Cold Justice (34 page)

‘The public, and Bowie, are getting impatient, Dan, they want him found. They don’t want all these other things to distract you. There’ve been murmurings of possible disciplinary action over your handling of this Stokes murder. Raymonds has friends in high places.’

‘Yeah, we have a pretty good idea how he got those. His cousin, the pimp, made sure it was party central for VIPs down here.’

‘Bowie has been told to warn you off any investigation into the goings on in Kellis House.’

‘Even though it may have a direct link to Samuel’s abduction?’

‘Yes.’

Carter took a deep breath. He knew what would be happening there in MIT 17. Bowie would be going ballistic on a daily basis. Carter was not filing his reports on time; thank God Willis was getting hers in. The pressure on Bowie to answer questions he didn’t have a clue about would be unbearable and the rest of the team would be getting it in the neck.

‘No problem, Robbo. He remains my number-one priority. I’ll make sure DS Pascoe has all the help he needs with the Stokes murder and I’ll stay well clear of any historical stuff at Kellis House.’

Robbo signed off. Carter looked across at Willis. He smirked.

‘We have ruffled some influential feathers, Eb. But it’s all right. Don’t look so worried.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want Sandford into Kellis House and I want it taken apart. We don’t know what kind of search was done before we got here. We don’t know whose orders Pascoe and the team are following. The only people we can rely on are ourselves, right?’

Willis didn’t answer. She was staring out into space as she ran things through in her head. Carter was used to waiting. She nodded.

‘I think we should bring Towan in for our first interview.’

‘Yes,’ answered Carter. ‘We’ll leave Raymonds to stew a little. I don’t want him to think he’s first in the queue for anything.

Robbo finished the call to Carter and looked across at Pam, who was peering intently at her monitor. Her face was lit with the reflection from the screen; as it changed and she typed, her eyes read from left to right and it was reflected in her glasses.

‘I’ve contacted his last employer, the recruitment agency in Marylebone. It seems he was a rising star for a while but then partied too hard. There was mention of a drug dependency and he used up his three warnings. The manager I talked to said it was a sad outcome. They had him earmarked for a share in the company but he messed up. He ended up being a bad influence on the newer members in his team.’

‘So, do we have the connections in place in Gordano services?’ He looked across at Hector. ‘All set?’

Hector was watching his screen intently.

‘Just waiting for confirmation from the contact. They’re getting nervous. They don’t want to blow their own investigation: it’s been going for nearly a year. They don’t want any information leaked.’

‘Understandable. Tell them, these two will be taken out of the frame – they’re just a couple of amateurs.’ Pam stopped typing.

Hector continued his online conversation and then sat waiting, tapping his pencil tip on a notebook. Watching the screen.

‘Yes! And thank you kindly, sir.’ Hector tapped his reply as he talked. ‘We can watch the transaction on here. It’s about to start.’

Robbo and Pam dashed across to watch the footage.

‘This is shot from a haulage lorry,’ said Hector.

The filming started as the lorry was coming into the Gordano services and heading for the signs towards the lorry park. The date and time was running in the corner of the screen.

‘Look, there’s Marky’s car. They must have moved from one car park to the other.’

From the camera angle they could make out the back end of Marky’s car tucked in between two lorries. There was a break as the film jumped; the lorry came to a standstill.

‘Here we go,’ said Robbo as they watched first Marky then Jago get out of the car and be approached by a man dressed in a cleaner’s uniform from the services. When he spoke his voice had been wiped so that they couldn’t hear the names being used.

‘He must be the undercover officer they have working at the station,’ said Robbo. Two men got out of their lorry and joined them. The undercover officer shook their hands.

‘Do we know anything about who these men are?’ asked Pam.

‘We just know they are a large Ukrainian outfit who smuggle just about anything.’

The men were dressed in dark jackets and wore peaked caps on their heads.

‘These two are brothers apparently.’

One of the brothers walked out of shot and came back with three bags. He handed them across to Marky and Jago and they placed them in the boot. There was five minutes of leaning into the boot as the goods were examined.

‘Now, where’s the exchange?’ muttered Robbo as they all held their breath and watched the screen.

‘Here we go,’ said Hector as Marky reached in the back seat of the car, pulled out a holdall and handed it over to one of the two men.

‘Freeze that, Hector,’ Robbo said as they examined it in close-up.

‘Is that Samuel in the bag? Samuel weighs twenty-four pounds. Pam, you got that ready?’

‘Yes.’ Pam went to her desk and pulled out a carrier bag with groceries in it. ‘This is exactly that, I made sure.’

Robbo took it off her and stood in front of the screen looking at the angle of Marky’s arm, the flex of his bicep. He handed it to each of the others in turn. ‘Are we agreed?’

‘One hundred per cent.’ They ran the rest of the film footage. ‘Even the way he’s passing it over,’ said Pam. ‘There’s nothing weighty in that bag, there’s certainly not a child. He’d have handed it over with a little more care.’

Hector ran the film on. One of the brothers put the bag onto the floor and opened it; he checked inside.

Deal done, Marky and Jago got back in the car.

As Carter and Willis parked outside Kellis House, Robbo phoned them to give them the news about Marky and Jago. They got out of the car and rang the doorbell. Russell started barking at the sound. Lauren opened the door and looked expectantly at them both, but Willis shook her head.

‘He’s settled in, hasn’t he?’ Carter bent down to pat Russell.

‘A bit too much. He’s not going to want to go back to a balcony in Greenwich.’ Lauren walked back through to the kitchen.

‘How are you feeling now after the shock yesterday? Sorry you had to be the one to find him.’

‘I’m trying not to think about it. It still doesn’t seem real. I guess because I’m so tired it seems like some part of an ongoing nightmare. Do you know who killed him?’

‘Not yet,’ Carter said. ‘But his murder will not be a priority for us. We’re leaving our Cornish colleagues to get to grips with that. We’re concentrating on any relevance it has to Samuel. How are you managing for supplies, got enough to eat? Drink? I can pick up some food for us to eat here this evening from the hotel, if you’d like?’

‘Is it any good?’

‘I’d like to say it’s not bad, but breakfast was pretty ropy.’

‘Then I’ll stick to making pasta. Ebony is an easy person to cook for, aren’t you, Eb?’

Carter laughed. ‘That’s for sure. It’s quantity rather than quality she likes – no offence meant about your cooking, mind.’

‘None taken.’

Carter sat at the table and Willis perched by the sink.

‘Well, how do you like this house, Lauren?’ asked Carter.

‘I don’t, really.’

‘No, neither do I. It’s the first time I’ve seen it,’ said Carter. ‘It’s very dark and Gothic-looking.’

‘I guess those were his tastes,’ answered Lauren.

‘Just walking through the hall there – are there any paintings that have women with clothes on?’

‘Nope – all bare-breasted.’

‘Must have been a strange place for Toby to come when he was young. He must have spent his teenage years staring at the walls.’

Lauren smiled. ‘There was a long gap between when he came here with his mum and when he came here again after she left,’ she said. ‘Literally years. I think the décor would have been very different in the beginning, when they first bought the place.’

‘Are there any photos around from that time?’ asked Carter. ‘Be good to see what’s been done up.’

‘None that I’ve seen.’ ‘We haven’t really had a good look on the top floor yet,’ said Lauren. ‘That was obviously his master bedroom. There’s a four-poster and swathes of red velvet and chintzy materials. It spans the whole of the top floor.’

‘You’d hate it, guv – a spiders’ heaven,’ said Willis. ‘And the thing is, you can’t see them either until you’ve nearly stepped on one because the floor is dark.’

Carter shivered. ‘Spiders and snakes . . . hate them. What do you feel about this house then, will you be happy to sell it?’

‘It’s not my decision. It will be Toby’s. But I would want to get rid of it. Although I don’t want to leave Penhal. I don’t know how Toby can stand it in the flat in Greenwich. I feel so much nearer to Samuel here. I feel like there is still hope here and, when we find him, I want mine to be the arms he runs into.’ She turned away to stop herself from crying. ‘I wish Toby would see that we have a fight on our hands and put on his boxing gloves and get down here. People think he’s a coward, along with everything else.’

‘Lauren, we’d like to order a proper search of this house,’ said Carter. ‘I’ve ordered our Crime Scene Manager in here this evening – that means you two will have to sleep in the guest house up the road. We’ve commandeered nearly all the holiday lets in the area for our police teams. I’ve made sure you two get the places with heating. You going to show me round, Eb?’

‘Sure.’ They walked into the room to their right with the veranda.

‘Okay. Nice room.’

Willis moved swiftly on into the front rooms.

‘So here is where Toby and the others were when they came off the beach?’ Carter lowered his voice. They could hear Lauren washing dishes in the kitchen.

‘Most of this stuff is bought within the last ten years. He seems to have enjoyed adding bits all the time. The floor is original, the wallpaper hasn’t been changed in twenty years. There’ve been numerous paint jobs but no major work except to the bathrooms and his room at the top.’

Carter followed her up the stairs and had a quick look into the four bedrooms on the first floor.

‘I can tell why you didn’t sleep in either of those,’ Carter said, coming out of the ornate rooms and into Willis’s and Lauren’s.

Willis pushed open the door to the bathroom.

‘Wow.’ Carter stepped inside and squatted down. He touched the tiled floor with his hand. ‘Heated.’

‘Yes, a lot of money spent here, and it’s all been spent since 2000. It has a date on the instructions for the extractor and the shower; they were installed July 2000.’

‘Funny time to do major work inside your holiday house, right in the peak season?’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘This bathroom comes out, then, tile by tile.’

‘And let me show you upstairs.’ Willis led Carter up a separate set of stairs that took them to the top floor.

Carter stood in the doorway of the suite. The sun had come out and was streaming in via the long window that had replaced the original attic one and now afforded a breathtaking view of the coastline.

Carter stood looking out to sea.

‘Do we have enough to bring Marky and Jago in and charge them with the drugs?’

‘I think we need to wait, guv, till we find Samuel.’

‘Yes, okay, but Raymonds has to start really feeling the squeeze. I want him to understand we are closing in on him.’

Carter and Willis left Lauren and drove down to the police station. They pulled up and saw Pascoe’s car outside.

Pascoe looked up from his desk as they walked in.

‘All okay?’ asked Carter, putting his bag down on a desk.

‘Yes, I’ve made a good start. I’ve told the team in Penhaligon that I’ll be running the murder enquiry from here, but it will run alongside the abduction investigation. It will not take priority.’

‘Was there any problem with that?’ asked Carter.

‘Everyone understands that we need to keep it contained. We can’t end up with more officers than residents here. We solve one crime at a time. Plus, it’s unlikely to be an outsider. It wasn’t a random act.’

‘We’ll interview everyone who was at the farm,’ said Carter. ‘We’ll start today, but I don’t want them interviewed under caution for now. I want to keep people moving around here. I want us where we can still watch them. Okay, Willis will take the notes for us and make sure we all understand where we are. We’ve just had a development that at least discounts two of our possible suspects for the abduction of Samuel.’

Willis brought up the edited footage of Marky and Jago at Gordano services and turned it round for Pascoe to see.

‘Here we have Marky and Jago handing over a lot of cash in exchange for a lot of drugs.’

‘Jesus, that will destroy so many lives if that goes on the street down here,’ said Pascoe, almost choking on his coffee. ‘We have a big drug problem here as it is.’

‘We estimate, by the size and look of it, that these lads, Marky and Jago, have managed to buy themselves fifty grand’s-worth of what we think is probably a mix of cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. That’s apparently what the brothers from Ukraine like to deal. But, what they also like to do is cut it with rat poison and horse tranquillizer.’

‘Shit. We have to find that stuff.’

‘You’ve seen them beachcombing, we can definitely pull Penhal apart to find it. Sandford’s up at the farm at the moment; I’ll tell him to test for these substances as well.’

‘We searched down the mine again, as you requested,’ said Pascoe. ‘If we want to drain it we could have a better look in there but you’re talking about an unsafe environment and it’s going to take a lot of time and resources.’

‘We’ll consider it,’ said Carter. ‘Where did Marky and Jago get the money to buy this stuff? Jago has no money and no real job and Marky is in the middle of the low season in his business.’