Felix Francis - Crisis

There was a slight pause from the other end as if ASW was mentally evaluating whether the possible gain of information outweighed the potential for any future legal complications.

I was not averse to attempting a touch of blackmail of my own.

‘Tell Denzel to convey most fervently to Mr Robertson that I have proof of his extortion activities and, unless he gives us what we want, I will present all the evidence not only to the police but also to the benefit authorities and the child-protection people. Then he’ll lose both his house and his kids, as well as his liberty. However, if he helps us, I will keep it all to myself.’

‘Is that possible?’ ASW asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I would try my best. Either way, Peter’s little earner is about to come to a sudden and complete halt as the lever he is using will become public knowledge, one way or another. Either he tells us or he’ll have to explain his swollen bank balance to the cops.’

‘Right,’ ASW said, making a firm decision. ‘I’ll brief Denzel and send him over there immediately, but I must stipulate that he is to refrain from using any violence, especially if there are young children about.’

That’s fine , I thought. I knew that Denzel avoided violence unless it was absolutely necessary, say in self-defence. The threat of it was usually sufficient and anyway, in this case, there were more potent dangers to Peter’s welfare than just a few bruises.

‘What I’m really interested in is knowing who the father was.’

‘Got it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as we have anything.’

We disconnected but my phone rang again almost immediately. I thought it was ASW calling back but it was Kate.

‘Janie didn’t know anything about Dr Benaud,’ she said. ‘But Gavin Andrews was an owner with Oliver for many years. They also used to play poker together every Tuesday evening. Janie says she remembers Oliver being quite upset when the doctor died so suddenly.’

So Oliver Chadwick and Dr Andrews had been card-playing chums.

I could just imagine the good doctor phoning up his friend to say that his thirteen-year-old daughter had turned up at the clinic asking for an abortion. And to hell with medical confidentiality. His friendship was more important.

And Oliver would have known the likely cause of the pregnancy, so he’d done what any good father would have in the circumstances: he’d paid for the termination and kept quiet about it, even from his own wife and daughter.

But he’d done more than that.

He’d asked his friend to extract a sample of the foetus and send it to a lab, almost certainly to determine the identity of the father.

What had been the outcome?

I could hazard a guess, but that was hardly hard evidence either.

I spent most of the afternoon typing up more of my report and waiting eagerly for news from Denzel in Ealing.

ASW called first to report that, as I had feared, the Chancery Lane laboratory weren’t prepared to release the results of any tests except to the patient or the patient’s doctor, not without a court order, and that was final.

‘They wouldn’t even confirm whether they still had them or not,’ ASW said. ‘I told them that the patient was now dead but it made no difference. In fact, if anything, that made things worse. In that case, they said, they would need an order from the coroner to release anything to anyone.’

Hopeless.

‘Well, thanks for trying,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope Denzel has more luck.’

But it wasn’t until after five o’clock that he finally called me.

‘Hello, Harrison, my boy,’ he said in his rich deep Caribbean voice. ‘Howya doing?’

He was the only one in the office who called me Harrison. It made me smile.

‘Fine, Denzel, thank you,’ I said. ‘Tell me your news.’

‘I went to see your man Peter Robertson.’ He chuckled. ‘He wasn’t too pleased to see me, I can tell you. Tried to close the door in my face.’ He sounded affronted. ‘Good job I had me boots on.’ He chuckled again. ‘But I eventually persuaded him to allow me in.’

I didn’t ask him how. Hence I got told no lies.

‘And?’ I asked in encouragement. ‘What happened then?’

‘He didn’t say many nice things about you,’ Denzel said with another laugh. ‘That’s for sure. Not when I told him what you’d said about child protection and such. Spitting, he was.’ He laughed once more. ‘Says he wished he’d thrown you off the walkway last Saturday afternoon. So I gently suggests that I might throw him off it instead if he doesn’t answer my questions pronto.’

‘And did he?’ I asked.

‘Not straight away, no.’ He laughed again. ‘So then I asks him if he knows what a mess his nice large-screen TV would make if I dropped it from four floors up, followed by the rest of his stuff. And you’ll never guess what.’ Another laugh, longer this time. ‘He threatens to call the Old Bill. So I says, go ahead, call them. I’m sure they’ll be dead keen to speak to a blackmailer.’

‘Where were his kids when all this was happening?’

‘In the room with us. We was talking real quiet, real low-key. The kids were engrossed watching something on TV.’

‘So you didn’t drop it, then?’

He laughed louder this time. ‘Naah, course not. But I would have if he hadn’t finally coughed up some answers.’

‘What answers did he give?’

‘Everything. Once he started there was no stopping him. Crying, he was, too. Sobbing. Said he missed his wife something rotten. Devoted to her, he said, in spite of her problems. Wished they’d never ever discovered about the bloody DNA test. Zoe was getting better until then, he said. Afterwards things went downhill again, and badly.’

‘How did they discover about the test?’

‘Seems she registered with a new doctor and he said something to her about the medical records having arrived safely from her former surgery. So she asked to see them, apparently on a whim. No proper reason. Just because she could. But she found something in them that led her to apply for more notes from that clinic you went to. And that led to the testing lab.’

Simple as that. Exactly the same route as me.

Be careful what you wish for.

Except she had obviously managed to get her results from the Chancery Lane Medical Laboratory, whereas I hadn’t.

‘So the lab did do a DNA test on the sample sent from Cambridge?’

‘Yes. Indeed they did,’ Denzel said. ‘And they sent the profile to Zoe as the patient.’

And now for the million-dollar question.

‘So who was the father?’

‘That’s the strangest thing,’ Denzel said. ‘Peter says he still doesn’t know, and I believe him.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘Because, even though he has the profile for the foetus, he has nothing to compare it with.’

Hence, I thought, he was blackmailing all the Chadwick sons, because they didn’t know either.

But Oliver knew. Of that I was certain.

There would have been no point in him going to all that trouble to obtain the DNA of the aborted foetus unless he had also acquired samples from the boys for comparison. Maybe he’d simply taken hair from their hairbrushes, or some saliva from a glass.

He’d have known all about how and where to obtain a DNA profile from his work with horses.

‘Is there anything else?’ I asked Denzel.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Other than the fact that Peter says that one of the Chadwick wives knew what had gone on in the past. Seems she’d been here last year and Zoe had told her.’

Arabella , I thought.

And she had killed herself, not because she believed her husband was guilty of murder, but because he was guilty of incest — something she had been told by Zoe but chose not to report. And she had remained married to him in spite of that knowledge, and everyone would now know it. That was the shame she couldn’t bear. Plus the fact that, due to her keeping quiet, Zoe had ended up dead.