Silent Scream (31 page)

‘Thank you so much for giving me your time.’

‘My pleasure. If there is anything else, you know where we are, but not for too long.’

‘Of course, you have the dogs.’

Mrs Delany’s eyes welled up. ‘No, sadly I don’t. They both died a couple of years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Anna picked up her briefcase and was surprised when Mrs Delany rested her hand on her arm. She wore a large emerald and diamond ring and a diamond-encrusted wedding ring.

‘Tell me, how long will it go on for? If you don’t find who killed Amanda, how long will you continue the investigation?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘But you don’t have any results, do you?’

‘No, sadly we don’t as yet.’

‘It’s just that the sooner it is over, the sooner we don’t have to be constantly pressured . . . Cold cases? Don’t unsolved cases become cold cases?’

Anna wanted the soft hand moved away from her. It made her skin crawl.

‘We won’t give up on your daughter, Mrs Delany.’ She would have liked to have added, ‘unlike her parents’, but held her tongue. Just as she reached the door to leave, she posed one final question.

‘Amanda’s toy rabbit – where did it come from?’

‘She had a pet one when she was tiny and it died. She found it all stiff in its hutch and was inconsolable.’ Mrs Delany’s unlined brow managed a slight frown. ‘She went away to school and I think my husband bought it for her, you know – one that would always be with her and couldn’t die.’

‘Unlike Amanda,’ Anna said under her breath as she walked out.

Mike Lewis had done a considerable amount of work before Ronnie Hodgson arrived to help him go through the documents he had taken from Andrea Lesser’s office. Using a calculator, he showed her how much money had been contracted for films and promotion, and the dates when it had been received by Andrea Lesser; clearly it had not been forwarded to Amanda’s bank account.

Miss Hodgson was stunned. She had never been consulted about this money. Had she been, she would have been extremely concerned that she had not made provision for where it should have been banked in high- or low-interest accounts. She was astonished at the amounts that were showing in dollars; with the pound now much lower than when these monies had been paid, she would have automatically insisted the dollars be paid straight into an American account. She finally admitted that she had, at no time, been aware of these contracts and very large deposits, over four million pounds’ worth. This figure was close to the sum of the investments made by Smith-Barker on behalf of Miss Delany – investments into pension plans and companies that had all been wiped out in the stock market crash.

Langton listened to both Mike and Barolli as they took him through the paper trail. They had, without a doubt, a motive for the murder of Amanda Delany. Their job was to tie in how the two, Andrea Lesser and Andrew Smith-Barker, could have arranged her death. Andrea Lesser had keys to the mews house, she could have easily hired someone to do the job, but now the team would have to prove it.

‘Bring them in and grill the pants off the pair of them,’ Langton ordered. ‘Leave no stone unturned. It’s difficult to prove fraud without a lot more evidence, which will be hard to come by with the victim dead.’ He encouraged them to delve deep into both suspects’ backgrounds, dig up anything they could to connect them to the actual killing and prove they had instigated fraud. They had only Miss Hodgson’s verbal statement that Amanda had become suspicious.

‘Suspicions but no real proof, if Miss Lesser is saying that Amanda knew of the transactions.’

‘Ronnie Hodgson’s still here, Guv. She’s with the Fraud guys sifting through all the contracts.’

‘OK, let me have a word with her.’

Ronnie Hodgson was nervous when Langton approached the interview room, but he quickly charmed her. He pulled out a chair for her while he perched on the edge of the table.

‘This must be very distressing for you,’ he began.

‘Yes, yes, it is. We believe that four million pounds was due to my client.’

‘Is it usual that an agent invests on behalf of a client?’

‘It has been done, but always with the client’s agreement. Film work often pays such a lot of money, it is necessary to be ready to deal with it, so to speak.’

‘Deal with it, like investments?’

‘Yes, pension plans and suchlike.’

‘In the past, you received a cheque, did you not, with the agent’s commission taken off?’

‘Yes, but sometimes it was sent directly to my client’s bank account and they would simply send me an invoice of expenses and percentages taken from the original payment.’

‘Did you get any invoices regarding the four million pounds?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Were you aware that these large sums were to be paid into your client’s account?’

‘No. I knew Amanda had accepted film work, but I had no indication how much she was being paid.’

‘So you were dependant on Miss Lesser to contact you and send you the invoices.’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘Have you at any time in the past been worried about late payments?’

‘No, never, but as I said, I was not always aware of which contracts Amanda had signed or what negotiations had been made on her behalf.’

‘I see.’

‘I have brought in all my files.’

‘We really appreciate your assistance, but tell me – what do
you
think has taken place?’

Ronnie Hodgson licked her lips. ‘I can’t really say, just that it is unusual.’

‘Unusual? I’d say it was a bit more than that, wouldn’t you? Four million invested over a lengthy period of time and your client seemingly unaware of the transactions. But she was becoming very suspicious, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what did
she
think was happening?’

‘She thought it was being stolen.’

‘Stolen?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘When I asked Andrea Lesser about it, she assured me that there was nothing untoward taking place and that a few contracts were late being sent out so that monies were delayed being paid.’

‘She lied.’

‘Yes, I believe so now.’

‘Why do you think she lied to you?’

‘Because, according to the contracts, I’ve seen that the money
was
paid in full to her agency and on time – and should have been forwarded immediately into Amanda’s bank account.’

‘So she put the money elsewhere?’

‘It appears so. She must have passed it on to Andrew Smith-Barker, an investment banker, who I know to be a personal friend of hers.’

Langton moved from the table with a smile.

‘Thank you so much. I would appreciate it if you kept this information private and confidential until we have made further investigations.’

‘Oh yes, yes, I will,’ she assured him.

‘I am sure you will, as I believe you to be a very honest woman and I would hate any of this to be detrimental to your business, which could well happen. But I will endeavour to give you every protection . . . We don’t want the tar-brush syndrome, do we? You could, Miss Hodgson, be seen as very much a part of this theft of your client’s money.’

Langton ushered her out to continue her work with the Fraud Squad. He took Mike aside.

‘She’s a good witness. Lesser and Smith-Barker must be brought in as soon as possible. I’d say they’ve been shredding anything that might implicate them in swindling our victim out of her earnings.’

He tapped Mike on the shoulder.

‘Don’t go easy on them. We need a result because if they didn’t kill Amanda, somebody else did. Push the agent woman, sounds like she’s besotted with the banker . . . OK?’

Mike watched Langton stroll down the corridor before he turned back into the interview room. When he entered, Ronnie Hodgson was crying. He wondered what Langton had said to her; she was more eager to help than she had been before.

Anna waited for Felicity to come into the scruffy lounge. She had opened the door of the Maida Vale flat in her dressing-gown and gone to get dressed. It was almost three in the afternoon. The room had been cleaned up since Dan Hutchins had died. The smell of stale tobacco and wine remained, but at least there were no dirty food cartons left littered around. Anna was pleased that Felicity was alone, although she was expecting Jeannie back from an audition, some play on the fringe.

‘You want a cup of tea?’ Felicity asked as she returned in jeans and a T-shirt, but barefoot.

‘No, thank you.’

She disappeared and returned with a cracked mug and a slice of white bread covered in thick jam. She sat on a dirty cushion, jam smeared across her pallid cheeks.

‘Are you an actress?’ Anna asked.

‘Not really. I was at RADA but on the stage-management side.’

‘Can I ask you about Amanda? She used to live here, didn’t she?’

‘Yeah, off and on, between blokes. She kind of used this as a base and we got all her mail here. Well, we never knew who she was dossing down with and she’d just turn up and collect it.’

Felicity slurped her tea and waved her hand around the room.

‘We’re gonna do it all up when we get the money from her will.’

‘Do you know how much Amanda left you?’

‘Yeah, well, we called her agent and asked about it and she was pretty rude and told us that she’d send us a cheque as she was the ex . . .’ Felicity stared into space, trying to recall what had been said to her. Then she went on, ‘We want to rent out poor Dan’s room. We’ve not done nothing as he was paid up until the end of this month.’

She took a bite of her bread and then tossed the rest into an overflowing wastebin. It hit the side and dropped onto the floor.

‘I miss him,’ she said.

‘You must miss Amanda too.’

‘Yeah, but not as much, as she hadn’t really been around that often. You know, she was a bit out of our league and it was hard for Jeannie as she was always so jealous. Not for me really as I’m not an actress. I just do the odd stage-management gig, but mostly I’m on the dole and

There was a pause as Felicity slurped her mug of tea, then took out a packet of Silk Cut cigarettes and turned on the electric fire to light her cigarette from the only bar that was working. She blew out smoke and stared at Anna.

‘What do you want?’

‘Just to talk really, find out a few things.’

‘Executor, that’s the word I was lookin’ for. Miss Lesser is the executor of Amanda’s will, so she will be paying us but I’m not sure how much. Do you know how long it will take?’

‘No. I think solicitors and death duties have to be sorted before any beneficiary is paid.’

‘Oh.’

‘You knew Amanda for a long time, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

Anna hesitated, not wanting to push too hard until she felt Felicity was at ease with her. But just as she was about to say something, the girl moved across the floor to sit closer to her, picking up an old shell to use as an ashtray.

‘Dan loved her, you know, he’d do anything for her and she was always kind to him, but he was just . . . depressed a lot. He could never see anything in his future because he reckoned everyone lived and then they died and there was not much point in bothering with what happened in between.’

‘I find that very sad.’

‘Yeah, but when you think about it, that’s what happened to him. He lived a bit then he died, but you know, I never understood where he got the dough from to buy the gear that killed him. I mean, he was always broke and it was him that started Amanda wondering what was going on with her money.’

Anna leaned forward as Felicity stubbed out her cigarette.

‘When she could, she got him jobs as an extra on her films, and he got friendly with a couple of actors.’

She took out another cigarette and went across to the electric fire again to light it.

‘What do you mean about her money?’

Felicity sat hunched up beside the fire.

‘He’d been at some internet café and met up with an actor he’d worked with on her film,
The Mansion.
Did you see it?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well, they got chatting and then he showed Dan his new car. He said he’d got paid more than he expected. It was a secondhand Mini, but in good nick, a convertible. Anyway, Amanda came round a few days later maybe and he said to her about the Mini and that she should get herself a car, but she said she didn’t have a licence and preferred usin’ a driver. Then she said that it was odd about the other actor buyin’ a car because she hadn’t been paid a cent for the film yet, and she was quite pissed off about it. Anyway, she called from here and spoke to Andrea Lesser.’

There was a pause as Felicity puffed away on her cigarette.

‘What happened when she called her?’

‘Not a lot, but she said she was gonna check up and see where her money was. I didn’t hear what she said as the phone is in the hall, then she left.’