Текст книги "Death in Dark Waters"

Автор книги: Patricia Hall

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Seventeen

Mower drove back to the Heights in silence with Dizzy B slumped in the passenger seat beside him, headphones turned up high. Neither man seemed willing to talk and Dizzy Sanderson glanced out of the car window with increasing anxiety as they approached the tall blocks of flats which were almost obscured by the driving rain. He put his Walkman away as Mower parked in the lee of Priestley House.

“This place is beginning to give me the creeps,” he said. “I reckon you have to assume you’re being watched up here – by both sides.”

“Probably,” Mower said. He glanced towards Joyce Ackroyd’s bungalow where the glass in her windows had still not been replaced, boards facing the street blindly. “If I were the drug squad I’d have video cameras up here full time. But we’re on the side of the angels, remember?”

“They might still believe you are, man,” Sanderson said. “But I reckon my credibility’s all blown away.”

Up on the walkway as they made their way towards Donna Maitland’s flat, Mower glanced down. The whole estate seemed deserted, as the rain gusted in bitter squalls across the muddy grass and the puddled car parks while the concrete of the blocks above and below them turned dark and streaky with damp. But even a casual glance convinced Mower that Sanderson was right. There were eyes which watched: here and there a curtain twitched and behind some massive dustbins he caught a flicker of movement which could have been a hooded head. But before he could focus he was distracted by Sanderson who had reached Donna’s doorway first, to find the lock broken open and the door hanging drunkenly on its hinges.

“Shit,” Mower said angrily, shouldering his way past his friend and into the living room, where a scene of devastation faced them. The television and video and anything else of value had gone, and the rest of the flat, from the bedrooms to the kitchen and bathroom, seemed have been systematically wrecked. Mower stood in the door to Emma Maitland’s room, where soft toys had been ripped up and the pretty bedcover torn and tossed on the floor, and felt tears prickle at his eyes.

“Bastards,” he muttered as Sanderson came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder as he peered at the wreckage of the child’s room.

“Her friends or ours?” Dizzy asked quietly.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t both,” Mower said, swallowing hard. “If the drug squad bust in here the neighbourhood toe-rags would be close behind to see what pickings they could find.”

“Let’s look for what we came for and then get out of here,” Sanderson said. “Though if your colleagues have been through the place the chances are they’ll have taken anything of interest.” And as they picked through the remains of Donna’s home Mower soon became convinced that Sanderson was right. No files, no computer discs, no paperwork of any kind, not so much as an electricity bill, did they find amongst Donna’s scattered belongings.

“Zilch,” Mower said at last. “It’s all been cleaned out and I don’t believe the toe-rags took her phone bills and address book any more than the drug squad took the TV and video.”

“Let’s go,” Sanderson said, his anxiety showing. “You may be able to get away with this, but I’m out on a limb here.”

“Right,” Mower said, following the DJ to the door, but before they reached it they heard a tap on the cracked glass panel and a postman, water streaming off his red and blue jacket, put his head round the drunken door, raised an eyebrow at the chaos and held out a single letter.

“Mrs. Maitland live here?” he asked.

“I’ll take it,” Mower said. The postman shrugged and moved on, leaving Mower in possession of an envelope which he ripped open without ceremony. Inside he was surprised to find a copy of a certificate from the Public Records Office in Southport. Why, he wondered, could Donna have possibly applied for a copy of Grantley Adams’s marriage lines. With Sanderson displaying signs of increasing impatience he tucked the letter away in his jacket pocket and followed him out of Donna’s wrecked home.

The two men made their way down the concrete staircase, which had been converted into a waterfall by leaks in the roof above. On the ground floor a woman stood by the glass doors, huddled into a thin mac and with a sodden scarf over her head, her face haggard and her eyes reddened with crying.

“I thought it were you,” she said to Dizzy Sanderson. “I were looking out o’t’window and saw you come over here.” That was one set of watching eyes accounted for at least, Dizzy thought, not quite recognising the mother of Stevie, the young junkie he had only seen in semi-darkness a few days before.

“Mrs Maddison? Lorraine?” Sanderson asked. “How’s Stevie?”

“That’s it,” the woman said, clutching his arm in a frantic grip. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. He’s run off, hasn’t he? When he heard that Donna Maitland were dead he got into a terrible state, crying, he were. I’ve not seen him cry since he were a little lad.”

“He was fond of Donna,” Sanderson said by way of explanation to Mower who was listening with some bemusement.

“She got him sorted, did Donna. He’d never have done it without her,” Lorraine said. “But he were right scared when he heard the news. Said that if they could get Donna they could get him too.”

“He thought she’d been killed?” Mower asked. “Why should he think that?”

“Don’t you?” Lorraine Maddison snapped back, verging on hysteria now. “Stevie thought they’d be coming for him next because he saw too much that night Derek died. I reckon he saw someone he knew, though he’d never tell me who. So he’s run and I reckon he’ll be the next body they find. Can you help me find him? He trusted you, Mr. Sanderson. You’re the first person he’s talked to about that night. I could never get owt out of him, not a bloody word. I need someone to help me look.”

“This is DS Kevin Mower from Bradfield police …” Sanderson began but the woman grabbed his arm and pulled him away from Mower.

“I want nowt to do wi’t’police,” she said. “I don’t trust bloody police. Look what they did to Donna. They’re either bloody fools or in wi’t’dealers themselves. Donna Maitland were t’best thing that’s happened for the kids on this estate for years, and now look where we are. I just want you to help me find Stevie, that’s all. I don’t want any trouble, just to know he’s safe. I’ve not got him off junk to see him killed now.”

Sanderson glanced at Mower, who shrugged.

“I’ll wait outside,” he said, and went out into the downpour without looking back.

Michael Thackeray lay back in his armchair with a sigh and closed his eyes as he listened to Laura clattering around the kitchen next door as she made coffee. There were times when he thought that the wall he had carefully constructed around himself over the years would prove impregnable against even Laura’s best efforts to undermine it. And there were evenings when he slid imperceptibly into a contentment he had seldom known when he got home to find Laura watching the TV news or beginning to cook a meal. He had promised half-heartedly to hone his own rudimentary domestic skills and take a share of the cooking and chores when they had moved into the new flat, but deep down lurked an unreconstructed Yorkshireman who secretly believed that everything beyond the kitchen door was a woman’s domain. Even watching his father struggle with domesticity as his mother became increasingly disabled had not convinced him that there was an obvious solution to the boredom engendered by endless meals out of cans or a frying pan slammed straight from the stove onto the table.

Tonight his appreciation of Laura’s cooking skills had been muted by the anxiety he read in her expression as soon as he came through the door. He watched her with a finger of ice touching his stomach as she brought a steaming dish of pasta to the table and served in silence.

“Did Kevin Mower call you?” she asked eventually, carefully avoiding his eyes as she twirled spaghetti round her fork.

“Should he have done?” he countered.

“He said he would.”

“You’ve seen him again, then? Any particular reason?”

“He asked me to look at Donna Maitland’s computer files with him – and I’ve got a cracking story out of it, as it goes.” For a moment their eyes locked across the table, challenge in hers, fear in his, before he nodded slightly.

“I should have called him. We need to talk,” he said quietly. “Not for publication, but he turned out to be right about Donna’s death. Amos Atherton doesn’t think it was suicide.”

Laura hoped that her surprise did not look as feigned as it felt.

“You think she was killed?”

“It looks likely,” Thackeray said. “I’ve got a meeting with Jack Longley first thing to decide whether we launch a murder inquiry. If Kevin’s up to his neck in her affairs I’ll need to interview him as a witness. I can’t get through to him on his mobile, I don’t know why, I’ve left messages on his voice-mail, but this he’ll have to co-operate with.”

“You should know why Kevin’s so distant,” Laura said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? When he lost Rita, I was at risk too, don’t you remember? But you found me. You got me back. He’d never admit it, but that must crease him up.”

“Laura, that’s psychobabble,” Thackeray protested, remembering the day when he had thought Laura might be dead. It obsessed him like a wound he dared not probe.

“Is it?” she asked. “Is it really? I’ve seen you watching Vicky Mendelson’s kids. Don’t tell me you don’t resent the fact that you lost your son and she’s got hers safe and well and growing into smashing boys. I can see it in your eyes. And I can see it in Kevin’s too, when he sees us together and he doesn’t think I’m looking.”

Thackeray glanced away, unwilling to go any further down that road.

“I’ll need to talk to Joyce too, as she worked with Donna,” he said.

Laura glanced at her watch.

“I said I’d pick her up at nine,” she said. “She couldn’t bear to miss her governors’ meeting, even though it is a hassle for her to get to the school from here. She persuaded someone to collect her by car and I said I’d fetch her.”

“And is this cracking story anything to do with Donna Maitland?” Thackeray asked, hoping fervently for a negative response. Laura shook her head.

“No, except in the sense that she seems to have stumbled on it first. But it is about someone else you’re interested in. Barry Foreman. It turns out his girlfriend is a director of one of the construction companies bidding to redevelop the Heights. And if that isn’t fishy, I don’t know what is.”

“His girlfriend? You mean Karen Bailey, the one who’s gone missing?”

“Unless it’s someone else of the same name, which seems unlikely,” Laura said smugly. It was not often that she reduced Thackeray to the state of astonishment which seemed to have overwhelmed him and she could not restrain a small smile of triumph.

“The firm’s called City Ventures and they’ve got offices in Leeds. It all seems perfectly open and above board, pages on the web, lists of directors. I’m going to call them in the morning and get an address for Ms Bailey. If it is the same person, then I think your Mr Foreman has some explaining to do. And possibly Dave Spencer as well. Ted wasn’t in the office this afternoon but I don’t think he can turn me down on this one. It could turn into a major corruption story. I think he can spare me off flood watch for that.”

“You’re not thinking of interviewing Foreman are you?” Thackeray asked, trying to conceal his horror at the idea.

“Don’t you think he does press interviews,” Laura said, her eyes full of mischief.

“With his innocent businessman’s hat on I’m sure he does,” Thackeray said. “But if you start trying to trace his girlfriend then I think you would be taking a hell of a risk. You’ve already had Joyce threatened in her own home. You don’t want the same thing to happen here, surely? The man is dangerous, I’m one hundred per cent certain of that. Don’t go near him, Laura. Please.”

“I must,” she said. “If he and Spencer really are in cahoots over the redevelopment that’s a major story. The Gazette can’t ignore it. Do you really think Foreman’s behind all the intimidation on the Heights? Is he under investigation for that?”

“Not directly,” Thackeray said.

“He’s not your prime suspect?”

“He was a prime suspect long before the business with the gunman who left his employment so conveniently before he began taking pot-shots at hospital patients. Foreman got away with that and I’ve still got nothing I can pin him down with, if that’s what you mean. That doesn’t mean my instincts are wrong, Laura, or that he’s not dangerous. Simply that I can’t prove anything. I’ll have to talk to Jack Longley in the morning and see what he thinks about the Gazette butting into an on-going investigation. I think it’s a complication we could do without and you certainly could.”

“What the Gazette investigates is up to Ted,” Laura said, polishing around her spaghetti dish with a piece of ciabatta carefully and avoiding Thackeray’s anxious eyes. “But one thing’s for sure. If he thinks you or Jack Longley are trying to cover something up, it’ll make my job of convincing him to let me go ahead very much easier.”

Thackeray finished his meal in silence. He knew that there was very little chance of persuading Laura to change her mind in her present mood. One day, he thought, their jobs would bring them into such a violent collision that their relationship might be terminally damaged. But he had not yet found any way of deflecting her from a course she considered to be right and doubted that he ever would. He watched her as she cleared away the dirty dishes and put her coat on. There would be no way they could continue the argument once Joyce returned to the flat.

“Do one thing for me at least,” he said, catching her hand as she went to open the front door. She put her head on one side, a half-smile on her lips.

“I’d do anything for you,” she said. “Almost.”

“I’m serious, Laura. Keep me in touch with what you’re doing.”

“I know,” she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “I’ll tell you what Ted says about Foreman tomorrow, and what I’m going to do next. Will that do?”

“I suppose it will have to,” Thackeray said. But when she had gone, and he had heard her start her car and drive away down the hill towards the special school where Joyce was a governor, he flung himself back into his armchair and closed his eyes with a sigh. Laura was like a brightly coloured bird, he thought, and he loved her for her energy and grace and fierce independence. But after losing so much in a previous life he desperately wanted to keep her safe. Yet caged birds, he knew, would only too often languish and die. He hoped that he was strong enough to resist the temptation to trap her and, perversely, that she was strong enough to remain free, even if it did mean that they were destined to live in this perpetual state of tension.

He switched the television on to catch the local news which was dominated by the efforts of the water authority to keep the Beck within its bounds. A glum looking official, filmed standing at the point where the swollen waterway plunged underground on the edge of the town centre was complaining that the channel appeared to be accommodating less of the threatened flood waters that it had been designed to take, and that they would be starting a hunt tomorrow for an obstruction concealed under the buildings of the town’s commercial heart. That, Thackeray thought with some satisfaction, might keep Ted Grant’s troops far too occupied for them to find time to follow up hints of council corruption. He had no doubt that Laura had probably stumbled on something serious, but he fervently hoped that he would be able to forestall her inquiries with some of his own.

Chapter Eighteen

“What the hell is going on, Laura?” Ted Grant tipped back in his leather chair, paunch straining against his shirt and the top button of his trousers, eyes popping like blue marbles, as he scowled massively at Laura Ackroyd. Laura shrugged.

“What do you mean?” she asked. Behind them the newsroom was almost deserted, most of the Gazette’s staff already rushing out and about in the town which was sandbagging itself against a now almost certain flood unless the rain, which had not eased now for seven days, suddenly ceased. The lowering grey clouds, which meant that the newspaper offices were fully lit in the middle of the morning, gave no indication that any such salvation was likely. And in any case the forecasters were sure that the water now pouring down every deep gorge and shallow depression between the town and the waterlogged moorland above would overwhelm the flood defences regardless. Houses on the west side of the town were already being evacuated and the water board had begun its investigation of the Beck’s concrete culvert, into which several cellars in the business district gave access. Earlier that morning, in the controlled chaos which the newsroom had quickly become, Laura had been allotted the task of coordinating the “human interest” stories which would shortly start pouring in as schools were closed and householders moved out of their homes and into emergency rest centres with whatever belongings they could carry. She had not had the chance to raise her suspicions about Councillor Spencer and his regeneration committee colleagues with Ted Grant, who was in Montgomery of El Alamein mode. Now she thought, it looked as if that particular can of worms had been opened some other way.

“What do you mean?” she asked, at her most disingenuous.

“Why have I had Jack Longley bending my ear this morning about the risk of reporters interfering with ongoing police investigations?” Thank you, Michael, Laura thought to herself ruefully, although she should know by now that if Thackeray set himself on a course of action he was as difficult to divert as she was herself.

“What have you got on Barry Foreman?” Grant asked.

“He seems to have gone into the building trade, in a secretive sort of way,” Laura said sweetly. “And as he’s a member of your committee that’s going to be involved in handing out hefty contracts for rebuilding The Heights, I thought we should be asking a few questions. Don’t you?”

Grant sighed melodramatically.

“But not today, Laura, for God’s sake. Not now. For one thing these floods are going to take up every inch of news space we can prise out of the management’s sticky fingers. Nothing like this has ever happened in Bradfield since the 1940s. I can’t give you the time to go chasing wild geese this week. And if what Jack Longley says is true, the police are onto Foreman anyway, so the whole thing may be put on ice if they charge him with anything. It’d be all so much wasted effort. Can’t that boyfriend of yours give you a steer on this. He must know what’s going on. In the meantime concentrate on putting the flood pages together. I’m hoping to run eight extra pages on this and so far I’ve got bugger all to put on them.”

“Right,” Laura said more sweetly than she imagined Grant had anticipated. She went back to her desk and used her mobile phone to call Kevin Mower.

“Remind me of the names of the directors of City Ventures,” she said. Mower read out the list of names.

“I’ve discovered another connection,” he said then. “Althea Simpson is Grantley Adams’ wife. It’s her maiden name and Donna had sussed that out by getting their marriage certificate.”

“And I know for a fact that she used to be an accountant,” Laura said. “Well, well, what are the ever-so-respectable Adamses doing in the company of Barry Foreman’s girlfriend who, as I recall, was a lass from Benwell Lane, born and bred and effin’ proud of it, as she might say.”

“I’m going in to see the boss at two,” Mower said. “He invited me in – no excuses accepted.”

“Good,” Laura said. “It’s time you two got your act together.”

“Fat chance,” Mower said gloomily.

“Well, in the meantime I might call on Mrs. Adams in my lunch hour – to ask her about young Jeremy’s progress, you understand? And if the subject of City Ventures just happens to come up I’ll try to find out exactly who those other directors are, and when she last saw Karen Bailey.”

“Be careful,” Mower said.

“You sound like Michael,” Laura said softly. “But Donna deserves someone to follow this up.”

“Donna deserved a hell of a lot more than she got,” Mower said, his voice tight. “But take care, Laura. There’s some very nasty people out there.”

Laura spent the rest of the morning conscientiously sifting through the incoming tales of teachers arriving at school that morning to find water running through their classrooms; householders rescued by boat as streams broke their banks, inundating everything in their path; and the distraught farmer who had been innocently over-wintering his ewes, which had miraculously escaped the foot and mouth epidemic, in a normally dry fold in the hills only to find them trapped and drowning in a quagmire created overnight by the relentless rain.

“If this is global warming I think I’ll pass on the Pennine olive groves,” Laura muttered to herself as she fitted together grim tales and grimmer pictures of an uniquely sodden winter into a kaleidoscope of local catastrophe.

By lunchtime the job was done and the Gazette building began to shudder slightly as the presses began to roll. Laura switched off her computer terminal, buttoned up her waterproof jacket and made the dash across the puddled car park to her Golf. The low-lying part of the town centre was now cordoned off by police and fire brigade and she had to make a lengthy detour to reach the Adams house in one of the leafy suburbs in the surrounding hills. Mrs. Adams push-buttoned her through the gate and the front door as easily as she had done the first time and waved her into the sitting room overlooking the dripping, dark mid-winter garden.

“You look as though you were expecting me,” Laura said as her hostess brought in a tray with coffee cups and a percolator.

“I’ve been expecting someone,” Althea Adams said. “I wasn’t sure whether it would be the Press or the police.”

“Because of Jeremy? How is he?” Mrs. Adams nodded with a wry smile as if she knew that the question was mere prevarication on Laura’s part.

“He’s going to be fine. And the school is taking him and Louise back.”

“So what’s the problem?” Laura asked.

“I suppose it’s just that the Jeremy business meant that Grantley has been throwing his weight about even more than usual. I began to think it would only be a matter of time before someone took serious exception to Grantley. I thought it would be that policeman, what’s his name? He seemed unlikely to be either conned or intimidated.”

“DCI Thackeray?” Laura smiled faintly to herself.

“Him. I knew he’d be furious about what went on. I heard my husband on the phone to Superintendent Longley, to the Deputy Chief Constable, to anyone he thought had some influence. I knew he’d get up someone’s nose and that might expose him in ways he really doesn’t need.”

“But I turned up instead,” Laura said.

“I didn’t really rate you, any more than Grantley did. You were young and a woman. Just shows how sexist you get when you live with someone like Grantley for all these years. He’d not have seen you as any sort of a threat, any more than he would me. We’re just women, after all, here to do as we’re told and keep quiet about it.”

“Do I take it that you’re not so keen to do as you’re told any more?” Laura asked, taken by surprise by the vehemence of Mrs. Adams’s complaints. “Or to keep quiet?”

“I’m fed up to the back teeth with all the lies and deceit,” Althea Adams said. “At first it was just cutting corners. I knew all about that even before I married him. I did work for him, after all.”

“As an accountant? I remember you saying …?”

“I did his books when the firm was still quite small,” she said. “He never missed the main chance, even then. But now …”

“You’re a director of City Ventures, aren’t you? Using your maiden name? Althea Simpson?”

“You worked that out, did you? Yes, it’s all a cover of course, women standing in for their men. We don’t actually do anything, you understand. Just meet now and again as a board to rubber stamp whatever the blokes have decided.”

“Like Karen Bailey stands in for Barry Foreman?”

“And Jane Peace, Jim Baistow’s married daughter. The men on the board are the apparatchiks – company secretary, finance director and so on, but we four women are there representing other people, though Karen wasn’t at the last meeting we had. Nominees, I suppose you could call us. Grantley persuaded me it’s not illegal – just a convenience, he said, so that things didn’t get muddled.”

“Muddled” was one way of putting it, Laura thought, as she looked at the list of City Ventures’ directors that she and Kevin Mower had downloaded from the Internet. Muddled, she thought, was not the word she would have chosen to describe the links between the committee members planning the redevelopment of the Heights and the building company which looked likely to be selected to do the work.

“So who’s Annie Costello?”

“Oh, she’s Dave Spencer’s girlfriend.”

“Councillor Spencer?”

“The same,” Althea Adams said. “Which is when I decided that I wanted out. You could end up in prison for less.”

“I expect you could,” Laura said.

“And it’d be no good pleading ignorance because we all knew bloody well what was going on. And who was going to get the contract to regenerate the Heights. That was it as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to jail for that gang of crooks.”

“So what will you do now?”

“I’ve had it up to here with Grantley and his schemes. I’ve had my bags packed for weeks just waiting for the moment to leave. Jeremy can stay here but I’ll take the girls with me. I think the moment’s come, don’t you? What will the Gazette pay me for my story do you think? Or do I have to go to the Globe in London?”

“I’d make it DCI Thackeray first, if I were you,” Laura said. “When you’ve given me chapter and verse for the Gazette, of course.”

Michael Thackeray gazed at Kevin Mower, slumped in his office looking just as unkempt as the last time he had seen him, and wondered whether Superintendent Longley might not have been right to turn down flat his request for Mower to rejoin CID immediately. The sergeant inspired no confidence in his boss although Thackeray had tried to persuade Jack Longley that it would be preferable, now that it had been decided to treat Donna Maitland’s death as suspicious, to have him back on board rather than careering around the Heights like a white knight looking for a dragon to slay.

“You know someone’s trashed Donna’s flat, don’t you?” Mower asked angrily. “Looks like the drug squad went in there with an enforcer and the locals finished the place off. Your crime scene’s as good as wrecked. We’ll never get a result there now.”

“I’ll talk to Ray Walter about what they found,” Thackeray said. “Amos is not one hundred per cent certain we’re dealing with murder here. She could have cut her own wrist with a knife.”

“A knife that dematerialised? There was no knife in that bathroom, guv,” Mower said flatly. “No trail of blood from anywhere else. And the light was out. You don’t slash your own wrists in the bath in the pitch dark. That’s what bugged me at first – I switched the light on when I went in and didn’t realise till later what I’d done. What about the toxicology? How many sleeping pills had she taken?”

“Amos says she must have been pretty heavily sedated,” Thackeray said.

“So what more do you want? She didn’t kill herself. I knew that from the very beginning.”

“Kevin, you’re too involved in this to make any sort of judgement …”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mower said wearily. “I know you don’t think I’m off the booze but I am, you know. That’s all history.”

“You’ll be OK when you have your medical, then, won’t you? But that isn’t what’s worrying Jack Longley anyway. You were emotionally involved with Donna Maitland. That’s a good enough reason for keeping you off the case. We want you as a witness on this one, Kevin, not an investigating officer. So my advice to you is to use the couple of weeks you’ve got left on leave to get yourself fit so you sail through the medical …” Thackeray hesitated, aware of the anger in Mower’s dark eyes. He did not want to provoke him into doing or saying anything terminally stupid.

“So no one can come up with any excuse not to take me back, you mean?”

“I don’t think anyone’s looking for excuses,” he said. “But you need to show you can cope.”

“And in the meantime, I sit on my backside while you decide how much energy to put into finding the toe-rag who killed Donna? Whatever the drug squad thinks, she was a good woman. She didn’t deserve what was happening to her. Ask anyone on the Heights.”

Thackeray suppressed the sudden spurt of anger which threatened to overwhelm him too.

“You know we’ll put in exactly the same amount of effort into clearing up Donna’s death as anyone else’s.” His voice crackled like ice and Mower knew he had overstepped the mark.

“I didn’t mean …” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

“In the meantime, there is some good news,” Thackeray said, changing the subject abruptly. “It looks as if we may be able to pin something on that bastard Barry Foreman at last, with what you and Laura unearthed about his business dealings with the council, and some unexplained payments Val Ridley turned up on Stanley Wilson’s bank records. Bonuses, in theory, but I reckon it’s much more likely that Foreman’s been bankrolling Wilson’s porno empire. I think Foreman has access to far more cash than his legitimate activities could possibly support and he’s been syphoning it off into other activities, legal and illegal. It may take months to track his dealings down, but at least we’ve got a lead now.”

“Still no sign of our unexpected company director Karen Bailey, though?”

“No sign of Karen, no sign of her twins.”

“It might be an idea to keep an eye on Foreman,” Mower said carefully. “In my spare time, guv.”

“What you do in your spare time, Kevin, is entirely up to you,” Thackeray said, equally non-committal. “You’re on leave, after all.”