Last Reminder (5 page)

My end stopped, and I fell backwards into a mess of arms that pushed me upright again. His end bounced a yard into the air, ejecting him like water off a sheepdog’s back. The Chihuahua scampered away, between the legs of the cheering crowd, and into the open doorway of the flats. He’d had enough excitement for tonight.

I drew a breath and turned to Inspector Lockett. His eyes were wide and his mouth gaping, but he couldn’t form any words.

‘Cancel the sandwiches,’ I said.

The youth could have had a gun or a knife, or even a fractured spine, so I approached him warily. He was about nineteen, undernourished and under average. On drugs at a guess. He had landed in a sprawled position, his shoulders against the wall, the residual fear still pulling at his face. Or maybe it was a new fear.

‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer but his unblinking eyes tried to focus on me. I moved one of his feet with the toe of my trainer, and he snatched it away. Same with the other – he’d survive.

‘OK, son,’ I said, grasping the collar of his jacket, ‘On your feet.’ He resisted for a few seconds, then allowed me to haul him upright. ‘You won’t believe this,’ I told him, ‘but I’ve just done you a favour.’

Lockett took him away and most of the crowd wandered off, wondering if whatever was on satellite TV would be as good as this. A couple of grinning youths invited me in for a beer and a woman with an anorak over a housecoat told me that it was no thanks to me that the dog hadn’t been hurt. I chatted with one of the PCs for a few minutes – he’d had a spell at Heckley a couple of years ago – and went home.

Two minutes in the microwave at number four warmed up the half a mug of tea I’d left on the worktop. Upstairs, I cleaned my teeth, stripped off all my clothes and crept into a nice warm bed. Just as I’d arrived at Lingwell I’d remembered that I’d left the electric blanket on. I reached out for the alarm clock and set it for fifteen minutes earlier than usual, to give me time for a shower in the morning. It was two minutes past midnight. It had been quite a Monday.

There was a message on my desk next morning to ring a PC in Traffic. I did it straight away, in case it was anything I might need in the meeting.

‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Priest,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t realise you were tied up with a big case. It’ll do some other time.’

‘Go on, you might as well tell me,’ I said.

‘It’s OK. I was just going to ask you to do a poster for us.’

I went to art college before I became a policeman. It’s an unusual route into the force, but it can be surprisingly useful. Any of them could have told me about the
Fighting Temeraire,
but how many knew that Wham! took their name from a Roy Lichtenstein painting? It doesn’t help solve cases, but I pick up a few useful points at Trivial Pursuit. The drawback is that I get asked to do all the posters for police dances.

‘No problem,’ I told him. ‘Send me the details
and I’ll do it when I can.’ Actually, I find it quite relaxing, enjoy doing them.

‘It’s about bullbars,’ he said.

‘Bullbars?’

‘Yeah, you know, on the front of off-road vehicles. The van that hit that little boy in town last week was fitted with one. We’ve just received the pathologist’s report and it says that they made a significant contribution to his injuries. In other words, if it hadn’t been for them, he’d be alive today.’

‘Mmm, it’s sad,’ I said. ‘So what do you want? A little poster that you can stick up all over town?’

‘That’s right, Mr Priest. And maybe we can go round putting them behind their wipers while they’re in the supermarket, that sort of thing.’

‘Right, I’ll see what I can come up with. Have you managed to find some money in the budget for them?’

‘No, sir. We’ve decided to pay for them ourselves.’

‘Out of your own pockets?’

‘That’s right.’

‘OK, well, put me down for a couple of quid. Give me a few days – as you said, we’re a bit busy at the moment.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

The phone was halfway back to its cradle when I heard him calling me.

‘Mr Priest!’

‘Yes?’

‘Sergeant Smedley would like a word with you.’

He came on after a couple of seconds. ‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said.

‘Hi, George. What can I do for you?’

‘Do you still have that old E-type Jaguar?’

‘You mean thirty thousand quids’ worth of desirable motor car; the pinnacle of auto engineering, never approached before or since?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Yes, I still have it. Want to buy it?’

‘No. I’ll stick with my Morris Eight. More my image. Can I put you down for the cavalcade at the Lord Mayor’s parade?’

‘Oh, I should think so. I enjoyed it last year. Will you send me the details?’

‘Will do. Cheers.’

‘No problem.’

I inherited the Jag when my father died. It was a wreck, but I restored it, more or less in his memory. Then I sold it and bought it back again. It’s fun to drive, but I’m not an enthusiast. Annabelle likes it, which is all the reason I need for keeping it.

Upstairs, I had another coffee with Gilbert. ‘Hobnob?’ he asked, pushing the packet towards me.

‘Not for me,’ I replied with a grimace. ‘I’ve just finished a piece of chipboard.’

I brought him up-to-date with the case and Gilbert filled me in with a few titbits that he’d gleaned. Goodrich was a member of the Rotary club, Neighbourhood Watch, the Road Safety Committee and several other worthy organisations; all of which, no doubt, brought him many openings through which to ply his trade. Nothing illegal in that.

‘Let’s have this one sewn up, Charlie,’ Gilbert said. ‘Then we can get the strength back on the streets, where they belong. I’m catching hell from the Chamber of Commerce.’

‘My heart bleeds for you,’ I told him, looking at my watch. ‘I bet some of those shopkeepers can be really nasty. C’mon, let’s see what Fraud Squad have found for us.’

There were twenty-five assorted policemen and women waiting in the conference room, talking noisily, reading newspapers – all, depressingly, tabloids – and sitting on the desks.

‘Quiet!’ I shouted, trying to hush them. Slowly, they turned their attentions our way. ‘We don’t expect you to leap to your feet when we come in,’ I railed, ‘but it would be nice if you could tear yourselves away from the football pages.’

‘It’s the financial news,’ the worst offender answered, turning a picture of a blonde bimbo towards me.

‘OK. Settle down. Before we begin Mr Wood has an urgent message.’

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Very urgent. Next week I am on holiday, so it would be nice if we could wind this up before then.’

‘Skiing in Aspen, Mr Wood?’ Sparky wondered aloud.

‘No, David, we’re going to our cottage in Cornwall. The phone number is ex-directory and sorry, but you can’t have it. The next piece of good news I have for you concerns overtime.’

‘All unpaid,’ somebody called out.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Gilbert told him. ‘We might manage to squeeze something from the budget, but no promises. Now let’s get on with this enquiry. DS Newley is at the PM, so hopefully he’ll have some news for us soon. Meanwhile, we’ll treat it as murder, committed some time on Sunday evening. Over to you, Mr Priest.’

‘I’ll assume you all know the background,’ I told them, ‘so let’s fill in the details. Jeff, what can you tell us?’

DS Caton placed his notebook on the desk in front of him. ‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid,’ was the answer. ‘First of all, Goodrich doesn’t appear to have any next of kin. He never married and his parents are dead. An older sister died a couple of years ago, and so far we’ve not found a will. Various solicitors he did business with are being contacted with a view to finding this. We have managed to track down his secretary. In Scotland.’

‘Day out for you there, Jeff,’ someone said.

‘Don’t think I’ll bother,’ he responded. ‘She’s a middle-aged widow and only worked for him for two years, before he went bankrupt. Now she’s returned home to look after her elderly parents. We’ve asked the local CID to have a word with her.’

Funny how these youngsters thought ‘
middle-aged
widow’ was a pejorative. I knew one that any of them would have climbed a hot lava flow for, except that they’d have been in my footsteps.

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘Not really. Young Luke has found something, on Goodrich’s computer, but I’ll let Maud tell you that.’

‘Thanks, Jeff. The stage is yours, Maud.’

She stood up. ‘Can I come to the front?’ she wondered.

‘Course you can.’ I jumped to my feet. ‘Here, use my chair.’

‘It’s OK, Mr Priest. I prefer to stand.’ She shuffled the sheaf of papers she was holding and addressed the room. There were four women in it, and the only other non-white was Shaheed, an Asian PC. ‘First of all, I’ll tell you about Luke’s success.’ Because he was a civilian he wasn’t at the meeting to speak for himself. ‘He found Goodrich’s data-base in about thirty seconds. “What do you want to know?” he asked, before we’d turned round, so we told him to bring up the client list. He
tapped two keys and there it was. All I ever get is “Message error, bring me someone who knows what they’re doing”.’ She said the last bit in a tinny robot voice.

I glanced at her audience. Most of them were smiling, but one or two weren’t impressed. I suspected that she was nearly as good as Luke on the computer, but was deliberately demeaning herself. To survive in the job she needed the full cooperation of her colleagues, and that meant not being a smart arse or a threat to their promotion prospects. It shouldn’t be necessary, and it made me angry.

Maud continued. ‘So, I told him to print us a list and left him to it. He ran one off and realised that all the entries were in chronological order, by the dates that they signed on as clients. That’s OK on a computer – you just tap in a name and it finds it for you. Luke thought that perhaps we’d prefer alphabetical hard copies, so he asked the machine to sort the names and print another list. While he was browsing through he noticed that it contained a disproportionate number of people called Jones. He did some quick calculations with the phone book and reckoned that Goodrich should have had about four Joneses among his seventeen hundred clients. In fact, he had eleven. Then Luke noticed that seven of them were called A. Jones, B. Jones, C. Jones, right through to G. Jones.’

People shuffled in their seats, wondering if this was relevant. If there was a fraud, they just wanted to know the basic details.

I said, ‘So he had files for seven people called A., B., C., D., E., F. and G. Jones.’

‘Not files as such, Mr Priest. They were on his list of clients, but the information was incomplete. There are no addresses and no amounts of money against them. It rather looks as if someone entered the names but didn’t know how to set up a file. Like as if he did it himself, without his secretary’s knowledge. Instead, he started using…this.’ Maud held aloft a plastic bag. Inside it we could see what looked like an exercise book.

‘This is a cash book; available at any good stationer’s or newsagent’s. We found it in the back of the file – the filing cabinet file – for a Mr and Mrs W. F. Jones, who appear to be a perfectly respectable retired greengrocer and his wife. Goodrich evidently just put it there for
safe-keeping.
It was his secret account book. Inside are pages for each of our seven Mr Joneses, with long lists of amounts of money against them. Two to three thousand pounds at a time, once a week, for the seven of them. In other words, about twenty thousand pounds a week, for over two years, ceasing just before last Christmas.’

‘So if these were some sort of payment,’ someone asked, ‘which way were they going? In or out?’

‘It’s not clear,’ Maud told him. ‘There are other figures and dates, but we haven’t cracked what they mean, yet.’

‘Was he being blackmailed?’ a voice at the back wondered.

‘We don’t know. But we’ve found something else. As you already know from the handouts, we were investigating him for possible fraud, at the request of his clients’ solicitors. However, we have another piece of information about him which has just come to light. Two years ago, just about when he set up the file for A. Jones, we were notified by N-CIS about an SCT against him.’

I sat up. ‘Money laundering?’ I wondered aloud.

Maud nodded in my direction. ‘Possibly.’

‘Er, explain SCTs to us,’ I suggested.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘An SCT is a suspicious cash transaction. If you go into a bank to deposit a large amount of cash, currently three thousand or over, you will be asked where it came from. If the bank manager is not satisfied, the law requires him to report it. The National Criminal Intelligence Service correlate the reports and let us know about any coming from our patch. It’s a bit of a dodgy area, so we keep mum about them until we are sure that the money comes from criminal activities.’

A bit dodgy
was putting it mildly. Over eighty per cent of SCTs were quite legitimate, and the civil liberties people would have a field day if we acted
on them all. A handful lead to convictions and the rest fall into a grey area. Lawyers are the best people to launder money. They are protected by rules of confidentiality that priests and doctors can only envy. Second-hand car dealers come next on the list. A financial adviser, calling into his bank every week with a couple of thousand pounds in grubby notes that his clients have handed to him, might just about get away with it. Except that he would be doing it in every bank in town.

Gilbert grunted and shuffled around. ‘Do you think we’re talking drugs money?’ he asked, peering at Maud over his new half-spectacles.

‘Early days, Mr Wood. Let’s see what we find.’

Hartley Goodrich was beginning to look interesting. Maud answered a few more questions before I invited the SOCO to spellbind us all with his revelations.

‘Fingerprints,’ he announced, briskly. ‘First of all, to eliminate the milkman who started the whole thing off, we checked the bottle on the doorstep. It had been wiped clean. We asked him if he wore gloves and he said not. We also checked next door’s bottles and they bore his prints. The plant pot that hit Goodrich had also been wiped clean, most likely with a tea-towel that was hanging in one of those pull-out rails, under his worktop. His assailant had put it back, but it bore dirty marks similar to the soil from the pot. We’ve sent it to the lab. On the
table was a bowl, or a planter, that the plant pot has stood in at some time. We found plenty of Goodrich’s prints and one or two other marks, probably old ones. I’m not hopeful of them being of interest. For what it’s worth, the plant was a
Dieffenbachia picta.
It would have been less messy to have poisoned him with it.’

I said, ‘Let’s not explore that avenue. This isn’t St Mary Mead and Mr Wood isn’t Miss Marple.’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘In spite of the spectacles. Anything else?’

‘We’ve taken the usual fibre samples and found a couple of hairs that we haven’t identified yet, but they are almost certainly his own. Oh, and a few flakes of dandruff.’ He turned to me, saying, ‘We’d like a word with you about that, Mr Priest,’ which earned him a cheap laugh from the audience.

‘I see,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘Is that all you could find? You were there long enough.’

‘One little thing,’ the SOCO said. ‘When I lifted the milk bottle to dust it, there was a wet ring of condensation on the step, where it had been. Next to it was what might have been the remnants of a similar ring, as if one bottle had been taken away, or the one present had been moved. Unfortunately, the mark dried out and vanished as we were looking at it.’

I wasn’t sure if this was interesting or confusing. We all want to be detectives, follow the trail, make
sweeping deductions, but mostly it’s easier than that. Look for the woman or the money; find the blunt object; match them together. End of story. This was going to be one of those, I hoped. I’d had enough revelations for one day, but I was reckoning without Nigel’s phone call.