Embezzlement

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

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Embezzlement

Contents

Chapter One. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... ..2

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

Chapter Three..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....15

Chapter Four.. .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ...21

Chapter Five.... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... ..29

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

Chapter Seven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...41

Chapter Eight. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..........46

Chapter Nine... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...52

Chapter Ten. .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... ... .... .... .. .. .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... ..... .... ... . .... .... .56

Chapter Eleven. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .63

Chapter Twelve..... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... ......69

Chapter Thirteen – three weeks later. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .... .... ...77

Chapter Fourteen – Three Months Later. ..... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .... ..... 80

Chapter Fi een..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .......83

Chapter Sixteen. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... 86

Epilogue. ... .... .. .. .... ... . .... .... .... .... . ... .... .. .. .... ... ..... .... .... .... .. .. .... ... . .... .... .... .... . ... .... .. .. .... ...92

3

Chapter One

If it hadn’t been raining, my future life would have been very different – but it was raining. Not just ‘raining’

but coming down in torrents as the city was hit by a sudden summer storm, the rain accompanied by thunder and lightning, the rain that, when I was a child, my parents would have described as ‘raining cats and dogs’ –

and as a child, I had interpreted the phrase literally, and could never understand why the animals raining down from the sky were invariably invisible.

I wasn’t dressed for such weather – after all, it was a warm summer’s day without a cloud in the sky when I had started out, and my jeans, T-shirt and light cotton jacket were no protection against the deluge. However, I was in luck; as the rain struck I was just about to pass the open doorway of the local auction rooms and I hurriedly ducked inside.

A notice board inside the entrance announced that the rooms were open for pre-viewing items that were to be sold by auction the following day, so rather than just stand inside the door, an embarrassingly clear escapee from the storm, I wandered around the items on display, trying my best to look like an interested possible buyer.

From the looks of what was on offer, what was to be sold on the morrow seemed most likely to have been the result of one or more house clearances – it was mostly furniture, much of it heavy, solid stuff which few modern families would look at twice, although there were quite a few good quality small occasional tables, and I idly contemplated buying a small wine table for my bungalow – certainly none of the bigger stuff would have been suitable for my small dwelling place.

It was then that my attention was drawn to several paintings exhibited on the far wall and I walked over for a closer look. One in particular caught my eye. It was clearly an original oil painting, about thirty inches by twenty, of a sea scene. It showed heavy seas beneath a lowering grey sky – ‘dirty weather’ well caught in all its savage malevolence, but it was the main element of the picture that interested me. Ploughing through the waves, throwing up an enormous wave which was crashing back over her bows, was a big warship and I recognised her at once. The artist had depicted the vessel which, between the two world Wars, had been the pride and joy of the Royal Navy, the battlecruiser HMS Hood.

I had a particular reason for recognising that ship. On the twenty-fourth of May, ninety forty-one, she had been sunk in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, destroyed by the shells of the German ships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. My grandfather, Thomas Riorden, had been a Chief Petty Officer aboard her. Of her crew of over fourteen hundred men, only three survived. Sadly, grandfather Thomas was not among them.

I examined the painting more closely. It was signed and dated, and had been painted by one James Whitaker in nineteen sixty. I stood back and looked at the other paintings. Even to my untutored eye, none of them were the work of James Whitaker; a motley collections, mostly of water colours, none of them had anything like the vibrancy about them of Whitaker’s work.

I wondered about James Whitaker; had he had a connection with HMS Hood, or was it merely a piece of work that he had completed, either for his own interest or for sale? On an impulse, I decided that I wanted the picture. Although small, my bungalow had a suitable wall space, and I felt that I owed the shade of my long departed grandfather nothing less.

Accordingly, the next day, thankfully on a far quieter day from the point of view of the weather, I was once more at the auction rooms; the auctioneer must have been very disappointed at the interest shown. There were no more than twenty or so people present, if that, and a fair amount of the items on offer failed to sell.

‘My’ picture was put up fairly late on and the auctioneer, a fair haired young man looking all of sixteen, and presumably pretty junior in the company to have been landed with the task of trying to dispose of items of such little interest, was growing increasingly desperate.

“Lot eighty-nine, ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, trying his best to inject some urgency into his patter,

“a fine painting of a Royal Navy destroyer from the second World War. What am I bid? Can I start at one hundred pounds?”

4

I winced at his misidentification of the picture’s subject vessel. A destroyer, indeed! A typical World War Two destroyer would have displaced around two and a half thousand tons. HMS Hood had been over forty-seven thousand tons. A single salvo from her eight fifteen inch calibre guns would have blown any destroyer in existence, then or now, to smithereens.

Clearly, the young man could not start at one hundred pounds; nobody showed any interest. He looked around the room.

“Come on, ladies and gentlemen, this is a magnificent oil painting of a very nostalgic subject. How about eighty pounds?”

Still no interest. I let him stew for a moment or two, then spoke to put him out of his all too apparent misery.

“Fifty pounds.”

He wasn’t happy, but with nobody else showing the slightest interest, the picture was mine.

***********

I knocked in the nail to secure the picture hook, hung up my newly acquitted painting, and stepped back to admire it. I had never known my grandfather – he had been killed some thirty-six years before I had even been born, but I had known Mary, his wife and my grandmother , who had lived until nineteen ninety-nine, when I was twenty-two, and who had been intensely proud of her late husband. It was a pity that she was no longer alive to see my acquisition – she would have loved it. The only mementoes she had of Thomas were a couple of photographs of him in uniform, one as a sixteen year old boy sailor, looking terribly young and determined, the other some years later upon his promotion to Chief Petty Officer, taken on board HMS Hood as he lounged at his ease against a guard rail, as the ship swung at anchor in some unidentified harbour, and a few pictures of them on their wedding day.

I wondered what my late wife would have made of the picture; Annette had come from a military family, her father and brother both having served in the Army, a service which had cost them both their lives at tragically young ages. Her father, Kenneth Gooch, had been a Captain in the Parachute Regiment and was killed in the Falklands war at the battle for Goose Green, aged just twenty-eight, leaving Annette two years old, and her brother John even younger at two months, to be cared for by their widowed mother. In his turn, John, a second lieutenant in the same regiment as his father, was one of the very first British servicemen to die in the invasion of Afghanistan. Even younger than his father, John had been only twenty.

As a result, Annette had come to abhor anything military and had been a strident voice against what she called ‘Blair’s illegal war’. She had even stood for the local council as an anti-war campaigner, but had come nowhere in the poll.

I often thought that one of the reasons that she had married me had been that, despite our descent from Thomas, neither my father nor I had been remotely ‘military’. Dad had spent all his working life in the planning department of the local council; I was teaching modern languages at the local school. Her mother, Elizabeth, had continued to live in Aldershot even after the death of her son, but Annette had already left the area where her father had followed the career that had led to his death, detesting its association with the Army, migrating to Scotland at the earliest opportunity and had never returned south after graduating from Dundee University. We had met at work, having both been teachers at Perth High School and married in two thousand and four. Alice came along just under three years later, whereupon Annette gave up work to concentrate on being a full time mother, at least until Alice was old enough to be settled in school. It was never to be; I lost them both in an awful traffic accident in the February of two thousand and thirteen. The bus in which they had been travelling skidded on the icy road and ploughed head-on into a large lorry coming the other way. The drivers of both vehicles were killed, as were three of the bus passengers; two of those three were Annette and Alice. The dreadful irony of their deaths was that they were only on the bus because Annette, a rather nervous driver, had felt that it would be safer to travel by bus rather than risk driving in such treacherous conditions in her Mini. I was left alone at the age of thirty-five.

5

I continued teaching for a few months, but my heart wasn’t in it. One of Annette’s foibles was to worry about the future, and she had several insurance policies on our lives. One of them was a policy against dying in a public transport accident. For a ridiculously small premium – a few pounds a month – it was for quarter of a million pounds; after all, how many people die in public transport accidents? Our house had too many memories and it had to go. A fair sized four bedroom detached dwelling, bought with help from my parents and Annette’s mother, it brought in over four hundred thousand. Together with a more normal policy on Annette’s life, I found myself sitting on nearly three-quarters of a million pounds in capital, and even after I had bought a small two bedroomed bungalow well outside the city, and thus cheap, I had enough money to quit teaching and try something else.

The ‘something else’ was photography. Since early schooldays I had been a keen photographer, and I now decided to turn my hobby into a profession, secure in the knowledge that my capital assets would insulate me against failure for a considerable period of time. I found an agency that specialised in taking onto its books folk like myself – reasonably competent workers who could be relied upon to deliver if they accepted an assignment. For that they took a thirty per cent cut, but the fact that all the mundane work of placing work was taken off my hands made the fee well worthwhile.

I had now been working with the agency for over a year and I think that it is fair to say that both sides of the bargain were happy with how things had progressed. Right at the moment they had nothing for me, but that was not overly unusual, and I had no doubt that another assignment would come my way in the not too distant future.

I realised with a bit of a start that I had been sitting without moving, staring vacantly into space, for ten minutes or more. It was a habit that I had fallen into more and more of late, and I impatiently shook myself into some sort of awareness, realising as I did so that the painting of the Hood was hanging slightly crookedly. I rose from my chair and went to straighten it; as I wrapped my fingers around the frame – for it was a bit too heavy to simply nudge into position with a push from a fingertip, I realised that the paper backing of the frame was a bit loose. I took the picture off the wall and laid it face down on my table. The back comprised a sheet of brown paper secured to the rear of the wooden frame proper with Sellotape, Sellotape which had been there for some time, judging by the way that it had discoloured and lost much of its adhesive power. I peeled it off carefully, anxious not to risk any damage to the back of the frame, but it came away without any trouble, revealing more than I had expected. Between the back of the frame proper, and the sheet of brown paper which I had just removed, there was a sheet of A4 paper. The side facing me was blank, but when I removed it and turned it over, it proved to have several lines of handwriting on it. It had also been resting on top of a computer disc, a disc which had no label, nor any other indication of what might be on it.

The writing on the paper was scrawled, as though written by someone in a hurry and I had difficulty in deciphering it, but eventually I felt that I had, if not every nuance, at least the gist of what had been written down by some unknown person.

‘Darling,’ I read, ‘don’t believe everything that people will be saying about me in the future about ….(at that point the writing became illegible)…. I hope that one day I will be able to return, but if not, remember that I love you always and do what you will with the below.’

There followed what must have been a signature, but which was totally indecipherable by me, then a series of lines of numbers, again totally beyond my comprehension.

I puzzled over the mysterious message; clearly it was intended for somebody close to the writer, but had she or he ever received it? Had it been hidden away because it had served its purpose – or was it somehow a message not received? It was undated, but judging by the state of the Sellotape, then if it had been placed in position and then hidden with the brown paper and tape, then it had probably been there for at least a few years.

I wondered what to do with the message and the disc. Obviously its presence must have been unknown to whoever had placed the picture with the auctioneers, but would that person find a meaning, a meaning that escaped me, in the note? Surely whoever it was at least deserved that opportunity?

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My mind made up, I phoned the auction rooms; the woman to whom I spoke was helpful, although only to a limited degree. The picture, I was informed, had been part of a house clearance. The person who had contacted them was a Mrs. Linda Jones, but the woman was willing to divulge neither Mrs. Jones’ address, nor her landline. I couldn’t blame her; chances were, that as this was a house clearance, Mrs. Jones was an elderly lady downsizing, possible because of the loss of Mr. Jones, and the woman from the auctioneers wasn’t going to offer her up to an unknown man whose intentions were equally unknown. She did, however, give me a mobile phone number for Mrs. Jones. After all, she was well aware that I would have no way of finding the location of a mobile; it could be quite literally anywhere on the planet.

Satisfied with what I had been given, I dialled the number of the mobile. It rang for a few moments, then was picked up.

“Hello?”

The voice sounded a good bit younger than I had expected.

“Oh, hello. Is that Mrs. Linda Jones?”

“Yes – who is calling?”

“Mrs. Jones, my name is Peter Riorden. I was at the auction rooms yesterday and bought a picture of HMS

Hood which I understand was part of the house clearance that you put up for sale. The thing is, inside the frame backing I have found a hand written note which, although it looks as though it may have been there for quite a while, also looks as though it might be important and in addition there is a computer disc, and I would like to return them to you or to whoever you feel should have them.”

There was a long silence at the other end and I wondered if Mrs. Jones was about to terminate the call, but at last she spoke.

“You say it was actuality inside the frame as it were, Mr. Riorden?”

“That’s right – it had been covered over with brown paper which had been stuck down with sticky tape.”

There was another long silence before she spoke once more.

“Mr. Riorden, I’d like to see this note and the disc if at all possible. Where are you calling from?”

“I’m calling from home – I live just outside Blairgowrie.”

“Oh, you’re not far away, then. I’m in Perth itself – how about meeting for a coffee and you can at least show me the note?”

“That’s fine by me – where and when would you like to meet?”

Another pause; this definitely seemed to be a lady who didn’t rush into things.

“How about the George Hotel in the coffee lounge – say eleven tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be there – you’ll be able to recognise me as I’ll be wearing a blue blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, white shirt and a dark red tie. Oh, and I wear spectacles and I’ll be reading the Daily Telegraph.”

“Fine, that sounds easy to spot – I’ll see you at eleven, then. Goodbye.” And she was gone.

I had deliberately not asked for a description of herself; this way she had a chance to identify me before she revealed herself, and if she didn’t like what she saw, she could retreat.

Chapter Two

A few minutes before eleven the next morning I was seated at a table in the coffee lounge of the George Hotel, dressed as I had said and duly reading the Telegraph, giving Mrs. Jones every chance of identifying me before making herself known.

I only had to wait perhaps five minutes before a woman approached my table.

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“Mr. Riorden? I’m Linda Jones.”

It wasn’t only the voice that was younger than I had expected – so was the rest of the package. Mrs. Linda Jones was about my own age, perhaps a little younger, tall and slim, dressed in a conservatively cut two piece suit in a soft material, very dark blue in colour, the jacket worn unbuttoned to show what looked like a silk blouse, white in colour, with the near monochromatic effect relieved by a scarlet chiffon scarf worn round her throat. Her oval face was dominated by eyes that I could only describe as violet in colour, her pale complexion contrasting with jet black hair which swept to her jawline. Altogether not at all what I had imagined.

I got to my feet and proffered my hand; her handshake was cool and firm. I indicated the seat on the opposite side of the table and she slid gracefully into it. The waitress came over to us and we ordered just a pot of coffee, nothing to eat.

She wasted no time; no sooner had the girl turned away to fulfil our order, she looked me straight in the eyes and spoke.

“So, Mr. Riorden, what do you have for me?”

I fished inside my blazer pocket, extracted the note and handed it over. I had folded it to fit conveniently into the pocket, so she had to unfold it to see its contents. The disc, in its protective envelope, I laid on the table between us.

For an awful moment, as she studied the note, I thought that she was going to faint; her complexion, naturally pale, become totally ashen and a couple of tears trickled down from the inner corner of both eyes.

The voice, which had sounded so self-assured on the phone and as she introduced herself, came out lower in pitch, with an uncertain catch to it.

“It’s daddy’s writing,” she said in a near whisper. “How on earth did it come to be where you found it?”

“I’ve no idea, Mrs. Jones. It was only by chance that I found it at all. If I hadn’t tried to straighten the picture as it hung on the wall, I probably never would have found it, nor the disc.”

She began to regain her composure.

“It’s a long story, Mr. Riorden and I don’t know if I should tell it to you, because it involves my mother as well as myself. The thing is, she isn’t very well; this might be very upsetting for her.”

I suppose that I am naturally nosey by nature, and by now I was all agog to hear more. Perhaps she picked up the vibrations, because she gave a slight shake of the head and was about to speak when the waitress retuned with our pot of coffee and two cups. We sat in silence as the girl poured us each a thimble full of strong black coffee and at last departed.

“As you now know, my father wrote that note, and my father disappeared on the eighteenth of July, two thousand and ten. He left for work as normal, but never got there and never came home. From that day to this, nobody has seen him nor heard from or of him – he has just vanished. Daddy was the finance officer of Lewis Brothers in Dundee – do you know of them?”

I shook my head in negation.

“Well, until just a few years ago, they were quite a large company making metal fittings of all sorts and sizes. The day daddy disappeared, so did a lot of money from the company’s bank account and everyone assumed that he had taken it – everyone, that is, apart from my mother and myself. We knew that he just wasn’t capable of doing anything dishonest, no matter how trivial. However, the thing was, Lewis Brothers, although they appeared to be doing quite well, were actually having a very hard time financially. That money disappearing was the last straw. The company went bankrupt and all the workers lost their jobs, so it wasn’t really surprising that nobody else believed in dad’s innocence.”

This was sounding more interesting by the minute, but she suddenly pulled herself up short.

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“Look, Mr. Riorden, I’m sorry to have blurted all this out – it was the shock of seeing that note of my father’s and wondering if at last it could start a trail to finding out what happened to him. Thank you for bringing me the note, but I think that I ought to leave you now and think about it by myself.”

I didn’t want her to go; also a devotee of mysteries, whether fictional or in real life, finding myself in the middle of a real life one was something that I didn’t want to lose.

“Before you go,” I told her, “I wonder if you have any idea what those numbers that your father wrote down might mean?”

She frowned at me.

“No, but surely that is my business.”

“Of course, but the thing is that I think I know what that the first two lines refer to.”

Now I had her attention; it was something that I had thought hard about overnight, and I really did think that I had solved a part of the mystery of the numbers her father had written down.

“Oh, what?”

“Well, you don’t normally see them written down like that, but if you look at that first line it is fourteen digits long, right?”

She nodded her head slowly.

“Yes, so?”

“Well, if you take off the first six – they look like a bank sort code. In fact, if that’s what they are they refer to a Lloyds bank branch somewhere; I recognise the first two pairs because I bank with Lloyds myself. The last pair are different to my account, but those numbers identify the branch, so it just means that the account is based in a different branch to mine – hardly surprising. That leaves you with eight digits – and Lloyds bank accounts are usually shown as ten digits, but the first two are always zero zero – something to do with bank computer systems, I expect – and it’s the following eight that actually identify the account. Now, if you look at the second line, it is twenty-three digits long. When you use a credit or debit card over the phone you get asked for the card number – which is sixteen digits long, the expiry date, which is always written as four digits and also the last three on the back of the card, I think that what you have there is the identity of a Lloyds bank account.”

A frown furrowed her brow.

“We’ve always banked with HSBC – in the old days the Midland, then HSBC when they amalgamated.”

I thought for a moment.

“Do you happen to know what bank Lewis Brothers used?”

Her face blanched again.

“I’m not totally certain, but I think that it was Lloyds.”

“Well, that surely must have something to do with the mystery of your father’s disappearance.”

“Yes,” she replied doubtfully, “but it isn’t good news, is it? Why would he have written those details down and in the note say to my mother to make what use of it she will?”

Her face became a picture of misery.

“Perhaps everybody was right – perhaps he was guilty after all.”

“Perhaps it isn’t an account of the Lewis Brothers? After all, Lloyds have millions of customers. Is there any way that you can check?”

Her brow furrowed in concentration once more.

9

“Well, dad had a deputy that I met a couple of times. I should imagine that he might know. Do you think that I should ask him, though? After all, I expect that he must have been one of the people who thought that dad was guilty – if I go to him and he confirms it as a Lewis Brothers accounts, that’s just confirming dad’s guilt, surely?”

I pondered what she had said. To be honest, this was none of my business, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to dig into a mystery, and if the digging involved helping a very attractive woman, why not?

“Perhaps it should be given a bit more thought before approaching him. After all, as I said, Lloyds have millions of customers. Is it possible that your father set up an account, not using HSBC, to make some money available to your mother if he knew, or even just suspected, that he might no longer be around, for whatever reason?”

She perked up at little at the thought.

“What about talking to your mother about it?”

She hesitated and looked unhappy at the thought.

“Mum isn’t well. She hates discussing anything about dad’s disappearance – she finds it very, very upsetting that he should just have vanished the way he did.”

I pursued another line of thought.

“To hide that note and the disc in the way that he did, your father obviously wanted to keep it safe from accidental discovered, but they were clearly intended for your mother, and from the tone of it could be expected to be very important to her. Why didn’t she know that it was there?”

She shook her head in bewilderment.

“I don’t know. When he disappeared, because he loved it so much, mum couldn’t stand looking at the picture. She nearly threw it in the bin, but I persuaded her not to. She was adamant that she didn’t want it in the house any longer, so we gave it back to my grandmother.”

“How did you come by the picture?”

She looked at me in momentary surprise.

“Oh, of course, you couldn’t know. It was painted by my grandfather, James Whitaker – Whitaker is my maiden name. He was in the Navy and actually served on HMS Hood as a gunnery officer just before the war, but luckily was posted to another ship in nineteen forty, so wasn’t on her when she was sunk. After he retired from the Navy, he did quite a lot of painting – I’ve got a picture of his at home of another of the ships that he served on and also a portrait of my parents with me as a baby that he did. When he died my grandmother gave the picture of the Hood to my father, who had always admired it. I only included that painting in the house clearance because my mother had taken such a dislike to it, otherwise I would have kept it.”

“What a coincidence,” I said, “my grandfather served on Hood and he would have been on board at the same time as your grandfather –he was a Chief Perry Officer and a gunnery specialist, so they may well have known each other. He wasn’t so lucky, though – he went down with her in forty-one.”

She blinked in surprise.

“How extraordinary! I don’t really remember granddad – I was only four when he died, but I heard a lot about him from my father and grandmother.”

We had suddenly achieved common ground and it was clear that Linda Jones no longer saw me as a stranger

– nor I her – even though we had only met twenty minutes earlier.

We chatted for a few more minutes whilst Linda – we were now on first name terms – wrestled with the decision of whether or not to let her mother know what had been found in the frame of her father-in-law’s painting. Finally, and reluctantly, she decided that her mother must be told.

10

“Will you come with me, please, Peter? She’s often better with people she doesn’t know than with just me.”

“Yes, of course – anything that I can do to help.”

It transpired that Linda and her mother lived only a couple of minutes’ walk away from each other, both in flats in the town centre, so I left my car where I had parked it and we both walked the few minutes it took to reach where Mrs. Whitaker lived.

Entry was by a keypad into a small entrance hall, thence by lift to the fifth floor where Linda’s mother had her flat. Here she produced a key from her handbag and opened the door, calling out as she did so.

“Hi mum, it’s me, I’ve brought a friend to see you.”

“Come on through, Linda; I’m in the lounge.”

I followed Linda through the small hallway and through a door in front of us, which opened into a surprisingly large lounge with a big picture window looking out over nearby roofs to the River Tay.

Niamh Whitaker was, I judged, about sixty years old, small and red-haired, red hair with no traces of grey, despite her age. Physically, she and her daughter scarcely resembled each other at all, other than for the fact that both had a pale complexion. Linda was tall and slim, her mother short and rather plump; whereas her mother’s hair was red and her eyes green, Linda’s hair was jet black and her eyes a startling shade of violet.

Presumably Linda’s build and colouring came from her absent father, not her mother.

“Well, come in, both of you,” the older woman said impatiently, her voice still bearing traces of an Irish accent rather than a Scottish one.

We did as we were bid and I found myself the object of close scrutiny from those green eyes.

“Mum, this is Peter Riorden who has found something interesting that I thought that you should see.”

For the first time in our very brief acquaintanceship, Linda sounded distinctly nervous.

“Well don’t just stand there, the pair of you – sit you down.”

She waved her hand at two easy chairs, which, like her own, were located to take advantage of the view out of the window.

We both seated ourselves and Linda, still sounding nervous, was the first to speak.

“Mum, you remember the picture of dad’s that you didn’t like – the ship?”

Mrs. Whitaker frowned; her response was decidedly snappy.

“Yes – what about it? I thought that we had seen the last of it?”

“Well, when gran’s things went to auction, Peter bought it – and he found a note from dad and a computer disc hidden inside the frame.”

Mrs. Whitaker looked from one to the other of us in bewilderment.

“A note for me?” she glared at me suspiciously, “And how did you know that it was for me, young man?

Anyway, who are you?”

“When I found it, I didn’t know that it was for you, Mrs. Whitaker – but it was clearly intended for somebody and I didn’t have any right either to keep it or to just throw it away, so I traced your daughter through the auctioneers. When she saw it she recognised her father’s handwriting, so we’ve brought it to you. As to who I am, I live outside Blairgowrie; I used to teach at Perth High School, but I lost my wife and daughter in a road accident a couple of years back, and I gave up teaching. Now I work as a freelance photographer.”

She still eyed me with an element of suspicion, but at a slightly reduced level of intensity.

“I suppose that you are one of these paparazzi, are you?”

11

“No,” I said patiently, “I’m not. Most of my work is for calendars and book illustrations and the like, not news stories.”

Perhaps slightly mollified, the frown, whilst not by any means disappearing completely, edged down a little in its intensity.

“Let me see that note!” She demanded peremptorily.

Linda handed it over and her mother scrutinised it minutely, looking up to glare at me from time to time; clearly I was still an object of suspicion to her. Finally she laid it on her lap and looked from one to the other of us again, the suspicion becoming overlaid with unhappiness.

“Yes, that’s my Graham’s writing sure enough – but what does it all mean?”

We explained the assumption that the first two lines of digits referred to a Lloyds bank account, but were still unable to explain the rest of the note – the two lines of digits were followed by several lines of numbers arranged in groups of four characters at a time, but with no recognisable words in the groups. Linda and I had already assumed that it was some form of code, but how to decipher it we had no idea.

Mrs. Whitaker looked more and more puzzled as we explained our reasoning. I tried my best to scrutinise the older woman without making it too obvious. The note had clearly upset her, as indeed it had her daughter, but was the upset accompanied by guilt? Her husband was assumed to have embezzled a large amount of money, an embezzlement which had resulted in a large number of job losses and the closure of an otherwise well-established company. Was her professed support for the man hiding a knowledge of what he had been assumed to have done? Could she really have been in total ignorance of Graham Whitaker’s activities if they were, indeed, illegal?

Niamh Whitaker’s mind was a whirl of indecision as she looked firstly at her daughter, then at the stranger that she had brought with her. The man seemed honest enough – his tracking down the intended recipient of her husband’s note seemed to demonstrate that, when he could simply have thrown it away and saved himself the bother, but could he be trusted any further? Finally, she made up her mind.

“Linda, do you trust this man?”

Linda and I looked at each other in a degree of perplexity; Linda because she was suddenly concerned that her mother might know more about her father’s disappearance than she had ever said before, myself because I failed to see how Linda could possibly answer with any conviction. After all, two hours earlier we had never even met.

I decided to take the initiative.

“Mrs. Whitaker, Linda and I only met for the first time this morning. If you need to say anything to her that you wish to keep confidential I think that I had better leave the two of you to talk in private.”

It was something that my highly developed sense of curiosity had hated having to say, but in the circumstance, I felt that it was all that I could say. To my surprise, Linda reached out and laid her hand on my arm as I attempted to rise from the chair, causing me to sink back into it.

“Mum, Peter could have just thrown that note and the computer disc of dad’s away and thought nothing of it.

He didn’t; he found me, and through me, you, so that it could get back to the person it was intended for. I think that proves his honesty. He also came up with an explanation of what all those numbers in the first two lines mean, something that would never have dawned on me. So, what is it that you need to be assured of his trustworthiness about?”

Her mother gave a slow sigh.

“A week or so after he disappeared, I found a note from your father tucked inside the pages of my diary.”

Linda looked at her mother in amazement.

“Why did you never say? It might have helped us find him!”

12

“It didn’t make any sense – I thought that it was just a note of something from work, a file or something, and he’d tucked it into my diary without thinking.”

Now that, I thought to myself, is a load of codswallop. That wasn’t what you thought at all, lady. You were worried it might somehow be incriminating.

“What did the note say? Do you still have it?” Linda pressed her mother.

“No, I threw it away, but I can remember what it said – for some reason it stuck in my memory.”

That reason, I mused to myself, was because you really were worried about it – you couldn’t get its contents out of your mind.

“So what did it say?”

“Well, it was gibberish.”

Linda leant forward impatiently.

“Mum! What did it say?”

“Well, it said ‘Key DOOH110’”

Linda sat back again, perplexed.

“What on earth did that mean?”

Her mother shrugged helplessly.

“I have no idea. I told you – it was gibberish.”

The two women looked at each other in puzzlement – but my mind was working furiously. Ever since childhood I had been fascinated by puzzles, puzzles of any and every type. Not just crosswords and the like; any mental challenge was grist to my mill. At fourteen years of age I had become champion of the school chess club, a title that I had retained until leaving school at eighteen. At university, whilst not so totally dominant, I had been in the top three or four players all the time during my four year languages course. I had not really set my mind to the groups of numbers, hoping that Linda or her mother would be able to unlock their mystery without the need for cerebral activity – but that was surely not going to happen. It was, I decided, up to me to solve the mystery, and once that became clear I almost immediately came up with a possible solution.

“I think that I may have an idea as to what they are,” I offered diffidently. “Obviously, they are a code of some sort, and any code that someone can create, someone else can work out if they have some sort of clue.

The most difficult code to crack – in fact virtually impossible for a short message, is one based on a shared document – usually a book possessed by both the sender and the recipient. With something like that, the messages will be made up of references to pages, paragraphs and lines in the book – for instance, the tenth word on the first line of the second paragraph on page seven might be ‘money’, say. No way could anyone work that out from a coded message which was just P7p2l1w10. It would be totally unbreakable. If the message was long enough, and one had some idea as to what some of its content might be – for example, if they suspected that it might be a message about, oh, I don’t know, let’s say setting up a meeting, it might be possible to make some informed guesses – but unlikely. The main problem with such a system is that it only works if all intended recipients have the right book – which might cause a problem over time or whatever.

“Now, these numbers, I am pretty sure, are a fairly straightforward substitution code – each number actually represents a letter of the alphabet.”

Linda frowned and interrupted.

“How could that work? There are twenty-six letters of the alphabet, but only nine numbers – ten if you include zero.”

That was no problem.

13

“Quite right – there are two ways round that. The first is to simply count up to twenty-six, so that represents

‘z’ in the easiest transposition. That’s clumsy, though. It means that some of your four character groups would almost certainly only represent two letters, and the repetition of , say, number thirteen or whatever, would offer up a clue to the person trying to decode the message. A better way is to write down all twenty-six letters, then start with, say, zero against ‘a’ and when you get to nine – the actual tenth letter, which is

‘k’, just start over.”

Linda was keeping up with me, whereas her mother was beginning to look confused.

“But that means that once you are past the first ten letters, you are into a number potentially meaning one of two or even three letters.”

“That’s right – but given a reasonably long message, it would quickly become clear which letters were wrong. For the sake of argument, and assuming ‘a’ is zero, then the number zero might mean ‘a’, ‘k’ or ‘u’, but the context of the rest would soon make it clear as to which it should be.”

Linda nodded slowly, whilst her mother still looked perplexed.

“So, with any luck, we may be able to read dad’s message?”

“Yes, because he has left us the key.”

“He has?”

“Oh yes, the first part of his note to your mother effectively said ‘look in the back of the picture of HMS

Hood’. The second part – the ‘110’ is telling us the code offset.”

“Code offset?”

“Yes. When I was giving you an example I said suppose zero is ‘a’. But most people using this sort of code wouldn’t do that – they’d want to mix it up a bit. There are a couple of ways of interpreting what your father meant by ‘110’ – the simplest, and the easiest to start with , is to assume that his first substitution is number ten – in other words, he started his code by putting the first letter -a- against the tenth letter of the alphabet, the letter ‘k’. If that is the case, he would have had the choice of starting with either zero or one, so we’ll probably need to try both.”

This time Mrs. Whitaker nodded slowly; what I was saying was beginning to make sense to her.

“But why would dad go to such lengths?” her daughter queried. “And how would he expect either of us to be able to work it out in the way that you have, Peter? I would never have come up with all that in a million years – would you, mum?”

The older woman shook her head.

“Never – and even now I don’t understand what made you think of it, Mr. Riorden.”

I shrugged.

“I’ve always been keen on puzzles, crosswords, ciphers, that sort of thing.”

“Oh!”

We both looked towards Linda, the source of the exclamation.

“I’ve just realised when you said the word cipher. Leonard, my ex; he was in the Army for eight years –

working in military intelligence – and working on ciphers. Dad must have thought that we would show it to him and that he would work it out. Trouble is, although at the time we tried to keep it from my mum and dad, our marriage was on the rocks. When dad disappeared and people thought that he had stolen money, that was the last straw for Leonard and we divorced very quickly afterwards, so he never got to see the note.”

Things were slowly beginning to make some sort of sense to me, whereas up to that moment I had been at a total loss to understand how Whitaker could possibly have expected his message to ever be found, let alone 14

decoded. I decided that I needed to take the lead on cracking the mystery contained in the cryptic four figure groups.

“Look, I assume that you both want to know what Mr. Whitaker has written?”

Both woman nodded, one head of black hair, one head of red, bobbing in unison.

“Right – it may take quite a while. Can you let me have some paper and a pen and a table to work on?”

The essential items were quickly provided, and I settled down to work. The cipher was less straightforward than I had at first hoped, but at last the task was completed and the three of them gazed at what I had come up with.

‘My darling Niamh,’ they read, ‘the fact that you are reading this must mean either that I have had to disappear, or that I am facing a period in prison. In either case, I want you to understand what has happened over the last few weeks and to understand that I acted at all times for what I thought to be the best.

‘I assume that Leonard has decoded all this for you – as you read on, you will understand why I have resorted to such a cloak and dagger approach to put you in the picture as to what has happened to me over the past week or two, but first my thanks to Leonard for working all this out (“If he only knew,” Linda said sadly). I suppose that, strictly speaking, I am a criminal, an embezzler, but I had what I regard as a very good reason for my actions, and I did not do it for any personal gain. My full story is on the computer disc which accompanies this note; please don’t judge me until you have been through it all.”

I hesitated before continuing.

“The last couple of lines are different to what I have decoded so far. In fact, it wasn’t in code at all, although it looked as though it was. Mr. Whitaker simply wrote his message backwards, splitting it into four letter groups to make it look as though it was in the same code. I assume it was because he was short of time for some reason. It is succinct, and as I can see from your faces, as meaningless to you as it is to me.”

All three of them gazed fixedly at the piece of paper, unsuccessfully willing the words to make sense to them. They were simple enough – ‘I got it wrong – please forgive me’, but what could they mean?

“Perhaps we will know more when we have read what is on the disc? Do you have a computer, Mrs.

Whitaker?”

“Well, I’ve still got Graham’s old computer – but I don’t know if it still even works.”

She got up and left us for a few minutes, returning with a small laptop computer and its power supply. Linda took it from her, plugged in the power cord and switched it on. We all waited anxiously to see if the aged device would actually work and after a few moments were reward for our scarcely contained patience as it booted up.

The disc did not contain, as I had anticipated, a written document, but a recording of speech, and I instantly realised from the reaction of the two women that we were listening to the voice of the vanished Graham Whitaker.

‘It all started just over three weeks ago. Like most companies nowadays, our financial systems are all computerised. As the company’s finance officer I had full access to that system – or so I thought. I had become concerned that the system seemed to be increasingly slow in use, to the point that my two staff members had all remarked on it. We are too small a company to have our own IT experts on our strength, so I contacted an outside company which specialises in helping out on situations such as that we seemed to be experiencing. I hadn’t used them before – the company that we had used in the past had shut up shop – and I was very impressed with the speed and thoroughness that their man showed when he turned up and went through our system. His final report to me came as a bit of a shock; he had removed a fairly innocuous virus that had been slowing things up, but he also had identified that our system had not just one, but two, elements. The first element was the one that I and my staff used every day; the second, which could only be opened using a password sequence to which I had not been privy, showed our accounts in a somewhat different light. In short, this second system was reporting to the tax people massaged figures that made it 15

look as though the company was less profitable than was in fact the case. In other words, we were evading paying the correct amount of tax – a criminal offence. The computer expert seemed quite blasé about the matter, but I was concerned that evidence of wrong doing within the firm was now known to an outsider. My immediate problem was to identify just who was involved in this activity, and my suspicious mind determined that it must be one of the senior people – but who?

‘It was with some concern that I realised that any independent investigator would almost certainly conclude that I was the most likely suspect. After all, as the finance officer I would surely be expected to know what the company’s true financial position was. I knew, of course, that I was innocent of any involvement of any wrong doing – but how could I convince that hypothetical independent investigator of the fact? I felt that I had two possible courses of action before me. One was to immediately go to the police with what I had discovered, and hope that they would believe me, when there was the danger that they would leap to the conclusion that I had only come to them because the computer expert had uncovered what was going on and I was trying to throw suspicion elsewhere. The other possible course of action was to try and find out for myself who the guilty party was and then go to the police, and that was the course upon which I determined.

‘As you know, our management top level is small – just myself as finance officer, Stephen Gerard as production manager, George Hammond as company secretary, and Richard Holder as major shareholder, chairman and CEO. I had no idea which, if any, of them could be trusted, so talking to any of them was out of the question. I would have to work solely on my own. My first task was to work through the hidden system which, thanks to the computer expert, was no longer hidden from me, to see if there was any indication as to who had been using it. I failed. There was plenty of activity on the account, but no indication as to who was undertaking that activity. As I worked my way through it, however, I came to appreciate just how clever it was. As finance officer, once the yearly figures had been agreed with my board colleagues and audited, it was my responsibility to actually submit them to Revenue and Customs. In the old days this would have entailed sending them a wodge of paper returns, but in this day and age it is all done by an on-line submission – and this is where the cleverness came in.

‘The ‘hidden’ system was set up to intercept the on-line submission and substitute an alternative version –

the one making the company out to be less profitable than was actually the case. It seemed awfully dangerous to me – suppose the Revenue had come back on the submission by letter, or by a personal visit.

Then reality hit me – like a ton of bricks. If that had happened – I would be the point of contact and any wrong doing would be laid right at my door. Whoever had set all this up had covered his tracks very well –

and ensured that any tracks that there might be would point straight to me.

‘The more I pondered on the problem, the more puzzled I became. The way in which the hidden computer programme had been set up – and indeed the way in which it had been hidden – indicated a high degree of computer expertise. I could never have achieved it, and none of Gerard, Hammond and Holder had ever shown any signs of such skills. Indeed, all three of them had, from time to time called on one of my two assistants for help with managing the company’s normal systems, which by comparison are child’s play. I couldn’t see any of them being able to set up something so sophisticated – so who had done it?

‘However it had been done, somehow or other I needed to find out and then tell the police, but my simplest solution would seem to be to just take money out of the company and hide it away somewhere and see what happens.’

Whitaker’s narrative stopped that point, leaving the two women looking at me and at each other in puzzlement. I broke the puzzled silence.

“What about taking all this to the police?”

Niamh Whitaker snorted in derision.

“They were never interested in finding out what happened in the first place. As far as they were concerned, the money and Graham disappeared at the same time, so he took it and that was that. They weren’t interested in trying to find him then – why should they be interested now? Anyway if they see that ‘please forgive me’

part of the message they’ll just say that he was apologising to us for being a thief.”

16

I could see the strength of the woman’s argument, but I was reluctant to just ignore what they had found.

“But if you want to find out what actually happened to your husband, Mrs. Whitaker, surely the police are the people best equipped to do that?”

Linda had remained silent during the exchange, but now spoke up.

“When the police spoke to us after dad disappeared, one of the detectives gave me a card with a contact number on it. If we get in touch with him direct that might be helpful.”

Chapter Three

Detective Inspector Fiona Campbell looked long and hard at the three people seated on the other side of the interview room table. Two women, one man. Although they were mother and daughter, the two women could scarcely have been less alike in their physical appearance. The mother, Niamh Whitaker, whom Fiona judged to be in her early sixties, was short, tending a bit on the plump side, with red hair as yet untouched by any trace of grey. The hair, cut short at the sides but pulled into a bun at the back, framed a round face from which green eyes, either side of a nose that might almost be described as snub, gazed at her uneasily. At a guess, Mrs. Whitaker was in two minds as to the wisdom of seeking out police assistance, and she occasionally twisted together the hands which lay on her lap, a nervous habit which twitched at the thin material of the flowered print summer dress she was wearing.

Niamh Whitaker’s daughter, Linda Jones, had presumably inherited her genes from her disappeared father, not her mother. Tall and slim, and looking considerably more self-assured than her mother, she had an attractive oval face, dominated by glittering violet eyes and a straight nose that just avoided being too long for the rest of her features; jet black hair which swept to her jawbone on either side and gleamed in the light from the overhear fluorescent tube like a raven’s plumage. Unlike her mother’s summer dress, the daughter was wearing a lightweight, smartly cut very dark blue trouser suit, the jacket unbuttoned to show a deep red blouse. Her pale complexion was the only element of her features in which she resembled her mother.

The man, Peter Riorden was no relation to either woman, but it was he who had provided the catalyst in the reopening of a case previously thought long closed. Apparently it was he who both found and deciphered the mysterious message from the long disappeared Graham Whitaker and Fiona studied him with interest. He was, she judged, in his mid to late thirties, a bit older than herself. Tall, perhaps six feet two or three, he was well built without being overweight. Short blond hair topped a square face, lightly tanned, from which pale blue eyes returned her gaze from behind a pair of heavy rimmed spectacles, a combination which gave him a studious look. Despite his size and the tanned features, he looked more an indoor than an outdoor character.

He was dressed casually, blue jeans and a blue denim jacket worn unfastened over a white t-shirt. The dress style, she decided, didn’t really suit him; it was too young, too casual, for a man who appeared intelligent and studious. It certainly didn’t go well with the heavy spectacles.

Fiona mentally reviewed the case that had brought the four of them to this room. Nearly five years earlier Graham Whitaker, husband of Niamh, father of Linda, had left for work and never been seen again. He had been the finance officer of a Dundee company, Lewis Brothers, and when he had disappeared, so had over a million and a half pounds of the company’s money. Lewis Brothers, outwardly successful, had in fact been in dire financial straits and the disappearance of that money had been the last straw. Unable to meet their short term liabilities and thrown to the wolves by their bank, the company had gone into liquidation.

At the time Fiona had been a newly promoted Detective Sergeant, working on the team of Detective Inspector James MacNeil, who had led the investigation into the disappearance and embezzlement. MacNeil had left his card with Linda Jones but was now retired, which was why she had inherited the problem.

“So, ladies, Mr. Riorden, what do you feel that this discovery does to solve the mystery of Mr. Whitaker’s disappearance?”

17

She tactfully avoided mentioning the money that had disappeared at the same time, money which this note surely proved had been taken by Whitaker. It was Riorden who replied; he seemed to have taken over the leadership of the little group, even though the least directly involved in the affair.

“Well, Inspector, we feel that Mr. Whitaker’s message points to something more complicated than had originally appeared to be the case. At the time, given Mr. Whitaker’s position in the company, it seemed only logical that with him and the money vanishing at one and the same time that it was a simple case of embezzlement. What his note now reveals about the company apparently defrauding the taxman of considerable sums over the years, surely it must call into question the assumption of simple embezzlement?

As you can see, the existence of the fraud was effectively uncovered by this computer expert that Mr.

Whitaker had called in.”

Fiona frowned in concentration.

“I do take your point, Mr. Riorden, but after some four years the trail, if indeed there is one, is going to be pretty cold. However, as you have identified what appears to be details of a Lloyds bank account which might have been the destination of the missing money, I will obviously have that checked out. Thank you for bringing all of this to our attention. I will do some digging and, Mrs. Whitaker, as you are your husband’s next of kin, I will contact you and let you know if we discover anything.”

Fiona ushered her three visitors out of the police station and wondered, as she watched them depart just what, if anything, might lead from their visit.

Once she returned to her office she called in one of her Detective Constables. Helen Roxburgh was an energetic twenty-six year old, already mentally pencilled in for rapid promotion in the minds of her superiors.

“Helen, got a job for you.”

“Right, boss – what is it?”

Fiona handed over the piece of paper containing what was assumed to be the Lloyd’s bank account details.

“We think that these numbers are the details of a Lloyds bank account. Get on to the bank and find out as much as you can about it, if indeed it is an account. I want to know when it was opened, who opened it, what activity it has seen – you know the sort of stuff.”

“OK, boss.”

Fiona watched as the DC bounced out – it would be misleading to claim that Helen Roxburgh merely

‘walked’ anywhere – with enough energy to set her blonde ponytail swinging vigorously from side to side.

It only took Helen a little over half an hour before she was back in Fiona’s office, a perplexed look on her face.

“Got what you want, boss – and it looks a bit odd to say the least. It is a Lloyd’s account, set up with their Dundee branch. It was opened on the fourteenth of July, two thousand and ten. There are actually two accounts – a current account with thirty thousand in it and a deposit account which was opened with one million six hundred and eleven thousand, five hundred and twenty-two pounds and 38 pence. Apart from annual interest added to the deposit account there has been no activity on either account ever since. Nothing paid in, nothing taken out. The account was opened by one Graham Whitaker who provided an address in Dundee for correspondence – not the address in Perth that he and his wife lived in at the time. The bank has sent statements to the address on an annual basis; it has never received any further communication from Mr.

Whitaker. I checked out the address they were given; it’s an accommodation address run by a Dundee businessman. I spoke to him on the phone – he seems genuine enough and it sounds like a pretty tuppenny-halfpenny set-up. At a guess, it’s the sort of set-up where folk get mail sent to that they don’t want other family members to know about. I didn’t ask him specifically about what Whitaker had set up – I thought that might be better done face to face.”

“Thanks, Helen – I quite agree. That was quick work – well done.”

18

Once her subordinate had left the office, Fiona mused over what she had been told. Checking against the file which had been opened when the embezzlement had first been brought to the attention of the police, she realised that the amount in the deposit account matched, to the exact penny, the amount that had gone missing. Clearly Whitaker had not touched it. The thirty thousand in the current account must have come from some other source. So Whitaker had not benefitted personally from the crime – but was that by design or had something or someone prevented him from doing so?

She decided that it was worth following up on the accommodation address that Helen had identified, but could she justify spending her own time on it, or should she delegate it? She knew than when and to whom to delegate was a skill that she still needed to develop; only three months in her new rank she was still feeling her way to a certain extent.

Finally – but it only took thirty seconds or so to come to the conclusion; she was not one for prevaricating –

she decided the matter was intriguing enough for her to follow up at least this first step herself. She picked up her phone and dialled Helen Roxburgh.

“Helen, you and I will go and look into this accommodation address. You get a search warrant arranged and drive – I’ll meet you in the car park in an hour.”

True to her word, sixty minutes later she was buckling the seat belt of the front passenger seat of Helen’s Astra estate, and a further twenty minutes saw the two girls entering a small corner shop just off Trades Lane in Dundee’s older shopping area.

Helen had ascertained the name of the proprietor, so as she entered, holding up her warrant card, Fiona announced the two of them.

“Mr. Harrup, I am Detective Inspector Campbell and this is my colleague DC Roxburgh who spoke to you on the phone earlier. We need to examine the post box that you have for Mr. Gordon Whitaker, and I have here,” she produced the necessary document, “a search warrant entitling me to examine the box, its contents and anything that may be associated with it.”

Harrup was a short, tubby man perhaps fifty years of age, dressed in grey slacks and a navy blue sweater, both of which had clearly seen better days. Not quite bald, what little hair remained on his head was brushed from right to left to maximise its apparent quantity; pale blue eyes set in a pasty face gazed myopically at the two police officers though thick lensed, metal rimmed, spectacles. He looked nervously from one woman to the other.

“May I see that warrant, please, Inspector?”

Fiona handed the document over; Harrup inspected it carefully, then handed it back.

“This way, please, Inspector.”

He led the two policewomen through a door at the back of the shop into a large room behind, three walls of which were lined with metal boxes; at a rough estimate, Fiona felt that there must have been a hundred or so of them. There was nothing sophisticated about them; each bore a reference number on the front and after checking a small notebook that he withdrew from his trouser pocket, Harrup went to a box and opened it, an act which required nothing more secure than turning a handle. Fiona was amazed that Whitaker should have used a system with such lax security, but clearly he had. Perhaps it had been intended as a temporary measure, with some event preventing him from arranging something better?

The contents were a disappointment. Whitaker had received an annual statement updating the account holdings; as Fiona already knew, the only changes were the addition of interest payments to the deposit account. There was a letter, but when opened it proved to be nothing more than a bland letter from the bank assuring Whitaker of their continued intention to provide him with a first rate service.

“So they didn’t notice that he hadn’t actually used their ‘first rate service’ in four years!” Helen observed sarcastically.

19

“Looks like it – doesn’t say much for their customer service.” Fiona responded, similarly unimpressed by what they had found.

Half an hour later Fiona was back in her cubby-hole of an office, contemplating what she should do next.

OK, the money that had been taken from Lewis Brothers had been recovered – but now what? Who should get it? Had the company still been in existence the answer would have been obvious – and straightforward.

But Lewis Brothers were no longer in existence. Presumably the money would go to the Official Receiver who would then decide what should be done with it. Her first task, however, was to report the progress that had been made to her immediate superior, DCI Graham, and a few minutes later she was doing just that.

John Graham, like Fiona herself, was new in post, although not as new as his junior officer. Thirty-eight years of age, he had been the DCI for the area for some six months and was generally regarded by his superiors as doing a reasonable job.

“So,” he asked, “what next?”

“Well, sir, the Official Receiver will have to be notified and take responsibility for the money and what happens to it. As to the disappearance of Graham Whitaker, I don’t see that much has changed. Nobody could find him four years ago and I don’t see any chance of anybody finding him now. It seems to be ‘case closed’ to me.”

Graham leant back in his chair, the springing creaking slightly under his sixteen stone. Fiona surveyed her boss uneasily, wondering why he hadn’t accepted what she had just said. Not for the first time, she wondered if Graham was really all he was cracked up to be. The hiatus in the organisation of Scotland’s police forces, caused by the creation of Police Scotland two years earlier, had seen the development of some anomalies as a number of senior officers, seeing the opportunities for promotion limited by the politicians’ desire to achieve policing on the cheap, had departed for pastures new. As a result some officers, and Fiona felt strongly that Graham was amongst their number, had suddenly been promoted to vacancies that would not have occurred in the days before the reorganisation, and were now perhaps in posts that were a bit beyond them. Graham, she thought, was unsure of what to do next – but what was there that could be done? Graham eased his bulk in the chair and Fiona was once more struck by how overweight the man was. Only five feet eight or nine his flabby physique was unprepossessing, as was his heavily jowled face and thinning and greying hair. Grey eyes behind heavy horn-rimmed spectacles completed an ensemble that scarcely seemed appropriate for a senior detective; despite what his superiors thought, to Fiona he seemed out of his depth.

Graham frowned and Fiona sensed that she wasn’t going to like what was coming next.

She didn’t.

“I don’t think that we should be in too much of a hurry to declare the case closed, Inspector. Whitaker effectively absconded with well over a million and a half pounds, yet hasn’t touched a penny of it. Why not?

What happened to him? If we accept what he says in that recording of him, he was trying to smoke out whoever was responsible for the tax evasion – and tax evasion on a pretty large scale by the looks of things.

No, before we decide to close the case, we need to have a look at the people who were at Lewis Brothers at the time. Somebody must know something and we should try and find out what it is.”

Fiona’s heart sank. She could appreciate what Graham was saying, but the magnitude of the task concerned her. The three senior people at Lewis Brothers who had been named in Whitaker’s note would need to be traced and spoken to – what would they remember, or admit to remembering, from so long ago? Whitaker had dismissed the likelihood of any of the three having the ability to have set up the evasion scheme, and surely he, of anybody, ought to have known what he was talking about in relation to his colleagues. She could see a long slog ahead of her, with little chance of success. Still, Graham was the DCI; if that was what he wanted, that was what he would get.

“Right, sir, I’ll get people digging to see what we can find out.”

She left Graham’s office and returned to her own, wondering just where to start on what she felt was certain to turn out to be a wild goose chase.

20

The logical place to start, she told herself, was with the three senior members of the Lewis Brothers set-up, Holder, Gerard and Hammond. Although Whitaker’s voice from beyond the grave (because she was virtually certain that the man was dead) had said that none of them possessed the computer skills to have set up the tax evasion scheme, that didn’t necessarily mean that any or all of them were ignorant of it. The possibility must exist that one or more of them had hired somebody with the necessary expertise to carry out the work for them.

She got back to her office and again called in Helen Roxburgh.

“Helen, we need to do more digging into this Whitaker affair and the logical place to start is with the other three members of the board of Lewis Brothers. I know that all three of them no longer have any Dundee business connections, not after their company went bust, but track them down please, and arrange for you and me to talk to them.”

“Right, boss – we go to them, or they come to us?”

“Depends were they are – I don’t want to be driving all across the UK to find them, but if they are scattered hither and yon, I suppose we’re stuck with it.”

It was nearing the end of the working day when her subordinate returned, her face a mask of puzzlement.

“Boss, I’ve tracked those three men down, but we can’t talk to them – they’re all dead!”

“Dead? All of them? What happened?”

The DC consulted her notebook.

“Stephen Gerard, the production manager, was killed in a traffic accident - went into a tree on the A85 on the fifth of November, two thousand and ten. Night time and a wet road, on a bend. Nobody saw it – the road was clear at the time, although there were traces of an impact to the offside rear of his car and it is possible that it was actually forced off the road, although Gerard’s wife said that the car had received a bit of a bump in a car park a day or two earlier – they weren’t in the car park at the time – came back to find the damage, which wasn’t very great.

“Next to go was George Hammond, the company secretary. A bit of a keep fit bloke, he was out cycling on the eighteenth of December, two thousand and ten, in the dark. Found dead in the road, apparently hit by a vehicle, but no vehicle ever found, no driver ever came forward.

“Last but not least, the CEO and major shareholder, Richard Holder. He was found hanged in his garage on the seventh of January, two thousand and eleven. His wife found him; whereas Gerard and Hammond were effectively salaried people, although they did have some shares on the company, as by far the major shareholder, Holder was hit hard by the company’s crash. Although he wasn’t totally ruined, the bankruptcy meant a very considerable loss to him – he and his wife were in the process of selling their house and downsizing considerably, and the assumption at the time was that it was all too much for him.”

Fiona looked at her DC in amazement.

“All three of them – and all in the space of a few months? Well, there are coincidences and then there are coincidences – and then there is something like this. Nobody joined up the dots before?”

“No, boss – two traffic accidents, one suicide. Nobody realised that there were dots to be joined up.”

Fiona frowned, chewing on her bottom lip as she considered the possible implications of what she had just been told. That of the four top men at Lewis Brothers one had disappeared and three had died, all in the space of a few months – it defied the odds of probability and then some. The case was beginning to assume elements of incredulity in her mind.

Helen had been standing just inside the door as she delivered her information, and Fiona waved her to the visitor’s chair on the other side of the desk.

21

“Bear with me on this, Helen, because the whole thing is beginning to freak me out. A company in financial trouble – although outwardly OK, but actually struggling. Of the four top people in the set-up, the finance guy suddenly disappears after switching out all the company’s ready working funds causing it to collapse.

Within a few months the other three of the top men are all dead – two assumed road accidents, one suicide.

“Now – the money situation, I know that computers are so bloody clever nowadays that most folk believe that, given enough skill, you can do anything with them.

“So, let’s think about what happened, or is supposed to have happened, in this case. We only have what Whitaker stated in his recording, but let’s run with what he said, at least to start with. OK; the normal office computers are running a bit slow so he calls in an outside expert to have a look. The expert – again, according to Whitaker – finds a not very serious virus in the system and eradicates it. In the process, however, he also finds this odd system running in parallel with the normal one with the specific task of intercepting the company’s annual return to the taxman and massaging the figures so that the company pays less tax than it should.

“So, the money which should have gone to the taxman but didn’t must have gone somewhere else – but where? In his note Whitaker assumes that one of his colleagues is syphoning it off and, according to him, he moves the company’s ready cash to try and force whoever is fiddling the books out into the open. Excuse me? How the hell is that supposed to work? All of a sudden the company has no money to pay the month’s bills, including wages – does that cue the guilty party – if indeed there is one – out into the open? How? I don’t see, I just don’t see it – do you?”

Helen shook her head.

“No, boss – put like that I can’t see that it makes any sense at all. Comes pay day and nothing in the kitty. If it was one of the other three – or more than one – what do they do? They can hardly turn round and say ‘Oh hang on, we can use the money I’ve been pinching’, can they?”

It was Fiona’s turn to do some head shaking.

“No – so what was Whitaker thinking if he really did do as he says and for the reason he says? It just doesn’t make any sense.

“Another thing – going back to that note of Whitaker’s. Look at the sheer improbability of it being found if his widow and the other two are telling the truth. Hidden in a picture frame, written in code; going on what we have been told, Riorden only discovered the note by the wildest of chances. If he hadn’t found it – or even if he had found it and just chucked it away, as many people would probably have done – then what?

None of this would have come to light and we would have had a simple case of embezzlement – but one thing this case certainly isn’t is simple – and it’s getting more and more weird the more we dig into it.

“A thought – Whitaker’s note gives no indication as to how much money had been hived off. To go to all this trouble it must have been a reasonable amount, so where is it? If it was nicked by one of his three colleagues, it should show up somewhere, perhaps not in their normal bank accounts, but somewhere, surely?”

Helen interjected.

“Up to now there has been no reason to look at the finances of those three, only Whitaker – and when that was done the money that he had embezzled wasn’t found – and never would have been but for that note and disc coming to light. This whole case is riddled with inconsistencies.”

“Tell me about it.”

Fiona pushed her chair back and stood up, stretching her back to relieve the tension that had been building up from leaning forward over the desk for so long. She walked away from the desk – her office was too small to take more than a pace or so, but that was what she did anyway. As she did so, she cast her mind back to the conversation that she had had with DCI Graham, the conversation which had led her to digging deeper into this case. Much as it irked her to admit it, even to herself, Graham had been right and she had been wrong.

22

There was much more to the case than had originally met the eye and she was now stuck with trying to make some sort of sense out of it all. She looked at her watch.

“God, seven already! Bugger off home, Helen – we’ll have a team brief about all this first thing tomorrow.”

Chapter Four

Fiona surveyed her team as they looked at her expectantly. So far, only Helen Roxburgh knew more than the sketchiest of details of the investigation that was about to become their number one priority – at least for the next few days or so when either some progress would have been made indicating a way forward, or it would become clear that the whole thing was a big dead-end.

Her team comprised, in addition to Helen, three more DCs – John Govern, at thirty-nine years of age the oldest and most experienced of her DCs, seated next to him, her youngest, Ken Stewart, just three months younger than Helen. Her quartet of DCs was completed by David Linnear, a year older than Helen and Ken.

Final member of the team was Paul Murray, her Detective Sergeant, not only the senior member of her team in rank, but also in age at forty.

She quickly ran through what was known about the case and what she and Helen had discovered during the course of the previous day. By the time that she had finished she had the distinct impression that her team were as bemused by it all as she was, but bemusement wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

“Right,” she said, “I know it all seems the weirdest kind of dog’s dinner, but if it was simple we wouldn’t be needed. First task – we need to talk to the widows of the three men. I don’t like coincidences, especially when the coincidences are associated with over a million and a half quid going missing. Paul, you and I will do that – set it up please. Obviously, given the circumstances, we go to them, not the other way round.”

Her DS nodded his head and she turned her attention to John Govern, whom she knew had the best eye for detail of all her team, including herself.

“John, I want you to review the files on the three deaths – work on the assumption that they are in some way linked, even if the link isn’t obvious, even if nobody thought of looking for a link at the time. OK?”

“Yes, boss.”

Finally, she turned to her three remaining DCs.

“Ken, I want you to start a composite file – we are treating Whitaker’s disappearance and the deaths of the other three as all part and parcel of the same investigation, so do it that way. David, Helen, if there is any suspicious element to the three deaths there is just a chance that one of the people who lost out when Lewis Brothers went tits up was unhappy enough to take it out on one, or more, of the bosses they felt responsible. I want criminal record checks on all the employees of Lewis Brothers at the time of the crash and a trace as to where they are now and what they are doing. It’s donkey work, but it needs to be done, and done quickly.

Right, folks, let’s get to it.”

**********

Some four hours later, Fiona and Paul Murray were sitting in the living room of the house occupied by Louise Holder, the widow of Richard Holder, the one-time CEO of Lewis Brothers, who had apparently committed suicide some four years earlier. One of the elements presumed to have led to him taking his own life had been the financial come down resulting from the firm’s bankruptcy, a come down which had meant that Mrs. Holder now lived in a modest three bedroom house on the outskirts of Dundee, whereas the previous residence of herself and her husband had been a far grander place.

The widow was not over-pleased to have the matter brought up again.

23

“Really, Inspector, what is the point of all this – Richard killed himself thanks to that wretched man Whitaker and I’m having to live with the consequences. I don’t understand why you want to talk about what happened. It happened and I am still trying to come to terms with it – why can’t you leave me alone?”

Fiona sighed inwardly. She had every sympathy with the woman, but with the lurking suspicion that Holder’s death might not have been as straightforward as had been assumed at the time, she needed to know more about the man than was on file. She decided that honesty was probably the best policy.

“Please believe me, Mrs. Holder than I am not just trying to rake over old coals. When your husband died it was in much the same time frame as two of his colleagues, Stephen Gerard and George Hammond. At the time there was no reason to suspect that there were any links between the three deaths, but we now have fresh evidence about what Graham Whitaker was up to, evidence which might indicate that the deaths of his colleagues – and his own disappearance – may not have been as coincidental as appeared at the time.”

Mrs. Holder frowned, a frown which added to her apparent age. Fiona knew that the woman was fifty-three years old, but she looked considerably older. Grey hair and an aged look to her features combined to make her seem at least a decade older than her actual years. It was, Fiona surmised, hardly surprising that she looked careworn, given the trauma that she had suffered with the death of her husband.

Mrs. Holder gave a deep sigh of resignation.

“Very well, Inspector – what do you want to ask me?”

“Did you have any inkling that your husband was contemplating taking his own life before he actually died?”

Mrs. Holder shook her head vehemently.

“No. I was asked that at the time and I still say what I said then. Richard was angry at the way that the company had failed – but he laid on the blame on that man Whitaker, not on himself, nor on anybody else.

The week before he had just completed the arrangements to sell our previous house and move in here; in fact, we hadn’t actually moved when he died – it happened in the old house.”

“Could it have been that the thought of having to leave your previous house drove him to despair?”

Again the shake of the head.

“No – he wasn’t looking forward to having to make such a downsizing after all the work that he had put into the company over the years, but he wasn’t down about it – he was furious about it!”

“Did anything out of the ordinary happen in the days immediately before his death?”

“What sort of things?”

Fiona shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know what might have counted as out of the ordinary for Mr. Holder and yourself, Mrs. Holder –

only you will know that.”

For the first time the woman hesitated before replying.

“Well, there was a telephone call two days before he died. I don’t know who was on the other end of the line and I only half heard what Richard was saying. The phone he was using was in the hall and I was in the kitchen, but I had the door open so Richard’s voice carried through to me. Whoever it was, and whatever it was about, it clearly made him angry and he told me that he out to go out for a while and positively stormed out of the house and drove off. He was away for perhaps an hour and when he returned he was still angry, but he never said what it was all about. I didn’t press him about it – I was too busy getting things ready for our move, which was imminent.”

“Did he seem different in any way after that call, Mrs. Holder?”

“Well, he was still clearly angry about it a couple of hours later, but he simmered down over the evening and the next morning was his normal self.”

24

“Mrs. Holder, I know this must be painful for you, but I must ask. What actually happened on the day that Mr. Holder died?”

The woman was silent for a long, long moment and Fiona began to wonder if she was going to refuse to answer, but eventually she took a long breath and spoke.

“I had said the previous evening that I had quite a lot of shopping to do and also that I wanted to drop some things off at one of the charity shops. I asked Richard if he wanted to come with me, but he said he had paperwork to catch up with, so I left on my own. That was about half past nine or a little after. I didn’t get back to the house until just on twelve – I’d stopped for a cup of coffee as well as doing my shopping and everything. The old house had a double garage with an up and over door – an electrically activated one, so I drove up to it and pressed the button on the remote, intending to drive in and park the car. We had a door from the garage straight into the house, so that was the easiest way of unloading the car when it was full of shopping as it was that day. When the door went up,” she stopped and Fiona could see the anguish on her face, “when the door went up I could see Richard hanging there. I screamed and rushed out of the car and over to him, but it was obvious that I was too late.

“Even so, I cut him down and called 999 for an ambulance, but when it arrived they said that he was dead and called the police. The police arrived quickly and I spent an age with them going over everything that had happened in the previous days. I told them about the phone call the previous evening, but the officers I spoke to didn’t seem terribly interested in it.

“I was in a state of shock for days afterwards – we don’t have any children and no close friends here – we originally came from Aberdeen only five years earlier when Richard bought into Lewis Brothers.”

Fiona was intrigued by the woman’s story. Given all the problems that the Holders were facing at the time, what was said in the phone call that could have made him so angry the evening before his death? Before coming out to see Mrs. Holder she had studied the autopsy report on her husband’s death; there was nothing in it to raise any suspicions – the only notable aspect was that Richard Holder had drunk about half a bottle of whisky immediately prior to his death, something by no means unusual in suicide victims. That, however, made her think. The police file of Holder’s suicide was skimpy, to say the least, containing little more than copies of the autopsy report and the statement given by Mrs. Holder at the time. There was no report of a search of the premises, other than the garage. Presumably Holder had drunk the whisky in the house, then come into the garage to hang himself. The report on the search of the garage was straightforward; Holder had brought a kitchen chair out, tied a rope to the exposed roof beam of the garage, got up on the chair, fashioned a noose round his neck and kicked the chair away. Everything was sadly consistent with a man at the end of his tether taking his own life – but, and it was a big but, Fiona could not help but think that three deaths of three connected men over so short a period of time might not be as straightforward as they had seemed at the time, especially as all three had been looked into by different officers with no reason to suspect any connection between those three deaths.

“Tell me, please, Mrs. Holder, if you noticed any change in your husband’s behaviour in the days leading up to his death – the telephone call that you have mentioned may be significant, but was there anything else?”

The woman shook her head before speaking.

“Not really. Oh, I suppose he drank rather a lot when the company first crashed, but he got over that quite quickly.”

“Did he drink a lot, Mrs. Holder?”

“Not normally – a couple of glasses of wine at dinner most evenings. Never drank during the working day, even if having a business lunch anywhere.”

Fiona began to wonder; someone who didn’t normally drink very much – if they drank half a bottle of whisky straight off, how stable would they be on their feet? Another thought struck her.

“Mrs. Holder – it isn’t mentioned in our files, but did the police take away the whisky bottle after they came?”

25

Mrs. Holder frowned.

“What whisky bottle?”

“Well, your husband had drunk a considerable amount of whisky immediately before he died.”

“Never! Richard never drank whisky – didn’t like it. We kept a small bottle for guests, but in fact I threw it away when I moved house – and it was still unopened. He liked cognac – we always had that in the house, and gin, as well as wine, of course, but not whisky, not for ourselves – I don’t like it either.”

It was Fiona’s turn to be surprised.

“But, Mrs. Holder, it was mentioned at the inquest.”

“I didn’t go to the inquest – I wasn’t well enough to cope with it. This is the first that I have heard of Richard drinking whisky, and I can assure you that it just would not have happened. If he wanted to drink before” she hesitated, then plunged on, “before he did it, there was plenty of cognac and gin in the house, but not whisky.”

It was at that moment that Fiona decided that she was right – there was something decidedly fishy about the deaths of Holder, Gerard and Hammond, something that had been missed earlier. But how to proceed?

Everything had happened over four years ago. The trail was cold, very cold indeed.

The two police officers took their leave of the widow. Once in the car, Fiona turned to her sergeant.

“So, what do you think, Paul?”

“Something odd is going on, boss. If Holder wanted to have some Dutch courage before topping himself, and there was brandy and gin in the house, both of which he liked, why go out on whisky, which he didn’t? And what happened to the bottle? Makes no sense. I’m beginning to wonder if it was suicide at all.”

“Me too, Paul, me too!”

Their next port of call was to see Helen Gerard, the widow of Stephen Gerard, the one-time production manager of Lewis Brothers. Like Mrs. Holder, Mrs. Gerard no longer lived in the house that she and her husband had inhabited before his death, which had been a middle of the range four bed bungalow on the outskirts of Dundee. Her new abode was a well-appointed, although slightly smaller, bungalow outside Pitlochry. A new Range Rover was parked on the gravel drive in front of the house, a vehicle which Paul Murray eyed appreciatively.

“Looks as though this widow had done rather better for herself than did Mrs. Holder, boss.”

Fiona looked around her; as Murray had said, the whole ambience of the house, its garden, the locality, and indeed the car, looked expensive. A thought began to niggle at the back of her mind.

Opening the front door to Murray’s knock, Helen Gerard maintained the air of money. She was dressed in a simple, figure hugging silk dress, the sort of simplicity, and the sort of fabric, Fiona well knew, that did not come cheap. Mrs. Gerard was tall and slim, with shoulder length ash-blonde hair expensively styled to set off a flawless complexion dominate by bright blue eyes which surveyed the two detectives quizzically as she ushered them into a large lounge at the back of the house, a room with a big picture window giving a view of an immaculate garden. A quick glance at their hostess’ hands with their long, polished nails, decided Fiona that the work needed to keep such a garden looking so good wasn’t undertaken by Mrs. Gerard herself. From the file regarding her husband’s death, Fiona knew that the woman was now in her mid-fifties, but she could easily have passed for being ten years younger; money keeps you looking young, Fiona thought to herself.

It was the lady who spoke first.

“I am at a bit of a loss, Inspector, to understand why you are here. Your colleague,” she waved a hand in Murray’s direction, “was less than forthcoming when we spoke on the phone.”

26

“We’re here, Mrs. Gerard, because recent information suggests that the deaths of you husband, Mr. Holder and Mr. Hammond may have some sort of link between them.”

“I don’t understand. Stephen and George Hammond died in traffic accidents; Richard Holder killed himself.

What sort of a link could there be?”

“That is what we are trying to find out, Mrs. Gerard. When your husband’s car was examined after the accident, there was evidence of some damage to the offside rear of his vehicle, damage that must have been caused by another vehicle hitting it.”

“I explained that at the time, Inspector. We went out shopping a couple of days early, parked at the supermarket, and when we got back to the car found that somebody had obviously backed into it, and then just driven off.”

“Did you report the damage to your insurers, Mrs. Gerard?”

“No. It wasn’t very much and Stephen was going to have it sorted out without bothering the insurance company – it would probably have cost little more than his excess anyway, and they would probably have increased the premium next time round as a result. Just not worth the fuss and bother.”

“Something that puzzles me, Mrs. Gerard. At the time you lived just outside Dundee and your husband’s accident occurred the other side of Perth – a good twenty-five miles or more away. It was night time, so presumably it wasn’t a business trip – where was he going?”

There was a momentary hesitation on the widow’s part before she answered.

“To be honest with you, Inspector – I don’t know. We had had a bit of a row that evening and Stephen decided to go for a drive – as he put it ‘to clear his head’.”

“What was the row about, Mrs. Gerard?”

“Is that really relevant, Inspector?”

“I can’t know unless you tell me.”

The woman frowned in annoyance, but answered.

“It was about David, our son. He wanted to borrow quite a lot of money and Stephen had refused him. I thought that he was being quite unreasonable and told him so after David had gone. When he said that he wanted to clear his head, I thought that he just wanted to think over David’s request by himself, without me going on at him. When I heard where the accident had taken place, I was totally surprised. I can’t imagine why he was in that area at all.”

“Where does your son live, Mrs. Gerard? Or rather – where did he live at the time? Could he have been on his way to see him?”

She shook her head, the ahs-blonde hair swinging around like a cascade of silk.

“No, David still lives in the same place – he has a flat in Dundee.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“He is a partner in a very hi-tech computer business. He and three friends from University set up the company back in two thousand and six, and it did quite well, but by two thousand and ten one of the partners had left and David and the other two were finding thinks difficult. The aftermath of the recession was still affecting companies like theirs and David asked Stephen for a loan to prop the company up until things picked up again. Stephen felt that the most likely outcome in the future was that the company wouldn’t pick up and that he was being asked to send good money after bad.

“David took it well, but he was clearly very upset and after he left I really laid into Stephen.” She hesitated before continuing. “Now, of course, I bitterly regret that argument. If I hadn’t taken David’s part so strongly 27

right there and then, perhaps Stephen would have come round in the end. Certainly, I’m sure he wouldn’t have decided to go off for that fatal drive.”

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

Fiona looked at the woman, prey to the uneasy thought that Helen Gerard was acting a part; acting the repentant sinner, saying what she thought that her audience expected to hear. She decided to change tack a little.

“I presume that David’s company managed to weather the storm?”

“Yes. Ironic, really. Stephen was very well insured and I was able to help David out from the insurance money – and David was proved right after all. A couple of years later he – or I suppose really the company -

were able to pay me back in full and with some interest.”

“So is it the same company as it was before Mr. Gerard’s death?”

“Yes – they call themselves CS Partners, the ‘CS’ standing for Computer Solutions’. They’re based in Dundee and specialise in rescuing companies who are having serious computer problems – people hacking into their systems, employees doing hi-tech fiddling, all that sort of thing.”

At that point Fiona felt that she had gleaned all that she could from Mrs. Gerard, and she and Murray took their leave of the widow. Once in the car, Fiona again turned to her sergeant.

“Well, what do you think of that performance, Paul?”

“Well, I reckon that you are right to call it a performance, boss. I don’t think she’s exactly broken hearted at the loss of her old man at all. Looks like him hitting that tree was a blessing all round – the son’s company is rescued, the widow gets a tidy sum of money – apart from Gerard himself, everybody benefits.”

“Yes, and I would love to know what he was doing being where he was when he crashed. I think that things about these three deaths are looking odder by the minute. OK, let’s go and see what widow number three has to tell us.”

Elizabeth Hammond lived in Edinburgh, in an expensive looking apartment block overlooking Prince’s Street Gardens and both Fiona and Paul Murray were struck by the fact that two of the three widows seemed to have benefitted financially to a considerable degree from the deaths of their spouses, whilst one, Doreen Holder, clearly had not.

Mrs. Hammond had buzzed them through when they presented their warrant cards to the CCTV camera at the entry phone and greeted them as they stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor.

The lift had opened onto a small foyer; clearly there was just the one apartment on the floor, the already opened front door only six feet or so away from the lift itself.

The widow was tall and heavily built, perhaps five feet seven or eight, with short black hair cut to frame an almost masculine looking face, a face from which clear blue eyes surveyed the police officers with interest.

She was dressed casually; blue jeans – but expensive looking blue jeans – and a heavy white roll neck sweater, with otherwise bare feet clad in pale brown, almost cream coloured, moccasins. Fiona knew that the woman was forty-six years of age, but, as with Mrs. Gerard, she could easily have passed for ten years younger. Once again she was struck with how much less affected by widowhood Mesdames Gerard and Hammond seemed than had been the case with Mrs. Holder.

They were ushered into a large lounge, its main feature being a picture window looking out over the famous gardens. Black leather armchairs and a three piece settee contrasted with a deep pile white carpet, all three items of furniture arranged to maximise the view from the window. Off to one side stood a large TV on a stand and the walls were decorated with half a dozen vibrant prints, featuring splashes of red, orange and deep blue, lifting the otherwise monochromatic ambience of the room.

She waved Fiona and Murray to the settee, seating herself in one of the armchairs; all three of them could see the other two comfortably.

28

“So, officers, how can I help you?”

Fiona had been studying the woman closely from the moment that she and Murray had stepped out of the lift.

Her body language gave no hint of unease – quite the contrary; Mrs. Hammond seemed totally in control of herself.

“Mrs. Hammond, due to fresh evidence that we have discovered, we are no longer satisfied that the deaths of your husband, Mr, Gerard, and Mr. Holder are necessarily unconnected, so I am looking further into the possibility that one, or more, of the deaths may be less straightforward than they appeared at the time.”

A slight frown crossed the widow’s carefully made-up features.

“I don’t understand, Inspector. George died at the hands – or rather the wheels – of some driver who didn’t have the courage to face up to what he had done – and the police proved totally unable to find the man.”

“Why do you assume that the driver was a man, Mrs. Hammond?”

The heavy shoulders were shrugged expressively.

“Natural prejudice, I suppose – but this sort of thing is surely more often done by a man than by a woman?”

Fiona shrugged in her turn.

“That’s by the by, Mrs. Hammond. What I would like you to tell me is all that you can, not just about the day that Mr. Hammond died, but on the days leading up to his death.”

The woman frowned in concentration – and suddenly looked her true age, Fiona thought.

“Well, I can’t say that I noticed any change in his behaviour for the previous few days – or few weeks, for that matter. He was still pretty upset about the way that Lewis Brothers had folded – if he could have got his hands on that man Whitaker I hate to think what might have happened – and he had been less happy than usual even since the firm collapsed. I suppose that eventually he would have been his old self again, but, of course, he never got the chance.”

She broke off, and a tear rolled unbidden down her left cheek; she extracted a flimsy handkerchief from a pocket in the jeans and dabbed it away. She gave a little gulp before continuing.

“It’s all so bloody silly. I hated him going out on that bike, especially on winter nights. To be honest, I was shocked at what happened, but not surprised. Why didn’t he listen to me?”

The woman seemed genuinely upset, Fiona thought, but could it be an act? If so, it was a pretty good one. A thought struck her.

“Did Mr. Hammond get any phone calls that evening, or perhaps an evening or so before?”

The widow thought for a moment.

“Not that I recall, but George hardly ever used the house phone. He had one of these very clever mobile phones and it was always with him – ever when out riding that bicycle. He could have had any number of calls on that, so unless I was in the same room with him at the time, I might well not be aware of them.”

Fiona had been mildly hopeful that Hammond, like Gerard, might have received an annoying phone call shortly before his death – no way of knowing.

At that point she and Murray left Mrs. Hammond’s presence; once in the car, Fiona again turned to her sergeant.

“What do you think, Paul?”

“Well, I think that flat of hers cost a pretty penny – all those in that block have four bedrooms. I’ve checked on the estate agents’ sites – it must have set her back at least six hundred grand, probably more. She only moved into it after hubby died – looks like another nice insurance pay out.”

29

Fiona nodded her agreement, and a thought that had crossed her mind when talking with Mrs. Gerard took slightly deeper root.

Back at the station Fiona called her team together to update them on the interviews that she and Murray had had with the three widows and to check on the progress that the others had made.

“Right, Helen, John, how have you got on with your checks on the criminal database?”

The two DCs shook their heads in unison; it was Helen Roxburgh that spoke.

“Nothing of any import, boss. When the company folded it had twenty seven employees, with not a serious blemish on any of their records. A couple of drink driving convictions – long expunged, a case of shop lifting as a teenager, and five speeding offences. Nothing at all recent – the latest was a speeding offence by one John Killick – and that was seven years ago. Nobody with a history of violence, not even getting involved in a punch-up as a youngster – all boringly law abiding, really.”

Fiona assimilated what she had heard. Past good behaviour didn’t mean that somebody might not have gone ape at losing his – or her, five of the employees were women- job and bumping off senior management, but it seemed a pretty unlikely scenario.

She turned to Stewart.

“Ken, anything to tell us from creating a single file from the four cases?”

“Nothing that stands out, boss. All three deaths, as we know, were investigated by different divisions, no cross-over at the time, and on the face of it, it’s difficult to criticise the fact. It only looks odd when you look outside the actual deaths and try to link them with Whitaker’s disappearance and the missing money. Now that you and the DS have interviewed the widows, I’ll incorporate what they told you into the file, but two things do strike me – that phone call to Holder and the fact that there seems to be no explanation for why Gerard was where he was when he died.”

Fiona nodded her agreement; already, although she had the glimmerings of an idea about the four cases, she could see no way through to a solution. At that point she realised that with the activity involved in tracking down and speaking with, those involved, she had overlooked one important element – according to what she had been told, money that should have gone to the taxman was being syphoned off – but how much money?

That was something which would need to be checked, even though it was peripheral to the case as a whole, she needed to know if the amount involved justified all these odd goings on and if they didn’t – then what?

Chapter Five

I woke early on the Saturday morning; the agency had been in touch the previous day and asked if I could undertake a commission for an American company that wanted some ‘typically Scottish’ scenes to illustrate a brochure that they were producing in advance of launching a Scottish subsidiary to their business. The agency had a plentiful supply of standard fare for such requests of course – castles like Eilean Donan, shots of Highland cattle, bagpipers and the like, but the Americans wanted specific shots of the area in which they intended to locate their new venture, which was to be in Dundee, and as I was on the doorstep, I got the call.

A variety of shots showing Dundee as a bustling centre of commerce, balanced by nearby landscapes were called for, and it was the later element that had me out of my bed at four in the morning to take advantage of early light on the Sidlaw hills which lay to the west of the city and would therefore have their eastern slopes bathed in the morning light of the sun – always provided, of course, that the sun was shining.

Sod’s law – it wasn’t. Instead, a gentle drizzle emanating from a heavy grey overcast greeted me as I opened the curtains. For a moment I was tempted to go back to bed, but I was wide awake and I knew from past experience that once having woken and stirred from my bed I was unlikely to get back to sleep, so I dressed and went into the kitchen for an early morning cup of tea.

30

Not for the first time, I thought back to the events of the last few days. I remained fascinated by the mystery surrounding Graham Whitaker; Niamh Whitaker had been contacted by the policewoman, DI Campbell, who had told her that the money which her husband had embezzled from Lewis Brothers had never been touched, bearing out the man’s assertion in his message that he hadn’t moved the money for personal gain. So – that being the case, what had he hoped to achieve? In his message he had said that he was hoping to find out who was responsible for the tax evasion scheme, but for the life of me, I could not understand how he expected depriving the company of its much needed working capital would have any such effect. From all accounts, Whitaker wasn’t a stupid man, so he must have had some reason for believing that his plan would work – but what could it have been? And as he clearly hadn’t made off with the money – what had happened to him?

I mooched around the house – I had packed the car the previous evening with my camera gear and I decided to leave it there in the hope that the morrow would have better weather.

Getting involved with the disappearance of Graham Whitaker had been, to be honest, the most interesting few days that I had experienced in ages. Self-employment was all very well, and at first I had welcomed the release from having to face a classroom of students every day when my mind was full of thoughts of my lost wife and child, but I was beginning to feel that perhaps I needed some form of stimulus over and above occasional photographic assignments to keep me occupied.

I had an early breakfast and then, despite the drizzle, which showed no sign of relenting, I decided to go for a walk in the area where I had intended to be photographing. I had already marked out in my mind a number of possible locations, but it wouldn’t hurt to check them again, nor to possibly identify a few more.

It was a fruitless exercise. No sooner had I parked in a convenient lay-by and started to climb the nearby hill than the drizzle turned into determined heavy rain and forced me into a hasty retreat. With my metaphorical tail between my legs I drove home and wondered what to do with the rest of my day.

It was now mid-morning, and on an impulse, I phoned Linda Jones.

“Hello.”

“Linda? It’s Peter Riorden – I wondered if you were doing anything or if I could invite you out to lunch?”

“Peter – nice to hear from you again. As it happens, I haven’t any plans for lunch time – where and when?”

“How about the George? One o’clock OK for you?”

“Yes, that would be fine – will you book a table?”

“Oh yes – don’t want to find the place too full to get in.”

“Right – see you there.”

I rang off, pleased that I had something to with the day rather than just watch the rain come down. It was now around eleven o’clock, so no cause for hurry and I wondered what to wear, finally deciding on more or less the same apparel that I had worn the first time that I had met Linda – my old blue blazer with the rowing club badge on the breast pocket, pale grey slacks, a white shirt and, rather than the dark red tie of our previous meeting, a more muted pale blue one. Altogether, considerably smarter than the clothes that I normally wore – I hoped that she would appreciate the effort.

She had also made an effort – I rose to greet her as she approached the window table that I had booked, admiring the floaty summer weight dress in a flowery print which she wore in defiance of the weather and which billowed around her as she walked across the dining room.

“Peter – lovely to see you again.”

“And you!”

We kissed cheeks and I settled her into her chair. It was a week since we had met up with the police to pass on what we had learnt from her father’s message, and I was eager to hear if there had been any more developments.

31

“Not really, I’m afraid,” she said glumly. “As you know, the police told mum that dad hadn’t touched a penny of the Lewis Brothers’ money. They have also confirmed that his bank cards have never been used, and mum already knew that he had never touched their joint account.”

I was disappointed to learn nothing new, but didn’t want the affair to dampen her spirits – nor mine, for that matter – and we settled down to order lunch. In deference to Scotland’s draconian drink drive laws I settled for a single small glass of wine with my steak; Linda, within walking distance of her home, was able to indulge herself with a gin and tonic and a couple of glasses.

We both declined a sweet, but took our time over coffees before I walked her back to her flat; thankfully, the rain had stopped and the sun was doing its best to imitate a summer’s day. We got to the entry door and she turned to me.

“Come up for another coffee, Peter?” she invited.

“That would be nice.”

It was the first time that I had been in Linda’s flat and I was impressed by the air of spaciousness that she had created with a minimalist approach to its contents. The walls, ceiling and the carpet on the floor were all white, the three seat settee and its matching armchairs were black leather; the low occasional table in front of the seat was of black smoked glass. Pride of place on one wall were three oil paintings which I instantly recognised as the work of her grandfather, James Whitaker. Two of the paintings were of Royal Navy warships. In a style similar to his painting of HMS Hood, the painting which had drawn me into this mystery, on one of the paintings he had depicted – as I learned from a small brass plaque on the bottom of the frame -

HMS Devonshire, a heavy cruiser. The second naval picture, but this time of a vessel peacefully at anchor, picked out by the rays of the setting sun, was of a much smaller warship. Again, there was a small plaque, this one inscribed ‘First command – HMS Tarragon, Flower class’. The other picture depicted a family group

– father, mother and daughter. The mother was clearly a younger Niamh Whitaker, the child – about two years old or so – was presumably Linda, but it was the man who most interested me. This must be the disappeared Graham Whitaker and I studied him closely. Like his daughter, he was tall and slim – in his case perhaps six feet two or so, although as his wife was sitting whilst he was standing, it was difficult to be sure.

Again like his daughter, his hair was black, although cut short, not styled in any way. For some reason, the fact that he was in the uniform of a naval officer came as a surprise, although as his father had been in the Navy, why shouldn’t the son have followed in his footsteps? The uniform, that of a Royal Navy Sub-Lieutenant, had surprised me, but it was his face that really caught my attention. Long and narrow, with deep-set eyes under heavy brows matching his hair and a hawk-like beak of a nose, it was a face that, once seen, would not easily be forgotten.

Linda returned from the kitchen bearing two coffee mugs and saw what was holding my attention.

“Yes, granddad painted all of those, as you have possibly guessed. The bigger ship, the cruiser Devonshire, was his lucky charm – that’s the ship he was transferred to from the Hood. But for that, it’s just about certain that he would have died when Hood went down. The other ship, as it says on the plaque, was his first command – he captained her for two years in the Battle of the Atlantic escorting convoys.”

“I was looking at your dad as well – it’s the first picture that I have seen of him.”

It was as though a cloud had passed over her face.

“Yes, a year after he disappeared mum put all the pictures of him away – it was too painful for her to see them every day.”

“I can well understand that – I can’t even begin to imagine what she – and you – had to go through.”

“It was very hard, Peter. In some ways, now that it is all in the open again, it seems less hard second time around – almost as if it was happening to different people. I wonder if we ever will find out what really happened.”

32

I shared her doubts; to all intents and purposes, Graham Whitaker had vanished from the face of the earth. As I mused upon the fact, it struck me just how little I actually knew about the man.

“Had your father worked at Lewis Brothers for long?”

“Just three years or so. Before that, as you saw in granddad’s painting, like granddad, he was in the Navy, but in the paymaster’s branch, not a seaman as such, although he did serve at sea quite a few times. He retired at fifty-five as a Commander and after just enjoying doing nothing for a while, decided he ought to get himself a job to keep himself busy and landed the post at Lewis Brothers about a year and a half or so after leaving the Navy. Obviously, his experience and qualifications from his navy days made him a good choice as a finance officer for the company.”

The more that I heard about Graham Whitaker, the less he sounded like an embezzler who had got it wrong, and the more he sounded like a man who had tried to sort out some criminal activity, and sadly got that wrong. I was more convinced than ever that he was dead. But if that was the case – who had been responsible for his death? The obvious culprits – one or more of his senior management colleagues seemed unlikely hi-tech villains from Whitaker’s own words – and in any case, once he – or they – had discovered that the company’s money had gone walkabout, surely they would want to get it back somehow – either back into the company’s coffers or into his/their own accounts? Killing off the – presumably – only man capable of getting the money back seemed foolish, to say the least.

I wondered what had happened to those three men, and asked Linda if she knew.

“Yes,” she replied, “it’s all very tragic – all three of them are dead. Stephen Gerard and George Hammond died in traffic accidents and Richard Holder committed suicide. They all died quite soon after dad disappeared and the company folded – just a few months afterwards, in fact.”

I was staggered. Surely all four of the top management of a fairly small company dying or disappearing in the course of, apparently, just a few months stank to high heaven? The old James Bond cliché ‘once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action’ ran through my mind – and here we had not three possibly linked occurrences, but four. I found it very hard not to believe that something evil was going on. I wondered what the police, in the form of the attractive DI Campbell, made of it all.

We moved on to more personal matters. She told me that her mother was experiencing a fit of depression, brought on, without doubt, by the resurrection of the matters surrounding the disappearance of her husband, and I felt guilty that I was partially to blame. If I had not discovered Graham Whitaker’s communication, his wife would have continued to lock the matter away in her memories, rather than have to face it all over again.

I realised that I didn’t know what Linda did for a living; somehow, the subject had just never come up before. I learned that she was legal secretary in a Dundee firm, working for a partner who specialised almost exclusively in conveyancing work.

“It’s not exactly riveting,” she said, “but it pays the bills and it’s the sort of job you can leave behind you at the end of the working day, and not have to worry about, and it is also Monday to Friday, no weekend working, so it suits me very well.”

I left after an hour or so of general chat, determined to see more of Linda Jones; I was becoming more and more attracted to her, and hoped that the feeling was mutual, but it was early days yet.

Chapter Six

Fiona Campbell sat back on her chair as she ran through the elements of the Lewis Brothers case in her mind.

The whole thing seemed a mish-mash of unlikely coincidences – and she didn’t believe in coincidences in criminal investigations, for the more she thought about the case, the more convinced was she that criminality was involved.

The key to it all, she was sure, was the way in which Graham Whitaker had disappeared. The actual movement of the money was crucial to that disappearance, but how on earth had the man thought that he was 33

doing something sensible? His words had been that he was trying to smoke out whoever was behind the tax evasion scam, but how likely to succeed had his ploy been?

Something that needed following up, she decided, was talking to the computer expert who had alerted Whitaker to the fraud. She had set Ken Stewart the task of tracking down the expert and so far the young DC

had been unsuccessful. All the records of the company had been looked at when Whitaker and the money had disappeared, but nowhere within them was there any record of the company that Whitaker had approached to undertake the investigation. That in itself was highly suspicious; why had no record been found? The file indicated that Whitaker’s staff had been quizzed, but they had all claimed that Whitaker hadn’t told them anything about his intentions. That, Fiona mused, was logical; Whitaker would have had no way of knowing whether or not his own people had been aware of, or even perhaps involved in, the fraud, so saying nothing to them made sense.

There was, she had reluctantly decided, only one way of following up on that particular aspect of the case, and the task that she had set Stewart was to contact every computer firm in the Dundee area to see if they had done any work for Lewis Brothers four years ago. So far, the results had been negative.

It was then that a thought struck her. When she and Paul Murray had spoken with Mrs. Gerard, the woman had told them of an argument that she had had with her husband the night of his death, an argument about loaning money to their son, a son who was a partner in a computer company which specialised in just the sort of work that Whitaker had wanted undertaken. Would Whitaker have approached that particular firm had he known of the link with one of his ‘suspects’? But – suppose that he hadn’t known of the link? His words indicated that in the past Lewis Brothers had used a company which had gone out of existence, so he had been forced to look elsewhere.

As though reading her mind, Stewart knocked on her door and came into her office.

“Got a result at last, boss,” he exclaimed proudly. “A company called CS Partners did the work for Whitaker and I’ve spoken with their sort of Girl Friday, who told me that the person who carried it out was a Hector MacClachan, who isn’t with them anymore. She had an address for him, which she gave me – do you want to talk to him?”

So – it really had been the company of which David Gerard was a partner which had done the investigation for Whitaker. Another coincidence, or part of a pattern?

“Oh, yes – very much so. Give him a bell and arrange for you and me to meet him.”

An hour and a half later Fiona, accompanied by Ken Stewart, were being ushered into a medium sized, but clearly high quality, bungalow just outside Perth on the Dundee road. Somehow, Fiona had expected a computer expert of apparently high competence to conform to her preconception – young, spotty and otherworldly. MacClachan wasn’t young – although neither was he old; at a guess he was in his mid-forties.

He was rather above average height, perhaps six feet two or three, and well built, with a tan that gave the lie to a life spent gazing at computer screens. Blue eyes regarded the two detectives from a rugged face – in fact, she told herself, not unlike a black haired version of the late Steve McQueen. She shook herself from her reverie – McQueen had been a screen idol of hers in her pre-adolescent years and for a while beyond - and returned to the business in hand. As they entered the room, a woman rose from an armchair to greet them.

MacClachan indicated the three people to each with a wave of his hand.

“Steph, this is Inspector Campbell and DC Stewart. Officers, my wife, Stephanie – and also my business partner. Now, Mr. Stewart,” he turned to the young DC, “you said on the phone that you wanted to talk to me about work that I did for Lewis Brothers – correct?”

Stewart nodded.

“That’s right, Mr. MacClachan – my boss and I would like to talk to you on the subject.”

Stewart looked uncertainly at Mrs. MacClachan, who instantly picked up on the vibes.

“Hector – I’ll leave you three to it – if you need me, I’ll be in the office.”

34

Stewart couldn’t help following her with his eyes as she vacated the room; Stephanie MacClachen he felt, was well worth a look. Younger than her husband, perhaps by as much as ten years, certainly no less than five, she was tall and slim, with pale blonde hair cascading to her shoulders and a little beyond. The slimness did not descend to skinniness – instead it accentuated the curves of her figure, and Stewart found himself envying the older man.

MacClachan waved the two detectives to armchairs and settled himself into one as they sat.

“So,” he said, “how can I help you?”

Fiona took up her tale.

“Mr. MacClachan, you did some work for Lewis Brothers about four years ago and identified a peculiarity in their system – could you tell us about it, please?”

“Of course. I was approached, by phone, by the finance director, Graham Whitaker. He was concerned that their system had suddenly started to run more slowly than usual, and asked me to have a look at it. The company was too small to have its own people capable of a really thorough investigation, hence coming to us. I believe, although he never actually said, that he came to us purely randomly after finding out that the company that they had used in the past was no longer in business.

“I went over to their place and had a good look at the system. The cause of the slow running was pretty obvious – they had picked up a virus which their anti-virus programme had failed to identify. I removed the virus, updated their system security and normally that would have been that, but I was intrigued that the system resources that they were using,” he paused at the look of uncertainty on Fiona’s face, “that is to say, the actual amount of memory being used by the central computer, was excessive for the programmes that they were running, which were just basic accountancy, payroll and office programmes. I decided to dig a bit deeper, in case there was something malevolent hidden that I hadn’t spotted.

“Instead, I found that there was a second system piggy-backing on their accountancy system, a rather clever system which was triggered whenever the annual return was completed for the tax people, or the quarterly payments that were made. In effect, it was acting as a two way doorway. Anything going to the tax man, and anything coming back in return, had to go through this system which could alter the figures involved. In other words, the company intended to send £X, the piggy-back changed the figure to something less, and when the tax man sent back an acknowledgment for the lesser amount,, the programme changed it back to read £X again. So, the company and the tax man were both under the impression that they were seeing the same figures – but they weren’t.”

Fiona frowned in concentration.

“Would this have been difficult to set up?”

“It depends who was doing it – once writing up the necessary code on one of my own machines, I could have set up something like that in a matter of minutes once I had physical access to their system. If I couldn’t actually sit down in front of their main computer, I could still have done it remotely by hacking into their system, but it would have been considerably more difficult, as I would have to be very careful not to leave traces of what I had done which could have been seen by the staff there.”

“Do you think any of Mr. Whitaker’s staff – or for that matter Whitaker himself – could have put that programme there?”

He shook his head determinedly.

“If any of them had that level of skill they wouldn’t have needed me, or someone like me, to sort out the original programme problem – the slow running. The difference in skill levels would be high – oh, I don’t know, say like the difference between a Rugby player who turns out for his pub social club second fifteen and a full international player – an enormous gulf.”

“Can you say how long the fraudulent system had been in place?”

35

“On the face of it, that was well hidden. Each time the programme was activated, it reset itself, so it never seemed older than the most recent time that it had fired itself up. However, I was able to dig much deeper than that – it had been installed two years before I found it. Even then, I couldn’t be one hundred percent certain of my dating – but I’m about eighty-five to ninety percent sure. That’s what I told Whitaker when I reported back to him.”

“Have you any idea who could have installed it?”

“Well, it would have to have been someone with high level computer skills – it was a really professional job.

My suspicion would fall on the company that Lewis Brothers formerly dealt with if they had been around at that time. Trouble is – I don’t know who that company were, and going by what Whitaker told me, they must have gone out of business about the time the rogue programme was installed or even earlier. But of course, it doesn’t have to have been them – and it doesn’t have to have been done by somebody who had physical access the their main computer. It could have been done remotely by anyone with the necessary skills.”

Another thought struck Fiona.

“Mr. MacClachan, at the time you were a member of CS Partners – and so was David Gerard, the son of Stephen Gerard, the production manager at Lewis Brothers. Did he have anything to do with the work that you did for the company?”

MacClachan looked surprised – in fact, very surprised, and he shook his head.

“No, I knew David well, of course, but I didn’t realise that his father was anything to do with the company.”

“Isn’t that a bit strange?”

He shook his head again.

“Not really, Inspector – the clue is in the name – CS Partners. The four of us, Paul Davies, Lewis Horne, David and myself, all brought in our own work and had our own clients. We had all met at university – I’m a bit older than the other three who were doing Bachelor degrees, whereas I was doing some post graduate work. We all chipped in to meet office expenses and the salary of Judy Kent, our sort of general factotum, but what each of us earned depended on our individual contacts. If one of us had more on his plate than he could handle, he’s pass it on to one of the other partners and take a sort of ‘finder’s fee’ of ten percent – but that didn’t often happen – at the time we weren’t really rushed off our feet, quite the reverse, in fact.”

“Was that why you left the partnership?”

“Yes and no. It was getting quite hard to find enough work for the four of us, and anyway, I was getting dissatisfied with the we were working. The other three were very much reactive people. Somebody came to them with a problem and they fixed it – but that meant that they had no control over what sort of work came their way, nor what sort of quality work it was. I decided that it just wasn’t the way for me – for a start, Steph and I had just got married, we’d bought this place and had a mortgage to pay. I felt that I would be better off on my own, actively seeking out work rather than waiting for it to come looking for me – and so it proved. I became a hacker – and a well-paid one. I have contracts with a number of companies, including some of the biggest in all of Scotland, and what I do is to test the security of their systems by trying to break into them and when I do – which is quite often – to find ways of preventing somebody else breaching the security the same way that I did. I’m totally my own boss and have no overheads to worry about – no office to pay for, no salaries to find.”

“Could any of your partners – no, let me rephrase that – did any of your partners have the skill levels that would have been needed to plant that rogue programme?”

“Oh yes, all of them. It wasn’t any lack in their computer skills that irked me – it was the happy-go-lucky attitude they had, being willing to wait for work to come to them, rather than going out and finding it.”

“How did your set-up actually work? I mean, when Mr. Whitaker came to your company for help, do you know if he asked for you specifically?”

“No, he didn’t. He got me by chance. The way that we worked things, there were the four partners and our 36

‘factotum’ Judy Kent. If a ‘cold’ call came through – which was the case with Whitaker, there was a rota which Julie stuck to, and as it happened it was my turn to get the job. In addition, however, we had been going for a few years and we all had existing contacts who tended to come straight to whoever they had used before. Also, on our web site we all had a potted biography – including Judy, who had the rather grandiose title on the site of ‘office manager’, although in truth, she was the office – we had no other staff.”

“What did you think of Mr. Whitaker when you met him?”

MacClachan shrugged his shoulders.

“He seemed a decent enough bloke, and his staff obviously got on well with him – and he with them. None of them had more than rudimentary computer skills, though, which is why they called me in, of course.”

“Did you meet any of the other directors?”

He shook his head.

“No, I only met Whitaker and his two staff members.”

“Going back to your own company – the four of you shared the expenses – how much were they?”

“Eight thousand a year each.”

“That’s quite a lot to find, surely?”

“In the good years it wasn’t too hard, but to be honest, by two thousand and ten it was becoming a bit of a struggle for all of us – certainly for me and I’m sure for the others as well. The recession was still hitting firms all over the country, and it was becoming easier for them to use commercial programmes themselves for things like data protection against virus attacks rather than buy in expertise. To be fair, some of the work that we picked up then was because firms had tried to go it alone, believing the claims of fancy programmes and getting into a mess which we then got called in to sort out – in many cases they would have saved themselves time and money by calling us – or someone like us – in from the outset.”

“Something that I don’t know if you can help us with, Mr. MacClachan, but I can’t understand what Mr.

Whitaker had hoped to achieve by shifting the company’s money in the way that he did.”

The computer expert looked puzzled and Fiona realised that only the police – so far as she was aware – knew just what had happened to the company’s money, and she wondered uneasily if she had gone too far in taking MacClachan into her confidence.

“Well, he told me that he had to do something to find out who was behind the swindle and I advised him to shift it to stop the leakage.”

It was Fiona’s turn to be puzzled.

“I don’t follow.”

“As I said, the rogue system was triggered every time a return went to the taxman. Like a lot of companies, Lewis Brothers actually made a payment of tax owing every quarter – the annual return was a more comprehensive return which crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s. Obviously, the five reports – the quarterly returns and the final analysis – had to agree, so the rogue programme actually removed money from the tax payments four times a year.”

Fiona thought hard. This was something that had not been apparent from the file she had read regarding the original investigation into the embezzlement.

“So how did the leakage work – do you know?”

He nodded his head emphatically.

“Each quarterly return authorised a bank transfer from the company’s bank account to the taxman, but instead of a simple transfer as you or I might make to send money to somebody, the rogue programme 37

intercepted the transfer order, reduced the amount, and transferred it to the taxman. The taxman, of course, issued a receipt for the amount received, but the rogue programme intercepted that, changed the amount shown to the original figure, and nobody was any the wiser. The amount that was taken was transferred to another bank – a bank in the Cayman Islands. Back then – things have changed a bit over the last few years –

the Cayman Islands were a secretive tax haven that made the Swiss system look like a collection of blabbermouths. No way of finding anything out about who held the account or anything like that. So, the only way to do anything about the leakage was to transfer Lewis Brother’s money to a different account –

that way the rogue programme had nothing to work on.”

“Mr. MacClachan – what you are telling me seems not to have come out at the time of the original investigation. Did you tell any of this to the investigating officers?”

“No, I wasn’t in the country at the time. Steph’s sister lives in New Zealand and we visited her and her husband for a couple of months. We left the UK on the tenth of July two thousand and ten, and didn’t return until the first of September. It was only then that I learnt about what had happened. I had given Whitaker a full report of everything that I have just told you so that he had it all in writing should he need it. I was never approached by the police at the time.”

She thought this through for a moment, then remembered that she still didn’t know how much money was involved in the ‘leakage’. She had intended to have that aspect chased up but simply hadn’t had time to set the necessary wheels in motion as it would have involved somebody liaising with the tax man to compare what the records HMRC held compared to the Lewis Brother’s records – which would have to have been tracked down, even if they still existed now that the company had ceased to exist.

“Tell me, Mr. MacClachan, do you know how much money was being syphoned off?”

“Well, I can’t be exactly sure, as I was more concerned with appraising Mr. Whitaker of just how it was being done, but it must have been around three to four hundred thousand a year.”

So, thought Fiona, quite a tidy sum and well worth going to this sort of trouble over. She wondered further about David Gerard – he had the skills, his father had been involved in the company; suppose, just suppose, that father and son had combined their efforts to set up this very profitable exercise?

After they left MacClachan and returned to their car, Fiona mulled over what she had learned from the man.

It had been illuminating and in some ways simply added to the puzzle of just what had happened some four years earlier. Just who had planted that rogue programme on the Lewis Brothers’ computer system – and what had happened to the money that should have gone to the taxman? She was well aware of the reputation of the Cayman Islands even just a few years ago as a safe haven for all sorts of dodgy money, although she also knew that the international banking industry had forced the Islands to clean up their act somewhat, but six or so years ago, when this scam had been initiated, it must have looked like a cast iron guarantee of non-interference.

Despite the possible involvement of the Gerards, she did briefly wonder if MacClachan himself was responsible, and that the attached programme was a device to screw a bigger fee out of Lewis Brothers, but she dismissed the idea as too far-fetched to be credible. She was convinced that, given his high level of computer expertise, and the lack of such expertise in Whitaker and his staff, MacClachan could have done such a thing – but it was totally open to being discovered by even the most rudimentary check – the appearance of a programme that had been in place for at least a couple of years before he had been brought in could have been proved or disproved by a simple physical examination of how much tax should actually have been paid in previous years compared to what the falsified records showed.

No, someone else had planted that programme – and presumably had done so a couple of years, possibly more, before Whitaker had approached CS Partners for help. However, the thing that still most intrigued her was the fact that one of the partners was David Gerard. Suppose it had been Gerard who had been next on the rota and had received the Lewis Brothers job? What would he have done, pretended to ‘find’ something 38

that he had himself perhaps set up, or ignore it and trust that no other computer expert would start digging in the future?

She had already decided that her next port of call should be to speak to David Gerard himself and Stewart had already arranged for them to meet with him after talking to Hector MacClachan. As his mother had told them when she and Paul Murray had met with her, Gerard lived in a flat in Dundee, a flat which proved to be above average in value, even though quite small, with just two bedrooms and the one large lounge, which was the room into which Gerard led them after meeting them in the entrance lobby to the apartment block.

Presumably the financial problems of four years earlier, the financial problems which had led to the row between his parents and ultimately to his father’s death, were a thing of the past. Certainly the large plasma TV on one wall, the expensive looking furniture, which included a table set in the window with an sophisticated looking laptop computer on it, gave no hint of penury.

The man himself was tall and slim to the point of looking positively underweight. Brown hair was worn fairly long, long enough indeed to be gathered into a pony tail at the back of his skull, a skull that, like the rest of Gerard’s physiology, being long and thin, lent his facial features a lugubrious appearance. He had a straggle of beard beneath his chin, a beard that somehow accentuated the overall unprepossessing appearance of the man, emphasised by an unhealthy sallow look to his skin, skin that looked as though, no matter how often it was washed, would somehow always have an air of grubbiness about it. The most noticeable feature of his face, however, was a scar across virtually the entire width of his forehead, a scar which stood out from his otherwise sallow skin as a stark white line . Fiona wondered how he had acquired it; an inch or so lower and whatever had caused it would have gone across his eyes; with a little less luck he might well have been blinded by whatever it was.

The man’s voice matched his overall appearance his delivery of the spoken word being a flat monotone.

‘No wonder he’s not married’ Fiona mused, ‘who could put up with that miserable character day in and day out, waking up in the morning to see that on the pillow beside you?’

“What can I do for you, officers?” somehow, the man managed to inject an air of boredom even into that short sentence, and Fiona steeled herself to remain focussed and not allow herself to be irritated by Gerard as she replied to his query.

“We’d like to talk to you about the time leading up to your father’s death and the discovery of the rogue computer programme in Lewis Brothers’ system. Tell me, please, what did your father think about it?”

He blinked slowly at her question. With his dry, scaly skin he looked, Fiona told herself, like a lizard hoping that a fly would come within reach.

“My father? What about my father?”

“Well, one of his colleagues effectively bankrupted the company, so your father was out of a job. He must had some views on all of it.”

“He was furious with that shit Whitaker of course – but that was it. The man had gone, the money had gone, the firm was broke. End of story.”

“What did you think about it, then?”

He shrugged.

“My father and I were never ones to live in each other’s’ pockets. I sympathised with him, of course, but it didn’t really affect me personally. He was fifty years old and I suppose that he would have needed to find another job in the fairly near future, but that road accident finished things. At least he had been well insured, so my mother didn’t end up on the bread line, which was about the only good thing to come out of the whole bloody affair.”

“Tell me, Mr. Gerard, I understand from your mother that just before your father had his accident, you asked him to loan you some money to keep your company going and that he turned you down. As I understand it, 39

your company is actually a partnership and that you and each of the other partners contributed on equal terms

- were the other partners in similar difficulties?”

For the first time an emotion flitted across Gerard’s features – guilt? Embarrassment? Fiona pressed on.

“Well, did they, Mr. Gerard?”

“I don’t know the details of their financial situations, Inspector – you’ll have to ask them. All I know is that we all managed to honour our financial commitments. It was a hard time – the recession was still biting and work was pretty slow in coming. It wasn’t long before MacClachan decided to leave what he presumably saw as a sinking ship, but I’m pleased to be able to say that he was wrong and that the partnership is now going very well, Since he left the three of us who remained decided to recruit two new partners – so the expenses that had been shared amongst four of us, and which, thanks to MacClachan, had to be a three way split for a while, are now spread amongst the five of us. We also dispensed with our office manager and take it in turns to do the tasks that she formerly undertook, just having a part-time girl on national minimum wage in the mornings – a big saving.”

“Tell me, Mr. Gerard, did you know that Mr. Whitaker had approached your company for help with the computer system at Lewis Brothers?”

He shook his head.

“Not at the time, no. I learnt about it later, of course, but by then the company was on the rocks and Whitaker had disappeared.”

Fiona persevered.

“I understand from Mr. MacClachan that it was only by chance that he picked up that job – that you all operated a sort of rota system for when new work arrived. Does that mean that it was just by chance that it was not Mr. MacClachan, not one of the other partners, perhaps even yourself, who had been allocated the job?”

“That’s right, Inspector – it was just chance. If it had come to me, I would have been the one to discover what was going on, and despite all the waffle at the time, I’m sure that it was Whitaker who set that system up somehow and robbed the company blind.”

There was something in the way that Gerard trotted out his answer that made Fiona wonder if he was telling the truth about the incident; she decided to change tack.

“Mr. Gerard, one thing that has never seemed clear – why was your father on the A85, miles away from home, when he had his accident? We asked your mother, but she could offer no explanation – can you?”

Gerard smirked – there was no other word for it – the man smirked. It was only a momentary thing, but Fiona caught it, then it was gone. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I really have no idea, Inspector.”

You’re lying, Fiona said to herself, this time you are definitely lying. I don’t know why, but you’re lying.

You know full well why he was on that road. So - why was he there?

Fiona got nothing more out of the man and, far from satisfied with how the interview had gone, she and Stewart returned to their car.

“Well, Ken, what did you make of all that?”

“Boss, I wouldn’t trust that creep as far as I could throw him. He knows why his dad was on that road the night he died – and he’s gloating over us not knowing.”

“Ken, there is more to this than meets the eye. I agree with you – Gerard junior knows a lot more than he is telling, and I’m sure that it revolves around why his father was so far from home for no apparent reason the night that he had his accident.”

40

She had a thought.

“When he worked at Lewis Brothers he was one of the top four there. He presumably had a secretary, or a deputy, someone who would have worked closely with him and might be able to tell us a bit more about the man. When we get back, do some digging, See what you can find out.”

“OK, boss.”

Back at the police station, Stewart ruminated over the interviews with the two computer experts. As he had told the DI, he was convinced that Gerard knew a lot more than he was telling. On the other hand, he instinctively believed what they had been told by MacClachan – the man came across well. Stewart was new to CID, but he had already interviewed many people during his time in the police and had developed a strong instinct for when he was being lied to – and that instinct had been working overdrive with Gerard.

He went back to the file that had originally been compiled when the embezzlement had been investigated.

What he wanted, and what he gratefully found, was a list of the senior staff in the company at that time –

men and women who could have been expected to be suspicious of what Whitaker was up to, or who at least had a good knowledge of what went on in the company.

Named as the secretary to Gerard was one Jennifer Malone. The address and phone number quoted against her name proved to be still current, so after a quick word with the DI, Stewart guided his car to a halt outside a smart, if somewhat small, bungalow in the small town – perhaps more accurately large village – of Muirhead, on the road between Coupar Angus and Dundee.

Jennifer Malone proved to be a small woman, a woman who exuded neatness from every pore of her being, a neatness which made the neatness of her dwelling place no surprise. She was perhaps fifty-five to sixty years old, with grey hair neatly (that word again!) styled and wearing a grey two piece of not dissimilar colour, the jacket open to show a spotless white blouse, the skirt of a modest mid-calf length. Her face was slightly plump, the plumpness skilfully minimised by the cut of her hair. Light blue eyes surveyed Stewart from beneath pale eyebrows, the eyes either side of a slightly retroussé nose .

“So, officer, how can I help you?”

“Firstly, Mrs. Malone (Stewart had noticed the wedding ring and given the woman’s age, settled for ‘Mrs.’

rather than the ubiquitous ‘Ms.’) thank you for agreeing to see me. We are looking again at the events which surrounded the loss of money at Lewis Brother’s back in two thousand and ten, and one of those events is the tragic death of Mr. Gerard in a road accident not long afterwards. One thing that nobody can explain is just what Mr. Gerard was doing that evening so far from home. Mrs. Gerard has told us that they had had a disagreement on a family matter and that Mr. Gerard had gone out to ‘clear his head’ as she put it, but she had thought that he had just intended to drive locally for a while whilst he thought things through on his own, without, as she said, her going on at him. She has no idea as to why he went where he did.”

The older woman blinked slowly at him, then smiled sadly.

“I’m afraid that it’s the old story, officer. Stephen Gerard had a girlfriend who lived in Methven somewhere.

Given where he had his accident, I would imagine that he was on his way to see her.”

This really was news and Stewart leant forward in excitement.

“How do you know this, Mrs. Malone.”

“I don’t know that that is where he was going that evening – I am just presuming it. However, I do know of the existence of the girlfriend. I don’t know her actual address, but I do know her telephone number and the number puts her in the Methven area. I know about her because she used to phone up for Stephen increasingly often in the three or four months immediately prior to Lewis Brothers closing.”

At that moment there was the sound of the front door being opened and a man’s voice calling out’

“I’m home, darling.”

41

“We’re in here, John.”

The lounge door opened in its turn and a man, presumably Mr. Malone, entered. Stewart was at once struck be the physical dissimilarity of husband and wife. The wife, short and rather plump, the husband tall, six feet four or five at least, and lean in the extreme, with sparse grey hair lying back on a highly dome skull and the facial features more skeletal than plump; rather like Jack Spratt and his wife in the nursery rhyme.

Stewart rose to his feet and Mrs. Malone made the introductions.

“John, this is Detective Constable Stewart; Mr. Stewart, my husband, John Malone. DC Stewart is here asking about Stephen Gerard.”

“Really – but the poor man has been dead for what, four years now?”

“Yes, sir, but we are looking at everything we can that occurred around the time of Lewis Brothers going bankrupt and one of the things that puzzles us is just why Mr. Gerard should have been where he was when he had his accident.”

Malone waved Stewart back into his chair and sat down himself. He turned to his wife.

“Have you told him about Gerard’s girlfriend, Jennifer?”

“Yes, I was explaining about her when you came in.” She turned back to Stewart.

“Yes, Mr. Stewart, as I was saying, whilst I don’t know how long the affair had been going on, the young woman – at least I presume that she is young, and she had a young sounding voice on the telephone – called more and more often. Stephen phoned her as well, but most of the calls between them were incoming from her, not outgoing from him.”

I wonder if you listened in to any of them, Stewart mused to himself. Jennifer Malone carried on.

“I know about the calls because the way our phones were set up was a bit old-fashioned. Stephen’s calls, both incoming and outgoing, went through me in the first instance.”

A thought struck Stewart.

“I’m surprised that Mr. Gerard didn’t use a mobile phone for calls that were presumably pretty personal.”

“He may well have done so outside the office, Mr. Stewart, but mobile reception was very poor inside the building – I think that it was something to do with all the metal around the place.”

“How often did these calls occur?”

She furrowed her brow in concentration.

“In the last month or so, she must have called him at least once a day; he called her perhaps two or three times a week.”

It occurred to Stewart that had yet to ask the most vital question.

“What was the lady’s name, Mrs. Malone?”

“It was Louise, Louise Wright – I sometimes wondered if Stephen had, in fact, found his ‘Miss Right’.”

“That’s an interesting comment, Mrs. Malone.”

She gave that sad smile again.

“Stephen was not happy in his marriage, Mr. Stewart. Oh, he didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, but it was fairly obvious by his reaction whenever his wife phoned.”

“Did she phone very often?”

The grey haired head was shaken in negation.

42

“No, probably no more than two or three times a month or so, but Stephen was clearly irritated that she called at all; our offices were inter-connecting and the door between them was usually left open, so I could normally hear at least the tone of his voice, if not necessarily the actual words. It was very clear that he regarded his wife’s calls as a nuisance. On more than one occasion he told me that if his wife called that particular day, I was to say that he was out of the office, even when he wasn’t, and that he wouldn’t be back before the end of the day.”

This, thought Stewart to himself, is all rather interesting. So, the Gerard marriage sounded to be on the rocks; how convenient for the widow that Gerard should expire, leaving a handsome – according both to the widow herself and Gerard junior – pay-out for the perhaps not too grieving spouse.

As he drove back to the station, Ken Stewart’s mind was working over what he had just learned, and what he had gleaned from the files, including the current file with its record of the interview between Mrs. Gerard and the DI and DS. Clearly they had been told a lot less than the whole truth, and he was pleased at the thought that he had discovered elements of the case which were, as yet, unknown to his senior colleagues.

He wasn’t surprised to find the DI still in her office when he got back, even though it was now well past seven. Quickly he filled her in on the salient points of what he had learned; as he finished, she leant back in her chair, clasped her hands behind her head and took a deep breath.

I do wish she wouldn’t do that, Stewart said to himself as the posture emphasised the thrust of his boss’

breasts. If she wasn’t the boss I could really fancy her; Fiona came forward again in the chair and smiled at him, the smile increasing her attractiveness in his eyes – but she is the boss, he told himself sternly, and way out of reach.

“Well done, Ken. Write it up and fill the team in about it at tomorrow’s briefing, and after the briefing you and I will visit Miss Wright.”

Chapter Seven

Ken Stewart brought the Mondeo to a stop outside an expensive looking bungalow on the outskirts of the small village of Methven. Set back from the road by some fifteen yards or so, the frontage of the house was an immaculately maintained lawn bordered by flower beds, equally well looked after, behind a low stone wall. At the side of the bungalow stood a detached garage with its up and over door open to reveal that it contained a classic Jaguar sports car, an E type in deep maroon, whilst in front of the garage, barring the Jaguar’s exit, was a second car, a newish Range Rover. Clearly Louise Wright had money – did she also have a husband or partner?

Stewart and Fiona exited the Mondeo and walked up the yellow gravel path to the house’s front door, their footsteps crunching loudly on the tiny stones.

As they reached the door he was about to ring the bell when the door opened – clearly the sound of their footsteps had alerted the occupant to their arrival.

Louise Wright stood at the open door surveying her visitors; Stewart effected the introductions.

“Ms. Wright, I am Detective Constable Stewart – this is my boss, Detective Inspector Campbell.”

Louise Wright was tall; standing as she was on the top of the two steps up to her front door her eyes were on a level with Stewart’s, despite his height of six feet two. She was also slim and dressed expensively in a soft white roll neck sweater and designer jeans, her feet encased in soft cream leather moccasins. She regarded them both gravely, then took a pace backwards.

“Please come in.”

Her voice, like everything else, sounded expensive, low and slightly husky. If she really was Gerard’s girlfriend, Stewart told himself, he was one lucky bugger – or at least he had been whilst he had still been alive.

43

She led the way through to the back of the house and into a large lounge, a room which further enhanced the presence of money in the Wright household. It centred upon a pair of French doors which, when opened, gave immediate access to a small patio featuring a garden table, chairs and a complicated looking parasol to shade the furniture equally from the effects of rain or sun. Against one of the walls at right angles to the French doors stood a large sideboard, the upper part glass fronted, behind which glass stood several decanters, all containing drink of some sort. The wall opposite had what at first appeared to be a large wood burning stove, but which on closer examination was clearly imitation, with the flames and warmth provided by gas. There were two easy chairs and a settee, arranged in a ‘U’ shape, facing the French doors and it was to these that the detectives were ushered by their hostess.

Louise Wright sank gracefully into one of the armchairs, whilst Fiona took that facing her, leaving Stewart to seat himself on the settee, needing to turn his head to look at either woman. Both, he admitted to himself, were worth looking at, but it was on Louise Wright that he fixed his attention. She was, he estimated, about thirty-five or so, perhaps a bit more – the expensive clothes, the careful make-up and the styled hair made it difficult to be sure. The hair, basically ash-blonde in colour but with discrete streaks and highlights, was worn to just short of her shoulders, arranged to frame an attractive oval face, the high cheek bones emphasising the slimness of the woman’s features, a face from which green eyes stared out at the would from either side of a slim, straight nose and from beneath eyebrows the colour of her hair.

Fiona was under no illusion as to the effect that this striking looking woman was having on her young colleague; ‘better get started before Stewart gets completely star-struck’ she told herself.

“Ms. Wright,” she began, but was immediately interrupted.

“Please, it’s Mrs. Wright – although currently there is no Mr. Wright – I can’t abide that feminist rubbish.”

Fiona began again.

“Sorry, Mrs. Wright. Thank you for agreeing to see us; as my colleague, DC Stewart, explained on the telephone yesterday, we have reopened our investigation into the death of Stephen Gerard back in two thousand and ten. From what we have been told by others, it seems likely that he was on his way to visit you on the night of his death – can you confirm that for me?”

“Yes indeed. He had phoned me, oh, I suppose about seven and asked if he could come over that evening. I said yes – but he never arrived. It was the next day, when I saw about the crash on the local TV news, that I discovered just what had happened. But surely – it was just an accident, wasn’t it? Why are you looking into it all again? It’s been nearly five years and I’ve come to terms with Stephen’s death – the last thing that I need is for it all to be raked over again.”

“I appreciate that this must be upsetting for you, but we are looking again into his death because we now believe that there is something suspicious about the fact that he and two of his colleagues, Messrs. Hammond and Holder all died within a matter of months of each other and within a few months of the disappearance of yet another colleague, Mr. Whitaker.”

Mrs. Wright looked bemused, as well she might, Fiona reflected, but it was time to press on.

“Mrs. Wright, I’m sorry to have to intrude into your personal life, and please believe me when I say that I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t truly important. Please, I understand that you and Mr. Gerard were in a relationship – is that correct?”

Louise Wright shrugged elegant shoulders elegantly.

“Oh yes. We first got together a bit over a year before his death. I was recently divorced and he was unhappy in his marriage. We met quite by chance at a charity dinner; it was thrown by the local Chamber of Commerce and it was something that my ex-husband, Roger, and I had gone to regularly over the last few years. The invitation arrived as in the past; it was for the two of us, but I saw no reason why I shouldn’t go by myself, as Roger had already paid for the tickets on a rolling basis the previous year. I knew quite a few of the regulars from earlier years, so it wasn’t as though I was going to be a fish out of water. In the event, I found myself at the same table as Stephen. He was another one on his own – Helen, his wife, should have 44

been with him, but cried off at the last moment with ‘flu. I suppose that one could call it fate, but we hit it off immediately. We shared an enthusiasm for old cars, an enthusiasm that Stephen had difficulty in following, as his wife saw it as a total waste of time and money. At the time he had – in addition to his everyday transport, a Ford Focus – an old big American car, a Cadillac from nineteen fifty. It was, sadly, something that he had to sell when his company went belly up in two thousand and ten. Back then I had an old Bentley of about the same vintage and we were swapping reminiscences of running the two old ladies all through dinner. I know that it sounds totally, utterly absurd, but I had come to the event in the Bentley and when the meal, and the charity auction which followed it, were over, he gladly accepted my invitation to look over the old car. Somehow, one thing led to another very quickly, and we actually made love in the back of the old car like a couple of sex-starved teenagers. From then there was no looking back. We got together as often as we could and about a month or so before he died he told me that he was going to divorce Helen and asked if, once that had been achieved, we could live together, preferably as man and wife.

“I was very happy to say yes, so as you can imagine, I was devastated when he died. Do you mean to say that his death may not have been an accident? That somehow somebody was responsible for it?”

“We have to regard it as a possibility, Mrs. Wright. Can you think of anybody who might have wished Mr.

Gerard harm?”

“Absolutely – his wife and son. I know that Stephen was very heavily insured. I know that he and his wife were just about at daggers drawn, and his son and he simply did not get along at all. With Stephen dead, his wife became pretty well off and I expect that his son benefitted as well, whereas had he and his wife divorced she wouldn’t have done nearly so well out of it. I don’t see how, but if either or both of those two were somehow involved in Stephen’s death, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

It was a possibility that had long suggested itself to Fiona and it was interesting to hear Louise Wright voice the same sentiments. It was certainly a possibility – but if it was that straightforward how, if at all, did it tie in with the deaths of Hammond and Holder and the disappearance of Whitaker? And how could it have been done?

As they drove back to the station, she asked Stewart for his views. The young detective, pleased to be treated as a full participant in the interview, even if his role in the house itself had been restricted to note taking, marshalled his thoughts carefully before replying.

“Well, boss, I’m not surprised at Mrs. Wright pointing the finger and Mrs. Gerard and her son. They gained considerably out of Gerard’s death, a lot more than would have been the case had the divorce gone ahead.

That leaves two problems; firstly, if they were responsible for the man’s death, how did they do it? Secondly, did Gerard’s death tie in with those of Hammond and Holder, as we have been assuming, or was it a totally separate occurrence? I don’t like the idea of coincidences in something like this, and there is also the fact that Mrs. Hammond also did very well financially out of her husband’s death. Holder and Whitaker are very different. In Mrs. Holder’s case, as her husband is assumed to have committed suicide, much of the insurance that would otherwise have come her way wasn’t paid out. In Mrs. Whitaker’s case, there is no insurance as her husband is just missing, not declared as being dead. Suppose, however, there are two strands here?

Hammond and Gerard – similarities. Both died in road accidents, both widows ended up pretty well off as a result. Whitaker trying to smoke out whoever it was robbing the till, Holder unable to cope with what happened to the company?”

Fiona nodded her head in agreement.

“One thing I would like you to do when we get back, Ken. Try and find out if Mesdames Gerard and Hammond knew each other well, whether they socialised at all, that sort of thing.”

“OK, boss.”

A vague scenario was beginning to take shape in Fiona’s mind, a scenario that placed the two now wealthy widows at the centre of things, things that had resulted in at least three, much more likely four, deaths of men who had, on the face of it, done nothing wrong, although ‘on the face of it’ might very well not be the whole picture.

45

Stewart sat at his desk thinking hard. How was he to find out if Mrs. Gerard and Mrs. Hammond knew each other socially? He could, of course, simply phone up and ask, but that had two drawbacks. Firstly, could he trust whatever answers he was given? Secondly, if there was any funny business going on, to ask the question directly would forewarn the women that they were under the microscope. A bright thought struck him and he picked up the telephone and rang someone whom he hoped might be able to help.

“John Malone.”

“Hello, Mr. Malone – it’s DC Stewart. Would it be possible to speak with Mrs. Malone, please?”

“Yes of course, Mr. Stewart – I’ll just fetch her.”

There was a minute or so’s silence, then he heard the woman pick up the phone handset.

“Hello, Mr. Stewart. Can I help you?”

“I hope so, Mrs. Malone. We were wondering if the Hammonds and the Gerards socialised at all.”

There was a brief pause at the other end of the line whilst Stewart metaphorically crossed his fingers.

“Well, I know that the husbands occasionally had a drink together of an evening after work, but I don’t know about them being any closer than that. The wives, on the other hand, are both members of the local tennis club – the same one I belong to – and always seemed to be good friends. I suppose that I should say that Mrs.

Hammond used to belong – I don’t remember seeing her there since she moved to Edinburgh.”

So, thought Stewart, the two women not only knew each other, but were good friends – and both had benefitted financially to a considerable degree from the demise of their respective husbands. Significant? He had another thought.

“Mrs. Malone, do you have any idea how the Hammond marriage was? As the two wives were friends, perhaps they shared dissatisfaction in their marriages as well?”

“As it happens, Mr. Hammond’s secretary, Elizabeth McEwan, and I go to the same bridge club – she was saying not long before the company went broke that Mr. Hammond was always moaning about his wife to colleagues.”

So, two failing marriages – very interesting.

He reported his findings to Fiona Campbell, who furrowed her brow in concentration.

“Bear with me, Ken, whilst I think this thing through. We have two dead husbands, two wealthy widows who owe their wealth to the death of those husbands. We know that the Gerard marriage was on the rocks –

what about the Hammonds? Was their marriage equally threatened? Or was it just Hammond letting off a bit of steam?”

Stewart diffidently put forward his own view.

“Boss, with Lewis Brothers having gone bust, neither Hammond nor Gerard would have their salaries still coming in. The two wives could expect to see the family income diminish a lot – neither of them were happy with their husbands, both husbands were heavily insured. Bumping them off solved the money problems and they both did very nicely out of it.”

“Yes, I’m with you on that – but how was it done?”

“Well, we know that Gerard’s car showed signs of damage, damage which the wife says was caused by a careless, unknown, driver reversing into the vehicle in a car park – but we only have her word about that.

Suppose she is lying? Suppose the damage was actually caused by Gerard’s car being forced off the road?”

It was something that had already occurred to Fiona and she was glad to see one of her team following the same line of thought.

“Go on, Ken – who do you think is the likely suspect if that is what happened?”

46

The young DC shrugged his shoulders.

“Surely, it’s got to be David Gerard? By his own admission, he and his father didn’t get along. Just as his mother benefitted from Stephen Gerard’s death – so did David Gerard. He was in urgent need of money at that time – both he and his mother have confirmed that.”

“Don’t you think it is all a bit extreme?”

Stewart shrugged again.

“I’ll admit that I took an instant dislike to the man – I certainly wouldn’t put something like that past him.”

“But what about evidence, Ken? We’ve no chance of getting any evidence this long after the event.”

A thought struck her.

“Do we know what happened to Gerard’s car?”

“According to the file, after it was recovered from the scene of the crash it was subjected to a forensic examination, which found nothing untoward, then was offered back to the widow. Not surprisingly, she didn’t want it back and it went to a breaker’s yard.”

So, no chance of following up on that – but then, hardly surprising after more than four years. If there had indeed been dirty work involved in that crash they would never be able to prove it, short of getting a confession from somebody, which scarcely seemed likely.

There was one further possibility; what about David Gerard’s car?

“Do we know if Gerard junior still runs the same motor?”

Stewart shook his head.

“No idea, boss – I’ll see if I can find out.”

It took him twenty minutes, and when he returned the news wasn’t helpful.

“Afraid not, boss. His current car is a two year old Mondeo, and short of asking him, there’s no way to find out what he drove back in two thousand and ten.”

“Two years old? H’mm – I wonder. Ken, find out where he bought it – the DVLA records will show first owner and it might have been registered to the company that sold it in the first instance – quite a few firms do that to show a paper increase in their sales. If – OK, it’s a big if – we can find that out without alerting the man, it might just be that it was a part exchange, or they might have some other dealings with him – perhaps servicing the vehicle – who knows?”

It took longer; it was well past normal time to go home before Stewart returned, but this time he had a smile of triumph on his face.

“Got it, boss. He bought the car from Morris Motors in Dundee – it was a part exchange deal, he traded in another Mondeo – a two thousand and seven model, which he had also bought new from Morris’. Not only that, but they’ve also always done his servicing, and in late November, two thousand and ten, they did some bodywork repair to the nearside front of the car- just where you would expect to see damage if it had hit the offside rear of a vehicle in front. And that’s not all – they did some more repair work to the front of his car just a few weeks later, on the twenty-first of December. The car needed a new grill panel from hitting, or being hit by, something head on. Gerard paid for both repairs himself – no insurance involvement.”

So, Fiona thought to herself – a possibility was moving towards being a probability. It now seemed likely that Stephen Gerard had not met with an accident, but had been forced off the road by his son, and that David Gerard might also have been the hit and run driver who had killed George Hammond. But what chance was there of ever being able to prove any of it?

She looked at her watch – it was gone seven o’clock. She stretched and yawned and turned back to Stewart.

47

“Good work, Ken. I think that we will have another word with David Gerard and see if we can’t make him sweat a bit. Arrange for us to visit him tomorrow.”

“Here, boss, or at his place?”

She thought for a moment or two.

“I think that we will ask him to come to us this time.”

“OK, boss – I’ll see to it.”

Chapter Eight

True to his word, Stewart had arranged for David Gerard to present himself at the police station immediately after lunch and he and Fiona Campbell faced him across the small table in an interview room. After careful consideration, Fiona had decided that at this stage it would not be an interview under caution, so Gerard was unaccompanied, and she was pleased to see that he looked slightly uneasy when she explained that the police were interested in the repair work that had been done to his car back in two thousand and ten.

“I don’t understand, Inspector – what is the interest of the police in a couple of minor bumps that my car suffered?”

“It’s a matter of timing, Mr. Gerard. Your father and his former work colleague, George Hammond, died in road accidents within a short space of time. The damage to your father’s car could be consistent with it having been struck by another vehicle before going off the road. Mr. Hammond was quite definitely killed by being struck by a motor vehicle. Shortly after each incident, you took your car into Morris Motors of Dundee for bodywork repairs, presumably because it had either hit, or been hit by, something or someone. Now, I appreciate that it may just be coincidence, but as we have now reopened our investigation into both deaths, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t give you the opportunity to explain the need for the work on your car so that I can eliminate the possibility that it might have been involved in either – or indeed both – incidents. So, what happened?”

Fiona had been studying Gerard very closely whilst she spoke; she was convinced that her line of questioning was worrying him, hard as he was clearly trying to conceal the fact.

He hesitated for a long moment before replying.

“It was just one of those things, Inspector. The first time was caused by someone backing into the car whilst it was parked – I came back to find the nearside front light cluster smashed and the front of the wing a bit crumpled. It was a nuisance – didn’t prevent the car from being driven, but with no front lights on that side I obviously had to have it fixed. Morris Motors have always looked after my cars and they did a good job on it. Maddeningly, I had to take it back only a couple of weeks or so later. It had been hit by a deer – came out of nowhere, gave me no chance to do anything. At first I thought that I had killed it and got out of the car, not sure what to do next – I mean, do you have to report a dead deer to anyone? However, it wasn’t dead, just a bit stunned and by the time that I had got to it, it had struggled to its feet and then ran off.”

“Where did these incidents occur, Mr.. Gerard?”

“The first one I was just parked in the road near our office; the second time I was just out for a drive – I sometimes do that, it helps me to think things through and I had had a row with my then girlfriend and I wanted to clear my head before seeing her again. It happened on one of the minor roads between Dundee and Pitlochry – I’m not sure that I could even remember exactly where after this length of time.”

“I’m particularly interested in the evening of the fifth of November – can you tell me what you did that evening?”

He frowned in concentration.

48

“Oh, that was Bonfire Night – I remember it because we had our own fireworks that evening – a really vicious row,”

“What was the row with your girlfriend about, Mr. Gerard. And where can we find her?”

The man was now clearly worried; he licked his lips nervously.

“Is this really relevant, Inspector?”

Fiona shrugged.

“I can’t know until you tell me, now can I Mr. Gerard?”

He heaved a sigh, a long drawn out, theatrical sigh. Here comes another lie, Fiona told herself.

“She was a very jealous person – she thought that I was seeing somebody else as well. It wasn’t true, but I couldn’t persuade her otherwise so things got into a bit of a shouting match and I stormed out – we had been at her place.”

“And her name?”

“Jenny – Jenny Hallam.”

“And where can I find Ms. Hallam.”

It was Gerard’s turn to shrug his shoulders.

“No idea. Not long after the row I decided that I had had enough of her jealous nature and broke off with her.

She moved away from Dundee about a year or so later I heard about it from a mutual acquaintance I sometimes had a drink with.”

“And who would that be?”

“Ally Gordon – his sister Ailsa and Jenny worked together and he mentioned that Jenny had moved away.”

“Can you tell me where we can find Mr. Gordon and his sister?”

“Ally has a flat in Dundee – somewhere in Kinnaird Street – I’ve never been there, so I don’t know the actual number – no idea where his sister lives.”

Stewart was a busily noting down the names and the address that Gerard had given them and Gerard watched him doing so uneasily. Time, Fiona decided, to let him stew in his own juice.

“Right, Mr. Gerard, thanks for all that – obviously we have some checking to do and we may need to come back to you, but thank you for your time.”

Stewart escorted Gerard from the building, then returned to the interview room to find that his boss had already left for her office. He gathered up the papers that he had brought with him and made his way back to the team room. The DI waved him into her goldfish bowl of an office.

“Ken, I want you to track down this Ally Gordon and see if his sister knows where Jenny Hallam now lives –

I want to talk to her to see how much she backs up what we have heard from Gerard.”

“Right, boss.”

***********

Once out of the police station, David Gerard got out his mobile phone and dialled a number that he had committed to memory, a memory that was what folk called ‘photographic’, something that had always been of great help to him.

“Yes?”

49

“You know who this is?”

“Of course I do – what is it?”

“We may have a problem – the police are digging around and I’ve just been interviewed by them – and they are clearly suspicious about everything.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing – but they don’t seem to believe me.”

“Well then – I don’t understand why we have a problem – the way that I see it is that you have a problem.

Don’t bring it to my door.”

“Don’t kid yourself. If anything happens to me, I’ll make sure that you go down with me.”

There was a long drawn out silence at the other end and Gerard began to wonder if he had gone too far.

When the other person spoke, it was in a tone laced with menace.

“David, I don’t think that you understand me. If you even try to implicate me with the police you will not live to stand trial. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”

Gerard swallowed nervously; he had no doubt that the other person meant exactly what had just been said, but he was determined not to stand alone if things went wrong. Plucking up his courage, he replied.

“Don’t threaten me – we need to work together on this. And I mean it – I don’t fancy prison, so if I go down, no matter what you try, you go down as well. If you try anything, you’ll lose – I’ve lodged some papers in a safe place that will be opened if anything happens to me.”

There was another silence at the other end, before the other person spoke again.

“You are playing with fire, David. Trying to put me in prison won’t help you when you are dead.”

“No, but at least you’ll suffer as well. We need to work together on this.”

Another pause.

“Very well, what do you suggest?”

“I need a cast iron alibi – and you probably do as well.”

“I’ll think about it.”

The phone went dead.

************

Fiona examined the woman in front of her carefully. It had taken two days to track down Jenny Hallam, who had moved away from Dundee and now lived and worked in Inverness as a receptionist in a dental practice.

She saw a woman who was, she knew, twenty-seven years old, slimly built with a cascade of rich auburn hair falling to her shoulders, framing an attractive oval face dominated by bright blue eyes that gazed back at the two detectives.

The meeting was taking place in Jenny Hallam’s flat, a small, but well-appointed two bedroom affair in Huntly Street on the river frontage, looking out across the river Ness to the churches and the castle on the Eastern bank. It was a nice flat in a good position, and Fiona wondered how the woman could afford it on the pay of a dental receptionist. Her clothes, like the flat itself, were not cheap; she wore a figure hugging woollen dress in a russet colour that matched her hair and, together with that hair, helped to accentuate those blue eyes. She was carefully made up with a hint of eye shadow to even further emphasise those blue eyes.

50

What on earth, Fiona asked herself, was a fashion plate like this doing getting involved with an ugly slob like David Gerard?

Fiona had decided to take Helen Roxburgh with her to interview Jenny Hallam, and as they seated themselves, the two detectives were treated to a dazzling smile, a smile that revealed equally dazzling white teeth; every passing second was making Fiona feel more and more dowdy by comparison. She decided it was time to start talking before she developed a deep seated inferiority complex.

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, Ms. Hallam. We would like to talk to you about the evening of the fifth of November, two thousand and ten.”

The young woman frowned in puzzlement – even her bloody frown makes her look like a Hollywood superstar, Fiona thought savagely.

“But that was over four years ago, Inspector – what happened that evening?”

Needless to say, the voice matched the rest of the package – low-pitched, sultry, seductive.

“Well, according to Mr. David Gerard, the two of you had an argument that evening and he drove off in a somewhat unhappy state..”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but I don’t remember anything offhand about that evening – I’m afraid that around that time David and I were having our problems, so what he says may well be right.”

“I can understand that. The thing is that Mr. Gerard’s father died in a car crash that evening. Mr. Gerard gave us his account of that evening and I want to hear from you as to whether your memory of the evening matches his.”

The puzzled frown returned.

“David and I finally broke up in December of that year. To be honest, even by early November we were probably beyond casual chats.”

“Why was that?”

“Going with David was, hopefully, the biggest mistake that I will make in my whole life. By then I was thoroughly fed up with his incredible jealousy and I told him so. He wouldn’t have it – said that I was the jealous one, and in the end I had had enough and gave him his marching orders.”

“Were you living together at the time?”

The auburn tresses were shaken violently.

“No – and that is one of the reasons that David was so jealous. He couldn’t keep his eyes on me all the time, so immediately assumed that if I wasn’t with him, I must be betraying him – his very words – with somebody else.”

Fiona reviewed what she was being told. Both Gerard and Hallam claimed that they were the one to break off the affair. Both accused the other of being the jealous one. To be fair, when an affair broke up in acrimony, it was by no means unusual for both parties to see themselves as the one totally in the right, the other as the one totally in the wrong. Fiona persisted with her question.

“Do you remember that particular evening at all, Ms. Hallam?”

The elegant shoulders were elegantly shrugged.

“I’m afraid not, Inspector, not offhand, but I may have made an entry in my dairy about the evening – I’ll go and fetch it.”

With casual, understated grace, she rose from her chair and left the room, returning just a few moments later bearing a leather bound book. She resumed her seat and started to leaf through it.

51

“Now, let me see – I’ve kept a diary since I was a girl and filled in something most days – ah! Here we are.

Fifth of November, two thousand and ten. ‘Had yet another row with David, this time at his place. Stormed out and came home in time to watch the news. Had been intending to spend the weekend with him – but sod it. If that’s how he wants to behave he can do so on his own.’”

She looked at the two detectives.

“So, yes, I did see David that evening, but not for long, I think that ‘the news’ to which I referred may have been the seven o’clock news on Channel Four rather than anything later, so I’ve no idea what he might have done later on.”

She flicked through a few more pages of the diary.

“Now, when did we actually break up? Yes, here we are – this was on the eighteenth of December ‘another row – big one, really big one this time – can’t take much more’ . I remember after that row I mulled things over for a couple of days and this on the twentieth of December. ‘Phoned David and told him it was all off –

can’t imagine what I ever saw in the creep’. Here, have a look for yourself.”

She handed over the volume, and a moment’s perusal was all it took for Fiona to confirm for herself what she had been told of its contents.

“That’s interesting, Ms. Hallam. Mr. Gerard told us that he was the one to break with you, and he also said that he was at your place on the evening of the fifth of November.”

Jenny Hallam shook her head determinedly.

“No, he’s wrong. I was round at his place – my diary proves it. He’s probably getting confused with some other evening – we had several rows towards the end and some of them were at my place.”

So, Fiona thought to herself, Gerard could always claim that he was just confused over the actual date involved after the passage of time. Indeed, that might even be the case. She had asked Hallam about the fifth of November because that was the date that Hammond had been killed, but she had no way of tying Gerard into any particular activity on that, or indeed any other specific, date. What she had now been told by Gerard and Hallam were two quite different stories – but they didn’t really take her any further forward. There was one aspect of the whole thing that intrigued her, even though it had no real relevance to her investigation.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Ms. Hallam, you and Mr. Gerard don’t seem to be similar characters – was there any reason for the two of you getting together?”

Hallam looked mildly embarrassed.

“We met at a birthday party in the winter of two thousand and nine for a mutual acquaintance, Kathleen Long with whom I once worked a year or two earlier and who wanted to have a big do before moving to France after Christmas – she’d landed a job in Paris. I’d not long broken up – but amicably – with a boyfriend who was good looking, attentive – and about as thick as two short planks and who bored me to tears. David was clearly very intelligent, quite different, and at first equally attentive. The jealousy came later and got worse and worse as time went on until I couldn’t take it any longer. In fact, he was so jealous that after we broke up – or to be more strictly accurate – after I broke it off – he pestered me, mostly by phone, but also by coming round on a few occasions. That started to get to me and was one of the reasons that I moved away from Dundee.”

Fiona looked around the flat appreciatively.

“You seem to have done well since you moved.”

There was a quiet chuckle in response.

“Not too badly, but my salary by itself wouldn’t run to this place – no, my parents helped out quite a bit. My father has just retired and had an insurance policy mature, said that he and mum didn’t need it, so here I am with a mortgage that I can easily manage, thinks to dad giving me the money for a substantial deposit.”

52

An orphan herself, Fiona was mildly envious of Jenny Hallam’s good fortune in her choice of parents. Good looks and money, and from the discussion that they had just had with her, pretty intelligent as well.

They took their leave of the women and returned to their car. As she buckled herself into the front passenger seat, Fiona turned to her companion.

“Well, Helen, what did you think of Ms. Hallam?”

“Well, that good looking and with all that money – I’m not really jealous – it’s just that I’d happily scratch her eyes out!”

So, Fiona reflected as she chuckled at Helen’s remark, she wasn’t the only one in whom Jenny Hallam caused gentle stirrings of the little green goddess.

“Joking apart, boss, two things really puzzle me. Firstly, what on earth – despite what she said – was a good looker like her doing getting involved with a slob like Gerard. I’ve talked to Ken and from what he tells me about Gerard, the man is a long, long way from being Mr. Wonderful. Still, I suppose that it takes all types.

More importantly, we are getting two conflicting stories about how their affair ended. She says she ended it; he says he did. And on the 5th of November, he says that they were at her place, she says that they were at his. Given that things were going wrong between then by then, I suppose it could just be a case of them getting confused over exactly what happened on any particular date, although she did have that diary to back up her memory – did Gerard have anything other than his memory.”

“No, nothing.”

“Well, I’d be inclined to believe her rather than him.”

Fiona nodded her agreement and thought over what they had been told. Much as she would like to, she couldn’t really see that what they had learned from Hallam was any help in making any sort of case against Gerard.

So where now? It was then that a thought, a thought envisaging a very, very long shot, struck her. Perhaps there was just a remote chance of taking all this forward.

Chapter Nine

I watched appreciatively as Linda got dressed, reluctant to see her leave, but accepting that, unlike myself, she had a job to go to, a job with fixed hours. We had progressed from acquaintances to friends, and now from friends to lovers. At her invitation, an invitation I had eagerly accepted, instead of driving home after we had dined, we had strolled back to her flat and spent the night together.

The previous Saturday we had met for lunch; at the end of the meal we had agreed to meet for dinner on the Wednesday evening. That was last night; this was Thursday morning and, hopefully, the start of new things for both of us.

She turned to give me a mock glare.

“Come on, lover, shift your bum out of bed – the day has begun.”

“To hear is to obey, oh mighty one!”

She giggled as I slipped out of the bed and gathered up my clothes from the previous evening.

“Do you want a shower, Peter?”

“No thanks, I’m still in yesterday’s things. I’ll go straight home and shower and change there.”

She nodded her head.

“OK.” Then she paused; what comes next, I wondered to myself?

53

“See you again tonight?” I asked before she could say anything.

“I’d love to – but for once I’m having to work late. It’s a partners’ meeting and we secretaries take it in turns to take the minutes, do any fetching and carrying – that sort of thing. Trouble is, the buggers are all so long winded. Last time it was my turn they didn’t break up until gone ten – and the draft minutes have to be with the senior partner first thing next morning I didn’t get home until well gone midnight. But – how about Friday night – and we won’t have to get up early?”

“Sounds great,” I assured her, although I would have been even happier with Thursday night and Friday night. “Tell you what – why don’t you come to my place and I’ll cook for us?”

She smiled – and one thing I had noticed was how much more she had smiled during our two most recent meetings than in the early days – and how nice was her smile.

“You can cook?” she enquired. “I won’t be taking my life in my hands?”

“Not from my cooking,” I assured her. “I’m a mean hand with a tin opener and a microwave.”

On that light-hearted note we snatched a quick breakfast and went our separate ways.

*********

The Friday evening meal, and the weekend that followed it, were a big success. When Annette and I had married, my idea of cooking was to stick a ready meal in the microwave, whereas she was a first class cook and insisted on teaching me at least some of the rudiments, knowledge which I had retained, even though I had returned to my bad old ways whilst living alone.

A starter of mushrooms cooked in red wine and a touch of garlic, a main course of salmon seared with herbs and served with new potatoes and green beans, and a sweet of home-made lemon sorbet had gone down well with Linda, who had expressed pleasant surprise at my efforts.

The Saturday we spent driving into the Highlands, walking beside Loch Laggan, one of my favourite areas, lunch in Kinloch Laggan, and then back to my bungalow to enjoy ourselves as only newly-minted lovers can.

Sunday it rained – it didn’t just rain, but poured as though the heavens were looking to make a second Noah’s Ark a sensible precaution. We decided that Linda would stay the night, rather than drive home in such conditions, and drive straight to work from my place on the Monday morning. For once I was glad to see such rain.

It was on Sunday evening that I idly asked the question that was to prove a lynchpin in the mystery of the disappearance of James Whitaker.

“Linda,” I asked as we sat on the floor in front of the fire, enjoying a glass of wine, “was your father’s car ever found?”

“No,” she said, “why do you ask?”

“Well, if it had been found, then where it was found might have offered some sort of clue to what had happened to him.”

She shook her head sadly.

“No, no trace of him, no trace of his car, nothing.”

“Do you know if the police really tried to find it?”

“Don’t really know – I suppose that they must have made some sort of effort, but whatever it was, it didn’t produce a result of any sort.”

“What did he drive?”

54

“He and mum had two cars at the time – an Astra estate which was their ‘sensible’ car and dad’s ‘hobby car’, a classic Ford Zodiac which was like the ones the police used to use back in the sixties or seventies, in white and with an automatic gearbox. Neither mum nor I could understand why he had it, but he liked it and it ran OK. He used to say that it reminded him of his youth and Z cars on old black and white TV, but never said any more than that.”

“There can’t be many of those still around – if it was anywhere busy it would have stuck out like a sore thumb.”

“That’s just what the police said at the time.”

“Was there any reason why he should have been driving it that day rather than the Astra?”

“Oh, although it was a ‘hobby’, he didn’t wrap it in cotton wool. He used it quite a lot and of course, mum and I weren’t allowed to even breathe on it, let alone drive it, so if mum needed the Astra during the day he had to use the Zodiac. He really did keep it in first class condition so it wasn’t just sitting around gathering dust, and he had a tame mechanic at the local Ford agency who did any work on it that dad couldn’t cope with himself.”

I thought no more about it at the time, but on the Monday, with Linda at work and the rain still tippling down, I idly searched the net for Mk. III Zodiacs. As I had expected, they were as rare as hens’ teeth, but I did find a couple on E-bay. One particularly interested me. It was described as a ‘barn find needing virtually no work’. Even more interesting was the fact that it was situated only a few miles away, just outside Arbroath. The listing had several photos of the vehicle, two of which clearly showed that the number plates had been removed. On an impulse, I phoned Linda.

“Peter, why are you phoning – is something wrong?”

“No – look, I know that you are busy, but just a quick question – what was the registration number of your dad’s car? Do you remember?”

“Yes, it was DYK555B – why?”

“Just an idea that I’ve had – can I see you tonight?”

“Yes – come round to my place about seven thirty – is that OK?”

“Absolutely – I’ll see you then.”

When I got to Linda’s flat she was agog to learn just why I had wanted to know the registration number of her father’s car and I explained what I had found on E-bay. She was thunderstruck.

“Do you really think that it could be dad’s car?”

I shrugged.

“It’s a very long shot, and obviously I can’t be sure, but there aren’t many of them around, this one is white and an auto, it’s only a few miles away and according to the description was found in a derelict barn.”

“What should we do?”

“Well, we need to try and ascertain if there is any way of proving that it isn’t your dad’s car, because if that is the case, there’s no point in doing anything at all. First off – are you sure about the number plate? For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you the number plate of the car I had before the one I had before my present one, if you see what I mean.”

“Oh yes; ever since I was a girl I’ve always created mnemonics to remember things like number plates, post codes and the like. All those sort of things that don’t make sense in themselves.”

“So what was your mnemonics for the Zodiac?”

55

“Well, the number was 555 – and that used to be a brand of cigarettes that a boyfriend long ago smoked –

State Express 555. Once I had everything else, the final ‘B’ just fell into place.”

“And the first three? The DYK?”

She gave a throaty chuckle.

“Don’t tell anyone else, especially not mum – I remembered DYK as ‘Drop Your Knickers’!”

I joined in the laughter.

“Doesn’t seem a bad idea, actually!”

“Oh no, not yet – I need feeding, and it’s my turn to cook.”

“Well, before it’s your turn – is there anything that you remember about your dad’s car that could rule this one out?”

She furrowed her brow in concentration.

“Well, it was white paintwork, like the one you’ve found on the net. Inside the seats were genuine leather, not imitation and they were black. Did it say what the seats were?”

“No; the pictures of the interior showed dark seats – black or a very dark blue or grey – but it didn’t say what the material was.”

She continued to concentrate.

“It had a radio, but it was a top of the range car, so I suppose even back then, that was normal.”

“Yes, the interior shots of this show a radio.”

She stopped and shrugged helplessly.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Peter, but that’s it – that’s all I can remember.”

“Well, at least it gives us a starting point. Look – the sooner we follow up on this the better. Any chance of you taking tomorrow afternoon off?”

She thought for a moment.

“I don’t see why not – I’ve got plenty of leave owing to me and there’s nothing urgent that I know of.”

“OK – I’ll ring the seller and arrange for us to look the car over and assuming he agrees, I’ll bell you to confirm and pick you up – that OK?”

“Sounds fine to me.”

Ivor Harris was a tall, slim man, fifty years or so old; dressed in heavy country tweed trousers tucked into Wellington boots and an army style sweater complete with leather patches at the elbows and shoulders, a sunburned face was dominated by a hooked nose and bushy eyebrows over deep-set blue eyes. He looked just what he was – a successful working farmer who spent much of his time out of doors.

He had met us at the end of a heavily pot-holed lane off a minor road which in turn had led off the A933, the road from Arbroath to Brechin. He had been waiting for us and invited us to join him in his somewhat battered Land Rover. The lane, which looked bad enough from where we were, deteriorated rapidly, he assured us, and would be a major challenge to the suspension of my Astra estate. We climbed aboard gratefully and, as we had been warned, were soon being thrown around like passengers in a small boat in a rough sea, despite Harris only proceeding at a walking pace.

At last the journey ended as Harris drew the Land Rover to a halt outside a large, and fairly dilapidated, barn.

The front of the barn was facing us and the sliding doors were open – and seemed to have had to have been forced off their runners to achieve that state of affairs.

56

We climbed out and straightaway could dimly perceive a car within the barn’s gloom. As we got nearer, I could see at once that it was, indeed, a Mk III Ford Zodiac. It was standing there on flat tyres, the originally white paintwork liberally besmirched with bird droppings and a thick coating of dust, but otherwise seemed to be complete and undamaged.

“How did you discover the car, Mr. Harris?” I enquired.

“Quite odd, really. This land used to be part of the farm belonging to a neighbour of mine, George McFee, but he is getting on a bit and the whole farm was getting too much for him to manage. Neither of his sons are interested in following in his footsteps and as this bit of land adjoins mine, he gave me first refusal on it.

When I looked it all over I opened up the barn – must have been the first time that the doors had been opened in years – and there was the car. At first I assumed that it belonged to George, although why he should have put it here was beyond me, but when I asked if he wanted it back, he said that it was the first that he knew about it and that he had no interest in it, so I put it on E-bay.”

“That’s a strange story indeed,” I said before turning to Linda. “Well, what do you think?”

“I’ll need a much closer look.” She replied and all three of us trooped over to the vehicle. Once there, Linda opened all four doors and peered inside for a good few minutes.

“It might be, Peter, it might well be. The upholstery is the same as I remember and the tax disc holder looks the same – although the disc itself has gone. There’s a May two thousand and ten issue of Country Life on the back passenger seat; dad bought the magazine occasionally but wasn’t a regular subscriber. I can’t swear to this having been his car, not without the number plates or tax disc, but I certainly can’t say that it wasn’t his. There is nothing to say to me that this wasn’t dad’s car, nothing at all.”

As she spoke there was a catch in her voice, and I could only try to imagine what finding this car – if indeed it was her father’s – must be doing to her emotions. Could this, I wondered, be the start of a trail to finding the missing Graham Whitaker. For the sake of Linda and her mother, I certainly hoped so; it would be unutterably cruel for them if this was to prove a red herring after all.

Harris had been looking more and more puzzled as we spoke; when I had phoned him to arrange to see the car, that was all that I had done – I hadn’t mentioned just why we were interested in it, so we rapidly filled him in with the background. I was concerned that he might prove difficult, but in fact he was fascinated by our tale.

“So, what now?” he asked.

“We must let the police know that we may have found Linda’s father’s car.”

“Yes, of course you must.”

I got out my mobile; I had the number of Detective Inspector Campbell stored in its address book and she was clearly the logical person to call in the first instance.

Chapter Ten

The phone shrilled and Fiona picked it up.

“Campbell.”

“Inspector, this is Peter Riorden.”

For a moment the name meant nothing, then she remembered the man who had accompanied the wife and daughter of Graham Whitaker when they had brought that strange message from the missing man to her attention.

“Yes, Mr. Riorden, what can I do for you?”

57

“Inspector, there is a possibility that Mrs. Jones and I have found Mr. Whitaker’s missing car in a barn near to Arbroath. It’s the right model in the right colour, it has been dumped in the barn – which hasn’t been used in years – and the number plates have been removed. It has clearly been there for some long tome there is a two thousand and ten magazine on the back seat – the year Mr. Whitaker disappeared.”

“This sounds very interesting, Mr. Riorden – where exactly is it?”

“It’s down an unused track off a lane off the A933. I’ve marked the location of it on a Google Maps screen -

would you like me to E-mail it to you?”

“That would be most helpful if it is all that isolated. Where are you yourself?”

“Mrs. Jones and I are still at the barn; the owner, a Mr. Harris has only recently bought the land on which it stands and had no knowledge of the car’s existence until a few days ago. He is here with us at the moment, but he needs to get back to his farm, so he’s going to leave us here if you are going to get somebody here soon.”

She thought quickly. Riorden, and for that matter, Mrs. Jones, had struck her as highly sensible people; this looked to be a lead worth following up on.

“Mr. Riorden, thank Mr. Harris for me, please, and tell him we will be in touch with him in due course. If you and Mrs. Jones wouldn’t mind staying where you are, I’ll send one of my team over to meet with you straight away – they should be with you in half an hour or so.”

“Right, Inspector- we’ll wait here. Oh, and tell whoever comes that they’ll need something like a Land Rover

– the lane is just about impassable in a normal car without damage.”

“Right, I’ll bear that in mind – thank you for your call, Mr. Riorden – I’ll get somebody to you as quickly as possible."

DI Campbell was as good as her word; just on thirty minutes after the end of our phone conversation, a police Land Rover arrived and disgorged a stocky male uniformed officer and a tall young woman in plain clothes. The latter approached us, holding her hand out in greeting.

“Mr. Riorden, Mrs. Jones? I’m DC Roxburgh – DI Campbell has sent me to have a look at the car that you have found.”

I took her hand and was treated to a firm handshake and an appraising glance, one that I returned. DC

Roxburgh was a good looking young woman, probably in her late twenties, with an air of restless energy about her which was immediately apparent to anyone with any sort of empathy. She also shook hands with Linda and then looked into the barn at the car.

“Right,” she said, “I can see why you are suspicious – number plates gone and nobody knew that it was here, I understand?”

I nodded.

“Yes, that’s right. As I explained to DI Campbell on the phone we can’t be sure that it is Mr. Whitaker’s car, but there is nothing about it which definitely rules it out from being his.”

She took a pair of latex gloves from an inside pocket of the light linen jacket that she was wearing and snapped them on before going any further towards the Zodiac.

“Can I ask if either of you have touched the car?”

“I opened all four doors and looked inside.” Linda replied.

“Did you touch anything inside?”

Linda thought for a moment.

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“Yes. I leant inside to have a good look at the interior and I put my left hand on the top of the back of the front passenger seat.”

“Anywhere else?”

Linda shook her head.

“No, I’m sure that was it.”

Roxburgh turned towards me.

“What about you, Mr, Riorden?”

I shook my head.

“No, I never went within arm’s length of the car.”

“What about Mr. Harris?”

“Well, he didn’t touch it whilst he was here with us, but I should imagine that he will have done so at some time since he found it.”

She nodded her head and turned back to Linda.

“Right. Mrs. Jones, we will need to take your prints for the purposes of elimination, if that is OK with you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank you – we will have to have Mr. Harris’ as well, but we’ll get to that later.”

She walked right up to the car, opened the driver’s door and fiddled inside, obviously with the bonnet release, because there was a click and the bonnet sprung up and inch or so. She went round to the front of the car and opened the bonnet fully, took a small torch from another jacket pocket and shone it around the engine compartment.

“Ah,” she exclaimed in triumph, “the manufacturer’s identity plate is still here.”

She indicated a small metal plate fixed to part of the interior bodywork.

“From this we can definitely identify the car.”

She took out a mobile phone and speed-dialled somebody; we could only hear her side of the conversation, but she was clearly talking to another police officer.

“Ken, it’s Helen. I’m with Mr. Riorden and Mrs. Jones at that car they have found. The number plates are gone, but the ID plate is still in place. Can you run a trace on it, please?”

She recited a long list of numbers into the phone, then ended the call.

“Right, that will enable us to get back to the car’s registration, so that we will know for certain. Let’s see if there is anything in the boot.”

She opened it and looked inside.

“Well, nothing to see at first glance. Now, if it is confirmed that this is Mr. Whitaker’s car, we will obviously give it a thorough examination to see if it has anything to tell us. In the meantime,” she turned to the uniformed officer who had been a silent observer all this time, “George, would you be kind enough to run Mr. Riorden and Mrs. Jones back to their car and then come back here?”

“OK, Helen, back in a jiff.”

We climbed into the police Land Rover and were ferried back to where we had left my car and the PC, once we had got out, turned his vehicle round and drove out of our sight.

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**********************

Once the Land Rover, with Jones and Riorden inside, was out of sight, Helen made another call, this time to Fiona Campbell.

“Boss, it’s Helen. This car looks a definite lead. Ken is running its maker’s ID to be sure, but it looks very dodgy. No number plates, no tax disc, left unlocked but the keys gone, and in the boot there are some nasty looking stains which I think may turn out to be blood. Can we have forensics on the case?”

Fiona thought for a moment – she would probably have to justify a full forensic investigation, and its not inconsiderable cost, to her boss, DCI Graham, but decided that she would rather argue the case after the event rather than ask for permission and risk being turned down on budgetary grounds.

“Let’s make sure that it really is Whitaker’s car – won’t take long – and then I’ll send them in. In the meantime, how secure is the site?”

“Not at all, boss. Admittedly, the barn is in a pretty isolated area, but the doors are wide open and won’t go back in position without some sort of tools – they’ve come off their runners, presumably when they were forced open by Mr. Harris, the land owner, and are too heavy to be lifted back into place by just PC Lamont, who drove me here, and myself. There’s no evidence that anyone has been around recently, but the ground is dry and hard, so no footprints or anything. For all I know a troop of Boy Scouts could have marched through the area ten minutes before I got here.”

“Right. You and Lamont stay there for the moment. As soon as I hear that the car has been confirmed as belonging to Whitaker, I’ll send the forensic team over and you can leave them to it, but we’ll probably need to secure the site somehow until we can extract the car.”

It was only a matter of minutes before Ken Stewart tapped on her door and came in.

“That car is definitely Whitaker’s, boss. The manufacturer’s ID confirms it and checking with DVLA it hasn’t been taxed since two thousand and ten.”

“Right, Ken – let Helen know, will you whilst I arrange for forensics to get over there.”

“Right, boss.”

Two minutes later, she was on the phone to Harold Oliver, the chief Scene of Crime Officer for the area and explained what she needed, She had worked with him on numerous occasions in the past and soon had his agreement that a team would be on site within the hour. She relayed the news to Helen Roxburgh and then resigned herself to waiting for results.

In the meantime, she would have to update DCI Graham and went along to his office, pleased to be able to report a positive movement in the case at last after so many days of ‘no progress’.

Graham was in pernickety mood.

“You should have come to me for permission to employ forensics, Inspector. How long will they be there?

Budgets are tight, you know.”

“Yes, sir, I do know. Until Oliver’s team have had a chance to look things over, I don’t know how long they will need, but this is the first lead we have had on this case in over four years. If we can crack it, it will be a feather in our caps, especially after Mr. Hunt’s team never got anywhere.”

That was a political dig. Back in two thousand and ten, the embezzlement case had been investigated by the then Detective Chief Inspector, now Detective Superintendent, James Hunt, and Fiona was well aware that Graham and Hunt disliked each other. The possibility of putting one over on his predecessor on the case was not lost on Graham. He frowned, but Fiona knew that it was only for show.

“Alright – but don’t let them take forever!”

“Right, sir – I’ll make sure that they go as fast as possible.”

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It was nearly three hours before she heard more on the matter. Garry Crane, Oliver’s deputy, was leading the team at the site and he had phoned through with some initial findings.

“Inspector, we’ve got some interesting finds here. The stains on the carpet in the boot are definitely blood, and I’ve sent a sample back to the lab to check, in the first instance, if they are human blood. Don’t want to get all excited only to find out that they came from some leaking shopping or dead dog or the like. There are no fingerprints on the steering wheel, the automatic gear lever and the inside door handles, only two sets on the outside door handles – which, from what I have been told, are probably those of Mrs. Jones and Mr.

Harris. However, there are plenty of prints elsewhere inside the car, at least three different sets, probably of the members of Whitaker’s family – again, at first look some of them probably match those of Mrs. Jones on the outside door handles.

“All pretty routines so far, but a couple of things bother me. Assuming that the blood stains turn out to be human blood, then somebody was bundled into the boot of that car and bled whilst in there. So, what happened next? Someone knew about this place – you could scarcely come across it by chance – and left the car here. Then what? It’s over a half mile walk back to the road so it’s likely that two vehicles were involved.

Perhaps whoever was bleeding was taken away in the second vehicle, but it scarcely seems likely. I think that there is a good chance that there is a grave around here somewhere, so I’ve ordered a geophysical survey

– the university archaeological department have helped us in the past with this sort of thing and one of their folk will start first thing in the morning.”

How much will that eat into the budget, Fiona thought glumly. I’d better keep quiet about that bit of the search until it has actually been done.

************************

Crane’s hunch was right; just before noon the following day he was again on the phone to Fiona.

“I was right,” he said without any preliminary, “we’ve found a grave and I expect to have it fully exposed in another hour or so. Can you arrange for a pathologist to be present, please?”

“Leave it with me – I’ll also come along myself.”

An hour later Fiona arrived at the site, a few minutes after John Kinge, the pathologist. The two had worked together in the past, and Fiona was impressed with the man’s competence. The site was now opened up – a shallow grave had been excavated, in the middle of which was a body, apparently that of a man, still dressed in the remnants of a business suit; Crane came across to meet the two newcomers.

“Inspector, doctor – we haven’t moved the body at all, just cleared the soil from around it. Interestingly, the body wasn’t the only thing that we found,” he waved to trestle table that had been set up a few feet away,

“we also found a pair of car number plates, DYK555B, which I understand are those missing from the Zodiac, and a set of keys, including a car key which also belongs to the Zodiac.”

After a careful examination of the body in situ, accompanied by a plethora of photographs being taken, Kinge finally went through the corpse’s pockets, finding a wallet in the jacket which he handed to Fiona. The leather had partially rotted, but several credit cards and a photo card driving licence in the name of Graham Whitaker were still in pristine condition and just about clinched things so far as Fiona was concerned. The body would still need to be formally identified – which due to the state of decomposition would need to be done by dental records or DNA analysis – but she was satisfied that they had found the missing finance officer.

Leaving the pathologist to supervise the removal of the body to the mortuary, and Crane’s team to tidy up generally, Fiona returned to her office. As Crane had said the previous day, who would have known of that barn and its suitability for hiding Whitaker’s car away? Having now visited the site herself, she was 61

convinced that it hadn’t been found by accident; whoever had left the car there, whoever had buried Whitaker nearby, must have already known of the barn’s existence and of its suitability.

Before leaving the site of the grave, she had agreed with Dr. Kinge that he would perform the post mortem later that day and it was late in the afternoon when he called her.

“Bit of a surprise for you, Fiona. Given what had happened to the poor man, I was expecting to find signs of a violent death, but not a bit of it. Our man died from natural causes – a heart attack.”

“Good Lord! A heart attack? Then why was he hidden away like that? And what about the blood stains?”

“Why he was hidden away is your province, I’m afraid – all I can say is that I was fully expecting to find evidence of him having been murdered, but not a bit of it. No signs of blunt force trauma, no knife nor bullet wounds. I’ve sent samples for toxicology, and I suppose there is a chance that the attack was chemically induced, but I would be very surprised if that were to prove to be the case. The blood stains are a bit of a mystery at this stage – there are no wounds on the body that I can discover which would explain them. I haven’t had the DNA results on those stains yet and I will be matching them against Whitaker’s DNA. I suppose there is a chance, unlikely as it seems, that the blood isn’t actually his. Oh, one other thing – given how long he has been in the ground, time of death is pretty difficult to determine with any degree of accuracy, but around the time that he disappeared is definitely within the likely time window.”

The doctor rang off, leaving Fiona to puzzle over what she had been told. So, Graham Whitaker disappears, as does a large sum of money. Soon after he disappears he suffers a fatal heart attack and person or persons unknown dumps him in the boot of his own car, drives it to an isolated barn, and buries him together with his keys and car’s number plates, presumably to hide the identity of the car should it be found. Bizarre didn’t even begin to describe it. How to explain the bloodstains if they weren’t Whitaker’s? How did whoever had buried him know about the barn? Plenty of questions, but precious few answers.

First things first. Whitaker needed to be formally identified. Given the state of his body asking for a visual identification by either his wife or his daughter was out of the question. Identification would have to be either from his dental records or by checking his DNA against that of his daughter. In either case, his family would need to be informed that his body had been found and that was a task that she could not delegate. She looked at her watch; nearly six. Should she break the news this evening or wait until the morning?

Reluctantly she decided that there was no good reason to delay and picked up her phone.

**********************

I had called om Linda up after she got home from work and we were planning to go out for a meal and to spend the night together at her place when her phone rang. I could only hear her side of the conversation, but that was enough to alert me to the fact that it was bad news. Looking positively ashen, she ended the call and slumped down into an easy chair.

“They’ve found dad’s body near to where that car is. That was Inspector Campbell – she didn’t want to call on mum unannounced so called me first, but she is calling on mum in thirty minutes time. I’ve got to be with her – but will you come with me, please Peter?”

“Of course – we’d better go straight round now.”

It was only a few minutes’ walk round to Niamh Whitaker’s flat, so we were able to prepare her for the policewoman’s visit, a visit which confirmed the worst fears of wife and daughter.

DI Campbell looked almost as strained as did Linda and Niamh; breaking such news must be a truly awful task, I realised.

62

“As I explained, Mrs. Whitaker, we are just about totally certain that the body we have found buried near to where his car was found is indeed that of Mr. Whitaker, but we do need formal identification.”

“Can I see him?” Niamh demanded.

Campbell hesitated, and I had a very good idea as to the reason.

“Of course you can, Mrs. Whitaker, but I really wouldn’t advise it.” She hesitated for a moment. “Mr.

Whitaker is really not as you remember him.”

The colour had drained from Niamh’s face as she took in the implications of what she was being told.

“You mean that his body is awful?”

Campbell nodded.

“I am afraid so, Mrs. Whitaker. Certainly you would be unable to recognise him.”

Niamh sank back in her chair, looking numbed.

Campbell turned to Linda.

“Mrs. Jones, I am just about as certain as I can be that the body that we have discovered is that of your father, but to be absolutely certain we need to rely upon checking his DNA against yours. Would you let me take a DNA sample from you – all it means is a simple mouth swab, which I can do here and now if you are agreeable.”

“Yes, of course – anything that will help.”

I watched in silence as Campbell took a swab from Linda’s mouth and sealed it in a small contained which she carefully sealed and wrote the time, date and Linda’s name on it. She sat down again.

“One of the things that we found was a bunch of keys, one of which is the key to the car.” She had a small briefcase with her, and from it she extracted a clear plastic bag, sealed and written upon. As she had said it contained a bunch of keys, and she handed the bag to Niamh.

“As I said, one of those keys is the key to the car, but can you tell me what the others are, Mrs. Whitaker?”

Niamh examined the contents of the bag closely.

“Sure, that’s the key for his Ford, and that’s the key for the Astra we both used,” as she spoke, she fingered individual keys through the plastic, “that’s the front door of the house we lived in back then, and that’s the back door of the house. That one is his office key,,,” She hesitated, “but I don’t know what this last one is.”

The key to which she was referring looked like the key to a cheap briefcase or the like, a small thing stamped from thin metal.

Linda reached out and Niamh handed the bag of keys over for her to have a look at.

“I think I know what that one is,” she said, “dad used to have one of those slim sort of briefcase things – I think they were actually called document cases – that you just tucked under your arm, no handle or anything.

Just a single piece of leather, really, that folded over in the middle with a zip all the way round it – it would take something like twenty sheets or so of A4 before becoming over filled. He used to keep it in the car – the Astra I mean, not the Ford - don’t you remember?”

Niamh furrowed her brow in concentration.

“Oh yes, now I remember that – but he didn’t have it in the car for ages before he disappeared. I don’t know what became of it. He must have just never got round to taking the key off his ring.”

Campbell had perked up when she heard Linda possibly identify the key, but now relaxed again as it proved likely to be of little, if any, importance. She reached out and Linda handed the bag back to her, then reached into her briefcase again.

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“We also found this with her husband’s body and I wonder if you recognise it?”

‘This’ was a knife, again contained in a clear evidence bag. It was an impressive looking weapon with a fixed blade some five inches long, a wooden handle and a crosspiece to prevent one’s hand from slipping off the handle onto the blade. The blade itself was a good inch wide and very sturdy; it was single edged, the sharp edge curving to meet the straight, unsharpened edge to form a wickedly sharp point. The back was not plain; it was serrated to form a small but useful looking saw.

Linda looked at it blankly, but Niamh recognised it at once.

“That was Graham’s. As a boy he was in the Scouts – used to go on camps and that sort of thing – and he had that knife as part of his uniform when he was a senior scout. Useful for cutting up small branches and the like to make fuel for camp fires. He kept a few photos of his scouting days and had that and his Scout belt and a few badges in an old trunk along with mementos of his Navy days. I haven’t seen any of that stuff in years – I didn’t even know that he still had it. To be honest, I thought that he had thrown it all out long ago.”

Well, that explained where the knife had come from; Fiona had at first assumed that whoever had been with Whitaker when he died might have been responsible for the knife – clearly not. It looked as though Whitaker had taken it with him as a means of self-defence – or perhaps to use it as a threat? More facets to the puzzle surrounding the man’s death. It was time to go.

“Thank you, Mrs. Whitaker, Mrs. Jones – you’ve been most helpful. I’m really so sorry for your loss; as soon as Mrs. Jones’ DNA is matched against that of the body – which I am as sure as I can be is that of Mr.

Whitaker – I’ll let you both know straight away.”

Linda ushered the detective out and returned; Niamh looked from one to the other of us, her face grave.

“So that’s it then. Your dad’s dead, Linda. I suppose I knew, really, but I’d always hoped..”

She broke down at that point, the tears flooding from her and Linda crossed over to comfort her.

“Do you want me to stay tonight, mum?”

“Please, love – and you Peter, if you would.”

“But you’ve only the one spare room, mum.”

I was about to offer to sleep on the settee when Niamh laughed weakly, a laugh half subsumed in tears.

“Don’t be so silly, Linda – don’t you think that I’ve got eyes in my head? I knew you two were together as soon as you did.”

She twisted half round in the chair and looked at me, her eyes still red from weeping, but the tears, at least for the present, dried up.

“You will take care of her, won’t you Peter?”

“I promise – I’ll never let either of you down.”

*******************************

Fiona returned to her office hoping to hear of some sort of progress, any sort of progress, in the case. There was a note on her desk:

‘Boss

Dr. Kinge phoned. He has had preliminary toxicology back – nothing suspicious so far, but a couple of days before the final result will be in.

I’ve tracked down the car that Gerard junior drove back in two ten. Now owned by a Shelagh Norton, lives in Arbroath. I’ve phoned her and agreed to take one of the SOCO team to look at the car tomorrow late 64

afternoon – she’s a teacher and will be home by five. I’m off home now but bell me if you want to change things.

Ken’

That was good news – or at least possibly good news. She was tempted to join the visit to Ms. Norton herself, but on reflection decided to leave Stewart to follow up on his successful hunt for the vehicle. It was a long shot, indeed a very long shot, but suppose there was some sort of physical evidence still on the vehicle that it had been in contact either with Gerard senior’s car or Hammond’s bicycle? Or even both? Of the two, she was more hopeful about Hammond’s bicycle. David Gerard’s car had had to have quite bit of repair work after the damaged caused, Gerard claimed, by an unknown careless parker; the bill for the work included some respraying of the nearside front of the car, so any paint transferred from the vehicle involved in contact with Gerard’s car would presumably be lost, but perhaps the same might not be true of the bicycle.

However, the alleged deer collision which Gerard blamed for the need for a second visit to the repair shop had required considerably less work, and it was to that fact that Fiona was pinning her hopes.

Chapter Eleven

It was mid-afternoon the next day when Fiona’s phone rang.

“Fiona, it’s John Kinge.”

“Hi, doc – any news for me?”

“Yes, I have, actually. The DNA results from the car and Whitaker’s clothes are back. It’s not his blood, both samples came from the same person, a man. Nothing to match it in the database, though, I’m afraid.”

“Interesting. Bear with me, John. How’s this for a scenario? Whitaker and Mr. X get into a fight, in which Whitaker wounds X with that wicked looking knife buried with him, thus getting X’s blood on his clothes, but then suffers a fatal heart attack from the exertion and X, still bleeding from the wound, bundles Whitaker and the knife into the boot of Whitaker’s own car for disposal, thus leaving some of his own blood on the carpet in the car boot?”

“That works for me – certainly the physical evidence we have so far bears it out as a possible scenario. Using common sense, even a probable scenario. Oh, and I managed to get a surprisingly quick result on Mrs. Jones’

DNA – the body we dug up is quite definitely that of her father, so that can be confirmed to her and her mother.”

Fiona sat back in her chair, contemplating what she had just been told. Her supposition that Whitaker had been involved in a fight with someone unknown certainly seemed a probable explanation – and she remembered the scar on David Gerard’s forehead. It wasn’t recent, and head wounds such as that one were notorious for the amount of blood that they shed. She was beginning to feel more and more sure that David Gerard was in all this up to his neck.

****************************

Stewart brought his car to a halt outside a neat bungalow in Keptie Street, Arbroath, a bungalow which looked out across the road to the park with its large pond – a pond almost big enough to be called a loch. As he did so, Amanda Harris, the SOCO officer accompanying him, similarly stopped her car outside the house.

There was a Ford Mondeo parked in the short drive outside the house, so presumably Shelagh Norton, as promised, was at home. He greeted Amanda and they approached the front door of the bungalow together.

He pressed the bell push and after just a few seconds the door was opened by a woman in, he judged, her late forties or early fifties. Short and plump, she looked up at him from behind heavy rimmed spectacles which gave a somewhat owlish look to her face. Despite that, she exuded an air of competence and Stewart could imagine that the classes she taught would be well behaved and attentive – or else!

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He produced his warrant card.

“Ms. Norton? I’m DC Stewart – we spoke on the phone yesterday. This is my colleague, Miss Harris.”

Shelagh Norton glanced briefly at his warrant card, equally briefly at Amanda Harris, then stepped back.

“Right, come in, both of you. I was just about to make a cup of tea – can I tempt you?”

Before Stewart could reply, and without giving him a chance to speak, Amanda said that she would love a cup of tea. Stewart wasn’t averse to a cup himself, but he felt mildly irritated that Amanda had taken the lead in replying. After all, she was a civilian employee, he was a serving officer, He got the impression that Amanda Harris, at thirty-three a few years older than himself, and a well-respected practitioner in her profession, wasn’t too pleased at accompanying a mere Detective Constable on what was almost certainly going to turn out to be a wild goose chase.

Rebuking himself for being petty, he followed the two women into the house into a large sitting room tastefully decorated and with a number of landscape prints on the walls. Ms. Norton waved then to easy chairs arranged either side of a small, two eater settee, all three in a deep russet coloured leather and clearly expensive. The settee and the chairs were arranged in the form of a ‘U’ and all three enjoyed a view out of a large picture window onto a small, but well maintained, rear garden. As they seated themselves their hostess disappeared, presumably into the kitchen to prepare the tea, a presumption confirmed a few minutes later when she returned carrying a large tray upon which were cups, saucers, tea-pot, milk jug and a plate of chocolate biscuits,

She set the tray down on the low coffee table in front of the settee and busied herself pouring cups for each of them before finally settling herself down and looking at them.

“So, how can I help?”

This time Stewart responded at once, not giving Harris a chance to forestall him.

“Ms. Norton, firstly, thank you for agreeing to see us at such short notice. The reason that we are interested in your car is that there is a possibility that, long before you bought it, it was involved in one, or possibly two, collisions with other road users which sadly resulted in fatalities.”

The woman looked shocked in the first instance, then interested – very interested, Stewart told himself.

Probably the most interesting thing that she had been involved in for years!

“Good Heavens! How extraordinary! But how will you be able to tell?”

“What we would like to do is take a small sample of the car’s paint and see if it matches traces of paint that were left at the scenes of the collisions. Would that be all right?”

“Yes, of course – but the car won’t be damaged, will it? I have to use it every day to get to school.”

Amanda Harris chipped in.

“Don’t worry about that, Ms. Norton. I’ll just take a small sample – less than would fit on a fifty pence piece and spray the area with a clear lacquer I have so that there is no chance of the spot going rusty or anything.”

“Well, in that case, please go ahead.”

All three of them finished their tea and trooped out to the car where, five minutes later Amanda had removed a small piece of paint and, as promised, sprayed the affected area with lacquer, Thanking the woman for her cooperation, Stewart and Harris left in their separate cars, leaving an intrigued school teacher behind them.

In telling Ms. Norton that paint traces had been left at both collision scenes, Stewart had been less than truthful. Although the mangled remains of Hammond’s bicycle were still in the evidence store, Gerard’s car was long gone. At the time had been regarded as a simple accident, and even when the possibility of another vehicle having hit it before it left the road was investigated, Mrs. Gerard’s explanation that the damage seen to its offside rear quarter had been caused in a car park had been accepted at face value and the car released 66

to her. The insurance company had declared it a write-off and it would long ago have gone to a breaker’s yard for crushing.

**************************

It was the next afternoon before Amanda Harris completed her analysis of the paint sample taken from the Norton car and she came to Fiona with her results.

“I’ve had a good look at that paint sample, Inspector, and compared it with the paint traces found on Hammond’s bicycle. The Mondeo, like many modern cars, actually has four coats of paint on it by the time it leaves the assembly line. It starts with a primer, usually a fairly pale grey in colour, then a base coat, then the top colour coat, and finally a clear lacquer coat. Typically when a car is involved in a collision with something, it leaves traces of those top two coats. The impact would have to be very substantial to leave traces of the lower coats. In the case of Hammond’s bicycle the traces were, as one would expect, of those two top coats.

“The sample that I took from Ms. Norton’s car, on the other hand, proved to have five coats of paint – the normal primer, base coat and top coat, then on top of that a second top coat and lacquer coat. Obviously when the car was repaired the damaged area was rubbed down, removing the original clear lacquer and abrading, but not totally removing, the original top coat. New paint was then sprayed on as a fresh top coat, followed by new lacquer. Here, we were lucky. The new top coat, although looking the same to the naked eye, was actually a different composition to the original top coat, so I was easily able to distinguish between the two, and the original paint matches the traces of paint that were found on Hammond’s bicycle. Now, that doesn’t prove that Hammond’s bicycle was hit by this particular car, only by a car which had been finished in that particular paint. I’ve checked with the manufacturer and what was Gerard’s car was originally finished in a batch of paint that was used for only a two month period in two thousand and six when the car was bought by Gerard. The colour – it was called Tahitian Red, proved not to be very popular and that particular batch of paint proved to have had poorer adhesion qualities than normal and complaints were quickly received of paint going dull as the lacquer and the top coat separated from the base coat almost as soon as buyers took delivery of the cars, and as a result it was used on only a couple of thousand cars in the entire UK. Based on that, there can’t have been all that many cars finished in that particular batch of paint in Scotland.”

Fiona sat back in her chair, digesting what she had just been told. So, the car which had killed Hammond had been painted in the colour which Gerard’s car had sported. That only proved that Gerard’s car could have been the killing machine, not that is necessarily had been. By itself it was a link in the evidence chain, but no more.

“Thanks, Amanda – that’s most helpful. I’ll get somebody on trying to check just how many Mondeos in that colour were registered locally at the time.”

She called in John Govern – it was only fair to spread the donkey work out amongst her DCs – and explained what needed to be done. It was hardly the task to be met with unbounded enthusiasm, but like so much police work, it had to be done and it had to be done thoroughly, and she knew that she could rely upon Govern to see the task through.

She wondered just what the chances were of actually bringing this case to a successful conclusion; she was sure that David Gerard was involved in the deaths both of Hammond and of his own father, but did he have any link to the supposed suicide of Richard Holder? And did he tie in with the disappearance of Whitaker?

There was one possible line of enquiry there – the blood on Whitaker’s clothes and in the boot of his car. She needed to get a DNA sample from David Gerard – but on what grounds? She had no proof of any wrongdoing on his behalf, and if she asked him to volunteer a sample he would be perfectly within his rights to refuse, and the very asking for a sample would obviously alert him to the likelihood that he was under suspicion.

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Could she, on the forensic evidence that she now had, justify having him arrested on suspicions of having been involved in the collision which had killed Hammond, with a charge of anything from failing to report the accident to causing death by dangerous driving? The more that she thought about it, the less attractive the idea became. There was little chance of securing a conviction for anything based on what she had, and if the odds were that poor she would be castigated by her superiors for poor judgement. Another question; should she have what had been Gerard’s car, and was now owned by Ms. Norton, impounded and subjected to a full forensic examination? But then, after four years of being in constant use by its new owner, what chances were there of the car still carrying any useful evidence at all?

She began to wonder if the investigation was running itself into the ground, despite the recent discoveries.

Then she sat back and smiled. Of course, she was missing the obvious! As long as he was unaware that Whitaker’s car had been found, there was a way that she could bring pressure to bear on David Gerard to give a DNA sample. In the meantime, however, she wanted to build up a bigger body of evidence, one important element of which was to narrow down the odds against the car which hit Hammond’s bicycle being the Mondeo owned by Gerard at the time.

***************************

It was well into the afternoon of the following day before Govern came back to her with the results of his search for Mondeos finished in the critical batch of paint.

“We’ve had a bit of luck, boss,” he told her, “Tahitian Red was an extra cost option on the Mondeo at the time of that dodgy stock of paint. It wasn’t used on any of the other models in the Ford range until several months later, so Hammond’s bike could only have been hit by a Mondeo and there were only eighteen Mondeos, including that owned by Gerard at the time, registered within fifty miles of Dundee painted in the right colour. Four of them have been written off by insurers after collision damage, we know about Gerard’s car, and of the other thirteen, ten have been sold on to new owners, of whom four are down south in England, and I’ve got the addresses of the new owners, as well as those who still have the car from new, and the original owners of the cars which have been sold on or scrapped. As you’d expect, they are all over the place, but apart from those in England, none very far away.”

Fiona decided that, at least to start with, she couldn’t justify sending anyone all over the place to interview owners face to face.

“Right, John. First off, phone all the folk who were the owners of the cars at the relevant time – tell them that we are re-investigating a case which involved a red Mondeo and we want to eliminate their car if we can. I know most of them won’t have a clue as to whether or not they were anywhere near where Hammond was killed at the appropriate time, but with luck we’ll be able to eliminate some of them.”

Within the hour, Govern was back.

“I’ve managed to eliminate ten of those cars, boss. All those owners are quite sure they were nowhere near where Hammond was killed at any time near to the right one. That just leaves three, other than Gerard, who had no idea whether or not they might have been in the right area at the right time. Oh, and I didn’t give any of them anything to worry about – I said that the driver of a red Mondeo might have witnessed something without realising its significance.”

“Well done, John – that gives us a starting point for going back to Gerard.”

The DC looked puzzled.

“How does that help, boss?”

Fiona smiled.

“You’ll see – we’ll go back to the man himself – you drive.”

Half an hour later a puzzled David Gerard was letting the two detectives into his flat. He frowned at them.

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“Inspector, what now? I’ve already spoken to you and told you all I know about my father’s accident and that of Mr. Hammond.”

Fiona smiled encouragingly at him.

“I’m really sorry to have to bother you again, Mr. Gerard, but something new has turned up. At the time that that Mr. Hammond was killed, we now have a new witness, a pedestrian witness who said that she saw what seems to have been the aftermath of the hit and run – a red Mondeo driving away. The thing is, she couldn’t actually see the impact, nor even the site of the hit and run itself – she was going away from it rather than towards it, but she says that she heard a vehicle brake hard, stop, then drive off again after a few seconds and pass her.

“Now, when we examined Mr. Hammond’s bicycle we found DNA traces on it that weren’t his. It’s just possible that whoever drove the car that hit him got out to see what had happened and touched the cycle, so, we are checking all the owners of red Mondeos in the immediate area at the time and asking them to give us a voluntary DNA sample for the purposes of elimination. You are one of fourteen people who owned a red Mondeo at that time in the area, so would you mind us taking a sample?”

Gerard shrugged, irritation plain to see on his face.

“If it will stop you having to keep coming and bothering me, let’s get it over with.”

Got you! Fiona told herself, mentally absolving herself for the sin of a bare-faced lie. There had, of course, been no new witness – but the story had served its purpose. Her claim that Hammond’s bicycle had borne DNA traces not his was true – in fact they were those of his wife, something that was scarcely surprising – so at least not everything that she had told him was untrue.

The sample was quickly taken and the two detectives apologised to Gerard for bothering him again and made their escape.

***************

It took three days for the results of Gerard’s DNA sample to be processed and compared with the traces left in Whitaker’s Zodiac – and as Fiona had expected, there was a match. The blood on Whitaker’s clothes and in the boot of his car, had come from David Gerard. So, did she have enough to arrest him? She could link him to Whitaker’s body – but Whitaker had died of natural causes, so she couldn’t hope to have a murder charge against Gerard hold water. Concealing a body, yes – but that was small beer compared to what she felt to be the totality of Gerard’s crimes. The paint on Hammond’s bicycle matched the batch of paint on what had been Gerard’s Mondeo at the time – but again, of itself that was hardly enough. She could just visualise defence counsel sarcastically asking how, out of all the Mondeos painted in that particular colour, she could assure the court that it was Gerard’s car, and Gerard’s car alone, which had initiated the impact.

And, over and above the deaths of Whitaker, Hammond and Gerard senior, there was the death of Holder, which she was now convinced had been murder disguised as suicide.

Another thing which was nagging at her. The barn where the Zodiac had been hidden, and near where Whitaker had been buried. How had David Gerard known about it? It was well off the road and by no means somewhere that you would happen upon by chance. Somehow or other he, or somebody known to him, must have been aware of that barn beforehand. If it wasn’t Gerard himself, then who?

Her mind was skipping from one element of the case to another. There was the matter of the phone call which Holder had received two days before his death, a phone call which had made him angry and which had caused him to leave his house for an hour or so – so presumably he had gone out to meet somebody – but who? It couldn’t have been one of his erstwhile colleagues – by then Whitaker, Gerard and Hammond were all dead. According to his wife – now his widow – Holder was still angry when he had returned home. What might it all have been about? What bearing might it have on the other elements of the case?

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It was then that there was a tap on her door and John Govern entered.

“Yes, John – what is it?”

The DC looked a little hesitant before responding.

“Might be nothing, boss, but I felt that it was worth pointing out to you. You remember that the barn in which Whitaker’s Zodiac was discovered stood on land originally owned by a man called McFee, who sold it to Ivor Harris who it was who actually discovered the Zodiac?”

Fiona nodded her head.

“Yes, go on.”

“Well, when I was collating the latest information I saw that Mrs. Gerard’s maiden name was McFee. Could be just coincidence, of course, but I thought that it might be worth following up, so I did a bit of digging.

Turns out Mrs. Gerard has an uncle, name of George, which is the same name as the farmer who sold the land to Harris. Still could be a coincidence, but I thought that I should come to you before spending any more time on it.”

Fiona thought for a moment.

“Good work, John. Give the farmer a bell – but don’t go near Mrs. Gerard – and ask him about his family.”

Ten minutes later Govern was back.

“Spoke with McFee, boss. He confirmed that his elder brother, name of Albert and now deceased, had a daughter name of Helen – and her married name is Gerard!”

So! There was a possible way in which David Gerard could have been aware of that old barn, but it would have to be checked out thoroughly.

“Is he likely to let Mrs. Gerard know that we are sniffing around?”

“Doubt it, boss – he described her as a stuck up little cow since she came into money after her husband’s death and he hasn’t spoken to her since the funeral, although apparently they were quite close in the early days of her marriage, and her son used to explore the farm and the surrounding area in the school holidays.”

Better and better – now it seemed highly likely, almost certain in fact, that Gerard knew about the barn. But how to prove that such a link tied him into anything other than the concealing of a body, in law ‘Disposal of a corpse with intent to obstruct or prevent a coroner's inquest’ which at least carried the possibility of unlimited imprisonment but was very rarely, if ever, implemented in modern times, when Fiona was now convinced that the man was a multi-murderer? The only card that she felt that she really held in her hand was the fact that, so far, Gerard was unaware that Whitaker’s car and body had been found. Was there any way that she could turn that fact to her advantage?

Momentarily, she toyed with the idea of issuing an appeal to the public asking if anybody had seen Whitaker’s car in the hope that such a move might lead to Gerard betraying himself, but rapidly came to the conclusion that such an exercise would be pointless. Giving Gerard the impression that they didn’t know where Whitaker’s car was, even if they were once again looking for it, would surely simply reinforce his belief that he was in the clear over the vehicle.

What about doing the more or less opposite – letting Gerard know that they had found the car and found his DNA in it, but continued to conceal the fact that they had also found Whitaker’s body? That was bound to really worry him, but it could quite easily be proved by a defence barrister that Gerard hadn’t murdered Whitaker and such a course would get her no further forward in tying Gerard into the deaths of Hammond and his own father, never mind that of Holder.

She realised that she was in a whirl of indecision, something was just about unknown to her – she normally had no difficulty in coming up with a plan of action even if, sometimes, subsequent events or discoveries demonstrated that the plan decided upon had been not the best of ideas.

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Glumly, she decided that she had no better idea as to what to do than to go home and sleep on it – so that is what she did.

Chapter Twelve

David Gerard was a worried man. Initially, when the two detectives had called requesting a voluntary DNA sample, he had been too irritated by the continual police interest in him to pass up the chance of getting them off his back for once and all. He had also, he reluctantly admitted to himself, been too busy eyeing up the female police officer and wondering what sort of a shag she might have made had things been different, had they met at a pub or a club for instance, to think through what she was actually saying.

Now, however, he had had time to think things through rationally. After four years a witness suddenly appears who might have information about the incident in which Hammond had died at the hands, or more accurately the wheels, of a hit and run driver? How likely was that?

As he thought the matter through further, his blood suddenly ran cold as a possible alternative explanation hit him. Suppose that they had found Whitaker’s car after all this time? His own blood had splashed on the carpet of the car’s boot as they had bundled Whitaker into it – could they match DNA after so long? Surely they could – or at least thought that they could; why else come after him to give a sample?

Only one interpretation of the police visit. That bitch of a Detective Inspector had conned him, conned him good and properly.

So now what? He hadn’t killed Whitaker; the silly old sod had dropped dead on him with what looked like a heart attack. If it came to it, surely that was something that could be established? Then he became more worried still. If they had found the car, could they have also found Whitaker? His own blood hadn’t only splashed onto the carpet of the Zodiac; it had also splashed onto Whitaker’s clothes.

Could they have found Whitaker? He had been buried quite a way away from the barn into which they had hidden the car, but didn’t the police have sniffer dogs to seek out buried bodies?

He reran the events of that disastrous day in his mind’s eye. Whitaker, conned into moving over a million and a half pounds out of the company’s bank account, had been persuaded to meet up with them to plot the next step in identifying whoever it was in the company who was milking the funds that should have gone to the taxman.

He had been surprised to see the two of them there, incorrectly assuming that he was to meet up only with the man who had identified the fraud. He had been even more surprised when they had demanded the details of the bank account into which the company’s funds had been transferred. He had refused, and when the two of them had threatened him, it had been his turn to take them by surprise by pulling a knife out of his pocket.

It was a nasty looking weapon with a blade perhaps five inches or so long. Whitaker had been carrying it in a leather sheath, but a flick of the wrist was all that it had taken to send the sheath spinning to the ground, leaving naked steel glinting in the sunlight. Outnumbered two to one, Whitaker must have decided that attack was the best form of defence, for instead of simply standing his ground, he had lunged at Gerard, who was nearest to him, and whose backward stumble had resulted in the sweep of the knife scoring a wicked gash across his forehead; Gerard had felt at the time, and still felt, that Whitaker had been quite prepared to kill; as it was, had the knife cut been an inch or so lower it would have taken out his eyes and blinded him. Even so, blood from the cut was pouring down his face, some of it going into his eyes and making it difficult to see.

What he could see, however, he would never forget. Somehow his partner had grabbed Whitaker’s knife arm, swung the man half off his feet and slammed the hand holding the knife against the side of the Zodiac with such force that the knife had flown from his grasp. The two had then wrestled violently, with Whitaker clearly getting the worst of it, until he had suddenly gone limp and fallen to the ground, his breathing becoming a series of agonised gasps, gasps which had quickly ceased.

The two of them looked at each other in horror; now what? By mutual consent, they hurriedly opened the boot of Whitaker’s car and thrust him into it. Somehow, they now had to dispose of the body – and the car, and it was then that Gerard remembered the deserted barn on the old McFee farm, a barn that hadn’t been used in years. Quickly he explained things to his partner and an hour and a half later it was all done. The car, 71

with its number plates removed, had been secreted in the old barn, and Whitaker had been buried well away from it, and they had driven away full of mutual recriminations over what had gone wrong. The plan had seemed so simple; get the bank details from Whitaker, then the threat to his family if he failed to keep quiet about matters – and it had all gone horribly wrong. Now, not only did they not have the bank details, but Whitaker was dead and his disappearance was hardly likely to go unnoticed.

It had been some days later that the rudiments of a Plan B had suggested themselves, a plan which would call for the elimination of Hammond and Holder and even Gerard’s own father. His partner had demurred at that point; would Gerard be willing to commit patricide? Gerard, however, squashed the doubts. He and his father were not close, in fact didn’t even like each other, and the loss of a parent, set against the anticipated financial gain caused him to lose no sleep whatsoever.

Plan B revolved around the fact that the three men were very heavily insured; they had taken out policies on their lives to inject funds into the company should any of them die prematurely, but the funds created from such deaths, now that the company had folded, could be diverted to other recipients, and Gerard and his partner would arrange things so that they would be amongst the recipients.

It had worked reasonably well, but the profit had been nothing like that which would have accrued had the original plan worked. Now, four years later, the police were once again interested in what had happened.

Why? Something must have triggered their interest.

The answer was surely obvious. The car and/or Whitaker’s body had been found. Now what?

He mentally reviewed the deaths of his father and Hammond – no matter how hard the police might try, he felt confident that they had no way of linking him to either murder. What about Holder? Again, if the police had known anything, surely they would have come calling long ago – and they hadn’t.

No, it was only Whitaker that he had to worry about – and here the police would surely be able to link him to the crime, even if it wasn’t murder.

He wondered desperately as to what he should do. Even if the police only charged him with concealing Whitaker’s body, that in itself was enough to send him to prison and he had no wish to lose his liberty for the next who knows how many years. Somehow, he had to either get right away or find a way to avoid being charged and convicted, and of the two alternatives, only the first one really seemed to offer any hope. The fact that the police hadn’t already arrested him seemed to offer a slight glimmer of encouragement. Why had they not done so? Were they looking to build more of a case against him – to tie him into the other three deaths?

Not for the first time – in fact for times without number – he wondered where the money that Whitaker had moved was now. If only he could somehow get his hands on it, or even on a decent proportion of it, it would make escape that much easier.

His mind was in a turmoil as he contemplated his future, a future that was looking grimmer by the minute as one thought succeeded another.

What about his partner? Was his partner also under suspicion? Probably not, or he felt sure that he would have heard about further police visits. When they had spoken on the phone, Gerard had threatened that he would not go down alone, but being realistic could he even achieve that? And if he did, what purpose, other than vindictive satisfaction, would he achieve?

The problem with fleeing the country was money – or rather the lack of it. Whilst the insurance pay-outs on his father and Hammond had only indirectly benefitted him by his accomplishment in persuading both widows to invest in his part of the company with the promise of an enhanced repayment in the indefinite future, they hadn’t resulted in much ready cash for himself. At best he could realise about ten thousand pounds which would vanish in no time if he had to leave the country and find somewhere to live and work.

Yet again he cursed the departed shade of Graham Whitaker – why the hell couldn’t the bloody idiot have just gone with the flow? It wasn’t even as if it had been his own money that he was protecting – and what had his efforts got him? An early grave - and the money that he was trying to get back for his company vanished into never-never land.

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Was it, he wondered, and not for the first time, possible that Whitaker’s wife or daughter might have some clue to the money’s whereabouts? Even a clue that they didn’t know that they had? He had often toyed with the idea of trying to find out, but the high likelihood of such an approach simply bringing him to the notice of the police had dissuaded him. Now, however, his situation was desperate. Should he involve his partner in an attempt? After thinking about, he decided against it. So far as he was aware, whilst DNA matching could quite definitely link him to Whitaker’s car and dead body, there was no such link to his partner, who might well adopt the attitude of “I’m all right, Jack,” and quite possibly leave him even deeper in the mire than he was already.

************

Fiona woke with a start as Tobias settled himself on top of her. For a moment she was totally disorientated, unsure of where she was, what time it was, anything. She realised that she had fallen asleep in her reclining armchair and looked with bleary eyes at her wristwatch. She groaned aloud as she saw that it was two in the morning and from falling asleep in the chair she had a stiff neck and back, not helped by Tobias’ weight on her chest.

“Come on, cat, let me get up,” she muttered and pushed the animal to one side, eliciting a muttered growl deep down in his throat. Tobias jumped down and stretched, digging his front claws into the carpet. Had she fed him when she got home? Fiona furrowed her brow as she tried to remember. She had been so exhausted on her arrival that she hadn’t even fed herself, never mind her eight year old neutered tomcat, who was now clearly expecting his patience to be rewarded.

Groggily, she got to her feet and made her way into the kitchen, Tobias winding himself around her legs in an apparent attempt to trip her up. She opened a tin of cat food and dished it up and watched as her pet devoured it with every indication of having been starved for ages – he was a good actor in that respect.

She wondered whether to make herself anything to eat; she didn’t feel hungry but was only too aware that since breakfast that morning – no, she corrected herself, that was now yesterday morning – her only food intake had comprised a ham sandwich eaten at her desk and several cups of coffee.

After a few moments of indecision, she decided against it. Instead, she contented herself with a hot cup of drinking chocolate; by the time that it was ready, Tobias had finished his delayed meal and decided that an excursion into the garden was required. One of the things that made it possible for Fiona to keep a cat was the fact that Tobias wore a very clever collar which incorporated a tiny radio transmitter. The matching receiver controlled the cat flap in the kitchen door so Tobias could come and go as he pleased whilst she was out of the house, but no other animal could use to flap to gain entrance.

As she watched his furry black rump disappear, Fiona wondered, not for the first time, who had the better deal out of their cohabitation. It had begun some eight years ago. Fiona, a newly minted Detective Constable, had arrived home at her small bungalow late one foul winter’s night to find a small black kitten trying to shelter from the heavy rain in her miniscule porch. Uncertain as to whether to shoo it away or grant it shelter, the decision was taken out of her hands; as she turned the key in the lock and started to open the door, the little animal shot thought the opening. She followed more sedately and by the time she was properly inside the house the kitten had found the kitchen and was looking expectantly at her. Divining that the little creature was hoping that she would feed it, Fiona opened the fridge and rummaged through its contents for something suitable, finally deciding upon some cold chicken which she cut up into kitten bite sized pieces and watched as they disappeared in seconds.

She had had every intention of handing the kitten over to the Cats’ Protection League or some similar organisation the very next day, but somehow it just hadn’t happened and eight years later Tobias was a fixture in her life.

Now, as she watched him wander in and out as he chose, it dawned on her that leaving Gerard at a similar degree of liberty had the potential for being a mistake, a very, very big mistake, a potentially career threatening mistake. Suppose that he put together the probable – in fact true – reason for the police’s continuing interest in him and decided to do a runner? Despite the frequent use of people disappearing ‘off the radar’ as an element of plots in fiction, in the real world it wasn’t as easy as was usually portrayed, but 73

Fiona was only too aware of the fact that it was possible, that it did in fact happen. Gerard was highly intelligent and if he wanted to disappear he might well be able to do so – in fact, given the crimes that he had committed it was only sensible to assume that he might have already planned for such an eventuality. It was time, she decided, to reel the man in, to stop pussy footing around – and as she came to the decision, she smiled to herself at the thought of ‘pussy footing’; whoever had invented the phrase had clearly never come across a cat like Tobias!.

*********

The next morning she wasted no time in putting things in motion, and by noon, accompanied by DS Murray, she presented herself at the offices of CS Partners where, after giving him the necessary caution, she arrested Gerard for the illegal concealing of a body. She had also obtained search warrants for his office and his flat and the rest of the day saw both places thoroughly searched for any useful evidence.

She had been helped in her decision by the fact that the pernickety DCI Graham was on a few days leave, so the previous day she had updated the more sympathetic Detective Superintendent John McKeay, the head of divisional CID, who had congratulated her on the progress that she and her team had achieved in so unpromising a case. Congratulations! Something unheard of from Graham, who never ceased trying to find fault with anything and everything his subordinates did; Fiona had often felt that, as his only female DI, she came in for even more criticism than did the other DIs, so talking to McKeay had been a pleasant change.

Gerard had been taken aback by his arrest and, after hotly denying the charge, had refused to say anything more without legal representation. That had been arranged – as was, in any case, a legal requirement – but even when accompanied by the duty solicitor Gerard had effectively remained mute.

The search of his office had come up with nothing in any way of use in pursuing the case against him; Fiona was confident that she had enough evidence for a conviction on the charge of concealing Whitaker’s body, but she dearly wanted more. She wanted something, anything, that might link Gerard to any one, or preferably all, of the three deaths of Whitaker’s colleagues.

The search of his flat was something of a surprise. When she and Ken Stewart had first interviewed Gerard at his flat they had been ushered into a large, expensively furnished, lounge with just a single, again expensive, laptop computer in view. The larger of his two bedrooms, however, was a veritable Aladdin’s cave of computers and computer accessories. The room was dominated by a couple of cheap tables, groaning under the weight of the electronic equipment on them. Two, again cheap and cheerful, chests of drawers contained a jumble of cables, old odds and ends and a variety of storage media, much of it out of date by years. Given the content, the search team had taken away all the old computers – as well as Gerard’s current machine –

together with anything that looked as though it might be even vaguely interesting and dumped it all in the lap of the technical support department, to the dismay of its civilian staff.

Gerard himself was held in custody; it was Friday and he was scheduled to appear in court the following Monday for the preliminary hearing at which the sheriff would decide if he would be granted bail or remanded in custody to await full trial at some later date yet to be arranged. In the meantime, Fiona was all too aware that trying to get the technical support people to put in a major effort on so much potential junk –

or perhaps not junk – over the weekend would send the overtime bill through the roof and the very soon to be returned from leave DCI Graham with it.

*********

It was Wednesday and to date the week had not gone well. DCI Graham was back from leave and, as usual, was critical of the progress, or in his view, lack of progress, made by Fiona and her team whilst he had been away. Centre stage of his criticisms was the fact that on the Monday the Sheriff’s Court had released David Gerard on bail despite Fiona’s application that he be remanded in custody as the subject of further ongoing investigations. Her application had been dismissed contemptuously by Gerard’s lawyer, who accused the 74

police of indulging in nothing more than a fishing expedition against his client, and all that Fiona had been able to do was to seethe inwardly whilst accepting the court’s decision with as good a grace as possible.

It was late in the afternoon when she at last received a report from the technical support team on the variety of computers and ancillary equipment seized from Gerard’s home and office. David Jones was not the typical computer geek of fiction – and often fact. Fifty or so, a bit below average height and a bit above average weight for that height, he was invariably dressed smartly in a dark suit – today dark blue with a faint chalk stripe – offset by a dazzlingly white shirt and a dark maroon tie. Fiona had leant on his expertise often in the past and they had a good working relationship and she knew that for the task to have taken as long as it had indicated that a lot of work had been needed. He sat himself dawn on her visitor’s chair and smiled benignly at her, a smile which instantly added character to an otherwise very ordinary face, a face set in a totally bald head, the only sign of hair being his remarkably heavy eyebrows which overhung deep set grey eyes and an almost snub nose.

“So, David, what do you have for me? I must say I was surprised at the amount of old-fashioned stuff that Gerard had in his flat – I would have thought that as a computer expert it would all be state of the art.”

The smile, if possible, broadened.

“Ah, but for some of what he does for a living, that old stuff is state of the art. He’s got computers going back to the days of floppy disks as well as his modern stuff.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Well, think about his potential clientele. Suppose you have a small business and use a computer to create invoices, perhaps do stock control, calculate wages, do a tax return? None of that needs up to the minute equipment, and if you’ve been using the same machine for years and it does what you want, why change?

Then, however, after years of faithful service, the machine goes on the blink. It’s too old for most mainstream computer companies to be interested and the original manufacturer of the machine itself is quite likely long gone, or if still in business not interested in something out of the Ark. That’s where you need somebody like David Gerard who can cope with problems in machines or programmes both ancient and modern.

“Now, we’ve gone through all his stuff. His modern computer – one which is state of the art – he uses both at home and in the office and it has all his records of work done, income and expenditure, personal tax returns, all that sort of thing. Nothing in the slightest bit dodgy on it; no pornography, no history of visiting unpleasant websites, nothing. Looking at his older machines, they have all been used for just the sort of rescue work I said about, except for one oddity.”

Fiona pricked up her ears and leant forward expectantly.

“Like a lot of people, Gerard kept a diary on his computer – but not, as one would expect, on his everyday machine but on one of the oldies. The diary was actually started some eleven years ago, when the machine on which he keeps it was already well out of date, so it must have been a deliberate decision.”

Fiona did the maths in her head.

“Eleven years ago he would have been at university.”

Jones nodded

“My guess is that he used an out of date machine because it was unlikely that anyone in his circle of friends and acquaintances would have the necessary hardware to hack into it short of nicking it – and even if they had, he password protected everything. Over and above that, he used a word processing programme called Perfect that was incompatible with Microsoft Word which was just about what everyone used by then, and the machine itself used three and a half inch floppies, again way out of date when people were moving from DVDs to USB sticks for storage. All in all anything he had on that computer was just about safe from prying eyes. I’ve had a quick look at the content – it starts off quite chatty, with comments about people, presumably fellow students and the like, but after about four years – presumably after he left uni – it 75

becomes pretty cryptic. ‘Met JK at 6’ sort of entries. Obviously, your folk will want to go into in depth, I assume, but I think that my people have done all we can with it at this stage.”

“Does the diary come up to the present day?”

“Oh yes, the last entry was the very day before you arrested him,”

“Right, thanks David, I’ll have somebody go through it with a fine tooth comb.”

She only had to think for a moment before deciding that this was a task for John Govern who, of all her DCs, had the best eye for detail, so she called him in and explained what was needed. He took it in his stride, with no indication of despair at having to plough through eleven years’ worth of diary entries, the vast majority of which, perhaps even every entry, would prove to be of no interest.

That task delegated, she leant back in her chair and wondered what, if anything, would be a useful next step.

Unable to come up with anything obvious, she concentrated her thinking on Gerard himself. Now that he had been arrested but was out on bail, what might he do? One possibility might be, as she made clear in her case for denying him bail, was that he might simply disappear. She felt that it was essential to keep him under surveillance, and reluctantly accepted that she couldn’t deploy the resources that such an exercise would require without DCI Graham’s approval.

It was with considerable reluctance that she entered Graham’s office and explained her reasoning to her superior. He frowned at her with scarcely concealed irritation.

“Are you serious, Inspector? You really want to tie up valuable manpower keeping an eye on the man?”

“Yes, sir, I am serious. He is highly intelligent and there is a good chance that he will have some sort of escape plan worked out.”

“But he had to surrender his passport, and he has to report to the local nick every day as the conditions of his bail!”

“Getting a false passport isn’t impossible, sir, and if he establishes a pattern of not reporting at any fixed time, he could give himself up to thirty-six hours or so before alarm bells start ringing. I am convinced that he is guilty, either alone or with assistance, of three murders.”

“Three murders which, officially are actually two road traffic accidents and a suicide and you haven’t a shred of evidence to prove otherwise.”

“Not yet, but we are working very hard on it – and if Gerard should do a runner and we do subsequently come up with evidence, we are all going to come in for a lot of criticism.”

One thing that Graham feared above all else was having to accept criticism that he couldn’t dump on somebody else, and Fiona was well aware of the fact. The man hesitated, clearly in the grip of indecision.

“All right – surveillance for forty-eight hours. If he does try to disappear, and if he is as smart as you seem to think that he is, that should be long enough to discover what, if anything, he is up to.”

And with that Fiona had to satisfied, although she left Graham’s office far from content. She disagreed with her superior’s view. Gerard knew, as well as anyone else, that it would be some months before he came to trial for concealing Whitaker’s body. Why try and do anything so soon? Surely he would wait for a while before making any move?

********

It was well into Thursday before Govern came back to her with the results of his examination of David Gerard’s computer diary. One look at his face forewarned Fiona that there was no great breakthrough in the offing.

“So, John, what does the diary tell us?”

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“Not a lot, I’m afraid, boss. The first few years – when he was at university – are quite chatty sort of stuff about who he met, what he did, what he thought of people. I’ve identified as many people as possible; in the early days that wasn’t hard as he tended, at least at first mention of somebody, to use their full name. I’ve checked all those I’ve identified to see if any are none to us. Several have records, mostly for police cautions for drug possession, although nothing earth shattering. Two have records for assault – I did a quick check and both were drunken punch-ups with no serious injuries with the two men ending up being bound over.

None of those with records appear in the diary once Gerard left uni. Three of the people in the diary are dead

– all motor vehicle accident well after Gerard knew them. He had two regular girlfriends whilst he was there

– Julie Voss in his first year, that lasted about eight months, then a bit later Helen Cartwright – that lasted about a year. I say ‘about’ in each case because in both cases interest seems to have tapered off and from eager lovers they became little more than acquaintances and then vanish from the diary and perhaps from the scene altogether. I doubt that either girl would like to read what he wrote about them – it wasn’t flattering and he seems, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a shit in his dealings with them.

“Once he had left uni the entries start to become more and more cryptic, and for the last five years or more only Gerard himself would be able to understand what they refer to in the majority of cases. I paid particular attention to the dates we are really interested in. On the day that Whitaker disappeared, that was the eighteenth of July two thousand and ten, Gerard has written ‘day went to shit. Need Plan B’. Whether Plan B

existed, or if it was just a figure of speech is anyone’s guess – certainly it is never referred to again. On the next significant day for us, the fifth of November that year, when Gerard senior died, the entry just reads

‘Dad killed in car crash’ – nothing else, and certainly no expression of grief. Move onto the eighteenth of December, when Hammond died and there is something that could be interesting. He wrote ‘Hit deer. Car needs repair.’”

Fiona sat back in disappointment.

“So it’s true, then.”

Govern frowned at her.

“Not necessarily, boss. Don’t forget, all this comes off his computer – he could have written that up at any time up until the day before he was arrested – or he could simply have made it up at the time.”

Fiona shook her head.

“Sorry, John, of course you’re right – doesn’t really mean anything one way or the other – go on.”

“When Holder was found, seventh of January two thousand and eleven, the only entry is about a job he was doing ‘Attended G&F all day’. I checked that back against his work records on his main computer. There was a record of him doing some work for a small fruit import company, Giles and Fisher. However – from what was charged for the work, I do wonder if he was actually there all day. I did contact the company but they weren’t much help. They confirmed that the work had been done, invoiced and paid for, but nobody had the slightest idea when Gerard got there, nor how long he stayed; as they said, it was four years ago – who was likely to remember?

“However, going back to the deer incident – something really intriguing. When he was interviewed and asked about the damage to his car, Gerard got a bit mixed up. He said that he had a row with his then girlfriend, Jenny Hallam, at her place on the fifth of November, and stormed out. When he was asked about the eighteenth of December, the day Hammond died, he reckoned he was out driving after another lovers’

quarrel and hit a deer. Now, Jenny Hallam confirmed they had a row on both those dates, although she says that on the fifth of November they were at his place, whereas he says that they were at hers – but given the time lapse and the fact that rows between the two of them seem to have been becoming more and more common by then, he may very well just have confused the date in his mind. Jenny has a diary to back up her version of the evening; all Gerard mentions in his diary for the date is the death of his father – hardly surprising that he didn’t enter anything else. As we know, he does have an entry about the deer on the eighteenth of December and Jenny Hallam’s diary for the day says that they had yet another row, but doesn’t give any indication as to when they parted that evening.”

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“I’ve listed out all the identifiable contacts and shown the number of times they appear in the dairy. As I said, the entries get more and more cryptic as time went on. For instance, he first met Jenny Hallam – whom her simply refers to as ‘JH’ throughout – on the fourth of November two thousand and nine. The entry reads

‘went to KL’s do. Met JH who looks tasty and up for it’. He didn’t waste much time; took her out a couple of times in the next two weeks, then for the seventeenth of November he writes ‘took JH back to her place.

Shagged her – lot to learn’. Then, a good bit later, after several more cryptic entries, mostly just something like ‘JH – yes’, the fifteenth of December, ‘JH again – she’s a bloody slow learner’. On the entry he made for the twentieth of December, two thousand and ten, the day that Jenny Hallam says she phoned him and broke it off, he writes ‘JH phoned – told her to fuck off’. His final entry which mentions her is a month or so later, fifteenth of January ‘JH is a drag, well rid of her’ ”

Fiona seethed mentally at the arrogance of the man; she already disliked him and her dislike ratchetted up another notch. Although, she paused in mid-thought, was it possible that is was Gerard who broke things off as he said and that it Jenny Hallam who wasn’t telling the truth? But then, did it matter? It was unlikely that the recriminations between the two would have any bearing on her investigation. What did matter was trying to find out, somehow, anyhow, just what Gerard was really doing on the critical dates.

Chapter Thirteen – three weeks later

David Gerard looked around the room and, for perhaps the tenth time, went over his plan, trying to act as Devil’s Advocate, seeking out any possible flaw in it. Yet again, he failed; it was, he was convinced, as fool-proof as it was humanly possible to make it, Now it only remained to put it into action. He smiled to himself as he remembered the inadequate efforts of the police to check up on him; an unmarked car with two officers in it parked a few doors away, a car which had vanished from the scene after just two days – as though he would have been stupid enough to try anything right away. Even now, he did wonder if he had waited long enough, but on balance felt that now was the time – no point in any further delay.

He left the flat, knowing that it was very nearly for the last time, and drove the short distance to the local police station. It was early, not yet quite nine in the morning; over the last twenty-one days he had been careful to establish a pattern to his arrival times. The conditions of his bail required him to report not later than five in the afternoon every day, and he had complied, appearing at the police station mostly in the middle of the afternoon but sometimes, as today, early in the morning, explaining the difference by claiming that he was off to do some work at the offices of a client. That was a lie; since his arrest there had been no clients. His partners at CS Partners had made it perfectly clear that they had no wish to have anything further to do with him and although, as none of them were actually employees but independent partners, they couldn’t sack him, he hadn’t wanted to continue to associate with them anyway.

Now it was time to put all his careful planning into effect, planning that had started with the unexpected death of Graham Whitaker. He had cursed the Whitaker’s weak heart ever since the man had suddenly dropped dead in front of Gerard’s very own eyes. It was something that hadn’t been supposed to happen and something from which everything else had sprung. The moment he had accepted that there must always be a possibility that the death would eventually come to light he had set up his contingency plan. He hadn’t mentioned it to his partner – he wanted nobody to have any idea of what he was planning.

The first step – and by far the most important and most difficult, had been to create a false identity that he could use to facilitate his disappearance. The initial step in setting up that false identity had been to procure a new passport – and not a British one. Instead, after a lot of very cautious investigating on the Internet, he had gone to Dublin where he had obtained a passport – to all intents and purposes a genuine passport –

proclaiming him to be one Liam O’Gara, born in the Republic in the city of Dublin. There really had been someone of that name in Dublin – a minor underworld figure who had disappeared without trace some seven or eight years earlier. The expert who had produced the passport had assured Gerard that there were no potentially embarrassing outstanding warrants, nor anything similar, against O’Gara, so any official check of Gerard’s new identity would come up without ringing any bells. O’Gara did not have a criminal record as an adult; various misdemeanours in his youth had been recorded, but because they had been committed when he was a minor, his fingerprints and DNA identity had not been retained in the database of the An Garda Síochána, the police force of the Republic. Gerard assumed, but was too cautious to ask, that the real O’Gara 78

was in fact dead, a death never officially recorded anywhere, perhaps because he had upset the wrong people.

That had been step one. Step two had been to set up a suitable bank account in Dublin, and in the four years since setting it up Gerard had been careful to ensure that the account looked ‘normal’, with frequent deposits and withdrawals,. He had also established credit and debit cards with the bank, something that had necessitated several flying visits to Dublin so that the cards could be physically obtained, using a temporary address supplied by the same man who had provided him with the O’Gara passport- and had used those cards to pay for the occasional purchase of food, fuel and the like from time to time once back in Sotland.

Thereafter, by the simple expedient of opting for paperless communications from the bank, there had been no need to return to Dublin at all.

Step three had been deciding where to live with his new identity. Scotland and Eire were out of the question; in Scotland there was always the danger of running into somebody who knew him; in Eire the danger was the other way round – running into somebody who had known the real Liam O’Gara. No, somewhere in continental Europe beckoned, Europe with its porous national borders and where, almost without exception, few if any would be able to distinguish between his Scottish accent and a genuine Irish accent. The fact that he was reasonably competent in French, but with only a smattering of Spanish and Italian, made the choice a no-brainer – France it must be.

After having his compliance with the bail requirements duly recorded by the desk sergeant, Gerard drove back home and parked his car, as usual, in the road outside his block of flats. Then, he went back inside and, having made one final sweep of the premises to be sure that he hadn’t forgotten anything, left on foot, towing a large suitcase on wheels, a suitcase which effectively contained everything that he needed for his new life in France.

Some three hours or so later later he settled back in his seat as Easyjet’s thirteen fifteen direct flight to Charles de Gaulle airport climbed away from Edinburgh’s gentle drizzle and bore him towards a new existence.

**********

It was the next day and as the clock ticked past four thirty, George Mackie, the desk sergeant at Dundee police station started to feel uneasy. David Gerard, the man on bail pending trial for the rather bizarre crime of concealing a body – the first such crime Mackie had encountered in nearly ten year on the force – had never before been this late in reporting in. Suppose the man had decided to do a runner? Making his mind up, he picked up the telephone and called his immediate superior, Inspector Una McCauley.

“McCauley.”

“It’s Mackie, ma’am. That bail character, Gerard. He hasn’t reported in yet. I know it’s not yet five, but not far off and he’s never been this late before, and yesterday he came in at eight fifty, so he’s had over thirty hours free if he’s up to something.”

Una McCauley thought hard, but only for a moment. She knew Mackie well and if he was beginning to get vibes about the situation, it was worth checking.

“OK, George. I want a car to call at Gerard’s place not later than one minute past five to check on him.”

“Got it – I’ll see to it.”

By ten past five Gerard’s flat had been visited and the presence of his car parked outside noted, as had his failure to respond to repeated – and far from gentle – knocking on his door. Receiving the report of the constables, Una McCauley pondered the next move. Gerard’s failure to comply with the terms of his bail conditions entitled the police to haul him in immediately and hold him until the court decided upon the next move – but ‘hauling him in’ might prove a problem. In over thirty hours he could have gone just about 79

anywhere in Scotland, or indeed in the UK, or started a much longer journey to foreign parts. She issued the necessary memoranda to ports and airports, and a ‘detain if seen’ request throughout Police Scotland., although she had little expectation of immediate success. If Gerard had fled the country it was all too late.

Where might he have gone? Was there a case for seeking a European Arrest Warrant for the wretched man?

She advised her own superior, Chief Inspector Alan Mackie – no relation to the desk sergeant – and as a result wheels started to turn – but as she had feared, all too late.

*******************

When, the next day, Fiona learnt that Gerard had absconded, she seethed in anger. Now, perhaps, the idiot of a sheriff who had allowed the man to have bail would be satisfied. A man that, she was totally convinced, had participated in three murders was running free. It was no surprise to find that DCI Graham had persuaded himself – and presumably others – that this was her fault for not finding enough on the man to justify keeping him remanded in custody until he could be brought to trial.

Gerard’s flat had been entered but it was no surprise either to hear that nothing had been found which might have given any indication of his present whereabouts, nor what he might be planning.

Her discussion with Graham had, inevitably, resulted in an order to drop any further investigation into the deaths of Holder, Hammond and Gerard unless, and until, David Gerard could be uncovered. The cases had never been officially classified as murders so, unlike cases so designated, they wouldn’t remain open for ever. They were, to all intents and purposes, closed, as dead as the unfortunate men themselves.

Before accepting the inevitable, she had interviewed the widow Gerard. Mrs Helen Gerard had been of no help whatsoever. She declared that she had no idea where her son might gone and that, furthermore, in view of the crime of which he stood accused, and the fact that his flight from justice seemed a straightforward admission of guilt, she had no wish to know, no wish ever to see him again. In fact, so far as she was concerned, she bitterly stated that she no longer had a son and promised to advise the police immediately should he ever be foolish enough to contact her in the future.

************

Whilst Fiona Campbell was raging against the way the police – and the public - had been let down by David Gerard being given bail, the man himself was settling down to enjoy the first day of the rest of his life as Liam O’Gara, citizen of the Republic of Ireland, now looking to establish himself for a long term stay in France. Once his aircraft had landed at Charles de Gaulle airport, a taxi had taken him into the heart of Paris, where he had booked into the Richard Hotel in the Rue Richard Lenoir, an inexpensive establishment despite its central location. He booked in for just three night; he had no intention of making Paris his permanent destination - it was too expensive - but he needed a breathing space before moving on, a breathing space which included checking the Scottish news on the BBC to see if his disappearance had excited any interest.

He was in two minds over discovering that it was reported, but low down in the pecking order in the evening news; glad that there didn’t seem any great song and dance over him absconding, mildly disappointed – an ego thing – that he wasn’t deemed worthy of greater prominence.

His long term location was something that he had thought long and hard about whilst formulating his escape plans soon after Whitaker’s death. He want somewhere small enough to be inexpensive, reasonably well placed for transport links to the rest of Europe, and if necessary the world, yet of such a nature that one more foreigner wouldn’t stick out, wouldn’t be a subject for local interest and gossip.

He had finally decided on Rheims, with its network of nearby motorways and a high speed train link to Paris and into Belgium. Its lack of a nearby airport he saw as an advantage rather than a disadvantage – it made it that much more of a backwater in official thinking, thinking that just might, at some time in the future, fall to 80

wondering where David Gerard might have absconded to. Now it remained to find somewhere to live in the city, a task to which he applied himself diligently on the Internet over the next three days, a search which saw him take the high speed train to Rheims at the end of that period.

Again he needed an hotel for a temporary base and he found one in the Premiere Classe chain, the Reims-Tinqueux, in the Avenue Andre Bourvil. It took him just over a week, but eventually he was able to rent a small, two bedroomed apartment in the Rue Nanteuil, a narrow street not far from some of Reims’

commercial buildings and with the saving grace of a dedicated space in a nearby underground car park.

Now he needed transport, and after scouring the local paper he purchased, for cash, a seven year old Renault Meganne, a bit tired but in reasonable condition for its age and the amount of miles that it had done.

Whilst in France he hadn’t only been looking for accommodation and transport; he had spent much of his time in perfecting a computer programme that he had initially worked on soon after the death of Whitaker.

Faced with the prospect of having – as had now proved to be the case – the need to vanish from his old haunts, he had thought long and hard about how to acquire enough money to live on. The original plan, to acquire a large share of the money that Whitaker had foolishly moved from the company’s bank account, had died with the man himself.

Now it was time to put the finishing touches to the programme, touches which, he told himself smugly, would have been far beyond the ability of most computer ‘experts’. By the time that the programme was ready he had identified his targets. Originally, whilst still in Scotland, he had toyed with the idea of directly attacking banks and raiding some of the accounts that they held, but he demurred at trying to breach the level of computer security the banks enjoyed. Instead he had seized upon the fact that every day millions and millions of transactions take place using debit and credit cards, transactions which require the purchaser to give up the full details of their card. Even though those details are not immediately obvious to the organisation from which they are purchasing goods or services, they have nevertheless been recorded in ‘the system’, and it was one of those systems that Gerard intended to target.

The principle was simplicity itself; identify a large number of transactions, take a small amount from each and end up with a decent total. The way he would go about it was to attack the booking systems of hotels, and by the end of his second week in Rheims he was ready to roll. He had identified one hundred hotels, out of the thousands in France, which used the same commercial system to handle bookings. What he had set up was that every day at each of those one hundred hotels someone’s bill would be increased by one Euro –

after all, who is going to get over excited by the loss of a single Euro? The way that he had set it up was that the additional one Euro charge didn’t appear on the receipt given to the customer; only later when he – or she

– received a statement, or checked their account on line, would the rogue charge show up. At that point, the person raided might try to work out what had happened – but would they bother? The programme included an element to ensure that no account was ever raided more than once and it would produce one Euro per day from each of one hundred hotels, or a total of thirty six thousand, five hundred Euros a year - tax free.

The funds raided were transferred directly to an account in the Cayman Islands, an account Gerard had originally opened prior to Whitaker’s death, expecting to be able to use it to hold funds that he was looking to blackmail out of Whitaker to keep his wife and daughter safe. Once a reasonable amount accumulated in the Cayman Islands he would transfer it to his Liam O’Gara Irish account – he had no intention of opening an account with a French bank for fear of it becoming of interest to the authorities as it was likely to show some unusual patterns of deposits and withdrawals, especially as a Cayman Island bank would be involved. .

Chapter Fourteen – Three Months Later

Detective Inspector Colm Murphy was tired. He had been on the go since four that morning, called out to a possible terrorist incident in Old Abbey Street, a road running parallel with Dublin’s world famous O’Connell Street, but a far inferior location in terms of the quality of the buildings, one of which, so a report went, was home to a group of young men of Middle Eastern appearance and, according to a suspicious neighbour, ‘looked up to no good’.

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The report had turned out to be a false alarm. The young men were four Israeli students, studying at post-graduate level in the School of Religions, Theology and Ecumenics at Trinity College returning late from a party and making just enough noise to spark the report from an over-anxious neighbour. False alarm or not, it had still generated work and paper work, all to precious little avail, but all eating into precious time.

Now it was nearly seven in the evening and Murphy had an appointment with one of his informants, a man who had proved useful in the past and hopefully would continue to prove useful in the future, but a man with a highly developed sense of paranoia, liable to take fright and scurry away if Murphy didn’t meet with him at the agreed time. Wearily, he pushed his chair back from his desk and rose to his feet, His jacket was draped over the back of the chair and he shrugged it on, checking that it concealed the Sig Sauer 226 pistol as he thrust the pistol into the holster at his hip. As a member of the Special Detective Unit – the Aonad Speisialta Bleachtaireachta – the unit charged with anti-terrorism investigations, he and his colleagues were routinely armed, unlike the normal uniformed members of the Garda Síochána, although Murphy had never had occasion to draw his weapon on duty, never mind actually fire it. It was the fact that the Israeli students had been misidentified as a possible terrorist threat that had dragged him from his bed at four in the morning and he was anxious to get home and return to that bed at a reasonable hour.

His meeting place was only a few minutes away in a bar in a quiet side street and he managed to make the rendezvous a couple of minutes early; even so, Niall Bowe was already there, seated at a corner table where he could see the entire sweep of the small room and with a wall to his back so nobody could approach him unseen.

Murphy slid into the seat opposite Bowe, pushing a second glass of Guinness across the table to join the nearly empty glass already there. His own drink, a small Jamieson’s, he similarly placed in front of himself.

“So, Niall, what do you have for me?”

“Something a bit tasty, Mr. Murphy. I’ve just completed some papers for Paul O’Brien.”

That was of interest to Murphy. O’Brien was a reputed, though never proved, one time IRA enforcer on both sides of the border. Since the more or less peace in the Six Counties, O’Brien had returned to Dublin after some years in the North and, to date, had done nothing to draw to himself the attention of the Garda, but he remained on their radar.

“What sort if papers?”

Bowe shrugged his shoulders.

“The usual – passport, driving licence, credit cards, a few utility bills.”

Murphy frowned in concentration. The papers that Bowe referred to sounded very much as if O’Brien was looking to set up a new, false, identity for himself – perhaps to enable him to leave the country? But why?

The man wasn’t wanted for anything – at least, not in Ireland. Was it possible that his time north of the border was the reason? Was a skeleton emerging from a cupboard?

He looked at the man opposite him. Bowe was an unprepossessing individual, a slightly built five feet six or seven with an instantly forgettable face lacking any dominant feature. His visual insignificance, however, masked a razor sharp mind and a high degree of skill in the creation, for a price, of false identities for those wishing to shed their existing one, like a snake sloughing off an old skin to parade a new one.

However, what none of those benefitting from his skills knew was that Bowe was the creature, body and soul, of Detective Inspector Murphy; that Bowe remained at liberty only as long as Murphy permitted it.

Years earlier, in exchange for Murphy turning a blind eye to the major part of his activities, Bowe had offered up the new identity of a couple of much wanted men, men who had been loyal soldiers in the IRA in Belfast and, once the Good Friday agreement had put a damper on their then current activities, had looked to move to pastures new, pastures which included Dublin. The Republic, in Murphy’s view, had enough villains of its own without having to suffer the rejects of the North. Bowe, even then, had a reputation for flawless forgery which stretched to both sides of the border and, through intermediaries, had been approached to supple the two men with new identities. He had done so, but had also let Murphy know what those new identities were. Murphy had needed no telling as to how potentially dangerous to Bowe his action had been and he was very, very careful in how he went about the apprehension of the former IRA men. As far as they

– and the rest of the world - were aware, they owed their capture to the unfortunate leaving of their DNA at the subject of a complaint against them by an over-zealous neighbour.

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Now, he would have to achieve something similar in tracking down the new persona of Paul O’Brien; again he would have to be scrupulously careful in ensuring that nothing pointed back to Bowe, or the man’s usefulness – and in all probability the man himself – would vanish like a puff of smoke.

“Anything else to interest me, Niall?”

“Not really, Mr. Murphy,” Bowe hesitated for a moment before continuing, “although there was one rather odd thing.”

“Oh? Tell me more.”

“I had visit from a man from Scotland about four years or so back– never had that before. As you know, I’ve done work both sides of the Border, but always one part of Ireland or the other, so this was something new. It was easy enough – he wanted papers to show him as a citizen of the Republic, not of the North and I couldn’t see that it would really interest you – presumably he wanted out of Scotland for some reason, but I don’t know if he intended staying here. Thing is, I like to check the BBC News websites for the various parts of the UK and just a month or so back, this Scotsman was in the news. He’d skipped bail from a charge of concealing a body and that’s not a crime that you hear of very often – and the name was of that Scotsman who came to me.”

Murphy’s interest was piqued; on the face of it, no great thing, but he decided just to a quick check. Better safe than sorry; on the face of it, it seemed an unlikely terrorist scenario, but he decided that he would just check.

“What were the names, Niall?”

“He was born David Gerard. Now he can call himself Liam O’Gara.”

At that, Murphy took his leave of his informant and wended a weary way home, to the inevitable need to apologise yet again to his long-suffering wife for his late arrival.

**********

The next day Murphy focussed his main attention on setting up a discrete check on Paul O’Brien and it wasn’t until nearly time to go home that he instructed one of his staff, Detective Constable Moira Sexton, to do a bit of digging into David Gerard, now Liam O’Gara.

It took twenty-four hours, and the result was only of mild interest to Murphy when the young woman reported back.

“I’ve checked airlines and ferries, sir. Gerald hasn’t come over to Dublin in the last year – as far back as normal records go. Neither has O’Gara. However, there is now a European Arrest Warrant out for Gerard, but there is no mention in it of him also using the name O’Gara, so it looks as though the Scottish police don’t know of his new identity.”

Murphy frowned thoughtfully; it seemed just about certain that Sexton was right, that the Scots were unaware of Gerard’s alternative persona. As far as he could see Gerard, regardless if which name he was currently using, posed no threat to the Republic and from that aspect could be safely ignored. On the other hand the man was cocking a snook at police officers like himself, even if they worked in a different force in a different country. He reached for his phone.

***********

Fiona was on the point of giving up for the day – a day which had been frustrating as she had reviewed the progress that her team had made on a number of cases, none of them major, all of them important enough to need following up, and in total representing an over burdening workload, especially as the team was one short, with DC Ken Stewart down with a dose of flu and unlikely to be back for a week or so.

She had actually reached for her coat when the phone went. Cursing under her breath she picked it up.

“CID, DI Campbell.”

The voice at the other end sounded Irish rather than Scottish.

“Detective Inspector, I’m DI Murphy of the Special Detective Unit in Dublin.”

“How can I help you, Inspector?”

“Well, it’s I that can help you, I think. One of my team tells me that you want to get hold of a man, David Gerard, who skipped bail a little while back.”

“That’s right – is he in Ireland?”

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“I’ve no idea where he might be, but I do know who he might be.”

“Sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Ah, I’m not being clear, am I?”

No you’re bloody not, Fiona thought, but she kept the thought to herself; Murphy continued talking.

“The thing is, Inspector, one of my contacts tells me that about four years ago a man calling himself David Gerard came to Dublin and got himself some papers so that he could pass himself off as someone else entirely. The name of his alternative identity is Liam O’Gara. Now I’ve had a check made and there’s no sign of a man calling himself Liam O’Gara in the Republic, nor is there any trace of such a man visiting in the last year. I know that you have a European Arrest Warrant out for him, but it’s just in the Gerard name with no mention of O’Gara. Now, I can’t be sure that it’s the same David Gerard, of course, but it does seem a possibility, now doesn’t it?”

“It does indeed, Inspector – thanks very much for this – I’ll get the warrant updated – and if there’s any way I can return the favour in the future – just let me know.”

“Ah, now, I just don’t like to see the ungodly getting away with something like this – best of luck with catching him.”

“Thanks again, Inspector.”

“No thanks needed – take care.”

“You too – bye.”

Fiona replaced the phone handset and pushed back in her chair. Could this be, at last, a breakthrough in trying to track down Gerard? Quite deliberately, she hadn’t pressed Murphy on just how he had come by the information he had just passed on; that was the Irishman’s business, not hers. Her task was to follow up on the information that she now had been given. She gave a deep sigh as she contemplated letting DCI Graham of this latest twist. She was sure that, as usual, he would be unsupportive; she would be on her own if this proved to be another dead end.

She took up the phone again, but this time for an internal call to Graham, a call that resulted in her entering her superior’s office five minutes later. As she had predicted to herself, Graham was less than helpful, and certainly not impressed, simply agreeing that she should have the European Arrest Warrant amended as quickly as possible.

The next day she set the wheels in motion; hardly surprisingly, no electoral roll, whether in Scotland or in the rest of the UK, came up with a Liam O’Gara, but hopefully Gerard would be somewhere within the European continent and that the various police forces who received the amended warrant might actually do something about it – at least with modern technology and the ability it gave forces to track people, it was a chance, although not a very strong one. It would really depend on Gerard, or O’Gara as he presumably now called himself, somehow coming to the attention of the police in wherever he was – it was unreasonable to assume, even for a moment, that police forces would automatically start rooting through their systems looking for O’Gara.

However, given any luck she should be able to narrow things down a little. She returned to the papers that Murphy had E-mailed through to her – photostats of O’Gara’s driving licence and bank cards. It was the bank details that had given her some hope. O’Gara had chosen to open an account with the Bank of Ireland and Fiona’s first step was to contact the bank, citing the European Arrest Warrant for Gerard/O’Gara. The approach had to be formal; the bank was unlikely to respond to a casual telephone call, but three days later she had what she wanted. ‘O’Gara’ managed his account purely on-line so that there was no convenient address to which bank statements and the like were being sent, but there was one peculiarity that immediately stood out. Until Gerard had fled the UK there had been no cash withdrawals from the account, although the cards had been used for mundane things like paying for shopping or fuel. Not one cash withdrawal. Subsequently, however, the debit card had been used for four cash withdrawals from ATMs –

and the withdrawals had been in France! The first one, only days after Gerard’s disappearance, had been in Paris. The subsequent ones, however, had been in Rheims, making it likely that Gerard was somewhere in that famous city. It was beginning to look as though Gerard, lulled into a sense of false security by his new identity, had out-smarted himself.

The next step was to contact the French police; again it all had to be done formally, but at last she was able to report success to Graham. ‘Liam O’Gara’ had been picked up by the French and DNA analysis and fingerprints which had been E-mailed to the French police had proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that Liam O’Gara and David Gerard were one and the same man. As a result Gerard was now being held in 84

Rheims, where he was awaiting being collected and brought back to Scotland – and this time there would be no nonsense about granting him bail.

Fiona was a bit put out when Graham promptly decided to go over to France himself to collect the prisoner.

He clearly saw a couple of days away at the police force’s expense as a perk of his rank, despite the fact that he had contributed absolutely nothing to the tracking down and capturing of Gerard.

Chapter Fi een

Shelagh Norton was not normally given to venting her feelings in strong language, but as she listened to the cacophony of unusual noises from under the bonnet of her usually totally reliable Ford Mondeo, she feared the worst, fears which were realised as the engine died altogether and the car coasted to a silent stop, Wearily, she rummaged in her handbag, sitting beside her on the front passenger seat, and extracted her mobile phone. Fortunately, she was only quarter of a mile or so from home and on her way back from work, so it wasn’t a case of having to somehow get to the school so that she take her normal run of classes for the day.

The road was a quiet one and the car had possessed sufficient momentum to enable her to pull into the kerb before all motion ceased, so there was no danger to herself nor to other road users as she phoned the garage which looked after the car for her. It had its own breakdown recovery vehicle, so it was quicker than getting the AA out and within ten minutes the breakdown truck arrived, driven by Jamie Hamilton, a young mechanic whom she met several times. She got out of the car to meet him.

“Afternoon, Ms. Norton – what’s the problem?”

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly and expressively.

“I don’t know, Jamie – I was driving along quite happily and suddenly there were the most awful noises from under the bonnet and the engine just died completely.”

“Oh dear, that doesn’t sound like the Mondeo’s normal behaviour – let’s have a look under the bonnet.”

So saying, he opened up the bonnet and gazed at the silent engine for a moment.

“Hmm, can’t see anything obvious – would you mind trying the starter for me, please.”

Shelagh got back into the car, and turned the ignition key to the accompaniment of unpleasant grinding noises, noises so unpleasant that she immediately stopped trying the starter.

Hamilton stepped away from the vehicle, a concerned look on his face.

“I’m afraid that sound pretty bad, Ms. Norton – I’ll have to take it in.”

“Oh dear, how am I going to get to school tomorrow? Is it likely to be a long job?”

“Let me phone the boss – I think that we can arrange a courtesy car for you whilst we play with the Mondeo.”

He fished his own mobile out of an overall pocket and five minutes later Shelagh was in the passenger seat of the breakdown truck with the Mondeo, its front end raised off the ground by the crane, following on behind like a fish halfway out of water.

***********

As Jamie had prophesised, the news was not good; the next evening, Shelagh received a call from the garage; the Mondeo needed a new engine. When told the cost involved she was tempted to say that, given the car’s age, it just wasn’t worth it, but after a minute or so’s discussion with George Hamilton, the garage owner and Jamie’s uncle, so decided to agree to a replacement, After all, although it was expensive job, it would be a good bit more expensive to buy a new car altogether and, this current disaster apart, the Mondeo had always been totally reliable.

So she gave the go-ahead and three days later received a call telling her that the Mondeo was ready to be collected.

She drove to the garage to relinquish the Vauxhall Corsa that she had been loaned as a courtesy car and to renew her acquaintance with her own Mondeo. Before she could drive it away, however, George Hamilton asked her to pop into his small office; he had something to show her.

Intrigued, Shelagh followed the big man in and he pointed to an object lying on his desk.

“We found this trapped against the engine mount, Ms. Norton. And I think I know what it is, but I can’t be sure.”

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Shelagh took a closer look – and recoiled in horror. Three inches or so long, blackened, and withered, heavily encrusted in dirt, she nevertheless was convinced that she was looking at part of a human finger, a finger from the nail down to just above the first joint had it still been attached to the hand from which it had come. She swallowed twice before finding her voice.

“It’s a human finger, George – I must tell the police.”

Her mind flew back to visit that she had received from that young Detective Constable and his civilian companion some months back. They had told her that, before she had bought it, the Mondeo might have been involved in two fatal accidents; a possibility which the evidence now before her eyes made it seem highly likely.

She rummaged in her handbag and came up with the card which the young policeman had left with her ‘in case she thought of anything’. Well, now she most definitely had ‘anything’ to pass on. Shakily, she keyed the number on the card into her mobile.

Ken Stewart had been about to call it a day; he had been reviewing a number of files, al dealing with recent robberies from small shops, seeking any indication of a helpful link between them, To date he had found nothing helpful, but the common factor of the robberies – that all the shopkeepers had been threatened with a knife, and that in each case there had been two perpetrators, convinced the police that the crimes were the work of the same pair of individuals. He had his jacket half on when his phone rang.

“CID, DC Stewart speaking.”

“Mr. Stewart, this is Shelagh Norton – you came to my house with a colleague a few months back to look at my car – do you remember?”

“Yes, of course, Ms. Norton – what can I do for you?”

“Well actually, I think that I can do something for you – my car had to have the engine removed and the garage have found what seems to be part of a human finger trapped in the engine mount. It’s very filthy and wizened, but I’m pretty sure that it really is somebody’s finger, not some sort of imitation.”

Stewart’s attention was immediately on high alert. Could this be a breakthrough?

“Ms. Norton – that sounds very interesting – where is the finger now?”

“I’m at Hamilton’s Garage and the finger is lying on Mr. Hamilton’s desk.”

Stewart thought quickly – both the DI and the DS were out of the office at the moment, so he was on his own, but this was simple enough.

“Ms. Norton, could I ask you to stay there until I reach you and collect the finger – and I’d also like to talk to the garage people so that they can tell me precisely how they found it.”

An hour later, Stewart was on his way back to the station, the grisly piece of evidence in an evidence bag on the passenger seat beside him, and a detailed description of just how and where the finger – because, like Shelagh Norton and George Hamilton, he was quite convinced that it really was a genuine human finger and nothing else – had been found jammed tightly into part of the engine mount. He also had on the seat signed statements from the two garage men telling exactly how and where the finger had been found and a similar statement from Shelagh Norton stating that since she had purchased the car it had never been involved in any form of collision that might have been responsible for the presence of the finger.

When he got back he found that both Fiona Campbell and Paul Murray had returned and were of the same mind as himself – the finger was human and surely could only have belonged to George Hammond. Proof of that would, of course, be needed and the initial task was to have the digit examined by the pathologists, in the first place to confirm that it was what it appeared to be and in the second to attempt to extract a usable DNA sample from it. If that was achieved, the next task would be to identify that the sample was, in fact, from Hammond. The Hammonds had a son, Brian, now twenty-three years old and working in the planning department of the local authority. It would be possible to confirm that the digit had come from the body of his father; one thing that Fiona did before setting the wheels in motion was to check the original autopsy report on Hammond. It would be disastrous if the man had actually still been in possession of all his fingers when the post mortem examination had been carried out. She need not have worried; the report stated that the deceased’s right hand had been badly mangled in the collision and parts of no less than three fingers were missing. Well, now it looked like one of those missing finger parts had been found; presumably the other missing pieces had been swept away by passing traffic, caught up in tyre treads, that sort of thing.

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It took five days, but in the end, the results were conclusive; the finger had belonged to the biological father of Brian Hammond and his mother confirmed that that meant that it had belonged to her late husband – there had been no other man in her life either when Brian had been conceived or, for that matter, since. Fiona had felt guilty at reopening the wounds caused by the death of Hammond senior, but his son had been only too willing to give a DNA sample in the hope that it might help in bringing his father’s killer to justice – for now the son and the widow shared Fiona’s conviction that Hammond’s death had been more than a tragic accident. Of the two, perhaps not surprisingly, it had been the widow who had been the more uneasy at having the matter of her husband’s death brought up once more; the second visit to Mrs. Hammond’s Edinburgh abode had been a courtesy call – her son lived in Dundee and Fiona hadn’t seen the two of them together, but separately. The more that she thought about it, the more something seemed to ring not quite right about the widow’s reaction. When she had first interviewed Mrs. Hammond, right back in the early days of the case, she had seemed totally at ease; this time there was some sort of edge to the woman’s demeanour and Fiona wondered what might have caused it.

Fiona had appraised DCI Graham of the development; as usual, he was less that supportive.

“Not much to go on, is it, Inspector? Defence counsel will claim that the evidence was planted, that even if it was Gerard’s car which killed Hammond we can’t prove that he was driving it at the relevant time, and what about the other accident – Gerard’s father? Have you made any progress on that one? And what about Holder

– you claim that it was murder, not suicide, but again not a shred of real evidence.”

Seething inwardly, Fiona had to admit that no progress has been made in building any evidence regarding the deaths of Gerard and Holder. Why, she asked herself furiously, was Graham always so bloody negative?

As Fiona left his office, Graham reflected upon their latest discussion. He admitted to himself that he simply didn’t like the woman – she was too pushy, too successful. Why, she had been promoted to Detective Inspector at an age eight years younger than when he himself had made that grade. He had an uneasy feeling that it wouldn’t be all that long before she got another promotion and was his equal in rank and, who knows, perhaps not long afterwards actually outranked him? It wasn’t a prospect that he relished, and he was determined to keep her in her place to the best of his ability.

Chapter Sixteen

Stephanie MacClachan was unhappy. For some time now she had suspected that her husband Hector was having an affair and she didn’t like it. At thirty-four years of age –alright, pushing thirty-five, but who was counting? She was ten years younger than Hector and was self-assured enough to know that she still a highly desirable woman – so why was the rat playing away from home?

As Hector nominally worked much of the time from home, she had realised that in the last few months the number of times that he had found it necessary to visit a client had been edging upwards. It was also noticeable that almost without exception on his recent forays outside he had switched off his mobile. She had tried to call him twice a couple of months previously to ask him to bring in some shopping on his way home only to fail to reach him. When she had mentioned the fact, really only in passing – after all it was hardly a big deal – he had claimed that he had switched the phone off to avoid distraction whilst working on a particularly tricky computer problem. On the face of it, a perfectly reasonable explanation – but it wasn’t the explanation itself that had started the little worm of suspicion in her mind but rather the way in which it had been delivered. After twelve years of marriage she prided herself in being able to read her husband’s moods and thoughts like an open book, and something hadn’t rung quite true.

She was alone in the house. Hector had left just after eight in the morning to visit a small financial advisor’s set-up in Arbroath and had told her that the visit was likely to last all day. This visit, she was pretty sure, was genuine – the secretary of the concern had phoned the previous day to confirm that Hector would be coming, and it had been Stephanie who had answered the phone in the first place.

Now she had a full day clear to follow up on her suspicions.

They both used one of the smaller bedrooms in their large bungalow as a dedicated office – Hector for his work as a computer security consultant, hers for her work as a self-employed accountant. They both of them rarely went into the other’s office – there was usually no need, but today there was every need. She switched on his computer and sat down in front of it, salving her conscience on her intended snooping – this was her marriage possibly under fire.

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The computer was, of course, password protected, but she already knew Hector’s top level password – as indeed he did hers. Once the computer was up and running, the next step was to rummage through the many files on it. Most of them were straightforward and genuinely work related; these all had a simple password which she could access from the print-out that Hector kept as an aide memoire in the desk drawer, but she had no need to look at them and, indeed,, no interest in them.

What was of interest to her was an enigmatically entitled folder - ‘ZXC’. Its very anonymity was suspicious.

As she expected, not only was it password protected, but the password for it did not appear in the aide memoire. Obviously, these were the files that she needed to access.

One of Hector’s more impressive pieces of computer programming was a programme he had written some years earlier that was specifically aimed at cracking computer passwords; whether or not he remembered, he had at the time boasted to Stephanie about its potency and she had massaged his ego by using it herself. She still had it available and now she used it against its originator. It took time, but not a lot of time; thirty minutes later she had open access to a series of folders on Hector’s hard disk, and for the next two hours she browsed them, growing more and more angry as she did so.

The first in importance, and the most distressing in content, was a file that linked to an E-mail account. It was not his normal account, but something quite separate, and in a clever piece of manipulation, he had arranged things so that the E-mails he sent, and any replies that he received didn’t record in the E-mail account itself, but were safely switched to this computer file.

As she read them she fluctuated between despair and fury. There was as series of E-mails to someone consistently addressed as ‘Anna’. There were arrangements for assignations, letters of appreciation for what must have been sexual encounters, but much more distressing there were notes confirming that money had been transferred to ‘Anna’ from their stocks and shares accounts – accounts that she only checked every quarter, unlike the current and savings accounts, and which would have been checked by her in some six weeks’ time.

All that was bad enough. Far, far worse was the discovery that Hector had booked a flight on-line, a flight for two persons, himself and an Anna Cartwright. The destination was Rome – and the flight was one way only.

She printed off the E-mails and the airline ticket; they would be ammunition to lay before a solicitor in the very, very near future.

It was only by chance that she also opened a folder titled ‘Gerard’, and then only because she recognised the name from Hector’s time at CS Partners. What she discovered changed everything for ever.

*******************

Fiona’s phone rang and she picked it, glad of the distraction from poring over the raw data that she needed to process into her element of the division’s crime statistics.

“DI Campbell.”

“Inspector, this is Stephanie MacClachan – we met a few months back when you asked my husband about events surrounding the disappearance of Mr. Whitaker.”

Grateful that she didn’t have to scour her memory to recall the woman, Fiona recalled a slim, attractive female in her mid-thirties and wondered what had occasioned this call out of the blue. She didn’t have long to wait.

“What can I do for you, Ms. MacClachan?”

“Actually, Inspector, I think that I can do something for you. I have just come across some information on my husband’s computer about the disappearance of Mr. Whitaker and a number of other issues which I think that you need to see very urgently. I have the information on computer memory sticks – may I come in and show it to you?”

Her mind reeling from what she was hearing, there was only one possible answer that Fiona could give.

“Yes please, Ms. MacClachan – I’ll be waiting for you – I’ll tell the desk sergeant to ring me the moment that you arrive.”

Less than thirty minutes later, Stephanie MacClachan was seated opposite Fione and had laid three USB

memory sticks on the desk between the two women.

Stephanie indicated the stick on her right and, with the edge of her hand, moved it a little way away from the other two.

“This one,” she said, “is all about Hector and myself really – it’s the proof that he is having an affair and I’ll be using it for my solicitor to commence divorce proceedings. Nothing on it impinges on the contents of the 88

other two, but I thought that I should let you have it for completeness should you so wish. However, it is the other two that I think will be of interest to you.”

She pushed the middle memory stick an inch or two nearer to Fiona.

“This one contains copies of E-mails that Hector exchanged with David Gerard. The contents are cryptic –

neither of them wanted to commit anything incriminating to the typed word, but when you look at the dates and compare them with the contents of the this memory stick I think that they indicate that the two of them were up to no good.”

She pushed the final stick a little closer to Fiona.

“This one contains copies of telephone conversations. All of them are between two men. One of the men is definitely Hector; the other, going by what is said, the fact that Hector calls him ‘David’ from time to time, and cross-referencing the calls against the E-mails, I am sure is David Gerard.”

Fiona was puzzled. Why on earth should a man like MacClachan, clearly highly intelligent, leave what sounded like highly incriminating evidence lying around in so careless a fashion?

It was a question that she put to Stephanie; her visitor thought about it for a moment.

“The thing is, Inspector, Hector is very, very good at what he does. All these records were buried deep in his computer and I don’t think that any normal search of the machine would have revealed them. I was only able to find them because Hector, several years ago, perfected a programme for breaking passwords. I think that he must have forgotten showing it off to me at the time, or never thought that I would invade his computer –

and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I had begun to suspect him of having an affair, I would never have had cause to do so.”

Fiona nodded her understanding and looked at the apparently innocent little memory sticks, little pieces of technology which promised that, at long last, she might be able to make some progress against David Gerard

– and perhaps Hector MacClachan as well – over the deaths of Gerard senior, Hammond and Holder. A thought struck her.

“Where is your husband at the moment, Ms. MacClachan?”

Her visitor looked at her watch.

“He’s working with a company in Arbroath; he will probably finish there about five.”

Fiona looked at her own watch; it was just after three-thirty. She was about to speak when, as if on cue, Stephanie’s mobile phone rang. She extracted it from her jacket pocket and looked at the display.

“It’s Hector – I’d better answer it.”

She did so; listening to one side of the conversation, it was clear to Fiona that Hector MacClachan was advising his wife that he would be home later than expected.

“OK,” Stephanie said, “I’ll keep dinner waiting until you get home – but don’t be too late, will you?”

She ended the call and replaced her phone in her pocket.

“He won’t be home now until eight or so.”

Fiona thought quickly.

“Ms. MacClachan, I want to listen to some of those telephone recordings right away. Depending upon what is on them, I may have grounds for taking action against your husband here and now.”

Stephanie sat back with a satisfied expression on her face and Fiona was reminded of the old saying ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. Clearly this was very much such an instance; it looked as though there was every possibility that Hector MacClachan would live to regret bitterly ever cheating on his wife.

She picked up the appropriate memory stick and inserted it into her desk computer and a few minutes later, having listened to just three conversations, with the wronged wife assuring her that one of the voices to which she was listening was indeed that of Hector MacClachan, her mind was made up.

“Ms. MacClachan, I can’t thank you enough for all of this – it looks like giving me vital evidence. What I am now going to do is to get a warrant to take possession of your husband’s computer – are there any other records that might be associated with all of this, do you think?”

Stephanie shook her head.

“No, Inspector. Hector is very, very computer orientated – you’ll hardly find one percent of what he has on his computer reproduced on paper.”

“Right. Do you want to be present when we take possession of his computer?”

“Well, I’d better be there to let you in, but after that I’m off to a hotel for the time being – I can’t stand the thought of facing the cheating swine.”

Fiona came to a second decision.

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“Yes, I think that would be a good idea – and I’m also going to have your husband brought in for questioning.”

Once her visitor had left, after arranging to return to her house and let in the officers Fiona would send to appropriate MacClachan’s computer, things moved swiftly. The necessary warrant was obtained and her DS, Paul Murray, accompanied by a uniformed officer in a marked car sent off to exercise it. In view of MacClachan’s likely arrival time home, Fiona also had the car, and Murray, return after bringing in the computer to the station and to await the return man himself.

******

It was getting on for nine o’clock in the evening. Hector MacClachan had, to his total amazement, been picked up by Murray and his uniformed colleague when he returned home and ferried to the police station.

He was now in an interview room, facing Fiona and Paul Murray across the long used, more than somewhat scruffy, table.

He scowled at the two detectives.

“What is going on here? I don’t understand what you people are up to – am I being accused of some sort of crime? If so, tell me what it is and I will demonstrate how absolutely fucking ridiculous all this is – I want to go home.”

Fiona smiled at him – not a pleasant smile, but her favourite, reserved for those she was after nailing to the wall, a ‘you are in deep trouble, sunshine’ sort of a smile.

“Well, Mr. MacClachan, I’d like to get home as well. However, there is one little problem preventing either of us achieving that aim. I need you to tell me all you know about the deaths of Stephen Gerard, George Hammond and Richard Holder.”

If she hadn’t already been exposed to MacClachan’s air of total credibility, Fiona would probably have been taken in by the man’s air of confusion. As it was, however, she was convinced that it was a sham.

“What on earth are you talking about, Inspector? I know nothing, absolute lay nothing about the deaths of these men, From what I read at the time, two died in traffic accidents and the other one committed suicide.

All terribly tragic, but not a bloody thing to do with me – can you get that into your head?”

Fiona replayed the sadistic smile, then she tossed one of the memory sticks onto the table between them.

“So, Mr. MacClachan, if I were to tell you that this memory stick records you speaking to another man and expressing pleasure at these three deaths, then that would be nothing to do with them, is that the case?”

For the first time a flicker of concern showed itself on MacClachan’s features.

“What is that? I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“That, Mr. MacClachan, is a copy of the conversations between yourself and David Gerard regarding those deaths.”

Now, Fiona thought to herself, let’s see you talk your way out of that. MacClachan gazed at the memory stick as though mesmerised by it. At last he spoke again.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not at the moment, no.”

“Then I’m leaving and if you attempt to stop me that will constitute unlawful detention and I will sue the police and you personally.”

Fiona let out a long, theatrical sigh.

“Oh dear. Well, in that case, Hector MacClachan, I am arresting you on suspicion of conspiracy in the death of George Hammond on or about the eighteenth of December, two thousand and ten. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand this caution?"

MacClachan stared at her in amazement.

“Are you out of your mind, woman? I know nothing about all this rubbish – and I am not going to say another word without the benefit of a solicitor.”

“That’s alright, Mr. MacClachan; I took the precaution of advising the duty solicitor that he might be needed, He can be with us in twenty minutes or so. In the meantime,” she turned to Paul Murray who had been a silent witness so far to the interview, “Paul, would you please escort Mr. MacClachan to the custody sergeant and have him placed in a holding cell until his solicitor arrives.”

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Murray rose to his feet and guided the clearly shaken prisoner, as he now was, to the door. As the two men left the room, Fiona phoned the duty solicitor who, as had said, was aware of the likely need of his presence.

“Mr. Johnson, it’s DI Campbell. As we expected, I have had to charge MacClachan and he has asked for legal representation.”

“OK, Inspector – I’ll be with you in about fifteen minutes. I presume that Mt. MacClachan is in a holding cell?”

“That’s right.”

“Right. I’ll need a bit of time with him before you start the formal interview – what have you actually charged him with?”

“Conspiracy to murder George Hammond on or about the eighteenth of December two thousand and ten.”

“Is that likely to be the only charge?”

“Oh no – I’ve at least another conspiracy to murder charge, and quite possibly a straightforward murder charge, not to mention possible involvement in the concealing of a body.”

“H’mm – sounds as though my client has a lot of grief coming his way. The sooner I can talk to him the better all round.”

“I’ve arranged for a briefing room to be available the moment that you arrive.”

“Right, see you soon.”

True to his word Johnson was talking with his client just twenty minutes later and a further half hour on saw him accompany MacClachan into the interview room which had been prepared for them.

Paul Murray started the tape recorder and Fiona had the four of them formally identify themselves for its benefit. It was Johnson who spoke first.

“Inspector, Sergeant, I have spoken with my client who wishes to affirm that he knows nothing of the matter with which he has been charged. He has heard of Mr. Hammond and his tragic death, but that is as far as his knowledge of the man’s death goes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Johnson. I feel that, as this interview proceeds you will find that your client has been less than forthcoming with you.”

Fiona turned her attention to MacClachan.

“Mr. MacClachan, do you know David Gerard?”

“Of course I do – we used to work together as you must already know.”

“I just wanted your confirmation, Mr. MacClachan. So, when was the last time that you were in contact with him?”

MacClachan furrowed his brow.

“H’mm, let me think. I left CS Partners in early two thousand and eleven, and we haven’t been in touch since.”

“So if I had been told that the two of you had a telephone conversation four months ago, then I would have been being misled?”

MacClachan hesitated; his poker face was slipping.

“Yes, they must have been mistaken.”

“And if whoever it might have been claimed that the two of you needed to establish alibis, that also would be wrong?”

Now she could imagine that MacClachan was thinking furiously, wondering just how much she knew.

Finally, he decided to brazen it out.

“Yes, that has to be some sort of mix-up. Either that, or they are lying to you.”

Fiona reached down to the floor beside her chair and picked up the cassette recorder that, out of sight of MacClachan and Johnson, lay there. She placed it on the table and pressed the play button. MacClachan’s face turned ashen as he heard the conversation between himself and David Gerard that had occurred immediately after Gerard had first been formally interviewed by the police. As the recording ended, it was Johnson, not MacClachan, who spoke.

“Inspector, I’m sure that you are well aware that he courts will not accept tape recordings in evidence.”

“Of course, Mr. Johnson – but I think that we have established that Mr. MacClachan cannot be relied upon to tell the truth, even in a matter as serious as this.”

She returned the cassette recorder to its place on the floor and took up in its place a slim sheaf of papers.

“Now, Mr. MacClachan, these are transcripts of E-mails between yourself and David Gerard, E-mails which, despite the way the language in them has been couched, would indicate some form of collusion between the 91

two of you. I would particularly like to draw your attention to an E-mail from yourself to Mr. Gerard on the sixth of January, two thousand and eleven, timed at twenty-two thirteen. In it, you say ‘spoke with H – no go.

Plan B needed.’ Now, according to Mrs. Holder, Richard Holder the former CEO of Lewis Brothers had a telephone call that evening, a call which resulted in him leaving the house for an hour or so and returning an a very angry state of mind. The very next day Richard Holder was found dead by his wife. He had hanged, and at the time it was regarded as suicide. Further examination of the case, however, satisfies me that Mr.

Holder was murdered. In the light of that, in the light of the telephone conversations, I am forming the opinion that you and David Gerard are partners in crime and, whilst we will be holding you in relation to the murder of Mr. Hammond, I am confident that we will be able to add further charges in the near future.”

Johnson spoke once again.

“Those E-mails, Inspector – may I have a copy of them, please?”

“Of course, Mr. Johnson. These copies are in fact for you.”

Fiona handed the sheaf over and there was silence for a few minutes as the solicitor rapidly scanned them.

“Thank you, Inspector. I must say that at first sight I can see nothing that specifically indicates any criminal activity on the part of my client.”

“I will have witnesses to reinforce what is contained in those E-mails, Mr. Johnson.”

And at that the first interview of MacClachan was over and he was returned to the holding cell. Fiona was only too well aware that what she had at the moment would never stand up in court, but this was just the first step in the process.

**********

It was the next day that she once again interviewed David Gerard. The man had now been held on remand for over a month and the incarceration had not helped him. He had lost weight and looked haggard and unwell. He was accompanied by his solicitor, a severe looking young woman named Hilary Beech; Fiona had never met her before but had done a little asking round of colleagues who had come into contact with her. The general opinion was that she was reasonably competent but no high flyer.

“Once the tape recorder was running and those present – Gerard, Hilary Beech, Paul Murray and Fiona herself had been identified – Fiona opened the proceedings.

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Mr. Gerard. Yesterday we arrested Hector MacClachan.”

Gerard, who had been staring down at the table top, lifted his eyes to meet Fiona’s gaze.

“Hector? What has he got to do with anything?”

“Well, according to him, nothing. He blames everything on you. According to Mr. MacClachan you killed three men – Richard Holder, George Hammond and your own father. He also claims that you alone concealed the body of Graham Whitaker.”

Hilary Beech interceded.

“Inspector, how is it that this Mr. MacClachan can lay these accusations against my client, accusations which, if they have even a shred of truth in them, must call into question Mr. MacClachan’s own involvement?”

It was the question that Fiona had been longing to hear.

“Because Mr. MacClachan is by no means a pure innocent in all this. He claims that he was aware of Mr.

Gerard’s plans but thought them to be a wild fantasy – he actually regards your client as virtually unhinged –

and it wasn’t until after the fact that he realised that Gerard was serious. He claims that he saw no point in making what he knew common knowledge – that he had no proof and that he was worried that he might become Mr. Gerard’s next victim. Personally, I don’t believe a word of it, but it’s not down to me – it will be down to the court and they might well decide to be lenient with Mr. MacClachan if his evidence really puts your client away for a long time – which seems highly probable.”

It was at that point that the dam broke. Despite his solicitor’s attempts to calm him, Gerard went overboard.

He confirmed everything that Fiona had suspected, that he and MacClachan had combined to murder Richard Holder – although in Gerard’s version of events it was MacClachan who bore prime responsibility –

and had attempted to blackmail Graham Whitaker in a confrontation that had led to the man’s fatal heart attack. The deaths of his own father and Hammond he claimed to have been accidents – that he had tried to frighten both men, although he was unable to come up with any convincing argument as to why he wished to frighten them.

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Then he moved on to an aspect that, to Fiona, came as a bolt from the blue. The crimes had not only been the responsibility of the two men. The start of the murder spree had actually come from a brainwave of Helen Gerard and Elizabeth Hammond. Both women were unhappy in their marriage; both wanted free of their respective spouses. Both realised that the heavy insurance policies the men carried meant that financially their wives would benefit financially far more by becoming widows than by becoming divorcees.

The death of Richard Holder had been an ‘unfortunate’ corollary. He had become uneasy at the deaths of his two colleagues, following on so soon after the disappearance of Graham Whitaker, and had made the mistake of confiding his suspicions in Mrs. Hammond, not realising that she was the very last person he should have talked to. MacClachan had attempted to threaten Holder, only to find that the man was in no mode to knuckle under – so he had been disposed of.

It was far more than Fiona could ever have hoped for and she did wonder uneasily if so comprehensive a confession, and the manner in which it had been delivered, might indicate that Gerard might be found unfit to plead.

She need not have worried. Armed with Gerard’s information she was able to expand the charges on the man himself and on MacClachan and also to arrest the two widows. Even DCI Graham was unable to find anything to complain about.

Epilogue

I squeezed Linda’s hand as the foreman of the jury delivered the verdicts. All four defendants had been found guilty on all counts in a case that had kept the media at feeding frenzy level for weeks. The judge handed down the sentences. For the murders of Richard Holder, George Hammond and Stephen Gerard, David Gerard was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of twenty years. For the concealment of the body of Graham Whitaker he was sentenced to six years, both sentences to run concurrently. For the murder of Richard Holder, Hector MacClachan was sentenced to life imprisonment with the same twenty year recommendation. For conspiracy in the murders of George Hammond and Stephen Gerard he was sentenced to ten years and for the concealment of Graham Whitaker’s body , six years, again all to run concurrently. The two widows were both sentenced to eight years for conspiracy to commit murder.

As we left the court, Niamh gave a deep sigh.

“At least now that Richard Holder’s death has been proved to be murder, and not suicide, his poor widow will get the insurance money that was withheld, but you know,” she said, “the person I feel really sorry for is Brian Hammond. Just imagine – his own mother conspired to cause the death of his father!”

Linda and I agreed; as so often is the case, it is the innocent who have the heaviest cross to bear.

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

Chapter Fi een

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue