At Libreville prison, Warden Haveling’s secretary said that it was likely either Warden Haveling or his assistant Mr Folley had a number for Mr Ayliss. But Folley had been on night duty and wouldn’t be in until midday, and Warden Haveling was tied up in a meeting until 10.30 a.m. ‘But I’ll get Warden Haveling to call you back the minute he comes out his meeting.’
Rayleigh left his number and made his second call to Payne, Beaton and Sawyer, the law firm that previously represented Durrant, and was put through to a John Langfranc.
‘No, unfortunately I don’t have Mr Ayliss’s number,’ Langfranc commented. ‘But I know someone who very likely has: Mike Coultaine. He used to work for us and apparently has kept in contact with Darrell Ayliss since. In fact, I understand that it was Mike Coultaine who recommended Ayliss to the Durrant case now.’ The small bit of scuttlebutt he’d found out when he’d called Rodriguez to find out how the BOP hearing had gone.
Rayleigh took Coultaine’s number, and dialled it the second he hung up on Langfranc.
‘Yeah. I know how to get in touch with Darrell Ayliss,’ Coultaine said. ‘In fact I met up with him just a few days ago. What’s this all about? Something to do with the Durrant case?’
‘No, no. Some query to do with his ex-wife.’ Rayleigh was thinking more about the first part of what Coultaine’s had said. ‘You mentioned you met up with him. What did he look like?’
‘Like… like Darrell Ayliss.’ It was obvious from Coultaine’s tone that he found the question odd. ‘Why?’
Rayleigh sensed that he was about to make a serious horse’s ass out of himself unless he explained a bit more. He told Coultaine about Melanie Ayliss’s brief encounter with someone she’d expected to be her ex-husband in a car the day before. ‘And although it was only for a couple of seconds and she hasn’t seen her husband for seven years, she’s got it in her head that the man she saw wasn’t him. So, I have to ask you, sir — do you know Darrell Ayliss well? Well enough, when you met him a few days back, to know whether it was him or not?’
Coultaine exhaled heavily. ‘I shared an office with Darrell Ayliss for three full years, with him no more than a few yards from me. And, unlike his ex, I’ve had the benefit of seeing him far more recently. I’ve visited him in Mexico twice now, the last time just fourteen months back. It was him. There’s no question about it.’
‘Right. Thanks for that, sir.’ Rayleigh chuckled awkwardly. ‘You know, we get these things in… we gotta chase them up.’
‘I understand.’ Fresh breath from Coultaine. ‘But I think you’ll find this is more to do with Melanie Ayliss’s old maintenance battle with her ex-husband. She’s trying craftily to make use of police resources to track him down.’
‘Yeah, yeah…. could be.’ Sounded about right. But he loved it when they were cleared up quickly. ‘Thanks again.’ The second he rang off, he threw the folder onto the ‘Case closed’ pile.
And at Coultaine’s end, as soon as he hung up, he called Jac.
39
The phone was on its fourth ring before Bob Stratton finally picked up and Jac worried for a moment that he wasn’t there. He put on the drawl and introduced himself as Darrell Ayliss, said that he’d seen Stratton’s name in the file he’d taken over from Jac McElroy.
‘He’s noted here that you’re good at finding people — with an exclamation mark. And that’s exactly what I’m after.’
I was there at the time… I’d have incriminated myself…
The thought had struck Jac in the early hours of the morning, woke him sharply at 5.40 a.m. — not that he was sleeping that well in any case, different hotel beds every night and the turmoil of thoughts in his head — another crime going down at the same time! That’s why he hadn’t been able to come forward; fear of self-incrimination.
Maybe he was clutching at straws — maybe it was just an old friend or hoaxer — but with still no reply to his last e-mail and only forty-eight hours now left, that was all there was left to do: squeeze every last drop out of the few remaining possibilities.
He explained his thinking to Stratton. ‘Probably not in the Roche house itself — too much of a coincidence — or even immediate neighbours. But somewhere within, say, fifty or a hundred yards… close enough that this person would have got a reasonable look at the murderer leaving the Roche house that night. Enough to say that it wasn’t Larry Durrant.’
‘And you say you’ve got some photos and a description of this mystery e-mailer?’
‘Yeah. From a girl in the internet cafe, I…. I see from McElroy’s file.’ Having to be careful every second what he said. ‘Though the photos don’t give that much, they’re only partial cam-shots with at most thirty per cent facial profile, and the description — black, stocky, five-ten, maybe six foot, late thirties, early forties — could fit ten or twenty per cent of the city’s black population.’
‘Okay.’ Stratton was thoughtful for a second. ‘But if I get fresh photos of a few live-ones in front of this girl, something might strike a chord.’
‘Yeah, possibility,’ Jac agreed. ‘Except don’t forget we’re looking for someone that was active twelve years ago. If they’re not active now, mug-shots are going to be thin on the ground.’
‘True.’ Stratton took a fresh breath. ‘But that’s going to be stage two. The first thing’ll be to find out if another crime did go down nearby twelve years ago. Then we’ll have a start point to know if it’s even worth looking further. And also what type of crime and connected mug-shots we’re looking for.’
Nel-M tried to grab some sleep on his twenty-minute-delayed 6.45 a.m. flight from Vancouver, but the images still surging through his head were making it difficult.
If only everything his end of things had gone as smoothly as Garrard’s. If only.
He’d spoken to Tommy Garrard two hours ago and it apparently had gone like clockwork: car in the drive, alarm set off twice, husband comes out, no other family there at the time, into the house to get the envelope, two quick shots, and away again.
‘Nobody saw me. But just in case, like you suggested, I wore a mask at the time.’
But with Nel-M’s target, there’d been no car in the driveway, and he’d had to bang a side-passage dustbin to hopefully get the man of the house out to investigate. Three sharp bangs at two-minute intervals, Nel-M starting to worry that he’d bring the neighbours out as well, before a heavy-set guy finally emerged — wielding a baseball bat and moving surprisingly fast for his size, perhaps not realizing Nel-M had a gun until it was too late. Nel-M floored him with a leg shot, then had to drag the stumbling, bleeding body back through the house with his wife and son, no more than eleven, looking on — swinging his gun towards the wife for a second as she made a move towards the phone — to get the envelope from a bedroom drawer. He’d made sure to ask about the envelope while they were still outside, out of earshot of his family, then clamped a hand across his mouth as they moved inside, knowing that if the man did mention it, he’d have to shoot them too.
But as he levelled his gun to finish the job halfway back down the hallway, his wife screamed and lunged for him then — only a split-second to turn his gun from the head-shot to put one in her leg to take her down. Then he stood over them both for a second, breath falling rapid and short, as he pondered whether to finish her too.
He’d also used a mask from a joke shop — so what else would her and her son have seen other than a bit of dark skin and some salt-and-pepper curls either side of an Ozzy Osborne mask? Then at that moment she groaned heavily with pain from her leg wound, made him worry that she’d disturb neighbours; but as he raised his gun, he caught the look in her son’s eyes, questioning, pleading. What was he going to do — shoot the kid as well? As Joe Pesci once said, ‘You could be out there half the fucking night.’