The train was slowing down, approaching Preston Park, where she wanted to get off.
‘Unfortunately, Abby, it’s her that I have, not you.’
‘I’ll swap places.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Please, Ricky, let’s just meet.’
‘We will meet, tomorrow.’
‘No! Now! Please, today. Mum might not survive until tomorrow.’ She was getting hysterical.
‘That would be too bad, wouldn’t it? For her to have died knowing her daughter is a thief.’
‘God almighty, you are a callous bastard.’
Ignoring the remark, Ricky said, ‘You’re going to need a car. I’ve posted the key of the Ford I rented to your flat. It will be there in the morning.’
‘It’s been clamped,’ she said.
‘Then you’ll just have to rent something yourself.’
‘Where are we going to meet?’
‘I’ll phone you in the morning. Go hire a car tonight. And have the stamps with you, won’t you?’
‘Please can we meet now, this afternoon?’
He ended the call. The train jolted to a halt.
Abby climbed out of her seat and made her way unsteadily along to the exit, holding tightly on to her handbag and the plastic bag with one hand and the handrail with the other as she climbed down on to the platform. It was 4.15.
Got to hold it together, she thought. Got to. Somehow. Somehow.
Oh, Jesus, how?
She thought she was going to throw up as she left the station and walked over to the taxi rank. To her dismay, there were no cabs waiting. She looked at her watch, anxiously, then called the number of one of the local companies. Then she called another number, one she had called earlier. The same male voice answered. ‘South-East Philatelic.’
It was the one stamp dealer in the city whose name Hugo Hegarty had omitted to give her.
‘It’s Sarah Smith,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way over, just waiting for a taxi. What time do you close?’
‘Not till 5.30,’ the man said.
An anxious fifteen minutes later the taxi appeared.
108
The Witness Interview Suite at Sussex House comprised two rooms. One was the size of the sitting room of a very small house. The other, which could just fit two people side by side, was used solely for observation.
The larger room, in which Glenn Branson sat with Bella Moy and a very distressed-looking ‘Katherine Jennings’, contained three bucket-shaped armchairs, upholstered in red, and a bland coffee table. Branson and Abby each had a mug of coffee in front of them and Bella was sipping a glass of water.
Unlike most of the gloomy interview rooms down at the well-worn Brighton Central Police Station in John Street, this one felt bright and actually had a view.
‘Are you happy for this to be recorded?’ Branson asked, nodding up at the two wall-mounted cameras pointing down at them. ‘It’s standard procedure.’ What he did not add was that sometimes a copy of the tape would be given to a psychologist for profiling. You could learn a lot from just the body language of some witnesses.
‘Fine,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.
He studied her carefully for some moments. Despite her face being drained and all scrunched up in misery, she was an extremely good-looking young woman. Late twenties, he guessed. Black hair that was cut a little severely and almost certainly dyed, because her eyebrows were much lighter. Her face was classically beautiful, with high cheekbones, a large forehead and an exquisite nose, small, finely chiselled and very slightly turned up. It was the kind of nose that less fortunate women paid thousands of pounds to plastic surgeons to try to achieve. He knew that because Ari had shown him an article on nose jobs once, and he had looked for signs of surgery on women’s noses ever since.
But the young woman’s most striking feature was her eyes. They were emerald green, mesmerizing, feline eyes. Even with her wretched expression, they still sparkled.
And she knew how to dress. In designer jeans, ankle-length boots – admittedly scuffed and dusty – a belted, black, knitted polo neck beneath a long, expensive-looking fleece-lined jacket, she was pure class. A few inches taller and she could have stepped off a catwalk.
Branson was about to start the interview when the young woman raised a hand. ‘It’s actually not my real name that I gave you. I think I ought to clarify. It’s Abby Dawson.’
‘Why were you using a different name?’ Bella asked gently.
‘Look, my mother’s dying. She’s in terrible danger. Could we just – just-’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I mean, do we need to go through all this? Can’t we just – just do that later?’
‘I’m afraid we do need to get all the facts, Abby,’ Bella said. ‘Why the name?’
‘Because…’ She shrugged. ‘I came here, back to England, to try to escape from my boyfriend. I thought it would make it harder for him to find me with a different name.’ She shrugged again and gave a sad smile. ‘I was wrong.’
‘OK, Abby,’ Glenn said, ‘would you like to tell us exactly what has happened? Everything we need to know about yourself, your mother and the man you say has kidnapped her.’
Abby pulled a tissue out of her brown suede handbag and dabbed her eyes. Glenn wondered what was in the plastic groceries bag that lay on the floor beside it.
‘I was left a collection of stamps. I didn’t know anything about them – but by coincidence I was going out with – dating – this guy Ricky Skeggs in Melbourne, who was in the rare stamp and coin business in quite a big way.’
‘Is he connected to Chad Skeggs?’ Branson asked.
‘It’s the same person.’
‘Chad and Ricky are both derivatives of Richard,’ Bella said to Glenn.
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I asked Ricky to take a look at them and tell me if they were worth anything,’ Abby continued. ‘He took them away, then gave them back to me a couple of days later. He said there were a few individual stamps that were worth something, but most of them were replicas of rare stamps, collectable, but not valuable. He said he could probably get a couple of thousand Australian dollars for the lot.’
‘OK,’ Glenn said. Her eyes made him uneasy, they were all over the place. He felt he was getting a rehearsed performance, not something from the heart. ‘Did you believe him?’
‘I didn’t have any reason not to,’ Abby replied. ‘Except I’ve never been a very trusting person.’ She shrugged again. ‘It’s not in my nature. So I’d made photocopies of all the stamps before I gave them to him. When I checked with the ones he gave me back, they all looked the same, but there were subtle differences. I confronted him and he told me I was being delusional.’
‘That was smart that you made the copies,’ Bella commented.
Abby looked at her watch anxiously, then sipped some coffee. ‘Anyhow, I was glancing through one of the specialist magazines in Ricky’s flat a day or so later, and read an article about a rare stamp auction in London. It was about a Plate 77 Penny Red that went for a record price of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds. And I recognized it as looking similar to the plate of Penny Reds I had. I checked the newspaper photo against my own stamps and to my relief I could see they were very similar but not absolutely identical, so it wasn’t mine he had sold. But I then panicked that Ricky was going to try to sell them.’
‘Why did you think that?’ Bella probed.
‘There was something about the way he acted over the stamps that made me very uncomfortable. I just knew he was lying to me.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyhow, a couple of days later he was blasted out of his skull on cocaine – he snorted it all the time – and then early in the morning he crashed out into a deep sleep. I went on to his computer – he’d left it logged on – and I found several emails to dealers around the world, offering stamps that were clearly mine for sale. He was very clever. He’d broken them down into individual stamps and plates so they couldn’t be identified as one collection.’