‘What did he want?’ Isaac asked.
‘He said for us to check you out in the pub.’
‘Which you did?’
‘I didn’t; they did. I wasn’t involved.’
‘Did you see anyone?’ Ross asked Isaac.
‘I wasn’t looking, but someone could have looked in the window.’
‘We had a patrol car there.’
‘It was before that,’ Preston said.
‘Did he say why?’
‘Not to me. Not that I cared, I wasn’t going to kill anyone.’
‘Because you couldn’t?’
‘Preston’s killed, another gang’s member, not that we’ll ever prove it,’ Ross said to Isaac.
‘Is that it?’ Isaac said. ‘Mr Preston, you’ve killed?’
‘My client will not answer that question. Now, if you don’t mind, I suggest we wrap this up, let my client leave.’
‘Not so fast,’ Ross said.
‘He said he wanted the old man killed; to make it look as though it was a robbery,’ Preston said. ‘We weren’t asking questions, not with that amount.’
‘Why didn’t you just take it from him?’
‘There was a car nearby, a man inside. He had a gun, one of those that fires lots of bullets, real expensive.’
‘Pointed at you?’
‘At all of us.’
‘The car, describe it?’
‘A BMW, dark blue.’
‘Registration number?’
‘I wasn’t looking, nobody was.’
Larry, listening from the other room, took out his phone and called the police in Godstone.
‘Describe the man with the money, the other one in the car.’
‘It was dark; we only saw the gun. The other man, he wore a hat, the collar on his coat turned up.’
Ross turned to Isaac. ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours, forty-eight at a push. We’ll be holding Mr Preston here until then.’
‘The charge?’ the lawyer asked. Her coat was across her lap, her handbag on the table, the case file closed. She was going, regardless.
‘Mr Preston will be held on suspicion of murder. You may wish to believe him, but I don’t, nor does DCI Cook. It’s not the first time that Mr Preston and I have crossed swords. It might be the last.’
***
It wasn’t possible to provide security to the level required to ensure the safety of the Robinsons and the Winstons, not that Tim Winston hadn’t been insistent, furious as he had been about Rose being at the Robinsons’ house again.
The front room of the Winstons’ house. On one side of the room, Tim and Maeve Winston, on the other, sitting on a hard chair, Wendy. Rose maintained a neutral position, a book resting in her lap, pretending not to be involved, but she was.
Jim Robinson was going to identify his father the next day, and Brad would be taking the morning off school to accompany him.
Tim Winston was not interested in the Robinsons, only his family, a natural reaction, and so far Wendy hadn’t told him about the detention of an individual in Canning Town.
No longer regarded as a robbery or a random killing, Hector Robinson’s death had all the hallmarks of an assassination.
Nobody at Challis Street could make any sense of it. It was illogical why a criminal organisation would remain secret, yet focus attention on themselves through a concerted attempt to eliminate anybody who was somehow associated with the murder in the cemetery.
Rose and Brad had only seen the body, had a brief glance at the murderer, and Hector Robinson had not been involved at all, nor had Janice Robinson. It was a modus operandi that Homicide couldn’t make sense of.
‘Who next?’ Tim Winston said. Wendy was on her own, Larry and Isaac on their way back from Canning Town, and besides, she didn’t need assistance to talk to the family, only had something to tell them.
‘We have no reason to believe that you or your family is under threat,’ Wendy said. It was the official line for her to take, but she didn’t believe it.
Winston sat close to his wife, holding hands; Maeve listening to all that was said but saying little. It was clear she did not know yet of her philandering husband and the weekly meetings that he had enjoyed with Janice Robinson.
It was bound to come out eventually, and Wendy was curious to see the reaction, to see if Maeve Winston was as placid as she seemed, as forgiving and loving of her husband as Gladys Robinson had suggested.
‘Brad’s father? Random or something else?’ Winston asked.
‘It’s under investigation. A local youth, a member of a gang, has been detained.’
‘That’s not the question.’
‘It’s all I can tell you at this time.’ All that Wendy was willing to say. If it was an assassination, elimination of those close to the murder in the cemetery, then doubling the police presence at both houses, ensuring that patrol cars circled the area every hour on the hour, wasn’t going to achieve much.
Wendy wanted to believe that Rose was safe, that they wouldn’t harm her, but she knew that was wishful thinking.
Was it, as she had read about overseas, a breakdown in government and policing, anarchy rearing its head, as in Northern Mexico, parts of South America, America during prohibition; criminal organisations taking over the role of government, installing their own people.
It was a frightening thought. Society was becoming fragmented, with ghettos springing up throughout London and the other major cities. Violence was on the rise, the court system was under strain. Was Warren Preston to go free?
The young man with no hope of a future, perpetually unemployed, not even looking for a job, just his dole payment and what he could steal or scrounge or trade: what of him and the thousands like him? Even in the area of Challis Street Police Station, there were other ‘Warren Prestons’, disenfranchised, looking for something, not knowing what, causing trouble.
‘Do we keep Rose at home?’
‘I suggest you continue as before,’ Wendy said. She had no more to
