‘Kid gloves, Jack; his dad’s important.’
‘I’ve spoken to his dad. He’s had no luck with the mobile either. He’s getting worried about him; he was talking about flying down there. I advised him not to, not yet at any rate, till we’ve exhausted all our channels. However, I did persuade him to give me the numbers for his son’s debit and credit cards, and the account details. The issuers told me that he used the credit card to buy eighteen quid’s worth of books in WHSmith at Stansted airport last Monday, and in a supermarket in Collioure on Thursday, to buy goods worth forty-seven euros. On Saturday, he withdrew three hundred euros from an ATM, again in Collioure.’
‘Have you told Mr Colledge about this?’
‘Not yet. The bank only just called me back.’
‘Okay. You can ring him when you have a minute.’
‘Will do.’ The DS frowned. ‘You know, it really would help if we had an address.’
‘We do,’ said Haddock, who had returned to his desk beside the wall, and was leaning over a lap-top computer. ‘After a fashion. Sugar’s mum told me that she booked the place on the Internet, through a letting agency called “franceabroad.com”. I’m just looking it up now.’ He waited. ‘Yes, here it is; and there’s a phone number.’
‘Get on it,’ Stallings ordered. ‘While you’re doing that I’m going to call Mr McIlhenney. I’m not waiting for young Dave to pick up your text, Jack. For all we know his battery’s dead and he’s left his charger at home. It’s time we asked the local gendarmes for help.’
She picked up her phone and dialled the superintendent’s number. It was engaged.
Eighteen
‘The boy’s father’s an MP,’ McGuire exclaimed. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’
‘Not so far, from what Becky told me,’ McIlhenney replied. ‘She says that the man’s concerned, fair enough, but that he gave her all the help he could. Longer term, that’ll depend on how things go with the boy. If he has someone who can vouch for where he was at the time of the murder, there’s no problem. If not, it might become a bit trickier; if we have to treat the kid as a suspect. I trust Becky to handle the dad, though. She’s lived and worked in his environment for years.’
‘Sure, but this is a homicide investigation.’
‘She’s had plenty experience of those too. Remember, she was a DS in the East End of London before she moved to Charing Cross. What’s making you so twitchy anyway?’
‘This situation; the idea of some nutter copying Ballester.’
‘We don’t know that it is. We’ve only just IDed the victim; we hardly know anything about her. She could have had people in her private life queuing up to bump her off. We still have to find that out.’
‘Maybe so, but my money’s on this being down to that nutter I’m worrying about. Come on, you’ve seen the crime-scene photos, and you’ve seen the PM report. You had the same pathologist who did the autopsies on Zrinka and Amy Noone handle this one. What did he say? That in his opinion the methods of execution were identical. Are you telling me that you don’t believe, in your heart of hearts, that we’ve got a copycat?’
McIlhenney shook his head. ‘No. I admit it, I agree with you. But I’m hoping we’re both wrong, because chances are a head-banger won’t stop at one. Ballester wasn’t really a serial killer, but this one might well be. We could be out on a limb here.’ He looked his colleague in the eye. ‘Should we seek the advice of our absent friend and mentor?’
‘I rather think we should,’ said McGuire. ‘I’ve already called him once today, about something else, but I don’t think we should put this off. Tell you what, let’s try an Internet link; I know he’s on line in his Spanish house. I’ll call him and ask him to switch on.’
‘Okay; you do that and I’ll e-mail him some of the crime-scene pics, so that he can see what we’re talking about.’
As the head of CID left his room, McIlhenney turned to his computer terminal and opened the folder he had set up for the Dean murder inquiry, then switched on his e-mail link and clicked the ‘write message’ command.
He was about to begin when the phone rang. He snatched it up. ‘McIlhenney,’ he said evenly, conquering his impatience.
‘Superintendent,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘Joanna Lock.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said coolly. ‘I have a message for you, from the Crown Agent, Joe Dowley. I went to see him after our discussion and I told him what you wanted me to do. He went ballistic. I am to tell you, on his instructions, that there is no way that anybody in the Crown Office leaked the contents of that report, and that if you ever again make the slightest implication that there might be, he will have your guts for garters. He says that the buck stops with you and if you have a problem with that he’ll go to Sir James Proud, your chief constable.’
Neil McIlhenney could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that he had lost his temper in his adult life. At that moment he knew that he would have to bring the other hand into play.
‘He said what?’ he exploded. ‘You tell Mr Dowley from me that I didn’t ask for his opinion, nor do I give a fuck about it. I’m engaged in a murder investigation and I require the assistance of his office. And tell him this too, Joanna, word for word. If he ever threatens me again I will head straight up to Chambers Street and rip his nuts off!’
‘He’s not going to like that.’
‘Too fucking true he’s not!’ He slammed the phone back into its cradle.
Nineteen
Becky Stallings picked up the phone and tried again, for the third time in ten minutes. Third time lucky.
‘Yes!’ Neil McIlhenney snapped. In his unofficial introduction to the Edinburgh force and its senior figures, her boyfriend, Detective Sergeant Ray Wilding, had described the city’s CID controller as ‘the soothing influence on Mario McGuire and Bob Skinner’. Both the head of CID and the deputy chief constable were famously volatile, he had told her, seriously hard men, never to be taken lightly. On the other hand McIlhenney, while no soft touch, was invariably calm and heavily relied on by his two senior officers, both of whom were close friends as well as colleagues. ‘McGuire and McIlhenney are blood brothers,’ Ray had said. ‘When they were younger, they used to call them the Glimmer Twins; you know, as in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Some still do.’
And so, when the detective superintendent bit her head off, it came as a complete surprise.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she replied. ‘Bad time?’
It was as if she had pressed a reset button; immediately, normal service was restored. ‘No, excuse me, Inspector; I was expecting a call from my bank manager. How are things? Have you found the MP’s son yet?’
‘We know where he was last Saturday and, thanks to young Sauce, we’ve got an address for him in France.’
‘What does your instinct tell you about this lad? Is he our killer, and is he sitting out there pretending to wait for her?’
‘He has to be a suspect, sir. He’s her boyfriend, and one of the last people to see her alive.’
‘So was his father,’ McIlhenney pointed out. ‘You told me they all had dinner together the night before Sugar was murdered. Why would the boy kill her? They were just about to go off to France for some serious art and probably some serious horizontal jogging.’
‘If you want a reason, maybe he took cold feet.’
‘I doubt that; teenage boy, older woman? Now, can we go back to my question? What does your instinct say?’
‘That he didn’t do it,’ Stallings replied instantly.
‘Then we’re agreed. He has to be interviewed, for sure, as a priority, but we won’t expect that to close the case.’
‘No. He’s not the only person on the suspect list either. Have you ever heard of a PC named Weekes, Theo Weekes?’
The line went quiet. ‘The name’s familiar,’ said McIlhenney, eventually. ‘One of ours?’
‘So I’m told by Sugar’s father. He and Sugar were engaged, but he dumped her a couple of years ago. John Dean was pleased: he didn’t like him.’