As was the custom, the meetings were an opportunity for all present to put forward suggestions, no matter how foolish and obscure they were. This time what they appeared to have was a murder by agreement. It baffled all of them, and one thing that Isaac did not like was uncertainty.
‘Marcus Matthews was married to Hamish McIntyre’s daughter,’ Larry said. ‘The word on the street is that McIntyre’s not involved.’
‘A name to strike fear into anyone who knows him,’ Isaac said. ‘You’ve seen him around?’
‘Once or twice, but he moves in elevated circles now. He’s not the sort of person to get down the local pub of a night for a pint with his cohorts. Strictly upmarket is McIntyre, a box at Ascot during the season, seats at the opera, the best of everything.’
‘When I was younger, he was a rough man who swore profusely, maimed anyone who got in his way.’
‘He still is,’ Bridget said. ‘I’ve compiled a report. The relationship with his daughter is tortuous, and it’s believed they’ve not spoken for several years.’
‘Wendy, any more to add?’ Isaac asked.
‘I’ll check out where McIntyre goes, get a feel for the man. You’ll be off to meet with Matthews’ widow?’
‘We will.’
‘Hamish McIntyre didn’t kill Marcus Matthews,’ Bridget said, looking up from the folder in her hand.
‘Why’s that?’ Larry said.
‘If the date of death is confirmed as 13 September 2013, then McIntyre was not in the country.’
‘Where was he?’ Isaac said.
‘Majorca,’ Bridget said, smug because she had the facts. ‘I’ve checked, and he exited England on the twenty-fifth of August, returned on 14 October 2013.’
‘Long enough to establish an alibi,’ Larry said.
‘Hamish McIntyre had a broken leg. He’d been in a car accident, and the hospital records haven’t been falsified. He couldn’t have climbed those stairs with his leg in a cast.’
‘Where is McIntyre now?’
‘He rarely comes into London, preferring to stay at his house in Kent.’
‘If he wants to pretend to be the country squire, it doesn’t alter the fact that the man’s a criminal.’
‘No one’s been able to prove that conclusively for a long time. His last conviction was in 1996, served two years for robbery, a building society in Croydon,’ Bridget said.
‘Two years? That’s not a long time,’ Larry said. He had seen it all before, a smart lawyer, a villain with money, the ability to intimidate witnesses, to pay them off if necessary, and murder became a minor and unfortunate affray.
‘One of the other gang members was sentenced for seriously wounding one of the building society’s employees with a baseball bat,’ Bridget said. ‘Everyone in the place, employees and customers, gave statements at the scene that the man had spoken with a Scottish accent, whereas the man who was convicted was from London, full-on Cockney.’
‘A travesty of justice?’
‘No one would stand up in court and repeat what they had said at the crime scene, and the gang members had all been masked.’
‘Two years, why not an acquittal?’ Wendy asked.
‘A police car had been passing by. They saw McIntyre pull away from the scene, two others in the car. There was no denying he was involved. He stuck to his story that he had been outside in the car, and yes, he admitted to his part in it.’
‘He couldn’t get out of it totally,’ Larry said.
Chapter 3
It wasn’t often that houses stayed unoccupied in Kensington. For one thing, their values were so high that whoever owned them rented them out, renovated them or sold them.
136 Bedford Gardens, a detached Victorian house, was an exception. There was nothing to mark it out from the other homes in the street, apart from its advanced state of decay.
Charles Stanford, the owner, had been traced to an address in Brighton, a seaside resort in East Sussex.
It was the second day of March, and as Isaac and Larry drove along the seafront in Brighton, saw the waves and felt the blast of the cold wind coming off the English Channel, they were not in the mood for ice cream or candy floss.
Isaac had brought Larry Hill into Homicide after they had met on a previous case. Larry had impressed him, not only with his professionalism but also with his astuteness in seeing through the evidence presented and drawing alternative conclusions; conclusions which had turned out to be right. It wasn’t a burglar or a predator who had killed a woman in her apartment, her naked body untouched apart from her head being thrust into a bath filled with water. It was her older lover, a man who never saw justice, becoming the victim of an ordered assassination.
Isaac knew Larry to be an asset, but the man came with baggage, not known initially. Detective Inspector Larry Hill was an alcoholic. It could be controlled by Isaac reading him the riot act and his wife withholding favours in the bedroom, making him sleep on the sofa downstairs.
‘Stanford’s a man who lives off the grid. A place in Kensington worth millions, yet he appears to live a reclusive existence. That’s according to what I could find out from his local police station,’ Isaac said. His words proved to be accurate; Stanford had an upmarket address to the north of the city, in Preston Village, named after the manor house that had existed since the thirteenth century and had been rebuilt in 1738 in the Palladian Style. The manor
