The Snuffbox Murders (16 page)

He rubbed his chin. ‘I hope his visitors are properly searched and cautioned,’ he said.

Ahmed didn’t reply. The searching wasn’t up to him.

‘Who seems to be doing most of the talking?’

‘Farleigh does, sir.’

‘Aye. Well let him have the polish and the duster then.’

‘Right, sir,’ Ahmed said, and went out.

The phone rang. It was Scrivens from the listening van on Edward Street.

‘Riley’s just left the house, sir. I heard him tell Violet Beasley he was going to the garage.’

‘What garage?’

‘Didn’t say. I’m going to leave the tape running, sir, and follow him.’

Then the line went dead.

Angel thought a moment, closed the phone, jumped up, ran out of the office and out of the station. He got into the BMW went down Park Road almost to the corner of Edward Street, where he stopped the car, picked up his mobile and dialled Scrivens.

‘Where are you, lad?’

Scrivens answered breathlessly: ‘Bradford Road, sir. I lost him. I’m on my way back to the van.’

Angel grunted and rubbed his chin. Then he said, ‘Did he say anything more than that he was leaving for the garage?’

‘No, sir.’

‘All right, lad. Not to worry. I’ll send you some company … that mustn’t happen again.’

Angel returned to the office, found DS Flora Carter and dispatched her to join Scrivens in the van. Then he phoned Twelvetrees at the CPS. He told him about the possible value of the twenty-eight gold snuffboxes and the fact that they were missing following the murder of Charles Razzle. Twelvetrees said that if the twenty-eight gold snuffboxes were found in Farleigh’s house or showroom, or if they could be positively linked to Farleigh, then the case against him would be solid and the CPS would proceed and set a date for the case to be heard.

Angel smiled as he replaced the phone. There was progress indeed. All he had to do was find twenty-eight gold snuffboxes in Farleigh’s house or showroom and the case was sewn up.

He picked up the phone and tapped in Taylor’s number.

‘How’s it going, Don?’

‘All right, sir. Almost done. Nothing incriminating here.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Well, the house is well-furnished for a bachelor. Games room and small gymnasium. Swimming pool. Two cars in the garage. One is a Ferrari, the other a Bentley. Everything of the best. No signs that a woman has had any influence in the planning, designing or running of the place, and no embarrassing things under the bed or anywhere else. Although certainly small traces of face powder and long brown hairs in the en suite bathroom indicate that he has entertained women or a woman here recently. But no drugs, jewellery, gold bars, pornography, cash, weapons or stolen property.’

The muscles in Angel’s face tightened. This was not what he wanted to hear.

‘I’m looking for a collection of twenty-eight antique gold snuffboxes,’ he said, ‘individually wrapped in tissue paper and kept in a small cardboard box. They are worth a small fortune and finding them there, or at his shop in Sheffield, will wrap it up.’

Taylor pursed his lips. ‘Oh. Right, sir,’ he said resolutely. He understood Angel’s concern and the pressure on him.

‘Now he was a security man,’ Angel said. ‘So he might have some smart, hidden safe somewhere where we least expect it.’

‘Don’t worry, sir. Now that we know, we shall be especially thorough. If the snuffboxes are in this house, our detectors will find them.’

Angel replaced the phone. He rubbed his chin. There was nothing more he could do with that until SOCO turned up the booty.

There was a knock at the door. It was Crisp. He bounced in and said, ‘I’ve a message from Maintenance, sir.’

Angel wrinkled his nose. He was hardly likely to be very interested in anything the station lavatory man had to say. ‘What?’

‘That radiator in the corridor outside the CID office that was making a funny noise has been fixed.’

‘Good.’

‘Apparently a tiny control knob had been completely unscrewed and was missing. It’s been replaced, adjusted and it’s all right now.’

‘Good. Are you monitoring what is happening down at 26 Edward Street?’

‘Yes, sir. There’s nothing happening. Just come off the phone to Flora.’

‘Wish we could speed things up a bit.’

The phone rang. It was the civilian woman on the switchboard. ‘Mr Hargreaves to speak to you.’

‘Is that Inspector Angel?’

‘Yes, Mr Hargreaves. What can I do for you?’

‘I was wondering how you were getting along finding the person or persons who stole those three coffins from my premises last month. You see, you will have heard that the former town clerk, Samuel Freeby has died. His widow has entrusted me with the care of his last remains. It will be a big funeral and she has expressed the desire of a mahogany casket. I wondered…?’

‘I am afraid that we have not managed to catch the thieves yet, Mr Hargreaves, but I am still working on it.’

‘The funeral is next Wednesday, Inspector.’

‘I doubt that we could promise anything definite by then. I am sorry, Mr Hargreaves. Please pass on our condolences to Mrs Freeby.’

‘Very well.’

Angel replaced the phone looked up at Crisp. ‘Anything heard about those three stolen coffins?’

‘No, sir.’

Angel pulled a face.

This hanging around in the office waiting for other people to report in and fielding queries and inconsequential questions from all and sundry was driving him crackers. There was an ever increasing pile of post, circulars and reports on his desk that needed his attention, but even reading and dealing with every piece of the stuff, would not solve any of the cases in hand, nor result in the catching of one single murderer. He suddenly stood up.

‘Come on,’ he said to Crisp. ‘Let’s see how Don Taylor is getting along.

They went in Angel’s car to Farleigh’s house.

Taylor saw them arrive and headed them off at the front door. He produced a big brown envelope with the word EVIDENCE printed in red across it.

‘There’s a pile of accounts and bank statements and papers from here, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go through them yourself or do you want me to do it?’

Angel took it. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. He put the envelope in the boot of his car and locked it.

Then Taylor said: ‘We’ve just finished inside the house, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve been over all the walls, along all the floors and even the ceilings. The only metals detected were constituents of electric circuits and gas-carrying pipes. I’ve also had a team measuring the external walls and then the internal measurements, searching for false walls, hidden rooms, or secret cupboards. There weren’t any. There’s nothing here, sir. I’m certain.’

‘Does this house have a cellar, Don?’

‘Yes, sir. Had a good look down there. Three interconnecting areas, which have obviously not been used for anything.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Angel said. ‘Just to be sure.’

Angel took a hand torch out of his car and followed Taylor down thirteen steep steps into a dank, cool place where the floor consisted of polished flagstones and the walls were stone and brick, whitewashed over. He flashed the torch around the edges of the flagstones to see if any had been disturbed recently or to see if there was anywhere that had been freshly dug. There was nothing. They trudged up the steps.

‘Must be outside in the garden,’ Angel said. He strode round the grounds. They were bigger than they had first appeared, comprising lawns, a tennis court, a copse, outbuildings, a summerhouse and a tool shed.

He and Crisp looked for areas that seemed to have been recently disturbed. There weren’t many, but SOCO checked them out with their metal and heat-sensitive detectors. They had machines sensitive to changes in temperature, which detected buried human or animal remains, because the process of flesh decomposing actually produces heat. They found part of an ancient plough which they pulled out, and the skeleton of a large dog which they reburied carefully.

The clock raced round to 5.04 p.m.

Taylor said, ‘We’ve finished here, sir.’

Angel wrinkled his nose. He wasn’t pleased. He ran his hand through his hair. It looked like Brian Farleigh was SnowWhite in trousers.

‘Right, Don. Well, start searching at Farleigh’s office and showroom in Sheffield, tomorrow, first thing. Those snuffboxes have to be somewhere.’

It was 8.28 a.m., the following morning, Thursday, 4 June 2009.

Angel drove the BMW straight from home through Bromersley town centre straight down to the bottom of Park Road, where he stopped, parked and walked down to the corner of Edward Street and up to the observation van. He looked round, then tapped on the door. Crisp opened it carefully and let him in.

Flora Carter was seated in front of a reel-to-reel tape-recording machine, wearing headphones. She looked up at Angel, smiled and nodded.

‘Anything happening?’ Angel whispered.

‘They are arguing about money,’ Carter said. ‘She says she hasn’t enough to pay the gas bill.’

Angel nodded. ‘I know the feeling.’

Carter said: ‘He said he hasn’t a job. He doesn’t know when he’ll be able to give her any money now that the boss is away.’

‘What’s he mean by that? Angel said.

‘Maybe the gang leader’s on holiday, sir,’ Crisp said.

Carter put a finger up and said, ‘She’s crying.’

Angel sniffed. It wasn’t out of sympathy. ‘Why can’t somebody say something incriminating? Or put a name to the boss – whoever he is? Or why can’t Riley trot off and lead us to their new HQ?’

Carter reported more words between Riley and Violet Beasley, but neither said anything critical and nothing interesting happened.

After forty tedious minutes Angel came out of the van with a face as long as the padre’s sermon.

He trudged back to the BMW and drove up to the station.

He phoned Taylor, who was then in the process of searching Farleigh’s business premises in Sheffield.

‘Nothing yet, sir,’ Taylor said.

Angel replaced the phone and reluctantly began to tackle the pile of bumf that had accumulated on his desk. He kept his head down, ploughing through it all that Thursday and the morning of the next day hoping for a vital phone call from one of his sergeants that would progress his investigations.

At one o’clock on Friday, the phone rang. Angel snatched it up. It was DS Taylor. ‘Yes, Don?’ he said.

‘We’ve finished these premises, sir, and it seems to be just what it looks like, a sales and service centre for safes and security systems. We’ve checked it out for concealed areas. There weren’t any. And we’ve run the metal-detectors along the floors, walls and ceilings. There’s nothing untoward.’

Angel rubbed his chin. He recalled that the property was a converted Victorian residential house.

‘The cellar?’

‘Done that, sir.’

‘The garden or land at the back … have you gone over that?’

‘There are some waste bins and the remains of empty packing cases close to the property wall under the back windows, sir. We’ve checked through those. Beyond there is a bit wild. Looks like it was once a garden … been neglected … just overgrown grass and weeds.’

‘Check it out, Don. It’s our last chance.’

‘Right, sir.’

Angel replaced the phone.

There was a sound of hopelessness in Angel’s voice. Taylor knew it, and although finding the snuffboxes or anything incriminating out there seemed unlikely, it made him more determined to be thorough and scan every square metre of Farleigh’s land with great care.

Meanwhile, Angel kept his backside on the swivel-chair and his head down midst the paper jungle and was reading the last report off his desk when Ahmed arrived with a small pile of additional post from Superintendent Harker’s office.

Angel sighed and continued the marathon. At half past four, he looked up and phoned Crisp to check up on the latest news on Sean Noel Riley. He wanted to know if had let anything useful slip yet, or if he had ventured out of the house.

‘Nothing’s happened here, sir,’ Crisp said. ‘Do you want to keep this obbo going over the weekend?’

‘Of course. It might just be the time he might let something slip or do something enlightening. Work out a rota with Flora, Ted Scrivens and whoever else wants overtime, and you supervise it, all right?’

‘Right, sir.’

‘If anything vital happens, contact me immediately on my mobile.’

‘Right, sir.’

He replaced the phone and tapped in Taylor’s number.

‘Just finished, sir,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry to say there’s nothing concealed in the garden area that we’re interested in. Just weeds and worms.’

‘Right, Don. Pack it in. See you on Monday.’

To say that Angel was disappointed was an understatement. His face dropped like a guillotine. He began to wonder whether his powers as a detective were on the wane. Neither of the cases was unravelling. Both seemed to have reached an impasse. Maybe the murder and the stealing of twenty-eight snuffboxes from Charles Razzle was the first and only serious crime Brian Farleigh had committed. Didn’t seem likely, but it was possible. And maybe, because gold snuffboxes were collectors’ items and in great demand, he had already sold them. Maybe there had been an ardent collector out there somewhere, waiting, holding out his sticky hands laden with cash and the exchange had already been made.

Angel wrinkled his nose.

It was certainly possible … again, not likely, but possible. He considered that option for a little while, then he thought, if that
had
taken place, then Farleigh would have been in possession of a pile of cash. Taylor and his team had looked everywhere and had been unable to turn up anything incriminating. If there were cash or snuffboxes, where had Farleigh hidden them? The main evidence Angel had against him was his possession of a handmade front door key to Razzle’s house. If Farleigh simply said that he found it and the jury believed him, he could get off. After all, there was nothing known: he didn’t have a police record. Then Angel recalled the long-winded way Farleigh had taken to find out the six-digit code to open the cellar workshop door, which later, when he thought there was the possibility of CCTV film of him in the camera, he cut down to less than two minutes. Yes. Now that
could
be proved. There were plenty of witnesses. Angel’s confidence was returning. The murderer
was
Farleigh. He was very clever. But the murderer was definitely Farleigh. All Angel had to do was find the snuffboxes, link them to him, and he’d go down for life.

The weekend came and went quicker than two Senokot.

Mary had kept Angel busy in the garden between the showers. He had cut the lawn, weeded the borders, dead-headed the roses, trimmed the hedge and generally tidied round. He didn’t much care for gardening, but it got him into the fresh air and was a change from the smell of fingerprint ink, formaldehyde and button polish.

Mary reckoned that it kept his mind busy and stopped him worrying about his job. Its success was limited, because like the showers, it was only effective intermittently.

Anyway, he had been known to say that he really expected a certain amount of stress in catching murderers. It was what made the job worth doing.

He was back at his desk that Monday morning 8 June at 8.28 a.m., riffling through his post.

The phone rang. He reached out for it.

It was Harker. ‘Come up here, lad. Smartly.’

Angel groaned. He didn’t want to start a new week with a rollicking from the superintendent. He replaced the phone and rushed up the corridor to Harker’s office. He tapped on the door and pushed it open.

Harker was sitting at his desk looking like a man who had just discovered that he was holding a lottery ticket only one digit away from being the winner.

‘What’s this?’ Harker said, waving the paper at him.

Angel couldn’t read it, but it was pink and therefore almost certainly an expense voucher.

‘Looks like an expense chitty, sir,’ he said.

Angel scoured his memory to think who in his team had incurred any out-of-pocket expenses over the past few days. He couldn’t think of anybody.

‘Correct,’ Harker said, then proceeded to read it out loud as if it was a salacious extract from a novel by DH Lawrence. ‘One cod, chips and peas, four pounds eighty, portion bread and butter, fifty p. Egg custard, one pound eighty. Total seven pounds and ten p.’

He then looked up at Angel. ‘Who was
that
for?’

‘Don’t know,’ Angel said with a shrug.

‘You don’t know?’ Harker said.

A ball of fire from Angel’s stomach burned fiercely up into his chest. His face burned like a sunlamp. He clenched his fists and made himself breathe in and out slowly. He couldn’t reply.

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Harker said. ‘It was for a man you have put in the cells called Brian Farleigh.’

Angel realized what he was getting at. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Had you forgotten about him, lad?

‘No, sir. He is
my
prisoner.’

‘I understand that he has not been charged.’

‘He
has
been charged, and cautioned.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Harker said. ‘The CPS say they haven’t enough evidence to build a case against him. I presume you know about that?’

‘Yes, sir. But the missing piece of evidence is only very small, and, anyway, I am working towards producing the actual motive, which I expect to be irrefutably conclusive.’

‘Nevertheless, according to Farleigh’s solicitor, you have not built a case against this citizen who he claims is totally innocent, and who can and will produce evidence in court to prove it.’

‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He wants to be set free. What do you want me to do about it, sir?’

‘You must play the game by the rules, lad. You can’t arrest a man and charge him until you have a pretty watertight case.’

‘I
have
a pretty watertight case. With the evidence I have already given him, Mr Twelvetrees believes that he can
possibly
get a guilty verdict, but he also said that if I could get the motive, it would be a certainty.’

‘And what’s the motive?’

‘The stealing of a collection of twenty-eight antique gold snuffboxes.’

Harker blinked.

Angel said: ‘DS Elliott of the Antiques and Fine Art squad, confirms that they are worth a fortune.’

‘Really? I see. And you have searched Farleigh’s home and place of business?’

‘Yes, sir. And the grounds attached to both places, and both his cars.’

‘Does he own any other properties?’

‘No sir. Not that we have been able to find out.’

‘So what is your plan now?’

Angel knew he was in trouble. He could see the question coming and he didn’t have an answer. ‘I shall keep scratching around, sir. I am hopeful that—’

‘I knew that you hadn’t a plan, Angel,’ Harker said. ‘You are just bumbling along, as usual. Had it occurred to you that Charles Razzle could have disposed of the snuffboxes before he was murdered? I mean do you know for a fact that Farleigh took them?’

Angel pulled a face. ‘No, sir, but it seems very likely that he did.’

‘In your searches of Farleigh’s house and business premises, did you find anything there that was incriminating?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd?’

‘Not odd, sir. A bit unusual. Maybe he’s a clever man.’

‘Maybe he’s innocent. He has reached the age of thirty-nine and he has no police record, not so much as a parking fine.’

‘He knows about security matters, sir. He might be a clever man, too clever to be caught.’

‘And you are trying to wrap a murder-for-robbery charge around him with insufficient evidence.’

‘I have a lot of evidence to show his guilt. For one thing, he had a home-made key to Razzle’s house in his pocket. Also, he opened Razzle’s security door in less that two minutes when he thought there was a CCTV camera in there with film of him murdering Razzle.’

‘Well, we can’t keep him locked up for much longer. You’ll have to find that necessary evidence or I’ll have to release him.’

‘You can’t do that, sir.’

‘Tell that to Twelvetrees, lad. He’s the one you have to convince.’

Angel couldn’t think of a suitable reply.

‘Can’t hold him longer than Thursday,’ Harker said. ‘Then he
must
appear in the magistrate’s court and the CPS
must
declare what evidence they have. If it isn’t enough, they’ll have to let him go. You know the drill. You’ve two days.’

Angel came out of the superintendent’s office and wearily closed the door. He made his way down the corridor as if he had a hundredweight sack of law books lashed to his back with red tape. He shuffled down the corridor to his own office, glad to reach his chair. He dropped into it, leaned back and contemplated the ceiling. Two days wasn’t long, especially as he had nowhere else to search and he hadn’t an idea in his head. Angel thought it would make him ill if Harker released Farleigh after all the trouble he had taken to get him in a cell. He couldn’t think what to do next.

The phone rang. He reached out for it. It was Crisp from the observation van. Angel’s face brightened. He sat upright.

‘Hello, yes? Yes, what’s happening?’ he said.

‘Nothing, sir. It’s DS Carter and me, just checking in.’

‘What do you mean, “Just checking in”? Nobody checked in at all over the weekend.’

‘Nothing happened over the weekend, sir. We thought you would enjoy not being disturbed.’

‘Nothing at all?’

Crisp said: ‘Riley and Violet Beasley have been surprisingly cool and uncommunicative towards each other, sir. It is probably a carry-over of the row they had on Friday about bills and lack of money.’

‘And nothing was said about where he worked, his boss or other premises or workplace anywhere?’

‘Nothing at all, sir.’

‘And did either of them go out?’

‘She never left the house all weekend, sir. He went out to the Rising Sun, just round the corner on Bradford Road, yesterday lunchtime on his own. It was ten past twelve. I followed him. He had one glass of lager, which he swallowed in one gulp. Came back straightaway. Didn’t speak to anybody, only the barman.’

Angel growled, then said, ‘You could have told me.’

‘There was nothing to tell, sir. We were back here before you could say Frankie Dettori.’

Angel recalled that at that time, that day previous, he had been trimming the hedge. If Crisp had only phoned him, it would have got him out of that. ‘Next time I tell you to keep me posted about anything, you bloody well keep me posted, understand?’