistics. He used a reduced powder charge; reduced enough so that the action wouldn’t be cycled. In other words, the cartridge case would remain in the pistol after it had been fired – so only one shot available to him unless he worked the action manually which would have taken time he couldn’t rely on having. The reduced charge means that the bullet would be less powerful and unlikely to penetrate the victim’s body, but stay lodged in it. That also means that the bullets would be in much better shape for ballistic examination than if they had penetrated completely and then gone on to hit a wall or something similar. So, whoever did the killing is an experienced weapons user, not just a shooter.”

She looked pensive.

“Mr. Amherst, what you have said is very interesting, I will pass it on to Inspector Laine and I am sure that he will pass it on to the other forces involved. Now, if you will excuse me, I must go.”

And she left.

Later that evening I told Julia all that I had explained to DS Collyer.

“Do we know if anybody in the case has the sort of skills you have worked out, David?”

“I don’t, but hopefully the police will find out.”

“I don’t really understand about this ballistic stuff – oh, I know from the tele that bullets can be matched to the gun that fired them and all that, but how does it actually work?”

“Well, the inside of the barrel of a pistol or rifle has grooves cut into it to make the bullet spin as it is fired.

Those grooves are cut by a machine when the weapon is made and in the process tiny imperfections will appear – microscopic in size – and although the grooves will be the same for two weapons made by the same maker to the same design, the imperfections won’t be. As the weapon is used, over time the enormous pressures that are generated to drive the bullet will add more markings, so each weapon’s barrel becomes more and more unlike, in microscopic terms, others otherwise the same. Incidentally, one of the things that the tele never seems to catch is that a the first bullet fired from a weapon when it is brand new, will carry slightly different markings to that same weapon when it has been in heavy use and had hundreds of bullets fired through it.”

“What I also don’t understand is all this about the cartridge cases and whether they were ejected.”

“Well, like the bullet, the case will carry faint scratches from the action of the gun and again, these marks can be matched to the weapon.”

“So the killer made sure that he didn’t leave the cartridge cases behind him.”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I started, then stopped. Julia nodded at me.

“What you are saying is that the gun the killer used could be matched to the bullets the police recovered and also to the cartridge cases which they did not recover. But if the bullets would match his gun, why go to all this bother not to leave the cartridge cases behind?”

I was stopped in my tracks, I had been so wrapped up in working out how the cases had not been found, that it had not occurred to me to wonder why the killer would worry about them, when the bullets would be all the evidence needed to identify his pistol if it was ever found. What I had thought was a step forward, albeit a very small one, had in reality merely opened up another question.

I began to feel that I would never understand what was going on in this case.

The next day I looked up a former Army acquaintance. Robbie Colquhoun had been an armoury sergeant, retiring a few years before I left the Army. His son, Iain, had been in my platoon when I was first commissioned and was now himself a sergeant in the Paras, and currently serving in Afghanistan. He had been wounded back in my early days, which was how I had first met his father when I visited Iain in hospital to see how he was getting on. Robbie had been on the verge of retiring at the time and I had discovered that, a widower, he saw no point in returning to Scotland, where he had no friends or family left. Instead he had decided to settle down in Surrey, just outside Esher. When he had first retired he had done a few body guarding jobs for Alan Hammond, which was how I had bumped into him again. Alan had let me have his address and a phone call had been enough to get me an invitation to come and talk to him.

34

He met me at the door of his small bungalow and we looked each other up and down. I knew that he must now be in his early sixties, but he could have been taken as being at least ten years younger. Small, no more than five feet six or seven, and slimly built, he nevertheless exuded fitness and good health. Bright blue eyes twinkled in a weather-beaten face, a face that bore an old scar from the corner of his left eyebrow all the way down to the angle of his jaw. It had been caused, I knew, by a scrap of shrapnel in the fighting around Goose Green in the Falklands. Robbie had been extremely lucky not to have lost the eye or even worse.

He smiled a welcome to me.

“Come in, David, come in and tell me how I can help.”

We sat in armchairs in his immaculate lounge, and he listened intently whilst I told him the whole story, culminating in my current confusion as to why the killer had gone to such lengths to prevent leaving cartridge cases on the scene.

Robbie thought it all over for a while as we drank a cup of tea and worked our way through a plate of biscuits. At last he spoke.

“I think that you are looking at this the wrong way round, David. I don’t think that he was worried about leaving cases behind. I think that the weapon he was using gave him no option.”

“A Hi-Power? How come?”

“Three possible explanations come to mind. Firstly, and quite possibly most likely, he’s got hold of a faulty pistol. If the return spring in damaged the action won’t cycle automatically – it would have to be worked by hand every time. With a pistol old enough and used enough to have a damaged return spring, it would also be wise to use reduced charges in case something else went wrong – he wouldn’t want it blowing up in his hand.

“The second possibility is less likely, but a lot more interesting. He isn’t using a Hi-Power at all, but something with the same pattern of rifling but which does not eject the fired cartridge case. Think about it –

the police say that the weapon is possibly a H-Power based on the rifling pattern on the bullets recovered from the women’s bodies. That is all they have to go on. Now, the Hi-Power rifling pattern is a little unusual in 9mm pistols – it makes one turn in fourteen inches, whereas most make one turn in ten or so – so if you find a bullet with seven grooves and that rate of turn, it is pretty natural to assume that it was fired from a Hi-Power – but that isn’t always true. It could be that someone has made a barrel with he same specification as a Hi-Power, but with the rest quite different.”

“But that means that we are talking about a skilled gunsmith with full production facilities, not somebody fiddling about with an existing weapon.”

“True, but it makes a more logical scenario than risking fooling about with a knackered old wreck of a pistol and hoping to get everything right and that it doesn’t fall apart further or blow up in your hand. Do you have any evidence that anyone involved in all of this might have such facilities, or know someone with them?”

I shook my head.

“Nobody that I know of, Robbie – but then I don’t have the resources of the police to find out that sort of thing. Tell me, absolute rock bottom facilities, what would be needed to make such a weapon?”

He half closed his eyes whilst he thought over my question.

“Just realised – the best starting point would be to acquire a Hi-Power barrel and build around it. For something cheap and cheerful, or if you prefer, a minimalist approach, he would then need very little. A milling machine to shape steel – but they are comparatively very cheap nowadays – a decent drill press –

again, peanuts to acquire, thanks to Chinese industrialisation – and a simple lathe, and that is about it for the major elements. Given those minimal pieces of equipment, our mystery man could produce a functioning weapon very easily indeed. “

“How would he get a barrel so that he had something to start with?”

“More difficult, of course. He would need a pistol which was non-functional but with a barrel in decent condition,”

Robbie stopped in mid-flow.

“Hang about – I’ve not got to possibility number three yet. Vaughan has overseas contacts, yes?”

“That’s right.”

35

“Where?”

“Italy and Spain for marble and tiles, South America – but I don’t know what part – for exotic timbers, the USA for fancy bathroom and kitchen fittings. Those are the ones I have been told about – there may be others.”

“America, eh? Forget all I said about making some backstreet special. In the UK it is impossible to buy a pistol, or pistol ammunition, legally. Not so in the States. A couple of their big ammunition manufacturers actually sell low velocity 9mm ammunition for target shooters. It offers less wear on the pistol, less recoil and therefore better accuracy. I’ve never handled it, but I have read about it. One of its characteristics is that it is so low-powered that it doesn’t cycle the pistol’s action. That makes for a steadier hold in target shooting.”

I nodded my understanding, One of the things about an automatic pistol is that when you pull the trigger and it fires, parts of the action recoil until stopped by the mechanism, then are thrown forward again by a powerful spring. This makes a very steady hold more difficult to achieve than if several ounces of metal weren’t rapidly slamming back and forth.

“There’s another thing,” Robbie continued, “because of that, the bullets have a square cut front to them, so don’t feed through the magazine, but have to be loaded singly.”

More and more, what Robbie was describing fitted into what I knew about the shootings. One thing continued to puzzle me, however.

“But why would the shooter use such ammunition? He is placing himself in a difficult situation if he needs a second shot – he’d never have time to load another round whilst chaos was taking place around him.”

“Well, one thing I can think of. You know that in the normal ammunition the bullet is round nosed and fully jacketed.”

Again I nodded my understanding. Military pistols and rifles have to use bullets which are coated with a hard metal – usually a brass alloy of some sort – so that they do not expand when they hit an enemy’s body. This has been a requirement of international law for over a century. A pretty pointless requirement when you think of all the other nasty things that are used in battle, but there you are. Civilian ammunition, on the other hand, used for law enforcement or hunting, has no such strictures.

“Well,” he continued, “these bullets are unjacketed lead with a square cut nose. The lack of a jacket makes them cheaper to make; the square cut front punches clean holes in a paper target. Using them against a person, on the other hand, and you have a nasty expanding bullet.”

I saw at once what he meant. Such bullets, upon striking the victim, would expand and distort to perhaps twice their original diameter, causing a much more serious wound than an ordinary military bullet. I could now see the sense of the shooter’s choice of ammunition. Easier to handle and with a more lethal bullet, it became quite a logical choice. The lack of a quick follow-up second shot was presumably a price he was willing to pay.

“Another thing,” Robbie went on, “Vaughan – if indeed it is him – would be able to buy the ammunition and the pistol itself in America, whereas he couldn’t here in the UK. Seeing he gets stuff sent to his firm from America, he could presumably come up with some way of getting the pistol concealed in a genuine shipment of some sort to his company.”

We moved on to a general chat about times past over a second cup of tea and I eventually took my leave of Robbie, well satisfied with what I had learned from him.

When I got home I took out the card DS Collyer had given me; as well as her telephone number, it also had a E-mail address, so, rather than risk a rebuff, I simple E-mailed her about the American ammunition. Later on I had a reply, simply acknowledging my information.

I reflected on what I had now learned. I was convinced that Vaughan was a killer, but had to accept that he could not have killed Linda Lafferty, nor his own wife. His alibis for those two murders were unshakable.

Robbie’s scenario – that the weapon and the ammunition had come from the USA seemed by far the most logical and removed from consideration the possibility of him needing gun-making equipment or the need to reload ammunition himself. To prove that to my own satisfaction, however, I needed to check that his ties 36

with the States would hold up as a means of him acquiring what he needed to carry out his plans. It was time, I decided, to talk with Richard Cartwright again. I phoned him and was invited to see him the following day.

That evening I once again updated Julia on my findings and she asked if I had any idea yet as to how Vaughan had arranged the killings for which he had alibis. I had to admit that, apart from the obvious expectation that he had used a third party, I was no nearer to a conclusion.

“What about the Laffertys and the Hancocks, David. Are you going to tell them what you have found out, what you suspect?”

I shook my head.

“No. I can’t see what it would achieve and if I am wrong it could be a disastrous thing to do. David Cartwright is already convinced that Vaughan is responsible for his sister’s death, whether or not he actually pulled the trigger, so updating him won’t really change anything, and anyway, I need to get him to confirm that a link between Vaughan and America exists that makes Vaughan getting his stuff over there feasible.”

The next day I once again visited Richard Cartwright at his Thames Ditton home. This time, instead of Cartwright himself, the door was answered by a tall, slim young woman. She greeted me warmly.

“Hello, you must be David Amherst. Richard won’t be a minute – he just had to pop out to the newsagents.”

I followed her into the same room where Cartwright and I had previously spoken and took a chair. She smiled at me, a quite dazzling smile that showed gleaming white teeth that were at one with an extremely attractive face. Blue eyes, shining blonde hair that cascaded to her shoulders, a trim figure set off well by the tight jeans and silk blouse, she reclined gracefully in the chair opposite my own.

“I’m Helen Musgrove, Richard’s fiancée,” she explained. “He’s told me what you are trying to do about Lisa’s murder and I know that he is attaching a lot of hope to your finding something out that has been missed so far. He and Lisa were very close – had been since childhood, and he has taken her death very hard.

He is convinced that rat of a husband of her’s is behind it. When he first heard what happened I had a hell of a job to prevent him from going round and accusing him to his face.”

At that moment the man himself arrived, hurrying into the room, apologising for keeping me waiting.

“Do you have any news at all?” he asked anxiously.

“Nothing concrete, I’m afraid, but I do have a theory as to how he got hold of the gun and ammunition which I need to run by you to see if it feasible. As everyone knows, it is impossible for the private citizen to get hold of such things legally in this country, and by no means very easy on the continent. It’s different in America. It varies from state to state and even now getting a pistol and ammunition for it is pretty easy in some parts. My belief is that he obtained what he wanted over there and had them shipped to the UK as part of one of his legitimate deliveries from one or other of the firms he deals with over there. Does that sound possible?”

Cartwright nodded his head.

“I’d say that it sounds very possible. He has been over to America to meet suppliers four or five times in the last few years. The most recent occasion was about six months ago, and before that only another two months earlier. That was unusual – his other visits have been a year or so apart.”

Helen broke in.

“But if he did have the things sent over like that, surely it was very risky? I don’t suppose that he personally unpacks every delivery his company receives, do you?”

We all looked at each other. What she had just said was doubtless true, but after a bit of thought I felt that it would not have been an insurmountable problem for Vaughan and the others agreed. I turned back to Cartwright.

“Tell me, Richard, did you tell the police about his American visits?”

“Oh yes, they wanted to know everything that I could tell them about him. I made sure that they knew of his absences from the country and his infidelities, also the insurance policy on Lisa. One other thing about those two American visits – they were both to the same place, which was unusual for him. According to Lisa he went to Dallas on both occasions”

Texas, I knew, had more relaxed gun laws than some of the other states in the USA, so seemed a logical place for Vaughan to have gone to if my assumptions about his acquisition of weaponry were correct.

37

“Where else did he go, do you know?”

“Yes, the year before last he went to New York, and two years before that to Boston. The Dallas trips were both much shorter than the others, as well – normally he’d be away for a week or a bit more. The first Dallas trip was three days, the second only two. Again, I told all this to the police.”

At least my theory that Vaughan had used his American trips to supply himself with the means of murder looked totally feasible, but I still had no idea how I could move things any further forward.

More in desperation than with any real expectation of progress, I got in touch with Alan Hammond. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since just after Linda Lafferty’s murder and I quickly reassured him that I wasn’t looking for work; the idea of being guarded by somebody who had seen their principal murdered in front of them obviously was not a good selling point for an agency such as his.

We met up for a quiet pint after office hours and I told him the little that I had achieved to date, and my frustration that the police seemed to be making even less progress.

“What I really need, Alan,” I told him, “is some way of really digging into that man Vaughan. I am convinced that he is the key. He’s desperate for money and the death of his wife should have brought him around three-quarters of a million pounds; that and the fact that she was going to divorce him make pretty good motives for murder in my eyes.”

“Well, it certainly seems more likely than some random nutcase blowing away actresses for the fun of it. I guess that you have told the police everything that you know?”

“Absolutely – but they, in the person of Inspector Laine, regard me as nothing but an interfering busybody.”

Alan regarded me carefully.

“David, how determined are you over all this?”

“Very!”

“Enough to spend money?”

“If it’s an amount that I can afford, definitely.”

“Well, what you have to remember is that we live in a computer age – and I happen to know a guy who is an absolute genius with computers. You are wondering about what Vaughan received from America, for instance. Now, I don’t suppose for a moment that the paperwork showed ‘automatic pistol and ammunition, assassins for the use of’ but it may well have shown the sort of items in which that pistol could have been secreted. Bank accounts? Piece of cake. And so on. Interested?”

I thought about it.

“Is this legal?”

“Ask no questions, be told no lies. I don’t ask, he don’t tell.”

I mulled it over, but I knew there was only one possible further question.

“How much?”

“He charges a grand a day – but in a day he can achieve a hell of a lot. Want his number?”

“Yes please.”

Chapter Seven

And so it was that two days later I met James Harraway. I had phoned for an appointment immediately after talking to Alan and spoken with the man’s wife and agreed a time and date, as a result of which I found myself knocking on the door of a very ordinary looking three bed semi-detached in Wimbledon. Mrs.

Harraway and I had agreed on the phone that the meeting was exploratory and that I wasn’t very committed to spending my hard-earned money.

Actually finding the money meant that I had to dip into my savings; I didn’t have that sort of amount to spare in my current account and I was acutely conscious of the fact that, although my savings were reasonable, I hadn’t actually earned any money from any source from several weeks past. The bodyguard work had, of course, dried up, and I had received no journalism income since the brief article just after Linda Lafferty had been killed.

38

The door was opened by a pleasant faced woman in her forties whom I correctly assumed to be Mrs.

Harraway. She greeted me with a welcoming smile that sat easily on an attractive face framed by short auburn hair.

“Mr. Amherst, please come in, James is in the living room.”

She ushered me through, and my host rose to greet me. I had no real preconception of what to expect; fictional computer geniuses tend to be spotty teenage geeks or mad professor types, but James Harraway was one of the most ordinary looking men you could meet. About five feet eight tall, slimly built, with short greying hair neatly combed across his skull in a rather nineteen forties style, he had grey eyes that regarded me from behind frameless spectacles.

“Mr. Amherst, do sit down.” He turned to his wife. “Do you think that we might have some tea, Elizabeth?”

His wife disappeared whilst we took our seats. I looked round the room; nothing in it nor about it gave any hint to the owner’s area of expertise. A modest sized TV and DVD recorder snuggled next to an imitation log stove; bookshelves contained a mix of volumes none, at a quick glance, having anything to do with computers, a print of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’ graced one wall. Altogether a statement of the ordinary par excellence.

He regarded me carefully.

“So, Mr. Amherst. Alan Hammond tells me that I may be able to help you in your pursuit of a murderer or murderers. How?”

I had thought a lot about this meeting and had considered this very aspect at length. I had discussed it the previous evening with Julia and knew what I hoped to achieve, but whether it was possible, I had not the slightest idea.

Mrs. Harraway brought in tea and biscuits and, slightly to my surprise, joined us as I explained everything that I knew and suspected about the four murders. It took time, time during which neither of the Harraways said a word, but listened with an intentness that was positively encouraging, if a trifle unnerving.

At last I had finished and Harraway spoke for the first time since greeting me.

“Yes, I can see your problems, Mr. Amherst. Now, from what you have told me, tracing what the Vaughan enterprise has been importing should be simple enough, always provided that they use a computer system, of course. If they keep everything on paper it will be harder although not necessarily impossible, but in this day and age that is unlikely. Telephone records – no problem, although if anyone used and disposed of a pay as you go mobile that might be a dead end. Bank details, insurance and the like – again no problems. A day’s work should suffice, although I must warn you that there is a chance that more time may be needed, but I won’t go beyond a day without coming back to you. Incidentally, although I say ‘a day’ the work will actually be spread over two or three; I normally have several projects on the go simultaneously and today is no exception.”

I took my leave of that very ordinary looking house with its ordinary looking, but according to Alan, quite extraordinary, occupants and waited.

True to his word, I had a phone call three days later. It was Mrs. Harraway on the line and the message was simple – my report was ready and I could come and collect it.

The report proved to be an eye-opener as to just how vulnerable we all are to a determined and skilful computer expert. I don’t know if all I had paid for was legally obtained and I have no intention of asking, even now. Suffice it to say that it confirmed the uneasy suspicions that had been forming in my mind.

Vaughan had received a delivery of expensive bathroom taps from Dallas. The shipping weight had been twenty kilos. By some administrative ‘error’ they had arrived not at his business, but at his home. I had no doubt that the package would have contained his illegal weaponry, removed before the balance of the shipment went to the correct address. His bank balance showed a cash withdrawal of two thousand pounds two days before his second Dallas trip. Why take out a fairly substantial sum in UK currency before a trip to America, where it would be useless unless changed for dollars? There was surely only one answer; the pounds would have been changed for dollars at a bureau de change and using cash in such a manner would not leave a paper trail of the transaction.

39

But there was more, much more. In Texas personal identification is needed when purchasing a handgun and the purchase is recorded on a state-wide register. The day of Vaughan’s arrival in Dallas, three Browning Hi-Power pistols were recorded as having been purchased. One of them was by a UK resident.

The previous day, when Vaughan flew from Heathrow, four UK passport holders reported that they had lost, or had stolen, their passports at the airport.

One of those passport holders was a Charles Carpenter. Twenty-four hours later that UK passport was used as identification in Holland’s Hunting Emporium, Dallas. UK passports do not show the holder’s address, but the details that ‘Carpenter’ provided at the store showed an address in London, an address which did not actually exist. The purchase was for cash.

I could picture the scenario as though I had actually been there. Vaughan would have entered the shop, explained what he wanted. When asked for means of identification he would have produced the passport and something – perhaps letters addressed to ‘Carpenter’, letters which he would have been able to produce in his hotel (details of the hotel in which Vaughan had stayed emphasised the availability of full office facilities for guests) to establish an address. The cash would have been explained by claiming he had lost his wallet, or his UK credit card didn’t work in the USA, or some such tale. The shop clerk, in these days of recession, would have been only too happy to accept good old dollar bills.

The sale to ‘Carpenter’ was for a Browning pistol and fifty rounds each of low velocity and normal ammunition. That latter element surprised me. Why would Vaughan have wanted the two types of ammunition? I had already convinced myself as to his reasoning for using the low velocity rounds; perhaps he was unsure of their effectiveness and had wanted the normal ammunition as insurance?

Included in Harraway’s report was Vaughan’s telephone details, showing all the calls that had been made from his home landline and his mobile over the last twelve months. There were some calls from the landline to the mobiles of his wife and those of the Fields, Mr. and Mrs., and to their landlines. Interestingly, there were no calls, either by landline or mobile, to Charles Field’s mobile for the last five months, although there had been perhaps one or two a month during the previous seven.

The calls in themselves were no surprise; the two couples had known each well, lived close to one another and had socialised. Far more interesting was the sudden cessation of calls to Field’s mobile.

That, and other evidence that was unfolding form Harraway’s report, were beginning to tell of a plot so callous, and so ruthless, that it almost turned my stomach.

I turned to another section of the report. As with Vaughan, so Charles Field’s mobile phone log showed no calls between the two men for the last five months, although there had been calls in the earlier period.

I returned to the parts dealing with Vaughan. On the day of Sandra Field’s murder he had bought petrol at a filling station just north of Heathrow on the A312. Nothing remarkable in that, except that he had only bought twenty pounds worth and that the A312 leads to the M25 and then the M4 and then – Birmingham. In this day and age, twenty pounds worth of petrol represented well under half a tank full for his Mondeo. My reading of the matter was that he wanted to have a full tank for the day and he didn’t want to leave a paper trail anywhere near Birmingham. Circumstantial at best, but part of a web of connections that, to my mind, supported the possibility that it had been Vaughan who had gunned down Sandra Field.

In my own mind the next set of connections to try and make would link Vaughan to the killing of Amanda Hancock, Like Sandra Field, she had been shot as she exited a cinema, although in her case it had been in Liverpool.

There was an immediate similarity. Just as Vaughan had topped up his petrol tank on the day of Sandra Field’s death, so he had on the day that Amanda Hancock had been killed. He had even used the same filling station, but that was hardly surprising, as the first part of his journey would have been identical whether Liverpool or Birmingham was his final destination.

I turned my attention to what Harraway had discovered about the murdered women. In the case of the two girls, there was nothing which seemed to be of any help, but there was something of interest in what he had found out about Sandra Field. Somehow he had managed to access her E-mail account; I didn’t like to think how, especially as her computer would presumably never have been switched on since her death. Presumably he had identified it from E-mails she had sent to other people, perhaps her agents. Anyway, what 40

immediately caught my attention was two sets of correspondence. One set was between herself and Lisa Vaughan, the other between her and someone she addressed as ‘Graham’. From these, it was clear that Sandra Field was seriously contemplating leaving her husband, with ‘Graham’ as his successor. In both sets of correspondence she referred to a visit that she had made to her solicitor some three weeks before her death, presumably to discuss starting divorce proceedings. From the E-mails to Lisa Vaughan, although there was no specific mention of ‘Graham’ there were some allusions to a man. It was possible to interpret them as referring to a lover; equally, it was possible to see them as simply mentioning an acquaintance or colleague.

I was beginning to wonder if Charles Field wasn’t an even better actor than his late wife. It was possible, of course, that he was as yet totally in the dark as to his wife’s intentions, but far more likely that he did know that she intended to leave him. That being the case, and the expectation that a divorce would see her take half of everything, it might well be a motive for murder – especially if Field’s emotions were such as to see such a break as a trauma that he was unwilling to accept. It was hard to believe that the destroyed man to whom I had spoken was actually a calculating murderer, but it seemed more and more likely as I continued to plough through the report.

The ‘Graham’ in the correspondence had been identified by Harraway as Graham Wood, aged thirty-six, living in Guildford and a successful business man, CEO and majority owner of an engineering firm in Woking which specialised in making replacement parts for the classic and vintage car fraternity. The company had a very good reputation amongst that fraternity and the turnover – and profitability – were enough for Wood to live in a veritable mini-mansion in the expensive outskirts of Guildford, where no house comes cheaply. The minority owner of the company – a twenty per cent holding – was Wood’s uncle, James Wood, eighty years old, who lived in Brighton. James Wood had long been a devotee of old cars and it was he who had actually founded the company in 1970, with his nephew coming on board in 1990 and eventually taking over the reins ten years later.

Graham Wood was a widower, his wife dying of cancer in 2008. How he and Sandra Field had met was unclear, but in any case, to me unimportant. It was the present and the intended future that interested me, not the past.

To my surprise, there was no indication that Wood had ever been questioned by the police, nor that he had attempted to approach them, which seemed incredible. The incredible, however, become more understandable; Wood was currently out of the county and had been for some weeks, in fact, before the murders had started. He had been in California, apparently looking for bargains in the classic car field, and had only learned of Sandra Field’s death some week or more after the event. Understandably, he had not come back for the funeral – he had no means of knowing that the killing was other than some nutter on a killing spree.

He was now in Canada and had a flight booked to back in the UK in a couple of days time, so all being well I intended to talk to him on his return. I wondered if the police were even aware of his existence.

In the meantime, so far as Wood was concerned, all I could do was wait.

There were others things that I could do, however. One of them was to chase up my literary agent; soon after leaving the Army, I had written a book and, to my surprise, it had sold very well. There had even been talks of making it into a film and it was this aspect which I followed up on.

To my pleasant surprise the news was good; a production company had expressed interest and I was invited to meet with them in the near future. There was no question of me writing the film script – they had their own people for that, and no interest in employing a totally inexperienced author to try and learn a new trade.

The really good news was that, subject to meeting with them, they were willing to pay an advance fee, which would be very welcome, as my coffers were beginning to look a bit depleted.

We arranged to meet a couple of days later and the meeting went very well indeed. Kath Lawson, my agent had already prepared the way and I left the meeting with a guaranteed advance of ten thousand pounds, not a fortune in Hollywood terms, but enough to keep the wolf from the door for the next four or five months or so if handled carefully.

Julia was thrilled to hear my news about the advance and we had a slap-up meal and a weekend in the country to celebrate on the strength of it. The hotel that we had chosen was the Wessex, in Winchester, an 41

hotel that I had stayed at a few years earlier when on leave and deciding to treat myself to celebrate my promotion to captain. The choice of Winchester had been because my parents had stayed in the city in the past and had loved it and the surrounding countryside. On the previous occasion that I had stayed there I had been on my own; the celebration was by far the more enjoyable for having Julia with me.

At last Graham Wood was back in the UK and, after an initial reluctance, agreed to meet with me at his home.

I drove up to an impressive neo-Georgian pile, set in nearly an acre of immaculate garden, and rang the bell.

Wood answered the door and I found myself facing a man as immaculately dressed as were his house and garden. He was wearing a cream linen suit over a black shirt and cream tie to match the suit, his feet shod in soft leather beige loafers. I felt distinctly shabby by comparison, even though I was wearing my second best suit and regimental tie.

“Mr. Amherst, pleased to meet you, do please come in.”

He ushered me into a large lounge, large enough to have three settees arranged in a U shape in front of an impressive open fireplace. It was warm enough for the fire not to be lit, but a young tree trunk nestled within it, awaiting any fall in temperature.

As I seated myself I took careful stock of my host. He was a little above average height, perhaps five feet ten or so, and slimly built. Pale blond hair was neatly combed, emphasising a high forehead which terminated in pale eyebrows above light blue eyes. A straight nose over thin lips gave his whole face the appearance of have been fined down to the minimum.

There was, however, nothing minimal about his expression; those pale blue eyes fixed me with an intensity that was palpable.

“So, Mr. Amherst, what do you have to tell me?”

“I don’t know how much you know about Mrs. Field’s murder?”

“Very little. I only discovered what had happened to her when I logged into the BBC news on the Internet, a week after it had happened. I had been very busy tearing around half of California and just didn’t have the time, nor see the need, to look at news from home. What I read led me to believe that Sandra had been one of four victims of a serial killer with, apparently, a hatred of actresses. That being the case, I couldn’t see that there was anything that I could do. My immediate reaction had been to return home at once, but I thought it over and decided against it. Sandra was dead. Nothing I could do would bring her back, and my presence might well tarnish her reputation. She was, after all, a married woman who had been having an affair with me, but as far as I know it was our secret and I felt that it was best to keep it that way. However, from what you said on the phone, matters may be very different?”

“I do believe so. I think that Mrs. Field, Lisa Vaughan, Amanda Hancock and Linda Lafferty were all killed as part of a callous plot by William Vaughan and Charles Field. I believe that the two girls were killed just to establish the beginning of a pattern so that when Mrs, Field and Mrs. Vaughan were murdered the police would be looking for a serial killer with some sort of grudge or psychiatric problem, not something much more straightforward. One of the problems is that the four killings are being investigated by four different police forces, and although they all say that they are working in full cooperation one with another, I really do believe that the lack of an overall command is a bad thing. The way I see it, the first killing, that of Linda Lafferty, was undertaken by Field. Vaughan was actually present at the event and has an absolutely cast-iron alibi; he was on camera, sitting at a table in the hall, at the moment Linda was murdered.

“The next killing, that of Amanda Hancock in Liverpool was, I believe, the work of Vaughan. Whilst that murder was taking place Field had an alibi – not that I think the police paid any attention to him in regard to that killing – he was quite definitely in London in a series of meetings that day, with a dozen or so people all able to state where he was – and it was nowhere near Liverpool. When his wife was killed, Vaughan was out of the country, in Italy –so no suspicion on him. Field, however, has no real alibi for that killing. It happened in the City and he spent money in a supermarket that day near his home, so he wasn’t miles away at the time.

On the other hand when Sandra Field was killed, Charles Field again had a cast-iron alibi – business meetings.

42

“In fact, what we have here, in my opinion, is the sort of thing that Hitchcock portrayed in his film ‘Strangers on a Train’ where two men each agree to commit a murder on behalf of the other – except that Field and Vaughan went further. They not only murdered each others’ spouses, but two totally unconnected girls to further muddy the waters. As for motives – in the case of Vaughan it is very obvious. His wife was going to divorce him, he had a large insurance policy on her life and he also expected to inherit a substantial amount of money over and above that when she died.”

Wood interrupted my flow for the first time.

“Have you gone to the police with all this?”

“I’ve tried, but met a fair amount of indifference and being told to mind my own business. I have no actual proof of any of this – certainly nothing that they could go to court with. Something that I have to ask you –

are you sure that Field was unaware of your affair with his wife? That apart, I don’t know what his motive might have been. I know she intended to divorce him – but did he know that?”

“Until now, I would have said not. We talked about it before I went to America and Sandra said that she would be talking to her lawyer in the next day or two, but up to then she certainly hadn’t mentioned it to Charles. Perhaps she did say something to him whilst I was away – I just don’t know.”

I thought about what Wood was telling me; he had left for California some three months previously, but by then Field and Vaughan had already stopped speaking to each other over the telephone – or at least had stopped speaking on their land lines and known mobiles. My assumption was that it was at that time that they had started to plot the deaths of their respective wives, so as far as Field was concerned he had not decided to have her killed as the result of anything which had occurred whilst Wood was out of the country. I tried another tack.

“Tell me, how did you meet up with Sandra?”

He smiled sadly.

“It was all down to old cars. You know she was in that long running TV thing?”

I nodded my agreement.

“Well, for one episode they wanted an old car. Apparently that particular episode was a flash back in time to the days of the main character’s great-grandparents and they wanted a car from about 1908 or so. I have a loose circle of friends and acquaintances who, between us, provide quite a lot of old vehicles for TV and film work, and I knew that one of my contacts had just the sort of thing they were looking for – a 1909 Daimler.

Thing was, when they wanted the car he was going to be abroad and he wasn’t willing to let somebody from the TV company drive it. Those old cars are very different to what we are used to today and his car was not only old, it was very valuable. We know each other pretty well and he was happy for me to drive it in the film, so that is what happened. Where you see the car being driven,, it is me behind the wheel; in those shots featuring the actor in close-up, he is simple sitting in a stationary car. To impress upon the TV people just how lucky they were to be provided with this old thing, we made them insure it for a million – made their eyes water a bit, but they agreed.

“Sandra was one of the actresses in that flash back episode, playing the great-grandmother of her usual character, and the script called for her to be driven around a couple of times as a passenger in the car, so that is how we met. The episode was quite complicated to shoot – it was spread over nearly a week so I got chatting to her and one thing just led to another. That was nearly two years ago and we became more and more attached to each other. We weren’t able to meet very often, but from time to time I would book a hotel room for us when her film or TV work meant that she was away from home. She started to talk about divorcing Charles about six months ago. Naturally, I was all for it. We had every intention of getting married.”

He broke off his narrative, clearly emotive, then re-gathered himself and continued.

“But that’s never going to happen now. If only I get my hands on whoever killed her..”

He broke off again; this was clearly very painful for him, but I was anxious to get every scrap of information that I could from him.

43

“One thing that she made very clear to me – Charles is an intensely jealous man, and she worried that his jealousy might make things very difficult for her when she decided to divorce him – oh, by then it was quite definitely when, not if.”

The evidence against Field, even though it was flimsy in the extreme, was beginning to stack up. An intensely jealous man whose wife intended to leave him for somebody else and who would take half his money in the process, was a prime candidate for violent action to prevent that from happening. There was, however, a question that was nagging at me.

“Tell me,” I said, “do you think that Field had any idea what was happening about five months ago? That is when the pattern of contact between him and Vaughan suddenly changed.”

Wood’s brow furrowed in thought.

“I would have said no. Certainly at that time Sandra had not said anything to him, and of course now I have no way of knowing when, or even if, she did say anything to him.”

If Wood was correct in his assumption, that gave me a problem. My theory was that Field and Vaughan had decided to murder their respective wives about five months ago. That fitted the change in their telephone habits, and gave time for Vaughan’s American trip to obtain the gun and ammunition, but equally it meant that Field must have known what was going on between his wife and Wood. Nothing else made any sense.

Then a thought struck me as my mind went back to those E-mails between the two women, the E-mails which could be interpreted to infer a man she preferred to her jealous husband.

“Sandra and Lisa Vaughan were quite good friends. Is it possible that Sandra told her friend that she was seeing somebody else, even if not saying who, or that she was contemplating divorcing her husband?”

Wood looked even more thoughtful.

“I suppose it is – and if she did, and Lisa let it slip to Vaughan..”

There was no need for him to finish the thought. The implications were obvious.

“It must have been something like that.” I agreed, “nothing else makes sense.”

“So,” Wood replied, “now what?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed, “I have nothing concrete that we can go to the police with, nothing that would stand up in court.”

“Perhaps,” Wood mused, “we should do something ourselves.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Why not let the two of them know that we are onto them? Scare them into making a mistake of some sort?”

I thought about it. Wood had even more reason to want to see the two killers brought to justice than I had –

his future with Sandra Field had been snatched away from him in the most brutal manner imaginable, and I could well understand his desire for action against the two men we believed to be responsible.

We discussed possible courses of action for nearly an hour, before finally deciding what we would do, a course of action that was to have far reaching consequences.

Chapter Eight

The first stage of our plan was very simple. A photocopy of the receipt given to ‘Charles Carpenter’ for the purchase of a Browning Hi-Power pistol and two boxes of ammunition was posted to William Vaughan with a scrawled message written on it. The message was short and sweet. It just said ‘I know what you’ve done’.

Stage two was another copy of the same receipt, posted to Charles Field. This time the message read ‘You’re both going down’.

We had no way of knowing what transpired between the two men, but I could not believe that they would not be worried by what they had received.

We left them to stew in their own juices for a week, then moved to stage two of our plan. This time Vaughan and Field received identical messages.

The message was written on copies of the delivery note for the taps to Vaughan’s home address instead of his company address. This time it said ‘I want money’.

It was the beginning of our campaign against the two murderers – for murderers I was convinced that they were. I say ‘we’ because after Graham and I had concocted a course of action, we had discussed it with Julia 44

and Richard Cartwright, holding our council of war in Julia’s office after hours as it was reasonably convenient for us all. I had outlined what Graham and I proposed to the other two, both of whom had taken it in their stride and had suggested a few tweaks to the original concept.

It had been Julia who had voiced the worry that, I am sure, had been at the back of all our minds.

“You must be careful. Don’t forget these men have already killed four times. Why should they hesitate over a fifth – or a sixth, or more?”

“Don’t worry, we will be very, very careful over all of this. All we need to do is just get enough evidence to hand everything over to the police with enough incentive for them to really go to town over it.”

Again, we let Field and Vaughan stew for a week. This time, however, they didn’t get posted messages. They got a telephone call; I was the caller.

I called Vaughan first. He answered at the second ring. He must have been near the phone or in a tearing hurry to get to it. He answered with a cautious “Hello?”

I spoke slowly and deliberately, keeping my voice as inflexion free as possible.

“You know who this is. You have been expecting me to get in touch. Look in the post tomorrow.”

Five minutes later I had repeated to message to Field.

In the next day’s post they each received a package, a package containing a ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone.

The next day I phoned first Field, then Vaughan. I gave each an identical message.

“I want five thousand pounds in used notes, no higher denomination than twenties from each of you. Get the money together; I will give you a week to get it, then I will phone again.”

After I had finished the second call, that to Vaughan, I threw my phone away. Mobile phones can be located and even though I had absolutely no reason to suspect that anyone would be trying to trace me from my calls, I had promised Julia – and myself – that I would take no chances. I had made the call out of doors, on a quiet stretch to the Thames river bank between Kingston and Richmond, and once I had satisfied myself that there was nobody around to take any interest in my behaviour, I simply tossed the phone into the river, where it sank immediately.

One week later, and equipped with a new phone, I again phoned the two men. This time, after being assured by both of them that they had the money. I gave them my instructions, first to Field, then to Vaughan.

“Each of you is to put the money into a small briefcase. On Thursday the two of you are to travel in separate cars to Winchester where you will book into the Winchester Hotel. Book for Thursday and Friday nights.

Friday morning, you will each leave your briefcase at reception, giving some story as to why you don’t want to leave them in your rooms nor carry them with you. Give the impression that you are going sight-seeing, but in fact, just drive home, and that’s it. I don’t want to take any risks over you being traced back to me, so pay cash and use false names. Got all that?”

Field had listened to my instructions in silence, but Vaughan wanted to know more.

“How do we know that you aren’t going to go to the police anyway?”

“You don’t, but it is in my interests to keep you out of jail. After all, if you are inside, you aren’t going to be able to pay me, now are you? Don’t think that this is the last time you will be hearing from me; I’m not going to bleed the two of you dry – that might make you desperate – but I do look on you both as an ongoing source of income. I’ll be back for more in a few months time, so you might as well start putting a bit of money aside now.”

“How do I know you actually have anything the police could use?”

“Don’t be stupid – you saw that receipt and that delivery note. You don’t imagine that is all I have, do you?

Bank accounts, phone records, credit card details – all fascinating stuff, and if I’ve been able to get all that, just imagine what the police will find if they get pointed in the right direction. For instance, I know where you got petrol before you drove to Birmingham – and you went in your own car. That was really stupid – the police will be able to use CCTV to track you that day. Once they see you in the right area, it won’t take them long to tie everything together.”

The answer that came over the phone had the sound of a defeated man.

“OK, you win. We’ll do as you say.”

45

The four of us had thought long and hard about how to incriminate Field and Vaughan and had decided that having them agree to pay blackmail and to travel far from their normal haunts would surely indicate consciences far from clear and worthy of police time and effort in following up. We had no intention of taking the money, of course. What we did have, however, was every intention of producing evidence that the police would simply have to act on.

That Thursday we were all in Winchester, although Richard and I went nowhere near the Winchester Hotel.

We were both known to Field and Vaughan, and we dare not risk either of them seeing and recognising us. It was left to Graham and Julia to gather the evidence that we needed; photographs of the two cars with enough background to establish beyond doubt where the pictures had been taken. Shots of both men entering and leaving the hotel together, and finally identification of the staff on duty during the killers’ stay so that they could be interviewed later by the police. The fact that both men had paid by cash was bound to stick in the minds of the reception staff – how many people do that nowadays?

After we got back from Winchester it was time for another council of war. This time we met in my flat, quicker to reach from the M25 than any of the others’ dwelling places or offices.

Between us we prepared a detailed report explaining what we suspected and what we had discovered. The need to conceal the fact that much of our information had been obtained unlawfully made for some interesting creativity in the writing, but we got there in the end. I delivered the package, marked for the attention of Inspector Laine.

As a result, four days later the four of us were invited to the police station. We were issued into a medium sized conference room, rather than the tiny interview room I had previously seen, and as before Laine was accompanied by a woman. This time, however, it was not the attractive Detective Sergeant Lucy Collyer, but a sturdily built woman in her forties or early fifties, who rose to greet us as we entered.

“Gentlemen, Ms. Glendenning, do please come in and seat yourselves. I think that you already know Detective Inspector Laine; I am Detective Superintendent Emma Holland.”

As we seated ourselves and looked expectantly at her, I took a quick glance at Laine. He was clearly composing himself to portray a neutral reaction to events, but equally clearly, he was less than overjoyed at having been supplanted in the handling of the affair. I returned my gaze to Superintendent Holland. Sturdily built, with short, greying hair framing a pale face that spoke of little time out of doors, lots of time in an office, she was dressed in a conservatively cut grey suit, the skirt below knee length, the jacket mannish in its cut. The only relieving feature was a scarab brooch high on the left lapel of the jacket. She had square, almost masculine, hands, the stubby fingers devoid of any rings. She was continuing to speak.

“Thank you for the information that you have supplied. We have studied it carefully, and whilst your theories have a considerable amount of logic to them, I must say that they do not provide us with any new evidence that we could produce in court.”

My heart sank; we were about to be given the same old run-around. However, she had not finished.

“Nevertheless, I do feel that the tying in of both husbands presents an area that we must study in greater depth. As you appreciate, the four police forces involved in these four killings have been cooperating fully, but it has been felt that a formal team charged with investigating them all is now the way to go. DI Laine and his opposite numbers in the other three forces will continue to be the senior investigating officers for each case, of course, but all four forces have agreed that I should assume an overall coordinating role.”

That sounded distinctly better; the woman exuded competence. Coordination sounded much better that cooperation.

“So, please tell me how you have come to the conclusions that you have reached? What information have you gleaned that it would appear escaped the notice of the police?”

There was a sting in that question. We dare not admit to just how illegal much of our information gathering had been. The four of us had discussed this aspect long and hard before finalising the report that we had sent to the police. We had agreed that I would take the lead in explaining how we had come to our conclusions, so I took a deep breath and began.

“As I think you know, I met both husbands. From the start, Vaughan’s attitude didn’t ring true. He was doubtless on his best behaviour when he was interviewed by the City of London police, but he wasn’t 46

worried about me – I was just some hack journalist that he could treat as he wished. Here was a man whose wife had not long been brutally, and apparently pointlessly, murdered, but by the time he spoke with me that scarcely seemed to register with him. He was far more concerned in getting his hands on a few thousand pounds that Lisa had been owed.

“Field, on the other hand, was totally convincing. Here was a man who had been totally destroyed by what had happened, and he fooled me completely. I was already feeling extremely guilty over the death of Linda Lafferty; if I had had the slightest inkling that someone was going to try and shoot her, she would be alive today, for I would never have taken her out of that back door with its easy access and escape route for an assassin. Meeting the two husbands convinced me that Vaughan had something to hide and that Field’s distress reinforced my determination to do whatever I could to help bring the killer to justice.

“The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Vaughan was responsible for the death of his wife and that the other three killings were a smokescreen to divert attention – Richard,” I indicated Richard Cartwright, “first made that suggestion, and when he told me about the big insurance policy that Vaughan had taken out on his wife, the fact that she was intending to divorce him, and the considerable amount of money, over and above the insurance policy, that he stood to gain in the event of her death, I was more certain than ever. When I realised that Vaughan had a cast iron alibi for both the killing of his wife and the murder of Linda Lafferty, it threw me. OK, there was the possibility that he had hired an assassin, but hitmen for hire aren’t easy to find for the average citizen. It wasn’t until Graham surfaced and told me that Sandra Field was intending to divorce her husband and marry him instead, that I started to wonder about Field. Then I began to think; although Vaughan had an alibi for the deaths of his wife and Linda, he didn’t have one for the deaths of Sandra Field and Amanda Hancock. Similarly, although Field had an alibi for the death of his wife and Amanda Hancock, he didn’t have one for Lisa Vaughan, nor Linda Lafferty. I began to think that perhaps we were seeing a real life version of Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ scenario – each carrying out the other’s murder as it were. Tragically, Linda Lafferty and Amanda Hancock were just unlucky to be seen as adding weight to the crazed serial killer theory.

“It was then that two things came to my attention. When I went to see first Vaughan, then Field, I was shown into the lounge in each house. In each case there were some mementoes on a sideboard. Vaughan had a shield from his schooldays for a prize, a swimming award, again from school, and a few later things.

Similarly, Field had the same sort of mementoes. Something I noticed, but only subconsciously at the time, was that both men had an identical little trophy on their sideboards. Most awards of this type are either cups or shield shaped plaques. These identical awards were unusual; they were circular. In each case at the top were the letters ‘HRRC’ in the middle the phrase ‘Dewar Trophy’ and at the bottom a date and the name of the recipient. In the case of Vaughan the date was 1997; Field’s award was three years later, in 2000. It took a long time for me to twig, but I eventually realised what I had seen. The letters – they stand for ‘Ham and Richmond Rifle Club’, a well known local target shooting club. The award was circular because it was intended to represent a target, and the reference to ‘Dewar’ is because in small-bore rifle shooting circles there is a popular course of fire – twenty shots at fifty yards, twenty at one hundred – which is called a

‘Dewar Course’. I checked with the rifle club – although Vaughan is eleven years older than Field, the two were members at the same time and were friendly – as indeed they were in their social lives. So, both men were familiar with firearms, even though it is a very far cry from shooting holes in paper targets with a .22

target rifle to using a handgun to murder someone.

“Thinking about Field, I still could not rid myself of the image he had portrayed of a man totally devastated by his wife’s murder. Again, it was Richard Cartwright who supplied the missing information. In his early days, Field tried acting. He had a few small parts on TV but soon decided that he could do better for himself in the world of financial advising, so his membership of Equity ceased some years ago. That convinced me; what I had been subjected to was an act. A very convincing act, but an act all the same.

“So, I realise that what we have brought to you is all circumstantial, nebulous even, but is there anything in what we are suggesting that you see as totally out of the question?”

Superintendent Holland hesitated for a moment. So far I had said nothing of the further evidence that we had obtained; I could only hope that they would follow, and improve upon, the trail that we had started down.

47

The last thing that I wanted to do was reveal just how much we had discovered as the result of totally illegal computer hacking, but I wanted to keep them thinking about how Field and Vaughan had worked things, not how impossible it was that they might have. I decided to let slip another nugget.

“One thing that we wondered about; actually getting the gun. Like hiring a hitman, not something that the average citizen would find easy – but we know that Vaughan went to America a couple of times not long before the murders. Firearms are much easier to obtain over there than they are here. Perhaps that is how it was obtained.”

At last she spoke.

“Well, Mr. Amherst, I certainly would not dismiss your theories out of hand. Some of them, however, are difficult to accept on face value. Getting the gun, for example. Buying a weapon in the States would be one thing; getting it back to the UK would be quite another. Do your theories cover that?”

I shrugged.

“His company got lots of goods from abroad, including from America.”

“How do you know all this?”

At this point Richard Cartwright took up the lead.

“From me, Superintendent. Lisa talked a lot about her husband’s business trips. She didn’t like the fact that he never took her on any of them, and was suspicious that he was mixing business with pleasure whilst away from home. She told me that he had shipments from abroad, all sorts of things apparently. There was even an occasion when one shipment arrived at the house instead of at the company; she was irritated about that because the parcel was very heavy and she was at home when it arrived and the driver expected her to carry it into the house.”

As an exercise in pointing the police at that parcel which, we were sure, had contained the pistol, it was hard to improve upon Richard’s account, even though it was largely fictitious, but as his sister was dead, nobody could disprove his story.

DSI Holland had clearly taken up the point.

“You suspect that the pistol was in that wrong delivery?”

Richard nodded.

“It seems probable. Vaughan had been receiving goods from abroad for years – marble from Italy, exotic hardwoods from Brazil, tiles from France and Italy, fittings of various types from America. In all that time this was the only occasion on which a delivery came to the house instead of to the company. That delivery was apparently bathroom fittings – all metal things. What better a parcel in which to hide something else of metal? A few weeks later the killings started. It might, of course, be a coincidence, but I find that hard to believe.”

The Superintendent nodded slowly.

“Yes, I can see why that would arouse your suspicions. A bit hard to follow up for proof, of course.

Obviously the parcel has long since been opened and anything in it which might have been illegal, Mr.

Vaughan has had ample opportunity to hide or dispose of.”

At least she was following our thinking, not dismissing it out of hand.

“And how does Mr. Field figure in all this?”

This time it was Graham Wood who took up the narrative.

“I think because of me, Superintendent. Sandra and I had been having an affair, and we were agreed that we both wanted more than an occasional night in an hotel. We wanted to get married, which meant, of course, that Sandra had to get a divorce.”

Holland interrupted him.

“Tell me, Mr. Wood, why didn’t you come forward when Mrs. Field was killed?”

“I was abroad and only learned of her death some days afterwards when I looked at the BBC News website.

My immediate reaction was to come home at once, but when I thought about it, I decided not to. As far as I knew from the report Sandra was the latest victim of a serial killer who, for whatever perverted reason, was targeting actresses. I thought then that nobody knew of our affair. Had I come forward all that I could have achieved was to sully her reputation and she didn’t deserve that from me. I had never met her husband, but I 48

thought that to learn of his wife’s infidelity would only make matters worse for him – again, as far as I was aware he had done nothing to deserve that from me.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“Because David approached me with his theory as to what had happened.”

Holland immediately seized on a weak point; she turned to me.

“But Mr. Amherst – how did you know about Mr. Wood? He hadn’t come forward at all, his existence was certainly unknown to the police.”

This was a crunch point. We had to cover this without revealing the work that Harraway had done for me. It called for another performance from Richard Cartwright.

“Actually, Superintendent, it was me who brought Graham to David’s attention. Charles Field is a very jealous man, and Sandra had confided that fact to my sister on a number of occasions. She had also mentioned the ‘dishy chauffeur’ in the TV series and Lisa rather put two and two together and mentioned to me that she wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sandra were to leave her husband and that if she did so, it would probably be for this chap she had met when he was driving an old car for the TV series. When David and I got together in thinking over what might have been the scenario for murdering Lisa, we also wondered about Sandra’s death- and the two young girls as well, of course – and it was then that I wondered about that chauffeur. We looked up the DVD of the TV series and there in the credits was ‘motor vehicle supplied by Wood Vintage Vehicles’. From that we were able to track Graham down.”

It sounded pretty plausible to my ears; even if it was totally untrue, it was possible. Again, Lisa Vaughan wasn’t around to be asked about it; there really was a DVD of the TV series and it really did credit Graham’s company with providing the old car. Hopefully, it sounded equally plausible to Holland. Thankfully, she seemed to accept it, because she moved on.

“Did you mention any of this to the police, Mr. Cartwright?”

“Not really. They didn’t ask me anything about Sandra’s death. The first time that they spoke to me was only two days after Lisa had been murdered. Sandra was still alive at that point, so obviously there was no mention of her. I did tell them that I was sure that Vaughan was responsible for my sister’s murder, but they pooh-poohed the idea. Vaughan, they told me, had a cast iron alibi for the time Lisa was murdered and as far as they were concerned, that was that. I did say at the time that Lisa and Sandra were friends, but I don’t know if they followed that up at all when she was killed as well. At the time, of course, I was still overwhelmed by Lisa’s death; a tie up with Sandra’s murder when it happened just didn’t occur to me, other than the same lunatic must have killed both of them.”

Holland leaned back in her chair.

“I must say that what you have brought to us does seem a plausible scenario. I had, in any case, requested all four murder teams to do some cross-fertilisation – much as you have done and one of the things that now comes to mind is the fact that it is only now that the two men were experienced shooters and that Field used to be an actor have come to light.”

I was sure that she was putting the best gloss on things that she could – without our work I was certain that those two aspects would not have come to light at all.

That was about it. Holland thanked us for our help and assured us that the ball was firmly in her court and would not be dropped.

Chapter Nine

I had hoped that things would now progress smoothly; with Holland pulling the strings the lack of centralised leadership that had concerned me right from the start was now surely a thing of the past and I optimistically expected to hear of arrests in the near future.

It didn’t happen. Three weeks passed without any news of arrests or anything else. As far as the media were concerned the murders were old hat; there was currently another political scandal for them to get their teeth into and no news about murders now some months old was precisely that – no news.

I was reluctant to try and contact Hammond or Laine; I felt that we had been tolerated rather than welcomed in what we had done and I didn’t want to risk creating friction, friction which just might lead to them 49

wondering about how we had got as much information as we had disclosed and decide to investigate us rather than the murders.

I did, however, have another means of approach. Once again I contacted Linda Lafferty’s cousin, DC

Kenneth Harrison. Perhaps because Hammond had accepted the work that we had put in as useful, he was more amenable than at our previous meeting. Once more we met after he had finished work for the day and once more the venue was the Bag O’Nails pub.

I had asked him what he had heard about progress on the case and he was as forthcoming as he felt that he dared to be.

“Everyone is getting frustrated about it. Hammond is a live wire and has had people chasing up every possible lead. I’m sure that, even so the team haven’t said so in so many words, they are all convinced that this is a conspiracy between the two men, but everything is circumstantial. There is CCTV evidence that Vaughan went to Birmingham on the day that Mrs. Field was killed and that he went to Liverpool the day of Amanda Hancock’s death, but a good defence brief would be able to dismiss that out of hand; he went to both cities several times in the weeks leading up to the murders and has been to them since, so his lawyer would insist that it was pure coincidence that he was there on those two days.”

That threw me. We had never thought of trying to see if the two murder dates were the only ones on which Vaughan had driven to Liverpool or Birmingham. I could see how dismissive a defence lawyer would be able to be over the visits. Harrison hadn’t finished, though.

“Another thing – the gun. Even if Vaughan did go to the States to buy it, it is also clear that he was also there on genuine business, even if his visits don’t fit with his usual pattern of foreign visits. Because he visited a number of places in several countries at irregular intervals over the last few years, his defence could quite believably claim that there wasn’t a pattern to his visits, so to claim that he was acting out of pattern just doesn’t stand up.”

“What about that package that turned up at his house instead of at his company?”

Harrison shrugged.

“What about it? A cock-up by the firm – it was the first – and so far only – time that he had dealt with that firm in Dallas; he would just claim that they had confused the two addresses that he had given them – his company address and his home address. If I were him, I would claim that I had given the Dallas people both because of the time difference – so that if they needed to, they could contact me at home out of normal office hours.”

What had looked, in my optimism, to be a strong case was looking weaker by the moment.

“What about actually buying the gun?”

“You are joking, aren’t you? How many guns do you think get sold in Dallas alone every day?”

Here at least I was on solid ground.

“A lot, I’m sure. But one of the things that I did check on the Internet was the Texas state laws regarding purchasing hand guns. You have to provide identification and the shop has to register the sale on a central database. OK, a lot of guns get sold in Dallas, but there can’t have been many sold to a Brit on the days Vaughan was there.”

“That was checked – the Texas people gave Laine a list of weapons sold the days Vaughan was in the city –

and he doesn’t figure on the list.”

“Well surely you wouldn’t expect him to use his own name?”

“No, but what name might he have used? How can you tell?”

I pretended to be lost in thought for a moment, then advanced a line of theory that we hadn’t included in our report and which I wished now that we had. We hadn’t done so in the first place because we felt that it might look too obvious an indicator as to just how deeply we had been able to dig into databases we had no right to be looking at.

“Well, I know what I would have done.”

“What?”

“Vaughan flew from Heathrow I suppose?”

Harrison nodded.

50

“That’s right. He flew BA direct from Heathrow to Dallas/Fort Worth – it’s about a ten hour flight.”

“Well, what I would have done was to look for the chance to steal a UK passport at Heathrow from someone about the right age as myself. Given the number of people thronging around Heathrow, the chances would be pretty good of finding a suitable target. It might even be that the picture would be good enough – or bad enough – not to need messing about with, but even if it did, I am sure that I could doctor a passport sufficiently well to actually insert my own photo. By the time the disappearance of the passport had been discovered and anything might be done about it, I would be in Dallas. UK passports don’t have your address on them; a few other ‘proofs’ showing my address could be mocked up as soon as I got to my hotel. I go to a gun shop, present my proof of ID and I’m on my way. Don’t forget, he only had to get it past a shop assistant probably anxious to make a sale, not some eagle-eyed immigration officer.”

Harrison looked thoughtful.

“Tell me,” I said, pushing my luck, “were there any hand guns registered as having been bought by a Brit whilst Vaughan was there?”

That, however, was a step too far for Harrison.

“Sorry, I can’t tell you that’”

I accepted the refusal with good grace. I wondered if it was something that had actually been checked, but at least I was now sure that Harrison would find a way of ensuring that if it hadn’t been checked already, then it would be.

We parted on much friendlier terms than before; Kenneth Harrison was determined not to compromise himself by saying anything that he shouldn’t, and he hadn’t, but at least he now appreciated that I and my friends had done something useful, not just muddied the waters of the investigation.

A couple more weeks went by with no further news nor, as far as I could ascertain, any actual progress. I had managed a couple of minor assignments for one of the papers who had accepted my work in the past and Julia and I had spent a couple of week-ends away together, one more time at the Wessex in Winchester, and another in the Hotel Turenne le Marais, just a few minutes walk from the cathedral of Notre Dame. We went over by Eurostar, for Londoners so much simpler and more pleasant than struggling through airports, leaving on the Friday evening and returning after breakfast on the Monday. Julia’s part-time assistant, Helen Hughes, held the fort without difficulty until I dropped Julia off at her office and made my way back to my flat.

I had hardly got in the door when the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

Julia answered.

“David, have you got the TV news on?”

“No, only just got in.”

“Turn it on now – they’ve made an arrest! Must go – got a client waiting.”

I turned on the TV just in time to catch the end of the news as the weather was being forecast with the normal false smiles from the presenter as she told us to expect low temperatures, high winds, and rain.

Turning the set off again, I fired up my computer and went to the BBC news website.

There it was; ‘Man arrested over actress murders’. It went on to say that a forty-eight year old man had been arrested in connection with the killings and was being held by the police.

Forty-eight years old – that was Vaughan. But why only him? Why not Field as well? Hurriedly, I dialled Kenneth Harrison’s mobile number, which he had given me after we had last met. Needless to say, he must have been busy, as my call went straight to voice mail. I left a message asking him to phone me if he could.

To my pleasant surprise he phoned me back less than an hour later.

“David, it’s Ken Harrison. Sorry not to call earlier – a bit tied up with my boss.”

“Ken, thanks for ringing. I was wondering if there was anything you could tell me about the arrest of Vaughan but not Field?”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Field has done a bunk. Later today Superintendent Hammond will be on TV asking for anyone who sees him, or knows of his whereabouts, to get in touch with the police. Look, I’ve got to go – the boss wants me 51

again, but if you found out anything that might give a clue to where he has gone, for heaven’s sake let us know.”

“Ken, I can’t think of anything like that that I haven’t already told DSI Hammond, but I will go over everything again, I promise.”

And at that we both rang off.

I spent the next hour and a half reviewing everything that we had on Field and which we had not already –

because of it having been gathered illegally – told the police. There was nothing. I phoned the others to tell them of my conversation with Ken Harrison and to urge them to rack their brains in case there was anything that I had missed but, like me, they could think of nothing.

I was in the process of putting everything away again when a thought struck me. Field had a small financial advisory company, basically himself and three associates, but it had quite a respectable turnover. When we had been looking through the information that James Harraway had gathered for us, we were all surprised at just how much money the company was worth. Graham had summed up our combined view.

“Financial advisors? More like financial bloody sharks!”

The thing that occurred to me was that the company website – which after is available to anybody to look at, gave potted biographies of all four members of the team. Jenny Troughton, the tax specialist was described as a keen sailor. No further details, like what she sailed, nor where, but it started me wondering. Graham had said that Sandra believed her husband was possibly having an affair with Miss Troughton, but had never done anything about her suspicions.

Suppose Field and Troughton were more than just work colleagues, and if she had access to some sort of vessel capable of offering a getaway, might not that explain were the missing man was?

I decided to put my theory to a simple test, and picking up the phone, dialled Field Associates. A female voice answered and I asked to speak to Ms. Troughton.

“I’m afraid that she isn’t in the office today, sir. Can I ask who is calling? Can I take or message or get one of the other associates to talk to you?”

“No, it’s alright,” I said and rang off.

So, Jenny Troughton was away from the office. It was Monday; the police had tried to arrest Field the previous day, just over twenty-four hours ago. Two questions – had he known that they were coming for him or was he just lucky, and where the two of them together and if so, where were they now?

Once more I got out the report we had sent to the police and scanned it. No mention of the possible affair; we had tried to keep to things that could be demonstrated if the police were to dig into hard information. The possible affair hadn’t fallen into that category; Sandra Field hadn’t been sure herself and hadn’t followed up on it. I cast my mind back to the discussion with Holland and Paine; nothing that had been said that morning had dwelt upon the possible affair either.

I used the phone again, this time ringing Superintendent Holland. I had thought of phoning Ken Harrison again, but giving him the information – no, call that the guess – might make his superiors worry that he might have been speaking out of turn.

I was in luck; Holland was not only in, but agreed to take my call.

“Mr. Amherst, do you have anything for me?”

“I hope so, Superintendent. I’ve just heard that William Vaughan has been arrested but that you are still looking for Field. Something that was only mentioned at the time I first spoke with Graham Wood; Sandra had a suspicion that her husband might have been having an affair with the woman associate in his firm, Jenny Troughton. She didn’t do anything about following it up – at the time she was more interested in a future with Graham. I see from Ms. Troughton’s details on the company website that she is a keen sailor, although it doesn’t say where. I’ve just phoned their office anonymously and she hasn’t come in today. If Sandra’s suspicion was correct, they might be together somewhere – might even be using a boat to escape.”

“Mr. Amherst, thank you for that – I’ll have somebody check it out.”

I put the phone down, glad that I had given voice to my guess and the way in which it had been received.

The rest was down to the police and the details only emerged later. Jenny Troughton did indeed have a boat –

a thirty-four foot sailing ketch which was kept at Hamble. The two of them had boarded it late Saturday 52

evening and sailed away, ostensibly to Calais, although liaison with the French authorities there found no evidence of them arriving. In reasonable weather their vessel was well able to cope with the Channel, or alternatively get to the Mediterranean Similar sized vessels have even been known to cross the Atlantic.

They could have gone almost anywhere.

Obviously, the police wanted to know how Field had discovered that they were coming for him – originally they discounted the idea that it was just a coincidence. However, when exhaustive investigation failed to turn up any leak that would have tipped Field off, they had to accept that he had become aware of their increased interest in him and had decided to go whilst the going was good. The fact that he, Jenny Troughton and her boat had all disappeared together proved that his wife’s suspicions had been correct, but that was of little consolation. A murderer had slipped through the net. The fact that his escape was pre-planned was reinforced when his remaining work colleagues discovered that he had emptied the company’s bank accounts before vanishing, leaving them jobless and with outstanding company debts to settle.

Graham Wood was devastated. He had seen his future happiness snatched away from him in the most brutal fashion imaginable and now didn’t even have the consolation of seeing Field punished for his part in the crime.

It was three days later when my phone rang.

“Hello,”

“Mr. Amherst, it’s George Lafferty.”

“Good morning, Major, What can I do for you?”

“I wondered if we could meet – and it’s George, by the way.”

“Surely – and I’m David. Are you at home?”

“Yes, but I’m coming up to London today to do some shopping. I usually stay at the Savoy – perhaps we could meet there this evening?”

So we met up at seven that evening. It was the first time that I had seen George Lafferty since Julia and I had visited the Laffertys soon after their daughter’s death. I was shocked at the change in. Still immaculately clad, still wearing his regimental tie, he must have lost a stone or more in weight and the good clothes no longer fitted him as before. He looked as though he had dressed in the clothes of a considerably bigger man.

He advance to meet me, holding out his hand. I took it and shook it; the bones seemed to be too near the surface, as though the flesh had shrunken away from them.

“David, thank you for agreeing to see me so quickly.”

“No problem, George, what can I do for you?”

“I’ve a favour to ask – a big one, but first, let’s have a drink – what’s yours?”

“I’ll have a pint, please.”

We got our drinks, found a table in a more or less secluded alcove, and sat to enjoy them. George took a long pull on his own pint, then set the glass carefully down on the table surface. He looked at me for a long moment before speaking.

“I want you to find Field for me.”

I was taken aback. I had no idea why he imagined that I could succeed in tracking down Charles Field when the police, with all their resources and contacts, had failed to discover hair nor hide of him. I was about to say all this when he continued.

“David, I must see that man brought to justice. Linda’s death has totally destroyed Jane. She won’t eat, she won’t go out, she spends more time crying than anything else. Her GP has tried various anti-depressants, none of which helped. He has tried to refer her to a psychiatrist, but she refuses to go. I’m at my wits end, and I am terrified that she may even do away with herself.”

I didn’t know what to say; looking at him, it was clear that their daughter’s death hadn’t only affected his wife; it was clearly tearing him apart as well.

53

“George, nothing would give me greater pleasure than seeing that man behind bars where he belongs, but I just don’t know where to look for him, You know that he took off with his girlfriend before the police could grab him?”

He nodded.

“Well, they took her boat, which is sea-going, and could be anywhere.”

He interrupted me.

“David, I know that you and your friends somehow found out a lot about Field and Vaughan – including things that the police hadn’t managed to find out. If you could do that, isn’t there anyway that you do even more, and track him down?”

I thought long and hard.

“George, we employed a computer expert to do some pretty illegal things – which is why we managed to find out things that weren’t know to the police. They would have had to get warrants, show due causes and all that. The thing is, we had a starting point – or rather several of them. We knew the names of Field and Vaughan, of course. We knew Vaughan had visited the States. We knew, thanks to Richard Cartwright, quite a lot about Vaughan. We knew less about Field, but by tying him and Vaughan in together, it was enough.

Now, however, we know nothing. If Field and the Troughton woman were using their own passports and credit cards I am sure that they would have been found by now. The fact that they haven’t been found makes me certain that they have false passports and presumably false cards as well. How can we find them when we don’t even know their names?”

He refused to be dismayed.

“How good is this computer expert?”

“Very good indeed.”

“Well then, why don’t you ask him?”

That stopped me in my tracks. If I hadn’t seen the results of his work, I would not have believed it possible for anyone to accomplish what James Harraway had, in fact, found relatively easy. Perhaps he could come up with something. George must have sensed what I was thinking.

“Is he expensive?”

“A thousand pounds a day.”

He shrugged.

“We aren’t rich, but I could easily fund a week or two at that sort of rate, and if it eases Jane’s agony, it would be worth every penny ten times over.”

“OK – I’ll talk with him and see what he says – but please, don’t build up you hopes too much until we know what he has to say.”

As a result, I returned to the house in Wimbledon and explained the problem to James Harraway. When I had finished, he thought for a while.

“It should at least be possible to find out where they went and the passports they used when they landed. It will take a while, and it relies upon them having actually landed at a port, not simply beached their vessel somewhere. Given its size, however, that seems unlikely. What I will have to do is mount what we call a

‘brute force attack’; to check every British registered vessel which called at a continental port at the relevant time and the passport details those on board gave to the authorities. This sort of thing would have been impossible in pre-computer days, but now it is relatively easy – just time consuming. It will probably take me two or three days at least – will that be alright?”

I assured him that it would be and took my leave.

A week passed; as before, Harraway ran my task simultaneously with other projects he had in hand, but he came through with the results. Field and Troughton had sailed in her thirty-four foot ketch; that we knew as a starting point. Clearly they had somehow falsified not only their own passports but also the vessel’s registration papers. They must have thought that they were safe from being tracked down, but had no idea just how their trail could be seized upon by somebody like James Harraway. In essence, ten days after leaving Poole on board the Southern Breeze as Charles Field and Jenny Troughton, they had arrived at the 54

tiny Italian town of San Giorgio, about a hundred miles south of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian coast as Douglas Lattimer and Joyce Griggs on board the Southern Comfort. For the boat, they had contented themselves with a bit of doctoring of its papers. For themselves, they had fake passports, both of which had been reported as stolen some months earlier. Whilst major ports would have been checking arrivals with British passports against a list of known stolen or fake ones, a tiny Italian port, really no more than a mooring place for a few private yachts, far removed from the likes of those to be seen at Monaco or St. Tropez, and a fishing vessel or two, would have seen a much less rigorous examination. Harraway had tracked them down, as he explained it, by ‘brute force’; he had identified every small British registered vessel with a man and woman on board which had docked in a European port in the two weeks following Field and Troughton’s disappearance, cross matched the passports against the passport authority’s records and come up with the two stolen ones in a boat of the right size and a credible journey time.

The boat was still in the harbour and the local authorities had effectively arrested it as it had long overstayed the dues that had been paid. There was, however, no hunt for its owners; the authorities had the boat impounded; if the owners never returned it would eventually be sold off at auction and the money claimed for the local coffers. If the owners did return they would have to settle up before being allowed to leave. All very civilised.

I reported all this back to George Lafferty.

“So,” I said, “now what do we do?”

He hesitated for a moment before saying what was clearly uppermost in his mind.

“Do you think that you could find them – or more particularly, find Field. I’m not interested in the girl.”

“Well, I could try. It seems clear that they didn’t stay in San Giorgio but went on to somewhere else or the harbour authorities would be onto them to pay the mooring dues and we know that that hasn’t happened. The problem will be working put where they went from there. I’m willing to spend a week or so over there seeing if I can find a trace of them – I reckon that if I can’t come up with something in that time, I’m never going to.”

“I’ll pay your expenses, of course – and don’t stint yourself. Money is no good to me if Jane continues to go downhill, which seems frighteningly likely as things are at the moment.”

“I’ll get over there as soon as I can – a couple of days or so should enable me to sort things out here.”

I told Julia of the latest development that night. Like me, she was dubious about my chances of finding Field, who must have gone to ground somewhere, somehow. There was no guarantee that he was still even in Italy

– for all we knew it might have just been a jumping off place for somewhere else.

“I’ll come with you.” Julia declared.

“Well, I’d love that, but can you spare the time?”

“For a week or two – no problem – it’s time I had a holiday, or at least a break from the office. Anyway, how is your Italian?”

“Pretty non-existent – I’m going to have to find English or French speakers – my French is pretty good, but my Italian just about begins and ends with ‘Scusi, signore, ni parli italiano’”

She laughed.

“Well, that would be understood – but even that isn’t quite right. What you should say is ‘Spiacente, signore, non parlo italiano’!”

“Oh, so how’s your Italian?”

“Pretty fluent, actually. I’ve spent quite a few holidays over there, and in my gap year before uni I actually lived with an Italian family for three months.”

“Right – that’s settled. You are the official interpreter for the trip!”

Accordingly, a couple of days later, we were leaving Naples behind us, a hundred and thirty miles of the picturesque A3 (a far cry from its English namesake) ahead of us. The flight from Heathrow had been uneventful, and the arrival in brilliant sunshine at the Aeroporto di Napoli a delight after leaving a London enmeshed in a cold, damp day with the promise of more of the same to come. Our route took us through largely urban areas, including Pompeii, at first, but eventually it left the coast to climb the surrounding hills, 55

then to plunge down again to Salerno. South of Salerno it is named the Autostrada Salerno- Reggio Calabria as it races through a series of tunnels with occasional glimpses of the countryside. Still in the mountains, we left it a little before Lagonegro for the slower SS585 which took us south and west from the Autostrada and eventually, via the smaller SS104 into San Giorgio from the east. The weather was perfect and I was glad that the Fiat that we had hired was a convertible. Julia, in particular, enjoyed lolling back in the passenger seat, letting the wind blow her hair free.

San Giorgio is on the southern outskirts of Sapri, a small town of about seven thousand population and is little more than the harbour with its incorporated marina. A few fishing vessels were in evidence in the former, but the later held several dozen yachts, none of them the floating gin palaces of the super-rich, but quite a few clearly worth serious money.

Our first task was to check that the Southern Breeze, now known as the Southern Comfort, was still in the marina. A stroll round the mooring area was all that was needed. She was indeed still moored, bobbing very gently on the blue water, a notice attached to her stern proclaiming, in Italian, that she had been impounded for outstanding mooring fees. She was ketch rigged, despite her quite small size – two masts, both with fore and aft sails, now furled, of course. Her registration papers declared that she had been built in Hamble back in 1955, but she had clearly been well cared for in the subsequent nigh on sixty years. Wood built, her hull was painted a glossy light blue, her deck was natural wood, deeply varnished. She was not totally reliant on sail power; an auxiliary diesel engine was hidden in her depths. Her two masts, wooden as one would expect from her age, soared above her decks. All in all, she looked a valuable piece of property and it was sad to think of her as an accomplice to murder.

We next went in search of the harbour master. Luigi Parlese proved to be a charming man, perhaps late fifties or early sixties with a mass of white hair, matching his neatly trimmed beard and moustache, framing a sun-tanned face lined with deep wrinkles in skin that looked almost leather-like. Deep-set blue eyes regarded us with curiosity as we explained that we were trying to locate the owners of the Southern Comfort.

Our story – for I felt that explaining that we were trying to track down a murderer and his accomplice would lead to far too many complications – was that they had run out on us in a business deal and that they owed us money. Shown their pictures, Luigi readily confirmed that ‘Douglas Lattimer’ and ‘Joyce Griggs’ were indeed Field and Troughton, so my subliminal fear that Harraway had been mistaken was laid to rest. Luigi had no idea, of course, as to where they might have gone once they were on dry land, but we had another string to our bow in that search. In these days of credit and debit cards, it is almost impossible to avoid leaving a paper trail, no matter where you go, and no matter where you go, someone with the resources and ability of James Harraway can find you.

Several weeks before their disappearance, both Field and Troughton had opened new bank accounts with one of the more secretive banks in the Caribbean. Days before they left they had transferred all their funds to the new accounts; in Field’s case the funds included stripping out everything he could of his company’s assets.

Once in Italy, they had each opened yet another account, using the off-shore funds and references to satisfy the Italian bank as to their bona fides, using a third identity each. Charles Field, who had briefly become Douglas Lattimer, was now Charles Kilner, a citizen of the Dominican republic, although of American extraction. Jenny Troughton, briefly Joyce Griggs, was now Jenny Kilner, his wife, similarly with American antecedents.

I was staggered at the work that Field had put into their disappearance; clearly, right from the outset he had been concerned that the murders that he and Vaughan had carried out would somehow be traced back to them, and had planned meticulously to avoid the forces of law and order. It was his misfortune that I had put James Harraway onto his trail. Now that I had the physical confirmation from Luigi Parlese that it was indeed Field and Troughton who had sailed into his small harbour, all that needed doing was to locate their present whereabouts.

Once again it was James Harraway who was to prove their Nemesis. They had been using debit cards issued by their new Italian bank in the town of Reggio Calabria, the provincial capital of the commune of the same name, right down in the ‘toe’ of Italy, opposite Sicily across the Straits of Messina. They had rented an apartment in the Viale Calabria, a wide, pleasant street far enough away from the railway terminus and the 56

docks to be reasonable quiet, but convenient for transport if needs be. The town is quite large, with nearly two hundred thousand inhabitants – large enough for two foreigners, even foreigners as exotic as coming, ostensibly, from the Dominican Republic, not to stand out as they would have done in somewhere small. The town has a bad reputation as having been a hotbed of organised crime – the nearest of Sicily and its Mafia were reflected on a part of the mainland so close to that troubled island – a reputation that is slowly being overcome. I wondered if that background of organised crime had been of any significance to Field when he decided to relocate himself.

One further thought intrigued me. Dominica is a fairly cosmopolitan country, but predominantly Spanish in culture and Spanish is the national tongue. I had no way of knowing how fluent Field and Troughton might be in the language; perhaps reasonably so but not well enough to pass themselves off in a Spanish environment? Perhaps that was the reason for them coming to Italy? I had no idea whether they had Italian as well in their vocabularies, but in a town the size of Reggio Calabria they might well find enough English spoken to get by.

We parked the hire car in the Vico Vitteta, a couple of hundred yards away from the road where our quarry had their apartment, and leading off it. We walked cautiously into the Viale Calabria, taking advantage of the shadows cast by the trees. The last thing I wanted was to blunder into Field, as he knew me by sight and although he had never met Julia to date, to see her with me would be a total giveaway. Troughton I was less sure of. Certainly I had never met her, but I could not be positive that she hadn’t seen me at some stage.

We identified the building in which they were staying. Their apartment was on the fourth floor, with a balcony overlooking the street. It was the middle of the afternoon, with the sun at its hottest, and the shutters to the windows were closed.

In the records regarding the letting of the apartment that James Harraway hid unearthed for us, one particularly useful piece of information was the telephone number of the apartment, and Julia now rang that number. Three rings and a woman’s voice answered. In her fastest Italian, Julia asked to speak to an imaginary friend. I had assumed that neither Field nor Troughton would be fluent in Italian, but I was wrong.

The woman answered equally rapidly, assuring Julia that she had the wrong number.

We looked at one another. Clearly Jenny Troughton was home, but was Field?

We had thought long and hard about our next step. We needed positive identification of the two fugitives, but above all else we must not risk letting them suspect that their location was known. We were lucky in that on the opposite side of the road from our target there was a small restaurant. It was almost empty, so we were able to park our backsides onto chairs at a table close by the window and from which we could see, at an angle, the apartment in which we were so interested. We dawdled over coffee and pastries, both delicious and Julia engaged the waiter in conversation to check that the restaurant would be open for dinner later that day. We spun the conversation, and the coffee and pastries out as long as we could, but the apartment across the street remained firmly shuttered.

We needed an hotel, and less than half a mile away from Field and Troughton’s apartment, we found the four star Hotel Albanuova, in the Via Marsala, just off the Via Aspromonte. It was a backstreet residential area, with no shops or other attractions that might cause Field or Troughton to come wandering by. We booked in and made ourselves comfortable until nine in the evening, when we set off to return to the little restaurant and see if there was any sign of life in the apartment opposite.

We were about to turn into the Via Marsala when, overcome with a sudden thought, I stopped in my tracks, causing Julia to stop suddenly as well. She looked at me in surprise.

“What’s up, David?”

“I’m an idiot,” I exclaimed. She nodded in agreement.

“Yes, but quite a lovable one. What particular bit of idiocy, though?”

“How far would you say that it is from the restaurant to that apartment?”

She furrowed her brow in concentration for a moment.

“Forty yards or so? I’m not very good at distances.”

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“I make it about fifty-five. And Field and Troughton have been living there for a little while now, certainly long enough to discover that they have an excellent restaurant right on their doorstep. What would be more convenient for them?”

She followed my though process instantly.

“And if they decide to dine there tonight, we might walk in on them..”

“Or they on us. Come, on, let’s get away from here.”

My blood ran cold when I thought how stupid I had been. It was essential that the fugitives did not realise that we knew where they were, and I had risked ruining everything through sheer carelessness. I had let myself become fixated on hunting them down, so fixated that I had totally failed to think my actions through properly. Such an error in my Army days could have cost lives. I realised that I had become fixated on my target without taking account of what that target might do – rather like a chess player so wrapped up in planning his own moves that he ignores those of his opponent – a sure recipe for disaster.

Julia, however, had an alternative idea.

“Look, I’ve never met either of them, they’ve never met me. At least I can walk past the restaurant – they might just be in there.”

A few minutes later she was back, bubbling with excitement.

“Would you believe it? They are sitting right where we sat – and I’ve got a picture of them on my mobile phone – the first time being able to take photos with it has ever proved useful!”

We hurried back to our hotel and immediately sent an E-mail, with Julia’s photo as an attachment, to Detective Superintendent Hammond, telling her where she could find the fugitives. It was now getting on for ten o’clock at night, so I wasn’t surprised that we received no immediate response, but the next morning, an hour or so after we had enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, my mobile rang. It was the Superintendent.

“Mr. Amherst, thank you for your information. I am phoning to let you know that I am in contact with the local Italian authorities; they may want to talk to you, so would you please get in touch with them, The officer concerned is Commissario Crocetti.”

She gave me the Commissario’s telephone number, and an hour later, after Julia had phoned and made the necessary arrangements, we were ushered into a pleasant office in the police station. Overlooking the main piazza from its second story location, the occupant’s desk was located to enable its occupant to take advantage of the large window. The walls were a restful shade of cream, the furniture modern and simplistic.

The overall effect was one of simple elegance, far removed from what I had expected.

Commissario Crocetti rose to greet us and guided us into two comfortable visitors’ chairs across from his desk. Like his office, the Commissario portrayed a picture of elegance. Tall and slim, his long, saturnine face featured dark, almost black, eyes in his olive skin. A pencil thin moustache graced his upper lip, the black moustache echoing the colour of his hair, worn short and neatly combed. He wore an immaculate white linen suit, the jacket open to reveal a dark blue shirt with a white tie matching his suit. His feet were clad in pale cream loafers, whilst a slim gold watch with a black face encircled his left wrist, balanced by what looked like an identity bracelet, also gold, adorning his other wrist. He wore a thick gold band on his wedding ring finger, again balanced, this time by a signet ring on the corresponding finger of his right hand. All in all, he looked more like a male model for a high class fashion house than a working copper. However, I was well aware of the fact that looks can be deceptive.

He smiled at us, a smile which displayed perfect, dazzlingly white, teeth. I was beginning to feel like something that the cat had dragged in.

“Signor, signorina, many thanks for your help,” even his English was perfect – well, perhaps there was the faintest trace of an Italian accent – just enough to make him sound slightly exotic, “ I have received a request from your British police to apprehend two wanted fugitives now living here in our town. I am only too pleased to be able to help; we have quite enough villains of our own to cope with without needing any imports. Now, I need to be quite sure that we have the right people. I understand that you, Signor Amherst, can identify Signor Field from face to face contact, but only by photograph regarding Signorina Troughton, is that correct?”

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“Absolutely. I have met Field, but I’ve only seen photos of his girl friend.”

“And they are here under false identities?”

“That’s right – they both have false passports. Field is calling himself Charles Kilner, the woman is masquerading as his wife, Jenny Kilner.”

“Yes, that is the information I have from the British police. Now, clearly we must be absolutely sure that we have the right people, so, if you are agreeable, I would like you to accompany me to their apartment block. I have had one of my men check the place out; each floor has four apartments, with pairs of front doors opposite each other. The apartment opposite our quarry is currently occupied, but the couple who live there have agreed to us using it as an observation post. What I propose is that fairly early tomorrow morning you and I secrete ourselves in the apartment and you keep watch through the spy-hole in the door. One of my men, pretending to be a postman with a wrongly addressed parcel, will knock on their door and, hopefully, Signor Field will answer and you can confirm his identity. If the woman answer and you are sure it is her –

then that is good enough for me. I will have men waiting and we will then make the arrest.”

Just a few minutes later he indicated that his officer was on his way up. I glued my eye to the spy-hole; I had already checked that it gave an excellent view of the front door opposite.

The policeman, disguised as a postman, came into my view; as instructed, he positioned himself carefully so that when the door was opened he would not hide from the view the person who opened it.

I watched avidly as her rang the bell; there was a pause of a few moments and the door opened.

To my disappointment, it was not Field who appeared, but his paramour. Jenny Troughton was almost unrecognisable from the photographs that had been available back in Britain. Her hair, formerly long and blonde was now very short and jet black. Her eyebrows, almost invisible in her blonde days, now made a definitive statement; had it not been for Julia’s idea of photographing her and Field as they sat in the restaurant, I would have been less than one hundred per cent certain that it was indeed her. Thanks to last night’s picture, however, I had no doubt whatsoever; I was looking at Jenny Troughton.

I stepped back from the door and turned to Crocetti.

“It’s the woman – no doubt about it.”

He nodded and gave rapid instructions into the radio he had been holding at readiness. Less than five minutes later, the apartment had been raided and Jenny Troughton arrested. But there was no sign of Field. Certainly he had been there – clothes and other evidence demonstrated that, but of the man himself there was no sign and when questioned, Jenny Troughton, in addition to maintaining that she was Mrs. Jenny Kilner, claimed that her ‘husband’ was away on business and that she knew not where. He had, she claimed, left the previous evening after they had dined at the restaurant across the street. He had, she said, hired a car earlier that day –

again she claimed not to know from which company – and was driving over night for an early morning meeting, but again she didn’t know where.

How Field had escaped was a mystery. The police officers had been in place by ten to seven and the

‘postman’ had knocked on the door just a few minutes later – surely too early for Field to have gone out shopping. The ‘postman’ had stayed in the corridor until his colleagues had arrived, so Field hadn’t got out that way. The building had an external fire escape staircase, but Crocetti’s first act on arriving on scene had been to post two men to cover that exit, so he hadn’t made his escape that way either.

So where had he gone? Crocetti had his men conduct a door-to-door enquiry, in case somebody had heard or seen something, anything, but with no result.

The enquiry wasn’t exhaustive; in two apartments nobody answered the knocks on the doors. Crocetti had one of his officers check with the building’s agents who occupied those apartments. One was rented by a young couple whose immediate neighbour was able to tell the police that they were away on a brief holiday.

The neighbours of the other empty apartment had a different tale to tell. For some weeks now there had been a new tenant, a tenant they had never seen, a tenant who, apart from some subdued banging for an hour or so when he had, presumably, just moved in, made no noise, a tenant, indeed, who might as well now not exist.

Crocetti obtained a warrant to search the premises, and what was found there caused him to seek me out and ask me to join him at the police station. Their he filled me in on what they had found.

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All the apartments were let furnished, so it was impossible to draw any conclusions about a tenant from his or her choice of furniture. In most such places, however, one would expect to find some evidence of the inhabitants. Not here, however; the bedding still resided in a linen cupboard with the beds exhibiting bare mattresses. The fridge/freezer was empty. There was no radio, no television, in fact no evidence that the place had actually been occupied at all.

Apart from one thing. The ceiling of the living room had a hole in it, a hole approximately thirty inches square. The plaster which had clearly once formed the surface of the ceiling had been swept into a corner of the room and the dining table stood directly under the hole.

The hole clearly explained the initial banging, and its purpose was only too clear. It was the apartment directly under that occupied by Field and Troughton, and when that apartment was re-examined all became only too clear. In common with the apartment below, it had polished wood floors which had large rugs on them. When that in Field and Troughton’s dining room was pulled back it revealed that an area of the floorboards had been cut out and transformed into a trapdoor. What had happened to Field was now easily explained; presumably suspicious of the ‘postman’ he had let himself down into the apartment below and simply waited there until the police presence was removed.

Crocetti was just about incandescent with himself and his officers, but to be fair, once they had established Field’s absence from the apartment, there were no grounds for searching it other than obvious hiding places

– cupboards, under the beds, and the like.

There were two questions needing answers; why had Troughton remained behind, and secondly, and far more importantly, where was Field now?

The first question was easily answered; had Troughton not remained behind the rug could not have been pulled back over the trapdoor, revealing their hiding place and almost certainly leading to the capture of them both. Less easy was to know why she should have done so, presumably voluntarily, when it assured her own capture. Perhaps she thought that she really would be able to fool the Italian police into believing her story; that she really was a Dominican citizen and had nothing to do with any wanted murderer on the run from the UK. It was, of course, only Field who was wanted for the murders, although she was viewed by the UK police as a probable accomplice, not an innocent girl friend.

\the second question, that of Field’s whereabouts, was an imponderable. Over twenty four hours had elapsed between arresting Troughton and discovering the trapdoor. In that time, minus the two hours or so he would have needed to lie low until the police left the building, he could have got far away.

Crocetti’s reason for calling for me was to reassure himself that there was absolutely nothing further that I knew, or even suspected, that might help him in his hunt. Sadly, there was nothing; the fact that Field had fled to Italy was a total surprise to me. I knew of no contacts that he might have had, I assured the Commissario – then I stopped in mid flow.

“What have you thought of?” he demanded eagerly.

“Well, Commissario, I know of no contacts that Field might have in Italy – but I do know that Vaughan, his partner in crime, had contacts in Italy. It’s unlikely, as far as I am aware those contacts are straightforward businessmen, but I suppose that it is possible that Field knows of them and there might be a possibility of getting help from one or other of them.”

“Do you have their details?”

“Yes, I do – I brought all that we have about the murders with me on my computer – it’s back in my hotel.”

Crocetti was too impatient to wait for the computer to be fetched. Instead we drove, lights flashing and siren blaring, to the hotel, much to Julia’s surprise.

Hurriedly I booted up the laptop and showed Crocetti the list of Italian business men who had provided Vaughan’s alibi for the murder of his wife.

He looked down the list of five names, then looked again. He tapped the screen with a fingernail.

“This name – you are sure of it?”

I nodded, hoping against hope that I would not have to explain how I came by the names, as they represented some more of James Harraway’s hacking.

Crocetti pursed his lips.

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“Salvatore Mancini” he mused. “I wonder. According to this he represented the Martelli company. The Martelli company is based right here in Reggio Calabria, and we are hundreds of miles away from the marble quarries. I know of a Salvatore Mancini – he is not a nice man. He is the Segundo – how would you say it –

second-in-command – to an even less nice man, his uncle Luca Martelli. Uncle Luca is not nice, but he is clever. He is suspected of having his beak in every major criminal activity in this city, but he has never been convicted of a crime, never even arrested. Now if he, or just his nephew, are involved somehow in this, I am even more interested than before.”

I thought about it – if Vaughan had had dealings with Mancini it didn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility that there might be some sort of tie-in with Field coming to Reggio Calabria.

After Crocetti had left, I opened my E-mail account and, to my surprise, discovered that I had an E-mail from James Harraway. I read it with interest.

‘It has dawned on me’ he wrote ‘ that we have not looked at the travel pattern for subject B (that was how we referred to Field whenever needing to mention him in writing – subject A was, of course, Vaughan).

Intrigued by what has been found to date, I decided to rectify this over sight – without charge. I have found that on the 3rd March last year he took an early morning flight from Heathrow to Naples where he hired a car and returned to the UK on the evening of the 5th. When he returned the vehicle he had covered six hundred and forty miles. There is no record of him purchasing fuel during that time by credit card, so presumably he used cash. Similarly, his records show no hotel stay; again probably cash was used.

I cross-checked the date of his travel with that of subject A, who had visited Italy – again Naples – two weeks earlier.’

I pondered this new information. The mileage would cover a trip from Naples to Reggio Calabria and back, allowing for a small amount of driving around in addition to the basic route. What had Field been up to? I wondered if, in fact, both he and Vaughan had been intending to flee the UK and that Vaughan had just been a bit too slow, not realising that the net had been closing around him. There must have been a reason for Field making a flying visit to Italy and putting in so many miles in the process. Was the fact that Mancini had been in the meeting with Vaughan in Naples, but was based in Reggio Calabria, significant? A thought struck me; the Dominican passports. They had only appeared after Field and Troughton had landed in Italy and, quite possibly, not until after they had arrived in Reggio Calabria. Mancini – and his uncle Luca – had links to the local underworld, perhaps even controlled it. Perhaps it was the Mancini/Martelli organisation that had provided those passports.

None of that, however, helped in finding where Field had go to.

Chapter Ten

With no clues to where the fugitive might be hiding, and no further information we could give Crocetti, I suppose that we would have been justified in claiming that we had done all that we could and giving in and returning home, but my conscience would not let me. I had so nearly got Field arrested, but nearly isn’t near enough.

Crocetti had been gracious in his thanks for the information that we had been able to provide, but he clearly viewed our usefulness as being at an end.

Reggio Calabria is a city of nearly two hundred thousand people, an old, sprawling city with a multitude of places where Field might be holed up – always assuming that he was still in the city at all. I could think of no way in tracking him down that would not already be being taken by the police, but my pigheadedness would not let me rest.

I had intended to tramp the streets in the hope of spotting him, arguing that I was more likely to recognise him than a policeman with only a photo to work from, and that I had a far greater incentive to look for him than did any policeman, but Julia pulled me up short by pointing out the obvious problems in such a course of action.

“Reggio Calabria has something like two hundred thousand inhabitants, David. The odds against you catching sight of Field are enormous. And in any case, suppose you do see him, what then? If you see him, 61

the odds are that he will see you and do a bunk again. Suppose you actually manage to catch him – you don’t speak Italian, onlookers might think that you are a mugger. Last thought – suppose he still has that gun? He might even shoot you!”

“So what do we do then? I can’t just leave it – I want him.”

“Suppose we offer a reward? Just think about it – he is an Englishman here in an Italian town, provided of course, that he is still in the town. No matter where he is, there must be locals who know about him. He has to go out for food, unless he has organised somebody to do that sort of thing for him – but that still means somebody who knows about him. Times are hard, here as everywhere. Why should a local pass up the chance of some money for informing on him. He can’t have any friends here, not real friends – he hasn’t been around for long enough.”

“If we offer a reward surely the police would have to be involved – it might be that they people who know about him might not want to go to the police. Also, what if he hears about the reward? How are we going to make people aware of it? We can hardly put up posters – he could well see them and know what was going on.”

Julia paused to consider the practicalities of her idea. She shrugged her shoulders.

“You’re right – we are going to have to involve the police. Why don’t we talk to Crocetti?”

“I guess the first thing is to see if we can organise a decent enough reward. I wonder what would be enough to tempt people?”

Julia furrowed her brow.

“Five thousand Euros, perhaps?”

“Well, if I had the opportunity to turn in someone I owed nothing, that would certainly tempt me.”

It was time to do some telephoning. I had kept George Lafferty and Richard Cartwright au fait with what we had been doing, so the calls were no surprise. I explained our thinking, emphasising that there was no guarantee that a reward would work, but that we had run out of alternatives. George’s reaction was immediate.

“David, I can find three thousand Euros immediately – I will transfer them to you today. I can raise more if it is needed, but it will take a bit of time – I’d have to sell some things.”

I assured him that three thousand was a great contribution and phoned Richard Cartwright. Like George, his reaction was positive; a thousand Euros, thanks to the wonders of Internet banking, would be with me within the day.

I thought about money; Julia’s five thousand sounded a nice round figure, a nice tempting figure if there was somebody out there who could point the finger at Field’s hiding place at no cost nor risk to themselves.

I told Julia of my progress, then made a decision of my own.

“ I can add five hundred to the pot, might be able to squeeze a thousand, although it would bite into my savings.”

“No, David, don’t do that –I’ll match your five hundred – Linda and Amanda were friends, after all.”

So we had five thousand Euros to tempt someone who might know where Field was hiding. The next trick was to get that knowledge to where it do some good; for that we needed to talk to Crocetti.

Rather to my surprise, he welcomed the idea. His officers had achieved no success to date, but he felt that the idea of a five thousand Euro sweetener might well bring results.

“There is one thing, however,” he said, “it is quite likely that Signor Field has gone to ground with the help of the underworld. In that case it is unlikely in the extreme that anyone will give him up to the police for such a sum. They would be risking the displeasure of their peers and the bigger fish in the pond. On the other hand, I can have my men get their contacts to put the word about that a man wanting vengeance – that is you, Mr. Amherst - against this Englishman is willing to pay money to find him. They understand vengeance around here and as Field has no family here to protect him, they would not fear being dragged into a feud.”

Then it was a case of waiting and hoping. Several days went by with no news. In the interim two detectives arrived from the UK to take Jenny Troughton back with them, much to Crocetti’s relief. She had hired a lawyer who was trying to get her released, and Crocetti was uncomfortably aware that, apart from my testimony, there was no proof available to him to say that she was anything other than whom she claimed to 62

be; a Dominican citizen whose husband had disappeared and about whom she was, she claimed, increasingly worried. She had, her lawyer kept pointing out, committed no crime in Italy. The police claimed that she was using a false passport, but the Dominican consulate in Naples had declared that her passport was genuine, although they also admitted that they had no other record of her existence. They had promised to investigate further via the Embassy in Rome, but this was taking time and Troughton’s lawyer had tried to get her released pending those enquiries being completed. The UK officers, arriving with a European arrest warrant which was immediately approved by a local judge, arrived just about in time to get Crocetti off what was beginning to look like an increasingly uncomfortable hook.

I learned that the UK officers were, in fact, Detective Inspector Laine and Detective Sergeant Collyer.

Unsurprisingly, they were in no mood to meet with me when I offered, through Crocetti, to bring them up to date on what had happened between the fugitives leaving the UK and them arriving at Reggio Calabria. I had told Crocetti of what we had found at San Giorgio, but it was, after all, Julia and I who had actually seen the boat and talked to the local authorities there. I assumed that Laine was still unhappy at having had Superintendent Holland take over responsibility for what had been his investigation. To have a civilian further add to the things outwith his knowledge was probably an irritation he was unwilling to bear, and to be fair to him, nothing that I would be able to tell him would really add anything to the case.

There was movement, of a kind, the very next day. Julia and I were having a mid-morning espresso at a small roadside cafe, enjoying the warm sunshine and trying not to admit to each other our frustration at our lack of progress.

I had just finished the coffee and was about to suggest that we took a stroll when a man came up to our table and, without a word being spoken, sat himself down opposite me and next to Julia.

“You are Signor Amherst?” he demanded in heavily accented English.

I looked at him; he was, I would judge, in his early forties, slimly built and dressed in an immaculate white suit which, combined with a dark blue shirt and white tie, reminded me irresistibly of Commissario Crocetti, an impression reinforced by a very similar pencil thin moustache, the same dark hair and eyes. The two men could easily have passed for brothers. As I looked at him, I became aware that he was not alone; a couple of paces away from the table stood two men, both dressed in dark suits with white shirts, sartorially almost negative images of the man who immediately projected the impression of being their leader. They were alike; almost Tweedledee and Tweedledum, but a little under six feet tall, both heavily built, their buttoned jackets straining over broad shoulders and deep chests. Even their expressions were the same; unsmiling, with dark eyes, deep-set in sallow faces, constantly on the move as they scanned the area.

I admitted my identity and was treated to a smile, a smile which I found disconcerting, a smile projecting power and possibly menace.

“Allow me to introduce myself, Signor. I am Salvatore Mancini and I am interested in your search for Signor Kilner. It may be that I can help you to find him, but I wonder why I should do so?”

I was in a quandary; from Crocetti’s description of Mancini’s position in the area, I could not imagine five thousand Euros as being f much interest to him. It probably would not have paid for his clothing. It certainly would not have paid for the Rolex watch around his left wrist.

“I am looking for him, Signor Mancini, because he shamed me. He murdered a woman I was paid to protect and I will not rest until I can make him pay for that deed.”

It all sounded a bit over-dramatic, but somehow the situation seemed to call for dramatisation. He gave me a repeat performance of the smile.

“I understand that you are offering a small reward for information about where he may be found?”

“A small reward to someone such as yourself, Signor Mancini, but I am not a wealthy man; it is all I have been able to put together.”

Again that cold, worrying smile.

“In these hard times, Signor Amherst, even a small reward can be welcome. How would you pay such a reward?”

“In cash; I could have it available as soon as I knew where my enemy is hiding.”

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My mind was working furiously; why should a major figure such as Mancini concern himself in such a matter? My curiosity was met by Mancini’s next words.

“You can find your enemy in the village of Mossorrofa; he is hiding in an apartment owned by a man called Giorgio Montafiore in the Via Sella San Giovanni – this is the address.” He handed me a visiting card. On one side was simply the name of the Martelli company and its address and telephone number. On the other an address had been hand written.

“When you find your enemy, I would count it a favour if you were to let him know that he should not have left Reggio Calabria without paying his debts. It implies a lack of respect for those who thought him an honourable man.”

So that was it; Field had run out owing Mancini something – perhaps money, perhaps something else.

Whatever it was, it had earned him the enmity of a very dangerous man with a considerable organisation at his beck and call, an organisation that had tracked him down when the police had failed.

“There is one stipulation, Signor Amherst. The police must not be involved in this. You claim it is a matter of honour, a matter to expunge your shame at your failure; to involve the police would tarnish that honour –

and it would also damage my bella figura amongst my acquaintances if they were to believe that I would involve the police in such a matter, even indirectly. I trust that we understand each other in this matter? If you were to go against my wishes in this I would be very disappointed; I would probably feel it necessary to express my disappointment, shall we say, robustly?”

He turned his head slightly and one of his men was immediately at his side, bending down to hear his leader’s words. Mancini said something in Italian, softly, but not to softly for me to hear, although the words were, of course, meaningless to me. The man straightened and stepped back after sweeping his gaze over Julia and myself.

Mancini turned his attention back to me.

“On the matter of the reward, Signor Amherst, one of my men will call at your hotel for it in the evening the day after tomorrow – shall we say at seven o’clock? That should give you time to have it ready?”

I was about to say that I wouldn’t give up the money until I knew that the information that I had been given was correct, but decided against it. If Mancini’s information was inaccurate there was little that I could do about it; on the other hand, the time frame that he was giving me should be enough for me to check out its accuracy.

“That will be enough time.” I confirmed.

And with that Mancini was on his feet, gave a little bow towards Julia and was gone, his two men following a pace behind as he turned a corner and disappeared from our sight.

I turned to Julia.

“Could you catch what he said to that man of his?”

She looked concerned.

“Yes, I could. He said ‘have them watched. Make sure that they are not lost.’. David, that man frightened me; I think that he is evil.”

“I’m sure that you are right. The question is – what now? If we had learned where Field is ourselves I was going to tell Crocetti so that he could have him arrested and sent back to England. If we can’t tell the police, what can we do?”

Julia shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

I thought hard. I could not see how I could get Field back to England without official involvement – it just wasn’t possible. I had an uneasy feeling that I had over-egged the ‘revenge’ aspect of my hunt and that Mancini probably expected me to kill Field once I found him. Nothing was further from my intentions –

although I would shed not a tear should Field disappear of the face of the earth, killing the man and making myself a murderer in a foreign country was not on my agenda.

I racked my brains for some sort of solution without success. However, one thing was at least on the cards –

we could go to this village Mossorrofa and try and check if Field really was there. I was reluctant to take Julia with me, but given my lack of Italian I had little choice, so a couple of hours later Julia, whom Field didn’t know by sight, was checking the address we had been given.

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It was a middling size apartment block and Julia’s careful questioning of the elderly concierge elicited the fact that there was, indeed, a foreigner in apartment 2A.

We returned to Reggio Calabria and our hotel, with me still in a quandary as to what to try next. I even thought of trying to kidnap Field and getting him back to San Giorgio, where Troughton’s ketch was presumably still moored and sailing back to England with him, until the sheer impracticality of such a course became clear. How could I ensure his security on a small vessel when he would have to be fed, allowed to use the toilet, and the like, over the ten days or more that it would take to sail back to England?

However, the next day everything changed.

Chapter Eleven

We went down to breakfast the next morning to find the dining room, normally full of chatter, even more so than usual. As we sat down, Julia strained to pick up some threads of the conversations around us. Her eyes opened wide at what she was able to make out.

“David, people are saying that Mancini is dead!”

She hurried out of the room and five minutes later came back with a local paper. She perused it avidly.

“Yes, they are right – yesterday early evening. His car went off the road; he and two other men were all killed instantly.”

She read further.

“H’mm, the report queries whether there might have been another party involved. The accident happened on the Contrada, or district, of Pietrastoria Condera, on a road which runs through a hilly area a few miles out of town. There is a lot of new building going on out there, apparently, and he has an interest in some of them so met the architect on site. On the way back his car – one of his men was driving – went over the edge of the road and fell twenty-five metres onto rocks. According to this article that bit if the road is a well known danger spot – a woman was killed last year when she went off at about the same spot. But listen, here’s the really interesting bit – police are anxious to trace the driver of a heavy lorry which was seen further down the road very shortly afterwards.”

“Sounds as if they think that he may have been run off the road,” I observed.

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“Still, that lets us off the hook – we can go to Crocetti now without worries.” As I said this, I also reflected that I could pay back the reward money to George Lafferty and Richard Cartwright; with Mancini dead there would be no need for it.

And so it was that later that morning we visited Commissario Crocetti, to find a man clearly harassed.

“Signor, Signorina, I am sorry, but matters here are in a turmoil. The death of Mancini is causing all sorts of complications – and mostly because although the papers don’t know this yet, it was definitely murder. A medium size lorry, heavily laden with gravel, simply pushed Mancini’s car off the road and down that drop onto the rocks. Now I have to not only find out who was driving but why he did it – and the most likely explanation is that this is a bid for power in the region. Mancini’s uncle, Luca Martelli, is the head of his organisation, but he is getting old and many regarded Mancini as the de facto head. Certainly he it as who took many of the day to day decisions, or so our informers tell us. It may well be that this is the beginning of an attempt to oust the old man and take over his organisation. As a result, I really cannot spare a team to go and arrest Signor Field at the moment. Perhaps in a day or two things will be clearer.”

My heart sank. The fact that Julia had been questioning the concierge would surely reach Field eventually, and might well cause him to disappear again.

“Commissario, Field may well disappear again if given time. Surely as we know where he is a couple of officers could be spared for an hour or two?”

I could sense the policeman wavering.

“Signor Amherst, this I will do – I will send an officer to apprehend this man if you will accompany him for the purposes of identifying Signor Field – is that acceptable to you?”

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“Yes, of course,” I hesitated, “Will the officer speak English?”

“Yes, I have the very man in mind.” He crossed to the door and had a brief conversation with his secretary in the outer office.

Five minutes later there was a knock on the door and in answer to Crocetti’s summons, a young man entered.

“Ah, Manelli, come in – I have a job for you.” Crocetti turned to Julia and myself.

“Signor Amherst, Signorina Glendenning, allow me to introduce to you Agente Gino Manelli. Signor Amherst, the Agente will accompany you to apprehend Signor Field. Manelli, Signor Amherst has the address of the man we want – he will explain everything to you. Now, lady, gentlemen, if you will excuse me..”

And a few moments later we were out of Crocetti’s office and I was explaining everything to Agente Manelli, whose English, whilst heavily accented, was more than adequate.

As I explained matters, I examined the young man; tall, perhaps six feet three or four, and slim, his uniform immaculate, he had black hair which was cut short and plastered down to his skull, a skull which boasted a high forehead and deep set dark, almost black, eyes above a long, Romanesque nose. Those dark eyes bored into me as I spoke, with Manelli clearly confident in his own ability to cope with the task with which he had been landed. I warned him that Field might still be armed, but he patted the Beretta pistol in the gleaming black leather holster at his hip.

“Don’t worry, Signor, I will be ready for him if he tries anything like that.”

I began to wonder uneasily if Agente Manelli wasn’t perhaps a little too confident in his own ability, but I had no alternative unless I pulled out of the affair altogether, and I had no intention of doing that.

Quarter of an hour later we were in a police Fiat, with Manelli driving, headed out of town towards the village of Mossorrofa where, hopefully, Field was still in residence.

We drove into the small village and drew up into an available parking spot about thirty yards short of the apartment block in which Field was staying. As we got out of the car, to my surprise Field himself emerged from the front door and, unaware of our presence, turned away from us and started walking along the pavement.

“That’s him,, there” I said to Manelli, pointing out Field as I spoke. Manelli then made a big mistake.

“Signor Field,” he shouted, “stop at once – police!”

Field did indeed stop, doubtless taken by surprise at hearing his real name shouted out in that place, at that time. He turned towards us, taking in Manelli in his uniform; whether or not he recognised me right away I couldn’t tell.

Manelli was drawing his pistol, but at a speed which would never have worried Billy the Kid; seeing this, Field’s hand went under his jacket and emerged holding a pistol of his own, presumably the Browning he had used in the murders. As Manelli started to bring the Beretta up, so Field fired, twice. Faced with someone able to return fire, instead of unsuspecting, helpless women, he fired too hastily. The first shot went wild, the second, however, hit Manelli in the right arm, causing him to drop his weapon. Seeing this, Field turned and started to run – then stopped. Only a yard or two from him, a woman was bringing her car, a Citroen Picasso, to a stop. Field crossed to the car, opened the driver’s door and, waving his pistol in her face, dragged the woman out and threw her to the ground. He hurled himself into the car and drove away, narrowly missing an oncoming vehicle in the process. I turned to Manelli; grimacing with pain, he was clutching his upper right arm with his left hand, blood tricking through his fingers and down the no longer immaculate uniform sleeve.

“Quick,” he gasped, “we must chase him.”

I scooped up his pistol, shoving into my belt, then looked at him in concern.

“How bad is it?”

The rather foppish seeming young man was a lot tougher than he looked.

“Never mind – get into the car – you’ll have to drive.”

I did as he bade me and within two minutes or so, we set off in pursuit. As I wended my way through a couple of cars which had stopped when they saw what was happening, Manelli was struggling out of his uniform jacket in the front passenger seat, to reveal a shirt sleeve soaked in blood. He scrabbled under his 66

seat and dragged out a first aid box and as I accelerated out of the village he applied a dressing to his wound.

I risked a quick glance at what he was doing. He had been very lucky; the bullet had torn a chunk of flesh and underlying muscle away, leaving a furrow in his arm no more than an inch long. It must have hurt like the devil, but posed no real danger to him provided he stemmed the bleeding. Working one-handed, he somehow managed to achieve just that as I wound the police Fiat up to an indicated one hundred KPH, or around sixty miles an hour as we left Mossorrofa on the Via Provinciale San Salvatore Mosorrofa, a narrow, twisting road heading out of the village and bearing south-east towards San Salvatore.

Field had had no choice of his getaway car; the Picasso, whilst a comfortable family conveyance, wasn’t intended to be driven at high speed on such a road; it was no match for the police Fiat in road handing and I soon had it in sight. Seeing me closing behind him, Field increased his speed. Twice I thought that he had lost control as he negotiated the sharp bends; on the second occasion I was sure that the Citroen had clipped the retaining wall that was all that prevented a vehicle plummeting down the rock-strewn hillside.

Half a mile before reaching Sam Salvatore, the road took a really vicious right hand hairpin bend, and this time the Citroen failed to negotiate it. On the outside of the bend was the metal fence of an attractive white villa, with the entrance gates hung from two substantial stone pillars, and it was into one of the pillars that the Citroen slid. Somehow, Field managed to avoid a straight on collision with the unforgiving stone work.

The Citroen somehow describing an almost complete three hundred and sixty degree spin before slamming into it.

I braked hard and we screeched to a halt only yards short of the crushed vehicle. Given the speed at which Field had been travelling before the accident, I was amazed when the driver’s door was thrown open and he emerged, pointing his pistol at us. Simultaneously, we ducked down below the fascia of the car as two bullets shattered its windscreen.

Like all normal continental cars, the police Fiat was left hand drive, meaning that I could not exit it without exposing myself to Field’s pistol. Manelli, however, was protected by the bulk of our vehicle, and he threw himself out of the passenger door and onto the ground – but only then realised that I still had his pistol.

Desperately, he scuttled round to the rear of the Fiat and opened the boot. In it there was a back-up weapon, a pump action Franchi shotgun. I heard the metallic double ‘clack’ as he worked the action, then the roar as he fired at the Citroen from round the boot lid of the Fiat. Field, however, had ducked back down behind the Picasso and the shot gun pellets merely peppered its metal work and shattered the side windows.

“Give yourself up” Manelli shouted, “you cannot escape. Throw down your weapon and come out with your hands in the air.”

There was a long pause, then Field replied.

“OK, you win – don’t shoot.”

His arm appeared from behind the Citroen, clutching his pistol, which he tossed away to the side of the road.

Then he slowly emerged, his hands, as ordered, in the air.

Some premonition made me step out of the car, drawing Manelli’s Beretta from my belt as I did so, as the young policeman stepped away from the protection of the Fiat’s bulk and started towards Field. He was holding the big shotgun across his body, and as he walked forward he took his injured right hand from the stock and reached awkwardly for the handcuffs on the left hand side of his belt. In that way, although he still held the shotgun in his left hand, he couldn’t use it. I looked from Field to the gun that he had thrown away –

and my blood froze. It was not the Browning that he had used to fire at us back in Mossorrofa, the Browning that he had used for his murders, but something altogether smaller.

As Manelli took another step forward, still fumbling for the handcuffs, Field acted. His right hand swept down to his belt and dragged out the Browning; his intention was clear. Long before Manelli could have reacted, taken the shotgun in both hands and brought it to bear, he would be shot – shot at a range of no more than four or five yards and almost certainly dead.

It didn’t happen. Field’s attention was riveted on Manelli, and as he started to bring the Browning up to fire, I shot him with the Beretta. Twice, the ‘double tap’ I had explained to Detective Sergeant Lucy Collyer what seemed a lifetime ago. The impact of the nine millimetre bullets threw him back against the wreck of the Citroen and he slid to the ground, the Browning falling from his grasp as he did so.

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Manelli stood rooted to the spot as his narrow escape slowly sank into his consciousness. He turned to me.

“How did you know he was still armed?”

I crossed the road to where the pistol Field had thrown away lay in the dust and picked it up. I showed it to Manelli; it was a child’s toy, realistic enough to fool us from even just a few yards away, but a toy for all that. The woman that Field had dragged from the car must have had children, and this belonged to them.

“I realised that it was too small to be the Browning,” I explained, “then when you had to reach for your handcuffs, Filed had an opportunity – but I already had your Beretta in my hand.”

We walked over to Field. He was dead; my two bullets had taken him in the heart region of the chest and death must have been virtually instantaneous.

Manelli looked at the dead man, then at the Browning lying beside him, and turned to me.

“I can never thank you enough, Signor Amherst. You have saved my life.”

He walked unsteadily back to the Fiat and used the police radio to call for assistance.

Chapter Twelve - Epilogue

It was a week later. Back in Britain, I had been interviewed by Detective Superintendent Holland and DS

Collyer – no sign of the irritating Inspector Laine – to formally bring to an end the investigation into the deaths of Linda Lafferty, Amanda Hancock, Lisa Vaughan and Sandra Field. They had, of course, received a full report from Commissario Crocetti, which had been embarrassingly glowing in its references to my part in the affair, but they wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

At last we were done and I emerged into a miserable, wet day with grey skies and steady rain, a far cry from the weather in Italy just those few days earlier. Julia was waiting for me in her car and we drove away from the police station to meet up with the Laffertys. I had, of course, told them, and Hancocks and Richard Cartwright the outcome of our Italian trip, but this would be the first time that I had met them face to face since our return.

As before, it was Jane Lafferty who answered the door to us. The intervening weeks had not been kind to her. She looked at least ten years older and there was a lifelessness about her that worried me.

If I was worried by Mrs. Lafferty, her husband’s appearance came as a shock. He looked even worse than he had when I had met him at the Savoy when he had implored me to track down Field. At that meeting he had told me how terribly Linda’s death had affected his wife, but if anything he looked the worse of the two.

We drank tea, ate biscuits, recounted more fully what had happened in Italy.

“So the murderer is dead,” Lafferty said dully. “I suppose I should be glad, and I am, especially for your efforts, David, but nothing will bring Linda back. We will just have to get used to things, I suppose.”

And on that note we left them to their sorrow. I had spoken at quite some length on the phone to Eric Hancock; it was Vaughan who had murdered their daughter and he had expressed no real interest in meeting me, but Richard Cartwright did want to meet.

Julia and I met him in his house and he listened without speaking as I once again recounted the tale. Finally I had finished and he gazed dully at the floor.

“David, I’m glad the bastard is dead – had he been brought back for trial I think that would have been even worse, knowing that the most he would have got was perhaps ten years actually behind bars, paid for by the taxpayer. Thank you for what you have done, but please forgive me if I for saying that I really don’t want to see you again – I want to forget as much as I can about what has happened and I don’t want reminders in the future.”

I understood his feelings entirely and Julia and I drove away, the final episode of the story disappearing in the misty rain behind us.

The End

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Table of Contents

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve - Epilogue