‘Which voices?’
‘Voices generally.’
‘Gossip voices?’ Esther asked.
‘Gossip, but spot-on gossip. That’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘Now it’s obvious. Because of the BMW stopped in Pine Street.’
‘Which spot-on gossip are we talking about?’ Esther said.
‘Ask yourself, why two bags of boodle?’
‘Takings.’
Caple laughed. ‘Well, yes, you could call them that. Hodgy taking from the firm. Trying to.’
‘Skimming?’
‘Pellotte himself, in person, present.’
‘Pellotte collects regularly. Everyone sees the BMW harvesting.’
‘This is a morning, doorstepping call, I’d say, plus paramedic backup kit and the emergency wardrobe. Not routine. The opposite.’
‘Oh. Is Hodge all right then?’
‘OK so far, I think. But short of two Asda bags.’
‘The emergency clothing in the car boot?’
‘Unused.’
‘How do you know? Perhaps they’d changed into the suits they were wearing when you saw them. The garments in the boot might have been the stained ones. Are you sure Hodge is all right?’
‘The clothes were clean.’
‘The spot-on gossip you mentioned said Hodge was diverting Happy Gardening Solutions loot, did it?’
‘Clever voices, weren’t they?’ he said.
So, how did all this bring revelations about Gervaise Manciple Tasker? Esther wondered, but didn’t ask. Number Three guiding rule with informants: let them tell it their way. Don’t badger. Don’t push. Number One was: they know where they’re safest so let them pick the meeting spot. Two: assume what they tell you is three-quarters wrong. ‘All the Asda-bag money into their pockets?’
‘Not all. It’s too much. Their tailoring would look ridiculous.’
‘Why not just take it to the office safe – Happy Gardening Solutions? That’s usual. We think it’s laundered through company books.’
‘They’re making for somewhere else,’ he said, ‘and are timetabled. Where? There’s been some more gossip around. It says they’ll be away at a castle. A conference, to do with books they both like, especially Dean, relating to some author. Famous. Some in hardback. Not porn. Faunt Castle. No secret they’re going. Everybody knows and has a chuckle. Those two, in love with books! How nice! They’re proud of it, I bet. For something like that they’d want to look all right, not fat with cash. They pocket as much as they can in case the car’s raided or pinched. They’re going to be off Whit. Takers at the Faunt car park won’t know they shouldn’t touch the holy BMW. To them it would be just a BMW – luxury model, good for a glean or a drive away.’
Esther could see how the tale might develop. ‘They put some of the money back in the boot, did they?’
‘Alongside the oxygen, in a blue plastic crate, to help keep things tidy. They shoved the extra money under newspapers. And their pistols. Brownings. They’re famed for Brownings. From their jacket pockets.’
‘They flourished guns?’
‘Not flourished. Just didn’t bother hiding. This is Pine Street. This is Whit. This is Adrian Pellotte and Dean.’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘They wouldn’t want to go to a literature conference in a castle with automatics aboard, would they? Off colour. And they had to make pocket room.’
‘How much do you reckon?’
‘In the Asda bags originally, I’d say at least twenty K, and maybe up towards twenty-five.’
‘How much goes back into the boot, under the papers? You’ll know that exactly now, won’t you?’
‘Ah . . .’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You’re on to it.’
‘On to what?’
‘How things will turn out,’ he said.
‘They drive off towards this castle, Faunt Castle?’
‘There’s eleven thousand four hundred in the boot.’
‘And you could guess at something like that, from watching them.’
‘I knew it was pretty good. Used notes, no numbered list anywhere.’
‘But some forged and antiqued. At least some. Obviously, you couldn’t tell that then. Did you tail them?’
‘Tail them?’
‘To the castle.’
‘Tail Pellotte and Dean Feston! Not fucking likely. Sorry! Not at all likely, Mrs Davidson. Couldn’t be done – not secretly. They’re too fly, too alert, know the game too well. We’re talking about the chief of Happy Gardening Solutions and his heavy.’
‘Right. But, of course, you didn’t need to tail them. You knew where they were going. Faunt Castle will be on the map.’
‘I keep my car in a friend’s multi-lockable warehouse yard. It’s on Whit, but I have to pushbike there. It takes a while. So I couldn’t have tailed them, even if I’d been stupid enough to want to.’
‘It gave you a break-in idea, did it?’
‘What?’
‘Them loading their pockets. They’re obviously scared someone might force the boot while they’re into lit at Faunt. So, get as much of it about their person as they can manage. But more or less half is still there. “Very promising,” you say to yourself. “And I know where the car will be for most of the day, unattended.”
‘Many would surely think like this, Mrs Davidson, if they’d seen the money moving.’
‘As you had.’
‘This is why observing from a window can be useful. It’s dirty money, anyway. Crooked money. Drugs money. They can’t have a proper right to it. Courts confiscate that sort of money.’
‘You, too. A true hijack. You were doing society a service,’ Esther said. ‘Did you know how to get a BMW boot open? I don’t suppose it would be alarmed. Pellotte doesn’t want the police called to his car.’
‘Now, listen: I’m not under caution.’
‘No.’
‘None of this can be used.’
‘None of it.
‘And no recording.’
‘No recording.’
‘I thought, “They’re going to be off Whit. All that pious, timid respect for Pellotte’s car won’t apply.” It has always niggled me, you know.’
‘What?’
‘The BMW. Its shine and size. The untroubled life it gets.’ His cheery features went twisted and sour for a few moments. ‘The rest of us drive something small and old and bottom of the range even when it was new, so if it does get done or taken the loss is nothing much.’
‘Envy’s a deadly sin, Ivor.’
‘So damn smug the two of them look, cruising Whit. Yes, I know BMW boots. Not impossible.’
‘Evidently.’
His face became upbeat again. ‘Faunt, the castle, ever seen it, Mrs Davidson?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Beautiful. Not huge, but lovely. Middle ages, though mucked about with since obviously. Grey walls and towers backgrounded by the greenery of old trees. A centre for social and cultural stuff now, but you can imagine it as someone’s home, although with towers. And a moat. Swans. There’s a place like it in the books, I think. Why Faunt was picked for the conference. That’s the talk. Several pricey vehicles in the car park. Four-by-fours. A Bentley. Three BMWs. Couple of Lexuses. Perhaps he’s that kind of writer. Classy.’
‘You do the boot, lift the carrier bags, get back to your car and scarper?’ Esther said. ‘I don’t suppose you’d take the Brownings.’
‘What would I do with Brownings?’
‘Defend yourself, when Pellotte and Dean come looking for their deficit eventually?’
‘Guns are not me, Mrs Davidson.’
‘Good.’
‘But it’s tricky in that car park. Plenty of people about. Some conference folk, most likely, and others, too. It’s a community centre, you know. All sorts going on there as well as the literature. People coming to learn Italian and ballet steps. I have to look as if the
BMW is my BMW. Like casual? And there might be CCTV, though I couldn’t see it. The money’s still in the bags, both about half full. They’re bulgy. I’ve brought a black leather, very executive, valise with me in case I’m lucky.’
‘You pushbiked over to your car from Pine Street carrying a valise?’
‘Don’t report me to traffic for one-handed cycling, will you?’
‘Bit obvious?’
‘Necessary.’
‘Dean’s news gathering service will probably hear about it.’
‘I’m entitled to own a valise.’
‘And a bike. But he’ll wonder if you were after treasure. Theirs. A chunk will have gone missing, won’t it? Most probably, he’s got your address in his data cupboard. He might suspect some window gazing.’
‘All right, perhaps I could have done things a different way. I didn’t. I was rushed. So, at Faunt I take the money out of the bags in the boot and make four, neat flat piles. Then I wrap these with the newspaper and put them into the valise. This left the Brownings very obvious, but did I worry? I pull the boot lid down. Although it won’t shut properly because of a bust lock it stays down. Most likely it will swing up when they’re driving home, especially if they don’t notice it’s been done. Some rage then, I should think. Oh, dear, dear!’ He half giggled, half smirked. ‘I’m still acting matter-of-fact – like I’m here for the conference or another activity and have papers and so on in the valise to do with my visit. There’s a reception desk in the castle visible from the car park, which means, also, the car park is visible from the desk. I can see a woman staring out towards me and the BMW. I don’t like it. What’s she going to think if I walk to my old Peugeot from the BMW carrying a plump case and drive away, not even having gone into Faunt? Who’s she going to tell? Will I see a blue light behind me after a couple of miles?
‘So, I walk urgently up towards reception, as though ashamed of being very late, yet pleased to be here at last. I say to her: “The conference, please?” “Pole?” she replies.
‘I couldn’t make out what she meant. Did she think I was Polish? Did it matter if I was? Or was the author Polish? Maybe some other meeting on, to do with exploring to the North or South Pole. I said: “Right.” You see, Mrs D., it didn’t really matter where I ended up in the castle as long as she believed I belonged somewhere. She pointed to double doors on the other side of the reception foyer and I crossed to them and went inside. Quite a big room, fairly crowded, but with a few empty places at the back. This would be part of the original castle, the ceiling high, the walls bare stone. Might have been the Great Hall once, for feasts and merrymaking. Terrific. I love authentic old buildings. History I’m in favour of, times when Whit and Temperate didn’t exist even. I took a seat, placing my valise under it.’ He bent and re-enacted this with the custody chair, but no valise.
He straightened. ‘Now, a surprise,’ he said. ‘Who do you think was lecturing? Dean! He sounded pretty good, as though he’d really done some reading. He spoke about all sorts of characters in the books like they were actual people he knew very well, but quite different from the people he knew on Whit. Maybe when he was banged up alone they became like friends – company in his cell. The money gave him quite a lot of extra chest and most probably around the hips, also, but I couldn’t see that because he spoke from behind a lectern.
‘Once, he seemed to forget he’d bulked himself out and bumped against this lectern and obviously knocked the wind out of himself. It made him lose the line of his chat for a while. I thought he wouldn’t recover. But Dean’s a fighter and managed to get back to the topic all right. This was about some woman in the tales called Pamela who sounded a real goer – sorry to be so frank, Mrs Davidson – but it is literature. Finally, although married to a Lord, she’s still at it all over the place. But only a Life Peer. Dean said this proved life moved in circles, with this toff slapper in the middle pulling all sorts into her bed and linking them up. And I thought, yes, maybe life was a kind of circle. Consider it, Mrs Davidson, I’d managed to glimpse Dean and Adrian Pellotte in the street splitting the funds. Then I came to Faunt and lifted the money they hadn’t already lifted for themselves. Following this, I pop into the conference with these happy gains in my valise. And by a sort of fluke I listen to Dean give a talk which, because they obviously had to get there in time to do it, made them divide the money like that, meaning I could come to hear his performance, with about half of it nabbed, in my bag and right in front of him, and he with a quarter of it around his body right in front of me.’
‘Yes, a kind of neatness to it,’ Esther said.
‘He got some good applause at the end. I felt glad. He deserved that. I didn’t stay for any more of the conference, though. It seemed wisest. They might go to check the car. The chairman announced that in one of the galleries there was a painting about a dance which people might want to look at, but I went to the Peugeot and drove back to Pine Street.’
‘We haven’t had any report from Pellotte that his car was broken into and cash taken.’
‘No, maybe not. What’s he going to say – “£11,400 of Happy Gardening Solutions’ crack, charlie, H and skunk money has been outrageously lifted, officer?”’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t a sound idea to start using it so soon,’ Esther said. ‘Trying to use it. They’ll be listening out for tales of big spending. And Pellotte is going to be deeply cross about fractures to his myth.’
‘Which myth?’
‘The perfect BMW. A buckled boot. He’ll be like anyone else on Whit or Temperate.’
‘Ducky idea, isn’t it?’
‘He won’t want to show signs of frailty at present. A ruptured car is frailty. He’s trying to handle a crisis.’
‘That TV stuff, and his daughter?’
‘Some people in the firm watch him for weaknesses. They’d like to push him out and take over. You might have started a—’
‘The papers,’ Caple replied.
‘Which?’
‘The ones from the boot to wrap the money.’
‘Newspapers?’
‘Old newspapers. When I get home after Faunt I drop off the take in Pine Street, then go over to park my car in the warehouse yard and cycle back – valiseless now. First thing, obviously, I must count the earnings. Suddenly, though, I see his face. It stops me. For a couple of minutes it stops me, Mrs Davidson. All that money, waiting to be totted up, but I pause. Yes, I pause.’
Drama. ‘Whose face?’
‘Gervaise Manciple Tasker’s.’
‘How? Where?’
‘When I’m unwrapping. In one of the papers.’
‘He was a journalist.’
‘There’s an article he’d published and a photo of him as the writer, the way they do, and under it “Gervaise Tasker”. No “Manciple”.’
‘That would be his working name. What kind of article?’
‘Oh, about some topic.’
‘Well, yes, it would be.’
‘What they call investigative. To do with an MP. Backhanders etcetera.’
‘Which?’
‘It’s not important.’
‘It might be.’
‘No, it isn’t. What’s important is that I’d picked up four newspaper pages as wrapping when I took the money. So, I see his face on one and I wonder about the rest.’
‘They’re pages from newspapers, are they, not complete issues?’
‘Pages. I’d thought they were whole newspapers in the crate, but no. Pages. From different newspapers, different dates, different kinds of articles. But they’ve all got a picture of Gervaise Tasker. I’ve kept these at Pine Street, if you want to look. I had them spread out on the table – the money in stacks at one end where I’d been counting, and now the newspaper pages at the other. This was a kind of – well, a kind of revelation.’
‘In which way?’
‘They’re interested in him.’
‘You mean interested in the kind of reporting he does?’
‘Yes,
maybe his kind of reporting, in case he did it one day about Whit and Happy Gardening Solutions. And Temperate and Abracadabra Leisure. But also they’ve got identification pictures of him, haven’t they? Different pictures. Various angles. All round. Suppose they wanted to send someone or more than one for him. This could help make sure they got the right man.’
‘How do you mean “send someone, or more than one, for him”?’
‘Yes, send someone, or more than one, for him.’
And Esther decided then that Pellotte and Dean, and Happy Gardening Solutions could not be implicated in Tasker’s death. If they were, Dean would never allow potentially awkward evidence like that to pile up in the car, and stay there after Tasker’s death. Adrian Pellotte might act lordly and careless, not Dean. They could have been interested in Tasker and his objectives on Whit and Temperate. Dean did like to gather information, build his facts store, register incursers. That was different from killing Tasker, or having him killed, though – and different from sending ‘someone, or more than one, for him’.
Detective Sergeant Abner Cule had had doubts about Pellotte’s and Feston’s involvement from the start, because, for one thing, the forensic people said the bullets that killed Tasker were not from a Browning nine mm, the usual weapon of both. But, of course, they might have sent ‘someone or more than one’ to do the job, and such a hit man, or hit men, would use their own preferred gun. Or Pellotte and Dean could have used a different pistol, knowing the Browning was a giveaway. And Esther had also wondered whether Cule’s reaction came because he hadn’t cracked Dean in the interview. Cule, proud of his abilities, possibly thought this failure wasn’t a failure at all but meant Dean couldn’t be cracked because he was innocent.
Now, though, after Caple’s description of the newspapers, Esther’s thoughts did turn away from Pellotte and Dean and went elsewhere. She recalled that Temperate church sidesman in Tasker’s notes and his words of blessing: ‘Mene. Mene. Tekel. Upharsin. Ufucker.’ And she recalled Belinda’s hint that Esther’s guesses at Camby or Laidlaw for the Tribe meeting might be wrong. Belinda had clammed then, wouldn’t say more. But there’d been a strange moment: at one point, hadn’t she referred to Temperate people at the club as ‘personnel?’ Unusual word. A slip? A pointer? Who was Personnel in the Temperate firm’s hierarchy: Joel Jeremy North, according to Tasker’s notes. The sidesman? The Tribe figure? Perhaps if Amesbury’s leadership had become fragile, others beside the two deputies might want to show they were in the running as successor, and would prove it by the decisive disposal of Tasker, considered a danger to the company. Esther focused on North.