There was a message on my desk next morning to ring a PC in Traffic. I did it straight away, in case it was anything I might need in the meeting.
‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Priest,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t realise you were tied up with a big case. It’ll do some other time.’
‘Go on, you might as well tell me,’ I said.
‘It’s OK. I was just going to ask you to do a poster for us.’
I went to art college before I became a policeman. It’s an unusual route into the force, but it can be surprisingly useful. Any of them could have told me about the Fighting Temeraire, but how many knew that Wham! took their name from a Roy Lichtenstein painting? It doesn’t help solve cases, but I pick up a few useful points at Trivial Pursuit. The drawback is that I get asked to do all the posters for police dances.
‘No problem,’ I told him. ‘Send me the details and I’ll do it when I can.’ Actually, I find it quite relaxing, enjoy doing them.
‘It’s about bullbars,’ he said.
‘Bullbars?’
‘Yeah, you know, on the front of off-road vehicles. The van that hit that little boy in town last week was fitted with one. We’ve just received the pathologist’s report and it says that they made a significant contribution to his injuries. In other words, if it hadn’t been for them, he’d be alive today.’
‘Mmm, it’s sad,’ I said. ‘So what do you want? A little poster that you can stick up all over town?’
‘That’s right, Mr Priest. And maybe we can go round putting them behind their wipers while they’re in the supermarket, that sort of thing.’
‘Right, I’ll see what I can come up with. Have you managed to find some money in the budget for them?’
‘No, sir. We’ve decided to pay for them ourselves.’
‘Out of your own pockets?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, well, put me down for a couple of quid. Give me a few days — as you said, we’re a bit busy at the moment.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
The phone was halfway back to its cradle when I heard him calling me.
‘Mr Priest!’
‘Yes?’
‘Sergeant Smedley would like a word with you.’
He came on after a couple of seconds. ‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said.
‘Hi, George. What can I do for you?’
‘Do you still have that old E-type Jaguar?’
‘You mean thirty thousand quids’ worth of desirable motor car; the pinnacle of auto engineering, never approached before or since?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Yes, I still have it. Want to buy it?’
‘No. I’ll stick with my Morris Eight. More my image. Can I put you down for the cavalcade at the Lord Mayor’s parade?’
‘Oh, I should think so. I enjoyed it last year. Will you send me the details?’
‘Will do. Cheers.’
‘No problem.’
I inherited the Jag when my father died. It was a wreck, but I restored it, more or less in his memory. Then I sold it and bought it back again. It’s fun to drive, but I’m not an enthusiast. Annabelle likes it, which is all the reason I need for keeping it.
Upstairs, I had another coffee with Gilbert. ‘Hobnob?’ he asked, pushing the packet towards me.
‘Not for me,’ I replied with a grimace. ‘I’ve just finished a piece of chipboard.’
I brought him up-to-date with the case and Gilbert filled me in with a few titbits that he’d gleaned. Goodrich was a member of the Rotary club, Neighbourhood Watch, the Road Safety Committee and several other worthy organisations; all of which, no doubt, brought him many openings through which to ply his trade. Nothing illegal in that.
‘Let’s have this one sewn up, Charlie,’ Gilbert said. ‘Then we can get the strength back on the streets, where they belong. I’m catching hell from the Chamber of Commerce.’
‘My heart bleeds for you,’ I told him, looking at my watch. ‘I bet some of those shopkeepers can be really nasty. C’mon, let’s see what Fraud Squad have found for us.’
There were twenty-five assorted policemen and women waiting in the conference room, talking noisily, reading newspapers — all, depressingly, tabloids — and sitting on the desks.
‘Quiet!’ I shouted, trying to hush them. Slowly, they turned their attentions our way. ‘We don’t expect you to leap to your feet when we come in,’ I railed, ‘but it would be nice if you could tear yourselves away from the football pages.’
‘It’s the financial news,’ the worst offender answered, turning a picture of a blonde bimbo towards me.
‘OK. Settle down. Before we begin Mr Wood has an urgent message.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Very urgent. Next week I am on holiday, so it would be nice if we could wind this up before then.’
‘Skiing in Aspen, Mr Wood?’ Sparky wondered aloud.
‘No, David, we’re going to our cottage in Cornwall. The phone number is ex-directory and sorry, but you can’t have it. The next piece of good news I have for you concerns overtime.’
‘All unpaid,’ somebody called out.
‘I didn’t say that,’ Gilbert told him. ‘We might manage to squeeze something from the budget, but no promises. Now let’s get on with this enquiry. DS Newley is at the PM, so hopefully he’ll have some news for us soon. Meanwhile, we’ll treat it as murder, committed some time on Sunday evening. Over to you, Mr Priest.’
‘I’ll assume you all know the background,’ I told them, ‘so let’s fill in the details. Jeff, what can you tell us?’
DS Caton placed his notebook on the desk in front of him. ‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid,’ was the answer. ‘First of all, Goodrich doesn’t appear to have any next of kin. He never married and his parents are dead. An older sister died a couple of years ago, and so far we’ve not found a will. Various solicitors he did business with are being contacted with a view to finding this. We have managed to track down his secretary. In Scotland.’
‘Day out for you there, Jeff,’ someone said.
‘Don’t think I’ll bother,’ he responded. ‘She’s a middle-aged widow and only worked for him for two years, before he went bankrupt. Now she’s returned home to look after her elderly parents. We’ve asked the local CID to have a word with her.’
Funny how these youngsters thought ‘ middle-aged widow’ was a pejorative. I knew one that any of them would have climbed a hot lava flow for, except that they’d have been in my footsteps.
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Not really. Young Luke has found something, on Goodrich’s computer, but I’ll let Maud tell you that.’
‘Thanks, Jeff. The stage is yours, Maud.’
She stood up. ‘Can I come to the front?’ she wondered.
‘Course you can.’ I jumped to my feet. ‘Here, use my chair.’
‘It’s OK, Mr Priest. I prefer to stand.’ She shuffled the sheaf of papers she was holding and addressed the room. There were four women in it, and the only other non-white was Shaheed, an Asian PC. ‘First of all, I’ll tell you about Luke’s success.’ Because he was a civilian he wasn’t at the meeting to speak for himself. ‘He found Goodrich’s data-base in about thirty seconds. “What do you want to know?” he asked, before we’d turned round, so we told him to bring up the client list. He tapped two keys and there it was. All I ever get is “Message error, bring me someone who knows what they’re doing”.’ She said the last bit in a tinny robot voice.
I glanced at her audience. Most of them were smiling, but one or two weren’t impressed. I suspected that she was nearly as good as Luke on the computer, but was deliberately demeaning herself. To survive in the job she needed the full cooperation of her colleagues, and that meant not being a smart arse or a threat to their promotion prospects. It shouldn’t be necessary, and it made me angry.
Maud continued. ‘So, I told him to print us a list and left him to it. He ran one off and realised that all the entries were in chronological order, by the dates that they signed on as clients. That’s OK on a computer — you just tap in a name and it finds it for you. Luke thought that perhaps we’d prefer alphabetical hard copies, so he asked the machine to sort the names and print another list. While he was browsing through he noticed that it contained a disproportionate number of people called Jones. He did some quick calculations with the phone book and reckoned that Goodrich should have had about four Joneses among his seventeen hundred clients. In fact, he had eleven. Then Luke noticed that seven of them were called A. Jones, B. Jones, C. Jones, right through to G. Jones.’
People shuffled in their seats, wondering if this was relevant. If there was a fraud, they just wanted to know the basic details.
I said, ‘So he had files for seven people called A., B., C., D., E., F. and G. Jones.’
‘Not files as such, Mr Priest. They were on his list of clients, but the information was incomplete. There are no addresses and no amounts of money against them. It rather looks as if someone entered the names but didn’t know how to set up a file. Like as if he did it himself, without his secretary’s knowledge. Instead, he started using…this.’ Maud held aloft a plastic bag. Inside it we could see what looked like an exercise book.
‘This is a cash book; available at any good stationer’s or newsagent’s. We found it in the back of the file — the filing cabinet file — for a Mr and Mrs W. F. Jones, who appear to be a perfectly respectable retired greengrocer and his wife. Goodrich evidently just put it there for safe-keeping. It was his secret account book. Inside are pages for each of our seven Mr Joneses, with long lists of amounts of money against them. Two to three thousand pounds at a time, once a week, for the seven of them. In other words, about twenty thousand pounds a week, for over two years, ceasing just before last Christmas.’
‘So if these were some sort of payment,’ someone asked, ‘which way were they going? In or out?’
‘It’s not clear,’ Maud told him. ‘There are other figures and dates, but we haven’t cracked what they mean, yet.’
‘Was he being blackmailed?’ a voice at the back wondered.
‘We don’t know. But we’ve found something else. As you already know from the handouts, we were investigating him for possible fraud, at the request of his clients’ solicitors. However, we have another piece of information about him which has just come to light. Two years ago, just about when he set up the file for A. Jones, we were notified by N-CIS about an SCT against him.’
I sat up. ‘Money laundering?’ I wondered aloud.
Maud nodded in my direction. ‘Possibly.’
‘Er, explain SCTs to us,’ I suggested.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘An SCT is a suspicious cash transaction. If you go into a bank to deposit a large amount of cash, currently three thousand or over, you will be asked where it came from. If the bank manager is not satisfied, the law requires him to report it. The National Criminal Intelligence Service correlate the reports and let us know about any coming from our patch. It’s a bit of a dodgy area, so we keep mum about them until we are sure that the money comes from criminal activities.’
A bit dodgy was putting it mildly. Over eighty per cent of SCTs were quite legitimate, and the civil liberties people would have a field day if we acted on them all. A handful lead to convictions and the rest fall into a grey area. Lawyers are the best people to launder money. They are protected by rules of confidentiality that priests and doctors can only envy. Second-hand car dealers come next on the list. A financial adviser, calling into his bank every week with a couple of thousand pounds in grubby notes that his clients have handed to him, might just about get away with it. Except that he would be doing it in every bank in town.
Gilbert grunted and shuffled around. ‘Do you think we’re talking drugs money?’ he asked, peering at Maud over his new half-spectacles.
‘Early days, Mr Wood. Let’s see what we find.’
Hartley Goodrich was beginning to look interesting. Maud answered a few more questions before I invited the SOCO to spellbind us all with his revelations.
‘Fingerprints,’ he announced, briskly. ‘First of all, to eliminate the milkman who started the whole thing off, we checked the bottle on the doorstep. It had been wiped clean. We asked him if he wore gloves and he said not. We also checked next door’s bottles and they bore his prints. The plant pot that hit Goodrich had also been wiped clean, most likely with a tea-towel that was hanging in one of those pull-out rails, under his worktop. His assailant had put it back, but it bore dirty marks similar to the soil from the pot. We’ve sent it to the lab. On the table was a bowl, or a planter, that the plant pot has stood in at some time. We found plenty of Goodrich’s prints and one or two other marks, probably old ones. I’m not hopeful of them being of interest. For what it’s worth, the plant was a Dieffenbachia picta. It would have been less messy to have poisoned him with it.’
I said, ‘Let’s not explore that avenue. This isn’t St Mary Mead and Mr Wood isn’t Miss Marple.’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘In spite of the spectacles. Anything else?’
‘We’ve taken the usual fibre samples and found a couple of hairs that we haven’t identified yet, but they are almost certainly his own. Oh, and a few flakes of dandruff.’ He turned to me, saying, ‘We’d like a word with you about that, Mr Priest,’ which earned him a cheap laugh from the audience.
‘I see,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘Is that all you could find? You were there long enough.’
‘One little thing,’ the SOCO said. ‘When I lifted the milk bottle to dust it, there was a wet ring of condensation on the step, where it had been. Next to it was what might have been the remnants of a similar ring, as if one bottle had been taken away, or the one present had been moved. Unfortunately, the mark dried out and vanished as we were looking at it.’
I wasn’t sure if this was interesting or confusing. We all want to be detectives, follow the trail, make sweeping deductions, but mostly it’s easier than that. Look for the woman or the money; find the blunt object; match them together. End of story. This was going to be one of those, I hoped. I’d had enough revelations for one day, but I was reckoning without Nigel’s phone call.
We held a questions and answers session and doled out the various jobs. I asked Jeff Caton to take over the list of clients that Claud — Brian — had started and try to develop some sort of profile of each one that would eliminate most of them and leave us with a few possible suspects. Criminal Records would be a useful starting point. Maud and Brian were visiting local bank managers. One or two of them were going to have a nice day. Hopefully they’d be able to match the dates and amounts in the cash book to transactions over the counter.
The phone rang just as we were winding up. It had to be Nigel because we’d arranged to be undisturbed except for his call.
‘Have you met the new pathologist, boss?’ he enthused in my left ear.
‘Professor Simms. Yes, I’ve met her.’
‘Heather,’ he announced, with barely disguised triumph. ‘She’s ever so attractive, isn’t she?’
‘Er, yes. Very pleasant. What did she say.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he gushed. ‘She just pulled the sheet back, looked at his hands and then at his face and said, “Sedentary work. Very trustworthy looking. Meets lots of people. Self-employed, possibly in the financial sector.” She’s brilliant!’
I said, ‘No, Nigel. She just has a reasonable memory. I told her all that, yesterday.’
‘Honest?’ His voice had lost its enthusiasm.
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Come on, Nigel,’ I urged. ‘There’s a room full of people here, hanging on your every word, so hide your disappointment and tell me what she had to say about the stiff.’
‘Right, boss. But you’re not going to like it.’
He was right, I didn’t. And when he’d finished I wished I hadn’t asked.
The troops were all on their feet, waiting to disperse. I turned to them and said, ‘Just as we thought: time of death sometime Sunday evening. Ring in with anything interesting; otherwise, same time tomorrow. Go to it, my bonny boys and girls, and make sure to put it all down on paper, tagged for the computer. Remember, reports mean arrests. What do reports mean?’ But nobody answered. I turned to the super. ‘Can we have a word in your office, Gilbert?’ I asked.
Trudging up the stairs, Gilbert said, ‘Well?’
‘In your office,’ I replied. ‘I’m playing for time.’
We need major enquiries. If we didn’t have one, every once in a while, it would be necessary to invent them. A murder investigation opens doors, and we often solve several other, less serious crimes, on the way to catching the killer. During the hunt for the Ripper the crime rate in West Yorkshire fell dramatically. That was because anybody out late at night became accustomed to being stopped by the police.
‘Do you mind if we have a look in your boot, sir?’ we’d say. ‘Oh. And could you explain what these forty-eight turkeys are doing in here?’ Or these silver chalices, or this jemmy and balaclava.
‘Coffee?’ Gilbert asked, closing the door behind us.
‘You’ve just had one,’ I protested.
‘Well, I’m having another. I’ve a feeling I’m going to need it.’
I sat down and looked at the pictures on his walls while he prepared a brew. Most officers of his rank have framed photographs of themselves adorning their offices, taken at peak moments in their careers. Yours truly meeting the Princess Royal; the class of ’82 at Bramshill; me, when I won the Silver Truncheon at Hendon.
Gilbert collects pictures of fish. I was studying an evil brute called a thornback ray when he flopped into his chair.
‘Can you eat those?’ I asked, nodding towards it.
‘Mmm, delicious. Caught two last year. Go on then, break my heart.’
I said, ‘According to the post-mortem, Hartley Goodrich died of a cardiac arrest while seated in his favourite chair, sometime Sunday evening. He was hit on the head by the plant pot about twelve hours later — Monday morning. Somebody wasted their energy.’
Gilbert took a sip of coffee, grimaced and produced a dispenser of sweeteners from his drawer. He clicked one into his cup and gave it a perfunctory stir. Now he was playing for time. ‘Is that an offence?’ he wondered, although he knew the answer.
‘Depends on what the intention was,’ I confirmed.
‘And that’s nearly impossible to prove.’
‘Mmm.’
He did the routine with the sweeteners again, complete with grimace.
‘Why don’t you use sugar?’ I suggested.
‘Empty calories.’
‘You could always eat one less biscuit.’
‘Don’t be so bloody self-righteous. So I can tell Les Isles that we don’t need his help and we can wind up the enquiry and put the troops back where they belong — keeping the streets tidy, eh?’
I shook my head. ‘I want to keep on with it,’ I declared. ‘Tell Mr Isles that it’s not murder, but Goodrich is — was — up to his neck in something, and I want to find out what it was. A murder enquiry gives me the licence I need to knock on doors. Doors that otherwise would be slammed in my face.’
Gilbert said, ‘And where does the coroner fit in with this little scheme of yours?
‘You have a word with him. Don’t you have a lodge meeting, or something, where you could collar him?’
Gilbert rolled his eyes. ‘We’re in the same bloody golf club,’ he stated.
‘You don’t play golf,’ I reminded him.
‘I’m a social member, same as he is. They have the best selection of whiskies in the county. If I have a word with him it will be in office hours, not over the Macallan.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
‘I said “if.”’
‘We need the inquest adjourning, indefinitely,’ I said. ‘If no next of kin turn up it shouldn’t be a problem. I want to find out who the Jones boys are, and where all that money came from.’
‘Right, but I want DS Newley back, running operations, and most of the staff.’
‘No problem, but I’ll need Sparky, Maggie, young Caton, and Maud at least.’
‘It’s a deal. We’ll start winding down tomorrow, and you can have until the end of the week.’
‘The end of the week!’ I gasped, dismayed. ‘That’s not long enough!’
Gilbert held his arms out, like John the Baptist on the banks of the Jordan. ‘I’m on holiday next week,’ he announced. ‘You’ll be in charge. What more can I say?’
‘Right,’ I said, nodding and smiling. ‘Right.’
I had an hour at the keyboard, typing my own version of events, and read a financial magazine that I’d bought on the way in, swotting up the difference between a PEP and a TESSA, in case anybody asked me. Fraud Squad was still working through the files when I called at Goodrich’s house. We’d decided it would be easier to work from there, rather than hump all the files to the nick, where we didn’t have room for them. I noticed that they’d commandeered a kettle and his tea-bags.
The rest of the house already smelt of disuse — death, even — or was my imagination playing games with me? I wandered through the rooms, trying to read the mind of a man I’d never met. He was obviously well off. The pans in the kitchen were by Le Creuset. I’d heard of them because Annabelle told me that she’d just bought one, and he had a full set. I put the Dieffenbachia back in its bowl and ran some water into it. The curtains in the other rooms were made of a heavy silken material, elaborately ruffled and brocaded, with ropes to open and close them. The dining room seated eight around a polished mahogany table, with a captain’s chair for the head of the household. It all looked unused under a thin patina of dust, as if the place had been sealed until the master came home from the war. The decor throughout was by Barratt, out of Harewood House. Upstairs the slim-hipped slack-lipped young men still held their poses, and a red admiral had died of exhaustion against a window. I opened drawers, felt down the back, found an unopened packet of twelve condoms, long past their use-by date, and gave an uneasy nod of recognition.
Sparky came looking for me. Maud and Brian had identified the banks that Goodrich used, and went off to put the willies up the managers. It’s a stiff sentence for not reporting suspicious cash transactions.
As soon as they’d gone I asked, ‘Anything on the WAM number?’
‘No, but we’re in with a chance,’ he replied. ‘AM is a Swindon registration mark, so there shouldn’t be too many around here. I’ve asked Swansea for a printout of any BMWs with those letters kept in Heckley to begin with. No point in overdoing it just yet.’
‘Good. Now let me tell you something.’
Sparky listened as I related the pathologist’s findings, a big grin splitting his face when I’d finished. ‘You crafty sod,’ he said. ‘Trust you to make a convenience out of a midden. So we’re after wheeler-dealers, eh, and not really bothered who biffed him on the bonce?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Right. Well, I think we need to know who was in that car, whoever we upset. I’ll get back to the station and do some chasing.’
‘You do that,’ I told him. ‘And find me the addresses of the directors of the diamond company, IGI, if you have the time. Maybe we should pay them a visit. I’d, er, buy you some lunch, but I have an appointment. See you later.’
‘I noticed you’d washed your neck,’ he replied.
First thing I saw outside Annabelle’s back door was a pair of Wellington boots that were far too large and definitely not her colour. I knocked and went in. Seated in the kitchen was a young man, several inches of sock wriggling off the end of his toes, as if his feet desperately needed circumcising.
‘Hello,’ I said. It seemed as good as anything.
‘Hello,’ he repeated nervously. He had a long face that was slightly askew, and nursed an empty coffee mug.
‘I’m Charlie,’ I told him. ‘And you must be Annabelle’s gardener.’
He nodded and examined the coffee mug. His trousers were too long for him and his jacket sleeves too short, and they looked as if they’d been machine-washed at regular intervals. The poor lad obviously wasn’t quite all there. ESN, we used to call it — educationally sub-normal — but that was now considered politically incorrect and I couldn’t remember the new term.
‘You’ve certainly done a good job,’ I admitted. ‘Annabelle’s garden has looked smashing all summer.’ I gave him a grin. ‘I hope you charge her the proper rate for the job.’
‘Sh-she pays m-me three pounds f-fifty an hour,’ he declared in a burst of verbosity.
I was suggesting that he demand four quid when Annabelle strode in, looking all the things that reduce me to the state of the young man who did her borders, and gave me a peck on the cheek.
‘Sorry about that, I was on the phone,’ she explained. ‘I thought I heard you. Have you met Donald, the person who works wonders in my garden?’ She was wearing a striped butcher’s apron over a skirt and bright red blouse, and I noticed the makings of lunch at the far end of the work surface.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remarked what a good job he does. I was wondering about making him a better offer to come and do mine.’
All the praise was making him blush. He rose to his feet, slouching, and put his mug in the sink. ‘I’ll go n-now,’ he announced.
‘But your bus isn’t for another fifteen minutes,’ Annabelle told him. Turning to me she said, ‘He missed the one he usually catches.’
‘Where do you live?’ I asked.
‘Oates S-S-Square,’ he informed me.
I briefly wondered if it was named after Titus or Captain. ‘Where’s that?’
‘N-near the p-park.’
‘Heckley park?’ I wondered with sudden interest.
‘Y-yes.’
‘Do you go in the park much?’
‘S-sometimes.’
I said, ‘Look, it’s trying to rain outside. I could easily run you home. It wouldn’t take ten minutes.’
‘N-no, I’ll walk to the n-next stop.’
‘Are you sure?’ Annabelle asked. ‘Charles could easily give you a lift.’
‘N-no thanks. Is it all r-right if I come WWednesday?’
‘Tomorrow? Instead of Thursday? Of course it is, if you prefer it. Have you put your money somewhere safe?’
‘It’s in my p-pocket. Bye.’
‘Goodbye, Donald.’
‘S’long, Donald. Nice to meet you.’
As the door closed behind him the smile slipped from Annabelle’s face. ‘He’ll go straight to the pub,’ she said.
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘If it makes him happy…’
She came to me and we hugged each other. ‘This is nice,’ I told her. ‘I think I could get used to it. Trouble is, I won’t want to go back to work.’
She leant back from my embrace. ‘I was ringing Marie and Toby to thank them for the meal on Sunday. They are coming to stay for a couple of days at half-term. They haven’t got a car, so I’ll have to run them around, show them the sights. You don’t mind, do you?’
Toby and Marie were the manufacturers of the sloe gin that had laid me low. ‘Of course not. They’re good company. Tell them to bring some home-brew with them.’
‘I doubt if they have any left,’ she reproached, breaking from my grasp.
‘Oh. So when is half-term?’
‘Three weeks. Right. Food. How does trout in almonds, with vegetables, sound?’
‘Dee-licious. With Annabelle surprise for pudding?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I thought you only had an hour for lunch.’ She removed something from the refrigerator and busied herself with the cooking. ‘It was good of you to offer to run Donald home,’ she said, over her shoulder.
No it wasn’t. There was nothing good at all about it. I wanted a talk with him, ask him if he’d killed the swans in the park. But you are beautiful and naive, I thought. A summer’s breeze blowing through my corrupt and jaundiced life, and I don’t deserve you.
Sparky was replacing the phone as I walked in. ‘Appointment go well?’ he casually asked.
‘Yeah, not bad,’ I told him, sitting in the chair opposite.
He leant across and brushed my lapel. ‘Bit of seafood sauce on your collar,’ he said.
I looked down and pretended to wipe some more off. ‘It’s probably crime brulee,’ I replied. ‘It gets everywhere.’
‘I bet it does. There are no WAM Bee-Emms in Heckley, but two in Halifax. Unfortunately the owners don’t fit our description.’
‘Like, they’re white.’
‘Exactly.’
I thought about it for a few seconds. ‘They’ve got a point, you know,’ I said.
‘Who has?’
‘We’re only tracing this car because it was driven by a black person.’
Sparky turned on me. ‘No we’re not. We’re trying to trace it because it’s the only bloody lead we have.’
‘Yeah, maybe. But it looks bad.’
‘I don’t give a toss how it looks.’
‘That’s my boy. Anything on the diamond merchants, IGI?’
He turned over a sheet on his pad and read off it. ‘Head office, Park Square, Leeds. Three directors. One is the Right Honourable Lord Onchan, who lives on the Isle of Man. He was a professional figurehead, but he lives in a nursing home now. He won’t tell us anything because apparently he’s gaga. A man called Rockliffe was the money behind the venture. He went for a long drive without opening his garage doors, shortly after the whole thing went pear-shaped. Carbon-monoxide poisoning. Don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t work when you’ve a catalyser fitted.’
‘And the third?’
‘A man named…’ He ran the pencil down his list of notes. ‘Here we are — K. Tom Davis.’
‘K. Tom Davis? What sort of a name’s that?’
‘A fine name. At least, I bet he thinks so.’
‘And he lives in the Outer Hebrides, no doubt.’
‘No, Wakefield.’
‘Wakefield…New Zealand?’
‘Uh-uh. Wakefield, capital of the old West Riding.’
‘Right then. Grab your coat and the A to Z. Let’s see what K. Tom Davis can tell us.’