Reckless Endangerment (24 page)

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Brock of New Scotland Yard and this is Detective Sergeant Poole. I have it on good information, Mr Curtis, that you and Miss Webb attended a swingers’ party in Dorking on the night of Monday the twenty-ninth of July. I’ve also been told that you were there with friends of yours, a Mr and Mrs Reed.’

‘Donna and I were certainly there, but Julian and Muriel weren’t, not that night,’ said Curtis. ‘Anyway, what’s this about? It’s not a crime to go to a party of that sort, is it?’ His question wasn’t so much a protest as a concerned enquiry. Perhaps he thought he was about to be prosecuted for it.

‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘What you do in your private lives is none of our business. Except when it involves murder.’

‘
Murder
?’ Curtis stared at me open-mouthed. ‘What murder? I don’t know anything about a murder. Are you sure it’s me you want to speak to?’

‘Julian Reed has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a woman named Sharon Gregory at a hotel near Heathrow Airport on the night you were at this swingers’ party in Dorking.’ I glanced briefly at Donna Webb, whose face bore a similar expression of shock.

‘Julian? Murder?’ exclaimed Curtis. ‘I don’t know anyone called Sharon. I think there’s been some sort of mix-up here. Surely Julian didn’t murder anyone.’

‘What sort of mix-up would that be, Mr Curtis?’ asked Dave.

‘We were supposed to meet the Reeds at Dorking that night, but they never showed up.’

‘Perhaps you’d better explain,’ said Dave.

But it was Donna Webb who explained. ‘We’ve often “swapped” with the Reeds: Adrian and Muriel, and Julian and me. And we’ve been to Dorking with them on quite a few occasions. On the night you mentioned, Muriel rang and said they were going to the Simpsons’ place and they’d like to meet us there. Well, we always enjoyed a bit of fun with those two, so we jumped into the car and off we went. But, as Adrian said, the Reeds didn’t show up.’

Even though Muriel Reed must’ve been at least ten years older than Adrian Curtis, I could quite see that he would have found her attractive enough to want to have a sexual encounter with her; she was certainly possessed of a compelling ice-cold allure and had admitted having an appetite for younger men. But I found it difficult to envisage the apparently gormless Julian Reed appealing to Donna, given that he must’ve been at least fifteen years older than she was.

‘Are you absolutely certain that the Reeds were not there? This is vitally important, Mr Curtis.’

‘I’m adamant,’ said Curtis. ‘The four of us had been there often, and when Donna and I arrived that evening, I asked Jimmy if the Reeds had arrived yet, but he said they hadn’t.’

‘You say that Muriel telephoned you that evening, Miss Webb,’ said Dave. ‘At what time?’

‘I’m not sure. I was having a bath and Adrian took the call. What time was it, darling?’ Donna glanced at Curtis.

‘It was certainly after five o’clock,’ said Curtis. ‘Perhaps quarter past, even half past. But to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure.’

‘Did this happen often, that they’d ring you at a moment’s notice and suggest a meeting at Dorking?’ I asked, and noted that Dave had begun writing in his pocketbook.

‘Yes. As a matter of fact, that was the way we usually fixed our get-togethers,’ said Donna. ‘All four of us liked the idea of a spur-of-the-moment arrangement like that; it added to the excitement. Spiced it up, if you know what I mean.’

Actually, I didn’t know what she meant, but I invited her to continue.

‘Sometimes they’d suggest coming here or they’d ask us to their place in Chelsea,’ said Donna. ‘Sometimes they’d just arrive and we’d indulge our fantasies here, or they’d give us a lift to Dorking. We’ve been there quite often. Sometimes we dress up to act out a game, but it’s all innocent fun. The Simpsons sometimes join in, too.’

Donna Webb appeared to be quite uninhibited as she described the arrangements that she and Curtis had made for their orgies with the Reeds. But that aside, I thought that Adrian Curtis and Donna Webb were too honest to have been part of a complex plot whereby they’d been used by the Reeds to cover up the murder of Sharon Gregory. And I had to be satisfied with their account of what had happened on that night.

On Wednesday morning, Linda Mitchell reported the result of the forensic science laboratory’s tests on the DNA sample taken from Julian Reed.

‘Julian Reed is definitely the father of Sharon’s unborn child, Mr Brock, and the hairs found on the pillow and elsewhere on the bed at the Dickin Hotel also match his DNA. But there were several other hairs present on the bed that are neither Reed’s nor Sharon’s. And of course, the vaginal fluids.’

‘Any result on fingerprints, Linda?’ I asked.

‘The fingerprints don’t help much,’ said Linda. ‘There is, however, a set on the mobile phone that Dave found in the hotel room, but they’re not Sharon’s.’ She paused. ‘They’re Julian Reed’s.’

‘Forgetting the phones for a moment,’ I said, ‘I reckon the DNA clinches it. In my book it confirms that Julian Reed’s the killer and was in such a hurry to leave that he picked up the wrong phone.’

‘In addition to the phone, we found some other prints in the hotel room that match the set that were taken from Reed yesterday,’ continued Linda, ‘but there were a hell of a lot more that we couldn’t identify, including a set on the mobile phone found in Reed’s car. But it’s no surprise that Sharon’s prints
are
on it.’

‘It looks as though I was right,’ I said. ‘In his hurry to get the hell out of there, Reed picked up Sharon’s phone by mistake and left his own. Which just goes to show that a killer can usually be relied upon to make a mistake.’

‘There was one other set found in the room that might interest you, Mr Brock.’ Linda shuffled through her sheaf of papers and handed me a criminal record printout. ‘They go out to a Paul Matthews with an address in Sheffield. He’s got a previous conviction for false accounting and theft. He was a bank clerk and stole funds from the account of one of the bank’s customers. He got three years.’

‘I told you they didn’t clean those hotel rooms properly,’ commented Dave.

‘This Matthews doesn’t sound like a murderer,’ I said, ‘but ask Sheffield Police to check on his whereabouts when Sharon was topped, Dave. And then we’ll get a search warrant for the Reeds’ house in Chelsea.’

‘We don’t need one, guv,’ said Dave, ‘now that we’ve arrested Reed for Sharon’s murder.’

‘I know we don’t need one, Dave, but I’d rather have a district judge who can be blamed if it all goes pear-shaped. And right now I’ve got a nasty feeling it might.’

‘Got a minute, guv?’ Detective Sergeant Flynn hovered in the doorway of my office clutching his large daybook.

‘What is it, Charlie?’

‘The Honourable Julian Reed, guv. Turns out his property development business is going down the tubes. Of course, it could be some tax avoidance scheme,’ said Flynn. ‘There’s a lot more to it all than meets the eye, but it’s beginning to look like some sort of scam. I think it might finish up in the Fraud Squad’s lap. But my take on it is that he has substantial funds in offshore accounts – tax havens probably. Mind you, it’ll probably turn out to be legit.’ He looked a bit disappointed.

Flynn had obviously been making further use of his clandestine sources to obtain that information, but who was I to question it.

‘I’m sure it will, Charlie,’ I said. ‘The bloody man’s too naive to be cunning.’

‘That’s very nearly a truism, sir,’ murmured Dave. ‘If it’s not an oxymoron.’

‘Keep me posted, Charlie,’ I said, ignoring Dave’s little sideswipe.

‘Yes, guv. I reckon that Reed employs a creative accountant.’

‘What d’you think about that, Dave?’ I asked, once Flynn had departed.

‘It puts a different slant on Muriel’s claim that Julian couldn’t afford to leave her, guv. If Charlie’s right about Julian’s financial affairs being a bit dodgy, Muriel might’ve been putting the black on him. After all, it wouldn’t do for a future earl to be done for fraud, tax evasion and anything else the Fraud Squad might dig up, would it?’

‘You could well be right,’ I said, as I absorbed this latest twist in our investigation. ‘But that’s better than a future earl being charged with the murder of his extramarital sleeping partner.’

‘Excuse me, sir, but I was looking for Sergeant Poole,’ said DC Appleby, glancing at Dave as he hesitated in the doorway of my office. ‘He asked me to do some urgent checking.’

‘Come in, John. What did he ask you to do?’ I knew that when Dave gave a DC an urgent job he usually had a very good reason for wanting it done.

‘I suggested that John did a check on the cameras on the A4, guv,’ said Dave. ‘As we’ve nicked Julian Reed on suspicion of murdering Sharon, I thought it might be useful to see if we could get a fix on the exact time his car was on its way back from Heathrow Airport to Chelsea. If that’s the route he took.’

‘And did he, John?’ I asked Appleby.

‘That was certainly the route, sir. At eighteen-forty-one Reed’s Mercedes was clocked by the speed camera near Hatton doing eighty-seven miles an hour.’

‘He must’ve stayed there quite a long time if that’s the time he returned to Chelsea,’ I said.

‘He wasn’t going home, sir. The vehicle was actually travelling westbound. In other words,
towards
Heathrow Airport.’

‘What the hell was it doing going that way at that time?’ I said, half to myself.

‘We could ask him,’ said Dave.

‘Oh, we will,’ I said, and turned back to Appleby. ‘You’ve done a good job there, John.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Appleby

‘And now, Dave, you and I are going to spin the Honourable Julian Reed’s drum.’

I
t was half past one by the time we’d finished filling in all the necessary forms and had journeyed to Marylebone Road to obtain a search warrant from the district judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

We arrived at the Reeds’ Chelsea house at just after two. I had decided to take Linda Mitchell with us, and thought it would be a good idea to have Kate Ebdon along as well. But I told Linda to remain outside in her van until we needed her and her team of forensic examiners. If we needed them.

Muriel Reed opened the door. ‘Oh, it’s you again.’ There was a resigned note in her voice.

‘Yes, it’s us, Mrs Reed. Is your husband at home?’

‘Yes, he is. He’s not long back from Chelsea police station. For some ridiculous reason he has to report there every day as part of his bail conditions. This whole business is rapidly becoming most intolerable.’

If you think that’s intolerable, the worst is yet to come,
I thought.

‘I have a warrant to search these premises, Mrs Reed.’

‘Oh my God! When is all this going to end? It’s absolutely farcical that my husband should be suspected of murdering that tart, whatever her name is.’

‘It’s Sharon Gregory, Mrs Reed, as you well know.’ I was tired of the woman’s prevarication, and of standing on the doorstep. I pushed past her.

‘Oh, come in, why don’t you?’ Muriel’s response was bitingly sarcastic.

Accompanied by Dave and Kate Ebdon, I walked upstairs to the sitting room, followed by Mrs Reed.

‘Hello, Chief Inspector.’ Julian Reed was sitting in an armchair reading a copy of
The Times
. He looked tired, but his face expressed no surprise at our being there.

‘I was just explaining to your wife, Mr Reed, that I have a warrant to search this house.’

‘I suppose that’s what you have to do in cases like this,’ said Reed, standing up and casting the newspaper untidily to the floor.

‘Are you just going to stand there and let them ransack my house, Julian?’ Muriel Reed’s whole body seemed to vibrate with fury at our intrusion. Reaching back, she undid the clasp that was holding her titian hair in a ponytail, and shook it free so that it cascaded around the shoulders of her well-cut grey trouser suit.

‘We’ve no option, Muriel,’ said Reed mildly. ‘If they have a warrant there’s nothing we can do about it, except cooperate. And it’s
my
house, not yours.’

‘Well, you can cooperate if you like. I’m going to lie down. I’ve got a migraine coming on.’

‘My sergeant has some questions for you before you go, Mrs Reed,’ I said.

‘Has he indeed?’ Muriel glanced imperiously at Dave and sat down in the chair furthest from where her husband was standing.

‘What time did Mr Reed arrive home on the evening of Monday the twenty-ninth of July?’ asked Dave.

‘I got in just before five o’clock,’ said Reed.

‘The sergeant was asking me, Julian,’ snapped Muriel. ‘And the answer is I don’t know. I was downstairs having a swim.’ Noticing Dave’s expression of surprise, she added, ‘We have our own pool in the basement.’

‘No you weren’t, Muriel,’ said Reed. ‘You were sitting in that chair.’ He waved a hand at the uncomfortable white armchair in which his wife was now nonchalantly reclining. ‘And you were reading a magazine. It was much later that you had a swim.’

‘You’re wrong, Julian, and anyway I do occasionally have more than one swim in a day,’ said Muriel cuttingly. ‘Particularly when the weather’s as hot as it was at the end of July.’

Dave ignored this inconsequential tiff and got to the crux of the matter. ‘Did you go out again that night, Mr Reed?’

‘No, I didn’t. What makes you ask?’

‘Because a Mercedes car registered in your name was recorded by a speed camera on the A4 – that’s the Great West Road – at six-forty-one that evening, and its speed was logged at eighty-seven miles an hour. So, if it wasn’t you driving, who was it?’

‘I must’ve got home later than I thought, then,’ said Reed thoughtfully. ‘I don’t really remember.’

‘It has nothing to do with your returning here,’ said Dave, ‘because your car was travelling in a westbound direction. In other words, it was going
towards
Heathrow, not away from it.’

This awesome announcement was followed by a second or two of complete silence.

Clenching his fists, but otherwise controlling the anger he must’ve felt, Reed stared at his seated wife. ‘It was y
ou
who murdered Sharon,’ he said in a remarkably restrained voice. Despite his apparent absent-mindedness, he was obviously quick to grasp the implications of this latest revelation.