Little Knell (11 page)

Whimbrel House at Staple St James, too, had been built in the more spacious days of yesteryear. Then, large families and dependent relations and the live-in servants to care for them all had called for many rooms. On the other hand, this ancient retired cavalry officer and explorer had clearly had his being in his study, an old army-style camp bed in the corner serving him as a bedroom
à la
Duke of Wellington in his last days at Walmer Castle.

Most of the rest of the furniture had gone, making the task of the two policemen easier. It was a simple matter to look first through empty attics, and then the bedrooms where once the ladies of the household had dressed for dinner. The fine drawing room and even finer dining room were similarly devoid of anything in the nature of goods or chattels and even the study, scene of most of the activities of Sid Wetherspoon and Wayne Goddard, only had the scattered remnants of packing materials in it.

‘Should have tidied up before they went,' muttered Crosby, opening the door of a butler's pantry and shutting it again after he saw it was completely bare.

‘Somebody tidied something away, Crosby,' said Sloan astringently, ‘and we've got to find it, wherever it is.'

In the event it was Detective Constable Crosby who did. He opened the door of a broom cupboard in the lobby of the great kitchen and jumped swiftly back as a bound and bandaged figure toppled forward to the stone floor at his feet.

‘Dr Rodotheptah, I presume,' said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Stand well back, Crosby, and don't touch. Remember, Dr Dabbe says such men are dangerous.'

Chapter Nine

Loose

‘Don't touch the mummy, Sloan,' ordered Superintendent Leeyes equally swiftly; but for different reasons.

‘No, sir.'

‘And notify the coroner before you do anything else at all.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘He isn't going to catch us out twice.'

‘No, sir.' He decided it was no use trying to explain to the superintendent that Mr Locombe-Stableford hadn't actually caught the police out the first time; or that Her Majesty's Coroner for East Calleshire had patently been manipulated just as the police had been by some person or persons unknown – and both from motives that were still obscure to Sloan.

‘And neither is anyone else, Sloan,' growled the superintendent. ‘Remember that.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘All the same, it seems to me,' Leeyes pronounced weightily, ‘that someone somewhere is having a very good try at catching us out a second time.'

Sloan didn't attempt to deny this. He simply said, ‘We're going over to see the boyfriend next.'

‘Quite right, Sloan.' The superintendent was a great believer in the fact that murders were usually family affairs.

‘And,' went on Sloan, well aware of this, ‘we're trying to get a lead on a man called Peter Caversham, in Luston.'

‘Don't forget to see Jill Carter's employer again, too,' Leeyes reminded him. ‘The one who was the last person to say he'd seen the girl alive. Nigel Worrow.'

‘I won't forget,' promised Sloan. ‘There could well be something funny going on at his place.' As far as he was concerned, accounts could cover a multitude of sins any day of the week. Even the Calleshire Constabulary's own income and expenditure accounts listed buns and bribery under one single heading so that no one ever knew exactly how much was really spent on informers. The last person to query this had very swiftly been reminded how Sir John Falstaff had got it in the neck for his ‘but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!' and been sent on his way no wiser.

The superintendent was still speaking. ‘Surely the colonel's house over at Stable St James isn't all that far from The Ornum Arms, as the crow flies?'

‘No, sir,' replied Sloan, ‘it isn't, but no one saw anything in the pub car park the night the girl went missing. Crosby checked.'

‘Doesn't mean a thing.' His superior officer sniffed. ‘Negative evidence in both senses.'

‘Yes, sir,' agreed Sloan, since this was true.

Leeyes grunted. ‘As I remember too, Sloan, Whimbrel House is a bit on its own, isn't it?'

‘Quite isolated, sir.'

‘Then they were lucky not to have had squatters in there, seeing it was empty for so long.'

What Sloan wanted to check was that they hadn't had drug distributors in there. Large, empty and isolated houses were ideal for the calculated division of big consignments of heroin into smaller, marketable amounts; and as he would have been the first to agree with the man from Customs and Excise, this work had to be done somewhere. And safe houses were hard to come by these days. He wondered how they had got to hear about it.

If they had.

‘By the way, Sloan,' said Leeyes, ‘you might make sure in passing that the coroner's officer does his share of the work.'

‘Certainly, sir,' promised Detective Inspector Sloan with alacrity, as he put the telephone down. He turned to Detective Constable Crosby and said, ‘There's one more call I want to make and then we can get going.'

*   *   *

The resources of the Calleshire Constabulary extended well beyond the county's boundary. They included instant access to specialists in matters far removed from the usual run-of-the-mill policing. The expert to whom Detective Inspector Sloan was now speaking was attached to a famous Fraud Squad, where she enjoyed the role of forensic accountant.

‘Do call me Jenny,' she said.

‘Yes, miss,' said Detective Inspector Sloan automatically. He must pull himself together. Somehow, he'd expected forensic accounting to be man's work. He was getting out of touch.

‘And what exactly is it – er – Inspector, that you want to know about money-laundering by drug dealers?' She had a deliciously deep voice with a suspicion of a gurgle in it. ‘Tell me…'

‘I'd like some background, please, miss…' If she was expecting him to tell her his own Christian name she would be disappointed.

‘Oh, Jenny, please.'

‘Jenny.' He swallowed and started again. ‘I'd like some background, particularly on the sort of scam we should be looking out for here in Calleshire where we know we have heroin coming in and dealers operating.' He must remember, too, that money-launderers as well as accountants could be female. After all, traditionally, women had always washed everything else, hadn't they?

A very feminine little laugh came trilling down the telephone line. ‘Oh, it won't be a scam that you should be looking for, Inspector. Not if they really know what they're doing, that is.'

‘Really?'

‘What your money-launderer wants more than anything,' said the delicious voice, ‘is for all his financial transactions to look absolutely straightforward and above board.'

‘Yes, mi— Jenny.' She, of course, was speaking as if all wrongdoers were male. ‘I can understand that but what…'

‘You see,' she explained, ‘your bad boy has only got two choices about what to do with all his ill-gotten gains: hide them or legitimize them.'

‘If he hides them,' said Sloan vigorously, ‘we'll never find them. That's for sure.'

‘If he hides them then there's very little point in his having acquired them,' she who was called Jenny came back smartly. ‘He might as well have not taken all the risks.'

‘So he attempts to legitimize them,' conceded Sloan. That surely let Horace Boller off the hook; he wouldn't know how. Probably foreign to his nature, too.

‘Which is when his danger moment comes,' said the forensic accountant, wise in her generation. ‘So your money-launderer tries to do it in stages and in ways that don't leave an audit trail. Or, better still, he arranges to pay tax on the money. Nothing authenticates assets quicker than that.'

‘Money talks,' said Sloan obstinately.

‘But it can say different things when it does,' she said, adding sweetly, ‘And it doesn't have to shout.'

He wanted to say something about it being the singer not the song that mattered to his Criminal Investigation Department but she was still talking.

‘In our experience, Inspector, one of the favourite conduits in the first instance for this sort of money is classic cars.'

‘Classic cars can be sold on fairly easily,' agreed Sloan, the vision of a certain beautiful green Bentley coming into his mind.

‘So can most items bought in the fine art market,' the girl said.

‘And no questions asked,' said Sloan. He was sure she was only a girl. She sounded quite young – and as pretty as a picture herself, fine art notwithstanding.

‘It's more a case,' she said, ‘that there will usually be no questions asked about where the money came from to buy the articles in the first place rather than in the second.'

‘That's their danger point, is it?' The green Bentley would have to be accounted for, that was for sure.

‘And then there is always smurfing – thanks to crooked Bureaux de Change.'

‘They were the first places we looked,' Sloan hastened to tell her. ‘Especially one near the station here that we thought might be dicey, but we found no great numbers of small sterling notes being converted into high denomination notes in other currencies.'

‘And,' she sighed, ‘some solicitors and accountants report nothing even when they should – such as large sums going to offshore accounts. Overseas connections are what your money-launderer likes. The more the better.'

Sloan still didn't see where the Lake Ryrie Reserve in Lasserta could come in. If it did. He wanted Jenny to go on talking though.

‘Banks and building societies are much better at telling us about suspicious transactions,' she said, ‘than accountants and solicitors are.'

‘I expect it's because they tend to have a closer relationship with their clients,' said Sloan solemnly, suppressing any facetious suggestions about there being honour among thieves. He'd seen case-hardened solicitors in court give their clients the convincing impression they really cared that they had lost their clients' cause. ‘The personal touch.'

‘Could be,' said Jenny cheerfully. ‘You might keep an eye open, though, for another popular way of using up a lot of cash in one fell swoop.'

‘What's that?'

‘Finding someone who owns something that's quite legitimate – a winning sweepstake ticket or an endowment insurance policy – and offering them over the odds for it. That sort of thing. Money's no object in drug-dealing circles, remember. They're not like the forces of law and order; they've got infinite resources. Make ours look like chicken-feed.'

‘I suppose funds aren't a problem,' said Sloan, ‘when you're rich beyond the dreams of avarice.' He didn't know who it was who had first said that but he did know who had said the love of money was the root of all evil. His churchgoing mother often quoted St Paul: ‘It's quite a difficult concept – being too rich.'

The accountant's voice sounded suddenly quite sultry. ‘Drug dealing is like having the Midas touch twenty times over.'

‘That must have its dangers,' he said, prosaically.

‘And, Inspector, don't forget that a money-laundering method founded on trust between drug dealers – word of mouth – is the hardest of all to trace.'

‘Nothing in writing would be safer all round,' he agreed. It was the so-called gentlemen's agreements that caused most trouble in the business world, though.

‘They like the anonymity, too.' She gave another of her merry little laughs. ‘It has its advantages for us though.'

‘It does?' He couldn't match the accountant's detachment. He'd noticed that working with figures all the time did that to people. They lost interest in the human race.

‘If there should happen to be a breach of that trust between any of your money-launderers, then you won't have to worry, Inspector.'

‘They get taken out?'

‘They do. There's justice among thieves as well as honour. But it's pretty rough.'

Sloan wondered for a fleeting moment if poor Jill Carter had overstepped the mark somewhere along the line, but the forensic accountant was still speaking in her attractive gurgle.

‘What you have to remember most of all, Inspector, is that diamonds are still the money-launderers' best friend.'

*   *   *

The only aspect of life about the top apartment in the house in Park Drive, Berebury, which had changed since Detective Constable Crosby had last been there was the mien of its occupant, Colin Thornhill.

Now the whole physical bearing of the man projected total dejection and lassitude. Even police questioning had failed to arouse him. He was sitting at the table, his shoulders hunched up and his head sunk low between them. And the act of raising his head to respond to Sloan's calculatedly low-key interrogation appeared to call for more physical strength than he could conjure up.

Of emotional strength, Thornhill appeared to have none left at all. The answers he gave Sloan were monosyllabic and almost those of an automaton.

‘No,' he repeated as often as the question was put to him, not moving his sunken head from between his hands. ‘I've told you time and again that I haven't seen Jill since that day at the Ornum Arms, and that's the truth. Yes,' he insisted in the same low monotone. ‘We were very happy together. Very.'

The only questions which did seem to stir him were about the row over the curtains. Probings there roused him very quickly. ‘Whoever told you that, Inspector, got it wrong. We were only talking about them. Not arguing. Hell, what does the colour of curtains matter, anyway?'

Detective Constable Crosby, bachelor, nodded his agreement and murmured something to his superior officer about ‘a domestic'. Detective Inspector Sloan was not quite ready to agree to this: by the same token William Shakespeare's
Othello
could possibly be dismissed as a fuss over a handkerchief.