‘H-how can you be so sure?’ she asked, white faced.
I wasn’t enjoying this, but I waved a hand expansively, as if I was being matey, revealing little titbits to a friend. ‘We can’t,’ I admitted, ‘but I’ll tell you what we have so far. This is the picture, as I see it. The attacker arrives Monday morning, say about eight thirty. Picks up a bottle of milk from the doorstep and enters. Either the door is unlocked or he has a key. Mr Goodrich is apparently watching TV, glass of whisky by his side. The attacker hits him on the head with a handy pot plant, Goodrich slumps forward, dead. Fingerprints! thinks our assailant. He then fetches the tea-towel, which he knows is concealed under the work surface, wipes the plant pot clean and replaces the tea towel where it belongs. He is a very tidy person. On the way out he remembers the milk bottle and puts it back on the doorstep, after wiping that, too. I keep saying “he”. It could, of course, be a she. When we find someone who was sufficiently familiar with him and his home to fit in with that little scenario, we’ll just use the hair for confirmation.’
‘I see,’ she said in a very tiny voice, her expression somewhere far away, like Holloway.
I jumped up, looking at my watch, and made a hurried goodbye. ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ was my parting invitation, but she shook her head. As I left she closed the door behind me and I heard the click of the latch.
I sat in the car for several minutes, wondering and worrying about her. It would have been easy to go back, tell her that Goodrich died of a heart attack twelve hours before he was hit on the head, but I didn’t. I just placed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nobody had wired half a kilogram of Semtex across the terminals, so the engine started and I drove back to Heckley.
CHAPTER SIX
Roland Fearnside is a commander with the National Criminal Intelligence Service. We’ve worked together on a few cases, and I was probably instrumental in giving him a leg-up from being a mere chief superintendent. I normally try to avoid him, because he usually has a dirty job in mind for me, but this time I rang him.
‘I’m afraid Mr Fearnside is busy,’ a plummy voice told me. ‘Please leave me your number and I’ll ask him to contact you.’
‘Convenience busy or really busy?’ I asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Tell him you have Charlie Priest on the line and I’d like an urgent word with him. Please.’ No point in admitting to being a lowly inspector.
Twenty seconds later he was booming in my ear. ‘Charlie! How are you?’
‘Fine, Mr Fearnside. And you?’
‘Oh, so-so. And Annabelle?’
‘She’s fine, too.’
‘Still got the E-type?’
‘Sure have.’
‘Bloody hell! You’re a lucky bugger, Charlie. To tell the truth, I’d thought about giving you a bell.’
This was what I’d dreaded. ‘Oh, that usually means bad news,’ I declared.
‘No, not at all. I need a joke for an after-dinner speech I’m giving tonight. Thought you might be able to help.’
Typical. I cultivate a contact in N-CIS and he regards me as the force comedian. He probably believed I did the northern club circuit in my spare time. ‘Who’s it to?’ I asked.
‘Accountants. City types. Bunch of bloody deadbeats. Keeping them sweet is all part of the job, I’m afraid. All you have to bother about is collaring villains.’
‘Mmm. Rather you than me. I’ll have to think about it.’
‘If you would, old boy. Now what can I do for you?’
I told him about Goodrich, and the SCTs against his name, and that we now suspected he may have been laundering drugs money by investing it in diamonds. ‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘I interviewed his girlfriend and she told me that Goodrich was in cahoots with a character called K. Tom Davis, who was MD of the investment diamond company. She said that Goodrich told her, in a moment of alcohol-induced weakness or high passion, that Davis was involved in the Hartog-Praat bullion robbery.’
I heard Fearnside say, ‘Jeeesus!’ under his breath.
‘So,’ I went on, ‘what can you tell me about the bullion robbery?’
‘Right. Well, it was World War Two gold, recovered from a sunken destroyer — British — by treasure hunters, somewhere in the Baltic, I believe. Hartog-Praat is a Dutch security company, and it was their job to transport the bullion to the assay office in Sheffield. They went for the hush-hush approach, rather than maximum security, but somebody spilt the beans. It was a nasty job. If I remember rightly they doused a guard in petrol and threatened to ignite him. One guard died, but much later.’
‘Was anybody caught?’
‘Ye-es. Can’t remember his name. He was a known bank robber, who handled the actual hijack. Definitely not the brains. He went down for a long time and a couple of minions were given a year or two for allowing their premises to be used, something like that. I’ll have to dig the file out, put you on to the investigating officer.’
‘Was any of the gold recovered?’
‘No, not a bloody sniff of it. Tell you what, Charlie: gold would be a damn sight more attractive to these drugs dealers than diamonds. Gold can’t tell lies.’
‘Mmm. One of my DSs said exactly the same thing. I’ll be grateful if you could send me anything relevant, soon as pos.’
‘I’ll put someone straight on to it, Charlie. Good luck, and it’s been nice talking to you.’
‘Likewise. Just one last thing, before you go.’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s pink and hard, first thing in the morning?’
‘Ha ha! Go on.’
‘The Financial Times crossword.’
‘Hee hee! That’ll do, Charlie. That’ll do.’
Another unwanted reputation reinforced. I replaced the phone and drew a doodle on my pad. It showed a ship, long and lean, with a gun on the front. I added some fish and bubbles, to indicate that it was on the sea-bed. Bits of the story came back to me. There was a big controversy after the wreck was discovered. It was an official war grave, sacred to the memory of the men whose bodies were still down there. But even sanctity has a price, these days, and when the value of the destroyer’s cargo was estimated there were an awful lot of noughts after the pound sign. Had it been Communist gold, coming here to pay for the convoys? Or allied gold, to support the carnage on the Russian front? I didn’t know, but either way, it was blood money, and no good could come of it.
I drew a line down the middle of the page. At the top of one column I wrote ‘Drugs Dealers’, at the head of the other, ‘Gold’. The drugs dealers were awash with cash. Cash that they needed converting into something more solid, more negotiable across the world. Such as gold.
The bullion men were just the opposite. They needed their collateral converting into something more acceptable in straight society. Cash, for instance.
They needed each other like Yorkshire pudding needs onion gravy. I drew a circle round ‘Drugs Dealers’ and wrote ‘The Jones Boys?’ against it.
But what about the diamonds? The first payments were invested — wrong word — in diamonds. But the diamonds went bust and the payments kept on coming in. So what did the dealers get for that money after that? Gold? When we were role-playing, Jeff Caton said he preferred gold. I pinned the sheet on the wall above my desk, next to the photograph of Shirley Eaton.
Gilbert was clearing his desk, prior to his holiday. ‘Put the kettle on as you pass,’ he greeted me as I walked in.
I tested its weight and clicked the switch. He was rummaging in a filing cabinet so I flopped down into his chair and swung my feet on to the desk. ‘I think I could get used to this,’ I told him.
