‘Advice. Expertise,’ Hollis hazarded. ‘Maybe he was a consultant in that sense – like a business consultant.’
‘Certainly possible,’ said Slider.
‘And yet,’ said Atherton, ‘he doesn’t seem to have been living on it, or not entirely.’
‘Consultants don’t usually consult only for one company,’ Slider said.
‘No, but anyone else he was working for wasn’t paying him a salary into his bank account,’ Atherton pointed out.
Porson stirred restively. ‘This is all airy-fairy stuff,’ he objected, forgetting his temporary membership of the diptera muscidae family. ‘It’s hard evidence butters the parsnips. What about that CCTV tape? What did you get off that?’
Hollis answered. ‘We got the number of the parked car, sir. Right enough it went back to a resident of Masbro Road, a John Fletcher. We caught him at home last night and got some lifts off the bonnet. Luckily he’d not cleaned it for a while, and even luckier that’s not a place people put their hands a lot. We took his fingerprints for elimination purposes, anyway. But there was a good set of four fingers and a palm in the middle of the bonnet, matching where we saw the suspect on the CCTV put his hand to balance himself. He must have took off his gloves when he left the house.’
‘It’s the old saying, they always make one mistake,’ Porson pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Hoist with his own canard. Have you run the prints?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Slider answered. ‘There’s no match in the records.’
‘Ah well, can’t have everything, I suppose,’ said Porson, evidently disappointed. ‘But at least when you do get a suspect—’
‘We’ll have something to nail him with,’ Slider concluded. ‘It’d be a nice short cut if the prints matched Frith, but he has no criminal record, and at the moment we don’t have enough to ask him to give a sample.’
Porson grunted in acknowledgement of the point, drained his tea mug, and said, ‘All right, what about the other car? The suspect’s?’
‘It’s a BMW seven-series. Black. The best we could do after the lab had enhanced the pictures was a partial number, missing the last digit and with some doubt as to whether one number was a three or an eight. It gives us quite a lot of cars to check. We’re working on that. And we’ve also put the possible variations into the ANPR at Hendon, see if we get a ping.’
The Automatic Number Plate Recognition system was the computerized record of the millions of photographs a day taken by a network of cameras, some of them part of the congestion charge set-up, others placed on motorways, at road junctions, outside petrol stations, important buildings and so on. Very few members of the public knew about the system, which Slider thought was probably just as well, as there were certainly civil rights implications about the level of surveillance to which the general public was being submitted without its consent. But the images were so well defined that the registration numbers were able to be processed automatically by the central computer. Enter a number, and if that car had passed any of the cameras it would be ‘pinged’ and its route could be tracked. In many cases, the faces of the front seat occupants could also be clearly identified.
‘All right.’ Porson nodded. ‘Well, let me know if anything comes of that. Do we know what car Frith drives?’
‘Haven’t found that out yet,’ Slider said.
Porson didn’t need to say the obvious. ‘What else? Have you got Rogers’s phone dump yet?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Hollis answered. ‘Seems to be all social. Restaurants, clubs. Garage where he got his car serviced. A lot of women – most of ’em appearing in his address book. He doesn’t seem to have had any men friends. Dunno if that’s strange or not. Nothing work related. Hasn’t rung the only number we have for Windhover, nor any other medical establishment. And he didn’t make any calls on the morning he died.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Slider said. ‘Aude said he got a phone call early in the morning, and went into his dressing- room and rang someone on his mobile.’
‘Yes, guv,’ Hollis said. ‘She must have been mistaken.’
‘She said she heard him talking.’
‘Must have been talking to himself, then. Or she was dreaming. The fact is there’s no call logged on either his mobile or his landline.’
‘She was in flitters after what happened,’ Connolly pointed out. ‘Wouldn’t be strange if she got herself all mixed up. Coulda been another day the phone call bit happened.’
‘I suppose that must have been it,’ Slider said. ‘What about his landline?’
‘Nothing of interest there, except that he made quite a lot of calls to his ex-wife.’
‘She told me she hardly ever spoke to him,’ Slider objected.
Hollis nodded. ‘Definite porky, that.’ He took up another piece of paper. ‘He’s rung her four times in the last three weeks, the last call a week before he was killed, lasting eighteen minutes. You wouldn’t forget a call like that.’
‘She may just have panicked, given he was murdered, and tried to distance herself from him,’ Slider said. People did things like that all the time. ‘It probably had nothing to do with anything. Still, I’d like to know what they talked about.’
‘I like it when people lie,’ Porson said, rubbing his hands. ‘Gives you a reason to ask more questions. Find out what car this Frith character drives. And I could stand to know where he was on Monday morning. Given he’s the nearest thing you’ve got to a suspect.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Slider. ‘Provided we can find out without being obvious. He’s not a suspect until we know he’s done something suspicious.’
‘Can’t find out if he’s been suspicious until you ask. Which came first, the chicken or the road? Well, keep at it. I’ve got to go and tell Mr Wetherspoon where we are.’
That’d be up the junction without a paddle, Slider thought. It’s a long road that gathers no moss.
Connolly’s work in setting up a rapport with Andy Bamford reaped its reward, saving her another trip to Sarratt. She rang her ‘for a chat’ and found her new friend only too eager, though she was obliged to book the first of a course of lessons to allay possible suspicion that she was time-wasting. Still, she could always cancel later. In the course of the ensuing bunny, Connolly had as much difficulty in easing Andy round to the subject of Robin Frith as in getting a compass to point north. After considerable discussion of the horse he had taken for hydrotherapy and how good he was with animals and how much he cared for them – ‘They’re not just a way to make money to him, like a lot of trainers I could mention,’ – and his prospects of having another winner at Badminton this year, Connolly said eagerly that she was really keen to meet him, asked wistfully if he would be taking her lesson, and added, ‘Oh, d’you know, I think maybe I saw him when I was going through the village the other day. Early Monday morning. I bet he comes in really early, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah. He’s here by seven most mornings.’
‘It could have been him, then. Does he drive a black BMW – a seven series?’
Andy laughed. ‘A Beamer? No, he’s got a four-by-four, a Mitsubishi Shogun. He wouldn’t have room in an ordinary car for all the stuff he carries – tack and rugs and everything. And it has to pull a trailer. It is black, though.’
‘Oh,’ said Connolly, sounding disappointed. ‘I was sure it was him. It was a dead handsome man in a black BMW. Maybe he has an ordinary car as well? I could swear I saw it going into your stables.’
‘Well, he might have another car, I don’t know, but I’ve never known him bring it here,’ Andy said. ‘He always comes in the Shogun. Anyway, he wasn’t in early Monday morning, so that can’t have been him. He had an appointment at Archers, the feed merchant in Hemel, at eleven and he said it wasn’t worth coming in first. He said he’d work from home and go straight there, so he didn’t come in until the afternoon.’
‘So it doesn’t get us any further forward with the car,’ Connolly said to Slider. ‘He might or might not have a Beamer. And anyway, guv, it occurs to me any murderer might hire, borrow or steal a car rather than use his own, when he’s going to a murder.’
‘That thought had occurred to me, too,’ Slider reassured her. ‘We have to cover the bases.’
‘Right, guv. But if the feed merchant’s his alibi, that’s easy enough to check.’ She looked at him hopefully.
Slider thought a moment. If Frith had been at the stables, all present and correct, at the appropriate time, he would happily have dropped him, having no real reason to suspect him of anything. But by his own rule of clearing
