‘On who killed him? None.’
‘Why was he murdered?’
‘I’m floundering here. Unless those he reported to were scared that he would speak.’
‘He was going down for a few years after you found proof that he had been fencing stolen jewellery.’
‘I don’t reckon he would have squealed on his superiors,’ Donaldson said. He sat on a chair in Isaac’s office, dejectedly looking down at the floor.
‘The CSIs are checking out the murder scene. Maybe they’ll come up with something.’
‘There had been a scuffle of some sort.’
‘We should get a preliminary report from Windsor in the next couple of hours. In the interim, we should deal with what we’ve got.’
‘Apart from a lot of dead bodies.’
‘If O’Shaughnessy killed Dougal Stewart and Vicenzo Pinto, then who killed Rodrigo Fuentes and Alex Hughenden?’ Isaac asked. He was not as dejected as his fellow DCI, but he was worried. Once again, a case he was involved in and the bodies were piling up. He knew it would not be long before the commissioner of the London Met, through his mouthpiece DCS Goddard, made his presence known. This time there may be validity in his reaction, due to the number of bodies. Isaac knew that yet again he had to pull out all the stops.
‘We’re assuming Fuentes was killed by O’Shaughnessy and Steve Walters,’ Donaldson said.
‘And we don’t know where Walters is.’
‘You have a case against him?’
‘Enough to get him convicted.’
‘Then we’d better find him.’
‘Could he have killed Hughenden?’ Isaac asked.
‘It’s possible, although so far his murders have only been messy. With Hughenden, it looked professional.’
‘But there was a struggle. As if the man who killed him delayed, allowed his prey to get away. A professional would have just carried out the hit without warning.’
‘Are we deducing that he may have known his killer?’
‘It’s a theory.’
‘A good theory,’ Donaldson said. ‘We need to find Steve Walters.’
***
Wendy Gladstone and Larry Hill were brought into the office. Larry’s early finish to spend time with his children was curtailed due to the importance of wrapping up the deaths of four people.
‘What do we know about Steve Walters?’ Isaac asked in the office at Challis Street Police Station.
‘He’s a thug. No idea why Hughenden would have used him,’ Larry said.
‘Do we have his criminal record?’
‘There’s little to recommend him. Incarcerated at fourteen in a borstal for knifing a fellow pupil at school. At seventeen he’s sentenced to two years for shooting a shop owner, a minor wound.’
‘It’s not a long sentence,’ Donaldson said.
‘Mitigating circumstances according to the trial report.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The usual: deprived home, an alcoholic father, his mother had just died. He’s out after serving less than two years. Then there’s a period of seventeen months where there are no reports of him, apart from a drunken brawl outside a pub.’
‘After that?’
‘He joined the army; served in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
‘What as?’
‘Special forces. He received a few medals as well,’ Larry said.
‘He’d know how to kill someone with piano wire then.’
‘He may be a war hero, but Walters is still a nasty piece of work,’ Larry said. ‘Six years later, he’s demobbed and back out on the street. That’s about it for Steve Walters. The next time we hear of him is when he turns up here.’
‘And where is he now?’ Isaac asked.
‘We’ve no idea.’
As the group sat in the office, Isaac’s phone rang. ‘No fingerprints although we picked up a shoe print outside Hughenden’s back door,’ Gordon Windsor said.
‘And?’
‘It matches a set of prints we found at the first murder scene.’
‘Steve Walters?’
‘That’s the name you have. I only know him by a shoe. Whoever he is, he murdered Alex Hughenden.’
‘Now we know who killed Hughenden. Another murder solved,’ Isaac said. ‘Larry, Wendy, find the man.’
‘Yes, DCI,’ they both said.
Chapter 18
Lord Allerton, a timid man who had only joined the drug syndicate out of financial necessity, paced up and down the drawing room in his ancestral home. The red rope cord barriers that had kept the tourists’ children away from the family heirlooms were long removed. If he could relax, he would have to agree that the room, as well as the house, looked resplendent. He analysed all that had transpired and the trouble he was in.
On the evening news he had recognised the shop where a man had been murdered. He knew that his relative had been responsible. The aristocrat wondered where it was all going to end. The promise had been three weeks, and then there would be no more drug trafficking, an insidious business more in tune with the lower and middle classes. Not with him, a true blueblood who could claim an ancestry dating back eight hundred years. An Allerton had fought and died bravely in every war the British had fought in. Allertons had risen to high office in politics, in business, in diplomatic circles for generations, but he knew he was unique: he was a criminal, no better than a person who does not pay for their bus ticket or someone who cheats an old woman out of her life savings.
He looked up at the walls of the room, lined with paintings of his illustrious ancestors. He knew his portrait would not adorn those walls.
His wife was disturbed by the way her husband paced up and down the room, deep in thought. ‘What is it, Timothy?’ she asked as she gave him a reassuring hug.
‘I have done something wrong, terribly wrong. It gives me great anguish.’ His wife knew it was not adultery; she knew him well enough for that.
‘Will it help to talk?’ she asked.
‘It is not something I can live with.’
‘What is it?’
‘I
