“What first put you on the track of this Russian chap’s involvement?” asked Kenneth.
“Oh, that came late in the day, sir,” said Gus. “We spent ages talking with people in Biddestone, Corsham, and Chippenham before Blessing Umeh stumbled on a photo of Alan Duncan taken in Moscow. The victim’s mother had several photos in a drawer, including one of Yuri Kovalev, but Phil Banks never got to see them. It’s not common to search the home of a murder victim’s parents, where the said victim lived five miles away with a partner.”
“I assume uniformed officers visited the parents to notify them of their son’s death, confirmed they had an alibi, then left them to grieve?”
“Exactly, sir,” said Gus. “At that point, it could still have been suicide. The next day, when the coroner reported strangulation as the cause of death, they had no reason to return to Corsham.”
“It was heartening to hear that the Hub helped to solve the case,” said the ACC.
“We couldn’t have done it without their help, sir,” said Gus. “The answer lay in the photographs that Alan Duncan sent his parents. We had seen those early in the piece but didn’t appreciate their significance. Maddy Mills was hiding a secret, and my attempts to uncover it delayed the deeper analysis of those photographs. The pictures from Moscow sped up the process because, at last, I could see a plausible reason for Duncan’s murder. I suspected a submariner or a colleague not in those photos. Somebody that the men had in common.”
“You got little right until the very end, did you, Gus?” said Geoff Mercer.
“Possibly not,” said Gus, “but it wouldn’t be the first time that a lightbulb moment saved the day in a case you handled, would it?”
“Fair comment,” said Geoff.
“I can think of several,” admitted the ACC.
“Duncan and Lambert enjoyed a bet on the horses,” said Gus. “Nothing wrong with that in moderation, but they let things get out of hand. Rather than ask their colleagues to get them out of trouble, they hatched a plan to pretend to sell secrets to the Russians. I thought Duncan working as a draughtsman in a small company was odd, but although people mentioned he was a stickler for getting things right, nobody said he was a master at his craft. I can’t imagine how tough it must have been to produce something that fooled Russian engineers for two decades. In the end, they realised their mistake and sent Kovalev to find Duncan and kill him.”
“Lambert was Duncan’s partner-in-crime, I take it?” said Geoff Mercer, “and the bar owner you referred to earlier.”
“He was the group’s so-called racing expert,” said Gus. “Bob Duncan noticed a missing photograph taken at the Happy Valley racecourse in Hong Kong. Lambert appeared in just one of the group pictures. More often than not, he was behind the camera. I should have kept digging into why it went missing. Duncan took it with him from his parent’s home on Sunday before he died. It was a desperate ploy. Kovalev wasn’t interested in the cash that Duncan withdrew from the bank, nor in a photograph of Lambert. His mission was to kill Duncan.”
“If Mrs Campbell-Drake had told the police everything, you would never have discovered this Lambert character,” said the ACC.
“True,” said Gus, “nor would we have learned that Lambert tried to hide his connection to Duncan and the misleading drawings by assuming the identity of his dead colleague, Freddie Watts. That’s another spin-off offence that resulted from this case. Add that to the eventual exposure of the secret that Maddy Mills, or Jennifer Forsyth, had buried for twenty-odd years; then it has to be one of the most complex and distressing cases I’ve handled.”
“Distressing?” asked the ACC. “In what way?”
“I went to Chippenham with DI Ferris the other evening, sir,” said Geoff Mercer. “We arrested Madeleine Telfer in her kitchen and then had to escort her through the hallway in front of her husband and two children. All three were innocents in this case.”
“A tangled web, gentlemen,” said the ACC. “What are the odds that Kovalev will stand trial here?”
“Slim,” said Gus. “I haven’t spoken with our colleagues in Douglas today. They still had Yuri Kovalev under lock and key on Friday. The Russians have no embassy on the island, and as a Crown Dependency, the Manx government can set some of its laws. They defer to the UK Government to handle their foreign affairs. So, as long as Kovalev remains on the island, it could be ages before the Russians can apply diplomatic pressure to get him released.”
“I remember a Polish criminal hiding on the island last year,” said Geoff. “He had found out that European arrest warrants weren’t valid there. With these smaller dependencies, the paperwork here on the mainland doesn’t always account for every eventuality. The Ministry’s pen-pushers cover the most likely things that might need a proper procedure.”
“As my name appears to carry weight in Douglas, I might suggest they liaise with you, Mercer,” said the ACC. “A member of your team should take this case forward now that Freeman has done the groundwork.”
“Good idea, sir,” said Gus. “When you speak to the locals, Geoff, make sure that the second they hear from the Russians, they must spread the word. ‘Russia bullies a tiny island in the Irish Sea.’ The negative publicity could encourage them to cut comrade Kovalev adrift.”
“Leave it with me,” said Geoff.
“Is there another cold case in your in-tray waiting to
