‘Did you confront him?’ Glenn asked.
She shook her head. ‘No, he’d boasted to me the first time we met how easy stamps were to conceal, that they were a great way of laundering money and transporting it around the world. That even if you got stopped, most customs officers wouldn’t have a clue there was any value to them. He said the best place to hide stamps was inside a book – a hardback novel, anything like that, which would protect them. So I just searched his bookshelves. And I found them.’
Bella smiled.
Branson watched Abby’s face, her eyes, absorbing it, but not comfortable. This wasn’t the whole story. There was something she was omitting, but he had no idea what. Clearly, she was smart.
‘What happened then?’ he asked.
‘I did a runner. I took the stamps, crept home, packed a bag and flew to Sydney on the first flight I could get in the morning. I was scared because I thought he would come after me – he’s extremely sadistic. I made my way to England via Los Angeles and then New York.’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police in Melbourne and report what he had done?’ Glenn asked.
‘Because he scared me,’ she said. ‘And he’s very clever. He’s very good at lying. I was worried he would spin the police a story and get them back. Or that he would come after me and hurt me. He’d already hurt me once.’
Glenn and Bella shot each other a knowing glance, remembering Chad Skeggs’s history with the police in Brighton.
‘And I needed the value from them badly,’ Abby said. ‘My mother is extremely sick – she’s got multiple sclerosis. I need the money to pay for her to be in a home.’
Glenn picked up on the way she said that last sentence. Nothing he could put his finger on, but she said it in a strange way, as if that would be justification for any action. And it just struck him as strange that she said the word need. If someone took something that belonged to you, it wasn’t a question of whether you needed it. You had a right to it.
‘Are you saying it will cost millions to keep your mother in a rest home?’ Bella said.
‘She’s only sixty-eight, although she looks a lot older,’ Abby replied. ‘It could be for twenty years, maybe more. I don’t know what it will cost.’ She sipped some coffee. ‘Why does that have any relevance? I mean – if we don’t do something quickly, she won’t survive. She won’t.’ She buried her face in her hands again and sobbed.
The two detectives shot each other a glance. Then Glenn Branson asked, ‘Did you ever meet someone called David Nelson?’
‘David Nelson?’ She frowned, dabbing her eyes, then shook her head. ‘The name rings a bell, I think.’ She hesitated, then went on, ‘David Nelson? I think Ricky may have mentioned the name.’
Branson nodded. She was lying.
‘And the stamps – are they here in England now?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Safe, under lock and key.’
He nodded again. Now she was telling the truth.
109
All Nick Nicholl wanted at this moment was a good night’s sleep. His problem was that it was 8.30 in the morning and he was in the back of a blue unmarked Holden police car, in brilliant sunshine, heading away from the airport complex towards downtown Melbourne. They were on a wide, multi-lane highway which, to his eyes, could as easily have been in the USA as in Australia, except that the driver, Detective Sergeant Troy Burg, was sitting on the right.
Some of the road signs looked similar to those in the UK, but some were a different colour, blue and orange a lot of them, he noticed, and the speed limits were in kilometres. He stared at a slim black box on top of the dash, at a touch-screen computer mounted on the front binnacle and at the big shiny buttons all around it. It was like an adult version of a child’s computer. Although Liam wasn’t old enough yet, Nick was already looking at educational toys for him.
He was missing him. Missing Julie. The prospect of spending the weekend in Australia without them, with just bloody Norman Potting for company, filled him with dread.
The avuncular Detective Senior Sergeant George Fletcher, in the front passenger seat, seemed well briefed and got straight down to business after a few pleasantries. His taciturn colleague, a decade younger, drove in silence. Both the Australian detectives wore freshly pressed white shirts, patterned blue ties and dark suit trousers.
Potting, dressed in what looked like a demob suit, had briefly lit up his pipe the moment they stepped out of the airport terminal and he now emitted a rank odour of unaired fabric, tobacco and stale alcohol fumes into the car. But he seemed remarkably breezy after the lengthy journey, and the young Detective Constable, also in a suit and tie, envied the older man’s constitution for that.
‘OK,’ Fletcher said, ‘we haven’t had a lot of time to prepare but we’ve made a start on all the lines of enquiry. First thing we can report on is the trawl of immigration records for people with the name David Nelson who have entered Australia since 11 September 2001. We have one that is particularly interesting in terms of your time profile. On 6 November 2001, a David Nelson arrived in Sydney from a flight from Cape Town, South Africa. His date of birth puts him at the right age.’
‘Did he give an address?’ Norman Potting asked.
‘He came in on an Australian passport with a five-year residence visa, so we didn’t require that information. We’re now checking our Law Enforcement Assistance Programme. That will tell us if he has a driving licence and any vehicles registered in his name. It will also tell us any known alias he may have used and his last known address.’
‘He could be anywhere, couldn’t he?’
‘Yes, Norman,’ Nick Nicholl reminded him, ‘but we know that he had one old friend, Chad Skeggs, in Melbourne, so there’s a good chance he came here – and might still be here. If you are going to do a disappearing act and fetch up in a new country, you need someone you can depend on, someone you can take into your confidence.’
Potting considered this. ‘It’s a valid point,’ he conceded a tad grudgingly, as if he didn’t want to be outsmarted in front of these seasoned detectives by his junior.
Troy Burg said. ‘And we’re checking the Revenue to see which David Nelsons have a TFN.’
‘TFN?’ Potting queried.
‘Tax File Number. You’d need that for employment.’
‘Legitimate employment, you mean?’
Burg gave a wry smile.
‘We have something else that could be a connection,’ George Fletcher said. ‘Mrs Lorraine Wilson committed suicide on the night of Tuesday 19 November 2002, correct?’
‘Allegedly,’ Potting said.
Four days later, on 23 November, a Mrs Margaret Nelson arrived in Sydney. Could be nothing,’ he said. ‘But the age on her passport is about right.’
‘It’s not that common a name,’ Nicholl said.
‘It’s not,’ Detective Senior Sergeant Fletcher said. ‘It’s not rare, but it’s not common, I’d say.’
‘I think we should run through the agenda we put together, see if it works for you guys,’ Troy Burg said.
‘So long as it includes beer and tottie, it works for me,’ Potting said, and chuckled. ‘Tinnies, isn’t that what you call ’em?’
‘You mean girls or beer?’ Fletcher grinned at him, eyes twinkling good-humouredly.
In the distance, Nick Nicholl could see a cluster of jagged high-rise buildings.
‘You guys are in for a treat tomorrow. George’s going to cook for you. He’s a genius. He should have been a chef, not a cop,’ Burg said, becoming animated for the first time.