‘Time for sex,’ I replied.
‘Oh, goody.’
It was still dark when I went into the kitchen to make us some coffee. The digital clock on the cooker told me it was ten minutes to six, ten to eleven back in the UK.
When I went back into the bedroom, Henri was sitting up with the light on, reading.
‘What’s so interesting you have to read it in the middle of the night?’
‘Papers for the board meeting. I’ve had them for over a week now, but I haven’t even looked at them yet. Uncle Richard would be furious if he knew.’
‘What time’s the meeting?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
‘Why is it taking place here?’ I asked.
‘Because this is where the company has its registered office. Martin moved everything here three years ago, when he became managing director.’
No wonder I hadn’t been able to find any recent accounts for Reynard Shipping Limited at Companies House.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Partly because this is where he lives.’
‘I thought you said he spends his time in Singapore.’
‘He does, but this is his official home. Even though Cayman is not an independent country — it’s an overseas territory of the UK — Martin and Theresa have what they call status here. It’s like Cayman citizenship.’
She turned over another sheet of paper.
‘Of course, the company move was also done for tax reasons. Reynard Shipping was a British company and was therefore paying UK corporation tax on all its worldwide profits. The whole lot. Our competitors, meanwhile, were mostly based in Singapore or Hong Kong, which have far lower tax rates than the UK. Hence we had become uncompetitive. We even began losing money. So Martin moved the company registration over here to take advantage of Cayman’s tax laws.’
‘Very wise,’ I said.
‘We still pay UK tax on our UK profit, of course, through our UK subsidiary. That’s fair enough. But not on everything else as well.’
It all sounded eminently sensible.
I left her to read the board papers and went into the kitchen to call Detective Chief Inspector Owens, DS Jagger’s senior officer, as I had promised.
‘Ah, Mr Hinkley,’ he said when I was finally put through to him. ‘Thank you for calling.’
‘Have you charged Leslie Morris with murder?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘How about his son?’
‘So far we have been unable to locate Mr Andrew Morris.’
‘You mean he’s done a runner?’ I said.
‘It would appear so,’ agreed the chief inspector.
‘Have you charged Mr Morris Senior with anything?’
‘Not as yet. He has been released on police bail pending further inquiries. He has to report back to us on the fifteenth of January.’
‘But surely you must have enough on him to charge him with blackmail.’
‘Mr McKenzie is no longer being very cooperative,’ the chief inspector replied. ‘He maintains that he might be mistaken about the times of the calls made to him demanding that he lose the horse race, times that we know from the records match calls made to his phone from Morris’s number. He now says he’s not sure it was Morris who was blackmailing him.’
Unbelievable.
I would have to have words with young Bill.
‘Mr Hinkley, what I really wanted to talk to you about is your visit to Mr Swinton’s house on the morning of his death.’
‘Yes?’ I said. ‘What about it?’
‘At the time you gave your first statement to DS Jagger, you were under the impression that Mr Swinton himself had locked you in the sauna. Is that correct?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘We now believe that it might have been, in fact, the action of a third party.’
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I know.’
‘At the time, why did you think it was Mr Swinton?’
‘I thought he was the only other person there, so it had to be him.’
‘But what was it about Mr Swinton’s character that gave you reason to believe that he was capable of such a thing?’
‘Dave Swinton was the most competitive person I have ever met,’ I said. ‘And I’ve met quite a few in racing. He would do almost anything to win a race, even if it was not entirely within the rules. He considered that life itself was a series of games, and that winning was all that mattered. That’s why his marriage broke down. He was never prepared to lose an argument and he would never admit he was wrong, even if he knew he was. Some people thought he was arrogant, and he was, but I’ll tell you, without that arrogance, he would never have been half the jockey he was.’
‘Does that mean you didn’t get on?’ asked the DCI.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Dave and I were friends, but I still thought him capable of locking me in the sauna if he thought it would help him to win — whatever game he imagined we were playing at the time. Although, I have to admit, I was surprised and disappointed when I assumed he’d left me there to die. Why is all this relevant?’
‘I like to get inside the character of murder victims,’ the policeman said. ‘To try and think like them. Somehow it helps me to understand the reasons someone might want them dead.’
It sounded like mumbo jumbo to me.
‘The reason someone wanted Dave Swinton dead was because he’d found out who was blackmailing him,’ I said. ‘Plain and simple. And that person was Leslie Morris.’
‘But what if Mr Swinton was blackmailing Morris in return?’
‘Is that what Morris told you?’ I laughed.
I could easily believe that Dave had tried to blackmail the blackmailer. He would have considered it another game to be won. But the stakes had clearly been much higher than he’d imagined.
‘It would seem that Mr Swinton somehow discovered that it was Morris who was blackmailing him. Swinton obviously couldn’t report it to us as it would expose his own wrongdoing, so he attempted to silence Morris by telling him that, if Morris spilled the beans about the unpaid tax, he would in turn tell us about the blackmail and they would go down together.’
It sounded to me just the sort of thing Dave would have done.
‘I think that Mr Swinton may have also threatened Morris with violence. Certainly Morris says he was fearful of that. Swinton must have worked out that Morris, a diminutive sixty-six-year-old retired accountant with a heart condition, couldn’t be a serious threat to him physically.’
‘But he hadn’t factored in the son?’
‘Just so,’ he said. ‘From what I’ve gathered, Mr Andrew Morris has always been very protective of his father, and has been in a few scrapes over it.’
‘Well, I hope you find Andrew Morris soon,’ I said. ‘And preferably before I get back to England.’
‘We are afraid that he may have already left the country. We are currently checking airline passenger lists.’
Surely he couldn’t have followed me to the Cayman Islands?
No, I told myself. Don’t be silly.
29
Henri went to her Reynard Shipping board meeting at nine thirty, collected by her cousin Martin, while I called Bill McKenzie.
‘What’s all this nonsense about you telling the police you’re not sure if it was Morris who was blackmailing you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, almost in a whisper.
‘You were pretty sure when I spoke to you before.’
‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But now I’m not.’
‘What’s changed?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. I could hear the nervous timbre in his voice even from four and a half thousand miles away.
‘Has Morris contacted you?’
‘No,’ he said, but I knew he was lying from the slight hesitation before he answered.