Hunted

‘Problem with the laptop?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Good; perhaps we can get on then. What’s the hypothesis?’

She glanced up. ‘Pardon?’

‘You’ve obviously done a lot of work on this, and I respect that massively. So what’s your main theory?’

‘If you must know, this is a murder – and it’s almost certainly connected to Lansing’s business affairs.’

‘You’re sure Lansing was the target, and not Dean Torbert?’

She glanced at him again, as if he was some kind of buffoon. ‘If it wasn’t Lansing, that model aeroplane attack was a hell of a coincidence.’

‘Coincidences sometimes happen.’

‘Torbert was a first-year university student. He hadn’t lived long enough to upset anyone that badly.’

‘How do we know he wasn’t the one with the grudge? Perhaps it was Torbert who tried to run Lansing off the road, and it all went horribly wrong.’

‘I’ve looked into that. They didn’t even know each other, let alone have a grudge.’

‘What’s the background on Torbert?’

She shrugged. ‘Spoilt little rich kid, boy racer … take your pick.’

‘How did he come to own a Porsche?’

‘Mummy and Daddy are both wealthy, and separated. Sounds like he bounced between them like a shuttlecock. They rivalled each other buying him expensive presents.’

‘A Porsche?’

‘Look – this is Surrey, stockbroker country.’

‘Where did Torbert actually live?’

DC Honeyford sighed, not remotely afraid to show how frustrated the persistent questions were making her. ‘With his mother. In a millionaire pad in Guildford.’

‘I’m not a native, but that’s nowhere near Reigate, is it?’

‘It’s not too far away, but I agree; it seems odd Torbert was over in that neck of the woods at such an early hour. No one knows what he was doing there. But it’s no crime to drive around the county, is it? I mean, he may have had a girl this way – or even a boy. Who knows?’

Heck mulled this over. If Dean Torbert had simply been another bored youth who got his kicks tearing up and down the country lanes in his latest souped-up toy, it reinforced the impression that his involvement in this incident was no more than a bit of tragic misfortune. In fact, it would have been odd from Torbert’s perspective if some kind of accident hadn’t occurred. As a uniformed bobby up in Manchester, where, as a rule, idle young men did not get high-powered cars for Christmas, Heck had still watched on numerous occasions as their mutilated corpses were cut from heaps of twisted wreckage after a night spent blistering the blacktop.

‘Torbert was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ DC Honeyford added, clearly hoping to bring the conversation to an end.

‘But overall, you still think this was murder?’

‘Of course it was. But whoever did it lured Lansing out into the oncoming traffic to try and make it look like an accident. Any speeding road user would have done the job. Look, DS Heckenburg …’ She seemed genuinely exasperated by his sudden appearance in her life, and had to take a second to compose herself. ‘This thing must be connected to Lansing’s professional life. He ran a chain of multi-million-pound companies. He’s worth a fortune, but his finances are a tangled web. I’ve been trying to penetrate them for the last three days.’

‘Who would stand to gain most from his death?’ Heck asked.

‘Why are you even interested? I thought you were only here to see if this was part of a series?’

Heck shrugged. ‘If you can prove to me that it isn’t, I’ll happily go home. Then I won’t have to stand here looking over your shoulder.’

‘You won’t be looking over my shoulder anyway!’ she replied, her cheeks colouring. ‘I can assure you of that!’

‘Ahhh, so that’s it. You’re worried I’m going to steal your thunder.’

‘No, of course I’m—’ She paused, regarding him for a long time. Then, with slow, careful deliberation, she closed her laptop. ‘Yes, if you want the truth. That’s exactly what it is. Listen, DS Heckenburg …’

‘Call me “Heck”. All my friends do.’

‘DS Heckenburg. I made CID in three years by showing nous and initiative. That’s what I do. That’s my thing. If I get a sniff of something, I chase it down. I work hard. I don’t give up on it. The fact is, I wasn’t at all happy when I heard the coroner’s verdict on the Lansing case. But no one would listen to me. In fact, they said I was barmy.’

‘That’s because the gaffers don’t like unsolved murders. Doesn’t look good on the crime stats.’

She waved a hand, uninterested in his opinion. ‘Will Royton only okayed me to look at this again because he’s a decent bloke.’

‘Not because he trusts your judgement?’

‘Er … maybe a bit of that, but I had to badger him for two or three days before he was persuaded. Course, the truth is he’s not even persuaded now. That’s why I think he’s happy to see you here. He hopes you’ll swan in, some big shot from the Smoke, and wrap this whole thing up in a single day. Then I can get back to my routine duties and there’ll be no more discussion. Well sorry, but that isn’t going to happen.’

Heck sipped at his pint. ‘Sounds to me like you want Harold Lansing to have been murdered?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Neither did I. I mean you want your instinct to have been proved right.’

‘And that’s somehow incorrect of me?’

‘Not at all. Look.’ Heck put his drink down. ‘I’m here for a similar reason. Another officer looked at this case and felt the same way as you. You’ve been very honest, Gail, so I’ll be honest too – I can call you “Gail”? Feels less formal than DC Honeyford.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I’m only actually in Surrey as a favour to my guv’nor, who’s doing a favour for someone else. As soon as it becomes evident there’s nothing in this case for SCU, I’ll head home. I promise you. You’ll have a clear run at it without any interference from the Yard. But for the moment it can only help if we work on this together. You’ve already gone out on a limb. I appreciate you’re an independent-minded detective, but you must have felt pretty alone on this so far.’

She watched him warily. ‘Just so long as you know I’m not your gofer.’

‘Course not.’

‘I know you work for a specialist outfit and all that, but I’m good at my job too.’

‘I totally believe that.’

‘I’m not going to be bossed around or made to feel like an office junior.’

Heck displayed empty palms. ‘Not my style at all.’

‘Someone else surrendering to your charms, Gail?’ came a gruff but amused voice.

A man had approached them, unnoticed. He was tall, with a big, angular frame, clad in a rumpled brown suit and an open-necked green shirt. He had longish, sandy hair, pale blue eyes, and gruesomely pockmarked cheeks – as if he’d ploughed his fingernails through rampant acne while still a juvenile. He’d wandered over uninvited and now stood so close that Heck could smell his rank combination of cigarette smoke and cologne.

‘What do you want, Ron?’ Gail asked in a patient tone.

‘Me?’ He feigned hurt. ‘Nothing … just a quick pleasantry.’

‘That’d be a first.’

He chortled. ‘Still wasting your time chasing ghosts at Rosewood Grange?’

Gail flicked her gaze to Heck. ‘This is DS Pavey. Street Thefts.’

Heck glanced up at him. ‘How are you?’ he said, nodding.

‘And who’s this?’ Pavey asked her, not bothering to respond to or even acknowledge Heck’s question.

‘This is DS Heckenburg. Serial Crimes, New Scotland Yard.’

Pavey gave a low whistle, and finally deigned to look round at Heck. ‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’

‘Up to you, I guess,’ Heck replied.

Pavey turned back to Gail; evidently that question had been addressed to her too. ‘You two working on something?’

‘What’s it to you, Ron?’ she wondered.

Pavey smiled to himself before sauntering away to the bar. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, DS Heckenburg.’

‘Dare I ask?’ Heck said, watching him rejoin a group of several other suited men, presumably fellow detectives gathering for an end-of-shift drink.

Gail sipped her lemonade, though she’d flushed a noticeable shade of pink. The ice maiden wasn’t perhaps as cool as she’d have him believe. ‘Do you really need to?’ she said.

‘Idiot from the past, eh?’

‘Not long enough in the past. Don’t worry about it. He’s gone.’

But several times over the next fifteen minutes, Heck caught DS Pavey stealing irritable peeks in their direction. From the expression on his ugly, notched face, it didn’t look as if he’d gone very far.

Chapter 8

‘So who arranged Lansing’s funeral?’ Heck asked.

‘His former girlfriend,’ Gail replied as she gunned her canary-yellow Fiat Punto along the twisting Surrey lanes. ‘Monica Chatreaux.’

Heck glanced up from the paperwork littered across his lap. ‘As in Monica Chatreaux the supermodel?’

‘Correct.’

Heck mused on this. He was seated in the front passenger seat. Beyond the windows, woods and farmland skimmed past in sunny shimmers of green and gold.

‘And was she really his former girlfriend … or just his friend?’

‘Girlfriend apparently.’

‘So he wasn’t gay?’

Gail shook her head. ‘I considered that possibility – bloke of his age living alone, but apparently not.’

Heck glanced again through the documentation. ‘Death occurred on 6 July, funeral held on 16 July. Not a lot of time between the two.’

‘Week and a half is about normal where I come from.’

‘When there are sus circs?’

‘Once the coroner had delivered his verdict, it was a bit difficult hanging on to the body.’

‘So was Lansing cremated or buried?’

‘Buried. Banstead Municipal Cemetery.’

‘Good.’

She fired a glance at him. ‘Good?’

‘Yeah … if we need to dig him up again, we can.’

Gail shook her head at the mere thought, and returned her attention to the road, though at this early hour on a Saturday morning it was unlikely they’d meet much other traffic. In truth, Heck wasn’t keen on the idea of exhumation either. He’d been present at several in his time, and it never failed to knock him sick. Lord alone knew what condition Lansing’s body would be in by now. It was bad enough in the photos taken on first arrival at the mortuary. He flipped through them again, one after another.

The poor guy had effectively been chargrilled. All five layers of his epidermis had vanished. In its place lay a coating of crispy fat and melted muscle tissue. Here and there, nubs of bone gleamed amid the glutinous, oil-yellow pulp. Worst of all was Lansing’s face. No distinctive features had remained. Most of the flesh was gone; the grey orbs of his eyes had sunk into their sockets like ruptured grapes; the bones themselves sagged inward, fragmented, reduced to a jigsaw puzzle.

‘Died as a result of fourth-degree burns,’ Heck noted, scanning the details of the postmortem. ‘Yet it’s interesting that his corpse displayed other significant traumas too.’

‘Yeah, but all consistent with him having experienced a high-speed impact.’

‘Was he wearing his seatbelt?’

‘Difficult to say. The interior of the car was reduced to ashes. We think the airbag deployed.’

‘And yet he still suffered extensive facial injuries?’

‘I wondered about that too,’ Gail said. ‘Especially as it wasn’t a head-on collision.’

‘What’s even odder is that this is a guy with no prior driving convictions and no previous insurance claims. He’s as conscientious as they come, and yet we’re expected to believe that he pulled out onto a main road without checking it was clear.’

She glanced at him again. ‘When you say “we’re expected to believe”, what other choice do we have? That’s evidently what he did?’

‘And no drugs or alcohol in his system either,’ Heck mused. ‘I see he lost several teeth in the accident.’

‘Most were discovered in his stomach.’

‘Most but not all.’

‘I’ve put a request through to have that one you found on the roadside fast-tracked. Don’t see how it could have ended up out there when he was still in the car.’

‘Neither do I.’ Heck looked up as they entered the outskirts of Horsham. ‘Course, it’s not necessarily Lansing’s tooth.’

‘Don’t fret, once we find the motive we’ll find the method.’ Gail spoke with an air of confidence. ‘And that won’t be difficult. Lansing was filthy rich. What better reason to knock someone off?’

‘It depends. I asked you yesterday who his main beneficiaries are. We got distracted before you could answer.’

‘His will was straightforward enough,’ she replied. ‘Written some time ago, with no suggestion that it’s been altered since. He has no dependants, no relatives. Quite a bit of his estate was to be divided up between the various charities he supported. They’re all squeaky clean, I’ve checked them. Monica Chatreaux’s in for a cut. She gets Rosewood Grange …’

Heck assessed a shot of the 38-year-old supermodel which had once adorned the cover of Vogue: doe eyes and Cupid lips set beneath a glorious mop of tawny tresses.

‘Interviewed her yet?’ he asked.

‘Not yet. Bear in mind she’s a wealthy woman in her own right. She could probably have given Lansing a run for his money.’

‘Just because you’ve already got a lot, that doesn’t mean you don’t want more.’

‘Plus she’s been out of the country for the last three months, doing fashion shoots in the States. She only came back for Lansing’s funeral, and now she’s gone over there again.’

‘She could have hired someone to do the dirty deed.’

‘I don’t know …’ Gail looked unconvinced. ‘She and Lansing hadn’t been an item for quite some time when it happened. They stopped dating about eleven months ago. Broke it off by mutual consent. No acrimony, no spat. Think she’s dated someone else since.’

‘How did she behave at the funeral?’

‘With dignity. No histrionics.’

‘But there were tears?’

‘Yep.’

‘You were there, you saw that?’

Gail nodded, but looked distracted as she negotiated the narrow streets around the pedestrianised square called the Carfax, in the centre of Horsham’s shopping district.

‘You don’t fancy her for this, do you?’ Heck said.

‘She’s a suspect; she has to be. But something in my gut tells me this is more to do with Lansing’s finances.’

Heck glanced at another photo. This one had been lifted from a company website and portrayed a heavy-set man, thinning on top but nevertheless handsome and rather decorous. Rich white curls grew down both of his cheeks; he wore a navy-blue blazer over a white silk shirt and blue-striped tie. His name was Tim Baker, and he was the same age as Lansing – forty-five, which would be about right as they’d been chums since they’d schooled together at Eton. But whereas Gail had her doubts about the involvement of Monica Chatreaux, Heck had similar doubts about the involvement of Tim Baker.

Baker was a ‘sleeping partner’ in many of Lansing’s enterprises, owning 40 per cent of the shares to Lansing’s 60, but he’d not been involved in their day-to-day operation because, as an investment banker, he had his own professional affairs to conduct. Given that Lansing’s shares would now go to those recipients stipulated in his will, it would make the running of said companies a complex, time-consuming process. Hardly something Baker would have sought. It might even mean that several of those companies might now go under, so Baker stood to lose out even more.

Heck couldn’t help but voice these doubts. ‘Unless there’s something we don’t know, Tim Baker has everything to lose by Harold Lansing’s death, and nothing to gain.’

‘I’m sure there’s quite a lot we don’t know,’ Gail replied.

They met Tim Baker in the hedged rear garden of his large Victorian townhouse in the suburb of Southwater. The lawn was expansive and bordered by deep beds of flowers. The banker, who looked older and more tired than in the photograph they’d seen online, was wearing slacks and a polo shirt, and hosted them at a small wrought-iron table set out in the middle of the grass.

Gail sat facing him, while Baker’s rotund wife, a pleasant woman called Milly, provided them with beakers and a pitcher of orange squash filled with ice cubes and slices of real fruit. Heck preferred to stand, but accepted a beaker of juice.

Baker shook his head solemnly. ‘Harold … well, he just wasn’t into anything strange.’

‘You seem very sure of that, Mr Baker,’ Gail said.

‘I ought to be. Every idea he ever had, he bounced off me first.’

‘Every idea?’

Baker gave this some thought. ‘Obviously I can’t say every single idea; but, well, Harold was a straight bat. All his career – and I was there for most of it – there was never a hint of impropriety or shady dealing.’

‘I understand he had various offshore bank accounts,’ Gail said.

‘My dear, that’s not unusual. It’s just to take advantage of different tax regimes. There’s nothing illegal about it if it’s all declared. I’m sure if you consult your financial intelligence people, you’ll find there’s never been anything in Harold’s business past to arouse suspicion.’

‘What were you doing on the morning of 6 July, Mr Baker?’ Heck asked him.

‘Ahhh … I might have thought I’d be a suspect.’

‘I’m sorry we have to ask this.’

‘No it’s all right. I completely understand.’ Baker fingered his brow. ‘I was on holiday with Milly. We were on a month-long cruise, the Caribbean and American East Coast. We had no idea Harold had even had his first accident, let alone the second one. Only got back a couple of days before he was due to be buried. I must say …’ He eyed them warily. ‘I’m rather surprised by these enquiries. I mean with Harold in his grave. Everyone was under the impression it was all just ghastly misfortune.’

‘We’re not ruling out anything at this stage,’ Gail said.

‘But you suspect foul play?’

‘We just don’t know,’ Heck replied.

Baker blew out a sigh. ‘Well you obviously have to cover every possibility. It’s unbelievable, to be honest. Harold was a genuine good egg. If you look at some of the things he did in his spare time … he was a governor of the local grammar school, he sat on several church committees, put money into numerous charities. Why on earth would anyone want to hurt him, let alone kill him?’

‘Could it be a disgruntled ex-employee?’ Heck wondered.

‘Harold was always popular with his staff. He was a good leader, a firm decision-maker. He respected them as individuals, he was concerned for their welfare, he took responsibility during a crisis.’

‘Because you see, Mr Baker,’ Heck watched him carefully, ‘it’s occurred to me that if someone was trying to get even with Mr Lansing for some past grievance – maybe an imagined grievance – they might want to get even with you as well.’

‘Oh, Sergeant …’ Baker sighed again, as if this was a minor concern. ‘No face or name springs to mind in that regard, not even from the mists of time.’

If nothing else, Heck thought, this guy is not frightened. He’s telling me what he believes to be the truth.

Baker shook his head. ‘I can’t think of a single person who Harold and I might have upset so much that he would resort to vengeance on this scale.’

‘Lansing’s too good to be true, isn’t he?’ Gail said as they drove back towards Reigate.

Heck glanced round at her. ‘How do you mean?’

‘All that “holy Joe” stuff,’ she said cynically. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just give him a sainthood.’

‘There are good people in the world you know.’

‘You really believe that?’ She chuckled. ‘After some of the cases the Serial Crimes Unit’s investigated? I’ve looked you up, in case you were wondering. The Nice Guys Club, the Desecrator killings … that business up in the Lake District? And you still have idealistic notions about human nature?’

Heck didn’t reply. Fleetingly he was lost in thought.

‘This is a different ballgame, of course,’ she added. ‘These white-collar criminals – they’re not drooling nutters running around with meat cleavers. They’re clever. They can squirrel all sorts of important stuff away where it won’t be found. I can see you have doubts about that, Heck, and you must do whatever you feel is necessary; but I intend to go through Lansing’s business transactions with a magnifying-glass. Let’s see who gets to the bottom of it first, eh?’

That final comment caught his attention. ‘You mean like we’re in a contest together?’

‘Well, not exactly a contest …’

‘I should hope not. We’re on the job, in case you’d forgotten. Not playing stupid bloody games!’

‘All right, take it easy!’

‘You know …’ Heck forcibly moderated his tone, not wanting to pull rank so quickly when he’d promised that he wouldn’t. ‘Gail, if you want to follow that line, be my guest. But good luck to you. I’ve no experience investigating white-collar crime, if that’s what you want to call it, and I’ve been a detective fifteen years. To start with, you’ll have to liaise with FIU, the Serious Fraud Office, probably the City of London Police – and on the basis of what? Unfounded conjecture. On top of that, you’re going to attract a lot of publicity you don’t want.’

‘Like I care about bad publicity.’

‘Think about this, Gail. Harold Lansing is the victim, possibly of a catastrophic accident, but more likely of a skilfully stage-managed murder. Either way, it resulted in him being burned alive. And you’re trying to uncover evidence of criminality in his past.’

‘It’s only a means to an end.’

‘You’d better hope there is an end. Because you blacken the name of a pillar of the community like Harold Lansing, someone with high-powered friends all over the county, and it’s not inconceivable that your career, which I have a feeling you are very concerned about, might suddenly hit the buffers.’

Gail drove for several minutes without speaking. ‘Okay. So what’s your theory?’

‘I don’t have one yet. But I think we need to go back to the beginning.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Back to where it all kicked off. Let’s try to understand exactly what’s happened.’

Chapter 9

The River Mole was one of the most scenic waterways in southern England, snaking eighty miles from its headwaters near Gatwick Airport in West Sussex across the rolling Surrey Weald to its confluence with the River Thames close to Hampton Court. It boasted an abundant diversity of wildlife, from water voles, herons and kingfishers on its banks to all types of game fish – eels, brown trout, lamprey and pike – in its cool green depths.

There were several rapids along the Mole, but Deadman’s Reach, which Heck and Gail finally located after leaving the Punto in a National Trust car park and walking several hundred yards along a well-trodden towpath, was located in a broad, shallow valley through which the river meandered at a sedate pace, though Heck felt this was probably deceptive. He’d researched the Mole the previous night, and had learned that its flow rate was highly responsive to rainfall. Though this past June and July had largely been warm and dry, there’d been heavy rain in April and May, which might suggest why Harold Lansing had so easily been swept away.

The Reach itself was a jutting promontory of aged brickwork, a quayside in the past, though with hunks of rusted metal where mooring ropes had once been tied and tufts of weed growing around its footings there was no sign it was used for that purpose now. Some eighty yards to the north-west, the river plunged over the lip of a weir into a flat rocky basin before curving away through lower lying water meadows.

Heck halted and glanced around, wafting at midges. Both to east and west, the gentle slopes of the valley were thinly wooded. Immediately beyond the footpath, thick stands of gorse ascended to the skyline. He weaved his way up through these, Gail following, until they reached a stile, beyond which lay level pasture land. This was most likely the spot where the Doversgreen Aviators flew their model planes, though there was nobody here at present.