Peter Robinson - Strange Affair

Banks held the plastic steering wheel in his hands for a moment, then he put it back, returned the box to the wardrobe and set about closing the curtains.

By mid-morning the whole of Western Area Headquarters in Eastvale knew about the murder of Banks’s brother. Gristhorpe went into conference with Assistant Chief McLaughlin, and a hush fell over the Major Crimes squad room. Even the telephone conversations seemed to take place in whispers. If it wasn’t exactly one of their own who had fallen in the line of duty, it was still too damn close for comfort.

“Did you ever meet him?” Winsome asked Jim Hatchley, who had known Banks the longest of all of them.

“No,” said Hatchley. “I got the idea he was a bit of a black sheep. Alan didn’t have much to do with him.”

“Still,” said Winsome, “it’s family.” She thought of her own younger brother, Wayne, a schoolteacher in Birmingham, and how rarely she saw him. She would ring him tonight, she resolved.

“Aye, it is that, lass,” said Hatchley.

Winsome chewed on her lower lip and got back to the telephone. She had had a bit of luck tracking down the Mondeo, first through the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency Wimbledon office and then through the Police National Computer database of stolen cars. A car matching the description, with a “ 51” registration number plate, had been stolen from a cheap long-stay parking facility near Heathrow Airport shortly before Jennifer Clewes’s murder. When the car’s owner, who had been on a business trip to Rome since Thursday, arrived back on Sunday evening and found his car missing, he had immediately informed the local police. Winsome had rung Heathrow police, who would be the first to know if the car turned up, and asked them to let her know as soon as possible.

If all the leads in this case led to London, as they seemed to be doing so far, it could be a while before DI Cabbot got back to Yorkshire. Winsome envied her. A nice little shopping trip down Oxford Street or Regent Street wouldn’t go amiss right now. Not that Winsome was a clothes junkie, but she liked to look fashionable and she liked to look good, even if it meant creeps like Kev Templeton ogling her. She did it for herself, not for anyone else.

Winsome was just about ready to head down to the canteen for lunch when her phone rang.

“DC Jackman?” the unfamiliar voice inquired.

“That’s me.”

“PC Owen here, Heathrow.”

“Yes.”

“We just got a report in about a stolen vehicle, a dark blue Mondeo. I understand you were inquiring about it?”

“That’s right,” said Winsome, pencil in her hand. “Any news?”

“It’s not good, I’m afraid.”

“Go ahead.”

“The long version or the short one?”

“The short first.”

“It turned up in the early hours of Sunday morning on the A13 just outside of Basildon.”

“Where’s that?”

“Essex.”

“Excellent,” said Winsome. “Can we get a SOCO team over there?”

“Hold on a minute,” said Owen. “I haven’t finished yet. I said it had turned up, but what I didn’t get a chance to tell you was it was involved in an accident.”

“Accident?”

“Yes, the driver lost control and wrapped it around a telegraph pole. By all accounts he was going way too fast.”

“Do you have him in custody?”

“He’s in the mortuary.”

“Damn,” said Winsome. “Any identification on him?”

“Oh, we know who he was all right. His name’s Wesley Hughes. The bugger of it is he was only fifteen.”

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Winsome. “Just a kid. But what happened to our two men? The descriptions we have put them at way over fifteen.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that. We did get one lucky break, mind you: There was a passenger, and he was uninjured. Well, he got a few cuts and bruises, but the doc’s checked him out and he’s basically okay. A little shaken, though, as you can imagine.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen.”

“Have the local police questioned him?”

“I don’t know. It’s out of my hands now. If I were you I’d give them a ring. I’ve got the number. Sergeant Singh is handling it. Traffic.” He gave Winsome the number. She thanked him and hung up.

Next she rang Sergeant Singh of the Essex police at Basildon Divisional Headquarters. He answered immediately.

“Ah, yes, I’ve been expecting your call,” he said. “Just hold on a minute.” Winsome heard some muffled words, then Singh came back on the line. “Sorry about that. It gets a bit noisy in here.”

“That’s all right. What have you got?”

“A real mess is what.”

“Are we sure it’s the right Mondeo?” Singh gave her the number. It matched what she’d got from the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency and the PNC. “PC Owen gave me the basics,” Winsome said. “Have you talked to the surviving boy yet?”

“Just. It took forever to track down his parents, and even when we found them they seemed more interested in opening another bottle of cheap wine than coming down to the station. No wonder the kids run wild. Anyway, he’s a cocky young bastard, name of Daryl Gooch, but the crash took some of the wind out of his sails and DI Sefton took the rest.”

“What’s his story?”

“According to him, he and his mate Wesley Hughes saw the car in Tower Hamlets, off Mile End Road, when they were coming home from a party at about half past three on Sunday morning.”

“Tower Hamlets?”

“Yeah, the East End.”

“I know where it is. I’m just surprised and confused, that’s all. I thought the car had been stolen from Heathrow on Friday by two men in their early forties who drove it up to Yorkshire to commit a murder in the early hours of Saturday morning. Now I find it was stolen from Tower Hamlets in the early hours of Sunday morning by two teenage joyriders. None of this makes any sense.”

“Well,” Singh went on, “I wouldn’t know about that, but this is how Daryl Gooch says it happened. Young Daryl said the driver’s door was open, the key was in the ignition and there was no one around, so him and his mate thought they’d have a little ride in the country. Pity his friend wasn’t a better driver. Witnesses say he was doing close to a hundred when he lost control. As far as I can gather from Daryl, they were still pissed and stoned from the party.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know,” said Singh, “but there’s not much advantage to him lying at this point, is there?”

“With some kids it’s habitual,” said Winsome.

“I suppose so. Anyway, both kids are from Tower Hamlets, so they’d have had no reason to be out at Heathrow. They’re not exactly your jet-setting types. Any idea exactly when the car was stolen from the car park there?”

“Not really,” said Winsome. “Sometime between Thursday and Friday evening, I suppose.”

“Sorry I can’t be any more help,” said Singh. “Ring me if you have any more questions.”

“Thanks,” said Winsome. “I will.”

She hung up and nibbled on the end of her pencil as she thought things out. Assuming it was the same Mondeo that had been spotted near Jennifer Clewes’s flat on Friday night and the one Roger Cropley had seen at Watford Gap, then after killing Jennifer and breaking into Banks’s cottage, the two men had probably driven back to London through the night, kept the car out of sight for a day, then dumped it in a decidedly dodgy neighborhood where it was likely to disappear very quickly indeed and hoofed it back home, wherever that might be. It didn’t tell her much about them, except that they weren’t scared of visiting dangerous neighborhoods at night.

It was a good move to steal a car from a long-stay because the odds were good it hadn’t yet been reported stolen. If it had, there was always a chance that it might be picked up by a camera on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system that reads and checks them against the database of stolen vehicles. But that hadn’t happened; the car’s owner didn’t report it stolen until Sunday evening, by which time it was wrapped around a telegraph pole outside Basildon.