Grief Encounters (20 page)

‘I think they were blue.’

‘There you are, then. He could have put it in a building society, or several building societies. We didn’t have ISAs and TESSAs back then, but there must have been something similar. Then there’s the stock market…’

‘Do you think he’d know how to invest in the stock market?’

‘Hmm, perhaps not. Not individual companies.’

‘Let’s keep it simple,’ I said.

‘OK. I’d go for several building societies. There was no such thing as a suspicious cash transaction that far back. They’d accept money from anyone. They’d accept money filled with bullet holes and bloodstains, and stay open late for you if the sum was big enough.’

‘You’re a cynic, Margaret,’ I said. ‘So how long would you sit on the money before you started salting it away in building societies?’

‘Ooh, I’d probably start out with good intentions. Maybe to hang on for a year, but as soon as the heat died down I’d change my mind. Villains are usually the impatient type, especially when they’re in the money. I can’t see Ennis being any different.’

‘He claims he was only one of the foot soldiers.’

‘He’s a lying toad.’

‘Would you trust the money to anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Not even your Tony?’

‘Well, yes, I’d trust Tony. But I wouldn’t trust any of Ennis’s accomplices as far as I could hurl them.’

‘What about Magdalena?’

‘Ah,’ Maggie began, ‘the fair and voluptuous Magdalena. I wondered when we’d get round to her.’

‘Have you ever considered having a tattoo?’ I asked.

‘Never. But my sister has one. A ladybird on her shoulder. She thinks it’s wonderful, I think it’s ghastly.’

‘Did she have it done to please her husband?’

‘No, and he doesn’t like it, either. I think she had it done because she fancied the tattooist.’

‘Ennis said Magdalena had the tattoo done to please him. Len Atkins reckons he forced it upon her to demonstrate his hold on her. If Len was right I can’t imagine her running back to Ennis as soon as he was released, can you?’

‘Not really, except she might have liked a man who pushed her around a bit. The assertive kind.’

‘Are there women like that?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘Magdalena wasn’t one. I’d describe her as a proto-feminist.’

‘So maybe she gave as good as she received. Maybe they couldn’t live without each other.’

‘You mean…like Burton and Taylor?’

‘Why not? What’s Len Atkins like?’

‘He’s…a plumber. A hippy plumber. Len’s idea of a good time is to grout a shower cubicle.’

‘There you go, then.’

‘So you reckon she was Ennis’s woman all along, and she was just passing time with poor Len?’

‘It looks that way, don’t you think?’

‘Hmm. And it follows that he would trust her with the money.’

‘That’s right, although he probably had little option.’

‘So she put some in an account for their daughter and invested the rest.’

‘And lost it.’

‘And lost it.’

‘Which would leave the aforementioned Mr Ennis mightily annoyed.’

‘You can say that again.’

Brendan is my youngest and newest DC. He’s been with us for nearly a year and is still eager to please. We gave him a series of tedious but essential jobs, like sitting in a Transit all night with a pair of binoculars and a notebook, checking out nightclub bouncers who were dealing in ecstasy, and he came back smiling every time. His sense of humour is best described as creative, and he’s in love with Julia Roberts, but we don’t hold her against him. Yesterday I’d given him a job to do and now he was knocking on my door.

‘Richard Wentbridge,’ he said after I’d told him to sit down. ‘I’ve done a PNC check and he’s had three speeding tickets, going back fifteen years. He’s currently driving a Mazda RX8, as you thought, and he’s been clean for the last six years. According to the electoral roll he’s married with no children. Date of birth, oh-four, oh-two, sixty-four, which makes him forty-one. His house must be worth a million and he appears to have a lavish lifestyle with no visible means of support.’

I said: ‘Forty-one, a great age to be. I can hardly wait. Stick it all on a piece of paper and put it in my bottom drawer, please.’

‘Already done.’ He passed me an A4 sheet with a few lines of typing on it. ‘Will that do?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine.’

‘So what’s it all about, boss?’

‘I’m not sure, Brendan,’ I replied, and told him briefly about Miss Birchall and her birthday antics. ‘It might be nothing but it smells fishy. Meanwhile, it might be worth keeping a weather eye on Mr Wentbridge. Tell you what: let’s make a phone call.’

I dialled the number for our asset recovery team and spoke to the DCI who set the whole thing up. They work anonymously from a suite of offices in one of the new business parks that are sprouting up all over the place. Nobody’s building factories any more, but we have warehouses and offices a-plenty.

‘Wentbridge…Richard,’ he said as he typed the name into his database. If somebody has a rich lifestyle but cannot or will not explain the wherewithal to pay for it, the asset recovery legislation assumes that his wealth is ill-gotten and available for confiscation. In some ways it’s as important a tool as DNA profiling in the war against major criminals. Not all crime involves knocking someone on the head or climbing drainpipes in the dead of night. Asset recovery goes straight to the big boys who don’t get their hands dirty.

‘Sorry, Chas,’ he came back. ‘He’s not known to us. Did he ought to be?’

‘I’m not sure, yet, but I’ll keep you informed.’ I thanked him and put the phone down. ‘Right, then,’ I said to Brendan. ‘Here’s another one for you,’ and I told him about the Range Rover that had allegedly forced Gillian Birchall off the road. ‘It must have suffered some rear-end damage,’ I said, ‘so have a word with the main dealers to see if anyone has brought one in for repair since then. Start at the top and work your way down to the smaller paint shops. I know it sounds trivial but there may be more to it.’

Brendan grinned and said: ‘Great,’ as he stood up to leave. He likes working on his own, I’d noticed.

Big Dave arrived and stood in the doorway. I gave him a quizzical look and he said: ‘Peter Ennis failed to report yesterday. He’s back in Bentley.’

‘Best place for him,’ I said, and picked up the sheet of paper Brendan had given me. ‘Brendan!’ I called as he pulled the door closed behind himself.

He opened it again and poked his head round it. ‘Yes, boss?’

‘Richard Wentbridge’s wife,’ I said. ‘You haven’t given her a name.’

‘Haven’t I?’ He checked his notebook. ‘Sorry, boss, I must have overlooked it. Is it important?’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is,’ I said. ‘Concentrate on the Range Rover.’

Fiona Foyle’s eyes widenened. ‘Monte-Carlo!’ she exclaimed. ‘On Sunday! Yippee! You’re a darling, Tristan.’ She turned and gave him a noisy kiss on the cheek. ‘Did you hear that, Teri? We need to do some serious shopping before the weekend.’

‘The people who’ve rented the apartment don’t want the boat,’ he explained, ‘so we might as well use it. We’ll be roughing it, but we’ll survive for a week.’

‘Silly them,’ Richard Wentbridge declared.

‘That’s what I call roughing it,’ Fiona said.

‘What about the plane?’ Wentbridge asked.

‘Available Sunday morning for an early flight to Nice. It’s all taken care of, if that’s all right with you two.’

Richard looked at Teri. ‘Ooh,’ she said, ‘I’ll need ten new bikinis and a gallon of factor 25, but I think it will be all right. Don’t you, Ricko?’

‘You bet.’ Images of himself smearing his friend’s wife with suntan oil, back and front, on the mahogany deck of the private yacht, were already flooding his mind.

‘Will we be able to go to Cannes, to that restaurant we found?’ Fiona asked.

‘And St Tropez,’ Teri added. ‘I love St Tropez.’

‘We should be able to squeeze them in,’ Tristan replied.

‘And the casino!’ Fiona insisted. ‘We must go to the casino.’

‘Definitely the casino,’ Richard agreed.

It was their regular Wednesday evening meeting, and they’d dined again at the Wool Exchange. This time they’d returned to the Flour Mill, home of the Wentbridges, for the usual postprandial delights.

‘What did you reckon to the meal tonight?’ Foyle asked. He was sitting on a leather settee, between the two women. Wentbridge was pouring drinks at a cabinet in the corner, below an original watercolour of a Dales scene. It used to be his favourite painting, not because of its artistic merit but because he owned the pub it depicted. Now, pubs were being boarded up all over the place, and this one had become a liability.

‘It was horrible,’ Fiona replied.

‘My sole was fine,’ Richard declared, sinking into an easy chair after he’d supplied everybody with a drink.

‘It’s the best restaurant in Heckley but I think it’s growing a bit stale,’ Tristan stated.

Teri, sitting next to him, put an arm around his neck and pulled him closer. ‘I hope you don’t think we’re growing stale,’ she said.

‘Nuh-uh,’ he replied, shaking his head and engulfing her in an embrace. Fiona, sitting at his other side, glanced across at Richard and they held each other’s gaze for several seconds.

‘So where are we with the game?’ Fiona asked, and Tristan broke away from Teri.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s all gone a bit quiet. Cost me
£
400 to fix the Rangey and we’ve had nothing to show for it. She hit me a lot harder than I expected.’

‘You must’ve braked too hard,’ Richard told him.

‘It’s not something I practise regularly,’ he replied. ‘So why hasn’t she been in court?’

Richard said: ‘I went down there and looked at the list and she wasn’t on it. Apparently her case has been adjourned, so I’ll just have to keep looking out for her. It’s disappointing, but that’s life.’ He turned to his wife: ‘Teri might be onto something, though, mightn’t you, kid?’

‘It’s looking good,’ she replied, and told them all about her meeting with Torl, the previous evening.

‘Torl?’ Tristan echoed with disbelief. ‘He’s having you on.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Richard replied. ‘I had a chat with him before the session started and he told me the same thing. And he was in fifty thousands’ worth of XKR.’

‘He could’ve hired it.’

‘To pull totty at the speed dating? Come off it – he could do that with a Ford.’

‘Well he sounds dishy to me,’ Fiona said. ‘You’re only jealous because he’s taller than you. Presumably you ticked each other on your cards, Teri?’

‘That’s right. Encounters emailed me late last night, but he hasn’t rung me.’

‘It’s only been twenty-four hours.’

‘They usually ring after twenty-four minutes.’

‘He could be playing hard to get.’

‘Well he’s no business to.’

Richard coughed and said: ‘I hate it when people play hard to get. Don’t you, Fiona?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, standing up and pulling him to his feet. ‘It’s not something I’ve ever experienced.’

A few seconds later they were in the master bedroom. Richard, still thinking about the following week on the yacht, threw the pillows off the queen-sized waterbed and started to unbutton his shirt. Fiona said she needed to use the bathroom.

‘Have a look in the cabinet,’ Richard told her. ‘There should be some Johnson’s baby oil in there. Bring it back with you.’

Something didn’t make sense but I couldn’t pin it down. There were too many distractions in the office so I took a wander around town and bought a sandwich and a bottle of flavoured water. There were plenty of distractions in town, also. The local shop and office girls were out in force, minimally dressed, all spare tyres and bra straps, as they shopped for bargains in the cut-price stores that always proliferate in towns struggling to recover from mass job losses. I amused myself checking out their tattoos, guessing between shoulder blade or small of back, between butterfly or Celtic symbol. The men were displaying, too. They wore singlets to show off their artwork, and trousers cut off below the knee to reveal elaborate patterns on the outsides of their calves. I could have been an anthropologist in a Brazilian jungle, writing a thesis on Amazonian body art.

I strolled down to the canal and sat on one of the new benches on the revitalised waterfront. A glut of narrow boats were tied up, almost as far as the eye could see, painted in traditional colours – red, green, black and yellow. A woman on one of them gave me a friendly wave as she watered her geraniums. The boats came from Stoke, Stafford and Nottingham, spending time in Heckley instead of simply passing through because the drought was causing the water levels in the canal system to fall low. You can’t please all the people all the time. After a ten minute struggle I successfully extricated my cheese and Branston sandwich from its plastic box and settled down to enjoy it.

Sonia, my last girlfriend, had a tattoo. Just a tasteful butterfly, low down her spine, out of sight except under the most intimate circumstances. It hurt me, for a while, that she’d had it done for someone else, but I soon recovered. There were a dozen reasons why she may have had it done, but she was with me then, in my arms, and that was all that mattered.

Magdalena Fischer had her tattoo done back in 1977 or ’78, when punk was at its height and tattooing was ceasing to be a man thing. Whether she’d had it done herself, or had it forced upon her, was something we’d probably never know. Certainly Ennis’s story was more plausible, that she’d had it done to please him, and fobbed poor Len Atkins off with a lie to save his feelings. Ennis had changed, that was for sure. Not changed by twenty-five years in jail. He’d survived that, although it must have had an effect. No, it wasn’t prison, it was freedom that had crushed him, reduced him to a husk of the man he’d been. Magdalena had filled his head with romantic notions, but it’s easy to be a freethinking, freewheeling hippy when you’ve the safety net of a social security system to protect you from a fall. What was it Karl Karlson sang:
Freedom is the poor man’s solace
? I was beginning to realise what he meant.