Dead and Gone (19 page)

Patricia alighted from the Sprinter and struggled to place her suitcase on the platform. Bishopton railway station was little more than a wayside halt. The single platform contained a no-longer-manned, dilapidated ticket office and covered waiting area, with three long benches that appeared to have been designed with the intention of causing maximum discomfort. The platform sat squarely between two sets of rails, and at one end, a broad set of steps led upwards, before they branched at a footbridge over the lines. Patricia groaned: not another bloody footbridge. There was no other way to exit the station. The only other passengers had already vanished. She hoped they hadn’t commandeered the taxis. That was, of course, if there were any taxis to meet this train. The thought chilled her, but she felt sure
even such a small junction would at least have a Freephone. She certainly didn’t fancy walking into town dragging her suitcase along an unfamiliar route in the late evening. When she reached the top of the steps, she read a sign on the bridge. It told her that if she followed the arrow, she would find a public footpath leading to the town centre, a mile and a half distant. ‘No, thank you,’ Patricia muttered, and headed for the car park. Half a mile might have tempted her, had she been desperate. She wasn’t that desperate – not yet.

On reaching the car park, one of her fears was realized immediately. There were no taxis waiting, no vehicles at all apart from a solitary car that was parked, probably belonging to a commuter who was catching a later train. In the gathering gloom, Patricia could just make out the skeleton stalk of a phone stand and the plastic waterproof bubble above it. She manoeuvred her suitcase over the low kerb and across the rough tarmac, trying to avoid potholes that were barely visible. By the time she summoned a taxi and waited for it to arrive and by the time it had ferried her to the Mitre Hotel, the restaurant would be sure to have closed. In such a small town during the middle of the week, the choices for a diner would be limited. Either chance an ethnic restaurant or hope that the hotel’s room service could provide a snack that was approaching palatable. She set her suitcase into the upright position, and reached out for the handset.

Late on the second morning that Tina had been working at Helmsdale, she reported progress. ‘I’ve done about as much as I can. I’d better tell you where I’ve got to, which isn’t very far. The problem is I’ve had to examine the software piece by piece. I’m trying to put this in layman’s terms otherwise I’ll have to spend half of the time explaining the technical details. This isn’t the work of a standard hacker, but someone with an advanced knowledge of programs and how to write them. What they’ve done to protect themselves is to insert various devices, for want of a better word, which, if triggered, would activate a virus.’

She saw Nash’s puzzled expression. ‘Think of it as if you were a soldier walking across a minefield. If you took a slightly wrong turning, or walked ahead without looking down, you could hit a tripwire which would explode a bomb. If I were to miss one of their booby traps, it would wipe all the hard drives and erase any trace of the money trail.’

‘Is there any way round the booby traps?’

Tina gave him a cold, piercing stare. Nash was secretly amused that she seemed offended by his lack of faith. ‘Of course there is, if you know what you’re doing and you don’t spoil things by being impatient. The program writer probably thinks his system is foolproof, but it isn’t; not against someone like me. All it means is that the process will take longer than I anticipated. The reason I’m telling you this is because I’m intrigued by the level of protection built into the scam. There’s no way the designer could have foreseen that they would have been chased
down by someone of my ability. Parts of the software suggest someone with a level of knowledge few people who set up these scams usually possess.’

‘Belt and braces sort of thing?’

‘More like two pairs of braces, a belt and a piece of string. In the meantime, you mentioned going to look through some papers to spot anything that might be relevant to the other case.’

‘OK, I’ll try and fix it up for this evening, if that suits you. I’ll speak to Dean Wilson and I suggest we go there after work if that’s OK with him.’

‘That’s fine. I have no plans.’

It was almost 6 p.m. when Nash and Tina pulled up outside Dean Wilson’s flat. Dean opened the door and gestured for them to go ahead of him down the hall. When they reached the lounge, Nash made the introductions. Dean and Naomi had set out a stack of boxes on the dining table. ‘There they are,’ Dean said a trifle ruefully. ‘I hope you can make more sense of them than I can.’

‘I’ll leave it to you, Dr Silver,’ Nash said.

Tina gave him a glint of a smile at the formality.

Nash chatted to the young couple whilst Tina began her painstaking search of the papers crammed into the boxes. ‘Have you seen your parents since you told them about Dean?’ he asked Naomi. He thought it was still not up to him to reveal her true parentage.

‘Not yet,’ Naomi admitted. Her expression was one of fierce determination, much like the one Nash had seen when she’d spoken up in defence of Wilson. ‘They can either like it or lump it,’ she told him. ‘Dean and I are going to be together no matter what they think his sister did or didn’t do.’

Tina was now examining the third of the boxes. ‘I think you can safely say that Dean’s sister didn’t have anything to do with the fraud at Bishopton,’ she announced.

‘Why do you say that?’ Nash asked, getting his question in just ahead of Wilson.

‘Because the papers I’ve set aside’ – Tina gestured to a small pile on the table – ‘show that she was checking Bishopton’s customer accounts files. There are lots of figures circled in red and some comments scribbled alongside that make very interesting reading.’

‘And your line of reasoning is that if she’d been the one committing the fraud, she wouldn’t have needed to print this information off and check it. She would already know the details. Is that correct?’

‘Yes, and that seems to indicate that she was not involved.’

‘I’m going to phone your grandfather tomorrow and tell him that we no longer believe Linda Wilson was in any way connected to the fraud,’ Nash told Naomi. ‘Then your father will be certain to know. That may help to heal the rift.’

The young couple expressed their thanks, and shortly afterwards, Tina announced that she was finished. By then there was a quite sizeable stack of paperwork on the table. ‘I should have brought my briefcase,’ she said ruefully. ‘I didn’t expect there to be as much as this.’

‘I’ll get you a carrier bag,’ Naomi offered.

Nash winked at Dean. ‘Getting to be quite at home, isn’t she?’

Dean smiled back. ‘She is, and I love it.’

‘I think you’re a lucky man.’

Outside, Nash asked Tina if she’d care to go for a drink. They opted for the Fleece Hotel, where they took their drinks to the seat in the bay window of the lounge bar, overlooking the cobbled market square.

‘Dean and Naomi seem a nice couple,’ Tina said.

‘Yes, they are, and they had a bit of a rocky start when Naomi found out that Dean was Linda’s brother. Naomi’s family were the biggest losers in the Bishopton fraud. That’s why it’s important that I drive the message of Linda’s innocence home.’

‘I’ll remind you in the morning,’ Tina promised.

‘Anyway, enough about work. Things have been so busy I haven’t had chance to ask you how your family are.’

‘They’re fine. Gran seems to have taken on a new lease of life
since Dad recovered his health. He’s doing really well. He’s set up his own business as a market gardener and enjoying every minute of it.’

‘How about you? What made you decide to go it alone?’

‘Circumstances changed at the firm I worked for. We lost a large American contract when the people we were working for decided to source the business within the United States. That side of our operation was overstaffed, and when they had to make redundancies, the offer was far too tempting to refuse. So I took the money and set up on my own.’

‘Are you still living in Leeds? It’s a long way to drive home if you’re going to be working here for a while.’

‘No, I gave the flat up and moved back in with Aunt Margaret. She’s really edgy about living on her own after … well, you know what happened as well as I do. I figured I owed her that much after she’d taken care of me all those years, and it helps keep my overheads down until I get properly established. The other advantage is that it isn’t so far to travel when I go to Dad’s or Gran’s. I see my father every week or so, and make sure I visit Gran at least once a month.’

Tina reached forward and put her hand on Mike’s. ‘I owe you more than I can ever repay. That’s why I’d have done this job for nothing. I was happy to take it on when Superintendent Fleming asked.’

‘I was only doing my job at the time,’ Nash protested.

‘That’s not how I see it. You gave me a family. The family I’d always longed for and never had. I used to be really envious of other girls at school or university when they talked about brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and grandparents. That isn’t all, though. Both Chief Constable O’Donnell and my grandmother told me the lengths you went to in order to keep my father safe. If you hadn’t, we all feel certain he would have been killed. To me, that seems over and above the line of duty.’

All the time she was speaking, Tina was caressing the back of Nash’s hand. A gesture of gratitude and no more, he thought.

‘We can consider that debt paid if you can recover all those
missing millions.’ Nash spoke lightly, to cover the confusion he felt by the warmth of Tina’s words and the thrilling contact of her hand on his. He was still wondering if he had misread the message in her eyes when they left the hotel and he bade her goodnight. Nor was he any nearer resolving his feelings when he reached home. A home that seemed a little colder and emptier than usual.

‘Viv, I’ve got a job for you. In fact, both of you can do it. I want everyone who worked at Bishopton Investments interviewed. Ask them about this Mark Tankard character. At present, we know very little about him, apart from that description Diane Carlson gave us. Make that your priority.’

Once they had left, Nash brewed some coffee and took a mug through to Tina. ‘Have you had another look at the stuff we got from Dean’s place?’

‘Yes, and it looks as if Linda Wilson was highly suspicious about what was happening at Bishopton Investments. From what I can gather, without checking the disk you got from Farrell, I think she’d printed off a set of account details for every one of Bishopton’s customers. More than two-thirds of them’ – she indicated a pile of papers on the corner of Nash’s desk – ‘had figures in red biro scribbled on them, but until I access the Bishopton system, I can’t be sure what they refer to.’

‘Still, it looks as if we’re right in thinking that Linda wasn’t involved in the fraud. I’ll make that phone call to Christopher Macaulay.’

Once he’d spoken to Naomi’s grandfather, he sat behind Clara’s desk in the outer office going through the reports that she and Pearce had written up, concentrating on the interviews they had conducted with Dean Wilson, Diane Carlson, Peter and Christopher Macaulay and the CEO of Security Solutions, Jonathan Farrell. His reading produced little more than a vague feeling that there was something he was missing. He heard the phone in his office ring.

The normally easy-going chairman of Shires Financial Services had reached the group’s head office in Bishopton much earlier than normal. It was no exaggeration to say that Sir Stuart Crawshaw was annoyed. He’d been careful to arrange his first meeting of the morning well in advance of the arrival of any members of his workforce. It wasn’t that he suspected any of them of wrongdoing, but such was the nature of the work he had commissioned that forewarning them could have been counterproductive.

Nobody enjoys a visit from an external auditor, and with Shires Financial being a relatively small institution, they relied on the services of a freelance operator. This policy served two purposes: it was cost effective in that the group wasn’t committed to a large annual salary plus benefits, and there was also no risk of the auditor and staff forming a cosy relationship.

Sir Stuart was concerned that there might be something amiss within the group. The bank, the building society, the insurance and estate agency divisions had all turned in healthy profits, as had the credit card operation, but he was uneasy nevertheless. He couldn’t identify the cause of his worry, but his instinct had been proved reliable far too often for him to risk taking the chance of ignoring it.

When Patricia Wain didn’t turn up, Crawshaw waited until an hour after her scheduled arrival time before phoning the hotel where he’d reserved a room for her. He was more than a little surprised to learn that she had failed to check in. And when her mobile went straight to voicemail, his surprise turned to unease.

His anger had dissipated in the face of concern when he was unable to get a response from her home phone number. Crawshaw knew where Patricia’s husband Julian worked, so when he contacted the man’s employers he was able to obtain Julian’s mobile number.

This time his call was answered immediately. Julian’s concern was all for his wife, but Crawshaw had the additional worry that he had given Patricia access codes to the group software. If
those codes fell into the wrong hands, there was no telling what damage could be caused.

Julian told Crawshaw that he’d spoken to Patricia the previous evening when she was in York, but that she’d failed to ring him from her hotel later as promised. ‘I thought she’d simply forgotten, or fallen asleep. I know she was very tired.’ As he was speaking, Julian remembered what Patricia had said about being followed. His alarm escalated. ‘I’m going to contact the police.’

‘Hello?’ Jackie Fleming frowned, wondering if she’d misdialled. ‘Clara, is that you?’

‘No, it’s Tina Silver speaking.’

‘This is Detective Superintendent Fleming. Is Mike Nash there?’

‘He’s in the outer office. I’ll get him. He’s allowing me to work in here where I don’t get disturbed.’ At that moment the door opened. ‘Hang on, he’s here now.’ Tina held the phone out. ‘Superintendent Fleming for you.’

‘Good morning, Jackie,’ was all Nash said. For the next few minutes he listened as Fleming explained the reason for her call. After a while Nash started scribbling notes on the back of a large brown envelope that was lying on the desk. From her seat, Tina managed to decipher the words Nash had jotted down. They made little sense, and she wondered what the connection was. Mitre, Crawshaw, Wain and Shires. What did that all mean?

Tina glanced up from the envelope and saw Nash standing with the receiver in his hand, his mind obviously elsewhere. ‘You haven’t put the phone down,’ she prompted him.

Nash took no notice. He seemed oblivious to her presence, to his surroundings, totally absorbed in whatever was going through his mind. Tina waited, aware how irritating it could be when one’s train of thought is disturbed. It was one of the reasons she preferred to work in seclusion.

Nash turned and stared at her, or was he looking through her? At the same time he realized he was still clutching the handset
and replaced it on its rest. ‘A woman has been reported missing by her husband. She failed to check in at her hotel yesterday evening, where a room had been reserved for her. This morning she was supposed to attend a meeting in Bishopton, but didn’t turn up. The man she was meeting alerted her husband, who called us.’

‘She might have gone off with someone else. It does happen, I believe. I think it’s called adultery.’

Nash smiled slightly, but shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, not in this instance. The meeting she was supposed to attend was with the chairman of Shires Financial Services, Sir Stuart Crawshaw. The woman is an internal auditor who was scheduled to start an audit of their branches and services today.’

He picked up the envelope and stared at the back for a second, before turning it over. For a moment he couldn’t recall what the envelope was doing on his desk. Then he remembered. ‘These are credit card statements. I removed them from a murder victim’s house because I was curious about them. There might be some connection to the fraud. He had scrawled a load of figures on the statement but I didn’t have chance to work out what their significance was, if any. In fact, I’m not sure I’d have been able to, but you might.’