She took an envelope out of her briefcase and set it on the table. “One of the companies operating out of Daleview – PKF Computer Systems – cleared out lock, stock and barrel on Sunday evening.”
“Moonlight flit?”
“No, sir. All aboveboard, according to Colin Finch. Just very short notice. They were gone by midnight, when he started his shift.”
“Couldn’t pay their bills?”
“They weren’t owing when they left, but I should imagine a cash-flow problem might be at the back of it all.”
“Likely,” said Banks. “But they did nothing wrong?”
“No. Interesting timing, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would.” PKF had cleared off during Charlie Courage’s final evening shift. Banks didn’t like coincidences any more than any other copper worth his salt. “Go on.”
“Anyway, Ian Bennett had given me carte blanche and the keys were all there in Mr. Courage’s old office, so I had a quick shufti around the PKF unit.”
“Find anything?”
“Clean as a whistle. They’d obviously taken care to make sure they left nothing behind. Except this. I found it lodged behind the radiator. It must have fallen there.” She held the envelope and tipped it. A cracked plastic case about five-by-five-and-a-half inches fell onto the polished table’s surface.
“A CD case,” said Banks. “I suppose you’d expect to find something like that if they were in the computer business. Software and all that.”
“Yes,” said Annie. “It probably means nothing. In fact, the whole PKF thing’s probably nothing, but I handled it carefully just in case. We might want to check with fingerprints.”
“You think there’s something dodgy about PKF?”
Annie leaned back in her chair. She even looked comfortable in the notoriously hard and bum-unfriendly boardroom chair, thought Banks. “I don’t know, sir. It’s just the timing, them leaving the same weekend Courage disappeared. It might be worth looking into the company, see who they are, what they do. It might help explain Charlie’s sudden riches.”
Banks nodded. “Right you are. You can get stuck into that tomorrow. And it wouldn’t do any harm to get in touch with Vic Manson about those prints, either. If someone working at PKF turns up in our records, as well as Charlie…” He glanced over at the three DCs at the far end of the table. They had been on a house-to-house to find out if anyone had seen Charlie Courage after Sunday lunchtime. “Anything on the victim’s movements?”
Winsome Jackman spoke first. “A neighbor saw him going to work late Sunday afternoon, sir, and the man across the street saw him taking his milk in at about eight o’clock on Monday morning.”
“Anyone else?”
Winsome shook her head. Kevin Templeton said, “The woman at number forty-two, Mrs. Finlay, noticed something. She says she thought she saw Charlie get in a car with a couple of men later on Monday morning.”
“Description?”
“Nothing very useful, sir.” Templeton doodled in the dust on the table as he spoke. “One was medium height, the other was a bit taller. They wore jeans and leather jackets – brown or black. The taller one, he was going bald; the other had short fair hair. She said she didn’t get a good look and wasn’t really paying attention. I asked her if she thought Mr. Courage was being forced in the car in any way, and she told me she didn’t get that impression, but she could have been wrong.”
Banks sighed. It was typical of most witness statements. Of course, if you didn’t know you were witnessing anything momentous, such as a man’s final journey, you didn’t pay that much attention. Most people don’t see much on the peripheries; they’re more concerned about where they’re going, what they’re doing and thinking. “What about the car?”
“Light-colored. Maybe white. That was the best she could say. Nothing fancy, but new-looking, with a nice shiny finish.”
“Okay,” said Banks. “Time? Did we fare any better there?”
“A little bit, sir,” said Templeton. “She said it must not have been long after ten o’clock, because she had just started listening to ‘Woman’s Hour,’ and that starts at ten o’clock.”
“Interesting.”
“Maybe the trip was prearranged?” Annie suggested. “It could have been something he was looking forward to. Maybe he thought he was going somewhere nice, getting some more money?”
“Could be.” Banks turned to Hatchley. “What did your afternoon in the fleshpots of Eastvale turn up, Jim?”
Hatchley scratched the side of his bulbous nose. “Charlie was up to something dodgy, I can tell you that much.”
“Go on.”
Hatchley got his notebook out. Workmen started hammering somewhere in the extension. Hatchley raised his voice. “According to Len Jackson, one of his old colleagues, Charlie was on to a nice little earner, and it wasn’t his job at Daleview, either.”
“Was it connected with that?”
“Charlie didn’t say. He was pretty vague about it all. What he did say, though, was that he was already bringing in a bit of extra and pretty soon he’d be in for a much larger slice of the pie. What he was getting now was peanuts to what he’d have soon.”
“Interesting. But he didn’t say what pie?”
“No, sir. Charlie was pretty cagey about it, apparently. He wanted his old mates to know he was doing well, but not how he was doing it. Scared of the competition, I suppose.”
“Okay,” said Banks. “Well, at least that tells us we’re on the right track. All we need to know now is what he was into and who was running it. Makes it sound easy, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “Charlie, Charlie, you should’ve stayed on the straight and narrow this time.”
“He never was big-time, wasn’t Charlie,” added Hatchley. “He must have got in way over his head, not known who he was dealing with.”
Banks nodded. “Okay, that’s it for now,” he said.
Back in his office, with his door tightly shut to keep the noise out, Banks phoned DI Collaton down in Market Harborough to give him an update, more out of professional courtesy than anything else, as there wasn’t much to report. After that, he decided to call it a day. He tidied his desk and locked up, then headed for the door. Annie Cabbot was a flight ahead of him on her way down the stairs. She turned at the sound of his footsteps. “Oh, it’s you. Off home?”
“Unless you’d like to go for a quick drink or something?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “That bloody rain’s soaked right into my bones. All I want is to pick up something for dinner, then a long hot bath and a good book to curl up with.”
“Some other time?”
She smiled and pushed open the door. “Yes. Some other time.”
Maybe she should have accepted Banks’s offer of a drink, Annie thought, as she crossed the market square. It wouldn’t have done any harm, just a quick drink and a chat. She didn’t want to seem to be always giving him the brush-off, and it wasn’t as if the men were exactly queuing up to take her out. But things were still a little sensitive, and her inner voice told her to back off, so she did. Not that she always did what her inner voice told her to; if she had done that she would never have got in trouble in her life, and what a boring old time that would have been. But this time, she listened; at least for now.
Though she could still smell it in the air, the rain had stopped and the evening had turned quite mild. Colored lights hung across Market Street and around the cross, and the shoppers were out in force. She was lucky that most of the shops were staying open late until Christmas, or she’d have nothing but a couple of moldy old carrots and potatoes for dinner. There was the Indian shop on Gallows View that was always open, but they didn’t have much selection; besides, that was too far away in the wrong direction. What she wanted was something easy, something she could boil in the bag or stick in the oven for half an hour, no fuss.
In the end, it was a toss-up between vegetarian lasagna and Indonesian curry. The lasagna won, mostly because she had a bottle of Sainsbury’s Chianti at home that would complement it nicely. She also needed eggs,
