Quintin Jardine - Fallen Gods

"As in…?"

"Yes, it's David's. It used to be managed within Candela and Finch, but he switched it here a few years back, because he liked our security systems and our in-house trading facility. Ironic, is it not?"

"It sure is," Steele conceded, impassively. "When you began," he continued, 'you said that investment trusts were more or less all you did. What else is there?"

"We have a currency section," said the chief executive, 'speculating on the global money markets. That was on the sixth floor; it's gone too.

Never rains, eh."

"That's what we find." The policeman waited until he felt that he had all of Dolan's attention once more. "So why were you about to pick up the phone?" The silence continued, for several seconds.

"Because," came the reply at last, "I have just finished a reconciliation of our total assets; investments and cash in the bank and in transit. It's difficult, given the missing Oriental portfolios, but by my calculation, we're thirty million out… on the downside."

"Bloody hell," Steele exclaimed.

"That's an understatement."

"Will it finish you?"

"No, it won't, but it will send our share price floor-wards and make us a snip for any predators that are out there." Dolan stood up and walked to the window of his office; he gazed along the Western Approach

Road, at nothing in particular.

"So, inspector," he asked, 'are you going to call in the cavalry?"

"I'm going to call in the fire brigade, first off."

"I have done already. And I've called in independent experts. I did that on Sunday. They both agree that the fire started in a computer terminal that was left on over the weekend to receive incoming faxes … a normal procedure, and that there is no evidence of it being deliberate. Someone seems to have been dead lucky, Mr. Steele."

"So far," the policeman retorted. "I'm going to need a list of every person employed on the sixth floor with the skill to make thirty million disappear without being caught. Obviously, that will include the manager of the Candela family trust."

"I wouldn't bother with that, inspector. David manages it personally.

It's another of his many skills."

"How'd you like to stay in Buffalo and be my chief of detectives?" asked Bradford Dekker.

"No offence, sheriff," Skinner replied, 'but if I stayed here, I'd be after your job. Elected people trying to manage policemen are the bane of my life back home; if I lived here the only way I could handle it would be to become one myself."

"If the voters of Erie County knew all that's happened over the last couple of days you could run as the Taleban candidate and still get elected."

Bob pulled over a kitchen stool and sat on it, glancing out of the window. With the phone to his ear, he could see Jazz playing in the garden, with Trish watching over him. "So it's over, is it?" he asked.

"Yes. Poor old Candy Brew is downstairs right now in conference with his attorney, that's if the woman can get him to stop sobbing for long enough to listen to what she's got to tell him. When Madigan and I walked into his office he looked at us and burst into tears, and he's been like that most of the time since."

Dekker sounded elated, understandably. "The hair and skin samples matched his," he continued, 'like you said they would, but we didn't need to throw that at him. We didn't need to throw anything at him, in fact. He told us the whole story as soon as we sat him down in the interview room. Hero worship can be a deadly thing, Bob, when it goes to extremes. Mr. Brew had more than a crush on Ron Neidholm; he was downright in love with him. His house is like a shrine, an absolute shrine. He's from Chicago, originally, but he volunteered to us that he took a job in Buffalo because it was Ron's home town. His obsession was no secret either. It was a standing joke among the staff in Waterside Library, and among some of the borrowers as well. We've re-interviewed the Bierhoff woman; she admitted that she didn't just happen to mention Sarah and Ron to him, she did it to wind him up."

"Bitch," Skinner snarled.

"And how. She drove Brew right off the rails; he admitted to us that he went to Neidholm's house to ask him if it was true and if it meant that he wouldn't play football any more. The victim invited him in and took him through to the kitchen, because he said he was about to start fixing a salad. He said that he was expecting company. Candy's story is that when he confronted him, asked him straight out, Ron was evasive at first, suggested very politely that it was none of his damn business. But he persisted, and finally the big guy lost his cool. He told him that he had had a lifetime of guys like him, who thought that football was the only thing in the world, and that finally he had had enough. He wanted a normal life, among real people with a wife and kids, and no more freaks like Brew' Dekker was excited, now, in full flow; at last he paused for breath.

"While he was yelling this, according to Candy, he reached out and grabbed him by the hair with his left hand. That ties in with the samples that were found on the sticking plaster. The guy thought he was going to slug him with the other one, and he got terrified. The knife was lying on the counter beside him. He says he doesn't remember picking it up…"

"None of them ever remember," said Skinner, quietly.

"I'll bow to your experience on that. Anyway, he says there was this blank moment, and next thing he knew, Ron was on the floor at his feet with the knife in his chest. He just ran for it then, out of the house, got in his car and drove home. He sat there for two days, doing nothing, waiting for us to come for him, only we didn't. After a while he plucked up the courage to switch on television, and he saw a report.

It said that we had a prime suspect, a woman, and that charges were expected imminently. He knew they must have meant Sarah and he began to relax."

"He was going to let her take the blame?"

"Without a second thought; he believed, in fact he still does, that she deserved it. In his mind, if it hadn't been for her throwing herself at Neidholm, as he put it, life would just have gone on as it was.

That's why he approached him in the restaurant. He'd never had the nerve to do that before, or to write to him, or anything else; he only worshipped him from as close as he could get. Neidholm never had a public relationship, you see. Half of America thought he was gay; as for Candy, he just assumed it. So when he saw him there with Sarah, he experienced a flash of pure terror. He could tell how easy they were with each other, and he had this sense that everything was going to change, that all his fantasies were going to be taken from him, by this woman, whoever she was.

"He fretted about it from that point on, until Alice Bierhoff told him her story, and the poor guy just went nuts."

"Will he go for an insanity plea?"

"I don't know yet. The DA's offered him a plea deal to second degree homicide; that's what his attorney's trying to talk to him about. If he takes it, then Sarah won't have to testify. If he doesn't, I'm not so sure."

"You might try telling him from me that if he puts my wife on the witness stand and makes her admit to an affair in public he really will be fucking crazy."

"He's never met you," Dekker chuckled, 'so he wouldn't understand, but

I'll do what I can to keep that from happening."

"So what's our position now?" asked Skinner.

"Sarah has her passport back. She can leave Buffalo any time she likes."

"When's this going to hit the fan?"

"Brew's attorney won't go public while we're still negotiating, but I can't hold it beyond tomorrow midday. If he hasn't accepted the DA's deal by then he'll be arraigned on a charge of first degree murder."