Текст книги "Dead Man's Time"

Автор книги: Peter James

Соавторы: Peter James
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

76

His mobile phone rang. All that came up on the display was INTERNATIONAL.

He answered. ‘Yeah?’

‘Listen carefully – don’t worry, I’m on a secure phone. You should get one too.’

‘I have. I’m on it’

‘It’s the same number I’ve had for weeks.’

‘You’re the only person who has it.’

‘I want you to change it for the next time we speak.’

‘Next time we speak I won’t need it. We’ll be in the same room and I’ll have my hands around your fat neck.’

‘Temper, temper! Listen to me very carefully, we have a big problem. Gareth Dupont’s been charged. He’s been out on licence and now he’s on remand in Lewes Prison.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

‘Do you understand what it means for him if he’s convicted? The rest of his life in prison? I’m worried what the little shit might do to save his skin. He’ll shop Smallbone. Smallbone’s the weak link.’

‘Where the fuck are you?’

‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you silence Smallbone. Permanently. Get my drift?’

‘I want my part of the deal.’

‘You’ll get it when I hear Smallbone’s dead.’

‘You expect me to trust you? After the way you’ve behaved?’

‘I have low expectations; that’s a life lesson you should learn, if you want to be content. Toodle-pip!’

There was a click, then silence.

He stared at his phone in fury. But, he realized, the fat bastard was right about one thing. Amis Smallbone.

77

Gavin Daly awoke with a start, confused about where he was. He heard a drilling sound. For a moment he thought it was men digging a hole. But it was a bell. The phone, he realized. He was in his study, and must have fallen asleep in his armchair. His cigar lay in the glass ashtray, with a ring of ash on the end, next to his glass of whiskey, with the ice long melted. His head ached; he’d drunk too much this evening.

He took a moment more to fully orient himself, then picked up the receiver. ‘Gavin Daly,’ he said.

‘Hey Gavin, it’s Julius Rosenblaum here. Apologies for calling so late – hope I didn’t wake you?’ the treacly voice of the New York watch dealer asked. ‘But I thought you’d want to hear this right away.’

Daly looked at his watch. It was 11.30 p.m. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, no, not really – I’m – I’m still in my office.’ He was still feeling a little disoriented, not fully awake, but perking up fast. This was the call he had been waiting for, he realized.

‘The guy I told you about, Mr No Name, who called me on Tuesday about the Patek Philippe, came in this afternoon.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got the pictures of him and the watch, which I’ve pulled off our CCTV, and just emailed you. Thought I’d give you a heads-up. Do you want to check your mail and see if it is your watch?’

‘Yes – yes, Julius. Can you give me a few minutes?’

‘Take your time.’

‘You’re still in your office?’

‘I’ll be here for another ten minutes, then I have to go to a dinner. I’ll give you my cell and you can call on that if you miss me.’

‘Thank you. So – what did you think of the watch?’

‘He only brought in photographs, but the timepiece looks authentic enough. Quite a bit of damage – the crown and winding arbor are bent, the crystal is cracked and there’s a dent in the rear casing.’

‘That sounds like it,’ Gavin Daly said.

‘I asked him about the provenance. Said it has been in his family since the early 1920s.’

‘Did he now?’

‘Handed down from his grandfather.’

‘That’s a touching story,’ Daly said. ‘Remind me of his name?’

‘Robert Kenton. Does that mean anything to you?’

Daly thought hard for some moments. ‘No.’

‘I asked him how much interest he’d had in the watch, and he was cagey about who he had talked to, but said he was expecting offers next week – subject to the watch being what the photographs show – and he would take the best offer by close of business on Wednesday. I told him I was extremely interested, buttered him up a little, and he’s going to be bringing it in to me on Monday morning, at 11 a.m. If you could get over here, I could bring you into the room, then you’ll be able to see the piece for yourself. If it is yours, I just have to press one button, all the doors will lock, and the police will be on their way.’

‘I’m very grateful.’

‘Check the photographs and call me back.’

Daly eased himself, stiffly, out of the chair, went to over to his desk, sat down and logged on and opened the zipped file. Moments later he was looking at a sequence of low-grade CCTV images. First of a man entering through a door. He was in his mid-sixties, overweight, with short, curly grey hair, and dressed in a blue blazer with silver buttons, open-neck white shirt and paisley cravat. The next image showed a closer and clearer image of the man’s face. The third showed the front of the Patek Philippe watch.

He was certain that it was his watch, with the bent crown and winding and the busted crystal. But to be sure he had another hard rummage around for any photographs of it. He opened all the drawers of his desk, rummaged around through all the other old papers in there but still could not find one. He cast his mind back to when he had last seen one.

He was, he knew, getting a little forgetful. A couple of times recently he had lost important documents, or misfiled them inside others. It would turn up; no matter. He looked back at the screen, at the image of the watch, and began to tremble with anger. The bastard. The fat bastard.

Out of curiosity, he entered Robert Kenton into Google. There were over twenty hits. He then went to Images. None of them remotely matched the face on the photographs he had just looked at. Then he had another thought. Into the Google search he typed Eamonn Pollock.

Moments later he was staring at an old Argus newspaper headline from 1992.

BRIGHTON CHARITY PATRON SENTENCED

The whole story ran below: how Eamonn Pollock, patron of a leading Brighton charity for disabled children, had been convicted of receiving and handling stolen goods, including a haul of watches. But it wasn’t the story that interested him at this moment. It was the man’s photograph. Taken twenty years ago, he was marginally less pudgy, and his hair was darker. But there the differences ended.

It was the face of the man who had given his name to Julius Rosenblaum as Robert Kenton.

The man who, the genealogist Martin Diplock had found out for him, was a descendant of one of the men who had come into his bedroom that night, back in 1922, murdered his mother and dragged away his father.

And now he had stolen his father’s watch.

78

There were mixed feelings at the Friday morning briefing of Operation Flounder. All the team present were pleased that one suspect, Gareth Dupont, had been charged with Aileen McWhirter’s murder. But there was no celebration; they all knew that while one of the monkeys was now potted, the organ-grinder was still at large. Fingers pointed towards Eamonn Pollock, but so far they had no evidence to implicate him in, or even link him to, the crime.

The High Tech Crime Unit had found a series of calls made to Spain from Dupont’s mobile number during July and August. The Spanish numbers changed frequently and were all on untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile phones. They were not even able to tell the region in Spain. Neither Dupont’s work computer nor private laptop had yielded any useful information. Their hopes at the moment lay with Norman Potting, who had flown out to Marbella to liaise with the Spanish police investigating the deaths of the two Irish expats, Kenneth Barnes and Anthony Macario, and to see what he could find out about Eamonn Pollock. Digging away doggedly was one of Potting’s particular talents.

The forensic podiatrist whom Grace had used to great effect on a previous case was due to join this morning’s briefing at Grace’s request. ‘I’ve asked Dr Haydn Kelly to join us this morning as he has some significant information regarding Barnes and Macario. He will be along soon as he has a Faculty of Surgery board meeting to attend this morning and he’s been good enough to come straight over to us afterwards.’ At that point there was a knock at the door. He had arrived. Grace nodded at their visitor.

Haydn Kelly, in his mid-forties, had an open, pleasant face, with close-cropped hair, and had a relaxed air about him. He was wearing a navy linen suit, a crisp white shirt with a vivid emerald-green tie, and tan loafers; he could have just stepped out of a villa on the French Riviera. But when he turned to face the group, his demeanour became serious and focused. ‘Hi, team,’ he said. ‘Good to see you all again. The Marbella police have sent me casts taken from the feet of Kenneth Barnes and Anthony Macario. I’ll now explain, briefly, the matching I’ve done to the trainer prints taken from Mrs McWhirter’s house.’

Kelly spent the next five minutes explaining the calculations and his computer analysis, concluding that the shoeprints taken at the crime scene were a match to Barnes and Macario.

Roy Grace thanked him. ‘Okay, we now have three people at the crime scene. Two are dead, and the third, Gareth Dupont, is staring into the abyss. I’m having him taken out of prison on a Production Order, and am going to chat to him on an informal basis – see if we can get any names out of him – in exchange for a few privileges.’

‘How about a Jacuzzi in his cell?’ Dave Green said.

‘I wish!’ Grace replied. Giving prisoners favours was no longer an option. Any privileges had to be given, unofficially and unsanctioned, while the prisoner was with the police and away from the prison.

Bella Moy reported that one sharp-eyed member of her outside enquiry team had spotted an Art Deco mirror taken from Aileen McWhirter’s house on an antiques stall in Lewes. The owner said he’d bought it from a man who walked in off the street. He was sketchy about his description, but it sounded to her like Lester Stork.

‘That would fit,’ Grace said.

‘Presumably before he was dead?’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘Or did he get it dead cheap?’

Several of the team groaned. Then Roy Grace turned to the antiques expert, Peregrine Stuart-Simmonds. ‘You have a possible development.’

‘Yes, I do. I have a list of all forthcoming auctions around the world for the next three months, which I’ve pinned up there.’ He pointed to one of the whiteboards. ‘I’ve also obtained all their catalogues. The thing is with many of them entry remains open until fairly close to auction time. I’ve given all of them the details we have of the Patek Philippe, and I’m fairly confident they will notify me if someone tries to place it. At the same time, I’ve been in touch with all the dealers capable of either buying a timepiece at this price level, or handling the sale of one. So I’m hopeful between the auction houses and the dealers we may soon get some information.’

Glenn Branson raised his hand. ‘Mr Stuart-Simmonds, you said at a previous meeting it was likely a number of the items taken would have been presold to private collectors. Might that be the case with this watch – in which case it wouldn’t show up on your radar?’

‘Well, the thing is,’ the antiques expert replied, ‘the perpetrators would have had to have prior detailed knowledge of any of the items, if they were stealing them to order. I think it is very significant for Operation Flounder that almost everything that has been taken was detailed on the insurance inventory, while the other pieces missing, some of which appear to have been fenced locally, do not. The watch was not on the insurance, so in my view, it’s unlikely it was known about in advance.’

‘So do you think it’s possible the mastermind behind this still doesn’t know about it?’ Guy Batchelor asked.

‘Yes, very possible. It could be, of course, that whoever took it is not aware of its value.’

Grace said nothing. He was thinking about the concealed safe, and back to yesterday, to his brief interview with Sarah Courteney in her car. She’d acted a little strangely when he’d asked her the price of her own wristwatch – but maybe that was out of embarrassment at the extravagance of it. Yet she had said that she and Aileen McWhirter were very friendly, and that she used to pop in often. Had the old lady shown her the Patek Philippe? If so, did Sarah Courteney mention it inadvertently to Dupont? Pillow talk? What was that old saying? He remembered seeing it on a warning poster from the Second World War: Loose lips sink ships.

Sarah Courteney had big lips, very beautiful ones, so full they almost looked unreal. Were they loose?

79

Roy Grace had never harboured any ambition to be a rich man. He’d been to grand houses on a number of occasions, visiting them either for charity functions or as crime scenes; Sandy had been a member of the National Trust, and at weekends they would sometimes visit one of its stately homes. But while he enjoyed the beauty of their landscaped gardens, their architecture and art treasures, what he always found far more intriguing, with his policeman’s mind, was where the money had come from to buy everything in the first place. You did not have to go back too many generations with most aristocratic families to find robber barons, he knew.

That thought was going through his mind now, as the wrought-iron gates of Gavin Daly’s mansion swung open. He drove along an avenue lined with beech trees for half a mile, and then saw the front of the house looming. It was a truly grand residence by anyone’s definition, with a portico of four columns atop the steps, rising almost the entire height of the building, and although Grace did not know much about architecture, the aged stone and fine, classical proportions of the façade gave him the sense that this was the real thing and not some modern pastiche.

Either way, he could not imagine how many millions it would be worth. Tens, probably; yet all his investigations into Gavin Daly’s background had yielded nothing criminal. A wily character who sailed close to the wind, but not a crook. Grace felt sorry for him. A lonely man at the end of his life, his sister brutally killed. Did all this wealth give him any comfort or joy?

Parked near the entrance, close to an elaborate fountain adorned with stone figurines, was an elderly navy blue Mercedes limousine with an even more elderly uniformed chauffeur.

Grace rang the front doorbell, aware of the CCTV cameras scrutinizing him, wondering if he would be let in after their previous altercation. A good couple of minutes later the uniformed housekeeper opened it, and greeted him in her pleasant rural Sussex burr. ‘Good morning, sir. I’ll take you through to Mr Daly.’

He noticed a large suitcase standing by the front door, then followed her as she walked slowly and stiffly across the hallway, and knocked on the door to Gavin Daly’s study.

Grace went in, breathing in the dry reek of old cigar smoke, which seemed ingrained in the oak panelling and the furniture. He’d always liked the smell, because it reminded him of his father, who enjoyed the occasional cigar. Daly, dressed in a crisply pressed sports jacket, checked shirt, cavalry twill trousers and suede brogues, stood up. ‘How can I help you, Detective Superintendent?’ he said, looking distinctly uneasy. He strode across the room with his stick, shook Grace’s hand with his own bony grip, then ushered him to a sofa, and perched on the one opposite.

‘I hope you don’t mind me popping in to see you, sir?’

‘No. I apologize if I was a bit short with you previously. This is all very stressful, as I’m sure you can understand.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

Grace noticed him glance anxiously at his watch.

‘You have a plane to catch, sir?’ he asked him.

‘Yes – I do – I’m off to France; to Nice. I thought I’d get away to my villa there for the weekend. I need a break from all of this.’ He gave him a smile that was more affable than at their last meeting.

‘I can understand. A nice luxury to have. Although if I lived in a house as beautiful as this, I’m not sure I’d ever want to leave it.’

Daly sat stiffly and just smiled. ‘Do you have some news for me, Detective Superintendent?’

‘We’ve recovered an Art Deco mirror that we think belonged to your sister – I’d like you to identify it at some point, if that is possible?’

Daly nodded with enthusiasm.

‘But that’s not my reason for coming. Actually it’s a rather delicate situation, sir.’ Grace glanced down at the fine inlaid table between them. It was 9.30 a.m. and he craved a coffee, but that did not seem to be about to happen.

Daly looked at him inquisitively.

‘We know how well protected your watch was, in the safe with the dummy door. And we’ve been fairly sure all along that there must have been inside information.’

‘From the knocker-boy?’

Grace shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t have thought your sister would have shown him the safe, would she?’

‘Never,’ he said fiercely, and glanced at his watch again. ‘It was when they tortured her; that’s when she must have told them.’

‘That is of course one distinct possibility, sir. But I’d like to ask you something. How friendly was your late sister with Sarah Courteney?’

‘Extremely. Aileen was very fond of her. She never got on with my son Lucas, but she liked Sarah a lot. Sarah called in on her often, keeping Aileen company.’

‘Would you think it possible your sister might have shown Sarah Courteney your watch at some time?’

His face darkened. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That Sarah had something to do with this?’

Grace, faced with a difficult decision, looked back down at the coffee table, studying it intently for a moment, as if he might find the answer to what he should do carved there in the wood. ‘There’s no delicate way of saying this, but it would seem your daughter-in-law was having an affair,’ he said, looking Daly in the eye.

Daly shrugged. ‘Good luck to her. She deserves better than my son, that’s for sure.’

Surprised and relieved by the man’s reaction, Grace went on. ‘The man she’s been having the affair with is Gareth Dupont – who has been charged with your sister’s murder.’

There was a long silence. Grace saw Daly clenching both his hands so tightly he could almost see the bones through the thin, white skin. ‘This explains a lot,’ he said, finally.

‘Do you think the two of them might have been in cahoots, sir?’

Daly shook his head. ‘Not for one moment, no. Sarah is a decent person. I would imagine this Dupont character would have targeted her, and just gently, gently got the information from her. Have you talked to her?’

‘Yes, and I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Grace replied.

‘I’d say she was used, exploited. Lucas treated her like dirt. She was a ready target for a piece of vermin like Dupont.’

Grace watched his face closely. ‘What time is your flight to Nice, sir?’

‘One o’clock.’

‘Safe travels, and I’ll keep you updated on any news.’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

*

As he left Daly’s house, two things were preying on Roy Grace’s mind. The first was Sarah Courteney’s uncomfortable reaction when he had asked about the cost of her watch, which he still did not understand. But at the moment, as he pulled into his parking space at the front of Sussex House, there was something more immediate: the suitcase in Gavin Daly’s hallway. He had watched a documentary on television some months back, about people with second homes in France and Spain. They talked about the cheapness and convenience of hopping on and off a low-cost flight. The secret, all of them said, was to take no luggage. No wasting time with checked baggage. Just a small carry-on holdall.

That was a substantial suitcase in the hallway of Gavin Daly’s house. Very definitely it would be checked baggage – unless of course he was flying in a private jet. But even so, surely a seasoned and wealthy traveller like him did not need to lug baggage around?

Unless of course he had lied about his destination.

His phone rang. It was Peregrine Stuart-Simmonds. ‘Roy, I think this will interest you. I’ve just put down the phone from a friend: a dealer in very rare watches, Richard Robbins, in Chicago’s Jewelers Row. This is a man of impeccable integrity. He’s heard through the grapevine about a Patek Philippe watch, which sounds from the description very much like our missing one, being hawked around in New York.’

‘Does he have any names? Anyone our team could talk to?’

‘Yes, several. I’m on it now. Just thought you might want to know.’

‘I do indeed, thank you.’

The moment he ended the call, Roy Grace phoned MIR-1 and put in a request for a search of all passenger lists on outbound flights to New York for the rest of the day. The name he gave them to look for was Gavin Daly.