Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2) (5 page)

The cop watched in rapt attention as William Lawton’s secretary poured coffee. PC ‘Tommo’ Rogerson was modern in many ways as he liked some of the music his teenage daughters listened to, he read a quality newspaper and not one of the red tops, and his hair was styled at a ladies hairdresser, rather than succumb to the rough clippers of a barber, but he was old-school when it came to the boss’s secretary.

Give him a tight skirt, nice legs and a low cut blouse any day of the week, but a spiky-haired bloke with a penchant for loud shirts and a wiggling arse, no thanks. He was a fan of period dramas and knew the man of the house was often in a close relationship with his male valet, sharing confidences as his shirt was being done up or having his wine sampled before he took a drink, but a man-secretary, no way Jose.

With coffee poured and Jules tucked behind the word processor, or whatever he used to do his work outside Mr Lawton’s office, the tension eased in Rogerson’s shoulders and he loosened his firm grip of the police hat lying on his lap.

‘Thank you for coming today officers, Rogerson and Longman,’ William Lawton said from his seat behind a large desk. ‘I said on the phone that when Mr Young didn’t turn up for work on Monday morning, it didn’t bother me too much at the time, as I thought he might be suffering from a cold or flu, or he had been called away to a meeting that none of us were aware of, but when he didn’t show up for work by Wednesday, I started to get worried and sent someone around to his house. Jules couldn’t detect any signs of life and even when he asked a neighbour, they said they hadn’t heard him coming and going as he often did. I left it another day and when he still didn’t appear, that’s when I called you.’

‘You were right to do so sir,’ Rogerson said. ‘Has Mr Young’s diary been checked?’

‘Yes it has but David wasn’t the type to jet off to one of our suppliers in Japan or Malaysia without telling someone first. In any case, Jules or one of the other P.A.’s would need to book the trip for him, as he’s hopeless at doing those sorts of things himself.’

Rogerson watched Lawton as he spoke, not because he was a student of psychology or sociology, or an expert in body language or NLP, but he was a copper and it was an automatic action. Some wag in the locker room said he did it to keep him awake while listening to all the boring crap about their problems or the short-comings of their partner, but in Rogerson’s case he did it to try and decide if the words coming out of their mouths matched the expressions on their faces, and if so, could he rely on what they were telling him?

Lawton looked the part. Well-known to those who read the business pages as the Managing Director of one of the UK’s fastest growing companies and at one time his boss, Sir Mathew Markham was never off the telly, receiving some sort of award and bumming up British business or accompanying one of the royal princes on a trade mission to China or Hong Kong.

Lawton’s hair was styled, but to man who took an interest in such things, it was dyed and receding a bit at the temples. He wore expensive glasses with natty red frames and a blue striped suit that fitted him perfectly, the product, no doubt, of one of the top tailors in Savile Row, and not an off-the-peg job from a high street chain like the two he owned. He put his age at somewhere between late forties and early fifties and spoke in a well articulated, Home Counties accent, almost as polished as one of the presenters on the local television news programme,
South Today
.

‘Can you tell me Mr Young’s movements on the day you last saw him, Friday of last week wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was,’ Lawton said, locking fingers together as if he was about to read the Evening News and tell them about another bad day on the foreign exchanges or the devastating effects of a large earthquake in Chile.

‘As usual, he arrived in the office at seven-thirty. He worked until twelve-thirty, had a bit of lunch at his desk before setting off for our research and warehousing facility in Burgess Hill.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes before replacing them.

‘You see, even though this building here in Hove is Markham’s Head Office, it is primarily a design studio. The people upstairs design new products or modify existing ones using all the latest software tools. When we’re finished, they send the designs to the research lab in Burgess Hill where they create a prototype, incorporate it into a computer circuit, and test it until it breaks.’

‘I see.’

‘If the process is successful, the designs are sent to a manufacturing plant in China where the products are mass produced and when the order is complete, it is shipped to our warehouse in Burgess Hill and tested for quality, before being distributed to our customers. I’m simplifying a process that can take many months, of course but no matter how long or complicated it gets, the basic elements remain the same.’

It was clear to Rogerson that Lawton had delivered the spiel many times and if he possessed a greater understanding of what he had just said, he would have asked a question or two, but as he couldn’t tell a ring mains circuit from a central heating pipe, he kept it zipped.

‘David goes up to Burgess Hill a couple of days a month to see the finance people he’s got up there and to review budgets, production schedules, and anything else he’s involved with. On Friday, he went there to attend a meeting about a supplier that we’ve been having a few problems with. I’m told he left our offices about six forty-five and not being a drinking man, clubber, gambler or anything of this nature, I assume he went straight home.’

‘Where is home?’ Rogerson asked.

‘Shirley Drive in Hove.’

‘Is he married?’

‘He’s divorced. Six years ago, I believe.’

‘Are there children or other members of his family living in the Shirley Drive house; a girlfriend, perhaps?’

‘No. He lives alone. He has no girlfriend that I know of, and I think I know David pretty well.’

‘Do you know if he called anyone here before he left Burgess Hill on Friday night?’

‘Yes, he spoke to Sarah his assistant before she went home at about five-thirty, but no one else. I’ve checked.’

‘I see. So, what do you think has happened to him, sir?’

‘The obvious I suppose. He might have taken ill or suffered a heart attack and he’s lying on the floor, unable to move. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been in an accident on that dangerous motor bike he rides.’

‘He rides a bike does he?’ PC Eric Longman beside him said, his face instantly animated. He liked bikes and rode into work on a muddy trail bike that looked as if it had just come through an apocalyptic disaster zone. He wanted to get into the Traffic department where he was convinced he would swan around all day astride a big 900cc BMW, weaving in and out of traffic like Arnie in Terminator, and despite repeated attempts by him to burst his bubble, the boy’s enthusiasm could not be dimmed.

‘Yes, he took up motorcycling a couple of years back and after starting off on a small thing, a Yamaha I think it was, he bought that big brute of a thing he drives now. It rattles the windows as soon as it starts up. I kept telling him it was dangerous for anyone to drive one of these things, especially for a 52-year-old man whose reactions are not as quick as they once were, but he can be just as stubborn as my 16-year-old lad when he wants to be.’

Rogerson nodded. He knew the stats and had seen enough accidents to know it was a growing problem. Middle-aged guys usually got their first scrapes on a Honda 50 or a Vespa scooter, nothing more than a sewing machine on wheels, before moving up-market to a Yamaha or Kawasaki 125, zip-fast little machines which could out-accelerate the majority of saloon cars. For many, their burgeoning riding career came to an abrupt halt when a wife, children, and a crippling mortgage came along, and then an ugly people carrier that looked more like a van than a car, took the place of the sleek bike.

Now in their mid-fifties and with money in the bank, they took one look at the latest bike catalogues and realised they could own a smart new machine, capable of knocking spots off top-of-the-range sports car such as Porsches and Ferraris for the same price as a Ford Fiesta.

What many of them did not realise until too late, was the engines and equipment on all modern bikes were faster and more responsive than anything they had ridden before and in an emergency, all the training and perusing of manuals, would go out the window when they accelerated too fast, took a corner too sharp, or braked too hard, propelling themselves into a whole new world of trouble.

‘Have you a picture of Mr Young?’

‘Yes I have.’

He reached into the folder beside him and handed over a sheet of paper. It was copied from his personnel file and included his age, address, and a list of his qualifications and medical history, and the colour photograph was clear and according to the blurb, taken only nine months before.

He was a thin-faced man with a rutted, pale complexion, suggesting he spent too much time indoors or ate a poor diet. Large gold-framed glasses and an untidy mess of thinning brown hair made him look like Rogerson’s old English teacher but the eyes were dark and owl-like, giving the impression he would be a powerful adversary in a meeting and a difficult man to face in tense negotiations.

‘That’s perfect and I see we have his home address. Do you happen to have a spare key to his house?’

‘No, I don't.’

‘Not to worry, we’ll sort something out. Ok. I think we’ve got enough to go on.’ He placed his hands in his lap and looked straight at Mr Lawton. It was his turn to deliver a spiel he had delivered many times before.

‘As you can appreciate Mr Lawton, your Financial Director, Mr David Young has been missing a week now and at this stage, I’m inclined to believe that as he was a fit and active man, nothing unfortunate has happened to him.’

‘That’s good to hear.’

‘In cases like this, at least ninety per cent of missing person cases are resolved in the first three or four days, by which time the misps, as we call them, have got over their strop or whatever has been bothering them and decide to make contact, unaware their friends and family have been worried sick and are out looking for them.’

‘I see.’

‘What we will do now is take a look at his house and make sure he isn’t ill or lying behind a door. When we get back to the station, we’ll ask our colleagues to be on the look-out and call local hospitals and other agencies and ask them if they’ve seen Mr Young and if they haven’t, instruct them to inform us if he turns up.’

‘Thank you, that sounds excellent. It’s a large weight off my mind to know you are also looking for him, I can tell you.’ Lawton glanced at his diary. ‘This is Friday. David and I were due to play golf at West Hove this Sunday morning for our monthly match and I’ve never known him to miss it, as the loser, which is more often than not me, buys lunch. He’s such a mean so-and-so, he would never pass up the opportunity for a free lunch. If he still hasn’t turned up by then, I think you need to treat him as a bona fide missing person and pull out all the stops and try and find him.’

The day started like no other and DI Henderson doubted it would get any better. He had spent the last hour at Malling House in Lewes, home of the top brass of Sussex Police where he received a bollocking.

During a tense meeting which included his boss, Chief Inspector Steve Harris, the Assistant Chief Constable, Andy Youngman, the man with overall responsibility for CID, and a bod from Professional Standards, he tried to explain why the story in
The Argus
about Mrs Frankcombe was not a good enough reason to sack him.

If CI Harris had his way, Henderson wouldn’t be sitting in his office in Sussex House right now but making his way down to the Employment Office to sign on, unless unbeknown to him, the whole system had now gone on-line. Perhaps he needed to check it out in case an incident like this ever happened again.

Harris always had a bee in his bonnet about Henderson ever since the DI joined Sussex Police and their relationship and his behaviour, according his brother, Corporal Archie Henderson, was not dissimilar to the way a raw Sandhurst officer dealt with a seasoned platoon leader or sergeant, but even though Henderson hadn’t been fast-tracked as Harris had been, he wasn’t the mug his boss took him for.

It was a good job Andy Youngman was on his side and prevented Harris from saying something he would regret, as he understood his officers needed to have a blowout once in a while. What annoyed him though, was receiving a lecture about the best way to handle the press and a proposal from Professional Standards to put his name down for a media training course, as he had been working on this topic from the day he joined Sussex Police over three years ago.

Before coming south, he had worked for Strathclyde Police in an undercover unit, targeting large and vicious drug gangs. In one particular tense standoff, he killed one member of a gang and injured another. While some sections of the press hailed him as a hero for saving the lives of fellow officers, others pilloried him for killing ‘an innocent man.’ They forgot that the victim, Sean Fagin, had been an integral member of a gang that for years, had been engaged in the importation of heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth, bringing misery to thousands and not forgetting he was about to shoot a police officer; namely him.

Since then, he had been working on improving his relationship with the press, aided and abetted by his girlfriend, Rachel Jones, a journalist with
The Argus
. Her beat was the environment and rural affairs but she knew all the crime reporters at the newspaper, the main attendees of police press conferences and the people most likely to doorstep him or any member of his team.

It didn’t mean he would be taking Rob Tremain,
The Argus’s
chief crime reporter out for a beer sometime soon, or the way he felt now, stringing him up from the nearest lamppost for writing the Frankcombe story. He had to accept that Tremain reported, more or less what the woman told him and he would continue to treat him and his colleagues as allies and not adversaries.

DS Walters walked into his office, holding a thin file. It had to be the violent car stealing gang file, as the other cases on his plate, an armed robbery in Hove and a domestic murder in Patcham, were much thicker.

‘Morning sir. How are you today?’

‘Not smelling of booze, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

‘Bloody hell,’ she said, her face crinkling in shock. ‘I’m sorry, have I put my foot in it?’

‘Nah, don’t worry about it, Carol. I’ll get over it, I just hope Harris does as well.’

‘Do I gather from your glum expression, you’ve been over at Malling House this morning?’

‘Aye, I have,’ he said, taking a seat around the small conference table.

She waited for more but as he wasn’t offering, she gave up and opened the file.

‘As I said at the last team meeting,’ Henderson said, ‘I’m changing our focus to concentrate more on the sales side.’

‘I thought Tony Haslam said he thought the thieves and the ringers are most likely two separate gangs, so nicking one might not give us the other.’

‘I’m aware of this but I think if we can nick someone from the buying and selling gang, in time we’ll find the car thieves, or to put it another way, if we cut out their customer, they’ll have nowhere to go and be forced to stop their activities.’

‘I don’t think it’ll work.’

‘Putting your reservations to one side, what I want you to do now is look at all the ways the gang might be exporting stolen cars. I can think of a few, like shipping and personal export, but I’m sure there’s more. Track down whoever deals with the paperwork at Customs and at the main ports and see if we can get a look at their manifests or whatever they call them, and see if you can find any of our missing cars.’

‘I don’t imagine the car thieves are waiting around until they have ten or twenty cars,’ she said, ‘as it would give them any number of problems. If they’re moving a couple of cars at a time, it’ll make it much harder for us to track them.’

‘Did Tony tell you that too?’

Her face reddened but he didn’t pursue it.

‘You might be right,’ he continued, ‘if we were dealing with a Ford Fiesta or Vauxhall Astra but a Porsche or a Ferrari is a much rarer beast, I don’t imagine you’ll find loads of them in containers heading out to Dubai or Beijing every day.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘Carol, stop bitching. We’re all agreed, what we’ve been doing so far has yielded nothing and it’s dispiriting for the troops and pissing off the top brass, but if you can find the merest chink of light on the selling side, everyone will be as happy as sand boys.’

‘I agree with you there. The lack of progress is getting everybody down.’

‘So, we’re in harmony but I suspect not yet singing from the same hymn sheet. Now go off and get this organised; use Phil Bentley. Also, do me a favour and make sure Sally Graham follows up on the chilled van sighting, I think Gerry Hobbs may have diverted her into interviewing witnesses on the Western Road assault, but I don’t want the one reasonable sighting we’ve got slipping from view.’

‘Right oh, sir,’ she said standing up. ‘I’ll get this sorted but I better get out of your way before you give me something else to do.’

Henderson walked back to his desk and woke up his pc. He groaned when he saw all the emails received this morning, as he hadn’t looked since returning from Lewes. It included one from the Professional Standards guy who had attended this morning’s meeting with a summary of his conclusions, but one bit stood out.

‘…this should be regarded as a final warning. Any further transgressions of the Professional Code of Practice will be met with serious disciplinary action.’

‘And fuck you too,’ he said out loud.

‘I hope you’re not talking to me.’

He looked up and saw with relief it wasn’t the Chief Constable or a visiting dignitary but DS Gerry Hobbs.

‘Sorry Gerry, I didn’t mean you but the sender of a snotty email I’ve just received.’

‘It makes me feel better if I file those away so I don’t have to look at them or if it really pisses me off, I delete the bloody thing.’

‘Is this the reason why you never answer any of my emails?’

‘Ouch, I fell for that one.’

‘Maybe I’ll start doing that or frame the bloody thing. So what brings you into the bad mood corner?’

He sat on the chair on the other side of the desk as he didn’t like sitting at the little conference table, as it reminded him too much of interviews and difficult discussions, he said. After today, he had to agree.

‘I wanted to talk to you about our armed robbery in Hove.’

‘Did you see the story in
The Argus
?’

He shook his head.

‘Rob Tremain wrote something like, two women were injured when armed robbers attacked the Westchester Building Society in New Church Road and discharged their weapons. He made it sound like they were attacked and then shot by the robbers.’

‘Poetic license, I suspect as saying the villains fired two warning shots into the ceiling and the women were hit by flying debris from the ceiling tiles doesn’t sound half as exciting.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘I’ve spoken to one or two narks I know and they tell me Billy Francis was involved. I have to admit, it’s the sort of thing he would do, you know, rob a building society all tooled up, so a couple of hours ago I brought Francis in and I’ve been questioning him for most of the morning. He kept telling me it wasn’t him and couple of minutes ago we managed to check out his alibi and it does stack up.’

‘No easy solutions then?’

‘Nope, but he gave me some other names.’

‘Like who?’

‘A pair of South London villains; Sol Higson and Les Stephen. They moved to Brighton a few months back and started right where they left off in Croydon, robbing sub-post offices and building societies.’

‘Record?’

‘As long as your arm.’

He passed some papers across to him, a printout of their criminal records. He looked through it with a jaundiced eye, career criminals who had never held down a ‘normal’ job in their lives. On an application form to join whatever club they fancied, they would be forced to put ‘armed robber’ in the ‘occupation’ field and their address as one of Her Majesty’s penal institutions, as they both had been inside Pentonville and Wandsworth so many times, these places would feel more like home than Croydon or Lambeth.

‘My first question is, why would Billy Francis give these two up? I know there’s no such thing as honour among thieves but isn’t he a bit scared one of them coming after him and sticking him with a blade? They’ve got form for doing violence as well as everything else.’

‘I know and I did ask him, but I get the impression it’s a risk he’s willing to take if there’s a chance we can take these boys off his patch.’

‘It sounds like he wants us to do his dirty work for him.’

‘In a way, you’re right but if it gives us the opportunity to nick a couple of nasty villains, what do we care?’

‘I hear what you’re saying but as long as this isn’t a wild goose chase or even worse, and I want you to be wary of this, some kind of trap.’

Hobbs tried to say something but Henderson held up a hand to stop him. ‘Don’t laugh it off Gerry. Billy Francis is a mean son of a bitch who doesn’t have a good word to say about anybody and might be harbouring a grudge against you or me, or the police in general. I for one wouldn’t put it past him. All I’m saying is you need to be careful.’

‘Ok boss, point made.’

‘Good, I’m pleased to hear it. So what’s the plan?’