Текст книги "Dead Man's Time"

Автор книги: Peter James

Соавторы: Peter James
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

68

Roy Grace’s love of Brighton ran deep in his veins. At his wedding, his best man, Dick Pope, had joked with his typical black humour that if Roy was ever unfortunate enough to be the subject of a postmortem, the pathologist would find the word Brighton repeated right through every bone in his body, like in sticks of Brighton rock.

For over a decade the city’s football team, the Albion, known by locals as the Seagulls, had been without a proper home, and forced to use an athletics stadium. But during the past year, thanks to the generosity of an individual benefactor, Tony Bloom, and American Express, they now had the Amex Stadium, a building that by general consensus was one of the finest football stadiums in Europe.

Wednesdays were not usual nights for a game, but this was an important Championship game. As Roy Grace sat in the traffic jam on the A27, staring at the stunning sweep of the building over to the right, he felt a great twinge of pride. The building was not only great for the city, it had rekindled his interest in the game, as it had for thousands of other residents of Brighton and Hove.

Ten minutes later, parked on the kerb between two marked police cars, he was escorted by Darren Balkham, the Police Football Liaison Officer, wearing a high-viz jacket and uniform cap, to the Police Observation Room in the North Stand.

In an elevated position, directly behind the goal posts, the room had a commanding view of the brightly lit pitch and the terraces. The game was in progess and a quick look at the scoreboard told Grace the score, at the moment, was nil-nil.

Over twenty thousand of the twenty-seven thousand fans here today were season-ticket holders and there had been a lot of careful strategizing to minimize trouble when the seating areas had been allocated. One whole section of the East Stand was for families. Next to them were the fans known to be milder mannered. The rowdiest had been placed at the North Stand, close to the observation room. Visiting fans were grouped in an area on the South Stand.

The CCTV controllers behind a bank of monitors in this room could zoom any of the stadium’s eighty-seven cameras in on a troublemaker so tightly they could read the time on his or her watch.

Balkham introduced Roy Grace to Chris Baker, the Safety Officer, smartly dressed in a grey suit. ‘You’re looking for someone in the crowd – Lucas Daly?’

‘That’s right,’ Grace said.

‘I’ve already checked out our list of season-ticket holders and he’s not one of them. You don’t know who he might have come with?’

‘No. I tried to get hold of him earlier and his wife said he was coming here.’

Baker led him over to the bank of monitors and sat Grace down next to an operator.

Although monitoring potential hooliganism was the primary object of the cameras, they had a secondary function for the CID, which was to observe Persons of Interest to the police. In particular, to watch where local villains were seated, and who they were with. It was a valuable source of intelligence.

With the assistance of the operator, steadily scanning the 27,000-strong crowd, it took Grace just under fifteen minutes to spot Lucas Daly, on the twelfth row of the West Stand. He was wearing a leather aviator’s jacket with a fleece collar, a roll-neck sweater and jeans, and a blue and white Seagulls scarf draped around his shoulders. Grace recognized him from the photographs in the living room of his home when he had gone to talk to his wife, Sarah Courteney. He also recognized the men seated either side of him. One, Ricky Chateham, was a local wheeler-dealer, in the vending-machine trade as a day job, but a known handler of high-end stolen goods, whom the police had been watching for some time; he was also suspected of being behind the supply of drugs into several clubs around Sussex and its neighbouring counties, but so far there had never been enough evidence to nail him. The Albion records showed he was the season-ticket holder for the three seats they occupied. The other man was a criminal solicitor favoured by many of the city’s villains called Leighton Lloyd. Handy, Grace thought, cynically. Daly might well be needing him sometime soon.

It was a lacklustre game, enlivened by a couple of early yellow cards, and then some minutes later by a tantrum thrown by the team manager, Gus Poyet, after a player was sent off in a highly disputed decision by the referee.

The crowd roared and broke into their regular angry chant against the ref. The referee’s a wanker!

But Roy Grace wasn’t following the game. He was glued to Lucas Daly’s every movement. Daly wasn’t following the game, either. He was engaged in what looked like very intense discussions with the two men. Grace dearly wished he had a lip-reader with him at this moment.

Ten minutes before the final whistle he left the observation room and made his way along past the exits to the West Stand, then waited. All the supporters would have to pass him, whether heading towards the car parks, the buses or the train station.

As they poured out, his target, flanked by Chateham and the solicitor, stopped less than ten yards from him to light a cigarette. Grace stepped forward, holding up his warrant card. ‘Lucas Daly? Detective Superintendent Grace. I’m the Senior Investigating Officers on your aunt’s murder. Wonder if I could have a quick word?’

Ricky Chateham gave Grace an uneasy glance of recognition and strode on. The solicitor stood his ground, giving Daly an inquisitive glance.

‘See you in the car park, Leighton,’ Daly said, dismissing him. Then he looked levelly at Grace, showing no surprise or any other emotion. ‘Yes?’

Grace put Lucas Daly’s age at around late-forties. He studied his face for any signs of his father in it, but saw none. Unlike his father, whose aged face was etched with character, Lucas Daly had blandly thuggish good looks, with an unreadable expression, and exuded all the personality of an unplugged fridge.

‘How was your golf this weekend?’

Daly frowned, then took a moment to reply. ‘It was all right.’

‘Nice golf courses around Marbella?’

‘Does my golf have something to do with my aunt, Detective – er – sorry – didn’t get your name?’

‘Grace.’ Then in answer to the question he said, ‘Yes, perhaps it does.’ He noticed the man’s discomfort, and his eyes all over the place. ‘You were in Marbella this past weekend?’

‘What of it?’

‘On a golfing holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who did you go with?’

‘On my own – went to meet up with some friends who live out there.’

‘Expats?’

‘What of it?’

‘You didn’t actually go alone, did you?’

Daly stared at him, looking uneasy, his eyes all over the place. ‘What are you saying?’

‘You travelled with a gentleman called Augustine Krasniki – you bought return tickets for both of you on easyJet.’

‘Oh yeah, right – him.’ His eyes continued moving around wildly. ‘He’s my assistant, you know.’

‘Caddies for you, does he?’

‘Yeah, exactly.’

‘Good golfer, are you?’

‘Average.’

‘What’s your handicap?’

As Daly dragged on his cigarette, Grace watched the man’s eyes.

‘Twelve.’

Roy Grace had had a go at taking up golf some years back, but had given up after a few months of Sandy complaining about him being away so much during his precious hours of free time. He knew that a twelve handicap was impressive; you didn’t get that unless you played regularly. And if you played regularly, every now and then you would win a trophy. Which you would put on display. ‘Where do you play locally?’

‘Haywards Heath, mostly. I’m sorry, what does this have to do with my aunt – my late aunt?’

‘Do the names Anthony Macario and Kenneth Barnes mean anything to you, Mr Daly?’

Daly squinted at him, as if a stream of smoke had gone into his eyes. ‘No, never heard of them.’

Grace nodded. ‘So it wasn’t you or your father who had anything to do with them ending up in the harbour at Puerto Banus, then?’

For a moment Grace really thought, from Daly’s ferocious expression, that he was going to be punched in the face; he braced himself to duck. But the punch never came. Instead, Lucas Daly pointed an arm in the direction that the crowd was taking. ‘Never heard of them. Okay if I go now? I want to beat this mob out of the car park.’

‘You can go, but I want you to know something. No one’s above the law, Mr Daly. Okay? I’m very sorry about your aunt. What happened to her should not happen to any human being, ever. But you need to know I don’t allow vigilantes.’

Daly dragged on his cigarette again. ‘What exactly are you insinuating, Detective Grates?’

‘Grace,’ he corrected. ‘I’m insinuating nothing. But I’m not convinced you went to Marbella to play golf and I don’t allow people to take the law into their own hands.’

‘My father and I are law-abiding people,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘So can I ask, how are you doing in finding out who killed my aunt, and getting her property back? In particular the watch – it means a great deal to my dad.’

‘We’re working on it,’ Roy Grace said.

‘Yeah, well, my dad and I are working on it too. Just in case you don’t deliver – nothing personal. We’ll see who gets the watch back first, Detective Grace. The longer it’s gone, the less chance any of us have of getting it back. True?’

‘No one’s going to find it easy to sell a rare watch of that high value, regardless of its provenance,’ Grace replied.

‘That’s what worries me, Detective,’ he said. ‘Maybe some scumbag who knows nothing about watches took it and flogged it to a fence for a few quid.’

‘Which is why you went to Marbella, right? To stop the watch from being taken any further distance overseas? Anthony Macario and Kenneth Barnes got in your way, so you had them drowned. Am I warm?’

‘Warm? You’re the advance guard of the fucking Ice Age. I suggest you stop wasting public money having freebies at football matches, and get back to catching villains.’

69

It was 10.15 p.m. by the time Roy Grace drove out through the congested exit of the Amex stadium car park. There was an accident ahead on the A27, which partially blocked the road, and it took him another forty minutes to finally arrive back at Cleo’s house.

He punched in the entry code to the gate and entered the cobbled courtyard, looking at the house next door, which was in darkness, curious about the new neighbours. Seemed like they went to bed early, which was good news. In a small, gated community like this, the biggest nightmare would be someone who stayed up late playing loud music.

He let himself in, happily unaware of the figure behind net curtains in a dark, upstairs room next door, cigarette burning in the ashtray beside his tumbler of whisky, who was watching him with hate burning in his eyes.

All was quiet in Cleo’s house, with a few dimmed lights on downstairs. Humphrey bounded over and he patted and hushed the dog. Then he removed his shoes, tiptoed across the lounge to say hi to Marlon, and went into the kitchen. Cleo had left him a plate of cod, mash and beans wrapped in clingfilm and handwritten instructions on how long to microwave it, followed by a row of kisses.

He followed the instructions, gave Humphrey a biscuit, poured himself a glass of rosé wine from a bottle in the fridge, gave Humphrey a second biscuit, then carried his meal on a tray back into the living room, and sat on the sofa, which the dog insisted on sharing with him. He promised Humphrey he’d take him out for a walk later, switched on the television, the sound low, to see if there was anything he wanted to watch. Then he noticed the handcuffs.

They lay on the far right-hand side of the low coffee table, pinning down a handwritten note, which said:

For sometime soon . . . XXXXXXXXXXX

He grinned, then channel-surfed through to Sky News, and watched the banner headlines. When he had finished eating he picked up another of the books on the history of the White Hand Gang and turned to the index, looking for one name in particular. There were six different page references against it. He began to read through them; the further he read, the more he became convinced.

Then he was distracted by Humphrey suddenly sitting up and giving a single bark.

He turned to see Cleo standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding several silk ties in her hand and wearing nothing but a very horny smile.

70

‘What you smiling about, old timer?’ Glenn Branson asked.

It was 8.25 a.m. Grace looked up from his desk, holding a half-eaten Trudie’s bacon sarnie in his hand. ‘The report from yesterday’s progress at the trial. It’s looking good for us.’

Branson swivelled around the chair in front of his desk, and sat astride it, placing his hands on the back. He looked like he had just bitten into a lemon. During the arrest of Carl Venner, Branson had been shot, the bullet, fortunately, missing all of his internal organs. ‘Glad to hear it. Would hate to think it went any other way.’

‘How’s you?’

‘Full on damage limitation. Ari did a great job of poisoning my kids against me. I’ve got an unexpected ally in her sister, who turns out to be a great Ari fan – not.’

‘What about the boyfriend?’

‘He had the nerve to come round for some of his possessions – and to give me verbal for changing the locks! Told him if he wanted his stuff, he’d better start looking in the local skips. Can you believe it, the kids wanted to see him?’

‘I can believe it, matey. Of course they’re missing him. Remember, their lives have been turned totally upside down. For the past year or so he’s been their father figure. You’re going to have to take it one step at a time. One day your kids will realize what a decent guy you are.’

‘You think so?’

‘Sure. Give ’em thirty years or so to adjust – you know – to the fact you left their CDs all over the floor and regularly forgot to feed their goldfish.’

‘I don’t know why I like you,’ Branson said. ‘You know, sometimes you remind me of that bastard Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.’

‘Didn’t he handcuff his girlfriend to his bed?’

‘In the opening scene. Or maybe she handcuffed him.’

Grace smiled.

‘That’s a very dirty grin.’

Grace nodded, memories of last night still vivid in his mind. ‘Yeah. Very!’

‘Cleo’s a bit kinky, is she?’

Grace gave him a shrug. ‘You’re a movie buff. You like Woody Allen, don’t you?’

‘Not everything, but some, yeah.’

‘So don’t you remember, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex?’

Branson frowned. Then he nodded. ‘Yeah! Someone asked him if sex was dirty. And he replied, “Only if it’s done right!”’

Grace smiled, then tried to prise a bit of bacon free from between two of his teeth.

Branson lowered his chin onto his folded arms. ‘Ari and me, we used to do it right, once. It goes; that’s the bummer. You have kids, and it goes.’ He raised a warning finger. ‘Don’t let it go – despite your age!’

‘Thanks for the advice!’ Grace looked at his watch. ‘Okay, two minutes,’ he said.

71

Grace began the 8.30 a.m. briefing by launching straight into the hypothesis that had been churning in his mind all night. ‘Okay, team, Gavin Daly’s son Lucas went to Marbella and, according to the airline’s passenger list, he was accompanied by a character named Augustine Krasniki. Our Interpol sources tell us Krasniki has a string of convictions for assault back in his native Albania. In one of them, he gouged both eyeballs out of a male victim who had defaulted on a debt, leaving him permanently blind. But thanks to our bleeding heart liberal European laws, we have to let this monster in and give him money and free health treatment. Our same Interpol sources tell us that two people were found dead on Sunday morning – Anthony Macario and Kenneth Barnes.’ He looked at Annalise Vineer. ‘You have some information about them, I believe?’

The indexer looked down at her notes. ‘Yes, sir. Both of them were employed as yacht crew by Eamonn Pollock, on his boat Contented, which is permanently berthed in Puerto Banus. We know that Pollock has a record for handling stolen watches and clocks. Macario has a string of previous convictions for aggravated burglary, as well as one, seventeen years ago in Manchester, for Class A drug dealing. Ken Barnes is two years free of his licence for ten years for armed robbery on a building society branch in Worthing. He took a hostage – a twenty-year-old woman – who he threatened to kill. I don’t think you could find a nicer couple of guys, sir.’

There was a titter of laughter.

‘So no great loss then,’ Norman Potting said.

Ignoring the DS, Grace thanked Vineer, then looked down at the notes that his assistant had prepared for this meeting. ‘I think Lucas Daly went to Marbella to attempt to recover his father’s highly valuable Patek Philippe watch. The time of death of these two people found in Puerto Banus harbour coincides with his visit.’

Norman Potting raised his hand. ‘Chief, if they’d gone to try to recover the watch, and anything else, what would be the gain in killing those two?’

‘My thoughts precisely, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘The chance to check the boat out, perhaps? Hopefully you’ll find out more than Interpol have given us so far when you get out there.’

‘Why didn’t they just tie the two of them up, in that case?’ Guy Batchelor said.

‘Because Krasniki’s a psycho?’ Potting said. ‘We’ve just heard about his past form.’

Grace was thinking about the bruises he had seen on Sarah Courteney’s chest, when her dressing gown had slipped open, and then again in Dupont’s bedroom. ‘We know that Daly was arrested two years ago for assaulting his wife, Sarah Courteney, and then released when she wouldn’t press charges. He’s a thug. Could be that he and Krasniki went too far.’ He held up a sheaf of printed papers. ‘I have the post-mortem report on the two men from the Marbella Coroner. It makes interesting reading.’

He paused, the bit of bacon stuck in his teeth nagging him, but he couldn’t be seen picking his teeth in front of his team, so did his best to ignore it. ‘Summarizing the report,’ he said, ‘Macario had two broken bones in his foot, and bruising right across it, consistent with it being crushed. He also had severe bruising across the back of his neck, and Barnes had severe bruising around the front of his. Not injuries I would consider consistent with capsizing a small rubber dinghy.’

‘So if Daly and Krasniki killed these two, chief,’ Guy Batchelor said, ‘was it because they had got the information they wanted, or because they hadn’t?’

‘This kind of killing tends to be done to silence people,’ Grace said.

‘Silence them from what, in this instance?’ Batchelor asked.

It was a good question. The bacon in his teeth was really distracting him now, and Grace desperately wanted a toothpick. He tried to dislodge it with his tongue, for the twentieth time, without success. ‘Possibly to stop them from telling their paymaster who was on his trail. Possibly because, as Norman so succinctly put it, they’re both a couple of psychos and Daly lost his temper with them over his aunt’s death.’

‘Should we bring old man Daly in for questioning?’ Glenn Branson asked.

Grace shook his head. ‘I think Daly could be ahead of us. We should put surveillance on his son. I’ve a feeling he’ll lead us to the watch. If we find the watch, I suspect we’ll find who’s really behind this.’

‘Eamonn Pollock?’ Branson quizzed.

‘I’d put him as our prime suspect,’ Roy Grace replied. ‘We have Gareth Dupont in custody and we’ll have to try to make him talk. In his early interviews he gave his first account, and we developed a strategy for the interviews this morning. His detention has been extended. It’s a shame we’re not allowed to offer murder suspects a deal on sentence. But I think our interview strategy might be to offer him another kind of deal.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ Potting said.

‘Let’s recap on what we know about Lucas Daly. This is just my hypothesis – nothing proven yet. The knocker-boy, Ricky Moore, who Lucas Daly considers responsible for his aunt’s robbery and murder, ends up in Intensive Care with severe burns. Lucas Daly goes to Marbella, and lo and behold, Macario and Barnes end up as floaters.’ He gave Norman Potting a quizzical stare.

‘I’m on your bus, chief.’

‘Now, with Lucas Daly’s record for vengeance, if I was shagging his wife, I think I’d want to keep it quiet. In particular, I wouldn’t like hubby to find out. Would you?’

‘No.’

‘Murder suspects don’t get bail. If we can bang Dupont up in the remand wing, and let him know we’re going to tell Lucas Daly about him and his wife, I think he’d talk. You don’t have many places to hide in prison. But we have one problem to overcome. We haven’t got enough to charge Dupont yet; we need something that puts him at the house. He lied to us when we went to see him at his office, and we asked him what car he drove. He told us he owned a Golf GTI. There was a black Porsche parked outside his block of flats. The registration plate gave the owner as a leasing company in London.’ He turned to Bella Moy. ‘Which is why your search did not reveal anything. I’ve been in touch with the company, and they tell me it’s leased to one Gareth Dupont. At his address. But that still doesn’t put Dupont in Aileen McWhirter’s house.’ He looked around at his team.

‘We have his dab on a bronze statuette and the call made from his mobile phone, and now we know he drives a black Porsche, similar to one spotted at the scene exactly a week before the attack,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

Grace shook his head. ‘The triangulation report on his mobile phone isn’t helpful enough. He could have been anywhere within a quarter-of-a-mile radius of the house at the time of his call. It’s too circumstantial. On the fingerprint, his brief would argue that he might have handled the statuette at Lester Stork’s house. It’s not going to fly – we need something more.’

‘Sir,’ asked researcher Jacqueline Twamley, ‘do we know any more about Lester Stork’s death?’

‘Yes, I’ve heard from one of the Coroner’s Officers, Philip Keay, that it was natural causes – a heart attack.’

‘Probably the excitement of handling all that stolen loot!’ Norman Potting said.

‘Isn’t it a bit too cosy that Dupont was shagging Lucas Daly’s wife, chief?’ Potting said. ‘Doesn’t that smack of collusion?’

‘I can’t rule out that she’s involved and we need to talk to her. I’m pretty sure Daly beats her, so she’d have a motive. But when Guy and I talked to her, I got the feeling she was genuinely fond of the old woman.’ He looked at the DS.

Batchelor nodded. ‘I agree, chief. I’d say it’s more likely she was unwittingly targeted by Dupont.’ He shrugged. ‘Unhappy marriage. Dupont’s a fit guy, a charmer. More likely they met somewhere and he pulled. I’m going to talk to her and see what she says.’

The youngest and newest member of his team, DC Jack Alexander, raised his hand. ‘I’ve found out something regarding that Porsche, sir.’

‘What’s that, Jack?’

The young DC told him. When he had finished, the whole atmosphere in the room had changed.

‘That, young man,’ Roy Grace said, ‘is pure bloody genius!’