Yet when she spoke her voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet.
‘Are you saying that when Fred disappeared you thought he had been taken by these people, these evil, dangerous people, that you thought they would use him to threaten you?’ she asked. ‘And yet you told nobody about any of this. Not the police or your family. Henry, you are despicable.’
Henry flinched. ‘Look, I asked them if they had taken Fred,’ he said. ‘They replied that they weren’t child molesters. That’s all. They weren’t child molesters.’
‘Mr Tanner,’ said Vogel. ‘How did you find out that Charlie had been dealing with criminals?’
‘From his email. After he disappeared from his boat it seemed a good idea to check out his email account. At first we didn’t have any idea what might have happened to him. We thought his email might give us some sort of clue. And it did. As soon as we read all this stuff it seemed obvious that Charlie had reason to kill himself. I knew he lived on a knife’s edge. I knew he relied far too much on prescription drugs. Of course I knew. But as long as he held himself together I wasn’t going to do anything about it. When I came to believe that he’d ended his own life, naturally I wished I had.’
‘You didn’t consider that he could have staged his own disappearance?’
‘Actually no, it didn’t occur to me. That’s the stuff of fiction, isn’t it?’
Vogel persevered. ‘Who exactly is this “we” you keep referring to?’
‘Me and Stephen Hardcastle,’ said Henry.
‘So Stephen also knew about the illicit arms dealing?’
‘Yes. He was as shocked as I was. Charlie was Stephen’s closest friend, but he hadn’t confided any of it to him.’
‘I see. And how did you break into Charlie’s email?’
‘He’d left a laptop locked in his safe in the office. He had a brand-new one, which he must’ve taken with him, but when we looked in the safe we found the old one.’
‘His personal safe?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you and Stephen Hardcastle had access to it.’
‘Janet kept a spare key.’
Vogel nodded. He glanced at Nobby Clarke. She seemed content to let him lead the questioning.
‘Wasn’t it password protected?’ he asked. ‘His email would have been, surely?’
‘Yes. But we have a chap who does IT for us, sets up our accounts. I contacted him. Charlie had never bothered to change the passwords this chap used to set the whole thing up for him in the beginning.’
‘Didn’t you think that was sloppy for a man involved in illicit arms deals? I mean, wouldn’t you have expected him to destroy an old laptop? He doesn’t even ensure that he has a password nobody else knew about, and he leaves a laptop containing incriminating information in a safe to which other people have access. Didn’t you think that was unbelievably sloppy?’
Henry shrugged. ‘It wasn’t out of character, given the way Charlie had been behaving. Besides, if he was planning to kill himself, what would it matter? Even if he were planning to stage his own disappearance and create a new life for himself, as you now seem to think might have been the case, it wouldn’t have had any impact on his plans. Besides, Charlie was hopeless at computer stuff. One way or another, it didn’t strike us as odd that he had left his old laptop in a safe.’
‘And you used the email addresses Charlie had on his machine to contact these people and cancel all arms deals, is that correct?’
Henry agreed that it was.
Vogel was still looking at the screen on Henry’s iPhone. He did some quick mental arithmetic, using the fingers of both hands. Suddenly he got it.
‘Mr Tanner, didn’t you think that the Marlon email address was a little... prosaic?’
Henry looked blank.
‘Marlon, as in Marlon Brando, The Godfather,’ said Vogel. ‘Numbers 8, 9 and 20. They represent the letters of the alphabet: H, I and T. HIT. As in hitman, perhaps?’
Henry still looked blank.
‘Maybe, but what difference does it make?’
‘It could be an implied threat,’ said Vogel. ‘You were maybe supposed to work out that the email address was telling you it was from a hitman of some sort.’
‘I didn’t even come close,’ said Tanner. ‘I can’t see how you worked it out so quickly, either.’
‘He has that sort of mind,’ remarked Clarke.
She didn’t make it sound as if she was paying Vogel a compliment.
Vogel paid her no attention.
‘Mr Tanner, did you at any stage have dealings with “Marlon” or any of these people through any other means than email?’ Vogel asked.
Henry said that he hadn’t.
‘So you’ve never met any of these people, you’ve never spoken to them on the telephone?’
‘No,’ said Henry. ‘I tried to when Fred went missing. I gave them my phone number. I told them to phone me any time day or night. I told them I was prepared to do anything, give them anything, even the arms they wanted so much, anything to get my grandson back. I wasn’t entirely convinced, you see, by their denials. I still reckoned it was possible they were holding him to ransom. I kept thinking they would call sooner or later. I kept waiting for them to call. Nobody called.’
Vogel had more questions but was interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed constable, PC Mick Perkins, who had been instructed to keep a watching brief on Joyce Mildmay.
‘They told me you were here, ma’am,’ he said, addressing DCI Clarke. ‘And they wouldn’t let me use my phone in intensive care. There’s something I thought you should know straight away.’
He leaned closer to Nobby Clarke, speaking into her ear in little more than a whisper. Vogel could not hear what the PC was saying. He looked at Clarke questioningly.
Henry Tanner took the opportunity to reach out again to his sobbing wife. A glutton for punishment, thought Vogel. He had rarely seen anyone as angry as Felicity Tanner. Again she leaned away, rejecting him. And tough, strong Henry looked about to break down himself.
Clarke touched Vogel on the arm.
‘C’mon,’ she said.
Turning back to the bed, she addressed Henry and Felicity: ‘Mr and Mrs Tanner, we’re going to leave you now. Although I am afraid we will need to speak to you again later. Meanwhile, I would like to say again how sorry we are for your loss.’
The Tanners, both overwhelmed now by their own misery, seemed not to hear her.
‘If there is anything we can do to help, please tell PC Saslow,’ Clarke urged them as she opened the door. ‘That’s what she’s here for.’
Clarke then led Vogel from the room, with Perkins following.
‘PC Perkins says Joyce Mildmay’s wide awake now and the medics have given us the go-ahead to question her,’ said the DCI, as soon as she had closed the door to Henry’s room. ‘But it’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure.’
Twenty-eight
Joyce had been in a merciful daze ever since her admission to Southmead Hospital. Following her brief moment of dreadful lucidity on the Floating Harbour quayside after being pulled from the water, she had become hysterical. In the ambulance, en route to the hospital, she’d had to be restrained after banging her head repeatedly against the metal frame of her stretcher, and grabbing pieces of the paramedics’ medical equipment, including an inadequately secured oxygen tank, which she had proceeded to pound against the sides of the ambulance. She had also attacked the paramedics, scratching and kicking out at them.
She continued to repeatedly bang her own head against any adjacent hard surface in A & E, and to attack staff who tried to remonstrate with her. Ultimately one of the duty doctors had prescribed a heavy sedative, partly for her own protection, and partly for the protection of hospital staff and property.