All Quiet on Arrival (19 page)

‘Bloody hell!' I exclaimed. ‘And to think he's on unemployment benefit.'

‘Why shouldn't he be, guv?' said Dave. ‘I don't suppose that Her Majesty's government recognizes illegal drug dealing as a lawful occupation … yet.'

‘There was no sign of a struggle, as far as I can tell,' continued Linda, which is what Dr Mortlock had said, ‘but we're in the process of lifting a number of fingerprints. However, judging by the general lack of cleanliness of the room, they could belong to the three occupants before Metcalfe, at the very least. But we live in hope,' she added with a smile.

‘Any corres?' I asked, using the police shorthand for paperwork of any description.

‘Only an Australian passport in his name, and a credit card belonging to James Barton. I gather you'll not be surprised by that.'

‘I guessed there'd be something of the sort. He was probably the bloke who tried to use the debit card that the bank seized. Are there any letters?'

‘I'm afraid not. But there is an entry stamp in the passport. It seems he arrived in the UK on the third of June this year.'

‘I suppose you haven't come across a mobile phone or a BlackBerry, or anything like that. I know that James Barton owned one. He told us that he'd got a mobile.'

Linda picked up a plastic bag. ‘There's this mobile phone, Mr Brock, but it's a cheap pay-as-you-go job. I doubt that James Barton would've owned it.'

‘If Metcalfe nicked Barton's expensive phone, he'd've flogged it, I expect.' I suggested.

‘What about a rent book?' asked Dave.

‘Haven't found one, Dave, and we've done a thorough search,' said Linda. ‘But there was this.' She produced a small bottle of bright red nail enamel, and a mascara pencil. ‘They'd fallen down the back of the chest of drawers.'

‘I can't see that a butch Aussie like Metcalfe was in the habit of using those,' I said. ‘Any female clothing?'

‘No, nothing, Mr Brock.' Linda pointed to a makeshift cubicle, the curtain of which was drawn back. ‘I checked his boudoir,' she added sarcastically, ‘and as you can see there are only some empty hangers, a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts screwed up on the bottom. All dirty, of course. But I think I detected a whiff of Jo Malone.'

‘Who the hell's Jo Malone?' I asked, wondering whether this was another name to add to our list of partygoers.

‘It's an expensive line of perfumery, Mr Brock.' Linda shot me a pitiful smile. ‘White jasmine and mint at a guess.'

‘Oh. Well, if there was a woman living with him, she's made a hurried departure.' I glanced at the narrow bed, and decided that if Metcalfe had shared it with a female, both of them would have been very uncomfortable.

‘You happy for the body to be moved now?' I asked.

‘Yes, I've done with it,' said Linda. ‘DS Wright's here somewhere.'

I sent Dave downstairs to find ‘Shiner' Wright, the laboratory liaison officer. His responsibility was to take charge of Metcalfe's body in order to maintain continuity of evidence while the scientific tests were carried out on it.

On our way out, we stopped again at Seamus Howard's office.

‘We couldn't find Metcalfe's rent book,' I said. ‘Any idea where he keeps it?'

Howard looked shifty. ‘I don't know,' he said.

‘But you did issue him with one, didn't you?' asked Dave, his antenna telling him that Howard was lying.

‘He must have it somewhere,' said Howard, but it sounded unconvincing.

‘If you haven't provided him with one you're committing an offence,' said Dave. ‘Section Twenty-Four, Rent and Rooming Houses Act 1987 applies. Two years in the nick,' he continued, instantly manufacturing a fictional piece of impressive sounding legislation, secure in the knowledge that Howard wouldn't know anything about the law regarding rent books. ‘So you'd better hope we find one.'

Howard looked rather unnerved at Dave's threat, but said nothing.

‘It seems that there was a woman living with Metcalfe at some time, Mr Howard. D'you know anything about that?'

‘No, I don't. I never saw no birds coming or going. Anyway, it's only a single bed.'

Howard was definitely a character who under different circumstances would have merited closer scrutiny, but I had no time to waste on him. We waited until ‘Shiner' Wright had supervised the removal of Metcalfe's body, and left Linda to make a video and photographic record of the scene. And to gather any other useful evidence she might find in the course of her search.

‘I reckon our Seamus Howard's on heroin, guv, and that Metcalfe probably paid his rent in kind,' said Dave, as we left the building.

‘I agree,' I said, ‘but we don't have the time to mess about with that. We'll hand it over to the Drugs Squad. It'll give 'em something to do.'

By two o'clock Dave and I were back at the ‘factory', as we CID officers tend to call our place of work. I now had three murders to solve, and I wasn't happy, even though this latest one might have resolved the other two.

I telephoned Steve Granger at the Australian High Commission, and told him that we'd found Bruce Metcalfe and that he'd been murdered. I also told him that the victim had arrived in the UK from Australia on the third of June this year.

Steve said he'd look into it.

‘Any news on Gregory Horton, Steve?' I was still interested in discovering the whereabouts of the son of Maurice Horton and Diana Barton, even though I thought it was unlikely to further our enquiries. But I hate loose ends.

‘Nothing yet, Harry. I'll let you know as soon as I have something.'

As I replaced the receiver, Kate Ebdon came into my office clutching a file. ‘I've been doing some ferreting, guv, and I've discovered the name of the Bartons' London solicitor.'

‘How did you do that?' I asked, although Kate could always be relied on to dig up facts that were pertinent to the case.

‘I checked with the hotel company of which he was a director, and they told me. Apparently this firm of solicitors handled all Barton's legal affairs, personal as well as business. And since his marriage to Diana they'd handled her affairs too.'

‘So, what have you learned?' I motioned Kate to a chair.

Kate sat down, and opened the file. ‘I obtained a copy of both wills from the solicitor. Each was the standard sort of reciprocal settlement that I'd anticipated. On her death, Diana Barton's estate went to James Barton. But as he died within twenty-eight days, it came back to her and went to her son Gregory Horton. And as James Barton had left his entire fortune to Diana, Gregory gets the lot.'

‘How much?'

‘Give or take a few pounds, Gregory Horton's now worth something in the region of eighteen million pounds. That's made up of deposits, stocks and shares, and the Bartons' house at Tavona Street. And being Chelsea that's worth a few quid on its own.'

‘Ye Gods! If that doesn't sound like a motive, I don't know what does,' I said. ‘Pity we don't know where Gregory Horton is.'

‘Ah, but we do, guv,' said Kate triumphantly. ‘The last address the solicitors had for him is in Tandy Road, Blair, in the Northern Territory. I've had a look at the map, and Blair is a small town about five miles from Tamorah and eight miles from Darwin. You'll recall that Waimatutu Station is at Tamorah, the Patersons' place from where someone presumably sent the letter to Metcalfe that we seized from Makepeace.'

‘It could be that Metcalfe and Gregory Horton were in this together,' I said, ‘and that it was Horton who'd sent the letter.' But even as I expressed that view, I realized that it didn't make a lot of sense.

‘Nothing would surprise me with this topping, guv,' said Kate.

I grabbed the telephone and rang Steve Granger again.

‘Kate Ebdon's tracked down Gregory Horton, Steve,' I said, and passed on the information she had gleaned from the Bartons' solicitor.

‘Leave it with me, Harry. I'll get someone on to it as soon as possible. D'you reckon this guy will still be there? If he's just copped eighteen million, he'll likely have shot through to some place like Sydney for the bright lights.'

‘Your guess is as good as mine, Steve, but it'll be a long time before he lays hands on the cash.'

‘Any chance that this Gregory Horton's up for your murders, Harry?'

‘Not if he's still in Australia, and has been for the last month or so. But if he's adrift, he might be involved. And eighteen million pounds makes for a bloody good motive,' I said, repeating my previous thought. ‘But that aside, I'm pretty certain that the murders of James and Diana Barton were down to Metcalfe.'

There was a pause before Granger spoke again. ‘I think I'll ask HQ to get one of our people from the local AFP office at Darwin to take it on, rather than the Northern Territory Police. Sounds as though it might be getting serious.'

‘How long before you'll get an answer, Steve?'

‘It's three o'clock here, so in Canberra it'll be one in the morning. There's only a half hour difference between there and Darwin. So if I get an email off now, and HQ forwards it straight on to Darwin, our man there will probably pick it up first thing tomorrow morning. With any luck, I'll get a reply by Friday. How's that suit you?'

‘Fine, Steve, and many thanks.' Although I was impatient to resolve the Gregory Horton end of things, I did have other things to occupy me. At least I knew that the Australian Federal Police would pull out all the stops.

The next piece of good news to arrive was a report from the forensic science laboratory.

‘We're getting there, Kate,' I said. ‘The lab compared Metcalfe's DNA with the semen found in Diana Barton, and it's a match. And according to this,' I continued, tapping the report, ‘that makes it a match with the handful of hair that James Barton was clutching when he was found.'

‘Well, I reckon that's two of the murders cleared up, guv. All we've got to do now is find out who topped Metcalfe.'

Colin Wilberforce put his head round the door. ‘The commander would like a word, sir.'

‘Oh, he's back, is he?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Wilberforce, with a perfectly straight face.

I walked down the corridor to where the commander presided over his paper empire.

‘You wanted to see me, sir?'

‘Ah, Mr Brock, what's the progress on these three deaths you're dealing with.'

‘I'm ninety per cent sure that two of them have been cleared up, sir. It's looking as though both toppings are almost certainly down to Bruce Metcalfe.'

‘But he's dead.'

‘Yes, I'm aware of that, sir,' I said patiently, ‘but we've compared his DNA with that found at the scenes of the two Barton murders, and they're a match to Metcalfe's.'

‘Yes, that's all very well,' said the commander, pretending to understand, ‘but what about the Metcalfe murder?'

‘We're waiting on enquiries that have been lodged with the Australian Federal Police, sir.'

‘Is there an Australian connection, then?'

‘Yes, sir.' I explained, as simply as possible, where Gregory Horton fitted into our enquiries.

‘Is this man Horton a suspect?'

‘I don't know, sir, but I intend to find out. Of course, if he's in Australia—'

The commander looked alarmed, and fiddled with a paperknife. I knew what he was thinking, and it didn't take long for him to put it into words. ‘I hope you're not suggesting that it'll be necessary for you and Sergeant Poole to fly to Australia, Mr Brock,' he said sharply, suddenly realising what a huge cost this would entail.

‘Not at this stage, sir,' I said, somewhat blithely. I couldn't see a need to go ‘down under' at any time in the future. But I always enjoyed winding up the commander about expenses.

‘Well, I shall need to see a substantial reason if you do make such an application, and so will the DAC,' said the commander. He always fell back on what the deputy assistant commissioner might think, rather than offering an objection of his own. ‘We do have budgets to consider, you know. I sometimes think that you CID officers believe you can spend as much as you like in the course of an investigation.'

‘Yes, I'm afraid you and I tend to think like that, don't you agree, sir?' I said, in a lame attempt to remind the commander that he too was a CID officer. If only on paper. And, it would seem, only when it suited him.

‘Yes, yes,' said the commander. ‘But if you ever reach my rank, Mr Brock, you'll realize that there are other considerations.' But he said it in such a way that I ruled out any possibility of promotion.

‘Did you manage to get your caravan sorted out, sir?'

‘How did you know about that, Mr Brock?' The commander frowned.

‘I'm a detective, sir.'

Back in the incident room, I learned that the local drugs squad had already struck. They'd found a significant amount of heroin in Howard's own living quarters, and had arrested him.

Well, at least someone was having some luck.

O
n Thursday morning, Dave and I met Henry Mortlock at his carvery in Horseferry Road. As usual, he'd completed his examination by the time we'd been told to arrive. But Henry had always been impatient to get on with the job.

‘I'll put it in layman's language for you, Harry. In short, an instrument of some sort was placed against Metcalfe's left temple and a spigot, for want of a better word, was discharged into the left temporal lobe of his brain. Death would have been instantaneous.'

‘Have you recovered this spigot, Henry?'

‘No. It's not in his cranium, and Miss Mitchell didn't find anything like it at the crime scene.'

‘Any ideas?' I asked.

Mortlock peeled off his latex gloves and tossed them into a medical-waste trashcan. ‘I've come across this once before,' he began, as he took off his apron and threw it towards a bench. He missed, and it fell to the floor, but he ignored it. ‘Some years ago, I was called in by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary to a man who'd been found murdered on a remote cattle farm. He was the partner of the farmer – who was eventually convicted of the victim's murder – and we found that the murder weapon was a humane killer normally used for putting down animals. The Somerset police searched the farmhouse and found the weapon in a cupboard, and there were traces of the victim's blood and DNA on it. I reckon you're looking for a “captive bolt” humane killer, so called because once the bolt's been deployed, it retracts into the barrel. And that's why I didn't find the bolt, and neither did Miss Mitchell.'