Flawed (16 page)

‘Grounds to do a search on
Salamander
’

Hyde gave it some thought. ‘I don't know. I'd almost like to hold that in reserve. If we search her and find nothing, we've rather shot our bolt. If we can put Walsh and Bellow together on the deck of
The Salamander
on the last weekend in June, and we can't find anyone who saw Bellow alive after that, then we have a case with or without forensics.’

‘I thought I'd take a picture of Bellow to the marina, talk to
people who'd have been out and about at that time. And see who else was off the coast of Normandy that weekend. Maybe someone can put
Salamander even
closer to where Bellow was found.’

By now Hyde had given up trying to contain her pleasure. A little smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘You're pretty good at this, Charlie. At seeing both the big picture and all the little pieces that make it up. Not everyone can do that.’

‘I had a good teacher,’ said Voss.

‘Yes,’ said Hyde levelly. ‘Still, the time must be coming you'll be wanting to spread your wings. There's a limit to just how far you can go in a small seaside town.’

Voss forbore to comment. There was something unseemly about insisting that, on the contrary, Dimmock was a hotbed of crime, vice and psychosis, and a detective could get all the experience he wanted just by waking up here every morning.

‘You know, if you did want a change,’ continued Hyde, ‘I'd be happy to help.’

Nobody resents a compliment. ‘Thanks. I haven't given it much thought.’

‘Perhaps you should.’

None of which was helping to get Terry Walsh out of circulation. ‘In the meantime,’ said Hyde, ‘what have we got? We've got an accountant who overheard Walsh claiming to have killed Achille Bellow and slung him in the sea. We've got Walsh's yacht in the Channel off Normandy a couple of days before Bellow's body was found. We've got documentation of an unidentified guest on board. If we just had independent…’

Her voice petered out and her eyes went distant. ‘And
actually,’ she said softly after a minute, ‘we have. We have someone who was still close to Walsh in the period leading up to this and who's already expressed an interest in talking to us. If there was bad blood between Walsh and Bellow, it didn't start on June 23
^rd
. It had probably been coming for weeks. Bellow muscling in on Walsh's territory, Walsh warning him off, Bellow surrounding himself with Eastern European weight-lifters. Someone who was part of that circle would have heard the raised voices and stamped feet.’

‘Who…?’ But before the word was out of his mouth, Voss knew. He tried and failed to keep the whistle out of his voice.
‘Susan Weekes’

‘Susan Weekes,’ agreed Hyde. ‘She knew Walsh – that's incontestable, everybody agrees that she knew him. Even on the Walshes’ account she had a crush on him, hung around him any time he was in The Dragon Luck. She was still working at the casino when Bellow was killed. There's every chance she heard Walsh threatening what he'd do if Achille Bellow didn't back off. She may even have heard him boasting after the event, the way Vernon did.’

Voss thought about it. ‘It's possible. But even if she did, who'd believe her?’

‘If she was all we had,’ Hyde conceded, ‘no one. But if she's confirming things that we've got other witnesses to, everyone will believe her.’

It was true. Weekes on her own was clearly a flawed witness. But she could still add weight to the case against Terry Walsh, and they knew she was willing to do it. It remained to be seen if she had anything useful to say. ‘Do you want to see her again?’

Hyde's smile broadened. ‘No. Charlie, I think you should do it. I want your name on this. I want you to get the credit you're due. Find out where she is now. Go and see her.’

Susan had had a rough month. Not agonising or terrifying so much as grindingly unpleasant. She'd considered the possible consequences, good and bad, of a career in drug smuggling and had thought herself prepared even for the worst. But no one is ever prepared for the mind-numbing, soul-sapping drudgery of prison life, and one of the hardest things to deal with is the company.

On the whole, they're not nice people that you meet in a remand wing. Yes, legally they're all innocent until they're proven guilty, but most of them will be proven guilty and most of the others will get off on a technicality. Even in the remand wing of a women's prison, you meet hardly anyone you'd want to take to the office party. You meet stupid women, and greedy women, and sly and vicious women, and women who never look you in the eye. You meet women so degraded by their lives that prison seems a step up, and others so enraged by their circumstances that a careless word can lead to mayhem. It's a fallacy, that
There but for the Grace of God
thing, dreamt up by the terminally empathic Lots of people have bad luck in their lives. Most people don't respond to it with the sort of actions that get you sent to prison.

Susan was sharing a room – and it was called a room, not a cell, and it had gingham curtains at the high windows and what almost amounted to an
en suite
– with a woman who'd got away with passing dud cheques, right up to the moment that she found something wrong with a pair of designer
boots and demanded a refund. She was called Tracie, and had six children by four different men, and spent all day and most of every night recounting their deeply unedifying activities. Susan didn't find her frightening so much as a crashing bore.

So she greeted Charlie Voss like an old friend and was happy to talk to him, about The Dragon Luck and Terry Walsh and his business, for as long as Voss would listen. He bought her cups of tea. If he hadn't, she'd have bought him some to prolong the interview and delay the moment when she'd have to go back and find out what happened to Trade's daughter Simone in Lanzarote.

‘You told us you were Terry Walsh's mistress,’ said Voss, gently reproving.

‘So?’

‘That's not how Terry remembers it. Or Mrs Walsh, come to that.’

‘And you believed them?’ The woman tried for indignation but hadn't the spirit left to carry it off. ‘Of course you believed them. They've got money.’

‘We didn't just take their word for it. Mr Deacon investigated. He found no evidence that it was true.’

Susan sniffed. ‘So what are you doing back here? Don't you think if I could prove it I would have done?’

‘You talked about Terry doing business behind the scenes at The Dragon Luck. Not bulk paper business – the other kind.’

‘So?’ she said again.

‘You heard him talking enough to know where most of his money was coming from?’

‘Sure.’

‘And who his competitors were? Rivals – men who were fighting for a slice of his cake?’

‘I suppose.’ For the first time she sounded a little doubtful.

‘Do you remember any names?’

She got one almost without thinking. But then, Mrs Puddy who ran the knitting-wool shop in Baker's Lane could have done as well. ‘Joe Loomis.’

‘We know about Loomis,’ agreed Voss. ‘Anyone else? Anyone new – maybe in the last year or so?’

Susan gave it some more thought. ‘Yes. But I can't remember their names. Terry didn't like me to look as if I was listening.’

Voss nodded. ‘What about a man called Achille Bellow?’

Susan's brows drew together in a little frown of concentration. Then it cleared. ‘Yes. Terry said he was taking too much of his business and he was going to have to do something about him.’

‘Like, report him to Immigration?’ hazarded Voss. ‘Or drop him in the Channel in a concrete life-vest?’

‘The Channel,’ said Susan Weekes firmly. ‘Definitely the Channel.’

Dimmock's marina wasn't on the scale of, for instance, Brighton's. Until ten years earlier it had been Duffy's Boatyard, a couple of sheds, an area of hard standing and a slipway into a dredged area of the Barley estuary. It did a steady trade rather than a roaring one, building two or three wooden sailing-boats a year, refitting a few others, doing winter haul-outs and scrub-downs for more again.

It was the third generation of Duffys who spotted the magic
word
grant
and recognised that a marina is only a boatyard in its Sunday best. They built a mole out into the estuary, installed pontoons, decorated the office and soon filled every berth. It wasn't the grandest marina on the south coast, but cognoscenti considered it had charms all its own. She was called Becky, she ran the office, and defied the experience of lifetimes by being both decorative and efficient.

She looked at the photograph Voss showed her and listened carefully to what he wanted to know. Then, herself unable to help, she took him outside and introduced him to two old salts in guernseys and sailcloth caps. They were sitting on the weather-bleached deck of a gaff cutter even older than they were, apparently knitting rope. ‘They're always here,’ murmured Becky. ‘They live on board. They don't sail any more, they just sit there watching the boats come and go. If anyone saw the man in your photo, they did.’

And they did. ‘Foreign gent,’ grunted the slightly older and more grizzled of the Hawkins brothers. ‘Talked with an accent.’

Voss's heart hammered against the inside of his ribs. He nodded. ‘And he was with Mr Walsh?’

‘Walsh?’ queried the other brother.

Becky translated. ‘
Salamander's
owner.’

‘Oh – him. The townie. That's right, he went on
The Salamander.
Nice boat that. Roller reefing. Sail a boat like that through an ‘urricane, you could.’

‘Did you see them come back?’ asked Voss.

‘Saw
The Salamander
come back. Didn't see who come off her. It was late.’

‘They turn in about nine,’ explained Becky.

‘Any way of saying when this was?’

‘Last summer,’ said the elder Hawkins.

‘June,’ said the younger.

‘Late June,’ said the elder judiciously. ‘After Regatta Week.’

Before Voss could skip and whistle his way back to Battle Alley, though, Becky had another joy to add to his pile. She checked through the log – this, Voss discovered, was nautical-speak for diary – and found three other boats that had been sailing in the same area as
The Salamander
the last weekend in June. She made a few phone calls and found him someone who'd raised Walsh's yacht five miles off the Normandy coast, a scant ten miles from where Achille Bellow's body was found.

‘Raised it?’ queried Voss, puzzled. ‘It sank?’

Becky grinned. ‘It means they saw and identified her.’

Voss took the phone so quickly you'd have to say he snatched. ‘And when was that, sir?’

The skipper turned out to be a Miss Lawson who didn't appreciate being addressed as
sir.
Huffily, she consulted her own log. ‘We left Dimmock on the Friday evening -June 23rd. This must have been the Sunday afternoon, about four.’

‘And it was definitely
The Salamander?’
An affirmative grunt. ‘Was it anchored?’

‘Five miles off shore?’ said the woman dryly. ‘Not a sailing man, are you, sonny? No, she was pottering along under the jib.’

‘The little sail at the front,’ whispered Becky.

‘So they weren't in any hurry. How close did you pass her?’

‘Within about half a mile.’

‘Did you see who was on board?’

‘I could see there
were
people on board. I couldn't tell you who.’

It didn't matter. The Hawkins brothers had told him that. Terry Walsh, and his guest – the foreign gent in the photograph. It was more than he needed to search
The Salamander.
It was enough to reserve Walsh a suite at the Parkhurst penthouse.

‘We've got him.’ The excitement was like a guitar-string thrumming in Voss's voice.

‘Walsh?’ As if he might mean someone else. But Hyde wanted it clear and unambiguous. ‘
What
have you got?’

He went through it, building the case a piece at a time. ‘I spoke to French criminal intelligence – their last positive sighting of Achille Bellow alive was in Marseilles on June 20
^th
. I don't know how or when he got into England – he'd have been stopped if Immigration had spotted him – but obviously he had a way in. He may not have been fronting the operation here, but he must have been around enough for Terry to realise it was Bellow who was giving him problems and to figure out how to deal with him.

‘On June 24
^th
Walsh took a guest aboard
The Salamander
and told the marina office that he was heading for the north Brittany coast. Later that day he was seen -
raised,’
he amended, with a little smile Hyde didn't understand, ‘ten miles from the spot where Bellow's body turned up the following day. The Hawkins brothers identified a photograph of Achille Bellow as Terry Walsh's guest. A couple of weeks earlier Susan Weekes heard him complaining in The Dragon Luck that Bellow was costing him money and would have to be dealt with, and early in July Leslie Vernon overheard him boasting about killing Bellow on the phone.’ He spread his
hands, unable to contain his triumph. ‘Boss – what more do we need?’

Hyde was watching him with a light like wine in her eyes. The exhilaration of the chase was passing between them like a current. ‘Not a damn thing, Charlie. You're right. We've got him.
You
got him.’

Voss actually blushed. He wasn't used to having his contribution acknowledged. Deacon tapped his thought processes endlessly, and hadn't even the grace to buy the drinks while he did it, but Voss was resigned to the fact that his input went largely unrecognised. Until now it hadn't occurred to him that there was anything wrong with that. Junior officers did the legwork, senior officers made the decisions, and if there was any recognition going the best he could hope for was along the lines of, ‘Congratulations to Detective Superintendent Deacon
and his team'.
Which was fair enough, since criticism was mostly directed the same way. Only, since he and Deacon made a good team, there were more bouquets than brickbats and it would have been nice occasionally to smell the roses.

But leading an inquiry was a whole new experience. He'd have had doubts about his ability, except that Detective Inspector Hyde of the Serious Organised Crime Agency thought he was ready. She believed his grasp of the situation was sure and his judgement good, and clearly she was delighted with the outcome. It was impossible for even a famously level-headed detective sergeant not to feel flattered.