Ken McClure - Wildcard

The fact that she had been an almost obsessively tidy person proved to be a big help. All her bank and credit card statements were filed neatly together in an A4 binder. There was a separate binder for household bills and another for mortgage and insurance details. Within minutes, he was able to establish that Ann Danby had had no money worries. Her salary, paid directly into her cheque account on the thirtieth of each month, had been more than sufficient to cover all outgoing expenses and had left enough for a monthly transfer of five hundred pounds into a savings account with the Halifax Building Society. This account currently showed a balance of something over fifteen thousand pounds. In addition, she had tended to pay off her credit-card accounts, three in all, in full every month.

Steven paid particular attention to the credit-card statements because of what the doorman had said about Ann going away for the weekends. He could not, however, find any pattern of spending to support this or give any clue as to where she had gone. Did this mean that her trips had been connected with work, in which case they would have been paid for through a company account? Another possibility was that someone else — V for example — had been paying.

He found a leather-bound diary in the bottom desk drawer and opened it hopefully, only to find that it was merely an appointments diary. Better than nothing, he reassured himself, and started looking through it to see if the weekends featured. He found that they did, but without any detail: Ann had simply written in the letter V approximately every third or fourth weekend. There had, however, not been any weekend featuring V for the last six weeks then suddenly V popped up on a weekday, the Thursday during the week before Ann Danby died. He had been pencilled in for p.m. and she had put three concentric rings around the initial.

Steven felt a small surge of excitement as he realised that a meeting on that particular day would make V a possible suspect for having given Ann the virus. The subsequent incubation period would have been about right. But what had happened to V himself? Why hadn’t he gone down with the disease? Steven decided there was no point in wasting time worrying about that at the moment. His first priority must be to find out if there had been any passengers on the Ndanga flight with a first name starting with V. The passenger manifest had not been included in the Sci-Med file, so he requested the information by mobile phone, asking that the list be e-mailed to him as soon as possible.

The sound of a key being inserted in the front door broke Steven’s concentration. He had been led to believe that the police and health authorities had no further interest in the apartment. He was about to get up from his seat at the desk to investigate when an elderly couple appeared at the room door.

‘Who the devil are you?’ exclaimed the man, clearly startled to have found him there. The woman’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with alarm.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Steven, realising the couple must be Ann Danby’s parents. He felt more of an intruder than ever. ‘I’m afraid there’s been some kind of a mix-up. I’m Dr Steven Dunbar from the Sci-Med Inspectorate. I’m part of the investigating team. The police gave me your key. I understood that you wouldn’t be picking it up until tomorrow. I had no idea that you’d be coming here today.’

‘The police gave us a key yesterday,’ said Mr Danby. ‘It was the spare that we were going to pick up tomorrow. It’s just one damned misunderstanding after another with you people,’ he complained. ‘What more is there to investigate, for God’s sake? Haven’t my wife and I suffered enough?’

‘I’m sure you both have,’ said Steven sympathetically. ‘But there are still some important things to establish. If you can bear with me, I really would like to ask you a few questions now that you’re here.’

‘Questions, questions, questions.’ Danby sighed. ‘What d’you want to know this time?’

‘Did Ann have a boyfriend?’

‘My God,’ snapped Danby, ‘we’ve been through all this with the police already. She did not have a boyfriend. Was that some kind of crime that you keep asking about it?’

‘Of course not,’ replied Steven but he noticed that Danby’s wife had diverted her eyes when her husband was answering. It struck him as odd, perhaps the action of someone hiding something. It prompted him to say, ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Of course I’m bloody sure,’ said Danby.

‘And you, Mrs Danby. Ann never said anything to you about a special… friendship?’

‘You heard what my husband said.’

Steven nodded but kept on looking at the woman, who was clearly uncomfortable with this line of questioning and more particularly with his persistence. He was more than ever convinced that she was concealing something.

‘This is very important. I promise you that anything you might tell me will be treated with the utmost discretion.’

‘There were no boyfriends,’ stormed Danby. ‘Now will you please leave? We’ve told you people everything we can. Now please leave us alone to do what we have to.’

‘And what’s that?’ Steven asked gently.

‘Start clearing away our daughter’s effects.’

Steven was uncomfortable with the prospect of having to tell the Danbys that they couldn’t do that until he’d finished prying into every corner of their daughter’s life, so uncomfortable that he decided to leave. He convinced himself that the chances of the meticulous Ann Danby having left anything around concerning V were remote and he felt optimistic about finding V on the passenger list.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out your way.’ Apart from anything else, he mused as he returned to the lobby, if push came to shove, Mrs Danby could probably fill him in concerning V.

Steven took a taxi to his hotel and connected his laptop modem to the phone socket in his room. He made the connection to Sci-Med in London and collected the e-mail containing the passenger list for the Ndanga flight. He scanned it anxiously, and found that there was only one male passenger with a first name starting with V. He was Vincent Bell and he had been sitting in seat 31D.

‘Ring a ding ding,’ murmured Steven. His second thought, however, was that row 31 was a long way back from where the ill-fated Barclay had been seated in row 5. There did not seem to be a lot of opportunity for contact on board the aircraft. But they could have met at some other point in the journey, perhaps in the queue at the airport or sitting in the lounge, if places like Ndanga had departure lounges. At this juncture, however, it didn’t really matter. What did matter was that he trace Vincent Bell as soon as possible. He called Sci-Med and asked for their assistance in getting details about him and they responded quickly, furnishing him with basic information within the hour. They had obtained it from the passenger record compiled by the special reception centre at Heathrow where they had dealt with the incoming Ndanga flight. As one of the passengers not deemed to have been at high risk during the flight, Bell had only been asked to leave his name, address and the name of his GP, but that was enough. Steven now knew that Bell lived at 21 Mulberry Lane, Canterbury. Not the most convenient location from which to conduct an affair with someone in Manchester, but perhaps Bell was a travelling man, drifting up and down the motorways of the land six days a week in his company Mondeo. Alternatively, it could simply be a case of love knowing no bounds. As it often said in the personal columns of the papers, ‘good sense of humour essential’ but ‘distance no object’. He would soon find out for himself: he planned to travel to Kent in the morning.