By All Means (Fiske and MacNee Mysteries Book 2) (4 page)

‘No.  He would have filed his reports daily by encrypted email.  His laptop would have automatically deleted the emails after confirmation of delivery’.

Vanessa thanked Randall, and just as she was ending the call, he interrupted her.

‘His hard hat turned up in a refuse skip.  It’s quite badly damaged.  Will I send it to you?’

Vanessa said that he should avoid handling it too much, place it in a plastic bag, and send it by the next helicopter. She signed off, and with as much nonchalance as she could muster, rushed off to the loo.

*

When she got back to her office, Vanessa found a yellow sticky on her screen asking her to return a call from Neil Derrick.

‘Hi!  I’m feeling like shit, so make it quick.’

‘Just thought you’d like to know, somebody at the oil company that operates Vermont One has a sense of humour.  I thought that Ebright sounded too like an oven cleaner to be a sensible name for an offshore drilling company, so I Googled it. “Ebright”, or to be totally accurate, “Ebright Azimuth” is the highest point in the state of Delaware: 447 feet.  Only Florida has a lower highest point.’

There was sometimes an endearing Boy Scout geekiness about Neil, but Vanessa wasn’t in the mood.

‘Fascinating.  Maybe it will come up in a pub quiz and you’ll win a pint of lager.’

‘Funny name for a business that’s drilling thousands of metres under the sea. But I’m a commercial lawyer and I know that Delaware is a well-known corporate haven.’

‘Neil, what the fuck is a corporate haven’.

‘It’s a place where you register your business if you want to make it very difficult for anybody to find out much about it.  Delaware set up as a corporate haven at the end of the nineteenth century to attract businesses from New York.  And it’s worked for them.’

Vanessa took a sip of fizzy water.  ‘I’ll bear it in mind’.

‘You do that, darling. Meanwhile, I may do a little digging.  In my lunch hour, of course.  See you tonight.’

*

Vanessa was considering another loo run when Sara Hamilton came in carrying a printed pdf file.

‘This just came in from Northumbria.  It’s a copy of Thomas Nuttall’s Ebright ID.   It was with a bundle of clothes stuffed under the seats of a changing room in a menswear store in the Metro Centre in Gateshead.   It was found early this morning, but Christ knows how long it’s been there.  I’ve been on to Northumbria and they’ve sent somebody to the shop to see if anyone remembers him.  Trouble is, if he bought new stuff on Saturday, he may have been seen only by Saturday staff.   On the plus side, it must be quite unusual for someone to buy a complete new outfit and then say they’ll just wear it.  So the shop’s computer should have details of what he bought.’

‘He’ll be long gone.  But it’ll do no harm to circulate what we think he’s wearing.   I have a feeling that this trail is going cold very quickly.  Remember that little nugget Aisha came up with, about all the Nuttalls who live in Aberdeen?   Maybe it would worth her while to spend half an hour with the electoral register – and remind her, not that you’ll need to, she’s really on the ball – that she should look at the unedited version, not the one that people can buy for marketing and the like and that you can ask to be excluded from, and see if she can find a Thomas Nuttall of the same sort of age as our man’.

*

The Aberdeen office of Ebright Offshore Drilling was on a small business park just off the main road to Inverness.   It occupied one floor of a 1990s prefabricated steel and glass block looking out on a pond populated by some ornamental carp and bordered by some ill-kept grass and shrubbery.   Vanessa and Sara pulled into a visitors' space in the car park and, as they got out of the car, Sara said, 'Boss, are you OK?'

'I'm fine. Why?'

'None of my business, I know, but I just wondered about all that running to the loo.  If you've got an infection or something, you shouldn't be at work.'

'I haven't got an infection, Sara.  Don't worry about me.  I'm touched that you care.'

When they got to reception, Vanessa showed her warrant card and introduced herself and DS Hamilton.  'We have an appointment to see Mr Wootten.'

The receptionist smiled faintly, dialled a number, said that Chief Inspector Fiske was here, came round the desk and asked the detectives to follow her.  They walked through a long open-plan office, with people working at computer screens to the sound of nondescript music of the kind played to waiting customers by call centres, to what seemed to be the only enclosed space on the floor.  A discreet plate on the door read: 'T R Wootten: Europe Manager'.

The receptionist knocked and an American accent called, 'Come!' Vanessa thought that this was unusual.  Her experience of the hail-fellow-well-met style of Americans in Aberdeen led her to expect Wootten to come out from behind the desk to welcome them.  Her surprise was even greater when she entered the office and saw, sitting at the desk and showing no sign of getting up, a woman of about her own age, wearing a red silk blouse, a gold choker at the neck and large gold hoop earrings drawing the eye to her beautifully cut hair.

‘Hi.  I'm Tammy Wootten.  How can I help you?’

Vanessa was careful not to show her surprise and wondered why she hadn't known she was coming to see a woman.  'We're investigating the death of Harvey Jamieson on Vermont One and I have some questions about what he was doing there. The platform manager, Alex Randall, couldn't tell us much so I thought I should speak to you before contacting your head office in the States.'

Tammy Wootten seemed guarded.  ‘What is it you need to know?’

‘We need to have details of what work he was doing on the platform between his arrival on Sunday, and Thursday.  We have some knowledge of what he was doing on the day he was killed – Friday – because we’ve analysed the contents of his laptop, but we need the full picture. I understand…’

Tammy Wootten interrupted.  ‘Yes, Inspector, I know that you have Harvey’s laptop and we need to have it returned to us immediately.  It is, after all, our property.’

Vanessa tried not to bridle.  ‘It may ultimately be your company’s property, Ms Wootten, but for the moment it’s evidence and therefore the property of the investigation of a murder.   I understand that standard procedure is for someone doing Harvey Jamieson’s job to file reports as encrypted emails each day and that these emails are then automatically deleted from the laptop.’

Tammy Wooten, with a look of some hostility, nodded.

‘We need to see these emails.  If you have copies here, that would be very convenient.  If they have gone to your Head Office we’ll need to go there.  In a last resort, of course, our technical people can probably find them on the hard disk.  That would be laborious and time-consuming and I need to move this investigation forward.’

‘They would have been addressed to Head Office, not here.   These reports go directly to the Audit and Risk Committee.  I would only see them if the Committee decided that any local action needed to be taken.’

‘Fine.  Whom do I have to contact in the States?’

‘I would prefer that you went through me. I will get in touch with Head Office and let you know their view’.

Vanessa smiled.  ‘I know you can’t be expected to be up to speed on Scottish police procedure, Ms Wootten, so let me enlighten you.  We don’t conduct enquiries, especially murder enquiries, through intermediaries.  I will contact the appropriate people at Ebright’s head office directly, and if we have to speak to people there, I will either go to the States or arrange a videolink with the help of colleagues in the local police.  However, examination of the emails may make that unnecessary, but I can’t reach a conclusion on that until I’ve seen them.’

‘But you don’t know that Harvey’s death was work-related?’

‘It is a working assumption.  We are also investigating other possibilities, which is why, as I’m sure you know, I’ve had a team of officers on Vermont One interviewing everyone who was on the rig while Jamieson was there, and another team tracing those who left the day he died’.

‘All right, Inspector.  I’ll let you have names and contact details. We’ll email them to you.’

‘Within the hour, please.’

*

‘Thomas is a less common name these days than it used to be’. DC Aisha Gajani was waiting for Fiske and Hamilton when they got back from Ebright’s offices.  ‘I found only three Thomases among the Aberdeen Nuttalls.  Our man is, according to HR records on Vermont One, forty-two years old, born on 23 February 1970.  Two of the Thomases I found on the electoral roll were much older than that.  The other was born on 23 February 1970, at Aberdeen maternity hospital, to James and Marion Nuttall, of Torry, both still alive.’

‘Good work, Aisha’, Sara said.

‘That was the good news.  The bad news is that Thomas Nuttall died just over a year ago, of leukaemia.’

Vanessa sighed.  ‘Identity theft.  Or, to be exact, identity appropriation. This murder was premeditated.  We just need to know why.  Sara, have you had time to look at the interview notes from the rig?’

‘I asked the PCs to flag up anything out of the ordinary or that might be linked to Jamieson’s death.  One of the men interviewed says he saw a heated argument between Jamieson and somebody who sounds a lot like Nuttall.  This witness thinks this was late on Thursday, the evening before Jamieson was killed.  Nothing else flagged up, but I’m going through the notes just in case.’

‘Fine.  Aisha can give you a hand.  But I doubt you’ll find anything of interest.’

*

Neil Derrick was a senior commercial lawyer working for an Aberdeen firm of solicitors specialising in the oil industry. He had started his career as a criminal lawyer, representing petty criminals in crown courts in the South of England, where he had qualified after doing a first degree in Scotland.  He had got into commercial law when a colleague asked him to help with a complicated criminal fraud case.  A facility with numbers that he had shown since he was a schoolboy had turned out to be very useful.  That facility had also helped him to become quite an accomplished bridge player, a talent that he had yet to reveal to Vanessa.  Commercial work was intellectually demanding and more quickly lucrative than criminal work – oil companies, as well as other industrial clients he had worked for before moving to Aberdeen, paid a lot more than legal aid – but he sometimes missed the buzz that came from following the evidence and from the analysis of human frailty that came with crime.

His interest in crime had, of course, been rekindled when he fell for a senior police officer.  Vanessa liked to bounce ideas off him when she was in the middle of a case, and they were close enough, especially now, to talk in detail about her cases, even the most sensitive and confidential ones. He had, so far, been careful not to get involved without Vanessa asking him, but the oil rig murder was quite close to home, so he thought he might do a bit of research.  And, when he had mentioned to Vanessa earlier in the day that he might do some digging, she hadn’t objected.

Neil caught Vanessa on her mobile while Sara Hamilton was driving her back from Ebright.

‘What’s the name of that company that manages the hospital?’

‘Hedelco – Health Delivery Corporation.  Why?”

‘Just checking something.  Tell you tonight.  How are you?’

‘I’m fine.  It’s always better in the afternoon’

Sara Hamilton gave Vanessa a knowing smile for which she was rewarded with a ‘Don’t go there‘ look.

*

‘The usual?’  Colin MacNee was at the bar of the pub round the corner from HQ and Vanessa was sitting at a corner table.  Her ‘usual’ was a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc, so he was surprised when she said she’d rather have a mineral water.

‘Not like you, Vanessa, especially after a hard day at the coal face’.

Vanessa gave him a bewildered look. ‘You mean you don’t know? Janet must take patient confidentiality more seriously than I would!  I’m pregnant, Colin.  Some champagne the other night with Neil when I told him was my last drink for quite a long time.’