Exit Stage Left (11 page)

‘I’ll try and do better next time.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Follow me, Henry.’

Mortlock spent a few moments walking round the corpse and taking temperatures before examining the body. He made a few notes and stood up. ‘I would say – with the usual reservation, Harry – that Miles’s death was similar, in every particular, to the way in which Lancelot Foley was murdered. But,’ he added cautiously, ‘I’ll confirm that once I’ve carried out the post-mortem.’

It was almost midnight by the time that the technicians of murder had completed their tasks. There was no point in keeping my team there, and I decided that a thorough search of the house and its contents would begin tomorrow when they were fresh.

I rang the incident room and told Gavin Creasey, the night-duty sergeant, to get hold of DI Len Driscoll and tell him to start searching Miles’s house tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. I then instructed Tom Challis and Charlie Flynn to meet him here.

‘You and I, Kate, will break the news to Debra Foley first thing tomorrow.’ I walked out to the car and looked around until I spotted the late-turn duty officer. ‘We’re leaving now, Inspector,’ I said. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d arrange to have the premises guarded back and front until my officers return in the morning.’

‘All night, sir?’ The inspector’s face expressed alarm at this request; he’d now been on duty two hours longer than he should have been. ‘But it’ll mean taking men off patrols, sir, and we’re short-handed as it is.’

‘As Sir William Gilbert so graphically put it, Inspector, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’ I said, ‘but that’s your problem. Good night.’

K
ate and I arrived at Chorley Street a little after nine on Thursday morning.

I pressed the intercom. ‘We’d better get it over with, Kate,’ I said, while we waited for an answer. I was not relishing telling Debra Foley of her brother’s death.

‘Yes?’ There had been a lengthy delay before Debra Foley answered.

‘It’s the police, Mrs Foley. May we come in?’

There was a buzzing noise as the lock was released. I pushed open the door, and Kate and I mounted the stairs.

Debra was standing in the doorway of her sitting room. ‘What d’you want now?’ she demanded truculently. Although she was attired in a peignoir, she had made time to put on some make-up, but her hair was untidy. I assumed that she’d just risen from her bed.

‘I’m afraid we have some bad news for you, Mrs Foley,’ I said.

‘Oh, really?’ Debra responded sarcastically, as though doubting that we could be the harbingers of something even worse than the death of her husband. Not that she had seemed all that distraught by his demise when we had broken that news to her. She would probably be more upset to learn that all her husband’s money had been left to Sally Warner, if she hadn’t heard already. She turned from the door, leaving us to follow her.

‘It’s about your brother, Mrs Foley,’ I began.

‘Oh? What’s Bobby been up to?’ Debra arranged herself carefully in the centre of the settee so that her peignoir parted sufficiently to reveal her legs, and ran both hands through her unruly hair.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead,’ said Kate. She was never one to pussyfoot around when it came to breaking bad news.

‘No, no! It can’t be true.’ Debra dissolved into tears, great sobs wracking her whole body. ‘No, I don’t believe it.’ The thespian poise and studied behaviour that had been a feature of our previous interview with her vanished in an instant, and she quickly covered her legs. This time she was not acting. ‘What happened?’

‘He was murdered, Mrs Foley.’

‘But this can’t be. I only saw him yesterday at Lancelot’s funeral. You were there.’ Debra pointed an accusing finger at me.

I was always mildly surprised that people would say they’d seen someone yesterday, as if that would somehow disprove that they were dead today. I suppose it’s shock that causes them to make irrational remarks.

‘It happened sometime between you last seeing him and yesterday evening. We went to his house at Harrow at eight o’clock and found him there. He was already dead.’

‘Why should you have gone to see him?’ Debra gazed up at me, with a tear-stained face and traces of her mascara running down her cheeks.

‘He telephoned me and asked me to call on him at eight o’clock.’

‘But why? Why should he have wanted to see you?’

I weighed carefully whether I should tell her the real reason, but decided that to do so might well elicit some useful information.

‘He said he knew who had murdered your husband, Mrs Foley, but he declined to tell me over the phone.’

‘But how could he possibly have known that?’ Debra Foley’s face assumed an exaggerated quizzical expression, but the thought did cross my mind that she had poked about in the dressing-up box of her mind, pulled out something marked ‘quizzical expression’ and put it on.

‘That is something we hope to find out,’ I said.

‘Are you sure you know nothing about your husband’s murder, Mrs Foley?’ Kate asked.

‘How the hell should I know anything about it?’ Debra’s face became a mask of fury at the very suggestion. ‘Don’t talk such bloody nonsense.’

I decided that there was nothing more to be derived from this rather fractious interview. ‘I’ll let you know when the coroner has released your brother’s body, Mrs Foley,’ I said, and we left.

‘I think she knows more than she’s telling, guv’nor,’ said Kate, once we were in the car and on our way to Harrow to join the search team.

‘We’ve been through the house with a fine-tooth comb, guv’nor, and found nothing of evidential value. So far, that is,’ said Len Driscoll by way of a greeting when Kate and I arrived at Miles’s house. ‘It’s obvious from our initial survey that this guy was a very tidy man and a very careful one. His clothing’s all been put away with military efficiency, and there are no papers or correspondence to be found anywhere.’

‘I rather expected that somehow, Len,’ I said. ‘Was there anything on his answering machine?’

‘There wasn’t one, guv. In fact, there’s not even a landline. We found his mobile, but he’s one shrewd operator; the record of calls made and received has been deleted.’

‘I suppose there’s always the possibility that Linda’s crew might come up with some fingerprints, but in view of what you said about Miles I’m not holding out much hope.’ It was a depressing thought, but it looked as though we wouldn’t find anything in Miles’s house that would point us towards his killer.

But then Charlie Flynn found a safe in the loft.

‘It’s only a small safe,’ he called down, ‘but it’s got a combination lock, guv’nor, and I doubt we’ll be able to get into it without help. It looks pretty substantial.’

There is an old wives’ tale prevalent among crime writers and the producers of police shows on television that this problem is easily resolved. A detective with a stethoscope, it’s suggested, can twirl the dial and hear the tumblers clicking over. I can tell you that it doesn’t work; I’ve tried.

‘Get on to the lab, Dave,’ I said, ‘and tell them I want the services of a locksmith ASAP. They should have a list of reliable ones.’

It was twelve o’clock before the expert arrived, and we told him where the safe was situated. After asking whether the loft was boarded, how much headroom there was, whether there was adequate lighting and finally muttering something about health and safety, he deigned to climb the ladder. After testing it thoroughly.

‘Go up with him, Charlie,’ I said, ‘so that you can testify at the trial as to what was found in the safe.’

‘If there ever is a trial,’ commented Dave gloomily.

I don’t know how the locksmith did it, but ten minutes later he descended from the loft. ‘All yours, guv’nor,’ he said and made for the door.

‘Hold on, squire,’ said Dave. ‘I need a statement from you before you leave.’

After further muttered complaints, the locksmith made his statement and left, bitching about how long he’d have to wait for the police to pay his bill.

Charlie Flynn came down from the loft. ‘This is all there was in the safe, guv,’ he said, holding out a laptop computer.

‘Want me to have a go at it, guv?’ asked Dave.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll let the boffins work their magic on it. If we mess about with it we might wipe it clean.’ A comment which, I suspected, only served to demonstrate how little I knew about computers.

The pitiful expression on Dave’s face confirmed it. ‘Very good, sir,’ he said. ‘By the way, I checked the surveillance cameras, including the one in the porch at the front door.’

‘And you’re going to tell me that you found a clear shot of the killer approaching the house whereby we can identify him?’

‘We would’ve done,’ said Dave, ‘except that the clever bastard took all the tapes with him.’

We spent another couple of hours at the house before I decided that there was nothing else to be found. Nevertheless, I arranged for the local police to maintain a guard on the premises for a further twenty-four hours just in case something on Miles’s computer caused us to look over the property again. I also lumbered them with getting the front door mended and the property secured. As to the disposal of the house and its contents, that would be a matter for Debra Foley, or whoever Miles had nominated as executor of his will. If he’d made a will.

Taking Miles’s laptop with us, we returned to our offices at Belgravia, and I sent a message to Linda Mitchell with a request that she send a computer whizz-kid over to us to try to decipher the laptop’s data.

I also received the depressing but unsurprising news that the house-to-house enquiries in the vicinity of Miles’s house had gleaned nothing whatsoever. But that was not surprising; there is a widespread ‘we keep ourselves to ourselves’ culture whenever the police seek witnesses to a crime.

It was mid-afternoon before a young man reported to the incident room and announced that he’d come to look at the computer. He appeared to be about nineteen, was skeletally thin, and was a martyr to acne. To my surprise he wasn’t wearing an anorak, but he did sport an earring.

‘I’m Lee Jarvis, Mr Brock, resident nerd with the Metropolitan Police,’ he said, with refreshingly self-deprecating humour. ‘You got a laptop you want opening?’

I sat him down at a spare desk, and Dave handed him the computer.

For several minutes he studied it without touching it. Then he turned it over and over and continued to study it, at one point taking out a jeweller’s glass to peruse the serial number. Finally, he placed it back on the desk, opened it and allowed his hands to hover over the keys with all the finesse of a concert pianist about to embark on Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Then he began to play. ‘It’s encrypted,’ he announced eventually.

‘Does that mean you can’t get into it?’ I asked, disappointed that our only lead was about to defeat our expert.

‘Nah!’ Lee grinned at me. ‘No problem,’ he said. For the next ten minutes or so he played about with various keys and then referred to a small notebook. I presumed it contained his personal troubleshooting solutions on how to deal with a vexatious computer. He returned to the keyboard and eventually gave a shout of triumph. ‘We’re in,’ he exclaimed. After a few minutes scrolling back and forth, he made a further announcement. ‘There’s a load of stuff on here, Mr Brock.’ He rubbed his hands together, his face working with enthusiasm for his job.

Robert Miles’s computer did indeed contain a wealth of information, but whether this data would assist us was another matter.

‘What have you got, Lee?’

‘I’ve turned up this guy’s log. It’s the best place to start, I’ve always found. This one’s particularly good because he’s recorded in detail everything he’s done and everything he’s going to do.’

‘I’m especially interested in the last month.’ I leaned over Lee’s shoulder and stared at the screen of Miles’s computer.

‘On the second of January this year he was contacted by someone called Bill Anderson.’ Lee looked up at me. ‘There’s a note against that entry that says “re Corinne”.’

‘Are you sure?’ The entry didn’t make sense to me. Why should someone called Anderson speak to Miles about a woman who was, in fact, Miles’s sister? Was Anderson Corinne’s pimp? Or, even more macabre, was Miles?

‘Look for yourself.’ Lee pointed at the relevant item. ‘And there’s another entry on the tenth of Jan: “Visited Corinne at Keycross Court. Mission aborted.”’

‘What the hell’s that all about, I wonder? Is there an address book anywhere on there, Lee?’

Lee scrolled through the data. ‘Sure is. There’s his contacts list,’ he said, pointing at the screen.

‘See if there are any details for this Bill Anderson.’

‘Yep, it’s all here. It lists a Colonel William Anderson, and his address is shown as Wisteria Cottage, Reeching Lane, Romford, Essex. I suppose that’s the same bloke.’

‘Any other details about Anderson? Telephone number, for instance?’

‘No, Mr Brock, that’s it.’

‘It looks like this Anderson has some serious questions to answer, Dave.’

‘And so does Corinne Black, alias Debra Foley, otherwise known as Vanessa Drummond,’ said Dave. ‘So where do we start, guv?’

‘I’ve come across Anderson’s name previously, guv,’ said Tom Challis, who had been standing around in the incident room while Lee was interrogating the laptop. ‘And so has Charlie Flynn.’

‘D’you mean he’s got form?’ I stood up and eased my aching back. I’d been bending over Miles’s computer for too long.

‘Not under that name, as far as I can tell,’ said Challis. ‘But you asked Charlie and I to do background checks on the Foleys, and oddly enough the name Anderson was in Lancelot Foley’s address book. The one you got from Jane Lawless. It lists Anderson’s same Romford address.’

‘Were there any other interesting names in that book?’

‘I don’t know about interesting, guv, but there were three other men’s names that we’re still looking into. According to entries in the diary section of Foley’s Filofax, he played poker with Anderson and these other guys about once a month.’

‘What the hell is the connection, then?’ I asked. ‘Debra Foley’s brother has Corinne’s and Anderson’s names and addresses on his computer, but Anderson was a poker-playing partner of Lancelot’s.’

‘Perhaps they met before Debra split up with Lancelot,’ suggested Kate. ‘Maybe they had dinner or something like that.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ I said dubiously, ‘but Debra didn’t strike me as the sort of woman to throw dinner parties.’

‘No, but Anderson might’ve been at a first-night party after the Foleys’ play opened,’ said Kate. ‘I think it’s the sort of thing these theatricals do.’

‘Oh, they do,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’ Gail was still on several lists, even though she’d been ‘resting’ for some time now, and I’d been dragged along to several of these junkets. But it wasn’t my scene; I’m not a great admirer of the average luvvy.

‘Not the sort of thing they do at the ballet, though,’ said Dave, with a superior sniff.

‘You’re a snob, Dave,’ said Flynn.

‘None of this actually explains why Robert Miles had a meet with Anderson “re Corinne”, according to Miles’s computer,’ I said. ‘Or why, a week later, Miles recorded on his laptop diary: “Visited Corinne at Keycross Road. Mission aborted.” None of it makes a lot of sense.’

‘We could ask Anderson, guv,’ suggested Dave.

‘I think not. At least, not until we’ve done more background digging on him. He might be the man responsible for the murders of Foley and Miles.’

‘There’s more here, Mr Brock,’ said Lee. ‘Going back to Monday the ninth of July last year, there’s an entry about Zimbabwe.’

‘What’s it say, Lee?’

‘“Spoke to Anderson re
Operation Zimbabwe Overthrow
. Mission aborted. Financier pulled out.”’