about Luke’s success.’ Because he was a civilian he wasn’t at the meeting to speak for himself. ‘He found Goodrich’s data-base in about thirty seconds. “What do you want to know?” he asked, before we’d turned round, so we told him to bring up the client list. He tapped two keys and there it was. All I ever get is “Message error, bring me someone who knows what they’re doing”.’ She said the last bit in a tinny robot voice.
I glanced at her audience. Most of them were smiling, but one or two weren’t impressed. I suspected that she was nearly as good as Luke on the computer, but was deliberately demeaning herself. To survive in the job she needed the full cooperation of her colleagues, and that meant not being a smart arse or a threat to their promotion prospects. It shouldn’t be necessary, and it made me angry.
Maud continued. ‘So, I told him to print us a list and left him to it. He ran one off and realised that all the entries were in chronological order, by the dates that they signed on as clients. That’s OK on a computer — you just tap in a name and it finds it for you. Luke thought that perhaps we’d prefer alphabetical hard copies, so he asked the machine to sort the names and print another list. While he was browsing through he noticed that it contained a disproportionate number of people called Jones. He did some quick calculations with the phone book and reckoned that Goodrich should have had about four Joneses among his seventeen hundred clients. In fact, he had eleven. Then Luke noticed that seven of them were called A. Jones, B. Jones, C. Jones, right through to G. Jones.’
People shuffled in their seats, wondering if this was relevant. If there was a fraud, they just wanted to know the basic details.
I said, ‘So he had files for seven people called A., B., C., D., E., F. and G. Jones.’
‘Not files as such, Mr Priest. They were on his list of clients, but the information was incomplete. There are no addresses and no amounts of money against them. It rather looks as if someone entered the names but didn’t know how to set up a file. Like as if he did it himself, without his secretary’s knowledge. Instead, he started using…this.’ Maud held aloft a plastic bag. Inside it we could see what looked like an exercise book.
‘This is a cash book; available at any good stationer’s or newsagent’s. We found it in the back of the file — the filing cabinet file — for a Mr and Mrs W. F. Jones, who appear to be a perfectly respectable retired greengrocer and his wife. Goodrich evidently just put it there for safe-keeping. It was his secret account book. Inside are pages for each of our seven Mr Joneses, with long lists of amounts of money against them. Two to three thousand pounds at a time, once a week, for the seven of them. In other words, about twenty thousand pounds a week, for over two years, ceasing just before last Christmas.’
‘So if these were some sort of payment,’ someone asked, ‘which way were they going? In or out?’
‘It’s not clear,’ Maud told him. ‘There are other figures and dates, but we haven’t cracked what they mean, yet.’
‘Was he being blackmailed?’ a voice at the back wondered.
‘We don’t know. But we’ve found something else. As you already know from the handouts, we were investigating him for possible fraud, at the request of his clients’ solicitors. However, we have another piece of information about him which has just come to light. Two years ago, just about when he set up the file for A. Jones, we were notified by N-CIS about an SCT against him.’
I sat up. ‘Money laundering?’ I wondered aloud.
Maud nodded in my direction. ‘Possibly.’
‘Er, explain SCTs to us,’ I suggested.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘An SCT is a suspicious cash transaction. If you go into a bank to deposit a large amount of cash, currently three thousand or over, you will be asked where it came from. If the bank manager is not satisfied, the law requires him to report it. The National Criminal Intelligence Service correlate the reports and let us know about any coming from our patch. It’s a bit of a dodgy area, so we keep mum about them until we are sure that the money comes from criminal activities.’
A bit dodgy was putting it mildly. Over eighty per cent of SCTs were quite legitimate, and the civil liberties people would have a field day if we acted on them all. A handful lead to convictions and the rest fall into a grey area. Lawyers are the best people to launder money. They are protected by rules of confidentiality that priests and doctors can only envy. Second-hand car dealers come next on the list. A financial adviser, calling into his bank every week with a couple of thousand pounds in grubby notes that his clients have handed to him, might just about get away with it. Except that he would be doing it in every bank in town.
Gilbert grunted and shuffled around. ‘Do you think we’re talking drugs money?’ he asked, peering at Maud over his new half-spectacles.
‘Early days, Mr Wood. Let’s see what we find.’
Hartley Goodrich was beginning to look interesting. Maud answered a few more questions before I invited the SOCO to spellbind us all with his revelations.
‘Fingerprints,’ he announced, briskly. ‘First of all, to eliminate the milkman who started the whole thing off, we checked the bottle on the doorstep. It had been wiped clean. We asked him if he wore gloves and he said not. We also checked next door’s bottles and they bore his prints. The plant pot that hit Goodrich had also been wiped clean, most likely with a tea-towel that was hanging in one of those pull-out rails, under his worktop. His assailant had put it back, but it bore dirty marks similar to the soil from the pot. We’ve sent it to the lab. On the table was a bowl, or a planter, that the plant pot has stood in at some time. We found plenty of Goodrich’s prints and one or two other marks, probably old ones. I’m not hopeful of them being of interest. For what it’s worth, the plant was a Dieffenbachia picta. It would have been less messy to have poisoned him with it.’
I said, ‘Let’s not explore that avenue. This isn’t St Mary Mead and Mr Wood isn’t Miss Marple.’ I couldn’t resist adding, ‘In spite of the spectacles. Anything else?’
‘We’ve taken the usual fibre samples and found a couple of hairs that we haven’t identified yet, but they are almost certainly his own. Oh, and a few flakes of dandruff.’ He turned to me, saying, ‘We’d like a word with you about that, Mr Priest,’ which earned him a cheap laugh from the audience.
‘I see,’ I replied through gritted teeth. ‘Is that all you could find? You were there long enough.’
‘One little thing,’ the SOCO said. ‘When I lifted the milk bottle to dust it, there was a wet ring of condensation on the step, where it had been. Next to it was what might have been the remnants of a similar ring, as if one bottle had been taken away, or the one present had been moved. Unfortunately, the mark dried out and vanished as we were looking at it.’
I wasn’t sure if this was interesting or confusing. We all want to be detectives, follow the trail, make sweeping deductions, but mostly it’s easier than that. Look for the woman or the money; find the blunt object; match them together. End of story. This was going to be one of those, I hoped. I’d had enough revelations for one day, but I was reckoning without Nigel’s phone call.
We held a questions and answers session and doled out the various jobs. I asked Jeff Caton to take over the list of clients that Claud — Brian — had started and try to develop some sort of profile of each one that would eliminate most of them and leave us with a few possible suspects. Criminal Records would be a useful starting point. Maud and Brian were visiting local bank managers. One or two of them were going to have a nice day. Hopefully they’d be able to match the dates and amounts in the cash book to transactions over the counter.
The phone rang just as we were winding up. It had to be Nigel because we’d arranged to be undisturbed except for his call.
‘Have you met the new pathologist, boss?’ he enthused in my left ear.
‘Professor Simms. Yes, I’ve met her.’
‘Heather,’ he announced, with barely disguised triumph. ‘She’s ever so attractive, isn’t she?’
‘Er, yes. Very pleasant. What did she say.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he gushed. ‘She just pulled the sheet back, looked at his hands and then at his face and said, “Sedentary work. Very trustworthy looking. Meets lots of people. Self-employed, possibly in the financial sector.” She’s brilliant!’
I said, ‘No, Nigel. She just has a reasonable memory. I told her all that, yesterday.’
‘Honest?’ His voice had lost its enthusiasm.
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Come on, Nigel,’ I urged. ‘There’s a room full of people here, hanging on your every word, so hide your disappointment and tell me what she had to say about the stiff.’
‘Right, boss. But you’re not going to like it.’
He was right, I didn’t. And when he’d finished I wished I hadn’t asked.
