Sunday cont then Monday
Gary confessed to Cleo over their nightcap coffee that
Dorothy had been like a breath of fresh air with her theories and enthusiasm.
He owed it to her to follow up everything she had suggested.
One of Gary’s concerns was that it was starting to look as
if HQ was headquarters of promoting crimes rather than solving them. Someone
always seemed to know what was going on, starting with Bertie Browne and his Gazette,
but his brother Joe had also written about cannibalism and caused fear in many
hearts.
“You can’t lump together all those great colleagues if just
one has succumbed to whatever he must have thought was necessity, or even just
out of fear. The cannibalism case had to be leaked out at some point. I’m
surprised it took so long.”
“Take Henry for instance. Henry lives alone with his cats.
His mother died at the age of about 90. He had been looking after her and is
still living with the bric-a-brac she had treasured for decades,” said Gary.
“He once told me that he had been married, but his wife had left him because
she could not live with his mother and he had had to choose between them. What
if he’s been shooting off his mouth in a drunken state?”
“Does he even know what’s going on outside his office?” Cleo
asked.
“That’s a question that will have to be asked. And Gisela is
one of those women who make friends by confiding in them,” said Gary.
“As far as Henry is concerned, I can’t believe he’s anything
more than a guy near retirement age who hates his job but can’t admit it, even
to himself.”
“If it came to it, I could never choose my mother over my
wife, Cleo.”
“Henry’s is one of a million tragic stories,” said Cleo. “I
would never want to live with one of my children when they are grownup and have
lives of their own. But some mothers instil it into their sons that they are
the next best thing to a husband or wife. Sons and even unmarried daughters
actually live like that until the parents free them by dying.
“Not always, however.”
“Or they kill off the parents” said Cleo. . “Some parents
are selfish, having bred for what they see as their guarantee of support in
later life,” said Cleo. “But not Grit. I’m so glad she is the way she is.”
“So am I, and I’m glad she has Roger. He is a spoilt brat,
if the truth be known, and she has fallen for him hook, line and sinker, but at
least she does not cling on to Joe and me and is superlative grandmother
instead. All we need to do now is get Gloria settled with someone suitable.”
“I’ll second that though you sound a bit grudging about
Roger becoming part of the family, and there is no one suitable for Gloria. I
think she came here originally hoping to move into this cottage with me and
lead a mother-daughter life.”
“I’m no grudging od Roger,
but admittedly a bit possessive of my mother, now I think about it.“
“I didn’t know you felt like that, Gary.”
“Neither did I until I realized that the job Roger had so
eagerly bequeathed me was in an unholy mess and he had got himself out of it at
my expense. That shaded the rest of his existence, including the relationship
with Grit.”
“I don’t believe he really wanted out, Gary. He just wanted to
retire and get a bit more out of life”
“He’s certainly doing that,” said Gary. “The problem for me
is that he did not keep control over what was happening, as I discovered along
with Colin Peck, who had to get the data organized.”
“Without you, Roger would have cracked up after the arrest
of his wife.”
“That was a marriage in hell. She married a senior police inspector
for respectability and then went her own way, but when he went his way she
didn’t like it one bit.”
“So she shot her rival,” said Cleo.
“She did not think she would be found out. Roger had left
his gun at home because he did not take it to the gym. She took it instead, but
not to the gym. He was subsequently arrested on suspicion, Cleo, and not by me.
For that purpose they called in the guys from Oxford HQ. I was a colleague of
Roger’s, so I had to be out of it.”
“It’s sobering to think that she would have been quite happy
for Roger to go to prison for murder.”
“Eleanor saw Roger’s affair as a criticism of her and took
what she thought were justifiable consequences.”
“She left him to stew. I never believed that he would shoot
the woman he was having an affair with, or anyone else except in self-defence,
and even then...” said Gary.
“I’m surprised you stayed friends.”
“I was glad to be rid of Shirley. She was simply a
distraction from the woman I wanted who was playing games with me. Anyway, Roger
was better for her career.”
“I’ve said how sorry I am to have been so fanatical about
being married to Robert.”
“Not as sorry as I am,” said Gary.
A short pause followed while each wondered how the other
could be so blind.
***
“It’s sort of fun going down memory lane, but what does it
have to do with the priory case?” said Cleo, anxious to get off a very painful
topic.
“Fun? It should never have happened.”
“Are we talking about the priory or still mourning the other
dearly departed?” said Cleo.
“You are macabre, Cleo. You gave permission for that
eccentric Sloane to organize an architectural dig, and look where it got us!”
“I thought he was just a bit crazy, not that he would dig up
fresh human remains.”
“Al dug up the bones and was appalled.”
“I thought he was quite brave about it,” said Cleo.
“We are possibly on the threshold of solving dozens of past
crimes if we can nail Bailey down, Cleo. Sloane is small fry. I’m going to have
to sort out which of the unsolved cases of recent years can be laid at Bailey’s
door.”
“Get Colin Peck to help you,” said Cleo. “He probably knows
more about what’s in the HQ archives than anyone else would admit to, and that
includes Roger, who was in charge of most of them before you took his place as
homicide chief.”
“No one likes to talk about their defeats. I’ll definitely
talk to Colin in the morning. That’s a brilliant idea.”
“I’m not just a pretty face, Sweetheart.”
“I had noticed.”
***
Monday
Colin Peck had digitalized the HQ archives and in so doing
discovered a number of avoidable situations that had led to a case being
declared unsolved. He suspected that some had been forgotten and put so far on
the back burner that they never claimed anyone’s attention again.
Colin’s partner, Julie, was the daughter of Robert Jones,
Cleo’s ex-husband. Colin had undertaken some detection work for Cleo’s agency.
Through Cleo he had connected with Gary and taken on the massive job of sorting
out HQ records. Having a trained lawyer to sort out HQ records was a good idea,
though Colin was horrified at the careless system of record keeping, mainly
through snippets of memo paper stuck onto copies of documents.
In the meantime, he had reduced his job at HQ to part time
keeping the archives up to date, and joined a group of lawyers. There he
specialized in criminal law, which had been his speciality at university. Colin
was a useful colleague to have if you needed to know what happened at HQ to make
history, since he left no document unread and entered into his excel database
for easy consultation.
Gary’s promotion to homicide made a difference to what was
solved and documented, but he could not go back over past crimes that had been
shelved at the expense of solving fresh ones. Roger had had manager status at
that time, but hated it and pestered Gary for years to take over. Roger never
felt more than regret when a case was ditched, solved or unsolved, and was glad
to be out of it now.
The situation had improved when Gary took over the
superintendent job and was able to get things moving (Roger Stone had never had
the ambition to get things moving), but going back for nearly two decades to
get evidence of Bailey’s involvement in some of the crimes was going to be
difficult if not a wild goose chase.
***
Curiously, In all those years, even before he bought his
farm and moved in, Bailey had never been suspected of any wrongdoing anywhere. He
had kept a low profile and been cautious. He was mentioned only three times in
HQ reports, and then only as a witness who had seemingly not witnessed anything
of use. Colin’s search engine found that there was information in his online
database that listed and described past crimes, but he had only been able to
document what he found.
“I need parallels between the Norton brothers being let off
for lack of evidence and a possible involvement of Bailey,” Gary explained.
“The Nortons were blamed for all the crime in the area, but without evidence
the cases never got off the ground.”
“It’s interesting that Bailey’s activities must have
preceded those of the Nortons by at least a decade. Maybe he took them on and
they eventually turned tables on him,” said Colin.
“The three recent mentions of Bailey in the records happen
to coincide with the Nortons suspected involvement in the crimes under scrutiny,”
Colin said as he skimmed through the reports that had appeared on his monitor. “I
hadn’t spotted that.”
“It sounds like what I’m looking for,” said Gary.
“The first one involved a group of unidentifiable young
women unwilling to talk in any language, who were being forced into
prostitution.”
“If the Nortons were paid by Bailey to take the rap and then
able to prove they had nothing to do with it, it would fit in with the
scapegoat idea, wouldn’t it?” said Gary. “A scapegoat that could not be
nailed.”
“The vice department could not find a suspect to take the Norton
brothers’ place, so the case was simply given up,” said Colin.
“Typical vice department,” said Gary.
“You discarded a case involving drugs, Gary. Do you remember
the one?”
“I didn’t discard it, I left it to the drugs department and
they decided the Nortons had no case to answer. Presumably the drugs had been
left lying around somewhere. But that drugs department is no more, Colin. Henry
did not think we needed a vice department in squeaky clean Middlethumpton, so
vice and drugs disappeared from the accounts. Mia Curlew now deals with such
cases, and she has her wits about her, which is more than you can say for the
three old codgers counting their freelance cop days to retirement and not
opening any cans of worms they could avoid.”
“Then there was that case involving Betjeman Crighton,” said
Colin.
“How did Bailey’s name come up in connection with that guy?
He’s totally insane.”
“The Nortons had latched onto Crighton because he could be
used as a killer and get away with it, being insane. So the Nortons were accused
of inciting Betjeman to kill persons the Nortons wanted removed. There’s a list
of them here.”
“Where does Bailey come in?”
“Betjeman tried to blot him out, too.”
“So he was getting on the Nortons’ nerves. They were tired
of the big daddy scheme, so the boss had to go,” said Gary.
“But Bailey’s security was efficient. Don’t ask me how
Bailey managed it, but Betjeman was declared mad and sent to a mental home.”
“From where he was set free,” said Gary.
***
“I don’t think Betjeman was into murder until later, when
Laura Finch probably rejected his amorous intentions and hat to die for it. So
perhaps he was tricked into thinking he had to kill Bailey and was caught
before he could complete his mission. It was presumably not Crighton, who had
no motive, but the Nortons who wanted to be rid of Bailey. The report states
that Betjeman actually blamed the Nortons for his being anywhere near Bailey’s house.”
“That was probably the truth. I don’t think Betjeman was
into lying. They must have asked him all the wrong questions.”
“There’s only scanty reporting of questions being asked in most
of the files. I found that strange, but possible, since Betjeman often refused
to talk to anyone.”
“We don’t know who put the files together and stacked them
on the shelves,” said Gary. “It could have been someone who thought he or she
could omit hand-written minutes of the meetings.”
“I made notes on cases that had received very little attention,”
said Colin. “The Nortons could not be proved to know Betjeman, and Betjeman had
not killed Bailey, so his incoherent explanation was attributed to his insanity
and they put him away, but not because he was convicted.”
“After years later admitting (proudly) to the assassination of
Laura Finch and her son, Betjeman is now in a secure prison and won’t be set
free even if his parents like to think so,” said Gary. “He certainly told the
truth then – I was asking the questions. He was on a different planet most of
the time, and disproportionately proud of his ‘achievements’.”
“The view prevailed that Betjeman Crighton was insane and
therefore not trustworthy by definition,” said Colin. “I wonder why he was not
declared insane much sooner – the first time he came to the notice of the law.”
“He frightened the wits out of people, but his parents said
they would keep him out of mischief. The authorities believed them.”
“He was susceptible to misuse and the Nortons must have
realized that his madness was convenient,” said Colin. “That was an appalling
oversight by the authorities!”
“Bailey was by then officially a farmer in Lower
Grumpsfield. I could kick myself for not realizing that the guy was, and still
is leading a double life. All the cases involving the Nortons will have to be
reviewed, Colin. Will you take over the legal side?”
“I’m only part-time at HQ,” said Colin.
“You’ll get your lawyer’s fees.”
“Will Henry consent?”
“He has his own problems, Colin. He’s on the way out.”
“Not before time,” said Colin. “He isn’t above board,
either.”
“Can we deal with that another time?”
“Of course. I’ll send you the three reports we’ve just
talked about, shall I?”
“Please do.”
“Just one piece of advice as a lawyer,” said Colin.
“Go on.”
“You could find out where Bailey’s riches come from. Only
the police have access to bank accounts.”
“I’m grateful for any tips, Colin. Sometimes it’s hard to
consider details when crimes are staring you in the face.”
“But make sure there is no leakage. Bailey is paying people
to do what he wants, so he may also be paying a bank clerk or two to help with
the money-laundering.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, Colin. Any other ideas about that?”
“Bailey is apparently fond of young women and men, Gary.”
“And they are impressed by wealth, of course.”
“And he is dangerous. Don’t send Nigel.”
“But Nigel can comb the banks for likely contacts.”
“They can be questioned, of course, but that might encourage
a leak of information and put Bailey on his guard.”
“I’ll leave the bank enquiry for a bit, Colin. But Bailey must
have been paying the Nortons for their complicity, too.”
“Speaking as a lawyer, I recommend you reopen the cases that
could connect those gangsters. There’ll be legal contradictions and I’ll be
around to help you spot them.”
“Thanks for helping.”
“I’m helping myself, too,” said Colin. “Those unsolved cases
have haunted me, mainly because I don’t understand why they were dismissed.
Roger Stone isn’t corrupt, is he?”
“He never liked his job, but I don’t believe he misused it.
He was probably too lazy and did not want to get involved with local gangsters.
But he was important to MI5, so that might have taken priority over our tinpot
market town.”
“He was not good at or attentive enough to his HQ job, in other words,” said Colin.
“He’s probably too nice, Colin. Send me the reports and I’ll
get onto them right away.”
“I’ll find other cases that could be in the same category. I
didn’t have time to examine all of them in depth and I was not looking for
anything in particular.”
***
After Colin had left, Gary felt he had no alternative but to
get Nigel back in on the case, despite his task of sorting out the mess Henry
had created.
Nigel agreed. He had worked through the weekend and now had
a fair idea of the extent of the chaos in HQ accounting. They would have to
consult a higher authority. Henry’s drink problem would have to be revealed and
he would have to be removed from his job.
“I feel like a rat, Nigel,” Gary said.
“He started the ball rolling,” said Nigel. “It may have been
a cry for help, but we can’t stop at forgiveness and let him carry on.”
“I don’t suppose he wants to,” said Gary. “I’ll have to
consult the county police authorities and they will insist on getting the
auditors in. Where have they been, anyway?”
“I think the chaos started less than a year ago, so the
auditors have not been around checking yet.”
“And Henry just let things go. I wonder what happened in his
life that was so dreadful that he took to drink and neglected the job he had
been so conscientious about.”
“Pressure, maybe. The auditors will be appalled. I’ve
recorded everything. All the letters, demands, queries and complaints are
filed. HQ is not far off insolvency. Henry was mean about staffing here, but he
spent the money elsewhere, Gary, for instance at the Town Hall.”
“OK. I’ll see to it, Nigel. We can still avert the worst, I
hope, if all outstanding debts to HQ are honoured. Such financial calamities
often work in two directions.”
“The cock-eyed optimist, as usual,” said Nigel. “What do you
want me to do first?”
“I want a confrontation between the Norton brothers and Connor
Bailey, that grumpy farmer and syndicate head.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“I want to see how they react to one another, and I want you
to be on hand, quite apart from Mia, Greg and extra security. The visitors are
to be searched and no mobiles are to be allowed.”
“High drama, in other words.”
“If it’s as I think it is, we have a high level criminal in
Bailey. Try for tomorrow and don’t tell each party that the other will be
there. Stagger the times a bit and they are to be kept apart until everything
is set.”
“They might tell one another ahead of the meeting.”
“So we give them different reasons and the meeting is
coincidence. The Nortons are to identify a corpse.”
“Do we have one handy?”
“Chris will organize that. There’ll be one in one of those
mortuary drawers. Some people are reluctant to claim their dead, while others
have no one to claim them.”
“What about Bailey?”
“Routine. Did he witness a car accident? He was seen nearby
and has not come forward.”
“Is he likely to fall for that story?”
“He will. Anything to keep his slate clean. Cooperating on a
trivial level will be a way of saying he wants to help. Once he’s in here, he’s
going to have to answer some very sticky questions.”
“So you’re out for a big finale,” said Nigel.
“Before that we need to look at three cases Colin Peck has
found in which the Nortons were detained and then found innocent. Mention of
Bailey in those cases could mean that he was using the Nortons as a cover for
his own actions.”
“OK.”
“I’m going to talk to Ian Bailey about his brother Brad this
afternoon. He has been spotted in Lower Grumpsfield. It’s possible that Ian
Bailey knew something.”
“I could do that, Gary.”
“Or we could talk to him together. Ask him to come here now
or soon and without Rosie!”
***
A short phone-call later, Ian Bailey was on his way to HQ.
“I wonder if he’s hiding something?” said Gary. “He’s a bit
too cooperative.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Nigel. “I thought he had
told me everything about his parental relationships. He’s a Bailey by name, not
by birth except that his mother was still married to Bailey.”
“Exactly,” said Gary.
Before he and Nigel could discuss that, reception phoned and
said there was a Mr Bailey waiting.
***
“Did you tell my assistant everything the other day?” Gary
asked, plunging into the interview.
“No, and I should have,” said Ian Bailey. “I was shocked by
the news that Brad was dead. I’d talked to him on the phone the previous
evening.”
“Really,” said Gary. “So the rumours that he had been seen
are true. “Why didn’t you tell us about the phone-call?”
“We have a younger brother, Phil,” said Bailey. “I got on
with him but Brad didn’t. He went abroad and I lost touch with him. thought
Brad might have killed him and I did not want to be the one to inform on him.
He’s a mean-spirited junkie, but he is my brother.”
“So those bones that were dug up at Monkton Priory could be Phil’s,
couldn’t they?”
“It hurts me to say this, but I think they must be.”
“So your mother had three sons, all with different fathers.”
“Yes. She told us that she had loved them all at the time.”
“But things did not turn out, I suppose,” said Nigel.
“She fled from Brad’s father. My father died in a traffic
accident before I was born. I’ve no idea who Phil’s father was.”
“We have no DNA for a live Brad,” said Nigel. “We thought he
was the dead guy. The DNA is from your brother Phil and the DNA samples have been
confirmed as related, so the victim of the crime that ended at the priory
really is your brother.”
Ian Bailey was upset. He sat for some time with his hands
over his face. Gary waited for him to recover.
“Where can we find Brad Bailey?” Gary he eventually asked.
He did not think that Ian would have sheltered his brother.
“Try the farm in Lower Grumpsfield,” aid Ian. “I can’t think
of anywhere else, and no, I told him last night that I had a girlfriend and no
room for anyone else.”
***
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