‘Proof?’
‘I never thought much about it, not until I found out that he had been visiting Janice.’
‘She’s not,’ Wendy said. ‘We’ve taken DNA from her and Hector. She was his daughter, but do you think your husband suspected she was his?’
‘I doubt it. That wasn’t Tim’s style; too trusting.’
‘Of you?’
‘Of me. Nothing like that, but I’ve looked, thought about it, and if I got up north, who knows.’
Wendy wasn’t there as a psychologist nor as a marriage counsellor. She wanted out of the house, back to Challis Street and Homicide. A murder made more sense than the woman’s neurosis.
***
Ian Naughton remained elusive. No sight of the man since he had left Holland Park, no sign of the people carrier or the Bentley that had been at the rear of the house.
The number plate of the BMW had been changed from when it had been in the garage at Godstone to when it had re-emerged as a burnt-out shell. Forensics had checked the vehicle, found that it had been stolen two years previously, resprayed, re-registered and the vehicle identification number had been doctored.
It was a high-quality transformation, not the sort of thing a backyard operator could have done.
But it was more than that, Isaac knew. Naughton was baiting them; Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes, the master criminal leaving clues, revelling in the sport, killing as needed.
He was, Isaac could tell, a man who would be almost impossible to find.
It had come to him the previous night. It was late, and he had been unable to sleep. In the end, believing that worrying about the investigations wasn’t going to help, he picked up a paperback from the bookshelf, a book he had read more than once.
Holmes had described Moriarty as the ‘Napoleon of crime’, a criminal mastermind, adept at committing any atrocity to perfection without losing any sleep over it.
And that was it; Naughton was playing with the police. A man so successful in crime, but boring of the game, he had thrown in clues, killed people, purely for his pleasure.
As Isaac read more of the book, of the Machiavellian criminal mastermind, the more he realised that there were no clear motives behind the deaths. Jane Doe, whoever she was, could be relevant, but Janice and Hector could be minor players and he, Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook, was being tested.
If that was the case, Isaac was sure he was up to the challenge.
Challis Street. Homicide. Early in the morning, the most productive time of the day, Isaac assembled the team. Bridget was bright-eyed, Wendy was struggling, and Larry looked as though he’d had a rough night.
‘A curry,’ Larry said as he drank a cup of tea.
Bill Ross’s favourite restaurant had done the man a disservice. Enough for Larry to reconsider policing in the east of London, seeing it as nothing more than a momentary fascination.
The café in Notting Hill that had served him breakfast for the last three years, when his wife wasn’t talking to him, or he could sneak it in undetected, had never let him down, never given him a queasy stomach.
And even though it was policing at the coal face in Canning Town, the crooks were all the same, just less intelligent, less articulate. The superintendent over there might not have been politically correct, nor Bill Ross, but it was still a thankless task, and the gangs were without exception a disreputable bunch of reprobates.
Isaac outlined his theory; Larry couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Wendy trusted her DCI; she’d go along with his reasoning, not sure how it was going to help and how she was to proceed. Bridget wasn’t sure how it would affect the investigation.
‘What do you want from us?’ Larry asked. He looked perplexed, felt as though he should understand but couldn’t.
‘The woman in the cemetery is the prime focus. We keep Janice and Hector Robinson on the side; they’ll resolve themselves in due course. If they’re related, which we must assume they are, then we’ll get the answers eventually.’
Wendy could see the flaw. ‘If Janice and Hector are diversionary, a game someone’s playing, then how do we know that Brad and Gladys won’t be targeted, and what about Rose?’
‘We’ve done all we can, you know that. Barring a massive protection effort, we can’t do much more. And how long are we going to be in the dark? You tell me. You can’t; none of us can.’
‘I could revisit the cemetery,’ Larry said.
‘I could find out where Naughton and the Asian woman have gone,’ Bridget said.
‘Which is what you’ve been doing already, and with little success. The man’s supremely arrogant, playing with us.’
‘But why? He wasn’t to know that I’d figure it out,’ Larry said.
‘It must have been for someone else,’ Isaac said.
‘Illogical, it makes no sense.’
‘It’s neither of those. Think about it. Naughton wants to draw the best criminal minds to him, which means he’s a major player.’
‘Like SPECTRE,’ Larry said, referring to a James Bond movie he’d watched on Netflix the week before.
‘Similar, but purely criminal, although it could be more. We’ll not know, not yet.’
‘If Naughton’s playing us as fools, then he must be leaving clues,’ Bridget said.
‘Which means the man’s nearby or somewhere we can find him.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Larry said.
***
Isaac had known he was going out on a limb, and even Chief Superintendent Goddard thought his DCI was clutching at straws when the two of them sat down in Goddard's office, up on the third floor, a view through a large window as far as the London Eye. Isaac hadn’t been up in it, not yet, as Jenny was afraid of heights, and he wasn’t going
