‘Can you tell us why she contacted you?’
‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now – she’s also been dead a long while. But I was sworn to secrecy by her, you see.’
Remembering Grace’s instructions, Branson put things as tactfully to the man as he could. ‘We are dealing with a murder inquiry, Mr Hegarty. We require all the information you can give us.’
Hegarty looked shocked. ‘Murder? I had no idea. Oh dear. Gosh. Who – who is the victim?’
‘I’m afraid I cannot disclose that at the moment.’
‘No, right, of course,’ Hegarty said. He had blanched visibly. ‘Well, let me get this straight in my head.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The thing was, she came to see me – I suppose it was about February or March in 2002 that would be – or perhaps April – I can check that for you from my records. She said that her husband had left massive debts when he died and every penny they had had been taken and their house had been repossessed. It sounded a bit brutal, to be frank, to hound a widow like that.’
He looked at them as if for support, but got no reaction.
He went on, ‘She told me she’d just discovered she was due some money from a life insurance policy and was scared about his creditors getting hold of that too. Apparently she was a joint signatory on a number of personal guarantees. So she wanted to convert it into stamps, which she thought – quite rightly – would be easier to hide. Something I think she had learned from her husband.’
‘How much money was it?’ Bella asked.
‘Well, the first lot was one and a half million, give or take a few bob. And then she came into the same amount or even a bit more again months later, from the 9/11 compensation fund, she told me.’
Branson was pleased that the amounts Hegarty stated tallied with their earlier information. It suggested he was telling the truth.
‘And she asked you to convert it all into stamps?’ he asked.
‘It sounds easier than it was,’ he said. ‘That kind of spending draws attention, you see. So I fronted the purchases for her. I spread the money around the stamp world, saying I was buying for an anonymous collector. That’s not unusual. In recent years the Chinese have gone bananas for quality stamps – the only bad thing is that some dealers are flogging them rubbish.’ He raised a cautionary finger. ‘Even some of the most respected dealers.’
‘Can you provide us with a list of all the stamps you sold to Mrs Wilson?’ Bella asked.
‘Yes, but you’ll have to give me a little time. I could make a start after my game – could let you have it by around teatime this afternoon. Would that be OK?’
‘Perfect,’ Branson said.
‘And what would be extremely useful,’ Bella added, ‘is if you could let us have a list of all the people she could have gone to who would have had the money to buy them later on, when she needed the cash.’
‘I can give you the dealers,’ he said. ‘And a few individual collectors like myself. Not so many of us as there were. I’m afraid quite a few of my old friends in this game are now dead.’
‘Do you know any dealers or collectors in Australia?’ she asked.
‘Australia?’ He frowned. ‘Australia? Now, wait a minute. Of course, there was someone Ronnie knew from Brighton who emigrated out there, some years back, in the mid-1990s. His name was Skeggs. Chad Skeggs. He’s always dealt in big numbers. He operates a mail order business from Melbourne. Sends me a catalogue every now and then.’
‘Do you ever buy from him?’ Glenn asked.
Hegarty shook his head. ‘No, he’s dodgy. Tucked me up once. I bought some pre-1913 Australian stamps from him, I seem to recall. But they weren’t in anything like the condition he’d told me over the phone. When I complained, he told me to sue him.’ Hegarty raised despairing hands in the air. ‘The amount wasn’t worth it and he knew that. A couple of grand – it would have cost me more than that in legal fees. I’m amazed the blighter’s still in business.’
‘Anyone else in Australia you can think of?’ Bella asked.
‘Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll give you a full list this afternoon. Want to pop back around, say, 4?’
‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ Branson said.
As they all stood up, Hegarty leaned forward conspiratorially, as if for their ears only. ‘I don’t suppose you can help me,’ he said. ‘I got flashed by one of your cameras – along Old Shoreham Road – a couple of days ago. You couldn’t have a word in someone’s ear for me, could you?’
Branson looked at him, astonished. ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘Ah, well, not to worry. Just thought I’d ask.’
He gave them a rueful smile.
87
OCTOBER 2007
Abby sat in the back of the taxi, re-reading a new text that had just come in. It lifted her spirits and made her smile.
Remember … Work like you don’t need the
money. Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody is watching.
The driver lifted her spirits too. He used to be a boxer, he said, never made the big time but did a bit of training now, encouraging kids into the sport. He had a flattened boxer’s face, she thought, as if at some point in his life he’d hit a concrete wall, face-first, at about a hundred miles an hour. He told her during the journey back from the third rest home she had visited that morning that he too had an elderly mother with health problems, but couldn’t afford the charges of these homes.
Abby couldn’t think of a quotation to text back, so instead she just said:
Soon! I can’t wait. I miss u soooo much.
Xxxxxx
It was shortly after 1 o’clock as they pulled up outside her mother’s apartment block. Abby looked around, checking for any sign of Ricky, but the coast looked clear. She asked the driver to wait and keep the meter running. The first two places she’d seen this morning were horrible, but the third was fine and, most importantly, it seemed secure. Best of all, it had a vacancy. Abby decided she was going to take her mum there right now.
All she needed to do was throw a few things in a bag. She knew how slow her mum was, but she would do it all for her and hustle her out. Her mum might not like it, but she would have to lump it for a few weeks. At least she would be safe there. Abby could not go on relying indefinitely on the services of her mum’s new minder, the redoubtable Doris – whose last name she didn’t even know.
With her mother secure, she could put into action the plan she’d been figuring out during the past few hours. The first part of which was to get as far away from here as possible. The second was to find someone she could take into her confidence. But she would need to trust them totally.
How many strangers could she trust to hold everything she had in the world and not run off with it like she had?
This cab driver seemed a good type. She had a feeling she could trust him if she needed to. But would he be able to keep Ricky at bay on his own, or would he need a couple of others with him? Which meant she would be putting her trust in one person she had known for thirty minutes and others she had never met. That was too big a gamble after all she had gone through to get this far.
At this moment, though, she didn’t have a huge number of other options. The rent on the flat was paid in advance for three months, with two still to run, and that had taken the biggest bite out of her cash reserves. And the one-month payment in advance for her mother’s room at the Bexhill Lawns Rest House this morning, hadn’t helped. She had enough credit left on her card to see her through a couple of months, if she holed up in a cheap hotel somewhere. After that she would need to get at her resources. And to do that she had to evade Ricky.
She thanked God for the sheer luck she hadn’t yet transferred them to her newly acquired safe-deposit box.
She should have realized, from all she knew about Ricky, that he was a wizard with electronics. He’d boasted to her one night that he had front desk staff at half the top hotels in Melbourne and Sydney working for him, passi
ng him the returned plastic room keys of guests who had checked out. Those keys contained their credit card details and their home addresses. He had a willing buyer for the information, he’d told her, and the scam, or rather, data service, as he liked to call it, netted him far more than his legitimate business.
She let herself in the front entrance and walked along the corridor to her mother’s flat. She had rung her mother twice to check she was OK. The first time had been at about 10.30, when her mother told her the locksmith had rung to say he would be there by 11. And the second time was an hour ago, when she said the man was there.
Abby was dismayed to discover that her key still unlocked the door. More worryingly, she saw no sign of any workman having been there at all. She called out anxiously, then hurried across the hallway and into the sitting room.
To her astonishment, the carpet had been removed. The red carpet she remembered from her childhood, that she had cleaned the spilt rice pudding off yesterday, was gone. All that remained were some patches of worn-out underlay on top of bare, rough boards.
For a moment her whole world skewed as she tried to make a connection between having new door locks and the need to take up a carpet. Something felt totally wrong.
‘Mum! Mum!!!!’ she called out, in case her mother was in the kitchen, or the loo, or the bedroom.
Where was Doris? Hadn’t she promised to stay in her mother’s flat with her?
She ran, in growing panic, into each room in turn. Then she rushed out of the flat, tore up the staircase two steps at a time and rang the bell of Doris’s flat. Then she knocked on the door with her fist as well.
After what felt like an eternity, she heard the familiar rattle of the safety chain and, as before, the door opened a few inches. Doris, in her massive dark glasses, peered out warily, then gave her a welcoming smile and opened the door wider.
‘Hello, my dear!’
Abby was instantly relieved by the cheeriness of the greeting and for an instant felt sure that Doris was going to say her mother was up here in her flat.
‘Oh, hi, I just wondered if you knew what was going on downstairs.’
‘With the locksmith?’
So he had arrived. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s getting on with the work, dear. He seems a very charming young man. Is anything wrong?’
‘You checked his ID, like I told you?’
‘Yes, dear, he had a card from the company. I had my magnifying lens with me to make sure I could read it. Lockworks, wasn’t it?’
At that moment, Abby’s phone started ringing. She looked down at the display and saw it was her mother’s new number. She looked back at Doris.
‘It’s OK, thanks.’
Doris raised a finger. ‘There’s something burning on the stove, dear. Pop back up if you need me.’
Abby took the call as Doris closed the door.
It was her mother’s voice. But it was all trembling and wrong, and breathless, as if she was reading from a script.
‘Abby,’ she said. ‘Ricky wants to speak to you. I’m going to put him on. Please do exactly what he tells you.’
Then the line went dead.
Abby frantically redialled. It went straight to voicemail. Then almost instantly she had another incoming call. The display read: Private number calling.
It was Ricky.
88
OCTOBER 2007
‘Where’s my mother?’ Abby yelled into the phone before Ricky had a chance to speak. ‘Where is she, you bastard? WHERE IS SHE?’
A door behind her opened and an elderly man peered out, then closed it again loudly.
Distraught now, in retrospect, that she had been so stupid as to leave her mother with this old woman, Abby hurried to the relative privacy of the stairwell.
‘I want to speak to her now. Where is she?’
‘Your mother is fine, Abby,’ he said. ‘She’s as snug as a bug in a rug – in case you were wondering where it had gone.’
With the phone clamped to her ears, she tripped back downstairs and into her mother’s flat, closing the door behind her. She walked through into the sitting room, staring at the bare boards showing through the underlay again. Tears were streaming down her face. She was shaking, starting to feel disassociated, the first signs of a panic attack coming on.
‘I’m calling the police, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else any more. OK? I’m going to call the police right now.’
‘I don’t think so, Abby,’ he said calmly. ‘I think you are too smart to do that. What are you going to say to them? I stole everything this man had and now he’s caught up with me and he’s taken my mother as hostage. You have to be able to account for things, Abby. In the western world today, with all the money-laundering regulations, you have to be able to account for substantial possessions and amounts of money. How are you going to account for what you’ve got, on the earnings of a Melbourne bar waitress?’
She screamed back down the phone, ‘I don’t care any more, Ricky. OK?’
There was a brief silence. Then he said, ‘Oh, I think you do. You didn’t do what you did to me on a sudden impulse. You planned this long and hard, you and Dave, didn’t you? Any position he didn’t tell you to shag me in, or was it just me who got fucked?’
‘This has nothing to do with my mother. Bring her back. Bring her here and we’ll talk.’
‘No, you bring me everything you’ve taken and then we’ll talk.’
The panic attack was worsening. She was taking deep gulps of air. Her head was burning. She felt as if she was half floating out of her body, that her body was going to die on her. She tripped sideways, hit the end of the sofa, clung desperately to one of the arms, then swung herself down on to it and sat there giddily.
‘I’m hanging up now,’ she gasped, ‘and I’m calling the police.’
But even as she said the words she could feel that some of the conviction had gone from her voice, and that he could feel it too.
‘Yeah, and then what?’
‘I don’t care. I don’t bloody care!’ Like a child having a tantrum, she repeated several times, louder each time, ‘I don’t bloody care!’
‘You should. Because they’re going to find a chronically ill woman who has committed suicide, and her daughter a thief, with a cock-and-bull story about the man she stole from, and the man who put her up for it isn’t exactly in a position to enter any witness box to back her up. So think your way out of that one, smart bitch. I’m going to leave you to calm down now and I’m going to brew your mum a nice cup of tea, and then I’ll call you back.’
‘No – wait—’ she shouted.
But he had hung up.
Then, suddenly, she remembered the taxi waiting outside, with the meter running.
89
OCTOBER 2007
Roy Grace sent Cleo a brief text telling her he had arrived as he stood waiting for the baggage carousel to start up. By his calculation, it would be 6.15 p.m. in the UK. Fifteen minutes before the start of the evening briefing meeting on Operation Dingo.
He called DI Lizzie Mantle to get an update, but both her direct landline and mobile numbers went to voicemail. Next he tried Glenn Branson, who answered on the second ring.
‘Got your shoes back on?’
‘Yeah, I phoned to tell you that. Thought you might be pleased.’
‘So where are you? You’ve arrived, right? JFK Airport?’
‘Newark. Just waiting for my bag.’
‘All right for some, swanning off to New York, leaving us all here at the coal face.’
‘I would have sent you to Australia, but I didn’t think in your current situation that would have been too clever.’
‘At this moment, the further away I am from Ari, the happier she is. Anyhow, more on that when you get back.’
Spare me, Grace thought. And whilst he would do anything to help this man he loved so much, he was always nervous about giving him – or indeed anyone else – advice on matters that cou
ld affect their lives. What the hell did he know? And what kind of an example had his own marriage been? But he said none of this now.
‘So, tell me, what updates?’ he said.
‘Well, we’ve actually been hard at work while you’ve been lounging back, swigging champagne and watching movies for the past seven hours.’
‘I’ve been in cattle class, fighting off cramp, listeria and deep-vein thrombosis. And my headset didn’t work. Other than that, you’re pretty close.’
‘It’s tough at the top, Roy. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Yeah, yeah. This is costing a fortune. Cut the chat!’
Branson reported on their visits to the stamp dealer Hawkes and Hugo Hegarty.
Grace listened intently. ‘So it really is stamps! She converted the whole lot into stamps!’
‘That’s right. Portability. All the money-laundering regulations. They have sniffer dogs at airports that are trained to smell cash. And three and a quarter million in cash takes up a lot of space. But that value in stamps would take up just a couple of A4 envelopes.’
‘Do we have any idea what she did with them?’
‘No. Not so far. Anyhow, then we went to see Lorraine Wilson’s sister.’
‘What did she have to say?’
‘Quite a lot, actually.’
There was a beep and the carousel started moving. Grace was jostled by two hugely fat men, then an old woman backed a luggage cart into his legs. He stepped back and away from the crowd swarming around the conveyor, to a place where he had some space but could still see the bags. He knew from a stint at Gatwick Airport some years ago that theft of luggage from conveyor belts was common.
‘There’s a lot of noise your end,’ Branson said.
‘I can hear you OK. Tell me?’
‘First thing is, the sister went to New York with Lorraine Wilson a week after 9/11 – just as soon as they could get a flight. They went to the hotel Ronnie was staying at, the W.’